June 30, 2004

• A few minutes ago, while I was brewing coffee and thinking about
  blogging, I didn’t know if this would be a movie review, today’s
  journal entry (well, yesterday’s really, as it is 3:33AM right now), or
  a memoir segment.  I guess the only thing to do is to write it out
  and see how it comes out.  I may be able to fit some of all of
  those things in.  I guess a good place to start is where I left
  off last time.  There’s a comment on my earliest memory blog that I want to respond to:

  leafylady wrote:

  Your memory is
  sad.  I’m glad most children don’t remember the heartbreaking things
  our parents do.  I know I’ve done such things, though not that
  particular one.  What if my child remembered every “leave me alone”,
  every “no” to a snuggle?

  I suppose that means she was saddened by it.  The memory I hold in
  my mind is not sad.  I don’t feel sad when I think of it, and I
  certainly won’t accept responsibility for the judgement anyone else
  lays on my story.  The memory is just a memory.  Any
  emotion attached to it is in the mind of whomever is feeling that
  emotion.  The feelings that surround that memory for me are like
  an “AHA!” of understanding–so much of what came later makes sense in
  the light of that night.  I’m glad I remember.

  I have felt saddened sometimes by the thing that reportedly gladdens
  leafylady:  the fact that “most children” are so traumatized by
  the cognitive dissonance inherent in the abuse and neglect they receive
  at the hands of  their “loving” parents that they dissociate and
  block out the memories or deny the events.  I put “most” in quotes
  because I am not at all sure that most of us do not have unpleasant
  memories of parental misdeeds that we’d prefer not to recall. 

  The denial dance is one of the main rituals of this culture:  “You
  didn’t like that, eh?  Okay, just pretend it didn’t happen. 
  If you tell anyone I did it, I’ll say you’re lying, anyway.”  That
  few have the courage to face reality within themselves, and even fewer
  have enough courage to speak it out loud, tends in my weaker moments to
  sadden me.

  I do not suppose that hypothetical “what if” question was anything
  other than rhetorical.  Unless I miss my guess, I’m not supposed
  to answer it–so, I’ll just echo it:  “What IF your child
  remembers?”  I want mine to remember.  Remembering is
  healthy, and in people with unhealthy pasts it can be
  therapeutic.  We cannot process and transcend trauma that we do
  not remember.  I work at remembering, and to whatever extent I am
  successful, I profit by it.

  ---

  I’m watching the sky grow lighter.  An hour or two ago it was as
  dark as it gets this time of year, not dark but just twilight. 
  Each summer in recent years I’ve done at least one up-all-nighter and
  sometimes Doug has stayed up with me.  He’s in bed now, and it
  looks like this will be an all-nighter for me.  His sleep schedule
  had him in bed rather early Monday evening, he was up again in the wee-small hours
  of Tuesday soon after I’d gone to bed, and I kept him busy through most of
  Tuesday.

  Koji had an appointment with the vet for his annual health checkup and immunization boosters.  Taking him anywhere
  in the car is not something anyone would want to do alone, and Doug
  likes to get away from here when he gets a chance, anyway.  Our
  dog never wants the pack to be separated, so when one of us goes
  anywhere, he thinks we should all go.  That would be fine, except
  he’s the only member of this pack with the stamina to run for miles,
  and when we take him anywhere in the car he gets stress diarrhea. 
  The vet thinks it’s interesting that he never gets car sick, but always
  has to have a stop or two along the way to relieve the peristaltic
  pressure.

  He was sweet and funny at the vet’s.  We were early because I left
  home early enough to allow for stops along the way.  During our
  long wait, Doug and I took him outside once to offer him a drink of
  water, but he just whined and pulled back toward the clinic door. 
  He knew he was there for a purpose and he wasn’t going to leave without
  seeing the vet.  When we all got into the exam room together Koji
  trembled and cringed but made no move to bolt, nor displayed any
  hostility or aggression.  He’s a trouper, that dog. 

