We’d rather fight than move

My mother stood on the hayride that passed as a 4th of July float, wearing a purple suffragette gown, a fake greased black eye (modeled after a Tarryton cigarette commercial), and carrying a sign that said “We’d rather fight than switch [crossed out] MOVE.” She was also defiantly waving a rather large Confederate flag.

Given just that much information, you might militantly jump to the conclusion that my family lived in the back woods of the Deep South during the turbulence of the Civil Rights movement. You would be WRONG – my family lived in rural New Jersey in a rich and poor mix largely of Irish, Polish, Italian, and English descendants, farmers, bakers, butchers, and New York City commuters. My father, always dressed in a nice dark wool suit, starched white shirt, striped tie, and fedora, smelling fragrantly of leather and hair oil and aftershave lotion, carrying a small suitcase with his take-home papers, commuted to New York everyday on the train. Every morning, my mother would drive my dad to the train station, and she and my little brother and I would stand waving goodbye as the train chugged away towards the mysterious, smoggy but glittering, Emerald City in the East.

This probably explains why I obsessively drew “choo-choos,” instead of the stick figure families next to houses and lollipop trees drawn by my peers in Kindergarten.

My brother and I “borrowed” my dad’s grooming supplies once and poured them all together in an old tall tree stump (my brother’s “laboratory”) at the side of the house. We wanted to see if we could blow it up. It didn’t.

And, at that time in that area, there was no societal pressure, no demands, no threats, for us to move. It was a quiet, peaceful rural community, only occasionally interrupted by the distant sounds of two metal garbage can lids banging together like cymbals in the night. So, no reason whatsoever for the slogan. “We’d rather fight than move.” It was just a nonsensical play on the cigarette commercial.

Several years later, when I was 16, Shell Oil transferred our family to Houston, Texas. We did not fight it. We moved.

Origins: north vs south, rich vs poor

NEW JERSEY

My father came from a privileged, albeit troubled, background. He was a Princeton graduate on a tennis scholarship, went to prep school, was born in Miss Quinn’s Nursing Home in an exclusive suburb in New Jersey. He estranged himself from my grandfather Aldwyn (whom I dearly loved and named myself after) by passing out Communist literature on campus. He later went through a period of depression, then enlisted in the Army, became an Army sergeant, missed the Korean War because he contracted the measles, met my mother who was working for an Army veterinarian and married her. He had a boxer named “Hannibal.” He later became a Republican, like his dad.

My father kept a stash of his books from Princeton, and some of my grandfather’s books. I found them and read them. Orwell, Conrad, Michener, Lucretius, Bronte sisters, Eyre, Jack London. At the Back of the North Wind, by George MacDonald. Two old obscure horse books: Ruth Fielding in the Saddle, and Frog. A reading primer that had the story, Water Babies, Cedric the Knight, and another creepy story about an eagle stealing a baby. Up Front, by Bill Mauldin, cartoon-illustrated Army pocket handbooks for different languages, others I can’t recall offhand. We never talked about them.

My father hid his soft Victorian pornography and his Playboy magazines in his antique dresser under his underwear. We found that, too.

I was born in Orange, New Jersey. Shortly after, my grandparents bought an old estate formerly owned by the Ambassador to Belgium. It was located in rural Hunterdon County, about 50 miles west of New York City. My grandparents lived in the little Dutch colonial mansion on the property; my family lived in a remodeled duplex that was formerly the carriage house. A hay hook was still in the attic; the rooms were originally horse stalls.

This perhaps explains why I also obsessively drew horses. My room was haunted by horse ghosts.

I really don’t know much about my father’s side of the family. My grandfather used to joke that his relatives were thrown out of Wales for being horse thieves, but maybe he wasn’t joking?

My grandfather had some money – he owned the 66-acre property, after all. But our family lived like we were broke. I wore cheap shoes and clothes from Flemington Discount Center, and envied the girls at my school that wore the fuzzy cashmere sweaters in vogue. I did not get braces until after we moved to Houston, when I was a sophomore in high school. Until then, I was told to “push in my tooth,” by an orthodontist who resembled Albert Einstein. My thumb had a dent in it, but my buck tooth did not budge. I wore ugly glasses; I did not go to any proms; I had horrible bouts of asthma.

We did not go hungry, however, not like people who were really poor. We always had food. My mother was not a great cook, but occasionally she made chicken fricassee, which was my ultimate favorite, and jambalaya. And we got Christmas and birthday presents, and enjoyed 2-week vacation trips every summer.

AND, my mother kept a spotlessly clean house, my aunt was quick to remind me later, when she came to visit me in my own house and critically eyed the cat and dog fur that shown like wispy gold threads floating in bars of early morning sun through the east window.

NEW ORLEANS

My mother’s family and relatives lived in New Orleans, where she also grew up . Every 4 years we took a road trip to visit them. We’d always take the long way down the beautiful, mountainous Blue Ridge Parkway, and my brother and I would hoot and shout in the tunnels. We’d stay at Howard Johnson motels along the way.

