Part 1: The Va-Va-Voom Sisters

The Va-Va-Voom Sisters are three sisters who live in the Pacific Northwest, whose first names all start with the letter “V.” I have never met the oldest, V1, who lives in Idaho. Although I haven’t seen them for a while, I consider V2 and V3, whom I met in my last job, when I worked for a library system, as good friends and charmingly eccentric people.

V3, the youngest, told me that their father is an airline pilot. His dream as a dad was to teach all three of his daughters to fly. Unfortunately, they all hate flying and get airsick. I presume they all still love each other, but if you are a parent, don’t get your heart set too much on your children loving your dreams and passions. None of the Va-Va-Voom girls will go up in a plane with dad.

In several chapters, I will describe why I enjoyed knowing them so much.

Final Chapter of a Story of Late Dawning Realization

 

My sister, as with all my siblings, is very intelligent (if quite eccentric). After a slow start, she eventually went to college a couple of times, relatively late in her life. In her forties, she went to the University of Wisconsin and studied Greek Philosophy and Ancient Greek (the language) because she felt like it. Later she got a degree in Library Science (I am not sure where) and became the director of a small library in Vermont, so she could live near her daughter and her two grandchildren, where she lives now.

I suspect that if my niece and her husband lived near us, my barely extended family and my sister’s barely extended family would hit it off well. But it’s impossible to know these things for sure.

 

In any case, a few years ago, I thought again about that meeting at Beelzebub’s apartment with with his “niece” (if indeed she was a relative of his), Lucille. I had completely forgotten Lucille for many years, and had not even made a connection with what happened to my sister. (I had only met Lucille for a few minutes and at that time in my life, constantly moving from high school to high school in different states, my childish mind was in confusion and turmoil.)

Strange as it seems, it only dawned on me suddenly at the age of 60, that Beelzebub was a a serial sexual predator who preyed on young girls such as my sister. Whether Lucille really was his niece

I don’t know. Although I sensed something was wrong by Lucille’s tense, agitated manner, I was far too immature and naive to understand that she was trying to communicate, Help, I am being held prisoner by a rapist!

In retrospect, Beelzebub’s comment to 14-year-old Random about how people would not understand his “unconventional life style” now strikes me with horror.

 

Obviously, my parents had no grasp of this as well. Fairly or unfairly, I hold them responsible for what happened to my sister, However, life is very strange. In this case, a terrible event, the rape of my sister, turned into the birth and blossoming of a wonderful person, my niece J.

 

 

 

Recently, there have been several shocking news items about young woman being held prisoner for long periods of time by an older man who raped the victim over a long period of time, undetected by other people who encountered the victim but did not realize what was happening. The story I tell is slightly different, but not that much.

When I was in high school, my life was a bit in tumult, as we moved frequently and as I attended six different schools, and as I was in immature introvert. I only met Lucille for a few minutes, and forgot about her completely, until my brief encounter with her popped into my mind a few years ago.

Life is very strange. Sometimes something good emerges from something awful.

 

(There is a little more to this story, but I am not willing to put it in my blog. I will send it to a few friends by email, who usually get communication from me by tat method. If you are a reader and want to be on the list, email me at eman_modnar@yahoo.com. At the moment, I am planning to email David, woo, pandemonic, and Pete. That covers most of my regular readers, I think. If I left you out, don’t be insulted; just drop me a line.)

Part 3 of a Story of Late Dawning Realization

I remember J (my niece) visiting us when she was about 12. My wife and I compared her to our daughter, a year or two older, very unfavorably, and predicted that J would be a very messed up adult as she grew older. We lost all contact with my sister and my niece for a number of years.

When we were living in Oregon a number of years ago, J called us one day and told us that she was going to college in California and working in a conservation program for youth. She asked if she could visit us. At the time, my daughter was attending college at Oberlin in Ohio.

