Remnants
A FULLER INTERLUDE
I.
It has been a while now since Dad passed away. Since then (and for a while before), I’ve been working on a friend’s ancestry, largely trying to connect the dots that lead from her to Mayflower passenger Edward Fuller. Believe it or not, helping to connect the dots of someone else’s ancestry helps quiet the "baloney sandwiches"—my term for the jumble that seems to be my thought processes these days.
In the meantime, my "in-between" grieving process for my father has shifted from a Freudian sense of guilty relief at his passing to the pull of various bits and pieces of nostalgia reeling me back in. It’s a dangerous place—nostalgia. Believe me, I much prefer to be carefully Mod-Podging my way along Mayflower lines toward Edward Fuller.
You see, Dad left his life in such a mess. An independent and "do or die" recalcitrant soul, he certainly lived on his own Roy Rogers set of terms. His was a life born of substantive materialism, with every move made and every item bought largely on the credit of unpaid accounts, both business and personal. He was an equal-opportunity narcissist. He was not a bad man. He was a true American in a self-centric, Aristotelian world, a world where my father was right at home.
His passing has had, as his life did, a different "feel" from my mother’s. Mom’s death left "us" stranded on the planet without our safe harbor. Still, as the years have passed since she left, I have always felt her near me—not far off on some wannabe celestial plane. Indeed, there are times when I can't distinguish my very existence from my own genetic ties to her. I feel her with me in her brilliant sense of humor and play, her value of small, simple acts—like serving toast and coffee in the morning—and even in the way she laughed or simply cleared her throat. I have always felt her close by when I needed her.
I know Dad is in there—that is, "in me" or nearby now, too. But I feel it in different ways. I feel Dad when I am hurried, or late, or irritated in a rush to judgment. I feel Dad in me when I believe I know more than someone else in any given situation. (Which sadly I have noticed is WAY too often...ugh.) I feel Dad in me when I think I am "getting over" on someone—because for Dad, life was always all about "getting over" on someone else; the Art of the Con. Dad's memory isn't a safe harbor like Mom’s. I guess, on a good day, it is an abject survival mechanism.
I feel the Old Testament of his judgment.
Still, I am left with remnants of Dad. I am left with the things—and his memories—that cause me to wonder if they are even my own? They are curious things; as a newly minted orphan, they are things I haven’t thought about in years. They are things I wonder if I ever knew, or knew of them, or ever thought about at all. In that perfectly egocentric universe of Dad’s, it tells me that somehow, some way, he is not very far away.
I guess it all started the other day with me looking for my kindergarten teacher. (Huh???) I know, I know... It’s just another one of those things we genealogical types tend to do. For some reason, I’d gone back to 1960, and there she was: "Mrs. Heitman," admonishing me and my classmate the lovely and artistically inclined "Jill Hastings" for having mixed the Christmas paint colors of red and white and presenting our pink Santa's to the class. This was a terrible faux pas for an old German schoolteacher—children expressing their creative license without permission - simply not done in the Reich or in South Dakota from which Mrs. Heitman hailed.
Interestingly enough, and despite being admonished to never "make pink" out of anything, I adored Mrs. Heitman, as children are often wont to do with their first teachers. I was both sad and happy to discover that she had lived until the ripe old age of ninety and was buried not so far away from where she once taught class. I remembered, too, Dad coming to pick me up in his Navy sailor suit one day—maybe it was for kindergarten graduation—where he took a picture of Mrs. Heitman (and me and the lovely Jill Hastings....) It was just a remnant of a memory, but it was a good one. It was a true memory of Dad before he fell victim to the dark side of his own centrifugal self.
I came away from all this remembering the tempestuous color anarchist Jill, and the pink paint, Mrs. Heitman of course, and Dad in his Navy suit. By now, though, the clock had turned. It was decades later, and I was sorting through VA paperwork for Dad’s headstone for a small Kansas cemetery. And in the middle of all this, in the waning of some television broadcast, somebody said, "The Bay of Pigs."
I mean, how "pink" is that?
It was as if someone had picked me up by the scruff of my neck. Dad? The Bay of Pigs? The Cuban Missile Crisis? Wait... Why do I know this?
Why do I think I know this?
It was haunting, really.
Was it my memory, or was it Dad’s remnant memory? Was it a vestigial memory adjacent to my own genetic makeup? I’d never thought about the Bay of Pigs in relation to Dad. But a certain angst took over me. I realized that it was my mother’s angst - even now over sixty years later. It was there sequestered in the darker genetic mental filing cabinets, but I recognized it. I recognized that fear and uncertainty—the feeling that somehow, some way, Dad’s naval reserve service from 1953–1965 connected to the Bay of Pigs. They—my mother and father—had wanted Dad to get out of the reserves before it was possibly too late.
There was a Cold War anxiety that crept over me. I was seven years old again.
Was this my memory?
Or were these my mother’s genes echoing her alarm decades later? Was it my father going off to fight the war against pink paint?
I do not know that my father’s twelve year tenure in the Navy Reserves ever had any connection to the Bay of Pigs. He was very lucky. Perhaps it was just a conversation a seven-year-old boy overheard. Perhaps it was simply Nana asking too many questions—questions that Mom could not answer.
By then, though, Mrs. Heitman had already faded into the pink memory machine, and Dad did not wear that Navy suit so often anymore.
II.
What was he talking about? I don't know if my cousin was talking too fast or if the "baloney sandwiches" processing center of my brain was hearing him correctly.
"We found this key fob in the old yellow Jeep in the barn. It says it's for 'Jack Record' and it's from Rolls-Royce. It looks like something that was sent to your dad from the factory."
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Before that Jeep was yellow...
