February 29, 2012

I don’t know where my father got his love of clothes. No one in his family seemed to give a second thought to what they wore, with an exception I’ll get to in a moment or two. My grandfather and grandmother were country folk. She was Irish, illiterate, religious, stout but pretty as a red-haired girl and in her later years she could have posed for a Dorothea Lange photo from the Depression. In fact, as long as I knew her, from infancy until my mid-twenties, when she died, she wore nothing that could not have been ordered from a Sears catalog in 1936. She had never traveled outside of East Texas/West Louisiana; the farthest away from home she got was one trip to the beach at Galveston. She raised three boys and a girl and any number of working men and women who gravitated to her warmth, including Scobie, a young Black boy who came to live with the family when my dad was just 10 and was like a third brother to him. My grandfather loved Scobie and so, years later when Scobie had grown and moved away only to be caught up in some crime and sent off to the state penitentiary in Angola, a dreaded place, it broke my grandfather’s heart. For a couple of years Grandpaman, as I called him, went once a month down to the pen to see Scobie. He eventually stopped, my dad said, because it was too painful. Scobie vanished from their lives.

My grandmother even put up with my grandfather’s friend, Blackie, who had stabbed his wife to death over in Waskom, Texas, and had been sent to jail for many years at Sugarland, the Texas state penitentiary. Blackie was a drinking man and, in his company, so was my grandfather, more, my grandmother was certain, than was good for him, so she was glad to see the last of Blackie. For a while, that is, until Grandpaman decided to get Blackie out of prison.

My grandfather at that time was running a small house painting and wallpapering trade; he had a panel truck and some ladders and extension boards and when he got a job, he’d round up his friends and pay them what he could. These were all rough-hewn, angular ex-farmers, piney-woods loggers, and turpentine men, like my grandfather, and like him, they were a taciturn lot, not given to much talk and, except in song from time to time, not much given at all to what you would call verbal play. My memories of my grandfather contain very few words, just pictures. He was about five foot six or seven, thin, and the color of old leather when I first began to really notice him. He was in his fifties then and had been working hard all his life. He, too, seemed to have stepped out of a Farm Bureau photo file. It was if the Depression had locked his generation forever in place, a place that by the early 1950s, no longer existed, a rural America closer to the 19^th century than the 20^th in its memories and its expectations. To visit my grandparents was literally to step back in time, to eat food that “our” people had eaten for generations, to sing the old church songs that carried tired hearts “over Jordan” Sunday after Sunday, to hear stories of logging camps and cotton fields and catfish caught, frogs gigged, horses traded.

I don’t know how long Grandpaman and Blackie had known each other, but Blackie was, Grandpaman claimed in the letter he wrote to the governor of Texas, the best interior trim man he had ever seen and if my grandfather didn’t get him back, the house painting business was going to fall apart. From what I heard from my dad, it was a pretty straightforward letter, about how Blackie had been drinking and had, for sure, stabbed his wife, but those days were gone forever. Apparently my grandfather promised the governor that they would both stop drinking and that my grandfather would see Blackie everyday and give him a job and vouch for his behavior. I can’t believe that that was all there was to it but before long Grandpaman drove over to Sugarland and got Blackie from the prison and brought him back to Shreveport. Now because Blackie was a Texas felon, he couldn’t live out of state, so Grandpaman got him a little house over the line in Waskom and drove over there every morning to get him and bring him into Shreveport for work. Blackie was so beholden to my grandfather that he spent every moment he could with him, took his meals at the house and, much to my grandmother’s irritation, even dressed like him. I’m not sure why this upset her so, but it did. Clearly there was something in the sight of two middle-aged rawbones in identical white shirts buttoned at the collar, paint-spattered overhauls and half-boots, and little grey straw fedoras tilted back on their bald foreheads, sitting on the porch swing after breakfast smoking tailor-mades if they had them, that really irritated her, as I can attest to of many a Sunday morning.