  He’s healthy, she said, but getting a little fat pad on his middle, so
  she wants us to get his weight down by about a pound and a half, to an
  even 60 lbs.  That seems an arbitrarily round number, and she gave
  us no clues on how to do it.  She also wants us to have him
  neutered, although she said that the testosterone he produces by virtue
  of being intact helps keep his weight down.  I’m getting cognitive
  dissonance here.  My menfolk are both aware that their own
  testosterone makes them vulnerable to similar prostate problems to
  those the vet warned us about for Koji, and neither of them wants to be
  neutered to prevent such problems.  I guess I’ll have to ask Koji
  how he feels about it.  He’s sleeping now.  We wore him out.

  After the vet visit, it was just a short trip to Felony Flats, so we
  dropped Koji with Greyfox while Doug and I had lunch and went
  shopping.  I introduced him to the taco bar at Yukon’s, then he
  led me to the bookstore.  He was delighted to find a whole section
  of manga, and bought three, each the first episode of its series. 
  I found a special sale on bargain books, bought two at big discounts
  and got a third free.  Two were recent novels by authors I
  like.  The real prize was The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. 
  I can tell that having this book is going to be fun.  My mind lit
  up when I saw it there at under ten dollars, and I saw both Doug’s and
  Greyfox’s eyes light up when I showed it to them.

  While Doug and I were buying groceries I noticed that sugar was on sale
  at a good price, so I purchased some for the NA group.  I saw Doug
  look disbelievingly at the two bags as I put them in the cart, then
  look questioningly at me.  He knows the stuff is poison to me,
  because I remind him every time I see him indulging in it.  I’m
  sure I’d mentioned before that one
  of my service positions is to supply the drugs:  the coffee
  (caffeine is addictive), sugar (addictive), and creamer (containing
  casein, also addictive) for our little group in that “program of complete abstinence from all drugs.”

  Anyhow, since I had the sugar to drop off and it was near time for the
  Tuesday night meeting, we went out to Felony Flats and relieved Greyfox
  of Koji’s company to make it easier for him to close up his stand for
  the day, then Doug and Koji waited for me in the car while I attended
  the meeting.  After that, it was back to Greyfox’s cabin to pick
  up empty water jugs for me to fill on my way back in on Thursday, and a
  few other things he had for me.

  We stopped at the local general store before coming home, because Doug
  wanted to rent a video.  We ended up with a (sorta) western double
  feature:  Jackie Chan’s Shanghai Knights and Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner.  He watched all of the Chan with me, and faded out in the middle of Earp.

  I remember the first time I heard Wyatt Earp’s name.  I thought
  the kids were saying “white urp” and since “urp” was a popular
  euphemism for vomitus, I couldn’t understand why the kids wanted to
  play white urp and I hadn’t a clue what would be involved in such a
  game.  I was a California kid newly arrived in Kansas.  It
  didn’t take those kids long to clue me in that the game was similar to
  the games of Cowboys and Indians I’d played on the Coast, and that
  White Urp was a local hero.

  Over time, I learned that it was Wyatt Earp, and learned some other
  associated names such as Dave Rudabaugh, Johnny Ringo, Bat Masterson,
  and Doc Holliday.  There in Kansas in the 1950s, the lines between
  the “good guys” and the “bad guys” were clear cut and plain.  I
  recall that in that first game of White Urp I was assigned to be Johnny
  Ringo, a bad guy.  *sigh*  Out west, I’d always been assigned
  to play an Indian, since I was a girl and most of my playmates were
  boys.  Actually, I had always sorta liked being an Indian, and
  Johnny Ringo had a cool name.  The only problem was that I’d
  always get shot, but I’d get some fun out of it by doing a dramatic
  death scene.

