The UnTexan

HOME MADE DISCOMFORT

THE JOYFUL ROAR: MY BROTHER'S FUNERAL

"One dyin’ and a buryin’, one dyin’ and a buryin’
Some cryin’, six carryin’ me, I wanta to be free."
                                                             Roger Miller

I just returned from my brother's funeral in Naples, FL. His wife, children, me, my sister, a few other relatives and a bunch of people on very loud motorcycles were there. My brother wasn't there. He was cremated and the ashes had not been delivered before things got started. But that was fitting. He was a man who was often someplace else when important things were going on.

John was the middle son, my younger brother, and from the first he was not like the rest of us. We were a quiet and orderly family, me, my sister, my parents, until John came along. John was noisy. He was stubborn. He was a rambunctious, spoiled little boy who grew into a man who had problems and who caused more than his share of problems for other people. John required a great deal of help to get through life and when he died in a motorcycle accident on Oct. 24 -- despite the fact that he stuck with his final marriage and became a good father to his youngest son during those years in Florida -- he was in many ways a 57-year-old oversized version of the rambunctious and spoiled child who dropped out of high school and wandered off into the world when he was far too young. He lived a risky life. He did dangerous things. He didn't always pay much attention to taking care of the business of day-to-day life. In some ways it feels like it took him 57 years to die instantly.

But John was charming, loving, generous and clearly beloved by his wife and son, friends, relatives and all of those people on motorcycles. The minister who oversaw John's funeral was a motorcyclist my brother's age who lived near the spot where John died on Collier Blvd. He didn't know my brother personally, but after the service he told me he "got the idea that John lived a thorny life" as he gathered information about him from his children and others. But he said the "joy" of John's funeral was that we could ignore the thorns for a while and embrace what was good about my brother's life among people who saw the good in him. "That is what a day like this is for," he said.

And there were good things. And we did celebrate them. Then we sang "Amazing Grace." And after that there were all those rumbling motorcycles.

It made me remember that the same psalmist who encourages us in Psalms 98 to "make a joyful noise," says one line later that we should "make a loud noise." And if ever there was a loud noise we heard it on Saturday. It was a joyful roar. And it seemed a fitting sound to embrace the end of a noisy life, the life of my younger brother who was not like the rest of us from the beginning, a biker in a family of people who were always more comfortable in Chevrolets.

John: Backyard football (with laundry)

 

MY BROTHER'S DEATH: A BIG HEART WITH COMPLICATIONS

My brother John died in a motorcycle accident in Florida yesterday afternoon. I wept when the phonecall came from my sister. And I wept several times after that. The depth of my grief surprised me and still surprises me this morning. We were not particularly close for most of our lives. We come from a family of people who love each other best from a comfortable distance, even when we are together. But there was extra distance between John and me. Most of it is my fault. I am not a very brotherly brother. And some of it is his fault. He was a big-hearted man full of love and prickly with complications and contradictions. But he wanted with all his heart for us to be brotherly brothers. He called me at least once a week, often more, for the past seven or eight years, after we went most of a decade without speaking. His calls always began the same way,"What you doing?" And they always ended the same way, "Love you, Bro." No matter what we talked about. I rarely welcomed his calls and sometimes ignored them. But when I answered, I always talked to him. And I answered his calls more and more over time. When I talked to him I could feel him working to close the gap between us and feel myself backing away. But he kept calling and I kept answering. Were we becoming more brotherly brothers? I am not sure. John and I last talked on Friday afternoon. "Love you, Bro," he said before he hung up. "Bye," I said. His love and my goodbye. It was what usually happened when we talked. But perhaps he came closer to me than I was willing to admit. And perhaps that is the message my grief and tears have delivered to me.

