My Grandfather Smoking

My maternal grandfather, a German immigrant who arrived in this country a few years before WWI, smoked for all his life, or at least for all of my life while he was alive. He smoked cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. This was back before smoking was a health and social sin. My earliest memories of baseball games are with him at Lawrence Stadium watching a Wichita Braves game, the stench of his cigar smoke the fragrance of the game. In his later years he would fall asleep in his chair with a cigar or cigarette in his hand, burning holes in the arms of the chair. My grandmother made him stop smoking cigars and cigarettes, but he would fall asleep with a pipe in his mouth, it falling out and spilling into his lap. He was banned from pipes as well. I smoked myself in college, cigarettes mostly, a pipe in grad school. When I’d come home occasionally on weekends, I’d sit alone with him in the living room of my parents’ home and slip him cigarettes as we talked about his youth in Germany and how I was doing in school. He wouldn’t fall asleep then, of course, and even if so I was there to catch any ashes (and if he’d forget he had a cigarette, I’d offer him an ashtray to flick them off).

I haven’t smoked cigarettes in almost 40 years, and I stopped pipes about 25 years ago, mostly because of health but also because of my stepchildren. My grandfather didn’t die of lung cancer, though he did have a daughter (my aunt) who did a few years ago (she smoked most of her adult life). But it’s difficult still for me to be as harsh on smoking and smokers as our culture is. So much of my memory of my grandfather is connected to smoking, and in a positive way, that it’s difficult for me to see it as an evil. I know smoking is bad in any number of ways. But memory can hang like a cloud over better judgment.

Pickle Memory

A cousin of mine, Christine, died of cancer when she was seven years old. I was eleven or twelve at the time and of course didn’t understand much of what was going on. The last memory I have of her was in her room in her parents’ house. She was propped up in a hospital bed. The only thing I recall from that last visit was her asking me if I’d like a pickle (she had a jar of pickles by her bed). I declined. I’m sure there was other discussion during that final visit, but her offer of a pickle is the only thing I remember. She was dead within a week. Memory is an odd, random thing. Why don’t I have any memories of Chrissy other than the offer of a pickle? It seems so trivial, so mundane. Was there nothing more said or done during her seven years that shouldn’t remain of her for me than that simple gesture? But maybe it’s just the simple gesture – the offering of a pickle from a dying young girl to a still unaware young boy – that seeps into the mind and creates a memory. Maybe it’s enough.

For Sale Sign Prank of 1966

In the summer of 1966, between my junior and senior years in high school, Gary Matassarin, Chris Christian, and I spent the night with our friend Foster Smith at I guess what might be called a slumber party. Foster’s mother fixed us something for dinner (I can’t remember what), we watched TV until it went off the air (yes, children, there were only three TV channels at the time, and they all went off the air between 11:00 p.m. and midnight), and then played card games. Sometime in the middle of the night we decided to go out in Foster’s car (a large Chevy or Buick as I recall), take For Sale signs from in front of dozens of houses on the east side of Wichita, load them in the trunk, and then replant them en masse in the front yard of Sally White’s parents’ house. Her father spent most of the next day, a Saturday, phoning realtors and grilling Sally about who the perpetrators might be. Of course, it wasn’t hard for her to figure it out, and we were required to return all of the signs to their proper homes. In the end, I think Mr. White actually seemed to appreciate our little in-the-dark-of-the-night prank.

I recall this youthful indiscretion in light of one of Mitt Romney’s high school (well, prep school) pranks that was reported in yesterday’s Washington Post:  About a year before my own transgression, the young Mitt led of a group of like-minded cohorts to chase down and tackle a classmate, who was effeminate (the term back then was faggot, not gay), had bleached his hair blonde and grown it long over one eye, and just generally made Mitt uncomfortable (“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” he’s remembered saying at the time). So as the hapless, pinned classmate cried and screamed for help, Mitt wielded a pair of scissors and proceeded to cut his offending hair.

