Chess,1959: Dad & Uncle Glen Come To A Blow

 The boy watching the two men playing chess wasn't bored, though he should have been. The games these men played moved at snail's pace, and the play was mediocre. But the boy wasn't bored; his attention never wavered. The game wasn't the object. The men were the object; both figured prominently in the small world of the boy, who might have been 12, possibly 13, an age where sitting still for so long should have been excruciating. As he sat centered on the chessboard a couple feet back from the table, the player to his right was his father, a thick, large-boned man in his earliest thirties. To his left, was an adored uncle, his favorite uncle. Uncle Glen was of an age with the boy's father, if not the same, close enough. Both men were average height, an inch or two under 6 feet, but Uncle Glen was more compact, smaller-boned and less fleshy than his father, and carried himself lighter on his feet. The father, a Clydesdale. The Uncle an Arabian. The boy found both men interesting, even fascinating. He also loved them.

The boy was me.

Young boys are always, I think, on the hunt role models. I was no exception, but thoughts of finding traits to emulate or adopt from my male elders and even from my contemporaries hadn't entered my conscious mind. I just knew what I liked and what I didn't like; what I admired, and what I scorned in the men in my life. 

On this particular day, the small living room of apartment #12 at 239 Capitol Street was not uncomfortably warm, but I can't say, so many decades later, whether that was because the season was moderate, or because the sputtering steam radiators that heated our space in winter were properly tuned for the day. I want to think it was Spring, and that the weather was fine and mild. Whenever my Dad was in the room, the room could be called "smoke-filled." On this day, with both Dad and Uncle Glen chain-smoking, it was quite hazy. If it WAS Spring, the sash windows in the living room might have been open, but the movement of fresh air through them would have been no match in any case for the great clouds of blue smoke exhaled by the two, and the lazy trails of denser smoke drifting up from their cigarettes. My lungs, inured by long and constant exposure to the tainted air, took it in stride. But how I hated the stink of cigarettes! It oozed from everything in our apartment; our clothes, our skin, our hair, the walls, the furniture. Climbing into our family car was akin to rolling around in a giant ashtray, and inside surfaces of the windows were coated with the yellowish-blue residue of one of the worst habits ever invented by and for mankind. I marveled that people were willing to endure the stink, never mind the discomfort, but it was simply a fact of my life, and I accepted it. After all, most adults in the America of the 1950s seemed to have the habit. I still marvel, as an old man, that people are willing to smell so foul in the service of so disgusting and deadly a practice.

The particular game underway was more than likely not the first of the day, but one of a series in a marathon that started when Uncle Glen arrived with a case of Becker's beer. How much beer he brought on a given day was always a measure of how long he intended to stay on the occasion. There were exceptions, of course; the day might go uproariously fine, and require a resupply from "Gomer's" which was really Nicholas Grocery, just across Electric Alley and through the Star Noodle's parking lot, then a quick few steps west on 25th Street. The beer was only for Uncle Glen. I hardly ever saw my Dad touch the stuff. Maybe, simply for refreshment on a hot summer day, he might down one or two, but his beverage of choice was Seagram's 7, more accurately brand-named Seagram's Seven Crown. But everyone knew it as just Seagram's 7, which was the most prominent legend on the labels of the seemingly endless number of "fifths" that came into our spaces full and marched out empty in very short order.

I think it's safe to say that Seagram's 7 was, even then, "Der Whiskey der Leute", or The People's Whiskey, a Volkswhiskey, if you will. It was (probably still is) an inexpensive "American Whiskey Blend", then distilled by Joseph E. Seagram & Sons and later (around 2000) purchased by a consortium of companies that included Coca Cola. Wikipedia describes how this beverage of distinctive character was mixed into various cocktails, such as "7&7", which would have been Seagram's 7 and 7Up. But my Dad had neither the patience nor the disposition for such affectation. For him, even glasses were a foppish accessory that unnecessarily delayed the eye-watering burn of Seven Crown on its way to his circulatory system. In various holiday seasons, the odd decorative decanter sold in a velvet bag might find its way home, but our constant companion was the plain, cheap brown "fifth" (4/5 of a quart), an unadorned glass bottle with no distinctive shape or contour. But I digress. More on this paint-thinner later. However, it would not be possible to describe the chess marathon that burns so bright in my brain without at least some preamble describing the fuels that gave such moments their unique essence.

I had actually taught Dad the basic moves for chess at some point, having learned them myself from my older cousin, Larry Barty when I was very small (and he was very bored.) I later played sporadically during our time on John's Drive in Sunset, mostly with Michael Mayhew, who lived directly across the street from us. I never heard the word "nerd" as a child; it probably didn't exist. But Michael would be a nerd as a boy in today's world. I tried teaching the basic moves to other friends, but I don't remember any of them being much interested. Why would they be? We were outside in every possible moment, from sunup until bedtime, having adventures, exploring, playing, catching frogs and snakes. Who, at our age, especially in the 1950s, would want to sit  quietly shoving plastic things around a checkerboard? It was great fun teaching Dad the moves, and kicking his ass time after time. He never seemed unhappy at constantly losing, and he was always up for another game, even pleading with me to continue after I had beaten him in several games running. His attention was rapt. He puzzled over the board much longer than I wanted him to, making the games drag out excruciatingly. But I would always win, and he would never resign, but insisted on playing out to checkmate, even when his position had long since passed hopeless. So I beat him, and I beat him, and I beat him. Until one day I didn't. After his first victory, he won the majority of our games. I was able to eke out only the very occasional win. He beat me, and he beat me, and he beat me. The tables had turned forever. A curious trait that I've made peace with into old age was manifesting even then: I am not a naturally competitive person. I don't like to lose, but I am reluctant to spare the effort to assure that I win. I am also reluctant to beat someone I know. It always seemed impolite to me, and I did not revel in the victories, but felt bad for the vanquished. I took no joy from winning, and so the essence of a game with clear winners and losers was missing for me. (To this day, I prefer playing against computer opponents. Even chess. I usually set the difficulty level so that I rarely lose, and there's no need to feel sadness when I beat the software. I'm sure it's some sort of character flaw.)

