Novel Treatments / Pockets of Change, Part Nine

Those disks we fly-fishing homes are so familiar with—yellow, 3.8 pound test, Platyl leader material, 60 feet, made in West Germany; a baseball signed by every Detroit Tiger when they won the World Series in 1968--boy were we charged then! And this box I don’t get at all: The first envelope, postmarked “Quincy, Mass.” and “1937”, has 56 drawings slathered in pink ink, all different people, one in bowler hat, one in glasses, one a female--and says “In honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Hancock, Jan 23 1737.” In my day “Put your John Hancock here” meant your signature, and I’m not surprised to find 53 people named that (of course, that isn’t what it’s about, whatever it’s about—when I took the Federal census for Troy, Michigan in 1974, I met three John Does and a Nuna Yerbizness. We wrote what they said; it was not our job to question names.)It’s to Grandpa but has 2 inches on the far lower right to put his full address, and the 3 cent stamp says “1836 Oregon Territory 1936.” I don’t even often remember that several states became so after my birth. Life has gone through a myriad of changes in my day, too.
The second thing in the box is a mint block file with a drawing of the 800 centimeter-rulers all over dad’s desk, some in new packages unopened (why wasn’t one sufficient? Why didn’t I pry and ask?)and waxed paper pages that don’t close tight holding stamps: a little square waxed paper envelope with 2, 50, and 80 denomination stamps from Leichtenstein, 3-cent Wildlife Conservation Stamps of various designs. I recall from reading his stamp catalogues and ads about commemoratives, with the host city postmark, the first issue of the samp, and a picture on the envelope. At 16 Dad got one re the death of Theodore Rosevelt. Grandpa got a letter with Newfoundland stamps on it from the Newfoundland Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Co, Ltd. Another group of canceled stamps include ones from Martinique and Indochina, amd a note: Charity Foundation-P.E. Chris-t, $90.00, D. W. Witherspoon”. One Christmas card is cooly made of 10 real stamps. Many envelopes are unfortunately sealed, probably the humidity in Florida, so I ruined an FDR one by opening it, finding a photo of FDR inside made of print, saying things like that he was the first nominee personally to appear before the convention that nominated him, and that his hobby was philately and he is regarded as America’s ace collector. I love some of the addresses: “Paul H . Young Co.”, someone in Portugal writes,”House of Fine Fishing Tackle”. And he’s got a lot of documentary stamps.
I’m not really in his room. While he lived here, he had to put up with 4/5ths of the room being decorated with statues and holy cards and rosaries and scapulars and Holy Water and “If you die wearing this, you will go to Heaven” medals. My His room has a full corner devoted to the Au Sable and another to him in WW2. My perogative, and Mom isn’t left out—I liked a picture of her as a hospital volunteer on the ID card and it’s on the refrigerator because so. And a photo of them prior to marraige shows such a lovely pair I can’t put it away, even though for 20 years I’ve had someone entirely different as parents, and different from both for the 32 years before that. I showed my Dan the picture and he said,”What a fox.”
“Wasn’t he?” I said.”It’s incredible.”
“I meant her.”
“Her? She looks like—her.”
“You’re missing eerything about her, Deanne.”
“I guess I am,” I said, noting the slender figure with the flat belly—she’d always looked 8 months pregnant when I was a teen.
And that was my problem. At 10, at 14, whatever my mother was, I thought she was set in clay. Her. Couldn’t change.
Now I have a 13-year-old telling me I’m all that. And I say,”Are you kidding? I’m all this other stuff. ” But, no mercy.
“You just never had any friends, Mother.”
“That’s pullshid! I have lots of friends. You must not have any—none come over.”
“THink I’d bring them to here?”
“Think I would?”
But nothing changes her mind. I’m a loser and she’s going to be a famous actress. (Just what I was going to be at 13….)
I don’t care. So I leave a room (a giant room) filled with things that mean nothing to them. (Oh, Dan liked Dad’s 2 guns he found very much, and gave me back my .22 with the scope.) Life won’t divide like this much longer. People won’t have shoeboxes of black and white photos. My kids’ friends’ grandparents are my age, which means all their home photos were in color from age 6 . Another generation, no one wil have black and white photos. No one inheriting them would know who any of the people or places in them were. I have one of the last stands—the last vestige of the old frontier: Black and white photos galore mixed with 65-year-old dry flies. So what? I had a year to live in 2006 and guess forgot to croak. I know it’s an any-time-now thing,but you have to admit it’s funny how the 6 family members who cried when they heard I was going to die are now the dead: Aunt Connie and Uncle Pick, Dan and Mom, Debbie and Mike. Am I suposed to throw out the Bear Grease Leather Dressing “It’s the best!” from Finland, and Grandpa’s Preen line dressing, Young’s Mosquito Dope  (which we know contains none of the toxic chemicals around now)? What these things remind me of, why they sit in prominent places on my dresser, is what they signify: the olden’days of  integrity. It’s not something decided over curtive emails to many-user ISPs that alert a potential investor in a Chinese toy concern that “these people have no regulatory arm and can ignore restrictive USA laws regarding lead levels etc and ratified by NAFTO, not Asia. There’s where we got them. We should be able to sell approx. 9.9 sippees per toddler for 15 to 50 years before this lead is discovered and the money-printing machine run out…”) or, as recently discovered in the state of Florida, which the east coast must be aiming fans blowing stupidity  at at 1 million miles an hour, just like winds on the sun blow fiery heat out, “Hey, I can collect $19,000 a month in retirement and not retire,” so now hundreds, even thousands of educators, governors, legislators, university principals, sheriffs, and police sergeants get monthly retirement plus an income of $366,000 to 1.4 million at the job they switched to. As a head honcho Floridian put it, probaby stopped in his dirt-spattered truck as he turned up his two-track with an unlit cigar in his myth, uh, mouth, “These people aren’t retired.” Next week as he rinses garbanzo beans or sprays his bagged garbage with insecticide to keep roaches off he’ll inform us that he doesn’t think it’s fair that they’re getting retirement pay and working, money a real concerned communitarian would put into the community’s problems. Then he’d say, if pressed to speak again,  ”That’s not as if he has our best interests at heart.” Floridians  are slow and slow to dislike anyone. Meanwhile our 11 universities have to stop accepting freshman below 3.0 this fall, which the President of my daughter’s college deplores, saying many bright minds will be wasted.
My own daughter, who’s had a 4.0 since she got two As in Japan last summer,  made the dean’s list this fall, and is in the honors course at FIU,said “Thank God I’m already here.”
“You were over 3.0.”
“Only weighted, mother. I just kept it from you. You needed rest.”
