That book always makes me think of Stephen King’s novella The Library Police in which a patron doesn’t return a copy of that book and pays a pretty heavy fine. One of several Stephen King’s with great potential and great moments and an ending that sounds like his publisher had just called “Two minutes… wrap it up”.
Bravo, Mr Sampiro, bravo! I’m a huge fan of your type of humor (the good stuff) and I really, really, agree with the others that you’ve got to get yourself published. In Volumes.
Damn, the spoiler was great, but this line made me totally lose it.
So hypothetically… (this may be more of a GQ)- how would one go about getting something like these published?
Yes, it probably is more readily answered in GQ, and I urge you to inquire there. Still, I’d have thought someone with a library sciences education would be familiar with one or two reference works.
Let us know how it works out. 
Shit… I should’ve known there’d be reading involved.
I’ll beg.
Please Please Please, Sampiro I ask upon bended knee, tell us the tales of the aunt who made a Nativity Set out of her dead cats and your father quoteing Canterbury Tales in Middle English while buying food for his cows.
I have doled out this thread to myself, a little more every day…
Don’t let it end!
<WILD APPLAUSE>
My co-workers have been wondering what has had me laughing so much today!
Thank you Sampiro!
It’s in the Christmas thread from the links Ferret Herder linked to; I posted it in this thread on a friend’s blog. The blog also has the story of My Mama’s First Gay Pride Parade and (for those remotely interested) a few thousands of my posts on gay marriage. (I’m not half as pro-gay marriage as I’m anti-those opposed to it.)
Oh my God!
Your mother at Gay Pride!
- what is the story about the passion play?
- you’re actually related to Capote.
I haven’t laughed so hard since I read another of your pieces.
Your stories are absolutely hilarious.
Please tell me you have, at one time, bought your Mama a new Bible. Or three.
Also, you’ll need to start a new thread, but I want to hear more about this:
I am in awe, sir. Congratulations. Eve, how we doing getting our boy hooked up with a publisher?
A very long story that I’ll save for another time (we’re talking really long), but… in the mid 1980s (I actually haven’t even told this much of it before) my mother was in an ironic situation. On paper she was well-to-do by Alabama standards- she was worth several hundred thousand dollars, ALL of it in farm land that could not be sold, could not be borrowed on, and was not income producing. In reality, she was dead-broke and deeply in debt trading in Coke bottles when we could find them for the nickel/dime deposits and selling off household furniture when we could and anything else to scrounge together cash. (Household income was well under $700 per month [my Social Security check through my father’s account and my senile aunt’s check] which was about $100 more than the housepayment [we gotta problem] and try though she did she could not find a job.)
Anyway, we decided on the whole “make lemonade” thing and… decided that perhaps we could save the farm and make a comeback by erecting a multimillion dollar amphitheater in our pasture and producing a Passion Play to rival Oberammergau’s. It didn’t work and we ended up losing everything, but it was an interesting year in retrospect.
Distantly. My paternal grandmother was a cousin of his mother. My father remembered meeting him as a child (they were the same age) at a family get together and couldn’t stand him, not just because he was a funny little creature but because he was convinced that Capote (who was still Truman Persons in those days) stole a dollar from his overalls when he was sleeping. (This was during the Depression when a dollar represented weeks and weeks of odd jobs.) I’ve no idea whether he did or not (my father didn’t embellish so I wouldn’t be surprised), but in the 1970s/early 80s whenever Capote would come on television (which was frequently) he’d let us know “That’s that little fag from Monroeville who stole my money”.
So did a Passion Play ever actually get produced?
And did you ever get your Mamma a new Bible?
No, but I did write one. I was still fairly religious in those days and even considered the ministry as a career. We did start a church in the old Homeplace in one of the more bizarre moments of my youth. I changed my mind about the ministry following a sermon when I got mad at an obnoxious kid and almost hurled the alter cross at him.
I’m afraid not. For one thing, my allowance was put on hold for quite a while, and for another she was a teacher at a religious school and started getting Bibles from students. Her Bibles had hard lives because when she’d go into one of the major rages (the “White Night” rages) she’d usually kick one across the floor or throw it into a wall or whatever to show her dissatisfaction with God.
