Reunion Stories

Iowa is cold in May.  

50 of my extended family members, all mostly descended from my grandma's family of 13, visited tiny Percival for the second Monaghan family reunion.  The first was in 1959.

The farmhouse is still in our family, although it's decayed in the ten years since we saw it last.  It's one of those things you just can't think about, because you can't do anything about it.  It'll be ok, but it's not the showpiece it once was.  Some of the siding is rotting and one of the porch columns has been replaced by some kind of...jack.  

Circa 1915

2015

All of us

It was very amusing for me to compare the branches of our family.  All of the Arizona people are dark, aggressive, funny, and a little scary.  My grandma moved to Phoenix in 1949 and two of her brothers soon followed.  Most of their children fit this bill, but none more than my grandma's four children.

In contrast, our midwestern family are all gentle, mild, religious, and peaceful individuals.  One of the cousins from Wisconsin said they were afraid of the Benz kids back in high school.  They were scary-looking, rude, and were still prone to fist-fighting in the living room.  My aunt threw knives at her brothers because she couldn't fight.  I always thought this was a funny lie my father told until he brought it up at a recent get together.  I looked to her for her denial - she only shrugged and said, "They deserved worse!"

My dad tells a story from high school in the 60s.  My uncle got very drunk one night and missed the toilet in the bathroom the whole house shared.  My dad got up some time after this and became enraged when his bare foot met a puddle of cold urine.  He returned to the bedroom he shared with his brother, punched the sleeping boy in the face twice, and went back to bed.  His brother didn't even ask the next morning why his face was bloodied and his eye a little silver bag.  He just went with it.

Offensive jokes in the parlor. My cousin, brother, me and my uncle Mark

I love to freak my cousin out by recounting my morbid grandmother's tales of death in the house.  No house gets that old without a few grisly experiences.  The parlor we're sitting in held the body of my great-great grandfather Ed Monaghan, who entered the US illegally from Ireland, and worked on the railroads until he could bring his wife and child to Iowa.  They built a little house, and then built this house in 1895.  Their son married a girl from South Dakota and brought her to live in the home with his parents and sister, and over the next 20 years, she had 11 children.  They all lived to adulthood.  One was lost in WWII and the rest commenced into midcentury America.

Ed's body lay in state in the parlor for a few days before he was buried in Nebraska City.  My dad made sure to tell my brother that the night he slept on the couch down there on one trip to the Monaghan farm in Percival.  James just accepted it, dark as he is.

My great-aunt Julia died in the house during childbirth and she probably stayed a few days in the parlor, too.  Ed's wife Bridget, our great-great grandmother, died in there and doubtless lay in state as well.  These are practically ghost stories to us now, but death wasn't so intimidating back then.  It happened all the time.  When someone died, there wasn't a service to come haul the body off before you had to look at it like there is now.  You'd probably wash and dress the corpse yourself, then leave them in your front room for a few days in case anyone wanted to see it before it went in the ground.  No big deal.

The overture screen from Gone with the Wind?  No.  My great-grandma Rose Emma's porch.

My skepticism grows as I age and I can't even pretend to believe all the paranormal shit that I at least cautiously considered in the past.  Still, I think this old house is a little disturbed.  I've slept there several times and each time has been less restful than the last.

It's the only place where I've ever woken up screaming in the middle of the night.  It was a setting of pure gothic horror: a lone Victorian house in the middle of an empty stretch of middle America.  A violent electrical storm with tree branches beating at the windows of the tiny upstairs bedroom I slept in.  A dream of a creature or spirit advancing upon me in the dark and a scream when it finally arrives at the bed.  

An old black walnut mirror sits on a shelf in my bedroom now.  It's from the farmhouse, some of the original set of furniture purchased by my great-great grandparents in 1895 for their fancy new house. The wood is chipped and splintering now and the glass is speckled and cloudy.  One of the few superstitions I allow myself is an aversion to keeping mirrors in the bedroom.  I don't like catching a reflection in the dark, and I guess that's one old Irish widow's tale that stuck with me - I don't want them in there.  But this one is, and it's ok.  I like to think of the faces that have looked into it and imagine the glass remembers them and could show them again.  That's not really reducing the creepiness of having a mirror in the bedroom, but ancestral ghosts don't seem so scary.

