Sticky Seats to Sherman

Featured

Posted on by

I used the road and some parallel ones once in 1975 to get from our house in Oklahoma to my aunt’s house in Sherman, TX. My cousins had been staying with us. Our grandparents, in their Ford Torino, took us to Sherman. We spent the night and came back to Duncan.

It was hot. Damn hot. There was no air conditioning. Our granddad would trade cars at the drop of a hat. But a/c was often not part of the deal. Whether in hot and humid Oklahoma or in hot and dry Roswell, there often was no a/c in any of the many cars he traded for.

My cousins, Jeff (my age, around 12) and Jamie (around 6) kept the windows open and sweated. My grandparents fussed at each other. She would ask a question, he would snap an answer, a short, sharp bark, almost like a command. His responses to her would often get like that. Either minor irritation or outright hostility, like in that baking car 100 miles along 70 East and down to Sherman. We arrived damp and 10 pounds lighter. The cousins were glad to get to their own rooms.

I slept in Jeff’s room. Jamie bugged us as usual. Jeff and I sometimes fought. Sometimes, as a little brother myself, I would side in solidarity with Jamie in his interminable war with big brother.

The seats were sticky. We wore shorts. T-shirts. Tennis shoes. I think we had comic books. My uncle was a manager of a Wacker’s five and dime (Texas/NM/CO/OK version of Woolworth). My aunt, my mother’s youngest sister, did many things. There was fun, but mainly heat and humidity.

Having just moved to the very humid land of the Cross Timbers from the very dry atmosphere of the High Mountain Desert lands of New Mexico, the mid-70s were a damp, dripping, mildewing, moldy, miserable, mess. We went to school in stiff new clothes to classrooms that didn’t have air conditioners. Just like my grandfather’s Ford Torino.

Once along the way, there might be a stop for a coke and a restroom break, but if there was, I don’t remember it. Maybe when we went south from 70 at Ardmore to Gainesville, TX, just across the Red River border, where we switched to US 82 to Sherman. Maybe.

I remember 70s chemical-smelling seats in the back, Jeff leaning out one window, me out the other, Jamie slumping over us in the middle.

140 miles. About two hours and 15 minutes. Roasting, baking, basting in our own juices. Granddad, you couldn’t find a car among the stock at Valley Chevrolet that was a used Ford with a/c? You love to haggle, why’d it have to be about white walls than climate control?

I tried my technique of kneeling in the floorboard and lying facedown on the seat. God knows the fumes I was breathing from that sticky plastic coating. We slept fitfully, started scraps of our own. I listened to the brothers and silently thanked an ostensibly higher power that I was a little brother by five and seven years to teen sisters with no little brother to fight with myself. Jeff and Jamie on Mom’s side of the family and Jeff and Mike on Dad’s warred constantly. Bruises were given to each other often.

Older and bigger, Jeff and I would bike away through the cemetery by their house leaving Jamie alone among the tombstones, panicking. I tried not to be too much of a snot, but then I was a bit of a snot as a little brother, so sometimes it was just fun.

One year, Granddad had surgery. Aunt Pat came to Duncan, picked up Mom and scooted back to 70 West to Roswell. For some reason lost in time, Jeff got to go. I had to stay with Jamie. He loved my dad, his Uncle Marion, just like every other kid. And Dad paid him plenty of attention, for reasons that would later become apparent. Then I found the sting of jealousy. I was a loner kid, happiest alone, but hey, I’m YOUR kid, Dad, he’s NOT. It reinforced my gratitude for not having a little brother. We fought some, made up. It was a long week. He had fun. Parts I enjoyed, parts were filled with injustice and indignation.

The surgery successfully passed, the sisters came home. Jeff got to go to the hospital and be the center of attention. Jamie left, I went back to lonerism. Reading a book. Being left alone. That was my shtick. There wasn’t room for cousins or constant play or parents. Me, a book, maybe a little hike in the backwoods pretending to be an army or marching band, waving a flag.

It might sound like I hated my cousins. Au contraire! I loved them and enjoyed getting together (and still would), but sometimes, when you’re a kid, you fight and love and hug and roll in the dirt and get in trouble and tease and troll the younger ones, get dismissed by the older ones. But all my cousins are well-beloved still.

But always, for whatever family reasons, there were sticky trips, with beloved cousins sweating as much or more than you, where the tarmac of US 70 West seemed to be taffy. Soft, gooey, surely sticking to the tires. The smell of asphalt in the summer of West Texas is an enduring memory. It’s used in Six Flags Over Texas and it bakes there too, creating a smell that is unforgettable.

Just as unforgettable as my grandparents’ plastic seats in their Ford Torino, running down the road, a torturous journey shared with my favorite cousins.

Nope

Posted on by

No, no it didn’t.

⋞Something Happened Here: Roswell prepares for Pentagon’s UFO report⋟

On the eve of the release of the Pentagon’s highly anticipated report on unidentified aerial phenomena, life here in one of the world’s UFO hotspots was exceedingly normal.

Downtown’s alien souvenir shops and the International UFO Museum welcomed a steady stream of visitors escaping their pandemic malaise on Thursday as coronavirus restrictions continued to loosen in New Mexico.

The US government will release a declassified report on Friday detailing its analysis of various unidentified flying phenomena. City leaders hope that outsiders’ enthusiasm about the report will pique their interest in visiting.

Pretty much lays it all out there. There are some fascinated folks, a fantacist or two, and some locals who never think a thing about it, except it separates the first two from their money.

Born and raised there in the early 60s, I never heard of it in detail until the 90s. My grandparents (with my mother and siblings in tow) moved to Roswell in June 1947, a few weeks before an Air Force/NYU screw-up experiment crashed 70 miles north. My grandfather may have mentioned it in passing in the 70s or so and people remembered it, but not as anything real. When the 50th came around, so did the tourists and their cash, and <ka-ching> Roswell, where Billy the Kid nosed around, had something going for it besides the fireworks factory (which blew up), the mozzarella cheese factory (no, really), the bus-manufacturing center (belly-up), and the airliner graveyard going for it. Ever since, it’s aliens everywhere.

The Plains Theater is where I saw my first movie in a theater (Blackbeard’s Ghost) with its unfortunate press-ganging of Peter Ustinov and Elsa Lanchester—poor souls, it was like putting Leonardo da Vinci and Georgia O’Keefe into a Quentin Tarantino movie—into typical-for-the-period Disney fare with its ubiquitous Dean Jones, a movie that scared the bejeezus out of me and I started crying and my sister had to take me to the lobby—Disney movies still scare the bejeezus out of me. Ugh.). Anyway. The Plains is now the … ahem … “International UFO Research and Science Museum” or something like that, and there are lots of mannequins and green paint and some books, I’m given to understand, where I stood and cried at being forced to see Dean Jones try to keep up while Elsa and Peter wiped the floor with him.

Ugh.

Roswell is a farm town. The fields around the city on the Pecos, where my grandfather farmed from 1947 to 1971, grow alfalfa and dairy cows. My field trip in first grade at Parkview Elementary School was to a dairy. There’s some oil bidness that fluctuates and a lotta windmills.

And that’s it. No cosmic crash landings or autopsies, no gummint conspiracy, just miles of sagebrush and yucca plants and cows and antelope and pecans and a stupid attempt to fool the Soviets when both they and we were up to very much Double Plus-Ungood.

It’s my hometown. I’m proud of being a New Mexican. Being a Roswellite is more of a conversation piece, but heck I’m proud of that, too. Prouder of the mountains to the west and the state and the skies and wind and storms and sunsets. But if you want aliens? Drive up to Santa Fe and gawk at the Californians or to Ruidoso and gawk at the Texans.

[Update 2-Oct-24: This Wired article contains the final, definitive word on the “Roswell Incident,” which is inaccurately named, since the site is closer to the ghost town of Arabella 60 miles from Roswell along the 80-mile-long stretch of NM 255 (aka the old Pine Lodge Road). We snooped on the Russians, didn’t want them to know we were snooping; and we dropped crash test dummies to increase safety for high-altitude ejections of air force pilots. Period.]

The Road

Posted on by
Navajo Motel, Roswell, NM
Navajo Motel, Roswell, NM

I dream of a different future which might just be possible only if I win a lottery. Or a semi-truck runs over us and a TV lawyer collects a big ol’ settlement.

A house. Built from scratch. In my home state. A meditation/de-stressing center where anyone can go to have some simple peace and quiet and be alone if they want to be or with others if they need community or a therapist or advisor if they need help.

I dream of book ends to my life; the first part of it was New Mexico, so let the last part be the same.

I first hit the road that is US70 when I was a day or two old. A block east to 70/North Main, a right on 70/Second, a left on Wyoming, a right on Juniper and there I was.

I hit the road long-haul when my uncle was killed in Oklahoma when I was six months old. We were due to go anyway for an extended family vacation; it was an extended family funeral with long-term repercussions for everyone. US70 was my first road, and it was often a route of sorrow. Visiting grandparents who were fading away. Watching my grandfather take his last breath after eight hours on US70. Visiting my grandmother after yet more hours on US70 as she, deep in Alzheimer’s, told me a story that made perfect sense to her, about her mother, that was mostly gibberish to me. Our last moments together.

