The Incredible Journey

     Bom Bom made several attempts to educate her grandchildren in world history.  The outcome had mixed results, but the journey was always the reward.  I was enrolled in the second of three grandchild culturing trips to Europe. Age was the major determining factor of when one went.  Kids were generally ten to fourteen years old when trips were arranged.  Bom Bom wanted us to be old enough to be self sufficient, but too young  to have cultivated tastes for spirits or an  active night life.  

     Liz, Stain, Marigold, Jen, Chip, Uncle Sigmeund, Aunt Amory,  and I accompanied Bom Bom in my eleventh summer, 1966.  Being a homebody, it was not a trip I was eagerly anticipating. I recall the night after school when our  parents asked whether Liz and I would like to go to Europe that summer with Bom Bom and some cousins.  Liz accepted eagerly.  I pondered the trip for a few seconds, said no thanks, and quickly returned my focus to homework, hoping my parents would move on.  I could tell from the corner of my eye that they had not budged an inch.  

Silly me; it became readily apparent that they had asked one of those questions that came with only one answer, and it was not the answer I had provided. My fear was  confirmed  when Dad offered that what they asked was actually known as a rhetorical question, and they hadn’t meant to suggest that I had a choice. He went on to say that the trip was the opportunity of a lifetime that was characterized by mandatory attendance.  I did learn that this journey of forced travel did include some redeeming characteristics - being in the  company of family and the fact that we would miss the first week of school in September. When it became obvious that I had no control over my destiny, I reluctantly agreed to go.  One significant detail that was omitted during the marketing of the trip was the requirement for a memorable, never-ending battery of inoculations, from typhoid to smallpox and everything in between.  

   

   Our trip began at the HoJo’s at the Delaware Memorial Bridge, where we all met.  Horsey, Eunice’s husband and a handyman on the farm, drove us all to JFK airport in New York, where we caught a BOAC airplane to London.  Liz, Stain, and I spent three days there with Bom Bom before we met the others in Paris.  We then worked our way through France and Italy. 

     While there was plenty of fun on the trip, there was no shortage of academics. To her credit, Bom Bom also arranged time at the major zoos and other areas of interest to kids. However, Bom Bom’s educational trips to Europe would not be complete without a tour of every historic cathedral, and this trip was no exception.  Bom Bom had an incredible knowledge of European history and expected us to prepare for our tours and retain a modicum of what we were taught. She arranged for our tours to be led by experts, who were, regrettably, not middle school scholars, but Oxford scholars. 

When Bom Bom felt we were being too inattentive on a tour, she would threaten to give us an exam.  Facts I zoned out on, I was able to fill in with logical details.  My big take-aways were that there were two great partnerships in European history.  In the art world it was Michael and Gelo.  In the royal world it was Marie and Twinette. 

      Marie and Twinette were two Austrian women who married Louis the Sixteenth.  He was a French Mormon Polygamist. It was very much an arranged marriage and entirely rejected by the French people until Marie’s family agreed to have her teeth straightened.  Another, little-known fact was that Marie was virtually inseparable from her friend Twinette, who had a weakness for games of chance and horse racing.  Both wives made sure that the French people had access to free cake, and in return, the French people overlooked their royal vices for many years. Predictably, Twinette and Marie’s fall from grace coincided with  the commoners’ run on cake.  It was all  formalized with a joint appearance before the guillotine.  

     Around the year 1506, Pope Julius the Second  needed to find painters for the Sistene Chapel ceiling.  

Painters did not like to paint high ceilings because as a group they were afraid of heights and it made their necks hurt.   Michael and Gelo were up-and-coming sculptors.  

Unfortunately, they had not painted a thing since art class in grade school, but  Pope Julius saw something in them and hired them to paint the Sistine Chapel.      They took the job because the Pope offered an attractive wage and dangled the carrot of an even bigger sculpting job that would pay the big bucks if they hung in there....literally, painting on their backs much of the time. The Pope did not place a high priority on paying his workers in a timely manner, which resulted in Gelo and Michael being some of history’s earliest starving artists.  When the Pope neglected to pay them for several weeks, Michael and Gelo exacted revenge.  Instead of painting the ceiling white, as contracted, they began painting scenes of “Great Moments in the Bible.”  This effort backfired, as the Pope took delight in their rebellious graffiti. 

