: Salvage

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:12:42 GMT

[Photo: Daddy Paul and me, Duarte, California, 1994.]

I found some recipes for soft cookies I'll make on the weekend to send my uncle. My mother's older brother, my "Daddy Paul," will turn 75 on Easter Sunday. The oven here has an unreliable thermostat, so I'll have to watch these cookies with special care as they bake. Chewing is an issue for him these days.

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My Scattered Family, 2005

I have an aunt in False Ontario (Southern California). At 62 she serves weekends at the L.A. county jail. She's moved in with her daughter now, who won't let her cats come in, and so each night she shuts them in her now-rank, civet-scented Civic. This sweet aunt used to keep a wing-broke bat. She fed it meal worms every evening when she got home from work, and then it would crawl around on the front of her shirt while she did her evening chores. She spent $300 on the series of rabies shots, just in case.

My other aunt, who's 64, in White Castle (on the skirts of Baton Rouge), tames feral cats for rescuers and transports adopted dogs from state to state and keeps parrots and sleeps with a four-foot iguana. For a few years long ago she bred pythons and Doberman Pinschers, and would send us holiday photos of her toddlers sitting on a king-sized bed surrounded by snakes.

My uncle lives alone in Wikieup. He gave away his lovebirds and his dog, because he just can't stand it anymore when pets get old or sick and die. He waters his bromeliads and drinks near-beer in a double-wide, and every night he sits in the silence and listens to the awkward rattle of his patched-together heart.

His son, my cousin, 48, serves time not all that far from here. He finds and loses Jesus every year or two. His prison life is such a comfort to us all. Price of admission this time around--taking 27 leather coats from a broke-and-entered storefront in a shopping mall, because, he wrote me, "What the hell. God never listens to me anyway."

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 23:02:29 GMT

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT THE MEBANE MILLSES, IN HONOR OF G. K. MILLS

I would like to say some things about my father and his family in commemoration of his birthday. If I look through all the files and boxes of papers in the house I might learn when his birthday really was. But there's no time do that just now; none of the family Bibles records it, and so we'll be approximate. I have a dim impression from childhood that it was January 19. But that could as easily be one of my stepfathers' birthdays. My mother, a Pisces, married three Capricorns in a row--all with birthdays around January 19th--and had a Capricorn child, poor woman.

This was the Daddy George I knew throughout most of my childhood--this tiny photo, exactly, and some memories, were all the evidence I had of him. I kept it in a little brass frame next to my bed.

Here he is at work in the Appraiser's Building in San Francisco around 1951 or so. He spent the Korean War years there, in the Coast Guard, ages 18-21. He's probably 19 here.

In his off hours he could be a little rowdy.

My mother left rural Iowa when she was 18 and made her way to San Francisco, where her older brother was stationed in the U.S. Navy. Paul, who was pretty rowdy himself, introduced her to his new party pal, George Kelly Mills. They hit it off right away. Mom said she fell in love with him because he had eyebrows like Tyrone Power.

The power of eyebrows.

Soon I was a bit more than a twinkle in Mom's eyes, and when she was four months along her older brother drove the bewildered couple to Reno for a quick wedding. (I did not know this about my history until I was 49 years old.)

Mom and dad fish off a pier in San Francisco while waiting for me to arrive. That's me, under Mom's coat somewhere. They're both 20 here. I was born in the wee hours of a December morning at the University of California at Berkeley Hospital, delivered by a Navy doctor, while G.K. and my uncle paced in the waiting room.

And here we all are. You will never see a smile on their faces after this.

In October 1953 my father is discharged from the Coast Guard and he takes his family home with him to Mebane, North Carolina.

Mom meets the Mills family, a rowdy bunch all around. They were all employed by the White Furniture Company. Mom, center, a reader and a thinker, appears to be a little lost.

Our first North Carolina Christmas.

I have not one memory of my grandfather, William James Mills. But I find I am attracted to men with magnificent exposed scalps.

Of my grandmother, Lacy Ann (Gore) Mills, I recall that she used to set me on a stool in the kitchen while she cleaned up after meals and would mix the dregs of the coffee with milk and give it to me. Mom told me Grandma Mills had a beard and used Nair on her face every day. She told me Grandma Mills was mostly Cherokee Indian just barely down out of the hills. She also told me Grandma Mills chewed tobacco and carried a coffee can around with her to spit in. (I wonder if that's what the little bucket there is for...?)