Percival

My relatives are putting together a family reunion.  One of those giant outdoor picnics of heredity that I have only seen in comedies.  By popular request, it is being held at the old farmhouse where my grandmother was born, in Iowa. 

It's weird to me that over 50 people will be attending this and that many of them requested meeting at the house instead of the original proposal somewhere else in the Midwest.  Weird because that's my house.  It's mine, and I will always entertain illusions of living there someday.

Up until recently, the house was owned by my great-aunt, whose frostiness was tempered only by her antiquated sense of hospitality when we went to visit a decade ago.  She was nice because she had to be, but that didn't stop her from bitching about things her brothers in law had done to her 60 years ago.  After she married my great-uncle Chick, it was decided that she would move into his family home while he was overseas during WWII.  What I thought sounded like a charming prank still stuck in her craw: the night she was to arrive for the first time to her new home was a late one, and after long hours of driving, they pulled up in the middle of the night and trudged carefully up the dark stairs to their bedroom.  On the upper ledge of the door had been balanced an open box of shot pellets.  Instead of slipping into a quiet bedroom for some long-anticipated sleep, they got a cacophony of hundreds of little metal balls clacking onto the wood floors and bouncing down the stairs, accompanied by the belligerent male laughter of many new brothers-in-law.  One got the feeling she had hated them ever since.

When we chuckled at the story, my dad particularly as he remembered fondly his uncles, she shot us a poison-tipped glance.  "Well it was certainly not funny at the time."  I remember that she seemed to be bragging about being from Ohio, a place that she thought was considerably more refined than Iowa.  Being from Ohio, she said, it took some time to adjust to the country ways of Percival.  I recall marveling that someone would speak of being "from Ohio" with the level of righteous pretension usually reserved for New York natives.

She was kind of charming, though.  We were initially wary because my grandmother hated her, hated her fucking guts, because she had thrown out a bunch of family heirlooms when she and her husband took over the house in the 1960s.  Allegedly.  She never visited and we had never met her, only thought of her as an evil witch living in my grandma's house somewhere towards the middle of the country.  We only met her after my grandmother died.  She was cute and old, with a 1960s tv set and a wall-mounted kitchen phone as her only windows to the outside world.  And an old radio, of course.  She asked me if I wanted to see "the Monaghan family library," and opened a linen closet to reveal stacks and stacks of Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey paperbacks.  Lots of phrases began with "The Monaghans..." in which she would illustrate what they do and don't do.  The Monaghans love barbecue.  The Monaghans have lived in this town for 100 years.  The Monaghans were the first Catholics in Fremont County.  The Monaghans fly planes and write copy for Chevrolet!

The Monaghans also had a cross burned in the yard of that farmhouse by the Klan in the nineteen-teens,  because of the Catholic thing.  My grandmother's sister told us stories of going to class in the one-room school and being teased and pinched by all the little Protestant children, who called them "cat-lickers".

After the great aunt's death, I was terrified for the house's fate, but all is well in that it conveyed to her genial son, a lay historian and riverboat card dealer.  That means I still have a chance to someday acquire the house.  In fairness, they have been careful stewards of the building's integrity, and apart from various stumbles, they have preserved it admirably.  When they diverge, though, they really mean it.  There is an upstairs back bedroom that, when I saw it, had 4" rainbow shag carpeting.  I don't know if that's period correct.

In spite of the occasional dashes of gingerbread and scallops, it is a practical, sturdy example of rural Victorian architecture.   It's not as flouncy or dark as I like them, but it is charming in its farmy way.

I like the glossy, polished dark wood thing and hallways so dark you want to put your hand out.  The first thing I would do in this house is strip the paint on the walls and find the original wallpaper pattern.  SUCH EXCITE!  Then I would, of course, remove all carpet to reveal the original wood floors, but I might just leave that rainbow shag in the back bedroom, because fuck the police, right?

So from the second photo, it appears to me that the house was not white originally.  I seem to recall an ancient conversation with my grandmother in which she said it was a garish color to begin with, something that sounded ugly to me at the time.  Perhaps yellow?  We'd do some archaeological peeling on that as well, just to see.




Circa 1913.  Not much changed.  My great-grandma in the middle holding a baby.

My grandmother's mom.

I'm convinced that modern civilization has overcorrected when it comes to time-saving improvements.  People are so idle now that even the un-introspective can fall into dark, existential quagmires and have mental disturbances that would never afflict someone who simply didn't have the time for it.