An odd piece of trivia about my mother: she’s only dated one guy since my father died, and he had a past that nobody could have made up. Both were in their late fifties at the time. He was a bipolar chain-smoking artist who grew up on an Amish rabbit farm before leaving (he had a huge showdown with his father when it was discovered that he had drawn a face on his adult retarded sister’s doll {I would never make up melodrama like this} and went from living in a West Virginia Amish settlement to Greenwich Village (ca. 1950) in a matter of weeks.
He worked for Disney for many years (he did a lot of the background art for The Jungle Book among other things) and for Audubon but he was totally penniless due to his illness and just incredibly bad career and financial moves.) The relationship didn’t last long but ended amicably and gave her a nice second wind for a second. It was odd seeing her as a romantic object.
Le Morte d’Bo: Part 1
I was having dinner in a Montgomery restaurant with my brother and his horrified family a few years ago (a once in a Democratic presidency occurrence) and the conversation turned to shared reminiscences of various animals we had growing up. His kids, weird beings with familiar faces and Aryan features of the rest of the family but who jarringly have neither a concept of nor wish to know about the goings on in Weokahatchee, Alabama late 1960s-mid 1980s (very strange: almost like seeing penguins in New Orleans) were stunned silent by the(increasingly horrific to the unannointed) tales of bald Pekingeses, the sluttish Husky who was afraid of the dark, the mummified Calico, the out-and-proud lesbian bird-hounds who scared the Mormons, the time my brother had scars for weeks when he woke up in his massive antebellum bed (now his son’s) to find a Siamese turf-war raging on his chest, the dog who knew his own birthday, the teeny-tiny pork chops we ate that summer when the nowhere-near-grown pigs ruined my mother’s vegetable garden for a second time, the goat who thought she was a dog, the peacock who fell in love with a duck and the God knows how many ghastly demises of all manner of animals, etc… They were even more horrified by what I’m sure they saw as their dad and their uncle’s nose wildly inappropriate laughter.
“Goddamn! Did we ever have one animal who died of old age!”
It’s not that we rejoiced in the deaths of these animals (except for the pigs- we all approved of my mother signing the death warrant on those little obnoxious high maintenance buggers) but… in retrospect some of the deaths… well, you just had to be there, or better yet, be in a restaurant long after remembering them.
Like my mother’s ANNUNCIATION OF THE MORTALITY OF FRECKLES. Freckles was a vaguely Beagle-ish dog, one of many we raised from an abandoned pup (Locksley Hall was a combination Hull House and Ellis Island for unwanted animals due to hunters going home without all of their dogs, runaway animals of all breeds (including a peacock and an albino raccoon) that came from nowhere discernible seeking sanctuary, people from town and country alike “dumping” unwanted puppies and kittens “out where they can find theyselves a good home” (Freckles was one of these) and my sister, who had the tracking skills of a pregnant salmon when it came to finding these poor foundling critters. We didn’t particularly want between one and two dozen dogs as well as a pride of stray cats (including the phenomenally fertile, unconquerably aggressive and seemingly immortal Bela the God King) and other beasties to add to the bottle calves and “Chosen Dogs” and other animals in residence at any particular time, but we usually had that many.
Freckles had two distinctions: his addiction to household cleaners (they were smack and Turkish Delight all rolled into one for him) and his being quite possibly the most impressively stupid mammal never to have appeared on a reality show. He was actually given an audition for house-dog for a while because of his size and cuteness but flunked when he scratched open a cabinet to eat a second can of Comet (costing us money we couldn’t afford for vet bills) then puked on my mother’s best rug. Being too much of a liability he was returned to the outside and didn’t seem to mind in the least. In fact he created his own little comfortable shaded den that was his and his alone. Under my mother’s Datsun.
When we had time one of us would always do a Freckles’ Check to make sure he wasn’t dozing behind a tire, but we didn’t always have time and sometimes we just forgot. That’s how one day Freckles lost most of his tail. When he came home from his third stupidity-related expensive vet trip his remaining tail was in a cast that we took turns autographing since amazingly none of my parents’ kids ever had a broken bone (at least not up to that point- later my sister turned over a shopping cart that my brother’s fingers were in and broke the lucky streak). Freckles learned he could get raisins by rapping his plastered tail on the floor like a beaver, the one trick he ever learned, and of course once the cast was gone he wasn’t as audible.
