If All Else Fails, At Least I Can Serve As a Horrible Example

My father worked at the RCA plant in Bloomington, Indiana for many years where they built television sets for a grateful nation. I am still not quite sure what my Dad did there, but it had something to do with parts inventory and quality control. When I was in my early teens he would sit at our dining room table poring over computer printouts listing part numbers, cross-checking them against other lists he had neatly hand-printed on separate sheets of paper. I would sometimes help him with this cross-checking task, and he taught me how to read out the part numbers in just the right way to make his part of the job easier. After a hard night’s work we would turn to Scrabble to take our minds off anxieties about the day to come.

Although he rarely showed it directly, he was frustrated by his work, and often felt that managers above him were not listening, or not intelligent enough to understand his ideas about how to proactively prevent one of the most catastrophic things that can happen on a moving electronics assembly line—unexpectedly running out of a part. Although computers were clearly used in this operation, it seems somehow that they weren’t used effectively, and parts shortages or shipments of poor quality unusable parts happened frequently enough to cause a good degree of heartburn. It was only later when over a couple of summers I actually worked the assembly lines to earn money for college that I got a fuller sense of the direct impact of parts outages on operations (as well as a clear object lesson in why a college education was essential if I didn't want to continue in a similar line of work). Imagine Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory when the line goes out of control and substitute circuit boards and silvery hot solder baths.

I think my Dad suffered from the same curse I suffer from at work today, likely an inherited trait—strong fear of inadequacy and failure. One of his coping techniques was to utter the following ironic mantra: “If all else fails, at least I can serve as a horrible example.” He actually spoke these words sardonically to his management at times--using the horrible example phrase when all other methods of selling his ideas had failed. In so doing he revealed himself as far more of a rebel than I ever had the guts to be. The searing need to bring high value to your work every day can overwhelm to the point where no accomplishment is ever good enough. Like any other overpowering need, it can be crippling. Demanding perfection from yourself can set you up for constant failure in your own mind.

But hell—at the end of the day if all else fails, at least I can serve as a horrible example.

Pretty Little Feet

Each summer when we were young, my Mom’s mother would fly out from California for a few weeks to visit. We got to go to the airport (which had a very exciting ride called an “escalator”) to pick her up. To make room in the tiny Ellettsville house, my brother would move out of his room into the garage to sleep, the garage door rolled open to the summer air. I slept out there also to keep him company, and my mother made things cozy with an old oval rag rug, reading lamps, and late night snacks.

Granny, whose first name was the very old fashioned Hazel, would arrive with her small suitcase--a sturdy woman with silver-gray hair who without fail enjoyed a daily solitary morning walk through the neighborhood in her sensible size 9 shoes. She was a widow; my Grandpa had died when I was only two. Granny never raised her voice to us, and yet somehow even an expression of mild disappoint from her would bring us to despair, so we were always on our best behavior for her visits. If we behaved particularly well, we could expect to be treated to a Chinese restaurant dinner in Bloomington with fortune cookies and sherbert for dessert.

Once when I was sitting next to Granny on the couch with my bare feet propped up on a chair in front of me, she glanced down and said, “You have such pretty little feet,” a compliment that made me inexplicably happy. And despite the fact that I cannot claim any credit for the feet I was born with and the more prominent fact that my feet are less than extraordinary, I have never forgotten this positive comment. Forty-six years later as I look down at my enameled toes and lightly tanned feet each summer her words come back to me and give me a small measure of happiness—a great lesson in how much influence a single kindness can have on a child throughout his or her life.

Firefighter

In the Indiana summer of 1963, I’m almost ten and my brother Paul is eight. The babysitter Gloria watches TV in the living room as usual, and in the backyard the neighborhood boys find creative new ways to kill the giant spotted gray slugs that emerge on the back porch after each summer rain. Everybody knows that pouring salt on them makes them melt like the Wicked Witch after Dorothy tosses water on her; but what about the Witch’s Scarecrow tactic—fire? The bigger boys have matches, and there’s plenty of lawnmower gasoline.

The next thing we know my brother is rolling around on the ground, one denim pant leg on fire, screaming. I have wished many times I knew all the tricks I know now about treating burns, but back then we had only Gloria, a frightened thirteen year old who won’t call our parents because she doesn’t want to piss them off, and who thinks maybe butter will help. My brother lies on the couch in agony, with giant blisters three and four inches long rising on his leg. Eventually, my parents arrive home and take him to the hospital.

