Uncle Orly

My Uncle Orland died yesterday. He was my father's older brother.

We weren't close. My father moved us to Maine in the mid-'60s, and the families, which had previously been very social (we summered together at Lake Vermillion, always did the holidays together, and had dinner often at each other's homes) went their separate ways. I saw my Uncle Orly only twice after I reached adulthood. The first time he took the fedora off of my head and rearranged the creases. The second time he called my car "an American piece of crap" (well, he was right) and told me, "This is what 84 looks like."

That bluntness was characteristic of Uncle Orly, but also of my father and of their father, Grandpa Adolph. Uncle Orly often said things that he shouldn't have said, especially to my father. Once, he took my father aside and told him off for being so critical of me. He said, "Don't you see what you just did? He was working really hard, and when you cut him down he completely deflated."

Once, he took me aside and complained about my father's hair. "He has beautiful snow-white hair, and he makes himself look ridiculous by washing it out with that Grecian formula stuff."

Remembering comments like that makes me wish that I had known Uncle Orly better. He was right about a lot of things, but being right doesn't always make it right to say it. There were sometimes Inappropriate Incursions.

Uncle Orly had white hair for as long as I knew him. He had piercing blue eyes and a strong voice. I used him as the physical model (though not a character model) for Mr. Sentack in my short story "Punch & Judy" (available elsewhere on this blog). He liked the outdoors and he liked racing cars, and he liked being the Alpha Dog.

I didn't have those words to describe him when I was a little boy, but I could sense it about him, and it's confirmed when I watch the footage of him in our family home movies. When he entered any room he was in command, but somehow in command from a distance.

There were stories from my father about their scouting days, about pranks played. One of the pranks involved the streetcars of St. Paul, although the details are lost to me. I'll have to ask my father. On another occasion, a Scouting trip (this was back when the Boy Scouts were really Boy Scouts, and much time was spent in the wild), the boys were investigating an abandoned house and Uncle Orly rigged up pranks to play on the others, to make them think the place was haunted. According to my father, Uncle Orly was deeply engrossed in this when he sensed a presence in the room, felt a hand on his shoulder, turned around to find himself alone. But that may have been a prank as well.

Uncle Orly was legendary for the Treasure Hunts he would sometimes set up for us kids, if he was cajoled in the right way. My sister and I had a taste of this when his family visited us in Maine, I think during our second summer. He started in the front yard and went deep into the woods out behind the house, leaving us clues of various kinds at every step of the way. Some were written, some were blazes on the trees. Some were too hard for us to figure out ("What's a hoosegow?" we asked our mother. It was the jailhouse that now rests in my back yard). We spent the entire afternoon on my Uncle Orly's Treasure Hunt, and finally found a cache of lollypops and candy in the mailbox far down the hill at the end of the drive.

I have nothing but supposition to base this on,.but after the loss of his middle son Brian (who has been very much on my mind of late; I'm planning another post about him), Uncle Orly appeared to go into a tailspin. Bad things began to happen. I won't type about them here.

Based on what little I know about their relationship, I would describe Uncle Orly's marriage to Aunt Lucille as one based on mutual disrespect. And yet they married for life, and seemed to have some good times with the bad. If Uncle Orly treated my Aunt badly, he paid for it in later years when his health began to go and he had to rely upon her "mercy." Once he fell on their front step and broke his hip. Aunt Lucille walked right past him, she had a church function to go to and couldn't be bothered, she left him lying there in the front yard. That's probably the most extreme example of how she dealt with him on a daily basis in his last years.

This week, the nursing home called to let her know he was going. She had another church function and that was more important. By the time she got home from that, they had called again telling her not to bother.

From my father's reports of Uncle Orly's final days in the nursing home in conditions that I am certain he found intolerable, I do not feel sad for his loss. But I feel terribly sad for his family and for my father, who loved him warts and all. And I feel terribly sad for me: because it seems like they are beginning to drop like flies, and I know that within a decade's time I'll probably be all on my own. I cried all last night and this morning, and at the same time felt disgusted with myself for all the tears over someone that I never made the effort to know as an adult.

My mother disliked Orly, and she had good reasons, but they were the reasons of grown-ups, and as I've already pointed out more than once I really only knew Uncle Orly from the perspective of a child. Still, her feelings colored mine as I grew up, which accounts for why I regarded him warily on the occasions when we did meet.

She disliked the way he treated my father. My dad worshipped his elder brother, and in return Orly was often condescending at best. She disliked the way that he treated his wife. She disliked the whole Alpha Dog thing.

For my part, I prefer to remember him as the man who created the legendary Treasure Hunts.

-- Freder.

Mickey's Gala Premiere

*

. . . is one of my favorite Mickey Mouse cartoons ever -- and, really, one of the greatest cartoons of all time. It has no plot whatsoever. A new Mickey Mouse cartoon is having its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and all of the Hollywood glitterati -- beautifully caricatured by the Disney artists -- turn up for the event. Garbo and the Marx Brothers are there -- hellfire, even Dracula, Frankenstein and Mister Hyde are there, laughing uproariously at all the inappropriate parts.

But that's neither here nor there.

My boss is the sort of person who will never call any job done so long as she can think of one single different way to do it. This is oftentimes infuriating to me, because I am the sort of person who calls a job done if it looks good and feels "right" and complete -- and it doesn't matter if I can think of a HUNDRED other different ways that it could be done. Everything can always be done differently, but will doing it differently make it better? Sometimes you just have to type the period and move on.

What I'm really typing around here is that my restoration / recut of the family home movies had its Gala Premiere at my father's house yesterday, to strongly positive reviews.

I pushed the job through, staying up until past three-thirty in the morning, because I'm basically seven years old on the inside and could NOT wait another day to get the finished product onto a DVD and watch it on my telly.

You know that you're working with some large honking files when it takes four hours to render them, another hour to export them to the DVD authoring software, and another forty-five minutes for the authoring software to compress them for DVD. At a couple of points I just wandered off and racked out on the porch while I waited.

The computer spit out its first disc a little after two AM, and of course I had to sit down and watch the whole thing, all 72 minutes of it (up from about 45 minutes in its original version).

All of which made going to work the next day a little bit heavy.