A trick he didn’t learn was to avoid napping behind Datsun tires or to at least move when he heard people getting into or cranking the car. One day my mother had to go check on some of the Ancient Ones (either my grandmother or grandmother’s sister or the twins or possibly even her own parents) and was already in a hurry and a frazzle and didn’t do a Freckles check. We heard her cranking the car, we heard the car make a sudden stop, and we saw my mother come in white-faced, down a shot of Evan Williams Black Label, light a cigarette and do a synthesis of Florida Evans/Henry Higgins: “Damn! Damn! Damn!”
“What happened, Mama?”
“That goddamned Freckles… I thought he’d learned the last time I ran over his tail…”
This was an unfortunate choice of words on her part because it made me think
“You ran over Freckles’s tail again! Poor dog, but that’s funny… how many dogs have their tail run over twice by the same car!” and I laughed.
And my mother, ever the one for breaking bad news gently,
“Yes Jon-Jon…” [smiling too-sweetly-times-three then taking a long drag on her Pall Mall] “I ran over Freckles’s tail again. RIGHT WHERE IT JOINS HIS FUCKIN’ NECK!”
Cut to a quarter century later where my unlit cigarette has just gone down from completing the reenactment and chunks of medium-rare Porterhouse have just blown through my brother’s nostrils and his kids instinctively lean forward thinking he’s having a stroke. I’m in no better a condition, just with less nose-steak.
“Oh god… oh… god… that poor fuckin’ dog! Oh shit…” and we both literally have tears in our eyes from the laughter. The kids aren’t laughing. We try to explain:
“We didn’t laugh when she said it! It wasn’t funny then… well, not real funny…”
My mother is at the end of the table.
“Well… I was stressed… I never felt sicker than when I’d killed an animal with my car… even though by then you’d think I’d have built up an immunity to it. I’m convinced the main reason God created dogs was so that hillbillies could have speed bumps”, this sentence going to heaven on a plume of Pall Mall smoke just like the one that elevated Freckles’s obituary.
“Well, you were more sensitive than Daddy”, I assure her, remembering Pillsbury.
Pillsbury was a cute shaggy medium sized mutt that my sister particularly loved. One Friday night my father was doing his weekly ritual of driving his Cadillac/pickup mutant around the county back roads trying to find optimal Grand Ol’ Opry reception and Kathy was driving home from college. Then as now Kathy drove like a bat out of hell and then as not so much now Pillsbury was terrible about wandering away from home and running in the road. We could literally hear her howling (my sister, not Pillsbury) through several heavy closed doors. Kathy has never handled loss or grief or tragedy particularly well.
She came in her face red and drenched and wouldn’t calm down long enough to tell us what had happened. She collapsed into my mother’s arms squalling too hard to make sense. “Here honey… take a sip of this Evan and Coke… take another… there… whatever you did, it’s alright… your safe and that’s all that mat… YOU’RE NOT PREGNANT ARE YOU!”
“Nooooooo! I…. I…. Oh God whyyyyyyyy…. I –think- I -ran –o-ver Pil-ls-bu-ry!”
“Oh thank God! Well…. Baby… I don’t mean it like that! He’s a cute little dog… or was… here…. Have some more of this bourbon and coke… it’s alright sweetie, calm down…. It was an accident! They happen! Are you sure it was him?”
Kathy sees the dimmest glimmer of light in the pitch black night (nowhere near as bright as the light Pillsbury had seen- briefly- a couple of minutes before). “Well…. “ snort…”I… it was really dark… I… can’t be… sure… do you think… maybe… it was a rabbit or… or… a stray dog… or something?”
“Well, we can’t be sure, I don’t want to get your hopes up, but it could have been… here, have some more Evan and Coke… now calm down…”
Kathy’s now regressed about 20 years, crying silently with her head on my mother’s then ample breastesses, infantile but calm as The Earth Mother tells her “It’s okay… just don’t think about it…. It’s alright…” and my father walks through the door and gently says
“That damned Pillsbury dawg’s deader than a pile of dinosaur shit over on the highway… head busted open like a damned watermelon…”
as he walks quickly through the house into his bedroom so as not to miss the beginning of Ernest Tubb’s post Opry show on the clock radio. He’s totally oblivious (as always) that there’s any possible connection between his words and his daughter’s instant and total “Aunt Esther at a funeral” hysterics. My mother exhales some smoke from her nose and says with utter maternal calm while guiding her young to safety “Baby… you go over here and cry on your brothers for just a second… I’m gonna talk to your Daddy about something…”.