My mother’s family were dirt poor. My grandmother gave birth to my mother at home. My grandfather had lost his hearing in a chemical factory explosion when he was only in his 20’s. My grandmother worked in a bakery. My mother and her family lived in a shotgun house in the Irish Channel area. They were Catholic. They would swim in a bayou on the other side of a chain link fence separating them from the alligators. During the Depression, they ate oatmeal for 3 weeks straight. My mother remembered crabbing with her family from the end of a pier.

My mother remembered how her mother would grab a rattlesnake by the tail, swing it around and pop its head off. She also remembered how her mother would take her and her brother’s hands and wade through snake-infested hurricane floodwaters. She remembered her mother taking out her rifle and shooting out a nest of snakes under the front steps. She remembered how her mother would chop the heads off her chickens, and watched them run headless around the yard.

My mother claimed to have a psychic connection to her mother. Whenever she put a letter in the mail to her mother, she got a letter from her mother back the next day.

Years later, after we had moved to Texas, my mother went to visit her mother in New Orleans as she lay dying. My mother had to turn her every few hours. When she came home, I held her as she wept like a little girl.

Cats

My half-Creole uncle greeted us when we arrived in his sleeveless white undershirt, and, stretching his long skinny arms out wide, said warmly, “Man, we ben waitin’ for you cats the LOOONGEST time!” Boiled fresh-caught shrimp in their shells and fresh French bread with bowls of hot melted butter were piled on top of newspapers covering the long table behind him. Later, we’d all sit around that table joined by aunts, uncles and cousins, playing poker for pennies. The adults smoked and drank and told tall tales.

My grandfather brewed his own beer during Prohibition. My mother remembers hearing bottles occasionally explode in the summer heat during the night on the back porch.

Uncle Oliver was the only person I knew that said, “cats,” when he was talking about people.

Uncle Oliver had been an Air Force lieutenant, flying missions in WWII. He was my aunt’s 2nd husband. She divorced him because he loved gambling more than he loved her. But when they were still married, during our visit (I was 4 years old), he sat down with me as I was drawing something, don’t remember what, but I do remember him writing all in beautiful capital letters under my drawing, all the words, real and nonsense, that rhymed with my name. I also remembered him chasing my brother and I around the house with a rolled up magazine, swatting us when he could catch us as we squealed in delight. He and my aunt lived in a house in the French Quarter, with the fancy wrought iron bannisters on the second floor. They had a nice German Shepherd dog. I forget his name.

Reportedly, Uncle Oliver once drove his car backwards across the Lake Pontchartrain bridge, all 24 miles, when his forward transmission failed.

My brother and I met my grandmother’s favorite bantam roosters, Pete and Shorty, that she let into the kitchen and let us give them treats. We also petted her smart little mongrel dog, that would do flips and bring notes out to my grandfather in the yard that would tell him when dinner was ready. I lured my brother into the chicken coop, locked him in it, and ran off, leaving him yelling for help.

My mother said my grandfather could read lips like anything, but when you were trying to have an argument with him, he would just turn his head the other way. He would also dream about fighting, because he would go to boxing matches, and punch my grandmother in the middle of the night. She couldn’t yell at him to wake up, because he couldn’t hear her.

When my mother was underage, her older sister, Margie (Uncle Oliver’s wife), would dress her up in big girl clothes and they would both sneak out at night down to the clubs in the French Quarter. My mother remembers shaking hands with Louis Armstrong and Al Hirt.

My aunt also once dressed her 12-year-old son, C.J, up in drag for a Mardi Gras parade. “He was really cute!” she laughed.

Later he would join the Navy, and worked with Uncle Oliver to rescue people from 1965 Hurricane Betsy floodwaters. My aunt, who had moved back to New Orleans, remembers looking down from a boat C.J. was towing by a rope while swimming, and seeing the headlights of Uncle Oliver’s truck still on under the water. He became a Navy Seal, arming and disarming mines in the Bay of Tonkin during the Vietnam War.

Cousin C.J. would come visit us in New Jersey when he was still in the Navy on leave, wearing his uniform. He was crazy, my brother and I thought. He would run at a tall tree at top speed, and without breaking stride, climb swiftly all the way to the very top, then, like a gorilla, he would shake the branches and yell, “HOO! HOO! HOOOOO! HOO!”

C.J. became a paraplegic years later as a civilian construction worker in Houston when a stack of concrete pipes fell over on him. We visited him at the hospital – he was doing pull-ups on the bar over his bed. He had an unquenchable spirit. He bought a plane and a car with his insurance money and had them rigged so he could operate them. He died as a passenger in a car that had purportedly stalled on a railroad track in front of an oncoming train. Everyone got out but him. He was my aunt’s only child.

