"Who do you think you are, Miss Philadelphia?" Mom always asked Bop and Zizi.
This wouldn't have burned so much, except Mom had been Miss Philadelphia. She would tell Bop and Zizi that if they were good she just might drive them down in the Wagoneer down to Van der Kamp's The windmill frightened Zizi, and she was always certain that one of those paddles would reach down and spank her or pull her up and swing her around for circles.
Bop, however, was fascinated by it, thinking of it as a symbol of flight, like the propeller of a Pan Am clipper, and she dreamed of one day becoming a stewardess, staffing the first class section -- non-stop from New York's Idlewild Airport to Paris. The very name of the airport evoked glamor and abandon -- running both idle and wild. Bop would pull out a Fiestaware platter from the kitchen and would walk down the hall with a Dixie cup on her had and pretending that her flannel robe was a tailored blue wool uniform. "More coffee, sir? Why it would be my pleasure. And how about an almond wafer? They baked exclusively for Pan Am by Van der Kamp. What, oh, you're going to Amsterdam after Paris? How fitting."
The Woodward Line pierced through the city that winter held in a grip as strong as that of a blacksmith. Bowlers and workmen's more practical flap caps barely held in the cerebral heat until it danced down the street with ever seductive old man winter, swaggering and jingling ice cycles in his pocket like pieces of silver and wedding diamonds. Love always chases the next opportunity, just as metal razor clipping cling to the seductive magnet. The audacity of silk top hats, dancing nervously above chattering, fluoride blazed teeth, anxious to return to their steam heated townhouses with inlaid floors built by immigrant Scandinavian hands, never to see a manicure but able to cut the perfect parquet. These strangers shared that moment, one they saw disappearing as it happened, ice melting into mustard gas before freezing into a haze of atomic bombs that eventually warmed up as collateral damage before their memory floated away with the dust of two towers falling on the heads of their darting great-great-grandchildren who were christened with the middle names of these ancestors they had only seen in musty photo albums. The Woodward Line disappears into the white abyss of memory from the dawn of the previous century, one of many lines slowly erased by expired hearts and unidentifiable relatives in photographs banished to the yard sale heap.
Some days I am certain I sense my mother's essence, shrouded in the tiny steam cloud dancing above a bowl of miso soup.
Or isn't that the offbeat rhythm of her shuffling house shoes I hear echoed in the strokes of my bamboo tea whisk?
All of the ardent efforts of my generation's attempt to be spiritual not religious can not erase the image of a group of altar guild ladies silently arranging calla lilies and irises, privilege pausing to bow down in awe at the beauty and power of nature -- too transient for them to ever tame and emboss but within their capacity to appreciate yet never fully comprehend.
At every turn there is a new book or other product preaching about the futility of material things and selling a plan that will ensure that you will live in the Now not the past. The past is too brilliant of a dancer to fall for such bunk. Bloodlines of the past hold up a mirror that dares me to look at my own future or at least come to terms with those who have already lived it. Reconcile or forever be locked in this dance.
Silences, especially at night, lead me to ponder the fault lines under my bed. A cracked windshield, spider web smile lines that can overnight become ravines. Silence was the beacon call to sleep when my mother read at my bedside, those commas and dashes that gave her the chance to let her eye glance from the page to my bed to see if I was truly, finally asleep. Even now, hours before I need to rest my head for the night, I can hear the silence and wonder if the next sound will be the page turning or the book closing and the light turned off for the night.
It's hard to explain, and after all, we are not an explaining people. Explanations are always an embarrassment, usually reserved for those people who don't know which of the seven forks to use on the third course. It's much easier just to not invite such people to our dinner parties.
Our dinner parties are fewer these days, but they do still happen. We have come to enjoy most of them in silhouette. In the 1910s, in that brief idyll before The War, Uncle Alberto posed for a series of silhouettes cut furiously from ebony card stock by a Bulgarian artisan with tiny barber clippers. He captured every essence of Uncle Alberto, all of it in a silhouette darker than the pre-dawn sky. For a few lira he was captured for eternity, his soul carved from the abyss.
Cousin Cecile never understood why that portrait meant so much to him. Perhaps that's why she gave it to little cousin Ramona who thought it was the image of a sideshow attraction and placed it in her toy box where Uncle Alberto finally found solace hugged by a ceramic giraffe named Igberto and a felt horse named Alain.