This is the last photo of me with my father. He never smiled in any of them. My memories of him: Sitting on the floor when I was two, watching him read a newspaper. He would fold it into columns lengthwise, and I tried and tried to fold a section that way, but failed. I have a memory of him on crutches. Mom confirmed this--he was in a motorcycle accident at some point. I remember sitting across from him at lunchtime, eating soup. I watched him crumble his saltines into it, and I tried to crumble my crackers the same way. Couldn't. These are prelanguage memories, when it seemed my entire consciousness comprised the impulse to duplicate my parents' actions. I have no memory of him holding me, talking to me, or even making eye contact. But that doesn't mean much. I can't conjure up such memories about anyone else, either.

Before I turned three my mother left the Millses--dad loved his 'coon hound and his mama more than he loved her, she said--and took me to Iowa and left me there with her parents on the farm. She went back to North Carolina and got a job proofreading maps in Burlington. (Her mother had been a proofreader for Life--or Look--in Des Moines for a while. Must be a gene. That's how I got started editing. This blog is evidence that the skill wears off over time.) Mom sent for me when I was three-and-a-half, but it didn't last. She used to joke that when I walked outside one day and said "Where y'all goin'?" she knew she had to leave the South. God forbid her daughter should talk like a Southerner. She hated the racism (as a conspicuously part-Indian girl growing up in blonde blue-eyed Iowa, she knew what it felt like). She used to force the black woman who babysat for me to sit at the table with her, in the front window, in full view of the neighborhood, and have something to eat before going home. Mid-1950s. The babysitter was terrified, Mom told me. She felt bad about that later, after she'd grown up.

Anyway, after 1956 I never saw a Mills again.

I found this photo of my father in my mother's things after she died a few years ago. I wonder when he sent it. I remember he sent me a photo and letter when I was 11 or so; he was holding up a bunch of fish on a line. This looks like the same era.

When I was 18 and living on my own I thought maybe I could finally get to know the family on my other side, so I wrote a letter to my father, addressed simply "George Mills, Mebane, North Carolina." Three months later I heard from someone named "Aunt Lib" in Burlington (I think it was my father's Aunt Elizabeth). She included this obit with her letter and told me all my Millses were dead. I promptly forwarded the letter to my mother in California (who threw it away) and lost the obit clipping. To this day I don't know how anyone died. It says here "three days of illness." He was only 37. His father had died the year before. His mother died the year after. And I remember Aunt Lib said in her letter "the doctors said it was insufficient oxygen to the brain." Which could be hanging, drowning, smothering, tumors, what? what? Two weeks ago I found the obit, after having given up searching. It was weird. I hadn't thought about it in years. That morning I woke up and something told me it was in my big family bible. And it was. Tucked clear back in. I went right to it. I couldn't do that again today when I went to fetch it for the scan. I practically had to tear the Bible apart to find it.

So now I have some names. And maybe someone is still alive who is related and can tell me something. I hope so. He was cute. And I still have dreams about him. I think he was probably a good guy.

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 22:38:09 GMT

For a while we lived on some acreage, five rented acres, a small homestead in the middle of a venerable olive orchard, that itself lay in the middle of a venerable almond orchard, with virgin scrub--poison oak and manzanita--beyond, just where the valley climbs east toward the foothills of the northernmost Sierra Nevada. The owner had built the place to raise his family on, but once his sons were grown he and his wife moved back to town. Rumors circulated about developers buying up adjacent properties, but our landlord was adamant: he would never sell. We liked it there. The area was a home too to magpies and rattlesnakes. Coyotes ate Pete the cat and several of our hens. The tallest, stoutest valley oak for miles around grew there. We dubbed it the Magic Oak and savored its protective silhouette against our sunsets, summer and winter. The almond orchards beyond our boundary had been abandoned for many years. Star thistle grew thick between the trees, and where it gave way to oat grass the pheasants nested. We grew accustomed to their sudden barking in the midmorning silences, and again toward evening, and we enjoyed the racket the magpies made from their olive-tree nests. The foliage in the olive grove formed a low ceiling, and when the magpies left for the season there was a sweet hush between the twisted trunks, where tender grasses made a thin, cool carpet. Finally, though, the chain saws came. Workers started in at 7 every morning, cutting swaths through the almond trees up toward us from the blacktop. Then came the heavy equipment--bulldozers, backhoes. The land around our five acres was flattened and streets were carved and pressed and paved. Pipe was laid, street lamps erected. They severed our phone line eight times. When they reached the olive orchard they laid their chain saws down. The trees were just hitting their stride, really, old as they were, and were worth good money. Once a week a great machine came and scooped another dozen out of the ground, roots and all, and stacked them on flatbeds bound for a Palm Springs golf course. We hung on tight as we could. But the landlord finally caved in to a developer from San Diego, and before long we were heaping our things into trailers and trucks and wending our way back to the city. Trees get in the way of earthmovers, and every one of ours had been flagged for cutting. The first new residents of Creekside Estates, Phase I, were unloading their moving vans just as we left to make way for Phase III. There was no time for them to acquaint themselves with the Magic Oak, and I doubt they missed it when it was gone.