So, Dad, having mastered the moves, and finding it increasingly difficult to coerce me into playing, turned on Uncle Glen, who seemed very willing. Once the rhythm was established, I believe they were fairly well matched. But it was never about the game. It was about their friendship, their common ground, and their positions in the hierarchy  of the Milligan family, from which happy household their brides both came. Here's a hint: I have heard it often from my Mother (always said in a jovial surround, with humor, and never accepted badly by my Dad) that it was the habit of the Milligan patriarch to refer to the ardent suitor of his youngest of five  daughters as "That God-damned plumber." Dad wasn't really a plumber, though he could plumb. His father, William Franklin Thompson had been a plumber, owning a plumbing business in the small mining town of Bingham Canyon, Utah, where he could sometimes be found at 495 & 1/2 Main Street, or reached at the telephone number of 315, for those few persons having such miracle devices in those days.

Dad, at the time of having this appellation first applied to him, was more properly a steamfitter. I'll leave readers to draw their own distinctions. One difference may have been that plumbers furnished estimates, and steamfitters probably didn't have any truck with such things. Dad really didn't have an official profession when he met my Mother. They were only 16. But he was probably pressed into the service of the W.F. Thompson Heating & Plumbing company whenever possible, as a helper or an apprentice of his father, and that was good enough for Mr. Milligan ("Pop" to me) to label him "That God-damned plumber." As WWII progressed and all the young men in America and around the world were swept into it, my Dad went into the U.S. Merchant Marine service working on Victory and Liberty ships transporting men, food, clothing, ammunition and the machines of murder and mayhem to remote places in the Pacific theater of that great world-wide convulsion, and Uncle Glen was swept into the U.S. Army, which I didn't know at the time of the chess games. But that's what it says on his grave marker, so it must be so. While Uncle Glen was learning to be a corporal in the army, Dad was learning to be a "steamfitter" aboard ships in the U.S. Merchant Fleet, with his buddy from Ogden, Ernie Strain, who at some point came to be referred to as "Dirty Ernie." Don't ask; I don't know, and there's no one left to ask. When the war ended, my Dad worked in a series of factory jobs in or near Ogden, tried a little silver mining in Pioche Nevada, and finally settled into being a steamfitter in whatever places employed such skilled tradesmen. Uncle Glen took a path of similarly little resistance and settled into working for the rest of what turned out to be a tragically short life working for the Union Pacific Railroad. Which eventually killed him in the most hideous way on a lonely stretch of track in the emptiest part of Wyoming, which is one of the emptiest states in the United States. I was in the Weber County jail at the time, on the 9th floor of the Ogden Municipal building, in the lower floors of which my fine grandfather, W.K. Milligan, had toiled for most of his life rising in the ranks of the Ogden Police Department. Thus indisposed, I was unable to attend the funeral of my most beloved and favorite Uncle Glen. But, once again as is my habit, I digress. 

The point of all these last words is to paint a picture of Dad and Uncle Glen as the black sheep of the Milligan Girl spouses, a label they both joyfully embraced and wore with pride all of their lives. Mom was more devoted to her mischievous rogue husband than Aunt Dorothy (hereinafter referred to as Dot (since that's what she was ever called) was to my dear Uncle Glen. This is just my perception. I could be completely wrong. Neither of these men, however, could be reformed from the behaviors that made them two black sheep in the group of the five husbands of the Milligan Girls. They weren't awful people; I thought of them as pagans, or heathens, though not in the religious sense. But they were the Bacchanalian boys, the perpetually adolescent practical jokers, the teasers, the smirkers, the mischief-makers, the Gusto Guys. I suppose that often leads to a great affection for the products of Joseph Seagram & Sons and, in Glen's case, John, Gustav and Albert Becker, or like products of other brands.

They were kindred spirits and this was amplified by their sometimes uncomfortable presence in the Milligan clan. So they spent a lot of time together, and became great friends as well as brothers-in-law. Both died young, but it can be safely argued that they both might have died on many other earlier occasions. First among such opportunities would have been their exposure to the grim scythe of the war, and they survived it. In their professions, people died or were maimed in greater percentages than in the accounting or legal professions. In one such incident, perhaps in 1955 or thereabouts, I heard my parents somberly discussing an accident in the steam plant at Hill Air Force Base, where several of Dad's co-workers had been cooked alive, as in a household pressure-cooker, when a high-pressure line carrying superheated steam burst, killing everyone on duty in the boiler room. There was no OSHA at the time, and unbelievably, the building had been constructed, probably expedient to the war effort, with all of the doors opening inward, so that the instantaneous explosion of pressure and heat sealed the room and their doom. Only the serendipity of scheduling spared my Dad and others who were off duty that day. And of course, Glen might have died in any number of incidents like the one than eventually killed him beneath the wheels of a rail car. Aside from hazardous professions, the two were party boys who routinely drove drunk and reckless, thereby causing several accidents, one of which was horrific enough to merit the display of my Dad's formerly beautiful 1956 Mercury Montclair hardtop in the lot of a body shop on U.S. Highway 91 at Riverdale Road collapsed accordion-style into a lump of mangled metal half its original length beneath a sign that said something like "Don't Drink and Drive!" People asked "How many died?" assuming the impossibility of anyone surviving it. But they did. Dad was bruised and battered, and his jaw had been shattered, forever changing his facial contours and spoiling what has been a beautiful countenance, and Uncle Glen was also bruised and battered, and had lost a few teeth, not in the impact itself, but from an ensuing collision of his face with the gravel road-bed when he stumbled out of the car and found it impossible to remain standing. Many months later, they would speak of it with perverse pride in their survival, smiling and laughing as they remembered. Initially, however, there was no laughter, no smiles; for Dad's jaw was immobilized in a hideous Frankenstein contraption called a "Streetor Splint" with anchor studs driven through his facial skin and screwed into the fragments of his jaw, then joined on the outside of his face by a framework of metal rods from ear to ear. And poor Glen had no front teeth. But, back to the chess game.