So, if my dad didn’t get his love of fine clothes from his folks, or from his brothers, who pretty much preserved Grandpaman’s sartorial practices as if in amber, I wonder how he came to it. Pictures of my dad in high school don’t suggest much beyond the possible argument that a fellow as good looking as he was probably figured out how to make the best of a good thing. Dad was the best looking of all the Suggs boys but even he didn’t hold a candle to Ruth, the baby and the only girl. She was good looking in that way some have that makes the question of what you have on totally irrelevant to the moment. Dad was handsome but clothes helped him a lot; when he was dressed up, he was pretty impressive. But blonde, blue-eyed Ruth, who did love nice things, was beautiful from the moment she awakened ‘til she fell off to sleep, and then some. Then when she grew older she married a man as beautiful as she was, James. James was six foot two or thereabouts, had black hair, broad shoulders, and blue eyes too. James was a plumber and loved motorcycles and once he and Aunt Ruth rode all the way to Las Vegas and back just for fun. When they came to visit on their Harleys, they always offered me a ride. Dad let me go only once.

It wasn’t that Dad mistrusted motorcycles; interest in them sort of ran in the family. His uncle, the one who went to jail for armed robbery, was known to us all as “Uncle Bootsie” because he wore knee-high lace-up boots to ride his big Indian all over the Ark-La-Tex (that 50 mile circle centered on the point where Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas come together). No, Dad didn’t trust Aunt Ruth. For all her beauty, there was, it turned out, something desperate in her, something that drove her easily over limits. Despite all that James and her brothers and her sons could do, Ruth slid off into self destruction and despair, to prostitution and drug addiction. In her last years her schizophrenia was diagnosed and medication eased her way for a while. Dad and Mom took her in to live with them but at the end, at her own insistence, she lived alone in a motel apartment in Bossier City, where she died.

February 28, 2012

The aged moss, a gentle mist, a dry martini---I wish I had been sophisticated enough to do that, but I was just a college kid, more often than not out of my depth, even when I didn’t realize it. But the quest for sophistication was never-ending in those days, at least for me. I was acutely aware of class, even though I didn’t know how to talk about it. It had something to with style, I was certain. I had learned that from my dad, in whose mind “class” meant “classy;” there was nothing socio-economic about it for him, not even the question of whether he could afford it or not.

My dad loved clothes and cars and nice shoes and he had wonderful taste. He just didn’t have much money and so his version of life as compromise usually meant the problem of paying the rent after the new sport coat had been bought. The worst story I know about him and clothes involves my college money and before I tell it to you, you have to promise to forgive him. I did. I don’t think my mother did, not for a while anyway.

In the summer of 1958 I was getting ready to go off to college. The summer before that, I had served an apprenticeship with my dad in the glass factory. He was forty then, a veteran of the Second World War, who had turned down a commission and the GI Bill’s education benefits to get back to his job in the glass factory. By 1957 he was beginning to feel the consequences of those decisions. The job he had, industrial glass cutting, no longer exists, all the men so employed having long since been replaced by machines. It was a physically hard job and mentally exhausting. It was also dangerous. A glass cutter worked in an open stall roughly ten by eight feet “square.” In front of him was a waist-high table about eight feet long and almost two yards deep, covered in green felt. A rule ran the length of its near and far edges. To start the day carters brought a stack of ten to twenty plate glass sheets, each roughly ninety by forty inches, and stood them on end along the wall of the stall to the right of a right-handed cutter. On the table would be a sheet of paper with the orders for the day. The company might want 100 “lights” of glass 9 x 12 and 50  of 10x14 and so on. The cutter’s job was to extract from the raw sheets the sizes and quantities of the order. Besides the obvious visual imagination called for, the job required a kind of judgment that only experience could provide: each sheet of raw glass was flawed by stones left unmelted in the furnaces and blisters caused by an uneven draw. The cutter had to find those specific lights around and between the blisters and stones pitting the glass he was given. A very small stone here or one blister there might pass but the inspector, who came around regularly throughout the day, could reject some or all of a pack of ten lights, a fate called “rammycacking.” Since the cutter was paid on a piecework basis, he could ill afford a half-morning’s work thrown into the scrap bin at the left of his stall to be taken back to the furnaces and melted down.