Something tells me that Ms. Rose Emma M. didn't have this problem.

AGB

Today is the 10th anniversary of my grandma's death. 

I don't have a lot of introspection about this "milestone".  It somehow feels like much less than a decade, and infinitely more.  It's still a bit of an open wound for me and everyone else in my family.  After she died, I went home and wrote a long account of the experience, but I think I'd rather do just about anything than read it again.  There's no need to as it's all part of the architecture of my brain now.

Some people are just bigger than others.  She somehow managed to be highly relevant to everyone she knew, a detail that was never more evident to me than when I turned around at her funeral to see my dad's old friend, Big Don, dressed like a Guns & Roses roadie as usual, crying openly on the grass.

Her life is an interesting piece of Americana lost to the contemporary world, along with those of all her peers.  Her mother was born outside of Deadwood, South Dakota, around the time when it was at its rowdiest peak of now-cliched wild western danger, to a French mother and a Scottish father.  In her early twenties, she (the mother, Rose Emma) went off with her sister to participate in a land race whereupon they staked a couple of claims in Vermillion, SD.  Soon after, she met Tom Monaghan and returned with him to the family parcel in Percival, Iowa.  My dad's favorite stories are about Tom's father, Ed, the "Irish wetback," who almost got sent back to Ireland in the 1870s when his ship was quarantined in New York Harbor, containing as it did more sick people than healthy.  Certainly disappointed and probably figuring that another few weeks in that floating deathbox would be the end of him, he and some conspirators jumped ship and swam in, stealing onto the beach and into the streets, bypassing Ellis Island all together.  He deprived me of those records, but I understand.  Ed worked at some manual labor jobs for a few years before striking moderate wealth in something to do with the railroad, at which time he sent home for his wife and daughter, and resumed their family in America.

The reason my dad likes him so much is because he was a large, brutish man who drank and cursed like 19th century Irish dudes are supposed to, and because he survived having a house fall on him, unlike some witches we know.  Apparently, Ed wanted to pick his first Percival home up and move it over a few acres, but when he was underneath the raised structure, the supports failed and the house came down.  Ed wasn't killed, but he was physically pinned for a few hours.  The local papers dramatically retold the story of his herculean survival.  My dad can't get enough of stories like this.  I'll look for the articles on chroniclingamerica soon.

My grandma was born in 1920 and used to joke to me that she didn't bother to "get born" until the 19th Amendment came along and straightened things out a little.  She was the tenth of eleven children between Rose Emma and Tom, and caught and nearly died from scarlet fever as a child.  Her lungs were scarred by this experience and she lived the rest of her life with fluid in her lungs and a rattling cough.

The one in the middle, sticking her tongue out.

Home was a five-bedroom Victorian house built by her grandfather Ed not long after the old house fell on him.  He had come into more money and required a more luxurious domicile to house his large family.  The house was fancy, compact, and cute, with a scalloped roof, widow's walk, gingerbread detailing and spindles that had been turned by hand on the site.  As far as I know, it's still there.  My dad threatened to buy it the summer after she died, and I barely survived the life-rending disappointment when he changed his mind.  The house is hours from city-slicker civilization, an isolated and vulnerable white speck in a sea of soybeans and corn.  He didn't want to deal with it, but I had already sold myself on holding court in there for the rest of my life like a mid-western Little Edie Beale, wandering glossy wood hallways with a scarf tied around my head, making up dances, regular stuff. 

8th grade

My grandma didn't care about all that and if I cooed over the beauty of the house in photos, she would tell me what it was like to clean it with six filthy brothers tracking mud and grass all over it and having to beat those rugs and do that wash. 

Cleaning with her mother, mid 1930s

She attended grade school in a one-room schoolhouse and probably high school in Nebraska City.  She was the first of her siblings to bother to stay in school long enough to graduate; her brothers were all farming, one sister had been married off and the other had joined a convent as soon as she was old enough to go. 

