3. Spumoni Ice Cream, Red Tricycles, and Pink Poodles

Our father was a master of profanity. He could weave it like poetry into any sentence, about any topic. He wove it into advice, into observations, directions, and into philosophy.  It was so deeply embedded in his own vernacular that he was not even aware of it any more. And really, hearing it so consistently, we all forgot about it too. It was no more jarring to us than having a father with a particular regional accent. It really only raised the eyebrows of people who were not used to profanity outside the confines of some male dominated place.

 I once stood, as a grown woman, in the Navy Exchange in San Diego and heard a young sailor, who was examining a pair of Reef sandals, say, “Jesus Christ these mother fucking things went up in price since I was last here.” He looked up and saw me standing there, his eyes got wide and then he apologized to me, saying, “I’m so sorry M’am, I’m been out on the ship for six months and I got used to it, I forget I’m in port again.” No worries. I get it. And that, right there summed up Dad , but, in his case he never really remembered that he was no longer in the infantry and that others might not need the bravado of curses mixed in and used as verbs, nouns, and the occasional speech place holder, standing in for the innocuous Ummmmm.

When he asked, “Do you have shit for brains?”  we knew not to have our spirits crushed. It wasn’t that he was verbally abusing us; he just wasn’t taking the time to pretty up the question. What he was really asking was, “Stop. What is the matter with you? What were you thinking?” Certainly, in our society it is not considered good form, or advisable , to ask your children if they have shit for brains, as a drill instructor might scream at a young recruit in the Army. But, Dad never considered it. He just opened up his mouth and let whatever he was thinking, fly forth from his brain, completely unedited.

When he told you there was no need for you to even wish to visit a particular place, because he had already been there, and it was, “the asshole of creation,” what he meant was to save you some trouble. It never occurred to him that anyone would still have the need to find out for themselves if that were true. Or that possibly, his idea of the asshole of creation, could be another person’s idea of paradise.  

One day we had taken a day trip to Santa Barbara, and for a special treat, Dad had stopped at the Save-on ice cream counter. He bought all of us a single scoop cone of spumoni ice cream, that strange Italian flavor with nuts and bits of candied dried fruit in it.  We all got back in the VW and drove a short way off to enjoy our ice creams. We got out of the car and stood under the eucalyptus trees, seagulls calling from the cement retaining wall nearby.  I had been licking away on my cone since the moment we left the Save-on doors, and I was savoring this strange new flavor.  Dad, who had not got a head start on his cone because he had been driving, finally took maybe two licks of his cone and made a strange face. He decided he couldn’t stand the flavor. He held the offending cone of spumoni out away from him in one giant hand and then quickly grabbed our cones from us. With both hands full of ice cream cones now, he marched over to a nearby garbage dumpster and threw them in. We stood there staring after them. He really had just thrown our ice cream cones away.  He turned back, pleased, and muttered something to the effect that he had taken care of that. Intimating that we no longer had to suffer through the horrors of that god awful spumoni flavor, for, with his quick thinking and lightening fast reflexes, he had rescued the entire family. I remember thinking, “but, I liked the spumoni.”  I never voiced the thought though. It wouldn’t have done any good. If Dad did not like something, there was no way, in his mind, that anyone else could feel differently.

Conversely, if Dad did not need something, it never occurred to him that anyone else might need it themselves. This, I suppose, was how I came to be a four year old with no toys. I don’t mean few toys. I mean no toys. No doll. No blocks. No plastic sand pails with little tiny hoes to play at the beach. No colorful rounded Fisher Price “peoples” or wooden puzzles of America that I seen in my friend Sarah Maggie’s house. An adult friend of the family finally took notice of my lack of toys and brought me a doll that would wet herself, which was rather fascinating. But, what I really wanted was a tricycle. I wanted a tricycle like Sarah Maggie had. A red one, with flowing plastic tassels from the handle bars. I was pretty sure you could get one at some store, but not at any store that I had been to, those only sold food it seemed.  I asked for one, but I did not get one. It may have been that my parents could not afford one. Or it may have been that they did not think it was as important as I did at the time.

My older brother, Forrester, took pity on me and made me a tricycle of sorts. Well, really, if you had a vivid imagination you could pretend it was a red tricycle with flowing plastic tassels. In reality, Forrester had taken the white Styrofoam lid off of an old Styrofoam cooler, and then he had taken a wire coat hanger and bent it up and through the cooler lid, so that they approximated ape hanger handle bars. He then showed me how to straddle the lid like a hobby horse, and holding on to the coat hanger handle bars, run as fast as you could in graceful arcs through the yard, pretending you were on a red tricycle. Fortunately, I did have a vivid imagination and I was pretty much thrilled with his ingenuity.  