Whether it was Roswell-Duncan or Duncan-Roswell, US70 was the thread that bound the two halves of our lives: Mom’s immediate family in Roswell, her extended and Dad’s family in Duncan. A road ran between them. I knew every spot on the road. An area just east of the Pecos River that I loved and thought of as “my” canyon. The Dairy Queen in Floydada is the halfway point of any trip. Gas stations. Shabby courthouses and dusty, shuttered downtowns every thirty miles in west Texas, ticking off the miles on the road. Vernon, Crowell, Paducah, Matador, Floydada, Plainview, Muleshoe, Farwell. We knew which restrooms were decent.

Dad would light a cigarette every 20 minutes. I’d try to roll down the window, he’d roll it up to a crack, and we’d breathe in the smoke and sigh relief when he put it out. Irritation would again mount as the next one was lit. He would get speeding tickets rather often around Matador, Texas. My sisters got the window seats and I was often squashed in the middle. I would kneel on the floorboard, lay my head on the seat, and sleep. Sometimes, there wasn’t as much cigarette smoke that way. It was like I was kneeling at an altar, the altar of US70, speeding along at 70 mph. With the speed limit often being 55, this would result in attention from the Texas Highway Patrol.

US70 is always two lanes through Texas. It took decades for the 90-mile stretch between Portales and Roswell to be expanded to four lanes. Now it’s smooth and wide and there’s no dangerous passing and the speed limit is 70 and people go 80 because there’s nothing out there. Derelict towns like Elida and Kenna, the Elkins bar, the abandoned schoolhouse from the 1920s, my canyon, the bridge over the Pecos which meant we were 10 miles from Roswell, either our home between 1957 or our destination from 1971.

When we moved from Roswell to Clovis along that road, my sister and I sang “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” over and over in the cab of the U-Haul while Dad was driving. He probably went a little insane and maybe smoked a little more. Another U-Haul along the road in 1974 took us to my 19 years, 10 months, 28 days, and 9 hours of exile in Oklahoma, a suffocating and hard experience for my teens and twenties that I still have difficulty with, for many, many reasons.

Now I use US70 often … going to work, shopping at Target, getting the car washed, going to Publix or Sonic or out to Mt. Juliet, or going into downtown … it’s all along US70. It’s not as mean a road or experience as taking that road to Oklahoma. It’s a kinder/gentler US70 in Tennessee, more benign. US70 West from Oklahoma to Roswell and Ruidoso was always a joy, a mounting excitement at going home. US70 East was always a hated road. It took me down from the Sacramento and Capitan mountains and ushered me back to ugly, flat west Texas and then to hated Oklahoma. US70 East here is just a trip to Kohl’s, US70 West takes us back home. A benign road. A central thread in life.

For my part, they could tear up eastbound 70 and make it one-way westbound only. It would always take me home and I’d never have to leave.

Revenge is Sweet

Posted on by
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

[Just a startling dream i had, profanity included. None of this happened or is real. Just to be clear.]

We went to another school as a group, supposedly for professional development. We observed some teachers in their classrooms.

I brought a label maker and showed some way to make fancy, gold-leaf labels using some expensive tape for the labeler. They liked it so much that one teacher stole it. Made her own nonsense labels and wasted hundreds of dollars of gold leaf tape on gibberish.

Pissed was the name for it. I was pissed. We went in the gym and sat on bleachers waiting for the principals to come in and wrap things up. I got up and showed the ruined label sheets and called out the teacher. They were hostile and put me down.

We got in our principal’s car to go back to our school. We went a little was south on a decent asphalt road and came to an intersection with a couple of houses. A dirt road ran diagonally from the intersection to the southeast and it had a sign:

“Caution: 17-Foot Hole Ahead! If using this road, take it slow and avoid falling into the abyss!”

My principal grinned and said, “We’ve got time left. Let’s see this 17-foot hole.”

He gunned it and we went flying down the dirt road. Suddenly, he hit the breaks and we hit a big bump and fell … about 17 inches. The hole was 17 inches deep, not 17 feet.

The farmer who dreamed up the scheme was there. His field was tunneled by something, probably gophers, and this little depression had sunk 17 inches. He was enticing people to come see the hole, then charging them for getting a wrecker to winch them out, because, even though it wasn’t deep, there was usually a flat tire or broken axle or something.

Standing with the farmer was some guys from the state Geological Survey taking some measurements and looking at the hole.

We caught our breath and then laughed. But there was another sign on the far edge: “Caution! Sinkhole activity in progress! Up to five feet variance being recorded today.”

The others got out of the car and went over to the farmer. I stayed where I was, still pissed that my fellow teachers didn’t have my back over the label thing. Also, I thought it was fuckin’ hilarious that the principal had done a dumbass thing and now his car probably had a broken axle. So I just sat there.

But suddenly, the car sank. It went down three feet. So I bailed. I climbed up the sides and then we watched as the hole began to slowly swallow the principal’s car. In the trunk were a bunch of the other teachers’ stuff, like book bags and projects. They were all disappearing. And they weren’t amused when I laughed at them. Whatever they lost would be a far cry from the expense of what I lost when my gold leaf stuff was stolen and they thought it was nothing.

Revenge. It’s sweet.

We walked back up the road to the intersection and knocked on the door of one of the houses. Lo and behold; it was answered by the very teacher who stole my shit. Oh, goody. She looked at me and smirked. “How’s your gold leaf shit?” she asked. “Still looks a thousand times better than your house. What do you call this decor, early American shit hole?”

She was not amused.

We all went into the living room to wait on the district to send a school bus for us. Things were tense. Especially when I saw the thief’s scissors on a desk and sat on the floor and began cutting strands of her super-ugly, super-skanky 1970s gold shag carpeting.

They didn’t notice at first, so I cut a nicely rendered “Fuck You!” in the carpet. There were some kids’ toys lying around, so I took those and began to dismantle them and pile the pieces in the floor in front of the fireplace, which had a roaring fire in it. Pieces nearest the fire began to melt and smell a little. She truly lost her shit then.

“My god, what the fuck are you doing?! That’s my kids’ toys! You’ve ruined them!!!” she screamed.

“The tape you ruined cost over $1,100, bitch. Where’s my money?” I replied.
She ran over and gather up the pieces of her kids Super Woman or whatever playset. Then saw the “Fuck You!” I’d cut into her shag. Which hadn’t been vacuumed since born-again Jimmy Carter fought off the rabbit while canoeing with the help of almighty god.

I thought she was going to have a stroke.

Our teachers left the house; cowards to the end. The offender’s husband was out in the fields, but her father-in-law, Gramps, was sitting in his recliner. He was 90 years old and having a chaw of tobaccy. And giggling his old ass off. He’d wanted his daughter-in-law to get fucked up ever since his son had introduced her as his fiancee back all those years ago. He was cackling.

She ran out of the house. I went back to cutting the carpet. It was so offensive a carpet, so offensively filthy, that it begged to be cut. So I did.

Suddenly the front door banged open and three Neanderthals walked in. I was actually pretty attracted to one. He was a bear cub just slightly shorter than me, old enough to know what he was doing. He and his brothers came over and tried to be scary.

“We don’t like what you’re doing to Cousin Karen’s carpet. Not one bit,” he said.
“No, I don’t suppose anyone would,” I replied. “This is just a little payback boys; Cousin Karen destroyed $1,100 of my teaching materials and doesn’t want to make it good. So, I’m taking it out of the carpet.”

“She did that? Well, that’s not nice of her. ‘Course, she don’t have $1,100. I doubt she has $11. But she shouldn’t a done that. And you shouldn’t be cuttin’ her antique shag either,” he said.

“Have you looked carefully at her antique shag,” I asked. “Filthy. There are critters down there.”

He looked. “Well, so there are. Nasty. But anyway, we’re supposed to bust you up a little and get you out of here,” he said.

“Bryan,” I decided to call him Bryan on a whim, “Bryan, until I get restitution, ain’t nobody goin’ nowhere.”

He stood up. So did I. I was a head taller than he was. He was also pretty much jelly, not rock-hard muscles. He decided not to chance it, especially since I was staring down on his head and had a sharp pair of scissors in my hand. He decided to gross me out.

He took out an old nasty jockstrap. It was his cum rag. It was crusty and gross. He shoved it in my face. I laughed.

“Son, I’m a gay boy. Shoving a cum-encrusted jock in a gay boy’s face and expecting him to run away is like shoving a fifth of bourbon in a drunk’s face and expecting him to dump it in the sink. Thanks for the present. I predict many happy hours of strokin’ my meat to this and adding my own DNA to it. May I keep it?” I said.

They gave me a look of disgust and walked out of the house.

Then the other principal came in with his skanky wife. She had a fleecy blanket you get from Kohl’s thrown over her shoulder like it was a mink. She was arguing with him. He tried to argue with me, saying the State Cops were coming for my ass.

“Great! It’ll be a triple arrest for your teacher’s grand theft of expensive goods (a state felony), for your refusal to act on a report of a crime in your building (a state felony), and for me cutting some carpet (a misdemeanor with a $10 fine), so bring ‘em on, the quicker the better.” I said.

He rolled his eyes and became conciliatory. “Now simmer down, let’s see if we can’t settle this thing amicably,” he said.

