May 9, 2003

• 1953–California to Kansas via Arkansas

  I recall hearing Mama tell someone that she “led a charmed life.”  She had met the “man of her dreams”,
  married him and they had a wonderful life together.  Then, after
  his death, along comes her childhood sweetheart.  She must have
  considered that a godsend.

  Mama was a good waitress.  I say that to give her credit where
  credit is due. It was really the only thing she did well.
   She taught me how to pay attention to customers, anticipate their
  needs, speak obsequiously and earn good tips.  From her I learned
  the cardinal rule of retail and service industries:  the
  customer is always right.  She taught me to look busy even when I
  wasn’t, so my boss wouldn’t get the idea that he could do
  without me.

  She was trained as an institutional cook.  She could follow
  recipes but she never enjoyed cooking and never became a good
  cook.  At home, I started doing much of the cooking after my
  father died.  She could ruin a boxed spaghetti dinner:  “al
  dente” was Greek to her.  All foreign languages, mathematics,
  mechanics, and many polysyllabic English words she would say were,
  “Greek to me.”  Few of the basic nutritional principles she
  learned at work were transferred to her home cooking.  Even in the
  school cafeteria, she often overcooked things.  I learned to cook
  in self-defense.

  Mama was hopeless where home and auto maintenance were concerned.  She could
  change a burned out light bulb.  When window panes rattled and let
  in the wind and rain, I went to the basement, found the can of putty,
  and sealed the windows.  She didn’t even know where the dipstick
  was to check the oil in the car.  I remember trying to show her
  how to adjust the carburetor, but she just didn’t get it, didn’t want
  to get it.  It was “man’s work” and none of her concern,
  especially since she had her little tomboy around to change the oil and
  do all the rest of that dirty work.  But God forbid that I
  should ever come to the dinner table with dirty hands or face.

  I used to think my mother was stupid.  Now I’m not so
  sure.  It could have been lazy craftiness, creative incompetence,
  a way to avoid having to do those things she “couldn’t” learn to
  do.  She tried to teach me feminine wiles and ladylike behavior…
  or, more accurately, she expected me to know those things.  She
  would yell at me or shame me for dirty fingernails or for not keeping
  my skirt down and legs together, although I’d grown up
  greasy in pants and overalls with little experience of skirts
  before I went to school.

  Some of her “teaching” took.  Some of it didn’t
  work and never could have worked for me.  My father and I had
  laughed with derision at her incompetence, in much the same way that
  Doug and I laughed at Greyfox during the years that his addictions and
  his NPD were running rampant and his favorite coping mechanism was
  creative incompetence.  Even if Mama was faking that helplessness,
  THAT was stupid, so… I guess she was actually stupid.

  In her desperate grief, fear and loneliness after my father
  died, the appearance of Jim, her childhood sweetheart, must have seemed
  like salvation.  There was no courtship, no caution or
  reservations ever expressed on her part.  They started making
  plans for him to come to San Jose that summer when school was
  out.  They planned to marry then and we would move back to
  Arkansas with him. 

  She started referring to him, when speaking to me, as “Daddy Jim,”
  even before I met him.  I was relieved that she had stopped crying
  all the time and stopped talking constantly of my father.  She
  didn’t know that I had killed him, but every time she cried for him or
  reminisced about how happy they had been, I felt the pangs of that
  guilt.

  She sold our house, or rather, sold her equity in it.  It
  hadn’t been paid for.  We packed our treasures:  mementos of
  Daddy, the painting of the old sawmill in the Sierras that his cousin
  Richard had made for me, and a trunkful of this and that.  It went
  into a shed behind Buck and Alyce Rogers’s house, where a flood a few
  years later destroyed most of it.  After the flood, a box came in
  the mail from Alyce (Buck had died by then, suddenly, much the same way
  my father had.) with Daddy’s old Kodak folding camera and a few other
  things she salvaged.

  Jim flew out from Arkansas and we met him at the San Francisco
  airport.  They were married by a justice of the peace at the
  county courthouse in San Jose and we loaded our TV and clothes into the
  trunk of our ’48 Chevy coupe (which she’d traded the Dodge sedan for
  because it netted her a few extra dollars in those first desperate
  weeks after Daddy died).  With Jim behind the wheel, we headed
  south to Route 66, then east.

  Somewhere in the mountains before we were out of California, I saw
  odd-looking heaps of gray sand or something in the roadside
  ditches.  They said it was snow.  I begged them to stop and
  let me see it up close.  I scooped a bunch of it into an empty
  paper cup and watched it melt as we drove down into the desert.

  I loved Arizona and New Mexico.  For reasons I didn’t
  understand at the time, it felt like home to me.  I understand
  that now.  I lived in that area through a series of lifetimes, and
  some of the descendants of my previous incarnations live there now.

  I
  wanted to stop at every roadside attraction and Indian trading
  post.  We did stop at most:  Jackrabbit Trading Post,
  Rattlesnake Trading Post, all those tourist traps that advertised
  themselves with little signs saying how many more miles to…
  whatever.  Jim bought me picture postcards at almost every stop,
  but we didn’t have a camera with us to take pictures.  For a year
  or so, then, my life wouldn’t be recorded in photos, until I got my own
  camera.

  Jim was a nice man.  He was divorced and had grown-up
  children and a grandchild or two.  He kept the car radio turned up
  and sang along with it.  When we had ridden in the car with Daddy,
  the radio was always on, but often it had been tuned all the way down
  into the short wave band, listening to police and fire calls.  Jim
  liked country music.  His favorite was Hank Snow, and he used to
  give me nickels to play “I’m Movin’ On” on the jukeboxes in cafes along
  the way.