My God, the child’s GPA has improved during her first two years at college. It’s usually the reverse, but she wasn’t there to party, but to leave poverty behind her forever. She’s also the President of a club who has a non-performing (“I forgot!”) V.P.but as sychronicity likes to delight people,the dorm told her she had a new roomate  after living alone till Christmas, and it was one of the most involved girls in the Japan Club, and they now plan events etc at their luxury. The V.P. lost the group’s signatures of how many students saw their booth, which school-sponsered activity money is disbursed based on, so  they missed the deadline and so  they  have no funding until spring. But the 2 girls have come up with Japanese movie night,and other free  things based on what they have between them, the other student being a Japanese foreign exchange student. Mary picked that university because of it’s Asian enrollment and joined the Japan Club only to have a series of coincidences make the graduating leaders vote her in as President the next year. Half her school, she says, is really in Cuba. I know it’s half-Hispanic, but I don’t know why there wouldn’t be Puerto Ricans and Dominican Republicans, even Meicans and Central and South Americans. Cubans, she says. She’s already aced 3 years of Spanish, long ago,(but her teacher said that realistically it took 7 full years of it for it to start to make sense) and, recently, 5 of Japanese.
Dad was president of the French Club his last two years of high school.
He said repeatedly that in his day only high school athletes got college schoalarships—it was unheard of anywhere else.
All these little bits and pieces. But I see in them the changing world, and not always is it for the better.
I am in Dad’s office at 6:30 a.m. and a little peeper gurgles outside my window, chirping up to a rapid rise in his tone and then ceasing. The last notes are like a new-born chick’s--we used to watch these two eggs with chickens peeking away at them from inside, in a warm incubators at a restaurant we stoppped at on the way to the cabin. Although Gandpa had a farm in Ortonville for awhile after Dad grew up, it has always been unclear when. It seemed to be after high school but before Dad went off to war and Grandpa experimented with midge rods.I know Dad went to Detroit’s Northwestern High School at 17,18, in 1938 and 1939.It seems to me that Grandpa either tried the farm in the early-mid 30s or the early 50s-- Grandpa’s old salesman Bob Sommers is the only living person who might know. Grandpa’s notebook that Mom burned was dated, but I don’t remember it.
Back to cheating, taking advantage, my daughter with an 130 IQ and in the 98th percentile for reading and writing and the 86th for Math (meaning that 2% of kids her age nationally  can read or grasp grammer etc better than or as well as she can)got into college by the hair on her chinny chin chin. The other, who likes to get Fs and forge my signature and never tell me, will never get in. Not if you have to have a 3.0 from now on. So that the money the university system just had to take deep cuts in, can go to those seniors (hypothetically) taking retirement from “one great service to mankind” to “work in another great service to mankind”( neither of which, believe me, pays as low as giving man’s churches’ windows, for which there is no $19,000 a month retirement reward.)
So the children and heirs of these people can admire the giant heavy vases their late parents left them in their homes, the real ancient statues from Greece poolside, and the  moose-drawer pulls on the cabin cabinets in their little Montana place (only 2,900 feet), and I’ll --as long as forever, for that’s what I have-- enjoy all the things made and procured  by a people with conscience. And the black and white photos spread out on the walls, like my kid’s magazine pics of Hillary Duff and the Jonas Brothers on hers, keep me always as close to home as if Grandma was setting up her rod right out my door. I don’t for a minute forget who I am. I was given life by people who enjoyed living. Not standing in lines, making reservations at restaurants,getting manicures, facials, fake breasts or botox, and theme park or dude ranch weekends entailing airplane rides, waits,crowds, the now of it all. Not dressing 3 pound dogs in tutus or organizing lawn parties for 250. I am so glad that’s not what my father cared about, because we would never have gotten along.
He had it packed up and ostensibly only saw it when he moved--which was ten years ago, last. I have it out--collecting dust, I expect—telling me what life is like right out- side. 2000 miles away and 40 to  80 years ago.  These black and white phtographs mean nothing after all the folks in them have been dead as well as all who knew them, but they        shouldn’t be thrown out. There’s a world we’d be losing. As poor quality as they are, all should be saved in a special collection. These are brand new immigrants with  famlies who’ve been here 300 years.They are building communities, clearing rivers for fishing, inventing guns and trout rods,fishing for their healthy meals with no mercury in them. Beyond celebrating this robust people, I am like Eva—bursting at the seams to tell the descendants all about the incomparable life it was. I want to share the classes Dad took at the University of Michigan School of Forestry and  Conservation, which he attended for 4 years; I want someone to get lost in the 999 big heavy books on birds.

In 1912 Eva, 53, listened to her aunt, a sister of her father, who’d married a Young, telling a story when in her 80s. She’d brought a little dog with her from New Haven and was the third white person to set foot on Bear Lake soil. One day her dog was really acting afraid and two hunters came up and asked if she’d seen any wild animals. She said she thought her dog knew where one was, and pointed. Two shots followed and the dog came running back to her and her brother. The hunters wanted to buy the dog. She said $200 was too little. Every offer they made was too low, she told them, for the dog was like a child to her, and her brother put him safely in the car. The next fall a hunter came to her door and asked if she’d take $25 for the little dog. Each time she said no his price went up. Finally, “There isn’t enough money in the world to make me sell him,”she said. So the hunter left and the relative she was telling the story to said,’Mama, Tews is dead.”
“What?”
“Tews is dead on the side of the road with a bullet hole in his head.”
Eva finishes, “The ladies applauded Mrs. Berne’s story…”
I can’t say she’s an excellant writer but she keeps your interest level high.

As my husband slacked off in running his business and I had to keep on top of it, leaving me unable to get my own career, I had serious thoughts of leaving him. The girls would grow up with heads filled with Young lore instead of his impoverished youth and ancestors. Then I noticed that my eldest could draw. Like her father and his father, who’d put original designs of stained glass in churches, chapels, schools, theme parks, and restaurants all over the state,Was it fair to take that rich history from them? Was it ever my right; I mean, they aren’t just mine. That’s what I never could understand about abortion. Why has the father no equal say?
When my daughter shows a sketch to her father and says,”What does it need, daddy?”
And he says,”A little more shadowing on the right side of the nose,” I know I never had the right to prevent this dialogue, even though as he rises the portable oxygen  tank falls on his feet, the hose turning his nose inside out, whie he cusses “I keep forgetting this damn thing!” Even when to get the mail 5 feet from the door he has to rest on the fence for 5 minutes before he can come back  in. We know we are going to have to care for him one day, and I’m not in love with him, and I can never go on a trip again--he needs to refill his oxygen tanks every 3 days--but children have every right to a relationship with their father as long as he isn’t abusive--Mom taught me that. With women having babies from sperm bamks to raise alone deliberately, what will the adults of tomorrow be like? I think of self-preservation they would have to pretend that not knowing 50% of their linage didn’t matter--especially if the 50% they knew were a dull people. For all my mother’s faults, I commend her and honor her for letting us keep our father.
It certainly paid off for Debbie. He took care of her 24/7 her last year on earth without a complaint.
