I was referring to my brother (as 'a born capitalist'):
And who got 'sent up' - a particularly apt turn of phrase, considering the circumstances - some years later, when he was then in high school, to northern California to live with our dad, when he became too much of a 'reiver' (see Wm Faulkner) for our mother to handle. She was long divorced by then - and had moved on, from the service station, to a better-paying job, as the bookkeeper (for which she had had a little training in the secretarial school that she attended upon her first divorce, from our father) for a man whom she had met through the service station job (and whom she became the mistress of; another story) - when things between them came to a head.
There had been relatively small things - like the time he lashed out and hit her because she got upset at how long he had been talking on the phone to some girlfriend or other (he had a number of them; was something of a ladies' man, with a hefty head of hair to match the image. This was well before Elvis and his lookalikes took over the scene), and hung up the phone 'for' him mid-sentence, as it were. That caused a bit of a kerfuffle. (That she tried to drag me into, on her side; but which I politely - to say, in silence - refrained from doing, choosing to stay well clear of the encounter. I'm not sure if she ever forgave me for that betrayal. Mom never showed her feelings much; wasn't the 'type', or whatever.) But the end came when he had snuck her car out of the garage one night - he had gotten away with that daring deed a couple of times already (I'm not sure how much of this information I was privy to; I think I knew about at least some of it. But it was nothing to do with me, except in a sort of 'boy, are you going to get it when Mom finds out' sort of arms-length attitude) - and couldn't sneak it back in because her 'boyfriend's' car was blocking the driveway.
He slipped in the back door and into our bedroom, just adjacent (Mom was in the front room with her gentleman caller on the other side of the house; which was where her bedroom was as well, hence my brother's ability to sneak her car out of the garage of a night without her knowledge; pushing it out to the road), and quietly woke me up, and told me what was up, and asked me what he should do. Try to wait Jack's visit out, or...
Tell her, I told him. (Even at that tender age, not thinking that in life you should dig a hole deeper that you're standing in.)
Which he proceeded to do And which ended his time in her house.
(Actually, he came back years later - when we had moved to another, nicer house; in part on her lover's dime - when our father kicked him out of his house, for being too much for him to handle, and my brother1 promised our mother that he would settle down. Which he did. For a time. Going to the local junior college, and taking a course on meteorology, I think it was. But even that ended badly. But that's definitely another story. Although it had a major connection with his being "a born capitalist", and budding entrepreneur. What Mom called "living with your head in the clouds; just like your father" when she found out that he wasn't going to classes, had gotten involved in some cockamamie scheme to sell a program of record-playing to local radio outlets around the state.)
...Mom's car. Her first car. Her pride and joy.
Certainly her sons weren't filling that role. Not that I was any trouble to her. But I was an accessory to the fact of my brother's abuse of her trust. And there was the second time that our dad tried to 'kidnap' us - not letting us go back home after a summer's stay with him, and his new wife, and our baby half-sister, while Mom did her summer thing, whatever it was, she didn't say - excuse me; that's a song lyric. I meant to say, that 'she never said'; never talked about. ( Gotta get Yesterday out of my mind...)
- But yes; the attempted kidnap. When she came to our dad's house - shortly after we had started school up there, and all - in a car, with a policeman (actually, a sheriff. Not sure what the difference is. To say, the different jurisdictions But she knew, by then. Having had to go through the legal rigamarole the first time, when I was just a little bitty baby - stop that), and drove us back down south, in an uncomfortable silence. And then found out, a short while later, that while up there, we both had signed legal documents stating that our mother kept liquor in the house - which was true - and that we wanted to live with our father - which was not true, at least not for me.2
So I was no pride and joy to her, either. But her car! That was another matter.
It was a black Plymouth, hot off the dealer's lot. The cheapest range of cars in the GM range, I was to discover later; but this was the purchase of a woman, from farming stock in Podunkville - back of beyond - who had set out in life - after having two children - on her own (seeing no future for herself, or her children, on the path that she was on - that she had been set on, by family circumstances), and had finally made something of herself, by at least earning enough money to buy her own car.
This was around 1947. (I would, then, have been around 13 at the time, to go by the car.) I don't remember if she drove it, on its maiden voyage in the consumer world, to the house; she may well have. But she called me out of the house to have a look at it, I remember. She was quite proud. (I have indicated above that she was never very effusive at the best of times; so with her, it was a quiet pride as well. But obvious, for all that.)
And then she asked me to take a ride in it with her. (I don't remember where my brother was at the time. He would have been still with us, at that time. But probably off with his girlfriends somewhere. Or maybe with 'the guys'. He collected them both; a little like trophies.) So, off we went. And periodically see would pass a pedestrian, and she would say - a little giddily: "Look, son, look. See that? They're looking at us. See?"
Er; yeeahh...
I have often wondered what would have happened in my life if my father had ever really looked at my mother; and better yet, let her know it. Know, how lucky he was.
She was, really, beautiful.3
Certainly not cut out for Podunkville.
And serving coffee, while her husband was off at university, having fun...