ONE OF THOSE DAYS

Do you ever wake up in the morning needing to say "Thank you" to some people and "Fuck you" to others only to realize you are unable to tell them apart? Today is one of those days. So I will have a drink or two  and keep the lid on it. I grew up in a family of experts at keeping the lid on tight. I also grew up around alcoholics, but it never stopped me from drinking. And I am not an alcoholic. Alcoholics drink because they must. I drink because I like it. Always have. But I don't let myself enjoy it much, at least not the way the alcoholics I have known do. I like neither the happy buzz some people describe nor the oblivion others seek. I drink moderately but enthusiastically. I cannot afford to let it show because I grew up around people who stifle their enthusiasms, their grief, their anger, their pleasures and the joys closest to their hearts. So tonight I will have a quiet glass of bourbon and wait for my world to settle enough for me to sort the thank-yous from the fuck-yous. There will be plenty of time for talk later.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY: JESSE HELMS FINALLY DIED

Jesse Helms died July 4 -- and not a minute too soon. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died July 4, 1826, and some obit writer tried to put Helms in their company. Jefferson, Adams and Helms? I had to laugh. It seems far more appropriate that Jesse Helms and Bozo the Clown died within hours of each other. But that's not fair to Bozo. There are Bozos and there are bozos. Losing Bozo made me a little sad; losing Jesse didn't. In fact, a Fourth of July without Jesse Helms was a July 4th worth celebrating.

A few of us held a bit of an email celebration.

One old North Carolina friend recalled returning to work "seething" after hearing lunch-hour Jesse Helms "editorial" diatribes on television "...against:communists, liberal higher education, hippies, disrespect for the American flag and anything pro civil rights" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before he was a senator Helms was just another redneck bozo, a sort of infuriating television joke for most of the people I knew, nothing more than a target for our jeering laughter. When he was elected to the senate in 1973 (as Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise! Surprise") it wasn't funny, and I am sure some of my friends who had remained in North Carolina after I left were more than a little uncomfortable when they realized the joke was on them and they were actually living among people who had elected the old bigot. What probably made things even creepier was knowing that their neighbors, relatives, co-workers and other fellow Tar Heels kept re-electing the sorry son of a bitch.

The same friend who remembered "seething," said his sister had called him July 4 "troubled because she could not find in her heart one shred of regret at his passing." He let her know she shouldn't fret about it. "I assured her that her feelings are natural, and healthy and show that she IS a good person." I agree. There is nothing to regret.

I did not leave North Carolina because of Jesse Helms - he was still the infuriating joke on television when I left in the late 1960s - but I did leave because I suspected I was surrounded by -- or related to -- far too many people who thought the same way Jesse did: hateful, small-minded, racist, white-trashy, Dixie-whistling, etc., and even worse, proud of it. They didn't talk about it on tv like Jesse did, but I knew it was there. So, I didn't trust them. And I never wanted to be mistaken for one of them. I left. A few years later, when they elected Jesse Helms, I knew I had been right all along: Jesse was the ugly thing that had been living inside them all that time. After he was elected in 1973, he became the walking, talking manifestation and confimation of my suspicions about too many of my fellow North Carolinians (lots of them my closest  relatives) before I left N.C. for good in 1969. Jesse Helms made it embarrassing to be from North Carolina, and he made it feel good to be living someplace else, no matter where that might be. And I have spent my adult life being someplace else.

The only good news I ever heard about Jesse Helms was that he had died.

MY MOTHER IS A FISH or WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A WANDERING EYE?

The day before my mother died, there were a few minutes when she appeared to wake up. At least her eyes were open above the plastic mask that covered her mouth and nose; it was attached to a machine that noisily helped force oxygen into her lungs. We were standing outside her room waiting while nurses tended to her. One of them opened the door and said, "She's awake." And one by one, we stepped into her room to say our good-byes, tell her we loved her and to assure her that it was fine for her to stop living and rest. At least that is what I remember saying as I leaned over and stared down into her eyes. I have not asked my father, brothers or sister about what they said to her the last time her eyes were wide open. It is her left eye I remember more than what I said; it was wide, wild and seeming to focus or trying to focus (or was I imagining the effort to focus?) as I stared down into her face. Did she see me? Or hear me? Or any of us? We don't know. But she seemed to breathe easier when she closed her eyes and appeared to be sleeping. She even snored a little. We all noticed that. She died calmly 24 hours later without ever opening her eyes again.

