AT THE EXPENSE OF THE BOYS?
The family puzzle I come back to is the failure of my father and brothers to thrive, though there is no obvious reason why they should not have before concussions, my father’s from a 1948 head-on car collision and my brother’s from falling and hitting his head on cement in the Seventies. They claim it was because my success was at their expense, if only that I did so well that it made them look bad.
Did I do so well? Pretty arguable that I did or didn’t or was only a success in terms of Bob Scriver’s sidekick. But what is success anyway? Academics? I was a B+ student. Making money? Laughable! I’ve lived on the technically poverty level even when married. (That’s officially $12,888 right now.) Resisting authoritarianism? Possibly.
Gender roles? Not unlikely. Consider this note scribbled on the back of a photo my father took. He always had dozens of extra prints that he wrote on and distributed. This photo was pretty routine but one of the last before the family fell apart, everyone going their own way in the late ’50’s. He was implying that “looking down on” denoted superiority and that it was gender-controlled, that is, boys grow taller and are therefore more important.
We were all college graduates. I did my graduate degrees after my father was dead. My father had a Masters in agriculture but defined himself with classical ’78 records, books, and chess — middle-class signals of superiority. Mark didn’t settle into a major but flirted with veterinary medicine. He never used his degree but took menial work. Paul used his MFA to teach but after the concussion never worked again. All three of these males are dead. I was not close to any of them except in childhood when we three kids were treated as a unit. A room of my own was an emigration of sorts. The boys felt it was an undeserved reward.
But that may not be the cause at all. Sam Strachan, my educated paternal grandfather, brought his family up by growing potatoes with horse teams. When they were nearly grown, he had become a mechanic and joined the Industrial Revolution by importing machinery to be drawn by tractors. Combines had come into use. Selling Kovar Krabgrass Puller was a leap into prosperity and so was living in the city, though they never lost their interest in plants. In fact, Sam’s brother Thomas stayed in South Dakota, gradually building a career on knowledge of grasses and forbes on the prairie.
About the time government regulations caught up with Sam and imposed tariffs on importation of machine parts, the family was ready to move to the coast because of Beulah’s need for iodine to prevent another goiter. Sam would invent the Kozy Kamp tent trailer which didn’t need a manufacturer except for the trailer bed. They reached Portland just as the Depression hit and picked fruit to survive.
By the time my brothers were old enough to push lawn mowers, shortly after the end of WWII when so much chemical research was underway in the interest of developing fossil fuels, Bruce (my father) was working for Pacific Supply Cooperative, a wholesale operation dealing mostly with fossil fuel derivatives like oil and gas, fertilizer, herbicides, and at one point wax, which my mother helped to promote by demonstrating how to make fancy candles.
Then there was the miracle poison called 2,4-D. My brothers were encouraged to go “dandelion hunting” with spray guns of the stuff. No doubt some of it ended up in their systems. Neither of them developed cancer but my mother, who hand-washed their clothes, found a lump in her breast about 1952 that meant a radical mastectomy. The surgeon removed all lymph glands and muscles connected. She said she felt like a skinned rabbit. The doctor said she was the mother of three children which meant saving her at any cost. My father said nothing. The boys said nothing. They must have been terrified. I was.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/24-d-most-dangerous-pesticide-youve-never-heard
“But 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, as it’s known to chemists, has a less wholesome side. There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that the chemical poses a danger to both human health and the environment . . .More conclusive is the proof that 2,4-D falls into a class of compounds called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, compounds that mimic or inhibit the body’s hormones. Laboratory studies suggest that 2,4-D can impede the normal action of estrogen, androgen, and most conclusively, thyroid hormones.”
24 D made lawns possible, that plush green carpet that became an obsession with some people. And golf courses. Both are components of the successful middle-aged white male self-image. My father never played golf and neither did my brothers.
My mother’s father did not relate to my own father. John Pinkerton was fiery, opinionated, unreasonable and homophobic, but fascinated by that subject, demanding of my little brothers who were not yet in high school, “What are you? Homos?” I can’t remember what it was that triggered him, but I think it was probably anything that seemed weak or shirking. He was a diligent man who built houses and was a pillar of the Presbyterian church until pledge time, when he always picked a fight and took leave for a while. His ancestry goes back to Kentucky.
This is not just genealogy — it’s profiling. Both brothers and both parents are dead now, so I’m freer to consider out loud things that have never been mentioned or even thought of at the time. I’m almost certain that Mark was molested as a small boy by rough bigger boys. They had put up a pup tent in a backyard and dragged him into it. They also demanded to see my little girl fold, so okay, shrugging. I thought it was about as interesting as a Betsy-Wetsy doll but they ran off punching each other, hysterical with laughter.
By the time our mother died, Mark seemed to me alcoholic, though functional. He was private, almost secretive, and his wife seemed to go along with that. I hardly knew her. After several years without contact, I called and she told me that he’d been dead for two years.
Neither brother, as far as I know, owned or used a computer, though Mark worked at a library for a long time and must have used an early computer there. I always thought he might write — as readers tend to do — but don’t know of anything he put on paper. Nor did either brother read anything I wrote. Each brother on leaving the Marines came to visit in Browning, was a bit shocked, and soon left. They knew trouble when they saw it, I guess.
Paul never married but had a daughter. Mark broke his leg and we joked that it meant his wife could “catch” him. She was a little older, had had a previous family, and accepted Mark’s bare bones attitude towards possessions. If he had a card table, a folding chair, and an inflatable bed, he was fine. When our father died, he helped my mother clear everything out — books and bookcases. trunks and archives. I ended up with the photos.
When our mother died, he cleared everything out including Paul, and dealt with the lawyer who was a drunk favored by teachers. I had nothing to do with it, made no decisions, never met the lawyer. In my mother’s mind, Mark was the oldest son, her agent and executor. I accepted that. He was fair and efficient.
When Paul went to him because he had no place else to go, Mark put him up in a motel, took him for evaluation to the Veteran’s Hospital where Paul refused all tests and confided afterwards that the doc was so impressed with him that he offered to hire him. Then Mark put him back on the bus to Eugene where he had been living on the street because when welfare workers tried to help him, he told them he was a spy from the FBI. When Paul died, Mark took care of everything.
I don’t know where the ashes of my brothers are now and I don’t think it matters. Ashes mean something different when you’ve been a minister and either scattered them with great ceremony or had to nag people after a memorial to come get them from the church. And when you’ve worked in an animal shelter with a crematorium to dispose of the animal bodies. For a while the cops came with bags and packages of drugs to destroy until the dealers figured that out somehow and started hiding live ammunition in the drugs. It’s not a bad metaphor.
