Destruction was an art, one we pushed to a level critics might call meta-destruction. When Mom locked something away from us, the lock itself became the new toy and we’d break that first, play with it, and then break whatever she’d locked away. If Mom roped off the vegetables in her garden, it simply provided a cool lasso to wrangle tomato plants with.
Each destructive act came with its own sound and our mother soon learned the signature noises associated with our various disassemblings. Crashing china was, for instance, an easy read but one heard after the fact. Harder to discern were the sounds of horrible things about to happen – the scrape-bump-rattle of a ladder being leaned against the china cabinet; the hollow slosh of paint cans being stacked up; the brittle clack of framed paintings being arranged into a fort. Had my mother been able to catalog these sonic silhouettes she might still own many of her nicer things.
“My children,” she wrote to her parents in 1961, “are being boys. Records turned on loud, wrestling on the floor, timing each other in dashes upstairs – oh, tell me, what do little girls do early on Sunday mornings?”
What little girls did we had no idea. We lived in our Man Village – a place without cleanliness, quiet, and where everything was eventually destroyed. Had my Dad owned an anvil we would’ve figured out how to destroy that, too. And the dirt. Oh, the dirt. Six pairs of feet tramping in from Minnesota’s mudbottom Aprils moved the rich soil of the Midwest into the Millstone as steadily as if we’d shoveled it in through a window. Wet clothes heavy with earth were peeled off at the front door before a mad dash to the bathtub to choke the drain with the leafy sludge that washed off us in viscous waves. Snips and snails and puppy dog tails were not what we were made of, as my poor mother could well attest as she cleaned up the bodily messes six boys left like a slug trail through her deteriorating home:
– a house full of unflushed toilets – bathrooms splattered by little boys playing “sword fight” while peeing – the smell of urine in a sink (“But the bathroom was so far away.”) – and the sick.
* * *
Memory: Throwing Up
Sometime in third grade –
I’m in bed and I throw up.
I have the lower bunk; my little brother Collin is asleep overhead. I am drifting off to sleep and then Blap! just like that – the adventure begins.
Throwing up is still kinda scary. Scarier still, there in the dim light of my bedroom, is the pool of barf – The Thing From Beyond The Esophagus. It looks like a giant pancake of creamed corn, lurking there just below my pillow, making its plans. I back away, but the monstrosity cascades down the slope in the mattress created by my body weight and rolls towards me like a giant yellow amoeba. The more I crawl away from it, the faster it comes. Quick thinking is in order.
Plan Number One: Make a mad dash straight through it – “Splish splash I was takin’ a bath” – and leap off the bed. Nope. Can’t touch the barf.
Plan Number Two: Call for Mom? No time.
Plan Number Three: Spider-Man!
Yes, that’s it! I grab the slats under my brother’s mattress overhead and lift myself up. Just as the Thing From Beyond The Esophagus rolls under me, I kick out, arch my back and land lithely on the bedroom floor. It’s then I notice how tightly my pajamas cling to my body, how much they feel like a super-hero’s costume. Wow, this is so great.
As my poor mother cleans up the defeated remains of my archenemy, I entertain her with a vivid recounting of my spider-like agility.
* * *
“Luke barfed!” someone yells.
“He what? Lemme see!”
A sound of thunder on the stairs; never to bring help – no – only to rubberneck.
Assuming a child throws up, say, even a minimum of two times a year, my mother mopped up somewhere around 120 piles of emesis on her premises. Similar conservative calculations suggest that before the six of us were toilet-trained, our mother changed some 30,000 diapers. Before the last boy left her household, Myra had also washed 78,000 socks and done some 473,000 dishes. This was the 1950s – before paper towels, before disposable diapers, before dishwashing machines. The Millstone may have been a magnificent house, but Myra was its char woman. One could argue that even the assistant janitor in a Roman vomitorium had a better job than our mother – he was at least paid for his work and could do it without a crowd of little boys leaning around his knees for “a better look.”
This was the 1950s.
Roger was never expected to wash one of those 473,000 dishes or 78,000 socks; that was women’s work. There was never a single break for Myra over the two decades of raising six boys, not one night off. She never complained though – this was the 1950s.
This is how it was. She did, however, have one room where she could hide.
Above the main entryway of the Millstone, the balcony to Mom’s library; above that, the conical roof of the attic.
A LIBRARY OF HER OWN
Long before schools installed public address systems, there was the booming and benevolent basso profundo of Rubert James Longstreet – my mother’s father and principal of Seabreeze High School in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Grandpa RJL began his career in education as a teacher but his final post was 30 years as principal of Seabreeze, where my mother graduated in 1941 as its valedictorian. RJL retired in ‘49 and though his beloved high school was demolished in the late ‘50s, an elementary school in Daytona Beach stands today bearing the name: “R. J. Longstreet Elementary School.”
