by Dorien Grey
Neither Mom (Odrae) nor Dad (Frank) graduated from high school. They met and married in 1929, when Mom was twenty and Dad was twenty-two. That they ever got together, or stayed together, is something of a miracle. Mom’s family, the Fearns, could have stepped out of the pages of a book on the All-American Family, even though Grandma Fearn was born in Norway. Think of a Norman Rockwell painting, and you’ve pretty much got it.
Dad’s family, the Margasons, was a study in dysfunction. His parents divorced when he was quite small, with the result that he spent some time in an orphanage, an event which left its own deep scars. His mother remarried several times. Margason family reunions inevitably ended in near brawls as members rehashed the same old real and perceived wrongs they’d rehashed at the previous reunion and would at the next one.
Both my parents worked hard all their lives. My mom held down a full-time job and managed to care for me and Dad and the house at the same time. Dad, I fear, was of the old school, in that cleaning, cooking, and housework were woman’s work, and Mom did it without complaint. (I remember distinctly that she always buttered his toast for him, and that she always took great pains to see that not one quarter inch of the surface was left unbuttered.)
Please don’t get me wrong, Dad wasn’t a tyrant: he was simply a man of his time, and that’s just the way things were. He was also, regrettably, something of a womanizer, which of course deeply hurt Mom. They fought (verbally) constantly and at one point Mom and I moved briefly out of our house to another small one my folks owned. They really, really should have divorced, but they didn’t. Mom loved Dad too much, and he loved her in his own way. In the last three years of his life, they grew much closer, and both were the happier for it.
The recognition of one’s parents as being individual human beings apart from being “Mom” and “Dad” is, I’ve always held, the point at which one truly steps from childhood to adulthood. Mine were far from perfect: they were simply average, flawed human beings who did the very best they could. And despite my momentary fear of being sent to an orphanage (a threat Dad made on a couple of occasions when I was particularly incorrigible and without really realizing that, since I was just a child, I did not know he didn’t mean it), and my numerous other self-imposed insecurities, I never had the slightest doubt that both my parents loved me more than anything else in the world. Dad tried very, very hard to fit his own mental image of what a father should be, and I’m afraid I far too often treated him very badly. I would give the world if I could only go back and undo some of those hurts…but as you have noticed, life doesn’t work that way.
It was Mom, primarily, who gave me my love of words. She loved to read: O’Henry, Mark Twain, and Guy de Maupassant were her favorites. She had a great sense of humor and a surprisingly deep laugh for a woman of her size (5'2"). I don’t recall Dad reading much, but then I don’t think reading exactly fit his idea of what a real man should be. He worked. Work was what men did.
When I think back now on just how deeply and completely Dad loved me, though he found it so hard to express it other than by being what he saw as his “Father” persona, I truly ache with regret.
Dad died of a heart attack—his second within six or eight months—when he was 57 years old. Mom died a horrible and lingering death—partly because I refused to let her go when I should have told the doctors to stop treatment—from lung cancer at the age of 62. I have never forgiven myself for that, and never will. I am now 19 years older than Dad and 14 years older than Mom. Incomprehensible.
Should you wonder why I thought you might have any interest at all in people you never met, the primary reason for writing this blog is to remind you of your own parents and what they mean or meant to you, and establish a bridge between us, in hopes that we might meet in the middle of that bridge and, together, look down and watch our similar reflections in the waters of time.
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HIGH SCHOOL
For someone who is generally able to dredge up vivid memories of the past, my four years of high school are something of a blank. The fact that I can remember so little of them might imply some sort of negative trauma associated with it, but I don’t think there was one. I simply did not like high school. I did not fit in. To say I didn’t want to fit in probably wouldn’t be true, I’m sure…we all want to be liked. But high school is in effect a four-year class on The Joys of Heterosexuality, and I wanted no part of it.
The high school years are an endless sea of raging hormones, and mine were raging in quite a different direction than the vast, vast majority. It did have some slight advantages, though, in that males that age are often open to experimentation…with the unspoken but absolutely ironclad rule that you were never, never to talk about it. So as a result, I was able to do my own sexual experimenting with about half my high school class—the male half. I’m sure that 99 percent of them went on to marry nice girls and follow the Biblical instructions to be fruitful and multiply. (I was fruitful, too, but didn’t multiply.)
Oddly, now that I think of it, I cannot remember encountering even one other gay or lesbian student. Though statistically in a school of 1,200 there had to be at least 120 of us.
I had two friends during my high school years, one of whom did not attend the same school as I. And I feel obligated to point out that both were notable exceptions to my “half the class” statement. One went on to join and make a career in the Air Force, marrying his high school sweetheart not long after graduation. I’m sure I must have had other friends, and I do recall several names and faces but for the most part I was a loner through both choice and circumstance.
I was a somewhat-above-average student, though not all that much above average, probably due to the fact that I prided myself on never having brought homework home. Perhaps as a result of that dubious distinction, I remember an English exam in which I totally and completely froze, and was unable to remember the answer to a single question. In desperation I wrote a note at the top of the paper saying: “I’m sorry, but my mind has shut down. I could have cheated, but I didn’t.” It was an obvious bid for sympathy or at least leniency from the teacher, but it produced neither.
