The Boomer Life 2

My father came home from World War II, and I was born shortly after.  I took the first of millions of breaths on February 22, 1946.  This made me a Pisces and a Baby Boomer, a lethal combination.

This was not our family, but it could have been almost any of our neighbors.

My mother was a European-American of multiple ethnic backgrounds.  She often referred to herself as a “duke’s mixture.”  That was better than calling yourself an “I don’t know.”  Mom grew up in a small town in Washington State.  Her family was best described as “genteel working class.”  They had the income of working class people, but they had good breeding.  They had better manners than a lot of the wealthier people in the area, a fact that I experienced first-hand more than once.

For example, there was a time in high school when my piano playing ability was called on to accompany a girl who studied with the same singing teacher I studied with.  She and I attended the same high school.  We would meet and work together after school, in the gym, where there was a piano.  We rehearsed together like that a couple of times a week, after which she gave me a ride home.  Her family were wealthy fruit growers.  In other words, she wasn’t going to have to work on campus when she went to college, and her family would probably set her up in something or other after she earned her degree.  My cash-poor family would send me out into the world after I finished college with, “Good-bye, good luck, write to us a lot and don’t get into trouble.”

One day Miss Richfamily didn’t show up after school.  I waited until it was obvious that she wasn’t just held up.  She wasn’t coming at all.  She could have sent a message to me by calling the school, but she didn’t think that making me wait for her and stranding me at school (when I could have taken the school bus home) was worth bothering about.  I was pissed off enough to confront her with this the next day.  She didn’t apologize; she gave me some lame excuse.  Nowadays, I would zing her between the eyes with well-placed retorts designed to drive my point of view into her brain.  Back then, though, I was just a timid, shy kid who couldn’t deal with confrontations.  I gave in.  I hated myself for it, but I gave in.  That didn’t change anything.  She was still wrong.

There was also the time when, while driving me home, she decided she was hungry.  To her credit, she asked me if I minded if she stopped at a drive-in restaurant for some food.  Of course, I said it was okay with me.  What was I supposed to say, “Yes, I do mind and I hope you starve to death in great agony?”  My mother would not have approved.  We stopped at the drive-in restaurant, where she ordered a hamburger and ate it in front of me.  She didn’t even offer me a pickle.  I either didn’t have any money with me or I didn’t want to eat before dinner, so I sat and watched her eat.  If I had treated her with such rudeness, and my mother had found out, I would have been chastised up and down for having no class and embarrassing my parents, who didn’t raise any slobs.

My father was a lively, boisterous Italian-American who had been born in Italy and raised on Long Island, New York.  He met my Mom when he was in the Army Air Corps during World War II.  He had been sent to Washington State for some training.  He and Mom met on a blind date.  She took one look at him and didn’t like him.  Fortunately for me and my siblings, she changed her opinion.  She quit high school to marry him, and went to live with his family on Long Island while he went overseas.  Despite her background, Mom took to Italian family life like a real paesana, and Dad’s family loved her.  After Dad returned from the war, they moved into their own home, and I was born.  I spent the first three years of my life surrounded by a gaggle of Italian aunts, an uncle, cousins, grandparents, family friends and neighbors.  Then my Dad fought with his Dad and decided to move himself, my Mom and me back to Mom’s home town, Union Gap, Washington.

I never found out what they fought about.  Nobody ever told me anything when I was a kid.  They still don’t.

Dad was gregarious, friendly, generous, tender hearted and loud.  He had a lot of friends, many of them drinking buddies.  Unfortunately, he became an alcoholic.  When he was sober, he was a good father.  When he was drinking, he was verbally abusive.  That’s a whole other story for another time.

When we first moved back west, we lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment behind my grandfather’s gas station.  Mom and Dad had to put me to bed in the bedroom, so they slept in the living room.  There was a kitchen, with room for a small table.  Living behind a gas station had its points.  I got to hang out in the gas station, play with the almost life-sized cardboard cutout of the Philip Morris bellboy (until I was told to stop doing that because it was there to help Grandpa sell cigarettes) and watch all the people who came in.  They were ordinary people, but I was just a little kid and I didn’t know that.  Sometimes, too, a drunk would come out of the tavern across the street.  This was always exciting, especially if the town cops came by and the drunk was arrested.  One time the drunk was a woman.  She managed to cross the street and stagger along our side of it until the cop car pulled up.

Our Police Department consisted of two cops and one car.  Our cops were more like Andy Taylor and Barney Fife than Briscoe and Logan.  Arresting drunks and giving out traffic tickets were the highlights of their week.  Of course, there was the time a couple of strangers tried to rob Snyder’s Market and Mr. Snyder took after them with a gun.  That was so exciting that it gave the town something to talk about for weeks afterward.  I think our two cops had to get help for that one from the Police Department in the nearest decent-sized city, Yakima.  An attempted robbery where the potential victim fought back with a firearm was a lot more complicated than giving out parking tickets.

Grandpa’s gas station and our apartment were located across the main highway, isolated from most of the town.  This was hard for me, since I had been used to being surrounded by relatives, friends and neighbors.  I never quite adjusted.  Instead, I developed a terminal case of shyness that lasted all through my childhood and into some of my adult years.  I never had a social life when I was growing up.  Most kids don’t make it into the most popular clique, but I didn’t make it into ANY clique.  Instead, I made friends and had fun with a couple of the other outcasts, and was happy whenever any other kid would talk to me.  Most of the time they ignored me.

My younger sister was born after the big move, in 1950.  Suddenly, I wasn’t getting the attention I was accustomed to as an only child.  I developed a habit of acting out, which didn’t turn out to be as useful as I hoped.