A few seconds later Kathy hasn’t calmed down in the least but she’s far from the loudest unpleasant feminine noise in the house. A quarter century later my mother is agreeing
“Garland always was the sensitive sort… I still remember that fight. That was one of the last times I remember telling him that one of the kids wasn’t his and to guess which.” An aside to my unsmiling and dead silent sister-in-law: “I don’t care how secure a man thinks he is, remember that that one will always get him” and turns back to her Hot Fudge Brownie Sundae. Now everybody’s silent. For a second.
“Speaking of hitting animals in the road, of course…” I start.
“Lou Ida and that damned mule…” nods my brother.
He turns to his kids. “You met Lou Ida that time I took you to see where I grew up. She’s the only person who lives in Weokahatchee now.”
“Is she that crazy old woman who said she wanted my bed back?” asks my nephew.
“Yep, there’s only one Lou Ida, thank God. She was my father- your grandfather’s- twin cousin. They were born the same week. Well… okay, whose mule was it…”
“Old Grady Sanford’s… it got out of its fence a half-mile up the road from Lou Ida’s place…”
“Alright, this was back when Lou Ida was just a crazy middle-aged woman. She was driving home from work…”
“She worked at a Dairy Queen but thought of herself as a chiropractor” my mother exposits. “Used to get her into trouble. God help anybody who came to ask for a Banana Split and had a limp. They’d leave with a neck brace in an ambulance.”
“So Lou Ida’s coming home one day… from the Dairy Queen…” he concedes to our mother, “and Old Grady Sanford… this farmer lived up from us a bit, must have been a hundred even then…Young Grady was at least eighty…anyway, Old Man Grady’s mule is out of its pen and in the road and Lou Ida WHAMS right into it! Kills the mule, totals her car…”
“And the sheriff’s deputy comes up” I add, having to get in on this one “and says, Miz Lou Ida… what I don’t understan’ is… that damn mule was only standin’ in one lane of the highway, and you wadn’t goin’ more than thutty forty miles an hour…why didn’t you just go on around him?”
“And Lou Ida says…. She says… “ my brother tries to tell, and then he and me and my mother all say it in unison in Aunt Lou Ida’s ‘Blanche Dubois on Steroids’ crazy voice,
“’CAUSE HE WAS ON MY SIDE UV THE R-O-A-D! I wasn’t gonnae break the law…”
The kids don’t get it. I guess you just had to know Lou Ida. I’m surprised she didn’t try to give the dead mule a lumbar adjustment like she did the guy who ran into her phone pole.
Then the story turns to Bocephus Beauregard, aka BoBo, aka Bo, just Bo, and not the grisliest but definitely the most inconvenient death of any animal in Locksley Hall.
[NOTICE: THIS IS ONE OF THE STORIES THAT I AM MOST OFTEN ACCUSED OF EMBELLISHING BEYOND REDEMPTION. ANY MEMBER OF MY FAMILY WHO WAS ALIVE AT THE TIME, NONE OF WHOM ARE PARTICULARLY GOOD STORYTELLERS, CAN AND WILL VERIFY THAT IT’S PROBABLY THE LEAST EMBELLISHED OF ANY FAMILY TALES. IF I WERE TO MAKE IT UP FROM WHOLE CLOTH IT WOULD HAVE LESS OF A ‘BEETHOVEN’ MEETS ‘THREE’S COMPANY’ FEEL.
HOWEVER, IF YOU ASK ANY MEMBER OF THE FAMILY TO TELL THE TALE, EXACTLY WHO DID WHAT WILL BE CHANGED TO PUT THE MOST POSITIVE LIGHT ON THE TELLER.