Throughout my somewhat checkered academic career up to college, my parents collected a sizable assortment of notes from teachers all saying, in effect: “Roger could do much better if only he would apply himself.” Applying myself would have involved patience, and we all know where I stand on that one.
So when I walked out of the doors of East High in June of 1952, they closed behind me and I never looked back. I occasionally, even today, get announcements of reunions and news of my classmates, none of whom I can remember. I’m sure I might be able to remember some, if I really tried, and I’m sure they are all very nice people who have gone on to live happy, heterosexual lives. But each bulletin I receive only serves to remind me of the fact that I did not belong in their world in 1952, and I still do not belong in it today.
If anyone has any questions as to why I do not care for reality and became a writer, I’d be happy to answer them.
* * *
REMEMBERING FAMILY
Just before I went off to the navy, I gave my cherished wooden DC-3 model airplane to my cousin Tom, then probably around five years old. He is now the police chief of South Beloit, Illinois, just celebrated his 38th wedding anniversary, and he and his treasure of a wife, Cindy, have two children and four grandchildren. I rely heavily on Tom’s knowledge of police procedures for verisimilitude in my novels. He recently told me he’d been reading my blogs and wondered why, after my having done blogs on my grandparents, aunt and uncle, (all following later) I had not done one on the rest of the family. And so here it is.
In the mid-to-late 1930s my dad’s job was to train managers for newly-opened Western Tire Auto Stores in Northern Illinois and Northern Indiana. Whenever a new store opened, we would move to whatever town it was in for the several months it took Dad to train a permanent manager. The logistics of constant moves were ba
d enough without having to stumble over a very young boy at every turn. As a result, during the move and settling in period, I would be shuffled off to my beloved Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck for a few weeks. They already had three sons...Charles (Fat), John (Jack), and Donald (Cork), thirteen to sixteen years older than I. But because I spent so much time with them, they were like brothers to me.
As the years passed and WWII came and went, Fat, Jack, and Cork all married. Fat and his wife, Shirley, had two sons, Jackie and Ronnie, four and eight years younger than I. Cork and his wife Nornie had four kids: Judi, Tom, Karen, and Dave; Jack and his wife Veda had no children. All the second generation kids grew up and went off and started families of their own and, as is the history of the human race, each new generation is like the ripples moving out from a stone dropped onto a calm surface: the farther away the ripples get from the initial drop, the harder they are to keep track of.
I’ve never made the distinction between first and second cousins: to me, they are all just “cousins” and I love and admire them all equally. All have done very well for themselves in their own lives: Tom, as I mentioned, is a police chief, Judi and Karen are/were nurses, Dave works in an atomic power plant in Mississippi.
I am eternally grateful to everyone in my family for their complete and unquestioning acceptance. As I’ve mentioned, I am the family’s only gay. They all knew it long before I told them, though it was a totally open secret. They all knew Norm from our six years together, and when Ray and I came from California to drive around Lake Michigan, Jack and Veda had a family dinner for us, and Ray was simply accepted as my partner. Not one member of my family has ever for an instant made me feel unwelcome or as though I did not belong. I only wish every other gay and lesbian could say that.
Shirley, Fat’s wife, never missed sending me a birthday card until she died. Veda and Jack have been married for…it must be close to 65 years, now…and Veda has not missed a birthday in all that time.
My parents, Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck, Fat and Shirley, Cork and Nornie are all gone now, and I cannot allow myself to dwell on how terribly I miss them all. Grief is a deep and frigid ocean with a strong undertow which can sweep those who venture into it out into the depths to drown, so while I occasionally find myself standing on the shore, I never allow myself to go near the water.
If you have family, treasure them and love them and never hesitate to say how important they are to you. I hope mine knows.
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THE TEENS
Odd, though I spent six years there, my memories of my teenage years are not so much string of beads, one thought attached to the next, as they are a small pile of unrelated incidents—like these blogs—which have to be picked up and considered individually. Of course, the more I think about those years, the more memories surface.
I suspect that one reason my memories of my teens are not more organized is because I wasn’t very fond of them. Lots of minor teen-type angst, lots and lots of raging hormones. As already indicated, I did not like my high school days and have almost no memories at all of them, except for an unrequited crush I had on a trombone player in the school orchestra. Being gay in high school is not easy. I had to put up with all the problems that come with puberty, plus dealing with the acute awareness that I had almost nothing at all in common with my “peers.” I don’t recall many incidents of harassment, and I was out to no one, not even my best friend Lief. However, I did take full advantage of the fact that raging hormones also affected my straight male classmates who were more than willing to experiment. (I distinctly recall a couple of times when, in the course of this experimentation, I was almost caught by my parents.)
I’m sure I had several acquaintances I might have considered to be friends at the time, and there are a number of names and faces which swim to the surface as I write…people I liked to varying degrees, and a couple I would rather like to run into again.
