THE QUEER RELATIVE: MAN-MAKING IN THE VETERANS CIRCLE

My father believed being gay was a lifestyle choice until the day he died. At least I assume that is true. He died at the age of 91 and I know he believed it until he was past 90. We talked about it on the phone. 

And we weren't arguing.

That's important because we spent our lives arguing about one thing or another, the way fathers and sons do when they inhabit lives so different they seem never to have sloshed around the same gene pool. My father was a man of his time and his time had lasted far too long for me. He wanted to hang on to it, I wanted to get on with it. And loud arguing was considered a viable way to have a discussion about anything in my family. Someone was always arguing about something. And old arguments never died. My mother and my father's mother had an ongoing (but non-specific) argument that lasted from the time my mother and father married during World War II until just before my grandmother died in the 1980s. "We made our peace," was all my mother ever said about it after my grandmother died. Some arguments between my parents were so old that they needed only a few fraught words to get things going. It was an efficient way to argue. They reached the really angry part of the fight much more quickly. So much fury, so few words. (The truth is they argued about many things because they had agreed not to talk about the one thing that needed talking about.) My grandmother once told me, "Your mother and daddy have always been mad at something. And your daddy wasn't like that before." Before what? The war? My mother? Before when? She never explained it to me. But it's true. It's who we were. Angry people. Peace was rarely made.


Sometime when my father was around 80 years old we were eating chopped pork barbecue and hushpuppies in a restaurant in North Carolina, pushing each other's buttons about something, most likely the same on stuff - family (always a hot topic), race relations, sexual orientation, sexual relations, Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson, war and peace, flags and uniforms, Bush and Clinton, politics in general, it could have been anything. He paused, bit the end off a hushpuppy and surprised me. He said he thought there were certain subjects we should never discuss again. My mother, then in the mostly non-verbal stage of her decline, looked stunned, appalled that such a thing had been suggested. But I agreed eagerly. And we didn't. 

We stayed on safe ground after that. Basketball was safe ground. North Carolina basketball in particular. Baseball wasn't (I was a lifelong Yankee fan, he hated the Yankees). Stock car racing was safe ground because he was passionate about it and I didn't know enough to argue. Happy family stuff, safe; unhappy family stuff, not. My mother the saintly, safe; my mother the troubled human being, not so much. My nephew the jailbird junkie, NEVER. Weather was always a safe thing to talk about and sometimes it came down to nothing more than that as we picked our way through phone calls every few weeks, especially after my mother died and my father was the only parent I could talk to.

Talking to him could be a chore. My father loved what he called reminiscing and he could do it for hours. He and my mother did a great deal of it, especially during the last years of her life, sorting through photographs, papers. When she couldn't participate any longer he reminisced and she listened. When she was dead he sought out other people, though there had been plenty of other people before that (one of my parents' standing arguments involved all his talk to other people while my mother waited in the car or some other uncomfortable place). He called it reminiscing, but it wasn't. It was much more than that. He pursued the past like a hungry predator because he had so little appetite for the present.

I am not much for reminiscing or predatory pursuit of the past, but it happened sometimes. That's how I brought up the December night we went to meet Gil's body at the train.

It was odd for him to invite me along on such a nighttime errand. My father and I didn't do many things together when I was growing up. Our interests ran in different directions, he worked long hours, we didn't know how to do it as I grew into my teens and beyond. I spent most of the time with my mother, aunts, grandmothers. I always preferred the company of women. Still do. But that night he asked me to ride along with him. I never have been sure why. Maybe he didn't want to be alone and didn't want to say so. Maybe it was because it was my birthday. Maybe he wanted to teach me a lesson (he was tyrannically didactic in the same way he became tyrannically reminiscent later in life). Maybe he wanted to show me something about the way men do things. But he asked me to go with him.

We went downtown to the train station to make sure the corpse of the man who had been his favorite cousin, pal and playmate when he was growing up arrived safely from Florida. I remember seeing the wooden box on a baggage cart on the platform beside the train and again at the funeral home. I remember my father telling the undertaker, "He was a veteran and he will be buried in the veterans' plot." We went home.

