THE SONG OF BOOKS

The Strachans: Bruce, Lucy, Mary, Mark, Paul

My father (1903 - 1969) was a problem.  He also evidently had a problem he couldn’t resolve and his search for answers packed our house with books.  He was the oldest surviving child lived 17 days because he was premature.   (The first conception — and I’m aware that probably women lose several conceptions without knowing.) I’m the oldest surviving child of my father’s, assuming all his children were inside the marriage to my mother, which was certainly faithful on her side.  She always thought my father might have a second family somewhere, so to her mind if he were unfaithful, it would be in conventional terms.

I inherited his search for an indefinable solution and acquired as many books, but the difference is that I read mine.  Not just read, but try to tear apart in the interest of understanding.  I couldn’t do this until my books were purchased — one doesn’t harm library books which are community property.  I have always been highly “moral” in the interest of avoiding danger.  But at some point, maybe late high school, I decided that I would follow good evidence wherever it went, though it made my ears sing with adrenaline.

My father traveled with cameras for his job (PR) and took this photo himself.

He had a concussion.

It’s not as though my father would turn out to be a bank robber or a murderer.  He was a “spanker” and a lousy provider.  I decided this was due to head trauma from an accident driving at night in the Oregon Coast Range when a drunk driver hit his car head on.  But maybe there’s more.  His job — except during WWII — was as a traveling man, a “drummer” not to sell things but as a field man for Pacific Supply Cooperative, which supplied things (mostly petro-derived) to farmer co-ops.  Since he grew up on the prairie, partly in Canada, he was highly aware of the power of co-ops, as though they were his church.  Otherwise, he claimed to be an atheist.  But he was certainly a progressive, esp. when it came to things like nudism or birth control — that is, the taboo parts of life.  

My father tried to make taboos pretty and harmless.

I inherited that.

I inherited that, too, though I never really acted on any of it.  Like him, I mostly read books, but the Seventies revealed that a lot of people shared his ideas.  I know some of them now, still, though they’re older.  Rainbow Family, hippies, off the grid.  I’d sort of timidly approach them, but get rocked back on my heels.

My father traveled during the week, came home exhausted but also wanting a little RandR, like movies; wanting to involve his family in hiking.  Consciously or unconsciously, he chose my mother as someone competent who would manage while he was gone.  This worked until my mother, realizing there was never going to be enough money, went back to college to get her teaching degree.  Adding this meant her weekends were jammed and she became less willing.  Also, what she learned changed her.

When my father died, we discovered that hidden behind his conventional books, some of them popular writing (novels, self-improvement, and culturally admired books like Shakespeare), was a lot of porn.  Not sophisticated erotica (he kept his medical sexology books in his sock drawer — Masters and Johnson, Freud, Kinsey) but lurid truck stop paperback porn.  This was female-overpowering, vulgar, violent stuff.  I only read a few before my brother threw them in his pickup and took them directly to the dump so no garbage man could say where they came from.

With all this information at hand, why was my father reading porn in cheap motels instead of continuing his education? (There was no TV.)  He had a BS from Manitoba and an MS from OSU (then a college) — was it their fault that he never progressed to the level of the Saturday Book Review?  He was a magazine addict, very conventional:  Newsweek, Time, Post, Look, Life.  (I read all of them, too.)  My mother had no time to read until she was retired.  Then she read “Book of the Month” sorts of things.   She liked to do what was popular. 

When I was serving the Kirkland Northshore Unitarian Universalist Church (across the lake from Seattle), as an interim minister, the book causing a sensation was Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child.”  This congregation was a cheerful, lively bunch of artists, teachers, counselors and journalists and many of them loved that book.  

They had been raised humanely and loved their parents (mostly) though they tried to live even more ideal lives.  Miller’s premise was that above-average kids tended to break the taboo on criticizing their parents and critiquing their childhood.  They wanted to be original, not owned by family.  Pretty safe with this group — I don’t even remember any alcoholics.  Drugs weren’t in play. 

In those days I knew nothing about incest based on idealism, and little about male gays.  Neither did most other people.  That may have been a quiet pull beneath our lives.  Would it have explained my father?  Was he abused?  Did he abuse my brothers? (I asked the surviving bro, who said, “Certainly NOT!”)  Then what was the fixation on sex about?  Was he aware of some shortfall in his own dynamics, maybe connected to his failure to be aggressive at work?  He was quite fat and about as sexy as Santa Claus, except no beard.  (I find beards sexy.)  His mother developed a goiter later in life, so I wonder whether the iodine deficiency of the prairies affected her pregnancies.

There’s a body of literature about parents who believe that their children should be gently and lovingly initiated into sexual activity by their own parents (same or other) or by a sex worker surrogate while they wait in the next room.  This is a violation of the conventional (Victorian) boundary between the generations and very confusing.  Esp. if the natural desire of the still-child is same sex or just null.  For some people sex arrives as an overwhelming thunderbolt and then the problem is quite different.  It’s also different in a rural setting than in an urban one with many layers and categories of private culture.  And different between English and French.

My mother (1909 - 1998) had three sisters and an intense Irish-descent father who never really succeeded, but kept everything going by taking construction projects which meant traveling.  The family construct was that the three girls were as good as any boys.  One summer my mother used a borrowed mule to raise a cash crop of corn.  The two oldest girls in particular were strong and competent, very attached to their father, comfortable working alongside men.

My father’s sibs were two male and one girl, very pretty and refined.  In fact, that family’s formal position was that women are princesses, gracile, to be cherished, beautifully dressed, and taught to play the piano and paint charming but tiny watercolors.  My father then played the gallant guardian, romantic and faithful, but never sexual.  He tried to pull me into that story (though I found it confusing for him to offer to take me to a burlesque show) but in that aspect I remained with my mother’s take on the subject, which included jealousy of all precious princesses.  As soon as she had an actual son, I was demoted to being her assistant.

Luckily, I had excellent teachers.  It was the Fifties and they were nearing retirement, essentially Edwardian, often single, and unconflicted. Education (liberal arts) was their answer to everything.  It worked and still works.  Of course, I read all those books, but never discussed them until I got to college where the doors flew open.  They were stage doors and from then on life was dramatic, multiple, and incredible.  I like it when my ears sing.