The Myriad Dangers of Clothespins

The events that shape us all, and the ways that the results can change.

My grandfather is gone now.  I loved him.  Still do.  We would sit, talking, listening to his old big band records; Herb Alpert, the Dukes of Dixieland.  He kept a Victrola in the parlor; the cabinet filled with glass-like 78's that he never listened to anymore.  I started playing trumpet in the school band.  He videotaped a PBS special on the music of Wynton Marsalis, just so I wouldn't miss it.  We watched and listened together, marveling at his talent.  My grandfather played the trombone.  He gave me tips on how to improve my embouchure, showed me why Dizzy Gillespie had it all wrong.  The cheeks shouldn't blow out like that, they should stay in, lips pursed, so the air could move straight through the mouth. 

I learned to listen to music actively, passionately.  He taught me that the distance between notes is bridged, not by tones, but by feeling.  I like to think that my love for music was inherited, inherent in the workings of my DNA.  I could never hope to stop it; it was out of my control, like a white river passing from its mountainous source, through my mother and down to me.  I became the delta of his love. 

Scrawling some letters on loose leaf, tapping rhythm on the carpet, I called him, brimming with excitement, and played for him.  It may have been the shortest, worst combination of notes ever written down.  I know that now.  Secretly, he knew it as well.  Instead of wincing at the cacophony, he encouraged me in my new found creativity.  I still write music.  The sounds and instrumentation are vastly different, but the soul of it, the feeling, is identical.  I believe that this primal experience with my trumpet explains why I assume friends aren't being honest with me when they claim to enjoy my songs.  I fear that they are simply showering me with encouragement. 

My grandfather always encouraged me, whatever I aspired to.  Encouragement and advice, those were his gifts to me, the ones that will never stop giving.  The ones I will someday pass on to my own, and to their own.  The most poignant thing he ever said to me was "I have been where you are, you might be where I am."  I sometimes wonder if he ever attained or surpassed the summit of his father's experience.  His father never spoke English.

My father hit me.  Heading home on my bicycle one Sunday afternoon, I glimpsed my father's car.  I was late.  I should have gotten home on time.  He was worried.  The car swerved off of the road, onto the patch of lawn where I was riding and screeched to a halt.  I fell off my bike and wanted to run.  I think the entire neighborhood heard him screaming at me, while my mother remained in the car and cried, begging him to stop, begging him to be reasonable.  In those days, he was rarely reasonable. 

The purpose of admonishment is to teach a lesson.  Punishment exists as a method for preventing future, similar, mistakes.  I do not remember many of the affronts, but I will never forget the results.  In hindsight, it became clear that violence was an ineffective means of effecting consequence. 

I sometimes played backyard baseball with a childhood friend, pitching and hitting a tennis ball with a plastic bat.  We measured our progress in the game by where the batted balls would land.  In a moment of rage, caused by something I can't remember, my father wrested the bat from my friend's hands and began to strike him with it.  He curled up in a ball, making himself small, to minimize the pain.  Once again, my mother was there, screaming at my father, begging him to stop, begging him to be reasonable.  He had embarrassed her like this before, the day he slapped the nephew of her friend.  Years later, I was introduced to the nephew while at college.  He didn't remember me.  I doubt he'll ever forget my father.

When we are young, often times our parents' motivations are not clear.  Worse than that, sometimes they seem nonsensical.  My mother, ever the voice of reason in regards to my father's abhorrent behavior, was not without faults entirely her own.  Lost in a haze of frustration with my disobedience, she would also resort to my father's tactics.  While his violent reprimands were generally made by his hands, hers included all manner of household weaponry.  A hairbrush, wooden spoons, toys, anything within her reach was a possible gavel, passing judgment down upon my back and limbs.  The perfect embodiment of cliché, these beatings frequently ended with a stern "Wait until your father gets home!", although she rarely followed through on her threat.  Even she was, to some degree, afraid of my father though he was never violent to her. 

My grandfather gave me my first pocketknife.  He showed me how to whittle sticks into useful items, like clothespins.  When he was a child, with the Depression running rampant through the country, he and his brothers would use clothespins as toys.  I can imagine them pretending the pins were soldiers, an innocent harbinger of their service during World War II.  My grandfather enlisted in the Navy, but never saw active duty.  In the wake of the sinking of the U.S.S. Juneau, and the deaths of all five Sullivan brothers aboard, he was sent home.  The military feared another family losing all their children to war, and soon after formally instituted the Sole Survivor Policy. 