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 21:16:39 GMT

The months preceding Jesse's birth were difficult ones. We lived in a strange city. We had little. I was 22 years old. My son Josh was nearly three. He was my golden boy, my precious firstborn, full of light and joy one moment, torment and tears the next. We lived in a bathroomless apartment in the basement of the Straight Creek Journal, in a house owned by Medill McC. Barnes, on York Street in Denver, across from City Park and the Denver Zoo, on the slums' fringe. (Our toilet and bathing facilities lay beyond our door at the far end of a spooky hallway.) Because we had no windows of our own, Josh and I traveled often through town on city buses and watched the streets and sidewalks and traffic pass us by like 3-D movies. After supper on the hot evenings of my eighth, ninth, tenth months, we'd catch the bus that started its route across the street and make the circuit that took in the suburbs at its southwest extreme. The two of us, our faces pressed to the window, watched as the decrepitude and trash faded gradually into the uniform sterility of new tract housing. The bus route ended in a shopping mall, and there Josh and I would disembark and walk quickly to the ice cream shop at the far side of the steaming black parking lot, and I would buy one sticky, dripping vanilla cone for us, and then we'd board the same bus, the day's last bus, just moments before it left and journey home to our little apartment in the dark. These were our evenings in the long days before Jesse arrived.

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 20:06:32 GMT

Three Scenes from Eureka I. After my second husband left us, after the miscarriage and my brother's long pneumonia, I moved my family to the coast, to the ground floor of a mauve Victorian at the top of F Street in Eureka. It was our first apartment. We always had lived in houses before. I knew our yelling would not set well with the neighbors. During our three months there I practiced dealing with domestic issues in lowered tones. It was a good thing, being forced to remain calm. And it was just as well then that I pawned the stereo to get money for gasoline and laundry soap and cat food--items not included in the fat sacks we got at the food bank. Those weeks we would climb the steep sidewalks toward home with our bags of half-rotted celery, summer squash, stale sourdough bread, withered beets (Dead beets for deadbeats, I quipped), and four pounds of American processed cheese, despised by one and all. The boys were old enough then to understand the seriousness of our predicament, and they did not complain when I handed them lunch sandwiches of inedible cheese guck and called them to suppers made up entirely of root vegetables. II. I got up very early and went to the kitchen and wrote letters until the residue of blanket-warmth had evaporated and the chill of the real world began to seep through my several sweaters. Then I made coffee and watched out the windows, determining the wind's direction by the plumes of smoke from the stacks in the harbor. At night the soft orange sun went down behind the pulp mills, placing the complex in flattering silhouette. The early mornings, though, gave the factories an underlit, science-fiction cast. They glowed menacingly on the water, incessantly generating their sour perfumes, the essences of that city. Our cat Moth deserted us there. It had taken me time to feel close to her. She was stupid, and a glutton besides, and overgenerous with her affection. I was forever tossing her off the bed or out of the kitchen or shutting her in a bedroom to keep her off a visitor's lap. It was only after we introduced a new pet into the household that I began to develop a fondness for and even to empathize with the displaced Moth. But it was too late. She became ill-tempered and withdrawn. She growled and spat. We had hoped she would come to love the kitten Basket, but then we moved to Eureka, that foul-smelling town, into an apartment that reeked of dogs. It was too much to ask of her. Moth, who so rarely in her life had ever ventured farther out of doors than the porch steps, fled. III. Day after day dawned gray and melancholy. I awoke to the alarm resentful, puffy, with waterlogged eyeballs and stones in my brain, and lay under the covers until I heard mail clunk into the box on the other side of the wall--signaling hope, a time to stand clear of blankets and move forward. And then one morning I awoke with gladness in my heart. I leaped to the kitchen to make pineapple breakfast cake and reconstitute the orange juice and start the morning coffee. Even in my sleep I must have sensed a shift in the barometer: the light through the windows was bright and warm; not a shred of fog or cloud remained. The children slept on until, impatient with feeding only myself and bored with my solitude, I went to their rooms and exclaimed about the cake, and flipped up the windowshades as flappingly as I could manage, and let the clear, deliciously cruel sunlight come at them full-force before they could defend themselves. I think they were happy to see me so happy and to know I was lonely for them. No one protested. A flurry of clean laundry was flung about, socks and underwear flumped down next to each dresser, everyone trying to put their clothes away quickly, to clear the brain's cobwebs and complete pre-breakfast rituals. Immediately after eating the boys rushed to their bicycles and were gone, to the old-town comic-book and junk shops, and to the docks for more reeking starfish to bring home. My young half-brother who lived with us, a boy with Down syndrome, sat in the dim living room like Gautama Siddhartha and peered at me through his toy binoculars, where I sat in the next room in the broad sunbeam reading and gulping down coffee and waiting for the mail.

