Who Do You Think You Are? An Occasional Series

OK, so Lisa Kudrow apparently has this great new geneaology program on NBC called "Who Do You Think You Are?" I have never seen an episode of Friends, but I respect Lisa Kudrow's integrity if only for this exchange from Romy and Michele's High School Reunion:

Michele: I'm the Mary, and you're the Rhoda.
Romy: YOU'RE the Rhoda, you're the Jewish one.

But I digress. If the people in my family were this program's executive producers, this show would be titled "Who the Hell Are You?" The blessing or curse of growing up in my small town in the 1970s was that if you didn't know who you were, someone would tell you in exquisite, tortured detail. Since the griots of my home town no longer stride the earth, Meta Cranky feels obliged to provide Crankies #1 and #2 with a genealogical primer. Let's begin with granny ladies, shall we?
Hazel was always the Mary, never the Rhoda. Here, she's standing in front of her cellar door in celebration of her flower garden, although b&w pics don't do her zinnias justice. Here are some random factoids for Crankies 1 & 2 to know about their great-grandmother:

She had that braided hair thing going long before Yulia Tymoshenko wowed the Ukrainians with her traditional up-do. I don't know how the prime minister keeps her hair in place, but my granny used armies of hair pins. Here's a bit of Amusing Family Lore that requires you to know: 1) Granny had braids, she was short, and she could talk until the earth was flat and; 2) My cousin Tim was 6 feet tall and change. When my granny began a story that promised to be the length of Paradise Lost, Tim would look down on her braided crown and begin plucking out hairpins. Her fierce concentration allowed her to hold forth until all the pins were gone and the braids hung, unfettered, down her back.
Since her ears weren't pierced, she wore devices she called "ear screws" that probably are banned in Scandinavian countries. She never left the house without them. She always looked really good, which was a testimony to genetic material that gave her The Good Hair and some serious bone structure. She also looked good, though, because she decided it was important, and she went to the trouble to apply lipstick and abuse her ears to make it happen. Not to bore small crankies with tales of economic hardship or anything, but let's just say that Hazel didn't always have a lot to work with.

The photo at the top of this entry was taken when Meta Cranky's dad returned from the war in about 1944, and it's always, for her, been a Dad picture. There's a different story going on, though, when you look at the faces of his nuclear family.

OK, you're loving it that Cranky Girl's dad, granddad, and auntie all have identical dimples in their chins, right? Is that a great trick or what? But now look at Hazel. Her face says pretty much, "they haven't licked us yet."

By the time I knew her, Hazel had settled into a matronly comfort that allowed her to monopolize conversations and confidently tell people how to breathe in and out. She could effortlessly deflate egos with this killer phrase: "pretty is as pretty does." Yet her face in this homecoming picture is all about adversity and endurance: there in those contracted eyebrows you can see her uncertain finances and the worry of a double blue star mother. She was opinionated and prejudiced, utterly competent, and tireless in accomplishing the hard physical labor that kept a poor family from being a trashy family. She cried only on Mondays, wash day, because she could weep while she wrung out laundry alone in a wash house.

She earned the right to be the Mary.
--MCG

Queer Eye for the Seventh Grade Research Paper

Cranky #1's latest English class assignment is to interview people involved in U.S. civil rights issues. So she's reading about the Stonewall riots to prepare for interviews with gay rights activists.

Her choice of topics serves the dual purpose of 1)making me feel ancient and crone-like, and 2)allowing me to reflect on my red-state upbringing, with its wealth of homophobia and sheer ignorance about The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name.

I was over 30 before I connected the dots about Alex, the navigator on my dad's B-24. Alex, a Republican bachelor, exchanged countless letters with my mother, faithfully sent my granny cards on Mother's Day, and presented thoughtful graduation gifts to my brothers. The salient biographical details for me were that he bought me the most gorgeous Easter dress I will ever own (dropped waist, covered buttons down the front, crinkly skirt, be still my heart), and that my dad always disappeared when he came to visit. Alex and my mother would chatter for hours, Alex would rise to depart, and magically my father would reappear to say farewell. "Where did Charles go?" my mother would ask. Somewhere where his gaydar signal wasn't picking up, I'm guessing.

My Greatest Generation dad had no useful models for how to behave around a person of a different sexual orientation. Alex's presence signified Too Much Information, and in the face of this knotty social and sexual puzzlement, my dad headed for the certainty and security of his pickup.

