Short Circuits Read online

  Like Uncle Buck, he was always there for my mom, but he never interfered in her life or offered unasked-for advice. But if he sensed anything wrong in her life, he was always quietly there.

  In his later years, his Black Lung disease confined him to Rockford’s tuberculosis sanitarium (do they even exist anymore?), where he died in, I believe, 1957. One day the San, as it was known, called Mom to tell her that Grandpa wasn’t going to make it through the day, and I took her out to see him for the last time. At one point, Mom left to go to the restroom, and I was alone with Grandpa Fearn.

  He looked at me and gave me a small, mischievous smile. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. A few hours later, he did.

  * * *

  GRANDMA FEARN

  I never knew my maternal grandmother: she had died at the age of 42, with between 20 and 40 million others, in the great flu pandemic of 1918, carried to the U.S. by returning wounded American soldiers. I wish I had known her. I would have liked her. She was born Annabelle Erickson in Bergen, Norway in 1872. How and when she immigrated to America I do not know, nor do I know when and how she met my grandfather. But they did meet, and they had two children: a son, Charles, born in 1900, and a girl, Odrae, born in 1909.

  From what Mom told me…and Mom was only nine years old when Grandma died…she was a warm and loving woman though like most women of her time, not effusively demonstrative of her affection. Her job, again typical of women then, was her family, and she did her job with flawless efficiency. Mom remembers the time she brought a young male classmate home from school and announced that they were going to get married. “That’s nice,” Grandma said, and then sat them down at the kitchen table for milk and cookies.

  Though Mom wanted to learn to speak Norwegian, Grandma would have none of it. “You’re American,” she would say. “You will speak American.”

  Hers was a world of Pastor-over-to-Sunday-dinner, of family picnics in the country, of close friends and loving relatives, of long conversations on the front porch on hot summer evenings. Hers was a world that sadly no longer exists.

  Grandma had a young brother named Peter, whom my mother adored. Peter came over from Norway to live with Grandma and Grandpa. He was, at the time, 18 years old and, though he somehow managed to fool the doctors on Ellis Island, he had tuberculosis. As his health worsened, he was sent away to Arizona where, it was widely thought at the time, he could get better. But of course he couldn’t and, terribly lonely, he begged Grandma to let him come back to Rockford where within months he was dead. Dead at 18. Of tuberculosis!

  Though I’m sure she never showed any favoritism between Mom and Uncle Buck, I suspect Uncle Buck was the light of her life. When America entered World War I, Uncle Buck wanted to enlist, over the strenuous objections of both Grandma and Grandpa. So he ran off and enlisted without telling them. He left home one morning and headed to the railroad station to board the train for his Army indoctrination, and somehow Grandma found out shortly after he left. She raced to the railroad station just as the train was pulling out. I had always thought that she never saw him again…not because he became a victim of the war, but because she did. But I found a photo of him, Grandpa and Grandma, and Mom in which Uncle Buck is in uniform, so…memory is not an exact science.

  I have a photo of Grandma Fearn in her 1910 finest, and if you saw it, you might be able to make out the chain of a watch fob on her blouse. The original of that picture, hand tinted, hangs in an ornate gold frame over my bed, and as I type this, I can glance to my right and see the beautiful, delicate pocket watch it was attached to, in a small glass dome.

  How can one condense a life into a few short paragraphs? I certainly can’t, but all I have to do is to look at that photo, or that watch, and Grandma lives, and though we never met, I know her as though she had always been in my life. Which she has.

  * * *

  AUNT THYRA

  My mom, about whom you’ll be hearing in later entries, was—not surprisingly—the person who had the most influence on my being whoever it is I am today. But in a way, I was blessed with a “second mother,” my Aunt Thyra, who hold a place in my heart very close to Mom. When I was very young, my dad’s job required a lot of moving around from city to city, and each time my parents had to move, they would ship me back to Rockford to stay with Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck until they got settled in. Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck had three boys of their own, 12, 14, and 16 years older than I, and they were as close to brother as I ever got. Though I would never have told my father, I always considered myself more a Fearn than a Margason.