My New Orleans cousin Johnny (son of my mother’s brother, Uncle Frankie, a Navy WWII vet) also came once to visit us in New Jersey, with his brother Donny, who was also in the Navy. Johnny, who wasn’t in the Navy, was crazy, too, in a different way. He hung around with the wrong people on the streets of New Orleans, and was eventually murdered by a gang. Earlier he had shown me a card game that he said he played with his friends. He said losers would get rapped over the knuckles with a plastic baseball bat. But he would just make me drink a glass of water instead for every hand I lost.

My aunt lost every material thing she owned, twice. During Hurricane Betsy in New Orleans, and years later while she was vacationing on a Hawaiian cruise with my mother after both their husbands had died. She returned home to Proctorville, North Carolina to find that someone had broken into her mobile-home-converted-to-house and robbed it, then set it on fire and burned it to the ground. My aunt’s biggest regret was that she had lost all her photos of her son, C.J.

My mother’s uncle Andrew had one son, Raymond, who disappeared. They found his clothes and wallet in his car at the end of a pier. He lived with his father in Long Island and worked as a luggage handler in the airport. I liked Cousin Ray – he must have been around 15 years older than us, was quiet, had clear blue eyes, and showed us how to use a compass in the woods.

My mother’s brother Frankie walked and talked in his sleep. They called him Brother. They found Brother one day in the living room, talking and picking berries of different colors in his dream and counting them aloud.

(My brother also walked and talked in his sleep, but that’s a story to be recounted at another time.)

My mother talked in her sleep in New Jersey when she was dozing on the couch after Sunday night tv and a few drinks, and we always tried to trick her into saying something, but it was always inarticulate.

We always did this

Every Sunday night we’d eat off metal trays in the little tv room den. We watched a small black-and-white television. I drew black-and-white pictures with the pencils my father would bring home from work in NYC. I imagined what colors all the shades of gray could be. We’d watch Wild Kingdom, then Lassie, then Walt Disney, then Bonanza. On some nights, you could cry from one show straight on through the next, depending on the programs.

My mother never felt she had the approval of my father’s parents. When my New Jersey grandmother, whom we called “Mawn,” (New Orleans grandmother we called “Grandma”) would babysit us, she would rearrange the furniture. Then my mother later would put it all back the way it was. One time she dumped a plate of spaghetti on Papa (my father’s father) when he was teasing her. She thought of herself as a rebel.

They all drank. The privileged, and the poor, of my whole family, from north to south. One time my brother and I found the bottle of bourbon my mother had concealed in the closet, and I dumped it all out and filled it with Worcestershire sauce, tabasco sauce, cayenne, and vinegar. Never heard a word about it later.

She had drinks with my father every night when he came home from the train station. She was mean when she was drunk, and said mean things. And self-critical. My father would say things just to set her off. She would say, “Oh, I’m so stupid.” And, “I’ll just kill myself.” Dinner was often an unpleasant event that I checked out of with the help of my imagination.

Once, I helped my father take my mother to the emergency room. A few minutes after she had unsteadily left the dinner table, we heard a crash in the back of the house, and ran back to find her clumsily dabbing at a deep cut over her eye, standing over the sink dressed only in sheer pantyhose and a white blouse. Blood in the sink, blood on the bed, blood on the floor next to the night stand she had fallen against. We got her dressed and helped her walk over ice and snow. She lay on the gurney, and the EMTs laughed when she failed their drunk test. “Slide your foot down your shin.” Fail. “Touch your nose with your hand.” Fail. They laughed, and looked at each other, then stitched up her eyebrow with a long, curved needle poking it through both sides of the gash they had first flushed out with iodine.

My father and mother always called each other, “Hun” (Southern for “Honey”). Even when they were on other sides of that long house, they’d shout, “HUN! HUUUUUNNN!” It was only when they got mad at each other that they would use their real names. And when they got really mad, they did not speak to each other at all. Sometimes my mother would sleep on the couch. But they would always start speaking to each other. When my New Jersey grandmother and grandfather got divorced, they never spoke to each other again. They would both come over for Thanksgiving and talk and laugh with everyone else, but to each other, they were invisible.

My mother grew up Catholic, but when she married my dad, who was agnostic, she quit going to mass. Instead, just out of convenience, I guess, I was baptized in an Episcopal church, and my brother and sister in the Methodist church (I think?) When I was around 10, my brother 9, and my sister 2, she decided she wanted to return to Catholicism and raise us in the Church. At that time, her marriage to my dad was not recognized by the Church (and I suppose us kids were illegitimate?), so he agreed for her sake to go to catechism with her and convert to Catholicism. It was kind of cute to see them walking hand in hand to the rectory. Then, they remarried in the Church in a ceremony only attended by my siblings and I. That was the last my dad went to church (he may have gone for Easter – can’t remember), but my siblings and I went to catechism, got re-baptized, First Communion, and Confirmation all in one year, went to confession, and became full-fledged Catholics as well. For awhile.