“Amicable is $1,100 in my pocket within an hour and the thief being put on unpaid leave until the start of the next school year. That’s reasonable and equitable,” I replied.

He just looked at me.

His wife was getting hot and pissed. She took off her blanket and threw it at me. It landed instead on the fireplace heart. An end of it fell in the embers and caught fire.

She didn’t notice. I didn’t move. The principal cackled on. His wife smoked a Virginia Slims; where she found any, I don’t know.

He finally realized her blanket was on fire. He jumped up and yelled and pulled the blanket right out of the fire onto the shag carpet. That shit was made by every flammable, carcinogenic, artificial fiber known to 1970s man. It started melting and burning immediately.

The principal and his wife fled. I helped Grandpa out of his chair and he took me into the kitchen.

“That was the best thing I’ve seen in ages. Been waiting for this for donkey’s years. Here, son, what you do is go out the back kitchen door, disappear into them corn stalks,” he said.

We began to hear the sirens of coming fire trucks. The house was putting forth an impressive column of smoke.

“When you get to the next section line road, cross it and follow the soybean lines, keep heading west. You’ll come to the highway. I’ll have a friend of mine pick you up. He’ll be in a red 1968 Chevy pickup. You can trust him. Now scoot! And thanks!” he said.

I took off through the cornfield and the soybean field. The truck was waiting where Grandpa said it would and I hoped in. Zeke (of course) was his name and he congratulated me like I had killed the wicked witch of the west.

He drove me all the way home, cackling under his pipe. He drove away with a laugh and a wave and I went in to change out of my sooty clothes and freshen up.

It was just the start of interesting.

#EmptyThePews

Posted on by

I posted this elsewhere and on the bird site first, but it also belongs here on 70West.

Why my pew has been empty since 1982: A long thread for anyone who may be interested, et al. Perhaps someone may relate or need to hear. Inspired by @C_Stroop and #EmptyThePews on Twitter.

It starts in 1975. I’m 12. A budding little gay boy. At the C. of the Naz., we get a spiffy little sermon, which runs like this: “Speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession!!!” Amens, claps, whistles, “Kill the Devil!”

Fast forward a week later. Someone in charge of our family’s spiritual development decides to follow info bestowed by the Holy Spirit Fairy, an entity which seems to act rather … impetuously. Or at least that was my experience with Him.

The Spirit has moved someone that we must immediately abandon the C. of the Naz., where, remember, I’ve just been told on the authority of the church into which I was born and raised that speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession.

[An aside: 12-year-old me had memorized the 1960 Church Manual so I could know how to perform weddings and funerals because … get this … I thought I would become a C. of the Naz. preacher.]

Given a choice about which church to attend would have been lovely. Alas, it was not to be. I was the young, stupid child who couldn’t possibly be trusted to know what was good for him, spiritually speaking. At best, a “baby Christian.” (These buzzwords sound familiar?)

Actually, after just one hour of being exposed to the new church’s … shall we say, bizarreness and cultish overtones … I’m confident I would have scurried back underneath the skirts of the mother church (of the Naz.) if I had a driver’s license and a car. But I didn’t.

So I wasn’t given a choice. Remember the previous sermon, supposedly delivered by a stern God to CotN Leaders possessed of “Utter Sanctification” and who are therefore qualified to speak on subjects Most Weighty: “Speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession!”

Again, I was 12 years old. Puberty was dawning. Teenage outrage, hatred of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, inflated sense of injustice, and general all-around questioning and boundary-pushing are imminent. I needed constancy. But the Spirit had spoken and must be obeyed.

The next Sunday, we don’t drive over to be with the sanctified who hate devilish tongue-speaking. Instead, we head straight for the new church, an Assembly of God knockoff/alleged “non-denominational.” “We’re going here from now on,” says Parental Dearest.

What happened the first Sunday at the new church to which we had been led by the Holy Spirit? Well, I’ll set the scene one more time: The previous week, the church of my birth told me speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession.

This week? FRICKIN’ HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD! JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH! POPE PAUL VI AND ALL THE SAINTS! AND DEAR GOD WHY ARE ALL THESE WOMEN IN EXPENSIVE ULTRASUEDE DRESSES RUNNING UP AND DOWN THE AISLES SCREAMING THEIR FOOL HEADS OFF???!!!!!

Then: The kicker. If I am to understand the main belief point through hours of gibberish, a complete lack of any catechism, no orderly service of any kind, no regular communion, and a multitude of other things, a central belief is this:

“If you do NOT speak in tongues, God is withholding His greatest blessing from you and therefore there is something wrong with you if you don’t immediately babble in tongues in ‘the presence of the Lord.'”

In other words, NOT speaking in tongues was evidence of God withholding his greatest gift from you & you were opening yourself up to … you guessed it, demonic possession. As soon as I hit 16, my pew began to be empty. By 18, only bribery could get me in it. So…bye!

It would take a long thread to describe coming out (yeah, the Spirit got involved there, too), getting away & being an adult in charge of myself & the joys of life since I got myself to #EmptyThePews. Thanks for the inspiration, @C_Stroop and thanks to everyone who read!

Your Travel Guide to Baghdad-By-The-Bay (2002)

Posted on by
Reply
Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

[A longish screed about things to see and do as a tourist in San Francisco in 2002, written for a friend. Many of the links, being 20 years old, may not work.—Ed.]

‘I sat in the Delhi airport and watched the big electric clock in the departure hall that tells passengers when to board. I thought I imagined that time was moving in fits and starts: 1:12 a.m. for fifteen minutes, then 1:27 for another twenty, 1:47 … Closer inspection revealed that the clock was not plugged in, and its digits were being flipped manually by a little man in gray overalls whenever the mood took him.’
— Jonah Blank, Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India

‘SF is what the freedom-inducing utopian metropolis was mapped out to be: which is to say, more open, tolerant, funked-out, colorful, strange, unorthodox, thoughtful, nature aware, baffled, contradictory, and kaleidoscopic than any other city in the nation. It is equal parts beautiful and annoying, frustrating and wonderful. Perhaps this is why we seem to be so hated by sundry hunks of ‘Merka. We get it right, even in how frequently we get it wrong.’
— Mark Morford, SFGate.com

Hmmmmm. Slumming in SF for a vacation. Interesting choice. If you’re lucky this summer of 2002, you might arrive just in time for both « Barry Bond’s 600th career home run » or « Oakland’s 70th murder of the year ». Or maybe both.

My first advice is that, SF being just like downtown Washington, DC, where buses tend to wipe out the old and the slow, be very careful crossing the streets. Our smack-the-pedestrian rate is down this year, but still appears to be trying to keep pace with Oak-town’s homicide rate. And, as always, one should certainly watch out for those DWA’s (I’ll let others explain that acronym to non-Californians), to wit:

True story: This afternoon, I was sitting in my chair, doing what I do every afternoon at 3, namely, scattering resumes from « Seattle » to « Vermont » like so much bird seed while being endlessly amazed at just how much trouble « a little boy named Beaver » can get himself into, as well as endlessly pondering what would possess a woman to vacuum while wearing high heels and a string of pearls (not to mention allow her youngest child to be named after a swimming rodent – and just why is Ward always so friggin’ uptight?), when I heard a short screech, followed by an almighty and hellacious bang.

Well, I thought, it’s someone else’s turn to visit « the fine UCSF trauma center », rated the eighth best hospital in the empire! Sure enough, David came panting up the hill shortly thereafter; he had been in « a Muni bus » down the hill coming home, when a little old DWA man decided to make a left-hand turn from northbound Seventh onto westbound Lawton.

From the far right lane. Across four lanes of traffic. On a red light. In front of the northbound oncoming #44 Muni bus.

While the bus driver had quick reflexes and managed to stop the beast in time (thus sparing us all a scene of neighborhood carnage), the oncoming southbound cars on Seventh did not. Result: Squished Daihatsu and simply higgledy-piggledy afternoon traffic – the loony bin – er, I mean ’« Laguna Honda Adult Rehabilitation Center »’ – having just let out the shift change of Nurse Ratcheds – er, I mean, ‘mental health care professionals’ – a few blocks south.

Yet, undaunted by the scene confronting him, the Muni driver waited for the green light and then simply maneuvered his bus gallantly around the accordioned Daihatsu, let out David at the appropriate stop around the corner and went on his merry way. Which is possibly the first time in recorded history that a Muni driver was concerned about keeping to schedule. But I digress.

Not knowing where (or indeed if) you, dear reader, visited in SF before, I have a few suggestions:

First, take a look at « SFGate ». They always have something there interesting for turistas.

Even better, be sure and investigate « The SF Bay Area Guardian’s ‘Best of the Bay 2002 ».’ There’s a plethora of recommendations, including, if one is so inclined, the best nude beaches.

Hint: One of the best of the nude beaches is just to the west of the GGB and goes by the name of « Baker Beach ». Just be sure and remember the BB rules:

First, the beach runs below a high cliff, on top of which are tourists with cameras and binoculars who are supposedly there to ‘catch the spectacular view of the GGB’ [wink, wink]. If you don’t mind possibly ending up on the internet, well, then go ahead and « doff the CKs ».

