TheStar.com – Bush anything but moronic, according to author

This story is really interesting, and yes, I think Mark Crispin Miller is on target in his assessment.  You can see it in Dubya’s eyes.  It isn’t when he talks about hate and war that he flubs his lines, but only when he’s reciting some speech on compassion or conservation.  He’s a sociopath, all right. 

I started writing this Friday, when we got home with the latest load of full water jugs and buckets, but Xanga wouldn’t let me upload pictures then, so I saved it until I could add illustrations.

Another water run today.  Someone asked me last time how often we have to go to the spring for water.  This time, it was about two weeks since our last double trip, when we filled the barrel then went back for more.  Next time will probably be less than two weeks, since we only made one trip today and there are a lot of pots and pans to wash from Thanksgiving dinner.

Above, you can see Doug taking cautious steps on the ice.  I fell almost as soon as we got out of the car, while I was scattering kitty litter for traction.  I landed hard on my tailbone, and whacked my head pretty hard.  None of that hurts this morning unless I probe the bruises.  What bothers me most is the whiplash injury to my neck.  The second photo shows Sheep Creek Flat, and my gloved finger.

For two nights, the temps have stayed near freezing, on the wet side.  The highway gets enough traffic, sand and salt to keep it from being too slick, but every side road is a solid sheet of wet ice, very slippery.  Like Greyfox, I’m grateful for studded tires and 4WD.

UPDATE!!

I
suppose this belongs here with the older family pictures.  This is
my newborn great grandson, with his big sister.  Need I say I am
awed and all soft and gooey great gramma inside?

Well, Xanga only let me upload about half the images for this blog,
so I skirted the problem by borrowing some of Doug’s FTP space and
remote-linking.  Take that, Xanga!

It seems the better I feel, the less writing I get done.  When
I was too ill to get around and do physical work, I had all day to
write or surf Xanga and the net.  I know that being so sick was
part of what motivated me to really get to work on the memoirs.  I
wanted to get my life written down before it was over.  Now that I
feel like I’m going to survive a while, and have more strength and
energy than I’ve had in years, my time is being spent on other things.

Whereas before, if I dropped some trash or something I didn’t need
right away, I’d let it lie there rather than risk falling over if I
bent to pick it up.  Now, since I’ve always been the only one who
cleans this house, as I move from place to place, I stoop and pick up
some of those things dropped months ago, along with the debris left by
Doug and Greyfox.  I’m still not ready to drag out the vacuum
cleaner, but I’m getting there.

I’m still not ready to write about my adolescence, either, but I’ll
get there.  I want to deal with my parents and extended family in
more detail, first.  Going through pictures and writing the blogs
about my father brought up a lot more memories of him, and of other
family members long dead.

My mother had dreamed of my father before they met, recognized his
face the first time she saw him.  A fortune-teller had also
foretold the circumstances of their meeting, seeing “plates with a
big red ‘M’”, which turned out to be the “W” for Woolworth’s, the lunch
counter where my mother was working.  Daddy worked in a salvage
yard, and lived there in a trailer he fabricated himself from old car
bodies. 
I recall his telling of having one fork and one spoon which he licked
clean after each meal, and one plate, which he would wipe clean with
bread and turn upside down over the “clean” fork and spoon, until the
next meal.  He was working for a dollar a day, plus a commission
on the parts he removed from junk cars for customers.

That same ability of his to make things and make do led to three
patented inventions after he went to work for Food Machinery Corp.
during WWII.  Two of them were canning machine parts, and one was
a stainless steel finger protector that can still be bought in
pharmacies and surgical supply stores.  He whipped up the “finger
cot” one day when he had to work with an injured finger.  All
patents were applied for by FMC’s lawyers and held by the
company.  He said that was only fair, since he had come up with
the ideas on the job, and used their materials to make
the prototypes, on company time.

 After his death, a plaque commemorating my father and his
inventions was hung in the corporate offices and my mother and I were
invited for the ceremony.

Mama and Daddy met in the Denver area, and after they married
they lived in Pueblo, Colorado for a while before they moved to Idaho
where my mother’s father and step-mother were living.