  We
  stayed in motels a few times and I started collecting miniature bars of
  soap, something I’d never seen until then.  I also picked up a few
  rocks at roadside stops, the beginning of a collection I continued even
  during the time I was living out of a backpack on the road in the
  ‘sixties.  Since there are no photos to illustrate this segment of
  my memoirs, how about a shot of a small segment of my current rock
  collection to break the monotony?

  Speaking of monotony, Texas was… Texas.  I remember one of
  the postcards I got there:  “Texas ain’t so big, and acrost it
  ain’t so far.  I went across from border to border, and only wore
  out one car.”  There were only 48 states then, and Texas was the
  biggest.  Everywhere was evidence of just how badly that had gone
  to the Texans’ heads.  Since Alaska has put things into
  perspective for them, they’ve taken to selling “Texas speed bumps”,
  little pieces of gray felt or fleece with black rickrack “tire tracks”,
  mimicking roadkilled armadillos.  Charming.

  In north Texas, we drove through a sandstorm.  The interior of
  the car, with windows and vents closed, filled with dust. 
  The plush seat turned to sandpaper on my legs.  Eyes, ears, nose
  and mouth all had grit in them.  That night in the motel when
  we opened our suitcases, which had been riding in the trunk of the car,
  there was a line of red-brown grit on our clothes, on all four sides
  along the seam where the lid met the bottom of the case.  Mama
  said she would never live in a place like that.  (foreshadowing
  alert)

  Jim did let me stop at a lot of roadside attractions, but he was
  usually in a hurry to get back on the road.  He drove in the
  daylight and Mama often drove long into the night before we’d stop for
  food, a shower and a bed.  I slept in the car a lot, and studied
  through many miles.  I had brought along an old edition of a
  National Spelling Bee speller, and a high school math textbook, where I
  picked up the basics of algebra at least four years before I would get
  to use it in school.  It helped me in life before that, though,
  when my mother bought a business and needed my help with inventory and
  bookkeeping.

  The trip was hurried because Jim had a business in Pine Bluff, the
  tire shop where Uncle Walter and Aunt Lilly had found him.  He had
  left one of his sons in charge while he was gone, and they had started
  advertising the business for sale.  The plan was to sell it and
  then he and Mama and I would all move to Kansas. 

  He put Mama and me in an apartment near the VA hospital in Little
  Rock and was gone all day every day and often very late in the
  evening.  Mama spent her time the way she usually spent her time
  when she wasn’t at work.  She read True Story and True Romance
  magazines, and watched TV soap opera or listened to it on the
  radio.  Before we got a TV, it had been radio soaps all the time,
  and I recall hearing radio soaps in her house even after I was
  married. 

  I have clear recall of my play while I was in Little Rock.  When we moved in, I
  found in the cupboards a stack of small rectangular plastic trays,
  maybe big enough for a sandwich and some chips.  I played with
  them constantly, arranging and rearranging them, trying to make
  symmetrical or balanced designs out of an odd assortment of
  colors.  If I were to see a kid play that way now, the words that
  would come to mind would be “obsessive-compulsive”.  I had no
  other toys except my basketball and a couple of tennis balls, and I
  wasn’t allowed to play with them in the house, nor was I allowed to go
  out to play in the “strange” neighborhood. 

  A buyer was found for the tire shop.  We packed Mama’s and my
  stuff back into our car (Jim had a green station wagon, a woody,
  that would stay in Arkansas until he went back for it.) and drove
  to Kansas.  Mama was really looking forward to seeing my Aunt
  Alice, her eldest sister.  Mama and most of her siblings called
  Alice “Mom”, because she had reared them after my grandmother
  died.  My grandfather had remarried, but “Nellie” was always
  “Nellie”, said with a sneer, and never “Mom”.

  Aunt Alice lived in this cute little house that had made history
  when it was built.  Uncle Harry (in the state hospital when we
  arrived there, and for most of the rest of his life) and she had built
  it around the end of World War II, from materials they salvaged on
  their jobs at Beechcraft.  The framing, cabinetry and
  interior paneling were from packing crates.  The siding, from
  flattened oil and fuel cans, was the first aluminum siding in Wichita.

  

  Uncle Harry had collected broken glass, pottery, marbles and odd
  bits of rock, and used them as decorative mosaic in the concrete
  retaining wall that bordered two sides of the lot, and to build a patio
  and planter boxes on the side opposite the house from this view. 
  I always liked that house, and lived in it several times, both before
  and after I was married.

  We took Jim to the airport for a flight back to Little Rock, and
  then Mama and Aunt Alice and I went the 30 miles or so from Wichita to
  Halstead where her son Eldon, known to everyone as Red, lived with his
  wife Blondie (AKA Charlene) and their daughter Elizabeth.  We were
  going to stay there with Red and Blondie until Jim closed the sale
  on his business in Pine Bluff and drove back up to Halstead. 
  He and Mama were considering buying the Halstead Sundries store from my
  cousin Red.

  Jim phoned that evening to let Mama know he’d made it back to
  Arkansas okay.  I spoke to him then, and never saw him
  again.  He disappeared.  After a while, my mother got their
  marriage annulled.  She said it had never been consummated, and I
  have no reason not to believe that. 

  A dozen or so years later, he turned up again in my mother’s life,
  and they got married again.  They lived together in Louisiana
  for a while until he took another powder.  This was during
  the time I was on the West Coast, running with bikers.  At the
  time, my mother’s relationship with Jim astounded and baffled me,
  but not any longer.  It is, after all, fairly typical soulmate
  stuff. 

  • 7:14 pm
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