RJL had a classicist’s love of knowledge and to the very end of his days continued to learn, study, read, and teach. He retired in the small town of DeLand nearby but continued as a professor of law at Stetson University. Just outside town in a little home on Lake Winnemissett, he kept a library of 2,000 books – on ornithology, history, religion, science, and philosophy. On clear nights he fiddled with his new telescope to look at the moons of Jupiter and during the day continued to band birds to study their migrations.
He was thrilled when told a pelican he’d banded as a young Audubon Society member in 1933 was retaken 31 years later a hundred miles to the north.
His love of knowledge, of books, and of learning was thoroughly transferred to his daughter. And though she was every bit the lifelong student her father was, she’d occasionally confess – even late in her life – that she felt “uneducated.” Tuberculosis and marriage had disrupted her college career and lacking the actual certificate she felt her lifelong studies somehow didn’t count. But she had an extraordinary education – self-made – one that began during her convalescences and continued throughout her life. As a reader, she was tireless. She ate information. She tore through books at a pace that would’ve made Evelyn Wood the speed-reading queen just slam her book down and say, “Myra, can we just take a fucking break?”
She was never without a book. She grabbed one on the way to the hospital to have a baby. She had one in the car “for emergencies.” She read while stirring Sani-Flush in the Millstone’s toilets and while waiting to pick up her boys from school. If she didn’t have a good book to read, she’d head to the library at night, even during a Minnesota winter.
Her education did not cost us a parent; she was a mother first, a student second. She read in stolen moments; in between breaking up fights or hosing our art off the walls. Throughout the house she kept books propped open to be read while she ironed or cooked or sewed. Taped to the refrigerator were definitions of new words to learn; to the front door, new titles to get at the library. She brought home children’s books too and left them by our bedsides, in the basement play room, on the porch, even on a reading rack in the bathtub. Her education suffused the whole house with the rustle of a university library – the turning pages of six boys reading books, the older ones writing in their journals.
And then there was her crown jewel – the Tower Library.
“Tower” makes it sound higher than it was; it was only the second floor. But it was the way the room commanded that whole rou
nded section of the Millstone – above the curved stone entryway and below the cone of the attic’s red-slate roof – that gave it the feeling of a tower.
French doors opened onto a small stone balcony and let morning light into the small oval room. It was here where my mother’s love of learning flowered.
Myra believed, as her father did, that “books are the best wallpaper.” So she began to paper the room, filling the shelves as her interests grew and took turns like a river, branching from philosophy to history, the Revolution to the Civil War, biography, astronomy – everything but “popular novels,” which both she and her father disdained. Even the library’s ceiling bore the imprint of her interests – there she carefully mapped out the constellations in pencil and labeled the stars.
In the middle of this room was her favorite place to write, an antique Betsy Ross desk; with drawers on both sides, it was a desk made to own the center of a room. In its drawers she stored the letters from her father and at this desk she answered them.
Their letters were written on the small blue composition notebooks, the same kind the old professor handed out in his classes before essay tests. They called their letters “Blue Books” and when a year’s worth of them had collected on his desk in Florida and hers in Minnesota, Grandpa would gather and bind them by hand in green hardcover books. The complete set of their correspondence now stretches across 37 inches of my shelf.
By the time our family moved into the Millstone, Myra and RJL were into their tenth year of weekly correspondence and subjects were well established. Family was first. But the letters were more than “the kids are fine.” The two of them filled the Blue Books with such detail about their daily lives that even if long-distance telephone had been affordable, the sheer volume of information they exchanged would have moved through the wire like a goat through a python.
Following family life and daily events, the subject was books; old books, in particular. The smell of old books, the delicious weight of them in one’s hands, and the musings on who the previous owners might have been. History, biography, and literature formed the core of their interests, but they also studied Greek together, the daughter sending her weekly translations 1,500 miles to the professor with a 3-cent stamp.
As the ‘60s brought the nation’s attention to space flight, the two of them studied astronomy to complement their breathless viewings of every lift-off from Shepard to Armstrong. The new decade also brought the centennial of the Civil War and the two of them inhaled volumes on the great conflict. R.J. Longstreet and daughter were related to Confederate General James Longstreet (cousin, several times removed) and although Myra and the professor were both card-carrying liberal Democrats, their sympathies leaned to at least one Confederate, the often-maligned soldier who Robert E. Lee called his “Old War Horse.”
RJL, in a letter to Myra:
Am moving along through Catton’s This Hallowed Ground and the next few pages will have me back in Gettysburg. Shall be interested to see whether General Longstreet gets the blame again for not taking Little Round Top. Some day I want you to stand with me on that summit. Let’s spend at least two or three days immersed there in our favorite subject before it is too late.