The dead man's name was Gil. He was a homosexual ("queer" was the word my dad used relentlessly). He had hanged himself in a closet after an argument with his boyfriend. "I'm not surprised. He chose to live that way and it killed him," my father said. "He hung out around queers and he became one. I warned him." It all was news to me.

My father sounded bitter, angry, betrayed, as if Gil had done something personal to him. And perhaps he had, though my father would never say just how he found out Gil was gay. It was clear in his tone that he believed Gil was an un-man and that that was a dangerous and disgusting thing to be. For years Gil had been a non-person to him. But he lived with us once.

They both served in World War II and after the war my parents and I lived in half of a converted barracks on an old Army base known locally as O.R.D. Gil lived there with us. At least for a while. I remember him as a charming, smiling man in a suit with neatly slicked back hair. I also remember him bearing a strong resemblance to my father. I even have a muddled memory of sharing a bed with him, me under the covers, Gil beside me, sleeping, lamplight shining. Nothing more than that. I was three or four years old. I don't remember any commotion when he left but one day he was gone.

I didn't know about Gil's homosexuality until that winter night in 1963 when we went to meet his body at the train. I had no clear idea what queer meant except that it was a condition that led Gil to kill himself and that my father saw it as a terrible threat and outright danger to unsuspecting boys like me (I told him about a gay man trying to pick me up on Market Street one night and he wanted to go out and find the guy. And do what? Beat him up? Turn him in? We drove around and never found him so I'll never know). He didn't explain the danger. I was sexually stupid for my age. We didn't talk about sex - hetero, homo or otherwise at home (my dad secreted "dirty" magazines in his top dresser drawer and I found them, which is how I first saw Bettie Page and learned about naked women and their strange - not queer, but strange, that was a relief - effect on me).

Bettie Page reading in her high heels and underwear.

Of course teen-aged boys in those days - and these days too - threw out words like queer and fag as jokes and insults. And I am sure I did too. But within a few years I had slipped into a more open world than my father ever would live in. Homosexuals were already there when I arrived (turns out they had been there all along) - along with various other kinds of people my father would have hated or feared and who I was happy to know. I was relieved and I liked it so much I stayed.

And that is where I was calling from when my father was 90 and I asked about going to meet Gil's body at the train. I had always wondered why my queer-averse father let Gil live with us. Wasn't he afraid that I might end up deciding to be queer too from hanging out around Gil? 

"It was after the war. He needed a place to live. He was family," my father said. "I told him he could stay as long as he stayed away from that. He promised he would." I suppose he meant Gil should stay away from whatever passed for gay social life in the late 1940s in the middle of North Carolina. My father seems to have believed that whatever was going on it was happening in Winston-Salem, thirty miles away from where we lived in Greensboro. When Gil broke his promise and couldn't stay away from Winston Salem (that's how my father described it and maybe that's what they called guys fucking guys back then - going to Winston-Salem. There were so many hints and euphemisms.), my father kicked him out. A decade later Gil was dead and we were meeting the train from Florida. It took a long time to understand why we were there.

My father liked the idea that certain things could make a man out of a boy; most of them involved uniforms of one sort or another, flags, salutes, oaths, band music and (best case scenario) combat. He suggested that a few years in the Army might do that for me. I declined and told him I had no interest in Vietnam, hated the fact that other boys my age already were over there fighting and that I didn't think I would go even if they drafted me. Our serious differences had begun by that time. We argued incessantly. But Gil couldn't argue. He was dead in that box. And in the end my father made a man out of him. I know now that is why we were at the train depot that December night. We were man-making.

My father knew how it was done. 

He insisted that Gil be buried in the Veterans Circle at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Greensboro. He made all of the arrangements. I don't remember going to the funeral, but I am sure it involved flags and bugles. I have a vague memory of the grave. When I called the cemetery the other day, I was told that Gil would be easy enough to find if I wanted to visit. "All of the veterans' graves have upright stones on them," the woman said, "because that's what they deserve." None of those flat to the ground easy-mow markers like the rest of the cemetery.

