DRAFT FRAG FROM MEMOIR

The Toolmaker’s Other Son

A Memoir by Galen Green


Fragment #6 of 99; Rough Draft
Copyright 2005 by Galen Green; All Rights Reserved

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(continuing in the middle of the beginning of Chapter Two: Wichita)

None of this would probably be worth mentioning, had I not grown up to be “The Toolmaker’s Other Son,” the son who has spent what some folks seem to regard (often behind my back) as far too much of my adult life writing and singing songs, as though vaccinated (as the old vaudeville joke goes) with a phonograph needle. Like Garrison, who obviously can’t get that old radio stuff out of his blood, or like Woody Allen whose every soundtrack is woven together with tunes from the various hit parades of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, or like my generation’s most memorable voice, Bob Dylan, whose public singing debut at the age of 4 found him singing that wonderful old swing-era tune “Accentuate the Positive” at his grandmother’s birthday party—like these and millions of other men and women raised in the middle part of the 20th century – I myself now look back upon my own life and career shaped and driven by the rhythms, rhymes, themes and often self-defeating philosophies of those 3-minute ditties which filled the world’s airwaves throughout my childhood.

Let’s not mince words: Harry & Margaret adored Bing Crosby and vastly preferred him over Frank Sinatra, and that has made, as the last line of Robert Frost’s poem reminds us, “all the difference.” I learned to walk upright to the melodies and cadences of the radio that Margaret played from dawn till midnight as the soundtrack of our little lives together there on Estelle Street in Wichita in the years 1950 and 1951, when our nation was switching over from the flavor of Harry S. Truman to that of Dwight David Eisenhower.

Not all of my earliest memories, however, had to do with music or with what came out of the radio. I remember, for instance, reaching, one fine summer’s afternoon in 1950, for a little yellow stuffed toy chick which just happened to have a live wasp sitting on it, so that I immediately received in my tiny toddler finger a jolt that I’ll never forget. Margaret reported that she finally, after several weeks, had to get rid of the little yellow stuffed toy chick because whenever I saw it from then on, I became agitated and pointed to it accusingly with these words: “Chicky bite!” Thus began my lifelong education in the dynamics of operant conditioning.

Some of the most pleasant hours of my early childhood there on Estelle involved my mother’s “red” cocker spaniel bitch named Linda. She must have been 3 or 4 years old when I entered the picture, and had had her first litter of pups (Whose father, as Harry always insisted on stating the matter, “had come from a good neighborhood.”), when I myself was only a few months old. Because of the proximity of my arrival in Linda’s world to the arrival of her puppies, and, of course, because of the helplessness which this new human baby crawling around on all fours out in the backyard during that summer and fall of 1949 shared with her own relatively helpless doggy babies, she took a particular maternal proprietary interest in me. Harry must have related this fact on literally hundreds of occasions, to anyone who would listen, for the next 30-some years, until his death at the age of 74 in 1982.

Harry and Margaret both tended to be that way with any story they considered to be worth repeating at all. In all fairness to them, I suppose that this tendency is fairly common, if not downright universal. Indeed, isn’t it largely because of these situations, incidents and anecdotes which our elders won’t restrain themselves from endlessly repeating that we ourselves possess some semblance of semi-factual basis for remembering our role in the world, way back in those golden days before our passage into the so-called Age of Awareness? I suspect so.

And thus it was that Harry would always end his rendition of how Linda their cocker spaniel had insisted on adopting little Galen as just another of her pups -- to be herded around the yard by the gentle nudgings of her cold, wet, black little doggy nose – with the phrase: “She just thought he was one of her pups.” Thus it was that I suppose that I began to think of myself early on as something to be adopted. But then, aren’t we all, in one sense or another. Something to be adopted, I mean. It’s just that in my case it’s always been handy and tempting for folks to latch onto that label of “adoption” and to make more out of it than is really there.

And so I’m guessing now, from beyond the grave (as folks used to say), that the two of you, brought out of China in the mid-1990’s by your now-dead mother Sarah, are going through your adult lives carrying a similar stigma. I can recall at least a dozen occasions when you were small and I would tell friends about these two little adopted Chinese girls I had in my life, named KaiLi & AnMei, that even the most worldly among my adult friends would immediately ask, “Oh, do they speak English?” Verily, verily, I say unto you, this whole adoption thing is a dimension known fully only to those of us who’ve spent our lives dwelling herein. Don’t you agree?

