The Ancestors?

Yesterday, for the Fourth of July, for the first time perhaps ever, I hauled out a couple of pictures that I have dubbed The Ancestors, figures from the Revolutionary War, art that was produced for the Bicentennial, fifty years ago. They were bought by Nanny, my Mom's mother, not for any patriotic feeling but as frames for her poodle pedigrees. For the first time I noticed the name in the corner, Henry Thomas, and did a little research. Not original paintings, of course, but mass-produced lithographs. There's not much on record about Henry Thomas except that he was a commercial artist (no duh) who produced work in the mid-Seventies. His stuff is going for about $40 - $50 on the market these days. Those were the best pictures I could find on the Internet of the ones we have (I took pictures but they didn't go through). Also picked up a couple of images of his work in the same vein.

Family Relic: More of Nanny's Eastern Bric-a-Brac

What really brought this to mind is that I was watching the William Powell Philo Vance films, and I saw this exact incense burner (same design; bigger, though). I got this from Mom's stuff, and she, of course, got it from Nanny. Nanny, I imagine, got it from one of my uncles from when they were overseas. I forget, sometimes, how much of Nanny's stuff we still have; how much I personally still have. There is a strange strand of aesthetic I inherited from Nanny that I don't always acknowledge. It stands tucked away on one I my shelves; it could really use a good going over with a little polish. Or would that spoil the patina? A proper dusting, anyway.

"I Want My Granny's Records"

I mentioned a few posts ago in November Nanny’s Christmas records. Today by pure chance one came up in my queue on You Tube. I recognized it immediately. I always knew her records were part of a larger series; a bit of research filled out the history.  “A series of 7 Christmas albums produced exclusively for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company between 1962 and 1968.” They are all available to listen to on You Tube. She had Volumes 3 and 4. Where they are now and who has them, I don't know. But I can listen to the whole series now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_V_br4i-yo&list=RDo_V_br4i-yo&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWURmvE7EzU&list=RDo_V_br4i-yo&index=2

 

On Nanny in November

I thought that, just as an exercise, I would try to think about things that I admired about Nanny, my mother’s mother. I’ve written enough about what a terrible person she was; surely, she must have had some positive traits or done some good things? I know Susan remembers her fondly; I can only imagine that’s because Nanny must have had some qualities she admired. What those were I can only speculate; perhaps you’d have to be a fellow female to do so.

One of the earliest fond memories I have of Nanny was that when we were little and visiting her shop, she would give us our own Cokes. Believe it or not, soda was a rather rare treat for us, and to have our own bottle (rather than it being totted out in small glasses) seemed like a luxurious upgrade.

And she had ambition, and a work ethic. Anyone who opened so many beauty shops could not sit around on their laurels. True, she didn’t seem to know how to curate it once she had it. She did know how to personally lever it once she had it, using ‘wealth’ to manipulate her family and to gain appeal in what I must reluctantly refer to as her ‘sex life,’ including attracting husbands. Much of my early life was Mom and us kids frantically juggling stuff between her shops as she tried to build an empire. Not pleasant, but … ambitious.

I always admired her taste in Christmas decorations, too. I was pleased when Mom inherited so many of them, because they had been a bright spot in my otherwise Christmasless childhood. They seemed the one toehold of whimsey in her life. I remember listening to her Christmas records many times during dull stretches when I was trapped over there for one reason or another.

I also have a sneaking admiration for her painting skills. That she had the stick-to-it-tivness to try painting for so long. And she produced some passable efforts, especially in her still-life flowers. She had some vision of beauty and tried to reproduce it.

I think, in the final analysis, Nanny was a cosmetician down to her bones. Quality didn’t seem to matter to her very much, just the appearance of it. The fancy house she built was not sturdy, but it mocked an image of durability.  Much of her existence seemed to follow this rule: a constant dance of smoke and mirrors, an illusion held together only long enough to serve her purposes, which dissipated when one tried to touch the reality of it. She was a master of putting lipstick on a pig, but it always helped her sell the pig. One can admire her salesmanship, if not her product. If only this ability had always been directed toward more solid, worthier goals. A desperate dance of survival, not without skill.

I came to praise Nanny somehow, but I’ve had to place so many qualifiers around what I can say about her that it comes across as a not-so-subtle put-down. But so it goes. Even her own children could not think of anything nice to say at her funeral. “Why wasn't he natural in his lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.” But that might have happened to her, however she was.

