Chapter Eighteen The Company One’s Mind Keeps
Chapter Eighteen
The Company One’s Mind Keeps
“That is sand upon
bedrock, and the bedrock is this: that
there are still many, many men who feel, deep inside, that women as a group are
just something –– not someone –– something to be used and humiliated. They grope on the subway; they beat up at
home. They rape and sodomize, male against female, the world’s oldest bias
crime.”
--- Anna Quindlen,
writing The Last Word for the 24 June
2000 Newsweek issue
Friendship, next to my Boys and
Truth, is the third most important matter to me. Summers are a perfect, slower – paced time
to plunge deep into strengthening the bonds people can develop for one
another. Now that soccer assisting and
the usually confining
After all, Herry was now into
healing and repair. Things between us
would get better, much, much better I
was sure. It was summer so high time for
the rest of us four to concentrate on fortifying friendships with the folks we
had been meeting the past several months.
About all of us it could have been said then, or so it was I had been
thinking, that which Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an Englishman of the 19th
Century stated,
“A man is known by the company his
mind keeps.” Instead of all of those
other activities and types of women from his past, Herry was now keeping
company, or so I in my naïveté so wanted to believe, with all manner of amends
and renovation for his erstwhile transgressions. And we four?
Relaxation, diversion and friendships were all so deservedly on tap and
up for our taking.
The tiny bit of a vacation that
the Boys had had the previous August – just after Zane’s and Jesse’s finishing
with their Manhattan zoo duties and finally getting ourselves all moved here
and then immediately into their Iowa Games’ participation – had been such a
sorrowful one because of the almost immediate and horrible passing of Sylvan in
that damned and obviously deadly urban forest out back, Zane’s wonderful,
curious, three – or four – year – old, 29 – pound laprine. Sylvan, huge with such soft and beautiful
butterscotch fur, was so easy to take care of; but the tenth morning we were in
town and settling in – when Zane found his hutch latch off its hook, the wire
door swinging loosely and him missing from it – the epinephrine I felt surge
was overwhelming. Zane’s frightened
yell came up the deck stairs to me, and our search immediately ensued, just the
two of us. I was worried Jesse and
Mirzah would get lost the undergrowth was nearly impenetrable and we were all
so new to this.
Some of the scrub bushes looked
rather dead for mid summer actually.
About midway down and about ten careful strides through the brush off
south of the single beaten path to the Creek, one such pile was heaped up high
with seemingly fallen, dead tree branches, leaves and other dried matter. Just a tinge of blue hue peeked through one
lower edge which distinguished it from the few other similar piles in the
general vicinity. Zane called through
the forest to me hunting up in the small ravine, a gully really, washed out and
down to the Creek from
But no Sylvan. The two of us resolved to return to this
matter of the motorcycle later, but first I went back
to the pursuit of Sylvan again up
north. Within seconds of resuming my
earlier post and just as I had utterly feared would happen, I did not find him
and Zane did. I would have given
anything to have been the one to discover him.
As much as I love the Truth, I
know I absolutely would have hidden Sylvan’s tortured and mutilated carcass
right then and there and come back to bury him later myself and never, ever
told Zane or Mirzah or Jesse what something or someone had done to Sylvan’s
wonderful, big bunny head. I truly
believed then, and do so still today, that I would have lied about this whole
thing long into my own as well as Sylvan’s grave.
No little boys and girls who love
animals and beasts and Things Natural as much as Zane and Jesse do should ever
have to bury in a plain cardboard boot box their belovéd but murdered pet in a
shallowly dug grave under the tall and beckoning pines just off the brown brick
sidewalk south of the house as those two Boys had had to do for Sylvan that
summer morning around 10:30. One of my
most heart – breaking moments in life ever;
and I still weep just writing this, hearing in my mind’s ear as I cry, the
bloodcurdling scream that ripped up the ravine from out the throat of my most
belovéd first – born Zane that terrible, terrible, languid August day.
The funeral over and a day later Zane
and I both remembered about the motorcycle still encased in its blue tarp
beneath those disguising and weathered organic wrappings. I called the police about it. Amazing it was, simply wowing, just how fast
Officer Charlie Gooding of Ames Finest made it over to our Othello driveway to
check out this newly found piece of golden machinery.