When I was a kid, I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. I’d sit on the toilet (lid closed) and watch her put on her makeup, and blot her lipstick on carefully torn off squares of yellow toilet paper, leaving perfect, red lip prints in the trash. My mother had green eyes, wavy auburn hair, and light olive skin that was just a shade or two darker than mine.

My father had brown eyes, dark hair, athletic frame, and very light skin with a lot of freckles. He was a classically-trained pianist who played anything from Rhapsody in Blue to Tannhauser. He also idolized and tried to imitate the lush, complex improvisations of blind Black jazz pianist, Art Tatum. After a few drinks, he’d also pound out show tunes at our parties and would sing at the top of his voice, “Some enchaaanted evening, you may meet a strangeaaarrrrr…”

The health queen

When my mother was a teenager, she was voted Health Queen of her high school. When her name was announced during the ceremony, her sister pushed her out of her chair on to a concrete floor to get her attention, and my mother accepted the award with bleeding knees. I still have the “Health Queen” bracelet that she won.

As my white-haired mother lay in the casket, I vividly imagined her lying there with the auburn hair she had when she was young. After the funeral, at dinner at my sister’s house, my aunt piped up and said, “I want to share a secret I’ve been carrying for 57 years. You have a BROTHER.” I could feel the table rumble under my plate.

Before meeting my father, my mother had given birth to a baby boy, known only by my mother’s maiden name, as she gave him up for adoption. He was the result of a one-night stand with an unnamed Polish man. We still haven’t found him, or the Polish man. She had also been married once before in New Orleans, to an abusive man everyone called “Dude.” She moved to NJ to get away from him. She lived with my aunt, who had a job there.

THEN, my aunt said, “AND, prior to having the baby, she got syphilis.” We put our forks down.

I’m not sure my dad, who had died some years prior, ever knew any of this.

Whenever my aunt visited, in New Jersey or Texas, she and my mother would sit and drink and smoke and tell tall tales and laugh and play gin rummy or penuckle for hours. They had their own private thing. Some time after she passed, my aunt, who was 8 years older and had outlived her, told me that she had loved my mother more than any other human being. And also that my aunt’s third husband had made a pass at her. She said that my mother and her would look at each other and say, “What happened to our lips? We used to have lips?”

Just prior to my mother’s passing, our family had gathered around her hospital bed. We sang “Seven Beers with the Wrong Kind of Man,” (I brought the lyrics). This was a song that we always requested that she sing on Family Talent Night. I bought her a bright yellow, smiling sun musical balloon from the hospital gift shop that played the tune to “You Are My Sunshine.”

My mother smoked Kents and drank bourbon on the sly. When we were kids, I remember that she had to have all 4 of her front teeth filed to sharp points before she could have them capped, which gave her kind of a cannibal look for a few days. Kinda scary, but not a bad look for her, really.

My mother was tone-deaf. She would sing lullabies to us as kids. I still don’t know the melodies. My father would tell her, “Don’t sing to them,” but she did anyway. I loved the sound of her singing voice. My aunt said that she and her would sing a duet with harmony of “Seven Beers” when they were young. I can’t imagine.

The doctor had told us that she survived the operation, but he doubted that she would survive the recovery. When she got her breathing tube removed, my mother called my sister and complained that she was in a non-smoking room. Before the operation, my brother and I had asked her if there were any secrets we should know. She said nothing.

Just having fun

My father had always made fun of the the way my mother talked. Even though she ended up living in New Jersey for 30 some odd years, she fiercely clung to her Southern accent. My father would say, “It’s not UM-brel-la, it’s um-BREL-la. It’s not am-bu-LANCE, it’s AM-bu-lance.” My mother would laugh her fake laugh and pretend to try to say it the Northern way, without ever getting it right. Purposely.

I heard my mother telling someone in Houston once that she had lived in New Jersey for “thahty yeeahs, and Ah lahned how tah row mah ‘ahR’s’ lahk ah Nawthanah.” [“…30 years, and I learned how to roll my R’s like a Northerner.”]

No one else in New Jersey at any parties we went to had apparently ever met any other Southerners before, because they always acted strange around her. And she would laugh as if she was having a great time. I felt this acutely.

So my mother stood in her purple suffragette dress on the Fourth of July float that represented our street, Haytown Road, that was a hay wagon pulled by a tractor driven by our old neighbor farmer, whom we let graze his cows on our property in exchange for him taking care of our apple orchard. The motto of our street prominently displayed as a hand-painted sign on the side of the float was, “Keep the Hay in Haytown” (every year it was the same slogan). My father, wearing a false handlebar mustache obviously taped to his cheeks, and a straw hat like a ragtime player, played boogie-woogie on a out-of-tune piano wobblingly set up up on the float right behind the tractor. I and some Girl Scouts in vintage uniforms sat on hay bales. My little sister wore an adorable little pink pioneer dress that my mother made for her. My brother was there, dressed up like Davy Crockett with a coonskin cap. My mother was waving a large Confederate flag with one arm and the sign “We’d rather fight than move!” with the other. The air was heavy with irony. Perhaps it was my first taste of performance art?