Over the next couple days I made ten more copies and packaged them up. Yesterday I hand delivered them to Dad, who, although he didn't know it yet, is my designated distributor to his side of the family.

My father's wife was acting extra weird yesterday. While Dad was updating me on my sister's condition following her heart attack (she's having a rough time of it), his wife interrupted twice to deliver lectures about asian cucumbers. What was that about?

I'd brought pizza makings with me to whip up a quick lunch for the three of us, and when I set the raw crust down on some paper towels to start working on it, she reached right in under my hands and flipped it over onto its top. Pause. I flipped it back. Pause. She flipped it over again. I finally said, "No, that's the bottom," and flipped it back. I mean, who's the pizza chef here anyhow?

All I can think of is that she's not used to having someone else working in her kitchen. I'd brought an eggplant with me to use on her portion. I meant to fry it up before putting it on. Instead, she grabbed it, sliced it -- and threw it into the microwave! Anyone who'd microwave an eggplant hasn't been watching Chef Ramsay as much as I have.

Without even giving me the chance to do it properly, she piled the eggplant so deep on her portion of the pizza (I mean, it was an inch and a half of eggplant stacked up) that all I could think of was "vomit." Sure enough, when it got to the table she took one bite, choked on it and beat a hasty retreat. That's what happens when you interfere with the guy who knows what he's doing.

I don't know how she managed it, but she did come back and choked the whole thing down somehow. She strikes me as the sort of woman who likes to prove a point.

I also learned that she is the sort of woman who, if she sees some job of work that she thinks needs to be done to your house, she will come over to your house while you are away and just do it whether you wanted it done or not. That's another thing that happened this week. I wasn't aware of it until they mentioned it to me yesterday. When I got home, sure enough, there was a metal plate screwed onto the side of my house outside the second floor landing.

You see what I have to put up with?

Moving right along. Dad wanted to watch the movies right then and there, so I had to sit through them again for about the millionth time. I guess my opening scenes were just about as effective as I thought they were, because not more than a few seconds in Dad announced, "I think I'm going to start crying."

Before yesterday, his wife had always refused to watch the home movies on the grounds that they were "his past, not hers" -- fuzzy logic if you ask me. But yesterday she sat down and joined us, and actually paid attention and seemed interested. If it was genuine, and I've no reason to assume otherwise, I call that quite an achievement. After all, I do imagine that there are few things in the entertainment world worse than having to sit through someone else's home movies. If I've succeeded in making them watchable and even enjoyable for people whose past it isn't, then I award myself two thumbs up.

-- Freder.

The Things Normal People Do

 I hate it when people give me food. I know that it's meant to be a gesture of something or other, but to me it's just one of the ways that normal people are trying to rob me of control over my own life. The stuff is usually fresh and needs to be eaten right away -- but what if I don't want to eat cucumbers or peas this week?

Not being at the mercy of someone else's good intentions is  a big deal to me at this stage of my life.

I rarely go out and do things on my own hook because normal people are always coming up with ways to steal my days off, and after that's happened I always need time to decompress. There goes the weekend! The first and only recreational-type thing that I've done for myself, on my own hook, in more than two years was to go to the movies last week to see Captain America.

Otherwise, the only time I leave the house its to go to work, go to the store, or because someone is scheming up plans that they think will improve my life.

Yesterday I had to go out to my father's house again for lunch. About the only reason I didn't mind this is because it gave me an excuse to drive my new car for longer than three minutes.

I expected to be made uncomfortable and I was, although forewarned is forearmed and like that. My father's wife gave me a tour of her garden and forced me to eat raw peas. The only thing I eat raw is carrots. I chewed manfully, but really wanted to spit the damn things out.

Food is as personal a thing as clothing and sex: we should always be allowed to make our own choices in these things. We have so little control over almost everything else.

I heard some of the same stories that I've heard before, was pressured once again to come to the theater with them (for deeply personal reasons, I don't want to attend live theater anymore, but especially not under these circumstances.. I've tried to explain this to them, but I always stop short because I can see that. for them, it's not about my feelings). I was aware that my father was studying me to see if my hands were shaking. This awareness usually makes me nervous and causes the shaking, but yesterday I was steady.

I had a space heater forced on me. My father has been trying to give me one of these damn space heaters for at least two years now. While Mom was alive I at least had a valid excuse not to accept it: there was no room in the house to put it anywhere! Yesterday he was not taking "no" for an answer.

Too much time was spent with my father and his wife giving me a hard time because I told them that I'm unwilling to attend -- that thing I can't write about because my friend won't just tell everyone his secret like a normal person, no, he has to sit on it so that he can make it into a Big Presentation, turn a get-together into another episode of The Fucking *their name here* Show.

Normal people do things, I guess, in an attempt to be friendly. Instead, I just always feel like I'm being Railroaded.

I had very little freedom -- of movement or anything else -- for some considerable time. Now that I have choices, I want to be the one who calls the shots in my life -- and incursions from the outside world like the thing I'm not allowed to talk about really make me cranky! I'm feeling more protective than ever of my free time. . . not to mention my larder.

-- Freder.

A Letter to Dad

In receipt of your snail mail letter the other day. Stop beating up on yourself. What's the point? Mom's gone; nothing can be done, it can't be helped now. I'm not beating up on you and you shouldn't be beating up on you. Past is past.

The little girl's name is Jackie Evancho. I witnessed her discovery a year ago on the NBC show AMERICA'S GOT TALENT. Mom and I watched this show obsessively and I have continued to watch it obsessively since. It was one of the things that got me through last summer. The show is full of surprises: people who come on virtually swaggering about how great they are, only to completely flame out in front of millions of people -- and then this little girl comes on, completely humble,  and you don't know what to expect, but then that voice comes out. 

Just another one of the surprises that life hands out -- and you have to be thankful for the GOOD surprises when they come along, because the bad ones are so very bad.

I must confess that I'm so far along in my thinking of that bitch who calls herself my sister that it takes me somewhat aback to see a letter that's addressed to me -- and to someone who no longer exists. If she ever did. The past is becoming a fantasy world, and she is nothing more to me than a ghost. Thank god for that.

Maybe lunch next week at your convenience?

