Remember, now: you're following a non-philosophy link.  Why, I don't know; but don't complain about what you find here.  If you don't like it, go somewhere else.  It's my page.

Most of us have a family -- one we came from, as it were (parents, brothers, sisters, pets too)  or one that's our own (husband or wife, children, pets too), or both.  For now, I'll speak of the former under the rubric of my 'family history', though its history continues to grow; I'll speak of the latter as 'my family', and of course its history continues to grow too.

FAMILY HISTORY

I'm thinking of "family history" more like "historical stuff about me and my family," not like a bit of genealogy.  For now, it's memories of how things were, as I recall it, growing up.  There is something I should say by way of preface, something that for all I know takes the nostalgic edge off of exercises like this one, but which for all that--and perhaps because of that--needs saying.  The point can be put generally first:   there is nothing about the intrinsic quality of an apparent memory impression that shows it to be a genuine rather than a mere seeming memory.  The point isn't that we cannot always claim veridicality for our memories:  of course we can't do that, because over time information up there in our heads becomes less and less detailed (information can get lost) and clear (information can to varying degrees get obscured), and we know that this happens without knowing exactly the extent to which it happens.  My point is rather that, whatever level of detail and clarity an apparent memory impression may enjoy, there remains still the question of whether it is in fact a memory, rather than a mere seeming-memory.  That's the general point.  Specifically, then, in regard to certain items I claim below to recall, I must confess to having no confidence whatsoever that I'm reporting a genuine memory.  This is not so in most cases, but it is so in some of them.  I can only say with confidence that in every case, I seem to remember what I say I do.  I shan't go on adding this proviso here and there in what follows:  consider it done.

Grandpa

Grandpa would often hoe weeds, sometimes with a diamond hoe, and sometimes a hula hoe.  I think he typically used a diamond hoe out under the big locust trees and around the barnyard:  I never remember him using other than a diamond hoe out there.  One time Dwight and I were throwing a blue frisbee to and fro in the barnyard.  (I cannot now recall whether this occasion was his first encounter with a frisbee:  there was such an encounter, and I was there at the time--or anyway, he represented it to me then as being the first time he'd seen one.  I distinctly remember him marveling over it as a toy, and trying to throw it himself.  He tried only once to throw it on that occasion, but he did watch us keenly, between scratches in the hard dirt with the hoe, as we played.  He seemed amazed at how it could float very very slowly and remain aloft.)  I always felt a bit bad about playing when others were working, but apparently not bad enough to stop my play to join Grandpa hoeing.  In any case, I did wonder aloud (to him, on this occasion) why he should be out there so often getting after so few weeds.  He became a little serious with me, and said that the reason there were so few weeds was that he got out there often, and likened hoeing a single weed with winning a battle, weed-hoeing at large being very like a war.  And then he told me about a war being lost "for want of a horse-shoe nail."

Being a fighting soldier in the First War was something that I think Grandpa avoided, but unlike the COs (Consciencious Objectors) of the Second War, Grandpa and others still had to enlist.  Gary had a set of throwing knives that, on occasion, he'd come over and toss at the locust tree in the barnyard nearest our property, by the work driveway.  Grandpa once told me that, along with some other fellas in the War, he would throw kitchen knives from a long distance with considerable accuracy, into wooden tables and also into the floor.  That's about kitchen knives, not guns: I don't know where Grandpa learned to shoot, and I don't know if the childhood belief I had, that he was a very good shot, was well-founded or not. (There was a tale I liked to tell my friends, and still sometimes do:  Grandpa would sit on the ground behind the barn, gun cradled between his knees, and shoot a rabbit running along the ditch-bank way back behind the place; the rabbit would fall into the ditch, float around the corner and down toward the house, where he would pick it up.  I'm morally certain that this tale was not invented by me:  I was told it by people older than me.)

"For the want of a horse-shoe nail:"  I don't remember any horses at Grandpa's, though Dad speaks of them kicking the tractor when eventually machinery replaced the animals.  And I don't remember the cows either.  But I do know that there were cows there, 'till fairly late in the life of the barn.