Of course there are two major differences between our two “pranks” (as Mitt refers to his actions). First, mine was actually a prank – Mitt’s was assault. And if it happened today, it would be prosecuted as a hate crime. Second, Mitt can’t recall the event at all. Apparently he participated in any number of such “pranks” and “hijinks” back in those days, so asking him to remember any one of them would be too much to ask. But he does say that if he did it, and if anyone was hurt by it, then he’s sorry. He sure is. It begs credulity that Romney can’t recall this incident. He’s either lying, or he lacks empathy and shame. “What a stupid, senseless, idiotic thing to do,” one of his accomplices now says. (He remembers.) “It was a hack job. It was vicious,” another recalls. (He also remembers.)

In a way I envy Romney. He’s able to simply wipe out all recollection of any embarrassing past events. Meanwhile, I’ll probably go to my grave haunted by the memory of the For Sale sign prank of ‘66.

A Mouse Up My Leg

Certain memories linger though we’d prefer they didn’t. One such for me is the time a mouse ran up my leg inside my pants. I was living in a student apartment in Wichita. It was a duplex, probably built in the 1920s or 1930s. There was a moldy, dusty basement that I was afraid to go into, and fortunately there was no reason to do so. Mice lived in the basement, apparently in abundance. I would be reading or writing late at night, and regularly a mouse would scuttle along the baseboard across the room from me, usually three or four of them an evening. Sometimes they would pause, look up to see what I was doing, and seeing I wasn’t doing anything that threatened them, go about their business. We had what was essentially an appeasement – they went about their business in quiet, and I went about mine. Then one morning I was in the bathroom, doing my business, my jeans down around my ankles. The heating in the apartment was forced air and for some reason there was an open grate on the floor just in front of the stool in the bathroom, placed just so that my downed pants leg covered much of the grate. Yes, as I sat there I felt something scurry up my leg. I slapped at it when it got somewhere around my knee, stood up, and saw the rodent fall dazed briefly to the floor, then disappear quickly back into the grate and back to the basement. I don’t know if that mouse survived. It probably did. And surely it had a tale to tell of survival in the jungle above the grate and in the dark night of the denim. And I have the memory that in 40 years won’t go away.

Memory

I have a very clear and specific memory. I was 10 or 12 years old. Sometime around 1960, my grandmother took me and my sister (8 or 10) on a plane (probably a DC-3) – our first plane ride – from Wichita to Oklahoma City, where we had an uncle and aunt who owned a motel on Route 66. Our parents drove and met up with us. At least as I remember. If it was 1959, my uncle Lyle drove me in his golf cart behind the motel, away from the lights of the highway, to see the flyover of the Russian satellite Sputnik (I do know this happened). This was my first airplane ride. Or not. I recently asked my sister and mother what they remember about this trip, and neither one remembered anything. “I'm not sure your memory is serving you well,” is how my mother put it. Probably not. Which is what’s weird. We remember what we remember, even when it doesn’t conform to what actually happened. We make things up. We create our past, we create and shape our reality. Not purposefully, not deceptively. Just because that’s the way the mind works. Memory is not fact.

10th Anniversary of 9/11

The 10^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States have been (surprisingly) sober, calm, and reflective, with only minimal jingoism (and that being mostly surrounding the various sporting events, which I’m sure felt the need to tie a patriotic bow around their making millions of dollars exploiting the remembrance). What strikes me about the various TV specials and newspaper commemorations is the sense – sometimes explicitly stated – of “never forget,” that 9/11 will be forever in our national consciousness, that the ceremonies and memorials we gathered around today will be gathered around year after year, decade after decade in perpetuity. But of course that won’t be the case. We remember now because we are so close to the horrific events of that day and are still living the effects lingering from that day. The survivors and the families of the dead are still alive, as are the politicians and others of authority on that day. The memorials are fresh (and some not yet even completed). The images are from our memory, not history. But in time the images and memorials will be history, as those of us who experienced the day, directly or from an all-to-near distance (most of us now living), are gone. That’s just the nature of time, of history, of memory. On December 7^th or June 6^th, we as a nation pay little notice anymore to the memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Normandy invasion, and haven’t for at least several decades. What makes us think that in 50 years, or 100 years, when most all of us are gone, September 11^th won’t be just another day in the week for most Americans (assuming there are still Americans 50 or 100 years from now). Time and history move forward, and memory fades. That’s not to lessen the import of September 11^th. But all is transient, and what seems so permanent and forever now (“never forget”) is actually only blowing along the surface of a shifting sand.