Graduation 1938

Education was important to her parents, and she told me her father supplemented she and her sibling's schoolhouse education in their cellar using a chalkboard he had ordered by mail for that purpose.  He focused on math and language, primarily.  Unfortunately, he died in 1941, at which point they almost lost the farm, and five of his sons and one daughter trundled off to war, leaving my grandma and her mother to handle things on their own.  Rose Emma gave more than most to the war effort, with six children overseas and German POWs sent to work detail on the farm.  Almost as soon as he enlisted, the youngest boy was killed over the Pacific in 1941.  Straight out of a novel, he was 18, charming, and the shared favorite of a clan of contentious siblings.  My grandma said she felt sick to her stomach for a year every time she heard a plane flying overhead, and years later, her sister the nun recited to me from memory the contents of the letter that came to her at the convent to tell her of the death.  He was the only war casualty in the family.

My grandma remained in Iowa until, at age 26, she was told by a doctor to get her wet lungs out of the midwest or die.  So she moved to Sante Fe, where she lived with a girlfriend in an adobe house in the old part of town and worked in a typing pool.  

Far left, like you couldn't tell.

...until she met a dark dirtbag named Dale Benz on a blind date and was swept away to Arizona.  I don't know how she and my grandfather ever stood each other, but then, I don't know how my parents ever did either.  Vast differences in personality and goals seem less important when you're young. 

They moved to Arizona in 1949, and my dad was born the following year.  For some reason, a doctor had told my grandmother that she was barren prior to her pregnancy.  This was the blow of all blows to her because she so desperately wanted a large family.  "I always loved a crowd," she said.  This fear was compounded by the fact that she was already 30 and skating the precipice of old maidness.  She was so distraught by the thought of never having her own children that she said she went to church almost daily to pray to St. Jude, begging for children and wearing the finish off his toe.  Jude is my father's middle name.

My grandmother, her sister in law, my uncle, and Rose Emma in 1960

My grandmother loved children.  She delighted in playing with us, and was able to patiently take seriously all of the things that other adults seemed to dismiss.  We would very seriously embark on our crafting afternoons in which I glued plastic jewels and sequins to paper plates, and made wall art out of doilies.  We drove to craft stores all over town looking for the perfect supplies, but ultimately, our favorite resources were the dirty barrels filled with old buttons and trimmings at the local SAS store.

She would tell me stories about life on the farm, when her dad went out to work before dawn and returned after dark, or about learning to drive on the deeply rutted dirt roads, and about fleeing from the moccasins while trying to play in the ditches and "criks" in the summer.  Years later, on a pilgrimage to the old house the summer after she died, my cousin and I walked those dirt roads and peered into the wet ditches, looking for the snakes.  With disappointment and relief, we found none.  I can't think of many things more satanic than a swimming snake.  The roads and the fields and the house and the yard and ditches, trees and flat horizons in all directions felt like a hallowed place to me.  It was quiet and breathless for me to imagine her there as a young person.  Funny to think how many people have passed through that area not knowing what it is.

Somehow, her being gone still feels like the worst thing that has ever happened to me, because it's all still there.  It's a tripping hazard.  I feel disappointed and deprived, like a cosmic cheat has been committed in an area that I never thought was a vulnerability.  I have dreamt of her two or three times a year with total consistency since she died.  In every dream, she's alive again.  I'm always so surprised to see her, like finding a ring in the grass, there you are!  Usually, the dream-me exclaims and tries to ask how this can be, but she's always busy, shuffling around in her house, waving away my questions and putting me to work to fix or plan something.  She's always in her house. 

My cousin had a dream about her in which she was flitting about her living room in a great, loud party, drinking and talking and laughing.  My cousin started to cry at the sight of her in the dream and my grandmother said, "What? I'm fine! Look at me. I'm fine!"  Then she leaned in and advised her on a matter in her life, which turned out to be true.  I'm sick with the self-pity of missing her.  I can't imagine it any other way.

My three grandmas. 1920 on the left.

She looks alarmed in this pic, but she's actually just talking shit to my dad.

Party

My grandma was always a great fan of holidays and parties and decorated her entire house for Christmas.  Streamers and stockings and lights and cookies, cakes, food and crap everywhere.  This photo of her parents at Christmas on the farm helps to explain that.  I would place this picture around 1918.  Unlike other holidays, the most recognizable elements of American Christmas celebrations have changed very little. 

Crepe paper decor was such a big deal back then.  Not sure, but I think the Dennison's catalogs pretty much invented using it to decorate for parties, or at least made it popular to.  They're good for ideas when you want to decorate your Victorian palace in the most authentic way.