Turns out it was stolen all
right. Reported missing by its owner,
another
I was certain even with Herry gone
off up there on 24th Street to take the cure from his exhibitionism
and from all of those other manifestations in him of his true and perversive
addiction, that I could bring Mirzah, Zane and Jesse more joy this summer than they’d had those couple
of weeks finally off from their scheduled responsibilities the previous
one.
But. The phone rang along around the third week of
June.
Mehitable announced that I was
driving her and my Boys in AmTaham’s baby blue Cadillac to the
As much as Mehitable True now
loved having a son – in – law who was a physician and would, therefore, be rich
any day soon, she full well knew what Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s opinion of her
was. No matter that just a short decade
earlier her favorite and apt one – word title for Herry, we recall and then in
his pre – graduation days, had been that of ... milquetoast. Rather a far, far cry from the one of …
doctor. Which is one reason why it was a
very, very, wholly rare event when Herry and Mehitable and AmTaham were ever
together with each other for longer than a grand total of five to ten
minutes. So, no, Mehitable supposed
Herry as well would not be joining us.
Gaaawd knows, I wished I wasn’t
going with Mehitable either. It was of
no use to argue, though; and, of
course, I had not been consulted at all about
this and, therefore, had had absolutely no prefatory time in which to consider it, a most common
tactic of Mehitable’s when she wanted to manipulate some certain outcome to go
exactly her own way, much less, disallow me any thinking time whatsoever in
order to stop my coming up with reasons why her Truemaier grandsons and I just
couldn’t make this trip with her.
I had not intended to look for
work just yet although my year off was certainly drawing rapidly to an
end.
If you cannot find work as a
veterinarian of one sort of another in or right around
Little did I know. Just downright life – dumb I was. Unprotected. “Thank you very much, Mother!”
* *
* *
Mirzah, Jesse, Zane and I hadn’t
seen AmTaham and Mehitable in a little while, maybe 2½ months or more. It had not been since I rented the honkin’
big black video camera for Zane to film his Grandpa AmTaham as his Kate
Mitchell History Day project which he took to State later in Des Moines and
actually there won second place with it!
The theme for that last spring’s event, really a rather big deal, in the
fifth grades around the State of Iowa had been to develop with documentation a
piece of some kind, like a video or a poster board or a picture album or an
extensive report, about a very, very important person to you in history. Well,
this was right up the Ancestor – in – Training alley of mine although this was
Zane’s deal and picking as his very, very important person his Grandpa AmTaham
had entirely been all of his own thinking and choice. Others in the class, of course, picked
Einstein or Gandhi or a few women, too, ... I should think – although I myself
actually had heard of none selected.
But Zane had settled quite early
on on making his History Day project submission a video in which he interviewed
his Grandpa AmTaham who, to Zane and to Jesse, probably couldn’t have been more
interesting or more important in their lives if he had outright otherwise tried
to be. Zane and Jesse, even youngest
Mirzah, although Mirzah simply hadn’t had as much time on the Planet to get to
know his Grandpa AmTaham as had Jesse and Zane, completely and with abandon adored
their Grandpa AmTaham. With us all
finally living in
Herry, of course, ignored my daddy
thinking him a bumbling country bumpkin idiot hayseed because he wasn’t
wealthy, not even at least by his elder years, like his own farmer father
was. I say that that was Herry’s opinion
because, some time later, I actually read just about those exact words in
Herry’s own handwriting. I didn’t need
to read it somewhere, though; to me about his thinking on Ancestor AmTaham Dr.
Herod Edinsmaier made no bones.
Usually, doesn’t the husband
always joke about himself and his mother – in – law –— with respect to their
relationships with one another?
Particularly if that relationship is known to be sour or, in the very
least of ways, unsatisfactory? Not with
Herry. The entire time I knew the man
both before and after I was married to him and, later, divorced from him ... all of that time ... the one parent of mine whom Herry at all
times wholly loathed in every way possible was my father, AmTaham True.
I know now that all of Herod
Edinsmaier’s hatred of AmTaham was borne out of Dr. Edinsmaier’s own incredible
narcissistic need for attention and his quenchless insecurities. AmTaham simply threatened the beYesus out of
Herry. True it was and couldn’t have
been truer: AmTaham was not rich in
material fortune and booty – loot treasure and was never going to be. From off of the same scripted page as the
bumpkin idiot hayseed comment of his, Dr. Edinsmaier deplored what he
considered to be a coming ‘fact’ in his future:
that he, Herry, because he was married to me, would have to be
responsible in some financial way, let alone, in actual physical elder care,
for both Mehitable and AmTaham in their old, old age. And that thinking of his, that this actual work of taking care of his in – laws
would, in some manner, be his fate even before AmTaham or Mehitable were in any
way at all either physically or financially incapacitated, vexed Herry no
end.
