Grandma…

I’ve written about other family-members, but never about my Grandma.

I had more than one, of course; my Dad’s mother died well before I was born. I remember a sepia-toned photo of her – hair back in a bun; looking serious. She was detached; defined only by my Dad’s memory of her cooking and her sense of humor (which, I’m now as convinced as I need to be, where the family SOH originated).

My maternal grandmother did not have the benefit of such distance. She, on the other hand, lived until I was ten. She was real.

Real in the sense that she chased me out of her kitchen with a rolling-pin.

Real in the sense that she never had much use for me – my nonstop-energy was always met with ‘Simmer down; young man!’

In Grandma’s world, children were to be seen; not heard – and any hearing done at all must be preceded with either “Ma’am” or “Grandma”.

I remember being puzzled at her behavior.

Now, my mother (and to a lesser extent, my Dad) always treated both my sister and I as little adults – we wern’t left out of conversations (as long as we had something intelligent to say); questions were always answered, and there weren’t Off Limits Discussions (I knew about the workings of the human body very early, as an example).

For all this, my Grandmother was convinced that I was going to Hell.

Grandpa mainly tolerated Grandma’s Old Southern Religious Bent; he didn’t complain when her favorite radio program, “Revivaltime!” was on the air; he usually slipped out of the old farmhouse in Petersburg, Virginia to smoke unfiltered Camels and nip at a flask in his hunting-jacket – and, when we were visiting, sometimes he’d give us rides in the tractor-bucket just to hear us squeal.

An hour after Grandma had obtained her weekly fill of Pharisees, Saducees, and other sizz-fizz courtesy of the radio-airwaves, she’d talk a mile-a-minute about the fact that the world was Going To Hell, Generally, and that we’d better Get Right With God.

I had always considered this to be a particular form of mental illness — at times, I actually laughed, at which point I’d be banned from the living room while Grandma foamed at the mouth some more about the Tares, and the Wheat, and how separating them was a Good Idea; that Lee had tried to do so during The War, but the Damnyankees prevented it.

Yes. Both Grandma and Grandpa were racists. It was part of the era. I learned the N-word at Grandpa’s knee – about ten minutes before my Mother forbade me to use it in polite company – but that’s another story entirely.

Grandma went to church. Three times a week, actually — Wednesday night; then Sunday morning and evening.

Evening service, she explained once, separated the Wheat from the Tares.

While I puzzled over the definition of “Tare”, I dutifully washed behind my ears and went to Church with my Mother, who dragged both my sister and I not only because her mother went, but because she Genuinely Believed, and we were both In Need.

There, I was witness to a peculiar form of the Christian religion — the “Charismatics”, or “Full Gospel” sort – but in my own mind and long before I’d done any kind of reading about this brand of lunacy, I always referred to them as The Folks Who Climbed The Stovepipes.

See, Petersburg, Virginia in the early ’60’s was a place which had half a foot in the 19th century. There were still some dirt roads at one end of town, and well outside of the city proper there were plenty of red dirt and gravel affairs. My Grandparents lived up one of them, on an old farm which had seen the Civil War and its aftermath. I don’t have any idea how this particular brand of Christianity got made, but its practitioners seemed to be limited to the more-rural ends of America.

During one particular service, after the preacher had stomped, shouted, and sweated himself through yet-another-sermon about the Wheat, the Tares, the Pharisees, the Saducees, and Sizz-Fizz, he called for ‘tesimonies’.

Now, this was an opportunity for people who’d gotten themselves Pretty Worked Up (and my Grandmother was among them) to stand up and tell the Congregation just how wonderful it was to be One of God’s Chosen; to be Going to Heaven, rather than Going to Hell along with the Pharisees; the Saducees — you get the picture.

Then, to my shock (I was, I believe, about eight), a fellow stood up, began raving in what sounded like Doublespeak, and rolled in the aisle!

Another fellow, not to be outdone, jumped up and began St. Vitus’ Dance.

Another poor woman, falling over in the aisle, began drooling and gibbering uncontrollably.

Then — as true as I’m sitting here writing this – a fellow jumped up, shouted something unintelligible to me, and ran to the old black potbellied stove in the corner – and began climbing the stovepipe.

My first thought was, “I’m glad this is summertime. He’d have burned himself otherwise.”

The next was an urgent and sincere request to my Mother:

“Mom! Do something!”

This was the response of a boy (me) who knew that his Mother was a rarified creature called a Nurse, and she could deal with the medical issues of most people, regardless of their source.

