Yesterday

I had a date with a guy I met on MySpace. He's 35, lives in Long Beach (which isnt too far at least) and was willing to drive to my hood since I had to work yesterday and he didn't. The night before we talked on the phone till 2 am so I felt like I kind of knew him so I let him pick me up at home which I don't often do. He has a 1968 Dodge somethingorother, some kind of muscle car, in really nice shape, so we went in that. He got the door for me every time, even closed it since the doors on that thing weigh a ton. Went to eat at a BBQ place and shared each others food. I'm not at all squeamish about that kind of thing but a lot of people are and it was nice to know he wasn't one of them because if a date orders something that looks/smells good I usually want a taste and am not shy about asking for one. He ate some of my mashed potatoes, I ate some of his corn and clam chowder and we both shared the brownie ala mode. Then went to Starbucks where I treated him (well, I got our drinks for free but still, he didn't have to pay) and we sat and talked till around 9:30. Then back to my house to hang out until 12, and I even got a neck and shoulder massage out of the deal. He's actually really nice, good sense of humor, tall, doesn't take things too seriously and not bad looking. I think there will probably be another date which would not be a bad thing. Stay tuned...
I am truly the melting pot being German, Black, Cherokee, French and Irish. My mom is only German and French but my dad was all five of those things. I've always considered myself just me, or mixed or whatever but my dad definitely considered himself Black, period. I'm sure part of that was the time he grew up in where you were even more racially defined than now. Regardless, he sometimes got annoyed with me that I didn't consider myself Black but I'd remind him I also didnt' consider myself white, I was just me. Anyway, in probably the 40s when my dad was working on the railways he ended up in Chicago for a night and decided to go find a bar to hang out in. I'm sure segregation was in place at the time but anyway he ended up at a black bar. So he walks in and goes up to the bar and orders a drink of some sort and then turns to the guy next to him and says "hey nigga, what's up?" or something to that effect and the man turned and looked at my dad and said "you aren't black enough to be calling me nigga" and my dad took his drink and slunk away. I always found it amusing that someone who so clearly identified himself as black was too white to call another brother nigga.
another time on the train my dad was sitting in front of a little girl and her mother and noticed that the child kept looking at his hair. Finally she asked him if she could touch it. The mother was very embarassed and told the girl no but my dad said "of course you can" and let the girl touch his hair. Obviously she'd never touched really curly kinky hair before. She told him "oh, it's so soft" and was all smiles because she got to touch his hair that was so different from her own. My dad felt and I also feel that understanding our differences as people leads us to not be afraid of "others" or distrust or dislike them but to be more accepting and helping a young child know what this different hair felt like and especially that he was so kind to her hopefully put her on a path to be more accepting and not racially intolerant. Too bad as adults we forget that desire to know about others rather than just judging them on the basis of things like skin color or hair texture or all the othre irrelevant things in life.

Isn't it ironic

I just thought of this and I think it is ironic. Granted, I find a lot of things ironic, such as the fact that many conservative Christians want to ban things like abortion and gay marriage yet the states with the highest percentage of unwed mothers are all in the bible belt. Ironic.
This story is about my dad and is also ironic. He used to violently dislike when members of other religions would come to the house and try to "sell" their particular brand to us. Mormons, Jehovah's Witness's, etc, they all annoyed him equally as they do me in fact. He would tell me he was going to answer the door nude to disuade them from frequenting our house but to my knowledge he never did that. However, one time two of them came to the door and had their pamphlets and jumped right in and asked him "where do you think you're going to go when you die?". so my dad says "I don't know about you, but I'm going to Chicago", which if you knew him was a pretty standard answer to a question like that. of course I thought that was funny as hell but the missionaries were appalled. One asked "is that really where you think you're going?" and my dad said something like "get the hell off my porch!" and slammed the door in their faces. funny stuff. but here's the ironic part: my dad passed away a few years ago and was living in Santa Maria, CA but wanted to be buried at Fort Snelling, MN because he was a veteren of WWII so my mom had his body flown back to MN but on the way there was a stop over. where do you suppose that stop over was??? why yes, it was in Chicago! So for all those zealoty, over religious types who think they know everything and that their way is the only way I say HA! My dad knew where he was going and none of you could have gotten that right, so get the hell off my porch!