In one of my first Sepia Saturday posts, I wrote about my paternal grandparents Acy and Cassie Biggs. Acy (above, around 1949) was the eldest son of his nearly dozen siblings but was paralyzed in a farming accident when he was in his 30s and was confined to a wheel chair for the remainder of his life. Like many families struggling through the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, most of his siblings and his parents -- John and Mattie Biggs below on their wedding day in 1888 -- migrated to California. The two branches of the family -- the large one in southern California and the smaller branch remaining in Oklahoma -- had little connection during the 70 years after the separation began. Although I met a few of them through the years, most of their names and stories were mysteries to me.
When my mother died in 2004, I got an email from a second cousin who said that he had been building a family website chronicling the history and that he wanted to connect the Oklahoma and California branches. I was the living bridge, a member of the Oklahoma branch who had been living in California for ten years. Slowly, I have had the chance to meet more and more of the California cousins and have learned first hand stories and histories that had been vague memories and legends up to then.
The cousin who contacted me, Mike, has the diligence of a reporter, reaching out to many long disconnected family members, and the site he built is quite detailed and organized. One of the most interesting tidbits is that although I am a bit over six foot two, I am the exception to my namesake, and my great grandfather John stood just under five feet, often referred to as "Little Mr. Biggs". I've since had the chance to visit the neighborhood in Torrance where the family settled. Ironically, one of my closest friend's family settle just a few blocks down the street, having migrated there in the 1940s from China.
(Our latest participation in Sepia Saturdays. Be sure to check the link to other great posts.)
How much of our family history is fact, legend or pure fiction? I've learned that mine is a pretty wild mix of all of that, and some of the "narrators" of our family's journey have been of varying reliability. Yet, I know that there is some truth embedded in some of the most outlandish tales.
The above photo is of my maternal great grandmother Eva Bell Cheuvront Coddington Cain and her son Claude, taken around 1891 with her son Claude. Here are the facts that I do know about them. She was born ion Montreal in 1867, the eldest of five children. In 1886 she married a man named Frank Coddington and moved with him to Mankato, Kansas. This is the only photo I know of them as a couple. Their son Claude was born in 1889. They divorced shortly afterward, one of the first in the young state's history. Why they divorced has always been murky, but my grandmother always described Frank as a man with a reputation of being "dangerously handsome and downright dangerous when he was angry, especially when he was drinking". Being a divorced, single mother with a strong French accent, no alimony and hundreds of miles from home must have been a daunting prospect. But Eva took solace in her "little prince", books of Plato and Baudelaire and memories of home. In 1900, she remarried a man many years her senior, Maurice Cain, who had also arrived on the US prairie from Quebec. Together they built a new life that included my grandmother and three other children.
Being a dozen years older than the new brood of children, Claude apparently always felt in an awkward role but was especially admired by the three women of the household, and I always heard stories of his amazing singing voice and love of poetry and art. Sadly, none of his work was ever passed down through the family. My grandmother spoke of his dreams of going to New York or even Europe, but he only got as far as Kansas City where he worked as a streetcar conductor until dying suddenly at the age of 29. It was an event that forever shattered Eva. When my mother looked at the photos of the beautiful, poised young Eva in Victorian finery, my mother said it was hard to recognize her as the grandmother she knew -- a hunchbacked woman with goitre, half her teeth missing and smoked a corn cob pipe. Years of hard farm work and dashed dreamed took their toll on her. My grandmother and her sister would sometimes speak of Claude in hushed tones, his life as what they termed a "confirmed bachelor" and the night he drowned in the Missouri River. As a child, I always wondered why he would go swimming at night. Only towards the end of her life did my grandmother share that he jumped into the river but would then refuse to share more details. When I pressed for answers, she would either turn silent or my parents would tell me that I was being rude.
My instincts and imagination have filled in what I think might have been Claude's story. I don't know how much is fact and how much is fancy. I've long wondered why I he has held such a fascination for me. Other ancestors have had more heroic or dramatic histories. In fact, he is only my "grand half uncle" though I can see a shared bloodline when I gaze on his face in the above portrait of him in his uniform. There is a familiar mix of grace, arrogance, melancholy and longing for what is beyond the immediate horizon. Was he composing a sonnet in his head as the shutter snapped or dreaming of what was beyond the flat Kansas landscape, envisioning himself dancing somewhere in a salon in Paris?
What is most perplexing is that I think I may be the only living person who knows that Frank ever existed or possesses photos of him. Even my sister, who is dedicated to preserving family history, can't remember hearing stories about him. I've asked extended family members about him, and they don't even seem to know that our great-grandmother had a first marriage. The video below is something I created a few years ago, my imagining of what Claude's story may have been. I know that I probably got several of the facts incorrect (he died in 1918 not 1912 as stated in the video and some of the names are changed), but I hope it honors the truth of his life. I want to believe that this lost soul is not forgotten and that the sweet young prince that brought solace to his mother more than a century ago left behind a wisp of poetry on the prairie, still floating in the cornfields of the sunflower state.