A barn- or monkey-owl would return every year for a visit to the barn.  As I remember the barn, it was large and sometimes dark inside.  Robin and Gary used to coax me up the ladder to the loft, following assuringly behind, only to scramble away when I neared the top and leave me to descend alone from that mysterious place up there.  I do believe that it was there in the loft where Grandpa stored the blue flat-bottom wooden boat; and I seem to remember being told that he had built that boat.  There were dusty grain-bins or smaller rooms in the barn, where I was never willing to hide without Faye or Joyce:  we hid there when playing "kick the can" out in the barnyard.  Playing kick the can is my favorite, most pleasant childhood barn-yard memory.   My second-favorite memory is swinging in the swings from those big locust trees.

But those aren't memories about Grandpa.  Here is a barnyard memory about Grandpa having nothing to do with weeds or cans or swings, but with the barn.  As a relatively young kid I would sometimes make a bow and arrow.  The bow would usually be fashioned out of a garden-variety almond sprig, using twine for the bowstring.  (We had a handsome bundle, or ball, of twine out in the shop, which smelled to me vaguely of oil and which we were at pains to keep tidied as a bundle, to avoid twine tossed-salad).  The arrows were usually fashioned out of slender green bamboo stakes, laying around with the nursery stock at our place and over at Uncle Floyd's:  in these I would cut a slit in one end, and on the other wrap lead strips (Robin would secure these for me, from somewhere) and tin foil, to make a blunt tip.  (Once, I shot and killed a blue jay with a home-made set-up like that, out in the eastern-most olive tree by the road.  This episode makes up one-half of my repertoire of amazing hunting stories.  The other:  I shot a bird out of the air, aiming from the hip, as it flew in front of me unexpectedly.  This was out in the orchard, along the lane back to the ditch.)  Anyway, for some reason or other I once got a fancy, store-bought bow and arrow set, and I also got an Indian head-dress, complete with red and yellow and blue feathers spread across it.  I was out in the barnyard, suited up as an Indian and playing with my bow and arrows.  (These arrows had rubber tips, and would indeed stick onto flat surfaces when shot properly, coming off with a sucking sort of noise when pulled from the surface.  This worked especially well if the ends had spit on them, just like the darts used in dart guns.)  Grandpa saw me at the same moment I saw him, coming around the south-west corner of the barn.  He mock-froze, staring with a frightened look, and then turned and ran away with a yell, disappearing around the barn.  I of course took up pursuit, and upon clearing the west side of the barn to see absolutely no-one, continued around the north side.  No Grandpa.  I would now sneak quietly along, bent low, as if an scout, my arrow readied:  I'd be a good Indian alright.  But as I crept, I remember suddenly thinking to myself (and this moral twinge ruined the game considerably): what could I possibly do with that arrow if my tracking abilities should serve me well enough to turn up Grandpa?  I could hardly shoot him.  Arrows, as with guns, were never to be even aimed at people, let alone discharged in their direction.  (I was later to lose my pump BB gun?a Cross or Benjamin air BB gun?on the same day I was given it as a Christmas present, pointing it in the wrong direction.)  I couldn't resolve the issue, really:  I was playing with the bow and arrows, after all, and to lay them aside to take prisoner instead seemed scarcely an option.  I'd have to shoot OK, just not very accurately.  Past the north side I went, peeking right around to the east side, looking then to my left over at the woodpile....  A snapping sound behind me:  I spin, and there stands Grandpa, his back to me, peering into the barn as if unaware that I was so dangerously nearby.  I cleared my throat, hoping he'd run away and invite me to chase rather than shoot.  Instead, Grandpa peered into the barn (a door of some kind) for what seemed like forever, and I couldn't stand it go any longer.  So I yelled like a good young Indian, and as he turned I shot him..., sorta, down toward the ground, roughly in his direction.  And then of course Grandpa went on to cooperate splendidly, whooping and hollering and dancing a jig in his baggy overalls, as if that wayward arrow were really a thousand of them, coming right at his ankles.  I can't remember any more about the episode;  I do know that Grandpa didn't chew me out for shooting as I did, and I remember feeling relieved about that.