Dad

I was 9 when my mom and dad got remarried and my older brother was 11, almost 12. I also have an older sister from my mother's first marriage who was 20 at the time they remarried. She was living in the house when they got remarried but moved out soon afterwards. When I was older I learned that she had always harbored hopes that our mom and her dad would get remarried at some point. Of course, considering her father is gay, that was most likely never going to happen anyway. However, being the age she was, she understandably felt a little hurt when they got back together. It had just been the four of us for a long time, plus, she was old enough to remember their previous marriage and all the fighting and drunkeness, which neither my brother nor I could. I'm sure she was a little distrustful that things would be different this time around, but my dad really did stop drinking; as long as I knew him he never had another drink his whole life. By the time he passed away my sister considered him her only dad and now regrets not taking his name. I was actually named for my dad, he was almost as bad as George Foreman, naming all his sons after him. My oldest brother (from my dad's first marriage, my family is very convoluted) is 22 years older than I am and is a Junior. Then he named his last born, me, after him too but changed the spelling to the feminine form. For a time my older brother lived with us and it was so confusing when someone would call Gene or Jean, so we had to go by Sr, Jr and Jeannie (which I hate). To this day some family members still call me that and some very old friends, but those are the only ones I allow to use that name. My grandmother calls me Cheannie because of her German accent, it sounds odd but it's cute.
It was weird getting used to having someone else who could tell us what to do, my mom was pretty lenient, as long as we weren't getting maimed or arrested we could do mostly what we wanted, especially in the summer. Curfew was dark, which is like 8:30 in July and August, so we'd be out as late as possible. Dad wasn't quite as lenient as mom and we didn't like having to check in more often and ask permission to sleep at a friend's house. Even though I was the youngest I was also the most independent and liked being able to come and go as I wanted, within reason. My mom would also allow us to bring home almost any kind of critter we wanted, we could keep them overnight and then had to set them free. So we were always bringing home lizards, horned toads, frogs, snakes, etc. My dad hated snakes so all of a sudden we couldn't bring them home anymore and the 4-7 cats we always had around the house became like 2. But it was good having a father around, especially for my brother, he'd only had my two uncles as male role models before that and I think he really needed my dad around. We'd go to the beach and my brother and dad would race up the sand, even though my dad was 56 or so by then it took years before my brother could beat him. My dad also really liked fishing, we'd go to the lake or the pier and then he'd clean and cook whatever we caught. I learned how to clean a fish from him, and although I can't say I've used that skill recently at least if I had to, I'm sure I still could.

My Dad Con't

Dad was born in 1921, in St Paul, Minnesota. He loved to tell stories about his childhood all the way into adulthood so I actually know a lot about him when he was growing up and what his life was like. His father died when my dad was only 13 or so, of prostate cancer, but his mother lived to be quite old and his grandmother (maternal I think) lived to be 98 or 100 I think. It's kind of funny how some people only consider "white" people to be authentic Americans, or they assume that they've lived in this country longer but in my family it's completely the opposite. On my dad's side I am like 6th generation American while on my mom's I'm only 2nd. My dad's side is truly the melting pot; Black, Cherokee, German, French and Irish. On my mom's side I'm German and French and when my mom married my dad, my grandmother, who came to the US from Germany when she was 18, wasn't thrilled. But my mom didn't care what color my dad was, lucky for me and my brother.
So my dad would tell us stories of when he was a kid and a neighbor asked him if he could kill a chicken and my dad figured, how hard could it be? So he said he could and she offered him a nickle to kill it for her so she could cook it for dinner. And he grabbed the chicken by the neck, like he'd seen people do, and swung it around trying to snap it's neck, but apparently there's more skill required than you'd think and the chicken was just flying thru the air by it's neck making lots of noise. So then he asked the woman for a hatchet to cut it's head off, but all she had was an axe, so he's trying to hold the chicken and manage the axe and basically is just maiming the poor thing but he finally kills it and by then it's so messed up it's useless for eating but hey, he did kill it so the woman still pays him his nickle. I know this is a sad story for the chicken and not PETA or ASPCA approved but keep in mind this was like 70 years ago or something and that chicken was going to be dead anyway, plus, it's still kind of funny.
My dad actually had a lot of different kinds of stories like that, of how much it snowed in the winter and having to walk to school in it (most parents/grandparents have those stories, 10 miles uphill...), he also had a bunch from working on the railroad, started as like a porter I guess, but he got to travel quite a bit, to Chicago and back and other cities too and eventually he ended up a cook on the trains which led to him cooking for most of his life, at home and workwise. In fact when my mom and he met, he was a cook at a restaurant and she got a job there as the hostess and was being a little harassed by another cook and my dad told him to leave her alone or he'd hurt him, aw, so romantic :) But I guessed it worked because she ended up with my dad.