The tournament was nearly finished. After several hours of ponderous moves, punctuated by chin-stroking and head shaking, and the grudging acceptance of hearing "checkmate" triumphantly exclaimed from one side of the board or the other, maybe followed by a morose "Well, God Damn it" from the opposite side, I knew we were nearly done. The length of time between moves had, it seemed to me, lengthened to an absurd extent. The case of Becker's had dwindled to a six-pack or less, and a fifth of Seagram's 7 had nearly disappeared. Once or twice, I had presumed to accidentally nudge one or the other of the players when one or both had allowed their eyes to droop closed in thought, with chins resting on or near their chests. First one, then the other, during separate moments of such deep thought had allowed cigarettes to drop ashes or fall in their entirety onto shirt fronts and trousers, followed by frantic slapping at the new burn holes by the victim and gleeful chuckling by the lucky opponent. No matter; in a short time, the roles would be reversed. I confess, I was hoping strenuously that this would be the last game, and that someone would manage a checkmate very soon. Certainly they couldn't continue; the fuel was very nearly exhausted. I saw that the chins were down again, and that Dad was about to lose control of his cigarette again. I was bending down slightly, peering at their eyelids to see if the thinking was still underway when the cigarette my Dad was about to drop burned too close to his fingers, the glowing ashes scorching his skin. As I reached over to rouse him from his "thoughts", the hot pain registered, and his eyes popped open with the deliberate speed of a freight elevator inching its way to the destination floor…well, maybe "popped" isn't the right word. He flipped the attacking cigarette onto the floor, then realizing it would burn there too, stooped to pick it up and momentarily off balance and out of sorts, jostled the table, which caused Glens eyes to widen in slow-motion, as he too was roused from his "thinking." As Dad came back upright with the short cigarette recaptured, Uncle Glen registered his awkward movement, and said "Hey! Put that back, God damn it, Carty; you already moved. It's MY move." Dad said "I didn't move anything; besides, it's MY move, not yours, dumbass. You just moved your King's bishop!" Glen's eyes widened, and he said "Why you cheatin' bastard! Did you think you could get away with moving while I wasn't looking?" At which point, shockingly, Dad reached a meaty paw across the board and gave Glen a very slow-motion low-energy smack on one of his cheeks, saying "THERE, God damn it; call ME a cheater, that's what you get!" Glen didn't dodge the blow, which was really, for lack of Dad's motor control, more of a nudge than a slap. His own lack of coordination made that impossible. But he awkwardly got to his feet, and said something like "Well, THIS game is over, and by God, that's the last time I'll ever play with a cheater!" Dad, not to be outdone, said "I was winning anyway, and that was a cheap trick to get out of losing." Adrenalin having restored some cognition for both men, Glen said, "Jesus, Carty; you're too drunk to hang onto your cigarette, how did you think you were going to beat me?" The outrage was bleeding out of the incident rapidly, as the two began to realize how ridiculous they looked. Dad was smiling again when he said "ME!? Look at the smoking hole in your shirt! If I can't beat someone who burns up his own clothes, I guess I'd better quit." Now Glen laughed out loud, and pointed to the little black-rimmed pinholes in Dad's pants and said "HA! Liar, liar…your pants are on fire!" They were both laughing now, hard enough to bring tears to their eyes, as Glen said "Sheez…I'm about to piss my pants. I gotta take a leak", and headed forthwith out the door to one of the hallway bathrooms shared by the six apartments on the second floor. Dad began cleaning up the chess pieces and the and the refreshment mess, and when Glen came back into the apartment, the day rapidly came to a close, with my Uncle Glen hugging Dad, and Dad hugging Uncle Glen, and me, having been massively entertained toward the end of a stultifyingly sluggish series of chess games smiling ear to ear at all the sunny goodwill in the room, happy that the face-slapping and clothes-burning had come to an agreeable ending. And I desperately needed to go outside for some fresh air.

2050

I read today that The European Union will ban all carbon fuel vehicles from central cities by 2050. England's not going along. UK Transport Minister Norman Baker says “We will not be banning cars from city centres anymore than we will be having rectangular bananas.” Good for him. Stiff upper lip, wot? Isn't it typical for politicians to be drawing plans for the grandest air castles while rioters fill their streets and social structure crumbles? Of course it is. Much easier to daydream about 2050 than to think about today and tomorrow.

But this blog isn't political. I don't even know if you can call it a blog, since I let years pass without writing in it. I have another blog for politics. I just can't help noticing, though, that we now live in...1984. Here's a proof. Wikipedia: Doublespeak is language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g., "downsizing" for layoffs), making the truth less unpleasant, without denying its nature. It may also be deployed as intentional ambiguity, or reversal of meaning (for example, naming a state of war "peace"). In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth, producing a communication bypass. I think we should track down all official practitioners of "Doublespeak" and smother them in their sleep. No sense beating around the bush.

