5 years ago this week...

My father died on January 7, 2010. Having received the news from his partner Camille that he was in the ICU when I was still in NYC (at that time I lived in London), I was able to fly to Sacramento the next day and be with him the moment he died. I've written about that moment here and elsewhere.  While I did not know my father that well, his death had a huge effect on me, for many reasons. What I will focus on in this post is what happened next.

One day that week - perhaps five years ago today - I went through his storage facility and discovered among other things, the photos of my grandmother, Dick from the 1920s, 30s and 40s that shocked me into a new awareness of her as a person - a person who had once been young and happy - a person who I had never met. As anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows that event - along with reading the letters and seeing photos of Jani (my more flamboyant and loquacious grandmother) when she was younger - is what set in motion The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick & Jani.

So, in a sense I've been working on this book now for five years. I didn't start the actual writing until 2011, but I will never forget finding those photos while it poured outside in sunny California and I was holding up some large steel metal object so it wouldn't crush me. (The storage locker was basically a bunch of Jim's stuff hurled into a metal shed, which is another - very long - story.)

On January 7, 2015 - a couple days ago - I woke up very tired. I attributed this feeling to the fact I'd been working flat out on the book for the past five days. I decided to rest that day, following a phrase I'd read earlier attributed to Ovid "Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop." I forgot that that day was the anniversary of my father's death - an event that changed the trajectory of my life in many ways - not the least of which was finding those photos.

So, it is a time to rest, to take stock. Yesterday, I went through and typed up the - far fewer - letters in my possession of Dick's - the ones she sent to me - along with those from my father telling me of her death. Again, I did not remember the anniversary time of year and was struck by how hard typing up these letters was - the quicksand feeling again.

Both of their lives, Dick's and Jim's, for different reasons, appeared to follow a similar depressing trajectory - a lot of early promise frustrated by outside circumstances and personality traits that do not match those circumstances - so that whatever they had hoped to make out of their lives did not come to fruition. They both died from a combination of a stroke suffered in their sixties, followed by a massive heart attack in their seventies. Dick lived longer (77 to Jim's 72) and recovered much better from her stroke. When I think of Dick and her husband George and their families from Seymour, CT, the phrase that comes to mind is: cannon fodder. The people who work in the factories, the secretaries, the clerks, the people that are not noticed, the ones who get sent to the front lines - like her brother that died in the Destroyer off Okinawa the same day FDR died. They were not poor - except during the Depression when everyone was, but lower middle class. Dick aspired to much more. Jim went to RISD and was meant to be an artist - what Dick had wanted to be before the Depression era art class cuts from her school - so she went to work in a rubber factory instead. However, during his last year at RISD, Jim got my mother - age 17 - pregnant and voila, I show up - a complication - an accident - Not In The Plan.

A lifetime of fun ensues.

OK, so you get the idea. My father was a man who would take no for an answer, was happiest when he was working for CETA (a government program of the 1970s - Career Educational Training in the Arts - dare to imagine that if you will now - bwahahahaha) and teaching art to schizophrenics. That was the kind of work he was meant to do - he was probably on the Aspergers spectrum, though no one knew about that then. Very intelligent, painfully introverted, liked to watch basketball and baseball while scuffing along in furry slippers. Wrote poems, took photos, got discouraged by the art world. Did not have a trust fund to fall back on. Moved to California...found the CETA job and lost it in the Reagan era - an era for which he was in no way prepared...found women to marry, discouraged all these women in the end...except his last partner who stuck with him through thick and thin - though she had many of her own crosses to bear...

This is a painful life to watch unfold, especially when that person is - in fact - your father.

So, this is a strange week, as I let all this wash over me. This past of mine, it is hard to absorb and accept. You want to have heroic parents or at least normal ones...and well, that was not my lot.  Any of the parents/grandparents I idolized have been revealed to have - as all people do eventually - clay feet. Normalcy was not on the table - except in terms of a weird facade that no one really believed in because it was so clearly a paste-up job - no one clings to the bars of the appearance of normalcy that hard if it's real. Sometimes I find this part So hard to write about...this side of the family, but it is half of my heritage, like it or not. I won't go into a lot about Dick because I'm writing about/from her voice now...but this is to give you all some idea of the material through which I slog.

I doubt my story is that unique in the end - the details are, sure - crazy stuff - lots of twists and turns - huge cast of eccentric characters - basically an indie film that could write itself if I did that kind of thing (note to self: do that kind of thing - make some money for once, you nitwit; self: *ignores and sings loudly to self in shower*). But the song remains the same. An American story - not the dream - the real story - of class division, aspirations thwarted, confusion about who is responsible, delusions of grandeur and delusions of inferiority, fear of aspiration if not from the ruling class (and yes there is one - I know, I went to school with them on scholarship)...etc...Insouciance is not a personality trait, it's a class inheritance. It is attractive and brings opportunities, but does not come for free. There are exceptions, yes, but the fact you can probably count them on one hand proves the rule.

These are some of the issues, along with gender limitations of course, that I am attempting to wrassle with this book and in my own heart. My own life has been lived in so many corners of all these worlds that no matter what I think I believe, I can then pretty much argue the opposite, and at some point in my life, probably have. This may be a good thing for a writer (though it may just be a good thing for going loopy), but it makes walking through this world that wants you to do stupid shit like have a personal brand (dear God kill me now) pretty hard.

OK, update complete for now...maybe time to take a walk outside (haven't been out of the apartment since Wednesday).