Oasis - Part I

Thompsonville was a strange oasis, a mere stopping place for some folks, just “moving through.” Dad awoke one night, for example, to pounding on the door. A dark, “gypsy-looking” lad asked in broken English if he could stay for a couple of days. “We don’t have any spaces right now,” Dad said. “ He went on to say we did have open territory, three areas, out in the “field behind the park … you can at least park for the night and get a shower.”

The next morning presented us with a whole caravan of gypsies! Michael, my youngest brother, is the best source of the gypsy episode, but I know it brought predictable outbursts of laughter for the rest of the folk’s life together. Who else could be so taken in by “he” and “they?" Only Pop, the host par excellence, the hospitable [from which we get the word “hospital” of course] who naturally lived out the word host [which in Sanskrit also means “guest”:  interesting flip flop, one in the same].

Dollie and ET were truly the Good Samaritans, those who simply waited for the wounded and downtrodden. Thompsonville proved more than a mere stopping place; for some it would be their final resting place.

The gypsies? You ask. Vague memories of a short stay. Kind, musical, an invitation into the “Other” for us kids. The young girls, two my age [11th grade] were swarthy, black-haired, dangerous-looking. One even carried a small dagger. The makings of a movie.

Then death came.

One of the boys, a 16-year-old, suddenly died. Nobody in Escondido was interested in paperwork, especially for anyone who was not white. The night THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS played an exhibition in our high school gym, they could NOT stay overnight in Escondido—24 miles from San Diego. In my Eisenhower-conservative bubble, ignorant in my white world, such things failed to ring a bell. It took a few years of reading and living among the Germans [who were certainly not black] to begin expanding that circle I was in. It had to expand—my mind and heart.

My own ignorance was as imprisoning as that retention camp, Manzanar, that lay a mere 10 miles away. I saw brown faces; I knew about Nazis, and I saw Mount Whitney in all her shining glory of 14,000 feet, scratching Heaven that day, but I did not see real human beings, thrown together like mackerel, living in tarpaper barracks, listening patiently to the constant anger of the relentless Mojave sandstorms …

Hell is ignorance.

There was no “investigation” of the strange death of an unknown “black” gypsy boy. But there was a feast and music and tears and all of Thompsonville, surrounding a pig, roasted in the deep sterile soil of our “field” in back. Jimmy Fugate, a mindless, chain-smoking, high school dropout was asked to “stand in” and “be” the son now lost. “I ain’t gonna have nothing to do with gypsies or whatever they call themselves, ‘Romans,’” he said. Romans.

There was dancing. Slow afoot and nervous about the mane of flying hair and the dagger, I stayed on the sidelines and quietly ate my roasted pork. That night the gypsies moved on—in the “middle” of the night, Mom said, “all at once and not a dime of rent.” Pop, who smoked a pipe occasionally, removed the Meerschaum—smoke floating across our kitchen. “One of life’s ‘Little experiences,’ Honey,” he said, looking back at the Herald Express.

Now as my mind meanders to 55 years ago, I see my journey more clearly. It appears I was a slow-grower, a late-budding California Boy.  The lessons of what Pop called, “the human condition” were deposited layer after layer, like steady snowfall on a glacier, season after season. In fact, we were all growing and changing. Christ and his Church was not our theme song, but the constant background music of our home, in spite of the motley world we lived in, the turbulence of bad nerves and the frenetic effort to make an honest living. We never ate a single meal together. Someone had to “watch the store.” Without that stabilizing communion-like family meal, we were fractured, but we communicated. We were free to, as a Faulkner character says, to “talk our hearts out till they reached some kind of truth.”

The “truth” about a lot of things. Diversity and Tolerance coming, slowly but surely …

Each night Dad would “count the day’s accounts.” Double-entry bookkeeping. Gene, my brother, was spokesman, a very slight hopeful tremor in his voice: “How did we do today, Dad?” Always gentle and keenly aware of a collective moment of bated breath, he felt the burden of inaudible anxiety. “We did $40 in the store,” he would say. I glanced over at the new General Electric television, the reception several thousand pixels added, crowding out more of the snow. With finality and the natural Italian-family-like melodrama that was the atmospheric condition in our home, I stood. “I will never go into business,” I said. “I want a real job, with a paycheck, a mortgage, and some predictability.”

Dad smiled, patient as always. “Well, son, you do what you can do. And this is what your mother and I do.” Such courage. Such belief in a socio-economic system that allowed a man his dream—no, only a small portion of his dream.  Like Willie Loman, this “Salesman” would never find the dream, but in the words of TJ Tolmam, speaking of such struggles:  “He kept on moving.” Yes,  "we survived," Mom would say, years later, slumped in her nursing home wheel chair. “What a blessing the Lord gave us. But I hated so much of it. But many of those people are still on my prayer and letter list.”


Next time I’ll explain again how Thompsonville was an oasis—a Brave New World for Uncle Milt and Aunt Ethyl, now penniless, drying out from a duet of bingeing, that had finally taken them to the garage, where on the shelf sat the last resort:  Wood alcohol.