       Marigold, Liz, Jen, and I all loved Italy but quickly grew wary of being pinched all the time by stealthy male strangers.  Bom Bom and Aunt Amory had warned us, but the Italian men’s approach took us  by surprise.  Stain, on the other hand, admired the the hairy-chested men.  During the trip, it became necessary for Stain and Chip to get  haircuts.  Stain insisted on keeping all of his clipped curly locks and on special occasions would tape them to his chest just below his shirt line.  The look went well with his cane, but the cane quickly became problematic.  

     Uncle Sigmeund had broken his leg skiing the previous winter.  He was using a cane when the trip began but had set it aside very early on.  Stain decided that he could put it to good use and hauled it everywhere. He assumed a limp when he used it, and people would look at him with a pitiful eye and rush to open doors to help him. As luck would have it, Stain had difficulty holding onto the cane and  never failed to drop it at the most inopportune times. Dropping it in acoustically designed cathedrals amplified the noise many times over. However, by the time we left each cathedral, Queen Victoria’s tolerance had expired, and she had confiscated the cane from him.  To the masses unfamiliar with the background, it appeared as a miracle.  A poor crippled child who had hobbled into the church had left running and skipping. 

      The high point of the trip was a two-week cruise through the Greek Isles on the SS Ankara.  While in the Greek Isles, we would sail at night and tour islands during the day.  After a couple of hours on tour each day, Stain and Chip’s attention spans deteriorated to the point where they wandered off to hunt in pairs for chameleons.  They were so fascinated by the lizards’ unique feature of losing their tails when grabbed that they  accumulated an impressive collection of tails, as well as tens of live lizards that they stored in their newly acquired conk horns. On the way back to the ship late on the first day, two unobservant and uninformed, calorically gifted British dowagers, thinking  that Stain and Chip were endearing young lads, invited them to take the two empty seats in their rowboat back to the ship. As I had the benefit of my short lifetime of experiences with Stain and Chip, as well as currently sharing a ship cabin with them, I was aware that nothing could be further from the truth than those old dowagers’ impressions of the boys. What ensued was a regrettable international incident of sorts. 

The boys chose to seize the opportunity by commencing a conk horn blowing competition that began as soon as the boat left the shore. 

The ladies were every bit as horrified as the  lizards that were escaping from their horns.  The  roar of the conk shell horns merely added insult to injury. When Stain noticed how horrified they were, he kindly paused and offered his conk to the screaming ladies, thinking in a weak moment that perhaps they might like a turn.  The ladies both jumped to escape the lizards, even though their escape options were quite limited. 

The move, not without peril, produced an extremely unstable rowboat, and the young Greek man whose lot was to row the passengers to the ship, pleaded with them to sit.  By this time Chip and Stain realized that their lizard collection was at risk, and they began diving all over the boat trying to salvage as many chameleons as they could. This renewed instability caused the boat to take in water and the dowagers to shout even louder.  The oarsman, unable to understand loud English any better than normal tones, responded by  grabbing each boy by the collar and planting them in the bow, where they just sat and sulked.  Having restored order, the oarsman brought everyone to the ship.    After telling Chip and Stain that “Queen Victoria was not amused,” Bom Bom was able to make peace with the traumatized dowagers that evening in the state room.  Going forward, when Stain and Chip transgressed on tours and started to put chameleons down our backs, Uncle Sigmeund would come to the rescue and divert all of the grandchildren from the historical tour gone bad to the closest beach, where we would snorkel in the crystal clear Mediterranean. All in all, it was a very fair trade-off.