When J came to visit us, my wife and I, expecting a very messed up young adult, were surprised to meet a pleasant, mature, self-possessed young woman. We took her out to dinner and had a lovely time. She came to visit us a couple more times, eventually bringing along a boy friend, S, she had met at college. He also proved to be an intelligent, courteous, and delightful young man. Both niece J and boy friend S graduated together with degrees in environmental engineering of some sort. They moved to the east coast of the United States and got married. A few years ago, I attended a couple of family reunions on the East Coast, organized by my Aunt Naomi and financed by her millionaire daughter, my cousin Joanna. Now living in Vermont, both niece J and her now husband S attended. They not only attended, they served as brilliant organizers and facilitators, taking people on hikes through Vermont and later New Hampshire wilderness and invariably being kind, patient and endearing to everyone at the reunion, ranging from little babies to aunts in their seventies.

Being a rude person, I said to my sister, “I am surprised at how well your daughter turned out. When she was a teenager, I thought you were a terrible mother and your daughter would be ruined for life.”

My sister’s answer was, “I was indeed a terrible mother. I have no explanation of how well she has turned out except that she had a lot of strength of character and she attended a Waldorf School.”

[I am a little skeptical of that explanation. My youngest brother and youngest sister attended a Waldorf School and they are both seriously messed up individuals.]

Unfortunately, as my daughter and her partner live here on the West Coast, and J and her husband S live in Vermont, they have never had a chance to meet as adults, nor have their children had a chance to encounter each other. My daughter and her partner, of course, are parents to the inimitable Random Granddaughter, now attending kindergarten at the School for Very Bright Children.

J and S have two children. My sister, very close to my Aunt Rose, like her became a follower of the weird semi-cult of Anthropacifism, based on the teaching of the German nut philosopher Rudolf Steiner. The Anthropacifists are best known in the United States for the Waldorf Schools and for biodynamic farming. My niece’s two children go to a Waldorf school. Although I consider them to be nutty overall, the Waldorf schools have some good points going for them, and bio-dynamic farmers have some success with their method of agriculture, which includes some peculiarities such as planting by phases of the moon.

Part 2 of a Story of Late Dawning Realization

The significance of Lucille’s behavior only popped into my consciousness a couple of years ago, though it should have been apparent to me about 45 years ago, as I shall explain in part three of this post.

About six years after the Rockland County episode with Beelzebub, I was living in Los Angeles, after flunking out of college and going out with Mrs. Random to be. One day I learned that my parents were having great difficulties with my sister D. They decided that she needed to get away from home.

There was a precedent in that they had sent me to live with my aunt Rose (mother’s sister) for a year when I was four years old. I suspect the year with Aunt Rose saved my youthful sanity.

However, my parents told me that my sister was going to stay with Beelzebub for a while, which struck me as very strange. Also, my sister was about 16 years old at the time, instead of four years old as I had been when sent to live with my aunt.

A while later, after I had been married for a little while and our own daughter had been born, I learned that my sister was pregnant, and that Beelzebub was the father. My sister came home, had the baby, raised her daughter as a single mother and never married.

Beelzebub never suffered any consequences for this statutory rape (as it should be described as my sister was underage when she became pregnant) and never paid any child support. As far as I could tell, my parents never took any action to hold Beelzebub to account.

As a young, immature married person I thought of my parents, What were they thinking? but mostly I thought about my my own marriage and my own child. “

Random Granddaughter Executes Her First Commission as an Artist

Sunday, child genius Random Granddaughter is coming to visit. As she does not have a driver’s license yet (as far as I know), I presume she will bring the mommies along. Mrs. Random and I always like to see Mama (my daughter) and Mommy (her out of law partner) along with her little highness (though she is not that little, already being tall enough to play center on a kindergarten woman’s basketball team).