When I embarked on this project of drafting an open letter for the two of you to read when you’re all grown up and I’m dead and gone to wherever my earthly remains are most needed for gruesome forensic experimentation, I made several promises to myself. One of these promises was that I wouldn’t limit the brightly colored jigsaw puzzle pieces here in this box on the living room carpet to “Galen Green’s Greatest Hits,” but that I would, instead, include in it, for posterity to scrutinize beneath its merciless microscope, at least a few examples of my writings which reveal some of those facets of my personality which I’ve tried to keep hidden throughout my life – somewhat in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln when he told the photographers that he wanted to be remembered “warts and all.”

It’s in that self-deprecatory spirit that I’ve decided to reach deep down into the bottom stratum of our big puzzle box and pull out a piece so shamefully mendacious that I believe that I’ll place it way over here in the farthest southwest desert corner of this enormous space we’ve cleared here on the living room carpet for out purpose. That way, if either of you decides that it might be best to simply kick it over there, under your dad’s easy chair, to be accidentally swept up later and thrown out with the trash next Thursday, well, that would be OK, too. Anyway, for better or worse, here it is:

{insert here: “Christmas, 1949”}

Another reason for my including this shamefully dishonest little prose poem (probably composed circa 1975) in my open letter to you is that I wanted to demonstrate to all those other readers out there who’ve claimed, throughout much of my writing career, that the source of my failure as a fiction writer has been that I’m wholly incapable of lying, that this charge has not been entirely accurate. While I’ll readily admit to having been neurotically – if not quite obsessively – “hung up” (as we used to say) on the truth and on telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (probably something which Harry & Margaret instilled in me with a tad too much zeal), I have at least dabbled in the dark arts of mendacity, even though it may have been little more than a stylistic exercise, intended to exorcise some demonic craving I felt within me to pit the little David of my id against the Goliath of my super-ego. Who’s to say? Certainly not me – not I.

Still and all, even with its myriad flaws, “Christmas, 1949” does somehow strangely put me in mind of the spirit (i.e. the flavor, the odor, that aura of indefinables) which I can’t seem to help associating with that semi-conscious (dare one say hypnogogic?) ether in which we float through earliest childhood. Marcel Proust I ain’t. Can we agree on at least that much? Besides, I’ve probably already said enough on this subject, for the time being.
Suffice it to say that those first three years of my life, there in that little two-story house on Estelle, were lived in an atmosphere of blissed-out semi-oblivion, relative to some of the other three-year stretches I was to find myself enduring later on in our story, so much so as to convince me that that sort of relatively carefree early-childhood experience might well account for the human psyche’s collective invention of a Golden Age, a Garden of Eden.
Over the past 56 years, one of the handful of questions I’ve been asked most frequently has been, “How old were you when you found out that you were adopted?” The short answer to this question is that I was first informed that I was an adopted child at so young an age that I simply cannot recall a time when I did not know that Harry & Margaret had adopted me. It was simply part and parcel of what I learned “at my mother’s breast,” figuratively speaking, of course, in the same sense that I knew that I was a boy and not a girl, that our doggy’s name was Linda and that she was very friendly and smelled good to me (especially when her fur was wet), that we lived on Estelle Street in Wichita, Kansas, which was somewhere near the geographic center of a country called The United States of America, which was the best country in the world, that the family across the street was named Brown (Edith & Henry) and that they had two sons who were somewhat older than me whose names were Larry & Daryl, that the family living in the house next door to the north was named Ketchum and that they had a little girl my age named Shirley, that the family living in the house on the other side of ours was named Stone and that they had a little boy named Stevie who was a year or two older than me (but they moved away and I never saw him again, even though he’d promised me that he’d come visit me someday), that my momma’s name was Margaret and that she had been a school teacher before they “got” me, that my daddy’s name was Harry and that he had grown up on a farm somewhere near where my grandma and grandpa lived and that he worked as something called a “toolmaker” at a big factory called Boeing where they made some of the biggest airplanes in the whole world, and that my momma and daddy and I, along with their mommas and daddies were Methodists which were a kind of “Christians” who worshipped God who made us all (along with everything else, including lots of things that nobody can see) and loved us all and whose son Jesus was the reason we had Christmas and Easter and went to Sunday School and church downtown every Sunday.
My point here being that there never was a time that I can recall not knowing any and all of these basic facts of life. Of course, there were quite a number of significant facts of life of which I was not aware back then, which might most quickly be summed up in the simple mega-fact that not everyone in the world was like us and that I still had a thing or two to learn about them and about the world we all shared. And I still do. And always will. And, as much as it’s about any thing, that’s what our story here is about, what this book is about. Not to spoil the ending for you or anything like that, but that’s largely what being “The Toolmaker’s Other Son” is about. Learning new stuff.
ii.