This mental strain, the constant demands of instinct and judgment, was made more burdensome by the physical strain.  Glass is heavy and a sheet of glass 90 by 40 is very heavy. The cutter would turn to his right, facing the stacked glass and take one sheet in his hands, about halfway up its length. He would lift the sheet and turn to face the table, the glass between him and the table edge. He would then turn the sheet ninety degrees to the right so that his hands were at the top and bottom of the now horizontal sheet. Lifting with his bottom hand, his right, and loosening the fingers of his left hand at the top of the sheet, he would then flip the sheet of glass into the air ever so slightly so that it would fall exactly flat on the felt top of the table. From there he could begin to cut.

Most cutters were wounded men. Everyone I knew had scars on their hands, faces, or arms. Some has lost an eye, a finger or two, a couple of toes. There was safety equipment but not everyone wore it and in my father’s day men of the generation prior to his had worked without much gear at all, through the Depression and the war and some even before that. The trade had come to America in the late 19^th century with Belgian glass makers and most older cutters had names like Desire and Hermes and LaBenne. Since this was a guild trade, most entered by serving apprenticeships with their fathers or brothers or uncles. A few, like my father, had been “adopted” by single men with no families. The man who took my father in had lost a hand to the glass and worked with a two-fingered metal claw that was fitted with rubber tips. A safety-conscious cutter wore a thick leather apron that covered him from his chest to just below his knees. He wore steel-toed work shoes, thick leather gloves, and padded cotton sleeves set with steel grommets that reached and covered his shoulders. Most wore a cap of some kind. You can imagine how hot this outfit was in the summertime. That we lived in Louisiana that summer made it even worse. That is why some of the younger cutters worked stark naked beneath the equipment. Walking down the workroom past the stalls where the men faced their tables and turned their backs on the world was quite an experience.

Once the cutter faced the glass on the table, the game was on. The cutting tool was an industrial diamond set to the precise angle in the tip of a cartridge held in a beveling clamp at the end of a small rod. The length of the rod and the swiveling clamp allowed the cutter to set the right attitude of his draw down the glass, from the far edge of the table toward him at the near edge. And so it went, for eight hours a day: lift, turn, turn, flip, measure, cut, pray for the best. Radios played, men sang, told jokes and stories, cursed the inspector. This was the world I wanted to enter.

It took some arguing on my part to convince my father to take me on, as he had done both his younger brothers in the past, but many of the sons of my father’s friends were starting, boys I knew from high school and from years of company softball games and picnics. It was almost a rite of passage, I suppose. My father eventually gave in and one morning in June of 1957, union card in my pocket, badge on my ball cap, apprenticeship book in hand, I walked with my father through the factory gates. I have to tell you that I loved it, for all the boyish-mannish reasons you can think of. I loved watching my father work. He was a patient teacher by example and instruction. He was well-thought of by his comrades and moved with ease through the factory. We sweated through the summer together and as school approached I asked him how the apprenticeship worked in the school year. Only then did he tell me that I would not be coming back. He had let me work with him because he knew it was necessary for my growing up, but he said it was not necessary that he deceive me. He told me that he knew I thought glass cutting was a good job but he wanted me to know that it was not.  Piece work pay for a dangerous job was the worst kind of life. The job was seasonal, as well, a fact that I had understood as we moved around the country year after year, from factory to factory, chasing open furnaces and unfilled orders, but I had no idea what that meant financially, he said. I remembered nights we had slipped out of town a car length ahead of the landlord—or the sheriff, probably. There had been a few flush periods, a few months at a time. Once we had owned a house, but once we had lived in a three-room shack with no hot water and a bathroom shared with the people next door. I don’t know if my father thought of himself as a happy man, a fortunate man. He seemed so to me. But by many measures his life was hard and worrisome and unrewarding. Whatever was the case, he did not want any of it for me. “You’re going to college,” he said.

So, you can see that that next summer, of ’58, was as much the end of something for my father as it was a beginning for me. Even if he didn’t understand “class” the way Marx or Veblen did, I think he knew that something fundamental was changing in our lives. It was as if our roles had suddenly reversed. Growing up I followed him, or wanted to, everywhere. He sang, I sang; he played sports, I played sports; he told stories, I told stories; he cut glass, I cut glass. Whatever he did, I tried; whatever he loved, I loved. Then, there we were at that fork in the road, the one boys and their dads come to. It wasn’t just that we had to go in different directions; it was harsher than that. He would continue up a road that I was no longer allowed to travel, the one he had come up, had ushered his brothers along, shared with other men and boys. I had to watch him go on without me, to wonder if he would miss me.