A few people have asked the question: "What's become of Millie the Glass Eyed Wonder Cat?" Some have speculated that Mr. Sullivan is allergic to felines. Or that Bow won't let another four-legged creature upstage her rightful role as the reigning diva.
Miss Millie is still with us but keeping a low profile.
It's hard to believe that it was almost three years ago that we spent a couple of weeks at Lazy Acres, sorting through the junk and jewels there as it went on the market, now in new hands for more than a year and a half.
At the risk of hitting the rerun season before it's even spring, we thought we'd share this two part episode in which Millie makes a vainglorious appearance with a mirror as well as other residents of the estate that come to life after the sun goes down.
Among the many things that could be said about my maternal grandfather pictured above, one can not be debated. He was precise on any matter or task he took on. Whether it was use of the English or French languages, pruning cherry trees, playing a game of Yahtzee or the care and riding of horses.
Although some of his older horses came to live on my parents farm, I never gained great confidence or skill as a rider. I did, however, have decided awe and respect for both their grace and power. The fact that each had a distinct personality and sense of humor added to their mystery. There wasn't that much riding of the horses after my grandfather died, but they lived out comfortable, labor free lives, all of them passing the age of 35 or higher.
As a middle schooler, being 35 was an age I couldn't even wrap my mind around and the amount of life experience surrounding it. It came into focus years late when a distant cousin -- whose father raised one of the now elderly horses as a colt -- visited our corral and raced toward the red maned quarter horse that approached her with joyous gallop I had never seen him exhibit before. I remember tears streaming down her face as she fed him sugar cubes and it seemed they spoke in a silent language of memories that only the two of them understood. Indeed it was easier for me to wrap my mind around the copper plated horses that adorned the flagstone fireplace mantel of our farmhouse. They were always there on the lower left shelf of the mantel, even though pottery and flowers changed through the years on the other shelf. I never knew their provenance, just that they were always there.
When my parents sold the house in the 1980s, I felt certain that their pack-rat sensibilities meant they were still with us. After both parents died and my sister and I were dividing the estate, it was this type of solid memory that we valued more than real estate or stocks. So there was a mix of excitement and mild disappointment when we discovered two of the copper horses in a box in an obscure corner of the basement. I was certain there were three, but I was pleased to reunited with these two, thinking of my cousin years earlier visiting the old quarter horse.
Last Sunday while strolling through Alemany Flea Market seeking dusty treasures, a dimly gleaming object caught my eye three stalls down. Lying on his side was an all familiar copper horse. I knew in an instant that he was not a duplicate of the two I had at home but the long missing alpha to tower over the other two. He was even missing a front leg like the other two.
I sent off the above image to my sister with the subject line "Missing family member discovered in California". She sent back a message and the attached photo. While she was pleased to know about the reunion, the picture confirmed that there had originally been four horses. There is clearly a fourth head on the far left. The quest continues.
For sepia Saturday, I hope it's not illegal to "recycle" past posts, but I'll share this post I did back in December 2006 after making a series of short slide/music shows for the holidays about different branches of the family. It came at the end of a two year stretch of much loss (both of my parents, my aunt, one of my cats, a few friends.) Knowing that those memories were still there, and looking at relatives lost even further back and seeing them so young and stylish is reassuring.
The pair above are my maternal grandparents, Ralph and Nancy Polley, on their wedding day in 1923. I've always loved this photo since it has such a F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald feel to it, and I love the photo of them on their roadster while taking a vacation in the Rockies. That's my mother peering out the back window. My favorite part of this photo is the technical "flub" of the shadow of the photographer at the bottom. Who is it? Another family member along for the ride? A mysterious stranger who kindly took the shot? The outline of the hat adds to the mystery, though I can't confirm if it's a man or a woman. A couple of Christmases ago I had this photo transferred onto a tin box which was a real hit with the family members who received it. They didn't complain about the toffee inside either.
The death of Empire of the Sun author J.G. Ballard on Sunday reminded me of how deeply I related to his semi-autobiographical book that was turned into a not completely bad film. The airing of an old interview with Ballard on Fresh Air today hit on many of the aspects of why that book felt like my own biography. Torn from a life of privilege, he found an odd freedom and respect for his captors in a Japanese prison camp and never felt able to be at home in England or with his family afterward. I've enjoyed several of his other books, but none struck the chord this one did. Just as I was excited when Christian Bale emerged as an adult actor but has never come close to equaling his debut.
