Father and Daughter

/ By / In / 8 Comments

Paul Simon’s song “Father and Daughter” starts out “If you leap awake / In the mirror of a bad dream…” This reminds me of my favorite story about my father, which I have told to my children numerous times. When I was little, I had a recurring nightmare about a witch chasing me. I think it must have started after I saw The Wizard of Oz, because the witch who was chasing me certainly looked a lot like Margaret Hamilton. When I finally told my father about it, he said “The next time that witch starts chasing you, you turn around and look her in the eye and tell her to leave you alone or else your father will get her!” It may sound silly, but the next time it happened I did as he instructed, and after that I never had that nightmare again.

My parents’ roles in our family were very clear: my father was in charge of making money and providing for the family, and my mother was in charge of raising the children and cooking the meals. He would no more have told her how she should raise us than she would have told him how to practice medicine. That probably made things easier, because there was never any of that “if one parent says no, try to get the other parent to say yes” strategizing. My mother had the final say on everything to do with us. But as a result, we probably didn’t get to know my father as well as we would have if he had taken a more active role in parenting.

He worked all the time. His medical office was attached to our house, and when he wasn’t seeing patients he was working on their files, and of course he went to the hospital at least once a day to make rounds. However, he was always home for dinner, every single night. This was a pattern I followed with my children as well. It never occurred to me that there was any other way. When I started reading articles, as an adult, about the benefits of family dinners I was astounded that this was even an issue, because of course families would eat dinner together. Sometimes at dinner he would talk about operations or illnesses he had seen that day, but when we all began to turn green, my mother would make him stop. Other times he would start a conversation on a controversial topic, to see if any of us kids would take the bait. One of his favorite phrases was “Just for the sake of argument. . . .”

He had a great voice, and he loved to sing and play the ukulele. I can’t remember what songs he actually played on the ukulele, perhaps my older sisters will read this story and remind me. I do vividly remember his favorite songs for singing in the car. Our family took a lot of long car trips, and we had a whole repertoire of songs we sang in the car, partly just to pass the time, and partly to avoid carsickness. (One year my mother taught us all The Marseillaise, because one of my sisters needed to learn it for her French class. I can still sing the whole thing, which I learned phonetically, although I only have a vague idea of what I am saying since I have never taken French.) My father had three favorite car songs: The Caisson Song (with the words slightly changed to include my oldest sister’s name), Glorious Victorious (a drinking song that starts out “Drunk last night, drunk the night before” — which in retrospect seems like an odd choice for a family car-trip song, but we thought it was great), and best of all, Dunderbeck. Dunderbeck told the story of a butcher who took out a patent on a sausage machine, ground up all the “pussycats and dogs and rats” in the neighborhood to make sausage, and ended up getting ground up in the machine himself. It sounds macabre, but we all loved singing that song, with my father in the driver’s seat singing loudest of all.

He was by no means the perfect father. He had a terrible temper, and I have elsewhere told the story of how he threw a glass milk bottle at me in anger about something I said. When he yelled, he was formidable — no wonder that witch would have been afraid of him! But there was no question in my mind that he loved my sisters and me, and would do anything in his power to help us if we needed it. When I was in college, and ever afterwards, when I called home, if he happened to answer the phone, he would ask two questions: “Is everything okay?” and “Do you need any money?” If the answers were “yes” and “no” respectively, he would be satisfied and say “Let me give you to your mother.”

He died in 1995, at the age of 85, from Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He and my mother were about to celebrate their 52nd anniversary. I was surprised at how much I cried when I heard the news.

My Father, the Alligator Man

/ By / In / 7 Comments

By Ginger Smith Bate

Until Simon and I became parents, Father’s Day meant nothing to me. I bought my first Father’s Day card when my son was six months old. Since then we celebrate the day with a favorite meal, cards, and a couple of small gifts. I remind Julian the day before that he needs to do something.

My father, William Bradley Smith, died two months before I turned four. He died of pneumonia at Rex Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina. We were spending the winter in Cary at my Great-aunt Roberta’s house. Winter was the off season for the traveling carnival where my parents worked. Carnivals are open when the weather is warm and people can be outside enjoying rides, eating cotton candy, winning prizes throwing baseballs at bottles, shooting plastic dunks, or tossing rings. And then more than now, paying to look at the freaks. My father was one of the freaks.

My father was an Alligator Man. He was born with a genetic disorder call ichthyosis. Much of his skin was rough and scaly. Most people with it do not live beyond infancy. There was nothing then that could cure his skin condition. He used creams and a product call Camphor Ice to keep it somewhat soft and pliable. It did not affect his face. He had a good face. If you put pictures of my face next to his face, you will see that he is definitely my father. He was loving, clever, and patient. He liked to play with me and carry or walk me around the carnival people during the day when there were no customers and proudly tell them that I was his daughter.

His mother died in 1913 and his father in 1915. He was seven when he and his brothers and sisters were sent to live with uncles and aunts. He went to Aunt Roberta in Cary. He went to school. He loved to read. But his life was difficult because he looked strange. He found a group of people who didn’t care about that. He joined a carnival when he was fifteen.  He traveled the South and the Southwest with them. He worked at Coney Island. He worked with other carnivals. Some of them were with circuses. He made a living and had friends.

