January 10, 2003

• My father’s sudden, fatal coronary at age 46 came as a shock to
  everyone who knew him.  He had boasted of “never being sick a day
  in [his] life.”  It wouldn’t be so surprising were it to happen
  now.  Daddy had a lifelong cigarette habit.  When he could
  afford them, he went through 2 or 3 packs of unfiltered Camels a
  day.  During the period when he was scrimping to build the
  houseboat, and then for the down payment on our house, he rolled his
  own out of Bull Durham.  He rolled cigarettes one-handed, a trick
  I never mastered.  I can close my eyes and, in memory, see him
  grasping the tag on the Bull Durham drawstring in his teeth to close
  the pouch.

  He is smoking in some of the pics I’ve posted to Xanga, and many of
  my memories of him involve his cigarettes.  It’s probably not too
  far off-base to suppose that my asthma and emphysema got their start in
  the clouds of second-hand smoke that filled my childhood.  My
  mother smoked too, at a time when few women indulged, and even fewer
  did so publicly.  Who knew, then, with the tobacco companies all
  touting the health benefits of their brands over their competitors’,
  what the consequences would be?  Perhaps the heart attack saved
  him from a lingering painful death from cancer.

  NFP
  speculated that the whipping my father gave me the night before his
  death might have been sufficiently painful, emotionally, to kill
  him.  It probably did contribute to the heart attack.  We
  know that stress is a factor.  There might have been another
  factor, too.  This occurred to me for the first time this week as
  I was recalling those days so I could write the blog.  What, I
  asked myself, was he doing in Mama’s bed that morning?

  His “den”, the back bedroom, was where he usually slept.  The
  front bedroom had been referred to as “their” bedroom, but in practice
  it was Mama’s alone, except for that day.  My mother didn’t enjoy
  sex.  When I was older and asked her questions, she gave me books
  to explain the mechanics of procreation.  The only things she had
  to say personally about the sex act were negative.  She said it
  was painful (that’s common in fibromyalgia, and I’m convinced that my
  mother had undiagnosed fibro through most of her life) and she
  characterized it as a wife’s duty to her husband.  Her Victorian
  attitudes and those of her contemporaries, along with the hypocritical
  sexual propaganda I saw in censored movies and on TV, made me think I
  was unnatural or bad because I enjoyed it so much.  But that came
  later.

  Many heart attacks occur during sexual intercourse.  If that
  had been the case, my mother would have swept it under the rug. 
  Maybe she was wrestling with her own guilt during those years when I
  was dying inside for having killed my father, or maybe she blamed
  him.  We never talked about such intimate, secret matters. 
  Whatever triggered the coronary thrombosis, the conditions were set up
  for it by his smoking and the polluted industrial environment in which
  he spent most of his life.

  My parents set me up to take the blame for it because I wished
  it.  We always saved the turkey wishbone and made a ceremony of
  breaking it to see which of two people’s wishes would come true. 
  They taught me to blow out the candles on my birthday cake to make a
  wish come true.  They gave me coins to toss into wishing
  wells.  At dusk, we all would watch the sky; when it
  had darkened sufficiently for the first star to show, the one who
  spotted it first would cry out, “Star light, star bright, first star I
  see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish
  tonight.”  There was no kindly Mr. Rogers, back then, singing
  that, “those scary mad wishes don’t make things come true.”  Years
  later, watching Mr. Rogers with Doug, a decade and more after I’d
  worked through it in therapy, my heart would still ache when I heard
  that “wishing” song, and I would wish that I had heard it long before.

  My
  second grade school photo shows a sad girl with dark bags under her
  eyes.  There is another one, in which the photographer has
  apparently told me to smile.  The sad shot looks better than that
  bleak rictus.  This I take as evidence that the school pictures
  were taken in winter, because by spring I wasn’t in second grade
  any more.

  After I walked out of the classroom while my classmates were droning
  their way through Dick and Jane, and the custodian took me to the
  principal’s office, the psychologists got their hands on me for the
  first time.  At San Jose State, in the psych department, I was
  given an IQ test, the Stanford-Binet.  On that scale, the IQ was
  expressed as a “percent” ratio of true age to “mental age”, a concept
  no longer in vogue.  Mental age, in that paradigm, was a matter of
  averages and norms.  If one was above the norm, the number was
  over 100.  I was never told what my numbers were that time. 
  My mother was told that I had the mental age of a high school senior
  when I was in second grade.  I was seven.  The average high
  school senior is 17.  That would make the number somewhere in the
  neighborhood of 240.

  Stanford-Binet was seriously flawed in many ways.  My verbal
  ability probably skewed the result.  Regardless of all that, it
  must have been a thrill for those profs and grad students to discover a
  super-genius.  The result was that I was fast-tracked.  Mama
  said they thought that giving me more challenges in school would take
  my mind off my grief for Daddy.  I was promoted from second to
  third grade in the middle of the term.

  The third grade teacher, Mrs. Bourba, was the first woman I’d ever
  seen with a moustache.  I saw it up close as she leaned over me in
  our after-school sessions.  Staying after school was a standard
  punishment.  I guess the teachers saw it as punishment on them,
  too.  Either Mrs. Bourba hated me personally, or she resented
  having to stay after school to teach me to write.  She was
  obviously angry.  She was harshly critical of all my efforts to
  write longhand.  I couldn’t be allowed to go on printing, when the
  rest of the class was writing, and so during the day I was struggling
  to form letters in that new way and keep up with the other kids. 
  After school, I was cringeing and getting cramps in my hand trying to
  come up to third-grade-level skills.

  Handwriting specialists can usually tell where and when a person
  learned to write by the way they form their letters.  It’s not so
  easy with mine.  I picked up the rudiments of handwriting in
  several states over several decades.  A dislocated right shoulder
  during my school days, and a broken right arm while I was in college,
  forced me to learn to write left-handed.  It was easy because I’m
  generally ambidextrous and dyslexic, can read upside down or mirror
  writing almost as fast as I read the usual way.   In prison,
  finally, around the start of the 1970s, I spent many hours practicing
  flowing penmanship in an archaic style.  I’m still trying to
  figure out how my daughter Angie, who was reared by adoptive parents, turned out to have handwriting so much like mine.  It’s just weird.

  At Broadway School the little kids in kindergarten, first, and
  second grades had a playground with swings, slides, merry-go-rounds and
  sandboxes.  It was separated by a tall chain-link fence from the
  other end of the schoolyard.  In that other end there was a set of
  monkey bars and a ball field for the “big kids”.  For a few days
  after my promotion, until we were forbidden to do so, Lyndon Cramer and
  I would meet for recess at the fence and hold hands through one of the
  spaces in the wire.  My first romantic kiss was a good-bye from
  him when the bell rang.  I have no pictures of him except for the
  one in my mind.  I see him clinging to the fence wire, crying, as
  Mrs. Bourba pulled me, screaming and crying, away from my side of the
  fence.

  

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  • 3:53 pm
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