Ah yes. The Rolls.
Wasn't that car always broken? My mind seemed to race at the thought of the key fob. It was a remnant from another time I could not quite place. It was a piece of Dad's story that I could only partially remember. Phrases like: "The Rolls is broken down again," "Rolls-Royce is sending someone to tow and fix it," and "Your dad and I toured the Rolls factory," kept replaying in my brain as I tried to process my cousin's rapid-fire excitement at his find.
Are those memories real or simply pink baloney?
(Lord knows what was in that barn.)
Did someone actually say these things? Or was my mind just pulling at bits of the pink matter of my brain? (Mrs. Heitman would not be happy with me if I did not paint my memories correctly.)
He, Dad that is, had paid $50,000 for it—"The Roller," as "Uncle Forrie" would have called it back then. It was gently (?) used, its origins murky at best. Still, $50k for a used ’74 "Roller" in 1976 was a ton of money. It had to be a stretch on everything in his budget—from bouncing my college tuition checks to making sure his wife, Diamond Doris, had her thrills at the Moulin Rouge.
I can still see "us" all as he drove the family onto the sandy beaches of Folsom Lake one Fourth of July. We were there to show off his prize to his gathering of "employees" and ogling onlookers. I can almost still see the red leather and the silver-pink glint of the hot July sun on the hood as the "Roller" crunched through the sands at Folsom Lake.
What was he thinking? No wonder the car was always broken.
It was always about the show of it all, though—"Depression-era Kansas makes good"—and about making people "see him." There on the shoreline, he could stare out from behind the wheel and over the hood of the "double Rs" and grin his somewhat movie-star smile that said, "I've made it... see me..."
The truth was, though, he never had.
It was a Cinderella’s coach. Soon enough, "The Roller" would have to be sold to pay off taxes, to make some mortgage payment in arrears, or to fend off "securities out of trust" or "contingent liability." Soon enough, The Roller would disappear back into the charade that it always was. It was, after all, and still is, only a remnant.
However, for one bright, sunny Fourth of July day, he got his glory, and the world did perhaps revolve around him just for a moment on that beach at Folsom Lake in front of his few rag-tag employees and in front stray and random folks who my Uncle Gene would have always called "the mooches." Though, truth be told, it was we who were the mooches, not the rag-tag employees or the gawking onlookers. It was Dad who had finagled his way into that Cinderella coach that could only disappear and leave behind one small piece of its history attached to an old yellow Jeep in a barn in some corner of Oregon...
A key fob to tell the tale of something that once was.
Wherever you are, Dad, I hope you made your way back to that bright, sunny day on the beach. I hope you made your way back to the Roller.
I hope you are sipping that pink lemonade—with your usual double splash of vodka, of course.
III.
The trouble with any of this—aside from "baloney sandwiches," pink lemonade in a Rolls, or even Mrs. Heitman’s disdain for improperly mixed pink paint—is that some of these remnants aren’t even mine to share. Some of them are genetic memories, inherited "things" that belonged to someone else. Some of them are Dad’s. Some of them are what Mom might have said, and some of them are Grandma’s.
Some of them aren’t even pink at all. Some of them are yellow.
I realized this yesterday, as I trudged up the hill in the pouring rain at my son’s house. There, at the top of the hill and artfully attached to his wood and UTV shed, were artifacts from those other lives. Yes, many of them were associated or connected to Dad. These brought back the "happy nausea" of familiar things; they were like those near-Pepto-Bismol moments after a really good meal when you know you’ve had too much. You are too full, with no more room to carry anything else.
But there at the top of the hill (and in the pouring rain) was my son’s collection—a shrine of sorts, largely to Dad, but to the others before him. It consists of rusting metal and a fading acrylic sign for Dad’s business and for his rag-tag employees of the 1970s. However, there in the midst of it all was a license plate:
"California World’s Fair 1939."
And I was pulled into this remnant that wasn't mine. There was nothing in it for me to remember. Even Mrs. Heitman looked as dumbfounded as when I looked back in my mind for her to offer me some explanation. Even she did not know how to mix the colors of that painted memory, which belonged to my grandparents’ generation. How could I recall it?
I looked down at the license plate, touching its rusty infringements and feeling the not-so-yellow blue of its raised lettering.
There was a bit of my father’s voice in it as I touched it: "We went North. Dad was looking for work... we went to the World’s Fair..." But that was it. That’s all I have—just some pink baloney processed memory of a yellowed signpost of someone else’s memory. A memory that wasn’t really much of Dad’s at all.
His remnant was his mother’s. So how could I process this? What was I supposed to do with it?
And yet, there it was, at the top of the hill at my son’s place in the woods.
Would my son know what to do with it? Was it his burden, or was it their choice?
I don’t know.
IV.
So, I’ve gone back to the Mayflower descendants of Edward Fuller. He’s a safe bet for me. I do not have to understand him, or the fact that he never owned a Rolls-Royce that disappeared like Cinderella’s coach, or mixed pink paint for Santa's under the disapproving eye of Mrs. Heitman while the baloney processing center of anyone's brain tried to understand or process it all.
It seems crazy that I've bitched and moaned about Dad, and Mrs. Heitman, and that my own baloney sandwiches of a brain has been so myopic in my own renderings and of my narcissistic judgments.
Is that just the Edward Fuller interlude talking or is it a damn cop out?
Beats me. I can't say.
I guess the best part of it all was hearing my grandmother’s voice come down that hill and through the woods in the rain leading to my son’s house, where in a woodshed, memories live still—tacked to the side of a makeshift shrine to those who came before.
Like I said to my sister this morning...Smile because it happened.
Me included.
K, Imma outta here.
☮