He met my mother after one of his carnivals played in Lenoir, NC. She met some carnival people who asked her to join them. She was eager to leave North Carolina, and the carnival, traveling life was an adventure. She became the lady who survives when swords and knives are plunged into a box. She met my father. They married in 1944 and their trailer was pulled with the others from town to town except in winters when they parked it in Aunt Roberta’s yard.

I was born in 1947. I remember the trailer. I remember coloring with my father, playing with him under the huge oak trees at Aunt Roberta’s, looking through boxes of things that had belonged to my grandmother, and being pushed by him in a cart in the Piggly Wiggly grocery store. I have a small chest of drawers about eight inches high with four drawers that belonged to Grandmother Rose and a china living room set that he said she kept on a table. My grandparents’ house is gone. Aunt Roberta’s house is gone. Hurricane Floyd took her oak trees. I have a book that my father gave me for my third birthday. He wrote “Love from Daddy” inside the cover.

William Bradley Smith died in January 1951. My mother and I were visiting one of her sisters. A man delivered a telegram from one of my uncles telling my mother he had died. I have a mental video of that. At his funeral, another uncle picked me up so that I could look into this coffin. To me, of course, he looked asleep. I remember that. I can close my eyes and see him. My mother took me to Blowing Rock, NC to live with her parents. She tried to keep working with the carnival, but then she went home, too.

My father is buried in Historic Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh in the family plot that my grandfather bought in 1890. I have one picture of my grandfather and one of my grandmother. I have three pictures of my father. One my mother gave me. One I found online. And the third one, a friend saw on eBay and emailed me details. It’s on a post card. This kind of card was handed out on carnival midways and at Coney Island to entice people to go to the freak shows. To get the card, I bought the photo album it was in.

My mother did not talk about my father. I did not talk about my father until I was an adult. People who lived near my grandmother had met him, and being called “the freak’s kid” by some of their children, even when I was in high school, was painful. My mother wrote about him and their marriage when a therapist I was working with suggested that she might write about what she would not talk about.

About ten years ago, I started looking for him. Searching in the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh and on line have given me more than I thought possible. He is in Billboard Magazine before 1950. Syracuse University has a glass negative and a print of him. An interview with him is in a book in the UNC Chapel Hill library. He and his family are in the 1910 census. My friend Diane Dunkley sent me a copy of the census pages, and she discovered the eBay album.  There were many pictures of him in my mother’s family picture albums, but either she or her mother threw them away. If you are interested or curious you can Google his name or Aloa the Alligator Boy. There is another man who has been confused with him and you might find him instead. My father is the handsome one.

Why do I not have Ichthyosis? Each parent must carry the recessive gene. Both of my grandparents did. North Carolina was and might still be the source of the people with the defect who filled freak shows. Also, it seems to skip generations. One of his sisters had ichthyosis. She was a carnival traveler, too. None of the others were affected.

Why did I write and submit this? Because in this terrible time of rampant, open prejudice, I want to tell my little story about skin prejudice. My experience is minuscule, but in a tiny, tiny speck of awareness, I know what it’s like to look or to be different, or to be the child of someone who does.

 

Witnessing

/ By / In / 5 Comments

Sweet Spring Trail

A few days ago I had one of those experiences – the kind that you feel in your body before you know what it is – the kind that crystalizes some deep truth in your life. While walking in our local woods with my son, now 36, I noticed he had stopped behind me on the trail, so I’d turned to see what he was up to.  He’d spotted some spider holes in the moist soil bank, small holes where spiders sit inconspicuously, waiting for their next meal of an unsuspecting insect. It was such a small moment and yet I felt in awe of my son who can see things I can’t see – like the tiny spider holes – and do something I’m now learning to do – wait and watch.

I used to walk the trails so differently. I’d rush through my daily work out with the objective of moving along the path as fast as I could while distracting myself from my exercise induced aches and fatigue. Putting on my sunglasses and ear buds, tuning into my podcast of the latest interesting interview that would fill up my mind, off I’d go – completely unaware of my body or the environment around me. I wouldn’t see the tiny spider holes, or the numerous fungi hiding under leaves or barely peeking out through the dirt they push aside as they make their way towards the soil’s surface, to bloom and be eaten or, if poisonous, decay. What a world this is! What a world I was missing!

Watching my son respond to the natural world reminds me of watching sunsets with my grandmother. As a child visiting my grandparents on Round Mountain, we’d rarely miss the daily ritual of sunset watching. After dinner when the evening summer sun was still visible my grandmother and I would walk out to the front of their house in this central California desert. Their home sat atop a knoll and was surrounded by empty dry land except for sagebrush and an occasional small tree. But my grandparents had cultivated an oasis of tall trees along with their beloved gardens which surrounded their home.  Scorching heat produced a barren landscape beyond their knoll but when the sun began to set, the sky was set afire. My grandmother would watch the radiant colors spread across the sky before us and make sweet cooing sounds, oohs and ahs. I watched her unguarded passion. It was a moment of witnessing a grown up in love with the world.