Second, the beach is segmented by groups. Running from west to east, with the furthest eastern section being the closest to the GGB, you will find: First, clothed families and SF’s very few, very lonely Republicans; Second, clothed adults (moderate twenty-somethings who recently moved here from the Midwest and are still too inhibited to visit the areas to the east); Third, unclothed straight people (evenly divided between true believing nudists and folks who are obviously uncomfortable but determined to push on regardless – oh, and don’t be scared, but this group enjoys playing volleyball); Fourth, unclothed lesbians and their retrievers; and Fifth, unclothed gay men. Those fully clothed people walking east along the beach visiting each section are just engaging in prurient and surreptitious plain old ogling.

Then there’s that secret sixth section, over the rocks and snuggled up against the bridge, but what happens there would, if described in this missive, probably highly annoy the Imperial censors. Not to mention scare you. Let’s just say that there are more reasons than the sunsets why the view off the western side of the GGB can be quite spectacular. Unfortunately, the western sidewalk is usable only by bicyclists – no pedestrians, no gawkers with Nikons and telephoto lenses – despite what I alluded to above.

Just remember that San Francisco beaches are notoriously deadly affairs; a few months back, an « entire Japanese youth tour group », standing with their backs to the Gate at Baker Beach (the western, Republican, end) for picture-taking purposes, were swept out to sea by a large rogue wave, which only the camera man saw approaching. One of them did not return to shore and has never been found. Kinda like those Alcatraz escapees back in the ‘50s.

The western side of SF is « Ocean Beach », but the gray (yes, I said “gray”) sand is often unappetizing, and the notorious cold, riptides, rogue waves and the occasional shark or angry sea lion combine to … well, rival Oakland’s homocide rate. In short, beaches are for sunning, dog walking, frisbee-flying or kite flying, not for swimming (see above photo).

What else? Well, I always recommend the drive up 101 to Santa Rosa, where you can have great « Tex-Mex at La Cantina » (on the courthouse square downtown) and « visit Snoopy’s home ice, the Redwood Ice Arena, opened by Charles Schulz in 1969 and which now houses a Peanuts museum and gift shop ». This is where Sparky hung out when he wasn’t drawing. « This past weekend saw the grand opening of his great new museum ». It’s a dilly and will attract hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

While in SR, there’s also « a nice indie bookstore, Copperfield’s, » in downtown SR that gives much-needed relief from the big, bad corporate chains like Bore-doors and No-Brains & IgNoble. One can also drop by McDonald Avenue, the fairly unchanged neighborhood seen in Hitchcock’s 1943’s « Shadow of a Doubt », as well as « Scream » and « Pollyanna ». (What an interesting trio that is. A friend just bought Pollyanna on DVD; beyond the shadow of a doubt, it made me want to scream. Hyuck. Hyuck. Hyuck.)

Anyway. The stairs down which Joseph Cotton pushed Theresa Wright in SoaD are said to still be there, relatively unscathed. Santa Rosa was more recently the locale for the excellent Coen Brothers’ noir-ish « The Man Who Wasn’t There », starring Billy Bob Thornton and Frances McDormand. It didn’t have a body being pushed through a wood-chipper in mid-winter like « Fargo », but it did have an execution, drunken hog-riding, and a roll-over car wreck caused by a blowjob. So hey.

If one’s visit stretches out toward the end of August, one shouldn’t miss the Tall Ships sailing through the Gate, part of the « Tall Ships Challenge », which will feature sailing vessels from around the world. It started Aug. 8 in Richmond, BC, and concludes Sept. 14 in San Diego, with simultaneous celebrations in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I always highly recommend « Fort Point », the 1850’s fortress underneath the GGB. It’s a well-preserved fort with spectacular views. Just don’t stand too close to the edge of the Bay. The rogue waves which hit the tourists at Baker Beach hit Fort Point sometimes too. And no, you can’t get to Baker Beach from there. A chain link fence prohibits what happens on the west side from being viewed by the tourists from Dubuque on the east side.

Fort Point is most famous as the spot where Kim Novak jumps into the Bay and Jimmy Stewart has to rescue her in Hitchcock’s « Vertigo ». Those steps are still there. And by the way, ain’t no way Jimmy coulda rescued that crazy wench; either she would have been immediately swept out into the Gate, or he would never have been able to hoist her back up the steps – I mean, lord, he was a thin thing and she was a rather … buxom woman.

Love ice cream? Well, one can hit four legendary ice cream stores, which were recently « part of a unique, only-in-San-Francisco, bike-around-the-city-and-eat-ice-cream, tour ». Yum, yum, yum.

Like to skateboard or rollerblade? Well, one might just have the brand-new, half-a-million-dollar skate park near the Cow Palace all to one’s self. Built recently for ‘boarders who were tearing up city sidewalks, it’s now being shunned by them: ‘It sits in a wind-rush so ‘hella cold’ that it’s been dubbed ‘The Chilly Bowl.’ Most boarders still prefer the broad sidewalk near Pier 7 on the Embarcadero, next to the ritzy Waterfront restaurant. Which, of course, is hella illegal.’

By the way, « ‘hella’ is a California colloquialism » which I first heard from high school girls on the aforementioned #44 Muni bus (‘That was a hella rave last night, Britney!’ ‘I know, LaQuisha! That Ecstasy gave me a hella buzz!’). ‘Hella’ can be used in other situations, as well: ‘That flight was hella bumpy!’ ‘That flight attendant was hella rude when she threw that Salisbury steak at me!’ And so on.

If one is into movies, check out the venerable, ever-fascinating « Castro Theater » with a terrific and eclectic, ever-changing series of great films, the movie fan’s Mecca. It’s located on Castro between 17th and 18th, which is, by the way, the geographical center of the queer universe. If you’re lucky, you’ll be treated to a performance of the Mighty Wurlitzer, the restored organ which rises out of the pit before some showings. The Castro was completely restored to its original glory not too long ago; it’s worth going just for the architecture. It also had a role in a scene of « EdTV »; Matthew McConaughey chased Jenna Elfman into one of the Castro’s restrooms. (We natives laughed at that scene; those crazy LA movie people had the chase begin in North Beach and end in the Castro – it would have been an uphill foot race of over five miles lasting, on-screen, about 30 seconds. I mean Matthew’s in pretty good shape, but I doubt he’s in THAT good shape.)

More standard, touristy suggestions:

« 1. Walk the Golden Gate Bridge » (do it now; they’re considering charging walkers $1 a piece in the future, and the toll for drivers will soon be raised to $5 bucks a car – charged to southbound drivers only). Walking the GGB is always fun; you can feel it bounce and sway as cars and trucks fly past you at 75 miles an hour close on one side and, on the other, there’s that sheer drop down to one of the world’s most treacherous ocean currents.

I admit that the bridge is beautiful and makes for perfect postcards; however, the charm and wonder of walking it escapes me. I find it about as thrilling as walking along, say, the Metro bridge over the Potomac in DC – while Orange line trains come at you from both directions. But hey! If you’re lucky, you might witness one of the many deadly head-on collisions that happen on the GGB all too often, or maybe even one of the estimated 200+-a-year suicide plunges into the Gate. Those in the know report that impact forces do the deed, not drowning, and that most victims end up, how do we say this? Several inches shorter than they were in life. Now THERE’S a vacation story to tell the folks back home!

« 2. Take the $23 Alcatraz After Dark tour ». It’s a totally different place in the sunset, less tourists, more mystery, more shadows. Colder than Laura Bush after she’s dragged Jenna home from yet another bout of underage DC bar hopping, but still well worth the trip. Be sure and go to D block, where the isolation cells are; a ranger puts you in a cell and closes the door. Fun, fun, fun. I wasn’t aware that dark could be so … well, dark. Not recommended for those afraid of blackness, tightly closed and confined spaces, 60-year-old toilets, or large, indigenous rodents. Or the ghosts of Al Capone, ‘Creepy’ Karpis or the Birdman of Alcatraz.

Bonus attraction in D block: Shrapnel and bullet scars from the 1941 prison takeover are still visible, created by an all-out Marine assault from the Bay on the rioting prisoners. Also be sure and see the papier-mache’ heads used in the Clint Eastwood movie, « Escape From Alcatraz » and the spot where ol’ ‘Scarface’ Capone gave haircuts.

Also, if you’re lucky, one of Alcatraz’s aging inmates might be on hand with a few interesting tales. The night my NorthPoint Field Operations field engineer trainee group and I went, we heard, from a nice man who was 90 if he was a day, an interesting (and surely physically improbable) tale of how one becomes a prison ‘bitch.’ Needless to say, some of the more … less-travelled … engineers were a bit … startled at the tale.

« 3. Visit Golden Gate Park » (in my neighborhood). Stay on the paths and try not to look too closely at what goes on in the bushes. GGP is safer than DC’s Rock Creek Park (at least during the day) – you’re unlikely to run into the bones of dead Congressional interns (although I do hear that Mr. Condit is back home in nearby Modesto during the Congressional break, so you just never know).

It’s also home to the « California Academy of Sciences », where you, too, can stand on a platform and experience what it felt like during the « 1906 earthquake ». In other words, it jiggles you up and down really fast and makes your lunch come out of your nose. No word on whether they also drop bricks on your head and then set you on fire so you can experience the aftermath of the 1906 ‘quake as well, but that might be included in upcoming museum renovations.