And that is where he is. Under his upright stone. Gilmer Wilson Huffines, died Dec. 10, 1963, buried in grave #255 on Dec. 13, 1963, a man among men, no queers allowed.

And that was that. 

Gil was back in a world my father approved of, a world as he knew it should be, a world of better days, a world he would try to remake to his narrow specifications, a world he could understand, until he died in 2014 at the age of 91. It was a world no wider than a grave.

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THE SUNDAY GLASSES AND THE MISSING LINK

I grew up somewhere between hot coffee and iced tea like most southern boys who were reared among people who eschewed alcohol with all the self righteous ardor that gives sin its sparkle and shine.

There was iced tea. Always. I don't remember when there wasn't. But I drank my first coffee when I was a young boy sitting on my Granddaddy Barnes' lap. It was perked coffee, sweet with sugar and white with evaporated milk. He was my mother's father and I never remember her parents' kitchen table without a can of Carnation or Pet evaporated milk and a sugar bowl. My grandfather mixed it up in a glass for me while my mother fussed from the other end of the table.

"Coffee will stunt your growth" she said. My grandfather laughed and said, "Men like us don't let women tell us what to do, do we?" My mother laughed. My grandfather stirred.  

I was too young to ponder the role bossy women might play in my life, but growth-stunting was something serious to consider. They were a large, noisy family of short people and there always seemed to be someone at the table with a cup of hot coffee. I was determined to be taller than that, I needed to be taller than that, but I didn't want to disappoint my grandfather. "Men like us," he'd said. So I took my chances and drinking coffee didn't stop me from outgrowing them all. I grew taller than my mother while I was still in grade school. When I proudly told my father, he said, "That's not saying much." I outgrew him too.

Eventually my grandfather draped himself in granddaughters (a man raised by his mother, with several sisters, seven daughters and a wife, he always liked girls best) but those times drinking coffee sitting on his lap at the kitchen table are the among the closest I remember feeling to him. He died before I reached high school.

I still drink coffee and sometimes when I have a can of evaporated milk handy I punch two holes in its top with the point of a sharp knife and use it in place of cream. I always think of him when I do. I even remember the way the morning light fell across that long, narrow kitchen and onto the table and my pale glass of mostly milk coffee.

My father's parents, whose house I preferred to visit, were taller people. They were coffee drinkers too, but I never remember sitting on my Grandfather Howerton's lap to drink

With my Grandfather Howerton

coffee. It wasn't right for children to drink coffee and my grandparents didn't do what wasn't right. Their lives were quiet, orderly, firmly governed by morality and propriety, though it sometimes was difficult to figure out where one stopped and the other started. Do good? Do right? The fear of doing the wrong thing was a palpable guiding force in their lives. Fear of going wrong and somehow disappointing them - especially my grandfather - kept me on the straight and narrow for a long time, too. And then it didn't. First the straight bent and the narrow widened. Then it all broke down completely.

But before that happened I had nearly 20 years of Sunday and holiday dinners (lunch to non-southerners) at their house. Every Sunday after church (we all went to the same church a few blocks from my grandparents' house), every Christmas, every Thanksgiving.
 
When I was a child I ate as a child at Sunday dinner - in the kitchen with my Grandmother Howerton, my sister and eventually my brother, where I belonged. The adults - my grandfather (head of the table), two aunts, two uncles and my

Aunt Beverly and Uncle Sidney

father (eldest son, foot of the table) and mother - ate at the big table in the dining room off the good plates and drank their tea out of what I came to think of as the Sunday glasses - nothing fancy, but nice enough not to be used every day. The best dishes were from the Jewel Tea man, the glasses were pink Depression ware from detergent boxes, probably Duz, both accumulated patiently over time. Those glasses bedazzled me from the first time I saw them.