In Boise, my grandparents kept rabbits, the long-haired angora
variety.  The meat was for their table and there was a market for
the fur.

I never knew either of my grandmothers.  They died before I was
born, as did my father’s father.  My Grandpa Scott, Mama’s father,
was in a wheelchair all the time I knew him, and died when I was almost
three years old.  He had driven a truck delivering coal in Boise,
Idaho.  Stopped to make a delivery, he was behind his truck when
he was hit by another vehicle and his legs crushed.  I saw him a
few times, when we visited Redlands, where he moved from Idaho to live
near two of my mother’s sisters who had settled there when the family
moved west.  My mother’s family were what those in California
before us called “Okies”.  If called that to their faces, they’d
usually respond that they were actually Jayhawkers.

I remember sitting on Grandpa’s lap in the yard while my aunts and
my mother were in the kitchen preparing a family holiday
feast.   I also recall his yelling for them to come help me
when I was standing in a hill of fire ants.  Another story, of a
game of “pretend” I played with Grandpa has been told and retold by my
parents, aunts and uncles.

I had watched a three-story hotel in San Jose burn down, sitting on
my father’s shoulders.  He was a gawker, a siren-chaser, who tuned
our kitchen radio down to shortwave when he wanted entertainment. 
If a police or fire call sounded interesting, he’d drive to the
site.  If we were headed home at night from a fishing trip or a
trip to the Alviso dump, and we saw searchlights in the sky, he’d drive
to the source of the light.  Anyhow, that was how I happened to
watch firemen knocking down a hotel fire when I was a toddler.

On our next visit to Grandpa, I was telling him about the firemen,
as I played with the garden hose in the yard.  I said, “Pretend
you’re a house afire, Gampa!”  Then I turned the hose on
him.  He started screaming for his daughters to rescue him. 
His yells, then and when I was standing frozen in terror on the
anthill, are my most enduring memories of Grandpa–that and the funny
old-man smell.

My father’s maternal grandmother, Grandma Davis, lived in a little
cottage a few blocks from our place.  Her living there was the
reason my parents rented their little 3 room shotgun house on Fox
Avenue, right across the street from the PG&E building.  My
last time in San Jose, in the ‘sixties, I rode right across the old
neighborhood on a freeway.  The place where our house had been was
an onramp.

My parents met in Colorado, then moved to Idaho to help out my
grandfather and my mother’s step-mother, Nellie.  At the start of
the war, my father headed to California, looking for work in a defense
plant.  He tried to enlist in the army, but he was
classified 4-F because of a youthful encounter with a blasting cap
in which he lost some fingers and the hearing in one ear.  There
was a defense plant in his grandmother’s neighborhood in San
Jose.  For the rest of his life he worked there at Food Machinery
Corp., FMC, first on armored vehicles, and when peace returned, on
canning machines.

Grandma’s house was next to the park, on Alameda.  It was old
and a little bit crooked, with redwood shingles and siding.  She
and her daughter Goldie, my favorite relative after Daddy, Buddy, Donny
and Daddy’s cousin Richard (men always first in my life) kept a garden
with, among other things, marigolds and hollyhocks.  (above,
that’s Goldie standing in the door of her travel trailer, and Grandma
Davis next to Mama, who is holding baby me)

I remember The smell of the flowers in Grandma’s garden,and
Grandma’s smell, too, and the smell of her house and of her
funeral.  I was just a babe in arms then, about 14 months old, not
walking yet.  I think the memory of her funeral stuck with me at
least in part because it was the first, and I recalled it clearly five
or six years later when I went to my second funeral, for my
father.  The flowers smelled the same.  Smells are so easy to
remember, and they bring back sounds, pictures, emotions, tastes….

Intensely emotional moments are memorable.  Brain chemistry
imprints them and they are likely to flash back in random
moments.  Pain can imprint memories.  I recall riding in my
cousin Buddy’s bike basket, flying down the street, shrieking with
joy.  I recall sailing out of the basket and landing on nose and
hands, a perfect three-point landing, up against a really smelly fire
hydrant, when Buddy tried to jump a curb, but didn’t allow for the
extra weight, I guess.  That was my last basket ride.  Mama
had a hissy fit.