DT

Almost All Gone

Old photographs can be haunting even when you don't know anyone in the picture. Change is the murderer of all things. When you do know the people in the photograph, you can be left feeling powerless and sad. I look at the picture above and think, my god, was the world ever really like that?

There are only three people in that picture who are still alive: My sister the wolf, my father, and me. It's funny that we three are sitting together while everyone else outside of the car is waiting to be swept away by Time and Motion.

My grandmother Agnes, far left, was the first to go. This picture was taken before she suffered a stroke while weeding her garden on a sweltering hot day. It didn't kill her: it robbed her of herself and her memory. She became first a wordless, frustrated child, and then, slowly a vegetable confined to bed. She died of choking while my Aunt was feeding her.

And the auto moves on.

Next was her husband, my grandfather Adolf, the first alcoholic in the family, standing on the runner board to my right. He was coming out of an antiques show when he was struck by a car driven by a young idiot with a girl in his lap. He was hit so hard that his body was thrown clear across the street. Grandpa had a hard life, had a lot to cope with, including the loss of most of his tongue to cancer. He was a very matter-of-fact guy. I didn't know about most of his troubles.

So my father was the first one of my parents to become an orphan, while I was still quite young. The auto had a chance to speed forward some few years before the next one dropped away, the man holding the camera, my grandfather Claude. He died at home, in my grandmother Melvina's arms, I believe of an aneurysm.

Grandma (sitting on the running board) went steadily downhill after that. She was already frail. I don't think that she ever forgave Grandpa Claude for dying first. My mother and her brother got her into an assisted living facility, a better place than many I've seen. I was there to help move her from her house into her new apartment. She tried to get along, but I could see she was bitter. I came back home to Maine and never saw her again. On her deathbed she told my mother, "Is this really all there is? What's the point?" and early last year Mom said she was starting to feel the same way about life.

The car didn't last long. Dad loved old cars, but he kept switching them out. The one I remember was a big black enclosed car the size of a small house.

The picture was taken at our house on Edgcombe Road. Even though I was very little, I have many memories of my life there that I can "see" as clearly as when they happened. My father didn't believe me, but I was able to describe the house to him in detail. Sometimes my memory is so vivid that I feel like I'm looking into an alternate universe. Can see into it, but can't go there. The black automobile carried the three of us away from all that. It is far, far in the distance.

Sometimes I don't think I understand the world or the way it works any better than I did when I was that little kid behind the wheel.

-- Freder.

Period, End of Story.

Dear Dad;

I'd bet folding money that you're going to see this, which is why I'm posting it here instead of putting it in an email to you.

I guess that what I've been trying to say in my recent angry posts is actually quite simple.

I'm not your confidante and you're not mine. For once in your life, respect somebody else's wishes and stay out of things where you are not needed or wanted.

There. Now I'm done with this subject.

-- Freder.

Thanks but No Thanks

I just sent this email to Dear Olde Dad, in response to yet another demand for money, yet another request that the full results of the second auction be disclosed to him:


Joann's office will soon issue you a check (if they haven't already) for the items you inserted into the auction (which in retrospect I shouldn't have allowed you to do. Just a bad idea all around, but I was still in a state of shock, and the whole auction process was an Act of Violence being perpetrated on me at a time when I was not ready for it -- I couldn't think straight). 

But as for the auction results, Joann and Sue and Carole and I are all in agreement that it does not fall into your Circle of Concern, and we will not disclose this information to you. Get over it.

Like you, Claudia cannot stop haranguing the estate for money, and Sue tells me that, somehow, she has a pretty accurate notion of what is in the pot. 

It seems that in the whole family, I am the only one among us who is not interested in reducing Mom's life to a dollars and cents amount.

I  should never have taken money from you -- not that, honestly, I was given much of a choice. I do love the house, but if this didn't pan out, something else would have, and it wouldn't have come at such a cost.

Somewhat more calm, no less angry, in need of moving on. . .

While casting around for some images of Bad Dads on the internet, I found this quite funny British blog post:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/feb/10/clip-joint-bad-dads

So that made me smile a little bit. There hasn't been much of that going on at my place over the past couple of days.

I wanted to write about Adaptation and The Frighteners, both of which crossed my eyeballs earlier in the week. I wanted to write about the progress I'm making on the new website (not much) and in setting up the new house (somewhat better).

Instead, I've been stewing in hatred, restless, unable to focus, gnawing on the bone of my father's latest betrayal, angry at myself for ever thinking that, just perhaps, he might have grown a vestigial sense of personal responsibility in recent years.

That he hasn't, and I fell into my own trap, that's my fault.

It didn't help matters that he sent he sent me three emails, one of them labeled "humble apology," and there wasn't anything humble or apologetic about any of them. Instead, it was the same old self-justifying crap that he always does, the same crap he pulled on mom all those years ago when he justified his affairs by telling mom all about them, as if that made it all right, because he was being honest, you see, he wasn't keeping a secret.

When I was seven years old I came home from school one day and found mom sobbing. Now I know why.

Last night I got drunk and flamed him from the bottom of my heart. I said, Do you know what you did? Do you know how bad this is?

 I said that this blog is just for me, it's my therapy, the only therapy I have, and what you did was the same exact thing as if you hid out in my therapist's office and eavesdropped on the sessions.

I said And then, and then, you had the unmitigated gall to write and tell me that my feelings, my own personal thoughts and feelings, where you were not even invited, were not valid.

I believe I then launched into a string of obscenities.

But it's true -- it's just as if he leapt out of hiding in the middle of the session and "corrected" me in front of the therapist.

.I should get over it. I need to get over it, this is just one more violation in a series. But right now I can't stop kicking myself, can't stop wishing that I could kick him. This is as big a betrayal as he's ever committed against me, but I gave him the opportunity to do it, knowing that nothing ever changes, knowing that you can't put a bottle in a drunkard's hands and expect him not to take a swig.

I have to pretend to work now. Maybe that will help me climb out of this bitter soup that I'm sitting in. My goal for tonight: take a few more deep breaths, and write that post about The Frighteners. . .

-- Freder.

P.S., Dad. . .

I especially hope that M_ reads my last post and I especially hope that she reads this one. I want her to know that, as per your usual past behaviors, you are constantly trying to make me complicit in keeping secrets from her.

