cyclopic's Open Salon Blog

Family Stories

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:09:52 -0400

For a long time I was into genealogy. It was fun and I learned things I never knew, met relatives I’d never heard of, and dispelled at least one family story that had been around forever.

The story was about our Indian Ancestor.

From the time I can remember, my mother told me the story. It was a well-developed story with a lot of specific information. Here’s the way it went.

He was an Indian chief named Red Eagle. His so-called English name was William Weatherford. He was a Creek Indian who led an uprising against a group of English settlers at Fort Mims, Alabama.

The story gets kind of murky after that. In fact, it disappears entirely except for a couple of murky connection between us and Red Eagle. Weatherford was my mother’s family’s surname. And she also pointed to such towns as Weatherford, Oklahoma and Weatherford, Texas, which, she said were named after Red Eagle and where her father once lived. These are tenuous connections at best.

It just so happens that Red Eagle is a well-known historical character. There is a lot of information available about him, including a book of roughly 800 pages which lists an entire record of his ancestors and descendants from the 1700’s to the time of the book of , about 1980.

I went through the entire book from page one to page 800 about three times. Unless I was thoroughly blind, there wasn’t a single mention of a single one of our relatives, who a cousin has traced back to Virginia and the British Isles and France. No connection. Nil, nada, zilch.

Of course, just because a name doesn’t appear in a list doesn’t mean there wasn’t a connection. We could have been descended from an illegitimate branch. Those things happen. Or my eyes could have been tired.

But perhaps even more interesting, I learned that Red Eagle himself, the great Creek Chief and warrior, was one-eighth Indian. The rest of him was British Isles titanium white.

Given the number of generations between his and mine, the amount of Indian blood in my veins is probably on a par with or less than General Custer’s.

Myth dispelled?

Not at all.

When I laid out my findings in front of my sister, she had a short, straight and to the point response. “Well, they’re wrong.”

Myth lives.

But my experience illustrates a point. There are many people who look like me who purport to be part-Indian. I think it’s fashionable as long as they don’t actually look like an Indian. But, in fact, their stories are probably just as ephemeral as mine.

One of my dad’s cousins once told me that his grandmother was an “Indian maiden,” a term quite often used in the world of family myth. He even said he had a picture of her in full regalia but he had lost it. There are a lot of lost pictures of Indian Maidens around somewhere.

I may return to my story someday for more research. But right now I have other things on my mind. Like weaning myself from my daily milk shake or chocolate dipped cone from Dairy Queen. I’m on day seven of rehab and my belt is looser by an inch.

Big Rich Texas

Thu, 4 Aug 2011 11:08:26 -0400

…is a Television show I stumbled across on the Style Channel. It’s actually all about a troupe of faux-blond, overly mascara-ed Texas women who live high on the hog so to speak. I’ve only seen one or two episodes, but based on my limited observation, the program seems to be patterned after The Real Housewives of New York City, only bigger and brassier. That’s just the way Texas is.

I’m probably deranged, but I like to watch these shows. I think it all started with Bravo Network’s the Real Housewives of Orange County followed in no particular order by the Real Housewives of New York City and then the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Somewhere along the line, the Real Housewives of Atlanta crept in.

They all run to a pattern, big rich beautiful (depending on your tastes) generally blond women who seem to be in a dither over something. I’ve never quite figured out why they are constantly in some kind of verbal brouhaha. In fact, I don’t even know what their arguments are all about.

Occasionally, they’ll have a party and we get a chance to see their husbands, boyfriends, or significant others. These men are all dressed alike, usually in jeans and a white dress shirt untucked and unbuttoned to a point just above the navel.

The men are usually freshly shaven and neatly trimen around the ears. They stand quietly drink in hand near their women and do their utmost to exude confidence, the kind that requires years of bar fights and other forms of male acculturation to achieve.

Sometimes they look at one another quizzically as if to ask, “Why are these women arguing? Why don’t they just draw and shoot like us Texas manly guys?”