Buddy had stayed with us a while, might have moved in and become my
big brother, except that Mama couldn’t handle the dynamic between
us.  I was his puppy-dog, his shadow, and he loved taking us both
out of bounds.  My Uncle Earl’s kids, Buddy (Duane), Virginia
(another of the redheads in the family), and their older sister Dorothy, were
reared by aunts and uncles after their mom’s nervous breakdown.  I
had time to spend with Buddy twice in my life:  then in San Jose,
and when I was about nine, in Kansas, where I helped him grind the
mirror for the telescope he built so we could look at stars.  One
odd little thing:  at the time, in Kansas, I couldn’t recall the
earlier time we’d played together in San Jose, but I have clear
memories of both those times now.

My mother had brothers and sisters from one end of California
to the other.  Two sisters settled in So. Cal., and three of her
brothers lived in Sacramento. That’s me below in Mama’s arms on
the right, and my father second from left, back row.  The woman
and girl beside Daddy are Aunt Nora, and cousin Virginia, whom Aunt
Nora adopted.  Next to Mama is my cousin Red (named Eldon, but
known to all as Red) who was a Naval aviator in WWII.  Red’s arm
is around Aunt Ella, and in front of Ella is her son Donny.  Ella
and Donny belong to my Uncle Scotty (another nickname) at the far end,
as does the pretty little girl in front of Scotty and Daddy, my cousin
Nancy.

After Daddy died, I spent some time in Sacramento with the family
there, while Mama tried to deal with things at home.   Donny
and Nancy were in High School then (I was 7), and Nancy took me to
school with her one day, to amuse me.  One Sunday, I wanted to
swing, so Donny boosted me over the tall chainlink fence around a
schoolyard, climbed in after me, and pushed me on the
swings.  Last time I saw him, in the ‘Sixties, he was a Sacramento
vice cop.  His sister Nancy ended up a murder victim, killed by
her estranged boyfriend.  Buddy, my best pal, Virginia’s brother,
was murdered too, while he was in his thirties.  He walked in on
two burglars at his house.

Uncle
Roy, another of Mama’s brothers, drove a taxi in Sacramento.  I’m
sure his life would have made an interesting book or movie.  I
wish I knew more of the details.  He and two of my mother’s other
older brothers had caught and saddle-broke wild horses for a living in
their youth.

Some of my father’s cousins were California Okies, too.  Foster
Meyers and his family lived on a farm on an island in the San Joaquin
River near Tracy.  I don’t know how it came about, but my mother’s
brother Frank and his wife lived on the island, too, for a while. 
It could have been the family connection that brought them together
there, or it could have been Cosmic Synchronicity… it allhappened before I was born.

I loved visiting the island.  There were goats, chickens, and
cousins all over the place.    I followed my bigger
cousins everywhere, and the chickens and goats followed me.  I was
a nurturer and soft touch, even then.  Did you know that both
chickens and goats like Cracker Jacks, and so do little red-haired
girls.

It was also the first time I ever rode a horse.  Nig was a work
horse, who spent most of his life harnessed to a plow.  By the
time I knew him he was retired, hanging around the yard, sticking his
head in the open kitchen window for handouts, and giving rides to
visiting cousins from the city.

Maybe this will have gotten the early childhood and ancestral
background out of the way for now, and I can move on to the next phase
soon.  Maybe not….

High-Protein Gluten-Free Muffins

  These are health-food, diet food, for people like me with sensitivities and special dietary needs. Deliberately low on sweetener, they don’t brown prettily and their texture is gritty. Even so, and even though the rest of my family won’t eat them, I found them dangerously tempting during a time when I was trying to strictly limit my carb intake to discourage a case of Candidiasis.

Preheat oven to 375°. Makes about 12 muffins.

Combine in a large bowl:

1/4 cup natural unsweetened peanut butter (What’s the use of baking healthy muffins if you use sugar-laden Skippy or Jif?)
1 Tbsp. vegetable oil (I use light-tasting olive oil)
1 Tbsp. honey
1 egg
3/4 cup milk (goat milk if you’re sensitive to cow’s, or soy milk if you can tolerate soy–I can’t)
3/4 cup cold water

Sift together:

1/2 cup corn meal or corn flour
1/2 cup fava bean and garbanzo flour (a gluten-free staple in my pantry, from Bob’s Red Mill.)
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
3/4 cup brown rice flour
OR 2 cups of any gluten-free flour or flours of your choice
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder

Mix dry ingredients into liquid with a few swift strokes, only until flours are moistened.

