Someday boy-appropriate dogs would enter the family.
The worst dog chore in the family fell to me: every Saturday morning I skulked around the backyard, a double-thick paper shopping bag in one hand, a pooper-scooper in the other.
In a singular stroke of parenting genius my mother and father allowed me to choose my own pooper-scooper every few months—they were way ahead of the curve on the concept of “ownership.” Whenever the wear and tear of G & F’s intestinal tracts had put the damage to the tool of my trade my father took me down to Lumberjack, the lumber and hardware store of choice in Northern California, and allowed me my pick of the litter, so to speak.
Back in the mid-seventies pooper-scoopers were rather rudimentary compared with today’s options—Four Paws, Yard Pup, Little Stinker. The tool I used looked like a fish spatula. Design and decoration variation occurred only at the handle: with my handle choice I expressed both my character and my aesthetic principles. I admit I favored flower prints.
On this October day the grass shone a brilliant green and among the blades a riot of dew softened my step. I was a sojourner, a Native American tracker in search of scat. My life depended on it. The backyard became my jungle, my Laos, my lost country. There—evidence of G & F: I bent and scooped. My father had taught me a system of poop appropriation that many years later in the Marines I would recognize as “policing.” You walk a grid: you leave no swath of ground uncovered by the eyes. If it doesn’t grow, it goes, the saying went: cigarette butts, bullet casings, ration packaging, and bandoliers. But here in southeast Vacaville I looked only for the evacuations of our stuck-up poodles, the ladies, as my mother called them. Here: bend and scoop. There: bend and scoop. Everywhere: bend and scoop.
I held my little nose. I breathed into the bend of my elbow. I dragged the increasingly heavy bag along the damp grass, toward the garage. My chore done! Another weekend in the trenches and I had survived. I heaped the bag into the open garbage container—the weight of nations no longer taxing my shoulders.
On Saturdays my father woke up late, or left the bedroom late. He’s neither a reader of books nor much of a television watcher, so I’m not sure what he would have been doing in the bedroom a few hours past my mother other than sleeping or daydreaming. He was famous for his stash of candy, and he always had a bit of a belly, so he might have been feeding himself candies and relaxing in bed and dreading coexistence with his family. For most of his life work allowed him an escape. The man must leave for work.
But not on Saturdays—on Saturdays the father cannot escape the brood, and the wife, and the building we call a home. Some men escape with golf, or race cars, or the local bar, but my father never had a hobby that I know of.
I reread the comics at the kitchen table while around me my mother and sisters created a portrait of efficiency and cleanliness: laundering, dusting, vacuuming, poofing pillows, shining furniture, making early preparations for dinner.
When my mother passed me she’d muss my hair and kiss my forehead and I was then and would always remain her baby boy.
My father exited the marital chamber and told me to get ready for the yard inspection. With a start I ran to the backyard and stood on the patio. Nerves rattled my knees; my heart raced: I generally missed a spot, but lately I’d been on a roll, say five or six weeks straight without a penalty. I wanted an undefeated fall season.
“What is this?” my father called from about twenty feet away.
“I don’t know,” I said. Knowing exactly what this was. My undefeated season had been crushed.
“Well, why don’t you come take a look?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t care if you don’t know. Come here, Son.”
I sidled up next to my father. Usually he lectured sternly about the finer points of policing the area, of paying attention to my surroundings, of the responsibility we each had in making the family ship run properly. I suppose this is what most fathers spend their time doing: making minor corrections in the navigation.
But this time my father grabbed me by the back of my neck and he forced my face down toward the pile of dog shit; I fell to my knees, my nose now inches away from the pile. So close I could smell and taste it, the wet meaty aroma of dog shit. My stomach heaved.
“What is that?”
I cried. I gagged. I failed to speak when spoken to.
“What is that, Son?”
“Dog. Poop,” I said through tears.
He held my face an inch or two above the dog shit for a few more seconds. And then snatched me away as though he’d saved me from something.
“Now go get your scooper and clean that up.”
I did as told while my father watched me from a chair on the patio. When I finished he called me over. He sat me in his lap.
He said, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have to look after you all of the time. You’re a big boy. You know what your job is. If you don’t do your job right then no one else can do the right job. And then nothing works around here. If you don’t do your job I can’t mow the lawn, and then you can’t hose down the patio and the driveway. You see?”
I sniffled. I nodded.
“I can’t be mowing over the dog poop. That just causes more of a mess. We gotta be on top of this stuff, Tone. OK?”
I sniffled. I nodded. I went about my Saturday.
AFTER PAYING THE car invoice from my father I left him a phone message asking if he remembered that backyard event. I asked him if he remembered shoving his son’s face in a pile of dog shit. It is true my face never touched the dog shit, but this seems to me a matter of semantics. I could have used the word toward, or near, but neither seems specific enough, or close enough to the experience of a seven-year-old boy.
I don’t know what the car invoice and the dog shit event have in common. I remembered the dog shit event after ranting to a friend about the car invoice: we sat in a bar in Oakland, King’s Lounge, and we drank cheap drinks and looked at girls and I told him what a prick my father had been about the car, and in the middle of telling him the story I saw myself and my father in grainy sixteen-millimeter memory film, in that backyard in Vacaville, a father and son already locked in emotional combat.
