title: this is how i grew up, why i resist the intrusion of technology, and how i became interested in theological issues.
irish cicero is always ragging my butt about blog stuff, ... , do this better, do that better, use capital letters, and learn about the category box. well, he ragged on me sufficiently long and hard and lustily that i finally found the category box.-- it has been obscured lo! this many years because i work with a "split screen" so that i can see stuff, compose away from typepad, because typepad is a p.o.s. and more troublesome than it is worth: i hope the jackass who invented it rots in hell, and i wouldn't mind putting him there.
so, the little category box irish has been ranting about has always been obscured. until i put typepad full screen, and found it. well, i will be fucked if i can make the damned thing add a new category. like i said, it is a p.o.s. program.
my little war with technology. but, it got me to thinking about life before digital technology, which i grew up in, and how my early inquisitiveness along with my mother's intellectual prompting, got me to thinking about the theological and geo-political stuff that preoccupies me to this day.
i am going to tell you about how i grew up, before this tidal wave of material progress and information and stimulus we call modern "life" inundated my efforts to resist it.
i have more damned degrees than your average german, including one from a rather prestigious little college, and one from a not so bad law school (no, i didn't make it any damned better.)
you should know that as a child i read reader's digest and saturday evening post. that's it. and, i went to the umapine school in the basement library, and read such things as were there, including the "all about books." to this day, i remember being fascinated by "all about the duck-billed platypus." you should read it.
that's it. irish cicero is always going on about the great books, and how he devoured them in his formative years. well, i read in the saturday evening post about alexander p. botts, the greatest earthworm machinery salesman of all time, ... , so that when joe e. brown came to the silver screen reprising that same role, i felt intellectual comfort and inner warmth in the familiar. you little slickers, you sophisticated little bastards, haven't got the slightest idea what i am talking about, do you? laughing. and, it is a quaint notion in this day and age, that someone would/should spend a quiet saturday evening reading something for pleasure, instead of chasing that pleasure at a single's bar, isn't it.
i grew up on marjorie main and noah berry. i read tugboat annie with religious fervor in the post, and i loved tugboat annie as though she were my aunt. she and her tugboat hubby were what we in n.e. oregon called "gypos," with no animosity and prejudice, because we were all gypos: people who make due on the margins by ingenuity and grit, and a rare gift for improvisation that you people who pay for every damned thing will never understood. gypo's just make do, in ways marvelous to behold.
i never had a new bike, always hand me downs from my older brothers as they outgrew their interests and i progressed to them. as a consequence, i never owned a bicycle with fenders, nor one that had the little brackets that held the servo brake lever to the frame, nor even the rubber grips on the handle bars: to this day, i have a scimitar scar, a crescent (how prescient) on my right nipple, where it was almost removed during a crash wherein my forward motion was arrested by the exposed end of a handle bar. no problem. there is in this world, even yet i would suppose, a marvelous, ... , what?, ... , device, substance, material, thing, ... , panacea, ... , called baling wire. it is the wire that sits above the area where the hale bale comes from the bailer, and it wraps the bale in a tight bundle of two wires.
the wire fixes everything, and holds everything together. it is at once soft and resilient, withstands bending and twisting, and is tough. so, we would run it through the holes in the brake where a nut might otherwise go, wrap it around things rather generously and sloppily, and twist the brake fast. (hey, i almost invented a meal. how about that?) and, it held until it didn't, which fact was usually announced to you are you were pitched head over heals above the handle bars, executing a "motorcycle stop" on the concrete in front of shorty blumhagen's gas pumps. shorty would come out and yell jocularly, you guys get your goddamned bloody elbows and noses off of my new concrete pad, before you stain it. quite the wit, that shorty. he operated a little grocery, which sold nothing because everybody made their own, ... , one day mrs. came across the street, opened a fresh bar of the new soap shorty had just gotten in, sniffed, and said, it doesn't smell like anything i want to touch me, and went home, without buying. she made her own soaps from animal fats and lye's and stuff she threw in, and it did smell better than shorty's, or, shorty, for that matter.
