Distance

20 

It started soon after my mother had moved into my sister's bedroom. I would get invited in for talks and these talks would be the first of the how she was wronged stories and how Dad was a terrible person tales. Now here's the thing, as mother had spent years with me over-hearing her tell similar derogatory stories about me to other people, I already took these new stories with a grain of salt.

I need to back up a bit. While my sister effectively raised me during my earliest years, my mother would demonize me to her friends and perhaps one of my brothers. As I was too young at first to understand what she was saying, she would get comfortable doing these poison sessions while I was in the very next room playing. These put downs of me and tales of how burdened she was by having to deal with my existence was just the background noise I grew-up in. I was about four years old when I realized these tales of want were about me, but I was too young at the time to have a clue what I should do about it and so it just remained the background noise in the house. And I became quite use to not reacting when people were putting me down or belittling me in earshot.

But my mother had now found a new role for me in life, and that was to be her confidante. Not only that, but I was going to be something she could use against dad, by first trying to poison me against him, or more simply by taking me away from him.

As I had worked my way up in the haying business to help out with driving the tractor during bail pick ups and helping to deliver, I was eager to find out what I could graduate to as the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Four came around. Instead my mother had a surprise for me, she and I were going out to Wyoming to visit my sister, for a month. This left me torn. I would love to see my sister, but it would mean I'd miss out on part of haying season and seeing my friends. My only solace was that the haying season had recently become split with the field being used for two cycles, one in June and one in August. So my hope was I could at least participate in the August harvest.

The trip from New England to Wyoming was the second time I'd ever flown, and this time there was a change of planes in Denver, Colorado. While we never saw much of Logan airport where we would leave from and come back to, at Stapleton we had a couple hours to kill until we took the flight through Wyoming. This meant sauntering down the airport hallways, visiting the various shops and even grabbing a snack. This was before I had even been to a mall for the first time in my life so a building with all these different shops under one roof, and that roof also served as an airport, was mind blowing to me.

One of the shops that particularly grabbed my interest was one which featured Mexican jumping beans. They came in a little flat plastic box, about an inch and a half per side, the bottom half was colored plastic and the top half the clear plastic lid allowing you see them jumping. While I had heard of Mexican jumping beans, I think through cartoons, I had assumed it was a joke and didn't realize they actually existed. I asked mom if I could have a box and she said, ''Maybe, on the way back.''

The flight through Wyoming was also a new experience as, unlike all other flights I had been on that were direct to their destination, this plane landed at various towns before getting to the one we wanted. So the plane would land, some people would get off, some would get on, then take off again, then land again, let some people off, etc. The good news was, unlike today's typical flights, our plane didn't have to wait in line once it landed or before taking off as it was pretty much the only plane at these little airports.

Finally, we were there. My sister and her husband picked us up and first took us to the apartment. As we were staying a whole month, my mother thought it'd save money if we just rented a furnished apartment. At the time I thought that was okay, though the apartment didn't have any bedrooms, so my mother slept on the couch in the living room section and I got to use a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor. Once our luggage was dropped off, we then went to their house. A rental itself, it was next to a sugar beet field and by the middle of the month a traveling carnival set-up on the far side of the field.

Yet so much of my time became sitting to one side and listening while mom and sis talked, occasionally her husband would add a few words. As the days moved on, my role developed into tagging along as we saw the sights. One on one time with my sister, I think, ended up being one game of cards when her husband took our mother out somewhere for more sights. To make our time at the apartment more interesting my sister offered us the use of her portable record player, though the choice of albums to borrow had to include records that my mother wouldn't mind listening to, so that left me with The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album and the Cast Album of Hair as the only two records for me.

When not visiting my sister, our time at the apartment largely became my mother going through the classified ads in the local paper and circling some while I would just roam the apartment building and its surrounding yard. The building was an old family home which had been subdivided into apartments. Two on the bottom floor, two in the second floor, though one of those was the landlord's apartment. Was there a fifth apartment in some attic level? I don't remember. This was the time I came to know of Cracker Jacks as mother would supply me with a box for lunch and I would often sit on the front porch of the building and watch the squirrels do their work. I would sometimes provide a few popcorn kernels for them if they wanted to come up. The landlord showed me that I could hold it out and the squirrels would sometimes come up and take it out of my hand.