After she announced at the age of five that her career goal was to be an artist (apparently displacing her goal at four of becoming a triple threat fire chief, railroad engineer, and ferry captain), I came up with an artistic commission for her. As I am not very close to my siblings, either geographically or emotionally, I cannot say for instance how old any of them are. However, I still remember the birthday of my brother B (who lives 3000 miles away in Portland, Maine) as well as the birthday of my sister D (who lives a hope skip and a jump away from brother B in Vermont, where she is head librarian of a small library) though they are not close at all for reasons I will not go into.

My other brother J is a little closer in Missouri, though beyond hope emotionally as he is bi-polar. I don’t want to go there as I am close enough already to that mental state. My other sister, P, lives even closer in California, and beyond beyond hope emotionally as she is a “born-again” religious fanatic and a narcissistic monster. I live next door to being a narcissistic monster myself, so I certainly don’t want to be any closer to sister P.

Brother B is about three years younger than I am. I thought to myself, I did not even wish him happy birthday for his 60th birthday. What a terrible big brother am I!

Through the mommies, I asked Random Granddaughter to create a birthday card for my brother in time for his birthday of June 2. A couple of weeks ago an envelope arrived in the mail, inside another envelope. The inner envelope which contained a couple of butterflies painted on it, was sealed. A note from my daughter said that neither she nor Mommy had seen the card as RG had painted it and sealed it into the envelope.

I sealed it in a fresh container envelope and mailed it to brother B in Maine. I emailed him a warning that he was about to receive a birthday card that no one had seen, so I was not sure it was decent and appropriate. A few days later he emailed me back that he had received the card and it was quite decent and appropriate.

I should tell him to hold onto the card and pass it on to his grandchildren (as yet unborn), as once RG becomes a famous artist, even her pre-kindergarten works will probably sell for millions of dollars at auction.

An Even Later and Even More Appropriate Post for Memorial Day (Part 1 of 2)

 

 

 

 

On most Wednesday mornings I volunteer with a group of church members who cut and split wood to donate to elderly people and to people in temporary financial distress to use for heat. My closest neighbors in the woods where we live on a large island (on our five acre lots “close” means they live about a quarter mile away from us), members of this Protestant church, invited me to participate in their “wood ministry.” 

I usually ride to and from the splitting with him. After each morning of sawing and splitting and hauling and delivering, the volunteers, all male, all church members, and all retired, gather at their church for coffee and snacks. At 65 years of age, I am the “baby” of the group. I am the only member of the volunteers who is not a member of the church.

Last Wednesday, the Friendly Neighbor (as I dub him in my blog) and I walked out to his pickup truck to head home. It was a sunny summer day. He commented on how attractive the few scattered clouds looked against the blue sky. As he is an interesting person of many talents and experiences, I asked, “Did you ever consider being a pilot and flying among those clouds?”

He replied, “Indeed I did. I passed all the physical exams and qualified for the training. However, my father died and I felt a responsibility to take care of my mother. Though it turned out that I could have gone on to fly. It took a while, but after my father died my mother found a job and was able to take care of herself.”

At first I thought he was talking about flying as an avocation, but then he said, “One of my best friends, a person a couple of years older than I and a person I really looked up to, was the first American pilot shot down in the Vietnam War.”

I then realized he had planned to be a pilot for the Air Force in order to fight in Vietnam.

He continued, speaking of his friend, “He was a very talented and capable person. He had been accepted into medical school. However, he really thought of himself as a person who had been given a lot, and he felt an obligation to give back. He felt he would be helping people live free, and not be prisoners under Communist control.”

He then continued, “He was not the only close friend I lost in Vietnam. Another one of my friends was shot and killed as he was getting off a ship to go ashore in Vietnam for the first time.

“In terms of my pilot friend, who had always been listed as missing in action, a few years ago, I just happened to read a local [Puget Sound] newspaper which carried an article about how his body had finally been recovered, long after the war was over. It was just a coincidence to see that article in a local newspaper [as he was not from Puget Sound], but I was very glad I had.