  Charles (“Buck”) Fearn, my mom’s brother, was nine years older than Mom, and when he returned from WWI and married Thyra Cederland, my mother hated her for having stolen away her adored brother. But that passed quickly, and they grew to be as close as sisters.

  Aunt Thyra was a typical woman of her time. She never worked, staying home to cook and clean and take care of the family and later become a full-time grandmother and great-grandmother. She never learned to drive a car. She was always heavyset, but had a very pretty face, and she always smelled of talcum powder or perfume, and she treated me with as much love as her own sons. Her hugs, which she gave freely though she was not overly demonstrative, were priceless.

  Every Christmas eve, we would go to their house or they would come to ours and every single Christmas from the time I was about five on, Aunt Thyra would bring me a jar of olives. A strange gift, but she knew I loved them, and they were always special, coming from her. It was another special bond between us.

  She always carried a large black purse which, when she came to visit, she would always put on the floor beside her chair.

  On December 7, 1941, my folks and I sat in the living room of Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s house and listened, on a grand old console radio with burled wood cabinet and doors and a yellow dial that showed the stations (and which is still in the family), to news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was our 9-11, and the effect on the nation was even greater. The next day we were back around the radio to hear President Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech. And as we listened, Aunt Thyra could not help but look from one of her sons to the other. All three were soon taken away by the military: Charles (“Fat,” who wasn’t), the eldest and just married, and Jack, the youngest, were drafted while Don (“Cork”) enlisted in the Marines. (They would all return safely, but no one knew so at the time.) Three small blue-star flags were placed in the front window of Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck’s home.

  Aunt Thyra joined several women’s groups doing whatever she could for the war effort, and the years passed and the war ended, and the boys came home.

  Uncle Buck, who had been a heavy smoker all his life, developed cancer and died in 1953, at the age of 53, and Aunt Thyra continued on without him. Remembering now how Uncle Buck’s death devastated me and my mother, I can only imagine what it meant for Aunt Thyra. She never complained, never asked for sympathy; just went on with her life and devoted her time to the growing number of grandchildren.

  When my own mother came down with lung cancer, having moved from Rockford to be near me in California, Aunt Thyra, who had never been on an airplane and had always expressed a deep fear of flying, got on a plane to come out to spend some time with Mom before she died. And she, Jack, Fat, Cork, and their families were there when I returned Mom’s body for burial beside my dad. I’m not sure what I would have done without them.

  I don’t think Aunt Thyra graduated from high school, and she wasn’t particularly well-read or worldly, but she more than made up for any lack in the quality of her unconditional love. After the death of my parents, she was my rock—the one remaining sturdy thread connecting me to all the love of my childhood.

  And then one day in 1976 she suffered a heart attack and, rather than calling for an ambulance, called for Jack to come take her to a doctor. He found her dead on the bedroom floor, where she had been putting on a pair of stockings. She would never allow hers
elf to die less than a lady.

  Life is never easy, and as we grow older, we lose more and more of the people who were part of the very foundation of our lives. Most of my foundation is gone now. And to this day, I grieve for Ray, for my father, for Uncle Buck and all my dead relatives, and most especially, I think, for my mother…and Aunt Thyra.

  * * *

  UNCLE BUCK

  Odd, now that I think of it. I told you earlier I always looked on Aunt Thyra as being my second mom…but I just realized that I never thought of Uncle Buck as a second dad. He was just my Uncle Buck, and he had…and has…a special place in my heart like no one else. And yet both Aunt Thyra and Uncle Buck treated me as though I were one of their own, and I never had the slightest doubt that I belonged.

  Uncle Buck was an auto mechanic all his life, and a darned good one, too. He had a definite preference for Ford products and I still can close my eyes and see his four-door 1939 Mercury, which he had all during WWII (they stopped making passenger cars from 1942 to 1946 because of the war).