My mother has had several careers but the longest was as a teacher. In the 1970s she taught at an exclusive (which is to say, very expensive) private school in Montgomery. By all accounts she was an incredibly good and certainly incredibly popular teacher. Thirty years later she still gets “running start” hugs in grocery stores from now middle aged former students, some of whom beg her to “break the pencil between your pinky and middle finger like you used to do!” (she can’t do that at 70, unfortunately). When she had a listed phone number she would get calls from students she hadn’t seen in 15 years calling her for advice on a life-crisis, and regardless of what was going on in her own life at the time she’d take the call and the student would never know that the former teacher they had called for wise counsel had a pistol in her hand when the phone rang or that her house was due to be foreclosed on later that week before or other such disasters.
(Other than the part about being a teacher, the above isn’t terribly relevant, but I give it in order to create a more “fair and balanced” account of my mother, who has many redeeming points when she’s not being an absolutely impossible life shortening she-Kraken.)
One of my mother’s students was from an extremely wealthy family. The mother was a major society figure in Montgomery and the father, who was the St. Bernard aficionado, was an executive with a local construction billionaire who had extensive business dealings in Saudi Arabia (which is relevant but not yet). One of their St. Bernards was Bocephus Beauregard, BoBo or “Bo” for short. (Hereinafter, just Bo.)
Even by St. Bernard standards, Bo was huge, a wooly mammoth in a dog suit. He wasn’t a mean-natured animal, but his bark could be heard in the stratosphere and people were naturally terrified of him.
Alabama is a terrible, terrible place to raise St. Bernard’s as whatever the season it’s about 40 degrees hotter than what they were bred in. Bo was miserable in summer. One of the ways he became less miserable was by clambering out of his pen, jumping in his family’s swimming pool and shaking dry. When he did this during one of his Stepmother’s swanky outdoor party’s, both drenching and terrifying her guests, she ordered him into exile. Her daughter, knowing that my mother lived on a farm, begged her to take him, and we (especially my sister) were only too glad to take him.
He got along well with us. The handymen and the old women and even the other dogs were terrified of him at first because of his size and that James Earl Jones in a Megaphone bark, but he was amazingly sweet. We did have to keep him in a pen apart from our free-range dogs because he would scare the hell out of the calves we raised or go into the woods and come back dehydrated and covered with briars, but the pen was big [about a quarter acre] and furnished with iron washpots for his water and an old kiddie pool for him to cool off and a house that was better than many people in the county had. He was happy, and we enjoyed having him. (Handy men never got used to him though; one bark was literally enough to send some up a tree.)
The two years after we got Bo were bad ones for his original family. The parents split up, the kids went off to college, the father was to be transferred to his company’s Saudi Arabia offices, and the mother, who had never liked having St. Bernard’s in the first place, was selling the big house anyway. The remaining ones had to go. Relatives took a couple, leaving only Blossom Butt (b.k.a. “B.B.”), a super gentle and small by St. Bernard standards female. Once again the student asked my mother if we could handle a slightly used St. Bernard, and once again we were thrilled. Bo and B.B. could make babies and we’d play with them.
Even my father was thrilled. In the first place, Bo was one of only two dogs of the packs we ever had that I knew him to really like, so much he’d take him riding in the mutated Cadillac. The sight of my Orson Welles as Hank Quinlan father getting out of his halfbreed purple sedan pickup, cowboy hat over his eyes, cigar clenched in his teeth, an enormous St. Bernard on a red velvet leash, singing Roy Acuff’s “The Great Speckled Bird” or reciting “The Raven” to some 16-year-old-father-of-two-reform school dropout pumping his gas who’s saying “Yessir… that’s for sure right” while very obviously thinking “Would somebody get this fat old nut the hell away from me?” are some of my most vivid and characterization-rich memories of him. My eternally cash poor Daddy is also of course delighted that St. Bernard pups then brought about $100 each and the usual litter is 4-6.
Anyway, we accepted B.B… Her soon-to-be-off-to-Arabia foster dad and sister drove her up in their station wagon and brought her into our living room.
Locksley Hall had the floor plan of pretty much every middle/upper-middle class house I entered in the 1970s. You entered into a foyer, off of which was the formal Living Room (which shared a wall with the den) and formal Dining Room (which shared a wall with the kitchen). The only variation I knew of this design was decoration, size and level of ornateness. (Locksley Hall’s was the biggest but also the least ornate and most randomly “if you can even call it” decorated I knew.)