One day, I decided that I was sick because I had a mosquito bite.  I refused to get out of bed, insisting that I was dying.  This went on until Dad decided to teach me a lesson.  He pulled the mattress off the bed and hung it from the clothesline outside.  He must have been pissed off as hell, because getting a mattress out the back door of a tiny apartment, then getting it to hang on a clothesline, isn’t easy.  He managed to do it, though.  I spent the rest of the day sitting in a chair, staring at the mosquito bite.  It didn’t do any good.

My family wasn’t the Cleavers or the Andersons.  The Bundys and the Conners wouldn’t be introduced to television until much, much later, so we didn’t have any dysfunctional family role models to compare ourselves with.

My little brother was born in 1953.  By this time, I was in First Grade at St. Joseph’s Elementary School in Yakima.  I was too busy dealing with school bus rides, nuns, other kids and school subjects to act out over a new addition to the family.  I had become resigned to not being the center of my parents’ universe, anyway.

In First Grade, I was introduced to the 1950s Catholic school experience.  That is a subject for a later time.

If anyone could scare hell out of us, she could!

Songs My Father Taught Me

The education that my siblings and I received from my father was eclectic, to say the least.  We learned some dialect Italian words for a few things.  We learned that it is possible to wind spaghetti around a fork by holding it in the air and revolving it until no strand was hanging down.  We also learned how to shoot craps.

Dad did not need help from a spoon to wind
spaghetti around a fork.

The lessons in shooting craps took place when we were on a family vacation in a beach town on the Oregon coast.  We were together every evening in the little cabin where we were staying, with no television.  This meant that we had to rely on family togetherness.  Dad took out a pair of dice and got us started shooting craps for pennies.  It was a real penny ante game.  Although the odds favor the house in games of chance, I don’t think Dad won any more than we did.  He never did have much luck with money, anyway.

These are not instruments of gambling.
They are instructional materials.

My Dad was a friendly guy who would give his last dime, an arm and a leg and the shirt off his back to anyone he thought needed them, without expecting anything in return.  He was an honest man, probably because he was such a poor liar that he almost never tried it.  Like many good-hearted, honest people, Dad thought everyone else was as honest and good-hearted as he was, and was sometimes shocked and hurt when one of them failed to extend help when he needed it.  In addition, he was always looking for bargains.  His friends knew that if they had some old piece of junk they didn’t want they could always sell it to Dad.  The result was that we always had the worst cars and television sets in the neighborhood.  If it had to be pushed to start, or if the only way you could get a good picture was to have the youngest member of the family stand next to it and act as a human aerial, it probably belonged to us.

I won’t even mention the ugly shed that someone persuaded him would make a good gas station, even though the only place Dad could put it was in our back yard, next to a gravel alley, and there was already no lack of gas stations on our main road.  That thing was so ugly, the neighborhood kids wouldn’t even play in it.  I don’t know if he actually paid for it.  I hope not.

My Grandma (Dad’s mother-in-law) once won a color television set in a church raffle.  Grandma gave it back to the church so they could raffle it off again.  She was more devoted than almost everyone in the parish, including the nuns and priests.  When Dad heard about this, his reaction was typical: “Why didn’t she give it to us if she didn’t want it?”  The two of them were not each other’s favorite person, even under normal circumstances.  This pushed her even farther down the scale of Dad’s estimation.

The priests of St. Joseph’s Parish thought Grandma was “a little saint.”  Dad had other ideas, although he was good enough not to discuss them with us kids most of the time.  When the two of them were together, they were cordial to each other.  Dad even called her “Mom.”

In fact, Dad’s language was pretty clean, in spite of the fact that he grew up a poor kid on Long Island.  I don’t remember ever hearing him say the “f” word, and he kept other four-letter words to a minimum.  I don’t know how he spoke when he was among his male buddies, outside the house, but with us he kept a clean mouth, even when he was yelling at us.  This must have taken some control.

Dad had an untrained but beautiful, natural baritone voice.  He was a living example of the stereotype that all Italians can sing.  Sometimes I would be singing at the piano when he came home.  He would join me, and we would sing duets.  Old standard pop tunes were his forte, although he could croon a pretty good Neapolitan song now and then.  He would never sing alone in public, which was a shame, because he could have been a pretty good pop singer.  Maybe he could have even made some hit records.  We would have loved that.  We would have had a Dad on television, and our TV would have been a good one.  My little brother would not have had to be an accessory aerial anymore.

Unfortunately, my Dad’s escalating addiction to alcohol drove a wedge between the two of us, which lasted until I left home for good.  A lot of things were never resolved, and any real communication between the two of us was broken.  He was a good man, even though he showed that side of himself much more to his friends than his family when he was drinking.  I look at pictures of him holding me as a baby, before the damages of life took over, when he still had his dreams and his life ahead of him.  He was a good father then.  I like to remember him that way.

One last thing that I have learned is that I have a lot of him in me.  Like him, I have no luck with money, although I am learning, late in life, to be more careful with it and to save at least as much as I spend.  Like him, I also prefer to be friendly and helpful to people when possible and I have a tendency to trust people too much.  That means that, like him, I sometimes find myself knocked down when I wouldn’t have been knocked down if I had known better, but hey!  I have always survived and gone on. 

Another thing I got from him is my tendency to dream dreams.  In my case, I have followed them, and I’m still following them.  I get that tendency to focus and pursue from Mom, who was the practical one in our family.  When one dream becomes impractical, I just find some other talent and form another one.  It hasn’t made me rich or famous or anything, but it has made my life simultaneously fun, stressful, emotional and intensely interesting, to say the least.

This world needs friendly, helpful, good-hearted, honest people who dream big dreams.  If I have any of that in me at all, I got a lot of it from Dad.  All I can give him in return is thanks for passing on the right genes.