While AmTaham was never going to
roll in the dough, he did embody everything else –– and did so with such ease,
grace and honor –– that Herry himself was never, ever going to be. Simply for starters, AmTaham was gorgeous
even as an older man and, finally, an old man.
And, as you can imagine then, too, as a young suitor of my mother and
soldier in uniform or garbed in his usual rugged livery of blue jeans, flannel
shirt and denim barn coat, AmTaham was a stunner. As a three – year – old and a 13 – year – old
and a 33 – year – old, I thought AmTaham True the awesomest composition of
adult human maleness ever, ever orchestrated.
He was tall, 6’2”. His were the
always, always completely uncovered coal shocks of thick, slightly wavy, long
black hair, the chiseled and ruddy cheekbones, the magnificent nose and the
confident countenance and bravura of a true
Ancestor in the making. AmTaham
True.
Zane in his early 20s recently
returned from a several months’ – long, hiking Wanderjahr around
Then there was the brain of this
man. AmTaham knew everything. Everything important enough to be known
before one was deceased and, therefore, truly a Righteous Ancestor, that’s for
sure. I mean that most seriously. A steel trap.
He spoke German at home before he did English. He read and read and read and never stopped
reading until, literally, seconds before he dropped dead. This reading habit he started, too, long
before he began walking to school. At
age five, six or seven years when his own father, Great – Grandpa Zebulon for
the accomplishing of certain chores couldn’t find AmTaham, the eldest of six
children, next one in line being a brother, then four littler sisters, why,
Great – Grandpa’s first place to look for AmTaham was the hayloft of the 80 –
acre True homestead’s great centerpiece, the colossal red barn with the hayfork
machinery which was so, so fascinating to watch in operation. AmTaham stockpiled a passel of books up in
one corner of it just beneath the wide, wizened flap of a wooden loft door
which allowed the great and warm light of the slowly setting sun to shed into
the mow from the western sky in the late afternoons following school. The most
prized and oft – examined book AmTaham devoured up there day in and day out was
certainly not any of the several
bible versions or other scriptures of the surrounding christian neighborhood
but, instead, Noah Webster’s Dictionary.
AmTaham True owned a vocabulary
that I, to this day, have never known any other to match. He not only knew the words’ meanings but
exercised the expressions, always, always in the manner of the Queen’s own
English, into his ordinary daily speech whether hand – milking Camel his
forehead gently resting against her right caramel – colored flank or climbing
aboard the Oliver 88 to head out west across the fecund expanse hauling behind
him the equally green 12 – row planter or saying grace and giving thanks to,
for him, a non – existent Allah over his family’s entire supper of white
breadcrumbs topped with Karo Syrup and Camel’s milk. This praxis was not in the least meant to
impress nor boast nor claim renown nor just to even engage another in
conversation. AmTaham didn’t possess the
voracious neediness for others’
attention and accolades that Herry Edinsmaier so desperately did.
AmTaham only wanted, for himself, to remember the things that
he had studied. Therefore, to do that he
actually used those bits and pieces of knowledge in his everyday life as often
as it took for him to not forget them.
The same was true of his love for classical music. Two of his three tractors, both of the
Olivers, each had a wooden shelf secured and wired through holes drilled into
their green, left, back – wheel fenders on which sat a large, black contraption
that daily, as a matter of fact, captured the broadcast waves from the student
– run radio station, WSUI, at the nearby university in Iowa City. So.
During the decade that was the 1950s as he disked and plowed and
harrowed and planted and cultivated, AmTaham True reeeallly ... cultivated.
That steel – trap mind of his.
Out there on the plains at top decibel in order to be able to hear above
the engine din, AmTaham, over half deaf himself anyhow from his participation
in the pandemonium that had been World War II, harvested a whole agri – culture of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven
and Tchaikovsky and Liszt and Chopin or Brahms.
He could name for you in the very first few opening bars and measures
what work, what concerto, what symphony and what opus number the next piece
playing on his funky audio contrivances was and which composer created it. Much in the same fashion that we four
teenagers of his could identify all the pop songs and artists that blared out
from the rock stations of the real radios we kept by our beds upstairs!