My brother was a frequent flyer in the ER. He had more energy than other kids. He could never sit still in school, could never do what he was told, mercilessly teased my younger sisters with taunts, hands wiggling in their faces, and more. He had a lot of trouble sleeping. He liked to play with knives and fire. My father said he “only learned things the hard way.”
He was bipolar—and in 1963 nobody in our circles knew much about that, or about therapy or lithium. So there were many trips to the ER, and when he got older there were trips of another kind, as he sampled every drug he could get his hands on, perhaps unconsciously seeking some relief or control for his wild energy.

He never teased me. My fate instead was to be the responsible firstborn, trying and failing to keep the younger sisters safe from him, trying to keep him safe from himself, flushing the acid he got in high school down the toilet, talking him down, picking him up, helping him out, loving him nevertheless, appreciating the good things—his wit, his music. I fought the fires the best I could, and there was a lot I didn’t know then that I know now.

Suicide attempts, pharmacy scams to get prescription drugs, prison assault, drama, insanity followed over the years—fires galore. There came a day when I began to truly understand that some fires burn so fiercely that the best firefighter is powerless to contain them. A few months later, shortly after he turned fifty, my brother moved into a lonely little apartment he was provided when his name came up on the waiting list after various agencies finally acknowledged he was too sick to support himself. He adopted a stray cat. He had many visitors, but few friends. One Saturday night he sat down in a blue armchair he had found for himself that was a lot like the blue chair I used to have in my living room years ago—and he shot up enough methadone to stop his heart forever.

It was only then that his pain and my firefighting on his behalf ceased.

Four

As I sit in the coffee shop a large, multi-generational and multi-ethnic family arrives and chaotically settles itself onto the outside patio. The family is mostly white but there is an Asian girl of about 10 with long black hair and thick glasses, and a beautiful Afro-American girl of about four with warm brown skin and bright eyes. She and her white sister about the same age hold hands as they find their seats; they are utterly adorable. I admire this family for giving these children a home and being open to diversity; they seem like a family worth knowing. All the children seem to get lots of hugs and attention.

The four year old is picked up by the older sister and held briefly, and I’m reminded of my sister Nell, seven years younger than I am. When she was that age, whenever she was asked any question she always responded by holding up four fingers and saying, “Four,” her age. So for quite awhile we all called her “Four.” She was the youngest of four children in the family, very cute with a pixie haircut and big brown eyes. She loved to ride piggy back and I would often carry her long distances on my back.

Four is a magical age. When Nell was four and I was eleven we were still living on Dewey Drive in Ellettsville and hadn’t yet moved to Sugar Lane. The three girls in the family shared a single bedroom, and there was only one bathroom in the little house.

In summer bands of kids freely roamed the little town with less to fear from strangers back then. We spent a large part of one summer digging deep holes under the gigantic sycamore in the back yard, and even dug recesses into their walls for little fireplaces, wisps of smoke rising from their separate earthen chimneys. Summer rains were bathwater warm. The water mixed with soil to form a rich brown soup that a child could convince herself was chocolate. Mud pies and thick concoctions of chocolate pudding and cake batter were poured from one container into another and baked in the sun.

The men in the neighborhood pooled their money and built a simple cement block swimming pool a few blocks away called the Turtleback Swim Club, and on many a hot summer evening my father could be persuaded to take us night swimming, the underwater pool lights shining mysteriously from the water’s depths. On cooler nights we would cling to the edge in the water near the lights for the small amount of heat they emitted. Back then, sometimes the chemicals weren’t right in the pool, but we swam in it anyway despite coffee colored water that turned our blonde hair a slightly green tinge. A four-year old could ride on her father’s shoulders and be tossed high into the air—could also pretend to be terrified at the bullet form of the father swimming swiftly underwater, grabbing her to toss her again high into the air or side with her in a splashing battle with the big boys.

Those summers, the creek nearby hosted minnows and crawdads which to their misfortune were sometimes captured and made into pets for awhile. A four year old was sometimes sent out with iced tea for the gardening father and rewarded with a taste of a lightly salted, sun-warmed tomato or green pepper.

Those were some of the good parts of being four. But don’t be fooled; there were terrors as well—a menacing older brother of ten who could spin out of control and other big boys rumored to kill baby birds and commit other acts of cruelty. The truth was, even then the world could be a complicated and scary place and nothing was quite what it seemed.