     The only other kids on the ship were a handful of Brits, led by a boy named Angus. Things started out well but deteriorated rapidly when he insisted on referring to us as the “kids from the colonies.”  This reference really struck a nerve with Chip and Stain, who tried to settle it on the ping pong table, but Angus always managed to hit the ball overboard whenever he fell behind.  This required a lengthy appeal to the cruise director, who only rationed two balls a day.  Chip and Stain made exhaustive attempts to bring Angus up to speed on the Revolutionary War and its outcome, but Angus was hopelessly in denial, and it became a formidable obstacle to their friendship.      

     Every night after dinner, we were allocated time to write in our journals. Stain mostly drew pictures of robots and sea monsters. While my attention to lecturers was far from complete, I do think I would have recalled their coverage of the role of robots in early Greek culture, had there been any mention.... still, I could give him a pass on the sea monsters, as there was no shortage of references to Odysseus’s epic journey.  After fulfilling our journal obligations, we would hang outside the galley so that we could procure empty wine bottles and corks.  Using a ballpoint pen, we would write notes from historical figures we had been lectured of and toss them overboard.  There were notes from Hercules, Zeus,  Cleopatra, Achilles, and Queen Victoria.  “Queen Victoria’s”  note implored upon anyone who found it to honor the American people, and went on to express remorse for past injustices, specifically taxes and the Revolutionary War.

     The cane was the only thing I can recall that was able to “push Bom Bom’s buttons.“  As for Stain, he was recognized far and wide on our ship as the hairy-chested kid with a cane .... from the Colonies.  

Clean-up Editor - Toni Gardner, Author of "My Fathers" and "Walking WHere the Dog Walks"

Note to the FFD readers

Last week the Irreverent Notes Headquarters suffered both an earthquake and a hurricane (Irene). These natural disasters caused  a lengthy power outage (90 minutes) and a great deal of tree matter in the yard.   As a result, publication of the next issue will be briefly delayed.  Thank you.

 Margaux

Earthquake - 8/23/11

Hurricane Irene - Power Outage and Tree Matter

The Hermans

     While life in our home was fairly structured, our cousins the Hermans lived in a more free-flowing manner, with looser boundaries.  At a very early age, they were allowed to play with matches in the basement, drink sodas, and eat as much candy as they chose.  Their house was the only residence on  the 16-wheeler Coca-Cola truck delivery route.  The antique cabinet to the left of the main entrance was kept stocked with an impressive variety of candy – all you could eat - that rivaled any candy store.  If you didn’t fill up on sodas and  candy, there were  plenty of chips and “bar shrimp” (cheese doodles).  They lived in a virtual kid Utopia.  While my family consisted of introverts, the Hermans were all extroverts, lead by Aunt Babs who could talk to anyone about anything, and put the most awkward individual at ease.

     Stain  and Little Sinner, carefully monitored by Looper, were  allowed to stay up as late as they wanted and were allowed to watch horror films judged by my parents as having no redeeming value. Additionally, my parents insisted that staying up late made us irritable.   That always struck a nerve with me because it seemed so irrelevant to the experience.  That suggestion also implied that the Hermans did not get grouchy from sleep deprivation.   To the contrary, Looper, Stain, and Little Sinner got just as grouchy as we did; it was just that  Uncle Herman and Aunt Babs were better at ignoring it.  

While my parents did not solicit advice from their children on how they could be better parents, Uncle Herman and Aunt Babs must have, because Looper, Stain, and Little Sinner never hesitated to offer helpful parenting advice, usually conveyed in very loud, colorful language.  While these tips were generally disregarded in their entirety by Aunt Babs and Uncle Herman, there were times when the parents responded with even more colorful language, if that was possible.  

     Another draw of the Herman house was that they had all the great toys including messy ones like the “Creepy Crawler Factory,” the sort of toys that rarely made it to our inventory.  It wasn’t from a lack of interest or trying on our part. It was just that they did not make the final cut by our birthday shoppers. The Hermans  also had the latest fads in pets, whether it be Sea Monkeys, ant farms,  or dyed chicks and bunnies from Woolworth’s at Easter time.  Stain had a pair of “neutered” gerbils that went on to procreate like bunnies.  Somehow they became free-range occupants in the house, and spent a life living large on the lam, moving stealthily between family member’s clothing drawers, feasting on fine woolen sweaters.

