Pyro

I haven't written too much about my Dad. He was industrious - well, maybe more like ADD -, creative in his own way, (which was usually the result of a great deal of frugality) and patient with every one's children except his own. He loved to have fun even though he always felt guilty about it afterward and had a sweet tooth the size of the Matterhorn. He's still all of these things. However, the trait that defines him best, captures his reckless side, involves his benevolent faith that he is always protected by a higher power and excites his still juvenile sense of adventure is his pyromania.
Fire has always been my father's companion. His philosophy can be summed up as, "When it doubt, burn it. When it's in your way, set it ablaze. When you need a little cheer, light it up. When you're bored, burn something and watch the literal incarnation of "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Purify it with fire."

I mean seriously, who else lights his child's first birthday cake with a blow torch? Why else would someone use gasoline to light a barbecue - all the time and as a matter of practice as opposed to desperation? There was the motor oil on the snowy logs in the fireplace ("just to get them going"). Every fall, huge piles of brush and leaves begged for incineration. And part of me still believes that the only reason we moved to a new house in the late 70s was that the new house had an incinerator in the basement and a yard big enough to build a fire pit. He didn't really care if it was illegal - that was interpreted as a technicality that couldn't be meant for him.

The funniest thing about this picture is that this isn't the only one. There are more. Loads of them. He still loves fire and will disregard almost any neighborhood regulation or city ordinance if it means he gets to or wants to light things on fire.
Once, when we were on vacation in another country we stayed at a place that had tiny beach cabins, picnic tables and fire pits by the lake shore. The only thing that the campground didn't come with was ready fire wood. In his desperation, he decided that one of the picnic tables was dangerous. 'Someone might get hurt', he said. It had to be burned. Of course, he had to rip it apart before the pieces would fit in the fire pit. He happened to have brought a saw along. Apparently, this wasn't an issue either. So we cooked our dinner that evening by burning the picnic table - we ate our dinner from the other one. Thank God there was alcohol and no other guests.

Regular Kids and Then Some

Do you think most families believe themselves entirely ordinary most of the time? I know we did - the entire neighborhood of us. I know I did within my family. Of course, I was four. I had no perspective regarding what 'normal' looked like or was. I just assumed that I was it. There is a line in literature taken from a book titled, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing that says it best. It reads:
"It is ever the lot of children to accept their circumstances as universal, and their particularities as general.”
That's one of the best sentences I know of. And it's so true.

From the perspective of my forties, I can see how flawed and blissfully ignorant my viewpoint was. As well, I am fully aware of how delicate yet opaque the protection of this viewpoint is; not only to me but to all kids and maybe including their parents. In pictures and likely in most behavior and thought we were so normal.

We fought lions in the front yards of our neighbors.We built fortresses behind the protection of parents houses. We sailed on voyages of discovery. We made up games where we could be normal tyrannical and flawed grown ups.We commiserated defeat with our leader and rushed to try again. We were explorers to parts unknown. We formed unions and allegiances. We were just kids; hangin' out, going to school, being friends with people around us and playing all the time.
We didn't know that inside the houses of our neighbors lived lives that we could never have imagined; lives that even the most informed gossip columnists couldn't predict.

Granted, normalcy did exist, but it did so along social immorality, domestic abuse, political struggles, race riots, psychological turmoils and addictions galore. They all had to live somewhere. Some of them even lived in my house. I just thought it was all normal.

Maybe it is. Maybe it still is and it's still my perspective that's not focused or defined.
I mean . . . when I think about all the kids that came out of our little neighborhood and find that there are teachers, managers, bankers and firemen I truly believe that I lived a normal life. But there are also psychotic geniuses, disturbed social outcasts, full-fledged convicted felons and most likely members of organized crime syndicates by now. They all seemed pretty normal when we shared a neighborhood.

Miss Match

I remember this dress of my Mothers. I remember seeing it hanging in her closet as a little girl. She made it from a stiff fabric of turquoise and lime green. It was almost a damask-type of material, heavy and thick. The dress was trimmed in soft, aqua velvet ribbons. The fabric was almost shiny or sparkly but not quite. The ribbons were dull and smooth. I still have those beads she's wearing. They were (are) a sort of light aqua blue too. They were the opposite of the dress, very unrefined, uneven, unsparkly and unsophisticated. I was never sure why she chose them to go with this dress except that they were the perfect color. Nothing else about the pair felt right though. Like many things in her life, they were opposites in every way, but she put them together anyway. Her most prevalent and glaring pairings always included one part extreme sophistication, the other part exquisite cottage art. Her way of illustrating how she felt in her world, I suppose. She would have been happy a medieval earth-mother living in the forests with the druids, but life demanded that she be a member of the working middle class and the wife of a notable member of the community. A sophisticated and rough-hewn piece of the same puzzle.