mrs. also had gooseberries around back of her house, and she made gooseberry pie, which is, absolutely delicious. you've never had any gooseberry pie, and you are poorer for it. it is also a good thing to grow, little green translucent things, so sour as to defy description, and so sour as to guarantee that they will never been purloined from the vine by voracious little boys. is they any other kind of little boy?
shorty's gas pumps were the kind that had the glass bulbs on top, that when the gas flowed through them, you could see the little gizmo turn inside, which was neat. like when andy griffith gets on the bus to go off to the service in "no time for sergeants." one of those.
i am going to explain gypo to you, in two fashions. the short explanation, but the long path, is to read about the stampers in "sometimes a great notion" ken kesey's great novel about a gypo logger family. the longer explanation here, but the shorter path to knowledge, is to read here about my friend, rollie taylor.
rollie had an upbringing probably not wholly different from that depicted by the redoubtable marjorie main, (again), in the great ma & pa kettle movies, based upon books set in the great olympic peninsula of washington state, about a family eking out a hardscrabble existence in tough times: the fact that they led beautiful & loving family lives was for the alert to discern in the context of their many misadventures. but, i digress.
rollie owned an international scout, to which he devoted endless hours of maintenance, and in which he carried his worldly possessions, including every mcdonalds sandwich wrapper which he stuffed into the floorboards on the passenger side, where the dogs and i sat, amidst the mountain dew cans lying three deep with the wrappers. i complained to him about sharing the seat with one of his favorite & beloved dogs, named "b.d.", short for "bad dog", to which he replied, what, you wanna sit in the back.
one day rollie came over, and said, hey, you gotta look at this. well, i hadda.
he popped the hood, ... , well, he sort of creaked and twisted and shuddered it open, ... , and there before me in the engine bay was a piece of 2x4 wedged between the wheel well cover and the distributor shaft, held robustly in place by, ... , what else?, ... , some baling wire.
took some doin', he said, but she runs fine right now.
maybe mike drovdahl understands, if he is reading this, but the rest of you haven't a clue. trust me, you just don't.
sizing the matter up in an instant, i said, huh?
he delighted as he explained that his truck had been running a bit rough at times, and then just fine for a while, and then it would barely run. i inquired, how is this so much different from the usual state of affairs, which cogent observation he brushed aside as he related to me the diagnosis of and solution to the problem.-- he got to checking things, and gave the distributor cap a tug, ... , why, i will never know, ... , and he noticed the entire distributor wiggled. well, he said, they ain't sposed ta. he then got some tools, fortuitously having just the ones he needed (as is the gypo way, after all), and removed the distributor and drive shaft from the engine block, and noted that the distributor drive shaft was worn and beat "all to hell." he replaced it, started the old dear up, and then figgled around with it, moved it, in other words, and found the places where it moved so much as to disturb the timing of the engine to where it would barely run, and then found the sweet spot to where the engine ran like a top (comparatively speaking, allowing for the one or two cylinders just a bit down on compression.) and, when he found the sweet spot, he determined that if he wedged a 2x4 just right, the distributor was in the right spot, and the engine timing (that would be spark advance to you with technical orientations) was right.
then it was just a matter of securing the 2x4 to the distributor shaft.
that, my friends is gypo. gypo is not having enough money to go to the dealership shop and paying for a proper repair, but in figuring out a way to keep things running long enough to get "bucks up" ahead so that you can go to the junk yard and buy an old part off of one of the relics/hulks in the yard, and fix it yourself.
and, as rollie observed, he had no choice but to keep the old dear running, as he has just got baby new shoes. in other words, he had to wear out the tires he'd just put on, because they were worth more than the truck. we went many places in that old tub, places my shiny little rigs wouldn't go, because they were scared of 'em. nothing held any terror to that old scout, as it had been everywhere and everything had already happened to it, twice. we didn't get there very fast, and we got there dusty and on occasion with a pop canned bounced off the top of the head, but we got there. rattling the whole way. with gypo grins. the gypo way.
