My mother's parents were Joseph and Maude Vernon; a week ago while cooking my weekly fare of beans and chicken, mom said to me "have you ever been in a situation where you weren't a victim." She was responding to my explanation of the ethical conundrum I faced on my last job herding dead people's estates through the Los Angeles Superior Court. I had been a probate analyst for a private investigator out of Tucson. Because the "marks" in this racket are dead and unable to fend for themselves, and because it is the largest court west of the Mississippi, "flowing shit" doesn't begin to describe what passes for ethics within that unique community. When she made that comment, I wanted to slug her, but she is my mother, so I finished cooking my beans and chicken for the week. That morning we'd been to where I had created a cairn for my recently deceased father - her first husband. I gathered the majority of stones while on every-other-day runs in parts of the Southwest and Northwest where I had been searching for a stone carving studio; my older siblings having made attending to my father so difficult, this activity was the most constructive way I could see to spend my time. My father knew what I was doing and approved - though he couldn't quite understand why I was not always at his side, he knew I was doing the best I knew how. I brought mom to the wetlands at Bolsa Chica where I have begun the cairn, so she could know better my heart and maybe see i do not hate on my brother and sister, but honor my father's memory; when we arrived that morning, all that remained of my effort was sage and incense. Nearly all the stones I had collected had been stolen. Bob Dylan has said, "every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick…" - I was not laughing. To understand this essay you will need to know the living people I describe are for the most part, loving, caring individuals manifesting as much good into the world as they know how - 10 months before his death, pop broke the thigh knuckle at his hip socket. The wound was inoperable, so he set the bone himself like some desert animal in the scrub - mending it enough to take 22 steps, 22 steps at 86 years old with a broken leg. Yes this is an essay about my grandfather Joseph…he, like my father, and like myself are not amongst those my mother considers to be strong men.
I cannot speak authoritatively about my orphan grandfather, for he died 10 years before I was born; I do know that my own father was all about questions, so I can't think of a better way to honor them both than to begin the process of learning about my grandfather by raising as many questions as possible. For any investigator, much less a rank amateur such as myself: rule 1) what are the facts?
Grandpa Joseph was an orphan from a largely Bohemian enclave in Montour, Iowa; his adoptive parents were reportedly abusive; he fled while still a teen ending up in Nevada, by way of Utah; married twice - two children from his first marriage; he married my grandmother in 1925 - a college educated woman 20 years his junior. She bore him 3 children whom were largely raised in the midst of the "great depression"; he was an itinerant miner and a gas station manager/attendant. He set off the first explosion breaking ground for what was to become the Hawthorne Nevada Munitions Dump the same day my mother was born - July 19, 1928. He provided for his family through the depression; left a job in the Highway Department secured for him by his sister-in-law; was abandoned by his wife after ten years of marriage; died from cancer at the home of that same estranged wife in 1944. He spent many years in the Nevada desert, has been described as voluble. My cousin, his eldest grandchild recently wrote an outstanding sixty page research document on my grandmother's exploits in which his existence was defined within a dozen sentences.
Not a lot to go on…; my mom was 16 when her father died, and I've only just begun to get a sense of the emptiness she may have felt. I was 56 when my father died; I'm not sure which would be harder - knowing someone many years and having to say good-bye, or never really getting a chance to know someone and having to say good-bye. It matters not, for all we can do is say good-bye - again with those thorny facts. Is my effort to learn about a dead relative just the denial part of the Kubler-Ross paradigm? Am I resisting grieving for my father and diverting myself from the messy interior work with this essay, or is it an honest reaction to what I feel was a weighted effort to exalt my grandmother's role in the family history, while giving short shrift to my grandfather's lesser accomplishments? Already, I have more questions than I have answers, so I must be on the right trail. Much of what is difficult about this essay centers around the kinship I feel with someone I never met. For example, using a quote about the men of those times, my cousin describes my grandfather as, " - a chaser of rainbows." I am a stone cutter / artist who makes 3 dimensional objects with 2 dimensional vision. I understand 3 dimensions, but due to a congenital anomaly everything I see is one eye at a time; I am an artist - a cyclops, who at the end of his career, has no significant following, yet I refuse to quit. One doesn't get much closer to rainbow-chaser than that. Herein lies the rub, is it inherently wrong to chase rainbows? I can appreciate my cousin's defense of my poor sainted grandmother whose only real crime was to be seduced by a feckless miner in the wilds of Nevada during the "Roaring 20's." Yet from everything I have heard and learned, one doesn't approach the Nevada desert with anything but a keen sense of determination and no small measure of self-reliance. What I am learning about my grandfather is that he was not educated; his in-laws were not fond of him, dismissing him as an uneducated "Yankee," ~ a working class stiff - a rough cobb; he did not assume personal responsibility for his short-comings, rather accusing others for his continued job changes. He was inappropriate enough to comment to his fourteen year-old daughter that her mother had "gone to seed" by the time she was 30 - an accurate description according to her middle daughter, but no less inappropriate; attentive to his children, relishing the "kiddy's" mealtime - a mealtime that was often subsidized monthly by his sister-in-law, my "maiden" great aunt. He was also indulgent enough with his middle child for her to quip "what's on your conscience," when he would rue out loud about the interest of young rakes for his too-beautiful-for-words daughter. One gets the sense that my grandfather was a perfect subject for the patronizing behavior which my grandmother and great-aunt resorted to - possibly as a buffer from what certainly must have seemed the very judgmental world of the 30's, 40's and McCarthy 50's of these United States.
