Mother's Day, 1951
Late in life I realize how much I have been really stupid about the uses of authority and how deeply embedded that is in my family. Let me be clear that my family -- most of which is either dead or dispersed now -- was conservative, educated and thoughtful. We didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, cheat or . . . a lot of other stuff. But I clearly remember when I was taught to defy authorities. It was the fire department.
My father was a paper hoarder. (I inherited that.) We lived in a small house, much smaller than people think is basic now. There was only one bathroom, two bedrooms. Every room was lined with bookcases. My father’s “office” was supposed to be the sun porch and he had a desk there, but his real office was in the basement which was mostly occupied by a big old coal and wood furnace. Down there, supposedly while he waited for the wood fire to get hot enough to add the coal, he read the paper, sitting on an orange crate at a plywood desk. There were a lot of projects waiting for him and they were stacked into orange crates on end to make shelves. The whole basement was lined with them except for the woodpile and the coal chute. I can’t remember the chimney of either the furnace or the fireplace in the front room EVER being cleaned. It was a fire hazard. We were cautioned NEVER to let the fire department come in to inspect for dangerous situations.
When my father died, my mother cleared out all the papers and most of the books. Even before he died, when he went on a long photography trip to trace the route of Lewis and Clark, she replaced the furnace with an efficient electrical unit. The house was never really warm nor dry again.
In middle-age my youngest brother sustained a head injury in a fall and came home. He had a master’s degree in metal working, silversmithing, and had been teaching, which meant a certain collection of risky chemicals, and he wanted to take protective measures. So he called the Bureau of Buildings to see what the restrictions on a separate storage shed might be. What dimensions didn’t require a permit? The result was a little structure that looked like a privy for a person who didn’t need to bend over. When my mother asked for a back deck, he used the same strategy, so the deck was more like a porch, but she enjoyed it anyway. Later I worked for the Bureau of Buildings as a clerk and saw that most of the plans examiners and inspectors, especially for such small matters, were easy-going and helpful. Often they had good ideas about design or construction that saved money. Why was my brother so determined to avoid them?
At a certain point in my life I had a young female relative who was in big trouble. She was orphaned, living with a friend’s family. flunking out of school, drinking way too much, and constantly getting pregnant in spite of being on the pill. She appealed to me for help when the first pregnancy was tubal -- life-threatening. The young doctor was afraid to talk to me because he couldn’t understand my relationship to her. (Not easy -- the former wife of a man with four wives who didn’t raise his daughter by his first wife, the mother of the girl.) He evidently did not involve any social workers or her remaining biological relatives though she was underage. We didn’t know anything about emancipation.
The second pregnancy was from a rape proudly performed by a classmate whose mother bragged about how many girls he had impregnated. (These were working class families.) I threatened to castrate him and then I took her for a D&C. Neither the school, the biological family, the girl herself, nor I thought of turning the young man in to the law or getting counseling for the girl. We just struggled through. There were more pregnancies, all terminated, all connected to drinking, and then the girl herself was terminated in the last of a long series of car crashes. By that time I was in seminary -- in fact, doing a hospital chaplaincy -- and had a long talk with a senior minister who had no real insight to offer. He was too tactful to say what people here would say: I should have chucked seminary and raised that girl and her babies.
The brother with brain damage had once dated a policewoman, whom he called fondly “Cop.” He was friendly with the whole Eugene police force. When he was in the Marines he had been an MP and was nearly called for crowd control in the Watts riots. He was big, strong, and trained. Our family home had gradually been engulfed in black ghetto and every morning he took his cup of coffee out and carried it along the curb to pick up cartridges from the shooting in the night, usually four or five of them. One evening he and my mother saw that at the house across the street one man was beating up another with a 2X4. “Call the police,” said my brother and went out to save the victim. Just as he took the 2X4 away from the aggressor, the police arrived and assumed HE was the aggressor. The two men, closing ranks, agreed with this idea.
The cops decided to arrest my brother. They drew their guns and advanced on my brother, who retreated into the house, this time saying to my mother, “Call the police commissioner!” He had gone to high school with that official. Inside the house he dropped and rolled in case the cops fired through the screen door. In the end it was sorted out, but never again did anyone in that house call the police. I knew my brother had brain damage, but didn’t think of doing research about it. I didn’t know that one of the major experts on head trauma was in Portland. He had asked among his friends who said there was nothing to be done and I accepted that. They tended to be artists, free spirits, fatalists. This was before computers -- no Google.
After my mother died, this brother used up his part of her estate and then lived with cousins on their ranch. They tired of him, thought he was getting too paranoid to be safe, and demanded that he leave. They did not contact any helping agencies. A sheriff’s deputy, the coyote trapper, came out and talked to him but made no intervention. The brother was destitute, but when he asked welfare for help, he told them he was an undercover agent for the FBI and they threw him out.
He did not want to live with me in Montana, and my other brother would not accept him in that household, but did take him to the VA who wanted to do an MRI to establish disability. He was way outside reality by this time and terrified of being confined for insanity. Eventually he lived on the street until he died of a heart attack. Then for the first time he accepted the help of authorities: EMT’s. I wouldn’t have known except that his friends (a person has friends even on the street) remembered him talking about his brother and found him because the name was unusual. (I had kept my married name.) The nurse made my brother call me. There was nothing to do.
Why were we so stupid about what help was out there, so reluctant to use it, so resistant to even let people know what was happening? I don’t really know. Temperament? Pride? Homesteader independence? Household secrecy? I’m still that way. I still fear being trapped, accused, framed, stripped, seized -- and yet I carried a sheriff’s deputy badge for five years when I was an animal control officer. I’m anything but meek. I’m more compliant than most folks. But I don’t want ANYONE telling what to do or to have control over me. Is that arrogance? American? Western? Or genetic? Oppositional Defiance Disorder?
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