Dad finally filled me in on his side of the famly a year before his death, when a delicate heart-surgury gave him pause for thought. He gave me a plastic box filled with letters, photos, and legal documents. Other stuff he just let me find, some of it not easily. like the things hid in a “Readers Digest Condensed Books” that was really a safe on his book shelf. I only opened it because eit was the only fiction he had, or I probably would have given it away. It had stamps (the kind collected) and lures and flies (the kind you fish with) in it.  Now, could they be valuable, or something?
What have we thrown away in our ignorance? My uncle John-called-Jack on Mom’s side once bought a used piano and it didn’t sound right so his pianist daughter opened it and it was stuffed with envelopes of money. The Good Will or wherever he got it said he’d bought it, the money was his.
He and Mom have a brother whose wife’s aunt was stabbed to death in a robbery in her downtown KC Mo home that everyone had told her to move from but, born there, she refused.Her neice checked first thing where she kept her money--a coat pocket in the front closet--and it was all there, over $100,000 in the 1970s.
Yes, Dad, I should have shown an interest in your important stamps and flies—but I think you prefer me to have character to brown-nosing you to max  my inheritance.
There were a lot of family letters and diaries but I noticed a few things consistantly kept out of all of them—namely, the very buggy nature of the region where the Au Sable and Manistee both start, and  for miles surrounding these rivers and their branches: the insane quantity of mosquitoes, gnats, deer flies and horse flies. No one would ever know there was a bug if they read all Dad’s forebearer’s accounts of their days inland on  the northern lower penninsula.
That would start with Dad’s father’s father, of a Michigan pioneer family from before the logging industry wiped out her white pine forests.

It’s obvious I got my nature from my dad. His dad was Paul H. Young, the young fellow who walked into a jewelry store in Duluth and created all us descendants. His father was named Charles Henry Young, his mother, Sarah Alice Browning-Lionberger Young: I don’t know how they met. Charles Henry Young’s father was Bejamin T. Young, and little is known of Benjamin T.’s  wife, but Benjamin T.was a Great Lakes ship captain from the Green Mountain area of Vermont. He and his wife Marguet, said to be part Native-American,  lived in Ontario and had cows, horses, sheep, and other farm stock. The huge white pines of Michigan were the talk of all the neighbors and in 1870, when Charles Henry was 5 years old, his dad packed up the family and took up a government claim in Michigan. A family story swears that Charles Henry was born while the wagon train was on the move because they didn’t have time to stop or they’d be in the middle of nowhere at dark.
C.H. had at least 2 older brothers, 2 or 3 older sisters, and a younger brother. One of his sisters was married and came out the next year with her three daughters, including Eva, aged one.
It would seem that all of the men and boys who built the buildings and the women who cleaned them would have had a strong sense of pride in their work, but it was little Eva who was so bursting at the seams with pride that she devoted her life to writing about and painting pictures of their pioneer community. She thought so much of C.H. that as a young lady in high school  she wrote  a narrative called “The Boyhood of Charles H. Young, written by Eva Ferrier as I remember him, also the locality, log house, frame house, 2 schoolhouses, sugar bush, and log church.”
Taking on the voice of Charles Henry, she wrote, in part,” Six families lived on a one-mile stretch of woods where the men took up government claims.  There were no roads, nothing but trails made by the government. The trial we all claimed lay  two miles north of Bear Lake and 22 miles north of Manistee.”
In other words, although my grandfather was raised in Arkansas, his father had been raised very close to Lake Michigan’s shores.  Locate the Au Sable, draw a line straight west to Lake Michigan,and there ’s Bear Lake, in the same “quaking forest of uninhabitable land”. In her innocence, perhaps,  Eva tries to map the area for us:” “We were at the very edge where the white pines left off growing and the hardwoods  began.” She did not realize that by 1903 all of the trees in the area would be cut. But as she continues to write, she finds a voice—a voice with enough unique flavor to attract the Michigan Historical Society, which begins to publish her stories of pioneer life. Details are partly why her voice engages.
As Charles Henry Young, she continues, ” Father’s  160 acres contained scarcely a pine. It was hardwod, beechwood, elm, and maple, mostly sugar maple. Just where our one-mile stretch of trail left off was heavy pine. A Dr. Miller from east somewhere found his claim just what he desired, all pine.
“On the next mile trail north of us, the Voss Schoolhouse was built of logs and half a mile eastof our mile the men started buildin the Pleasanton School. But they weren’t in such a hurry about that. They heaved the logs on four sides and called them blocks, thus making a block school. After it was complete, they painted it a nice barn red.”
Of the sugar maples:” As soon as father could, he made a contraption called a shaving horse. On this he made soap-bucket staves and hauling tub staves, and then made the staves into tubs and buckets.
“They hauled the tubs around on a big hand sleigh, oxen if there was a good run of sap.  Sometimes mother would come to the sugar camp, bringing a  pan of potatoes,a frying pan, and a teakettle. She would boil potatoes, fry slices of ham, and make a big pot of tea. Oh! Those were the only days, for us!
“Sister Nancy married a grouchy young  man, Austin Richley. They had a plain frame home out near the lake. John White Allen lived on the same mile road.  He was a professor from the Harvard College and our schoolteacher.
“Mrs. Bert Lewis lived on the next mile road. She kept the Pleasnton Post Office and if Pat and his mules brought a letter to any of us from Manistee, Will, or Stella, Lewis would tell us to come, there was a letter for us.
“Mr.and Mrs. Pierce and family lived on the next corner. She had brought her library, even the big 6’ cases, with her from New Haven, and we could all borrow books. She even had a big balled headed eagle(sic)g mounted and set in the hall of their roomy house.
“In the Voss District lived 2 families by the name of Arnold.—Samuel and Marion. Their wives were the first teachers of the Voss school. They also were from new Haven and Harvard. OIn fact almost al our neighbors were educators and were quite capable of handling us children.
Mrs. Anderson turned her house into a little store and Pat brought her merchandise from Manistee. She was at the southern side of Bear Lake and we often walked the 5 miles to her store.
In 1870 George Hopkins and his brother came from someplace else  right after we arrived. George built the first sawmill. Will had a little novelty store of his his own.  Almost all the neighbors built frame houses by 1873, father included. When my oldest sister got here in 1971 with her hudband and children Lewis, Maggie,a nd Eva, they took their few belongings and moved into uor old log house while a log house could be built for them.  If they’d come two years later it would have been frame.”
“Just into the edge of the pine ran a creek of very cold water we called Bowens Creek, and it was from here we boys went after trout, and we caught em, too. Bear Lake back then was simply alive with fish. Will and Herman could not go too aften, there was so much work to be done, but I went with Homer Bailey  and the Keillor and Lumly boys. We always brought home all the bass and pickerel we could lug.
“My folks told me I was light (sic)complexioned, and  had light hair and very blue eyes. I don’t know--the only looking glass we had was a 2 by 4 affair hanging on a log, and Will or Herman was always using it shaving. But I’ll swear my skin was black--at least when I looked into teh mirrored depths of the little bay where we always went in our dugout for black bass, sunfish, and bluegills.”
