My Family

I never had a mother.  Or a father either, really, for that matter.

They were strangers to me.  My mother, whom I grew up with, after she divorced my father when I was still in diapers, was what could at best be described as a caretaker.  And of my brother, who was three years older than me.  But he got in trouble with our mother when he hit puberty, and she ‘couldn’t control him’.  A bit of a story, there.  And she sent him off to live with our father, who was remarried by then, and living upstate.

This was in California.  From our beginnings in Utah.  Mormon country.  Which religion both sides of our ‘family’ were members of.  But our mother quit the Church when she got a Temple divorce from our father, and set off on her own in life; and, though she sent my brother and I dutifully off to Church on Sundays - it was very possibly part of the terms of the divorce - it was never central to our upbringing.  Until later in life, when my brother got very much involved in it; and, at one point, so did I.  For a short time.  As I continued my search into ‘spiritual’ matters.  About the usual.  Who am I; Why am I Here; What is Life all About.  As I say: the usual.

But I get ahead of myself a bit, in talking about my mother and I.

I never really knew her.  She was a strange lady who appeared in my life from time to time while I was just a tyke.  I remember one day, when my brother and I were living in a house run by an old couple - whom we called/were told to call ‘Grandma and Grandpa Coble’ (though they were not relatives to us, just an old couple who took kids in for varying periods of time for their parents; in my case, from a very early age to halfway through the first grade) - and my brother said to me, “C’mon, we’re going to go visit our mother.”

What’s a mother? I wondered.  But off I went.  Whatever my brother said.   And he took me to an upstairs apartment, not too far away from where we lived, where this strange lady was, who had hidden some candy Easter eggs around her apartment, and we were to go on an Easter egg hunt.  (I remember finding one of them nestled up in the top of a floor lamp.)  And that was it.  Until another time, when he said the same sort of thing to me, and I tagged along with him, on what was Christmas Eve, and we went to a small house where this strange lady lived by then - also fairly near to where we lived.  And she had a small Christmas tree in her front room, under which were a few gifts for each of us.  And we were given leave to unwrap one each, before Christmas itself.  (I forget what my present was.)  And again, that was it.  Back ’home’ we went.  No conversation with this strange lady.  No hugs.  Just come, and go.  And another time, when, for some strange reason, she had something to do with a small birthday gathering for me, of some strange kids (I think they were the kids from my Sunday School class, that she had roped into the occasion) in a park near the one that we lived alongside of.  Again, no contact.  Just - presence.  Off and on.  While I was growing up.

Until the day, halfway through my first grade, when she got married, in someone’s front room, and we went off with her, to live in a town not too far away.  This was Boise, Idaho to start with, and Payette to go live in.  For a year and a half.  During which time, December 7th - Pearl Harbor Day - occurred.  Which occasioned our move quite far away, to southern California, and a town near the beach, called, fittingly enough, Long Beach.*  Where I grew up, until I quit school, at the end of my Junior year at Stanford, and went off looking for answers to life.  And where I have returned.  After all these years.  Of my lifetime of searching.  To see out my latter days in the sun.

In the town where I never, really, knew my mother.

Or my father, either.  Really.  For that matter.

Which has allowed me to realize, beyond what most - or at least, many - people come to, in their warmly embraced family-focused lives, that I’m not really from here.  

That this is not my real home.

That this is all just an illusion.

And the point is to recognize that about it.  And treat it like it is.  Like a classroom.

And graduate.  And start heading for one’s real home.

To get on with

The Journey.

                                                               The End

                                                                     of

                                                                  A Life 


P.S. I didn't mean to make this report on A Life sound too harsh on this soul who was my mother in this life.  She did, after all, secretly get me involved in learning to play a musical instrument (and thus gave me a lifelong appreciation for music) and paid for a clarinet for me, and paid to have braces put on my teeth, and my wisdom teeth taken out, and have a mole taken off my chin, and paid for a membership to the Y (where I learned how to play basketball; good enough to make All-City in my senior year in nigh school) - all from her own earnings - and let me grow up My Way.  But the basic fact remains that I was an investment to her, and for her; and when I dropped out of (formal) school, there was hell to pay at home.  Such as it was.
     Nevertheless, she 'taught' me - by example - something very valuable; about standing on your own two feet in life, and going for your dream.  For that:
     Thanks, Mom.       

—

* Briefly, the story: Our mother had been running a small cafe alongside a small gas station in my birth town of Provo, Utah, while our father was going to Brigham Young University - and chafing under the ‘insult’ of having to work while he “got to go to school” (as I found out the dynamics of later on in life) - when one fine day one of the guys eating there commented on her looks - “You look like that Hollywood actress, with the uppity name - de Havilland.  Olivia de Havilland; that’s it” - and that was enough for her to up sticks and head for Hollywood.  (This was in the mid-''30s.  A very magical place.)  Leaving me still in diapers, I was told later by my paternal grandmother.  And when she came back from southern California - with nothing to show for her wild-card play except some education about the area - she divorced our father and headed for the big town of Boise to enroll in Secretarial school, taking us along for - as I was to find out later in life - insurance for her old age.  Ever the practical one; regardless of the Hollywood caper.  And so, when she remarried, and moved to podunkville (i.e., to someone with ambitions), and Pearl Harbor occurred, she knew about the area where ‘a lot of money could be made’ in either the shipyards of Long Beach or the Douglas Aircraft Assembly Plant there, as she told her (successful small-town businessman) husband.  Hinting at it (with womanly wiles, no doubt), until he agreed to give up his comfortable small-town life and, all unbeknownst to him, help her go chase after her ulteriorally-motivated dream.           

   (Where subsequently she divorced him as well, and ‘set out’ on her own path in life again; continuing her quixotic quest on the side.  Ever the dreamer.  Ironically accusing first our father, and then my brother, and then me in turn, of ‘having your head in the clouds’.

   Well; how right she was.

   As do we all.

   But to continue.)

    

—-

N.B. Worth reporting on:

     I have just seen a clip of Sen. Dianne Feinstein shocking her base at a public event in San Francisco by claiming that, rather than supporting an impeachment process - which she had been through (with Slick Willy), and didn't recommend it - she felt that President Trump could turn out (admittedly with some changes) to be a good president “yet”.

     There’s hope for this country, and its leadership, yet.