     Little Sinner was the toughest little kid any of us knew.  This was in no small part a result of having a short life heavily influenced by Stain practicing his  freestyle wrestling moves on her, moves  he had mastered watching professional wrestling on UHF TV.  

Professional wrestling was the perfect union of two of Stain’s favorite things, wrestling and Halloween.  As a purist, Stain would not allow his enthusiasm for professional wrestling to be diminished by Little Sinner’s reluctance to participate.  

Owing much to Little Sinner, Stain went on to be an accomplished high school and college wrestler.  In one unfortunate high school match, Stain’s opponent’s arm was broken after a not-so-soft landing from an otherwise legal move.  The poor fellow was flailing on the mat as Stain looked on in horror.  

We were all a bit surprised at the unfortunate lad’s lack of fortitude given that Little Sinner had been thrown down steps and out windows, and instead of crying, she harnessed her efforts toward escape and hiding.

     Stain had a lifetime subscription to Mad magazine.  While the basic content has not changed much in 50 years, the Mad issues of the ‘60s, were generally full of crass, irreverent stickers, stickers like “Moby Dick is not a social disease.”  Not wanting to waste his free Mad stickers, Stain plastered them all over the family Chevy wagon, except, of course, the ones he stuck directly on the clothes he wore to school.  The car looked like a Mad magazine on wheels.  The look was completed with side-to-side bumper stickers equally crass.  The car was a legend at our school.  

The interior had its own unique features: seats and upholstery that had been gnawed away by their dog, Bozo. Bozo’s chewing had converted the driver’s side of the front bench seat into a deep bucket seat.  You could  tell when someone had ridden in the wagon because they always had foam upholstery crumbs clinging to their clothes for the remainder of the day.  On the front passenger side there was a hole in the floor about the size of a large hand, making the road visible.  Stain would reach through and skillfully sharpen his pencils against the road on the way to school each day. The local Chevrolet dealer, who was also a family friend, was always trying to lure Uncle Herman  to trade in the wagon and get it off the streets.  It wasn’t until the ‘70s however, when all of the forward gears were shot, and Chevy offered $500 to trade in for any vehicle driven to the lot, that Uncle Herman backed the Chevy half a mile in reverse to the dealership.

     A few times a year, our grandmother would take the family to the formal dining room at the country club.  Children had to dress up, and we were expected to dig deep to showcase our  manners in our grandmother’s presence.  We had been exposed to etiquette from the ballroom dancing classes we were forced to attend.  It didn’t help that my father and his siblings had been required to attend as well. Quite honestly, we would have preferred to stay at home and do homework. The classes consisted of old dowagers teaching us classic dances like the fox trot and  waltz.  We would have to suffer through a receiving line and dance with boys whose wool suits were so prickly they left wool splinters in our hands.  When the boys were dispatched to bring a soda drink back to their assigned partner, they generally chose to cull the ice from the drink and cast it across the dance floor in hopes of causing a macabre dancing accident.  When we complained bitterly to our parents of this entire process, my father explained that it was our “legacy of pain” that we all must suffer through as those before us.  We had  hopes that his ruling, characterized by a lack of sensitivity, might be overturned by our loyal grandmother, Bom Bom; however, we were deflated when she supported the decision, saying that we were gaining character.

     Any discussion of the Herman family would not be complete without a more detailed discussion  of their dog, Bozo.  Born two months before Little Sinner, Bozo was a standard poodle that the Herman’s had been given from Aunt Amory.  He was a friendly dog who fully embraced life. He had an independent spirit and no inhibitions. In his early days, Bozo’s zest for life, chewing, and wandering made him difficult to manage, particularly with two small children and a baby.  The Hermans very reluctantly sent him to a farm nearby, crying the whole way to deliver him to his new home.  After about a week, Aunt Babs called the farm and said that if, for any reason, they did not want to keep Bozo, then they would love to have him back.  As luck would have it,  in just a few short weeks on the farm Bozo had quickly developed a palate for live chicken feet, making harmony on the farm an unlikely outcome.  Aunt Babs got the call informing her of Bozo’s fall from grace and the farmer’s desire for a hastened farewell. Within hours, the family was reunited.  Living in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Bozo was raised before leash laws, baggies, and procedures (i.e., neutering) sucked the life out of being a pet.   He would leave the house every morning when Looper, Little Sinner, and Stain left for the school.  Bozo was one  busy dog - there is some evidence that most of the mixed breeds in the mid-Atlantic states could be traced back to Bozo’s lineage.