i saw something the other day, you sophisticates will not understand. it was a young kid and his wife, by all appearances, driving a big dodge diesel pickup and towing an old two axle camp trailer, a little long in the tooth. he was young and slender and clear eyed, the first beard of his youth something spotty on a good chin, underneath a good nose with just the hint of hair on the upper lip. and, she was young and slender and sitting upright, and excited to be with him in the pickup, and happy about being alive. as proud as any two swells waiting in a reception line to have their place in the world confirmed by those who get to confirm such matters.
country kids. the son and daughter of gypo's, no doubt about it.
that is the north eastern oregon i grew up with, and in. families that logged and built mountain roads, with old tired trucks and equipment that they ministered to at night, to get another day out of it on the morrow. trucks and equipment with more rust than paint on the outside, and seats upon which one sat on the exposed springs, the upholstery and ticking having long since departed this vale of sin and tears. and, tight knit families that fought you as families. not in gangs, but one right after another, until they nailed your ass, and you went about with a bent nose for your temerity.
yeomen.
tree fallers that wore nothing but black friscoes, and every new pair of pants they cut the hem off the bottom of the pants legs and frayed them and while everyone else wore heavy butts, they wore very heavy wool socks and heavy slippers, the name of which i am ashamed to admit i cannot remember: for all the world, they looked like heavy bed room slippers, except that they were made from top grain leather and had a heavy rubber sole. and, heavy flannel shirts, and heavy suspenders. you could always tell the tree fallers, always. the kinda guys that would have liked rollies' truck, once they got it broken in a little more. did you know that loggers go to work in crummies? you ever see one, you'll recognize it.
i also grew up with crank phones, and party lines. with hand crank cream separators in which one put the daily milking from the milk cow, running the raw milk through it to separate the cream. although it bothers me know, why would anyone do that? have you ever had unpasteurized whole milk, about 6% cream out of a good cow, that is chilled down so that the moisture in the air condenses on the anodizing on the aluminum cup in cold little dew drops? and, i can tell you that running the butter churn is not as much fun as you might think, after you have done it about a gillion times.
my mom made pickles in five gallon pickle crocks, giant pottery urns in which the cucumbers, fresh and crunchy went into a bath of vinegar and salt and spices, and emerged at my mother's hands as detestable soft foul tasting things. she could not make a pickle to save her life. she canned, and that came out good, here freestone peaches being the equal if not superior to store bought, and she never once killed any of us with green beans.
"store bought." do you understand that "store bought" was a rarity for us, except for clothing, and shoes. most everything else, we raised, slaughtered and put up ourselves, though i was a little late to that, and did not participate in it, though i remember the occasions. my brother raised a wonderful hereford steer, and i vividly remember the day my brother cut the little guy and made him into a steer, ending any pretense he might have had to becoming a great bull of the pasture. we called him pinky. and, we played with him, and we rode him, until he figured out how to knock us off his back by running under a low board at the entrance to his feed corral. we'd catch him, get on, he would knock us off, come over to see if he had killed us by doing so, and we would get on him and ride some more. i knew something was up when dad said, would you knock it off with the steer, if he plays with you guys all day, i will never get any weight or meat on him. pinky? meat? a connection here?
in due course pinky became a feeder steer, and a little irritable, so we went back to playing with the dogs, tippycanoe and his brother and sister, tippycanoe. all our dogs were named tippycanoe. it just made it easier. sort of like the old hydroplanes named the "slo mo's," 1, 2, 3 & 4. well, we had tippycanoes, 1,2,3 & 4, and who remembers how many. well, one day we came home, to fresh beef, and pinky was gone from the pasture. where's pinky? meat? a connection here, we mused, between bites?