I don’t know where it all came from – the flag, or my father’s ragtime costume, or my mother’s suffragette gown, the vintage Girl Scout uniform – or where it all went. Judging by the floats representing the other streets, which were all equally surreal, it must have been all random stuff people found while cleaning out their closets.

None of it made any sense. But, maybe that was the point?

OR – maybe my mother was NOT acting out the parody of her Southern self, like some people thought. Maybe she was taking the final stand against all these uptight, condescending Northerners that spoke down to her, or who came up to us kids when they were snockered and said, “You know, your mother is really a VERY smart woman.”

Can you make a value judgment on art?

Bronze sculptures on this page were created by Alberto Giacometti.

“There is no ‘bad art.’ Just ‘art’.”

“Everyone is an artist.”

Tell that to a musician, a ballet dancer, a woodworker, or a bricklayer, for that matter, and you’d have the last word in that conversation. They would simply shrug their shoulders with disgust and walk away.

There is no bad driving. There is just driving. I live in a state where this is so.

So “bad” is not a good word to use, contextually. So much bad in the world. Poverty, starvation, war. Evil bad. Not cool bad. There is no “bad” art in the context of world suffering, unless you think that the money one spends on art supplies could be better spent to buy a banquet for the needy family next door. But the artist also needs to make a living, somehow.

Art is an elevated endeavor on the part of the individual trying to make sense of his existence, or to at least give it some semblance of order. And to provide a sense of solidarity with others in the same existential boat.

(Unless art is used to enhance group think propaganda serving an unsavory political agenda, or to promote racial and gender stereotypes.)

One can always claim an exemption to critique by stating their acts of creation are recreational or therapeutic in nature, while secretly wondering / hoping if their careful strokes on paper might indicate hidden genius to any benefactor that might wander by.

This is not to denigrate any practitioner of art for recreational or therapeutic value. I myself am an amateur pop-up card enthusiast, though I doubt I’ll ever be skilled enough to make a tutorial video about it.

Also, to address the “a child could do that” argument (which was actually the point of some modern art movements); to replicate the energy, imagination, and immediacy that a child pours into their creations is no mean undertaking.

There is common art, and unique art. The unique art may never have been done before, but in the context of fine art, it may be considered bad art, until enough time has passed, when it is dug out of the landfill and christened good art, initiating a frenzy of collecting and auctioning and VIP-only museum openings and shows, and fawning reviews in the NYT.

There is unique art that poses, undercover, as common art, until one day its true identity is leaked, causing another cascade of discovery. And the money trickles upwards, compounding with interest, until a posh new home with an ocean view and well-heeled owners is found for the here-to-fore contemptible artwork.

Then, there is beginner and advanced art. The advanced art, carefully crafted, may also be regarded with disdain, until ample time has passed after the artist has been deceased to increase its value. But in THIS context, I would say, there is NO bad BEGINNER art.

The person who is just beginning his journey into art by trying to join two graphite lines together in the true spirit of dedication to the discipline of art is to be commended and encouraged. This is where people like me jump in and try to fan the flame of curiosity. Art is a private journey providing a generous reward of its own. This is where I cheer you on from the sidelines, waving pom poms of erasers and charcoal sticks.

You’ll enjoy learning how to draw. It is a lifelong practice, like music or woodcarving. Maybe one day, your art will be recognized. Maybe not. Would that make it good art, or bad art?

Smudge It! Charcoal drawing workshop series hosted at the friendly and bright Margaret Lane Gallery at their new Corbin location in Hillsborough, NC, for 3 Wednesday evenings in June. Materials supplied. Take home your own charcoal set! You can save and sign up for all three, or you are welcome to just take one at a time. Details here.

Red, Bright & Blue: Color is our primary concern in these 3 Wednesday evening painting workshops in July, led by Wendy Aldwyn.

Red, Bright & Blue: Color is our primary concern in these 3 Wednesday evening painting workshops in July, led by Wendy Aldwyn. We’ll create compositions with all the colors of the rainbow, and then some, with just the 3 primary colors plus black and white. As we play with paint, we‘ll experiment with hue, saturation and value, and look at additive (RGB) and subtractive (CMYK) color systems.

July 12: Red, with mixed emotions
What colors can we mix with that most passionate of colors, red, to enhance or to soothe our longings? For hummingbirds to humans, red is the color that attracts. As we dabble in our paints, we’ll look at how red works in harmony and in dissonance with other colors that we’ll invent with our basic primary palette.

July 19: Bright, the color of light
White are the rays from our yellow sun. A color split into rainbows, then back into one. We’ll create rainbow colors, then focus on chiaroscuro, a study of light and dark practiced by the old masters.