“When my sister Eliza was 16, father allowed her to marry a young man by the name of Dave Green. He was a real Nimrod. He lived in a low log house over in the Voss District.he was a regular   He and father always hunted together, and if they didn’t get a deer, they got two. Father made his own buck shot by pouring hot lead into his bullet molds, then dumping out a brand new shining(sic)bullet.
“After he had made a dozen of them, I gathered them up off the floor and put them into a little greasy buckskin bag.
“The next morning at 4:30 a.m. father went over Dave’s and by 5:30 p.m. they came home dragging in their deer. I heard him tell an Indian he had killed 104 deer in his day.
” The deep woods was alive with squirrels, partridges, and pigeons.  We boys shot them by the dozen and mother made pot pie.
“Oscar Keillor was the first man in our vicinity to own a team of horses. All the others had ox teams and big, clumsy-wheeled carts , save the teachers living some distance from the schools. They had a horse and buggy.
“You should visit our sugar bush. In the spring from the ninneteenth of March through April and half of May we were surely busy. We madw powdered, cake, and stick sugar , and syrup, to last us until next year at this time.
“At first father ’s sap containers were norhing but gouged-out troughs. We cut up a maple into 2-feet lengths, split them in two halves, then gouged out the center. These we set by a maple where the sap from the spike could drip into them.
She concludes this “auto”biography on “Henry”’s 18th birthday. His father gathered his four sons and offered each acreage or cash--he’d already given Eva’s mother and father 10 acres.  The rest took land too, esxcept Henry, who said, “You know I wish to kill the great dragon.” No, he said,”You know that I’ve always wanted to go to Hillsdale College and become an English professor, not a farmer.” Eva then utilizes a little drama--“In less than a week I started.I was on the train, wearing a suit of store cllothes, deep blue, a big smile, and $400 in my pocket.”
Of course if he’d bought a new suit and paid tuition and transportation  he did not have the whole $400 left in his pocket.But Eva seems to be a little dreamy. In another letter, to Grandpa, her first cousin, she draws the immaculate white sheet her grandmother made a tent of over a clothesline while their first cabin was being built.(C.H. helped build it, she reminded her mothers’ brother’s son.) But she thenadds about a painting she did of “The Childhood Home of C, H, Young”, “I told you they were mile roads but as I looked at the painting I realized we walked them too often and they must have been half-mile roads.”
That hints that in this entire story, she said mile whenever she meant half-mile.
I read so much about the painting, which I assumed a doer and shaker in the family got hold of. But it was here, in Mom’s cedar chest, a lovely surprise,a little miniature as far as the amount of community placed on one board. Although all my muralist-sized painter-spouse would say is “Nice.” To me it looked like Grandma Moses’ work when  without people. There were tiny but identifiable roosters, cows, ducks. She had that ability, and her buildings loked real. (Dan, who could tease a real wooden manger out of glass, declined to agree. Nor did he praise the  lively yellow-red sunrise sweeping the high sky,although most of his praise over his lifetime was for not being afraid to use color.He didn’t put anything down, but he didn’t think it stood out. Of course, his walls were lined with paintings by his own father, where “Vietnam” is a green soldier form in swamp with a red devil’s arm around his shoulders, walking him, and “Key West” is a highway atop a high cement wall, going directly into that one big pink house near Sunset Beach, near the “Southernmost motel in the United States”, once owned by a family named Ramos or something, which I had picked as a child as the only house worth living in in Key West, where all the land was already developed, and all the other homes but Hemmingway’s a lot tinier.
I like the painting, anyway, if for no other reason than that Charles’ wife, too, tried to preserve an image of her childhood home by standing in front of the tree it used to be by, her mouth rigidly closed as always, her hair drawn tightly back and her face severe and mean-looking. I couldn’t believe she wrote on it, insstead of throwing it away. But I guess it represented some trouble , getting to it, photographing her and the tree.Another photo says it is father’s home, but as I was once told by a fake Vietnam vet who questioned whether Dan was really there, “anyone can get photos and say they took them.”
Eva published articles ocassionally in Michigan History, the Michigan Historical Commission’s journal, including the March 1952 edition, which promises that it “contains articles by qualified writers.” Eva tells Grandpa she’s “just itching” to tell him about his father’s childhood home, which she left at 17, four years after his dad  left at 18.
An article in the August 20, 1954 “Detroit Times” callls Eva Ferrier “The Grandma moses of Michigan”. She was a robust 84, living away from civilization in the countryside. She credits pulling weeds and gardening for keeping her hands supple enough to guide a paint brush. The article says “Ina nother rural setting, at Bear Lake near Manistee, Eva painted her first picture at age ten and an old German professor who’d come there for a peaceful setting to paint discovered that she had some talent.”He did what he could to develop it,” Eva said,”and  down at the Detroit Museum of Art, they finished it off.”

Obviously, Eva found found life as a child in Michigan’s northwoods as engaging.I know the feeling well: all town business, any town business, is as far awaya s never as each day is spent getting through that day in those “playing outdoors” -like circumstances.I can imagine from the day she arrived as a one-year-old, getting to be outside so much, anytime, in fact, Moms banging pans to call kids to dinner; the echo-depth of every sound made, people throwing their lots in together, the naturally cool nights and warm awakenings by sun and birds with no sounds of traffic anywhere. It would be like camping with 5 families  all year. They got a big tub of water from somewhere once; Buck and Brindle, Eva informed Grandpa, hauled it in a big hauling tub behind a stone boat. Eva, 5, was told by her grandfather not to put her hands in it or she’d get the water dirty. How she admired her grandfather, who built three houses and then helped others build schools and churches, dig wells and gather sugar. Having seen new Americans and old build a pioneer community together, she was probably not surprised when this nation of high-spirited, plucky people became the world’s grestest super-power.
What’s harder to understand is her huge faith in Charles Henry. It’s not “Benjamin T. Young’s hand-built homes” but “My Early Childhood by Charles Henry Young”.
C.H. was apparently not well-liked as an adult. His sons say he was at first well-thought of and worked for a wealthy bsnker in Chicago.” But after he married Sarah Alice Lionberger and had 5 children, he was a teacher who argued vehemently with every school board he worked under and kept getting fired and having to take teaching jobs farther snd farther from home. It doesn’t look like his $400 got him much more than the shiny blue store-bought suit. In those days, Charles Henry’s youngest boy said, a person with a high school diploma was well-qualified to teach the farm childen to read, write, and “cipher”,  which was as much “learning” as a lot of them got.Childen wrote their ABCs, 2+2=4, etc. on a slate. Paper was scarce.”
