Essential Eccentricity

The previous episode of my memoir, Cheyenne, Wyoming, told about my first restaurant job (as a carhop) and my first extramarital lover, whose name I don't recall.  It could have been Jim, or it could have been Steve, or it could have been any other relatively common name.  If it had been an unusual name, I think I would have remembered it. 

He was an Air Force NCO, married, drove a pickup truck, and I don't think I ever saw him outside that truck.  That man had spoken to me as to an equal, respectfully, and had talked about many things including his feelings, plans, and aspirations.  He was as gentle and considerate a lover as a man can be in the cab of a truck, and he was passionate.  At sixteen, I had never known anything like that.  It was more like the movies had led me to expect that love would be than my relationship was with the other man I loved, the one I had married.

When the people who had been charitably allowing us to sleep in their basement kicked my toddler daughter and me out because I had stayed out until dawn after working to 1 AM, I went the only way I thought I could go, on to Washington, where my husband was learning to build floating bridges as a combat engineer at Fort Lewis.

The house that Al rented for us was a big creaky old wooden Victorian thing with high ceilings, and tall windows that rattled and let in the wind.  It perched on the top of a steep hill on the northern edge of the downtown business district in Tacoma.  There was a steep set of broken concrete steps leading up, waay up, maybe twenty steps or so to the front porch, from the street below.  The back door opened from my kitchen directly onto a level parking pad off the alley behind.  We never used the front entrance.

A small bungalow sat on the lot to the north of our big old house, occupied by a gray haired grandmotherly type who immediately developed an affectionate bond with my daughter Marie.  We visited her every day, helped in her garden and took home a few flowers for our work, and she was happy to watch Marie for me if I needed to run an errand.

To the south of our house, at the bottom of a sheer cliff separated from our house by a narrow concrete walk and rickety wire fence on wooden posts, was a gas station.  The cliff was covered by blackberry brambles, and an old wooden ladder was suspended from our fence, reaching a little over halfway to the bottom, so we could climb down and hang on it to pick more berries than could be reached from the top or bottom of the cliff.  We had blackberry cobbler frequently that summer.

About the time I got to Tacoma, Al went into the post hospital for surgery to remove kidney stones.  Once during his hospital stay, I left Marie with the neighbor lady and rode a bus to visit him on post.  He had been extraordinarily unpleasant during my visit, either from the pain or the depressant painkillers.  The path home from the bus depot led through the part of downtown where the bars were. 

As I walked along, I thought about that guy in Cheyenne, and about movie and fairy tale love, and the pleasures of sex that were missing from my marriage.  I smiled at one of the men I passed, and as I walked on, I heard him say something to his companion.  I caught the words, "on the make," and it embarrassed me.  I felt myself blush.

I was very confused about love and sex.  Mornings, I would wake early and lie there looking at Al sleeping, before I woke him and got up to begin breakfast preparation.  I remember sometimes being overcome with a feeling of warmth at the thought, "This is my husband."  But I loved that other man, too, and that meant, I believed, that something was terribly wrong with me.  Everyone said that we only could love our one and only.  I wasn't normal, and that was a source of shame.

One morning when I woke and walked toward the kitchen, through the room where Marie's bed was made in a nest of blankets on a sofa, she wasn't in her bed.  I called her name and looked in the rest of the rooms, but didn't find her.  I went to the neighbor's house to see if she had gotten up early and gone there alone.  She wasn't supposed to go out alone, and I was annoyed and ready to scold her for disobedience until I saw the alarm on the old lady's face and she told me she hadn't seen Marie.

She and I started walking the neighborhood, calling for Marie and asking people if they had seen a little girl in pajamas with kittens on them.   I was frantic after a few minutes of that.  We returned to the old lady's house and used her phone to call the police, then I went home to wait for them.  I was straightening up, picking up Marie's blankets to fold them and put them away, when I saw her hand on the floor under the edge of the sofa.  She had apparently rolled out of bed in her sleep and scooted under there.  Concealed by the overhanging blanket, she had slept through all the calling and crying and confusion.  I remember sitting there on the sofa, hugging and rocking her, while she patted my arm and said, "Don't cry, Mommy."