That I did not date is hardly surprising. At one point, my parents lined me up with the daughter of one of their friends. She was a student nurse at a nearby hospital. I arrived to pick her up and was told she was unavailable. I was vastly relieved on the one hand and not a little hurt on the other because I do not take any form of rejection well. I attended one party where Spin the Bottle was played, though I was excruciatingly embarrassed. I think I did kiss one of the girls simply because I had no way to avoid it, but really would have preferred one of the boys. Perhaps that was the beginning of my deep resentment of the arrogance of heterosexuals in assuming everyone is like them.
As for academics, I was a C+ student, largely because of my oft-mentioned laziness. I do not remember ever taking homework home.
We did not get a television until I was, I think, 14. I remember how people used to gather in front of hardware store windows to stare in awe at snowy images on huge, clunky-looking floor-consoles. Rockford was 90 miles from the nearest television station, in Chicago, and did not get its own station—singular—for another year or so.
I used to love coming in to Chicago, a two-hour bus trip, and would usually be so excited at the prospect that I would not sleep more than a couple of hours the night before. I took my first commercial airplane flight on a 20-passenger DC-3 from the newly opened Rockford airport to Chicago’s Midway airport. There was no O’Hare at the time.
Everything changed when I left for college, of course. I entered an entirely new world and an entirely new phase of my life. I felt, in some regards, not unlike a butterfly breaking out of the cocoon of my high school years. Whereas I was utterly neutral to high school and everything and nearly everyone associated with it, I to this day look back on my college years with nothing but delight—and, of course, the inevitable-for-me sense of longing and loss at the fact that they are gone forever. And if I was a different person when I entered my freshman year in 1952, I was different again when I returned from the Navy in 1956 to pick up my studies where I’d dropped them to join the NavCads. But by that time, I was no longer a teenager.
So many doors have closed behind me, but always there has been an unopened door ahead. I must learn to be satisfied with that.
* * *
THE YEAST YEARS
It is absolutely amazing how the mind works. I was trying to think of a subject for this blog, and my mind kindly provided the mental image of flipping through an old-style library card file…you may remember: those long wooden drawers with little brass pulls and a brass-framed rectangle on the front, above the pull, into which a card could be inserted to designate the drawer’s contents: a 3x5 card of every book in the library by subject, title, and Dewey decimal number.
And suddenly I was back in the Rockford Public Library, a staid, solid building of grey stone on the west bank of the Rock River, just off the downtown area. It was the kind of library anyone from anywhere in the U.S. would instantly recognize as being a library from six blocks away. One of my very first jobs, if not my first, was as a page in the library (even then I delighted in that image); my job was to return books to the stacks, go down into the archives and retrieve old books, magazines, and newspapers requested from the front desk.
I think I was in 10th grade at the time. I can pinpoint it by the fact that at one point my first serious love interest, who was a junior high classmate and whose name I’d best not repeat here, came into the library one evening while I was working. I’d changed schools, which had necessitated our parting of the ways, but I was still madly in love with him. (Well, for a teenage boy, it’s a little difficult to tell the difference between love and lust, but I was pretty sure it was love.) Anyway, I distinctly remember having him go with me into the basement archives where we…well, if you need a diagram, let me know. Had we been caught, I can only imagine the scandal, and the possibility of that happening undoubtedly only added to the excitement of the encounter.
I think the library closed at either 8 or 9 each night, and I would then walk across the river and up to North Second Street, where I would catch the
bus for home. There was a bagel shop on the corner, and each night I’d stop and buy a bagel which I would not eat until I reached the end of the bus line in Loves Park, Rockford’s immediate suburb to the north. We lived a mile beyond the end of the bus line, and I would eat the bagel while walking home, often through the bitter cold and snow of winter.
I still have somewhere a newspaper photo of me and some other library employees admiring the library’s acquisition of an 8mm movie projector: a newspaper-photo-worthy event in those oh, so innocent and oh, so long gone days.
I don’t think I worked at the library all that long: less than a year, I’m sure, and my specific memories are few. I remember the cart I’d push, the odd echoes of footsteps through the stacks, and the distinct smell of books, and the sense of calm and knowledge residing therein. I can picture the cards in their little sleeves inside the front cover of the books, and the lines of rubber-stamped dates.
Looking back, they were my yeast years: I was a lump of dough, most of the ingredients of my life having by that time been mixed together to produce who I was and would become. But there had to be a calm period of warm but indistinct memories which allowed the yeast to rise before being put into the oven of college. It was a good time.
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A SIMPLE MAN
Let’s face it…I’m a simple man (some would argue in all senses of the word). I have simple wants and simple needs and all I ever want is whatever it is I want right when I want it. Don’t bother me with having to think before I act, or having to figure out how things work. Getting from point A to point B should not involve circuitous trips through every other letter in the alphabet to get there.
If I go somewhere I expect to have my wallet with me. I’m far too busy to have to think about getting it out of the pants I wore yesterday and putting it in the pants I’m wearing today. It should know enough to be there.
When I leave my apartment, I expect to have my keys either in my pocket or in my hand. I don’t see why I should have to go back inside and spend twenty minutes looking for them.