My Grandfather is 84 Tomorrow

"Or 85, I can't remember," according to my mom.  He is very private.

He, my mom, my uncle and grandmother in Rocky Point in the early 60s. 

He's fussy, as many old people are, and he likes to talk shit.  Except he laughs before he gives you his zinger and then just ends up kind of mumbling it.  He and my uncle were talking about Goodwill at Christmas and he poked me in the arm and said, "You look like you shop at Goodwill, too! heh heh." Listen, buddy.  It's Salvation Army.

He does well on his own.  He built a little machine shop for his house and has customized the entire place.  The hall light is on a motion sensor for when he has to use the bathroom at night, and every electronic device has its own recess in the wall.  The tv, dvd and vhs players each have their own.  So does the microwave in the kitchen.  Yes, it looks ridiculous, but I love it.  He has the most mannish bathroom I've ever seen, which contains absolutely nothing but a sliver of bar soap on the sink and a molded plastic hairbrush from the 1970s.  "Where's all your stuff?!"  "What stuff?"

When we went there for Christmas, I was amazed to see that he had strung garland around and put up a small tree.  All of this decor was obviously from the 70s or early 80s.  He doesn't seem to have purchased anything but real estate since then, which curiously coincides with the end of his second marriage.  He's driven the same car for about 35 years, which is a red El Camino that he purchased new.  As far as a consumerist society goes, he lives off the grid.

It's strange to navigate the deafening generation(s) gap between us.  He's curious about everything, but doesn't have a computer or a cell phone.  When he asks about the functions of these things, I don't know where to begin.  It's uncomfortable to see the incomprehension, mostly because he's uncomfortable with it.  He's not used to not knowing how something works. 

I, on the other hand, am quite familiar with it and am content to believe that iphone = black magic.

Grandma's House

Geodes, stained glass pyramids, and cats.

My brother just finished another master's degree. Here we are looking super happy about it:


I'm excited to see what he'll do with it. Library science!

Speaking of happy face photos...Thanks, Mom. Not sure if this is brat-pouting or existential angst, probably both. What's the difference?


This photo pretty much says it all.  ALL.

My grandma grew up here. It was built in 1894 by my great-great grandfather.

After looking at my museum every day, it seems plain as hell. But it is rather fancy for the area, which is still a tiny farming community in Iowa.

I stayed there twice. The first time was fine, because I had to share a double bed with my cousin Emily and stayed up all night scaring her with ghost stories and asking was that a branch on the outside of that window, or...a hand? Too easy, until I later woke with the bathroom light on and no blanket as Emily had co-opted it for protection. The second time I was on my own, and slept in a tiny upstairs back bedroom with shag carpeting. There was an electrical storm that night and I had nightmare after nightmare. Like a scene in a bad horror movie, I woke at one point from a nightmare right as a thunderbolt clapped and the room lit with lightning, and screamed. I think the scream is what really woke me. I lay back down with eyes as big as saucers and wondered if I HAD actually screamed. I've never done anything like it before or since.

There is a sad mystery that I will probably never unravel about my grandma's aunt Julia, who I think died in the house very early. She and my great-grandmother were sisters and best friends. My grandma told me about her just once, and apparently never told my dad because he knows nothing, which is unusual. She said Julia was pale and small, with black hair and big dark eyes and died in childbirth in the house. She (my grandma) was a rather morbid storyteller (hmm) and I recall she said there was so much blood that it was running across the floors.

I've always thought about Julia and this story, and later researched her to no result. All I found was a record of birth as "Julia Angelia" and a claim staked in her name in S. Dakota which I knew about. No record of a marriage and no stories of a husband. Did she really die in childbirth and if so, where was he? It's a rather sad story and I would imagine my great-grandmother was much affected by the experience. A distant cousin sent me a childhood family photo of her, and she is innocent and sweet in a white dress, with loose hair around her face and her mother's hand rested protectively at her collar. She seems to be about five years old.

Everyone on this side of the family looks the same, with thick dark hair and dark heavily lashed eyes that look black. Maybe that's partly why she stays with me. She looks like, as my uncle puts it, "us". There's a photo of my grandma at this age that affected me deeply when I first found it. She looks like the picture of Julia in it. She had died about six months before I first saw this yellowing photo showing a little girl in a sack dress leaning against a split rail fence. Her hair is cut into a shiny black bob and she is barefoot and dirty, sticking her tongue out at her brother. I wanted to pick her up and stroke her hair and her child's face and it was a strange feeling to have about a grandmother that you last saw in a coffin.

