ROUGH DRAFT FRAGMENT

The Toolmaker’s Other Son

A Memoir by Galen Green


7th (of 99) fragments; rough draft
Copyright 2005 by Galen Green; All Rights Reserved

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(continued from section ii. of Chapter Two: Wichita . . . . . )

. . . for a mile or so up to the banks of the river, Downtown Wichita, which itself turned out of loom so large in my legend.

All right, so where were we? I was three years old, and our tiny nuclear family, along with our cocker spaniel Linda, moved from the house on Estelle to the house on north Lorraine. In thinking through how best to describe that period of my childhood, I find it difficult to come up with a lexicon that’s not fraught with sentimentality objectionable even to me. As with those earlier days spent crawling and then toddling on the floor, ‘midst ankles and grown-up voices, my third year on earth was spent almost exclusively in the company of Margaret, the retired schoolmarm, whose life between her graduation from high school in 1929 (?) _____________ and her marriage to Harry in 1941, followed immediately by their big move to the big city (They never tired of reminding me that their honeymoon night was spent in their new apartment on Waco Street in Wichita because Harry had to be at work the next day, bright and early, building B-17’s to be shipped to England as part of FDR’s “Lend Lease” package to save the British Isles from the onslaught of the Nazi blitz.), was spent teaching in one-room schoolhouses throughout Franklin County, Kansas. I could devote an entire chapter to her life as a schoolmarm, and very well might, if time allows. Suffice it say for now that Margaret seems to have missed teaching school so much that significant portions of the days which she and I spent in one another’s company (before Lois and then Kevin came to live with us) were devoted to a variety of school-like activities, all of which I enjoyed beyond measure, but my favorite of which had to have been those hours I nestled beneath her wing while she read to me. If there’s a Heaven, then that’s what it will be like.

Perhaps in the long run, however, the most deep and abiding impressions left floating around inside me from the early 1950’s are those impressions I assimilated through the filter of Harry’s and Margaret’s own experiences, as I observed their observations and as I experienced their experiences – vicariously, as t’were. I realize that I’m not saying this right. But it’s the closest I’m able to come, as I muddle my way through this therapy of attempting to tell you my story. And so it is in this spirit that I reach into our big puzzle box and pull out another jigsaw puzzle piece to share with you.

{insert here: “For Concha” – a sonnet published in Kansas Quarterly in 1972}

Concha (who pronounced her name “Consa”) was the wife of guy named Guinn Walker who played banjo with Diana Freeman and me, back in 1968, in a little folk group we called The Canadian Railroad Trilogy. (We got a few gigs – mostly at places like The Cedar on east 13th Street – but split up after a few months for all the usual reasons. For one thing, we weren’t that good.) Even though my acquaintance with Concha came many years after my formative filterings with Margaret, the experience in my late teens of observing Concha going about her housewifery and her motherly tasks with her own small children somehow put me in mind of my own childhood, of Margaret’s laundry basket hurrying from the shower, etc. Come to think of it, that brief period in 1952 and‘53, before Lois and then Kevin became my foster-sister and adoptive brother respectively – that brief period when Margaret and I had each other all to ourselves (at least during those hours when Harry was at work at the airplane factory) bears some resemblance, in memory at least, to those fragrant remembrances so lovingly immortalized by Truman Capote (before the booze began to drag him down).

Certainly, ours was a loving family in those early days. And it remained so for . . . a few years, even after my lofty status of “only child” became radically transformed in the calendar year of our Lord 1953. For that matter, however, ours was quite an agreeable neighborhood – the one we moved into there on north Lorraine in 1952 – in stark contrast to what it was to evolve into, throughout those reputedly “tranquil” years of the Eisenhower Administration. Let’s see if I can name the families who lived on our block back then, on both sides of street. Beginning with the house next door to the north, there were the McGivers, the Irelands, and the Jonkers. Beyond 17th street (a relatively busy thoroughfare), all was outer darkness – even on the sunshiniest of days. Across the street, starting at the north end of the street, there were the Chapmans, the Kays, the Howells, the Rydiords, the Cramers, the Fottses, the Winegars, a house I was never sure about but which appears frequently in my nightdreams as “the house I was never sure about,” and on the southeast corner the Trumbles. Across the street from them, at the far south end of our side of the street, there were the Hannimons (sp?) [the only openly Catholic family on our block], then Mrs. Hill, the Moores, the Edwardses, the Schultzes, the Davises, the Hankses, and then back to us, the Greens. Of course, I have no way of knowing whether or not I spelled most of their names properly; and I’m far too busy to track down a 1953 Wichita phone book. However, if you’re feeling hyper-energetic some afternoon, please feel free to do so. I’ll be interested to know what you find. Or, better still, perhaps you’ll be able to run across one those things we used to call a “criss-cross directory” or street directory. (To my knowledge, they’ve done away with those, in the interest of 21st century domestic privacy and confidentiality. In other words, the publishers didn’t especially want to get sued as a result of the undesirable employment of the information they were giving out.)