I liked the woodpile.  Sometimes we'd meet Grandpa out there at dusk, Dwight and I getting wood at the same time he was, often with Dad.  I remember him using a double-headed axe, and telling a story about someone he knew cutting his foot with such an axe, right through a boot.  I think he wouldn't let us use the axe, though I can't now understand why:  we used others, and it was the fellow's foot that was cut, not the fellow's backside.  (About the woodpile:  I loved it out there, and of all my childhood memories, chopping wood is by far my favorite.  Two things about the woodpile that I didn't like.  First, I didn't like the stink-bugs, which back then were often thick on the underside of wood but nowadays rarely seen.  Second, I was wary of the darker, cavern-looking spaces deep in the pile, where Robin and Gary often said they saw foxes and wolves and perhaps even bears.  While still relatively young, I never liked getting wood when it was too dark, and it was primarily for those two reasons.)

I enjoyed what I think of now as "wood days," when we went out to cut wood (which I think we would bring up from the orchard in the long almond trailor) or to buzz it on the saw.  These were like adventures:  we could use the hatchet to trim wood, and we could lift smaller pieces off the saw table and pitch them.  Grandpa often helped with the buzzing.  Mid-morning, Mom would bring hot chocolate and a snack out to the orchard or the woodpile; usually it was cold and foggy, and I always looked forward to a snack.  But to this day I like the sound of a chain saw off in the distance, and the thought of bringing in wood.  Grandpa once told me that the man who cut his own wood gets warm twice.  I thought I knew what he meant:  you warm up when you work, sometimes you even sweat, and of course the wood in the stove and fireplace make warmth.  I later learned that this isn't what was meant by the "warmed twice" claim:  it had a much deeper meaning that went on past me at the time (and threatens to even now, I confess).

Next to chopping wood, I liked chopping kindling (or perhaps it ought to be "kindleing," but that looks silly and anyway I prefer to spell it like I pronounce it).  Grandpa had a great kindling room, off of the garage:  one whole bin was, it seems to me, always chock full of the best, straightest-grained kindling wood--redwood siding, maybe--which he could chop into the thinnest, straightest bits of kindling.  Grandpa had a chopping block in there, with his hatchet of course, and there was a lantern hanging up near the rafter plate, and a milk-can in a corner as I remember, and also a poster of Smoky the Bear hanging on the inside door going into the garage.  That poster was once the indirect source of some terror for me, though it shouldn't have been.  The kindling room was dark, especially when the outside door was closed.  Joyce impressed upon me the importance of the bear poster:  it was a kind of warning about what kinds of critters there were in these parts, and indeed bears did hide back underneath the kindling wood pile.  And then of course she shut the door and ran, and I balled.

The door had only a tea-plate sized hole in it, covered with tin.  As I say, it was dark in that room, especially with the door shut.

But that's not about Grandpa either.  I remember when he re-shingled the roof and painted the outside of the garage and kindling building.  And I remember when, a good while before that, he pulled the barn down.  (Dan Mohler showed up that day, in a blue pick-up.)  One clear and distinct memory I have of Grandpa--a sort of mental picture that I get when I consciously think back for that purpose--is of him walking up there along the rafters of the new shop he was building.  As I think of it now, he was in a way young then.  (At the time, I don't think he seemed young to me; nor indeed was he.  "Youthful," relatively speaking, is just a feature of that mental picture I now have, and it's one I like.)

I remember him salvaging wood from the barn, and thinking at the time how patient he was at chiseling away raised parts of a concrete floor remaining from the barn (to be salvaged for a portion of the new shop), and pulling nails from certain pieces of timber  He showed me some of these nails:  they were either hand-wrought square nails, or else hand-cut square nails, or else machine-made nails with square heads.  (If either of the first two, they would date around 1790-1820; if the third, they would date between 1815 and 1850.  I don't mean that these nails are any reliable indicator of when the barn was built:  they needn't be.  [There are perfectly good, unused nails now in the shop at home, bought many years ago.])