After circling some ads from the paper, mother would go out for a while to ''run errands'' while I stayed behind. The first time I did what I usually did and roamed the grounds or the hallway. The landlord invited me into his apartment and we visited for about an hour and a half until my mother knocked at his door trying to find me. Once retrieved and back in our apartment, mom was horrified that I had gone into a strange man's apartment and from then on I was supposed to hide in our apartment when she would run on her ''errands'' and be very quiet so the landlord didn't know I had been left alone. Hiding meant I couldn't look out the windows, there was no television, so when my mother was gone at these times I listened to one of the two record albums on the portable player at a very, very low volume so it couldn't be heard across the hall. As my brother already had Sgt. Peppers back in New England, I had heard that album quite often. So I consoled myself with listening to the Cast Album of Hair, over and over again. I had probably memorized all the words by the time the month was over, though have long since forgotten them as I've never heard the album again during the rest of my life.

Don't get me wrong, there were many highlights of the trip. We would drive by the coal pits where my sister's husband worked as a strip miner, and we visited his parents' home a few times. It was a new custom built house for them and included his father's gun making shop. As it turned out I was more interested in the gun making shop, and his father more interested in gun and bullet making than visiting with my mother, so I hung-out with him and watched as he worked. He pretty much made rifles, but also showed me his prized hand guns.

One of the first things I got to watch him make were the little cannon balls for the little cannon that would be fired for the Fourth of July. The lead would heat-up to a shimmery liquid in a little metal bowl with a handle and a little open top spout to one side. Once melted, he'd lift the bowl and tip it so the molten lead would run down the spout and into a hole at the top of a closed block. He'd stop pouring once the lead over-flowed a bit and one time a drop sputtered to the table top where it spun and sizzled for a quick moment. The drop had a small stain on one side as it had first touched the table, I watched that stain as it split in two and each half moved away from the other to opposite sides before the drop hardened and stopped moving. I was tickled by this as it made me think of how the continents of Earth had been formed by a single dry area splitting and flowing to opposite sides as well.

There were the obligatory battlefields to visit, but they were just stretches of field like any other except for the plaques posted here and there. More interesting was down town as it was an actual, true western town with cowboy themed bars, shops and clothing stores. We looked in one and I was awarded with my very own pair of cowboy boots. My sister's father-in-law had horses at his spread and we got to ride them a few times; it was my first time riding a horse. And also my first time seeing a full sized train, in person that is, as the town was ringed by train tracks that would often close down roads as open top box cars heaping with coal would then take five to ten minutes to roll past. Even the father-in-law's driveway had a train track across it so I got see a train roll on by from just a few feet away.

Fourth of July at my sister's father-in-law's house was essentially him, his wife, my sister, my mother and my brother-in-law. He had taken it upon himself to buy all kinds of fireworks. In New England, we would usually see fireworks from a distance fired over a nearby lake, with the only hands on touch being long cattail like sparklers or little paper drops that popped when you threw them at the ground. But for this Fourth of July everything was hands on as we lit fuses and then ran away before the firework went off, or tossed it into the air to burst. Mother was mortified and insisted that I only watch, but my sister's husband was more sure of my skill and forced a compromise where I would light the small fire crackers and such, and he would light the cherry bombs and rockets. It was the most up close and personal Fourth of July I ever had, all fingers survived, and it was topped-off by the firing of the miniature cannon. I first got to watch as it was packed with gun powder and wadding, then one of the little cannon balls I had seen being made a few nights earlier was rolled in and all was packed with a little rod. We then all stood behind the canon as it was lit. Pow! and it rolled back a little bit from the recoil. I asked if we could do that again and my wish was granted. Pow!

