Lots of Manure

I mentioned the way the media muddles our notions of time and false personality. (Celebrities surely aren't their Images/acting roles: Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones off camera? I think not.) Since the beginnings of human consciousness, we have used our media out of the arts to conquer time, making visual--painting, sculpture--or verbal pictures--literature, history--to remember what we think is important, whether it's the wondrous Cro-Magnon animals inexplicably hidden away in deep caves in the extraordinarily beautiful art of Lascaux and Chauvet or the awesomely awful new movie version of the first and probably greatest world conquerer, Alexander , or the currently most popular TV CSI: Crime Scene Investigation with its engrossing forensic detection or any of Shakespeare, including his best-known Hamlet, or the bicentennial book celebration of Lewis & Clark's reconnaissance, though we still don't know if Meriwether Lewis committed suicide or was murdered on the Natchez Trace. All of these are subjective, edited by their makers, and consequently untrue. In case any fool tries to say a TV show, a book, a movie is the truth of the matter, I refer you to the simplest version of what I'm BSing about, Kurosawa's brilliant film Rashomon (1950), redone as a mediocre Paul Newman movie, The Outrage (1964), with its tale of a bandit and a traveling couple, an alleged rape and murder, told in four versions, all given equal weight. Ex-court reporter that I am, I know most people will recognize that witnesses present the same fractured, personalized versions in court testimony. A long-time mystery fan, I love puzzles and ambiguities and the brainwork to solve or understand them, though constipated mentalities don't. They want totalitarian security, artery-hardened tradition. Those people do not have more than a very elementary understanding of how our media are divided between defeating time in memory and entertaining the audience or how either is manipulatively accomplished. My aim here is not particularly to commemorate my grandparents nor even to present My True Version of the Past, albeit it is My Version; but, again, I am exploring how I got to where I am today, why, with whom. That's all. And to end this introduction, I quote Henning Mankell's Sidetracked with his detective, Kurt Wallander, first explaining to his daughter his father's surprise announcement of encroaching Alzheimer's:

No-one knows how fast it will progress. But he will be leaving us. Sort of like a ship sailing farther and farther out towards the horizon. We'll still be able to see him clearly, but for him we'll seem more and more like shapes in the fog. Our faces, our words, our common memories, everything will become indistinct and finally disappear altogether. He might be cruel without realizing he's doing it. He could turn into a totally different person.

[P. 157 of the 1999 Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition.] And then Wallander's dealing with a retired police officer:

Wallander couldn't believe that this vigorous man was over 80, that Sandin and his own father were almost the same age. 'I don't get many visitors,' said Sandin. 'All my friends are gone. I have one colleague from the old homicide squad who's still alive. But now he's in a home outside Stockholm and can't remember anything that happened after 1960. Old age really is shitty.'