And since then, we kids of the 60’s have to explain what penmenship lessons were. Kids never hear of it…
Charles Henry was born in 1866 , married “Alice” Browning-Lionberger and had 5 chikden: Paul, Ben, Maybelle, Irene, and Cy. Paul told Cy that he, Paul, was 12 years old when Mama sent him to fetch the doctor to “hatch me”. All the kids grew up in Cherry valley, Arkansas. Cy always said that from the first thing he could remember, Paul always took are of him and theat they were closer together than was normal for two brothers. Paul always took Cy’s side in his childish disputes with his siblings. Charles Henry was always away teaching at some country schoolhouse.  He  was generally considered a good teacher but he always found fault with members of the school board and moved on after one term.
This smells fishy. With his children’s health at stake, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut and hang onto a job? It sounds more like an excuse why he was never home…
Cy does make some sense when he notes that salaries of rural teachers in the late 1800s and early 1900s were meager and sometimes the county ran out of cash and paid teachers in  script, which was a promise to pay when some taxes were collected. Merchants didn’t like script and accepted it only at a discount.
Cy said that his mother, “being of practical English and German background”, had to make ends meet and feed the family.”
Holy Cow—another Mom and Dad? I kept reading Cy’s diary:
His first memories of a home was a house in a gravel pit with a splitchake shingle roof , and he could see sky where the shingles didn’t fit.
” When it rained, Mama caught the drips in pans, both for the cistern and as they leaked over our beds.Thee were lots of pans. ”
My childen can relate to that. We used pans, the plastic silverware tray, plastic trash bags to divert drips from couch arms TO pans—and got at least two straight hours of sleep a night before someone had to change the overflowing pans in these subtropical showers. The drips hit different densities of metal at different moments, making a beat, a rhythym. After seeing, all my life, pictures of my grandfather and great-grandfather (Grandma’s dapper doctor dad) in vests, cufflinks and pocket-watches, at solid-cherry wood desks with organized work on them, I had not anticipated any body in my lineage to live like the ones in my husband’s one family photo, dressed in faded, worn-thin clothes, too short at ankles and cuffs for the children, Ma’s smile like a jack-o-lantern’s and her face worn out from drudgery, in front of a shack with peeling paint and weeds  for a yard.
But catastropic illness when I was uninsured pretty well wiped a family out ($25,000 for a pacemaker-defibrillator, divorce to qualify for a heart transplant because you must have some brand of insurance to get a transplant—chuch fundraiser cash won’t cut it because if something goes wrong there has to be the funds for an immediate second transplant, and the only people going to insure me now I was diagnosed was Medicaid).
Before then, I had worked first at two wholesale plant nursuries experimenting with new processes and strains, and then for the state university system in the textbook department. Back in Michigan I had worked at 3 different plastic (injection and molding) factories, making Cadilllac door handles and Buick seatbelt holders, the original free plastic McDonalds’ coffee spoons ( soon changed to flat paddles when it was learned that people wre tooting cocaine with the spoons), and lots of things that went into telephone earpieces and the like that none of us, mostly women, knew what on earth they were or did. My principles didn’t match too well with some of those places—in one, a girl cut off part of her finger and it, and the blood,  were on the inside of dozens of car door handles that still had to be picked up by robotic arms, the textile wrapped around a flat piece of metal, then pushed down a glue-line where girls applied glue to the presetation and didn’t have time to see it’s next journey, where it came out of a flattening press all sealed and dropped in a box a guy picked up every few minutes and took to the girl who ran each end of the two-foot strip into a “bender” that made the two ends conform to the car, that is, held the handle out from the door so one could get a grip.
The foreman said to go on with the bloody batch--we were behind on production because of 2 heavy snow days when we couldn’t get to the plant--and, after all, the blood was permanently sealed out of sight, inside the door handle—cleaning them all would be  conscientious to a fault. (The girl who wanted to try to reattach her finger probably didn’t feel that way…)
At that point I had to re-think my disbelief of the stories I’d heard from kids a few years my senior and already in the “shops” (Fisher Body, Pontiac Motors, GMC), about how you couldn’t eat or drink on the job but sometimes were refused a lunch break and someone smuggled you a coke or chips or half their ham sandwich and then a super came by and you had no choice but to stuff the ham or coke in the part you were welding shut or whatever. Thus many a car, several shoprats told me somberly, had oders for months that the new owners and everyone they took it to coukdn’t figure out—it was a pint of curdled milk or a ham sandwich sealed in the door Knowing blood was sealed in a lot of doors I could no longer scoff at the other tales. And the next factory I went to, a foreman tried to get alone with me in a very lonely place.I had to be much more assertive than I really was (and just where was my 12-gauge shotgun?)   I read up on unions and brought it up with all the folks I’d made friends with one-by-one over the weeks (we worked 11pm.-7 a.m.) A few boisterous, grass-chewing men were very interested (in a union or in me), and half a dozen ladies were “shhh!” and all ready to go for it. Then the creep I wouldn’t sleep with fired me.
Heard about the union? Was that legal? The owner, a smartly-dressed, tall, portly man who owned factories plus, was sitting there when I came in to get my last paycheck.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.”Why, after I spend thousands of dollars training you and patiently waiting for you to be able to make production, when you’re finally good, and worth keeping, do all you young girls quit?”
So he didn’t know about the union. “Ask __”,I said, naming the creepy sex maniac. I mean, a man over 45 is downright creepy to a girl of 18, 20, unless she’s a hussler from time immemorial.
“If there’s a foreman here that’s giving you a rough time, I’d hope you’d come to his supervisor about it.”
“He’s the only one here all shift.”
“Please consider returning. I’ll look into this,” he said.
Oh, goody--now I can really return. The jerk had already said he’d been there 25 years and was irreplaceable--the only dude on earth who knew every aspect and nuance of that factory.
My other jobs in Michigan included census taking, helping widows vote, helping the national teacher’s association get a property tax millage through to improve local schools, and as one of the first female bellhops. At the Somerset Inn, beside the Somerset (Saks, Abercromie, Macy’s with marble sinks) Mall, in Troy, the city of tomorrow today. That last was a lucrative job, with salary and tips, and sometimes the wife tipped me and then as I put the lugage in the car, the husband tipped me. Trunk up so she couldn’t see--I mean, what would you do? Get him in trouble by letting on he tipped you behind her back? maybe he knew she tipped you too, they’d discussed it--then he’d really be in trouble.
I also got to bellhop for celebrities. I didn’t--never did--follow that crowd so I probably didn’t notice 5 dozen, but I had Artie Shaw, Vicki Lawrence, Henry Mancini, “The Skipper” from “Gilligan’s island”, Faye Dunaway, and the Ford wedding party. I also had a party who gave me a pound of sticks and seeds of pot for my tip. They just didn’t want to leave it in the room after apparently scoring a quantity and cleaning a pound of trash out of it. I was going to throw it away when the bellhop I’d told said,”Are you crazy? I’ll give you $20 for it right now.”
“Why,”I said, not asked.
“I can cut my bags with it, make them bigger,add a litle to each, get it?” he said. But I knew I couldn’t go to jail if I didn’t do anything wrong and that thst was the only way to stay out of jail, so I threw it down a garbage chute.I’m claustrophobic.