Afterwards, you can sit in the Japanese Tea Garden to collect your wits, or even use the pedal boats or canoes on Stow Lake. Caution! A dead elderly man was discovered floating on the lake face down a few months back, so, if one has a heart condition and is 88, one probably shouldn’t be pedaling or rowing boats around Stow Lake.

« 4. Shop the newly rejuvenated Union Square ». After a multi-year, multi-million-dollar face lift, the center of all things shopping recently reopened to tourists and its usual contingent of mimes and bums. It’s all there: Disney and Prada and Macys and Saks and Levis and Niketown and North Face and Virgin Megastore … as well as the piquancy of fresh bum urine and tourists buying every piece of made-in-Taiwan schlock they can get their hands on as they wait in patient herds for the « Powell Cable Car line ». (Hint: Catch the « California Street line » in front of the « Hyatt Regency Embarcadero » near the « Ferry Building » on « Market Street »; no lines, no crowds, few tourists, much more spectacular views. From the Ferry Building, a relaxing ride on the « Golden Gate Ferries line » to « Sausalito » or « Tiburon » is also a very wonderful thing.)

Union Square is where, by the way, a year ago this week I was dodging some x%x*^&# tourists from Dubuque and severely sprained my ankle. While it was potentially embarassing, none of them apparently noticed that I was sprawled on the ground; they either thought I was a bum or they were too busy craning red necks upwards, sayin’, “MA! Look at all them tall buildin’s!”

« 5. Take a walk down Second Street from Market to PacHell Park, home of the Giants ». This was my commute every morning when I was still actually part of the American work force. I love this quote in the article linked above about the area on the south side of the building where NorthPoint was located: ‘Look up the word “bleak” in the dictionary and this is what you should see.’

Still, at the end of the road is PacHell Park with it’s « SF Giants » store and museum and tribute to the Say-Hey Kid, « Willie Mays » (if you’re into baseball). It’s a beautiful facility, and unlike the corporate welfare given out to sports teams in the rest of Amurrica, it was built entirely with private funds – particularly from that evil phone company, hence its name.

Proud recent moment: « SF supervisors just voted earlier this month » not to sell out to corporate interests the right to rename « Candlestick Park ». The Park, ugly and nasty as it is, was built and is maintained by the taxpayers of the city. A rare, proud moment: Principle triumphing over the almighty corporate dollar.

« 6. Sixth Street ». Here is where you will find a richly layered, multicultural experience with sights, sounds, tastes and smells unparalleled anywhere.

It’s a veritable bazaar: Need a serial-less firearm? We got that. Counterfeit Nikes? We got that too. Cheap whores made up to look like Princess Leia in “Star Wars: Episode 4” and of indeterminate gender? Got ‘em in spades. More pharmaceuticals than Bayer, Wal-Green’s and « SF General Hospital » combined? Oh, yeah. Human drama? « Colorfully decorated pimp mobiles »? Movies which you can enjoy in the privacy of your own personal booth? Expert tutellage in « Ebonics »? We’re down with ‘em all, baby. Come see us.

Lastly, please allow me to offer my services as tour guide/chaffeur, if so needed. Lord knows I have the time. Just remember I drive as if the very demons of hell are chasing me and they’re rather hacked off about something or other. And you’re welcome to visit a rather more sedate tourist spot: My apartment. It’s not as exciting as Sixth Street or Baker Beach, not as famous as the « Crooked Street » or « Coit Tower », but it’s a heckuva lot calmer than all of the above. The most dangerous thing here is the « Beagle’s breath ». And the occasional DWA.

So, take your shoes off, set a spell. Ya’ll come back, now, y’hear?

A Few San Francisco Links:

Arts and Culture

Government | Industry

History

Media

Sports

Tourism

Transportation

Universities

Weather/Cams

A Eulogy for Brooksie Belle Ketchum Booth, My Grandmother

Posted on by
Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

[I wrote the following passages in two separate sections over two separate days.]

Part I – 2:00 a.m. San Francisco Time, Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001
The call I was dreading came just ten minutes ago – an unhappy, middle-of-the-night call — word from my exhausted and grief-stricken mother that her mother’s long battle was over and that she was at peace, finally. The call was more than simple news of a passing; it also evoked a curious mixture of grief and relief and joy and tears.

Grief that a beloved woman, who was in part responsible for my existence on earth, had reached the end of her long and hard, but fruitful and accomplished life. Grief for the hole torn afresh in my chest, next to the three scars left after the departures of my other three grandparents. Stating a trite obviousness: Losing family is never nice nor easy. I also carry scars because I never had the privilege of growing up and getting to know my uncles, Leon Ramsey and Jay Pollock. Yet, somehow, there was some relief that the imprisonment of that lively and articulate brain had ended and joy at the thought of all that she must be experiencing right now – in particular, a much-anticipated reunion with her husband and the healing in her heart of the missing of him.

I’m happy for her; but you’ll have to forgive me, I’m also a trifle perturbed – she was, after all, either supposed to hang around a lot longer or at least take me with her. But good for her anyway. I’m really not that selfish. Okay, maybe I am. A grandmother is something truly special, of course. Irreplaceable. And now both of mine are gone. I have a simple question today: How do you breathe after this? My throat was constricted after Mom’s call (it still is), and I relived the nightmares of 1988 and 1992 and 1993 and the loss of the other three grandparents all over again.

As a matter of fact, the moment that stops my heart completely this morning is a memory that came rushing back at me with an overwhelming force after Mom’s call: In 1993, when I arrived at Meme’s house that cold January evening and approached Granddad’s bed and Grandma lovingly cradled his head, woke him up and with a big smile said, “Look who’s here! You know who that is?” and Granddad turned his head and lit the room for me with a huge grin and said, “Well of course I do! It’s Stevie!” And then I saw the tears in her eyes as she looked at him and bathed his face with a wet washcloth, the knowledge that she was about to lose him sneaking up on her inexorably. The love there was suddenly naked and unabashed and I had never seen it quite like that between them before. These were not demonstrative people. Their 60th-anniversary kiss was quite a production, as I recall.

I have to believe that, right now, Grandad’s returning the favor for her, welcoming her home, holding her tight as she adjusts to her new freedom. Just think about how she feels. No more pain. No more loneliness. Together again. And best yet, free from her mind prison of the last eight years or more, able to think and speak coherently again, calling him “Daddy” and asking if he still dips snuff, trades cars every two weeks and how many yards has he taken on to mow?

Because that’s the thing. The pain of loss is sharp, but bittersweet since you remember certain happy things and know other things and that makes it okay. In the first place, she deserves the peace and tranquility and family reunions and everything she’s experiencing right now even as we sit around her body, scarcely able to breathe. She earned this. Years of back-breaking labor over the stove, the ironing board, the cotton field, the cash register at the store at Central High. The labor of five pregnancies. And the price she’s paid and the hurt and confusion she’s endured over the last eight years of one of nature’s most cruel diseases – it was intolerable – both for those who were able to see her every day and those of us who were far away from her physically, yet always had her in our thoughts and hearts. Folks, she was unable to look at a picture and call it a picture; it came out that it was a cow. She could say, “Well, there you are!” oftentimes without being able to recognize or articulate who you were.

And so now she’s at peace, whole again, rejoined with her husband and other loved ones who went before, rejoined with her mind. Joy unspeakable is hers and who am I to be selfish and piggish and want her here in the flesh? If anyone deserves what’s she experiencing right now, it’s Brooksie, our mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, friend, mentor.

She’s gone. And I personally hate it. I think it stinks. I’m a selfish lil snot. I so want her here. I want the consistency she represented – she was as immutable and constant as the Rock of Gibraltar. And sometimes just as stubborn and unafraid to get up in your face if you needed it. Especially if you and your cousin Jeff are playing with the porcelain spinning squirrel in the glass bookcase for the nine-hundredth time that day and she’s told you before and you’re gonna break the thing and then where will you be? I also doubt if she’d much appreciate me referring to her as Brooksie through some of this narrative. I’m sure to hear about that eventually.

Brooksie’s daughter, Janis Wynona, my momma, says I may be about to turn 38, but she is, after all, my mother and she has spoken and I better hop to it. How high, Mom? And if circumstances are just right, I might hear echoes from Wynemia Jenell, Joyce Lee, Patricia Jane, and George Oval Jr. Now, do you think that Janis Wynona, daughter of Brooksie Booth, learned how to keep me in line by reading some book? Not on your life. Nope. She and Grandma had me tag-teamed before I was capable of rational thought processes and halfway coordinated motor skills. There is also some limited video evidence that certain aunts knew these skills also, before I could even feed myself, while I was still known as Porky Pig.

By the way, I have to report here that Grandma’s disciplinary techniques also work on beagles. Not even a half-witted beagle like my Bayley can mistake the meaning of the phrase, “I brought you into this world and I can take you out,” delivered in my best Grandma Booth voice and intonation. He minds me quite well after that.
Her kids did turn out pretty decent, I s’pose.

Meme showed me how to keep an immaculate house, feed hummingbirds and turtles and how to care for others under conditions that might make Mother Theresa sit up and say, “Whoa! No way Joe!” She hasn’t had a hair out of place in my lifetime. And that’s the one thing I can’t possibly hope to emulate her on; my hair hasn’t been in place since day one. I’m just not willing to make that kind of commitment to hairspray or gel. Her generosity of spirit is awe-inspiring.