Desi?

People often ask me if I am a Latina. This usually just ends up pissing me off for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because they often don't seem to believe me when I say I'm not, as if I would lie about it. Secondly, I don't actually look Hispanic, and the only people who insist that I do are just white midwesterners who can't tell brown people apart anyway.

THAT SAID,

Look at this Ricky Ricardo looking guy! He DOES look a little espanish, no? My grandfather. A 2nd generation American of German heritage only. I guess I have to add, Allegedly.

So in addition to books about self-actualization, chakras and meditational techniques, I found a new old photo album on my grandmother's shelves. I can't believe there are photos I've never seen because rifling through closets was my #1 childhood past time.

Great-great grandparents. I know less about them than any of my family. They were Scottish-Irish and farmed in northern Montana.

My poor sweet mother.

I never thought I resembled my gram but now I think I do.


blonder dayz

Don't tell me you don't have a kitchen unicorn.

I am animal-sitting at my grandmother's house while she's out of town. It's like a weird, very quiet adventure. Though I have been there a million times and consistently through the years, I haven't stayed there since I was small, and am experiencing strange little memories, opening themselves unexpectedly after decades of dormancy.

Memories so everyday that I'm not sure why I remember them. In the shower this morning, I suddenly remembered "swimming" in the bathtub as a tiny child, holding my breath under the water and pretending to breast stroke. Last night I remembered screaming in her bedroom from the pain of an ear infection, and crying so uncontrollably and loudly that a neighbor came over to see what the fuck. Jarring still, I see my great-grandmother's things intermingled in the house. Last night I was rifling through her incomprehensible organization looking for something when I found a green and gold ceramic jar, filled with antique hairpins. I was suddenly transported to a giant yellow velvet couch where I sat, very small, watching my great-grandmother pin her hair up in curls before covering it with a hairnet while watching Mystery! on PBS.

How is there room for these things in my mind? This is interesting for several reasons. It makes me wonder what else I remember but won't know about until it is jogged. Recalling items as dusty as that, things that I literally haven't thought about since they happened, is an almost physical sensation. I almost clutch my head. It also seems that once I pull the seal on these memories and experience them, they begin to fade. The next time I think about it and try to remember more, I can't even see the image anymore.

Her absence is also a good time to take inventory. My mother and I dig shamelessly through her things. My mother because she is an animal, and me because I am looking for artifacts. My grandmother is the most irreverent person in the world and she doesn't give a fuck about heirlooms or history. Once I pulled a late Victorian photo out of a cabinet and said, "Who's this?" She squinted, shrugged her shoulders and said, "Dump it."

DUMP IT!

Hissing, I tucked it under my arm. Haven't trusted her since. I can't steal the things that matter to me because somehow she'll know. So I just check on them when she's not around. Most of it I already know about, but sometimes I find something charming, like a little silver bracelet engraved with the names of my grandmother's best friends from high school, made at the time. Or a poem someone had written in pencil about them, each girl with her own paragraph. The poem was about drinking and smoking on the sly at a lake, but described my grandma as sweet and reserved, content to drink Coke. An idyllic small town upbringing in rural Montana as far as I'm concerned. I know this because my great-grandmother told me. If I asked my grandma, she would say, "Eh? How was it? Cold."

This time I found a ration book from WWII. That I might actually take, lest she write a shopping list on the back of it and later ditch it in a Trader Joe's parking lot.

Some fancy family portraits.

My grandma, my dad, my great-grandmother, and I think me.

A remarkably bad photo of my dad and brother. I love this picture of James so much. I should print it out and bring it when I see him next. MAIDEN. This is incongruous with my idea of his tastes but look at me CATEGORIZING PEOPLE. I guess I was about seven, and we had just met for the first time, but didn't have much to say to each other. He was visiting from college.

In the background please note rocking horse collection, valentines made of doilies taped to side of tv stand. It's hard to say when the photo was taken due to the clashing of holidays (also pictured: christmas stocking). It could have been June.

