November 20, 2002

• 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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