That wide, wild eye is the last piece of my dying mother that I haul around with me. Sometimes I hear it. It clatters in there like a smooth pebble in a tin box. Sometimes it thumps and thuds like a tangled wad of soggy clothes in the dryer. Sometimes I see it as I stare at the blank wall above my desk, sometimes just before I sleep or just after I wake up. I have packed the other pieces of my dying mother in words and shoved them onto a high dark shelf almost out of reach. But I have never known what to do with her left eye, never figured out a place to put it. It is never quiet and it is always open.

Two nights ago I dreamed that "we" had agreed to keep a bit of my mother alive "in case we ever needed her again." We agreed to store some of her DNA in a tiny fish in case we ever needed it again. I know it was "we" but do not know precisely who "we" are, but it was my wife and my sister who went with me to the fish market to find out what happened to her after we found out something had gone wrong. A larger fish had eaten the minnow that my mother had become and we were there to see if anything could be done. The market had a glass-fronted case. There were live turtles at one end. "Cooters," I said (though turtles were called turtles where I grew up and I did not learn the word "cooter" until much later in my life). Just past the cooters there were fish on ice, all kinds of fish, and we walked along looking for the right one. Finally the man behind the counter pointed to the very end of the case with his knife and that is where we found the fish we were looking for. It was apart from the rest. I think it was a bass 8 or 10 inches long. It was on its left side and its tail was toward the glass, its large mouth wide open, facing away from us. The fish seemed rigid, dead. We looked at it through the glass. I leaned forward for a closer look and saw the fish's eye move. It was looking at me, like someone glancing over their shoulder as they walk away. And it appeared to be trying to focus, to see me more clearly. I was awake for a while before I recognized the eye -- it was my mother's left eye. It was a troubling dream.

"My mother is a fish." That is what Vardaman Bundren says as he tries to understand his mother's death in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. He ends up drilling holes in the lid of his dead mother's coffin to help her breathe, but she is still dead. There are no holes I can drill in the coffin lid to save my mother either. Besides, the dead do not ask to be rescued any more than dreams ask to be understood, no matter what we might want or need from them. But we cannot stop ourselves from trying.

See Mom, Death and Family all the way back to April 2006.

MOTHER ISSUES: APRIL 6, 2008

A few weeks ago one of my cousins from back in North Carolina sent me an email to let me know he reads my blog from time to time. He wrote: "...seems to me you have 'Mother' issues...guess if I thought about it, I might as well...am I missing something?" I had to chuckle because if there is one thing I am confident of, it is that most of my male cousins and I share mother issues of one sort or another. We are the sons of seven sisters who raised us lopsided in one way or another for one reason or another then launched us on the world (actually most of us had to launch ourselves because our mothers didn't really know how to do that right). Now most of us have arrived at middle age with marriages, relationships and various men, women and children sloshing in our wakes like so much debris. Some of our sisters haven't fared much better, but in general our mothers did a better job with girls than with boys. Five of the seven sisters are dead. My mother died April 6, 2006. My cousin's mother died a few years earlier. But they are still among us and I am sure my cousins and I have things to talk about; but we were raised around people who preferred to leave things (usually the most important things) un-talked about, so I don't know if we ever will.

GOOD BOY SCOUT/BAD BOY SCOUT

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is 58 years old today. He is a real Boy Scout. He wants everyone to know it. And that is scary. It is primary election day too. And good old Rick is nothing if not available (he sure isn't much of anything as a governor; Texas wouldn't miss him). He wants people to know that too, just in case they might need someone to run for vice president, someone to troll for that true believer vote now that Huckabee is gone.