One of his day trips involved hopping on the bus and heading down to the inner city.  The bus drivers knew him well.  One of his shortcomings was not knowing which bus to take home.  

Aunt Babs made many a trip, with reward in hand, to bring Bozo back.  In spite of his failings with the return bus, no one would suggest that Bozo was not a very bright dog.  He was remarkably obedient when he was not distracted by his own agenda.  A mere tapping on the couch would land you a partner for the evening.  That trick, and New Papa’s impatience, led to an unfortunate incident at Bom Bom’s farm.   One evening when he was waiting for Bom Bom to join us in the dining room, New Papa impatiently tapped his fingers on the table.  Bozo welcomed this as an invitation to join the family and leapt onto the fully set table, coming to a sliding halt next to the ham.  New Papa was furious on several levels, and it did not help that Bom Bom was as much amused as she was annoyed.  Of course, all of the grandchildren took great delight in the excitement, and poor Bozo never understood what had gone horribly wrong.  Bozo’s major vice was that he was a world class chewer, and he had been banned for life from most of the local kennels because of his gift for chewing through their fortified cages.    From then on he traveled with the family.

     To the untrained observer, the Herman household might appear chaotic, particularly as it related to Stain and Uncle Herman.  Quite the contrary, everything of import fell neatly into place when order was required.  When Uncle Herman was representing a client in court he got the matching pair of socks. When Bozo had mistakenly eaten a neighbor’s cat, the Hermans replaced it with two identical barn cats that miraculously appeared on the farm. The Herman house was a living microcosm proving Henri Poincare’s  Theory of Chaos and the order that emerges. 

Clean-up Editor - Toni Gardner, Author of "My Fathers" and "Walking Where the Dog Walks"

The Mayflower - The Untold Story

     My family used to be  Mayflower descendants.  The Mayflower Society says  that we are not Mayflower descendants anymore.  This would be  because my grandmother Bom Bom had a falling out with an uninformed telephone representative who chose an ill-fated path by stating that  she was no longer a Mayflower Descendant.  Bom Bom was not one to suffer fools, and with an air of bemused condescension, she advised him that for obvious reasons, he could not strip her of her descendency.   Bom Bom was not about to waive her principles and reward incompetency, so she parted ways with the Mayflower Society that afternoon. 

     The Mayflower descendant we descended from is John Howland.  As a 4th grader with a Mayflower paper assignment,  I gave a lot of thought to John Howland’s duties on board that ship.

He, along with a seven-year-old boy and an eleven-year-old boy, was an indentured servant to John Carver when he boarded the Mayflower. Curiously, he disembarked the Mayflower as a free man.   There is evidence with some historical significance, that, in addition to his assigned tasks, John Howland also assumed the bartending duties on the Mayflower.   He was twenty-one years old at the time of the voyage, with large amounts of idle time during the journey.  It is quite likely that John Carver permitted him to moonlight at the bar.  I have no collaborated evidence  for making this claim, but as a child amateur historian, I had to choose what to research carefully. This was  a moment  when I felt my time could be better spent watching “Leave it to Beaver” reruns, than doing research in the library to confirm the obvious.   Using certain indisputable facts, it was pretty easy to fill in the gaps about Howland.  

     John Howland was a passenger who allegedly cheated death twice on the voyage:  once when he was swept overboard in a storm, and once when he fell into the voyage rum tank nearly drowning.  It has been intimated  that falling into the rum tank was a natural consequence of being over-served.  After weeks at sea, it is quite imaginable that boredom and poor judgment crept into his daily routine, culminating in that unfortunate mishap.  Only two crew members would have had access to the keys to the rum tank, Captain Christopher Jones and the bartender. John Howland was obviously the latter man. Fellow passengers referred to John as a “lusty young man,” and it is well documented, by legitimate historians, that no Mayflower passenger has been credited with creating more descendants. 

