the early years

the shot

I realize I haven’t written in a while. This is a difficult blog to write.

I read this today and felt that it was applicable to the sentiments that I write here.

The Shot
Ted Hughes

Your worship needed a god.
Where it lacked one, it found one.
Ordinary jocks became gods –
Deified by your infatuation
That seemed to have been designed at birth for a god.
It was a god-seeker. A god-finder.
Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
When his death touched the trigger.
In that flash
You saw your whole life. You ricocheted
The length of your Alpha career
With the fury
Of a high-velocity bullet
That cannot shed one foot-pound
Of kinetic energy. The elect
More or less died on impact –
They were too mortal to take it. They were mind-stuff,
Provisional, speculative, mere auras.
Sound-barrier events along your flightpath.
But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and done that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek-scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true.
Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist, I did not even know
I had been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me –
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.

defined

My brother has joked about us being white trash for as long as I can remember.

What does that mean to him?  What does it mean to me?

Does it mean the kids who wear mismatched clothes and have dirty faces all of the time?  Does it mean that you're too poor to be able to buy food?  Does it mean that you have a car on blocks in your front yard or that you have a junkyard dog guarding your property?  Are white trash folks the ones that sit out on the front porch (if they are well-enough off to afford a front porch), chewing on tobacco, holding a shotgun to scare others off?  Do we think of Deliverance when we think of white trash?  Or do we think of Bastard out of Carolina?  Is it books and movies that have defined what white trash is to us?

For us, it meant that we shopped at second hand stores (or places where we could get a pair of pants for under $5), we were struggling to find money for food, that we were the kids who were either homeless or had homes that were ridiculed by those we went to school with, and that we were, in general, teased relentlessly by other kids because we weren't able to afford the same things they could.

We were latchkey kids.  We were kids who, while not living on the streets, did struggle.  We had to be little grown-ups because our parents were rarely home because they were working to try to keep us all alive.

Making the joke to call us "white trash" has been something that has really offended our parents.  I think it hurts them because they did struggle.  They did want the best for us.  They were kids themselves, though, and didn't really have the tools or skills to take care of all of us.  They did the best they could.  

We all do the best we can.  If we can survive those struggles, then we become stronger and more resilient.  The alternative isn't pretty. 

what is white trash?

I may not be portraying how poor we were properly.  And maybe more of that comes later when we were actually homeless.  Or maybe I don't explain what going to the swap meet meant every week – that it meant the difference between food on the table or not.

Or maybe I haven't explained how kids would tease us, even as very young children, for the way we dressed.  Our clothes were hand-me-downs from friends and family or they were bought in second-hand stores (before that was the cool thing to do) or they were bought at the swap meets.  And maybe I'm not explaining well enough exactly what that means – that these clothes might have stains or not fit quite right (especially when you're exceptionally tall and exceptionally thin for a child your age).  Highwaters were a part of my life because only short pants would fit around my tiny waist.

Or maybe I'm not explaining how we were always on subsidized food, even in school, and how that made us stand out – probably because this makes a bigger impact later, when I actually understand what subsidized school lunches are and how I had to work in the lunchroom to help pay for my own lunch – at the age of 10.  So while everyone else was out on recess, I was working.

And maybe I'm not explaining well what all of this does to your spirit and your hopes and your belief in yourself.  Because it does affect it.  You're the poor kid.  You're the kid people feel sorry for and look on with disdain all at once.  You're the kid who believes that you are just not as good as those who can afford to buy the newest things.

Being poor isn't fun and it isn't something that creates character and it isn't something that is appealing – even though Steinbeck novels make it almost seem romantic.

It's not.

It's sad and hard and depressing.

But it has also helped me be who I am – something I wouldn't change for all of the money in the world.  I value those hard years. 

swap meets

The thing I remember the most about San Diego was the swap meet.

Every weekend, we were at a swap meet. I can't remember what we sold but I'm pretty sure it was old stuff that my parents wanted to get rid of. You know the saying, "One man's junk is another man's treasure." I'm not sure if any of it could have been another man's treasure but it sure got us through some rough times.

I remember wandering around the swap meet. Back then, kids roamed without their parents. No one worried about a kid being snatched up or being hurt by mean people. No one kept an eye on their kids every second of every day. We were free to roam and play – just as long as we didn't get into trouble.

Five years old and I was roaming around a San Diego swap meet like I owned the place.

If you've never been to a big swap meet, let me explain it to you. We're not talking a few aisles of cars and peoples' wares spread out on tarps. We're talking miles and miles of cars and vans and tables and awnings and tarps (we were of the tarp variety – too poor to afford anything else). There are areas of new goods and areas of the used (we were the latter). There are aisles for food.

Every Saturday and Sunday, we were bundled up and taken to the swap meet. We'd help our parents unload the van (an old Metro – looked like an ice cream or milk truck) and put everything out on the ground. We'd help label everything with a price tag. We'd make sure that everything was out.

And then we were free.

Sometimes we had a dollar but more often, we had very little money at all. We'd go back to the van for lunch (mom would have made sandwiches).

For little kids, it was like a smorgasbord, though. It was a wild world full of many different kinds of people. There were amazing things going on.

What I remember most, though, is rust and old shoes and the smell of books. Rusty car parts and tools. Rusty metals were abundant. Old shoes were always scattered among the tarps. People bought them. I always wondered what they did with them after buying them (and, to this day, I have trouble buying used shoes, even at vintage stores, because of what they remind me of).

The books…oh, the books. That was heaven to me. I loved the smell of opening a book and rippling the pages so that old book smell would come out.

Even then. Even at that age, I couldn't get enough books.

They made everything bareable.

florida

I think that Florida was that place that sealed our poverty.  The military doesn't pay well.  Having two very young kids saps what money you do have.

While we had one half of a duplex at that time, it doesn't mean we weren't poor.

I remember a hurricane.  I don't remember which one.  But I remember the aftermaths.

Someone my mom knew would let us swim in their pool.  It was free and it was good fun for us.

I remember the hurricane because the pool was filled with a tree trunk and debris.  The one place my mom took us could no longer be used.

I think poverty affects you in a different way.  Poor people don't always think about the free things that are available to them:  libraries, museums, parks, etc.

We could have gone to libraries.  We could have had a healthy appetite for painting, sculpture, or whatever.

But when you don't know where your next dollar will come from, driving a car, that uses gas, taking time to go do things that could be spent on other things, is often difficult.  How do you overcome those fears and that overwhelming burden of the power that money has over you?

Can you? 

that car

When we were living in Jacksonville, I remember we had an old Jaguar.  I don't remember the model but I remember it was old.  Really old.  I think it had either dents or rust, too. But it was a Jaguar.  And my dad could fix anything, being the gifted welder that he was.

The thing I remember is that, for us, it was a status symbol.  It didn't matter how old, how beat up, how un-marketable that car was, it was a Jaguar and RICH people drove those.

Here we were:  dirty, rag-tag kids, hoping to find the next meal.  But we had a Jaguar.

That's the important thing.