My Dad

I've decided to do a blog (or blogs) about my dad. I was reading random blogs here in the blogosphere and came across one about this person's grandfather. I think the guy who wrote it was Indian and he wrote about what an impact his grandfather had on him and his life and how the old guy wasn't really understood by the rest of the family, they were all a little afraid of him but how he formed a bond with him, listened to him, learned from his life lessons and example and now that he has passed, how he misses him and their talks. So this won't be like that specifically, but just how I remember my dad who passed away a few years ago and who I still miss and what our relationship was like. I think all families, especially parents and children, have complicated relationships, none are perfect and some are downright horrible. My relationship with my dad was not horrible but at times it was very frustrating, sometimes I didn't like him very much, but I always loved him and I knew he loved me. I think being able to admit that we didn't have a perfect relationship is healthy, even that at times he made me crazy because he was so damn stubborn but then again, perhaps I get that aspect of my personality from him because god knows I am one of the most stubborn people I know.
I actually met my dad when I was 9 years old. I had never seen him in person up to that time, well, at least not that I remembered. My parents divorced when I was 9 months old, I was actually born in Omaha, Nebraska but when my mom left my dad she moved us out here to California where my grandmother and the rest of my mom's family lived. My father was an alcoholic and apparently quite abusive at times to my mom and I guess had started to be abusive to my older brother so my mom left him, which was definitely the right thing to do. When he wasn't drinking he was a wonderful loving person but he drank pretty much all the time by the end of their (first) marriage and so she left him and came here with three fairly young kids. He was not in the picture at all for a long time although I've since found some letters they exchanged while they were apart and I guess he was keeping in touch sporadically and sending money when he could. I had seen a picture of him and mom was sending him school pictures of us and I remember getting a card for my 8th birthday with $5 in it, I used that money to get my ears pierced because my mom wouldn't pay for it. Found out later he wasn't too happy about that, but oh well, it was done and he wasn't here to say yay or nay. Around the time I was 8 my dad entered rehab and it finally took, at that point he'd been drinking for around 20 years I think and the doctor told him if he didn't quit he'd be dead in 6 months so he finally quit. After he'd been sober a year he asked my mom if he could come out to visit us and she said yes. He came out in October of 1977, I was 9, that was the first time I ever saw him. He was 14 years older than my mom, 47 when I was born, so when he came out in 1977 he looked really old to me. The first thing I said to my mom when he got off the plane was "he looks more like a grandpa than a daddy", they both thought that was funny. His hair was pretty much just grey and white, not much black left in it, but really, other than that, he looked young, his face stayed young looking until he was quite old. He stayed at least two weeks, I don't remember exactly now, and then he went back to Minnesota (which was his home state and where'd he'd been living most of that time), got his affairs in order, and came back out to CA. He and my mom got remarried on Christmas eve that year, after being apart 9 years and were married for 25 years before he died in 2002. It was an adjustment to suddenly have two parents when you are used to having one and especially a dad who was much more strict than our mom had been but more on that later...