There are lots of memories I have of Grandpa and Grandma's place--all the buildings, I mean.  There were lots of buildings.  The basement (not the cellar under the house) was funny-smelling, and full of mysterious little things.  I was always intrigued by a large oil can, much like a linesman might use on the railroad, and a cap with a small brass lantern on its bill--a kind of mining hat.  (This hat is in my bedroom closet at home:  I confess to walking over and stealing it from the basement shortly after grandpa died, reckoning it to be mine for all practical purposes because I always took such an interest in it.)  I remember the baby chicks in the brooder house under the heater, and how exciting it was when the little chicks arrived.  I didn't like the older chickens themselves, really.  I once accidentally broke a glass egg when fleeing a hen that thought I was gathering more than I had a right to gather.  It was outside the brooder house that we cleaned fish, in a large tin sink, which just drained onto the ground.  A trumpet vine grew next to the sink, which hummingbirds would visit when in bloom.  I have fewer memories of the old chicken house (or so I remember calling it) further out back.  Grandpa once showed me a hummingbird's nest out there, built on top of an empty porcelain light-bulb holder or wire insulator.  There was rhubarb growing at the south-east corner of the old chicken-house, and I hated the rhubarb pie that Grandma would make.  Dwight loved it.  I also hated Grandma's custard, which she would invariably make and send over when we were sick.  (It all seemed a rather dreadful practice--to be already sick, and then given some bad-tasting food on top of it.)

Food.  Well, between the brooder house and the old chicken house was where Grandpa usually planted the garden.  Tall corn and long healthy rows of beans went there.  I once helped him plant carrots, and he said we oughtn't be grumpy if they failed to come up.  They did, beautifully.  And there were butchered chickens:  chicken days were in a way exciting, but the scalded wet feathers and blood made the back porch stink, and overall I disliked the whole affair.  There were peach and apricot canning days, at our house and over at Grandma's too:  these days seemed to me to be a bit less frantic and happier.  There were corn days, with literal mounds of ears of corn out in the barnyard on the almond tarps.  We would save up a handful of worms, and then run over to give them to the peacocks.  (We did the same with tomato worms.)

I never much liked eating lunch over at Grandpa and Grandma's.  Perhaps it was because they just ate different sorts of food, and I was (alas) a finicky eater.  I couldn't very easily complain about food at Grandma's:  not because I'd lost my voice, but I'd lose my nerve.  It just didn't seem proper to wrinkle up my nose at her food.  I do remember once being given hominy.  I gagged, and Grandpa got a bit unhappy with me, but Grandma let me off.  At that same meal, Grandpa ate some sardines from a can, and I thought that this was the strangest and most esoteric bit of dining I could fathom.  I was terribly glad when that meal was over.

Grandma would nearly always give us ice cream after lunch.  And nearly always it was vanilla, but on rare occasion, vanilla-chocolate squares.

I don't remember the kitchen ever being particularly warm.

It seems to me that we usually had Thanksgiving dinner over at Grandpa and Grandma's.  This was always the most wonderful meal:  I hated cranberry sauce, and wasn't made to eat any.  Grandpa would carve the turkey in the kitchen, and there was always mashed potatoes and pie afterward.  Often we had a Christmas dinner there too, and the men seemed to me always to be wearing a new flannel shirt on that day.  (Except perhaps Grandpa:  I seem to remember him carving the turkey in his white sunday shirt.)  I loved the big table, and felt warm and comfortable and happy that everyone could all be together.  We would sing the Doxology: I still think we ought to sing that.

We sometimes went to Grandpa and Grandma's in the evenings, when Dad and Mom had to go away for something and couldn't take us kids.  I enjoyed evenings there.  Grandpa would sit in that large gray chair next to the window seat, in the dining room:  he would read.  Sometimes he would fall asleep there and snore, before we had to go home.  (I always thought his snoring was funny but somehow lamentable--an ailment of growing age.)  Grandma would sit opposite a small table to Grandpa's left, under a floor lamp, the fish-tank above her left shoulder.  She would knit.  Us kids would occupy ourselves in the living room.  I liked the wind-up clapping monkey (these toys sell for good money nowadays), and the camel-hair fireplace broom.  Later, there was a relatively large sea-shell in the living room, which could be blown like a horn to make horn-like sounds.  And there was a race-car that Grandma eventually got for us to play with:  it was red plastic, with black wheels, and we would use pillows and books to make a ramp for it to leap over.  But most of all I liked a certain book about a young Indian and a broken arrow.  I can't reconstruct the story, anymore, but the arrow eventually came to symbolize a covenant of peace between this young Indian brave and a white boy.