For the use of his vehicle my father received from me more than a check. I handed back to him this awful memory.
It appears that most fond childhood memories are shared with your mother. Imagine life without them. Mine are imagined, based on my grandmother’s love, which I share at my mother’s grave.
Here is my father’s best writing yet. He acknowledges that my childhood was smoother and sweeter under my mother’s watch and invokes the fear of every person who walks the Earth: life without Mother. What is life without Mother? Nothingness. He finalizes the paragraph with an image of himself at the foot of his mother’s grave. Whatever you might think of me, he says, don’t forget this fact.
My father’s mother died a month after he was born.
I DECIDE I need to move the TV from the foot of my bed into the closet. I don’t have cable and rarely watch DVDs and the TV is an eyesore.
My closet is full of five or six boxes of books and miscellaneous papers from the office in Brooklyn I moved out of a year ago.
In the boxes of books I discover a few gems I haven’t seen in a while: The Oxford Companion to Italian Food; the Leonard Michaels novel Sylvia; The Letters of Sigmund Freud; Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End.
I find three pairs of earphones, scotch tape, rubber bands, tax documents, a Japanese foot massager, and a stapler. And a manila envelope with my aunt Janna’s familiar script: Forms to Keep. I have no idea what this could be. I pull out the forms and the top form is a photocopy of the obituary page of the Opelika Daily News from Monday, July 21, 1941:
Mrs. Annie Swofford, Auburn Route 1, Dies at Opelika Infirmary
Mrs. Annie Laurie Swofford, age 20, of Auburn Route 1, died at the Opelika Infirmary Sunday, at 2:45 p.m., following four weeks illness a
nd funeral service is to be held at 4:00 p.m. daylight saving time today, from the Baptist church in Auburn, internment in Auburn cemetery. Short Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
Deceased was born Annie Laurie Howard, on Auburn Route 1, residing there all her life. She was married August 29, 1937 to J. C. Swofford, who survives. Other survivors are: baby son, John Howard Swofford, mother Mrs. S. L. Howard, twin brother, Hodge Howard, now at Camp Blanding, Fla, David Howard, brother, of Auburn Route 1; sister Mrs. J. H. Crawford, Opelika, sister, Mrs. H. S. Strickland, Selma, ALA; brothers, Robert Howard, Auburn and Lafayette Howard, Perry, Fla.
Dr. J. R. Edwards is to conduct services and the following are to act as pallbearers: Earl Wood, Carson Cooper, Cecil Waller and Wilton Thorp.
Mrs. Swofford’s father, Samuel Lafayette Howard died in October, 1940.
Baby son, John Howard Swofford
My father was just a month old when his mother died.
She came from a well-to-do family in Auburn, Alabama. Her father taught music at Auburn University. Her mother was a homemaker. My grandfather was a young guy trying to put together a chain of gas stations and sundries stores, but he never pulled it together. His young wife died, he took his son home to Georgia, a few months later he went to the war and his parents raised his son until he came home in 1945.
I have always heard, money changes people. I met people who were down to earth folks, with class and integrity and sound moral and ethical strength and did not wear their money on their sleeve. It took a while for me to see they had money and I could not imagine it changed them. I hoped that if I ever got money (too late for that now) I would have the fortitude to keep it from changing my character. Other money people show it right away, they act like their money makes them better than others and entitles them to royal treatment, usually believing they are not subject to normal social behavior. I would like to see how they are treated on their way back down, by the ones they treated with arrogant indifference as they passed on their way up.
You had as much choice in choosing me as father as I you son. Do memories justify rude and irresponsible behavior—? Did you blind me—or have you changed that much in the last few years? Maybe a combination, whatever my contribution—it is unintended.
Another brilliant rhetorical turn on his part—after reminding me of the tragic death of his mother and softening me, he goes back on the attack.
I remembered the last line of that first paragraph as “See you on your way down.” Here my father is trying to be sly and anecdotal, trying to impart folksy Southern wisdom.
He believes money has changed me. Yes, for a few years I made very good money, banker money, but my father doesn’t understand that the writer’s life is feast or famine.
My father can’t imagine that the rift in our relationship has anything to do with our relationship. He’s looking for someone or something to blame, and money and I are to blame. Money, money changes everything. For my father, it’s as simple as that. Also, he’d like the past erased.
And more than anything, perhaps, he is hurting inside: still smarting eight years after my brother’s death, as is everyone else in the family. But he needs to lash out. A part of him, I’m certain, hates me for being alive while Jeff is dead. Just as if I’d died and Jeff had lived, he’d hate Jeff for the same reason. He had been waiting for a reason to hate me, and suddenly he had it: my first book, wherein he thinks I treated him unfairly, when in fact I treated him with kid gloves; what he deems my wild financial success; and the fact that I have failed to put a few things in the mail, which is a behavior common to me since I was a little boy: I’m a daydreamer; I don’t always follow through on the directions I’ve been given. This angers him, too. He can no longer boss me around, he has no control over me, and he doesn’t like that at all.