You may be interested to know that we (the United States, aka NATO, aka The United Nations) are now involved in a "KMA" in and around North Africa. Sounds something like the Country Music Awards, doesn't it, maybe as Larry the Cable Guy would abbreviate it? But it's not. "KMA" stands for "Kinetic Military Action."  It's actually a war. War is bad. Everyone knows that, from the littlest first-grader to Grandma Edith. "Kinetic Military Action", on the other hand, is...well, NOT so bad. And "KMA" sounds downright wholesome. This isn't really a new tactic for our controllers and pooh-bahs in government. At the earliest edges of my memory, we were involved in a "Police Action" on the Korean peninsula. The heaviest slaughter lasted three years, 1950-1953. But it never really ended. That war that was not a war but really was a war is now most famous for producing the longest "Cease Fire" in recorded history. Even today, in early spring of 2011, the war has never officially been concluded. Some people still can't bring themselves to call it a war. I've recently heard someone say "the Korean Conflict." Isn't that a kick in the ass? "Conflict" is what you have with your neighbor when he starts up his lawn mower at 7AM Sunday morning. It's what you have with your wife when you realize she's not changed the oil in her car in three years. When 33,000 American sons, dads, uncles, brothers and teenagers die in the course of it, along with an estimated two million civilians and a million or so co-belligerent troops, I think you are morally obligated to call it a "war", don't you? And of course, "Police Action" just makes people laugh. President Truman, bless him, had the stones and the grit to name it a war. No wonder the elites of the time despised him. Truman was a good little guy. The second-to-last Democrat I could look at without having pre-hurl saliva dribbling down my chin. In case you're curious, JFK was the last. So far (as of yesterday), it's estimated that this delightful little KMA has cost U.S. citizens about 600 Million Dollars. In six days.

But, hey, this isn't a political blog, so maybe I will repost this on HaveACivilWar.com and get off it here. Until we meet again, y'all have a delightful and productive KMA, hear?

Requiem

I guess we’ll be dropping like flies from here on out. I won’t repeat the clichés about people who obsessively read obituaries, for I am not one of these people. I rarely read local print newspapers anymore, preferring to gather my news from sources of my choosing. Everything’s out there on the internet, if you want it.

Besides, Ogden’s newspaper has gone from being the mediocre locally owned newspaper it was when I carried it all over the bad parts of town as a kid to a pitiful, pandering rag owned by some small media firm based in Ohio, I think. In those bygone days, I would ride my bike after school to the even-then-old Kiesel Building on the corner of 24^th Street and…well, Kiesel Avenue (of course!) to collect my daily papers. I would fold them in the basement right near where the presses ran…there was a dirty little hallway-shaped area accessed from a service stair off the sidewalk where a rough bench had been built for the purpose. It smelled overpoweringly of hot metal and ink and paper, and it was extremely noisy. Do any of you youngsters know what a Linotype machine is? I thought not. Look it up. That’s why the “hot metal” smell. If I had rubber bands, I would encircle the papers for throwing. If I didn’t, well, it took longer, but the papers could be folded in such a way that one side of a tri-fold could be tucked into the other to hold them together into a throwable package. IF you threw gently and at low velocity, they would stay folded until landing on the sidewalks or porches of the houses on my route. But I digress, this isn’t about my old paper route, or the degeneration of a decent local newspaper into a cheap rag that’s not fit to print. It’s about childhood becoming “The Old Days”, and me and my old buddies becoming blue-haired fossils and worse…assuming room temperature.

I spent fifty cents to buy an Ogden Standard Examiner on Friday because I was desperate for something to read while having breakfast at a new little restaurant I’ve found. Looking up at me from a grainy obituary photo was Fred Meeks. You may know him better as Vern Tessio, from the 1986 Rob Reiner movie “Stand by Me.” No, he wasn’t really in that movie or any other, as far as I know, but if Stephen King had been following me and my pals around in the 50s, Vern’s part might have been written with Fredric Meeks in mind.

I wrote a letter to Fred’s still-living parents who, amazingly, seem still to be living in the same house where our little band of brothers used to collect Fred as snowballs rolling down hills gather mass, going from house to house until we had a quorum for the day’s events. Here’s my letter; I can’t think of any other way to say what seeing Fred’s face in the newspaper made me think.

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Meeks and family;

I offer my condolences to you on the loss of Fredric.

Fred was a childhood friend. You may or may not remember me. It’s been so many years. Fred and I were the same age; he was born about three weeks after my birth.

I lived in Sunset with my parents, first at 56 Johns Drive, which I believe is now 300 West, and then later on the corner of Burns and Center streets, where my family operated the Center Market, which is now a pizza parlor.

I guess it was 1953 when we moved onto Johns Drive. At that time, Johns Drive was the last subdivision street on the west edge of town. Only railroad tracks and farms were west of us. I was in second grade then, and attended Clinton School until the new Sunset Elementary school opened. I think we started attending the new school when I was in fourth grade, with Mrs. Morby as our teacher. In fifth grade, we had Mr. Golden Sill, and in sixth grade, Mr. Quinn Beckstead. I offer these names, because I’m not sure when your street was completed to the west of us, and I’m not sure what grade I was in when I first met Fred. Maybe the teacher’s names will help.

Anyway, our little “rat pack” often included Fred, me, Michael and Gary Hoskins, Ronald Udink, Robert Gunderson, Benny Barger, Arthur Peterson, Johnny Watson and a few other kids who came and went in the shifting sands of childhood groupings. Together, we roamed the streets and farms of the Sunset/Clinton area, playing hide-and-seek, pretending to be soldiers, cops & robbers, or cowboys & indians. Sometimes we might have helped ourselves to apples from the orchards, or watermelons from the patches. It was just exciting enough for young boys out at night but not too bad in the large scheme of things. We hunted frogs and snakes in the drainage ditches alongside the railroad tracks and in the irrigation ditches running between the pastures and fields. Sometimes, we would bring our captured pets home to put in our desk or dresser drawers. Exciting for Mom. We put pennies on the tracks, then hid in the weeds for the trains to pass so we could collect our newly flattened ovals of copper. We played in the tall corn, imagining that we were in dense jungles and being stalked by lions and tigers. We slept out often in the summers, in sleeping bags thrown out on the grass under the open skies. We rode our bikes on great day-long safaris to the sloughs near the shore of the Great Salt Lake. In the winters, we would play or ice skate on the frozen surface of the big canal up by Highway 91, which was the four-lane main highway of the time before Interstate freeways were built. We would make incursions into Hill Air Force Base, packing off aircraft switch panels and other junk from the WWII leftovers dumped in big piles in the dirt, until the Air Force security police came to run us off. A week or so later, we would go again. I’m sure our parents wouldn’t have approved of some of our adventures, but this was an innocent time in America, a time of light, energy, and optimism.