We were not fancy people and the food we ate was sturdy, plain and tasty but the dining room was formal, the big table, the sideboard, the chairs with upholstered seats. There was a small chandelier. I remember walking through the dining room on the way to the kitchen, looking at what seemed to be the finest and fanciest table I would ever see and longing for the day when I could eat there too. I wanted to eat off the good plates and drink my tea out of the rosy pink glasses. I wanted to feel grown up and grand. And one Sunday, sooner than I ever expected, there was an extra place at the table for me. By then I could eat without spilling and had good enough manners (and dirty looks from my mother if I strayed), but the key to moving up to the adult table in my family was being a

My Aunt Beverly when she was old.

good talker and I could talk with the best of them around that table from a very young age. Words were my gift, my talent and eventually my burden and grief, but that came later. They got me to the big table. That Sunday and every Sunday and holiday after that, I sat between my Aunt Beverly and Uncle Sidney. After a few years my childless Aunt Beverly decided to eat in the kitchen with my grandmother and my siblings and the other children who came along later, nobody took her place and I had more elbow room.

Eventually I gave up my place at that table and all the other tables of my youth and young manhood and fled, but those pink Depression ware goblets haunted me. I stored them in my memory with care. They were part of the best memories of my youth - after I moved to the big table and before I walked away from the whole family mess.

I grew up with too much family and not quite enough love to hold it all together. My grandfathers were admirable, responsible but emotionally stunted men. One called his wife "Mother" and the other called his wife "Old Lady." Both were abandoned by their fathers - one father ran away and disappeared, the other committed suicide - and were raised by their mothers, tough-minded women who never remarried. They counted on their sons instead. Both men reached adulthood with a sense of responsibility and a profound need for the family they never knew. They both ended up with what they wanted and held on with childlike tenacity as hard as they could for as long as they could. They had to hold on because they never learned to trust the love that is supposed to glue families together. Who knew what might happen if somebody's grip slipped? I am sure it was a frightening thought for them. Maybe their long-gone fathers were to blame, or their mothers, but whatever their reasons for it, they used Sunday dinners and weak coffee, propriety and disappointment, brute force and blood loyalty to get what they wanted. They passed it off as love and passed it on. And it shows. Their sons and daughters, most of them emotionally stunted too - and addicted to God, booze, drugs, anger, whatever got them through - grew to old age never able to escape the long shadows of their fathers or the bondage of their family upbringing. They couldn't  love their own children quite enough to set them free. Some of the children's children have escaped but it hasn't been easy. 

Shortly after the death of my father last year I acquired the Sunday iced tea glasses. I had asked for them years before, the only thing from my grandparents' house I wanted after they died. I was assured by my sister that they had been secreted away for me to keep them out of unworthy hands. Declarations of worthiness and unworthiness, friendlies and enemies, good relatives and bad, shifting alliances, dishonesty and deceit, secrecy, gossip and outright lies, etc., belong to the mucky, conspiratorial mess of extended family that I escaped years ago and still want no part of. But I always figured that as the eldest grandchild - and the first to make it to the big table - I deserved those Sunday glasses. And I suppose, at last, I was deemed worthy enough by my sister to have them. She enjoys the co-conspiracy of family far more than I do and likes to decide who is worthy and who is not and when and where. She gave me the Sunday glasses after my father's funeral (at the same time she told me I would not be getting a table built by our great-grandfather-the-suicide for his wife and promised to me by my parents years ago. I suppose worthiness has its limits. Besides, what if somebody's grip slips?).

Sometimes the most ordinary things are ritualized and venerated: coffee or iced tea, evaporated milk or the Sunday glasses, old family tables. Grandfathers are denied their complexity and shortcomings and blindly praised. Their children become acolytes and their grandchildren, if they are not true believers awash in the blood of family, are left to question everything and seek love where they can find it. Some have and others haven't.

My Grandmother Howerton brewed Sunday tea in a round Jewel Tea pitcher, my mother had one, I have one too. Theirs came from the Jewel Tea man; mine came from an antique

My Grandmother with my sister and brother.

dealer. Tea, sweet or not, tastes better when it is brewed in a Jewel Tea pitcher. That's a true fact of my life. And tea always tasted that much better when we drank it out of my grandmother's Sunday glasses. The pitcher and the glasses - nothing fancy, ordinary enough mass-produced stuff - always were handled as irreplaceable objects of great worth, used carefully, washed, dried and put away carefully. The tea I have brewed over the years in my Jewel Tea pitcher has been good, but not as good as it is now that the Sunday glasses have set things straight.