The irony of it is that I’m thinking of her so much, even almost thirty years after she’s passed away. In fact, I’ve become sort of her half-assed biographer. I doubt if any of the family has written so much about her as I have. She was certainly a strong character, like you can say that Hitler was a stand-out character of the 20^th Century. Nanny passed away on November 12, 1997; perhaps that’s what brought her to mind.

Life is Brief, But When It's Gone, Hate Lives On and On

Just yesterday I had made some offhand remark about my grandmother, Nanny, to my nephew (she would have been his great-grandmother), and he asked me, “Did you really hate Nanny so much?” I was immediately reminded of this quote from King of the Hill: “Hate is a strong word, Mr. President. That’s why I used it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B7egX52K2Q Hate

“Sylvia Doiron was born on December 31, 1920 and passed away on Wednesday, November 12, 1997. Sylvia was a resident of San Marcos, Texas.” - The only obituary I could find.

"Dr. Pym has only treated one side of the psychology of murder. If it is true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to murder, is it not equally true”—here he lowered his voice and spoke with a crushing quietude and earnestness— “is it not equally true that there is a kind of man who has a natural tendency to get murdered? Is it not at least a hypothesis holding the field that Dr. Warner is such a man? … “So we see,” resumed Moon, in the same melancholy voice, “that a man like Dr. Warner is, in the mysterious workings of evolution, doomed to such attacks. My client’s onslaught, even if it occurred, was not unique. I have in my hand letters from more than one acquaintance of Dr. Warner whom that remarkable man has affected in the same way. We are in the presence, as Dr. Pym so truly says, of a natural force. As soon stay the cataract of the London water-works as stay the great tendency of Dr. Warner to be assassinated by somebody. Place that man in a Quakers’ meeting, among the most peaceful of Christians, and he will immediately be beaten to death with sticks of chocolate. Place him among the angels of the New Jerusalem, and he will be stoned to death with precious stones. Circumstances may be beautiful and wonderful, the average may be heart-upholding, the harvester may be golden-bearded, the doctor may be secret-guessing, the cataract may be iris-leapt, the Anglo-Saxon infant may be brave-browed, but against and above all these prodigies the grand simple tendency of Dr. Warner to get murdered will still pursue its way until it happily and triumphantly succeeds at last.” -Manalive, G. K. Chesterton.

So it was with Nanny. Was it a simple coincidence that her first husband chased her around the house with a knife? Or that her last husband (and her last ‘boyfriend’) both threatened to kill her? Or that her own oldest son said that they had to part, before he killed her or killed himself? When she finally passed away (from natural causes, to all appearances) there was still some speculation among us about whether she had been done in. When the man who was going to preach her eulogy asked my mother and her other brother if they remembered any particularly happy or tender moments they wanted mentioned, they were both stumped for an answer. And they were the people who most defended her while she was alive.

Though God knows why Mom did. I suspect it was a form of Stockholm Syndrome. After Nanny and Poppa Harold separated, Nanny made sure that Mom never contacted her biological father again, more as a test of loyalty than anything else. I think Nanny withheld her from Harold out of spite to him rather than any other reason. My uncles did contact him in later years, but Mom never dared to. When Nanny passed away, and we learned that Harold himself was on the downward spiral, Mom finally was able to talk to him. I was surprised; I had never been told my biological grampa was even alive.* Nanny kind of robbed us of that, as well. Her several ‘replacements’ (she could never hold onto anyone for long) were never grandfatherly people.

Nor was Nanny a grandmotherly figure. She was neither sentimental nor nurturing, and she saw us grandkids as a resource to be used or exploited for cheap labor. Even when we lived with her during college, we paid her rent with the added drawback of no privacy and always to be on hand to mow the lawn or move furniture between her several beauty shops. The upshot was we overheard her calling us “stupid Germans” to her last boyfriend, who she didn’t mind lavishing funds and support on to keep him tied to her crumbling charms.

And Mom was treated no less as a resource. When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to become a second Shirley Temple she was trained as a beautician, to help Nanny, and when Mom ran off to marry Pop (partly to escape Nanny, she later admitted to us kids) Nanny sold everything she left behind. Still Mom stayed devoted to her (she was her mother after all, and you only get one mother) and would pick herself up (even when she could barely drag herself along with arthritis) and travel 30 miles, often with us kids as additional labor, at Nanny’s whim. Mom took classes with H&R Bloch just so she could do her taxes at her insistence. Nanny still favored her brothers (who were smart enough to live out of easy visiting distance) and held the thought of ‘inheritance’ over all their heads to compel … well, their love would be too warm a word. Perhaps attention. And that in the end proved an empty lure, as her businesses were closed and she was almost broke.

