Time and Tide Wait for No One

Anna and Ella, in the 50's. I would give anything to have an afternoon with them. To ask questions, hear their stories. To help me figure out the mosaic that is my heritage, my reality.

Anna and Ella

This is the earliest photo I have of my grandmother, Anna. This photo is likely taken in east Texas, Waco or Mart, the small town where they lived in as teenagers. 

Anna looks contented, perhaps in contrast to Ella who appears nervous. Looking at this photo now, I am surprised at the strong resemblance between my grandmother and my mother, June. Why have I not noticed this before? 

Preparing once again to delve into this convoluted, troubled, and fascinating family, I feel somewhat removed, like I'm seeing everything for the first time. 

Tired and Restless

It's Friday night and I'm home multitasking: eating, blogging, watching tivo'd Steven Colbert, and browsing my bargain version of The Dangerous Book for Boys. 

I'm torn between wanting to flake out and wanting to get something done. Tomorrow John and I will review the layout of my new kitchen. So maybe I should focus on getting a good night's sleep. WooHoo!

In This Picture

In this picture you’re holding my hand in front of the small rock house where I spent my childhood. You must have been dropping me off. Your face has that pinched look from too much mothering. 

Maybe I was returning home from one of your parenting flings, a euphoric couple of weeks filled with dress-making, iced cinnamon rings from the Betty Crocker cookbook, trips to the zoo. A fantasy family life, usually ended by a painful slide into a two or three day drinking binge, followed by tears, remorse, and a solemn drive back to Grandmother’s house.

Sifting through the box of photographs there’s rarely any taken on the high side of this roller coaster. Perhaps we were all too caught up in the hope that this time would be different. Maybe it was your fear that there might not be a next time that brought out the small box camera to capture the moment.

This particular photo was mounted on a button, surely something special. It lay in the bottom of the box, next to one that proclaimed "I Like Ike" which I wore to school all one fall. I can’t imagine anyone in my family caring about politics or even voting. But I remember wearing that button and walking around chanting “I Like Ike! I Like Ike!” Scratch even the staunchest liberal and you might find a dirty little secret.

The Hurried I Go, the Behinder I Get

This too shall pass. I will survive. 

What goes around, comes around. 

It's just a barrel of snakes. 

The real question is, 
what happens if he catches it?

Only God Knows

When she was fifteen, she rode the school bus home, leaving behind walks to the burger joint with friends and gatherings in someone’s bedroom to experiment with new lipsticks or hairdos.

Instead she trudged up the bus steps, made her way down the aisle to the back seat where she would immerse herself in other worlds for the next half-hour. She’d explore unknown worlds where teenaged suitors were cast out when they accidently clanged a spoon against their teeth while eating ice cream. 

She tried to imagine such a life, where girls went to college before marrying the handsome law student. Or maybe became a nurse or missionary and went to unknown dangerous places to minister to the needy.

One summer she convinced her parents to let her work at the Little Chef drive-in where she put potatoes through the French fry slicer and helped the dishwasher. Rarely, she was allowed to work the front counter, mixing vanilla Cokes and clipping burger orders on the cook’s wheel.

It didn’t last, of course, cause the owner found out she hadn’t picked out the rotten potatoes before sending them through the cutter. “No one told me to,” she countered but it didn’t save her job. Back to being on the outside looking in wasn’t too bad. Her best friend got to use the family car and drove everyone to the drive-in for fries and Cokes. 

Chance accounts for more than planning can ever accomplish. On a warm Saturday afternoon two young airmen decide to cruise the Little Chef. Bored or feeling lucky or just being friendly, they chat up the girls in the next car. One of them asks her to go to the movies and she says yes, but only if her parents agree. They don’t of course. He’s 21, an adult, in the Air Force, and from New York. God knows what that could lead to.

Women's Work

Keeping clean. Not always that easy.

Oil

If you live in Texas, one of your hopes/desires/ dreams is that you will make it big in oil. It's an unrealist dream, but one that endures. It's fed by movies (Giant) and real gushers (the Daisy Bradford, the Lucas gusher at Spindle Top). Dream on!

Etta

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Etta James is a part of our history. For years my "clan" gathered at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Etta was sexy, substantial, cool. Our icon, our voice, our lady of love. Long live Etta!

The Good Years

In the summer of ’67 a young mother bundled up her two sons, aged 4 and 5, and boarded a bus for New Mexico. They had spent the previous two years living with a madman: a brilliant, self-taught artist/sculptor and precision machinist, who was also a former inmate at Camarillo. 

She met him at a roadside bar in Huntington Beach where she worked nights serving draft beer and peanuts. Tall with red hair and freckles, he was intense, unpredictable, and married to a nurse who was addicted to painkillers.

He bounced back and forth between the wife and the girlfriend until the wife came in the middle of the night to vandalize the girlfriend’s '55 Dodge (that she had just bought with a month’s wages). For good measure the wife shot out the windows of their upstairs apartment with 30-06 armor piercing. 

The police came and made a report, retrieving a spent cartridge from the rumpled covers in her children's bed. The machinist stayed. Her riddled car was towed away and a few days later his was repossessed.

Everything changed. Everything stayed the same.

Eventually they moved to a nicer, bigger apartment. At times things seemed almost normal. She quit her job at the relay factory in southside LA and stayed home. She took in ironing, made lemon meringue pies, and ate them before he got home from work. Her sons remembered this as the good years. 

She babysat his three kids alot. Most afternoons she’d load the baby into a shopping cart and trek over to Kmart. They all loved it except her youngest who would trudge behind, his chubby face screwed into a child’s version of The Scream.