Growing up in Oklahoma and Missouri, I always felt alien and found the locals to be far more surreal and incomprehensible than Martians. What interested them made no sense to me, and I've yet to find a place where I've felt completely at home. Okay, maybe Barcelona and Buenos Aires and parts of Shanghai. But the Shanghai of young Ballard is the one I want to live in.
Interactive V-Day: Your Wheels Oughta Be in Pictures
Back in the day, Saturday nights were about plucking nose hairs, pumping a bit of iron to make sure the T-shirt fit just right and then heading out into the glory of the night. I can't complain that I'm spending this Valentine's Day with someone who makes my heart pump with unconditional love, even if it's a gorgeous female of the four-legged variety. Love comes from the most unexpected places.
And what would my life have turned out to be when I was in my twenties if we'd had this whole interwebs thingy back then? This week, Bryce Digdug did a great post about his discovery of the Internet Movie Car Database. Is there also an Internet Movie Shoe Database and an Internet Broadway Cologne Database out there? Oh, please tell me that there isn't, or if there is just don't send me the link. I've got dusting that needs to be done! But for now, we really need to have a complete inventory of every car in Vertigo and Vanishing Point and every film in which a Pinto or Gremlin appeared. Is it more disturbing that someone took time to create this thing or that we will all plumb its sweaty depths? I don't really care, all I am concerned about is asking my three follower if they'd like to join in this game.
I'll show you mine first, now show me yours.
Here are the rules.
1. Post a photo of every car you've ever owned.
2. Under it list the years you owned it and one of the films or TV shows in which it appeared.
3. Strive to match the color, exact model and year of issue. But if you can't be exact, go as close as you can. In my case, except for my virgin ride, all of mine are a year or color off. But I'm damned close in each case.
4. Let's make this friggin' thing go virile! Tell every friend, Friendster contact in Manila, and person that notified you that you just won in the UK lottery and let's see if we can make this a Facebook application. Hell, I might even find the person who made me give it up in the back of that 1960 Valiant station wagon the night of our senior prom in 1974. Or wait, did I make that person give it up to me?
I'm sure that there is something very Freudian about the dates, vehicles and their screen appearances below. Also feel free to dish and analyze my psyche. (I still greatly miss that Wrangler and thought I was the hottest thing on four wheels when I owned it.)
Footnote: 1989 - 1992 were the Manhattan/Brooklyn years when I was gloriously carless.
For many years I kept detailed, diligent journals of every dream I could recall, sometimes jotting down just a word or image and forcing myself to dig deep to pull it up later in the day. Not much became of those journals, and they mean little when I look back at them.
I feel lucky that the dark recesses of my subconscious that emerge in these dreams are not as spooky as my daydream wanderings. And rarely are my dreams completely pleasant or nightmarish. Just murky and confusing.
And they often merge into one another with no logical sequence, such as last night when I was visited by one of my exes who was distraught that the economy had become so bad that The Gap was going out of business. "What a blessing!" I exclaimed, thinking about how that store seemed to embody all that I most despised about our time together, seeming so prefabbed and soulless, a paint-by-number relationship out of a magazine. "But how many times did you go there? How many pieces are still in your closet that came from The Gap? How many of them do you still wear?" I agreed that he was probably right, and looking at him with a certain lessening degree of disdain, wondered why I couldn't put them in the recycle bin.
I passed from this scene, realizing I was riding in a car with my father who died two and a half years ago. I was aware that he was neither dead nor alive but very present, and in a jovial but disconnected state as often he was in the last three years or so before Alzheimer's accompanied him for his final exit. He told a rambling story as he wove through traffic, stopping at green lights and buzzing through red ones. I could hear car horns blaring, tires squealing, people cursing and metal scraping against the car -- yet it kept moving forward. Knowing it was impossible to pull his firm hands from the wheel, I rested my head his leg as I did when he drove me home from summer camp as a kid, trusting that we would arrive home safely.
When I woke at 6:30 a.m., I felt peaceful but still conflicted.
In the afternoon, I realized I needed stamps and went across the street to the video/copy shop. The clerk said that the only stamps they had were ones promoting Alzheimer's awareness. "That's fine," I said. After I paid and took my change, the clerk smiled, handing them to me, "So you'll remember."