As you might expect based on the show’s title, signs and symbols of conspicuous consumption are all around: upscale shopping, tennis lessons, golf courses, gated communities, cocktail parties, gatherings at intimate lounges, all of the things that make the rest of us wonder why they whine and whine and whine and snivel when a misguided politician wants to raise taxes on the rich.

But are these people really rich? Or do they live from paycheck to paycheck? Have the show’s creators and producers managed to locate a bunch of poor but good looking Texas women from the swamps of Southeast Texas and trained them in the arts of pretense, which probably isn’t too difficult given the American tendency to embellish our lives.

I don’t know about the Texas beauties but a couple of Orange County wives have been reduced to finding work after a divorce. One of them even moved out of her upscale digs into a more modest residence. But that’s America in the 21^st Century. You just can’t trust the politicians to pressure their corporate buddies into bringing a few jobs back to the good old U.S. of A.

I think I’ve listed all of the Housewives of…Genre. If I’ve missed one or more, let me know. And if you have some ideas for similar shows, let me know about them as well. I have my own ideas. For example, I’d dearly love one about the Housemaids of the Terminator.

That’s my take on life in the idle lane. You may or may not like these kinds of reality shows. To me, they are examples of shows I can’t not watch.

Addendum: You may have noted a sentence above that I repeat here in which two adjectives may seem discordant: “The men are usually freshly shaven and neatly trimen…” Ordinarily, I would write “shaved and trimmed,” but I decided to slip in an Olde English construction to demonstrate the infinite possibilities for expression in the English language. Another example, “Get your friggin hands offa me you uncouth vermin,” is a form of expression descended from Frisian. Or, “Fuck you, Jack,” a greeting widely used among members of the U.S. Congress, a manner of speaking which is also known to be a regular utterance of Vice Presidents. English is a very adaptable language.

Addendum to Addendum. I still don't know why I write silly stuff like this. Maybe I'm just trying to keep my mind active and away from my wife's death. That's not a pity ploy. It's just an attemp to pack this post with a few more words to make it seem I'm a native speaker and writer of the English language. And to some extend, of gobbledegook, a form of burreaucratic communcation marked by an in ability to STFU.

How to Write a Book Review in One Easily Ignored Lesson

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:07:07 -0400

Sometimes when I’m in the mood, I like to write book reviews. These aren’t reviews in a traditional sense because I’m not a professional book reviewer. You might say they are, well, weird. Some of my acquaintances have said so anyway.

Take the one I wrote about a Nicholas Sparks book titled The True Believer. The book is about a guy who exposes so-called supernatural hoaxes. He travels to a small town to check on some mysterious lights and falls in love with the town librarian.

I thought this was a rather novel theme, something like Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man who travels to a small town in Iowa for the express purpose of conning the whole town into buying 76 trombones and falls in love with Marion the Librarian.

Only, and this is an important only, Sparks’ protagonist was a guy from New York dressed all in black with a sissy name. Would any self-respecting librarian, the most beautiful girl in the county, ever, under any circumstances in real life, fall in love with someone named Jeremy Marsh?

Not on your tinny tin tin, girlie girl, I thought.

But I was wrong. No more than two days passed before the librarian and Jeremy were in a secluded cabin on a secluded beach engaged in a steamy make-out session which, in the 21^st Century, passes for romance and never ending love.

This is where I learned, too, that a handsome dude from afar will draw women like flies even if he were named Shirley. It’s also when it dawned on me that a man can have the manliest of names, the most stable of names, a name signifying respect, strength, and status, a name like, say, Robert, and he will never be able to con a beautiful librarian into a secluded cabin anywhere in the universe if he looks like Curly, Larry, or Moe.

These are important life’s lessons. If you just don’t have it, pal, your only tactic may be the Pity Ploy. I had a friend in high school that actually looked so pitiable that every woman in town was convinced that she and only she had the sheer animal magnetism to cheer him up. This guy was elated more times than anyone can remember.

Somehow, as I read True Believer, I had the feeling that Jeremy Marsh gave off pity signals and Beautiful Small Town Librarian Lexie’s tender heart went out to him.