I’ve written something about Mom, Janis Wynona, but might not be able to read it. Her inner beauty is in fact her inner strength. This is an intelligent woman who sacrificed herself to serve the elderly of her community for over 25 years – she paid a dear price for it, but I promise that there are stars in heaven because of her. She’s saved lives, both figuratively and literally. And it is due to her and Dad that I have everything I have and am who I am. Speaking of Dad, I congratulate him on his good taste in swallowing hard and taking the vow back on April 10, 1955.

Joyce Lee, always the rebel – after all her slogan is, “The South gonna rise again!” taught me to have fun, not take life quite so seriously, and, as David Niven says in Please Don’t Eat The Daisies,” “I shall yell tripe! Whenever tripe is served!” Too bad she yells it for the rightwingers and I yell it for the leftwingers, but she’s such a remarkable woman, I can overlook that rather otherwise glaring fault. I shall never forget the day she gave her Herman the Lion monologue followed by the Ladies and Gentlemen speech in the crowded dining room of Mrs. Hap’s Smorgasbord Restaurant in Clovis, NM. I pray for the day when I find that kind of courage.

Patricia Jane also taught me to have a sense of humor, and adventure, but most of all how to survive. Dolly Parton in my favorite movie has the line, “Why when it comes to suffering, that woman is right up there with Elizabeth Taylor!” Her courage and fortitude in the face of some of the cards she’s been dealt in life is an inspiration to us all.

And what can we say about George Oval Jr.? What did he teach me? Well, he showed me, for one thing, how you can beat your nephew at cards by making sure that his back is to a blank TV screen – that way you can read all his cards without him knowing it – until about 25 years later. I grew up thinking I was truly lousy at “Go Fish.” But beyond the silliness, George, Junior, Son, whatever you wanna call him, shows his deep and abiding faith and plays a mean guitar, drives a mean drag racer, and taught me how to build models and whittle sticks and play in irrigation ditches. Not to mention those invaluable “Go Fish” lessons. His biggest asset, in my child’s eyes at the time anyway, was that he was big enough to torment my big sisters, thereby freeing up a significant amount of my time, most of which I used burying their cameras and barbies in the back yard. I owe ya, buddy.

Now see, there’s the rub. These people, all of us, are Grandma’s legacy. There are pieces of her in each of the people I’ve just described. They are the fine people they are because of her and granddad. Therefore, her life should be uproariously celebrated. Her death mourned, but her life, full of laughter and joy, celebrated. And the pain of today does heal with time. While there are still moments when I bump up against the scars created by the passing of my grandparents, it’s made easier when Grandpa Pollock’s voice sounds in my head, saying, “Whoooah Steveus!” or I hear Grandma Pollock saying, “Now, Curt!” and laughing over incidents on a vacation trip to Gal-vest-un, as she pronounced it. And hearing Grandad Booth swap stories with Uncle Charlie and Uncle John, then get up, jangle his keys, and start talking about the well running – well, it’s just better when I hear their voices like that. It’s also a bit scary when I hear their voices coming out of my mouth, but we won’t go there. Let’s just say that I came by my ranting at political news on TV honestly – Grandpa Pollock’s favorite stock phrase when referring to anyone in Washington DC was “dern fool.” I’ve changed that to “idiots!” but I doubt that, if he was still alive, that anyone else would want to be in the room with us while the news was on.

The aforementioned Dolly Parton in one of my favorite movies says, after the funeral of another character, “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion!” Truer words were never scripted for Dolly Parton. I don’t know if it’s my favorite emotion, but the bittersweetness of it helps assuage the grief and lets me breathe again. And that’s why we remember the good times today, the funny times, the echoes of her voice. Her voice is silenced in the physical world, but it lives on immortally in each of us. As a matter of fact, I think I can almost hear her now, telling me to “get on with it, you crazy thang.”

Part II – 28,000 feet over the Central US, aboard United 138, an Airbus A320, bound for Chicago O’Hare International Airport, 12:15-17:00 local, 15 Nov. 2001.

But what about Grandma’s life? She was a quintessential rural 20th-century American with feet in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Consider the events of the span of her life:

At some time in her childhood, possibly while a Serbian national named Gavrilo Princip was officially ringing the curtain down on the 1800s by shooting the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and dooming the new century to perpetual war, and while the killing fields in Flanders were running at full bore, for-real Indians in for-real costumes not made in Hollywood, rode up to the dugout the Ketchum family occupied near Duncan. The menfolk were up at Marlow, cutting firewood, and it was just Hettie and the little ones Dick and Brooksie facing down a couple of braves and their squaws. I’m pretty sure Hettie’s heart was pounding in her chest as she asked what the visitors wanted and was probably fairly concerned at the reply, “This is our land and you must leave.” But the natives rode off and never returned. And maybe quite a few of us sitting here owe our existence to their forbearance. And to Hettie’s brave determination.

Grandma saw two world wars and the infamous depression that would so color their lives. Her father died in 1917, supposedly due to complications as the result of an operation that today would be a 15-minute, outpatient “procedure,” after which you’d probably go ride a horse or play tennis. In other words, she witnessed the greatest and most rapid advances in medical science in human history. She started life in a dugout on an Oklahoma dirt farm but later watched Walter Cronkite report JFK’s death in Dallas and Apollo 11 touch down on the moon in mankind’s one giant leap. People began flying at Mach 2 in three hours between London and Paris a few short years later.

On a more personal level, my earliest cognizant memories of my grandmother: Out at Dexter, apple butter spread on thick bread slices, the taste of vanilla ice cream from her freezer. Store-bought vanilla ice milk. Never tasted the same anywhere else. But at grandma’s at age five – glorious. Her singing while puttering around the kitchen, whippin’ up some red beans and fried taters and cornbread for when Granddad comes in out of the fields. Snippets of conversation, “Well, Stevie, I’ll just tell ye.” The comforting whirring of an electric fan in her bedroom during a nap, a sound that still comforts me and lulls me to sleep every night. My friends think I have a fan fetish; it’s hard to explain that each night I’m able to evoke the security and peace of being five and lying in grandma’s bed with the soothing whirring putting me to sleep by having my own box fan going all night.

Other things: The mystery of false teeth. The way my bare legs would stick to her green naughahyde cowboy couch on the hot New Mexico summer afternoon. A dip in the irrigation canal and a refusal, timid child that I was, to take a deeper plunge into the irrigation reservoir.

In later years, narratives about Miss McGee and her parrot. I only recall meeting the woman once, but at the time, I possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of her goin’s, doin’s and spendin’s. It was our own personal soap opera, written and narrated by Grandma, with detail so rich no visuals were needed. General Hospital and All My Children may have been on the air longer and have a few Emmys on the shelf, but Grandma’s production of As Miss McGee Turns was a vastly superior and far more fascinating entertainment.

Grandma had some verbal expressions with obscure origins. She said them so often that I’m comforted now when I hear them in my head. She lives clearly and loudly in my memory that way. One example: “Hateful take it!” Well, sweetie, your English major grandson wants to know – what exactly does, “Hateful take it!” mean?! I suppose it’s the verbal equivalent of iodine – at least that’s my best guess. As in: One of the little grandkids falls down – “Well, hateful take it!” A toe is stubbed — “Well, hateful take it!” But whatever it meant, I do suppose it’s preferable to other things that might be said under such circumstances.

She and Granddad both were fond of the following — which has entered the lexicon of family legend, and which I find myself using from time to time. You see, I’m very much like my granddad. I get somewhere and then I’m ready to leave. Sometimes within the same minute. So my friends are sometimes bemused when, after a visit with them, I stand up, stretch, jingle the change in my pocket, and announce, all grandad-like, “Well, I guess I got to get home and turn the well off.” My friends’ expressions are priceless – the word “huh?!” written all over their faces. I know I’m imagining it, but I could swear that the night he died, I heard him whisper, “It’s time to go home and turn off the well.” Or maybe it was that he had to go ‘cause the lights on the car didn’t work. I sincerely hope God’s been allowing him control of the pumps over the last nine years and that there’s a rousing trade in automobiles up there.

I really can’t imagine the need for cars in heaven, but if there are (and I hope for Grandad’s sake that there are), I’m wondering how many he has traded for over the last nine years. Last Wednesday morning in heaven, after the reunion, Grandma undoubtedly had some comments to make about his latest acquisition, calling him “Daddy” and wondering why, if the battery was dead, didn’t he get a new battery instead of a whole new car.
And now I’m now sitting aboard an Airbus Industrie A320, a technological marvel of engineering and physics, flying at 500 miles per hour 28,000 feet above California’s newly whitened Sierra Nevada, headed for Chicago O’Hare, a flight of just three-and-a-half hours in duration, 1,843 miles in airconditioned comfort, being served a, well, United Airlines called it a “meal,” a dubious appellation, yet enough to keep you from passing out from hunger prior to landing. And we didn’t have to stop at the filling station en route; the gas tanks are huge and the potty’s actually right in the plane! To us, mundane. To my grandmother, a contemporary of Wilbur and Orville Wright, miraculous. She was 14 when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic solo, an achievement that was so mind-boggling and thought not to be within the realm of reality.