These years were my best in this life. Regardless of what the others in our little group went on to later, I would bet that most all feel the same. It was a simple time. The summers seemed endless. We would often wake up to one or more of our rat pack sitting on our front porches or lawns, waiting for us to hurry outside for the day’s Great Adventure. We seldom knew where we were going, or where we would end the day, and we didn’t care. It was a rich, happy, full, and wonderful time upon which to build our lives. When I first saw the 1986 Rob Reiner movie “Stand by Me”, I thought that my elementary-school years with my pals in Sunset had been captured perfectly.

At the end of seventh grade at North Davis Junior High, my family moved back to Ogden. I guess Fred and I and the rest of our group were 12 years old, going on 13 when we moved.

After that, I lost track of almost everyone in Sunset; Ogden may be only ten miles or so distant from Sunset, but for kids on bikes, that was far. Besides, our lives revolved around neighborhood and school, and Ogden was a different world.

Still, through all of the intervening years, Fred’s face and personality, like the those of the rest of our little group, has stayed fresh and detailed in my memory. Those few years between 1952 and 1959 helped form me into the person I later became, and I thought you would like to know that your son/brother/companion/father/uncle and my childhood pal Fred had something to do with that. I would also like you to know that he is remembered fondly by someone who hasn’t seen him for over forty-five years, and that he will live on in my memories for as long as I draw breath. If it helps you to know this, Fred is young, strong, laughing, and extremely happy as I see him.

I’ve had a full and mostly happy life, rewarded with friends, a wonderful mate, and four lovely children. I hope that Fred enjoyed similar happiness in his life, and that in leaving us, he has found eternal peace.

With my sympathy and warm regards,

Mike Thompson

I signed Mike Thompson, because that's who I am, in my DNA. No one in Sunset would have any idea who someone named St James was. Maybe they won't even read my letter. They have to be old as dirt by now. But they are still apparently living more or less independently in their own home, so let's hope.

Anyway, another one bites the dust. It sounds from the obituary that he died suddenly and unexpectedly at home, which is of course, the Cadillac way to go and what we all hope for.

Shoe Trees

The face in my mirror is not my Dad’s face…not exactly. Dad’s eyes turned down a little more at the outside points, while his mouth tended to lift ever-so-slightly at the corners, in an appealing sort of semi-permanent, somewhat remote, and sardonic smile. My own eyes are set more level and lack the childlike warmth that shined forth from Dad’s, and my mouth turns down a bit at the corners reflecting my more cynical view of the world and my less generous spirit. Aside from the asymmetry resulting from a pulverized jawbone, Dad’s face was more pleasing than mine, and certainly he was far more beautiful as a young man. Our head shape is the same blocky cylinder, tapering from the face and back of the head to a slightly narrower top than bottom. We have both lived our lives without recognizable necks, carried through the world in stumpy, hulking, mesomorphic bodies that defy the best efforts of clothiers and dieticians. We were born to be gladiators, I think; thick, dense bones that resist fractures, and tank-like, underslung carriages that are all but impossible to bowl over.

Aside from his genetic gifts, my Dad apparently helped to construct me more than I realized (or bothered to think about) for many, many years. The signs were everywhere; I just couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge them. Or perhaps I unconsciously veered from them fearing that too-close examination would reveal the unthinkable: I am very much like my Father.

Was Dad a bad man, or even a bad example? Well, no…and yes. He had demons. Whether they came out of the bottle to swallow him up, or whether he sought to fend them off with his jug of Seagram’s 7 will never be known, and I’m not sure it’s important. He could be mean and spiteful under the influence or he could be sad and alone, unfathomable, melancholy. He could also be joyous, even giddy. For most of my life between, say, twelve and thirty I was obsessed with his shortcomings, and determined to be unlike him. My love of him and my hatred for him swirled in a dark cyclonic soup through all of my adolescence and drove most of the events of my life in the late 50s and 60s. Only in the first ten years of my life and the last ten years of his did I give him credit for anything. Only in my childhood and in that short and truncated end stage could I love my Dad wholeheartedly without resentment, blame, or qualification.

Oh, man. I don’t get to think much anymore. I am a wage slave. What I do to earn bread and board is meaningless to me. Worse, I am completely irrelevant as the world spins on its axis. And I don’t get time to think very often…

This morning, on the short trip from the coffeepot to my office, I picked up my plain black shoes from the shedding place near the kitchen door and carried them to my closet, placing them between brown ones just like them, and a pair of tan suede slip-ons (Big 5; $20.) With no conscious thought, I picked up a pair of cedar shoe trees, inserted them into both shoes with a single-handed and very practiced motion, and snapped them down in place. When I started to raise up, a stray thought happened; all of my shoes have trees. Among most middle-class men who aren’t fashionistas, shoe trees aren’t required. Some don’t have a single pair. Where did I get THAT? Dad, of course. He always had shoe trees in his “good” shoes. In those days, most men only had “regular” shoes and “good” shoes, not the ten or twelve pair common today. When your “good” shoes became worn, or your “regular” shoes wore OUT, then the “good” became the new “regular”, and it was off to Thom McAn, Sears, or Penney’s for some new “good” shoes. Dad’s shoe trees were simple things made of perforated stamped metal and very stiff wire, and he only needed to have one pair for his “good” shoes. He was so constantly in his “regular” ones that his feet were the original and god-given shoe trees. Dad never tried to instruct me on the virtues of using shoe trees. It’s just something that was a part of him, and that became a part of me automatically.

