Mom revisits the place that shaped her identity

My mother had what many regard as an over-sized ego. If she had been a success it would have been "a belief in herself" or faith or something else.

She had discovered a love of culture in the midst of her abusive and neglectful childhood without much encouragement. She tells of one apparently kind and cultured man and his wife where she was placed for a short time and where she learned to love Rhachmaninov while hanging around his workspace with him.

As a young adult she had taken a correspondence course on becoming an artist. She bought the study guides available in the art supply store and drew and painted from life before she was accepted to the Art Institute.
Being taught at the school became an enormous mark of approval for her and she tried to use her degree to speak for her worth too often.

Some Jews Tried to Steal Me

The first baby sitter I had in Chicago was a Jewish woman who had two older daughters and a son who was attending medical school. My mother and the baby sitter clashed repeatedly over issues with regard to the proper values I should be taught. My mother had decided that I should be either a Lutheran minister or some sort of artist. These choices bothered the Jewish woman and I assume her husband as well. She told my mother that I should plan on having a man's job when I got older, like a doctor or a lawyer. She thought my mothers choices were strange and unreasonable.

During the day occasionally Mrs. Denemberg would bring up the debate. Mom had programmed me to keep insisting I was going to be a sculptor, which I usually misspronounced as sculpture.

A typical day would be arriving in the morning and parking in front of the television to watch hours of situation comedies until lunch.

After lunch she would tell me to amuse myself away from the televison so she could watch soap operas. There was a stack of her daughter's Archie comics in a bookshelf beside a chair. I usually laid behind the chair and looked at the comic books. I also found a stack of Playboy.

After I had been in the home for a few years and had been taught a few things one day my mother was late coming home and the daughters decided to take me in their room and watch television with me. I was five.

The first thing they wanted to watch was "The Monkees." During which they started playing a game with me where I was supposed to tell them which Monkee I was while they kept making suggestions and listing the telling details about the character.

They did the same thing when "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." came on but there were only two of them.

Then they wanted to give me a hug and the older girl went first but when the second one happened I took a hold of her so hard that they became alarmed that I would not let go. They had to pry me off of her. The conclusion of this was a discussion with my mother about there being something wrong with me emotionally and a suggestion that I would be better off with them as my family. This resulted in my mother moving me to a different baby sitter and causing me to feel a tremendous loss.

Mom's relationship to the lower species

This is a picture from about five years ago. Mom is taking care of her bird feeders. She put up three feeder racks outside her window of the porch that she used as her home here in my father's house. About once a month she bought several large bags of feed and made her blend for the birds.

I have stopped feeding the birds but I am keeping her grapes growing and making my dad keep the bird bath filled.

I asked Mom what her favorite movie was in the last years of her life and it was "Walt Disney's Incredible Journey." She liked the new version with the actors doing voice overs better than the first one with just narration that she barely remembered. We had a dog out in Berkeley that we could not give away because he kept having Incredible Journeys. He was a poodle cocker mix who adopted Mom while she was a vendor and we tried to give away several times but he kept finding us again. While we were in Wisconsin Viola stuffed him inside a gas oven and euthanised him. She then backed over him with a car. "M-O-P-P rag mopp" was what mom called him, Mopp for short. Viola was mad because he had made it so we could not find a place to live since we exceeded the number of dogs most landlords would allow by one.

I kept Mom's diploma and Viola does not think Mom hung it in a very sensible place

When Mom graduated several of her friends had conversations where they made fun of where they were going to hang the precious thing.

When Mom was leaving to die in California it was one of the things I asked her to leave with me and one of the ones that she did not argue about or refuse.

While Viola was here for her funeral she made the remark that having it where I put it was a strange place for Mom to want it. I just said I did not think so.

Viola looks like 'Little Debbie."

Once when we were living in Chicago Viola told me that she liked Marilyn Monroe and she used to like and once was "Shirley Temple." And she was going to be Marylin Monroe someday. She wasn't impressed with my plan to be the Ivan Albright sculptor.

Once when we moved back to Polo a boy started teasing her by saying, "Hey, it's Little Debbie!" and continued with other comments that used this uncanny similarity as its' origin.

Viola thought it was a suitable component to allow into her self image and began saying that she used to look like Little Debbie herself.

My personal opinion is that there was never much more than a casual resemblance. They share a hair color and style. But Little Debbie somehow finds the sublime plane of beauty where Viola is often grotesque.

Midwest 'pooberty.'

The man who infiltrated my family through his marriage to my sister and then tried to have her molest me until the last instance of abuse when she "accidentally" placed her hand on my groin and began to rub used to say that I needed to go through "midwest pooberty" by getting a driver's license before the girls would accept me. I was twenty and laying on a couch with Viola sitting behind the couch talking to me about the rent swindle that had been exposed by the landlady who had manipulated my poverty into a relationship with her.

Just after I had refused to try to help her keep her room the incident of fondling took place.

The figure in the picture holding the pointer and wearing "customized earth shoes" is similar to a drawing that I did for an English teacher who was very important in my education. He actually was a close neighbor for a while as well and he became someone who showed an interest in my life outside of school as well. He chastised me a couple of times for attempting to use biased language--I thought for effect, but he didn't get it and just gave me an F for a faggot comment on a paper, a chewing out over a Nigger, and the threat that if I called the wrong person a nip they might hurt me.