Not that any of this impressed her; I think the miracle of ice cream in an electric freezer, or television, or an automatic washing machine was far more impressive for her. And she certainly would not have stepped foot on United 138 with me; her philosophy was pretty straightforward: When asked if she ever had the desire to fly, the reply was invariably, “Naw sir, don’t believe that I do.” When pressed, you might hear, “That’s for folks ain’t got a lotta sense.” Same as saying, “If God wanted me to fly, I’d have wings ‘twixt my shoulder blades.”

Well, honey, I’ve got news for you. Look over your shoulder. God does want you to fly – he wants you to soar, free and unfettered – no more fear and trepidation and no more worrying ‘bout what the neighbors might say. Just joy unspeakable … finally, joy unspeakable.
Finally, there was something that she would say, over the last few years before the onset of Alzheimer’s, just to me, especially if she saw me dressed up: “Well! How ‘bout you and me a-steppin’ out tonight?”

Sweetie, I’ll step out with you any day, any time, any place. You keep a space on your heavenly dance card open for me, will ya? I’ll be honored.

And, by the way. Thanks for giving life to my mother, and by extension to me. And all the rest of your progeny. A great woman you are and a great woman my mother is. I’ve been all over the world and there’s not a better mother or a better grandmother anywhere on the planet. And we owe much to you for that.

I love you very much. So long and thanks for everything. See ya soon, sweetie.

Love, Steve, who is proud to be your grandson.

A Memory of My Grandfather

Posted on by
Reply
Photo by Vijendra Singh on Unsplash

I am inordinately proud of all my grandparents, proud of their heritage and what they did and gave to us. All of them worked extremely hard under difficult circumstances to bring, in their own way, the basics of life, love, and happiness to their families. We enjoy the blessed lives we have in no small part due to their sacrifice, courage, and matter-of-fact commitment to making a better life for us.

My grandfathers, both, were awe-inspiring men. Flawed (charmingly, not fatally), down to earth; loved to laugh and loved life, didn’t put up with any baloney. Their gifts to us, both in genetics and memories, are legion. From my father’s dad, I got my bad eyesight, an impatience for ignorance in high places, and the mouth to jaw about it — plus loyalty, integrity, and an occasional impish sense of humor. And from my mom’s dad, the sweeter side of my nature, a dedication to work and friends and family, and a wanderlust par excellence — plus a propensity to trade cars far more often than is healthy to the bank account. He was George Oval Booth, Sr., affectionately known as “Buck,” to his family and friends, and “Granddad” to his grandchildren. And he was the measure of a successful man.

Time has a way of healing all wounds, and softening all memories, but I can honestly say that my memories of Granddad don’t need softening much. When it came to us grandkids, Grandad was always in good humor. I never remember him being short or ill-tempered with us (perhaps he softened up as he got older). I remember his laugh and his sweet smile. I remember the smell of his snuff and the feel of his somewhat boney shoulders as you hugged him, shoulders and a back bowed and bent after decades of hardscrabble in the tough soils of west Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, earning a living for his wife and five children. I remember drinking water out of his empty snuff glasses on hot days while playing in the hot New Mexico sun. And I certainly remember his singing, particularly, “Won’t It Be Wonderful There?,” the song that Aunt Joyce always thought was about her because it contained the line, “Joyously singing, with heartbells all ringing,” which she thought Granddad was singing, “Joyce Lee singing …”

And that wanderlust. I certainly remember his pacing, his jangling of change, and his excuses to get back home after a visit (“We got to get home and turn the well off”), even if they had only been there for a short time. I remember that mainly because it lives on in me. I can fully appreciate his sometimes acute need; the fun is in the journey, in the departure, in the moving from point to point, not the actual stay, which, while enjoyable in itself, means having to keep still, at which he and I both aren’t much good. This wanderlust is legendary in the family; mom and the sisters remember quite vividly leaving Roswell late on a Saturday afternoon after work, driving the 450 miles to Duncan, only to return late on Sunday night and be at work at sunup Monday morning. It was the only way he could see his family, particularly his mother, but there was certainly an element of restlessness to it, of always wanting to be on the go, the so-called “thrill of the open road.” I know, because I feel it keenly myself today, and think of him and smile when it happens to me. My friends are sometimes understandably confused when I stand up and stretch and say, “I got to get home and turn the well off.”

Granddad went through the entire lineup of automobiles produced in Detroit between the time he was old enough to drive and that final Oldsmobile in the ‘80s. Well, maybe not, but it certainly seemed that way at the time, particularly to my grandmother, Brooksie, who pretty much never knew what was going to be in the driveway and whether the key on her keychain was going to fit the ignition of whatever hot deal was sitting out in the sun. He was the quintessential American in that way; his car was his identity in some ways. It was a source of pride and pleasure – something to show for the hard work on the seat of the tractor. And hey, if a new car got a rise outta Brooksie, it was probably a secret little bonus for him. For some reason, I remember particularly a dark red Ford Torino in the ‘70s, and a journey through north Texas when he and Grandma took my cousins Jeff and Jami and I to Sherman, Texas, sweating in the hot back seat. This particular deal didn’t include an air conditioner. That car gave way to another in fairly short order.

His storytelling was often fascinating; one that sticks in my mind is most certainly aprocryphal, especially in light of subsequent research into the family tree. But he remembered it clearly and took it with some seriousness. One day on the family farm in Montague County, Texas, when he was somewhere around seven years old, he was in the field plowing with his father. A strange man came to the edge of the field out of some woods. His father stopped the team, handed him the reins and told him to not move. His father then went to the edge of the field, talked to the stranger for a while, then came back. According to Granddad, his father then said, “You know who that man was? That man was John Wilkes Booth.” Grandad’s sense of humor was sometimes quite subtle and easily missed. Either he had a grand joke on us, or his father had a grand joke on him. Or perhaps, who knows?

I remember the way he would punctuate a discussion with “why,” not as a question, but as a declarative (such as “well”), as in, “If he hadn’t done that, why, then …” I remember his devotion to watching the evening news with Walter Cronkite. The fact that the Depression of the ‘30s scarred him so deeply that he lived out the rest of his life in fear of another one. How he loved taking care of his yard and mowing and watering. How careful and respectful he was of other people and their things. And the way that when he laughed he sort of bobbed up a down a bit, laughing whole-heartedly.

Shortly before his illness and death, he took a ride with me to pick up a package from the Roswell FedEx office. We had to stop at a farm implement store to ask for directions; he knew the people inside. They brightened up when they saw him walk in the door. He seemed proud to introduce me and charmed the socks off the place, making the receptionist giggle and the counterman laugh out loud with some joke or comment that I have long forgotten. At that point, sometime in the early ‘90s, he hadn’t farmed in quite a long time, but they still remembered him. In his own quiet way, he made an impression.

Granddad lived a quiet, unassuming, unoffensive life. He was a bit timid about certain things but never shy about things that truly mattered. He wasn’t perfect by any means. He could be stubborn, ornery, exasperating, sharp, and no-nonsense, but the worst I ever heard said about him was that he spent too much time in car dealerships. And his wife was the one who made the comment and she loved him anyway. That’s a pretty good reputation.

This was a man whose life was proscribed inside a limited bit of territory, from roughly a line running between Houston and Oklahoma City, over to Albuquerque, down to Carlsbad, and back over to Houston – in the jet age, a fairly small patch of the earth. Grandad lived much of his life in New Mexico but didn’t visit the state capital in Santa Fe until the final years of that life. On that same trip, he saw the Grand Canyon and Phoenix for the first and last time. He knew every inch of every mile between Roswell and Duncan, knew when to plow and plant, how to read the weather, and when to turn the well off, but never (to my knowledge) flew on a commercial airliner or toured the White House and never (also to my knowledge) saw either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, although he did, I think, glimpse the Gulf of Mexico. He probably never went to a movie theater and certainly never crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.

But the richness of a man’s life is not defined by the title of his job, the money in his bank account, the places he’s been, or whether he’s bought cheap souvenirs at some tacky vendor’s cart in Paris. Rather, richness is defined by the job he did raising his kids and how much he loved his wife; it’s defined in the selflessness and devotion inherent in his daily life; it’s apparent in his reputation, his integrity, and the love he gave and received. And in these ways, life’s intangibles, Buck Booth was wealthy beyond all measure.

Granddad was 85 years old when he died of cancer in 1993. He held his wife’s hand to the end and was surrounded by the love of his family as the final act of his long life played out. I arrived in Roswell several hours before he died and will never forget his grin and the spark of life in his eyes when Grandma asked, “Do you know who this is?” and he said, “Why, it’s Steve.” And not altogether without a flash of the old impatience, as if he was saying, “Well, of course, woman, I can see who it is. It’s perfectly obvious!” That scene is probably my most cherished memory; when he recognized me, he smiled.

I watched him draw his final breath and felt acutely the sudden loss as that breath left his lungs, his spirit flying away with it, his body giving a final sigh as he finally attained the joy and peace he needed. We were all diminished by his passing, yet drew on the reserves of strength and love he gave us as his legacy to get through the ensuing period of grief. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him and wish he were around so that I could just simply listen to him. I’m sometimes angry that we can’t have our grandparents around when we’re older and can understand and appreciate them, but instead are ignorant, impatient youths right at the time when they have the most to give of themselves.