If your diet allows it, you may add:

1/2 cup nuts, or seeds such as sunflower, pumpkin, poppy, etc.
1/2 cup raisins or other dried fruit

Spoon into muffin cups.  Bake at 375° for about 20 minutes, until the top springs back at a touch.  May be frozen to extend shelf life.  This recipe, with my diet, supplies roughly a week’s worth of grain-based carbos and a whole week’s ration of nuts and seeds.

Enjoy, if you can. For someone whose tastes are accustomed to “real” bread and cake (wheat-based), these may have no appeal. To anyone serious about cutting gluten out of the diet, and especially to one who has been gluten-free for a while, they are delicious.

Charley, then and now…

At left is my Charley, AKA Chuck, AKA Studd, 1973, tokin up in the basement apartment we shared just off C Street on 11th Avenue in Anchorage. 

Before I met him, Charley had been in jail, the Palmer jail, sometimes called the Honor Farm, for six years.  Minimum security was putting it mildly for that jail.  All a man had to do to escape was walk two or three miles out to the highway and hitch a ride.  There were no uniforms, no fences.  These men went out on search and rescue callouts, and fought forest fires.  During the state fair, they set up a table in the crafts fair and sold the things they made in the shop.  They helped the boys at the Turning Point Boys’ Ranch in their fundraising projects.

At the time, only a very small number of inmates could be housed in the State Jail, formerly a federal jail, in downtown Anchorage.  Then, as now, most Alaskan inmates whose corrections classification required maximum security were shipped Outside, to Arizona, Illinois, or California.  The state has opened several new jails since then, but it never is enough.  The latest statistics I could find, for Dec. 31, 2000, said that 826 of 3,583 Alaskan inmates were then housed Outside, most of them in Arizona.  The lucky ones like Charley and the others at Palmer, who are not considered serious escape or violence risks, get to stay in Alaska, where there is some chance of family contact during their incarceration.

Charley was president of the jail’s Jaycee chapter, and had held more than one office with the inmate council.  He was involved in sobriety groups.  As with most of the other inmates there, Charley’s crime had been alcohol-related, meaning he had been drunk at the time it was committed.  He had been arrested and convicted of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and two counts of burglary not in a dwelling.  When I met Charley, he was so strongly anti-booze that he would go to parties and lecture the drinkers there.  The mere mention of drinking in casual conversation could set off a rant.  I felt he took it to extremes, but he felt the extreme stance was justified.

This afternoon, I was over at Charley’s cabin and I interviewed him about the details, refreshing my memory of the many times I heard this story in our years together.  He had stopped by here yesterday while Greyfox and I were in Wasilla.  He dropped off some books and took a few, as usual, and was looking for some stuff he needed.  Today I found his stuff and took it to him.  It seemed like a good time to get my story straight for this blog.  It was good that I asked, because I had one essential fact wrong, right at the start.  I thought he knew the desk clerk at the hotel, but that wasn’t it.

He got the key to the hotel room from a hooker who said she had had it for a while.  It wasn’t a master, just a room key, with a big plastic tag showing the room number.  He was led to believe that there would be a quantity of drugs in the room.  At the time, Charley was driving a cab in Anchorage.  He had grown up first in Texas, then when he was about ten or twelve he and his little brother came to Alaska with their mother and step-father.  They homesteaded here in the Mat-Su Valley, then as teenagers the boys moved with their mother to Anchorage.  After high school, Chuck studied electronics and petrochemical instrumentation.  He worked in an oil refinery and was part owner of a TV/radio repair business before he started driving a cab.  By the late sixties, he was involved in those things most of the cabbies were involved in:  booze, drugs, hookers, gambling, and whatever else came along.