It would appear that he also performed his bartending duties quite well, offering a wide variety of drinks and bar food.   Unlike his fellow indentured servants, he earned enough in tips  to buy his freedom upon arrival in Plymouth.    

     Unlike myself, our family had a number of legitimate scholars who availed themselves of mainstream academia and conventional means of research.  Helen, the second oldest grandchild and Toad’s older sister, was one of these scholars.  She  attended  Radcliffe and looked very much like the model Twiggy.  When you played intellectual games of knowledge with Helen, she never responded with a straightforward answer.  Letting everyone else battle it out, shouting their answers, she would reluctantly pick up the pieces from their overly confident but occasionally incorrect answers.  While all of the participants were mesmerized, she would, without conviction, methodically begin thinking out loud. Helen would carefully review the history of the world concluding apologetically, for example,  that “Henry the VII  must be the correct answer, because we all know that Henry the VI’s reign was interrupted by his frequent bouts of insanity.” Correct again.

     Helen was several years older than us, and although she was always kind, she  quite understandably had more intellectual interests than hanging out with her younger cousins, who on frequent occasions had the capacity to be overly competitive, loud, and obnoxious.  Quite honestly, while we would have welcomed her company, we  would have thought less of her if she had wanted to hangout with us.  We didn’t want to hang out with us either, but had little choice. 

Shortly after college, Helen visited the farm with a hippy beau.  We found him to be very polite but painfully quiet and very difficult to read. It never occurred to us that there were people from small families unaccustomed to large, extended families with little cousins who could rapid-fire questions faster than they could be answered. 

     I don’t recall the source, but rumor had it that he was a member of the notorious  “Weathermen”, a radical, leftist underground group.  Being in the late ‘60s, we were in the midst of anti-Vietnam war sentiment. We were liberal but  the Weathermen were much farther left.    Being self-appointed scouts  for national security, we planned our very first mission when Helen and the beau went  swimming.  We snuck into his room  to search his luggage for bombs, weapons, and plans for a revolution.  What we found was quite unexpected - seemingly normal personal effects and a text book on meteorology.  We thought the book might have a secret compartment, but it was full of detailed maps of the U.S. with H’s and L’s all over them. 

Finding no smoking guns, we called off our investigation.  As luck would have it, he turned out to be a really nice guy who volunteered to take us  all crabbing that evening.  This was a wonderful offer, as none of us were old enough to drive, and Uncle Owl had hung a plucked dead chicken on the line in the sun for us to use for bait.  

     Blue crabs have a genuine appreciation for rancid, rotten meat.  We would tie the chicken pieces to  weighted lines and then toss them in the brackish water at the dock in Port William.  Penn and Jack were always the  “net men”.  We would summon them when we had a line with a crab on it.  They would sweep the net underneath the crab and raise it out of the water before he could escape. 

They would then deposit the wet crab into the dry cardboard box on the pier, and we would throw the line over again.  This exercise was repeated until we had a few dozen crabs. If we spent too much time, the soaked bottom of the cardboard crab box would break open when we picked it up to take the crabs home.  Then we would have to scramble around and re-catch the crabs  as they dashed for the river.  

     One might suggest that there was a certain stupidity inherent in our selection of a cardboard box to stow wet crabs. Being well aware of its limitations, we would argue that it was only stupid if we didn’t  realize that it was stupid.  We preferred to think of it as maintaining tradition and being more sporting.

I never gave much thought to what happened to the crabs after we delivered them to the farm kitchen, but the cook, Rie, would take over and steam them with her top secret spices, and we would spend the evening picking crabs.  Helen and the Weatherman joined us that night, and we took great pride in the fact that we had contributed to his character development and youth tolerance skills....that said, we never saw him again.

Clean-up Editor - Toni Gardner, Author of "My Fathers" and "Walking Where the Dog Walks"