The comforting smell of old books and the silence of Mom’s library seemed to me an ideal place to set up my army men and conduct noisy large-scale wars. More than once, her prized editions on the Civil War served as fort walls, behind which I set up a motley band of soldiers, mixing cowboys and Indians, World War II soldiers, and the Blue and Gray. Like General Longstreet, I too sent my captured prisoners south – down the laundry chute to the distant basement.
Dan, Luke and Chris, circa 1956.
FORTS, DEATH, AND BEDTIME
The Civil War was not my introduction to the whole idea of “sides” – that had been formed by fighting with my brothers. But the whole idea that grown-ups had once broken off into warring groups so clearly defined they even had uniforms, well, this was fascinating; conflict institutionalized. On top of that, these guys had forts. And forts were cool.
My very first forts were sculpted on my mother’s dinner china. Fort Mashed Potatoes was indeed a mighty structure, its high ground commanding the entire plate. Bristling with baby-carrot cannons and staffed by green-pea Army Guys, it was impregnable to all but the Giant Fork. (Fort Au Gratin, by the way? A total bust.)
Little boys who lived in the quiet Midwest of the 1950s were, of course, under constant attack by armed hordes and so forts had to be constructed everywhere. A ring of pillows in your bed. A blanket over a card table. And no matter where the fort went up, that outer wall was key – it separated Them from Us. Inside the wall you had sovereignty. A room to hide in and outlast any siege (provided you’d put up enough Kool-Aid and Hostess Sno-Balls).
Along with the idea of forts, the Civil War introduced serious weaponry. Did cowboys and Indians have artillery? We think not. Bayonets? Please. The Monitor and Merrimac? No and no. The Old West’s dusty little skirmishes and scalpings were playpen fights we thought, compared to battles big enough to have names.
In a letter to RJL, Mom wrote about my nascent interest in the Great Rebellion:
In Luke’s kindergarten class, we divided the children – three into the Northern group and two for the South. Luke Longstreet was tickled to be General Longstreet, saying “That really is me.” I made battle flags for Chancellorsville, Manassas, and Fredericksburg. But history dealt a hard blow to Luke and General Lee. They couldn’t understand how they could win so many battles and yet lose the war. Luke said, “Let’s do it over again next week and this time we win.”
Seeing my interest in the Civil War, my mother poured in as much history as my little teacup would hold, but I was in it for the blood. Winning was everything. One side had to lose. Or more precisely, one side had to be “The Loser.” In a just world, right beat wrong like rock beats scissors and not being on the winning side set one’s whole world crooked. Not winning an argument, unthinkable. Not winning a game of Civil War (or “Army Guys” as it came to be known), that was catastrophic. Perhaps worst of all was being shot by a soldier you had already killed. This was injustice itself.
In fact, the issue of authenticating death in all games of Army Guys was a sticky wicket given our ordnance was invisible bullets fired from imaginary guns.
“You can’t shoot me! You’re already dead!”
“I was just wounded! You’re the one who’s dead!”
“How can I be dead? I didn’t fall down.”
Everyone knew that proper machine gun deaths were officially identified by a herky-jerk marionette dance and a full face-plant in the turf; this was agreed-upon play action. Our backyard version of the Geneva Accords required adherence this agreement otherwise, what did you have? A universe without rules, where any fool could just jay-walk through your hailstorm of hot lead? Unchallenged, such heresies lead to anarchy, as it did on occasion when someone would secretly switch from Army Guy rules to Super-Hero rules. (“The bullets bounced off me so I’m not dead.”) This kind of nonsense was shut down on the spot.
Army Guy rules were fairly specific, one of which required you to produce a realistic machine gun noise. In fact, having the best rat-a-tat-tat was another thing your side could win at. Individual bragging rights, however, went to the guy with the most realistic noise, a sound we each created with various success behind a spitty mist of grape-colored Kool-Aid.
If you were out in the open and you heard the ack-ack-ack, you were dead. Since losing was unacceptable, you made your peace with being killed by winning in the Best Death category. Nobody died as good as you. You flung yourself to the ground, overacting a death rattle that could be heard from the cheap seats, giving your first-grader’s take on the Greek playwright’s timeless “Oh verily, I am slain!” Your hands went to stomach, your legs crumpled and then stillness. Of course, death by grenade was even showier – the concussion flung you several feet to a boneless rag-doll heap of heroism. Tossing grenades was also a sho
w because you had to pull out the arming pin with a manly yank of clinched teeth. The one drawback to grenades was your opponent needed to actually see you throw it, otherwise your dramatics were for naught and after several moments of silence on the battlefield you had to verbally inform your enemy of his demise.
(“Hey, I tossed a grenade in there, you know.”)
Falling to the spongy green grass, that was death for us – your face to the Minnesota sky, the sunlight turning eyelid blood vessels into orange spider-webs.
There you lay, certain your showy death had given a sort of murderer’s remorse to your assailant, and you waited until the battle ended or Mom called you in for sandwiches.
Thirty Rooms To Hide In Page 4