He cased the room, determined that the guest was out, and entered with his key.  He took a look around, saw an Alaska State Trooper’s “Smoky Bear” hat on the dresser and a 12ga. shotgun leaning in a corner.  He thought, “this isn’t right.”  Just then, the door opened, and a trooper, “four feet across and eight feet tall,” walked in.  (Charley is a great storyteller.  You should see and hear his version.  The gestures and facial expressions are all part of the experience.)  Charley picked up the trooper’s gun, cocked back the hammer, and said to the big man, “Don’t do anything we’ll both regret.”

Charley says he was shaking as he held the gun.  He thinks he and the trooper were equally scared.  The trooper was in town to testify at a trial, and assumed that Charley was a hit man come to kill him.  He had the trooper assume the position, took his side arm and patted him down.  Then he had him lie on the bed.  Using the trooper’s handcuffs, Charley cuffed his hands behind his back and then rolled him up in the blankets and left.

He went to a place out on the Kenai Peninsula and was tracked down by Rudy… last name Rudolf, I forget the rest.  Charley introduced us once when we met at some public event.  He and Rudy, the State Trooper “bird dog”, were good friends.  There had been the briefest of armed standoffs when Rudy caught up with Charley.  Unlike when Charley had burglarized the hotel room, he was sober when Rudy showed up and he listened to reason when Rudy explained what kind of shit would come down on his head were Chuck to shoot him.

At trial, he was sentenced to ten years on the armed robbery (stealing the trooper’s gun), one year on the assault (cuffing and blanketing the trooper), and two years on each count of burglary.  They were to run concurrently, so ten years was what he was supposed to do.  After six, he got out on parole for the last four years of the sentence.  A year or so into his parole, it was shifted from supervised to unsupervised, which meant  it was about the same as not being on parole at all, except that if he had gotten into any more trouble, he would have had his armed robbery sentence to finish out.  With me, he stayed out of trouble.

He didn’t stay off booze forever, however.  It was the oddest thing.  He was working at Sheep Creek Lodge near here, a couple of years after we moved out here from Anchorage.  Our relationship was strained, for reasons I’ll go into in more detail than anyone needs to know, when I get to that.  There was a custom at the lodge of the “after shifter”, a free drink at the end of the workday.  Charley had been refusing drinks and taking tokens, “wooden nickels” to give to friends or trade for dope, until the management decided that they would give no more tokens for after shifters.  To keep from “losing” it, Charley took a drink.  You know, don’t you, that for an alcoholic there is no such thing as one drink?  He had the good sense not to come home in that condition, but his slurred speech made it obvious when he phoned to say he’d see me in the morning.

That did it for me and we split entirely for a while.  There was some time in there that he was drunk more than he was sober.  Now, he is sober a lot more of the time than he is drunk.  If he would just remember not to come around here when he’s drunk, I wouldn’t have a single complaint against the man.  He’s the best friend I could possibly have.  We are soulmates, and I’ll get into that some more as I go along, too.  He told me today that he’s gotten to a place where he is, “happy where I’m at.”  He still talks about moving to Chicken, and I hope that he does, because that will establish a base far off the beaten track, a place that I could duck out to when the fit hits the shan.

This afternoon, I asked him if he thought it was a set-up: the hooker, the room key, the trooper.  He won’t speculate.  He agrees with me that it is plausible.  I asked him if he knew of anyone with the clout and a possible motive for wanting to shake up the testifying trooper, or get him killed, and in the process make some trouble for Chuck.  He said he knew one man who might.  He won’t name him.  He told me more today than ever before.  I know better than to pressure him to divulge a secret.  That was one of the reasons we broke up.  He couldn’t handle my not keeping secrets.  On my side, I couldn’t handle his not keeping promises.  Now that we’re not under the same roof, it’s easier to accept each other as we are, and we’re friends.

Anchorage Daily News | No cover

Green grass in November, above, is rare in this area.   The moose are enjoying it, but it has a downside.   As this news story says, “One problem. Hares change color based not on snowfall but on diminishing light. In years like this, with scant snow cover, a hare might as well set out a sandwich board. ‘Special: delectable white rabbit with a green grass garnish.’”