I want her to know that you wrote begging, pleading emails to both me and my lawyer asking for early repayment of the loan that she she made to me (and, incidentally, that I never asked for).

I want her to know that you can't get over shitting all over Mom every chance you get, including in your last email to me. Where in hell do you get off, constantly criticizing her? She had her faults, but many of those faults were CREATED by YOUR behavior.

You fucked anything that would hold still long enough for you to do it, including men.

I want M_ to know that every time we have lunch, it's you who wants to go to McDonald's and that you always wolf down TWO big hamburgers and a large order of fries (I can't eat two of those things and I don't know how you can).

I want her to know how you have used me as your personal confessional over the years, to keep secrets from people I loved.

Y'know what? I really didn't want to know how you discovered Masturbation.

But you told me anyhow.

Y'know what? I really didn't want to know that Mom knew you were cheating on her when she told you, while you were having sex, "Getting your love somewhere else, huh?"

You son of a bitch, Stay out of my blog and stay out of my personal life.

I want M_ to know how you made me complicit when you were cheating on Mom, when I came to visit you in New York, you not only didn't have the decency to put your affair on hold for the brief duration of my stay, you flaunted it in my face and then asked me not to tell, you made me a co-conspirator.

YOU SON OF A BITCH!!!

And now you do the same damn thing with M_.  And it IS the same damn thing, even though, to my knowledge, you aren't fucking another woman, still you are trying to keep secrets everywhere along the way.

I am SICK of this shit. I hope you read this and I hope your wife reads this. I hope she divorces you. You dick.

Oh, have I got a juicy one for you tonight. . .

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post tonight to present a rant against my Pig of a father.


As soon as they found out that I was keeping a blog, my father and his wife wanted to read it. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone out there who might have been paying attention, I wanted them not to read it. Knowing that they had access to these pages would seriously undermine my ability to express myself freely.


My father kept pressing me for the URL, and I kept ignoring him, hoping that he would get the message. He did not. "Still can't figure out how to find your blog," he would say, and I finally replied in no uncertain terms that I didn't want him to read my blog, that it was quite personal, very much a diary, "and you wouldn't read my diary, would you?"


In addition, I tried to satisfy their morbid curiosity by emailing them some of the more harmless posts, the ones that a) might interest them and b) were within what HR people call "their circle of concern."


Over the weekend I posted a link to the blog on my temporary page at www.ducksoup.me; this had to happen sooner or later, as the blog must play a part in my Grand Scheme for the new website. I cringed when I sent them the link, and hoped that for once -- just once, once, ONE TIME in his life that my father would respect my wishes.


Who was I kidding?


Around noon EST today, the hits on the blog started to go through the roof. I knew exactly what was happening, and sure enough, when I got home there was the email sitting in my inbox. 


I present it here, in full, unedited in any way:

Well, have just spent hours and hours on this material. Wish I had taken notes but then it would be tomorrow. My thien is on a rare solo trip to Flagstaff to use some bonus money she ended up with to buy, a rare event, cosmetics. So I have the time to poke around in your material. Impressions (at least the few that I can remember in my foggy old age): Loved the graphics; Vastly impressed with the terrific, creative, high energy, originality of the whole thing - clearly talent you got from your Mom not me; wonderful depth of perception in your analysis; effective use of software to organize, cross reference, provide moving pictures, etc. Wish we could have been close enough so that you could have shared your hard fight with the drinking and your apparent success - all alluded to only briefly here and there - but only intensified our (both My thien and I) pride in you! Had no idea that you so (apparently) resented My's help in vetting your nomination of that house that now is yours. In all those hours I think there was only one thing I really must disagree with. My thien would kill me for saying this, but I really feel I must. She will never know. You make the statement at some point that you owe it all to your Mom. (Referring to the new house.) Now I will credit her with giving birth to you; to giving you your wonderful talent; but major credit or sole credit for your new house, sorry old Son, that just won't wash with me. She spent literally millions of dollars (collectively from her folks and from me) so the fact that a little was left in the estate for you, which I had urged her to make 100% to you,  to use to afford it is hardly to her credit. Furthermore, YOU EARNED IT, EVERY PENNY OF IT, taking care of her. Further, had you to wait until proceeds from auctions and sale of Albion (that I bought) came in, you never would have ended up with 87 Western. Possibly you would have ended up with something better, that I grant you. One cannot play the "what if" game to any benefit. But without My thien fronting the money, it never would have happened. You have the credit to have picked the place. My thien has the credit to vetted it and fronted the money to have it happen. You have the credit to have made it happen. My opinion - which I know you value little - is that your Mom takes NO credit for this one. If this only enhances your negative feelings for us, so be it. Dad

I have pretty much been ballistic ever since, all evening long. I shot back this reply:

See, I asked you not to read the blog, and this is WHY I asked you not to read the blog.

Later, while dinner was in the oven, II expanded upon it thus:

I don't know where you get the notion that I resented My's participation. I never felt nor wrote anything of the sort, and I just went back and checked.

This is why you can NOT read the blog!!!!!

You pull this stuff out of your ass, and it's your own damn fault. You were asked not to read the blog, and I gave you my reasons. And yet the first chance you got, you went shooting right on over there,

Stop. Reading. Now. I will continue to provide the posts to you that I think could be of interest to you, or that are within your circle of concern.

If you continue to read, be warned that I am not going to feel responsible for your reactions and feelings. You were warned.

I feel just like you went into my bedroom and took my diary out of the drawer and read it without permission.

My father has made it his business to betray everyone in the family at one time or another, sometimes multiple times, and this is just another instance. I know very damn well that he will compound this by putting it all in one of his "Friends and Family" letters, and, you know, fine, whatever. 

Actually, I hope the son of a bitch does read this one. 

Actions have consequences, Dad. . . and it's shit like this that has caused us so much trouble over the years.

-- Freder.

Of Wills, Wolves and Melodrama

Actually, this picture is unfair. My sister is nowhere near as cute as this wolf!

I need to start thinking about making a Will. Now.

The day when The Wolf who Calls Herself My Sister was at the house, going through my mother's clothes, she looked at my scrapbook and then coyly said, "So, if anything happens to you, can Patty have this?"

