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New girl in town: trolls 'n dolls in Trollandia

 

Hometown dreams: 1964

I don't have much time today - I have to be somewhere fast - but I thought I'd post, or re-post this slideshow I made from old family/hometown photos. Some of these are very personal, but since they weren't specifically labelled, I hoped they would  be seen as "found photos", anonymous pictures of the past which often have a  dreamlike, even slightly creepy quality. They're either black and white, or overly-saturated/faded '60s (Instamatic!)  colour.

I had someone contact me about this video, someone I knew in high school. We both lived in this same town. As far as I can remember, we were both miserable. One time, one of HER friends ripped into me and didn't stop ripping into me (though I never knew why) during a 20-minute  walk the three of us took together. My friend said nothing during the whole thing. She was simply a spectator, which was somehow worse than being trashed. I don't remember much about our friendship except episodes like this (that, and her telling me to get off the phone because her boy friend was going to call).

Yet, over the years, and repeatedly, she kept wanting to connect with me - to talk about Chatham. Just about nothing else but Chatham. Chatham-ites are obsessive about  their history and are forever wanting to glom onto you and reminisce about it. Old photos trigger them: "Is that the old Armoury?" "No, that's the old Presbyterian Church." "Oh no, that's the old Kent Museum!" Why did they dig up the lovely flower beds with the delphiniums in Tecumseh Park (35 years ago)? Why did they take down the bandshell? Everyone loved that bandshell. And look - look at that old photo of the Chatham Kiltie Band, with all the band members marching in their kilts! My Uncle Arnold was in that band. Yes, so was my -

Excuse me while I kill myself.

For reasons I do not understand, I did briefly join a Facebook page called "If you grew up in Chatham", but soon regretted it because of its exclusively backward view. For some reason I told someone my "maiden" name, and suddenly there tumbled out of people all sorts of detailed, fond remembrances - of my brother Arthur. Absolutely no one remembered me, and there was no record in their minds that I had ever existed at all. "Now let me seeeee. . . (long pause), no, no, I don't think so. But I'm sure someone - "

Now comes this message from my dubious friend that "people are asking about your video" (which someone had found on YouTube and posted on the "If you grew up" page). It turned out to be one person only, and her name meant nothing to me. But she wanted to get in touch with me for some reason, and wanted my friend to tell her my married name. Since I have three published  novels, a longstanding blog and a (likewise) YouTube channel, if you google my married name, stuff comes up and it is easy to chase me down. I decided it was best to remain neutral and told my once-not-so-great/now-not-at-all friend that I'd rather remain anonymous. Her response had a little dart in it: Sure, OK, that's fine if you don't care about this. But just in case it means anything to you. . .  (more details about the "people/person" who was interested in knowing my name, saying that we used to ride horses together on McNaughton Avenue with another girl whose name also meant nothing).

I had something happen to me which might explain my sensitivity. My mother left my name off her obituary. It was written in advance, probably by my sister, and she didn't just "forget" she had a youngest child. Everyone else's name was mentioned, even a child who had died in infancy. But in her mind, I simply didn't exist. She had never given birth to me, never raised me. It was like those awful family photos with the faces cut out. 

Chatham disowned me a long time ago, and if they want me back now, it's a little too late. It is all too easy to get embroiled in these things, particularly if there are nasty memories involved. Had I thrown this door open, the people from that Facebook page would probably be asking me where I got these pictures, as if I had no right to display them. They would object to the fact that not all the pictures are from 1964. Or they'd want obsessive details on each one, such as: 

"When was this one taken? No, not the year. The DAY!" 
"Was that the summer you had your house painted?" 
"Wasn't it blue?. . . No, I think it must have been yellow."  
"Wasn't that the same year you had your elm tree in the front yard cut down because of that disease?"
". . . Oh, look, there's Arthur Burton. I remember him! Wasn't he special?"

Walking through walls

I don't believe in dwelling on the past, even though I do. I can't help but notice that when I go on the "did you grow up in Chatham, Ontario?" Facebook page, everyone remembers everyone in my family . . . except me.

I guess I was a cipher. I was invisible. Could I walk through walls? I don't remember.

They remember Arthur - as who wouldn't, mad genius that he was? They remember Walt the musician and my eldest sister Pat. They remember my house.

I remember being alive - it seems I do, but do you know something? My mother left me out of her obituary. I was the only one not named, and it was not an oversight. I was left out deliberately. Some members of my current family were kind of upset that she had lopped off a daughter as casually as docking a dog's tail. Imagine un-happening your own child like that, pretending that she had never been. What kind of heart. . . or lack of it?. . . would be responsible for that?

I can't help but feel that there is NOTHING my children could do that would make me do that to them, cut them out so meanly, so shockingly. They could be axe-murderers. They could axe-murder their father. Still they would be my children, my own, unto death, and I would name them, include them. Acknowledge that they existed, that I gave birth to them and raised them, and that they were loved.

Since I thought of this song - we used to sing it "Cha-tham, Cha-tham, Chatham-Chatham-jing-jing-jing", I thought I'd post a few of the nicer pictures that surfaced during this strange memory-purge.

I don't know why I'd even want to go back, when my mother did her level best to erase me. But maybe it's because she didn't. Hell, people get upset at being cut out of the WILL. But I've never before heard of this, pretending a child was never born, as I so often wished I hadn't been. I was one of those kids who always knew she was an accident, and I suppose this was her way of correcting it (at last!).

But here they are, the pictures, with no explanation at all.

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More pictures from Ryan's birthday!

Family photos: with a twist

When I stumbled upon a program that would make a photo look sort-of-like a drawing or painting, I was quickly hooked. Spent hours on these, trying to get them just right. Some of the really promising ones just turn to mud, don't work at all. They look sort of grainy and lithographic, like certain illustrations in children's books. 