That’s when I decided to offer Nicholas Sparks some advice on developing manly male characters. I thus created from scratch an original plot about a cowboy who doubled as a deputy sheriff. At the end of the story, he has to choose between his horse and the beautiful ranch maiden.

As the sun sinks slowly in the West, our hero tips his hat to the lovely maiden and rides slowly away on his faithful horse Jeremy. Now that, by God, is a Western romance story.

Seriously, though, I like the books of Nicholas Sparks. I’ve probably read most of them, and although I wrote a semi-satirical look at True Believer, I liked the book. He does a good deal of research for his writings and, aside from the rather tortured and problematic romance he injects into them, he writes like an investigator in this case of supernatural phenomena. He knows the subject matter and that is quite a feat for a writer who isn’t an expert in the field.

On the other hand, I am familiar with the writings of an author who writes from experience. She lives a somewhat isolated life in Nevada’s Cowboy Country, and when she writes about ranch life, she knows what she is talking about. How would I know this? When a writer talks about feeding horses with hay flakes, any country boy or girl can tell you, she knows hay and she knows horses.

Her name is Jeannie Watt and she writes Harlequin Super Romances. Ordinarily, I am not a reader of romances but I was drawn to her writings when I stumbled across one of her books on the bottom shelf of a book rack in a Safeway store in the center of Oahu in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Since then, I’ve read all of her books and reviewed most of them on Amazon.

Which brings up one of the guiding principles behind all of my book reviews: I only review books that I like and which I can write about positively. An author works hard to write a publishable book. I can’t write a book because I have the attention span of a gnat. Even writing this essay tasks me.

I thus simply refuse to write a negative review. Book reviews are, after all, merely the opinion of the reviewer. And opinions vary. Let the pros pan a book. I respect an author’s hard work. Who am I to diminish that effort?

Okay, that’s pretty much all of my thoughts on writing a book review. If you want to write one but have hesitated, put aside your reluctance and just do it.

Note: This is a rather unfocused essay that wanders a little bit. But that’s just my style. Maybe one of these I’ll produce a coherent piece worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. ‘Til then, that's just the way it is.

The Great American Pasttime

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:07:43 -0400

When men are boys, they’re supposed to play sports. Some might argue that men are always boys and there is some merit to that. But I’m talking about the span of years when male muscles are at their most resilient and reflexes sharpest.

For the average boy, this begins early, in kindergarten I would venture, the stage of development when kids are thrown together for the first time and little boys feel the first stirrings of dominance. This will take the form of wrestling and running.

“Dad,” some boy will say proudly while standing in front of his dad after the first day of school, “I beat Charles today in wrestling,” to which Dad will puff up, grin, and dance around a little because Charles’ dad used to whip his ass every day from kindergarten through the 12^th grade.

Naturally, the boy will forget to mention that Charles’ sister Charlene knocked him down later with a straight right. It was just a fluke. Girls don’t matter. Besides, she was kind of cute, unlike Charles who everyone called Monk because he looked like a monkey.

As the school years pass, the contest for male dominance will continue and by the time the boys reach high school, an informal athletic pecking order will have become recognized. We know Bill will become an All-State halfback and go on to play college football.

We know Charles will become the fastest forward in the state and eventually wind up leading UCLA to a national championship.

And we know Charlene will become the homecoming queen, lusted after by the football heroes and desired by tinhorn Hollywood scouts who will tell their best lies to entice her into a career as a stripper.

And the rest of us? The vast number who didn’t play football or basketball?

When we grew up, we lied about our sporting exploits.

“The older we get, the better we used to be,” some middle-aged bookkeeper once said in a moment of inebriated wisdom.

He summed it up neatly, and when the truth of his words hit us, we avoided each other’s eyes and ordered another beer.

Finally, one guy broke the embarrassed silence. “Whatever happened to Charlene?” he wondered.

“Didn’t you hear?” I said more accusatory than inquisitively. “She was on the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team.”

“And she had her own SI bikini calendar,” another guy said.

“Jeez,” Sports Failure piped up, “We can’t even beat the women.”

“Yes,” I said, “That’s why we lie.”

