Nov. 7, 2010

1974-76:
When I go into therapy ca. 1980, my therapist decides that the years when Julia started kindergarten and then first grade, 19775-76, were crucial for me. I could never resonate with this, but I think her thought was that Julia was the last anchor to 'home' being the place where my days were defined by my kids' needs?? It's odd that we never explored this more thoroughly.

There is a period when my mother is visiting, staying in the apartment at 1201, but Julia is....going to Patty's house after school? That would be when she was in kindergarten. I guess Jenny is coming home to 1201 when my mother is there, but I know I didn't get home until after my teaching day ended and I'd picked up Julia
--about 5 o'clock.

There is the trip to Disneyland in California on the train with the Trendlers; that must have been right around 1973 or 1974, Julia still small. I wonder if Ed has all these dates written down in one of his memo books.

1971-2?
My father dies soon after we come back to Libertyville. Al calls to tell me that he is fading, and that if I want to see him I'd better come soon, but I call the Salvation Army nursing home where he is staying, and the nurse says if I want to see him I should come NOW. I ask what he is dying of; she says he's just ready to die, and that they often go that way. I fly out the next day, Al picks me up at the airport, it's nighttime, we drive to his house. He wonders out loud if it makes any sense to go to the nursing home that night and warns me that Dad won't recognize me probably. He decides against it, but still....he calls the nursing home to find out that his father had died a few hours earlier.

We visit the minister who will lead the memorial service. I do not get to see my father; he's chosen to be cremated. I explain to the minister that this was an abandoning father, one who beat his sons and sexually abused his daughters, but I can tell he is not getting it or else not buying it. Apparently Dad had done an outstanding job at the Salvation Army, converting people, singing hymns with his guitar, which he had learned to play, apparently--this impressed me more than anything else, that he could have learned to play a musical instrument. Betty had told me that when she was a young adolescent who took piano lessons, she would play for Dad at his self-styled preaching sessions. Now I learn that he had been capable of the concentration, the determination, and the skill to apply himself to learning to play a musical instrument on his own. I guess here was something I could be proud of about him.

In the event, the minister preached a sermon about forgiving a man his faults and sang, accompanied by his own guitar, "How many paths must a man walk down...before you call him a man."  I wanted to say, "More paths than this one did!" I felt heartsick that all the sins against his family were 'forgiven' by a man who never lived through any of it. By now the tenets of Christianity felt pretty useless to me.

We went to the cemetery; I saw the plaque in the ground that marked the place his ashes were buried. Some days later, I had a dream in which I saw my father in his casket; in the middle of his forehead was a big dark mark, like a bruise. The casket was up high, in a kind of barn, set on rafters.

I have two memories of my father's relationship to me when I was a child that could be called positive. Neither is unmixed with fear and distrust, but still feel  kind of normal. When I'm about four or five, he's put me on top the icebox, maybe six feet off the ground. I am hunched down, in a crouch. He is standing before me, his arms out, telling me to jump, that he'll catch me. I am too terrified to jump. I don't think I thought he wouldn't catch me or that he wouldn't try to catch me, at least, but it was too great a leap of faith.

At about the same age, I am playing in the front yard of the house at 124 Pearl, when my father tells me not to leave the yard. But a friend who lives at the end of the block wants me to come over to play. I leave the yard and go to her house. My father finds out and at dinner that evening confronts me in front of all my brothers and sisters at the table. I have no memory of my mother's being present. I can just see Dad at the head of the table, bellowing down the table at me, "Marilyn Jean, confess that you left the yard when I told you not to."

But this is something I will not do. He is getting more and more angry, his face and neck are getting red, and my sister Helen, sitting next to me, advises me to just admit that I did it. She is afraid that he will beat me, as he has my brothers. But I sit tight. I know he won't hit me. I have a secret with him.

The year must have been 1943. This may have been during the time that my mother had gone to San Francisco, leaving my sister Betty in charge of all of us kids. Ultimately, Betty sent her a wire demanding that she come home or Betty would herself leave. She came home. It is after her return that Betty says she kicked my father out of the house, we lost the house, we can't live together any longer, and by 1945 Al, Sharon, and I ar shipped off to Long Beach.