Pop was my role model of choice. A policeman with rigid personal habits and codes. A man respected in the community, and well-known in our smallish town. A man with no known vices. A predictable, stable, even-handed man. He smoked a pipe, which smelled wonderful, and Dad smoked cigarettes, which were low-rent and stank up rooms, cars, clothing, hair, and everything else. I was Pop’s first blood grandson, and he doted on me. Nana and Pop never fought. (Of course they did, but it was their strict code that no other living person should ever be privy to disagreements between them.) Mom and Dad ALWAYS fought, and their disagreements were unconstrained by location, time, or bystanders. But despite my admiration of Pop and my adoption of him as the person I wanted to be most like, it is my Dad’s influence I see stamped all over my life. I can’t hold him to blame for my worst habits and actions because apparently, I always had free will to chose what to emulate. I never did smoke cigarettes or drink much. I was never a gregarious party animal. But I do use shoe trees. I do like to take naps. I am somewhat manic, though this is probably a mix of genetics and learned behaviors.

All day I have been thinking of Dad’s influence on me, and how his posterity has been more than just memories of him and few pictures. When Terry and I were preschoolers and into my first or second grade years, we would jump on Mom and Dad’s bed to be cradled in the crook of his massive arms and barrel chest. We would get tickled, giggle uncontrollably (all three of us), and beg Dad to stop, but we really didn’t want him to. After a bit, Mom would say, “Carty, stop it…let them breathe!” So he would stop for a minute, then we would start urging him to start again. He took me with him to hang out with his young buddies, and on deer hunts and camping trips. He was just a boy himself, not yet thirty during most of these times. He taught me to shoot his old 30-30 and a .22 pistol. He taught me to solder, paint, puzzle out electric circuits, and best of all, not to ever be intimidated by something mechanical or electrical that was outside my experience. He taught me to examine things, to puzzle things out, to figure out how to fix things. He taught me to be curious. And he probably did it all without understanding that I would one day look in the mirror and see…him.

I always loved you Dad, even when I thought I hated you. I never understood how much I would miss you, or what a huge part of my life you were. I never would have believed that I would look in the mirror one day in the twenty-first century, and think “I look so much like my Dad. Good.”

Thanks for the shoe trees Dad, and thanks for my life. It’s been good.

"The melancholy days are come...

the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere."

William Cullen Bryant wrote these words long ago (I don't know exactly when; he died in 1878) but it might have been me, and I might have written them myself sometime between September 10, 2005 and the present day.

Since my last rumination on 239 Capitol Street, one of it's dearest and most enduring inhabitants has gone from the earth forever. My dear, sweet Mother, Shirley Ruth Milligan Thompson followed her soulmate and lifelong companion into eternity twenty-two years to the day after his death, on the day set out in the last paragraph.


She suffered indignities, fear, and pain in her last few days, and loss of independence, vitality, and glory in the last decade, but she died in the arms of her four children, shielded from the very worst by medicines and end-of-life "caregivers" (a word recently invented, and one I despise.)

By my age, we accept the cycle of life. Having experienced the loss of loved ones and friends many times, we know where it's all going, and so we no longer crash and burn each time as we did when we were young and first lost a Grandad or a favorite uncle. Still, I haven't been the same since the day my Mom died. Hearts don't really break, but events can and do control whether people thrive or wither. I'm not thriving.

In photographic terms, one might say that my moods move within a "very wide dynamic range." Or you could just call me manic or bipolar. Another facet of my life that I've embraced more than come to terms with. I like it, being moody and unpredictable. But what has been happening to me since last September seems unrelated to my moods. I believe that it is a real, measurable deterioration in my mental function. Time is now warped; elastic. Some days last weeks, others seconds, and a few seem not to have ever existed in the continuum. Nothing seems urgent. Procrastination, always beloved, has become the central theme in my daily routine. I feel old. (Of course I AM old, but I've never believed it or felt like it until September.) It's as though I have a DUTY to be old now that MY generation is on the brink of the abyss. There is no one left to go before me. Mom carried that burden when she was alive, and now it's mine.

I live more and more in the past, which seems real, and true, and bright, and good. In contrast, today's world is filthy, mean, rotten, and not much worth saving. Am I transitioning into irrrelevance? I suppose that I am.

On a May day in 1946, Shirley Ruth Milligan Thompson held me in her arms and looked out on her world with new eyes; she was a Mother. Her future was ordained. Her legacy was assured. Her epoch was begun. Look at me, a helpless little infant in her arms. Me, when the slate was blank, the possibilities infinite. Capitol Street, Lewis School, Center Market, the U.S. Army, my loves, my children...all ahead of me, all unknown.

What were her dreams on that day? How did she plan to live her life with Carty? Of all the things I talked about with my Mother as her days diminished, THIS was what I needed to know, and THIS was what I never explored with her.

It's a safe bet that her dreams exceeded her grasp, and that life laid more disappointments at her doorstep than she wold ever have believed at this time; certainly more than she deserved. But how did she feel about her life when the final chapter of her story was written? That's a question I failed to ask, and now I'll never know. She gloried in her children, and I know she felt loved and elevated in that universe. Could that have been enough, or just something she settled for?

I am going to try being old with a measure of the grace my Mother managed. The bar is high.

In May of last year, I dreamed that my Mother came to save me, blind and afraid and trapped in my basement. In my dream, she made me feel safe, and that everything would be alright. It's what she made me feel so often throughout my real life.

And I'm reluctant to go into the basement, for who will save me now?

Help me, Mommy.

I dreamed that I was in my basement, and could not see. I was in a panic. I hoped it might be temporary, maybe as a result of waking suddenly. I knew I was supposed to be in my bed, but here I was in the basement, and I couldn’t see. I knew exactly where in the basement I was; the southeast corner, in an area we have blocked off with low obstructions to keep the doggies out. Though I am 59 years old, gray-haired, weather-beaten, and scarred, I cried out “Mommy! I CAN’T SEE!” I may have said it more than once. Almost immediately, I heard my Mother’s voice; “Where are you, honey!” I answered “Over here! I can’t see!” I could hear my mother moving toward me. I reached out, and felt her hand touch mine. She said “There now, honey it’s all right. You have to get back in bed; Patty said.”