In 1952, when I was 3, we all moved into a new house (an old house that was new to us) at 1737 North Lorraine, me and my momma and daddy and Linda, whose puppies had all been adopted by then. (There’s that word again, “adopted.”) The day we moved in, I somehow managed to sneak off without supervision long enough to stick one of my momma’s metal bobby pins into an electrical outlet and thus to learn what standard house current (A/C) felt like when it passed through one’s tiny toddler fingers. If you haven’t already tried this yourself, I don’t recommend it. Trust me on this one.
Wichita, Kansas, in those days, was a city of a quarter of a million people, at the junction of Highway 54 (running east and west, aka Kellogg) and Highway 81 (running north and south, aka Broadway), and somehow situated at the spot where the Arkansas River forks off into the Big Arkansas and the Little Arkansas, which nobody in those parts – either then or now – pronounces like the state where Bill & Hill are from, but rather the way someone with an extreme rural twang might try to pronounce the words “Our Kansas.” In other words: “R-Kansas.” (Hey, don’t look at me. I just paint what I see.)
Wichita’s chief industries back then were wheat, cattle, oil and airplanes. My daddy, as well as the daddy’s of many of my friends in elementary school, was employed by the aircraft industry, as has already been established. Besides being the home of Boeing, Wichita (touted as the “Air Capital of the World,” a boast which, like most, backfired into a veritable stink-blast of cruel jokes) was also the home of Beech and Cessna. (Learjet came along in the 1960’s.) Even though the sign we passed every time we drove back into Wichita on U.S. 54 reminded us that Wichita was the home of Glen Cunningham, who’d held the world’s record for running the mile at the time the sign was erected, I learned at a very early age that Wichita was even better known as the home of Wyatt Earp, who’d been its deputy town marshal for probably less time than James Garfield was President. His exploits (or highly distorted retellings thereof) were later dramatized on a TV show in which he was played by the handsome, dashing actor Hugh O’Brien, at around the same time that another short-lived TV series aired entitled “Wichita Town,” most likely filmed in Culver City, just outside of Los Angeles, California.
If I haven’t already hit you over the head hard enough with the themes of airplanes and gunslinger as they related to the Wichita in which I spent my childhood, please rest assured that I’ll come back to do it some more later on. I promise.
But this a story about me, The Toolmaker’s Other Son, not about Wichita. The year was 1952, and we’d just moved from the little two-story house on Estelle to what, by comparison, amounted to a hovel on north Lorraine. Later, if time permits, I’ll attempt to explain why my parents chose to make this move; it was rather complicated. Also, I should probably explain at this point the need for designating this particular hovel as being on north Lorraine, the reason being that our family later moved from there to a house on south Lorraine. But that was to be many years later, with that particular move marking the beginning of a whole new life for everyone involved.
To my knowledge, the highest plateau on the rolling Kansas plains upon which Wichita was built must be somewhere on what is today the campus of Wichita State University. Before that, it was simply Wichita University (municipal -- and far too expensive for folks of our socioeconomic caste), and before that, Fairmount College, a respectable liberal arts school founded by ______________ in the year ______.
Our little split-shingled, two-bedroom/one-bath, one-story gray bungalow with its single-car garage on north Lorraine sits approximately one city block from the southwest corner of the Wichita State campus. (I say “sits” because it was still there – and actually occupied – when I last checked, on a drive-by visit in the spring of 2002, even though I know for a fact that it had been boarded up and tentatively condemned, at one point back in the late 1980’s.) During the years that I was growing up there, one could stand on its tiny concrete front stoop and look over at the official residence of the university’s president. I actually ate lunch there in that stately mansion, one sunny noontime in 1958, the honored guest of the school’s president’s handsome blond young son, Jeff Corbin. But I’m getting way ahead of myself. Please forgive me. It’s just that my growing up in such close proximity to the university campus proved to be one of the most decisive determining factors in shaping my destiny – in bending the course of my life’s river this way instead of that – and I want to be sure to squeeze that into my rambling reportage.
As I was saying, the university campus and our humble working-class neighborhood immediately to the southwest of it spread out on what has always appeared to me to be as high a plateau as is to be found in those parts, though I could easily be wrong about that. From there, the land slopes ever so gently downward toward the banks of the Arkansas River, several miles to the west. Along the way, one finds the older sections of east Wichita – the freight yards, the stockyards, a number of grain elevators, miles of residential neighborhoods and a hundred small businesses, and finally, crowding for a mile or so up to the banks of the river, Downtown Wichita, which itself turned out to loom so large in my legend.
(. . . to be continued . . . )