March 24, 2008
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Intermezzo
I’m taking a short break here, but still could post another memoir segment later today. I have posted four of them in the past four days, which is more than I’ve done since about 2003, I think.
Questions keep coming up in comments. I have replied to a few of them in the comment box. (Hey, John and Xanga Team — I really like that new feature, especially because I now get email if someone replies to my comments, so I don’t miss the replies and don’t need to go back looking if there is no reply.) Others I have just let slide.
One question has been sliding so long I don’t recall who asked it. Somebody wanted to know where ol’ “Ford” is now. I don’t even know if he is dead or alive. The last time I saw him was about 1968, in Springfield, Oregon. I was in a supermarket, shopping with my biker ol’man, “VW,” and ran into “Ford” and a woman near the meat counter. He was wearing short sleeves and I could see that he had the tattoos, “Kathy” on one arm and “Lynn” on the other, crudely blacked out. I said “hi” to him, he did a double-take, looked at the guy I was with, took the woman’s arm and moved away quickly.
The last contact I had with him was indirect. In 1979 I was reunited with our daughter Marie when she was twenty and had her first child. I went to Kansas to visit them. While there, I phoned Ford’s mother to let her know she was a great grandmother. I didn’t mention him in that conversation and she didn’t bring him up. We talked about the baby. Months later, after I had returned to Alaska, I received a letter from Ford’s wife, postmarked at one of the little towns near Vernon, TX, telling me that he was happily married and I should stay out of his life. I wrote back to her and told her I hoped he had outgrown his wife-beating behavior, and assured her that she had nothing to fear from me.
When I started writing about his personality disorders and his penis size, I wondered if it might place me in any danger from him. Knowing that he had been a binge alcoholic from the age of five or six, it occurred to me that he might well have died of cirrhosis of the liver by now. I ran a search on his name. If he is still alive, he no longer lives in that area where he was in the late 70s and early 80s, and where both of his brothers still live. Someone with his name, born the year he was born, lives in Virginia, but there are also a lot of other people with the same surname in that area, suggesting it’s a family cluster and unrelated to him. I decided it was an acceptable risk. I have been referring to him semi-pseudonomously thus far, but that is about to change.
Fatgirlpink said:
Peculiar that your Mother would be cautious about rabbit food around
Marie but not an boy-man that beat women and killed puppies.…and lupa had trouble with that, too:
I can’t imagine a mom fussing over rabbit pellets but “allowing” a
daughter to go back to an abusive fuckwit like Ford, either. *headdesk*I guess you had to know my mother. Lots of words come to mind when I try to define her: hypocrite, emotional cripple, sociopath, passive-aggressive….
I have tried hard to understand why my mother treated me the way she did. I know I was a disappointment to her, from having been born female, to being a blatantly sexual female, and thus a “bad girl” in her paradigm, to my failure to conform to social conventions and my rude insistence on saying what I thought.
I believe she resented me for the strong bond I had with my father, and the way he and I ridiculed her fears and her intellectual blind spots. She always tried to maintain at least the appearance of doing her parental duty, and never tried to cut herself off from me physically or geographically, probably because that would have put me out of the reach of her manipulation, but she was never there for me emotionally. Anything more I’d say here would just be reiterating what I have said here and here.
What American accent do you have? (Best version so far) Neutral
You’re not Northern, Southern, or Western, you`re just plain -American-. Your national identity is more important than your local identity, because you don`t really have a local identity. You might be from the region in that map, which is defined by this kind of accent, but you could easily not be. Or maybe you just moved around a lot growing up.
Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.
Comments (9)
i haven’t been reading your blog long enough to know really what you are talking abuot
but i gather that this Ford fellow wasn’t the best kind of people
@eadie -
If you have any interest in “catching up” on what you’ve missed, links to all my memoir posts are in the module headed, “Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it,” on the right-hand side of my main page.
@SuSu - thanx
Thinking about it, it’s probably a bit like my mother telling me (when I was preggers with Conor) that I ought to stay with Randy because no other man could be trusted to protect him from predators and to not abuse him. That I went for her logic still baffles me.
Silly, silly ford. It sounds as if he was nearly fearful of you in that store, and his later days woman was as well.
:/ Karma is only the sweetest tasting pie.
Ignoring all Ford references. It was a different time with different mores. However it seems you can take the girl out of the northeast (north of Boston) but you can’t take the northeast accent out of the girl…even after 70 yrs.
Fun quiz–I’m northeast (surprise!).
I almost missed this post this morning, but I’ve learned that sometimes you will post more than one in a day when you’re really in the writing mode. I’m glad I checked. YOu know I still think that people may not do the best, but they do try to do the best that they know how to do. It couldn’t have been easy to be a single mother in the days when your Mother was expected to be. It must have been hard to lose your Father who seemed to really balance her out. I am certain y our experience would have been different if he had been there. In any case, reading these memoirs have become a favorite part of my day. I liked this update on those I’ve been reading about. Please keep going. I’m spellbound…
@fatgirlpink -
“It couldn’t have been easy to be a single mother in the days when your
Mother was expected to be. It must have been hard to lose your Father
who seemed to really balance her out.”
This is true, as it is also true that widows enjoyed special status, which she milked for all it was worth. One thing I have said in various ways and in several different contexts is that, while psychopathology often makes life harder for the families of the sick people, it is never easy or pleasant for the crazy people themselves, either. Cowardice is hardest of all on the coward.