Pictures are weird and spooky and have all sorts of depths in them. While cleaning up some very old family photos for my mother-in-law's memorial get-together, I played with brightness and contrast, and lo - out popped details that no one had ever seen before. These were mostly black and white photographs that were about 2 1/2 inches square. You could only see faces and partial bodies. But after I tinkered and enlarged a bit, POP! 

Sometimes whole people emerged, ghostly. Or just a face, a face of someone I never knew but whose DNA runs in my kids' and grandkids' veins. A telephone appeared, probably the first one ever made, with no dial on it. You didn't dial phones in 1930. You had to yell "operator, operator" and jiggle the cradle if the connection broke off, a habit which persisted until about 1998 (especially in the movies). Right, so pushing down on it will bring the person back. 

I found my husband's first stuffed animal, a ghastly thing that looked like it had gone bad. In the picture he was maybe three years old and clutching it like there was no tomorrow. Until I highlighted it, it was just a grey wash. Maybe I should've left it that way?

The evidence is here: Why Oscar Levant Wasn't Just a Crazy Person

Oh yes. Do you know why all this is happening? Three guesses. Because I can only cure one obsession by taking on another.

And why did I need to cure my obsession with Harold Lloyd? Three guesses. Absolutely no one wanted to publish my novel about him (The Glass Character),and my heart broke. It shattered. No matter how much I am bombarded with imperatives to epublish it, I can't buy it, I don't think I'd sell more than a couple dozen copies, if that. Just more discouragement. I have no idea how to promote it, and surely the market is flooded by now. As far as I know, there are no editorial standards for ebooks, similar to the paper self-published books I've seen (which so far have all been dreadful, just screaming for an editor). Around here, traditional publishers are so freaked out by the new forms that they won't go near you, so you will be basically stuck at that level. My paper books sold poorly enough, and I am not convinced sending it out into the ether would net me more than a few hundred at most. I could go on, but I won't.

Therefore the only way I can avoid major depression is to take up my next obsession, which I will NOT NOT NOT write a book about. I have promised myself, and I will stick to it.

Anyway, Oscar Levant, genius, creative polymath, crazy as a hoot owl (speaking of birds), and father of three beautiful daughters - wait! Could this be right?

Oscar Levant had a whole 'nother life besides the grumbling, Buster-Keaton-faced, piano-dextrous sidekick in innumerable movies. He was a chick magnet. I can't find a good photo of his first wife, but I know she was gorgeous in the plucked-eyebrow way women were back then (showbiz women, anyway). Once they split, he pursued singer/actress June Gale with obsessiveness and fervor, and it worked.

I get the feeling June Gale was one of these glamorous women who was tough as nails inside, and it was a good thing because she would gradually evolve into her husband's caregiver. Oscar would fall apart and drag himself up again over and over, until he took final refuge in his bed. I wonder if his wife had to go up to his bedroom 30 or 40 times a day to supply with him with coffee.

There is evidence, slim but fascinating, of this other life, a much happier one: dare I say it, almost normal? I only found a few photos of June Gale, but she is a knockout's knockout, dazzling even by Hollywood standards. Oscar wasn't exactly anyone's idea of handsome, but he had a "something", no one could figure out exactly what it was, some odd kind of charisma or tidal force that dragged people into his sphere of influence and wouldn't let them go.

He would come up to women and drape his arm around them and murmur to them in that distinctive low tough-guy voice, and they'd melt. These weren't necessarily affairs, but rather Levant experiments to see how far he could get: and he often got pretty far.

Anyway, on to his daughters. I found only a couple of poses, one in which Oscar receives a kiss from his eldest daughter with visible affection while holding the youngest rather awkwardly on his knee. Obviously happy, he DOES look handsome here. Fathers didn't get down on the floor then to play Lego or take their kids to the park in a stroller because such things didn't yet exist, but there is no doubt Oscar loved these girls and gave them all he had, all that his crippled, fragile, crushed but valiant heart could give them.

Oh, and this picture of the three girls - they all have the full lips and sleepy-lidded, haunting Levant eyes, and to be honest it looks a lot better on them. He has stamped them all with his crazy DNA, and one wonders what happened to them (though the biography claims they all went on to solid careers in different fields), whether they struggled the way he did to stay upright, to stem the force of his tidal despair.

So Oscar wasn't really alone, not at all, he had a beautiful and devoted family (with June fighting like a tiger to keep him out of the hideous cuckoo's- nest sanitariums of the day), but it didn't really save him. I find this incredibly sad. What would have saved him? I'm not sure. His meeting George Gershwin was the best and worst thing that ever happened to him: the bio quotes someone-or-other saying, "What makes you, unmakes you." Even after Gershwin's death at 38, Levant would forever walk in his shadow.

(Looking up something else, I found this little splash of delight about his disastrous purchase of a "summer house", in which he functioned about as well as Woody Allen on a game farm):

The transition to country gentleman was not an easy one. The quiet, the sound of crickets, the animals rustling through the underbrush at night were a torment to Levant. The first day in their new house, he went out to take his walk, as was his custom in the city. Almost as soon as he stepped out of doors he saw two black snakes undulating along a rock. Certain they were poisonous, he scuttled back into the house, where he remained for three days.

The next time he emerged, the sight of a hedgehog terrified him. Insects gave him anxiety attacks. Even birds, with their restless fluttering, upset him. Levant, his nerves already unraveling, found that the most anxiety-producing creature in all the woods was the hummingbird.

'The hummingbird is crazy,' he confided to the journalist Maurice Zolotow. 'I make that statement flatly. The hummingbird is psychotic. If there were psychiatry for birds, they would have to analyze every hummingbird.'

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Thistledown Press

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Chapters/Indigo
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