But at the same time, I know that much of what Granddad believed, the kind of person he was, and the legacy he gave lives on in his family. In a greater sense, he left the best parts of himself behind for us to benefit, and then laid down for the final long rest he so richly deserved. Pieces of him live on in each of us and we are humbled by the legacy. He was a grand old man.

The Wake Island Story, Part I

Posted on by

Memory Of WWII Still Vivid for Vets

(Part I of the Wake Island Story)

“Considering the power accumulated for the invastion of Wake Island and the meager forces of the defenders, it was one of the most humiliating defeats the Japanese Navy ever suffered.” —Masatake Okumiya, commander, Japanese Imperial Navy

By Steve Pollock
The Duncan (OK) Banner)
Sunday, August 13, 1989

MARLOW — It all came back to them this weekend — the stark terror of facing death while kneeling naked on a sandy beach the stinking hold of the prison ship; the brutality of the Japanese; the obliteration of youthful innocence.

They fought and bled for a two-and-a-half-square-mile horseshoe of an atoll in the mid-Pacific called Wake Island. They were United States Marines and they did their duty.

There were 10 men of that Wake Island garrison at the Marlow home of John Smith this weekend. With Smith, they talked, drank, and smoked their way through the weekend, laughter masking deeper emotions of brotherhood, camaraderie, and painful memories.

In the Smith kitchen, their wives continued the latest of an ongoing series of therapy sessions, attempting to exorcise some of the demons of the last 44 years of their lives with the hometown heroes.

In 1941, with war inevitable, the U.S. government began construction of a series of defensive Pacific Ocean outposts, including Wake, designed to protect against Japanese aggression. They were a little late.

Little Wake Atoll, with some 1,616 Marines and civilians huddled on its three islands, was attacked at noon, Dec. 8, 1941, several hours after Pearl Harbor.

The Marines knew war was possible, but “didn’t think the … guys had the guts to hit us,” one of them said.

Jess Nowlin’s hearing aid battery is getting a little weak as the afternoon wears on, but his memory and sense of humor are still sharp.

He said the Marines were going about their business when they heard the drone of approaching aircraft.

“We thought they were B-17’s out of Pearl coming in to refuel. They weren’t. They broke out of a cloud bank at about 1,800 feet, bomb bay doors open. They tore us up,” Nowlin said.

The Japanese attacked from sea and air, but the Marines held out until Dec. 23; only 400 remained to defend 21 miles of shoreline from 25 warships and a fleet of aircraft. Surrender was inevitable.

Through a haze of cigarette smoke, Robert Mac Brown, a veteran not only of World War II, but of Korea and three tours of duty in Vietnam, remembers the post-surrender scene on the beach.

“We were stripped naked and they hog-tied us with our own telephone wire. A squall came through but lasted only about 10 to 15 minutes. One of my clearest memories of the whole operation is of watching the water run down the bare back of the guy in front of me,” Brown said.

Japanese soldiers lay on the sand in front of the prisoners, swinging machine guns back and forth. The click of rounds being loaded into chambers was ominous. Fingers tightened on triggers.

“There was an argument between the landing force commander and a guy with the fleet. They screamed at each other in Japanese, arguing about whether to kill us or not,” Brown said.

The Marines made their peace and prepared to die.

The argument to make prisoners of the Marines and civilians won the day. The prisoners were allowed to grab what clothing they could to cover themselves.

And then a living hell began which would only be ended by the birth of atomic stars over southern Japan nearly four years later.

Taken off the island on small ships, the prisoners were forced to climb up the side of the Nittamaru, a former cruise ship pitching about on rough seas.

As the men walked back through the ship and down to the hold, the crew beat them with bamboo sticks, in a gauntlet of brutality.

Packed in the stinking hold, several hundred Marines and civilians had only one five-gallon bucket per deck to hold human waste. For the 14 days of the Nittamaru’s passage from Wake to Shanghai, they could barely move.

The cold of Shanghai was felt through their thin tropical khaki. It was January 1942. Robert Brown was to have married his girl on January 12. She married someone else.

“I thought you were dead,” she later told him.

From Shanghai, through Nanking, Peking, Manchuria and Pusan, Korea, the group journeyed in packed cattle cars to their eventual destination, a coal mine on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, where they dug in the shafts alongside third-generation Korean slave labor.

They were slaves themselves until August 1945.

“Thank God for Harry S. Truman and the atomic bomb,” several survivors said, as the others echoed that prayer.

They went home to heroes’ welcomes, but the public “‘never fully appreciated or understood what we did,” Nowlin said.

They’re much older now — in their 60’s and 70’s — and it was a family reunion of sorts; they claim to be closer than brothers. They don’t miss their “get-togethers” for anything in the world; Robert Haidinger traveled from San Diego with a long chest incision after recently undergoing a major operation.

As they gazed through the Oklahoma sunshine, they didn’t see the cow bam beyond the lovegrass rippling in the August breeze; it was a Japanese destroyer was steaming close in to end their lives all over again.

“It was awful, terrible; I wouldn’t have missed it for anything; you couldn’t get me to do it again for a billion dollars,” Nowlin summed it up.

The men: Tony Obre, Fallbrook, Calif; Robert Haidinger, San Diego, Calif.; Robert Murphy, Thermopolis, Wyo.; Dale Milburn, Santa Rosa, Calif.; George McDaniels, Dallas, Texas; Jess Nowlin, Bonham, Texas; Jack Cook, Golden, Colo.; Robert Mac Brown, Phoenix, Ariz.; Jack Williamson, Lawton; Paul Cooper, Marlow, and John Smith, Marlow.

The cost of the defense of Wake Island, from Dec. 8 to 23, 1941: Americans: 46 Marines, 47 civilians, three sailors and 11 airplanes; Japanese: 5,700 men, 11 ships and 29 airplanes.

The Wake Island Story Part II

Posted on by
Photo by Matias Luge on Unsplash

Wives Cope With Husband’s Memories

(Part 2 of the Wake Island Story)

By Steve Pollock
The Duncan (OK) Banner)
Sunday, August 13, 1989

MARLOW — It all came back to them this weekend — fists lashing out during nightmares, the traumatic memories, the attempts to catch up on lost time.

The wives of 10 Wake Island survivors met in Marlow with their husbands this weekend for reasons of their own.

“We go through therapy every time we get together. We help each other with problems,” they said.

The wives: Florence Haidinger, Maxine Murphy, Opal Milburn, Irene McDaniels, Sarah Nowlin, Betty Cook, Millie Brown, Jo Williamson, Juanita Cooper and Marie Smith.

They did their own bit during World War II: The Red Cross, an airplane factory in Detroit, North American Aviation in El Segundo, Calif, Douglas in Los Angeles, the Kress dime store.

They married their men after the long national nightmare was finished, and their lives became entwined by one event: the Japanese attack on Wake Island Dec. 8-23,1941.

Since the first reunion of Wake survivors and their spouses in 1953, these women have been like sisters.

“We love each other, we’re closer than family,” Jo Williamson said.

In Marie Smith’s kitchen, therapy was doled out in a catharsis of talk little different from that of the men gathered on the patio. Talk is said to be good for the soul; these women heal great tears in theirs every time they see each other.

According to the wives, the men came home from the war, married, had children and tried to pick up where they left off.

They wanted to take care of their families and try to catch up. They were robbed of the fun times of their late teens and early 20’s, the women unanimously agree.

“They have also lived every day as if it were their last,” Sarah Nowlin said.

The men needed some help after their harrowing battle and brutal three -and-a-half-year captivity.

According to the women, doctors never realized therapy was in order: “They never got anything.”

One man lashed out with his fists during nightmares; after a few pops, his wife learned to leave the room. Another would slide out of bed and assume a rigid posture on the floor, arms and legs folded. Yet they have all been gentlemen.

“I’ve never seen my husband harm or even verbally abuse anyone,” a wife said Reunions such as this help the men and women deal with life as they age. The youths of 16-22 are now grandfathers and grandmothers in their 60’s and 70’s.

Life today is a bit baffling to them.

Extremely proud of their men, the women have no patience with draft dodgers, flag burners, Japanese cars or foreign ownership of America.

They didn’t agree with the Vietnam war policy, but duty to country should have come first, they said.

“I didn’t want my son to go to Vietnam, but I would have been ashamed of him if he hadn’t,” one said.

The issue of flag burning stirs violent protest and emotion in the group: “Made in America”‘ labels are on everything they buy.

And the younger generation does not enjoy the women’s confidence: “I don’t think they could do what we were all called on to do,” they agreed.

And as Marlow afternoon shadows grew longer, the women of Wake continued to cleanse their souls.

The wives of 10 Wake Island survivors met in Marlow with their husbands this weekend for reasons of their own.

“We go through therapy every time we get together. We help each other with problems,” they said.

Tomorrow Today Yesterday

Posted on by
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Dreams, trials, memories

Hopes, fears, memories
Desires, defeats, memories
Isn’t yesterday anything but memories?
No, tomorrow is always a memory
     a scent a taste a touch

Why then is tomorrow nothing but dreams?
Why then is today always realizations?

God only knows, only He knows among everyone

Futile dreams, frustrating realities, bitter memories.

Is that ALL?

—Undated; probably 1978