So how do I evolve out of this scathing, pernicious, gratuitous judgement that oozes throughout the legacy of my grandfather's dumb luck? This is my 3rd attempt at an essay about this man. Began over 3 months ago, I remain no less determined to find a more balanced history for this human without a champion - that I am his namesake feels more like one of Mr. Dylan's "dirty tricks" than any real psychic burden, though I'd allow some uncomfortable parallels between our two lives, including multiple marriages; a checkered job history and an affinity for rock formations. But, more than rehabilitating his good name, or giving a voice to this man, I want to attenuate my own knee-jerk-fire-from-the-hip-judgement - judgement of my siblings, my mother, myself, our world. I feel strongly about this because my own father believed it possible to make a better world and that doesn't square with a myopic view of the world. He also was a chaser of rainbows able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, except he actually lived the part; when I am dead and gone, it will be a part of my eternal pleasure to have witnessed him, armed with a broken limb, recognize someone else's pain and search for ways to alleviate that person's suffering, or to make humanity smile, one person at a time for no other reason than to see a smile emerge. I sit here now smiling, for I may be able to finish my life doing what I believe I am meant to do - create: in stone, on canvas, on paper ~ out of thin air… Pop synthesized his ideas into simple terms about where one puts one's energy. For example, when mom wanted to relegate my ethical struggle with a complex socio-economic financial racket to "victimhood" I could have figuratively engaged in the violence of her thinking, or finish cooking food? acting on any destructive impulse is a long road to nowhere - same place I'd land if I were to attack my siblings, my cousin's scholarship, even … (and god help me I have to say it ~ grufyti ~ ) the results in each case differ only in dimension from what has happened as a result of the hatred focused on the twin trade towers… there just isn't time enough good feeling to waste if your desire is to make, create, contemplate or admire anything. The simple inexorable physics of existence drives this point home most effectively the day you die.
From this position I seek ways in which a more generous reading of Grandpa Joseph's life might attenuate some sadness in the twilight of my mother's complex history - a history rich in contrasts, but deficient in satisfaction. My mother has done her best with the cards she was dealt. I believe the same thing about her father & mother, my father and my siblings. So what happens to all this good intention? Grandpa Joseph, by all accounts, was not a stupid man, uneducated, but not stupid. At some point after his wife and children fled for the safety and comfort of the more conventional life available to them in 1930's Los Angeles he had to have asked himself the same question I have asked myself on more than one occasion - which is, "what the fuck is going on?" I'm only partially kidding - self awareness, unfortunately is not the privileged domain of scholarship, or even a guaranteed outcome of education; certainly not a reflection of business acumen, but can be too often found in the misery of life's more difficult experiences - I believe my grandfather had more than his share of unhappiness, self-inflicted or otherwise - it just doesn't matter… What does matter is that his life was defined by the desire to improve his lot; I don't know about mining gold, but there is little question in my mind that if I am a better man today - it is because of the women who have helped me; is this the reason that my grandfather took on a young quiet unassuming college-educated woman from the deep south - a woman who was to subsequently abandon him for the economic and emotional sanctuary of her sister's home? Did my grandfather want nothing more out of life than to perpetuate his DNA ? Is there a thread of human logic which dictates that a solitary man requires a woman to comprehend the complexity of human existence or were his choices just to make his life tolerable? What about the role of education? Did what my grandmother learn in college inform her choice about an orphan Bohemian miner as husband and sperm donor in the unforgiving badlands of 1920's Nevada? Too soon my mother will not be available to answer questions concerning my grandfather or the larger issues of life - how to reconcile unfavorable public opinion with self-respect; what is the nature of conceit; what is humility? If my grandfather was a decent man, why is he not more honored within the family constellation? My father had confidence about the person I have become, this was the result of much exchange between us, peaceful and not so much - ultimately my father demonstrated that what he thought of me wasn't the key, but how I think of myself that bears scrutiny; does my mother need special assurance about her self worth because she had so little time with her father, or do we all of us need to help the other know that it is alright?
jts 15/9/2011
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