36 years later when I described my pretend tricycle to my therapist, her mouth fell open in that incredulous expression that one hopes never to see on their therapist’s face. I considered telling her that she really should go back to school and retake the class in maintaining a poker face of impassivity no matter what your client tells you, but I just fumbled along wondering if she even believed me. She sat there silent, with no words of wisdom to add. Nothing comforting like, “it’s neither good, nor bad, it is just is.” or some other invaluable phrase which therapists fall back on when they cannot think of what else to say. Later I wrote an email to my siblings about my therapist’s face when I described the cooler lid tricycle. I thought they might be the only people in the world who would think it was funny. My brother Eric wrote back a vaguely comforting note, which essentially said, therapists do no good with things like this. There is no frame of reference they can possibly have, it’s too far out. They are, he said, “like a fucking pink poodle at a pit bull fight.” And of course, he was right.

Chapter Two Maybe

It was the early 1970s when this story really begins. These are the times of my first memories, when they were first etched in the little memory bank of a small serious blond headed girl.  My mother reports that my first full sentence, spoken from the back seat of the 1964 Mustang Convertible was, “ I wonder why?” She said this so startled my father that he stopped the car on the side of the road and turned around to stare at me, because, he said, his own father’s dying words had been, “I wonder what will become of me?” It may be that I am Alfred Rupp, reincarnated to endure life as a woman, but it is far more likely that I was contemplating something that I just couldn’t figure out. I’ve wondered why about a lot of things in the last 41 years.

These were the times when I was still the only child born of my mother and father’s union. The times before my three younger sisters were born and our family was completed.  We lived in a sleepy little coastal California town, with fishing boats in the harbor, and cattle grazing placidly on the rounded golden hillsides. I lived there with my mother, father, and my two older half brothers, one just graduated and the other still in high school. We lived on a part of an old ranch; now all that remained of the original spread was a little land, two very small houses, and two old barns, with a creek running down alongside.  One barn was somewhat newer, a hodgepodge of add ons, different colors and textures, and not terribly attractive, but the original barn to the property was tall and quintessentially barn red, held together with ancient square iron nails. It had a certain stateliness, which, even as a child, I could recognize. The barnyard, smelling of rose geraniums, made up much of my world in those days .

 My parents and I lived in one house which we called the Creek House, where the whole family gathered for meals. My brothers slept in the bunk house. My oldest brother, Forrester, smiled more, made me toys, and said kinder things to me, which I very much appreciated.  The younger of my brothers, Al, spent most of his afternoons sullenly smoking cigarettes or trying to learn to play “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” on my grandmother’s old guitar. He was generally dissatisfied with life, and wanted little to do with new baby sisters, stepmothers , healthy vegetarian dinners, or doing well in high school;  and he wanted everything to do with cool cars, driving, surfing, McDonald’s hamburgers, and making out with “chicks”. I adored them both and wanted them to adore me just as much.

For my father, the sun rose and set on my brothers. Dad had three sons die, one from leukemia and the other two born prematurely. Later he had lost the sons that were now living with us for some years in a custody dispute, and concurrently had lost another two  children in an even nastier custody battle with his third ex-wife. A seventh son was being raised across town by another former lover. Dad had left wreckage of past relationships strewn all the way up the Pacific Coast in the 25 years since he returned from the war. After  suffering so much loss, he was married now for a fourth time, and my father really had his heart set on a renewed relationship with the two sons he finally had close.  He truly loved having sons and had such high hopes that they would all work side by side for years to come. Though Dad loved his daughters, for many years, he did not love us with the same understanding and shining excitement that he loved his sons.

 He was trying to make up for lost time, buying them cars, and rebuilding the engines alongside the boys, desperately trying to create male bonds where extended periods of  time apart during their adolescence had  fractured closeness. In his desire to repair the past, Dad often overlooked the needs of the present. I went without bigger clothes or new shoes one year, because the money was being spent on car parts and allowances for my brothers. Our Dad wanted the love and approval of the sons he had long neglected; he wanted to fix the past so badly, to repair the holes left by absence that he often put the needs of his newest family off.