Speaking of teenagers, before we
kids passed that infamous operator’s examination and obtained our own
independent drivers’ licenses at 16 years of age here in Iowa, AmTaham had to
do all of the lawful chauffeuring of us to and from our activities when the
schedules of all of them did not jive with the times the school bus could
rurally deliver us home. Mehitable,
legally blind, since that floor – varnishing incident in my toddlerhood when
her retinae one day suddenly and permanently detached bilaterally, could not drive me nor my friends
anywhere. This was AmTaham’s sole duty
for all four of his children throughout our pre – driving junior high and high
school years which, necessarily, put quite a time – constraining burden on to
him as a matter of fact.
Occasionally, but not at all too
often, I would ask AmTaham to drive one, two or all three of my best
girlfriends, Diana, Kirsten and Lorelee, home from play practice, our Troy Tip
– Toppers 4 – H Club or the Junior Achievement business meeting. When he did, his asking any of them for
directions to their streets or the most rare of moments when he contributed to
the conversations or offered up an initial comment from his chauffeur’s seat
about any topic such as on how the 4 – H or JA projects were progressing,
Kirsten, Lorelee and Diana ended up mute in short order. They very nearly hadn’t a clue as to what the
man had just asked them or stated to their thin air, the vocabulary used in
making these general comments of his completely beyond them.
All four of us girls were almost
always straight – A students and highly competitive so each was not
about to let the others of us in
on her own personal secret, that is, that each one of us pretty much had no
friggin’ idea what Mr. True with his lexicon was saying up there in the front
seat. Therefore, our best course of
action to save face and ourselves from mortal embarrassment was to stay shut
up! We might actually have learned
something more, from him that is, if we did remain quiet anyway!
While AmTaham, I am sure, harbored
no inkling nor intent to cause any of us girls shame in our ignorance, his
lexis and elocution were always such – impeccable, that is – that our safest
plan was to ride along together rather proper – like for young ladies in those
days, that is of course, voiceless I mean.
It could also be said that I, Legion, rather reveled in my silence in
this singular scenery inside the car instead of being at all discomfited by
it. Lorelee’s mama and daddy were
farmers, too; but those other two friends of mine had suited and monied
businessmen for fathers; and my pa’s flawless eloquence only served to show
them both that some folks whom they and their families may have, as a matter of
course and classism, automatically written off as hickish, dullard – like
grovelers in the ground ... weren’t.
Though I knew better than to ever
–– right out loud –– compare Herry to AmTaham and vice versa on any of their
mutual or exclusive attributes and was so careful to never do that when I was
still in Herry’s life, there was, at the least if not more, one more
extraordinarily major difference between these two atheist men: their morals.
Herry was, well, basically amoral.
Without them at all. Looking back
I believe that I must’ve known this
from the git – go. I now take full
culpability for having – deep, deep down – known this fact up front and for still wanting to have such an evil a man
as he comport himself as my loving and genuine husband and my most precious
children’s father.
Like I have written before, I
cannot believe, with my brilliant brain that I was so ignobly idiotic, so
reprehensibly impolitic and so stupidly bedazzled. Herry wasn’t the first bad boy that I’d lit
out after. And had. Dr. Herod Edinsmaier was just the first one
who had had at least two pages of book smarts to him, and that characteristic
alone weightily attracted me to Herry in the first place. Very soon on, Herod’s facility to develop and
support a mediocre to above – average conversation or somewhat reasoned
explanation on interesting stuff and current affairs became the justification
that would exculpate him, in my eyes, from all of those other ugly and routine
traits of his, lubricious, licentious and woman – hating though they clearly
were from the start.
Matters sexual and misogynistic
weren’t the only spheres of Herry’s dishonor either. This, too, I knew early on. Herry drank lots and lots of beer up until
1977; but, way, way worse than that, he drove numerous times after
drinking. Most regularly Herry drove
drunk his own cars, an old beater, blue – green van and various motorcycles,
also big dump trucks belonging not to him at all but to construction companies
for which he, at one time before I knew him, had worked. And joked often and long about his talent and
penchant for hiding his incapacitation to operate a 2,000 – pound, and
sometimes much weightier, weapon on the road … safely. Especially from the local fuzz. Truly and more than one time, Dr. Herod
Edinsmaier actually guffawed about it.