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley

Memory and Literary Nonfiction

I have a hard time tolerating those literary nonfiction writers (and teachers) who demand that every detail of a personal essay – every image, every piece of dialogue, every thought or emotion at the time – be precisely accurate, as it actually happened, as if it were a finely pixilated digital photograph. The “literature of reality” (as it is sometimes called, begging the question) requires devotion to a photographic (and phonographic and aromatic) rendition of experience. (This is an issue that has been actively engaged in the genre for at least a few decades; the most prominent being Lee Gutkin, the author, teacher, and editor of Creative Nonfiction.) Consider this passage from Jonathon Starke’s “The Wound” (Brevity 34):

I looked from the horse over to my brother, who was holding the trailer door open with a hip, both hands gripped together at his stomach. He was seven, two years older than me, but always afraid to get near something like this. I stepped closer to the horse.

. . .

Teddy walked over. He ground his teeth together so hard I could see the muscles in his jaw wriggle. He took the bucket up high in his hands. I didn’t know what was coming, what he was capable of, so I tucked my head in my arms and closed my eyes. Teddy growled and dumped the water over me. Then he threw the bucket into the dirt and took me by the arm. Teddy dragged me over to the horse with the stranger and the other men right behind.

"This funny?” he said, letting go of my arm and taking hold of the horse’s reins. He jerked hard on them so the horse’s neck was pulled. “You think this is goddamn funny?”

No doubt the title of the essay, “The Wound,” is meant as a metaphor for the traumatic effect of this experience on the then five-year-old author. But could it have really been so traumatic as to etch it onto his immature mind in such perfect detail for all of these years? How his brother was holding the trailer door open, gripping his stomach? How Teddy was grinding his teeth, growling, tossing the bucket into the dirt? How Teddy jerked the reins and said exactly the words “You think this is goddamn funny?”

Perhaps. But I seriously doubt it, if only based on my own memories of being five years old. Or rather memory. All I have from that age is one fleeting image of lying down on one of those woven cotton mats for a nap in kindergarten. The next memory I retain (and a more traumatic one) is from two years later, running from our duplex after getting into a fight with my mother (over what I have no idea), punching my fist through the front picture window, and fleeing down the alley, only to finally, at the end of the block, see the blood dripping from my hand. What happened after that, I don’t recall. I do, though, still have a scar on the back of my right hand.

Again, perhaps Starke has a more vivid memory of his childhood than me (and, I suspect, you). But my guess would be that he would explain his narrative as being “true to the spirit of the experience,” as most writers, teachers, and students of literary nonfiction would probably agree. Reality – and thus “the literature of reality” – is elusive in memory. Recall is selective (personal) from the outset. And over time it foregrounds and suppresses, smooths and roughs, illuminates and obscures. The literary (or creative) of nonfiction is the aesthetic embellishment of memory, of experience, true not just to the spirit of the experience but more important to the point of remembering – and relating – the experience in the first place.

Boy Scouts

Way back in the early 1960s I was a Boy Scout for two or three years. Our troop was sponsored, as most troops were, and for all I know still are, by a church, in our case a conservative Christian church that would today be called fundamentalist. I learned all the basic tenants of scouting — “Be prepared,” “Do a good turn daily,” “On my honor I will do my duty to God and my country and obey the Scout Law . . . ,” “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind . . . ”— and learned to tie knots and learned to build a campfire and learned to administer basic first aid (including snake bites), and by the end of my tenure had accumulated enough merit badges to reach the penultimate rank of Life, stopping short of Eagle only because most of my friends in the troop were a year older than I was and had quit and because it was too much work.

