Doing qi gung exercises has changed my hands

 

Eric had to Boogie

Eric gave me his biography when I was a kid and it was something about his being one of the "Lord's of Flatbush" back in New York before he came to the promised land of the Northern California Bay Area to pursue the life of a liberated flower child. The illustration here is a simple cartoon of the way he looked during most of the time when he was most active in my life and my mother's. I could mention that he had a total ban on any photo's being made of himself and that he still lives in Berkeley and has begun sporting the total head shave look. He is an active member of the National Rifle Association and probably still keeps his Walther PPK hung on a few nails under his bed frame.

He pioneered the Hippy rock poster collectible scene and is making a pretty nice piece of change from his guide to collectors that he sells. He used to have a large number of the original posters that he picked off of the telephone poles and community bulletin boards when they were originally hung.

I accidentally brought him into our lives when I was 10 years old and wandering around the street fair that was Telegraph Avenue in the late 60's and 70's and continues to the present in Berkeley California. My mother was working as a vendor, selling her crafts, tyrying to support herself, and her two children, my sister Viola and myself, when Eric met me while I was walking around the University of Berkeley campus, looking for something interesting.

Eric was reclining on the steps of Sproul Hall and holding court with a fairly large group of coeds and I took him to be one of the amusing characters who performed for handouts that I was getting free entertainment from. He stopped his talk as the students dispersed for classes and turned his attention solely on me. He halted me when I tried to leave and began asking me questions about myself. He became very excited when I made a remark about my mother and sister being devoted to Indian affairs. He said "You have a sister?" and "How old is she?"
I was naive about the significance of his interest and questions and agreed easily when he asked if I would take him over to meet my Mom and sister.

Within a few weeks he was my 15-year-old sister's boyfriend and eventually got our father to grant him consent to marry her after they left with her as a runaway from her custodial parent, our mother.

He then later used her to bring young girls whom she was hired to be a nanny for over to his home in Berkeley where he molested them.

He is an old fashioned peace and love hippy who likes to talk to strangers and waitresses and he is looking for "furries" and women who are "shy" and are "leaving the porn business" on the meet-up boards.

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.