There was a large, oval rug in the living room.  Sometimes, Robin would roll us up in that rug (one at a time, of course), arms straight down to our sides:  once rolled up and not permitted to unroll, it was a terrifying, claustrophobic fight to yell and wiggle seriously enough to be finally unrolled.  But I think we must have liked the experience in its own way too, because I'm sure that I did it more than once, if not more than once in a single evening.  Memory can block the bad stuff out, and so can a sudden rush of courage in the face of a dare.

I believe that at the time I was a youngster growing up and visiting them, Grandpa didn't sleep in the same room with Grandma.  I remember Grandpa's room always being very cold, and somewhat less well-furnished than the rest of the house.  I cannot say whether the belief we had (or I had, anyway) that Grandpa would take a cold bath in the morning was a true belief or a false one.  On the wall of Grandma's bedroom hung two pictures, one of Dad and one of Uncle Floyd, when they were quite young.  (These were not photographs, but extremely well-done colored chalk drawings, drawn from postcard-sized photos.)  Her bed seems to me to have always been covered with a white bedspread.  Later on, during his ailing months, Grandpa would sleep there.

Sometimes Dwight and I would sleep up in the tank house, which was above the back porch.  I liked it up there: it was cold, but the dark wood, bathed in light from a single bulb hanging down from the ceiling, made it feel warm.  And besides, there were National Geographics to look at when we should have been sleeping.

I am sorry--I don't mean apologetic, just sorry--that I can't remember much more about Grandpa.  I remember crying at his funeral, at age 15 I believe, feeling positively guilty that I hadn't spent more time with him.  It wasn't until he died that I realized what a loss it was to me:  selfishly, I wished suddenly that I could talk about how he grew up and where his folks had lived as children and how life was in the First War and a hundred other things.  Anyway, I didn't, but sometime will.  'Till then, here are the bits of pieces of what more I do remember, fragmented and piece-meal as it is.  (I leave out stuff I remember about his last, ailing days, except to say that he wondered, when annointed there at home by the elders, whether the oil came from the olives at Olive Grove.)

Grandpa had white hair, and a wonderful smile.  His eyes would sparkle when he smiled or laughed.  He could play jokes, and he could be very serious too.  He liked hard candy, especially peanut brittle.  But I think he liked hard tack too.  I remember thinking that his pants were always too baggy.  In later years, they would ride up too high on his waist.  He built Dad a pair of sawhorses, which we found outside the back porch on Christmas morning.  In church, he sat on the second bench back, right (men's) side (facing the front):  once in a blue moon he would scold Dwight or I for being too noisy, though Dad's glare from up front performed that task much more frequently and severely.  I remember Grandpa singing, in church:  it seems to me that he didn't sing especially quietly, nor in a low voice.  Robin has a funny story about something Grandpa whispered to him in church, in connection with Walter Heinrich's metaphor of Christians "sitting on the stool of do-nothing."  When he got older, Grandpa used to doze in a hammock outside the back porch, in the afternoon.  He once told me that he would talk to birds there.
 

Favorite Childhood Memories

1.  One could hardly expect the wood-burning stove in the kitchen, and (later) the fireplace in the living room, to serve their purpose on cold mornings without a proper stock of firewood and kindling up at the house.  As a kid I reckoned it big-manís work to go out at sundown, past the puddles in the barnyard (and missing that manure drain hole from Grandpaís barn) to the wood pile out back, and thence to the kindling pile behind the chicken house (shop), to get a load of wood and kindling.  There were serious risks to letting the short dusk of a winter evening turn dark on you--the least of them being caught out with no split stuff to bring in. (Dad, in the interest of whole feet, prohibited chopping wood in poor light.)  There were three real risks.  First: the stink bugs on the underside of the wood, which you just couldnít seem to avoid when fetching wood in the dark.  (Flashlight?  Well, not when a log needed both hands, and to actually use the flashlight very much was to be less of a man, more of a sissy.)  Second: the dark holes in the woodpile, where--for all Robin and Gary had told us--there might be foxes or even bears, and where you just couldnít bring yourself to shine the flashlight for fear of actually seeing one.  And third:  hitting that darned manure thing or a soggy-bottomed puddle with a full wheelbarrow on the way up to the house, and losing your load.  But there were pleasant parts to getting wood.  One could chop kindling at night safely enough, if you turned on the shop light and opened the back shop door, and if you took off your gloves.  (Youíd have to actually go into the shop, pitch dark, and negotiate your way past who-knows-whatís-lurking, to find the switch.)  The sound of chopping straight kindling--straight redwood barn-siding kindling--is the one of the best sounds there is.  And then heading through the dark up toward the back porch, which Mom always seemed to have lit up, knowing it was warmer in there and that Mom had supper--or, if it was Saturday night, popcorn--waiting.