I had driver's ed at that High School and bought a gold Thunderbird with the money I had saved when I had to lend Mom some money to buy a car. She had wanted a truck but when I went on the lot a salesman jumped on me and said I really want to sell you this car and said he was giving me a tremendous deal on it. I thought it looked like a cool car and I decided I wanted it. I went and talked my mom out of her truck and we bought the Thunderbird. I had a lot of problems driving it because it had a tendency to squeal its' tires at the least acceleration on a turn and she would start shrieking and telling me to be careful every time it happened. I got so stressed from my practice driving with her I eventually decided I did not want to drive.

Before that though I came close to killing myself when I decided to take advantage of a few minutes that I had alone behind the wheel when we were moving across town and there were too many cars to take at once. I had permission to go out alone and I took a detour around town and opened it up on a skinny little road that connected two highways. I had it up to 110 before I knew it and was thinking about just letting myself fly off the end of the road where there was an airport. I decided not to because the teacher I loved lived near the spot and I did not want to do that to her. She recommended that I take classes with the guy in this drawing.

My Taste In Art

I had the opportunity to live near and among the arts growing up until the age of seven when I was exiled to an area with narrower views. I loved being in the Art Institute museum as a child and had many days where my mother attended classes and I wandered through the museum alone or with my sister. I probably enjoyed my comic book that she bought me on the way to school more than the paintings and sculptures.

This is a painting by the German Expressionist James Ensor. I first saw his work at an Art Institute exhibit when I was in High School and mom had just randomly decided to go to the museum. We had my father drive us as our weekend outing when he came to see what we needed from him for support.

Mom laughed at all the versions of the elites, after some conflict, maybe WW I, who were shitting and pissing on the heads of the common folk. I loved what I was seeing as art and did not much care about the scatology. As a kid I had liked Ivan Albright and had thought I would like to be a sculptor who made things like his paintings out of some sculpting material.

Mom explained the pissing and shitting pictures even though I hadn't asked.She was right in her interpretation though I couldn't give her the answer then.

The pictures were of the aristocracy and politicians of Europe, particularly Germany, and they were being accused of abusing the common people.

Mom and Dad on the farm

This is a picture of my parents doing chores on one of the various farms where they lived and worked.

Mom said that my father spent most of his free time at his parents house and only came home in the evening to sleep and have sex.

His parents complained about the relationship and said that my mother needed to give up her stupid pursuits of art and literature and get a job to take care of her family.

My mother did have several jobs outside of the home but she finally threw my father out of her life when he refused to care about loosing a home they were purchasing in Milledgeville Illinois. They remained married but separated until I was fifteen. We had been going to craft fairs in Wisconsin and my mother and I needed my father to drive us to a fair due to a loss of Mom's transportation.

While Mom and I slept my father made a wrong turn and drove further into Wisconsin. When she awoke and discovered his mistake she began yelling at him at first and then as she cooled off she and I just began mocking Vernon in a way that I had been accustomed to doing. After this incident my father asserted himself by asking for and getting a divorce.

My sister's relationship sponsored her years of abuse against my dead mother and myself.

My sister was a mentally unstable person who tortured me as a child. Once before she "ran away" (a term that is not exactly correct since the man she married was clever enough to "make-it-legal" by having our mentally impaired and morally questionable father sign a parental consent for the marriage.) she was eating smelly cheese on a hot day in our truck while our mother was in a business and I complained about the smell. She took the obnoxious stuff and smeared it on me. I was fed up with her abuse and I told her that there would be an inevitable day of reckoning for her soon since I was ten years old, growing, and had a big grudge. Later the milk advisory board stole the idea for one of their ads.

My sister likes to lick her fingers and is a noisy eater

Our family has been uncouth in it's table habits for far too many years. At the present time my father is making my life unbearable by his industrial sounds that he can produce with a spoon, bowl, and raisin bran. He thinks there are too many raisins in the cereal and he hits his bowls with a sharp and frequent clack as he pushes them to the side. My mother could roast a chicken and consume the whole thing in an explosive mass of slurping and sucking that left her glistening.

My sister picks at her food with her fingers and licks them constantly. I have been told that I eat too fast.

Viola said 'gacters' for her eyeglasses and she hated Santa Claus

Mom liked to keep an oral history of ourselves a part of her regular routines. She would tell choice stories of herself as though it were new information and she would remember a current event about my sister or I if it had the right sense of artfulness to it. The stories could be funny or about an abuse by an authoritarian buffoon. They were always stories where there were some sort of triumph by one of us, even if it were only how obviously wrong the nemeses were shown.

Two of Mom's favorites were about my sister, Viola. One was how she would mangle words when she was much younger and she had glasses put on her face when she was just three or four. She would say "I've got my Gacters." Mom thought this was very cute.

The other story was about a time when a woman approached Viola when she was still very young at Christmas and sweetly asked "And what would you like Santa to bring you this year?"

Viola puffed up her chest and blurted "I hate santa!!!" The poor woman was reportedly discombobulated by the shock.