November 27, 2002

• parents and early memories

  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….
  

  • 9:53 pm
  • 16 Comments