My dad always had two jobs: ironwork by day, security guard at a horse racetrack by night. I can still remember, as a kid, always looking up from the floor, watching dad kiss mom and leave in his rent-a-cop uniform and Dirty Harry-style revolver. Honestly, he didn't need that kind of 'strap.'
Mom worked various places, all retail. Her highlight was Montgomery Ward, which had a store on Main Street in my hometown, back when main streets were still places of commercial activity. She had a degree. Dad had none. He was loathe to mention it. I'm loathe to mention that I got one, now that it's of little use to me in my current work-a-day occupation.
Something I've come to realize over the years is just how much socioeconomic forces bear upon the family. The weight of it registers in the creaking timbers of family relations. The kinds of squeaks the boards registered in my family were simply time-management and fast and "angry" shouting to keep us 'babes in toy land' in line. Some of this was simply the stress of trying to live like their parents by contributing more and more of their time to work. Time was a factor, massively so. I still believe my dad's real family were the young men he spent 8 + hours a day 5 + days a week working around for the majority of his life, while those kids at home just got in the way when he was ready to shower up, eat, and unwind. My mother wasn't all that different in that she was frantically recreating the life she had without the benefit of time that her mother, aunt, grandmother had. While I know grandma worked out of necessity as a widow with only her then-deceased husband's railroad pension, Aunt Jo had the luxury to quit once she and Uncle Pete adopted their first kid. My mother's mom, well, she died of a brain tumor at 49. My mom's other aunt, Ginny, also worked, but she was a career-focused professional, no qualms about it. She was a bellwether for what would come. But in her day, with no kids, and a husband working for the post office, the two could afford a Porsche 911 and a Cessna. 'Those were the days.'
In those instances when my mother worked, she had to rely upon daycare. Lucky for me, my grandmother was always available to watch and care for me and my brother. My grandfather, close to retirement, would also take us on his little journeys through town, bar hopping, or heading to Tosh's farm. I still recall being driven down the highway, standing in the back of his pick up truck on the way to the farm, a snapshot of a time and context that would be viewed today as much as that dog we kept chained to the shade tree all day every day. Then, both sights were much more common. If we widen our focus, incarceration in the form of that dog chain formed a perimeter around the risk of the dog running away, as much as incarceration would form a perimeter around my grandfather in the form of jail bars had his beer-addled driving resulted in two kids being launched into a mangled piled of misshapen and bloody heaps, crying at the very least, breathing maybe not, on the side of the road.
But the time I spent with my grandparents wasn't abuse. It was bliss. They were millionaires, nee, billionaires of free time and wisdom that they piled upon me and my brother as much as they piled mashed potatoes, gravy, roast, and carrots onto our plates at lunch. And all of it was cradled, in heaps, by a love that wasn't so time-dependent, so time-harried, so time-truncated, so time-aware. Even though my grandfather liked, collected, and maintained at least a dozen cuckoo clocks in the house they were less about the marking of time than they were about maintaining that metronome-like regularity of the tick-tock that established the white noise in the background of the house. I still remember watching 'Back to the Future' for the first time and seeing all those cuckoo clocks in Doc Brown's mansion gonging simultaneously, thinking that this movie spoke to me very deeply. My grandmother had probably experienced that loud cacophony of all clocks gonging at the same time, and so, through blindness, she read their analog faces and set them all 5 minutes apart every time she rewound them. To this day, I cannot have a room or a house completely quiet as a result, nor do I think my exposure to that house led to this so much as it was a genetic precondition. I am my grandfather's grandson.
As my grandfather's grandson, I was set in his room before his dress shoes being taught by my blind grandmother how to tie a shoe. Over and over, I'd practice the hitch and the loops. I'm almost certain that I can still hear the voice of an old TV personality coming from a television in an adjacent room as I learned how to tie my grandfather's vacant church shoe as Joan River's voice echoed off of the bends I made in those laces as I tied that shoe over and over again.
Kids get bored, and so after they lose interest in the task they've been set to, I set about exploring my grandfather's room. The closet where he kept this shoe was opposite the door to the room. Each of them had a full length dressing mirror mounted on them. I learned that if you closed the entrance and looked into the opposite mirror you could look at an image being passed back and forth, over and over and over again. This was my first glimpse at what passed for an infinity slowly snaking off in a retreating 3/4 perspective from the original rectangle frame of the mirror that cast it. Each mirror got smaller and smaller, going further and further back into infinity, and try as I may, I couldn't see into that infinity because that 3/4 offset perspective, snaking out of frame terminated at its origin point: me staring into it. What I couldn't do, to see infinity, was get out of the fucking way. My face, my youthful, inquisitive face was in the fucking way.