And I thought to myself, "What, are you going to have me killed now?"

The thought did actually occur. But I pushed it aside, actually flattered that The Wolf was covetous of my pictures.

But some time later I told this story to my father in an email, and instead of telling me it was Melodrama (which it probably is, as my friend B____ did point out), he wrote back to tell me that the same thought had occurred to him!

And when I told it to my lawyer, as a joke, she not only didn't laugh -- she looked concerned!

People shouldn't react like that to the things I tell them. I'm an impressionable boy. Now a part of me is looking nervously over my shoulder from time to time to see if there are any Hit Men hiding in the trees!

My sister is not just an alchie like me -- she's also a junkie who nearly killed herself driving through a red light at high speed while she was on LSD. She has done things that, much as I dislike her and enjoy smearing her in public, I can't write about here. She undoubtedly has Connections with what is referred to in the Funny Books as The Underworld.

So -- you know -- just in case -- if anything untoward happens to me in the coming months, you will all know who to blame!

Meanwhile, I'm getting all my Ducks in a Row. If she and her Unholy Spawn can't inherit anything from me, and know it, that's the best defense -- the same as changing the lock on the house was the best security measure that I took all those months ago!

The day the fire died

Yesterday I found, neatly packed in a box in the basement, a terrific hooked rug that my mother made in 1962. The design was almost Mondrian-boxlike, with a different element in each box: half a sun, my mother's name, and more. I'd forgotten all about it; had half-forgotten that she ever worked in that medium.

She was so creative and did so many different kinds of things. Signs, clothing, handbags, papier mache fruit and flower arrangements, wooden carvings, wire creations, toys, jack-in-the-boxes, engraved leather work -- and sometimes combinations of all those things. She made the papier mache clock sign in the picture above. She was always working on something, in between raising us kids and doing many antique shows every year.

She sold a lot of it. I remember the summer she got the commission from Unionmutual to do hand-tooled leather bags to be given away at a company event. The arrangements sold at antique shows, as many as she could make. Some of her pieces are still on display at a pancake restaurant in the state capital. Her Jack-in-the-boxes were exhibited at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, which is otherwise notable for its collection of the work of three generations of Wyeths.

And then, suddenly, she stopped.

This was in the early eighties, right around the time she and my father divorced. The flow of creativity just stopped dead in its tracks, and another flow began, as she started to fill every corner of the house with antiques, toys, books, magazines, Disneyana, vintage games, Disneyana, dolls, teddy bears, and more Disneyana. Whether or not it was antique didn't matter. If it tickled her or struck her fancy, it came home with her.

She claimed to be claustrophobic, but she created a house that had one narrow path to allow a person through. In a way, the house itself became her magnum opus, a collage of Fun Things done on a colossal scale. It wasn't like the homes of hoarders you see on television. It was all neatly and artfully arranged, until after the operation to amputate her right leg robbed her of her ability to venture very far into the house.

When she ran out of money and couldn't afford to buy anything anymore, it made her so sad that she cried.

It was as if she was filling the empty space inside of her that was created when she stopped making art of her own.

My uncle O____ once said to my father, "You broke her heart."

It was a cruel thing for one brother to say to another, but it was true.

Something's Coming. . .

A funny thing happened on Thursday morning.

I felt fine! No anxiety, no depression -- I felt (dare I say it) chipper. Even cheerful. I can't remember the last time this happened. No, I mean I really can't.

What could be the cause of this sudden sense of okay-ness? Most likely, it's to do with "my" new house. I've been by there two mornings in a row in order to sign papers for the current owner, and both times I've left with a refreshing sense of anticipation.

It's literally three minutes away from my job. This means I'll be getting an hour back out of my life every day, not to mention the savings on gasoline. It means I can go home at lunchtime and feed and talk to the cats.

Folks have looked at the pictures and are saying things like "That's a lot of house" -- and it is, but compare it to the manse I am living in now. My mother's house has six bedrooms, four and a half baths, a pantry, a workshop, a large kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a front sitting room, and a study. The new house has four bedrooms, two baths, a small kitchen, a study, a dining room, a living room, and a side sitting room. The latter rooms sort of evoke the ones in my mother's house, but they are significantly smaller.

There won't be an echo!

It has something my mother's house does not: a three-season screened porch. My kitties will LOVE that!

The loan officer I spoke to is positive that the mortgage will go through. She thinks they can turn it around in as little as three weeks. If not -- then the closing is no later than December 31. The payments will be a little steep and tight at first, but as soon as the money comes in from the estate I can pay down at no penalty and re-negotiate to payments at a much more manageable level.

My father is helping, in the short term, but he will be repaid sooner rather than later. I don't mind owing the bank money, but it drives me crazy to owe him and his wife. The one who really made this all possible is my mother. You've seen the pictures (if not, go look now). Late in life she had terrible cash flow problems, and I often wondered why she didn't just sell the stuff and lay her worries to rest. Instead, she came crying to me every other month, asking for money I couldn't easily spare. She kept saying she would pay me back.

She'll do that, with much interest, but I wish it hadn't happened this way.

Stop the world, I want to get off...

I have no less than three posts in draft and they're all made redundant by what just happened.

My father called me and informed me that the deal on the first house is going through. I had written it off and was carrying on life searching for different options. Now, all of a sudden, I'm moving.

I think the house is great, and will be good for me, but I seem to have lost control of the process along the way. I'm in a state of turmoil.

"Borrrrrn Freeeeeee!"

Quats freaking out in an empty house. Compare with earlier photo of the same space.

By Tuesday night I was emotionally and physically exhausted. As I got up and set about getting ready for the auctioneer and his crew to arrive for their third day of stripping the house, I felt as if this had been going on for months, years. It felt endless.

The cats no longer fought to get out when I locked them away.

My father was the first to arrive. His wife was already out looking at houses with the real estate agent. It was a quarter to ten before the trucks started showing up.

They had left bins of things in the front room of the house. I volunteered to help carry them out, but I had only made two trips before I completely fell apart and had to go hide in the barn.

My father found me there and hugged me.

By lunchtime, my father's wife was back. Mr. J_____ invited us three to lunch at a little restaurant in Albion. I am sure that he wanted to regale us with more of his stories, but the entire lunch was co-opted by my father and his wife, and her report of the houses she had seen.