July 26: Blue, the color that stands alone
From the heavenly vault to the ocean depths, blue is the color that quiets and inspires us. Picasso had his “Blue Period,” so will we, as we explore the monochromatic power of blue, and the colors that warm and cool its solitary spirit.

Materials provided. Sign up for one, or sign up for all 3 workshops and save! Details here.

My grandmother, a noted boxer breeder and handler, and former dancer, was eccentric and charming. She struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. And she was one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known.

I. HIDE AND SEEK

My grandmother sits on the bottom stair in the darkened dining room, head in her hands. She is babysitting for my brother and I, who are playing hide-and-seek on the main floor.

Because I am “It,” I’m on the landing, counting to 10, while my brother hides somewhere upstairs. I’ve turned the light on the stairs on, because it’s scary dark. This wakes up Mawn, who gets up unsteadily and staggers over to the wall and flicks off the light, saying, slurring her words, “If you’re hiding, I’ll just turn off the light.” She goes and sits back down. I explained carefully that my brother was the one who was hiding, and turned the light back on. I like to look at myself in the ornate gold-framed, full-length mirror on the landing, which also dimly reflects my grandmother sitting at the bottom of the stairs, hunched over, back towards me. And I am afraid of the dark. She gets up again, and the dialogue and moves are repeated a couple more times. My brother and I decide to play a different game.

I was also deathly afraid of ticks. My brother and I would help Mawn in the Spring pull their swollen, gray-brown bodies off the ears of her show boxer dogs and watch as they bubbled and turned black when she set fire to them in a green glass ashtray. Even though I’d occasionally find one crawling on me, never one attached, I knew that one day there’d be a tick with my name on it in that house.

II. GHOSTS

Papa had left Mawn long ago (I barely remembered them living together), but he’d left behind a closet full of his clothes and shoes smelling like him, of leather and Camel cigarettes. Sometimes I go stand inside that closet to feel close to him. Mawn never threw away his clothes.

Mawn has a much larger, walk-in, cedar closet full of beautiful clothes she saves for the ghost of her past to wear. Pink lace, linen, green velvet and wool jackets and skirts and dresses, all with matching shoes. When I got older, the clothes fit me, but the shoes were too small. She also has a collection of wild, eccentric straw hats ornamented with butterflies, or giant plastic dice, or little stuffed bluebirds, or a little stuffed plastic boxer, that she wears in the ring at the dog show, so people will ask who is that crazy lady with that beautiful boxer dog.

a portal to the underworld

My brother and I understand that Mawn’s house is a portal to the underworld, frequented by ghosts from the past, ghosts of champion boxers, the ghosts of her father and mother. She has pictures of her mother and unidentified relatives in a box under her antique, horsehair mattress bed. Her father’s cremated remains are in a closet on the third floor, in a box wrapped in brown paper with a string tied around it, and a mailing address and name on it which I did not recognize. My brother and I occasionally visit that closet and take down the box, thrill to feel its weight, and shake it, hoping to hear bones rattling, but only hear SSHHH – SSHHH, the sound of ash shifting side to side. Cremated remains of her deceased champion dogs are there, too, in plain little cardboard boxes in a drawer in a black, dusty antique dresser in the same room that had the closet with our great-grandfather’s ashes.

III. PANACHE

She decided a long time ago for us to call her “Mawn,” because it sounded French – so “chichi.” She had played with the ideas of “Mawn and Pawn,” and “Moppet and Poppett,” for herself and my grandfather, but when I looked up at my grandfather and called him “Papa,” that moniker adhered to him, and my grandmother had content herself with “Mawn.” My father knew a little French, but my siblings and I never got very far beyond “parlez-vous français?” My grandmother also says, “treasurely,” and “toote suite,” a lot, too. I don’t think my grandmother was, at all, French, or had ever been to France. Unfortunate, for I’m sure she would have turned heads in Paris.

My father, her only child, is a classically-trained pianist who can play anything from Beethoven to Broadway classics, but my grandmother plays by ear. She bangs out her own parodies of showtunes at the expense of her rivals [most notably Jane Kamp, a prizewinning handler) and always finishes with a flourish and a laugh. One was, “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Doggie” after “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby.”

Oh, you musta been a beautiful doggie
You musta been a beautiFUL pup!
Prancin’ around at shows, way upon your toes,
Holdin’ your beautiful boxer HEAD up!
And when it came to winnin’ blue ribbons
You really showed the other DOGS how,
And now you’re a champ, and you didn’t need JANE Kamp!
Oh, doggie, look at you NOW!!