I resist ritual and drink my tea out of the Sunday glasses whenever I want to now. They are pink, tapered, short-stemmed, sturdy. I love the way the sugar gathers in the narrow bottom of the glass when I spoon it in. I love the way the sweetness lingers when I munch the melting ice after the tea has been drunk. I've loved those things since I was a little boy at the big table. The Sunday glasses come from that time before the straight bent and the narrow widened, fragile survivors, messengers from the world I once thought I would live in forever, rosy reminders that I could not.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF STUPID DEPARTMENT (2)

I've always loved vernacular architecture and part of the wonder of our house is the outrageous vernacular vision of its builder. Form doesn't follow function as much as it follows whimsy. Dramatic Frank Lloyd Wright-ish ideas go a bit wrongishly awry. But they're still dramatic.    

The vernacular charm of our kitchen is disappearing. The brick wall is becoming drywall.

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF STUPID DEPARTMENT

Plastic-wrapped kitchen.

Your father died a couple of months ago, right? And you've been sick since before that, right? Then you had your 70th birthday (a more disconcerting experience than you expected), right? Then you were in bed several days with the flu (the bad kind), right? And your wife was in bed several days with the flu (also the bad kind) too and went back to work before she should have, right? And the dental work. There's all of her ongoing dental work, pain, etc. Your life was pushing the edge of out of control for all kinds of reasons, right? In fact, there were lots of days when it didn't feel like your life at all, when things felt off-center and there was no way to get them back to where they belong, right? Right.

So, in the face of all these things you decided to go ahead with a long-planned, but delayed and further delay-able, kitchen remodel - which involved a whole week of demolition, constant noise from power chisels, brick dust and strangers and made your beloved house feel like it wasn't really home at a time when feeling at home would have felt pretty good. Right.

Not only that, but this is only the beginning. There are bleak out-of-whack weeks of work to go.

And how do you view this?

It is among the stupidest decisions I've ever participated in making. And I can't deny my participation. Or my stupidity.

And the payoff? Tonight my wife accused me of not taking care of her enough and said she is spending too much time taking care of me. Our life never has been her and me. We always have taken care of each other.

So fuck the kitchen. Fuck the remodel. Fuck the bricks and fuck the cabinets. Fuck anything and everything that threatens the one real happiness I've known in my life. Ever.

FAMILY CHRISTMASES: ONCE UPON A TIME

PHOTOGRAPHS, HISTORY AND DIGITAL KINDNESS

My father's Red Room with heaps of history.

I told my father I would copy and digitally restore hundreds of color slides of the family, most of them from the 1950s and early 1960s. I surprised myself. It is not the sort of thing I volunteer to do very often.

I am not an unkind person and I do not lack compassion. But I always have been suspicious of acts of kindness and avoid them whenever I can. I do not volunteer or donate. I do not collect or distribute. I do not spend time with troubled youth or deliver hot meals to the elderly. I do not give money to ragged people who haunt street corners and live under bridges. I don’t hold anything against people who do those things, but I don’t do them.

However, I said I would do this. I justified it by telling myself it was an act of digital kindness. What harm could that do? A digital favor for a stubbornly un-digital old man.

Besides, photography is something my father and I share, but not in the way father's and sons usually share things. He didn't teach me how to take photographs - he wouldn't let me touch his camera. But he made me want to take photographs - because he wouldn't let me touch his camera. 

My first love was my father's camera. When I was a boy, it was the sexiest thing I knew of before I knew about sex. Looking at it made me want to touch it. Sneaking a hand into the deep right-hand bottom desk drawer where it was stored and touching it with the tips of my fingers made me feel like I wanted to do things I had no words to describe.