i have bathed, many times, in wash tubs shared with older brothers and mother and dad.
my family invented the hair dryer. we would come from the tub, go out to the living room where the new oil stove sat above the grate in the floor where the air was force up from the old furnace in the basement, and go turn the fan on at the bottom, and then bow and pray to the oil stove god we made, as the heated air exhaust dried our hair. on sundays, all my brothers and i would bathe as dad read the sunday paper, and the comics, and while we were waiting for him to finish, we would all get down, our little naked butts pointing in the air, and dry our hair.
quite a sight, my dad remarked on more than one occasion to his customers in his black smith shop.
you have never gone to the toilet in an outhouse, i know this for a fact, because there is no toilet in an outhouse. in either a one holer or a two holer. there is a pit in the earth over which the house is perched, and in the house is a little wooden bench, which has a hole, or perhaps two, in it. and, one urinates through the hole (and this is a virtue, and not obtaining facility with this virtue is a good way to get your butt beat up about twice a week until you do), or sits upon it and defecates. yes, i have used an outhouse, and regularly, (there's a pun there, in case you didn't notice), for much of my life.
and, no, i never heard fo anyone getting a spider bite on his ass or his dingus, but that didn't stop me from always taking a stick or something to chase them away from the hole before i did my business in them.
i have spent my time in rustic settings. my dad homesteaded a half section of ground, that would be 320 acres to you, a plot 1/2 mile by one mile. it was located just out of orovada, nevada which is funny even to this day, because there isn't much to orovada, nevada to this day, except a whole lot of "just outa." we lived in a small cabin made out of 2x4's laid on their side, the 2x4's rescued by my dad from local saw mills because they weren't good enough to run through the planers to make lumber out of. scrap, in other words.
the gypo way.
no plumbing. a gas refrigerator.
we showered underneath a 50 gallon drum on stand, with a spigot that drained into a number __ can, a gallon can, in which about 15 holes were punched in the bottom. after coming home in the evening after changing sprinklers, we simply opened the spigot and bath in the shower bath, out in front of g_d and everyone. everyone just happened to include bud scudder's wife, who used to watch us in her binoculars from a trailer on the adjoining section, from about one mile away.
we found out about it when she giggled at dinner at their house, they would invite us over about once a week to keep us from starving, and spilled the beans. the next time we were over, she asked us how come we hadn't put up a curtain?
we said, why would we do that, and ruin everyone's fun. i thought bud was going to die laughing. judy, judy scudder, was her name. i hope she is still alive, and bud, too, they were pretty nice.
my oldest brother steve was ram rod, dad was rarely there. steve was 17 or 18, i was 13 or 14. up in hte morning, for a breakfast of canned fruit cocktail, well, one half can. in for lunch, for burned canned chili and undercooked rice, and then in for super, for cooked rice and cold chili. we lived like kings. once i got sick, so steve decided to fix me by heating some really cheap cognac and mixing it with a generous dose of pepper: this will clear you sinuses, he said with authority. and, it worked. i determined never to undergo that therapy again.
that first summer in Nevada was the summer of "wolverton mountain." "they say don't go, on wolverton mountain, if you're lookin', for a wife, ... , cuz clifton clower's on wolverton mountain, and he's a gun and a knife." a story of very wisely unrequited love, if i remember correctly.
how i became an amateur theologian. i was disappointed to discover early on in life that my mother, even though she provided the family with the reader's digest and the saturday evening post (to this day i think norman rockwell easily america's greatest painter, though he self deprecatingly called himself an "illustrator", ... , what nonsense to a boy who still wonders at the genius of "the four freedoms", ... , and if you don't know whereof i speak, you really ought) did not share my intellectual curiosity.
this bit of serendipity came about, well, by serendipity.
i was in my mom and dad's bedroom, ... , where i otherwise only went regularly when grandma jay took her death bed there, to visit and marvel and when she got really bad, didn't go at all, ... , one summer afternoon rummaging through their chest of drawers to see what could be there.