Mawn is a hard worker, tirelessly taking care of her dogs 24/7. We always see her in grimy khaki shorts or skirt, and white button-down blouse and scraggly gray-blonde hair. She is cleaning the dog pens, or feeding the puppies, or training the young dogs on lead. She keeps pieces of cooked chicken livers in her pockets for rewards. She is smushing the ground dog meat through her strong, leathery fingers with thick, chipped red fingernails, mixing it with cottage cheese, powdered “pablum,” and vitamins and serving it in stainless steel dog dishes to her weaning babies.

My grandmother has a green Amazon parrot named Mike, who can imitate exactly her greetings, exclamations, and phone conversations. He also takes special delight in calling her special pet brindle boxer, “U.S.” (short for “U.S. Male”), who comes running into the kitchen and looks frantically around, every time. U.S. and I were born on the same day, and same year. We shared our birthday cake and ice cream together until he died after we turned 13.

The kennel is spacious, windowed and airy, and has long runs that are meticulously hosed down. The dogs are free to run in and out of the building. It has fans and air conditioning (we don’t in our house), and a grooved rubber-topped grooming table with a noose, and with drawers fragrantly full of grooming supplies. It is partially shaded by a large maple tree in front. Bright yellow ribbons of Shell No-Pest strips hang from the ceiling, covered with flies. My grandmother keeps fresh newspapers and cedar chips in the dogs’ large beds. She also regularly exercises them individually outside, although on one occasion, two escaped together and ran off to kill some of our neighboring farmer’s chickens.

I remember one of the boxers getting a tomato juice bath after an encounter with a skunk.

In one half of our garage were several columnar stacks of newspapers my grandmother and my parents collected for her dogs’ beds. My brother and I would browse through and take out the comic sections.

birthing suites for puppies

The pregnant boxers are brought into the bathrooms of her house, and special birthing suites are arranged for them there. My brother and I run down from our house to hold the little ones, feel their squirmy soft bodies in our hands, smell their milky puppy breath, and let them suck on our fingers with with their little square toothless pink puppy mouths as their mother watches anxiously, but still trusting.

Sometimes my brother and I help Mawn with chores and training puppies, and are treated to barbecue potato chips and tomato juice with celery sticks, which we never have in our house. (Our parents didn’t drink Bloody Marys.) These treats were also available whenever she threw large afternoon soirées on her stone terrace, inviting all the well-heeled dog people she knew. Then, she’d wear stylish clothes with large red plastic earrings, red pumps, and jangly silver bracelets, Chanel #5, dark red lipstick and painted-on eyebrows. She’d greet us at the door with a strange sideways kiss – she’d pucker up her crinkly mouth and come right at our mouths, then at the last second, her mouth would swerve to the side and she’d go, “mmmMWAH!” with a loud smack on our cheeks. Maybe people did that in France.

Sometimes Mawn relaxes on the front lawn, kicking back in her lounge chair with a Scotch on the rocks, slathered in QT suntan lotion, in her dirty khakis and bra and white sunglasses, flexing her red-painted toenails. If we go out with my parents (we lived up the hill in another house on the same property, and shared the gravel driveway), my mother is always mortified to see her sitting out there like that. We live way out in the country with only occasional passers-by, still, SOMEONE might see her, almost topless!

IV. FAMILY

My grandmother never moves her own furniture. Every chair, every lamp, every picture, every little knick knack has its own fixed, perfect position for all time. But every time she babysat for us, she rearranged my mother’s furniture. Then, when she went home, my mother moved it all back.

my grandmother never moves her own furniture.

First Mawn and Papa, then just Mawn, lived in the main old Dutch Colonial house on the partially neglected 60-acre estate way out in the backwoods of New Jersey, but within commuting distance of NYC. My parents and my younger siblings and I lived in what used to be an old carriage house up the gravel driveway.

After my grandparents separated and divorced, they never spoke to each other again. At family get-togethers, we could never tell if one was even disturbed by the presence of the other by their animated, cheerful conversation with everyone ELSE.

Then we got it worked out so, during a holiday, we would see Papa in the morning, and Mawn in the evening. My mother would cook something and we’d all walk it down to Mawn’s house. Here and there at Mawn’s house, my siblings and I would find strange exotic candy never featured at my parents’ house: peppermint curls, licorice sticks, mints, candied citrus, petit fours, fruitcake, and turkish delight.

V. NEIGHBORS

Mr. Conover lived alone, way down the street. You couldn’t see his house from her house, or our house either, for that matter, but my grandmother would get calls from him late in the evening to please shut up her barking dogs. She, being heavily in her cups by that time, would turn on the outside floodlight, go out to the kennel, and from the safety of my bed, I could hear her slamming 2 metal garbage can lids together like cymbals, and yelling at the dogs, “SHAAADAP! SHAAADAP!”, probably more for Mr. Conover’s benefit than the dogs. Probably this could have been avoided had she brought them in every night, but sometimes she left them out in the runs to bow-wow at the moon or deer or whatever was nocturnally rustling in the apple orchard.

the party line

We have a telephone party line with my grandmother. Sometimes the lines get crossed, and we intercept Mr. Conover’s calls to my grandmother, and can tell by his slurred speech that he is just as heavily into his cups as she was into hers. They must have some lively conversations.

