Season’s Greetings

Things my dad used to do in the darkroom … before PhotoShop.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

Never Met a Stranger

My dad loved this kid. He loved all three of his grandkids, of course, but Cameron, who’d come first, really didn’t want to be held by anyone but his mother, ever, which makes it hard to bond with a strange old man. Alli, when she came, lived far away, so he was a bit of a stranger to her too. But Jesse—that baby never met a stranger (nor did Jim Clarke). Jesse loved ’Pa from the moment he laid eyes on him. And he’s still just like that.

Christmas 1986, Arkansas

A Good Man

A while back, Katie posted a photo of Jesse that looked just like Jim Clarke (his grandfather), and it just stopped me in my tracks. And then I sent her to a photo of Daddy to prove my point, and we had a conversation about him. Gerry Hampson reminded me this morning how lucky I was to have had—however briefly—a father so good that any photograph of him evokes a happy memory. I do know that.

I was thinking of this last night. He wasn’t a faultless man. (He had a temper, for example.) But he was a good husband and a good father. He had morals and he had character. He had a very strong work ethic. He knew right from wrong and he (and my mother) conveyed this knowledge to us kids. And we always, always knew we were loved.

Miss You, Daddy

Sometimes my memories make me feel better. I’ve been going through old photo albums. I’d call this one Daddy Out in a Field, Looking Like a USAF Pilot Contemplating Retirement.

It was taken out near Lake Don Pedro, I’m guessing 1970. He was forty-one years old. They’d been selling land out there in the foothills near the lake and the reservoir—it was about twenty, twenty-five miles from Merced—and he’d bought a lot out there, planning to build a house when he retired, which he planned for his late forties.

I’ve checked the map … there are a bunch of houses out there, sure enough. There’s even a Lake Don Pedro Elementary School, and the Google blurb says, “Lake Don Pedro is a census-designated place in Mariposa County, California. The community sits at an elevation of 1,122 feet. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 1,765.” That said, there is nothing that looks like a town. Grocery store? Gas station? Nope.

He’d planned to stay in the military longer, and I think he planned to build that house in his spare time. But then he failed to make lieutenant colonel, which both disappointed him and pissed him off. After a time, he decided he couldn’t afford to retire in California, and in 1972 he moved the family (Mom, Jill, and Jon; I was already out of the house) back to Tennessee, where they owned property (with a house on it) too.

I love this photo. He was a good man and a great dad. Wish I could tell him so.

Sweet Memories

Came across this photo of Jesse with my dad’s cigarette box. More than any single thing, that box embodies Jim Clarke for me and this photo gave me joy today. I’m told that both Jill and I teethed on this box too.

 

These Dreams, Oh Dear, These Dreams

About every two to three months, I have a nightmare period: when I dream, they are bad dreams. It goes on for several nights. Eventually it passes.

And I haven’t had one in about six months,* except last night I did. I can’t really remember what it was about, but it upset me, so that’s a nightmare, by my definition. Now that I’m awake and still puzzling over it, I read this piece in The Atlantic: “Oppenheimer Nightmares? You’re Not Alone.”

Seventy-eight years ago, 5:30 in the morning: a blinding flash, a boom, a shock wave, a crater. As the minutes passed, “a multi-colored cloud surged 38,000 feet into the air,” according to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. July 16, 1945, marked the first deployment of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s humanity-altering creation known as “Gadget.” The resulting mushroom cloud remains one of history’s most iconic images. And yet, the explosion itself is hard for most of us to conceptualize. What I’ve always found most haunting is the countdown to detonation—when the decision has been made but the world has yet to change.

Those inexorable, ominous seconds were the basis of a nightmare I had recently. It’s an old adage that nobody wants to hear about anyone else’s dreams, but perhaps we can make an exception for nuclear night terrors this summer. Poke around social media right now, and you’ll notice that scores of people are experiencing acute nuclear anxiety. (“Too many Oppenheimer dreams last night 😳,” reads one representative tweet.) My bomb dream happened last Sunday night. I was dead asleep, watching a missile carve an arc across the sky. I awoke just before impact, sweating, heart thumping, fists clenched. I did not get back to sleep.