  At one point he worked for a local dairy as a truck mechanic. Crates of milk were conveyed from the dairy to the trucks by putting them, like train cars, on a long track of metal rollers. He often worked weekends, and on such occasions, I’d go with my cousins Jack, Cork, and Fat to visit him. Those were my favorite times, because one of them would put me in an empty milk crate at one end of the rollers and push me, giddy with delight, down to the other end, where one of the other boys would catch me.

  And I remember the dairy still had an old horse-drawn delivery wagon. It was no longer used, but it was there.

  One of my earliest memories is of standing in the back yard of Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s house watching him while he worked on the engine of a car in the driveway. It was the first time in my life that I was aware of the sound of someone breathing. And I see him in the coal bin of the basement, shoveling huge mounds of dusty coal into the fiery maw of the house’s furnace.

  Often, when Mom and I were living apart from my dad, Uncle Buck would come by in a dairy truck and pick me up and take me with him wherever he was going.

  Oh, yes…and I was never “Roger” to Uncle Buck. I was “Guggenheimer.”

  But our very special time together was when he would take me down to the train station to watch the trains come in. He would put me up on one of those large, high-wheeled baggage carts that were high enough to be level with the doors on the baggage cars. I’d stand there, lost in wonder as the iron monsters chugged ponderously past, not eight feet away, grinding to a stop in a cacophony of clanging bells and groaning brakes, all wreathed in steam and smoke from the engine’s smokestack. And one time, while Mom was with us, Uncle Buck actually handed me up to the engineer and I got to stand in the cab of a real train! And it wasn’t until the engineer went about getting the train ready to move that Uncle Buck took me down. Mom was furious with him, sure that the train was going to pull out with me still in the cab.

  Uncle Buck was probably the quintessential big brother. My mom worshiped him, and it was clear that he was always, first and foremost, her big brother. It wasn’t a matter of lots of kisses and hugs and open affection: they weren’t necessary…love often goes far deeper than that.

  I was just getting ready to enter my sophomore year in college when Uncle Buck developed cancer. He’d been a heavy smoker all his life. No one in my immediate family had ever died before, so it never occurred to me that Uncle Buck might die. But he did. I got the call at college and immediately returned home.

  A strange thing about immediate grief. There is much comforting and consoling among family members, yet each one suffers in his or her way, alone. I remember the funeral. I was there physically, but totally numb. That man in the coffin wasn’t Uncle Buck. Not my Uncle Buck. I last saw him in St. Anthony’s hospital and remember knowing, when we left, that I would never see him again.

  At the funeral, I was sitting in the seat furthest away from the aisle and as everyone got up to file out, I managed to stand too, praying that I could make it outside. I couldn’t. The dam burst and I was swept away by a grief I’d never known until that moment. I heard someone say to my dad: “Get Roger.”

  I don’t remember the rest of the funeral, or the burial. I do vaguely remember going back to Aunt Thyra’s and Uncle Buck’s big house on School Street…the house in which my mother was born and her mother and Uncle Buck died…for sandwiches and coffee, as that was what people did after funerals.

  But what I do remember with crystal clarity to this day, and will remember until the day I, too, die, is Uncle Buck and how much I loved him.

  * * *

  TIME AND COFFEE CUPS

  Humans, as you may or may not have noticed, are an unusual lot. We seem totally incapable of fully appreciating what we have until it is gone.

  I was thinking of my mom this morning and how desperately, after 40 years, I miss her. Mothers are as special as humanity in general is unusual. My mother was the best mother in the whole world. Your mother was the best mother in the whole world. It’s all a matter of perspective, but our individual perspective is the only one we have.

  Mom was, I know, far from perfect. She smoked probably a couple packs of cigarettes a day; it seemed she was never without one. Even walking down the street, she’d have a cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth. I used to literally beg her to stop smoking. I would hide her cigarettes. At times I would carefully take an open pack and punch pinholes in them in the apparent belief that they would not then burn.