Roughly half of the families on our block had a child or two close enough to my age that I was seldom at a loss for playmates. For instance, the Jonkers had a girl my age named Linda. And because her name was the same as that of our cocker spaniel, I confusedly informed my older cousins Cecilia and Linette that the girl down the street “looked like” my dog. I was to have that little misspeak thrown back in my face for the next 45 years. The Chapmans had a boy named Mark who was three years younger than me. He was a good kid, but more of a protégé in my preteens than a peer. (And I wish to add, in the interest of full disclosure, that he was not the same Mark Chapman who gunned down John Lennon.) The Hankses, next door, had a son my age named Jimmy and a younger son named Johnny. (Hey, they didn’t call it The Baby Boom for nothin’!) I’m not sure what to say about the Hankses. Let me check the libel laws and get back to you. Fortunately, they moved away in the late 1950’s. Next door to them, the Davises had a son a year older than me with the improbable name of Galen, though everyone called him Buddy. As older boys tend to do with younger boys, he proved to be a powerful influence on my values, interests and tastes during those early years. The Schultzes had a passel of girls, all older. Their main contribution to my enculturation was a little chant they’d intone while jumping rope out on the sidewalk. It was simply the repetition of this nonsequitur: “Shake-speare. Kick in the rear . . . Shake-speare. Kick in the rear . . . “ As was the case with many of my friends’ fathers (as well, of course, as with both of my own biological parents), Mr. Schultz had fought in World War II; though in his case, a rumor persisted that he may have fought on the German side and been resettled in our secluded little Wichita neighborhood as part of a deal he’d cut with the victorious Allied Forces in exchange for informing on some of his fellow Nazis. I’m sure we’ll never know the truth of the matter – just as with most of this life.

Of all the children I grew up with there in our pseudo-microcosm on north Lorraine, however, the only two with whom I formed bonds of friendship which lasted into adult life were George & Darrell Moore. George was (is) my age, or rather six months younger, a triviality that tends to count for a lot when you’re not yet old enough to attend kindergarten. Their father was named Harold, though everyone called him Buzz; and their strikingly good-looking mother’s name was Darlene. She was pregnant with Darrell at the time they moved into the neighborhood, which couldn’t have been more than a few months before or after we did. I wouldn’t even bother mentioning this piece of minutia were it not for the fact that Darrell Moore and I were to cross paths half a century later, like a pair of star-crossed characters stumbling blindly through the darkness of an ancient Greek tragedy. Trust me: when I finally get around to telling you about it, you’ll be thoroughly convinced that such a thing as Destiny truly does exist and that we are, just as the ancient Greeks understandably believed, merely helpless puppets in its thrall.

It must have been somewhere within this tiny time-frame between our moving into the house on north Lorraine and my acquiring both a brother and a sister that I experienced one of the most unnerving interpersonal encounters of my childhood. I tried to describe it recently in a letter to my cousin, Dr. Jane Stone. If I’m not mistaken, I believe that that letter (or at least an excerpt from it) is buried somewhere in this box of jumbled jigsaw puzzle pieces. But before I try to rummage around and dig it out to share with you here, a bit of background may be in order.