Virginia Woolf claimed that human nature changed on or about December 10, 1910. I can't put that fine a point on it, but blessedly, humanity found a few clues about gay civil rights somewhere between my Easter dress and Cranky #1's research paper. Cranky #2 may very well fit into my frothy yellow confection this season, and I would be pleased to tell her about its provenance: It came from Alex, a dear family friend who had a queer eye for fashion.
--MCG

Paperback Wing Nuts

Since the Lyndon Johnson administration, Meta Cranky has had a torch burning for Shadow Castle, a 45-cent book that her youngest older brother (YOB) brought home from a Scholastic book fair. Look at the cover and you're smitten: there's princess Gloria's flaxen hair flowing well past her ass, and a dreamy Disney-quality castle in the background. Prince Mika is practically drooling on himself, he's so overcome by her fabulousness. Bluebell, the princess of the Blue Fairies, gets a similar over-the-top treatment inside the covers, except that she's a brunette with a curly do. Elves, goblins, swamp fairies, a vegetarian dragon. It's Middle Earth with better illustrations.

A cursory check at Amazon shows that Meta Cranky is among a legion of wing nuts who are unable to be ironic, or even objective, about Shadow Castle. Amazon reviewers confess to stealing these books from libraries and loathing former friends who borrowed, then lost, their personal copies. The book you discover when you're 9 is apparently the book you carry with you, intact and beloved, into geezerhood. Those of us who drank the SC Kool Aid are not going to get all lit crit-y and describe the revealing contrast of fairy and mortal, or analyze the dangerous goblin/swamp fairy alliance. Instead, like YOB, we'll tell you where we were when we first read it (top of a long-gone mimosa tree) and declare, with fervor and sincerity, "It's just that good."

Because of ridiculous sentimentalists like Meta Cranky and her YOB, used paperback copies of SC sell for $28. Someone who is not a liberal arts major, do the math and figure out where your portfolio would be now if you'd invested in 45-cent paperbacks instead of those lousy 401Ks. Even in these difficult economic times, however, Meta Cranky will tighten her belt to obtain the new EXPANDED edition of SC with previously unpublished material. More fairies! Creepier goblins! Those poor slobs reading the books on the Times best-seller list don't know what they're missing.
--MCG

Post Party

Back in the day, Meta Cranky delighted in Bad Parties. Giving them, attending them, watching people fall in the pool at them. Scott Fitzgerald articulated the essence of the bad party in Tender Is the Night, and my undergraduate journalism pals aspired to host parties that met these standards:

I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it.
I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.

Truth be told, most Daily Texan parties I attended in the mid-eighties didn't miss this mark by much. I have rosy memory of a full day spent inert on the sofa after a glorious multi-birthday soiree in my condo's party room. Through slit eyes, I watched a dozen post-partiers shuffle through my condo collecting lost shoes and empty pony kegs. Some poor soul hobbled by on a foot that had been impaled by a woman's stiletto. From my mostly horizontal position, I pointed toward missing articles of clothing and equipment, and listened to descriptions of epic, irresponsible binge drinking. I realized at day's end that the Mexican fat dress I was wearing was inside out.

Time and space don't much change the parameters of the Bad Party. We celebrated Grace Five Point Five recently, and I'm pleased to report that while it differed in specifics from the Daily Texan model, it still followed classic Bad Party form. Girls in outrageous outfits? Check. Girls jumping on sofas in the name of self-expression? Natch. Painfully loud music to fuel interpretive dance? You betcha. Then: "Caca de Vaca." Now? "Barbie Girl."

I began post-party cleanup by strategizing about the PlayDoh ground into the carpet. As I studied the wreckage, I begin to identify items left by members of Not My Tribe. Gigi's camera. Helena's sweater. Addie's purse. Ellie's jacket. KK's jacket, plus her headband. And I smiled in recognition.
--MCG

Cranky Girl #1 Considers the Diesel Engine

*photo credit to Glenda.

Cranky Girl #1 fulfilled a 7th grade English assignment by reflecting on her summertime rides in pickups. Here's her product.

I Didn’t Go to Schlitterbahn on My Summer Vacation

When I’m asked the question, “What did you do over summer vacation,” I usually answer, “I rode around in a pickup truck.” People tend to say, “Oh, that’s, uh cool,” and then rush on to tell me about their trip to Schlitterbahn. All I’m asking is that you consider that my vacation could be as fascinating and exciting as yours. Then I will be happy to hear about Schlitterbahn.