Aha. That sounds about right. After all, I’m a child of the nuclear era (when they taught us to drop and cover, as if that would save us).

During that time—my childhood, the Vacaville years—I had a recurring nightmare.

My dad was in SAC (Strategic Air Command) and the war in Vietnam was escalating and the Cuban Missile Crisis had just happened. (See what Wikipedia says about this here. I was painfully aware of these events as they happened, because, as I’ve noted repeatedly, current events were discussed at the dinner table.) Daddy was on call more than he was home. The moms in our neighborhood were worried about nuclear war.

So in my dream, “The War” has happened. I make my way home from school, only to find the house deserted and my family—my parents, more specifically—have left without me. Or at least that’s what I always thought: they’d escaped and I’d been left to survive or not survive “The War.” I had that dream for years, no joke, but haven’t thought about it in decades.

(When I was even younger I had a different recurring nightmare: I’m chased around a playground by a witch—black clothing, pointed hat, evil, ugly face—and she’s getting closer and closer and at one point I’ve climbed the slide, I’m at the top to have a look over the playground—where is she? where is she?—and I turn around and there she is at the bottom of the ladder. Then I wake up.

The human mind is an astonishing thing, isn’t it?

* This is changed since I started using this product from Asutra.

 

 

 

 

 

Family Business

I’ve been writing these posts about my ancestors, scouring the books I’ve collected about them, old letters, the birth and death certificates I’ve stored in photo albums … I’ve been telling family stories, family history, and striving to get it right.

And yet.

I’m worrying so much about details but it just occurred to me that there’s no one left to correct me.

Four generations in 1986: Kippy, Jamie, Jim, Jesse (at almost 3)

Life Is Messy

I’ve been reading and just finished this book (The Hand that Once Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell) … and I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll just say it began with the stories of two couples, a generation apart, whose stories were connected (but we don’t see how until the very end). There is an almost final scene in which a character who did know both generations (though not all the circumstances) berates his wife (one of the “villains” in the story—and she’d manipulated and lied to him too) for throwing away all the mementos and papers that would have shed light on the story for a character in the younger generation who was bereaved.

Confused now? It’s a little bit about secrets and a little bit about the things parents don’t tell their children, for one reason or another. You hear stories about this sort of thing. A friend I consider dear found out in her forties (doing a DNA test “for fun”) that the man she knew as her father was not, in fact, her father. Her siblings were ten years and more older than her, and when she called her closest sister in dismay, she heard a secret that had been kept from her for forty years: her mother had had an affair with a coworker. DNA technology has laid bare a lot of family secrets. You can read about it in The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are. Or in writer Nicole Chung’s story, which Wikipedia tells us:

Chung was born in Seattle in 1981 to Korean parents who put her up for adoption after she spent months on life support. She was raised in Oregon by adoptive white Catholic parents. …[D]uring her first pregnancy [Chung attempted] to reconstruct the story of her own origins, including searching for her birth family, contacting them, then discovering a history of abuse, divorce, and deception. … [Later she learned] the story of her birth sister, whom she met after reestablishing contact with their birth parents.

These things can get complicated. Messy.

I’ve been writing down family stories for years—the ones I lived and the ones I was told—as well as the genealogy that I have records for (books, birth and death certificates, other documents, photographs). I’ve got letters from relatives I met briefly at a family reunion. Notes I took when I met with Mattie Franklin Cheatham. Letters from my Aunt Evelyn. Talks with my dad.

My dad talked to me a lot in my thirties and forties, answering questions I had but also addressing my difficulties with Mom. He was crazy about her, always had been, but she wasn’t easy for him, either. He had chronic back troubles from lifting her heavy ’60s-era wheelchair in and out of the car, for example. Hadn’t had physical relations with her for years due to her muscles atrophying. He even talked to me about Eve. He knew we kids didn’t like her much (she pushed us away from him), but one thing he’d said was revealing: he’d been taking care of Mom in every possible way for decades, but it was nice, so nice, to have someone bring him a cup of coffee after he’d finished his supper. Just that.

It can change your perspective if you’re willing to consider it.

There are also things I don’t know and may never know. When one of my first cousins told me he’d “dumped” (his words) all of the letters and who knows what else that his mother (my Aunt Evelyn) had accumulated working on the family history, I cried when we got off the phone.