My father picked up the tab.

Sometime in the middle afternoon Mr. J______ stopped sorting items and entered the house. I believe he was determined that this was going to be the last day of his involvement. He went down the basement and all through the house, searching for value. He opened every door, including ones that were off limits. More on that later.

Among the things he found that he seemed to want were the boxes of my old shop stock from the Duck Soup days, ten or eleven big boxes full of comic books dating from 1982 and earlier. I couldn't believe that he really wanted them, but this part actually pleased me: I had been wondering how in hell I was going to get rid of the things. They will be auctioned off as a lot, included as part of the estate.

At some point I found myself in the front hall, looking into the study. My desk and everything on it were there, my computer was on its stand as normal, the sofa was against the wall. Everything else was gone. When they had taken down the painting over the fireplace, all of the plaster had come down with it and was piled up on the floor and mantelpiece. On the outside wall, a horrible amount of water damage had been exposed. The same was true in the living room. Plaster and paint chips everywhere.

When I looked up the stairs, I was shocked to see that Pandy Bear and Whitey were both out. They were starting down the stairs. The front door was open behind me.

I leaped forward at them and they split. Whitey ran back into the bedroom. I shut the door behind him. Pandy had gone off towards the bathroom. I ran down and slammed the front door shut.

When I went back to look for Pandy Bear, I saw that the doors that are usually closed, leading all the way through the back of the house, to the back stairway and the entry hall downstairs, were all standing open. No sign of Pandy Bear.

I ran down through the house and got to the back door just as Pandy was stepping outside. As I reached for him he took a fright of my action and what was happening in the yard, and ran off at high speed for a big fatty-bounce of a cat. He ducked into the bushes and dove into the hole that goes under the barn. He was gone.

I screamed at the workers. "Is there anything we can do to help, Doug?" Bill G___. said. What a stupid question. I went around the house calling for Pandy, but there was no sign of him.

When the day started to wind down, Mr. J____ walked me through the upstairs of the house, which was largely untouched. He said the beds and other furniture up there were not worth much of anything, maybe $50 - $150 a piece. His brother in law would be around in two or three weeks to remove them for his auction, but Mr. J______ advised me to keep them unless I was certain that I would not need them. They would not bring much at auction, and would be more expensive to replace.

He left. His crew finished packing. By five o'clock I was signing the final contracts, twelve or thirteen pages. The trucks drove off. All the grass in the yard was mashed down. The place was quiet and empty.

Pooky wandered through the house crying her head off, trying to absorb what had happened. Patches was totally cool and copacetic.

There was no time to look for Pandy Bear. My father and his wife had made a six o'clock appointment to look at houses.

This time, I drove myself. We picked up the agent -- Sue's husband Harold -- and drove to a house I had never seen before, in a good neighborhood. It was a plain white house with a screened porch for my kitties, sitting on a crazy knoll across the street from the Catholic Church. The garage was in poor condition, but inside it was nice, if on the small side. Very small, actually. I was conscious of feeling cramped even though it was unfurnished. The bedrooms upstairs were a little bigger than the closets in my mother's house. Not all the furniture that I retained would fit. Still, I could envision myself and the cats there. It would be a little on the cozy side, but it could be done. But that horrible carpet would have to come up. and the green paint in the kitchen would have to go.

Then we went up to the cute brown-shingled house that I had been looking at for so long. This was different. It was beautiful inside, and just the right size. I quite liked it. But the porch had a bounce and a droop in it and the screens were loose, and the house needed a lot of work: new shingles. Structural work. This did not phase me as much as it did my father. The deal breaker for me was the bathroom situation. There was just one bathroom in the whole place, and it was a horrible cramped thing, too small for me to fit a cat tray inside. It would be impossible to sustain five cats.

So it appeared the small white house was my only option, and I began to feel a little depressed at the thought.

We dropped off Harold, a very nice man, at his office and went up to MacDonald's for dinner. There we talked over the options, and they decided to come over to the house the next day to help me work on it. They said that they would investigate the Victorian that was For Sale By Owner on their way out.

The niceness and the helpfulness of everything they were doing for me actually made me feel uncomfortable. I drove home in full dark with such mixed emotions, not all of them sad.

There was no sign of Pandy Bear.

Shock of the New

On Monday night I stood in what had once been my mother's bedroom and screamed.

Then I went around the house and put signs on things that I didn't want them to take.

The next day was more of the same, with a couple of differences. Taking a lesson from the day before, I tried to spend more of my time in the house, keeping an eye on the pickers. This sometimes involved having to be in more than one place at the same time. I began to be more assertive and proactive, trying to define some boundaries. After talking to Sue C_______, I decided to keep the dining room table and a set of chairs to go around it. I decided to keep the apothecary chest, as much so that I wouldn't have to open and go through all the drawers as for its usefulness as a piece of furniture.

Other than that, it was very much like the day before. Panic, work, running around, pictures and tears.

Sue helped me sort through some personal papers and clothes. She left around 3:30, and I thought, it's just me and them, now.

About half an hour later, my father appeared in the yard. I went up to him and said, "I didn't expect to see you today."

He said, "M_____ and I are going to take you to dinner."

It was a nice thought, but not what I needed or wanted. I needed the evening hours to start cleaning up the disaster area that was my house and to start making the place habitable again. I didn't want to leave my kitties alone when they would no doubt be freaking out. But this was not so much an invitation as another one of his non-negotiable demands.

Once again Whitey and Honey had gone into hiding under my bed and had to be coaxed out. Once again Honey went tearing down the stairs, but this time she did not even make it to the bottom. The front hall had been cleared out. She saw the empty space, spun around 180 degrees and shot past me into the dark hall that leads to the guest room. I called her and called her, but she would not show herself.

My father was saying that we had to go. I just had time to quickly get some fresh food out for the gang, and no time to change or clean up. My pants were covered with filth.

I said I'd follow them in my car. My father's wife said, in her heavily accented, sing-song voice, "No, we drive you."

I sat in the back seat of their SUV with my head against the glass, staring blindly through the window and not saying much of anything. They noted a new building that had gone in on the main road. Without knowing why I said it, I said, "There are a couple of nice houses for sale in W_________ with screened porches on them."