It was about a half-second after I’d said this that I felt a ‘whack!’ on the back of my head — my Grandmother had actually HIT me!

Now, my parents never laid a hand on me. It wasn’t necessary. Grandmother, on the other hand, wasn’t such a person.

I glared at her.

“Don’t you look at me this way, young man! This is GOD’S work!”

Now, at age eight, I hadn’t the presence of mind, maturity, confidence (or the words) to tell her that this was, to my sight, a particularly dangerous form of mass-hallucination which really ought to be stopped immediately for the good of the participants – but instead, I moved closer to my mother there in the pew, and shivered a bit inside.

There hadn’t been too many things which Genuinely Scared Me in my young life – -but this was one of them.

Afterward, I asked my Mom if it would be all right if I stayed with Grandpa the next time Church was suggested – (Grandpa might have smelled like unfiltered Camels and the stuff in the locked cabinet back in Dad’s office back home, but I didn’t mind. He didn’t hit me, and he gave me rides in the tractor-bucket).

Mom agreed; this wasn’t her cup-of-chicory, either. Her brand of Church was a lot more subdued – and they didn’t have a fellow who Climbed The Stovepipes, either.

This was the last time I ever went to see Mom’s parents. The next time Mom went, I begged to stay home with Dad. So did my sister.

___________________________

My Grandmother continued, to the best of my knowledge, to attend this Church, which allowed people to Climb Stovepipes, Roll in the Aisles, and Raise Hell (er; ‘Heaven’) Generally. She died when I was ten, in 1965 – the last of the Old Line Grandmothers, who chased young boys out of kitchens with rolling-pins, slapped them on the backs of their heads, told them (along with anyone else who would listen) that they were Going to Hell.

Somehow, my Mother believed that, deep down, her Mom – my Grandmother – was a good woman.

Something deep inside of me, however, said something different.

Lucifer’s Hammer…

There’s a sixteen-story wall of water heading toward the city in which you live (Los Angeles), which has been caused by the Mother of All Comets (dubbed “Lucifer’s Hammer” by the media) hitting the central Pacific Ocean.

You have one half hour to (1) get out of town, and (2) figure out what you do afterward.

This is the premise of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s masterwork, Lucifer’s Hammer – and the final review and recommendation of my series on dystopian/apocalyptic fiction.

What Niven and Pournelle’s characters learn is that getting out of town is the easy part. What comes afterward is unpleasant in the extreme.

The term ‘boiling the ocean’ in reference to creating a problem which didn’t exist before isn’t metaphor in this book – it’s real. Weeks worth of rain cause flooding on a worldwide scale; the tsunamis created by the comet’s impact literally sweep ‘round the planet, and the ‘secondary kill’ – from disease and interpersonal conflict – is massive.

Nations settle border-disputes, once and for all, with no U.N. to prevent such behavior. Neighbors settle old scores. Inevitably, bands of ne’er-do-wells, released from the restrictions of society, begin roaming the countryside, taking what they want. Civilization, as people have known it up to that point, quickly falls apart.

The book’s main characters, residents of a north-central California community which centers around a Senator’s ranch, are suddenly thrust into the reluctant position of Defenders of Civilization.

The antagonists are a group of well-armed and reasonably-well-disciplined former National Guard troops and other hangers-on; they are marching north, stripping everything for supplies, destroying the rest, and killing everyone in their path who resist them.

Lucifer’s Hammer is a book which makes no apologies about its premise, nor pulls any punches about the human condition. People are people, and in the end, people will do what they feel is necessary to survive – and all ethics, morals, and laws are a thin veneer over that instinct.

The conclusion is one of the most chilling pieces of fiction I’ve ever read – and it stands today as one of the best post-apocalyptic novels ever written.

(Niven and Pournelle have written over thirteen books together, garnering a Hugo Award nomination for Lucifer’s Hammer in 1978. A film version of the book has been attempted twice, but killed by two separate studios due to its intensity.)

On The Beach….

We’ve been treated to some interesting speculation in fiction regarding the end of the world.

In David Brin’s The Postman, we’re to believe that a secret government project created a group of super-soldiers who set out to rule the west coast after a nuclear apocalypse. The archetype of the Reluctant Hero creates a better world.

Brinkley’s The Last Ship uses an American guided-missile frigate as a plot-device; the crew are the survivors of the Last War; they find that due to radiation-exposure, the men are now sterile – they are forced to accept that teaming with the crew of a Soviet submarine (underwater; they suffered no such reproductive damage) makes it possible that the female crewmembers of the American ship and the Soviet crewmembers of the submarine might create a new beginning for humanity.

Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic vision in On The Beach offers no such form of hope. There is no reluctant-hero; no medical plot-device to save humanity. Instead, we’re offered what was thought plausible in 1957 when the book was published – that radiation would affect the entire planet, heading slowly south, killing everything in its path.

The plot-device here is a clear one; it is, in the end, the ultimate ‘what-if’: You have one year to live. The rules are what you make them. What do you do?

In the case of the characters in On The Beach, they make do; they make love; they try to make sense of the self-imposed deadline-of-oblivion.

Beginning with the arrival of an American submarine and its crew in Melbourne, the book covers the scientific issues first, laying the groundwork for the rest of the novel. The scientific community in Australia is split between two theories – one holds that radioactive material will be brought to Southern Australia and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere within a year; the other holds that the radiation is likely dissipating in the far north – and they need the captain of the submarine and his crew to investigate these theories by traveling north to take air samples and background radiation readings.

The voyage is one of desperation. Australian naval officers are asked to volunteer; one does, over the strenuous objections of his wife, who is informed that he’ll be back – one way or another – before either the end, or the beginning.

The characters spend what time they have swimming in the ocean – they have section of beach which is a favorite; this becomes a metaphor for life – at least a semblance of life the Way It Used To Be.

One of the characters, Moira, insists on crawling inside a bottle when she isn’t in a swimsuit. The wife of the Australian naval officer is in a state of perpetual denial. The captain of the submarine is in another form of denial; envisioning his family as safe, when he knows they were living in the middle of one of the bomb-targets.

The journey northward to find life becomes one of gradual enlightenment for the characters. As the submarine moves north, finding no life and no hope, the captain comes to terms with his loss; Moira realizes that while the bottle isn’t her friend, it’s not her crutch any longer.

Other characters begin to act out the main premise – one couple plants a garden they will never harvest; the yacht-club has fewer and fewer visitors, but some insist on perpetuating tradition; one character organizes a no-holds-barred auto-race, preferring to go out either with a trophy, or in fire.

All the while, the radiation creeps ever southward; the submarine returns, having found nothing of value and no hope to embrace – the main characters are a metaphor for all of us, doing what they can, as best they can, as the end arrives.

(On The Beach was Nevil Shute’s first novel after his emigration to Australia, and is his best known work. The book was made into a feature film in 1959; while the film was a groundbreaking piece of cinema winning two Academy Awards, Shute himself detested the film, believing his characters were changed far more than necessary. )

Alas; Babylon….

Alas; Babylon, written by novelist and newspaperman Pat Frank, was published at the height of the Cold War, in 1959. It was the first of its genre – the genuine post-nuclear-apocalypse novel, written from the viewpoint of two brothers who hail from a sleepy town in Florida.

The term is actually a code between them from growing up – -they’d slip out to listen to the local preacher on Sunday evening under one of the church-windows; while the man thundered about ‘bad women’ and ‘bad men’ (and sometimes described what they did), he’d punctuate his sermons with “Alas; Babylon!”

The code was simple – when something was about to hit the fan in a big way – if one broke a window playing baseball, or failed a big test at school; was about to receive a bad report-card, one would give the other the heads-up with the phrase, “Alas; Babylon!”

The two boys grew up; one joined the Air Force after college; the other stayed on to run the family farm, and became something of a genteel and educated yet derelict bachelor.

Both of their lives change forever when the one brother, now a Colonel, sends the other a note informing him that he’ll be flying in over the weekend to ‘help with things’ – and ends with the words, “Alas; Babylon”.

The news the one brother brings his sibling is not good – he has information that the balloon is about to go up, and as the family farm is in a sparsely-occupied part of Florida, it would make an excellent place as a refuge for the Colonel’s family. They arrive for a ‘short visit’ – hoping that in a few days, they’ll all be laughing about an over-anxious brother.

Laughter, though, is not what this book is about.

The balloon does go up – as multiple bombs are dropped on military targets in Florida, with the peaceful little mythical town of Fort Repose being in the center of the safe-zone.

What follows is an excellent treatment of the human condition – the whys and hows of putting life back together; the inevitable lawlessness, and its equally-savage ‘correction’; the re-adoption of old ways, and the rejection of now-unsupportable luxuries. There is an efficiency to Frank’s treatment of the topic – workmanlike prose which never leaves the reader wanting more, and never leaves the reader without a singular purpose for reading onward.