The family is sitting around the living room while B.B., one of the sweetest dogs we ever had, is going from person to person shaking hands. It was cute the first few dozen times. She’d put her huge paw in your hand, you’d tell her she was a good girl, pat her on the head, wipe the slobber off your knee, and then put out your hand to receive her big paw again. Handshaking was the one trick she knew and she loved to show it off, over and over and over and over and over and over… Sweet dog, but not much brighter than Freckles if any (though she did manage to survive every car we had- during her marriage to our poodle she survived a… that’s another story).
Meanwhile, my brother and I go out back and bring in Bo. He recognizes his former family, he’s thrilled to see them, he climbs into his former father’s lap (this is why you don’t raise St. Bernard pups in your lap- they never grow out of the habit- B.B. did this also, making for some big eyes from insurance salesmen who suddenly found a beaming and drooling 120 lb. she-dog in their lap) and all is well. He sniffs B.B. (they weren’t related and didn’t know each other) and all’s well there. Refreshments are served, Bo goes into the den, B.B. stays in the living room with the two families, there’s laughter and merriment and alcohol.
The original family (we’ll call them “the Spooners”) announce that as much as they hate to leave their babies again, they have to go. I’m sent to fetch a camera to take some pictures of the two dogs and the two families together.
And I go to the desk in the den to get the camera, stepping over Bo, who has gone to sleep in front of the T.V. set. In going back I accidentally step on Bo’s tail, find it odd that he doesn’t growl or even move, get down to check on him, “Ssssppppp!!! Ssssspppppp!!!” to my brother who’s the only person visible from the den, he comes in with a “what the hell are you…” look on his face, then sees the problem, gets down, raises Bo’s eyelid, and says “This dog is deader than a Thanksgiving turkey.”
If you’ve ever tried hiding a225 pound dead dog when there’s a room full of people 10 feet away waiting to have their pictures made with him, it ain’t easy.
TBC
[NOTE: THIS IS A STORY I HONESTLY WOULDN’T BELIEVE HAPPENED IF I HADN’T WITNESSED IT. AND THIS IS ACTUALLY THE MOST ‘JUST THE FACTS’ SHORT VERSION OF EVERYTHING HERE RELAYED.]
“Well we gotta get him out the door…” whispers my brother.
“I know that. How?”
“Let’s see if we can lift him.”
That didn’t take long. The answer was no. My brother was a skinny 16 year old, I was a chunky 10, Bo was about 225 lbs. of dead-weight. We managed to get him on his back, which really neither helped nor hindered the situation.
“Haven’t you boys found that camera yet?”
Unison: “No ma’am! Still looking for it.” (Good save.)
“Let’s try pulling him.”
We tried, but it wasn’t easy.
“Maybe if we could get that rug under him we could drag it…” so while one of us hoisted up the corpus Bernardi the other slid the rug under as much as
“It’s right there on the shelf with the encyclopedias!”
“That one’s broken Mama!”
“It is not, I used it just last night!”
“Could you come show it to us?”
“What? Y’all don’t know what a camera looks like by now?”
“There are two cameras… show us which one you want…”
“The Polaroid!”
Picking up hints aren’t my family’s strong suit. Neither are moving huge dead dogs. Bo’s on his back, on a rug, and with me pushing a little (he’s already turning cold, which is gross) and my brother pulling we’re managing to get closer to the door w
“Well there’s one problem! You’re not even at the bookshelves!” My mother has peered around the corner into the den. “Will you two stop playing with Bo and bring that camera in here?” and just as I’m about to run tell her, two heads poke around the corner- Mr. Spooner and his teenaged daughter Linda.
“Look at him on his back there!” says Mr. Spooner in what I later learn is a “Yankee” accent (clipped syllables, named for the clipper ships they used to bring slaves up to the south with you know- I don’t know why he married Mrs. Spooner as those mixed-marriages never work and the kids don’t fit in among society snobs in New York or Alabama.)
“He’s always been ticklish” says Linda.
This was me and my brother’s finest moment.
This happened.
I’m glad I can say it did.
I wish I could say it didn’t.
I am not making this up.
I almost wish I was.
My brother’s hand, which had been dragging the rug, is about an inch from Big Bo’s dead belly.
My hand, where I’ve been pushing, is on his stiff hind leg.
You see where this is leading don’t you?