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 18:27:07 GMT

A BREED APART (1991) Me and Annabelle, we're outlaws. For example, today I was pulled over for expired registration. I stood on the sidewalk chatting with the highway patrolman about this and that, old VWs mostly, while he wrote up the warning, when he stopped writing and said, "You've got a good little watchdog there." I looked over and sure enough there was Annabelle's jackal face glaring out the back window of my old Beetle. She was standing full height, front feet splayed on the back of the back seat, ready to spring into action. "She'll take care of you all right," the cop said. He was a kindly highway patrolman. "Ranchers around here use those to herd cows, you know." "She's still a pup," I said, "but I suppose I'll have to get her a cow." The cop laughed. We're outlaws, Annabelle and me. It's like in that movie, where the golden-hearted convict says, "I ain't a good man. But I ain't the worst, either. I'm just a breed apart." That's me and Annabelle. In the movies the "breeds apart" always get blown away in the end. The world's no place for those who claim no extreme. It's that way in the movies, and I believe it's that way in the real world, too. I sure as hell can't find a place in it. Bobby had that problem. He ended up killing himself when he was only 24. In the note, among other things, he wrote, "I really loved Sam, you know." That's me. Then he gassed himself with car exhaust on the cold shoulder of some highway in the Mojave. My mom--his much older half-sister--called to tell me he was dead. I was married, living in the Midwest, and had just given birth to my first child. I always figured the baby's coming had something to do with Bobby's going. I didn't react when she told me this. That must have disappointed her; she has a great thirst for drama. But Bobby had died in my heart years before--had to, or the guilt would have done me in. His actual death, and even the way he died, seemed inevitable, seemed like a book closing on the only logical end. Anyway, now it's just me and Annabelle. I tell her she's lucky. It's the decade of the dog. They're everywhere--TV, movies--half the people I meet anymore just got puppies, it seems like. And look at me. I'm the last person I ever thought would turn into a doggie dame. But about a year ago dogs started replacing cats in my dreams, cats that had kept me company almost every night since I was 11 years old. I knew I was being prepared. When Brian and Paula's bitch got pregnant by mistake last spring, I knew what was coming. I held Annabelle--seventh-born in the litter of nine--in my hand when she was two days old, and I said to myself, She's here. I didn't say it out loud, though. As far as Brian and Paula knew I still despised dogs, and they made no puppy offers. But it was obvious soon enough. Annabelle was antisocial from the start, always off playing alone while the other pups tumbled and romped together. Whenever I came to visit she'd waddle over and sit quietly on my foot, little white furball with a black tadpole patch over her right eye, just like she was at home there. The day they brought her to my house and put her in my arms was one of the happiest days of my life. Holding her close to me at that moment I felt just as blissed-out as when my sons were born. Now it's just me and her. Sometimes I hold her so tight I can't believe she can breathe. "Don't leave me, Annabelle," I whisper. "Don't get run over. Don't get lost in the woods. Don't die of a dog disease. Please don't ever go." Worse than a lovesick lover. But Annabelle understands. And she doesn't abuse her power. If she leaves me I'll discorporate; my atoms will simply come unglued. Not long ago my youngest boy, wearing a heavy-duty backpack and carrying a duct-taped cardboard box of belongings under one arm and a sleeping bag under the other, boarded a train for Portland, Oregon, and life as a grownup. I imagine him out there becoming his own man. Annabelle got here just in time. Who am I now, pup? The stone's rolled back, and I'm empty inside. It's my belly that's so hollow--the aching cave under my ribs. If I could fit Annabelle in I'd finally be whole. Annabelle's my soul. I played role after role for years, just following my instincts. Now I've taken Annabelle and fled to the mountains. At first I felt safe here. True, the isolation and cold and unrelenting black of night hold their own terrors. But at least I was safe from the depredations of relatives and acquaintances, safe from everyone I know. Saved, really, from their disinterest. When they ignore me in their midst it pains me, but if I'm out of reach, then there's a good reason for it, and that's a comfort. Up here I planned to confront the emptiness and see if something couldn't be made of it. Instead, all the grief and anger and guilt I ever locked down deep within me is surfacing and demands to be acknowledged. I remember a childhood spent observing, trying to emulate the behaviors of my peers and seniors, groping my way through adolescence, and then leaping away the instant the calendar ticked "18" to marry and reproduce. Give me a function. I didn't know what else to do. I am a well. And my boys kept me well out of it, my well-self. And now they're gone. As I fall at last, here's Annabelle, shoved like a staff into my panicky hands, lodged in the opening, saving me. Annabelle and me. A breed apart.