I had a few other jobs in Florida, too, intending to write novels and needing jobs for my characters: motel maid, motel restaurant dishwasher, Sears restaurant table busser, sports bar short-order cook,day-school center teacher—every job you can get with no college.I got lucky though when answering a college paper ad for a tenant. My future husband answered the phone. “It’d attached to a stained glass studio,” he said.”Myself, I think that’s kinda neat.” His words intrigued me. And when I got there and said I’d take it, the owner handed me a key. I’d just told him I’d get a paycheck in 2 weks to move in with.
“I won’t have any money for two weeks,’I reminded him.
“I know where you live,” he said.
That was Dan’s dad. He turned out to be one of those rare people that get a double-dose of personality. His charisma was contagious. It’s no exaggeation to say that his daily noon meals “for any one that’s hungry” drew crowds, with judges sitting next to junkies,  newspaper photographers who’d done a photo-story on him, and then kept returning, passing the paella to a merchant marine. Two or three guys brought their guitars, knowing others would and they could jam. Joseph D. Myers liked everyone. He was also pretty accomplished, a tin-can tourist from Illinois at age 3 whose folks ran a 24-hour-a-day hamburger joint who was determined to be an artist and took the Famous Artist’s School course and then put a mural in a Lake Worth, Florida Post Office of an alligator hunt          that put the P.O. on the National Registry of Historic Places. He has another mural in the boardroom of Tampa International Airport and original stained glass church windows in over 150 churches, from 1 to 27 windows a church, and original art in local schools, theme parks, restaurants, and homes. He has twice as many windows his company fabricated to others’ specs and famous Biblical paintings, like The Praying Hands and Plockhurst’s The Good Shepherd, and restoratons and repairs to even Tiffanys and  a window by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was a father-son concern with my husband working there since age 7, full-time since age 14. This is when the reporters ask “Do any of your sons seem to have the gene for it?” and Dad, knowing that Son is going to try to hang onto the business after he is gone, praises that son emphatically (“He’s the real artist” ).
He doesn’t add,”And Chubby seems more interested in how his butt feels on the couch.” He just doesn’t bring up the other son, even if they do.(“Well, they both like to fish, Dan and I go sailing every Sunday. The one working with me, he seems ready to stay on with this. “)
I was lucky because I not only got a home but a job, first as secretary, then as co-owner/operator. I became everything from researcher and ladder-monkey to designer and then painter on glass.Most new businesses don’t start and stay in the black for ten years. Ours did. When Joe Myers died, the company had $2,000 and a plexiglas job in progress. We never had a bad year—until Marina was born and I got peripartum cardiomyopathy from the labor. I was given a year to live. Social workers and doctors surrounded my hospital bed and told me the only way I could live longer was to get a divorce, be the head of my own household, and thus qualify for Medicaid. I had no choice,   not with a little baby, and the dad so forgetful that he’d proudly brought her to the hospital to see me my 3rd week with an empty diaper bag over his arm. (“I rememebered the diaper bag,” he whispered, smiling. “See, I’m not so addle-pated.”)
This was why we had a leaky roof—I wasn’t allowed to make over $8,000 a year for a family of 3, 2 of them growing out of their clothes evry few months. No one was allowed to gift us with financial aid. Reading Sarah Alice Lionbergr’s things, I felt a whole lot better about myself. My children and I also hauled water home from convenience store water spigots in gallon jugs when ours was cut off. And Dad and my brothers and I hauled it up from the creek to do dishes and flush the toilet in the winter.
Between 1904 and 1909 Cy and his mother and Paul moved 5 times to rental houses in Jonesboro, during which time, Cy writes, “Paul took me fishing and caught me a pet squirrel bought me an air rifle when I was eight and taught me to shoot and handle a gun safely, took me hunting (I killed my first squirrel when I was eight.)Paul’s high school education was interupted from time to time when he took a job to help fed us. But for the time and the area we were well-educated. Papa taught us correct speech, table manners, and we had books in the home.”
(Who taught Charles Henry these things? Eva said Charles Henry’s father Benjamin taught him Christian principles—never to sware(sic), never to fight and lie and etc.”)
Sarah Alice Lionberger, Cy’s mother, had a preacher father. She wrote on a photo “Oct 1926 near Carthage, Ill. Jacob Lionberger homesteaded this farm in 1835--came from Virginia. Emmanuel lionberger was 10 years old and lived here till he married. He is father of Alice and  grandfather of Paul H. Young.”  Cy said he knew nothing about her early education but believed that she acquired a lot of her later education from Charles Henry. he said that she also taught school, as Paul, Maybelle, and Irene all did later.”Aunt Lenna (next in age to Mama of 12 sisters,no brothers)helped the older four(all but me) through High School (Jonesboro High).” Other writings by him, Alice, Lena, and Paul show that Maybelle, Irene, and Ben all lived with Aunt Lena during their school years and went to school from her house. Meanwhile Sarah Alice, who went by Alice, took in boarders to support herself and her little boy Cy. A tent revival sprung up in the vacant lot across the street, and although the religion differed from the one she’d been raised in--these foreign  people screamed and chanted and cried out and crawled up the aisles, and  Alice’s church was practicaly non-stop singing While her dad preached, it was none of the fire and brimstone tone of this other religion’s. Still, Alice needed money and the preacher offered her it to rent a room. It was convenient for him. She rented to him and later to a teacher and the postmaster. When the postmaster job came open, she and two men applied. Alice won. Immediately a doctor desired to rent the back room of the post office from her for his office. Somehow, including with dreams Paul had that didn’t work out, they got by.
In the order in which they saw it: In 1908, wrote Cy, our fortunes changed.
Apparently there were times that his Dad really was teaching in other counties. To me that makes him responsible to the max for his irresposibility,then;  knowing he got fired all the time and having young ones to raise and a wife to be with, the way they’d planned it, rather than just dumping the young ones off on the world and feeling their duty done,he knew to keep his mouth shut and keep his job. That’s all he had to do.Hard to believe.Anyway, Charles was teaching at the small town of Hickory Ridge, 37 miles south of Jonesboro where Mama and Cy lived. Well, goodness, why didn’t Mama and Cy move down with him?” Two brothers, Dave and Ambrose Evans, who were operating a sawmill out of Hickory Ridge,planted a sawmill to rice, experimentally. This was the first time rice had ever been grown in Cross Country, or anywhere nearby in East Central Arkansas. It was a complete success. The sod developed to be ideally adaopted for rice. There was a “hard pan” of clay about six feet under the surface which held water (accounting for the swamps, and under the layer of hardpan an ample supply of water for irrigation. It caused a sensation and investors hastened to buy up the wild land and clear the native timber for rice farms.