Anyway, I’ve been clearing out a closet, a little at a time. Throwing things away. (This is not easy for me. I’m a packrat, as you know.) And I have a memento (a hole-in-one trophy, complete with newspaper clippings) that belonged to a man I dated in the ’90s, which I’d been repairing for him … but then he broke up with me, unpleasantly, while it was still in my possession, and I did nothing. He was divorced, had a daughter, Kelly, that I befriended in the moment (she was only seven). He died a few years later, when Kelly was a young teenager.

And then four years ago (late 2019), out of the blue, Kelly found me on Facebook. She was twenty-nine, married, had kids, and wanted to know about her father, things her mother refused to discuss (it had been a bitter divorce, happened long before I met him). I was delighted to hear from her, to know she was happy in her life. She and I texted and emailed like a couple of crazy women. I told her I had something that she should have. We planned for her to drive up (just a couple hours from here) to visit, and I would give the trophy to her. We were about to travel to Rhode Island for the holidays, so it would have to wait until spring. But something happened. As I have written,

On Christmas Eve I learned that a young woman I was fond of when she was just a little girl (and had renewed a relationship with) was in the hospital, desperately ill with acute respiratory distress syndrome [ARDS]. They thought it was flu and had delayed seeing a doctor.

This morning—after flying in from Rhode Island yesterday, and getting in late—I learned she died yesterday. Christmas Day. Twenty-nine years old.

I contacted her husband through Facebook, tried several times, but nothing happened. And now, I am throwing that trophy away. Life is sometimes a puzzle; it’s unendingly messy. We do what we can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passing Through …

My father was born ninety-four years ago (yesterday). He died thirty years ago. He was a remarkable man and I think of him literally every day. This song by John Prine’s son, Tommy, shook me up a little.

It takes time to know when you’re wrong
It takes even longer to put it all in a song
And I wish it was easy to, like he did

When I’m by peaceful water it’s harder and harder
And I’d do anything just to talk to my father
But I guess he was leaving soon, as we do
Yeah I guess he was passing through, and I am too
—from “Ships in the Harbor,” by Tommy Prine

I hear you, Tommy.

(Singer-songwriter John Prine died April 7, 2020, at age 73.)

 

 

Runs in the Family

I edit books for a living—seriously, it’s the work I was born to do—and a while back I was working on a manuscript about the four attachment styles. (It’s a science that studies how children react with their caregivers and then assesses the type of person they grow up to be, in terms of getting along with other people, their relationships with others. The four styles are: secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant [aka disorganized].) As I continued to work on the manuscript, I came to the conclusion that my own relationship/attachment style is considered secure / organized. (Do check the link above.)

What was interesting to me was this: although my father’s upbringing was considerably different than mine (my assessment from the outside looking in, obviously), there is no doubt in my mind that his also was a secure style. We both had/have the same way of relating/reacting to others. (I’ll come back to this.)

I’d been working on this runs-in-the-family article for some time—mostly just thinking about it, scribbling a few notes—thinking about how, for example, a talent for music runs in my family, and wondering which things actually arrived in the DNA—a phrase we sometimes throw around without thinking—and how others may have developed via exposure. Or even via relationship. If I start researching this I’ll be here forever, so note that this is just my own observation, nothing more.

One thing I enjoy about my research is seeing family resemblances in old photos and learning of talents, interests, and proclivities that have been passed down through the generations.

For example, Florence Hopkins (my mother’s mother) was a talented pianist, I’ve been told. As was my mother, Doris. (Mom also played flute, and was in her high school orchestra.) All three of Doris’s children took piano lessons, and two of us (my sis and I) were very musical (piano and also band in seventh through twelfth grades—Jill played flute, I played drums). All three of Doris’s children also gave birth to musicians. My son, Jesse (named for Florence’s husband, Jesse), majored in music through grad school, toured the world with a brass quintet, and now plays in the US Navy fleet band. My brother’s son, Cameron, is a talented jazz guitarist and to this day plays in bar bands in Middle Tennessee. My sister’s daughter was in her high school band (flute) and for some years was a popular performance artist (singer-songwriter-guitarist) in her community.