[P. 180 of the same book.]
Actually, I'm not writing much (yet) about my grandparents as about their farms, before REA. And I took my chapter title not only from the intro above but my response to my longest pen pal (from 1952), as our correspondence has evolved from lengthy letters to packets of clippings, programs, brochures accompanied by short notes. Bill had included an article about city people (he's from Philadelphia) taking farm vacations, and I laughed that, if these were to be reality trips, they didn't know what they were getting into, which, as I remembered the farm, was lots and lots of manure. All kinds. Chicken, hog, cattle, horse. All very messy and smelly.
Judging from a much later response when our favored cousins generously came to help reshingle my parents' house--my birthplace in the front bedroom--for their 50th anniversary, Mom raised me to be a fastidious little boy. They all hooted, claiming it was the first time they'd really seen me dirty--at that late date. I'd protest, but it's certainly true I was a townie who viewed the farm as equivalent to exile in a foreign territory. My town was technically, legally, a village on either side of 150 population but the county seat because--as everyone knows--the larger towns couldn't agree who would have that political power and thus put it in the Center of Knox County. We had a thriving town in the 1940s and 1950s, three grocery stores, two precursors of today's supermarkets, a hardware, a hotel, a barbershop, briefly a haberdashery, a very popular cafe run by my "second mother," two garages and a tavern all three with gas pumps, a bank, a pool hall, a post office, a big town hall converted from a former hotel, a blacksmith, a church, a K-12 school, two abstract offices, a garage for the big-wheeled fire hose cart and later an old fire truck, and, of course, the courthouse. We had Saturday-night summertime outdoor movies before drive-ins became the fad, indoor movies in the wintertime in that old hall where we also played basketball, held banquets and carnivals, gave plays, and had very popular dances. The movies, the stores, the dances drew large crowds from the area, including the bigger towns. Furthermore, while we didn't have black-and-white television until I was in high school, we had a coal furnace, electricity, and indoor plumbing; and my parents and I were all avid readers so that we took newspapers and several magazines of the time and even bought the two Chicago Sunday newspapers at the hardware store's small magazine area. (My two sisters weren't born until 1952 and 1954.)
My grandparents lived on two different farms, one my maternal great grandparents' homestead Up West, north of Newport in Rock County, roughly 100 miles away, the other between Center and Bloomfield 11+ miles east. Both were heated by a coal oil stove in the living room and Grandma's kitchen range, fueled by cobs and kindling, no heat at night, no heat upstairs in the bedrooms. Years later I would go camping under such conditions but had a down sleeping bag. What we had were quilts, lots of quilts, heavy enough to prevent tossing and turning, and blanket sheets, not like the smooth flannel we have now. On both farms we had china pots for the nighttime toilet and the outhouse for daytime, the toilet paper preferably magazines and catalogs, not flimsy newspapers (besides which my grandparents took weeklies, not dailies, back then). Montgomery Wards and Sears catalogs. Again, hikers and campers have a vague acquaintance but much nicer facilities than a little two-holer wooden hut the same temperature as the outdoors, with stacked catalogs and flies (and, we always worried, snakes). I was hardly a stranger to outhouses because my mom taught country school, with the same accomodations though gendered, unlike my grandparents' unisex toilet; but, except for pre-school and the sixth grade, I went to town school. Yes, indoor plumbing.
Lighting on the farm was not by overhead chandeliers or lamps but first by kerosene lanterns and then, great improvement, Aladdin lamps using white glowing mesh "stockings," fragile mantles, lit by hissing gas that you pumped up first. Lots of spooky corners for someone with nyctophobia, fear of the dark, and shadowy hell for a reader when the adults monopolized the light sources for their card games, sewing, visiting, cooking, and eating. Not that Grandma and Grandpa had that much to read, mostly farm magazines--not Colliers, Life, American, Redbook, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Evening Post, Sports Afield, Ladies Home Journal, and all the rest we subscribed to. Grandma K. had a few books, especially later, and the oversized family Bible, and Mom passed along our magazines--which I had already read--so I generally took books along and stoically discovered that other farm families were even less lending libraries at the card parties my grandparents went to, taking Mom and me along. (The cartoons about desperate bibliophiles reading even cereal cartons, just to have some reading, mean much to me.) Grandma did have an upright piano with sheet music and songbooks in the bench, songs from Oklahoma and "The White Cliffs of Dover" the newer ones, which I still have and mean more from memory of her playing "Surrey with the Fringe on the Top" or "People Will Say We're in Love" than the sheet music. But I didn't learn to play the piano until I was 9, on that same piano given to me to that end.
Dad had won a console radio-phonograph with good bass, the only prize any of us ever won, and we had smaller radios as in the kitchen to listen to serials while preparing meals or doing dishes. In those Radio Days, aside from the ubiquitous card games, such as the pitch and cribbage Dad and Grandpa L. played at the station, the pitch and pinochle parties of Grandma and Grandpa K.'s circle, Mom's bridge club of the town women who met monthly (I had all the Authors memorized, of course, but the only card game I ever truly loved was Canasta, a wildly popular '50s craze), aside from reading or making things, the most popular entertainment was the Golden Age of Radio, truly wonderful for the imagination to fill in from the sound effects, from Fibber McGee's noisy closet whenever he opened the door (a barrel of stones and scrap iron on a pivot to be seen in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry), to Inner Sanctum's really scary squeaking door opening to its weekly mysteries that kept me near an adult, to Lux Radio Theater--I think that might be where I heard the original radio version of The Birds, with its spooky ending of the survivors trapped in the house and the birds coming down the chimneys--to the William Tell Overture for The Lone Ranger and those coconut-shell hoofbeats to Amos and Andy's politically incorrect blackface comedy to Tallulah Bankhead's drawl on The Big Show, on and on. I was partial to musical shows like Monday night's The Railroad Hour with Gordon MacRae, doing Reader's Digest versions of famous operettas, later the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts while everyone else listened to a football game, or mysteries and comedies and resented greatly having to give up Friday nights to the boring Gillette Blue Blades boxing matches Grandpa L. favored, with one of the more memorable commercial tunes. Grandma and Grandpa K. had one radio, largely devoted to stock reports and the weather forecast, though we did listen to the popular shows in the evening--if the adults weren't visiting. Several inferences are obvious: TV had not yet killed socializing conversations or bred rude footnoting that has invaded movie theaters, and children were firmly in second place before too much disposable income, too few chores, and lots of media pandering made them rulers of our pop culture universe like that infuriating reversal on Dawson's Creek of delinquent, infantile adults and oh-so-wise teenagers having to set matters straight. (Again, my courtroom experience offers plenty of testimony otherwise.) Life was not sterile, plastic-wrapped, largely bureaucratic. Actually, it was far more creative than having Hobby Lobbies and Michaels doing most of the work or simply buying things and more things at craft shows or having to create Teen Centers for "something to do" or morphing into couch potatoes--in those days we grew and dug them--with TV-glazed eyes.
Well, that's a start, and I haven't even gotten to the manure, lots of manure--or have I? Before I leave today's episode, I should explain that all my grandparents and my parents were farmers before my folks moved to Center where Dad became a mechanic-welder running a small filling station-garage and Mom drove a Model A out to her rural schools to teach and I grew up a city sophisticate, as I have suggested. The grandparents I'm describing are maternal, Mom being their oldest and the closest to them when I was growing up. We spent our holidays and most family occasions at Grandma and Grandpa K.'s, though my paternal Grandpa L. lived with us while I grew up. After my folks, my favorite relatives were, of course, Grandma and Grandpa K., buried next to my parents. (I am one of those rarities who has two sets of great grandparents, two sets of grandparents, various aunts and uncles and cousins, and his own parents in the same cemetery. I don't know what that would be in poker terms.)