Another photo of me and my dad that I found in the 25 year old crumpled paper lunch bag. Although I don’t remember this photo being taken, I do remember living here as well as some snippets of childhood for which this small house on Telegraph Road was the setting.
On a summer day, it’s me, age five, hamming it up while sitting on my dad’s lap in the front yard of our house that we rented from his Aunt Hazel. I don’t remember the occasion, but it looks like a gathering of my parents’ square dancing friends…maybe a game of poker is going on up there on the front porch. I don’t know why I’m pointing at my dad’s nose…just part of the mugging process and me being me, I guess. What I do know is that my mother made that polka dot sun suit and she made it out of a feed sack. (I wore a-la-feed-sack fashions well into my elementary school years.) I was okay with the skimpy homemade outfits until the following summer when I was suddenly stricken with modesty and refused to wear them altogether. And my flair doesn’t end there. I’m also donning my mother’s signature haircut for me…short. choppy. bangs. These days I cut my own hair and have a tendency toward short. choppy. bangs.
I see my dad’s wedding ring there that is now weighty, yet gently so, on my finger, kept secure by my own wedding band. My mother gave it to me after my father’s passing, and I slipped it on for the meantime so I wouldn’t lose it. I’ve yet to take it off. I’m glad that she gave me his original plain band and not the other one. At one point she bought a second set of wedding bands, ones with beaded edges. I asked her the reason for the new set of rings—had the originals been lost or were vows renewed—no, she said, she just wanted new ones. Odd, I think, to “replace” something like that.
And it was in this house where this photo was taken.
Lucy stares in disbelief as I tell her how many treats we could buy if we were to cash in on my vintage Rolling Stones tee. Purchased at an American Tour 1981 performance, the same shirt, same condition, is going for $95 on eBay—that’s a lotta Milk-Bones!
Held at the now defunct Capital Centre in Largo, Maryland, in early December of that year, the tour was to promote their album, Tattoo You. In 1982, selected songs from a few of the taped performances were released on the live album, “Still Life” (American Concert 1981).
Sorry, Lucy, but I’m hangin’ on to this one. (Check out some favorite Stones tunes in the sidebar!)
Just an inexpensive plastic Christmas toy, my dad bought this at either a Drug Fair or Peoples Drug in the early 60’s. Actually, he bought two, and he used to perch them atop my mom’s and my Christmas stockings. I think it’s kinda charming, but W says it gives him the creeps and reminds him of a bad horror movie. Heh. It’s that yin and yang thang.
I made this for my dad…okay, truth be told, I made it for me…and for you, though I would give anything for him to be here to see and hear it for himself. Set to my all-time favorite song, Grateful Dead’s Box of Rain, it never occurred to me that the lyrics were, as Phil Lesh explained in the video here, “…so apt, so perfect…” for all that my dad would face over the last few months.
I hope you enjoy this easy, five-minute glimpse into my dad’s life.
Me, with my mom and dad, seated in the small house on Telegraph Road in Alexandria, rented from my dad’s Aunt Hazel. The folks smile easily, but I warily ogle the guy and his contraption set up in our living room as he holds one of my mom’s glass figurines—an elephant, I think—moving it in a dancing fashion back and forth across the front of his face, trying to eek out a smile from me. I was a tough case, so he gave up and captured the moment as was.
This is one of my favorite pics of my dad, taken about 15 years ago when he was 60 years old. With his signature flat top haircut and cup of Maxwell House, he wears a shirt that still hangs in his clothes closet, kept company by hangers full of other flannels, corduroys and denims, some so thread bare that the light shines through. In contrast, his dresser holds plenty of brand new duds, still folded and packaged with the tags still on, gifts from Christmases and birthdays past. Here, he stands in his driveway, possibly eying Lady in the hay bottom of his three acres or the goings-on of the kinfolk up the road who, years ago, encroached, albeit legally by way of auction, upon my maternal grandparents’ 65-year-old farm.
Daddy was physically strong and active, self-reliant, hard-working, very well-mannered, responsible and extremely loyal. And he was my ally in our immediate family of four. Although we shared no DNA (he adopted me at age 3 after he and my mother married), we were, unlike my mother and much younger sibling, both introverted and quiet, most comfortable with those we knew well. Although on opposite ends of the political spectrum, we left well enough alone and didn’t hold our differences against each other. He was my familial sounding board and voice of reason. Did I mention he was an excellent dancer? Square dance and waltz.
But, like most of us, he had a bad habit and a deadly one at that. He smoked from the time he was a teenager and only gave it up for good 10 years ago when he was diagnosed with emphysema. If not for that, I believe he would’ve beat the pneumonia. So, seven weeks ago, when he first went into the hospital and asked if I could possibly come and help my mom who was left home alone, I never imagined that I would return to Virginia without my father safe, back at home. Only 15 hours prior to his death, when the nurse said, “I think we’re coming to the end,” did I then realize that he would not recover. I think daddy realized a day earlier when he started demanding the powerful anxiety pill that he knew would keep him sedated. Still, I can’t believe he didn’t make it.