VI. RESCUE

Before Papa left Mawn, she had helped him pull my sodden, lifeless, 4-year-old body out of a partially frozen, slushy, brackish pond. My grandfather gave me artificial respiration, and I survived to become a grandmother myself, and write this little story about her. It has been postulated that had my grandparents not been distracted by their arguing, they would have seen my brother and I coming down the hill (my mother sent us on an errand to borrow a can of beans), and this drama might have been avoided. My mother said that she had called to alert them that we were coming, and had asked them to watch for us.

. . .

My grandmother stretches out her arm, demi-seconde. Her dental bridge hangs loosely when she smiles. 20 years later, I come to visit from Houston, Texas, where my family and I live now (I am living with my husband), and find she has lost her mind. She has been eating mayonnaise with a spoon out of a jar. After I took her grocery shopping, she adds sliced bananas covered with sugar to the dog food for the 2 obese dogs in the kitchen, and claims, “But I’ve always done this, and they LOVE it.”

20 years later, I come to visit and find she has lost her mind.

The 8 dogs in the kennel she has forgotten; they are skin and bones, so sad to see. The SPCA comes and puts them down. A friend of hers arranges for this on the 2nd day of my visit, and takes her to get her hair cut while this happens. I stand out in the backyard by the cherry trees and cry and scream when the dogs are put down. I don’t watch. I beg the SPCA lady to let Mawn at least keep the 2 overfed, old dogs that she has in crates in the kitchen whom she afterwards feeds the sugary bananas. The SPCA lady lets her keep them. I show the SPCA lady Mawn’s impressive collection of blue ribbons and trophies. I can’t stop sobbing.

The SPCA also lets her keep her special pet brindle boxer, this one named “Taster,” who runs around free. Turns out that Taster is barely house-trained.

I end up staying 6 weeks. I apprise my father of the situation. He sends a little money. I find a wad of cash rolled up and stashed in a closet, and I pay her utility bills. Now the lights will be kept on, and we can put the trash out by the road for pickup, instead of her throwing it in the brook and watching the water, “Swish, swish it all away!” My father and brother come up for a weekend and clean out the filthy den where she sleeps, watching the old tv with all her clothes on. My father fires her lawyer who was hunting in her woods and ostensibly keeping an eye on things.

I convince her to take a bath, and she does, under my supervision. I buy her new clothes. I take her out to a little hole-in-the-wall in town for a pizza, and she cries while she eats it. It IS really good. There is oregano in a shaker on the table.

don’t feed the dogs bananas and sugar

I scold her for giving the dogs bananas and sugar, and she throws a folding table tray at my head.

She wants me to know there are mice in the house. When we hear them running in herds over the low ceiling in the kitchen, she points upwards, and in a stage whisper says, “The dogs. The dogs.” She wants me to know there are deer in the yard. She points outside and says, “The dogs. The dogs.” She has forgotten my name. She calls me, “My gal” and says, “You were the first.” I nod.

Actually, I wasn’t the first child born to my mother, but I only found that out decades later at my mother’s funeral, as revealed by my aunt. My grandmother never knew. My father might not even have known. Where are you, mystery big brother?

After my father, brother, and I go back home to Texas, where my family had moved when I was 16, after all other arrangements fail, she ends up having to be put in a nursing home. She had to be chased down the street, tackled by the nurse and given a shot before she would go inside the home. When my mother visits a few years later and shows her a picture of me with my new baby, she licks the picture. I don’t know why she was kept in a home in New Jersey and not moved down to Houston where we now lived and could have looked in on her.

VII. DANCE

Mawn once had her own charm and dance school. She came once to my elementary school and led the kids in a square dance. I didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed.

a charmer

She also taught me how to plié and relevé and carry a book on my head. It was a one-hour lesson, then she went to have a drink – I guess I didn’t show much promise as a debutante.

She would run around the dog show ring with her arm outstretched, like a dancer, holding the dog’s head up with the white show leash. She always had muscly, strong dancer’s legs.

. . .

My grandmother stretches out her arm, demi-seconde. She smiles her raggedy smile as I dance to the radio around the kitchen while I cook. It had taken me 2 days to clean the rat turds out of the oven. She had tried to clean the dirty, green linoleum floor with a little scrap of toilet paper. Mawn says, “I used to do that” as she watches me dance, then she makes a single gesture with her arm so graceful and eloquent, I stop, breathless, and am deeply, deeply moved.

Slideshow: Pages from The Book of the Boxer, by Joan McDonald Brearley and Anna Katherine Nicholas.
©1977 by T.F.H. Publications, Inc. Ltd. I. The book is inscribed to me by Billie McFadden (last slide), who gave me the book and helped me with my grandmother when I came for my unexpectedly extended visit.