If you say you live on a farm, people think you wear overalls and share your breakfast with Wilbur the pig. In my experience, farms aren’t inhabited by shy old men who raise adorable, spotless animals. Cow are just not that clean, and pigs don’t get buttermilk baths. Sure, I can tell you inspiring stories about calves being born, but honestly, calving is a big, bloody show with a wet, wobbly finale. Real farmers watch through the pickup window, while they thaw out their fingers from the February frost.

Some people’s summers have one big, memorable event. My summers are a lot of little good, funny, silly, serious events that I bundle up and call summer. For example, one night we got a flat tire on our Mazda Navaho. It was late, I was 6 and cranky, and Mom was in no mood to crawl under the car. Someone passed us and stopped to help. In making introductions my mom said, “You don’t know me but I’m Colleen Hobbs,” to which he replied, “O yeah, I know you. I went to school with your brother Sid.” How’s that for knowing your community?

For some people, the highlight of the summer is the most exciting thing that happened, like seeing a Broadway show or going to the Grand Canyon. The highlights of my summers, or at least the things I remember most clearly, are incidents like this: walking out across the field, inhaler in hand, to bring water to my uncle, who was disking a field. By the time I reach the tractor, the ice has melted. Another high point: being interrupted mid-pie one evening by an urgent call. We all dropped our forks, grabbed our shoes, jumped in a truck (I rode on the back) and went down three miles of red dirt road. The cows were out.

A visitor once asked me, “Aren’t you glad I saved you from that boring farm?” I couldn’t reply. Apparently my idea of a fun vacation isn’t the same as other seventh graders’. We may not have Wilbur, or Babe, but my family’s farm is a working farm where each day’s labor brings a chance to learn and grow. To me, riding in pickups is Schlitterbahn. The details of my summer add up to a larger lesson. You might learn about a person’s character, or how to test the strength of a flooding creek’s current. But every ordinary conversation or posthole can help you learn if you pay attention.

Bounty

The shopping, cleaning, and cooking that go along with our national holiday might, perhaps, take the shine off the genuine feelings of gratitude that we cranky girls harbor in our flinty little hearts. But this artifact from a cousin makes me feel serious-as-a-heart attack thankful for all those post-war miracles: antibiotics, fluoridated water, free school lunches, GI Bill, the U.S. highway system, and the like. These are the O'Hern children at their mother Jane's funeral in 1933. My grandmother Nora is the fourth from the left in the back row.

Jane O'Hern was married at 16 and died before she was 60. She had 13 children; Jeez, the hamster in Grace's bedtime book only had 11.

Jane's obituary described her as quiet and unassuming. If you live with someone as tightfisted as her husband, Pat O'Hern, and produce 13 children, you probably LOOK like you're unassuming. But I think she must have been tough as a boot. Her 13 children all lived to adulthood; the only one missing from the funeral picture died at 18 in a farming accident. In other branches of my family, unattended children died from drinking kerosene or stepping on rusty nails. But not Jane's. She didn't leave any at the gas station, or let any drown in a creek. She must have been paying attention and not just phoning it in.

If Jane O'Hern, with no education, running water, or even a whiff of useful medical care can do all that, I think I can manage to unload the dishwasher one more time.

--mcg

Domestic Science

A note to those of you who have graciously inquired whether we are back in our kitchen. The short answer is yes. Don't ask me to find the spoons, lightbulbs, or can openers that I used back in May. But we have made reasonable substitutions. Homework has been done on the counter. The mixer has been unpacked, and it still produces cookies. The only difference is that the mixing bowl now goes in the dishwasher after being comprehensively licked.

Much of the old is still there, and old. This is the same fixture that has hung above the dining table since I first saw it in the mid-1980s. My suspicion is that it is original to the house.

OK, well now it's red, instead of dirty beige. The globes came from the farm. I've seen them in a cabinet above the sink since about 1974. Recycle, reuse, etc.

When workers tore out the rotted kitchen cabinet, the name of the original owner was still clearly displayed. Mr. K. had the huevos to build a house in the last Depression. When our house gets turned into condos, or a University of Texas parking lot, or an expansion of Seton Hospital in the twenty-second century, maybe the subcontractors will smile at the Corvette-red light fixture that was installed in the Great Recession of Ought Nine.

--MCG