My grandmother introduced the natural world to me and I’ve come to love sunsets as she did. And now I see in nature so many of the small wonders that my son sees. His passion is different from my grandmother’s – quieter and more enlightened. He shows me the golden Chanterelles, which now I can confidently identify and cook up with garlic and butter. I know the oyster mushrooms growing on logs and pick them when they’re fresh and free of bugs. The many death caps, though beautiful, must be admired from a distance, my son seriously warns me. I missed all this as I rushed along, focused on my podcast, the clock and the future. But now I slow down and breathe in the aroma of the as yet unborn mushrooms scenting the soil near my trail; I smell the vanilla fragrance of Pearly Everlasting which must be growing nearby, though I can’t yet see it. I hear the screeching call of the Red-tailed Hawk and the Great Blue Heron wades in a pond as I walk by, rendered nearly invisible by the stillness of its blue-gray form. I stop and taste the Miner’s lettuce, sweet from a fresh rain.

There’s a mystical quality to my son’s relationship with the natural world. Many years ago on one of our first nature walks together he introduced me to Pearly Everlasting. I bent down to pick some but he stopped me. He said wait, and then he leaned over and spoke to the plant, softly asking if it was alright to pick it. I soon learned to follow his lead and now I ask any plant before I pick it for permission. It feels like a blessing. I’ve been learning from my son for a long time now – really since he was born.  He shows me how to wait in order to see the wild surprises nature is full of. It’s a joy to learn from my own child. I’ve long ago stopped telling him about the world; I relish learning about what he sees. It gives me confidence, not just in him, but in the future.

Witnessing my son – how he understands and sees the world – I don’t think of as my giving him a gift. It’s how he learns he exists. But, in fact, he is giving to me and it is a gift that extends beyond a shared interest in flora and fauna. I’m finding solace in nature as I contemplate my own existence ending. Everything I see is transient and yet so beautiful. My son shows me, with every walk we take, how to be in this world. I’m still learning how to quiet myself like the Heron, to be the spider in the hole waiting for the surprise.…

Draft Dodger Rag

/ By / In / 7 Comments

Memorial Day weekend in Sacramento is most notable for the Dixieland Jazz Jubilee, which has occurred every year since 1974. It is an amazing four days of music and fun, with bands from all over the country and the world who make the pilgrimage to northern California to play traditional jazz. I didn’t discover it until 1980, but have been going faithfully every year since then. On Monday, the final day of the festival, in recognition of Memorial Day, the bands invariably stop at some point and ask all the veterans in the audience to stand up, whereupon they go into a long rap about honoring their service, and how they sacrificed to make our country free. While I know this is admirable and appropriate, I just can’t get into it, because to me it is all tied up with the Vietnam War.

Like most Baby Boomers, when I think of war, I think of Vietnam. Of course there have been many wars before, and a few since, but that is the one that shaped my attitude toward war and the military. I wish I could remember when I first learned about Vietnam. It might have been in a high school social studies class, although we didn’t spend much time talking about current events. It probably wasn’t from the newspaper, because I generally just read the comics and Ann Landers in those days. It could have been at the lefty summer camp I went to, where we sang civil rights and union organizing songs, but that was in 1964 and ’65, and I don’t think the war was getting that much attention yet. I do know that whenever I learned about this war, I also immediately knew that it was wrong, and I opposed it, and I wanted to get involved in the anti-war movement.

I joined the Student Peace Union while I was in high school, although I have to admit that part of the attraction was that its initials were the same as mine. I began signing my letters with a peace symbol instead of my name. I wanted to participate in the October ’67 march on Washington, and was disappointed that my parents wouldn’t let me go. I wanted to be involved with the Mobe and help levitate the Pentagon, and couldn’t understand why they were being so protective, although it seems understandable now, I was only a 16-year-old high school senior at the time. By the next summer I had graduated from high school and I did go to Washington, and then Chicago, to work for the McCarthy campaign. I really believed McCarthy would get elected and end the war, which would have saved so many lives, both American and Vietnamese. But we all know how that turned out.

There were a lot of memorable antiwar songs in that era, which certainly had a profound influence on me, especially those of my beloved Phil Ochs. His first album, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, released in 1964, had a song called “Talking Vietnam Blues” which may have been my introduction to the Vietnam conflict. It started with these lyrics:

Sailing over to Vietnam
Southeast Asian Birmingham
Training is the word we use
Nice word to have in case we lose
Training a million Vietnamese
To fight for the wrong government and the American Way.

Probably my favorite song of his was on his second album, I Ain’t Marching Any More, released in 1965. “Draft Dodger Rag” humorously described lots of different ways to get out of being drafted.

I’ve got a dislocated disc and a wracked up back
I’m allergic to flowers and bugs
When the bombshell hits, I get epileptic fits
And I’m addicted to a thousand drugs
I got the weakness woes, I can’t touch my toes
I can hardly reach my knees
And if the enemy came close to me
I’d probably start to sneeze.

I never knew anyone who actually ended up fighting in Vietnam. All the guys I knew either managed to get 4-F status, became conscientious objectors, or, after the lottery was instituted, had good lottery numbers. I am grateful for that.