“The loss of those two close friends really brought the war home to me.” [A few days after he told me the story, I was able to find on the web the story about how the pilot's body was recovered

 I listened quietly and respectfully. There was really nothing more for me to say.

[The rest of his story will be provided in my next post.]

 

 

 

A Mystery about My Father

 

 

When I was a child, it was clear to me that

A) My father was a very intelligent (perhaps brilliant) man.

B) He was unable to get and keep (until late in life) a decent job.

C) My parents’ marriage had been a very bad idea.

One thought that has occurred to me only recently is that my father got my mother pregnant before they were married and that they had to get married. No hint of this was ever spoken to me by any of my relatives, but it might account for their ridiculous and pathetic joining together as a couple.

As I was growing up, I had the impression that my father had started attending the University of Chicago as a young man, but had dropped out about a year before he was to graduate because

D) He got married.

E) I was born.

F) He joined the United States Army (during World War II) and was assigned to serve in India.

I can’t remember if they ever specifically told me that sequence of events. I remember some college textbooks around published in the 1930s around our house. I remember my father talking about finishing his degree by distance learning. A lack of a degree (or so I understood) was one of the main reasons he never seemed to be able to get or keep a decent job (until the very last years of his life).

Quite a while after my father died, my extended family had a couple of family reunions on the East Coast of the United States (paid for by my “Chinese” millionaire cousin, Joanna Nichols).

At the first reunion, my father’s three sisters, Diana, Naomi, and Henriette sat around reminiscing about their childhood in Chicago in the 1930s and answering questions from the rest of us (the younger relatives).

I asked about my father dropping out of the University of Chicago.

My three aunts looked astonished. “Michael never attended the University of Chicago,” my aunt Naomi said in a definite manner. “He might have taken a class or two at the community college in Chicago, but that would have been the most college education he ever had.”

I was astonished. I looked at my mother in puzzlement. At that time, my mother was aging and failing fast but she was still coherent (though none of us realized that she was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s Disease). However, whether she was very weary that evening or chose to act as she was too tired to follow the conversation out of embarrassment, she acted as if she didn’t understand what we were talking about.

So I don’t know. Did my parents intentionally create a myth (mainly aimed at me, as the oldest of their five children) about my father dropping out of college when no such circumstances were in fact true? I will never know, I guess.

My Wife and I Finally Meet

 

When I was young I was so afraid of young women I could hardly bring myself to even speak to one. I’m not quite sure exactly why that was, but probably I thought of myself as so worthless a person no woman would want to have anything to do with me. This must be one of the reasons I feel a bond with David and his tales of being harassed and bullied by other children and feeling worthless as a child.

I wasn’t bullied as a child in the same way he was, but in a sense I bullied myself.

When I was a teenager, the thought of asking a girl for a “date” seemed more terrifying than climbing Mt. Everest without a scarf. I had no idea how other boys had the courage to approach a girl. I never went on a date with a girl while I was in high school. Aside from my timidity and terror, not knowing how to drive a car, not knowing how to dance, and always being an introvert in a new school (my father worked for a defense contractor and was always being transferred to help install computers at a new Air Force base for the Strategic Air Command, so I attended six different high schools in three states) also did not help.

In college, I did go out on two very timid and chaste “dates” with young ladies I considered so unattractive that I figured they would even go out with me. I am kind of disgusted with myself when I consider my thinking at the time. I hope the ladies involved eventually encountered someone in their lives who was a little more respectful than I was, even if I was perfectly polite to them and never laid an improper hand on them.

My brother was still in high school and already had gone through several girl friends. He was far less timid and inhibited than I was, not to mention so immature he would do any fool thing that came into his head.

One day after I retreated home in disgrace after flunking out of college, my brother and I were home alone. We were bored. As an introvert, I would have just buried myself in a book. As an extroverted immature person, my brother started flipping through the phone book and decided to call people with peculiar last names and make jokes about their names. I went along for the ride, listening on an extension phone.