Once, while my sister and mother stayed at the in-laws' ranch with them, my brother-in-law took me out for something special. It was a surprisingly long drive. I say surprisingly long drive as, even in rural New England all houses and buildings were well within a mile or two of each other, where as out west the nearest neighbor or business was sometimes many miles away. So I had gotten used to a drive between houses to be several minutes, but this drive was more like an hour. We arrived next to a small hill and parked there just as twilight was beginning. We quietly crawled up a small hill and peeked over the top to see a small valley, at the far side of which were some wild rabbits. A few of the wild rabbits had horns and were facing in our direction. He explained that these were jackalope: The ones moving around without the horns were the female ones, the ones with horns facing our direction were the male jackalope. He said we must have made too much noise crawling up the hill as the horned rabbits were very still, listening in our direction, but if we were very still and quiet they might start to move. He had a pair of binoculars and we spent a little time watching as the sun set. But the horned rabbits never moved, as we were apparently still too noisy. Then we had to leave before it got too dark.

The month ended with a birthday dinner for my mother at a local fancy restaurant a fair drive away from the main town. There we had a full rack of lamb served for all of us. The place itself was an old family wooden cabin that had been converted to a restaurant. Various sepia pictures of unknown people adorned the walls along with old tools and other kitsch. While this would become a common restaurant decoration style by the end of the Twentieth Century, this was still a novel experience for me at that time.

Then in the last days before we boarded the plane to leave, we went out for a prairie dog hunt. Again at the in-laws' property, my sister, brother-in-law, my mother and I all went out to a nearby prairie dog 'village' in a field and hid on our bellies behind a small rise. Brother-in-law took the first few shots, then offered mother a chance, she passed and so he offered me a chance. Mother wasn't thrilled but had become used to her son-in-law getting his way and he showed me how to hold the rifle and look through the scoped sight. The goal was to aim for the back of a prairie dog's neck and shoot to sever the spinal cord and thus kill the dog instantly. I took careful aim and looked through the cross hairs... and pulled the trigger. ''Good,'' he said, ''Now that one.'' I took aim at the next one, waited for it to turn sideways, and fired again. As we stood up, he went out to collect the shot dogs. A couple of his were still squirming and he had to hit them in the head a few times until they stopped. Then he got to mine that were limp and floppy as he picked them up. He joined us as we walked back toward the in-laws' house, he tersely told me that he was very surprised by my skill.

He never let me near a gun again.

For my last evening out west, brother-in-law and a friend of his had to round up and move the cattle for his father and I was invited along and we saddled a third horse for me to ride. I watched from behind as the two of them rode into the heard and yelled and slapped some cows with their ropes to get them moving and then, once they were, we followed from behind to either side. One small calf made a break for it and I was ordered to get it back to the heard. I at first chased it but it seemed a futile effort as all the calf did was simply continue to run in front of me and the horse, leaving it even further away from the retreating heard. My brother-in-law shouted at me to ''Get to the outside'' of the calf which took me a moment to figure out what he meant, then I realized. I urged the horse to run to the side of the calf away from the heard giving the calf the choice of running into the horse or turning away back toward the herd. It did the trick and the calf turned and kept running, this time to catch-up and rejoin the heard as we reached the next pasture.

My mother seemed disappointed by the end of the trip as she never got what it was she had been looking for during her many errand runs. I realized many years later that she must have been job hunting and, had she found a job, I wouldn't have been going back to New England. But at that time I was oblivious to this near dramatic change in my life and just looked forward to visiting the Denver airport's row of shops and picking up a box of jumping beans!

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Rumblings

17

Once kicked out of the house toward the end of my second grade year, my sister had little choice but to temporarily move in with her boyfriend. That soon turned into a permanent situation by the end of the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Two. During the summer break my sister had made the occasional furtive visit to the family home to see me and take me for some fun when she knew dad would be working at the ski area. By fall she and her boyfriend moved to 'their' own place, an upper floor of an old family home turned into a studio style apartment. In this larger, more comfortable space, my mother would then make visits allowing me to tag along. We just weren't supposed to tell dad.

As my sister started her second year teaching third grade, the administration soon found out about her living arrangements and informed her that she wouldn't be able to continue teaching for moral reasons, common place in that day and age, unless the situation was soon rectified. So a marriage was hastily set up, and the next time my father saw sis was at the reception in the basement of the local bar. It was my first time being in a bar and we pretty much had the basement to ourselves with the moving colored lights and music for dancing. Not a big turn-out. And this was the first time I perched myself in a corner and watched. For the rest of my life, with groups of people, I've more enjoyed finding a corner and observing people interact, more than participating myself. But that's a different story.