Before I got to Tacoma, Al had found a 1953 Buick he wanted to buy, just like this one formerly owned by Howard Hughes, only ours was dark red.  The car pictured here was sold recently for $1.6 million.  I think Al paid $150 for ours, and barely managed to drive it home with its Dyna-Flow transmission slipping and missing gear changes.  It sat on the parking pad for a few weeks before he learned what he needed to fix it and got some of his army buddies to help him do it.

On my birthday, a Sunday, he and three of his buddies took the transmission out of the car, opened it up in the driveway, and replaced whatever part had been defective.  It was a long procedure, on a hot day, and the beer one of the guys had brought was soon gone.  For lunch, I served sandwiches and iced tea, then someone went for more beer.  The repair work had gone smoothly while I had been occupied in the house, baking my birthday cake, cooling it, spreading on chocolate frosting, and starting preparations for a dinner of pork chops, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and green beans.

I was listening to the radio.  I remember hearing Johnny Burnette sing "You're Sixteen":


The guys hit a snag when they started to put the transmission case back together.  First, I heard some frustrated laughter and a lot of talk about "try this" or "do that."  After a little of that, they weren't laughing any more and there was a lot of swearing.  The sun was low in the sky, a wind had come up, and dinner was almost ready, when I went out to find out what was the holdup.  They showed me some spring loaded pins that held part of the case in place.  The springs had to be depressed before placing the top case on the bottom one, and they didn't have a tool to hold the springs in that could be removed quickly as the case was seated in place.

I knelt beside the transmission, pushed in one of the four springs, felt the tension, lowered my head to look at the angle of the pins' travel in their slots, got up and said, "Wait a minute.  I'll be right back."  I went in the house and came back with four wooden kitchen matches.  I showed them what I had in mind, and one guy knelt on the far side of the transmission, depressing the two springs there and holding them in place with matches, while I did it with the two on my side, then the others slipped the top transmission case in place and we pulled the matches out.

There was a lot of laughter and shoulder slapping as I took my matches and went back in the house.  The guys bolted the transmission back in place, gathered up their tools, and left.  I had put all the food on the table and gotten Marie set up on a stack of phone books in her chair, when Al came in.  Without looking at me, he stomped through the kitchen and across the room where Marie slept, paced a couple of times around our bedroom, then opened the wardrobe, grabbed a bunch of my clothes in both hands, and yanked them out, bending hangers and ripping cloth in the process, without saying a word.

He kicked at the heap of clothing on the floor and stomped back into the kitchen, shoving me out of his way.  Then he started grabbing serving bowls and plates from the table.  One by one, he threw each full dish of food into a pile by the wall, finishing off with my birthday cake.  Then he walked over to the pile of food, pulled down a pair of curtains and threw them on the pile, and pissed on it.  At some point during that, he had started talking -- screaming, really, saying how dare I make a fool of him that way, showing him up in front of his friends.

When he staggered off and fell across the bed and passed out, I felt mostly relief that he had taken it out on the food and clothing, and not on Marie and me.  Still, I cried as I cleaned up the mess and started mending the rips in my blouses.

That fall, Al's training ended and he got orders for Germany.  My mother and Grady were living in Kansas.  Grady had gone on a drunk and lost the job at the bird ranch in California.  They were working and living on a pig farm near Burrton, Kansas.  Al and I planned to drive there, he'd drop off Marie and me, drive to Texas to visit his family, sell the car, and get military transport from Texas to Fort Dix, New Jersey.

The drive was an adventure.  The Buick broke down in Green River, Utah and we were delayed a couple of days waiting for a part to arrive.  It started snowing as we headed into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.  We went over Rabbit Ears Pass in a snowstorm so thick that visibility was down to almost nothing, and even when we could see the road signs we couldn't read them because they were caked with the fresh wet snow.  A couple of times, we stopped and I got out and slogged through the snow to brush off a sign so we could see what it said about the road ahead.  Usually, they just showed squiggly lines representing sharp curves.