The topic is not romanticized; the small Florida town is a backwater; the people doing the best they can to survive, and while the outcome isn’t in doubt, the reader gradually realizes that the characters are in the best of all possible places – no need to cut firewood; plenty of fish, fruit, and other edibles; few issues which hard work can’t resolve – in sum, a paradise – liberated from politics and electricity.

Alas; Babylon is a rare book – one of those novels which will force you to think; a book which will make you examine your own reactions to events both negative and positive, and, in the end, which will force you to consider that should civilization come to an end, the real problem isn’t the event – it’s what we do afterward.

(Pat Frank was awarded the American Heritage Foundation Award for writing and journalism in 1961, in part for his work on the groundbreaking novel Alas; Babylon.

Alas; Babylon has been in print continuously since 1959.)

Baby Names and Baseball….

(Wrigley Alexander Fields)

The other day, I came across this piece of News of the Weird, and wondered if it was true – so I looked it up to see.

I was right. Some couple with a bent for baseball used their last name as a ‘foil’ for a first name – and their newborn son was named Wrigley.

That’s right. His full name is Wrigley Alexander Fields. According to the parents, he’ll be permitted to use his middle name as he grows up – a ‘bye’ he’ll appreciate, no doubt, as it will save him endless mental (and perhaps physical) trauma at the hands of his schoolmates.

(For those of you from other countries, or who aren’t ardent baseball fans, Wrigley Field is in Chicago, Illinois, and has been the home of the Chicago Cubs baseball-team since the Year Dot. It was built by that same fellow who gave us Doublemint and Juicy-Fruit – the chewing-gum king – but that’s another tale entirely).

I’m reminded of similar incidents.

Growing up, there was a ‘Pies’ family in town. Decent folk; really – but rather dull-witted, if in a humorous way. They named their only daughter ‘Honey’.

You got it. Honey Pies.

She got teased. After a while, the novelty wore off, but not before she likely developed a loathing for her parents.

Like Beavis and Butt-Head, we never saw her parents at school functions. Gods above only know what their first names were.

In college, I knew a girl whose family name was ‘Bugg’.

Now, this was – or could have been – bad enough, had her parents simply owned up to a mischance of lineage and left well enough alone, naming their daughter Cindy or Lisa or something similar.

No.

They had to exercise a sick sense of humor about the thing. Their darling little girl was, no doubt, a few hours old when they signed the certificate, naming her ‘Ima June’.

That’s right. This poor girl has gone through life with the name ‘Ima June Bugg’.

They didn’t even give her a ‘bye’ or an ‘out’, like Alex Fields’ parents – her middle name is unusable, too. She was either ‘Ima Bugg’, or ‘June Bugg’.

There ought to be a law.

In fact, there is – in at least two countries (Australia and Austria) – in both, there are naming-boards for children, and rules to follow, so you don’t cause Little Snookie any undue trauma in their later lives.

Here, we’re so hung-up on ‘free speech’ as a catch-all for many forms of lunacy that we’ll likely never see a law forbidding giving the name ‘Ben’ to a boy from the ‘Dover’ family.

I knew one of those, too.

I’m given to understand there’s an entire association for people named ‘Ben Dover’. Sad; but they probably need all the support they can get.

I worked with a fellow whose family name was ‘Love’. I imagine the given-name was something traditional, or at least was some sort of ‘family-name’ from back in the day.

They named their little boy – and my eventual co-worker – “Oral Love”.

Yes. That’s right. It was unintentional, but my co-worker was a walking blow-job.

The winner, however, was relayed to me by a good friend who’s an OB-GYN.

Most of the time, she tells her charges (in four languages, she can do this, by the way) to ‘put nothing in your vagina for six weeks’; reviews a basic-care-of-baby pamphlet (in Oregon, it’s printed in four languages, also), and reviews basic personal hygiene for the duration.

On rare occasions, she treats exotic forms of VD and the occasional yeast-infection.

On one special day, however, she entered a post-delivery room to find the hospital administrator (think that Cuddy gal from the TV show, “House”), plus a charge-nurse, having a conversation with a young lady who’d just given birth to a healthy baby girl.

Turns out she’d read a note on the clipboard at the foot of her bed (her own medical records), and wanted two words she’d read there to be the baby’s first and middle names.

The hospital administrator had been called by the charge-nurse to help talk her out of it.

However, there’s no law – and she was dead-set – so there’s now a little girl running around Oregon, some twelve years later, with a name about which I can only shake my head and wonder:

Chlamydia Urethra.