Secret visits to my sister continued with my mother and things had calmed down enough that my sister and her husband joined us for either Thanksgiving or Christmas of Nineteen Seventy-Two. I don't think it was both. The funny thing was her husband worked on the ski patrol at the park so when skiing season came I tended to see him more than my sister.

By Spring, I heard they were leaving to move out west. This came as a shock to me as the farthest anyone I had ever know had moved away was one state. I learned many years later that it was a shock to my sister as well. Her husband's family had moved from Wyoming to New England some years earlier and he had finished his high school years in our state. For whatever reason his parents had moved back while he had stayed in New England for several years afterwards, but he now had the itch to move back to Wyoming himself. Now married, my sister didn't feel she had any choice in the matter but to go with him and by the end of third grade they packed everything they had, including their small Japanese sedan, into the back of a U-Haul truck and drove away.

My not as older brother, mother and I were there for this last packing flurry and to watch the truck leave. My sister remembers dad showing up unexpectedly at the last moment to see her off as well as if he had never disowned her. I would later find that my father would routinely do this, disown his kids, then in later years act as if that had never happened and expect to be friends.

While my sister was now out of my life, by the start of fourth grade, my eldest brother was back. Apparently with a gap between jobs, he couldn't afford a place to live and moved back to the state where mother had him move into my original bedroom in the family home. Once again it was a situation we were not to talk about, it just was as it was. This was an odd situation as my not as older brother had my eldest brother's room and furniture, and I had my not as older brother's room, though spruced-up. It seemed to me that we should return to our original bedrooms and I asked about this. But once again we weren't supposed to talk about it.

My eldest brother personalized my old room by painting it flat white. As he couldn't use my child sized bed, it was gone and he pretty much had a mattress on the floor for his bed. Where my not as older brother would spend a lot of time with my eldest brother in his room during my early childhood, they now spent that time in my old bedroom. My eldest brother spent the Fall through Winter season using one of the painted walls of the room to draw a charcoal nude based on a picture in a magazine. By Spring his prospects had picked up and he moved into his own apartment leaving behind the white room with the completed charcoal drawing. While our mother thought it was a bit scandalous, the woman's pose really didn't show anything.

As it wasn't his idea to have my eldest brother back during that time, my father expressed his displeasure by accusing my eldest brother of silly stuff. The most memorable was him commenting to me one morning, before I left to catch the school bus, that my eldest brother had been taking dinner knives from the drawer and using them to cut up an apple for lunch later in the day, then he would lose or throw-out the knives rather than bring them back. Now maybe this had happened once, but we seemed to pretty much have the same number of knives at the beginning of the time when he moved in, versus the time he left. Though I had never seen my father as an authority figure, I hadn't seen him as a silly person either. But after that comment and his other string of grumblings during that time, I started to see him as a bit of a comic figure.

Then one weekend day during the ski season, I joined my father on his morning ride to the park. In earlier years, this had been a family routine where all the siblings would pile in and come with him to work so we could ski all day. Now it was just me and my father in the car. While there was the novelty of now having the front seat, I could also feel the absence of my siblings as well. Once we reached the park, my father went straight into the building while I unstrapped my skies and poles and followed after. I used the employee time clock/break room to change from my shoes to my ski boots. It was right next to the back door leading to the ticket girl windows and my father caught my attention before my boots were on. There was someone he wanted me to meet: An older, though new ticket girl at the end of the row. He lead me down the narrow room just to see her, which was vary strange as he had never before introduced me to the other ticket girls, I would just come to know them as the ski season progressed. This new lady looked me up and down, then ran the fingers of her left hand through my hair. ''Oh, you have your father's hair,'' she remarked and then I was given my free ticket to ski with for the day.

As I skied up to the lift for my first run, I reflected on the meaning of her comparison: So she's been running her fingers through my father's hair...?

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