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 06:22:34 GMT

One time I was healed by the Reverend David Paul. It was something. I always loved to watch the Bible-thumpers on late-Sunday-night TV in those days. Look at this, I'd say to the kids. This is better than any circus. Their fiery eyes and passionate performances fascinated me no end. And then one week the wan but convincing blond Pentecostal David Paul came to the fairgrounds from St. Louis to preach for two days and collect enough money to pay his Sunday-night rent at Channel 12. So I had to go. The scene was like Elmer Gantry meets low-rent American Fellini. A huge dismal old auditorium, mostly empty. At one side on a small portable stage Brother Harold played a lightweight portable organ and Brother Don played a cheap set of drums and they sang gospel songs for an hour before Reverend Paul came out to preach. I wish I could remember what they looked or sounded like. Brother Harold's wife's sister sold cassette tapes of his music from a card table. Forty or 50 quiet sad-looking people sat in rows on metal folding chairs, all women except for a couple of Mexican men who were there with their families. The women--obese, or old, or bony, or lonely, or in groups, red-haired women with white roots and white-haired women with black roots. When it was time to give money I went up to where the Reverend with his wife and child stood holding the plastic wastebasket, even though I didn't have any money, just so I could shake hands with him. I put my nothing in the basket and he took my hand in both his soft slender hands and shook it hard and put his face up close to mine and looked right through my eyes into my mind and whispered Bless you! so hard, like he was pleading with God to bless me. Afterward my hand tingled. It smelled of men's cologne all evening while he preached. When it was time, I stood up with all those who needed spiritual or mental healing and he healed us together from a distance. And then I went up for the hands-on. A dozen of us stood shoulder to shoulder and David Paul went down the line, speaking and shouting in tongues, with his man behind us--Brother Don, that would be--to help anyone who might be overwhelmed by the laying on of hands. Those of us in the line kept our eyes tightly closed, and we rocked a little with the rhythm of the Reverend's glossolalia. When he got to me he gripped the top of my head hard with one hand and shouted HEAL!, and a violent jolt of electricity passed from the top of my head down through me and out my feet into the floor. It knocked the wind right out of me, and I vibrated, and I went back a little and could feel Brother Don's hand supporting me; my knees wanted to cave in, and it was all I could do to stand there while Reverend Paul finished up with the others. I stood shakily in the line holding hands with a very small very white elderly woman named Mary on my left and a very fat very lovely young housewife in a flowered dress on my right. Later, when we were back in our chairs, Brother Harold began to pray, and everyone closed their eyes for the prayer, and while we stood there with our eyes closed David Paul and his petite blonde wife and their handsome blond baby slipped out silently and were gone. In the parking lot I sat in my car in the dark and shook and shook until I thought I could drive home. Halfway home I pulled over and shook some more, and then a great calm descended on me and I felt good then and drove the rest of the way with no problem. Two days later I came down with encephalitis--a brain inflammation--no one could guess the source of (it was February or March, still pretty cold, and there weren't any mosquitoes out yet). I was ill and in great pain for two weeks. I joked feebly that it was the wages of my insincerity, of abusing spiritual privileges, of seeking to be healed just to see what it felt like, just so I could write about it 18 years later in a blog or something.