When I became fully awake, I lay in my darkened bedroom, listening to my wife breathing beside me. It was almost midnight. I had been in bed less than two hours. Considering past the absurdity of the dream (I am NOT blind, though I often feel disabled when I don’t have my glasses on; my Mother is 50 miles away and could never negotiate the steps to my basement), I remembered the immediate comfort that I felt when my Mother’s hand touched mine. I was still unable to see, and had no idea how I had come to be in the basement when I belonged in bed, but I was calmed when my Mother’s fingertips touched my hand. Everything would be all right.

I turned on the bedside lamp to look at my hands. Thick, wide, short-fingered and big-knuckled hands covered with many, many small and medium-sized scars and one very large one. I remembered them. Though gone for fifty years, Penny’s sharp Boxer teeth had drawn blood many times during our rough play on Capitol Street. Small, triangular scars less than a quarter of an inch long, most of them, though one was nearly two inches. I loved tussling with her. The rougher the better. No blood, no glory. She never played rough with the girls, and they probably never imagined her to be the huge and dangerous wild wolf that she was in my childish fantasies.

My wife’s breathing changed; I knew she was either awake, or very nearly so.

I turned my hands this way and that; there, on the left thumb, the long, deep diagonal crescent, all that remains, along with my memories, of the day on Brock Street in the summer of 1976 or 1977 when I sliced it to the bone with a razor knife while cutting a piece of expansion joint for my new patio concrete. Dad was there with me, to help me. It needed stitches, but I couldn't leave, as the concrete truck had just arrived. We had to pour, so I just bundled it up and stuck it inside my glove. I couldn’t know on that day that this big, bluff, lively, moody man, whom I have loved endlessly and whom I have also cursed so much and so often, would be gone from the earth in five short years. He would have been only fifty years old that summer, nine years younger than I am tonight. I had no idea how to do concrete. I needed Dad’s help. He had done ALL of the tradesman-type jobs. A professional plumber and steamfitter, he could roof, stick-build, finish concrete, apply sheetrock, wire houses, fix cars, solder, weld, use any tool effectively. He could do just about anything. He could figure anything out. And he was generous with his humble gifts, willing to help anyone, at any time. I needed him; how badly, I never knew until he was suddenly gone. He had my hands (or, more accurately, I have his), big, wide, strong. Pieces of him survive in the world. The scar on my thumb. The patio we built that day. Me and my sisters, and all of our children, and theirs. Letters to my Mother from a 17 year-old boy sailing the seven seas in the midst of a world war. The garage at 56 Johns Drive in Sunset that he built when we lived there in 1956. Lots of pictures, taken sporadically through the years, but spanning his life from infancy to near the time he passed away. Almost every day I drive by the old American Can Company, where he worked after returning home from the war. It's not really on my way, but I detour to go by there anyway. For most of my life, it has been a derelict old-time brick factory, empty and boarded up for so many years, forlorn and dark. Soon, however, it will be gentrified into a Technology Campus, whose students will no doubt appreciate the high camp hundred-year-old brick, but who will never hear the clanging of bright, new, silver cans streaming along conveyor belts, or see the strong, clean-cut young men who worked there in the forties and fifties, laughing and joking in the clamor and chaos of the factory. And my Mother, who keeps him in her heart every day and every night, who lived only to remain in his love and for her children, and who could never contemplate life without him.

I’ve had two vivid wonderful dreams of Dad in the years since October of 1983, and one that I haven’t shared with anyone because it wasn’t wonderful, and was very discomfiting. I think of my Mother almost every day, but I don’t remember having her play a part in any recent dream of mine until this strange rescue she made of her blind, panic-stricken son in the basement just before midnight tonight. I don’t know what it means.

But thank you, Mom, for making me feel safe when I was alone in the basement, unable to see. It was only a dream, but thank you for reaching out to touch my hand, for telling me that everything would be all right. And thank you for the hundreds of times in my life, through turmoil, trouble, and tumult, when you reached out to me in the same way, as a child, an adolescent, a young man, and now as an old man, to soothe me and comfort me and make everything better. I have been very much at home in your heart all these fifty-nine years. Sweet Dreams, Dear Mother. I love you.

RA19739800: Preparing for War

During basic training at Fort Ord, every Wednesday was Haircut Day.

In early afternoon, we were barked and herded into formation, then double-timed to the barber shop. Once there, we would stand silently in line awaiting a five-minute turn in one of the many chairs. No conversation was necessary or welcome. All hair was removed from each young head with close-cut clippers. The need for speed was great; there were so many young men. There was less need for care or caution, because all would return on the next Wednesday, even though many left the shop each week with little trickles of blood forming at the tops of their ears, where they joined the skull. The price for this whiz-bang shearing was fifty cents, paid in advance. Like everything else in the lives of the young men, the process was efficient, ordered and directed. So conditioned were they, after a few short weeks as soldiers, that no one thought, even for a second, to complain of the rough treatment or the damaged ears.

It was the objective of the Army, within a few frenzied weeks of long days and short nights filled with exhausting physical training and unremitting psychological stress, to destroy the free will of the young men. The Army worked toward this goal with fierce diligence. Some of the new soldiers were recruits, like me. Volunteers, whose reasons for enlisting were legion. Others were reluctant warriors; draftees, whose Army serial numbers began with US instead of RA. No matter...the Army would hammer and mix and mold this kaleidoscopic assortment of young American manhood into something else, something new. Emerging from the basic training course at Fort Ord, California in the winter of 1962 were cohesive units of men capable of functioning as single-purposed machines; men conditioned to obey the commands and instructions of NCOs and officers without question, though they might later grumble and privately wonder at the stupidity they would often observe in command. Over and over, every day, in each aspect of their training the men were told that their lives depended on blind and instantaneous obedience to command. There was no relief from this theme. In sleeping and waking; in eating and physical training; in shooting and marching; in cleaning and grooming. Everything, EVERY SINGLE THING was tightly regimented and rigidly structured. The Army believed that the new thing they were creating could only be born in the ashes of ego. The few who could not or would not bend were broken. The frail or excessively weak were carried until they were judged to be beyond salvation, and those few were returned to civilian life. It was mean, it was brutal, and it was often very ugly. But in many of the young men, something unfamiliar began to stir. The more they were driven, the more they desired to be driven. As the psychological abuses and physical demands were heaped upon them with increasing intensity, determination to persevere, to succeed, and even to excel began to swell within them, both individually and as units. For many, this was the first experience in their lives that took them outside themselves, that created a higher purpose than self. In large measure, the Army knew their business, and they succeeded. Perhaps it was crude, undoubtedly it was blunt; but it worked.