Perry has written a book extolling the values of the Boy Scouts (to be trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent, mentally awake and morally straight, obnoxious, self-righteous etc.), and running down the ACLU for making the Scouts look inside their own closet and deal with the stuff they found there (Perry personally redefined the word "homosexual" in an interview to mean "focused on sex" -- and declared it has no place in Scouting). I was a Boy Scout, too (Troop 225 down at the Presbyterian Church, if I remember the number correctly); but I was an ACLU sort of Scout. Rick Perry would have hated me.

Being a Scout combined two things I did not enjoy as a boy and actually grew to hate as I grew older: 1) guys in bunches, and 2) uniforms. I remain suspicious of anything involving those two things (I was a crappy little-leaguer too), but I am sure it started with the Boy Scouts. I loved camping and I could tie knots with the best of them, but I was a bad Boy Scout. I liked to do the things Boy Scouts did, but I did not like doing them with other Boy Scouts. It always involved too many guys all dressed alike for my taste (and guys in bunches can be uniformly mean; for instance, an overly well-coiffed, scrubbed and tidy fellow like Gov. Perry would have been labeled "queer-bait" in the cruel confines of my troop). I never rose very far in the ranks and I was the only guy in my troop to win the reading merit badge. I have to wonder why there was any such thing as a reading merit badge. Reading and Scouting don't mix well. Scouts live in a smallish closet of oaths, rules, expectations, adventures in wholesome living and denial of certain realities (Gov. Perry no doubt earned the closet building merit badge). I was looking for something bigger than that and reading can lead a curious boy like me off in what the Scouts would see as unwholesome directions often better pursued without a uniform; eventually I ended up in the loving arms of a beautiful curly haired woman I could not wait to introduce to my parents. She was love at first sight for me and I figured my parents would naturally feel the same way. They didn't.

The problem was that my shirt got in the way. It was a Boy Scout shirt complete with shoulder patches, chest patches, a patrol patch, troop numbers and an Order of the Arrow patch on the flap of the right front pocket. I bought it for 25-cents at a Goodwill store. It wasn't the first oddball shirt I had bought at Goodwill. I had bowling shirts, repairmen's shirts, baseball shirts, shirts with names over the pockets and company names on the back, lots of shirts I figured were once worn by long-dead guys whose widows finally decided to get on with their lives, clean out the drawers and closets and donate their stuff to Goodwill (for years I shopped for suits among the same racks of dead-guy clothes). I hated new stuff (I hated suits). I loved other people's clothes. Goodwill worked for me. The Boy Scout shirt had badges for stuff on it that I never came close to achieving as a Boy Scout (Order of the Arrow! No way!). That was part of the fun. Besides, I never wanted to be confused with a Boy Scout. And I never intended to be. And that shirt said so. It was a defiant and defining shirt; it was witty, subversive (irony was still cheap and easy in those days). Besides, it looked good with jeans.

By that time I had spent years stuffing myself with other people's sentences and trying to build a man out of them (reading merit badge winner that I was, and Scouting builds men, right?). And I looked like a man when I was naked. But the truth is that I was a 40-ish ex-hippie-beatnik-bookworm in a Boy Scout shirt, a divorced guy with a cute kid; I was teaching English (non-tenure track, but I didn't care) to the mostly mediocre middle children of Midwestern Catholics at a sternly tidy, stone-faced Catholic college in Minnesota. I had parlayed that old reading merit badge into pretty good jobs in several states for nearly 20 years and the teaching job was only the most recent. But I didn't have a savings account or a retirement plan. I had never even thought about owning a house. So whether the Boy Scout shirt was perceived as defiant or pathetic by that time in my life was debatable. But I didn't care. It isn't easy building a man out of other people's sentences. It is easier to wear other people's clothes.