Mom - Rita, to give her full dues - died in the early '70s, from breast cancer. A double sad story. By that time I had well set out in life, on the road less traveled; leaving university - and a possible medical career - to go, in her mind, chase a will o' the wisp, and had never really accomplished anything, in her eyes. Just like my brother. I, too, became (after a promising start; student body president at my high school, and scholarship to a prestigious university, and such) "just like your father, with your head in the clouds". To the point where, during her - orthodox - cancer treatment, when I tried to alert her to some excellent 'alternative' work on cancer treatment being done by a woman very near where she and her third husband then lived (inland from La Jolla, just north of San Diego), her reply to me was, "Why should I listen to you. You never went to medical school." Ouch. So, for whatever reasons - karma can be a bitch - I wasn't able to help her in the end. She had to trod her path. And I had to trod mine. And they met, ever so briefly, before going on their separate ways.
But I'm glad we met, Rita. And I'm sorry that I didn't live up to your hoped-for expectations. But you, of all people, know that one just has to strike out on their own in their lives, sometimes, and can't forecast the future. Just has to 'go for it' - for their dream, in their way.
As for my brother, and the last word here in memoriam. He died some years before our mother, in an accident, that is still too long a story to go into here. But I do want to give him his dues, for two particular reasons. First of all, in particular for giving me a home to return to, after I had 'done my dash' to Washington, with me message to humanity. (Which is just now coming around to fruition/its day in the sun. Patience is a virtue.) And secondly, for having a good heart in general. For all the trouble he got into when younger, my brother ended up showing his true colors; and as part of that, was a stalwart in his Church, at and to the end. A pleasure to have known you, and have had you as a brother, Bob - er, DeVon.
---
footnotes:
1 given name of DeVon. Which he was a little embarrassed about; and our mom finding out about when some mail - from a body-building business (Charles Atlas, for those of you old enough to remember the ads. for no longer being 'a 90-pound weakling' that the bad guy kicked sand into the face of, and soon got his comeuppance, boy, for just whatever-it-was to buy the book) - arrived at the house for a 'Bob' Stanfield.
He had never let me in to that little life factor of his; which was almost his undoing when one day, while I was watching him play baseball, I called out - when he had done something well - "Nice one, DeVon," and a teammate of his looked at him and said, "I thought you said your name was Bob." I'm not sure how he got out of that one. Knowing him, he did.
2 My brother...
While staying with our dad that summer, one day he drove us to another town, no reason given - except to tell us, I think, that it was where he had brought us when we "were little" - i.e., when he had kidnapped us from where we were living as boarders in a house in Boise, Idaho (near where our mother was living; but who didn't really have much to do with us at that point, while she concentrated on going to secretarial school, in order to be able to look out for herself in life, depending on life's circumstances), and had brought us there - to Santa Rosa, in the middle of northern California. I don't recall if he ever told me (or know if he ever told my brother) why there; I just know that this time it turned out to be to go to a lawyer's office, and be given some papers to sign, in order to come and live with him.
What?!
"But - but all my friends..."
You will make new friends, our father told me, evenly, if a bit reproachfully.
Silence.
The lawyer, as I recall, looked at papers in front of him. (He may well not have been prepared for such insurrection in the ranks.)
I looked - somewhat beseechingly, perhaps; at the least, questioningly (I like to think somewhat accusingly), to my brother.
No help there.
Somewhat forlornly - and not liking this place at all - I signed.
Years later, when I asked my brother about 'all that', he said to me, somewhat apologetically, that I just didn't know how persuasive our dad could be.
We even lost our pet dog in the bargain. When our mother came for us, in the car with the sheriff, Duke - a black spaniel - was off in the neighborhood somewhere, and had to be left behind. For a new life for him, at least...
(And 'years later' - at some point - my brother, who ended up being 'big' into visiting people and places from our youth, traced down the people who had somehow inherited our dog. He reported two things. One: Duke - or whatever his new name was - didn't recognize him. (Or at least, gave no indication of such. Or, he could have been miffed at him - how could we go off and leave him like that, etc. - and wasn't going to give him a thing. Not even a slight tail swag; nothing. Hmph; or whatever dogs feel in such a situation.) And two: 'Duke' was obviously spoiled rotten, being extremely overweight.
So, there.)
3 I have written elsewhere that she was told by some young man, whom she was serving in the little diner, connected to a filling station (there is that motif again; a story of her life), that she ran, while our father was going to Brigham Young University (to try to better himself), that she looked "like one of them movie stars; what's her name. Olivia de Haviland, yeah, that's the one," which prompted her to have a go at Hollywood. And left me in diapers at the time, my paternal grandmother told me years later.
But that's all another story. But just to say here, that that information helped to clear up the double mystery, of why she had talked our stepfather into moving to southern California - and close to Hollywood - at the outbreak of war (telling him that there would be good work in the shipyards down there); and, once there, and divorced, why she would disappear during the summers, and not share anything about where she had gone, or was up to, during those times. It was all, simply, none of my business.*
But hey - I got some nice weeks at the YMCA summer camp in the mountains out of it all. And I look at where I am in my life today, and can honestly say, that I'm a happy camper.
Thanks, Mom.
Now if humanity will just come through for the home team...
* It became my impression that she went to places where movie stars congregated; obviously hoping to be seen by a talent scout, or otherwise 'passed on' to some movie mogul She let slip once that she had met Doris Day around a swimming pool.
Not that she was above meeting people in other types of watering holes: she knew the value of bars. In one of which was where she met the man who would become her third husband (a very nice guy; very cultured, who took good care of her to the end). But all that is another story. Just to mention this part of it here, to indicate how she was infatuated with The Great American Dream, of success.
Not that there's anything wrong with it. In moderation...
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