  Mom paid for her addiction with her life, and I nearly paid for it (and my father’s and all my friends and crowded bars and just about everyone around me) with mine.

  Mom was also, it saddens me to say, an unconscious racist. We for a short time in the late 40s or early 50s had a small drive-in root-beer stand made from a converted city bus. One night a black family pulled up. Mom would not let me go out to wait on them. When they came in and ordered coffee, she served them, and when they left she broke the cups they had used. That is the only time in my life that I was ever ashamed of her, and the fact that I had never before heard her make a racist slur made the shame all the greater.

  In her defense, if there can be one, is the context of the times, which were themselves racist. She simply didn’t know how to handle a situation which she had never encountered before. I’m sure she quite probably had never met a black person.

  But I digress (now there’s a “Stop the Presses” moment!)

  I’ve been blessed, as I’ve said so often, with a really wonderful family, who have always accepted me totally. And though they do not live all that far away, I seldom see them—certainly not from lack of invitation. But part of the reason is, I think, that to see them is to be too strongly reminded that none of us is who we were.

  Shortly after I moved back to the Midwest after 18 years in California, I was invited to my cousin Judi’s wedding, where I would see most of my remaining relatives from my mom’s side of the family for the first time in nearly 20 years. It was wonderful to see them, but it was also terrible because it forced me to look into the mirror of reality. Reality, to me, is often a terrible thing, and I fear it. But when coupled with time, the effect can be devastating. After I left the wedding, I went out to my car and I cried, because while they were still my family and I still loved them, they were not as I remembered them. Nor, I knew, was I. How could I expect they would be? But I did.

  So I give you the advice I cannot take myself: live in the moment and appreciate everything and everyone in your life to the fullest. Live, act, and react as though every day were your last, for one day—though hopefully a long, long way away—it will be.

  INSIDE THE BONE-BOX

  ANTICIPATION

  When I was old enough to go in to Chicago by myself, I’d start getting antsy the day before in anticipation. I’d not sleep very well that night, and wake very early on the day of the trip. I’d catch the Greyhound bu
s at the Hotel Faust (Rockford’s 11-story skyscraper and classiest hotel), and be off on my adventure.

  When I took my first trip in an “airliner” (a 21-passenger DC-3) with my mom from Rockford to Chicago’s Midway Airport (O’Hare didn’t exist yet), probably around 1950, I was an anticipatory basket case for days before we actually went.

  When I first began going into gay bars, I would be horribly embarrassed by the fact that I was so nervous…anticipating what the evening might hold…that I would literally shake. More than once I had to explain to someone who was bold enough to talk to me and noticed my shaking that I had a chill.

  I’ve always been big on anticipation, even at times when I would prefer not to be, such as now. I’ll be on my way to Rochester, MN as soon as I post this entry, for my six-month checkup following my successful treatment for tongue cancer. I have done this more than a dozen times, now (for the first couple years after my release, I was on a three-month-checkup schedule). Every time I have gone, anticipation starts setting in a week or so before my exam.

  August will mark five years—the magic milestone beyond which one is considered to be “cured,” and I’ve gotten a clean bill of health every exam thus far. I have no reason at all to suspect that this checkup will not go as well as all the others, but that logic does not keep me from being beset by anticipation. What would I do if…. But then I realize that if there were an “if” I would deal with it just as I did the first time. I would look on it as a horrendous and disruptive inconvenience, but have absolutely no doubt that I would get through it just as I did the first time I got the diagnosis.

  Anticipation is simply a part of being human, though like everything else having to do with our species, the degree varies from person to person. I sometimes ponder the totally moot question of whether, if one should accept an offer to know the future, it would be a good or bad thing. It didn’t turn out too well for Cassandra and I suspect, tempted though we all are to know what lies ahead, it’s just as well we can’t know what will happen until it happens. (I, for example, do not want to know when I will die. I want it to be a total surprise: and preferably a “boo!” moment where I’m gone before I can worry about it.)