I’ve been told that I’m pretty good with words, both spoken and in print – but there are times when words really do fail me, and this is one of them.

I can only shake my head.

Earth Abides —

When discussing the greatest novels of science-fiction, several come to mind – the ‘Grey Lensman’ series of “Doc” Smith; the “Foundation” series of Isaac Asimov; the collected works of Ray Bradbury.

I was discussing the genre with a friend of mine the other day, and asked if he’d ever read “Earth Abides” by George Stewart. He said, “No – should I?” I had to pause – because this book made a huge impact on me when I first read it at age seventeen.

“Earth Abides” is the story of a fellow named Isherwood Williams – a serious man whose occupation, up to the beginning of the book, is that of college-student.

“Ish” (as he’s known to his friends and family) is hiking in the hills around the San Francisco Bay area, where he finds a cave. He’s bitten by a snake, and spends the next few days there, suffering from snake bite and fever.

What he doesn’t know is that the alchemy of the snake-venom has protected him from something far worse – a plague which has wiped out nearly all of Earth’s population.

The rest of the book deals with finding people – and rebuilding a society in which everyone can live.

There are no biker-gangs or warlord-chieftains; no mutant humans or animals from some nuclear apocalypse. Absent are the “us against them” themes present in so many other books of this genre.

Stewart instead focuses on deeper meanings – the word “Ish”, for example, means “man” in Hebrew – and the coincidence is not trivial, nor do I believe it was unintended.

“Ish”, in his search for others, encounters an African-American woman (groundbreaking in and of itself for the year the novel was published, 1949); they choose each other to build a core family-unit and to create a new civilization.

She provides the common-sense counterbalance to his educated approach. Together, they have children; repair what we now call ‘infrastructure’, and attract other people with distinct talents and personalities into their personal orbit, all without creating an autocracy.

The plot-device of ‘everything’s-gone-now-let’s-start-over’ is a popular one nowadays; the best of these novels asks the central questions, “How do we make things better?”, and “What would we change, if we could?”

In Stewart’s future-past, some of the decisions are made for the characters involved.

Two of them set up housekeeping in the nicest home in the area – and they have a television; a large console radio; other things which now have no meaning, as there are no television or radio-signals. “Ish” tries his hand at starting a school – and finds that the children are not interested in math, science, or even learning to read – because those things no longer have meaning.

He ends his school, in a metaphor for civilization itself, by teaching them how to make a bow and arrows – and turns them out the school-door with their new tools.

While Stewart puts his characters in a dungeon which is soon without lights, water, and indoor plumbing, they all find their way out – and into the new light of a better tomorrow. There is no glamour; no glitz; no evil-bad-guy formula; no characters with the compulsion of, say, a George Peppard in “Damnation Alley” – but there are solid, real people facing solid, real problems – and they manage to emerge, triumphant.

(George Stewart was a professor of English literature at Berkeley. He was an expert on place-names and naming-systems – he was responsible for the naming-system of tropical storms which is still in use. His books on toponymic research are still respected and used in that field to this day.

Earth Abides won the International Fantasy Award in 1951, as well as the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 1990. It is listed in both Pringle’s “100 Best Books”, as well as Locus Magazine’s “All Time Best Science Fiction”. Steven King cites it as the main inspiration for his own novel, The Stand.)

A Pause, Before the Show….

(Show Chow — 2006)

Well, this coming week, I’ve got a lot of fun-and-games with the business — as most of you are aware, I own two businesses; one of which is a design and interior-remodeling business.

Every year, we do four trade shows. Two of them are coming up in rapid succession, and one of them is this week.

I may be kind of scarce – but there’ll be updates as I get them, complete with tales from the show, photos, more show-chow (remember LAST time?) and all sorts of fun and games.

(Who am I kidding? I’ll probably smuggle a couple of bottles of wine to the last two days and anaesthetize myself with liberal oral application thereof.)

So, by way of a placeholder (thanks; Sans!) – here are some maps of places I’ve been:

(No, Europe isn’t a ‘country’ -as 12% of Americans believe. These are the places I’ve been, in red.)

(Yes, Hawai’i is part of the United States – some 8% of Americans didn’t think so on the National Geo survey – here are the states I’ve visted on either pleasure, business, or both)

(Yes, Canada is a separate country, contrary to what a whopping 10% of Americans believed in the same National Geo survey – I’ve been to nearly every province bordering the U.S.)

Have a great rest of your Sunday, folks!