Around this time, James had been included in a poetry collection, maybe with other people from school. All of the pieces were very edgy and his had to do with some sort of Stand By Me type childhood awakening with plenty of cursing and sex. I was still pretty young, probably 10, and I found the book hidden in my mom's closet after hearing her talking on the phone about it, all hushed and scandalized. I read it. It didn't seem so crazy to me but it bothered me when I wondered if the poem was true; it made him seem very untouchable in my mind, intimidating and troubled, but in a Hollywood sort of way. I really hope she still has the book.

learning to like books, 1983.

Other voices

Father's Day edition. For some reason, my dad gave me this picture today. It's been around all my life and I'm not sure why he elected to remove it from his wall now.

My grandfather, late 40s, Phoenix, somewhere off of 22nd Street and Earll.

He was busy. Born on a farm in Crocker, Iowa, he ran away from his abusive father at 15, lied about his age and joined the Navy. A couple of years later, he went AWOL. Something about a girl. WWII started and he re-enlisted under an assumed last name. He worked on a frigate in the South Pacific and the only "war story" I know of is he was in a bar brawl somewhere and had a chair smashed over his face, which put his front teeth through his lip. He wore a mustache for the rest of his life. His actual identity was discovered by the Navy a couple of years later and he was dishonorably discharged. He spent a couple of years rodeoing, met a girl, divorced her (she lives in Prescott, still uses his last name), started a roofing company, got rich, starting a trucking company, got richer, put on airs, bought planes, and was never seen out of a three piece suit again. He was set up on a blind date with my grandma in Santa Fe, married her, moved the operation back to Phoenix, had four children, was out more nights than he was home, divorced her. After that he moved to Denver, married an old mistress, had two more children, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, went insane, died. Did I get it all? This summary leaves out human drama like laying out a private eye my grandma had hired (to track him) or chasing his last wife around their home with a decorative sword (brain tumor).

Actually, he was diagnosed with that tumor ten years earlier when still married to my grandmother. He didn't tell anyone. When the family doctor proposed the idea of removal surgery to him, he said, "No. Fuck it." The doctor told this story to my grandmother 30 years later when they ran into each other after mass at St. Francis.

Incidentally, all that money was embezzled by his lawyer while he was going through the motions of dying. He insisted on going to work still, but was much altered by the growing insistence of the tumor. He'd wreck the car on the way home or leave it running in the garage and go inside to bed. This was the lawyer's cue to steal a lot of money, the rest of which went to pay off some extravagant bills. In the end, my dad got a tiger's eye ring, and my uncle got a money clip. The two younger kids? Apparently not fully vested yet - no inheritance. The estate tried to recover a car he had purchased for my grandmother, which would have spelled doom for the now-impoverished, full-time working single mother of four. She was only able to keep it when a kindly old woman at the dmv pulled a fast one with a title transfer. Someday I'll try to ponder how she managed to send all the shits to Catholic primary and high school.

The end!

Emilia Bunhart

My best cousin, childhood bully and fellow teenaged goth is 30! How the time does fly.

Yeah, yeah, it's a photo of a photo.

Parlor Photos

The back of this stereoscope says "Aunt Josephine Robillard," so I assume she is my great-great aunt as this item came from my great-grandmother's collection. I love indoor photos of this era. There is so much crazy clutter, you see photos and memorabilia tacked all over the place and it's fun to zoom in and check it all out. I do recognize the woman in the photo above her right shoulder as my great-grandmother Celina Robillard. Although there is so much never to be known, I suppose it is decent that I know what I do about these people.

I traced these Robillards to Montreal and no farther, although by the time this photo was taken, my branch was in Spearfish, South Dakota. My grandmother was the original Gone with the Wind fan in our family and, when discussing her mother's family, would always toss in that "we" were Robillards just like Scarlett's mother Ellen O'Hara had been. I just nodded soberly; it was true. When I was very young and before I had read the book, I took that comment to mean that the characters in the story were real and that we were related to them.

HISTORICALLY THEMED FICTION NERDOUT REALITY CHECK.

I was digging around in some old scans and found this photo of the flag in my prior post, at a much younger age.

That's my great-grandmother and two of her boys. She only lost one son, not pictured. He was shot down somewhere over the Pacific. When I was in middle school, I would raid my grandmother's closets and pore through all of the boxed-up items and artifacts...one of which was a military-issue datebook that belonged to the boy who died. He was 19. It was full of girls' phone numbers.