My father has cursed me: See you on your way down, he says.
This turned out to be rather lengthy. I am proud of you and your accomplishments, more than you will ever know. You have many more to come. Stop and smell the flowers once in a while. Don’t forget your roots. I fear that money is bringing unfavorable change. Keep that from happening! As I said before I can’t expect an acknowledgement and at this moment, am not sure this will be sent.
Love, Dad
My father, whatever else, has chutzpah. I believe he knows he will send the letter. But this is a great narrative and emotional punch: I get to the end of his six-page-long assault and I read that he might not have sent it. What would have happened if he hadn’t? We’ll never know.
Sometime in August he picks his pen up again:
August 06
Granny told me you didn’t call her to let her know that you were not interested in receiving the cross of military service. You simply did not send a copy of your DD-214. What a way to let her know—. Even though many would like to rewrite history it cannot be changed. Your Swofford roots go back through the Southern Confederacy. Your great-great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier. If he had been killed and not made it back to Dog River neither of us would be here. You can be proud or ashamed but you can’t change it. Your Warner roots [my mother’s] could go through a Union Soldier. How many people know where their great-great-great-grandparents are buried?
Granny is Anice Swofford, my father’s stepmother. She’s a sweet old lady, my sweet old granny, with a gleam in her blue eyes and she likes the acronym GRITS: girls raised in the South. She makes the best sausage biscuits in the world and she’s a member of United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Cross of Military Service is a medal the UDC gives to combat veterans who are direct descendants of Confederate soldiers, and as my father outlined above, I seem to be one of those.
It’s my understanding that when Granny accumulates citations and awards for her family she gains esteem from her colleagues. And I don’t begrudge Granny her hobby. But I couldn’t accept a medal from an organization that associates loosely with neo-Confederate groups that would gladly wipe half my friends off the face of the Earth.
Sure, I could’ve called Granny and told her that, but it seemed easier to simply ignore her request for my military discharge papers. She’s a smart lady. She knows I’m a progressive. She’d get the hint. No need to smack down Granny over the phone, was my thinking.
Of our Southern ancestry my father writes, You can be proud or ashamed but you can’t change it. This is true. And I like the South, and as a kid I loved visiting all the family down there, and still do, but I can choose to not accept an award from an organization that fights to keep the rebel flag flying.
Aug 10-06
Now that we have had this pissy phone call I will probably be sending this and still no response is expected. Helping Tami is not the issue. You will know this will not be the last time she hits bottom and needs financial aid. I am glad that you are willing and able to help. I no longer have the resources, mainly because of being on a fixed income, which is much less than when I was working. You having the money to pay me back is not the issue. The issue was the question you would not answer. There you were being evasive, not answering the question, but asking others that had nothing to do with a re-payment date. Why do you think I was pressing for a re-payment date?
My father was visiting my older sister in Billings and she had gotten into some financial trouble. She needed some cash, not a large sum of money, as I recall, around a thousand dollars. I was cheating on Ava in Vancouver at the time and didn’t have a checkbook on me so I asked my father if he wouldn’t mind writing Tami a check and then as soon as I was back in New York, in a few weeks, I’d drop one to him in the mail.
For whatever reason this threw him into a rage. I remember well the argument. He wanted an exact date that I would put the check in the mail and I refused to give him an exact date because I hadn’t bought my return ticket. I was sitting on the terrace of an apartment in Vancouver BC. Inside the apartment was a woman I had just made love to. I drank coffee and took in a view of the sea, and I let my fathe
r scream at me and I refused to respond.
I ended up wiring Tami the money. Cut out the middleman.
Since you have made it “Big Time,” I am no longer dazed at your treatment of family. You should be embarrassed at not calling Granny and ashamed about James’s books. [I was delayed in returning signed copies of Jarhead to a cousin of mine.] Your mother will take exception, as usual. You seem to gloat at being an arrogant, self-centered person exhibiting the lowest level of responsibility. Why would your time be more valuable than theirs?
Love, Dad
Perhaps I should have called my grandmother and said, “Thanks, Granny, but I’d rather not receive an award from your neo-Confederate organization.”
Sometimes silence speaks wonders, even to your sweet, sweet-tea-drinking granny.
I should’ve returned those books to my cousin James sooner, but I didn’t. I’m unorganized. I lose stuff. I don’t write things down. I miss appointments. I piss people off. It has nothing to do with any success, or any sums of money. It’s just who I am. When I was a dirt-poor college student subsisting on ramen and PBR I behaved exactly the same.
None of this makes me arrogant or self-centered. But if your father thinks you are arrogant and self-centered, you are.
Sun Aug 13, 2006
It was good to hear your voice, know that you had a good birthday. You may not open this for three or four months or for that matter ever; since you said you have no reason to open mail as you have no bills. How fortunate for you. If it were a publisher or Hollywood type, would it sit that long? Now that I see most family matters are of little importance to you—should I call James and tell him he will be lucky to ever get his books back? Is it unreasonable that we expect responsible behavior from you?