Update:  When I first posted this, about a day and a half ago, I was using images that hadn’t scanned right.  The dark, murky pics were the best I could do using my available tools (image software).  Today, I fiddled with the scanner (hardware) and got it scanning right again.  I have replaced the images here, and added two more.  I would have added one or two others, but Xanga wouldn’t let me upload them.  If I can do it later, I will again update the time on this, but I’m also going ahead with a new “family” blog. 

While I was at it, and while we all watched Spider Man on DVD, I scanned a bunch more of my childhood photos to accompany the next few blogs.  I could scan photos and watch the DVD at the same time because we play DVDs on the PS2, and I can turn my head slightly and see that monitor when I’m sitting at this one.

The copy of Monsters Inc. that Greyfox rented today was on tape, so when it came on, I had to quit here and go watch that.  What a movie!  We all laughed our heads off, and at least two of us cried.  I can giggle just like Boo.

But, before I stopped to watch the wonderful movie, and even before I started scanning pictures, I was going through the old family photos with my headphones on and my new psychoactive CD playing.  It’s the Mind Converter, with the Theta-inducing “Zapper” sound, underlain by a Delta-frequency heartbeat.  Wow.  It and the pictures really took me back.  I have tons of stuff to fill in the blanks of my autobiography.

For tonight, I’m off to my bed after seeing to a few neglected chores.  I have been here with the scanner and computer almost all day.  Must… take… a… break.

Meanwhile, back at the memoirs–there’s some astrological jargon at the start here, but don’t let it daunt you… it’s not all about astrology.

Saturn is in Gemini now, in about the twenty-eighth degree.  It’s retrograde until next February, when, in its motion relative to Earth, it appears to stop its passage across the field of stars beyond it.  Then its apparent path will seem to turn back on itself and it will move through the last few degrees of Gemini and into Cancer.  When it gets around to the tenth degree of Cancer, it will again be at the longitude where it appeared at my birth.  This is my second Saturn return.  My first Saturn return occurred when I came to Alaska.  It was a transcendent experience, a major passage, a personal cusp.

Right now, Saturn is retrograding across a heavily aspected part of my chart, the curse/blessing pattern around the tenth and twenty-fifth degrees of a multitude of signs.  This is a time of intensity.  The Uranus station early this month at 8 plus degrees Aquarius fell into that pattern.  Uranus was stationary direct around the time of my birth.  Sudden transformative changes are the story of my life.  I’m changed… changing over these past few weeks.  Gauging by past experience and the astrological transits, I have an ascending series of big changes coming up.  It affects every facet of my life.  I’m surfing the wave of change that has been impelled by this latest Uranus station.  It’s exhilarating up here… WHEEE!

My essence, the Sun, in close conjunction with the healer/planetoid Chiron, is square Saturn right now, and it will be again next spring.  I’ve been eating healthily, not addictively, and I’ve been free of cravings.  I’ve been mentally sharp, physically coordinated, balanced, energetic, pain-free, in a good mood but not manic.  All that is in sharp contrast to how I was only very recently.  I’m thinking I might have made a wise, well-timed move here, following the neurotransmitter precursor supplement regime I found in End Your Addiction Now.

But all that, dear reader, is only an update, prompted by having so much to report, and brought to mind by my thinking about my adolescence.  That is going to be the next phase of my memoirs, the period right after my father’s death, which coincided with my first Saturn square.  I’m going to be using some new shamanic psychoactive sound CDs I got recently, from Dick Sutphen, to regress and remember.  That’s one more thing to add to my to-do list.  It’s a long list, and we have to make a trip to Wasilla for Greyfox’s dentist this week.  We will get a turkey or two, and a supply of other provisions, and then avoid going to town until the next necessary trip, which will probably be to get Doug new boots.  One of us has to stay home each town trip, because the woodstove must be fed continually.

Today, we three got the stock of Greyfox’s last stand out of Streak, where it had gone when Lassie broke down just before the Willow Bizarre… uh, Bazaar.  Greyfox was despairing of getting it all in here and onto the available shelves.  He asked me to clear another shelf for him.  He carried in one box tucked under his arm while the other hand held his truss tight against his little hernia, with Doug behind him with a stack of four boxes… the whole stock.  I got those five boxes and another one (flats, like pop or beer cans come in) and a stack of individual knife boxes, onto Greyfox’s available shelf.