I was raised by old people who were, themselves, raised by old people. Consequently, I have traveled through this life with what friends and critics alike have at times described as a very old soul. As my girlfriend in high school, Pam Batchelor, once said of me: “Some die young, and some are born old.” (Neither of us could have guessed at the time just how unintentionally prophetic her pronouncement would someday prove to be.) Certainly, there lurked a kernel of truth in PB’s friendly jibe. When Harry & Margaret adopted me, he was 41 and she was 37. I remember looking around a crowded church basement one evening at a Cub Scout function when I was perhaps 10 years old and suddenly realizing that the parents of most of my peers were young enough to have been Harry & Margaret’s offspring. But that is, as they say, not even the half of it. Margaret’s father, W.K. McCall, didn’t even marry until he was 40 (although Phoebe once mentioned to me that rumor-mongers in their village were breathing abroad the suggestion that W.K. had been married previously – way back in the 19th century). Thus, Margaret was raised by a father who was 45 years older than her. The topper, though, was in the case of Harry’s parents. His mother, Etta, was just shy of 50 years old when he was born, and his father, Ira, was even 3 or 4 years older. Moreover, Harry’s siblings were all senior citizens by the time I entered upon the scene. Therefore, when I mention in passing that I grew up surrounded by some very old people, I am by no means exaggerating. In fact, my brother Kevin (the toolmaker’s other other son) and I are the only members of our generation I’ve ever known of whose grandparents on either side were both born before the American Civil War (1861—1865).

OK. So that’s the short version of how it is that I was raised by old people who were, themselves, raised by old people. Here, then, is an excerpt from the letter I mentioned earlier that I wrote recently to my cousin Jane, touching upon the aforementioned unnerving evening I spent with the oldest person I’ve ever known “up close and personal,” – my father’s mother, Etta (born in January of 1861):

{insert here: excerpt from letter to BJS, on my evening with Etta, 1952)

Please don’t get me wrong. I consider it to have been one of the greatest blessings of my life – a life crammed with enough blessings to choke a horse – to have actually had the privilege of knowing and meaningfully interacting with real live walking talking Victorians and Edwardians. It probably has as much as any single cluster of factors to do with who I am and how it is that I got this way. These wonderful, mysterious, multi-dimensional men and women provided me with, among other things, a bridge to the 19th century, and hence, to the past generally -- to that place we tend to call “history,” meaning, usually, that cosmos of realities worthy of our remembering or of our somehow uncovering and/or dis-covering by whatever means might be available to us. But as far as any appreciation of why it is we might want to understand that cosmos of realities more often referred to as “history,” therein the patient must minister to herself/himself, my dearest children. Still, it’s a question worthy of an answer. And if Dumb Luck grant me the opportunity, I’ll try to answer it someday. But if not, I encourage you to write that book yourselves, for your own grandchildren’s generation’s fortification against “the evil to come.” (And it will come. It always has. It always will. The readiness is all.)

iii.


On three separate occasions throughout my adult life, I’ve experienced the convergence of motive, means and opportunity that made it feasible for me to undergo one form or other of what we used to call “talk-therapy” back in the 20th century. (More of that, anon. OK?) On each of these three occasions, my so-called “therapist” or counselor would begin by asking me a predictable (if ultimately forgivable) set of background questions about myself, mostly concerning my family of origin. Getting past the adoption piece was complicated and confusing enough, but once we came to the piece concerning my birth order and sibling position, even the most stalwart among them would tend to balk. Was I an only child or the older of two sons or the baby brother of a much older sister or a middle child caught in some sort of attention-starved sandwich? Or, Heavens Forefend, a bit of each? For what it’s worth, I myself find this to be a fascinating question – but, like so many of the questions raised by this telling, probably ultimately unanswerable.

At the time when little Galen celebrated his fourth Christmas with his momma and daddy and their cocker spaniel Linda, at the end of 1952, he’d lived his entire life up to that point as an only child, a kind of demi-god. This was a characteristic he shared with his two closest friends in adult life, Marie Smith and Art Dunbar, both of whose sibling position was that of the first-born child. (Every oldest child is, of necessity, an only child up until the time when the second child is born. Yet to confuse the personality structure of an oldest child with of an only child would be rank folly. Agreed?) Sometime during the summer of 1953, however, little Galen was presented with an older sister – a much older sister, eleven years older. He was only four, while she was fifteen and getting ready for her sophomore year at Wichita’s East High School. Consciously, he was madly in love with this dazzling new creature. She was pretty and funny and nice to him, and she smelled good. Yet, somewhere in the stinky depths of his psyche, he surely must have resented the overthrow of his godhead by the encroachment of this interloper on his turf.

Before he could even begin to adjust to this first shock to his social dynamic, however,

(continued . . . )