This, in an educated man approaching 30 years of age. In one who full – well knew exactly what the crime was which he was perpetrating
every single time he chose to commit it.
One of Herod Edinsmaier’s favorite
stories was of his strapping on a set of chains to the rear tires of that old
60s Chevy van of his in near total darkness and a deluging downpour in order to
give that vehicle traction enough to hustle it up and out of a shallow ditch in
an area of town that separated the campus from the city’s residential
divisions. The site of this incident
took place, as a matter of fact, only about a ¼ of a mile from the same picture
– window pad Herod had purchased out of which to view that Brookside
Forest. Right under the scrutinizing
noses of a city policeman and a university cop both of whom had stopped
alongside Herry to see what his trouble was, Herry later and often bragged
about accomplishing the chain thing, freeing up his van and driving it off into
the rainy night, then, without either one of the law enforcement officials ever
catching on to the fact that he was
completely smashed and had run off the road not because of their wet conditions
but because he’d been driving drunk.
Driving drunk will eventually get someone crippled or killed. Even George W had to admit to that much about
four days before he was (sort of) elected to the highest office in the
Land. But we all know, don’t we, that it
and its legal penalties against sloshed and criminally endangering fathers
driving their own or others’ infants, for example, four – month – old Zane or
Abby’s and Devin’s wee daughter, seem to be forgettable or purchasable …
depending, of course, just like perjury and lying in a state’s district court
are also forgettable or purchasable … , on how the hell pillared in either
position or parents’ pedigree you, Mister, happen to be at the time!
AmTaham’s knowledge was spread
around not just to the works of art and artists, that is, to fine literature
and finer music. I would have to say
that he knew so much because he read
so much. Maybe AmTaham would have
watched more television if he had not been so deaf, that is, if he had been
better able to hear the TV. As it was,
AmTaham was somewhat hard of hearing most of his 30s and very deaf after the
age of about 40 years, 60 percent gone in one ear and 40 percent more loss in
the other the doctors at the Veteran’s Hospital in Iowa City told him. His sense of hearing, they said, lessened
initially because of the war; and then the machinery of his farming vocation
fostered no support whatsoever and only served to further the deterioration of
the auditory nerves bilaterally.
In no way was his related at all
genetically or hereditarily to the complete deafness in my left ear which,
indeed, was itself actually teratogenic in origin. That is to say, mine had been due to
Mehitable’s having been infected with the German measles virus while she was
pregnant with me which she, to this day, denies. Pretty much like Herry she is in that Denial
Department there. Curiously and
expectantly enough, of course, the Veteran’s Administration of the federal
government of the country he fought other testosteronal human beings in defense
of, though admitting that AmTaham’s diagnosis of deafness was war – induced,
had nothing to offer him, ever, in
the way of either cure, palliation or ... compensation ... for it. For its loss.
So. AmTaham read.
He read instead of viewing television or seeking out social conversation
and interaction. Another disrelish of
Herry’s about AmTaham. Because whereas
Herry read a lot himself all right,
Herry also depended greatly and often, multiple times a day actually, upon the
admiration and regard from others and, most especially, upon their engagement,
the attention which he took from them –— so borne out of that neediness and
narcissism of his as witnessed by his ten hours a week in Alcoholics Anonymous
in addition to all of the procrastinating away from actual and sometimes
solitary pathology work which he did during the workday with a host of those
subordinate co – workers, very many of them female. Herry was basically Mr. Glib Guy. Loquacious.
A popinjay.
‘Course, then, in the evenings,
when all of the residents and other docs were home cooking supper or grocery –
shopping or bathing their babes or washing the kids’ and the spouse’s laundry
or even helping Zane with his first year of keyboard music practice in Hershey
and then also Jesse and Mirzah, too, with all three of their Suzuki piano
programs in Columbia a year later, Dr. Edinsmaier was either back at the lab at
the hospital finishing the things he should’ve completed during his daytimes
there or else off somewhere with one or more of those other women either from
work or from AA. Rosemarie, our most
belovéd child caregiver, years later, had had many, many words to say to me
about this – all of which she’d kept to herself until she learned, sometime
after the fact, that we were no longer ‘a family’. Herry’s utter absence from the Truemaier Boys
those weekday evenings when I was out working the three different part – time
veterinary practices in Pennsylvania, she’d always found consternating. Especially since Rosemarie knew that the
other children’s parents, who lived right there in the same housing complex as
did we and were also in pathology residencies, were themselves all at home
nights and did not require caregivers whatsoever for their kids such as Dr.