Back in the mid-1960s, Oklahoma City's youth had an enormous dilemma -- which of the three amusement parks should you favor?
First, there was Spring Lake, the stalwart Beatles-esque playground for the young that, by the 1980s, would be converted into a vocational educational school. I remember my sister going there with her best friend Karen Brown in 1966. They entered a "make-your-own-record" booth where ever witty Karen opened their recording with "This is Mrs. Brown's Lovely Daughter, " appropriately referencing a top 40 song of the era. Across town, just north of the Northwest Expressway was its rival, the upstart, short-lived Wedgewood that would be converted into a similarly named apartment complex during the Carter administration. Its cheeky approach was the Rolling Stones to the more mainstream Spring Lake. Who would have thought that bland Frontier City would soldier on into the 21st Century? I remember my dear friend Molene doing "Who Can Stop the Rain" in drag in the mid-1970s down the block at the wonderfully raunchy trannyshack named The Road House. These memories branded on my brain like a rose tattoo that will neither forgive nor forget.s
Even in "this economy" I find myself enjoying Christmas -- and not "the holidays" -- more each year. I enjoy it not in any reason for the season kind of way but more in the way that is woven through with pleasant memories, especially those rooted in optimism that leave me feeling, well, optimistic.
There seems to be something of an arch in my life with Christmas reaching its absolute nadir in my 50th year (a season tainted with death, loss and pessimism) and slowly ascending with each year. I won't quote Cavify's "Candles", but there is certainly much of that sentiment at this point.
For countless years, I dismissed Christmas as a crass, pointless system to support capitalism. It is still very much that, yet I take unusual comfort in things associated with Christmas -- not things I buy or am given this year but those from the past.
So, a couple examples":
* Sometime in the mid-1970s I bought the glass reindeer at the long-defunct Midwest department store John A. Brown. I purchased it with visions of it in my first urban and urbane pied-a-terre in a coastal city where I would be buying presents at Macy's when it was local department store not the company store of the nation. By the time I actually had my first abode, I thought I was far too sophisticated to have such a piece of schlock in my home.
* The tall man on the right holds not special aesthetic meaning on its own. However, my sister discovered it two years ago (on that above mentioned worst Christmas ever) when we were dismantling our parents' home. It was nestled in the back of the mud room closet and was something my mother bought in preparation for the last Christmas she was alive, 2003. She was too disoriented by the time the holiday arrived to remember to send it to me. Getting it three years later made it all the more meaningful. The sack it came in was from a store two blocks from a store two blocks away from the last house I lived in before moving to California. I know that she was not so disoriented that she went there hoping to find me in my old above, but I wonder if she drove by my old house, thinking of the times when we had Christmases together there.
As mentioned earlier, I oddly associate the Beatles with Christmas. Forty years ago, I went to the premier of Yellow Submarine with my best friend, thinking we had seen the most progressive form of animation to descend on humanity.
Finally, I share the introduction to the show I am watching as I write this -- 1988's Pee Wee's Christmas Special. It's a glorious mix of sweetness, wackiness and creativity. And, since one of my presents this year was a Dremel, it's not out of the question that next year there will be a Junk Thief Junk Shack Holiday Hootinanny.
In theory, at least, I despise almost anything with chocolate, mainly because any significant amount of it makes me groggy, depressed and feeling hopeless. However, the past few nights I have found surprising pleasure with a mug of cocoa if only for the nostalgia of the red mugs that have been a part of my family for as many holiday seasons as I can remember. My fondness for eggnog is not quite as strong, although the neighboring glasses evoke as many memories.
When I was six, I had a great idea for the holidays. I went through all of my favorite cards sent to us by our family and friends, crossed out there names, wrote in mine, and started handing them out. Junk Thieves start at an early age. My mother was horrified, but I am glad that I held on to many of them. These are just the tip of the iceberg.
For years I harbored dreams of being a greeting card designer and even sent to Hallmark for their application packet a couple of times right out of college. But, alas, they were not struck by my talents. All the same, the life of a card designer had a wonderful, mysterious appeal to me though I know it would likely turn out to be a grind.
As much as the cards, it's some of the names that fascinate me today: Oma, Averill, Cleta, Aswin, and other you just don't here today.
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
JunkThief is your typical Gallic Jew boy born on the Great Plains, went to Gotham and Ouagadougou and Kathmandu before settling in San Francisco's Mission District. Now he searches the dark alleys of that city to find good conversation, Weimar culture and (but of course) the perfect door knob.
"Who do you think you are, Miss Philadelphia?" Mom always aske
d Bop and Zizi.