Papa remembered his old banker friend, D. J. Burnham in Columbus, Ohio, wrote him, and persuaded him to buy a tract of land 1/2 s and 1/2 w of Hickory Ridge Rd.on the county dirt road, with Papa as manager.  We loaded our meager furniture in a boxcar and rode the caboose  of the local freight train to Hickory Ridge and rented a house in town..”
Eva had referred to “our meager posessions”.  I must have gotten my pack-rat nature from Grandma, who saved everything and was gifting us with, say, Dad’s 8th grade report card when we reached 8th grade, Mom said, because she couldn’t bring herself to throw anything away and wanted us to do it. But when I see a page of stores doing scrapbooking in the phone book, and how much like mini-mansions everyone’s house is but the unfortunate, I see a lot of future generations possessiong home movies of great, great grandpa palying guitar at 12, the Boy Scout badges he won—I think these familes just could not accumulate enough meaningful stuff before we could control humidity, and afford to have big moving vans, not just Brindle and Buck, or even just the porch of a caboose, and now  a lot of people will write or preserve family memories.
At least in my household, they hide their faces when you get the camcorder out.

Dad used to call it “camrecorder’ in it’s early days.
How am I supposed to forget Dad?
How am I supposed to remember him?
What about the fact that my own hourglass has been tipped and transplant candidates have to have a support group of at least 2 separate drivers in case one gets in a car wreck—Dad and Mom were going to stand with Dan and Mary as my support group. Dad was going to raise Marina if I died in the next five years. I’m lost.
Besides, Dad burned me. After  his surgery in 2006, before mine in June 2007, I was trying to discuss the fact that, allow though he owned his home mortgage free, I’d never afford the property taxes and insurance. he said,”Why not?”, and glared at my reason; “Thre will be enough money for all that,” he said; and then, kids talking to him, Mom talking to me, his voice suddenly rose and addressed me.”I forgot to tell you, Deanne—I’m not going to die.”
That was so much in keeping with how I saw him, I was reassured. The guy had smoked 3 packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day for 30 years or more and he was not only still around at 85, but he had no symptoms of emphysema and his intellect was genius quality. I married an idiot and both my daughters were singled out by elementary school teachers independently and tested and found to have IIQs of 130 give or take 2. Mary was in 4th grade and I had told that school from kindergarden’s first day that she tackled and solved adult puzzles in adult magazines. So what if it was the  National Enquirer? OK maybe the mag was geared to average IQs but a 4 year old solving them all was worthy of note.  The type of puzzle escapes me although I believe it had to do with numbers, perhaps a primitive sudoko such as Games Magazine used to run. So I gave her my new Games magazines (there wasn’t a children’s section, back then ) and she’d study and try those, too. With the second, I had no idea she was possibly gifted. Even though she was “right there” at 18 months, as my friends put it, and at four years old  Weird Al Yankovic’s guitar player said “Talking to her is  just like talking to one of us”, (Yeah, OK…)and his lady of 24 years, Jan,  said that she knew a lot of smart children but Marina was far smarter for just 4 than any she’d ever met, and this was a millionaire talking, someone who knew the kids of the founder of The Gap… I didn’t see it.
—But that wasn’t Jan’s  redeeming quality, only her superficial one: she was a lot like Martha Marie Young, efficient-and-a-half, classy, warm and natural, and was sharp as a bird’s mind—she had grown up in Hawaii, Pasedena, and American Somoa, her father the President or mayor or whatever we do there,  during her childhood, and owner of vast tracts of California and Hawaii, plus many businesses. Her mother died when she was 12 and she went to a boarding school like me but hers was more exclusive, and she attended college in Santa Cruz, at a clothing-optional institution, majoring in business and earning an MBA. She doted on her father, who was slipping away from heart failure, and when I showed up from Florida to get UCLA’s second opinion, she surreptitiously got online and found the best Peripartum Cardiomyopathy physician in the west, chosen by his peers, a cardio-thoracic surgeon who’d written books and papers on my specific disease, and, playing my secretary, she’d  gotten me an appointment at his Los Angeles’ UC Campus office. She was amazing. I wasn’t Hillary Clinton, just some unemployed dying mom. Jan is the most gracious woman I’ve met since my Grandma.
She and Jim, Al’s guitar player, who I’d lived with in 1975-1980, along with a dozen other friends, 4 or 5 at a time, put me up in a little Pacific-fronted cabin with pink bouganvillea all over the roof and the only garden on The Strand. All the other homes maxed the square-footage by having big homes from corner to corner, maybe a 1-foot-square yard for the unusual species of large dog on the porch, but the rest of the property used to achieve the biggest house possible. Jan’s house had been her childhood beach home when Hermosa , Manhattan, and Redondo Beaches were empty. Having a place in Hawaii with 3 private waterfalls, she felt no need to raze her 100-year-old  Los Angeles redwood cottage and put a 3-story fortress in its stead. The cabin was somewhat like a Michigan cabin; firepace burning nightly becuae of the cool breezes coming off the ocean, wicker furniture with cuddlier cushions, inconveniences like having to lock the bedroom door while in the bathroom so no one would accidently walk in; old-fashioned medicine cabinet ; the clothes washer-dryer had to be rolled into the kitchen and hooked up                                                                                               to do laundry; kayaks were suspended from the very high, beamed ceiling. Although I loved it, for a million dollars in 1998 everyone expected built-in nukers, kkitchen islands, kitchen desks for some reason, kitchen internet, his and her baths, major master suites, walk-in closets, and a lot more house. When she sold it for one-and-a -half million, it was quickly torn down and a big house the size of the lot, of drywall and concrete,  went up.
The cottage had had an inner coutyard plus a garden along the Strand’s boardwalk with 7 types of lettuce growing alongside tomatoes and roses. Jan ran her father’s affairs from a little office there; next to it was Jim’s recording studio, and then my cottage, with an unobscured view of the Pacific except when the people paraded along the Strand, which was from sunrise to sunset. They filled every inch of the walk on bicycles, skateboards, roller blades, leashed dogs, and combos of them all, such as roller skaters pulled by leashed dogs; and those, at the time, new V-shaped “batmobile” buggies, often pulled by dads on bikes. It was evident --I lived there 8 months--that there were all sorts of intact families with involved fathers. On the other hand, they could be uncles or new step-fathers, too. I was given the privilege of that life because it was assumed to be my last year, but I hung on another ten. So far. However I feel like I got all the best parts of life, from my two daughters to my dad; from the Au Sable to the lake home as a teen to a cottage on the Pacific that had the most marvelous bed, and chips and dip out every day for every one. Jan only shopped at the organic food market and  Trader Vic’s and you could tell. And she thought Marina was a genious. I blew that off and homeschooled her until 3rd grade and then the school tested her and she was just like her sister, 130. 98 percentile in the classes she keeps failing--Reading and Science.Mom said she had a lot to live up to, in her older sister. I never knew anyone was proud of my other daughter, and was surprised. “Oh, yes, “Mom said--this is after Dad died--now I’m going to cry for Mom--“She’s got a lot to live up to, it’s going to be very hard for her.”