I am sure the Boy Scout shirt came from a novel I read in the 1960s. The main character is a beatnik proto-hippie named Gnossos Pappadopoulis, who defiantly and subversively wears a Boy Scout shirt. But Gnossos was no Boy Scout. That appealed to me. Gnossos and his shirt lodged somewhere among all the other names and sentences accummulating in my brain (I wasn't brave enought to take them out of storage for a long time). Twenty years later I resurrected the book and taught it to the muddling-middling young Catholics. Sometimes I wore the Boy Scout shirt to class for effect. They didn't get it. They didn't laugh at the funny parts of the book (even the turd funeral).They didn't get Gnossos. They wondered why Gnossos didn't get a job. They did not understand how fiction could become a fact of life. But it can. Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a man who never existed, made me buy that shirt and ran me slam up against the Boy Scouts.

The problem of course is that my parents believed in the Boy Scouts and the shirt was an affront to everything they claimed to stand for (it took years for me to understand how offensive the shirt was to them). It turned out that my parents had the same faith in the power of Scouting that Gov. Rick Perry does. They believed in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They worked with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They organized Pinewood derbies for Cub Scouts. The organized Girl Scout cookie sales. They had God and country and Order of the Arrow faith. Oaths, laws and closets faith. Eagle Scout faith. Faith in uniforms and ceremonies involving flags. Blind faith. Maybe they believed that if I had been a better Scout, I would never have found my way to the woman with the naturally curly hair. Whatever it was, my Boy Scout shirt set them off. The problem is that generally I have no more faith in the Boy Scouts than I do in anything else. My parents looked at me in that shirt and finally saw the anti-Scout I had become.

After that the weekend did not go well. My mother swung between being rude, confrontational and non-communicative. My father backed her up (they always backed each other up, a habit among the long-married) and never hinted she might be drinking a bit on the sly. My sister turned overly polite, but it was a grim and accusatory politeness and she wasn't nice about it. Nobody mentioned that shirt to me the whole weekend. They took it out on the curly haired woman of my dreams instead. Perhaps they blamed her for turning me into the anti-Boy Scout (she didn't). Perhaps they blamed her for the fact that they finally saw me for what I had grown up to be. But that shirt was so powerful it even made my mother believe the woman of my dreams' naturally curly hair was really unnaturally curly (something she pointed out to me with a purse-lipped puff of distinctly southern thoroughgoing womanly disdain that Yankee women cannot even approximate much less fathom; in fact, my mother took advantage of my love's Yankee-ness; the South is a game with more rules than any Yankee girl can ever learn -- and my curly haired love didn't even know she was playing). The hair in question was and is naturally curly, of course, and I have never yet figured out where my mother's accusation came from or why it was so important. My only guess is that my mother thought I was being deceived by unnaturally curly hair and if I would fall for that, no telling how this woman was deceiving me otherwise and what sort of ruin I was in for. It was a sort of fake curls = real danger equation that I never figured out (my mother had an irrational and unexplained hatred of country singer Loretta Lynn that I never understood either), but that I have sometimes witnessed in bars. And it could be that my mother's secret relationship with the beer in my brother-in-law's well-stocked refrigerator for several days contributed to the problem. The problem of the offending shirt came up much later, years later, when they all thought everything had been forgiven and forgotten. It never really was. I am not much of a forgiver or forgetter. I never laughed about it and none of them came to my wedding to the curly haired woman of my dreams. I considered it a fair trade.

Gov. Rick Perry is a 58-year-old Boy Scout. A grownup Boy Scout is a frightening thing. A boy is a terrible thing to waste.

The Boy Scout monument in Washington, D.C. What were they thinking? The Boy Scouts say. "Be prepared." Good advice. But Satchel Paige said: "Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you." Even better advice. What Texas Gov. Rick Perry says doesn't really matter.