I sat just outside his front door, on a bench, whittling away the summer the way he taught me.  I soon became the Max Ernst of whittling.  Admittedly, that was a delusion of grandeur.  I was so horribly inefficient with the knife that all I could form were abstractions.  If I were trying to carve wooden facsimiles of garden stones, I would have been mildly successful.  The wood had a soul; it wanted to be something useful.  I could just never fully realize it's potential.

My grandfather was remarkable when working with wood.  His basement was filled with tools.  His heart was filled with patience.  He spent hours down there, especially in the harsh New England winters.  He created toys and decorations from patterns, Adirondack chairs from memory.  Some nights, I went down with him, watching him work.  I learned to work the planer, maneuver the boards through the jigsaw.  Only the table saw was out of the question.  It was too dangerous, at least until I got older.

I only got to work that saw once.  As I grew into my teenage years, I lost interest.  I became consumed by other things.  I was never any good with tools anyway, not until I had my own place.  I had to learn fast, and spent a lot of the time visualizing what he would do.  I spent even more time regretting that I didn't show more interest in it while he could still teach me.  He would have shared his knowledge, his skills, with me if I had only paid more attention.  It could have been just like it was when I discovered music.

My father had no room in his heart for music.  He didn't go to many concerts, didn't listen to records.  My first record player was my most cherished possession in the entire world.  The speaker was built right in, and the entire device was seated in a closeable case with an illustration of Winnie the Pooh on the lid.  I would listen to book and records, reading along with the narrator, turning the pages when I heard the "Beep".  One night, a friend of my father's was visiting.  The pair sat in our kitchen, chatting away the hours in some heated discussion or other.  I was in my room.  I had a difficult time, I suppose, paying attention to the story on the record through the din of conversation.  I remember walking into the kitchen like I was the king of the castle and announcing "If you don't keep it down, I'm going to turn the volume all the way up!"  My father laughed hysterically.  His friend did too, not because of my brash insistence, but because of the way I said "vol-oo-may".  My father corrected my mispronunciation and sent me off, assured that they would try to stay a bit quieter. 

I was very young at that time, before my parents bought their first house.  I can still remember the pattern of the wallpaper in my bedroom.  It was off-white, with tiny beige leaf like shapes organized in a diamond.  I remember because I spent a lot of time there.  Anytime my parents had company, I was exiled to my room.  I was told not to interrupt or disturb the "big people".  Occasionally my young mind could magnify the importance of certain things.  Like the pattern of the wallpaper, or the command to stay in my room.  One night in particular, I chose to obey my father a bit too strictly and soiled myself.  I can't recall what was more embarrassing, my mother having to clean me (and my blanket sleeper) or the beating I got from my father afterward.  By trying so hard to appease him, I had caused more harm.  I had embarrassed him.  In no small way, I can relate.  In hindsight, much like my grandfather's love for music, my father's fear of embarrassment has passed down to me.

There is no fear that struck me more fiercely than the fear of being embarrassed.  I have been a very finicky eater.  If the truth be told, even in my adulthood, I still ate like a child.  I avoided fancy restaurants and the dread that came if the menu was not "child friendly".  I was also overweight, a trait inherited from my mother.  This fact, in addition to my fear, ushered forth an entirely different set of challenges.  It intensified the aversion to restaurants, where I would imagine wandering stares wondering what the fat guy was eating.  Additionally, it made exercise difficult.  The mere idea of faces laughing at me on a bicycle, or out for a walk, horrified me.  These were the gifts given me by my parents, the ones that kept on giving.

My grandfather would eat anything.  When he was younger, and still healthy, he hunted.  Venison became one of his favorite delicacies.  He drove back from Maine with the deer carcass strapped to the roof of his station wagon.  In the garage, there were monstrous hooks dangling from the rafters where he would hang the deer.  He then went to work, carving and slicing, transforming the once beautiful animal into steaks.  The first time I witnessed this, I was mortified.  I asked my mother if she could make him stop hurting animals.  She explained that all meat was animal once, and although we didn't cut it up, it was carved nonetheless.  Weeks later, my grandmother made some pasta with meatballs.  Shortly after dinner, my grandfather let the cat out of the bag (or the deer out of the garage) and confessed that the meatballs were venison.  I remembered the night I saw him in the garage and almost vomited in my mouth.