It was a Mercury II Univex 35mm rangefinder that shot half-size negatives and slides. It produced more than 60 tiny

images on a normal 36-exposure roll of film. With its aluminum body wrapped in black leather, it looked solid, efficient, German, but my father would not own a German camera. His wartime experience with precision German engineering, especially artillery, on an Italian beach south of Salerno in 1943 left no room in his life for anything German (when I bought a green Volkswagen - my first brand new car - in the late 1960s he would not ride in it). His Mercury II Univex was made in the no-nonsense postwar U.S.A. He loved that camera; I desired it. And the equipment that went with it: the tripod, the floodlights, the exposure meter. But they all were out of reach.

My father documented family trips, holidays (especially Christmases), birthdays, a visit to the grave of Stonewall Jackson, a trip into a coal mine where my mother was not allowed to go along because miners thought women were bad luck, a climb up Jockey’s Ridge (the largest natural sand pile on the east coast), mountaintops, lighthouses, beaches, my mother looking sexy in her black one-piece bathing suit, my baby sister naked and posed on a rug, my brother and sister splashing in the surf, me wearing an unfortunate pair of white pants called “clamdiggers” (Capri pants for boys; I remember they had a piece of white cotton rope for a belt) with which I wore white socks rolled down almost to my shoes; I was standing with my mother and sister in front of a large outdoor painting of Jesus somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina or Tennessee (I don’t have a clue where we were or why we were there; we were plain old Presbyterians and did not indulge in religious frou-frou of any sort; our church didn't even have stained glass windows). He took snapshots of all kinds of things all over the place and produced hundreds of Kodak color slides, which is what proud young men did to their wives and children in the 1950s.

Color slides required a hand-held viewer or a projector and a screen. They were a hassle to deal with and almost always ended up stored somewhere out of the way. Ours ended up in the hall closet with the sheets and towels. After many years, both our family and our slides began to degenerate, color faded and the smiles disappeared from some of the faces. A few faces were lost completely.

My father found that unacceptable. Those color slides were the holy relics of his faith in the past. He held onto that faith because people smiled back then and whatever happened since then didn’t turn out so well. He could not allow those old smiles to disappear. It would be a sacrilege.

He was not a historian. He hoarded the past, stored it in boxes and files stacked high in my old bedroom and in the

The Red Room leaks to the hall.

hallway just outside the door. He called it the red room and spent hours and hours there searching and labeling, ordering and reordering the world to his satisfaction. He was a missionary of his version of the past, preaching it to anyone who would listen. Sometimes he was entertaining, other times he didn't know when to shut up. 

Old color slides and old men both become problems, but the color slides are easier to fix. 

So I told my father I would be glad to run the slides through my scanner/copier and do what I could to restore the digital images. I would burn them onto CDs and send them to him. He agreed and sent me four boxes full of slides.

My wife keeps me supplied with electronic ways to amuse myself. I have computers, printers, various music devices, speakers, a turntable for digitizing our record collection, software, hardware, cameras, terabytes of storage. It’s sexy stuff and it makes my fingers tingle. She also bought me a very nice scanner/copier. It is the machine that lured me into kindness.

I thought it would be fun ( the truth is I am as suspicious of “fun” as I am of “kindness”). For a while it was. Those happy people on the beach, in the mountains, around the Christmas tree. Then it wasn’t. The faces began to lose their cheer as the 1950s passed into the 1960s. I began to see the misery and hardship that was coming sooner than anyone suspected. I could see it beginning at the corners of people's mouths, in their postures and the way their glances avoided the lense as time passed, the visible way lightheartedness became heavier with time. I know he didn't see it that way.

I finished the job and sent him the digital images. All of them. And I always thought I would return the slides to him but I never did. When I returned from his funeral I saw the boxes of slide-filled carousels on the shelf in my office closet. Inside each box are his tidy notes about which slides are most important to him, which ones to fix first. I will leave them there - at least for now - and eventually I'm sure I will look at them again and maybe I will add a note about which slides are most important to me for one of my own children to find. But I will never go through the boxes of slides searching for images of him. There are very few. He rarely let other people touch his camera.