But most of my memories of scouting are of delinquency, especially while out camping. There was the relatively mild “snipe hunts” (first year as a duped bagger, the next year as one doing the duping), sanctioned by our leaders. And one day when some of us snuck off to skinny dip in a stream, only to emerge with leeches clinging to our bodies. And one middle of the night, after curfew, when another few of us took several flares from the truck, walked a couple of miles down the road, stuck the flares in the ground and lit them, and then after walking about half a mile back toward camp, looked around and realized we’d set the grass by the road on fire, raced back and stomped it out. (Red Howell, our scout leader, was waiting for us when we returned and said, “Don’t tell anybody anything about this.”)

But the highlight of my scouting days was a week-long national Jamboree in Colorado. One afternoon we (no leaders present) organized nude races down a hillside meadow, the theory being that our nudity would cut wind resistance. (That I would much later learn of the closeted gays in our troop didn’t really cause me concern.) And then there was the afternoon when we were on an overnight camping trip with mules carrying most of our gear, and Basil (forget his last name) decided it would be fun to jack off one of the mules. And he did.

As I said, this was a Christian scout troop.

Irish Flats

IT WOULD BE historically interesting in sportsdom could a census be taken of all the former star amateur baseball players who have been attending games at Lawrence stadium. Among them would be Jim McClure, livestock dealer in Wichita. Jim used to be a champ pitcher for Calista and later the “Irish Flats” star twirled many winning games for Kingman and Norwich.

I only have a photocopy of the clipping. There’s no date or headline, no idea even what newspaper it’s from (though probably one of the Wichita papers, as Lawrence Stadium was in Wichita, and probably from the 1900s or 1910s). Jim McClure, the “Irish Flats,” was my grandfather, my father’s father. But I never knew him. He died (“with his boots on,” as he had wished and as was noted in his funeral notice) when I was nine. I only have two specific memories of him: The first was my father taking me to the Wichita Stock Yards to see him at work, herding cattle on the wooden walkways above the pens, in his red flannel shirt, overalls, and muddied work boots. The second was fishing at a farm pond, my catching a large (at least to me) snapping turtle, his landing it once we saw it wasn’t the enormous fish I thought it to be, and his eviscerating it and making it into turtle soup that night.

But I really never knew him. I certainly never knew he was “Irish Flats,” a star “twirler” in amateur Kansas baseball. And it makes me wonder what my granddaughter Ellie will know of me in 50 years or so, long after I’m gone. Will she know that I played in several obscure rock and folk groups in the 1960s? That I had several poems and short stories published in small literary journals in the 1970s? That I had a couple of plays produced, and directed a few myself, in the 1980s? Will she find a vague newspaper clipping about when I was in my 20s or 30s and think, “Whoa, that’s my Grandpa?” I hope so. But I hope also that she has more than just two scant memories of her and me together, that she can remember a series of good times over years of our being together, times where I can become a living memory for her and not just the enigmatic star twirler “Irish Flats.”

Window

I doubt that I would recall the incident at all if it weren’t for the maggot-like scar still on the back of my right hand. I don’t know what incited my rage, or what, if any, punishment or repercussion came of it. What I do remember is that I was only eight years old, I got into a fight with my mother one afternoon about something, maybe nothing, ran out the door and down the three steps from our rented duplex, turned, and put my fist through the plate glass window, shattering it.

I immediately headed down the alley behind our house, running full out, frightened about nothing and everything. My memory is of a canyon of green shrubbery, an enfolding gauntlet with no exit arching above me on either side, though I’m sure it was nothing but the more scrubby patchwork of bushes and vines of my other, less anxious memories from that time. But when I got to the end of the block, I stopped, looked down and saw (as I remember it now) my hand covered in and dripping blood.

I made it back to the house (ran or walked fast, I can’t recall), my mother drove me to the emergency room, and I got a few stitches, though looking at the scar now, white, about half an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide, I don’t know why there would be a need for stitches for what seems a rather small wound. Perhaps a scar shrinks over time. Perhaps the stitches were meant as a reprimand for an infuriated (and infuriating) eight-year-old boy. Perhaps it’s just that memory is a fog floating between an indefinite past and an ongoing rummage for it.