I did not yet understand at age 4 that there were clear gender divisions in my Dad’s mind. I spent a lot of timing tagging along, and thinking myself a real part of all the action that went on with Dad and my brothers. In reality, I stood just outside the circle of males, small and mostly unnoticed. An interloper, as much as any family dog who might wander over to have a look at what was happening and stand amongst the people.  Dad and my brothers spent a considerable amount of time discussing and working on cars there in the big old red barn.  I thought it was a mysterious and delightful place. I remember it being filled with a pleasant mixture of warm dusty scents. I still get nostalgic when I smell old wood floors and WD-40. My mother rarely, if ever, went to the barn, she was always busy with some unwanted household chore, and I think she recognized it correctly, as the inner sanctum of male bonding.

The conversations the older boys had from under, and above, car engines, sounded fascinating and grown up to me. They used serious, important sounding words like carburetor, valves, and alternator;  mixed in always with a liberal dose of expletives and off color jokes. I loved it and I wanted to be included in it all. I would hang out behind them, imitating the way my older brothers stood, their perplexed expressions as they contemplated an engine that would not crank. Occasionally, one of my brothers would grace me with some notice and ask me to fetch a tool that was out of reach, and hand it under the car.

One afternoon, as we were all leaving the barn, after some successful mechanical fix, Al hocked up a loogie and spit it in the dust of the barnyard.  It was a fine loogie which rolled through the dust with ease.  I figured that must be the thing to do after finishing a hard days work, so I followed suit.

 “Akkkk pppffftttt.” I spat right on the ground. 

My  spit balled up and rolled in the dirt almost as perfectly as my 17 year old brother’s had. I paused, watching it, all clear and shivering  jell-o  like, dust gathering on the surface as it rolled. Surely, that had to impress my sullenly cool guitar playing older brother.  I could spit almost as beautifully as he could, and at such a young age. Somehow, I expected some notice, some accolade for this beautifully hocked loogie. The forward walking motion of all the males around me had stopped, so I pulled my gaze from my own spit ball as it came to a quivering rest, and looked up at my Dad and brothers.  Their faces registered shock and disgust.

My dad’s eyebrows were drawn together in some sort of profound disapproval, and not only was he looking at me with disapproval, now he was yelling at me too.

“Alice, “ he bellowed, “ that is the most ugly, horrible, fucking, disgusting thing for a pretty little girl like you, to do.  I never want to see you do anything like that EVER again. That was God damned disgusting.”

I was acutely embarrassed and confused; I can remember looking up at my brother Al, who had, only seconds before, inspired my spitting with his own magnificent loogie. He was so surprised that I had done this odious thing that he had forgotten to be broodingly sullen, and was now simply glaring disapproval at me. I looked back at Dad, who seemed not to care that Al had just done the very same thing.  In fact, the irony of it did not seem to have registered at all, with any of them.

“Do you understand me?” Dad demanded now, at the top of his deep voice. All three sets of male eyes stared at me. Dad drove the point home, “you are nice little girl and nice pretty little girls Do.Not.Spit.Ever.”

My brothers nodded in agreement.

  I remember my face burning with embarrassment, as I blinked back tears. I was too proud to allow myself to cry there in front of them. And I was utterly confused. How could such a great moment of solidarity have turned out so badly?  Obviously I had stumbled upon a previously unspoken gender division: those that are allowed to spit and those that were not. There in our barnyard, a four year old girl began to understand the term double standard, though it was years before a name was put to the feeling.  I had accidentally discovered a set of expected behaviors which were placed on me by virtue of gender, by virtue of being a nice pretty little girl, expected behaviors which simply did not apply to my brothers. I remember wondering how I could be a full member of this group, if I was not allowed to behave as they were? And why, I remember wondering, if it was disgusting when I did it, was it not disgusting when a boy did it? So, if I had this straight in my little child’s brain, it appeared that a pretty little girl could not spit, and a pretty little girl did not need new shoes as much as a boy needed a new car.  It was the first, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last lesson on gender differences and injustice.

The Beatnik’s Daughter Tries To Explain

The only people I was exposed to, between the tender ages of 2 and 10, who had any foundation in a religious faith at all, were our Mormon neighbors, and a few Mormon childhood friends of my father. I desperately wanted what they had. That serene glow from within. The grace that comes from an unwavering knowledge and faith in a carefully crafted plan.  The order and comfortable predictable-ness of their lives, where things were carefully planned, step by step, and where those things which they planned always worked out. Individually they had a plan, and more importantly I could see that their collective planning was able to create great impact for the common good of their community. I craved the safety of their stockpiled canned goods and 72 hour emergency packs.  The predictable-ness of their parenting. The love they showed in their measured voices. The predictable-ness of family board games, Family Home Evenings, and sweet homemade ice cream at family gatherings. I craved the predictable-ness of Sunday mornings where everyone arrived the meeting house, where they were all on the same page, and nothing had to be explained. I craved the Ivory soap cleanness of it. And I craved the polite kindness.