It's funny. I remember the dress. I remember the jewelry. I have no recollection of the person wearing them. My Mother - happy. Looking at this picture of my Mother makes me feel the same way that I do when I think of this dress and those beads together. They just don't match.
I only remember my Mom as a worried and simultaneously absent participant in our lives. She worried endlessly - about everything. Her fear grew as I grew older. At first it was just concern, then it nervousness, then it became depressed worry and a few years ago it blossomed into full fledged paranoia. Finally it left her essentially unable to concentrate on any matronly task long enough to complete it or care that it remained undone regardless of whom might be affected by it's incompleteness. Big tasks, like 'dinner' or 'being at home' were most days just ignored because they presented too much to worry about. It was so much easier to just go shopping and forget about the hard choices in lieu of the much easier ones.

I don't remember her as chatty or friendly or gregarious - but I do remember her attempts to be. Again, constructing misplaced aliegances to take the place of relationships with actual family members. They were so much easier to navigate when the participants didn't demand her attention every minute of the day as children and spouses tend to do.

Christmas began at 10 o'clock

Now that the holidays are over, I can spend some time - as I always do - thinking about how I wish they were different. I wish there were family around, I wish I could go to bed at nine and wake up with everything done, people coming to visit and have it all happen so effortlessly like I thought it used to as a kid. I thought a lot of things 'just happened' as a kid. What did I know?

Well, I knew enough to know that there was no Santa. I knew that my Mom and Rudolph couldn't possibly have the same hand-writing and I knew that if that were the case then it was just as likely that my Dad and Santa also had identical handwriting. I knew that came at 10 o'clock on Christmas Eve. After we got home from Christmas Eve service, we got ready for bed. We wouldn't have dreamed of opening anything on Christmas Eve despite that there were always a few things under the tree. Gifts we'd chosen for one another. I heard him every year. Once we were in bed - too afraid of repercussions to risk getting up to sneak any sort of peaks - Christmas began.
The back door would slide open in it's aluminum track, there would be footsteps out into the yard right past my window and then the barn door would creek open after the clang of the padlock snapping open against the jam. A few minutes later, all these noises would happen in reverse and they would end with a great bustle of paper bags, and boxes. My Dad loved to put things in boxes. He still does.

Santa? Yeah right. I heard the unraveling of reams of tissue paper, the Scotch tape ripping, scissors being set down heavily on the wooden table and ribbons buzzing as they were curled along the blade of a table knife . . . . and martinis. Don't forget the martinis. It all started at 10 o'clock sharp - those weren't no elves.

In the morning there was always more gifts than there was space around the tree. They spilled onto the floor and blocked the doorway. There were so many colors and so many sizes and just so many, many.

One year, as legend has it, I woke up around 4am. I was probably around eight years old. Of course it was Christmas morning so waking my parents up early was allowed this day. I did just that and was summarily sent back to my room - to bed. My Dad finally had to wake me up around eight o'clock when my sister and brother were out of every last shread of patience. It became the family joke at Christmas. How early was I going to wake or how late would I sleep? The one who couldn't wait making everyone wait for her. The one running the show in her own way.

Why do you think my sister is so pleased that I'm screaming? Maybe she just knew I'd be trouble. Or maybe she was just happy to know that I wasn't actually in charge of everything.

Well, someone had to be.

My sister is three years older than me. My brother is three years younger. I am 'the middle child' in every conventional way.
My sister had the really great clothes. I think my grandmother made most of them for her. She was the first grandchild. In many ways, she was spoiled rotten and always the center of attention. She was truly a physical version of 'hope' and 'expectation.' It could not have been easy. She was going to be great - whether she liked it or not.

My brother had all the autonomy. He could do no wrong. And, he was a boy as well as the baby. He was spoiled in a very different way. He was excused, he was cajoled and he was catered to because he was different (male) and allowances were made for him that were never made for either me or my sister. He was always believed, never doubted or suspected.

I . . . am the middle child. I clung to one of my siblings most of the time. Usually, which ever would tolerate me. I wasn't as remarkable as the oldest and I wasn't as unique as the youngest. I shared each of their respective spotlights with them and likely much to their chagrin at the time. I was autonomous and learned to hide in plain sight - right out in the open where nobody was looking.

We were, for all intents and purposes, entirely regular kids from a middle class neighborhood in the Midwest. We fit the mold of 'suburbanites' perfectly. We went to school and to church. My Dad went to work where he taught elementary school and my Mom stayed home, where she watched soap operas, gossiped with neighbors and attempted to cook dinners.