Mag 71 -- like dazzling wavy ribbons

Since being in Minnesota on Father's Day for a family reunion with my deceased alcoholic father's side of the family, I have been processing thoughts and emotions I had about all of us gathered there that day. It was one of the most powerful and poignant days in my life. We enjoyed many laughs and some unexpected tears. We sat on each others' laps and shared the strongest hugs I have ever had. We checked out similarities and celebrated uniqueness. While some talked about what had happened since the beginning of the weekend when they last saw one another, others caught up on the years that have passed when last in the company of one another. We bridged decades, lifetimes with those we had never met.

I stood on the deck looking out at family in the swimming pool splashing and in the hot tub conversing and laughing, their colorful swimsuits and trunks reflecting in the water like dazzling wavy ribbons in the new summer sun. If only the filter of time might weaken one gene for these and future generations, the dark heavy rope that has dragged a few under and to the bottom, and has challenged some of us to untie its knots from our souls, might begin to fray one year and disintegrate eons later. Until then I will remember each of them shining brightly for one another as I pray not you, not you, not you. . .

MLydiaM ~ July  2011

This magpie is inspired by my recent trip and the top image (of Endeavor, Lino Tagliapietra, Columbus Museum of Art) by Tess Kincaid, who hosts weekly photo writing prompts at Magpie Tales. There are many more magpies to read there.


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Lately,

drinking darkness by Phil Hilfiker


Lately, I am sorting thoughts about alcoholism and how it has touched me and members of my family. I don't dwell on it very often, but when I do I tend to dig deep. Inevitably, I read from three topical books that have been the most insightful and enlightening for me in my own sobriety. Each time I gain more insight and am further enlightened. The following excerpt is from one of those three books.

-from A DRINKING LIFE--A Memoir, by Pete Hamill:

If there's another Depression, he said, you'll always work.

My mother said nothing. I was beginning to understand what the Depression had done to both of them. I took the test for the Navy Yard and passed.

That summer, I was in another kind of depression. Day and night, I felt that I'd lost my way. It was as if some long steady tide were flowing out of me, the waters rising in my skull and then tumbling me along with that tide I couldn't control. It seemed absurd to think anymore about being a cartoonist. Or a bohemian. Maybe everybody was right, from my father to Brother Jan: it was arrogant, a sin of pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms, and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude was expressed directly, by my friends or the Big Guys or some of the men from Rattigan's. More often, it was implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I was? Forget these kid's dreams, I told myself, give 'em up. Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down, have children. Don't make waves. Don't rock the boat. Every year I'd do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God or not. I'd drink on the way home from work and spend most weekends with my friends in the saloons. I'd get old. I'd die and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith's funeral parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let's have a fucking drink. 


I didn't know it at the time, but I had entered the drinking life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true.

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not your type, however.......

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At the office we had a splurge of orders that cleaned out most of the stock and then gradually Miss Crippin's work tapered off to just forwarding the mail. For over a week we idled the hours away in each other's company. I was full of radical ideas, wanting to discuss books and the news of the day, the theater, a thousand things. None of it interested her, as she was involved with her religion, really trying to live up to its mores. Yet in spite of our differences, it was a wonderful time. It seems impossible but there it was. We really beamed at each other each morning. True, she never wore anything under her skirt, but that was the only concession. Her sexual need was in a logic-tight compartment that made her seem to have a dual personality, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the companionship that's possible for people with no like interests that sometimes reaches the stage of great beauty, of complete openness, of steadfast warmth, when all signs show it to be patently impossible.

-excerpt from A Heaven in the Eye, by Clyde Rice



It is the only book that my father and I ever shared, I reading it first and purchasing a paperback copy for him one Father's Day (the only gift I ever sent him during the only year we ever corresponded). He wrote that he loved it, but I knew that he would based on similarities he and the author had regarding a strong identification with specific place-names and a gutter-hot feeling for the women in their lives. If he hadn't drowned in the bottle my father might have written a first novel at 81-years of age as Clyde Rice did. Heaven knows he had the talent, and a gritty collection of keen and ironic observations to feed it.



*Information added after original posting: A Heaven in the Eye may be purchased from the Friends of Clyde Rice website.



art: Office at Night, Edward Hopper
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All American Dad

Here he is: my father. In this picture he's in his early 20's. He gave the photo to my mother sometime during the seven or so years they were together before I was born. On the back she wrote his name, Eino, and added "My woodchopper." That astonishing caption is indicative of her equally astonishing love for the man. She saw something in him that was never really there, similar to mistaking an iron pipe for a woodcutter's ax...

He was a first-generation American, the son of hardworking Finnish immigrants. I blogged about his mother here. They deserved better than what they got from him as a son. He was drinking by the time he was 15, he never held a steady job in his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, and after he rode the rails (yes, a real hobo) to the west coast he never held a steady job in any of the cities he lived in there either. He met my mother in Lafayette, California, where he was working as a dishwasher and when he told her he was a "pearl diver" she actually thought it was adorable. She fell so hard for him, she with the devout Christian Science upbringing who didn't even know what the word alcoholic meant.

The two of them went to Lake Tahoe where they lived and worked for a few seasons before heading to Reno, where she worked in the casinos and he drank and loafed. After years together I came along and they married when I was three weeks old. A month later, my mother returned to their small apartment one morning after a long shift dealing cards and found him passed out in a chair with his cigarette burned through his t-shirt into his chest. He was loosely holding me in the crook of one arm and I was asleep.

Gritty details form a bridge from that part of the story to his departure by bus from Reno to Duluth two weeks later. She saved me, but my mother also carried a torch for him until she died at 85. That's love.