My father said, "That's what you said in your email last night." (I didn't remember typing it, or even sending him an email the night before, I had been in a zombie-like state,) Then he said, "Let's go look at them. You show me where they are and we'll take a look."

My heart sank. I thought, Oh, me and my damn mouth again. Now this is going to take even longer.

When we got to town I directed them onto C___ Street and then W______ Avenue. At the very end of C___ Street there is a house for sale with a finished apartment above the garage. Just around the corner there is a nice looking Victorian with a sign out front reading "FOR SALE BY OWNER." My father actually stopped the car, and his wife wrote down the number. I thought, What is going on here?

We drove up the avenue to a brown shingled house that I pass every day. They wrote down the name and number of the real estate broker.

At the restaurant, my father took out a real estate magazine that he had brought with him and began leafing through it. It was only then that I realized that my off-hand comment in the car had played right in to the subject that they wanted to speak to me about.

They are going to help me buy a house.

They leave for Nevada in late October, and want it done before then.

That's the way to do it...

Monday morning around ten, and for at least two days afterward, the auction house will be at my home taking it all down. I know that during the day, my concern will not be about grief management, but on the logistics of six or more people all coming and going from the house through at least two entrances.

Their plan is to set up tables in the front yard (for this reason I have been unable to put out Halloween decorations). Two people will come into the house and start picking. Two people will act as runners, carrying the items out of the house to the two people manning the tables. These last will sort the items into lots, then pack and load everything onto the truck.

I've been trying to get the house ready for them, emptying drawers and more, but many of the desks and dressers and closets are actually inaccessible to me, which means that this will be an ongoing job. Also, I have no room to store anything that comes out of these places -- I will have to deal with it as space gradually opens up.

I have had to make plans of my own. Wanting not to worry all day about the cats getting out, I decided to lock them in my rooms upstairs, two in the bathroom and three in my bedroom, being mindful of matching the personalities to avoid cat warfare. I may have to switch them out a couple of times, as I'm not about to put a cat tray in my bedroom -- that's an idea I do NOT want to put into their heads! Likewise, Pooky will have to stay in the bathroom all day. I am not having her poop all over my sheets!

I plan on taking a lot of pictures. That's probably the best thing about digital cameras -- you don't have to worry about wasting film.

I know that it will be a long, busy day, and that I most likely will not have time to think much about what's happening. My father has said that he's going to be there for moral support; if he stays true to form, he will actually try to take over and run the operation. Then it will be my job to channel him in some other direction. That's all right. One more distraction for me.

My biggest fear is that my sister will find out what's happening and try to disrupt the process. I know that she wanted to lay claim to certain items, and until I found out that she was stealing from the house I would not have stood in the way of this. But things are different now. My position is that she made her choices and took them. She doesn't get to pick any more. She gave up that right. If she complains, I will happily tell her, "You're perfectly free to bid on things."

I had to swear my father to secrecy on the dates before I would tell him anything. I believe Monday will be safe. But her husband will be at home and he frequently drives down my road, and I fear that he or one of the kids will find out what's happening and convey the news to Claudia. This could make Tuesday or Wednesday a little sticky. If she turns up, I will ask her as politely as possible to leave. If she doesn't, I will call the state police.

At the end of the day, everyone will go away, and I will be left alone with the cats to clean up and deal with what remains. That's when I expect the tears to come.

It's not HIGH Ott. . .

I have a Poppy Ott that needs a good home.

What’s a Poppy Ott, you say? Here’s a piece I wrote years ago that will explain the whole thing. I¹ll meet you at the other end with my “Special Offer.”

*

As a legacy from my father's childhood, I inherited custodianship of a complete set of "Poppy Ott" books. Like the better-known Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, also published by Grossett & Dunlap, these were light mystery stories for children. Unlike those better known heroes, the Poppy Ott books combined their mystery with a heady mixture of other influences: "Our Gang" clubhouse trappings, Horatio Alger bootstraps capitalism, small-town atmosphere and a hefty helping of unsubtle humor.

The series' unlikely hero is introduced in Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot, when narrator Jerry Todd (just an average small-town boy, son of a brickmaker, star of another mystery series bearing his name) and his gang discover a pair of tramps -- an old man and a boy -- squatting in a tumbledown trailer at the edge of Tutter, Jerry's home town. Instant mystery: who is this shabby New Kid and where did he come from?

Before Jerry can answer these questions, a traveling medicine show arrives in Tutter, bringing with it a deeper mystery of pirate gold and murdered men -- and the possibility that one of Tutter's respectable citizens may have had a more colorful past than was recently supposed. The tramp boy, at first implicated in the goings-on, takes charge, clears his own name and solves the mystery.

By the end of the book, this Poppy Ott has been cleaned up and transformed into a respectable citizen, with more ambition and bigger ideas than most of the rest of the town combined. Later books show him opening all manner of businesses -- toy novelty manufacturing companies, pancake restaurants and interior decorating firms to name but three -- while continuing to solve mysteries as the head of the boys' Juvenile Jupiter Detective Club, engaging in frequent battles with the rival Stricker gang and having the kind of Outdoors Fun that went the way of all flesh with the invention of TV. All, presumably, while still attending grade school.

The books were illustrated by Bert Salg, in an engaging, scratchy style that still brings the characters -- and the period -- to life, and written by one Leo Edwards, who appears to be the only writer of 'thirties juvenile mysteries who didn't work with quotations around his name. Many of the books featured a special "club house" section which included Edwards's home mailing address in Cambridge, Wisconsin; children were encouraged to write letters and form "Freckled Goldfish" clubs of their own. These "Chatter-Box" pages -- the equivalent of fan clubs -- were often as much fun to read as the books themselves:

"Our chapter held a big Hallowe'en Party. First we had ghost stories, dancing, singing and biting money out of apples. Then 'eats.' We had apples, grapes, nuts, fruit punch and cake. Then the real fun began -- ducking for apples and money! I went after a nickel in the tub. When I came up for air I found my shirt and tie were wet. We had regular printed tickets which we sold. The tickets (printed at school) read like this: HALLOWE'EN PARTY, for the benefit of The Freckled Goldfish Ozone Park Branch, 9115-107 Avenue, at 4:30 O'clock, Admission -- 10 cents. We cleared $3.25 and now we have in the treasury $5.50."