I got my smile from Florence (see this post). I’d always thought I looked most like my dad (and I do look a lot like him)—and certainly my son, Jesse, does so much it takes my breath away—and yet this smile went from Florence to me to Jesse, it’s clear.

Jamie/Jesse smile

It’s my brother who has the most Hopkins; he’s the spitting image of our mom’s dad, J. I. My niece, Alli, looks a lot like her grandmother, Doris.

Doris / Alli

My mother, Doris, was the reader, too, and her grades kept her in the top seven of her high school class (of roughly 200). I started reading at three and never looked back and was ninth in my graduating class of 500ish, among a crew of kids considered advanced, or gifted. As was Jesse. And Jesse married a smart woman who loves to read as much as I do. (I know a lot of folks who love to read, but Katie’s the only one who keeps up with me.) Their daughter, my granddaughter Sybil, took to books as if it was something she got in her DNA, though I’m pretty sure that’s not possible. I think she got it in her crib. (I think mine was exposure, too, of course.) And Sybil is smart as a whip. No joke: at age three she’s in a Japanese immersion school.

My mom was a talented sketch artist—remember, she’d gone to an art college for a while—though it was beyond her once the MS took over.* My dad didn’t sketch, but he designed Christmas cards (using photos he took himself; and he did all the darkroom work) …

… and built model airplanes from scratch; he’d worked as a draftsman (that beautiful handwriting/printing!) and later designed furniture and built all sorts of useful things that were also beautiful to look at. We had a large (for the time) family room in the Merced house that he painted in large three-foot stripes along the long wall that wrapped into our kitchen area—aqua, teal, and sea blue. It was the coolest thing, writ large enough that you didn’t really think of it as stripes.

Daddy had an “eye” for these things, a design eye. He bought Danish modern furniture for that house in the 60s. Later, I had an eye for some things too. When I was in high school he built me a screen printer, and I and my talented-artist friend, Tony, printed and distributed all sorts of school pride (Go Bears!) posters. (Which led to my being elected Director of Publicity my senior year.)

Where do I get my strength for detail, for noticing the very little things? It makes me really good at my job, and it makes me more efficient in my day-to-day life. I think these things came from my dad, who had the same gifts. It shows up in my love of photography too. My dad was also quite a gardener—and my brother and I both got his green thumb. My dad loved tropical fish, had an aquarium for years … and that shows up in my son too.

In photos of my parents in their young adulthood, she is the shy, quiet one, while he is the one with his head thrown back, laughing. (His mother, Bessie, had a habit of the happy, smiling laughter too.) We’d go to the movies as a family—always a comedy, of course—and we kids wouldn’t sit next to them because my dad laughed so much and so loud.

Daddy never met a stranger—he’d chat up the waitress, the grocery checker, the stranger standing next to him. (Now, I am that person.) My son also has that easy gift of chatting with strangers, which he learned on the road with the brass quintet—they’d all go to the lobby and chat with the concertgoers after the show. Jesse’s always made good money waiting tables (college and grad school)—that’s his personality too. He can talk to anyone, just like my dad. Now, recently, I posted a photo of his daughter on Facebook and said “Sybil has lots of personality” and Jesse’s first grade teacher, with whom I’m FB friends, commented, “Just like her daddy.”** And this was just a day after a checker in the grocery and I laughed it up together over something I can’t even remember (with my poor husband standing there half-embarrassed). I said to Gerry, my father was just like this. So it’s gone from Jim to Jamie to Jesse to Sybil.

Is that in the genes, that propensity to laugh? I mean, Sybil smiled and laughed very early after her birth, and she’s still like that. I have a high happiness set-point, tend to optimism. And yes, we kids were well loved from the moment we arrived, which brings an innate security to a human; but I do feel like this is something more, a gift of the genes.

And I am profoundly grateful.

NOTES:
* Thinking about this now, I realize she lost both of her creative outlets (something I find vitally important to a happy life): the piano and her drawing. And over time she lost her fine brain too.
** In my first parent-teacher conference, one of the things I remember as if it was yesterday, she told me that he was well-behaved and every child in the classroom wanted to be his friend.