MY MOTHER'S BIRTHDAY: SEPT. 17, 1925

Today is my mother's birthday. I have always remembered my mother's birthday. I realized this morning that I have both the first and last photographs I ever took of her. The first one is of her ironing and she told me not to take it. I was in elementary school. Third grade? Fourth?  I don't remember which. I do remember she spanked me for ignoring what she told me and snapping the picture with my Brownie Hawkeye. In another photograph from that same period, she stands in the same doorway, clearly posing for me. She is wearing a sweater and pearls. The last photograph I took of her was on the day of our final real conversation in the spring of 2003. By then her ability to speak was failing her and we were running out of things to say. She died less than three years later. The first and last photographs were painful, each in its own way.

She died April 6, 2006, when she was 80. I was born when she was 19 years old. I was more than 60 years old when she died. So, we knew each other for a long time. We had some good years together and we had some not-so-good years after that. The not-so-good years probably outnumbered the good ones. We disappointed each other, let each other down, and eventually did not really know each other. Love was part of it. She was a hard person to love because she would not allow herself to be loved. She kept those who should have been closest to her at arm's length. For much of my life, I was like her and it nearly killed me. The only reason I outlived her is that I realized I could not go on living that way. For a long time I thought I was saving myself from my mother but I wasn't. After I understood that, I finally saved myself by allowing myself to be loved and go on being loved. I was in my 40s when that happened and it has not stopped. My mother would not save herself. Even after asking for help and being offered help, she would not save herself. So, we kept our distance for the rest of her life, loving each other in the only way we knew. Well before the end we had said everything we needed to say to each other about love and disappointment and salvation. That was a couple of years before she died. The only thing left to say after that was that I loved her. And I said it as she was dying. I stood beside hospital her bed and held her hand. My sister stood on the other side of the bed, holding her other hand. We told her we loved her and that we were with her, repeating and repeating as her breathing slowed and stopped. I still miss her. I miss talking to her. Even in the not-so-good years I would always call her on her birthday.

MCJOBS AND MONDEGREENS

I was a precocious reader. My mother read to me, but she never made an active effort to teach me to read. She never pointed at the words and had me sound them out (she was NOT hooked on phonics), so I suppose I picked it up by watching the words and their sentences as she read to me. But I do not hear words when I read them or write them, not in her voice or any other voice. Words happen to me silently. I write them down; I speak them. Sometimes I even see words in my dreams, whole sentences marching across the darkness letter by letter, like news across a ticker. But I do not hear them. It is as if my mother tossed me into a deep pool of words from which I am still trying to save myself. I am under words the way a drowning man is under water. It is quiet down here.

And here is another word, as if I need one more word. This is one I did not know until today: mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misheard lyric in a song, what someone described as an "aural malapropism." It is a word that dates back to an article written for the Atlantic in 1954 by a woman named Sylvia Wright. The first mondegreen I remember hearing was as a child when on of my younger siblings set out to sing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" and sang "Oh come all be hateful" instead. There are mondegreens and mondegreens. Allegedly the most famous is, "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear," which should be, "Gladly the Cross I'd bear." The Center for the Humane Study of Mondegreens -- which is San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll's longterm project -- has some real doozies.

And there is news of another word: mcjob (McJob if you supersize it), which the Oxford English Dictionary has included in the language with the definition: "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector." As someone who has had a few of those in his life, and whose children and wife have too, I think that definition pretty much covers it. Now, McDonald's in the United Kingdom (that's where the OED is published too) is starting a petition drive to have the definition changed to something more positive. In fact, they would like to have the definition of McJob (they ALWAYS capitalize it) "changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime." That is likely to be skills that will at least last long enough for a worker to make the move from the mcjob to Wal-Mart greeter. They can petition all they want to, but my guess is that mcjob will go on meaning what mcjob means right now. If you say you have a mcjob, people know what you are saying. Mcjob will keep on grimly meaning what it means until the people who have mcjobs find the need to make it mean something different. Words change through people using them, not by petition. And even McDonald's is not likely to change the OED.