Edinsmaier, however, always seemed to have need of ... every single evening.
AmTaham didn’t give a damn if he
did or he didn’t talk with someone else; and he certainly never gave one hang what anyone else thought of him so,
often, preferred the sole company for days upon days that could stretch into
weeks of that particular friend of his who lived right inside his own skin to
that of anyone else. AmTaham was by no means antisocial nor did he loathe or
shun social interaction. He loved
it. So long as … once others knew that he was quite deaf … AmTaham was given by them
the respect due him to actively engage him –– because of the way that he heard
differently from most of them –– in their conversations.
This though was, of course, work that Herod Edinsmaier, all of the
time during which he was a part of the True family, just up and completely
refused whatsoever to do for either AmTaham or for me in our deafness. Herry loathed our physical challenges and
Mehitable’s legal blindness, too, and simply would have none of it nor the
remembering of it so, by his own purposeful design, decidedly distanced himself
from us.
Besides the Trues’ assertiveness,
convictions and willingness to do hard work being a threat to Herry, we were
also … less than. We were an embarrassment. All of us.
A classic classist shame we Trues were.
Why should he, the Good and Wonderful Doctor Herod Edinsmaier, have to
interact and put up with folks less than himself in stature or status, either
one.
AmTaham thought his inability to
hear well no handicap at all. On the
contrary, anyone reasonable could easily understand why another so deaf would,
therefore, read all of the time to entertain himself. AmTaham read nearly all of the great authors
on the topics of anthropology and culture, ancient history and recorded
history, the world’s philosophies and religions, economics, agronomy, animal
science, biology and medicine, political science, travel, international
relations and foreign policy. And nature. Anything and absolutely everything on Things
Natural. Especially on evolution. From hunting and aquaculture in landlocked
areas to forestry and water conservation, from weather and precipitation
patterns to geological changes and habitat encroachment. Anywhere in the World.
He was, bar none, the most
progressive farmer in his own county; and on Sundays in my youth when folks
took to their weekly afternoon rides around the spring and summer countryside,
why, the gravel roads beside AmTaham’s and Mehitable’s fields were almost
always the dustiest. AmTaham was the
first to plant 30 – inch corn rows and fly in the face of the ages – old system
of 40 – inch ones, the width of a workhorse’s ass, of course. That, alone, brought hoards out; but when he
insisted on sustainable land practices and the resource management of Ol’ Man’s
Creek that ran the entire length of our and many other folks’ farms, why, that really brought them out to have a
look – see at what good ol’, quirky AmTaham was up to next. A sort of agronomy barometer he was for the
others in the community.
AmTaham passionately did not want
Mehitable’s and his children attending parochial school either. Every August the local lutheran school
principal paid AmTaham and Mehitable a visit to try to convince them to send us
four, of course, with tuition that
Mr. and Mrs. True would have to come up with, to that specific religious school
in the Burg. It wasn’t until just two
years before AmTaham passed into Ancestral Status and that certain and so
memorable conversation which he and I alone had had while cleaning those
paintbrushes, that I realized fully why he was so adamantly against us four
children ever submitting ourselves to a private and formal religion – based
educational system.
Not that I minded one bit! I wholeheartedly did not want to go there. It
would have been utterly god – this and god – that, the almighty – this and our
good lord and savior – that. Fuck! Anyhow the school itself was also old, staid,
had no funky playground and absolutely, unequivocally, the worst thing of all …
no cute boys my age. I knew all of the boys there since I, of
course, already attended sunday school and church with all of them; and there
were nooooo cute ones, believe me! Besides
I was since first grade, the year when all of the country kids finally joined
up with the town kids after our having been separated throughout kindergarten
into the morning group and the afternoon gang, fervently faithful to Larry; and
Larry was, ah, umm, O JYeah, Larry was presbyterian. So.
The last thing I wanted to do
was go to that religious school and miss out on Larry; and, of course, every
year I thought it was a matter of tuition money and the fact that AmTaham and
Mehitable believed the public school uptown to be a much better one for
obtaining an actual education that AmTaham always kindly turned down the
pastoral principal and showed him the door after their politely partaking of
something together like mocha cake and coffee.