 I craved to be in the belly of that community, to have the knowledge that you were not alone to deal with life. A place where a room full of women worked together to sew a quilt for a newlywed bed, or showered a new mother with all the material support she could need, but even more importantly, all the psychological support she needed. The stories they shared, the helping hands they offered, nurturing her into a confident wife and mother herself.  I knew that, instinctively, as I played under the quilt rack at the one and only quilting bee my mother attended with a Mormon friend. I listened to the soft voices, the gentle laughter, as the women told stories above me. And there, playing on the floor under that partially finished quilt of community, I felt wrapped in a comforting blanket of love and safety. I wanted that feeling every day.

My own life was unpredictable and given to the random rages and ramblings of my father, who’s inability to follow anything in any sequential order, or to follow any man made, or God made plan,  left our own lives uncertain, with no ability to control or predict our own destiny. I felt our family was alone, adrift in a small boat with no ability to steer our craft, just bouncing along without a charted course, utterly helpless against the shifting and always unpredictable currents of life.

 Certainly, I was loved, but it wasn’t with measured voices. Instead, it was unsteady, with a lot of yelling by my father, my mother often dissolved in tears, powerless over the loneliness of doing everything the hard way, and by herself. There was so much aloneness for her in those day, and I know her tears were those of grief, missing her sister, with whom she was estranged. Missing  her mother, and  her grandmothers, who had been such an integral part of her life, and who had all died within a relatively short period of time. Missing, really, the support of other women who have gone before you, and who help you learn to move with grace through all the things required of womanhood. Who help you learn to be confident and comfortable in your own skin as a wife and mother – as a woman.

There was equally as much aloneness for us kids, being homeschooled and subject to our father’s own ideas of how to live life. Ideas which few people shared and always required an explanation to others when we did happen to invite people into our lives. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t have a common cultural identity that made for comfortable unspoken understanding. No, we had to explain that we didn’t celebrate Christmas with presents or traditional feasting, not because of anything we held in common with any particularly identifiable religious group…but simply because our father didn’t like it and didn’t believe in such extravagances of time and energy. To explain that we didn’t even have a refridgerator in the house would have been too exhausting.  Our father hated ideas not of his own creation and he saw dependence on others as a sign of weakness.

It probably would have helped then, had someone explained to me that my father was ill. That after the war, after the Purple Heart, he was never quite the same. In hindsight I can see the demons of PTSD which haunted him all his days, which made him who he was, and therefore, in many ways, who we were. But, at the time, he was just Dad, and we were just different.  We were unschooled, because he didn’t trust the educational system and because he didn’t want to be subject to the time constraints and schedule of anyone else. We didn’t have electricity, because he didn’t want to get a permit and have anyone from the city building department, know how many unpermitted building modifications he had made, nor did he want to pay for electricity. We blew out our kerosene lanterns at night and went to sleep in sleeping bags on the floor, because he hated beds. He claimed that since the war, where he slept for only seconds at a time in the foxhole, he could not bare the softness of a bed, preferring instead the hard ground. We slept snugly, lolled not by the hum of forced air heat, or a refrigerator, but by the crackling of the wood fire, and the babble of the creek outside our windows.  We had only a two sets of clothes and kept them in old WWII surplus Musette bags at all times, in case we needed to leave our home suddenly, a symptom of his paranoia of some unnamed danger that lurked outside.

The unnamed danger that always made me feel uneasy, but no one ever explained to me that the unnamed danger was all in his mind now, and had been since he spent years in battle, his adrenal system switched to overdrive. That after years in battle, killing men from the other side, to save his own life and those of his fellow soldiers, he had lost trust in anyone in authority to do what was truly right and just  for mankind. That this was why he no longer answered to any higher authority than himself. They say that there are no atheists in foxholes, but some might say, there are plenty of men who could not understand how a loving God could allow the horrors of war to happen to them at all. My father concentrated on making his environment beautiful. Building things as he liked, repurposing cast offs, and raking patterns in the garden soil beneath the fig trees. All these things, I now recognize as self regulated therapy, in their simplicity and in their avoidance of what he saw as the complications of “life”. I still am not sure whether my own mother understood at the time, how badly damaged he was, or how his experiences of the past were shaping our present, and preventing plans for a future.