The minute the words came out, my memory went back to my first big one.

“Dad, I beat Charles in wrestling today.”

Now that I look at it in retrospect, my lie sounds amazingly similar to the “mis-spokes” of a heap of powerful politicians.

I’m not sure why I wrote this. I think it’s because I’m bored and just wanted to fritter away some time. Or maybe it's because I wanted to clarify a lie of omission. I played baseball in a loosely organized and sometimes disorganized Northeast Arkansas pickup baseball league, an interesting pasttime in which we'd drive all over the place, stopping in little towns in Arkansas and Missouri and asking the first person we saw if the town had a team. Usually nine farm boys would materialize and the game would be on, in a cotton patch usually but occasionally in a cow pasture littered with cow patties, mostly stale but sometimes fresh. We learned footwork, a good skill later on the dance floor.I also played in a city fast pitch softball league, one of my more embarassing interludes. The only business we could con into sponsoring us was a flower shop. We were forced to spend nine innings under the lights with tee shirts emblazoned, "Smith's Flowers." It was an interesting time of life in a tiny town in Arkansas. But, and this is no stretch, I was a pretty good ball player. At least, it gave me something to embellish as I grew older. In fact, as I recall it now, I was really good, the star of the team, widely acclaimed for my exploits by everyone but the coach who, when I returned home a few years after my discharge, didn't remember my name.

Living on Key West Time

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 09:07:00 -0400

We recently Treaveled to Key West for a wedding and a family reunion. The trip began on a sour note but ended in great happiness at spending time with people we hadn’t seen in years.

Our flight out of Houston was delayed for two hours by an irreparable mechanical difficulty, which eventually necessitated a switch in airplanes.

We thus arrived in Fort Lauderdale at the peak of the evening traffic hour. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t matter, but on this trip our late arrival and gridlocked traffic meant that we had to drive the entire distance from Fort Lauderdale to Key West at night, 165 miles according to Susan, our GPS narrator.

The night was pitch dark and the only sign of life we saw on the entire trip was an occasional group lined up at a solitary unisex rest room in a convenience store. Beyond that, the edge of the earth may have loomed. As far as we could tell, the famous Seven Mile Bridge was just another couple of lanes of blacktop separated by an endless dark line. Key Largo was merely a Bogie and Bacall movie or a song by Bertie Higgins.

When we finally reached Key West around midnight, Susan ably directed us through the almost deserted streets of Key West’s Olde Town to our hotel on the other side of the island. I say “almost deserted” because we unexpectedly almost ran down a host of bicycle riders. They were all over the place, visible only by their small, pale headlights. My distinct impression as we followed Susan’s directions was of a rather tacky town in the tropics much like many I had seen in my travels.

Olde Town

After a refreshing night’s sleep, we learned that our initial impressions were completely wrong. Key West is a clean, neat town of mostly white homes and buildings with pastel trimmings. According to some sources, such as Wikipedia, most of the structures date from the early 1800s to around 1900. The homes certainly had a decidedly colonial Spanish and French look to them.

Olde Town, as its name suggests, is the oldest settled part of the island and as well as the center of tourist life. The town is split by Duval Street, the hub of night life. The street is lined with drinking establishments galore with cafes and restaurants thrown in for the hungry tourist. Seafood is the backbone of the restaurant business much like Tex-Mex is the backbone of the Texas dining scene.

Duval Street is packed with tourists day and night despite city ordinances that require all booze establishments to close at 11 p.m. and remain closed until 11 a.m. the following morning.

Olde Town is also the location of numerous hotels and motels, most of which offer coupons for thrilling activities such as a six-mile cruise on a glass bottomed boat to the world’s third largest reef (according to the tour’s narrator) where the tourists who aren’t seasick can spend some time taking pictures of reef fish through the green tinted glass at the bottom of each side of the catamaran. I snapped a bunch of pictures but haven’t’ seen a fish in any of them.

Truthfully, I thought the highlight of the reef trip was our location. We cruised slowly above the reef a mere 84 miles from Cuba, and I fully expected a Cuban gunboat to appear on the horizon at any minute.