As he grew old he would not allow anyone to touch the way he needed to see the world either. He preferred his past unsullied by subsequent reality. I live in an ever-sullied world. It is a difference we never resolved. But versions of history vary. He got what he needed from those old slides; I suppose I get what I need too.

 

My father photographs grandchildren on my sister's front lawn.

WHEN THE ROLL IS CALLED UP YONDER, LEAVE ME OUT

My Mom.

I couldn't help but think about my mother as my father's funeral neared its end. We were in what I always think of as the Heavenly Hoo-Hah part of the service, when the preacher envisions the deceased getting back together with those who have died before them - and with their blue-eyed Jesus - and everybody dancing around, shouting hallelujah, praising God and grinning those irritatingly smug, giddy, Born-Again Christian grins.

Of course, we were always Presbyterians and didn't hold much truck with either giddy or born again, but the preacher was a borrowed, overwrought Methodist and he was going on about imagining the gloriously happy reunion between my recently dead father and my dead-since-2006 mother. I could only imagine my mother shouting, "Oh, no! Not him! Not yet! I need more time!" and running the other way as fast as she could.

I chuckled.

My parents were married for 63 years. There were some years of happiness and many years of fearful co-dependency (often confused with loving care in her final few years). And there was almost never any time alone.

My mother shared a  bed with three of her sisters until the day she married; my father's bed was in a bedroom with his parents' and his brother's beds until that day, too. For nearly all of the next 63 years my parents slept together, 47 of those years in a small house - a kitchen, living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, all gathered tightly around a short hallway - where life was crowded with children, grandchildren, relatives, damaged children, damaged children of relatives, homework, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, junkies, and where a few minutes alone in the bathroom were all the privacy anyone ever knew.

And it was noisy in that house, like a whirling kitchen blender full of marbles.

My mother realized too late that she probably would live out her life never having any quiet time alone. It was something she said she needed, something she told me over and over that she wanted, but something she said my father never would allow her to have. He was a very controlling man and she let him do it. I suggested that she was a grown woman who did not have to ask her husband's/my father's permission to find a place of her own. I even said I would help her find such a place, but she said, "He won't let me," and that was that. She asked for help but was afraid to be helped. That was the saddest part.

Alcohol helped her for a while and finally a debilitating illness gave her some relief. But she spent many years as an angry woman in a crowded, noisy life in a house she said she never liked. My last words to her when she died in April 2006 were, "You don't have to be angry any more." And she was able to be alone. And quiet. For a while. Death is not necessarily a bad thing.

Then after eight years my father died. And the preacher stood by his grave (next to her grave), prattling on about salvation, knowing the Lord, etc., blah-blah-blah, and imagined that wonderful heavenly reunion between them, which he seemed to believe could be taking place at that very moment. I could only imagine that my mother wouldn't find it so wonderful, that her idea of heaven just might be a place without my father in it. At least not for a while yet. And I could imagine her watching him stride happily toward her and - giddy, goofy-grinned Christian graveside visions notwithstanding - turning to flee, praying as she ran for a little more quiet time alone. Perhaps my father would call out to her as she ran but she would not stop. Not this time.

And if I believed in such things, I would hope her prayers were answered. And I would smile.

My Mom. With heavenly attitude.

 

UN-TIED: MY FATHER IN HIS COFFIN (2)

I looked down at my father.

Dead people shrink. I know that. But my father had lost so much weight near the end of his life that the coffin he picked seemed far too large, as if he could have used a size or two smaller. He was not wearing his glasses, but I don't think he had worn them much in the last months of his life. He never wore them during my last visit a few weeks before he died. He was tilted at a slight - uncomfortable looking - angle to the right. His hands did not look comfortably crossed on his stomach. They looked stacked and his fingers were straight and stiff. It was not the undertaker's finest work.

He was dressed in his blue suit - the one he described years ago to my wife as his "funeral suit" - and a light blue shirt open at the neck. No tie? My father always wore a tie with his suit. It was like a uniform - and he liked uniforms. Without a tie he looked not only uncomfortable, stiff and dead, he looked unnatural. I didn't like it.