Then again, he couldn’t come with me, either. Truth be told, I didn’t want him along; I was ready to go by then, hungry for more books and ideas. I wasn’t embarrassed by him or angry at him; I was just becoming aware that I was not him; not any more (I was wrong, of course, but that insight was several decades in coming.) In turn, he had to watch me go along a way he only vaguely understood, into a world the superficial dimensions of which he glimpsed but whose particulars were invisible to him. It had been he who insisted I had to go there but I am not sure he understood, as I certainly didn’t, how separate the two roads would be. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mean we were estranged or unable to talk to one another or disaffected this way or that, but that summer it became clearer and clearer that each of us was being left behind. For me, it was a time of promise and I was a little scared and a little self absorbed. Maybe with a bit of distance from my own excitement I might have seen what was happening to my dad, but I was only seventeen, so I’ll let myself off the hook. Even now I can only imagine what he was feeling. So, I was surprised when it happened, and bewildered.

February 27, 2012

There was an email/post/blogpoint going around for a while that captured the essence of the Culture Wars. It purported to be a history of the world in the telling of which “conservatives” had done or invented everything of value and “liberals” had contributed only the irrelevant or the exploitive. When it first appeared, many “liberals” tried to argue with it, point by point, saying, “No, we didn’t!” But there is no point arguing with satire. I mean, one can just state the truth and hope for the best. For instance:

World History 101

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals, and

2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement. To wit, after drinking a lot of beer and eating a lot of meat, many men would pass out or throw up and then pass out. When they woke up, many found that other men had taken their stuff and run off with their women. So, they founded "Conservatism," a movement to conserve what they had got while they drank and passed out. "Property" became the foundation of this movement--what I have is my property and must be conserved. What you have is potentially my property and when I get it from you, it must be conserved as mine, especially if I got it while you were drunk and passed out.

Other men, who had stronger stomachs and were better drinkers (as evidenced by their rapid evolution from relatively weak beer, which even at 3.2% has the capacity to render Conservatives stupidly drunk within minutes, to wines and Scotch whiskies, neat), realized that by offering enough beer and a warm place to lay down, they could get the Conservatives to bring all the meat to a central place. Then, while the Conservatives drank beer, threw up, and passed out, these guys made lists of the poor and ill and defenseless and made sure that they got their share of the meat in return for doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing that so fascinated the Conservatives when they were awake and/or sober. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some noteworthy Liberal achievements include the domestication of Conservatives, the invention of the individual, face-to-face sex, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that Conservatives provided.

Over the years Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most destructive land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the mule, the animal whose ability to pull the plow that broke the plains so grain could be planted and more beer could be brewed and civilization ensured, has been enshrined in the literature and art of the ages, including a magnificent series of films.

Modern Liberals avoid beer so as not to be confused by their French friends with Conservatives but will, if pressed, sip an imported beer (with lime added). They eat raw fish but like their beef well done and in very small portions called "medallions" (Conservatives prefer meat to come in slabs; most Conservatives are overweight, have high blood pressure, and die young, which is what makes them so testy; advocating a life style that provably leads to the premature extinction of your own kind is intellectually hard to reconcile). Liberals also like sushi, tofu, and French food including lots of red wine and are invariably slender, well-groomed and live very long happy lives with many serial wives and mistresses. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most Liberals have much higher testosterone levels than Conservatives as evidenced by the higher incidence of baldness among Liberals and African American basketball players. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are Liberals. Liberals invented the rule that a fly ball behind third base belongs to the shortstop to prevent Conservative infielders from injuring themselves and losing the game in the last of the ninth.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud or Miller Lite. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, white athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other Conservatives who, not being Liberals and so, not having careers but needing jobs, have to work for a living, and they pay them as little as they can, thus "conserving" their own wealth.

As much as Liberals would like to spend their time producing stuff, they realize that making it is only half the battle, so they take on the thankless task of governing the producers and deciding what to do with the production. Otherwise, while the Conservative producers, having drank, thrown, up, and passed out, were unconscious, other guys would come steal their stuff.

Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans and so work very hard to protect their Conservative friends from Europeans. It is this impulse to protect their Conservative friends that constitutes the basic weakness of Liberals, since Conservatives seem to have little more on their minds than the absolute eradication of Liberals from the earth and their embedded-ness in Hell (which, by the way, is also another Conservative invention worthy of notice; see, for example Alighieri, Dante and Santorum, Rick) or in Europe, not really part of Earth, actually.

Finally, this note: because Conservatives privilege action (or speech; the US Supreme Court says they are the same, which is why donations of millions of dollars from rich white men to Conservatives is not unconstitutional; what looks like an action is really a speech) before thought, it is hard to know what Conservatives really think, or if they do. One can only watch their actions. In fact, if you are in the presence of Conservatives, it is always good to watch their actions---and your back.

[A note to the reader: Yesterday's opening shot was supposed, as you might suspect, to provide a gloss on the name of the blog. However, like most narratives, this one has taken on a bit of a life of its own, wandering down back streets and making promises to strangers.While I only intended to say that keeping one's weight on one's elbows has become to me, over the years, a metaphor for how one might go through life, this tale has asserted its own imperatives. I'll let it have its head for just a while longer.]

The Shreve’s Landing Club was really nice, considering the location. The Bottoms hadn’t been gentrified, though there were some attempts to make it into a place for night-life. But it could be dangerous down there. Just four years earlier, when I was working as an orderly at the local charity hospital in the summer before my senior year in high school, I had a patient who had been beaten and knifed on the same block where the Shreve’s Landing Club stood. The victim was a black man (the hospital was segregated and I was the only white orderly on the “colored orthopedic and cancer ward”) I can only recall as Mr. Armstrong. Mr. Armstrong was being kept in an elaborate head clamp traction device to hold his spinal cord immobile; a weight, at the end of a cord which ran over a pulley and was attached to an eyelet at the fulcrum end of what looked very much like a pair of thin ice tongs the business end of each arm of which grasped either side of his forehead, pulled his head back and prevented him from moving at all. As a consequence, he could not do for himself and so,  with me emptying his bedpans and giving him a sponge bath every day and feeding him his liquid diet, we would chat from time to time. He didn’t like being in the hospital and kept making plans to leave, traction or no. I asked him if he planned to go back to the Bottoms and confront his nemesis, known to me only as Napoleon, who, I had learned , was responsible for Mr. Armstrong’s condition. I had every reason to believe that Mr. Armstrong was not only experienced with violence but reasonably courageous. My evidence was the visible map of knife scars all over his chest and arms. That being so, I was surprised when he said no, he was going to leave town. You’re not afraid to meet Napoleon are you, I asked. Not afraid, he said, just realistic. “As tough and as old as I am, I can’t beat him. That nigger is made of iron," he paused. "And other other hard materials. I’m done.” True to his word, Mr. Armstrong left. In the middle of the night the very next week he released himself from the head brace and went out the back door, never to be seen again. At least, not in the Bottoms.

When you entered the Shreve’s Landing Club, a small foyer gave way to a long bar along the wall to your left and a considerable dining area in front of you and to your right. Straight ahead of you, once past the diners, was a small dance floor and a stage. Orlando was on the door and there was a girl to take your coat. Unlike other classy places in town, the Club did not employ black waiters or bus boys; the entire staff was Filipino; I never knew why that was. Orlando was waiting for me with word from my folks that they’d be home around noon tomorrow and I was to have dinner there at the Club. Then Orlando introduced me to his wife, whom I knew of but had never met. I can’t remember her name but Orlando had met her in Oklahoma. She was a prostitute then, which must have been slim pickings in those small towns we lived in. I gathered she didn't socialize much with the wives from the factory in those days, not that it would have bothered folks had she done so. Except for the odd instances of Baptist-like rectitude, like my dad's annoyance with Aunt Juanita's pierced ears, our people weren't too quick to judge those who did what they could to make a way in the world. After all, one of Dad's uncles had done time for armed robbery and his own father had made beer and bathtub gin during Prohibition. Once Clyde Barrow came by my grandfather's house to buy beer; Mom claimed, in fact, that she and Dad had seen Clyde and Bonnie Parker at a dance marathon in Bossier City the very night they were ambushed by the law and killed. Anyway, Orlando and Mrs. Hawkins (Virginia?) had been together for all that time and she worked there at the Club, in some formal capacity, I mean. Mrs. Hawkins made sure I found the bar and told me that I should have a drink and as soon as she had a table cleared for me on the patio, I could go right on out there and order something good for myself.