Now, for 20 years or more Mom’s been playing like she had a wonderful life. Hearing of any teen trouble she’d say,”I’m so glad my children didn’t put me through any of that. My children were good kids.” I’d go, what do you mean?
I couldn’t, like, say it. Lady, one totaled two cars in two weeks and then was found 4 days dead! The details had come out.The details had come out in fact at my last time at the cabin, although, if Dad knew it, he didn’t say anything. I wasn’t suspicious because rigth after he’d foound his guns stolen he’d wanted to rush to the cabin. I thought it was to, maybe, keep from going off drinking?
But maybe, in the first case, he wanted to make sure Debbie hadn’t taken her party to the cabin and they were still there? Or, he had a gun there he suddenly needed, all his protection now being gone.
My dad NEVER said so, but my Dad always had a gun. Tony alone knew about hiss ervice revolver under his matress and told his friend who took it in the woods and “lost it”. And at his death my mother asked Dan to get Dad’s gun out of here and directed him to a pistol under the mattress. Dan learned in Vietnam to never sleep without your gun and can’t unlearn it so I assume the same thing happened to Dad. I wonder how much his father understood him. Most people think Dan needs help if he has to sleep with a gun. My Dad busts that theory.He’d never have told a soul. If there’s damage to the soul, if that’s why it now has to have a gun to feel safe, this country exacted that toll from them, and owes them all our highest respectand understanding.
And I must say that when we found our front door open as we pulled up, and saw a gypsy walk out it, saying he was looking for a jack, trying to look “out of it” while a blanket -ful of guns and jewelry lay on my bed inside,that I was proud of my husband as much as I was glad for him and glad that creepout didn’t come any closer to the driver’s door, at which point the gun he couldn’t see  in Dan’s left hand would have had to stick to his nose. It was sad letting the burgler get away, but I was proud of Dan’s decision not to risk wife and children over a few belongings, and  his readiness in case this wasn’t just about a few belongings.
Now, back to the IQ my kids landed. And--excuse me--their fairly sensible father’s genes mixed with Alice Youngs’ and others.

If only this type of thing had been available in the 1890’s—a measure of one’s intelligence quotient. There would have been much less anxiety in the life  of  Alice Young, and she may have lived past the age of 69, like all her relatives but her arsenic-damaged son Paul and her wayward husband aparently did, and her.
Whatever, C.H. apparently really did teach in the next county, which causes me to question the theory that families with unbelievable stories are hiding secrets  (“Papa argued with everyone he ever worked for and lost every job in every county in the state so he kept moving back a county from the rest of us, breaking new ground til the next arguement 5 days later…”)
Where’s the meat? You know, was Papa belligerant because no one let him drink whiskey in his classrooms or because the school districts were all prejudiced and keeping the deserving, hard-working poor from educations that might improve the quality of their lives? We never learn what the arguements were for, and if they had any merit at all. Seems to me Papa is standing on principle even though it divides his family, as if it’s a mighty important issue to him, Mama, all of them and they’ve all agreed to got his route. or why isn’t Mama moving with him? Because he moves too often? What of visits?  One must have happened, at least, because Cy writes about the rice farm: ”
“Papa resigned from his job as teacher anbd we lived there awaiting  negotiations to be completed. Paul had walking typhoid fever and I almost died from an attack of typhoid. Paul no longer had to feed the family so went to the University of Arkansas.
“An irrigation well was drilled, driven by a steam engine, land was cleared and crops grown but Papa was not a good farmer and after one year at the U. of A. Paul came home to help with the clearing, planting, etc., which made me very happy.
“He would take me to Bayou De View , 3 miles west of our home, and put me on a log at ‘The Drift’ where the stream made an abrupt turn and driftwood collected during high water, and equip me with a cane pole (wild cane grew along the stream),  short line,and  hook, and a can of ‘Betsy Bugs’ (grubs of some insect).I would collect nice strings of Bluegill and Black Perch while he fished for large-mouth bass with a rod and reel. Although he didn’t use a fly rod in those early days, Paul ws an expert fisherman. He was also a good hunter and an expert shot.I  have seen him kill a running rabbit with a deer rifle at 30 yards.He was a good naturalist—he knew the names of the birds and flowers, and wild plants.  He took a correspondance course in taxidermy, and his mounted birds and animals appeared as natural as if they were alive. ”
Grandma looked at the deer heads in our cabin and said,”Look at that white crud coming out of the mouths.The eyes sinking back. Your grandfather wouldn’t have done such a poor job at age 12.”
Arsenic had suposedly destroyed him—kidneys, I’d guess: Mom later said it was due to the things they did not know and taxidermy was a safe field, now. (But how do they ever know?)

Cy wrote,”After 3 years on the rice farm, Papa just took off--just went--one day he was there, the next day he was gone.”
It was 1912.  When Alice died ten years later, there was no mention in her long obituary of a husband or being predeceased by one. Irene was not mentioned, either. Dad said at this point, “He was probably an alcoholic.”
“A binge drinker,” I said.
“That could very well be,” Dad said.
Cy wrote, “Of course there were things to be done—hired hands to pay, feed for the horses to be bought, etc. Mama wrote Mr. Burnham, who appointed Paul manager of the farm.  Paul ran it 2 or 3 years. But Paul was not a good farmer. It was said that if paul was off in thefield planting rice and Ewal Pollet, his fishing buddy from town, came by and said the bass were biting in the bayou, Paul would tie the team in the shade of a tree and go fishing. This was not literally  true but the story illustrated Paul’s basic instincts. About this time Mama borrowed some money from Mr. Marr, a friend and a prosperous farmer from across the bayou,and she had a house built in Hickory Ridge. We moved to it in 1918.It was still standing in 1995.
“I decided that I would get a college degree in engineering. I did (University of Illinois,General Engineering, with Honors, elected to Tau Beta Pi Honorary Engineering Society, class of 1924.) Maybelle and Irene graduated from Jonesboro High School and both taught country school for a year or two, then got married. From 1912 to 1915 Paul and I often went fishing or hunting. About 1915, Maybelle married James Colllins, the bank manager. Her son J.C. “Jimmy” Collins ran the European Division of General Mills a few years. Irene married a farmer.  Her son, Llyod, retired after selling a good tool-making business. Her daughter’s son operated a seafood canning plant in Siam in the 1990’s. Paul meanwhile ran a threshing machine for a wheat farm in Kansas, worked for the lumbering industry in the Pacific Northwest, and became a foreman in the McDougal, Duluth, Minnesota shipyards.
“Ben got sick in 1917. We mortgaged the family cow to borrow $60 to send him to Kansas City to the doctor. He soon recovered and became a banker (Vice President, National Bank of Detroit). Mama, with a small income from boarders and from the post office, made regular payments on the house to Mr. Marr and let me invest my small earnings in War Saving Stamps for college.”
What small income?
“I was about

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