Later, after the grinding crucible of basic training, there would be time for fun and friendship as well as duty. But basic training was designed to be indelible and unforgettable, and most of us would carry the marks of those few weeks with us for all the rest of our lives, and certainly through the remaining years of our Army tours.

PS - May 20, 2005 - I meant to follow this up with a later post, but never did. I prepared for war, even hoped for it in that absurd teenage male testosterone saturated world that I inhabited in 1962, but I never went.

From Fort Ord, some of us shipped to Fort Gordon, Georgia. Apparently, something in the dozens of tests we took in Basic Training said to the big green machne "Here's one who can zone out in front of a typewriter and telegraph key for hours on end translating dots and dashes into messages without going beserk." Sixteen weeks of code and learning to change transmitter coils in refrigerator-sized radio transmitters without burning all the marrow out of my bones. U.S. Army Signal Corps Training School. What a cool thing for a nearly seventeen-year-old boy. We got bright orange parade scarves to wear with our dress greens, and crossed signal flags on new brass for our lapels. We all had our pictures taken.

After Basic Training, Signal School was delightful. Anyway, the point is that I didn't go to war. In my training company, as graduation approached, orders began to come down, in groups and in little dribbles. By graduation day, everyone had received orders except me and one other hapless boy. Most of the orders were for a place called Vietnam. No one knew anything about that place at that time. We had to look it up in the library to see where everyone was going. Nearly-seventeen-year-old boys don't read the newspapers much, and there was precious little to be found in them regarding Vietnam in those days anyway. The ones who were going were joyful. It would be a nice vacation in a tropical paradise.

Two weeks passed. The company area was empty and quiet. The next incoming class of RTT operators wasn't scheduled for a few weeks. I slept alone in my barracks, stony silent now without the rowdy young men of my company who were all en route to Vietnam. Finally, after two weeks of solitude, cleaning barracks, latrines, and day rooms, the other orphan boy-soldier and I were ordered to report for duty at Pyongtaek, Republic of Korea (by way of Oakland Army Terminal) for a thirteen-month deployment with the 304th Signal Battalion attached to HQ of the Eighth Army.

How sad we were...our lucky buddies would be tanning in a tropical wonderland that we imagined would be just like Hawaii (though neither of us had been there either, or ever see a coast or an ocean for that matter.) And we were going to a place with winters cold enough to freeze the air in your lungs. A place that contained Chosin resevoir. "Frozen Chosin" to Americans who died there, and the ones who survived that icy hell while I was in the first grade at Lewis School in Ogden, Utah.

Korea was wonderful for me, but that's another story. Twice during my year there, our officers asked for volunteers to go on temporary duty assignments to...Vietnam. It seems that RTT operators were suddenly in short supply there. (What ever happened to the hundreds of our Signal School mates who had gone before us, just a few months earlier?) I thought about going, but I had learned by then that unpleasantness always followed an act of volunteering in the Army. I had my new buddies, my cozy little diesel-stove-heated Quonset hut, and a routine I could live with, so I just stayed quiet, and didn't raise my hand. Besides, an ill wind was beginning to blow up into the East China and Yellow seas from the south; rumors of death and dismemberment were just making their way to our ears from Vietnam. Rumors of war.

Why 239 Capitol Street?

-
By any objective measure, it was the worst of the places I've called "home". I am drawn back to it like a moth to flame, though it hasn't existed for over forty years. When I returned from Korea in the Spring of 1964 and stood in my hot green wool uniform on the raw ground where the Capitol Apartments had been for all the days of my life, I thought my heart would stop.

I can't ever know this, but I believe my life changed course on that day. Whoever (or whatever) I was to become when I left home in October of 1962 was just a wisp of smoke in the still air. For awhile, I could see it, or sense it, hanging semitransparent in the air, but becoming more disorganized and distant by the day.

Life has taken me into the path of many interesting events, some quite spectacular and seemingly momentous. But that May day in 1964 was the nexus for me; all the eighteen years of my life seemed buried in the dirt at my feet, along with the old, crumbling bricks of the Capitol Apartments. That was my Day in the Yellow Wood.

Perhaps, somewhere in the varied halls of the universe, the Capitol Apartments yet stands guard on Electric Alley, and raucous Saturday night music from the open doors of the KoKoMo Club and the El Borracho still drifts through the summer night and into the second-floor casement window of a thirteen-year-old boy, lying awake in bed, wondering about tomorrow, the world, and his place in it. Perhaps that boy is me. Oh, I hope so.

I am 58 years of age, the lifelong mate of a sweet woman I would never have aspired to, had I been a seriously thoughtful person. I am the father of a beautiful and intelligent daughter. I have also, with my mate, favored the world with three bright, funny, and loving sons. I have grandchildren out there...my daughter made them and pampers them and grows them. I hardly know them. New York may as well be Antarctica, for all the likelihood that I will go there. All in all, I am a happy person. I may die before I write here again, so I can't leave this unsaid: It's a Wonderful Life.

It's therapeutic, making these scatchings, and disconcerting at the same time, not knowing if or when they will fall upon someone, or whether they will land like stones or like snowflakes if they do.