Well, it’s been nearly thirty years since she was found alone and collapsed on her way out to the garbage bins. In the aftermath we found out a lot of things about her: her birthname Arzenath, how she had supported a foreign college student (Arabic?) but never her own grandkids, and her metal box of ‘dirty tricks’ (including saltpeter to cut her last husband’s sex drive). Do I hate her? Perhaps not as much as I did, but I can’t bring myself to feel any affection for her, mainly because of how she treated Mom. I remember how I was moving beds around for her once, and she held a shotgun from under one of them. Wherever I moved, she kept the barrel pointing at me, even when I asked her not too. She seemed amused at my nervousness; I think if she ‘accidentally’ shot me (“I didn’t know it was loaded!”) it would have mattered not one whit to her except as a momentary annoyance.

Still, she was my grandmother (“The same blood flows in my veins. The same weakness.” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7fB2MiFiXp )

And the past cannot be changed; all that is part of my story. “That’s why I hate it.”

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PCKkVkXyi6s )

My only comfort is that I’m still here to set the record straight. As I know it. Take that, you old ... witch. I forgive you on my own part, but I cannot forgive you for Mom.

*My brother John explains: "Even worse - the Uncles had awesome relations with Harold the whole time, hunting, fishing, hanging out at his ranch, as did our cousins. We did not even have the knowledge that he was alive. They were also able to inherit from his not insignificant estate."

Hey, Moose

Here is the last bit of art by our grandmother Nanny that used to always hang at Loop Drive. It has unfortunately lost its heavy wooden frame somewhere along the way. It is dated September 23, 1963, so I would have only been about two moonths old when it was finished. Signed 'Sylvia Thigpen.' It always used to hang over the encyclopedia shelves in the no-man's land between the living and the dining room. I seem to remember someone (was it Nanny herself?) saying that she painted it walking in water because she was none too sure how to do hooves (they are tricky). Yes, the moose is also a little wall-eyed, but I have very fond memories attached to this picture. I'm glad that it has resurfaced. I'm afraid I've lit it rather poorly, washing the icy mountains out in a blinding field.

Time To Be Hittin' That Old Dusty Trail

Another piece of family art that the fathomless sea of Susan's storage has given up. Painted by our grandmother Sylvia Doiron, it hung behind the couch in the living room at Loop Drive for donkey's years. It's undated, but easily over 60 years old. While Nanny had trouble rendering anything that looked alive and her perspective was problematic, I do have to say she did have a talent for almost transparent, gemlike mountains in some backgrounds. The many times I had to carefully dust this picture, or stared wistfully at that curved road, wanting to escape down it away from boring JW meetings! 

Picture This

I had to take a lengthy round trip to the HEB Pharmacy, which has left me little energy at the moment to produce Friday Fiction. Maybe by this evening. But I do have an interesting little sidebar to post now. Part of Susan's new rearrangement of her storerooms is going through my grandmother's art, part of which became our mother's inheritance. Many pictures by Nanny herself, including this one that always hung in our house when we were children, in the hall for the longest time, then in the boys' room for a bit. I always connected it with her then husband Ken, who had a pilot's licence, and with Uncle Bazzell, who I think worked as an engineer for the Air force. There's was always an air of adventure about it. I accepted it as a family keepsake.

Now this bit of canvas (is that the right term? board? the proper word escapes me at the moment; I find now it's canvas board, so not the roll-up type) came as a surprise to all of us. It was never displayed when Nanny was alive. We found it hidden in her water heater closet. My impression is that it might be one of her earliest paintings; She seldom, if ever, tried any human figures or animals, though flowers seemed to be part of her speciality. The disemdodied hand kind of freaked us out. It seemed to have some symbolic significance. Maybe even some kind of mystical significance. Nanny always seemed to us to have a bent towards fringe spiritual beliefs (if not witchcraft); well, a lot of us did, from UFOs to ghosts.

Well, there are more paintings a-coming. I'm really only interested in the ones that used to hang at Loop Drive. And the rest? I do not know. To be sold perhaps, perhaps even sold for materials. Maybe my brothers might be interested in a few, or their children. We shall see.