I head into the back yard to water the garden. From over the fence I hear:
"Hey!"
"Hey," I reply.
Hey!
"Hey," again.
I continue watering and a young man's face appears over the fence. I've met a couple of the guys from that house, but it seems to have a lot of visitors/family/etc. Not someone I'm familiar with.
What're you doing?
"Just doing some watering."
Is that a garden?
I look at the neat and ordered rows of plants, the row of flowers, and the netting on pipes that keeps cats away.
"Yep. It's a garden."
A slight pause here, then
What are you growing?
I give the usual litany. Tomatoes, green beans, zucchini (although it is not growing well), lettuce, etc.
Do you like weed?
Ok, now the conversation just got interesting, although I'm not sure where this is going.
"No, never really been a big fan."
Do you know how to grow it?
While I would have to assume it would involve light and water, I say that I don't.
Oh.
A longer pause, then finally
I have my medical card.
He then proceeds to mutter something about his legs being fucked up, and then drifts away.
I've been offered weed to smoke (or eat) on numerous occasions but not until I became a homeowner was I asked to grow it for someone.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
More history
I continue to slowly explore the history deposited in my home. It turns out that I am not descended from an outlaw, as the Jesse James who died was not the historical thug, but a farmer in the Ozarks who ran afoul of Confederate sympathizers. My own ancestor literally had the noose around his neck when word of Union forces arrived and the "bushwhackers" ran away, leaving him to his own devices.
A lot of the interest in the records is what I can glean from inference. Ancestors in Missouri who married at 13 years of age. People having 11 children. Family names that recur in marriage records. These things tell little, but are reminders of what life was like five or six generations back.
Closer to home, time and space wise, is my father's Senior yearbook. Dad was a Castlemont High School, Oakland, graduate of 1960. I've learned a few things from going through the old yearbook, reading the signatures, and looking at the photos. One, Dad's high school looks way more interesting than my high school was. Even the clubs were cooler, or at least had cooler and more enigmatic names. The women's swim team was the "Aquadettes", but many of these club names give no indication of what was going on: Bishops, Block C, Caduceus, Excaliber, Guild of the Lance, Ladies of Avalon and the Ladies of Devon and the Ladies of the Holy Grail, Shamrocks, the Six Footers, Trianion, Ye Castle Hams, and the Undertakers. This doesn't even consider all the groups with greek letters for names.
Dad was on the Varsity Basketball team, but has very few signatures in the Varsity section. He does however have a lot of messages from women throughout the entire book, many of which imply that Dad was ... well favored by the ladies. This jives with something he implied back when I was in High School. I didn't date in High School, and my Dad had an issue with that. I didn't realize at the time that my Dad was a bit of a player.
He also had some interesting classes. In particular, people write about Bookkeeping Class, Yearbook (he was the Sports Editor), Office Practice, and American Problems.
I want to take a class in American Problems.
I wish, now, that we had gone over this yearbook together... away from my Mom... and had him tell me about these people and experiences. My Dad never really talked about the past. Just a few comments here and there, but no real stories. Really, you'd never know that any of these people who hoped that they'd be "friends forever" ever existed. Like a lot of men of pretty much every generation, Dad wasn't a "sharer".
It really is a loss.
I'll keep the yearbook and let my own imagination fill the gaps of my Dad's unknown past. I'll give him some great adventures, and maybe you'll get to read or see them someday.
A lot of the interest in the records is what I can glean from inference. Ancestors in Missouri who married at 13 years of age. People having 11 children. Family names that recur in marriage records. These things tell little, but are reminders of what life was like five or six generations back.
Closer to home, time and space wise, is my father's Senior yearbook. Dad was a Castlemont High School, Oakland, graduate of 1960. I've learned a few things from going through the old yearbook, reading the signatures, and looking at the photos. One, Dad's high school looks way more interesting than my high school was. Even the clubs were cooler, or at least had cooler and more enigmatic names. The women's swim team was the "Aquadettes", but many of these club names give no indication of what was going on: Bishops, Block C, Caduceus, Excaliber, Guild of the Lance, Ladies of Avalon and the Ladies of Devon and the Ladies of the Holy Grail, Shamrocks, the Six Footers, Trianion, Ye Castle Hams, and the Undertakers. This doesn't even consider all the groups with greek letters for names.
Dad was on the Varsity Basketball team, but has very few signatures in the Varsity section. He does however have a lot of messages from women throughout the entire book, many of which imply that Dad was ... well favored by the ladies. This jives with something he implied back when I was in High School. I didn't date in High School, and my Dad had an issue with that. I didn't realize at the time that my Dad was a bit of a player.
He also had some interesting classes. In particular, people write about Bookkeeping Class, Yearbook (he was the Sports Editor), Office Practice, and American Problems.
I want to take a class in American Problems.
I wish, now, that we had gone over this yearbook together... away from my Mom... and had him tell me about these people and experiences. My Dad never really talked about the past. Just a few comments here and there, but no real stories. Really, you'd never know that any of these people who hoped that they'd be "friends forever" ever existed. Like a lot of men of pretty much every generation, Dad wasn't a "sharer".
It really is a loss.
I'll keep the yearbook and let my own imagination fill the gaps of my Dad's unknown past. I'll give him some great adventures, and maybe you'll get to read or see them someday.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
World's best haircut
This is fantastic. Stephen Colbert doing a USO show in Iraq, and at the end is the best military haircut EVER
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Obama Orders Stephen's Haircut - Ray Odierno | ||||
| ||||
Friday, June 05, 2009
History (part 1)
My mom has been cleaning out her storage space, and in addition to a cabinet, table, chairs, and antique secretary's desk, she's left several boxes of old photos and documents for me to go through.