2.  If you know how to whistle--not just whistle, as you would a tune, but give a whistle-- you can help irrigate, with the big men.  (City people wonít understand.  You flooded almonds.  Grandpa or Dad or Uncle Floyd would be at the main gate down at the canal, or at a box along the pipeline, and needed to know when to back off the water when a check was flooded and when a box was getting shut down.)  I learned how to give a whistle in the bathtub one Saturday night, after trying the whole of an irrigation day to place my tongue just right and force enough air through.  Irrigation day was exciting:  the sound of the water rushing from the canal down the pipeline as it approached the box; the roar and wild frothing splash as it pounded out of the gate into the field; playing in the water with Boots, when he could be distracted from business of gopher- and snake-hunting.  (A favorite irrigation item of mine was boats, though home-made boats were a mixed success.  The boat on which I spent the most time, painted yellow, conspired always to float upside-down.  This I regarded with disappointment but even more as a kind of deep failing on my part.  But at some point Mom got Dwight and I two store-bought boats, his red, mine green, and these worked fine.)  The irrigation water was nice and cold on a hot summer day, and the mud felt good between your toes, and you could skip rocks.  After flooding, there was still plenty to look forward to.  The levees would stay up two or three days, which made for at least two or three days of good tunnel-building.  (The chore, of course, was to keep Boots away, who seemed to think that digging in a levee indicated serious gopher-hunting.)  And then, after the orchard had been plowed up, there remained two further opportunities--sorta like rituals.  Make trails--long, winding trails, stamped out flat in your bare feet through the plowed field, in a team effort, snaking around the trees and fixing the fair boundaries for games of tag ; and a bit later, clod-fights--friendly ones, first, when the clods were still moist and didnít much offend anyone except when they broke near your mouth, and then knock-down drag-out "throw it for all itís worth" fights, from behind the trees, when the clods turned dry and hard.  If you got hit wrong youíd bawl.

3.  Youíd flood almonds.  Youíd also knock them, at harvest time in late-August and early September.  A big operation would use machinery:  we used mallets and poles to knock them onto large canvas tarps, spread on each side of a tree.  I disliked knocking almonds when I was too little to join Dad and Robin up in the tree: it seemed piddly business to pole a tree, and pick up strays around the tarp.  But you could dilly-dally a bit, and eat almonds, and then contribute in a proper way toward pulling tarps to the next tree.  In the fullness of time, a little fellow will graduate up to the small mallet, and venture into the trees to pound on smaller limbs.  That involved strength and balance (both hands on the mallet) worthy of a big man.  It was hot, dirty, frustrating work: sometimes youíd slip onto your crotch or drop your mallet, and twigs would hang up in your shirt and especially your ears.  (My first memory of Dadís rich vocabulary came when he was up in a tree, and I down with a pole.  A stubborn twig caught in the neckline of his shirt, and then thwitted up across his face to knock off his hat.  He said "Damn!", and I informed him that a preacher couldnít say that.  He told me not to tell Mom and to toss up his hat.)  Eventually, when the tarps were too heavy to drag any further, weíd sack almonds, with an almond shovel that allowed dirt and leaves and small twigs to fall through it.  These were rewarding interludes, sometimes coinciding with lemonade that Mom had brought out: you could rest a bit, and each of us was obliged to offer up a guess as to how many sacks the load would yield.  Knocking almonds--a marriage between the tree-climbing recreation of a kid and the honest labor of harvest--was the sort of work youíd boast about at school, and feel good about when, however many days later, Dad finally loaded up the sacks to take into town.
 
 

MY FAMILY

There is Karen, my wife, and James, our son, and two dogs, Duke and Sadie....