After the first two victims quickly hung up in disgust, he hit gold, reaching a teenage girl sitting bored at home with her hair up in curlers. Even though she was bored, and even though she was only about 15 years of age, my WTB (wife to be) was already a cautious, strait-laced person, not the type of person to stay on the phone flirting with a couple of boyish pranksters.

Nevertheless, she even laughed when we made fun of her eccentric last name. (She was quite happy to change it to my last name when we got married. On the other hand, my daughter was quite happy to change her last name to her out-of-law partner’s last name after they had been not-married for a few years and Random Granddaughter joined the conversation.)

Actually my brother quickly grew bored with the conversation, but I started to improvise a comedy routine and she started to laugh. I don’t remember exactly what I talked about, though I do remember extemporizing some sort of pathetic routine about elves living under toadstools. I am sure it was exactly as bad then as it sounds now.

The funniest thing about this exploit is that my wife is generally not much amused by my sense of humor; much less so than the typical reader of my blog. But somehow or other I got her laughing that night and she not only laughed, she agreed to talk to me if I called her again. Well, I did have her number.

Well, you already realize I was a youthful loser-dork. What was my wife’s problem? It was her bra size.

My wife’s mother was quite buxom, as is her older sister. As my wife became a teenager, her bosom never developed much bux. She apparently figured this physical handicap meant that no men would ever be attracted to her, forcing to her succumb to a fate of being a lonely old maid. Intellectually, even then, she knew this was nonsense, and in fact, another teenage boy, named Bruce had actually asked her out on a date, but emotionally she considered herself as an unlovable flat-chested reject in a breast-obsessed society.

As two people who each felt ourselves utterly unlikely to ever find love, I guess our love was meant to be.

At the time we met by telephone I was attending a junior college in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles (after flunking out of the University of California at Berkeley) and volunteering in the news department of KPFA, the Pacifica listener-supported radio station in Los Angeles. My wife-to-be was still attending high school, where she took a drama class with Sally Field. However, my WTB is quite unlike Sally Field. Her real soul sister in the world of entertainment stars is Carol Burnett. My wife can do a brilliant Carol Burnett imitation.

I had gone on two tepid dates in college. My wife-to-be had gone out with a boy named Bruce. Bruce, the daring rake, planted a timid kiss on her lips at the end of a date. According to my wife, no sparks ensued, and her hormones yawned. I hope Bruce found his own true love somewhere whose fire he lit.

At that childish time in my life, I did not even know how to drive. After my WTB and I had talked on the phone a few times, I asked her to go out with me. Our “date” (which my father drove us to as I couldn’t drive) was a real dork-fest. On weekends, as a volunteer, I wrote and read a 15-minute newscast at the listener-supported radio station KPFA (part of the Pacifica network).

Probably seven people listened throughout the Los Angeles Metropolitan area, six of whom were probably confined to their beds, and one of whom had already called the radio station and asked why the news sounded so amateurish on weekends. Evidently fancying myself a fascinating and alluring media star, I asked my wife-to-be if she wanted to watch me do a radio broadcast and see the inside of a radio station.

My wife told her mother that she had met me at a party at one of her friends’ houses.

We went out on a couple of other equally exciting dates. I think we took the bus to go bowling with my brother and his girl friend of the time.

My WTB (the youngest of five children as I am the oldest of five children) adored one of her brothers, L, who lived in San Francisco and pursued a life as an artist. The rebel in her family, L stirred my WTB’s inner non-conformist, though at the time he caused me to lose her.

One day I called to ask her out. Her mother told me that she had gone to stay with her brother in San Francisco. The implication-or so I interpreted it-was that my WTB did not want to see me again. I figured love had been glimpsed and then lost forever from my life.

Suppressed Childhood Memory

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I am having too much fun. I need to get a grip. This is all about David, not about me.

David has suppressed memories of his childhood, for good reasons, I’m afraid; to protect himself against remembering terrible things that happened to him.