When we got to Burrton, I wasn't particularly happy about the pigs, or about living with my mother again, but I was relieved to be out of Al's shadow.  Marie, on the other hand, loved pigs.  She always wanted to go to the barn when we were feeding, or checking on farrowing sows.  When we needed to move pigs from pen to pen in the barn or from the pens in the barn out to the concrete pad and feeding troughs outside, we'd stand Marie in a corner out of the way where she could watch.

On one of those occasions, as I was poking and prodding several sows toward the open door, I heard Marie's voice, ascending in volume and pitch:  "Oh, my... oh my... OH MY!"  When I looked her way, there she was, backed into a corner, with only her eyes and top of her head showing above the rump of a sow that had gotten turned and backed in the corner.  It is loads easier to drive pigs than to pull them, but I got one of that sow's ears, and Mama got the other one, and we rescued my kid from the pig-butt peril.

"Oh, my," were the words I was trying to teach Marie as alternative expletives to the "God damns" she had picked up from her father.  For a while there, her favorite exclamation was, "God damn, oh my."  Eventually, though, she got it straight.  She was a sweetheart, as affectionate and curious as a kid could be.  I remember one time, riding in the car with my mother on the way to town, Marie in the back seat, chattering away.  She said something cute and clever.  We laughed, and my mother said to her, "Marie, your granny sure loves you."  She answered, "ReeRee (couldn't yet say Marie) loves everybody."

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ALL RIGHT!  This is a milestone, the bloggy version of a Golden Spike.  This episode links up with this one I wrote in 2002, completing this part of the story.  Next, I'll move up to where I left off in the mid-1970s, and work on it from that end.

The Full Moon in May, today, is the Vesak (or Wesak) Festival.  In the Buddhist world, it is a centuries-old tradition.  Today, Buddhists all over the world commemorate three great events: The Birth, Enlightenment and the Passing Away of Gautama Buddha.

The first Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (W.F.B.) held in Sri Lanka in 1950, adopted the following resolution:

That this Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists, while recording its appreciation of the gracious act of His Majesty, the Maharaja of Nepal in making the full-moon day of Vesak a Public Holiday in Nepal, earnestly requests the Heads of Governments of all countries in which large or small number of Buddhists are to be found, to take steps to make the full-moon day in the month of May a Public Holiday in honour of the Buddha, who is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest benefactors of Humanity.

Of course, in the U.S., with its constitutionally mandated separation of church (other than Xian) and state, it is not officially recognized.  Since virtually nobody will get today off from work for the celebration, most festivities in the U.S. were held this past weekend.   There was a big festival at Mount Shasta in California.  If you attended one elsewhere, let me know.

In Malaysia, at the Maha Vihara Temple in Jalan Berhala, the Festival has been "toned down," and some of the resources that might have been expended on the celebration were diverted to aid cyclone victims in Myanmar and earthquake victims in China.  Donation boxes were set up in the temple...and Buddha smiles.  But, come to think of it, I have never seen a frowning Buddha, and I wouldn't want to.

Yesterday, I asked a yes/no question, and got three different answers from various people.  I wanted to know if the second full moon in an astrological sign was equally qualified to be called a "blue moon," as the second full moon in a calendrical month is.  Predictably, there are those who express the opinion that only the second full moon in a calendar month qualifies, and those who believe that both months and signs are qualified.  There are also the historical purists and sticklers for fact, who want the whole story made known.

Scriveling left this comment:

Tonight, the moon will be full.  Whenever any month has two full moons, the second one is called a "blue moon."  This happens so rarely, that the saying, "once in a blue moon," means, "rarely."

This is the second full moon of the current Solar presence in Taurus, second Scorpio Full Moon this year.  Does that make it a "blue Moon" even though the first one occurred in April?