New Town

In contrast to Olde Town, New Town is a modern area of malls and shopping centers, mansions along the Gulf drive, and assorted business like the ones you might find in any similarly-sized town in the heartland.

And, of course, fast food outlets. You name the outlet and it will probably be located along Key West’s main around-the-island highway. As usual, however, they’ll all be located on the other side of the road. New Town and the Heartland aren’t too different after all.

The People

Based on nothing more than my observations without reference to other sources, most of the people we came into contact with were from somewhere else. We would expect that of the tourists, but others, such as hotel front desk people, sales clerks, waiters and waitresses, tour guides, police officers, taxi drivers, and a plethora (love that word) of others were the people we might once have referred to as expatriates, much on the order of the flotsam and jetsam and Sadie Thompson’s of Somerset Maugham’s stories of the Pacific Islands.

Our hotel desk clerk was a guy from Napa who was in Key West because he had lost his job in California. The tour guide and driver of our train ride around town was an escapee from the cold in Minnesota. And several others were people with European accents, mostly German and Scandinavian with a smattering of French and Spanish.

The worker bees, such as maids, bus boys, and other manual laborers appeared to me to be Hispanic from Mexico and parts of South America, although they could have been born and raised on Key West. I wouldn’t have known the difference.

The island is home to a fair sized U.S. Naval air station with a thousand or so military people stationed on it. As far as looks go, I wouldn’t have known the difference between the service men and women and the rest of the island’s population.

The Weather

Mostly hot and humid with frequent rain-bearing thunderstorms. I found the rain refreshing and I had no problem walking around in it to cool down. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, there was also a moment’s pleasant feeling of renewed warmth.

If there was a downside to the heat and humidity, it may have been a local custom of cranking up air conditioners to da max. In that respect, Key West is similar to Texas where it’s a hundred degrees outside and 67 inside.

Activities

Think Hawaii. Everything you would expect in an ocean-oriented community: beaches, water tours, parasailing, snorkeling, historic military installations, dinner cruises, air tours, you name it. Because of our limited time on the island and a full-round of family activities, including a wedding, we were able to take advantage of a mere three or four before we had to leave for home.

Interesting Things I Learned

I’m sure you’ve heard of a conch shell. How would you pronounce the word “conch?” I’ve always said it like the ch at the beginning of choo choo. But that isn’t the way it is in Key West. In the Keys, it’s pronounced like conk, as in “I’ll conk you on your noggin.” In other words, the word is spelled conch but pronounced conk.

There’s only one road in and one road out of Key West. That’s U.S. Highway 1, which runs from Key West to the U.S. border with Canada in Maine. The part of the highway running between Key West and Fort Lauderdale is about 165 miles. That’s the distance we drove on our first night in Florida.

The Return Trip

And it’s the distance we traveled on our return drive in the daylight. Quite a contrast. The weather was beautiful. We left our hotel early, missing most of the traffic along the way, and although the sky and the clouds were beautiful, the landscape was remarkably unremarkable. The road took us from one Key to the next with no grand views, just the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other.

Tropical foliage lined both sides of the road, but for most of the distance, the strips of land on which the highway had been constructed wasn’t much wider than the road. A drunk driver or a sober driver whose tire blew out could easily have hit the water at a high rate of speed.

On Balance

Speaking only for myself, Key West is a nice place to visit once but it isn’t a spot I would choose for regular trips. Just my personal preference. Maybe a part of it is the difficulty in reaching the Keys. We could have flown directly in because Key West has a nice airport, but our travel costs would have been much higher. Who knows these things?

Besides, how many times can you ride a glass bottomed boat or take a miniature train ride through Olde Town over roads so bumpy I had the impression they may have been made of cobbles laid by French colonial convict labor.

Would I recommend a trip to Key West? Absolutely. You will probably love it. I am merely reporting my own impressions.

Sidelight

We were in the Fort Lauderdale airport when news of Casey Anthony’s acquittal was announced. Coincidentally, I was in the Jefferson County, Texas, airport when news of the acquittal of O.J. Simpson came over the cable waves or whatever.