“Still is” says my brother who “tickles” Bo’s belly, while my own little hand makes Bo’s hind leg do the tickled dog hind-leg shake one last time.
And there’s a look on my mother’s face. Somewhere it has finally sunk in all at once and being the perfect hostess in the face of disaster she runs long.
“OOOOhh! ‘Em… let me show you Garland’s family Bible! You love Alabama history and his great grandfather was… em… a cavalry general in Wheeler’s…”
My father (a griot for all families in the county, but none moreso than his own): “I don’t know which grandfather that was. My great-grandfather’s hold in fact the distinction of having been the only privates in the entire Confederate army, except for the one who was a Yankee private when Winston County seceded from Alabama over…”
“Oh you hush, Garland!” and we here her kiss him on his cheek. Even to my omnisciently oblivious father that was a sign something major was wrong (they didn’t kiss or hug or have physical displays of affection of any kind by this time). “He’s modest. Tell the story Garland…. Tell them about your uncle who was in the San Francisco earthquake… y’all excuse me just for a second I need to… uh… check on dinner…”
Mr. Spooner: “Oh, we really need to be going, but I would like to have a picture of…”
And he follows my mother into the den a just a nanosecond too late to see me and 225 pounds of dead “beloved just this morning” St. Bernard chucked unceremoniously down a flight of back steps, landing with a thud on a vocally pissed off cat. My brother shouts “Come back Bo! Jon, go get him before he gets to the woods!” and shoves me out to go “chase Bo” then closes the door on us both.
The Deus ex Machina (reconstructed from other accounts- I was out of the room by this time)
The phone rings.
My mother picks it up and is instantly and obviously devastated.
“Hello… Oh my God! Oh my God! Is she okay?.. Well what happened?.. Is she going to be alright?.. Calm down, don’t panic… I’m going to get in the car and I will be there as soon as I can get there, you just be calm. Your mother needs you…I’ll call you back as soon as I’m about to leave!” and hangs up the phone as everybody, Spooners included, stand open-mouthed to find out what happened.
“I’m very very sorry… my sister… my sister has been a car accident. That was her daughter. I’ve got to run to the hospital… I am very sorry to be rude…”
“Oh don’t be! Don’t be! Are you alright to drive? Let us drive you…we’re going to Montgomery anyway…”
“Oh thank you, bless you, but I need to take my own car. Who knows how long this will take…”
And she sees them out the door, her keys in her hand, my father and my sister both getting ready for a trip to the hospital.
“Daniel, you put B.B. into the kennel out back and you stay here with Jon! Me and your father and your sister are going to the hospital! Garland, you drive!” and the Spooners are off and then the rest of my family is off down the long driveway. The phone is ringing and my mother answers with a brusque “I can’t talk now, I’ll call you back! Bye!”
“Is something really wrong with Aunt Joan?” I ask my brother.
“Who gives a shit… we gotta move this dog and find out what killed him…”
The phone is ringing off the hook. My brother tells me “Leave it alone… we gotta move Bo… we’ll move him to the front so we can load him in the car.”
“Are you going to put B.B. in the kennel?”
“Hell naw! I ain’t putting a live dog in a dead dog’s place! Help me move Bo…”
We’re able to get him onto a croker sack and move him around to the front yard just in time to see my parents and sister pulling back up. Kathy is crying of course and my father looks somber even for him.
My mother: “Damn… I thought the Spooners were going to tail us all the way into Montgomery, but we were able to finally lose them at the McRaney place and double back here.”
Reconstructed from my mother’s deposition, the phone conversation had indeed been from my aunt’s daughter, Linda, my mother’s favorite niece, and had gone like this:
Mama: Hello?
Linda: Hey. I just hadn’t heard from you in a while and wanted to say…
Mama: Oh my God! Oh my God! Is she okay?
Linda: Who?!
Mama: Well what happened?
Linda: What happened to who? You’re scaring me.
Mama: Is she going to be alright?
Linda: Is WHO going to be alright? You’re scaring me Blanche!
Mama: Calm down, don’t panic…
Linda: You’re the one making me panic…
Mama: I’m going to get in the car and I will be there as soon as I can get there
Linda: I’m not at home! Where? Where are you coming?
Mama: You just be calm, I’ll call you back as soon as I’m about to leave!