I remember my childhood as being terrible. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of feeling sorry for myself about how badly my father treated my mother, my brother, and myself.

Last night I got in touch with a suppressed memory. I remember my brother, my sister, and myself jumping up and down on a couch and getting hysterical. I remember our parents saying to us, “You’re getting too excited. Pretty soon someone is going to get hurt and you are all going to start crying.”

I remember my sister crying hysterically. We were indeed having too much fun.

It is incompatible with my “stance” of my oppressed childhood to recall that we sometimes had fun in my family. So I have suppressed those memories. Unfortunately, or fortunately, one of those memories broke through.

I was having too much fun with surrealist dwillings, plotting trips for David to meet truce in France, and other jumping up and down on the couch. I am suffering a hangover today. Also we have a staff meeting at work and I am very likely to mention the elephant in the room. This will not go over well at all.

However, I have to tell you about how my wife and I met. This embarrasses me hugely. Next post.

7A Tasks of Life

The story of my aunt Henriette is not fiction. It is ongoing in real time. I don’t know how it will turn out. I will keep you posted on what is happening. Based on how things have gone so far, I am not very optimistic.

In the meantime, I am contemplating what I consider the five tasks of life and how they have affected me and (though it’s a little presumptuous on my part), David Rochester.

The five tasks of life are:

• Journeying from being a child to being an adult
• Being a life partner
• Being a parent
• Making a living
• Journeying through the end of our life

Not everybody engages in all of these tasks. The first and last are required, though some people never really become adults. Some don’t survive the journey. Some just become large children.

Not everybody gets a life partner (what is often called a “romantic partner”). Some get many and never establish a successful relationship with one in particular. My father in law was married five times. (My wife’s mother was his first wife.) His fifth marriage turned out fairly successfully, though in the last year of their lives their lives and relationship unraveled.

Today my wife and I celebrate our 42^nd wedding anniversary. We will go out tonight to a restaurant (where we have never eaten before) on the island where we live.

Some people do not become parents. Sometimes they are unable to bear children. Some adopt children. My daughter can’t bear children. She has adopted her partner’s daughter and become a co-mom. She is taking great delight in the experience. It pleases me to see her happiness in this regard. Some people choose not to become parents. Sometimes they create children but are separated from them. I worked with a person once who told me that he had fathered a child, but the mother had moved to Alaska before it was born and he had never had any contact with the child.

When I was a small child, my aunt Rose, who could not herself bear children herself, took me in for a year. It’s quite possible she saved my sanity. When my daughter was a little girl she had two unrelated “aunts” who could not bear children but who were a marvelous influence on our child. Our granddaughter has at least one marvelous “aunt” as well. Her sperm donor plays a role like an uncle in her life.

Some of us make a very good living, though many of us are very unhappy in our careers. Some people do good work (in various senses) with or without making much money at it. Some spend their lives doing one career task; others move from one job to another throughout most of their lives. Some are born with a silver spoon in their mouths; some live as bums or derelicts.

Although I have been married for 42 years, and I seem to have a pretty relationship with my daughter, I have never had a “good” job. I figure two out of three ain’t bad. For that matter, I have never been a very “good” employee. Superficially, my current job looks like a good job, but at the moment, it’s a bad mess. I have about a year or so go to retirement, but I don’t know if I will make it that far.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as a “good death,” though probably some people live too long. Some people believe that humans have a soul that lives after death. I do not find that belief convincing or persuasive. When I was in my forties, I thought I would die soon of a heart attack. I actually had some mild panic attacks. I think this was a combination of knowing my father had died young of a heart attack. In part it was a reaction—I’m not sure what to call it—to my father dying a day after we had a fight where I had stood up to him for the first time in my life. In part it was because some blood pressure medication I was taking at the time had some unfortunate side effects.

In January, I will turn 64. I am quite surprised I lived that long. I can think of lots of things to complain about (and do frequently) but my life has turned out much better than I expected or had any right to expect.