Whose idea was that? I was ready to go find a tie and fit it around his neck the way he did for me when I was a boy and he was teaching me to tie a full Windsor knot. Men in my family thought a tie wasn't worth wearing unless it was tied in a full Windsor knot. No half-Windsors allowed. No clip-ons. A dress-up occasion wasn't a dress-up occasion without a well-knotted tie. And death always was a dress-up occasion. At least it always had been before.

I told my wife it wasn't right. My sister and one of my father's oldest friends were chatting a few feet away. I had to ask.

"Why doesn't he have on a tie?"

"Because he wanted it that way." My sister smiled.

"But why? It's not like him."

"I know," my sister said. She shrugged. "But he said no tie." She said he was very clear about the way he wanted things done at his funeral.

Dad's old friend Libby said my father quit wearing ties a while back. "When he started losing weight he didn't think a tie fit very well. His shirt collar was too loose on his neck. He didn't like the way it looked." Libby said he didn't even wear a tie to his older sister's memorial service a while back. "He liked to look good and he thought he looked better without a tie," she said. "And he refused to buy a new shirt." Of course he did.

Vanity compounded by frugality. That was my father. He would have angrily denied the first but fully embraced the last (the truth is there was more than a little bit of vanity in his frugality as well). He always said he was the best man at every wedding he ever attended. Now he wanted to be the best looking dead man he could be and that meant no tie. Not this time. And no new shirt to be buried in. Such a purchase would be painful to his Great Depression-honed sensibility (those of us who didn't live through the Depression and WWII never quite measured up in his estimation).


He planned it but it still didn't look right to me especially with the flag draped on the coffin. No tie. No flowers. Just the flag. He planned that too because above and beyond all other things in his life, my father was a veteran, sometimes too much a veteran and not enough other things, but that's who he was. And it's what he wanted.

In fact, my father planned his entire funeral in elaborate detail and paid in advance. The coffin, the vault, the clothes, the flag, the music (which had to be changed a bit because the singer couldn't hit the required high notes); he even went to see the minister about the eulogy. The whole thing went off almost without a hitch. There was gunfire and someone played "Taps." It would have been perfect if the gray-haired veteran helping fold the flag hadn't tripped over the burial machinery and nearly knocked over a weathered

old tombstone before he regained his balance, paused, then went on folding. He was embarrassed but unhurt - and the flag never touched the ground, that's important. I could imagine my father grimacing, but that stumble was the one flaw, the one little thing my father couldn't possibly have planned for, the thing that made everything else perfect. The flag was folded, salutes exchanged. My father loved flags and salutes. The flag was handed to my nephew just like my father wanted it. He loved my nephew (who I found out later was wearing my father's missing tie that day). All went as planned.

And without a rehearsal. He had wanted one of those too, just to make sure things were right. He liked to make sure. Practice. Practice. Practice. My sister-in-law said they talked him out of it, but my niece said she could imagine him saying, "I'll lie right here on the sofa and pretend I'm dead." And keep track of the way things were going. She could imagine it because that is precisely who he was. He was a man who wanted to attend his own funeral to make sure it was just the way he envisioned it, just the sort of man who would go to his grave tie-less and confident he was the best man there and let the rest of us go about our business. Even dead and tie-less he was still in charge. 

My father had a long life full of plans, almost always unrehearsed, and flawed by trips, stumbles and falls no matter how hard he practiced. It was the only life he had and he lived it the best he could, all the way to the end. It is the most anybody can do.

If you visit his grave and find a tie on his headstone (with a full-Windsor knot), you will know that I have been there. And it will be one of mine. I hate ties and see no need to wear one ever again. I never thought he would see it my way.
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If you go to my old blog The UnTexan you will find the pieces I wrote around the time of my mother's death in 2006. You can click on the archive for April 2006 or click on the category Mom, Death and Family. There's lots of other stuff on there too. Years of stuff. In fact, click on anything and everything. Enjoy yourself.
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