Linda: Okay… I’ll… [Mama hangs up]
We took him to a veterinary medicine professor, a friend of my father’s, in Auburn, 70 miles away. (This was a Sunday night ca. 1977 in a county where 24/7 Animal Clinic just didn’t exist.)
It was a quite natural heart attack. He was overweight, he had overexerted for the past few days, he’d had the excitement of seeing his previous owners, it was a boiling hot Alabama summer, he wasn’t young for a breed not known for longevity in the best of conditions. The vet asked permission to dissect him and embalm some of his organs for use in veterinary classes. I have to admit that if any of them are still pickled in a Vet Department closet somewhere I’d be curious to see them as a matter of sheer morbid curiosity. (Holding up a distended canine heart in clear but ancient fluid- “Alas poor Bocephus Beauregard… I knew him Horatio…”)
B.B. did have pure bred puppies, but obviously by another dad. In fact, she gave birth to a litter of eighteen, unheard of for a St. Bernard, eight of whom survived the first week. One of my favorite pictures is of those eight, all wet and soapy, in the hall bathtub for their first bath. My sister and I actually begged my parents not to have her bred again because we couldn’t bare parting with the pups. My parents consented (which is to say my mother consented and my father, who had after all $800 from the pups [less the stud fee], which was way more than he’d expected, knew to choose his battles well), but before we could have her spayed B.B. had pups by a stray Labrador Retriever. (Those were some beautiful pups- they looked like Newfoundlands.)
Even after she was spayed B.B. was the objet’d’lust for our DachaPoo Fritz, the only other dog my father ever liked. He was the single most spookily brilliant dog we ever owned, and his ending is an unsolved mystery that involves B.B. and I wonder to this day what happened, but that’s another story.
“B.B…. she’s the one! B.B. really and truly did die a natural death!” I tell my brother. She lived to be about 10, which isn’t bad for a St. Bernard.
“Well… one out of three hundred and forty seven, that’s not so bad” he replies. “And I don’t care what you say, I’m the one who found Bo dead and I threw him down the steps before Spooner could see without any help from you or anybody!”
“Hey, I found him and you never would have gotten him out the door without me pushing…”
“You threw your dead dog down the steps?” asks my niece. “Just threw him down the steps?”
“Times were different then. Simpler. Hotter. More dead dogs” says their grandmother.
Quick update on my mother and sister and their fight:
My mother is blaming joint and muscle pain on “the agony of having my Fourth of July utterly savaged” (direct quote).
My sister called today and kvetched for more than an hour about my mother and how “I swear to God she’d be prouder than a damned peacock if I was some piece of trailer trash having bastard babies when I wasn’t in jail but she’s so damned jealous of me having money she can’t see straight!” When asked about “what the hell does Mama want that I can give her that could even CON-ceivably make her happy” I told her “she really wants to go on vacation”. “Well hell, I’ve got 10 houses scattered all over south Alabama, she can stay in any one of them for free!” I told her that “I think she wants a roadtrip, motel, tourist attraction type of trip- Amish country or Dollywood or whatever…” “Well hell, I’m a millionaire and I don’t take that type of trip! They’re too expensive!” I don’t see much resolution.
I recently bought a SIRIUS Satellite Radio receiver and, true to my demographics, as often as not it’s tuned to The Broadway Channel. Last week I was taking my mother to dinner and, true to demographics, sat in the parking lot and wouldn’t turn off the car or go into the restaurant until Bernadette Peters singing Rose’s Turn from the most recent cast recording of Gypsy. If you’re not familiar with the story or the number, Rose’s Turn is arguably the most powerful show-stopper finale in Broadway musical history, where stage mother Mama Rose, so consumed-by-bitterness and envy at having worked so many years and so hard to make her daughters stars (even though they didn’t particularly want it) only to be (quite understandably) left in the background once they’ve made it, alone on stage, spews out her anger and self-loathing and ambition and other emotions and imagines what it would have been like if she hadn’t been “born too soon and started too late” and had (what she really wanted) been able to take the bows herself.
Sample lyrics
My mother listens to this and says (direct quote) “That is such a beautiful, powerful, true song. It should be the anthem of mothers the world over.”
Sampiro, the next time you are in Orlando(ish) let me know. I owe you a dinner for the incredible treat you have given me the past week or so.
Thank you.