I passed a few minutes at the bar, waiting and watching a number of very pretty young women, not girls but really women, a couple of years older than me, at least. They were dressed quite nicely but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere or even waiting for anyone. They seemed to be---relaxing, talking, smoking, drinking. It was like watching gorgeous bank tellers on break. I wanted to say something, start a conversation, say I was a college man (it was the early 60s, remember), but I had no idea what to say. Just as I was about to blurt out in desperation that I was home for the summer, to no one in particular, Mrs. Hawkins appeared. My table was ready.

People in Shreveport loved patios because they wanted to live in New Orleans and didn’t. Shreveport was actually Louisiana’s second largest city in those days, but it was in red dirt redneck country on the timber-clogged Red River, not cradled in the soft marshy, creole-ized curves of the inexorable Mississippi; instead of jazz we had the Louisiana Hayride; instead of jambalaya we had moon pies and RC cola. The patio at the Shreve’s Landing Club was a tribute to every cliché of genteel New Orleans, right down to the moss, harvested by little black kids from oaks along some back road over in Bossier and sold to Orlando so his Filipinos could drape it gracefully down the walls. The tables and chairs were openwork cast iron painted green and the floor was old brick. The patio was new, to tell the truth; whatever the building had been, this had not been a patio. The space was originally part of a sort of alley or half of a lot between the restaurant and the building next door. I knew this because just a couple of summers ago there had been a theater in the next door space where we, my dad and mom and some of their friends and a couple of us high school kids and Carole Gua had put on a kind of dinner theater, offering 19^th-century melodramas to an audience who came to eat and drink and boo the villains. The Club catered the meals and we used the space between the two buildings as our “green room,” prop room, what have you. (I mention Carole Gua by name because…well, more about that later.)

In any case, the patio was new, the night was warm and a little misty, and I was 20 and on my own.

February 25, 2012: 

With My Weight on My Elbows

When I was twenty, I got married and got some good advice at the same time. My mother had a friend, Marie, who was a widow. Her husband had been an engineer and had died in the Gobi Desert. Marie was probably two decades older than my mother and when I recall her now she is in my mind something of a combination of Mary Worth and Marie Dressler, for those of you reading this of a certain age. Marie had been a widow as long as I had known her and I think she had come down in the world a bit. My only evidence of this was that she was my mother’s friend and, for all my mother’s desires for things to be otherwise, we were just working class folks.

                                                                                                 

But Marie had a small house in our neighborhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it was full of items picked up over the years by her and her husband. I liked visiting her and when she called and told my mother that I should come by and pick up the wedding present she had for me, I had a certain anticipation. I walked over on a Sunday afternoon and Marie offered me coffee against the December chill. There was a gift, a silver server of some sort, wrapped. I would take it and my parents would bring it with them to Kansas City where the wedding was to be; Marie would not come so far just to see me married, of course, and so this meeting, or so I thought.

Marie asked about the girl I was going to marry “up there” and how we were to live in my final semester of school. She praised my good looks and my mother’s job of raising me and my father’s industriousness. And then she looked at me very seriously and said:

“My real present to you is not that silly silver thing. I want to give you some advice that will make your marriage easier. I learned two things from my husband about marriage and I want to share them with you. My husband was a fine, fine man and what he knew was correct. The first thing is that you should never go to sleep on an argument. Never go to sleep with something unresolved between you and your wife. If that means one of you must compromise, it means that you must, since it’s not likely that she will know this. But you can tell her; it might help.”

I had no idea just how idealistic such a proposition was; it sounded sensible to me but neither did I realize how essentially true it could prove in practice, if it could be done.

This had been delivered as Marie sat well back on her small sofa, a handkerchief in her hands, as was the style for women in her day, of her age. But then she leaned toward me and looked at me intently. “And here is the second thing, the most important thing along the way, really. You must remember this: a gentleman always keeps his weight on his elbows.”