  To my great relief and increased viewing pleasure tonight, the movie
  was more true to life than most are, and so the characters were not so
  clearly delineated in black and white.  I suppose it’s
  understandable that those Kansas kids would see the Earp brothers as
  heroes, being descendants of settlers and sodbusters whose towns had
  been cleared of lawless drunken cowhands and trail riders by such rough
  and rowdy lawmen.  The museums I recall visiting in Wichita and
  Dodge City portrayed the Earps as heroes and displayed guns and other
  artifacts of theirs along with those such as Bat Masterson’s cane and
  Doc Holliday’s hip flask.

  It’s a different story in Tombstone, Arizona, where Doc and the Earps
  had to face a judge after the gunfight at the OK Corral, and where to
  this day Wyatt is considered by many to be a deranged spree killer who
  became unhinged and hunted down everyone who might possibly have been
  involved in his brother Morgan’s murder.  That story involves a
  lot of unsolved crimes, and much of it remains a mystery except to
  those who have made their minds up on one side or the other based more
  on where their loyalties lie than on the facts, because facts are in
  short supply and much dispute.

  I have always loved a good story, especially when the storyteller got
  it straight.  I have seen, heard and read many versions of the
  Earps’ story, most of which played fast and loose with those facts that
  are known and embroidered freely to fill in the gaps.  Most of the
  movie or novel versions of the gunfight in Tombstone have it fought in
  a corral, but it was on a streetcorner near the OK Livery Stable’s
  corral.  The re-enactors in Tombstone do a pretty good job of
  presenting it, complete with noise and gunsmoke, but completely without
  the fake blood that might make it more believable.  Some acting
  ability among the reenactors wouldn’t hurt, either.  The ones I’ve
  seen were just phoning in their parts.

  Often, time is condensed in those stories and Morgan is killed in the
  gunfight on October 26, 1881.  He really died about five months
  later, either shot while shooting pool in a billiards room or shot
  while on the boardwalk outside the billiards room and carried in and
  laid out on a pool table where he died.  That latter is what was
  reported in the Tombstone Epitaph
  at the time, and is the version reported currently on a plaque outside
  the building in question in Tombstone.   The former is the
  way the movie I saw tonight presented it, and the way it is told in
  several other accounts I’ve read.  Who knows?  The Epitaph, like the Weekly World News of today, said mostly what it’s editor wanted to say and occasionally threw in the true facts just to throw people off guard.

  Tombstone has many of those little plaques that say something like, “On
  this site, on October 26, 1881″ or “…on October 27, 1881,” etc., this
  or that happened.  One of my favorite such signs says, “On October
  26, 1881, nothing much happened on this site.”

  Despite a few real floaters that just didn’t fit the generally accepted
  facts, I liked the movie.  One aspect of it that continually
  distracted me from the story and detracted from my enjoyment probably
  wouldn’t bother most viewers.  They kept jumping around
  geographically.  One sweet love scene outside “Tombstone” was shot
  on the banks of Oak Creek in Sedona with Courthouse Rock in the
  background.  A chase and gunfight that was supposed to be between
  Tombstone and Bisbee was actually at Pine Flat between Sedona and
  Flagstaff.  That’s understandable, because Sedona is a much more
  pleasant area to be than down around Tombstone.  If I had a movie
  to make, I’d shoot it in Sedona, even if it was set on the Moon. 
  But in the next scene after that fight, they ride over a little hill
  and suddenly they’re in Utah.  It’s jolting.  That’s what I
  get for paying attention to geography and geology.  

  I guess this entry is long enough, now, and it is well and truly full
  daylight outside, or as light as it is going to get under this pall of
  smoke from the wildfires.  Tuesday’s Anchorage Daily News reported
  fifty-five separate fires in the state at press time.  During
  lunch at Yukon’s I caught a teaser for the TV news, which showed a
  street scene in Fairbanks, like pea soup fog, only brown.  Each
  time yesterday that the sun became visible through the clouds it was a
  dim red-orange disk in the sky.  The  smoke in the air even
  here at least a couple of hundred miles from the fires is making
  breathing more difficult and stinging my eyes and throat.

  I’m off to bed to read my new book.  Later, all.
  

  • 10:39 am
  • 7 Comments