To be continued……….

Lessons From a Four Year Old on Creativity

A couple years ago I was attending the high school graduation of a friend’s son. It was one of those lovely early June evenings in Western Massachusetts, where the sun lies low in the sky, stretching the long shadows of voluptuously green leafed maples across the lawns. We had gathered in the football field on folding metal chairs; slapping at the mosquitoes that hovered to feed on our bare ankles, waiting for the Class of 2010 to march onto the field to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance.

As we waited, I began to watch the little girl in the row in front of me.  She was about four years old, with her long blond hair in a ponytail, lose strands tucked behind her ears, and was wearing a cotton summer dress. Her parents had brought a stack of white paper to entertain her during the graduation. She was kneeling in the grass, using the seat of the metal folding chair as a table top. She had a sharp pencil in hand and she was drawing, completely oblivious to all the grownups that were shifting in their seats, looking around for friends to greet, saving seats, and keeping the general busy unrest we adults all exhibit prior to ceremonies such as these.

She was drawing with pure joy. Her little tongue would peek out in concentration as she put pencil to paper and would draw a beautiful woman, or a horse, or dog, or a house with the sun shining over top. She never paused in her drawing to consider whether a line might be off. Never stopped to erase and correct an image. She just drew, in one continuous fluid motion, assured, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her vision was perfection. She completed the drawing within minutes, if not seconds. Then she would stop, put down her pencil and hold the drawing up in front of herself to admire her creation. She would smile at the drawing, sigh in utter contentment, set the drawing on her mother’s lap and begin a new masterpiece on the next piece of blank paper in her pile.

When do we lose that, I pondered, in my metal folding chair behind her.  At what point do doubts begin to surface in our minds that what we create is not perfect? At what point do we first stop to consider that our lines might be off? When do we first lose that confidence and stop drawing to erase?  When do we begin to look at our efforts so critically, that we are afraid to even draw the line in the first place, and begin to believe that our efforts don’t measure up? At what point do we create an arbitrary image of what perfection is, in our own minds? Wouldn’t  it be wonderful if we could hang on to a bit of our inner four year old and maintain the confidence to create with abandon…..and not be afraid to wave it around, show it off, and sigh at it with utter contentment?

Life, Death, and Life.

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp, because dawn has come.” – Rabindranath Tagore

I had never been through the day to day of death before. People that I have known have died, certainly.  I have brought dinners to the families, been to the funerals, and sent condolence cards. But, I had never really attended death before.  I had never sat with it continuously, sat it out, until we all gathered to be with our father at the end.  Our father, the father of the beatniks, a man who was larger than life and whose personality had always transfixed everyone in his presence; a man who had never been quieted by anyone or anything, was quiet as he turned inward, floating for days somewhere between this life and the next.

It was a powerful and a humbling experience. There were moments which transcended time and space. Moments we could not explain other than with the idea that we were in the realm of miracles. It seemed as though time lost meaning as we gathered, waiting, and talking, reliving, reconnecting, and coaching each other and ourselves through the unknown process into some new reality that seemed vaguely illusive.

 It seemed to me that death was really the ultimate surrender. The days were long and warm, the most perfectly beautiful golden light and long shadows our location could bring. We sat on the lawn, day after day, life suspended, smelling the warm rose geraniums in the boxes outside the window where our father lay. My brother commenting that he imagined Dad was hearing our voices in his sleep, the murmured talk, the laughing, the clink of glasses…much like a child is aware of the adults talking as he drifts off to sleep, safe and loved in the room right beside everyone.

Dad was safe, cared for, and loved right in the room next us, as we sat in the setting sun outside his window. There, in those days, we adjusted to being the comforting presence ourselves, as opposed to the ones who had been comforted by the man himself. Then one night, as we slept, the fog slipped in, whispering long tendrils of cool vapor through the yard, deep and thick from the ocean. At the same time, Dad’s spirit slipped out of his body, and freed, swirled away from this life and off to some new unseen realm beyond our understanding.

It was not as I might have imagined it. Much like natural birth was not as I had imagined it. It was raw and earthy, absolutely humbling, intensely intimate, life affirming, clarifying, and it was surprisingly not as sad as I might have imagined. And much like natural childbirth, natural death, also leaves you mentally exhausted, completely awed by the processes of nature, and profoundly grateful.

We will miss our father tremendously. He has shaped each one of us in ways we are still discovering. But our father left us with the greatest gift a man could give; he left us each other.

Chapter Three