i espied something of curiosity in the top drawer, a little miniature life raft made of rolled rubber. it was fascinating, and especially so when i discover that it unraveled. as i was puzzling over this curious artifact, as satisfyingly mystifying as surely the rosetta stone was to the frenchies who discovered it in the sands of eons, my mother walked in the door. she yelled, what are you doing? well, the answer was horribly obvious to even a casual observer, i was snooking. why in g_d's name did she have to ask something silly like that?
she yelled, and i still laugh at it this day, "is nothing sacred to you?" with that early gift for rapier repartee common to all jays, i said, huh, what are you talking about? at which point she pulled the prophylactic from my grubby little paws (we went around grubby, pretty much as a permanent state of being after about 10.00 a.m. when kids. breakfast clean, out the door, in the door for bologna sandwiches & salad dressing, ... , grubby), and banished me from her now despoiled inner sanctum.
and cried. i can remember her crying. to this day. i have often wondered why i didn't make a revised edition of the bible. a short chapter, nothing so elaborate as the book of ruth, but a nice little chapter illustrating how far man has strayed from the edicts, law, statutes and ordnances of moses. the "trespass of john" would make a good title.
my mother and i had another short intellectual confrontation, on an equal plane. i was once described by cheryl raber as being a new goose born into a new world, every morning. it is as apt a description of me as you are likely to ever find, ... , as few people are inclined to put that much thought or poetry into describing me, alas and alack. so, i am a bit oblivious to everyday concerns.
one day, after i had been out of college for a couple years, not having the slightest inkling what i wanted to do in life, i walked in from summer harvest only to be confronted by my mom waving a little red book under my nose and yelling at me, "devil worshiper, beast ... ." well, even i, as unconcerned about the trivial as i am, was a bit taken aback and concerned about this. i wondered whether she had finally slipped her moorings.
you may be surprised, but it did not go well with me when i suddenly burst out laughing, not knowing whether to pee my pants or fall over on the floor. she had turned the book, and on the lurid front cover, red as sin, there was a harlequin's mask, under the title, "the devil's dictionary," by one ambrose bierce. he was, as a matter of fact, an irreverent bastard, but hardly a devil worshiper or even a small dabbler in the occult, as far as i know. the editor of the st. louis dispatch, and a columnist there, is i have it remotely correct, he was given to heading his columns with pithy little sayings, which i consider to this day far superior to anything mark twain ever wrote. he wrote the classic definition of an "egoist," as someone being "far more interested in himself than in me."
well, at risk of life and limb i explained that all to mother, and even got her to read some of the things therein, explaining to her that were she of strong faith no blandishments of the devil could win her over, in case she were worried that i was planning subterfuge to convert her to forbidden ways.
and, she read, and said, well, some of these are funny, but some aren't very well intentioned. you know what i have also said, if you cannot say something nice about someone, then don't say anything at all. but, you'll keep this in a box, with your regular school books, o.k.?
and, that is how i became interested in the sacred.
john jay @ 02.24.2010
p.s. i suppose the road to perdition started with "dick clark's american bandstand." i might have been a respectable hermit in a cave to this day, except my dad bought a television.
one channel of fuzz, until we learned how to adjust the rabbit ears.
the first and only thing we got was dick clark, and american bandstand. i can remember the allure of all those little italian girls from philadelphia, dancing in their bobby socs and hush puppies, with their tight curls and sweaters all the way to their throats, and their pleated skirt twirling as they twirled.
oh, exotica? and, they had breasts, you could tell, you could see them under the sweaters, the brazen little devils.
i never recovered.
and suffer to this day, the dichotomy and tension of the illicit with the sacred. personally, i think walt whitman is correct. they are the same. the sacred and the illicit. it is merely the difference between the grin of genuine passion, and the lear of appetite unrestrained by any sense of the divine.
but, that is for another day. (they call this the teaser, in the trade. laughing.)