I expected these to be mostly childhood scribblings of mine. Such detritus seems to proliferate in the back cupboards of parents, and I'd already gone through a few such "thinning" expeditions in the last couple of years.
I'm working through the first batch and have already found some treasures I wasn't expecting. A small vinyl record of the first moon landing was surprising, but it is nothing compared to some documents I found paperclipped together.
Three pages are sketchy genealogical notes, one is a handwritten letter, and one is from the Secretary of the Navy. The handwritten letter is from my paternal grandfather, Martin, to his brother Louis. This took me a moment, since my Dad's name was Louis and he never mentioned an uncle. Then again, he rarely talked about his family at all. The letter is dated November 4th, 1942, and is primarily about the details of a gear that Martin was crafting to fix my grandmother Elsie's washing machine. Parts were unavailable due to the war effort, so he was making one himself at the Caterpillar factory where he worked. Two and a half pages of grammatically questionable description of a gear, after apologizing for not writing more often. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why anyone would save this. At the very end, Mary mentions that Elsie is five months pregnant. "Ah," I thought, "that's the significance. That would be when she was pregnant with my father." Still, I wasn't sure why mom had the letter.
Then I read the attached telegram from the Secretary of the Navy. According to the telegram, on November 15th, 1942, 11 days after Martin wrote the letter, Louis' ship, the Preston was sunk. There were few survivors, and the ship sank rapidly. Louis had been "Missing in Action" for a year, and the telegram was to inform my great grandmother that her son was officially considered deceased.
He was a machinist, first class. That explained why the entire letter was about gears, and why my grandfather quipped near the end that Louis could take the letter to a machinist if he didn't understand any of what was written.
So, now I know why my dad was named Louis. He was named for the brother who never heard about the jury-rigged gear for my grandmother's washing machine. He was named for the one who was lost.
Also of interest is that my Great Grandmother, Una Garfield Wilson, lived on E 14th St, right off of Lake Merritt. I can only assume by the fact that it was addressed to her, that my Great Grandfather (Charles Salem Wilson) had already died. The genealogy notes give no dates for him. Una was born in 1881, though, and appears to have died in 1964. How interesting that, being born in Hayward, raised in Pleasant Hill, educated in Santa Barbara and Chicago, I should end up buying a house 2.7 miles from my Great Grandparent's home.
Update:
In the envelope, unattached, I found a letter from Great Grandma Elise, written the day before. It's full of hope for the new baby, tales of common friends, and the great fear about the war. It is much more what I would have expected. I'm considering starting a genealogy project. Nothing major, but I want a way to digitally organize this information. I may need to invest in a new scanner.
I expected these to be mostly childhood scribblings of mine. Such detritus seems to proliferate in the back cupboards of parents, and I'd already gone through a few such "thinning" expeditions in the last couple of years.
I'm working through the first batch and have already found some treasures I wasn't expecting. A small vinyl record of the first moon landing was surprising, but it is nothing compared to some documents I found paperclipped together.
Three pages are sketchy genealogical notes, one is a handwritten letter, and one is from the Secretary of the Navy. The handwritten letter is from my paternal grandfather, Martin, to his brother Louis. This took me a moment, since my Dad's name was Louis and he never mentioned an uncle. Then again, he rarely talked about his family at all. The letter is dated November 4th, 1942, and is primarily about the details of a gear that Martin was crafting to fix my grandmother Elsie's washing machine. Parts were unavailable due to the war effort, so he was making one himself at the Caterpillar factory where he worked. Two and a half pages of grammatically questionable description of a gear, after apologizing for not writing more often. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why anyone would save this. At the very end, Mary mentions that Elsie is five months pregnant. "Ah," I thought, "that's the significance. That would be when she was pregnant with my father." Still, I wasn't sure why mom had the letter.
Then I read the attached telegram from the Secretary of the Navy. According to the telegram, on November 15th, 1942, 11 days after Martin wrote the letter, Louis' ship, the Preston was sunk. There were few survivors, and the ship sank rapidly. Louis had been "Missing in Action" for a year, and the telegram was to inform my great grandmother that her son was officially considered deceased.
He was a machinist, first class. That explained why the entire letter was about gears, and why my grandfather quipped near the end that Louis could take the letter to a machinist if he didn't understand any of what was written.
So, now I know why my dad was named Louis. He was named for the brother who never heard about the jury-rigged gear for my grandmother's washing machine. He was named for the one who was lost.
Also of interest is that my Great Grandmother, Una Garfield Wilson, lived on E 14th St, right off of Lake Merritt. I can only assume by the fact that it was addressed to her, that my Great Grandfather (Charles Salem Wilson) had already died. The genealogy notes give no dates for him. Una was born in 1881, though, and appears to have died in 1964. How interesting that, being born in Hayward, raised in Pleasant Hill, educated in Santa Barbara and Chicago, I should end up buying a house 2.7 miles from my Great Grandparent's home.
Update:
In the envelope, unattached, I found a letter from Great Grandma Elise, written the day before. It's full of hope for the new baby, tales of common friends, and the great fear about the war. It is much more what I would have expected. I'm considering starting a genealogy project. Nothing major, but I want a way to digitally organize this information. I may need to invest in a new scanner.
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