At least Greyfox’s anxiety impelled me to clear up some clutter that had been building up on my workroom shelves.  I’ve been up and around a lot, doing for myself and the guys many of the things they had been doing for a long time.  I’m getting in gear.  But that, as I said, is not what I intend to blog about this time.  This time I want to blog about my father.

He was a giant to me, six feet five inches tall and well over 200 pounds.  His voice was deep and his hands were rough, but even though he’d blown off the thumb and two fingers of his right hand, he could play the fiddle and work with tools better than most people.  He and my mother were astrological opposites:  his Sun at the same degree of Libra as her Sun in Aries.  He was a renaissance man.  He had driven trucks during the violence of early unionization, and even after joining the machinists’ union and working in a factory, he kept his Teamster’s dues paid up.

It was at a Teamster’s Union Christmas party that I had my first night on the stage, reciting (flawlessly, of course) A Visit from St. Nicholas (‘Twas the night before Christmas….) when I was three years old.  He carried me to the stage on his shoulder, set me down by the mic, beamed at me through it all, mouthing a few prompts as I stalled.  Then, on his shoulder, to a standing ovation, he carried me out through the crowd.

I rode his shoulder a lot until my legs got long enough to keep up with his strides.  I rode a tricycle he built from junk scrounged from the dump, and my rocking horse, and a scooter, likewise cobbled together from salvaged parts.

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I was only about two years old when he bought an old Hupmobile that had been sitting, junk, in a neighbor’s yard.  With acetylene torches, he cut out the rear and fabricated a bed for it, turning it into a truck.

Then he hauled home a bunch of plywood sheets from packing crates, old canvas from somewhere, and bought some hardware and long planks for the framework, and built a houseboat.  This was so that my mother and I would not have to sleep in a tent on the riverbank every weekend on fishing trips.  She never liked camping out, and had a hissy about it when one morning I woke up with a huge fat tick on my arm.

The boat was one more, and an even more effective, way to give my mother hissy fits.  I liked to sidle along the catwalks port and starboard, clinging onto the edge of the roof.  I’d pause at the window by the table inside where she played solitaire most of the time, get her attention, grin and sidle on to her admonitions to be careful.  Daddy insisted on three points of contact at all times, and that was good enough for me.  I never fell overboard. 

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The only time I came close to that was on a fishing pier at Santa Cruz when I was two.  I went between the bars and over the side and he caught me by my pants as I went, and hauled me back up.  From then until I was housebroken, I wore a leather harness snapped to a leash secured to some part of him or my mother.  Once, in the parking lot at Santa Cruz, a woman tsked, shook her head and said, “Oh, you poor thing, on a leash like a dog.”  I put my fists on my hips and answered, “It’s for my own good, so I don’t fall in the ocean.”  I guess I told her, huh?

My father tolerated a lot from me.  The first time I stumped him with a riddle:  “How many times will five go into one?” we argued back and forth with him insisting it wouldn’t actually “go” the same way, say, that three goes into nine, until I said, “Well, I put five toes in one sock today.”  His reaction was surprise and chagrin, then a slow smile of pride as he said, “You’re really some smart alec, aren’t you?”  He liked verbal fencing, word games, and so did I.  It drove Mama nuts… but that wasn’t more than just a short putt.

She didn’t tolerate my incessant questions, but he did.  If I’d be pestering her in the kitchen with “why” this and “what” that, she’d send me to the workshop to ask Daddy.  If he couldn’t answer, we’d find one or find out as much as we could.  Back-talk to my mother would get me slapped across the face.  If I protested my father’s orders, he’d explain why it was important.  She was authoritarian, he was authoritative.  I preferred the more relaxed, attentive atmosphere in the workshop, anyway, and Daddy put together a set of small tools for me.  I used the curls of wood from his plane and the curls of metal from his lathe as modeling material for sculpture when I wearied of watching or standing by to “help” with whatever task had his attention.