The three songs on the playlist accompanied a video of photos of my dad throughout his life that played continuously during the visitation in the funeral home’s chapel. Visitors quietly chatted and mingled and hopefully conjured up memories of him in better times as they gazed upon his urn and Surveying the North Forty, which sat framed on an easel. As daddy requested, there was no preacher and no fuss. Anything that family members and a few close friends wanted to say about him was reserved for the cemetery the following day. I think he would have approved as all the to-do was much like him–quiet, unassuming, friendly and comfortable.
Exactly four years ago today, we were driving east on I-40, heading home on our cross-country trip. We had heard about this sculpture called Cadillac Ranch, near Amarillo, Texas, so we decided to stop and see for ourselves. The experience was truly surreal, with the sun beginning to set, the flat, wide-open field, and of course, the 10 half-buried, nose-down Cadillacs. We were the only ones there, so that made it even more eerie. The art is ever-changing as visitors from around the world put their own touch of graffiti on the cars. We were there after the cars were supposedly painted pink in tribute to breast cancer victims, but as you can see, they were already covered with new layers of graffiti. You can still make out a general underlying pink layer though.
The sculpture was created in 1974 by a San Francisco art collective called Ant Farm when they were invited by Stanley Marsh 3 (he felt Roman numerals were too pretentious), the owner of the wheat field, to create a unique piece of art for his ranch. They came up with the concept of placing used or junk Cadillacs, facing west, half-buried at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza.  The original sculpture was moved a couple of miles west, to its current location, in 1997.Â
What does it represent? Don’t know exactly. You tell me.
The best childhood times are kinda like old and loved recipes–favorite memories, lovingly prepared and served up by family and even family friends. And although there was an odd assortment of those family friends while growing up–from Junie, the cheery rotund lesbian with the jet black ponytail and red lipstick, to Frank, the gentle and open-minded Methodist minister–they are happily always with me. Some now gone and others a phone call away, they all made positive, indelible marks. One of the most fondly remembered was Sally or as I’ve described her to others, Spoolie Woman.
After moving out of my grandmother’s house in Annandale, we rented the end unit of a 1940’s triplex in the Rosemont section of Alexandria. The boxy brick structure lacked any architectural interest despite its tall white columns, and its only redeeming feature was an enclosed porch, which hung off the back of the second story. The porch’s simple wood frame, screened and supported by stilts, opened into the 10-foot-wide kitchen of many coats of viscous paint and linoleum flooring. Besides a place for mild weather meals, the porch also offered a bird’s eye view of the alley below and surrounding neighborhood and came in handy for lighthearted pranks. My mother had forged a friendship with the youngest of Sally’s daughters, and the two of them would fry hamburgers, open the door to the porch and fan the irresistible aroma in Sally’s direction. They may even have timed her to see how long before she came knocking.
Sally was friend, next-door neighbor, mom to three, wife of the station agent, Salvation Army volunteer and part-time caretaker of me, an eight-year-old latchkey kid. A short, heavyset woman, wearing 50 or so years and a cotton sleeveless muu-muu and flip flops, her poor breasts had lost their fight with gravity and took residency when her waistline moved out. A hairnet restrained her graying Toni perm, and she had the raspy voice of a long-time smoker, although she had never smoked. The thin walls that defined our space would also subject us to the breadth of that voice as she bellowed out to her two high school aged daughters each and every morning. “Sally’s up,” my mom would sigh.
But I had my own times with Sally. During school’s summer break, come weekdays, I was totally under her care. Darting back and forth between our place and hers, I would sometimes join in with Sally’s humdrum activities of cleaning the house and watching the soaps, the reward being a big pot of what Sally called “spoolie”–basically, homemade beefaroni. After lunchtime bowls of the noodley concoction, topped off with her banana pudding–layers of Jello pudding, vanilla wafers and spotty bananas–Sally, in her rough but kind voice would beckon to me to “C’mon and lie down here on this cool floor in front of the fan and let’s take us a nap.” So there we’d stretch out with our full bellies…on her scrubbed and waxed linoleum floor, in front of the box fan she had set in the doorway of the porch, throw pillows from the couch beneath our heads. And there we’d nap, a respite from the D.C. heat and too much spoolie and pudding.
So, not only did Sally serve up a happy memory of a loving caretaker, but also of a simple recipe of macaroni, onions, ground beef and canned tomatoes that I have carried throughout my life and that satisfies my nostalgia like no Chef Boyardee ever could.
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