Who, for example, can write of my Uncle Gene and do so with Grace and honesty? Thomas à Kempis, one of my favorite Catholic writers, speaks of a “truth [that] teacheth inwardly,” then adds, that the “eyes that open to outward things [people]” is not the Truth we seek, but that we must be “intent on inward things.”
Searching Gene's inward life must include Juanita, his wife, my aunt, my mother’s cousin, and my Dad’s sister-in-law. Brothers, ET and Gene, married cousins, Dollie and Juanita. Yes, the cousin-guardian of my mother after Dollie’s Aunt Annie died. Juanita and Dollie, separated by eight years, were thrown together without a mother to guide them. Mom's Aunt Annie could have been that person. The person her sister Lucy [Mom's own mother] could never be. A clash of personalities—loneliness on a California ranch, night and darkness and fear.
Thank heavens there was ET.
Sadly, Dollie's nemesis was Juanita, the negative-shaping force in her "motherless" life. Lucy had been an unsteady presence until Mom turned 12. Sensing her own personal failure, Lucy sent Mom to live with Aunt Annie, and daughter, Juanita. Remember the promise of braces? Never happened.
With Aunt Annie now gone, Juanita stepped in and became the bane of Mom’s existence.
Christmas decorating expanded into a week-long ritual; Easter lasted three days. Epic-sized meals spread out for “the harvest crew” at the ranch, the preparation began two weeks before they even arrived.
Catholicism took on the dark, almost sinister, controlling mechanism we find in Henry James’ The American. A family in the novel control the daughter's love and destiny, and rush her off to a monastery away from her American lover.
The deep roots of Juanita's Mediterranean Temper surfaced. Juanita could out-yell anyone—even Mom. And she intended to break Dollie, as she would eventually break Gene, my uncle. "She could cut you in half with her knife-like voice," Mom once said in frustration.
Dark and moody, she could "freeze you" for weeks with what Mom called, "That damn silent treatment." Pain and isolation for Dollie. This was Dollie's First Windstorm.
When Mom married Dad, Juanita, jealous, angry that Mom “defied” her and “married without permission,” sent Mom her sole belongings in a box, COD, which in those days meant, “collect or cash on delivery.” Eight dollars! In 1939 that was—who knows? Mom said the whole wedding itself only cost six dollars: A license, a blood test, two dollars for a utility minister of some faith, and a corsage. No honeymoon. Dad started his job the next morning driving tractor for five dollars a day.
How then, did these two women ever come together, let alone live in the same town? Again, the Thompsons were like migratory crows. They always sought each other out.
Isn't that love?
Gene bought a business, put ET in charge, and then quietly shut the door on life. That answers the strange, ironic question of their tension-filled proximity.
Time heals wounds. Time can kill hatred. Question? How long can a holocaust victim harbor hatred? A thousand years? Two thousand years? I guess it depends if you believe in that many years. “The best literature in the world is purgative-redemptive,” says Kenneth Burke, the literary critic. So, in films and books we look for change, for transformation and acceptance. Other Sources, besides and in addition to God, sometimes converge to create change. In the film, Five Corners, Harry, [Tim Robbins] changes while watching Martin Luther King speak. He becomes a pacifist and a civil rights volunteer and plans on going to Mississippi.
Lora tells me that in yoga there’s an asana (pose) that represents surviving our life experiences: [1] Arising in the asana; [2] Abiding; [3] Finally dissolving into the next asana. Think of the beauty of that as reality and metaphor. If I take a certain stance or tap into an energy source, I change. Part of the heroics of walking on nails is first believing the nails are not there.
Let me add Terry Warner’s magnificent mantra: “Who I am is how I am with others.”
Mom, much later in life, said of Juanita, “She cannot go on cursing me if I choose not to be cursed.” This transformation came not on the road to some Damascus; this was the culmination of a life-long journey. But face-to-face reconciliation never really happened. Juanita had to die first, then Mom, facing death, continued the project alone, the "cross," she said, "Juanita has given me to bear all my life." But in the end, Dollie came to peace.
And Uncle Gene? Yeats’ Irish prophet and poet-renegade [Fergus/Gene], "Who rules the shadows of the wood … And all disheveled wandering stars," remains enigmatic, the least understood Thompson Boy. And a look at his marriage with Juanita does not make anything more clear.
This would be, as I’ve alluded before to the Tolstoys, “an uncivil war.” Not quite. It wasn’t what one of Hemingway’s characters calls his “separate peace,” though close. Maybe it was Nixon and Kissinger’s détente. At best, it was a non-marriage; two people living out their lives together residing in separate boxes. That’s why Uncle Gene “ruled [only] the shadows of the wood.” He was hidden in the shadows until the day he killed himself, lying quietly dead-drunk under his carbon monoxide spewing Buick.
I failed to find Fergus and even the Fairy Godmother who loved me. My search ends Here. I'll begin again--in the Other World.
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