There is no question as to whether these Poppy Ott books withstand the test of time -- they don't, which may be the most compelling reason to go back and read or re-read them today. Unencumbered by any kind of literary worth, the books are free to show us other things: more than simple-minded nostalgia (it's hard to feel nostalgia for a world that has been as completely obliterated as the one these books -- albeit in a wildly distorted, idealized form -- represent), Poppy Ott offers us Time Travel in its purest, most honorable form: sending us back, from the comfort of our easy chairs, not to the world of our fathers, but to the world our fathers dreamed about when they were lads. That is no small accomplishment.

*

Got it? Now get it: I have a first edition of the first book in the series, Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot, that I don’t need. Not in great condition, a reading copy. It’s free to a good home. I also have e-book versions that I created a while back of the first two titles in the series (PDF format) that I’d be happy to email (also free!) to anyone interested. These are complete and unabridged and contain all of the original illustrations by Bert Salg.

Finally! Something in this blog worth reading!

-- Freder

Trapped in a world the blogger never made

Saturday afternoon I was summoned to another lunch at my father’s house.

It was easier than the first time, but there were still the disconnects that my father and his wife don’t even seem aware of.

They had made the offer of their upstairs rooms as storage space for some of my things. I wrestled with that, decided that I wasn’t ready to start moving out -- then on Friday night I kind of told myself “You have to start sometime,” and with the fortitude of a couple of drinks inside me I carried six boxes of my comics collection out of the house and loaded them in the car. Then I packed up all of the original art for my two web comics and put all that in, too.

But when I arrived on Saturday the driveway was being blacktopped. It was impossible to park anywhere near the house. I would have had to carry all that stuff the distance of about two blocks. So I left it in the car, never mentioned it, and carried it all (except for the art) back into my house when I got home.

It’s probably just as well. With a self-storage unit I can access whatever I choose to store any time I need to; this would not be the case with anything I stowed in my father’s house.

I arrived when I was told to, at 11:00 o’clock, and my father wasn’t even home. His wife greeted me as if I had surprised her. It was an awkward ten minutes before he returned to the house. His wife speaks in monologues just like him. I suppose she was nervous.

We looked at the prints I’d had done of some of the 2,000-plus pictures that I’ve taken around the house. I need to make more. They turned out so well, much better than I expected from a dippy little $50 digital camera.

As he looked over the pictures, my father could not stop obsessing over the painting that my mother sold some time after they divorced. “That’s the wall where ‘Twins in Green’ used to hang,” he said, whether he was looking at a picture of the wall or not. He said it four times. It hadn’t been his painting for a long time when she sold it.

Lunch was Salmon, which I dislike, and potatoes and something called Korean Squash.

My understanding was that the reason they wanted me there at 11:00 (early for me on a Saturday; they live a little under an hour’s drive away from me) was so that my father could take me out car shopping in the afternoon. This, too, never developed. I was just as well pleased at that. I want to choose my own car in my own way on my own time.

Every year they buy season tickets at the B_________ Music Theater. They take a Sunday every month, drive down there with their friend Henry (I have heard so much about friend Henry that I don’t want to hear any more about friend Henry. I think dad has kind of a guy-crush on him), have lunch, take in a show, and stop for ice cream on the way home.

Next year, they want to co-opt my Sundays and for me to come along. This was presented to me in the form of a non-negotiable demand.

I do not like having my Sundays co-opted like that, especially, as I told them, since I don’t even know what my life will be like next year. I do not even know where I’ll be living next year. In any case, I don’t want to go to the theater, any theater, at least not with them. It just depresses me.

My father insisted that I take a POPPY OTT book that I already own, and a flyer about a space heater that he wants me to buy, and some legislation notes about town taxes that I most likely will never read. It’s typical of dad that, at a time when I have been working hard to clear my life of excess and valueless paper, he gives me more.

His wife gave me six bags of frozen pureed broccoli, and told me how to add cream or milk to make it into a soup. I was a little concerned about fitting it into my freezer, but I did get it all in there somehow.

She gave me a cooking appliance that she’d bought two of from one of those infomercials. She showed me how to cook fish in it, and described how to make an omelet. She is well-meaning and I’m not ungrateful for the gesture, but I will probably stick with my skillet.

It ended when my father declared that he had to leave the house again to buy a wheel for his wife’s wheelbarrow.

We walked out to where the cars were parked. He never stopped talking the whole way.

I know that they are just trying to help, and I don’t wish to be disrespectful of their feelings. But how much do they actually respect mine? At this moment in history, I need to be in control of the process of remaking my life. Every time I am with them I can feel that control being ripped out of my hands.

"Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!"

My box set of the APES movies arrived last week. How I loved the original Planet of the Apes when it first came out. My father and I went to see it together. Typically, he got us there half an hour late. But these were the days of continuous shows: the minute the credits stopped rolling, the picture started right up from the beginning. We watched the first half hour that we had missed, and then he wanted to go. I made him stay and sit through the whole rest of the movie again. It was very late when we got out. I didn't mind.

It has stood the test of time quite well thank you. All the elements really work together: script, score, design and performances. I don't normally care for Charlton Heston, but his over-the-top style of growling and emoting works well in this context, while Roddy McDowell, Kin Hunter and Maurice Evans create wonderful characters, doing the real meat and potatoes acting under their piles of make-up.

Meanwhile, Franklin Shaffner really knows how to frame a shot!

The ending no longer shocks, of course, but there's something to be said for the sense of inevitability we get as Taylor rides off to meet his destiny. It's as if our viewpoint has shifted from Taylor to that of Dr. Zaius. He (and we) know what Taylor is going to find, and we know he won't like it.

It's funny how the ending was cut for television airings. Why is it OK to say "Aw, damn you" on TV, and not "God damn you all to hell" ?

Which brings me to the reason I bought this set, rather than duping my VHS tapes. I haven't seen this in the original widescreen since I first saw it as ten-year-old kid sitting in that movie theater. It's much better in widescreen!

The VHS I gave to my father. Will he remember how I made him sit through it twice? I doubt it.

-- Freder