Now, I’m not going to try to fool you into believing that I had any idea what she meant at first. I just sat there, really, and tried to look like I understood. And then Marie laughed and put both hands on her knees to kind of leverage herself up off the couch and stood there across the coffee table from me. I do remember just how she looked. Her straight dress was a kind of very pale purple and there was an embroidered flower on the left shoulder, a magnolia, I think. The waist of the dress was cinched up high, under her bosom, with a thin, black patent leather belt and the sleeves were short, a little puffed at the shoulder. Her hair was, as you might guess, a bluish white and she had on pearl earrings, the kind that clipped on (I think women in her day, nice women, didn’t pierce their ears. My aunt Juanita had pierced ears and my father, usually the most accommodating of men, seemed very upset by that fact), and a necklace of pearls. She wore some makeup and only a small amount of lipstick. I wanted nothing more than for her to think that I had understood and valued her advice, but she smiled at me all the way to the door, into my coat, and out onto the porch.

“All right, Chris,” she said as I stepped down onto the walk. “Tell your momma I said hi, but don’t tell her about that advice, y’hear?”

“Yes ma’am, I will—I mean, I won’t. ‘Bye.”

I did “get it,” after about a block on the way home. I mean, I was not stupid, just maybe a little slow on the uptake. Let me give you an example. About six months earlier, I had come home from school a day sooner than I had planned. I had called ahead when I knew that but Mom and Dad had promised to go over to East Texas to visit my dad’s brother and wouldn’t be home until the day I had originally planned to arrive. So they said come on anyway and they’d leave something for me to eat at the house. Well, when I got home, there wasn’t anything to eat but there was a note in the kitchen that I should go down to the Shreve’s Landing Club and Orlando would feed me.

Orlando Hawkins was an old friend of my dad, from back when we had lived in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and Dad and Orlando worked at the glass plant in Henrietta, about fifteen miles southwest of there. They had not been friends very long, but they were close pretty quick and one day got the idea to run a crap game in the plant parking lot on Fridays after work. Dad was a small stakes gambler, by and large, adept at dice and cards and betting the horses and the dogs. I never knew whether he won or lost much but once he won a 1950 Jaguar XK-120 roadster, bright red, in a crap game and he claimed to have won the 21-foot cabin cruiser he kept on Cross Lake in a poker game. I do think he was a pretty good “mechanic,” a card dealer, and he was in demand to deal in big games mainly because he was, as far as I ever knew, as honest as the day was long. Once some big money men flew him from Shreveport to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to deal a two day game. He got some percentage of each pot, but I don’t know what that was.

Anyway, Dad and Orlando kept this crap game going until one Friday a car pulled up and two men got out. They watched the game for a while but they made the guys uneasy and the game broke up pretty quick. I don’t know the exact word for word content of the conversation that ensued, but it turned out that these gents weren’t policemen looking for a little graft. No, they were representatives of a man in Tulsa, fifty miles or so to the north, who had heard of the game and it worried him that he had not been asked if were “OK” to have such a game in Henrietta.  Dad and Orlando were given a choice of closing up the game or paying some percentage of their take, a goodly percentage it would seem, to this fellow up in Tulsa. The men promised to be back the next Friday for an answer, and for some money, perhaps.

That was where Mom drew the line. Actually, she drew it when Orlando came over to the house with a gun and a permit and asked Dad if he wanted to carry the gun or the permit. So Dad bowed out and left it to Orlando, who tried to make some accommodation with the men from Tulsa but that didn’t work out and the game closed and Orlando left town. It was maybe ten years later that we all ended up in Shreveport at the same time. Orlando had left the glass factory grind and was running an expensive bar-nightclub down in the old “Bottoms” for  some out-of-town money while Dad was still cutting glass, now at the Libbey-Owens-Ford plant on Jewella Road,  and Mom was teaching deaf kids in one of the schools near our apartment. Mom hadn’t finshed college, though she had started a couple of times (one of those times is what caused the trouble that made us leave Okmulgee, but more about that later), so she was trained by a couple of women who advocated a “deaf-oral” approach to the education of very young deaf children and she was allowed to teach the pre-schoolers. Years later we would move out to Los Angeles so she could study more of it out there, which is where the other trouble came up so we had to move back to Shreveport, but more about that later.