What neither of them tolerated from me were lies.  My mother had an additional set of taboos that I could violate at my peril.  Daddy urged me to use my better judgment and common sense, and always tell the truth.  Breaking things, wasting things, using “bad” language and such, would bring whiney snitching little reports at day’s end from her to him.  He would get the story and make sure I knew what the lesson was in the experience, unless I got caught in a lie.  Then he would get out the long leather razor strop and put me over his knee.  Three whacks were enough to make both of us cry.

In my mother’s hand on the back of the photo at left, it says I was reading Mother Goose nursery rhymes to her when my father snapped this.  It was 1946, and I was not yet two.  Besides teaching me to talk, read, and write, and how to find information in a library, he taught me basic principles of mechanics, physics, math, and logic.  He was a storyteller.  He told me stories that had been passed to him from his grandfather Cyrus, who fought for the North in the Civil War.  On my mother’s side, great grandfather Jesse fought for the South.  My father’s cousin Richard taught me the natural sciences.  Astronomy started with identifying and locating Mars, biology started with flowers, bugs and reptiles.  Richard, Daddy, and I all loved snakes and lizards.  They showed me how to capture them harmlessly.  That really drove Mama nuts.

Well, really, my pranks and the riddles and word games Daddy and I sprang on Mama just annoyed and irritated her, and sometimes hurt her feelings.  What really took her over the edge was his death.  She had been profoundly dependent on him.  The year of his death, she had an accountant do her taxes.  From then on until I managed to teach her how to read and fill out IRS forms when I was about twelve, I did the taxes.  I also changed the flat tires, adjusted the carb and fixed the vapor-locking fuel pump every time it quit on the trips across the desert.  But that’s another story.

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Anchorage Daily News | Elder puts his teeth into rescue of boy in icy river

This is not exactly a local story, because we’re a long way from Scammon Bay (Alaska is a big place), but it’s one that’s not likely to turn up in your local paper, either.

First, the old man saw the kid drifting down the river alone in a skiff, and when he yelled (in Yupik) for the kid to stay put while he rowed out to get him.  The kid misunderstood, and jumped into the icy water….

Go ahead, read the whole story.  It’s a good one.

My beloved old fart Greyfox had a rough day yesterday.  It was the annual Holiday Bizarre (I know, I know… they spell it the other way, but believe me, I got closer to the mark).  Weather and road conditions were unpleasant.  His table was set up right next to that of the local Brownie troop, and that man’s misanthropy is heavily weighted toward the young of the species.  This being his last business day of the year (He’ll venture out in January for Winter Carnival, and then as soon as daytime temps are in the twenties and the snowplow has been through Talkeetna, he’ll be back on Main Street.), he cut prices on everything and made it a lucrative, but not very profitable, day.

I was on the PS2 when he got home, so he got on here and banged away at the keys for ‘way longer than it should have taken to produce ArmsMerchant’s latest blog.  His explanation is that he edited it this time.  So, that’s cleared up.   What I don’t get is how he managed to get loud belly laughs out of both Doug and me, with a story we’ve both heard numerous times before.   Since I’m going back to the PS2 for a while now, and won’t be working on memoirs until later today (thank you, Robin, for the added motivation–and anyone who wants to add to my motivation is welcome to click the little purple hat up top) you might as well check out Greyfox’s blog.

 

Honey-Mustard Salad Dressing

My recent blog about what I do for a living reminded Sarah of a salad she had, of greens I foraged while she was here.  She asked me to post the recipe for the dressing.

This is the house dressing around here.  It is difficult to
find commercial dressings without vinegar, and with my blood type (A)
I’m not supposed to consume vinegar.  I also have to watch out for
black pepper.  I’m allergic to it, and it can legally be included
in foods with only the word, “spices” on the label.  For these and
many more reasons, it pays to make my own salad dressing.  It
can’t be too sweet, mustn’t get a glycemic response from my
salad.  It has to taste good, or I won’t eat it.  I’m picky.

It does not have a long shelf life, so I make it in small
quantities.  I never measure ingredients.  When Sarah asked
me, a few years ago, to send her the recipe, I tried to make something
up.  I put it on an index card.  It seemed vague and
obscure.  I tried again.  When she asked me to post this
recipe, I dug out the index card. 

I always start by dissolving a little honey in some warm water…

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