No, the True kids wouldn’t be enrolling next week, nope. I never knew until my early 40s and that
wonderful conversation over turpentine, scrub water and leftover paint in the
condo basement on Havencourt Avenue why we, all of us four, throughout every
single elementary grade and junior high and high school levels, always, always
went to public school.
* *
* *
Loyal, compassionate and feminist
would have to be the last three adjectives I would use to singly characterize
AmTaham True. The man had three
daughters. At no time in my recent nor
remote memory of him, not even one time,
do I know him to have made a vulgar, let alone, sexist comment, done an
objectifying deed or initiated or participated in any blatant or subtle acts of female suppression including humor or
the many, many forms of pornography. How
dare he – and call himself … father?
Morally, how dare he?
AmTaham wouldn’t’ve anyhow –
buttressing an ancient and well – known, but conveniently and so, so
purposefully ignored, point: men do not
innately have to. They do not get to. Because they’re men and because for 12,000
years or so they have brutalized and suppressed the majority of human beings
that there are on Earth because they’ve simply been able to, they do not have to.
All of their lives men can live and never, not ever, think up and then
actually go ahead and say or do something that somehow, in their sphere,
projects them to be dominant over or better than or able to put down girls and
women.
Sand upon rather literal bedrock
it is that AmTaham True, among what appears, however, to comparatively be only
a very, very few other men, documented that what was so, that which was in
existence 10,000 BCE to at least 70,000
BCE, that is, for at least 60,000 years, is still true after the last 12,000 years,
or a period of only one – fifth as
long as that entire previous time span, have elapsed: that the female and things feminine are as
worthy of everything as is the male
and things masculine. Things such as
will, reverence, honor, recognition, voice, freedom, peace, independence, power
– and humanization – throughout
… our entire
lives.
And trust. Along with all of the other examples of how
AmTaham True never, not one time, did
or said or even thought up something wrong against females and, specifically
against his daughters, he never ever, not
one time, betrayed me. Most of all,
AmTaham True never sold me out to Herry.
As did Mehitable. As did Mehitable time and time and time
again. As also did Dr. Herod Edinsmaier
know – always know – that she would.
AmTaham True knew, instead, what
Herod Edinsmaier has never acknowledged. AmTaham always knew just exactly what he had in us three
girls. As a man of the soil, he knew
what gift he’d been given in siring … daughters: the Earth’s Future. Righteous Ancestor that he would too, too
soon become, not only did AmTaham True not “despair” over ¾ths of
his immediate progeny walking around the World as us Not Males, AmTaham True actively and
outwardly and often acknowledged his
massive good fortune in fathering so
many daughters as his children. We girls
held his Future. We women are
his Future.
AmTaham was nothing at all if he
wasn’t loyal – including to his own kids, probably from the time they were
first conceived. Certainly up to the
very moment he drew his last breath.
AmTaham already had two middle names, hence one of the two reasons that
Mirzah did, too; and while neither of them was ‘Loyal’,
at least one of them should’ve
been. To friends he had had since his
childhood, particularly to his little brother Wilbert, and some since the war
years. But, especially to those from his
college days when he’d begun again undergraduate work at the age of 40 years –
alongside Rufus Adegboi, a colleague of his and probable Ancestor now also,
who’d walked nearly 900 miles from his tribe and lands of the back – country to
the west coast of Africa to sail to America to study agricultural economics, I
guess a walking effort on behalf and in the interests of educating one’s self
that AmTaham could really relate to, his having also walked all of his youth
into a parochial school in town from the outlying lands that were his mother’s
and father’s fields.
AmTaham never, as regards the
three children of his that were female, sold them out to the holocaustic
domination of the male – supremacist society that he so very, very easily could
have. And, specifically,
he did not, for the sake of his
own glorification in their eyes or his colossal desire to be in his Truemaier
grandsons’ lives, betray me, his own child, to the man Herry, who held the
keys, literally, to AmTaham’s access to Zane, Jesse and Mirzah. He up and fell down dead, AmTaham did, on
Monday, 30 March 1992, crossing into his so well – earned role of Righteous
Ancestor without ever seeing or touching his Truemaier grandsons one last, promised
time mid October 1991– rather than break his stance and pledge of loyalty to
me, his own belovéd daughter.
So when Zane declared to us all
that his History Day film subject was to be his most revered and belovéd Grandpa
AmTaham, you can believe I was not at all surprised. Yet so, so pleased. And you can imagine that the Good and
Wonderful Doctor Herod Edinsmaier was nowhere to be seen on the scene helping
Zane to get any of this project’s undertaking accomplished either.