He learned how to butcher from his father.  Many of the Portuguese immigrants brought their customs with them when they sailed to America.  In the "old country" it was fairly commonplace to butcher a pig hung from a clothesline.  I tried to imagine how he must have felt, seeing his father using his clothespin soldiers as tools for this carnage.  Was he appalled as I would have been?  Or did he patiently sit by and wait until he could reclaim his toys?  Perhaps the soldiers became more real to him, once they became stained with blood.  A boy's mind could certainly transmogrify marks from pig's blood into the scars of war. 

My grandfather had a scar on his head, where hair couldn't grow.  I asked him about it once.  He told me a story about falling from the back of a truck, too young to know to stay seated.  I could never fully decide if the story were true, or just a fable built to teach me a lesson about being careful.  I had a scar as well, on my upper lip.  Still do.  Not many notice it anymore, covered as it is by my moustache.  My father was painting one of the upstairs bedrooms yellow, preparing for the day when my younger brother would be old enough to sleep up there by himself.  On this day, the room was empty, save for the paint, brushes, and rollers.  The two rooms upstairs shared an interesting feature, drawers and a shelf built into the wall on one side.  I cannot recall what I had done, but I can definitely remember the shelf giving me quite a kiss on the lips.  And it wasn't a very good kisser.  I had the scar to prove it.

My father had his scars too.  Or at least he does now.  When I was old enough, I moved out of our house.  We didn't speak very much after that.  I resented him for getting remarried, for selling the house I grew up in, and for all the beatings.  Just prior to his engagement, I accompanied my girlfriend to her cousin's house.  She was babysitting his kids.  My car wasn't running at the time, but she assured me that I would make it home by curfew.  Her cousin and his wife got back late.  As soon as they returned, they drove me home.  All the lights in my house were out.  I tiptoed down the walk and eased my key into the lock.  The door then flew open and my father had me by the collar, dragging me into the house.  In the living room, there was an ashtray set into an old, wooden stand.  He proceeded to knock me off my feet, and began pounding the ashtray stand into my ribs.  All the while he was screaming.  He dropped his weapon, pulled me up and dared me to hit him back.  I wouldn't.  I couldn't.  He was my father.

The silence between us continued to expand.  We spoke only when necessary.  He took a skiing trip to Canada with his new family.  While on a run, he fell awkwardly into the snow, twisting his neck.  As he lied there in the cold, flat on his back, he realized that he lost the movement of his limbs.  He remained paralyzed in a Quebec hospital for far longer than they had planned to vacation.  X-rays revealed a condition called spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the cavity housing the spinal cord.  It was caused by arthritis.  The surgeon had to approach his spine through the front of his neck, splitting the vertebrae to allow more room for his spinal cord.  Slowly he regained control of his extremities.

Upon returning home, reflecting on his brush with mortality, he began to soften somewhat.  I went to see him, to make sure he would be alright.  He embraced me, tighter than I had ever felt, and apologized.  He was sorry he wasn't there for me more, that he couldn't be the father he meant to be.  When he looked up, tears welled in his eyes, and then streamed down both cheeks.  This was true.  He really was sorry.  He never specifically addressed the violence, but I knew that he was sorry for that too.  Things between us began to change after that.

It started slowly, as all things do.  We spent more time together, spoke more and more frequently as the days turned to months, even years.  We had razed the foundation poured in my childhood, and erected a beautiful friendship in its place.  My father had changed.  Remarkably, we were able to attain the sort of relationship every father and son hoped to have. 

My grandfather is gone now.  I loved him.  Still do.  But since he has passed, I have been endued with something just as special, a renewed life to share with my father.  We have attained a whole new outlook on the future which now, perhaps for the first time, can truly include the concept of family.  I can't help wondering if maybe, just maybe, my grandfather had planted the seeds of reunion from somewhere beyond the veil, somewhere that his clothespin soldiers never need to fight again.

Reviews

[J.K. (Not Rowling)]

The recurring theme of the clothespin throughout this autobiographical narrative is strong. It helps bring order to some obviously difficult memories. I can't imagine what living through this might have been like. You are straightforward, telling events in a clear-headed manner that I don't think would have been possible for you before your reunion with your father. Kenny, this is an amazing, soul-bearing piece of literature. You are brave to be so honest with yourself and your reader, without dwelling unnecessarily on painful events. You don't fall into the trap of self-pity, and that is extremely hard to do. It's remarkable that, through telling a story about your grandfather, you actually capture 3 generations of men and their different ways of dealing with struggles. It must have been cathartic writing this, setting free emotions, thoughts, and details that have probably been bottled up inside you for a very long time. They are free now, so you can also be free. This is a strong piece, and you should be proud of yourself for sharing it not only with us, but with yourself.