Herry, on the other hand, was up to next to nothing
honorable, “ … sand upon bedrock.” “Some
things” such as the apparently disembodied vaginas and breasts, the
procrastination during and actual absence from his doctoring job, the
procrastination during or, rather, the outright daily disappearance of his
physique altogether from any of his labors of the fathering job, the neediness
of his narcissism although of pillared prominence as a physician in the
community, the passive aggressive silences, the intransigence and contrariness,
the smutty and sluttish language alongside his voyeuristic use of pornography
not to mention the vulgar, sexual spin Herry implied or actually verbally put
onto everything including ordinary poems, perfectly correct vocabulary words on
TV and in ordinary conversation, even on the verbiage with which he chose to
address me or spitefully spewed in the spit that was his mother – fucking,
spousal pillow talk and foreplay, his incessant smirks and snide, sarcastic
retorts, his exhibitionism through the deliberate opening of the bedroom
draperies, the wearing of blue jeans on the weekends with large butt or crotch
holes in them and without any underwear on so that his hairy scrotum hung
through as he walked or sat legs apart, his answering the Othello doorbell clad
only in his equally holey skivvies and nothing else – without regard to who may
be on the other side, his loathing of anything that smacked the least way
sideways of homosexuality or lesbian and gay issues, his writings, the company
he constantly kept who were both women and men with minds in as much need of
repetitious, around – the – clock adulation and insatiable ego buildup as
Herry’s head was. Herry groped (at
least) Grace; an indecent liberty the frottage, his frotteurism is concealingly
and subtly termed in ‘therapeutic’ circles.
The fondling incestuously – and probably worse – of three little
sisters, the bestiality.
I was just … some thing to be
consumed, to be “ … used and humiliated.”
Then – … then there was
Herry’s crime of supplying pornography to kids, – to my Truemaier Boys! And,
finally of course, the terrorism and torture of “ … the world’s oldest bias
crime … ” –– the ultimate mother –
fucking: the Good and Wonderful
Doctor Herod Edinsmaier went after – and threatened them all with death – my Sons!
Dr. Herod Edinsmaier’s
associations, companionships and behaviors are, indeed, sand upon bedrock. Of the most ancient, evil and diseased
sort.
* *
* *
I?
I was accountable for turning the other cheek faaaaaar too far. A blind eye and two deaf ears, instead of
just my usual entirely dead one, is really more of what it was I turned. A terribly common and often fatal female
thing to do. Also a sand upon bedrock
deal that may be changing somewhat.
Perhaps we women, as over half the
human race that we are, are getting a little bit better about not permitting
this to happen to us as much – particularly as we all finally acquire and
really, really take inside ourselves the knowledge that forgiveness –— just
like hope –— ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
As it has, for so damned long, been hauled out and hailed by the world’s
male theologians as being. Gradually
now, because of calamitous and deadly experiences such as being mother – fucked,
not – forgiving but still living long, great and so – fulfilled lives is
siphoning out onto the general populace, especially that majority portion of it
which is female. Reference, for
instance, the sagas and sentiment of Must
You Forgive? Psychology Today, July / August 1999, recounted by
Jeanne Safer, PhD.
What a mistake it’d been of mine
to agree in June 1988, to let Herry have visitation with the Boys at his place
every single weekend. Grievous,
‘permitting’ error on my part. Now I was
living with this consequential experience once again – where I’d tried to be
fair, to be kind, to ‘let’ shit just happen
because I thought I should be ‘good’.
What is ‘good’ is now
redefined. I wish someone’d’ve tutored
me on this sooner so that I wouldn’t’ve screwed up quite so much all through
the legalities that were to follow.
Geesh, if I’d only known aforehand an itty bitty fraction of the
generalities regarding legal stuff that I now know in hindsight! This is much of the matter – of – course,
self – protection knowledge that Mehitable should have taught me as the
Ancestor – in – Training mother that she was during my childhood, youthful
adolescence and young adulthood. And did
not. O, as a matter of fact, ferociously
and zealously and specifically, it
seems to me now, did not teach any of her female children!
And yet. We were about to embark to Wisconsin together
on a family outing of vacation – like proportions but both sans Herry and sans
AmTaham. O yippee, skippee!
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