Memories

This is a time of life review for me. Over the years I have accumulated a number of stories...some of which are pretty raw...but nevertheless a part of me. As I reflect back, I'd like to share some of them. Lately, even before this illness, I have been giving a lot of thought to my family of origin, particularly my mother's generation.

Viktor Frankl wrote a little book entitled "Man's Search for Meaning." (I'm going to permit myself to cut and paste materials from other authors and sources that go to the heart of what I wish to say ... what follows is from the Amazon Review.)


Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is among the most influential works of psychiatric literature since Freud. The book begins with a lengthy, austere, and deeply moving personal essay about Frankl's imprisonment in Auschwitz and other concentration camps for five years, and his struggle during this time to find reasons to live. The second part of the book, called "Logotherapy in a Nutshell," describes the psychotherapeutic method that Frankl pioneered as a result of his experiences in the concentration camps. Freud believed that sexual instincts and urges were the driving force of humanity's life; Frankl, by contrast, believes that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose. Frankl's logotherapy, therefore, is much more compatible with Western religions than Freudian psychotherapy. This is a fascinating, sophisticated, and very human book. At times, Frankl's personal and professional discourses merge into a style of tremendous power. "Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is," Frankl writes. "After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips."

In the prison system, we often use this book with "lifers" to help them establish a sense of purpose. One of the more successful programs at my last prison assignment was the hospice visitation program where older inmates who were several decades into a life sentence took turns attending and being present at the bedside of dying prisoners.

For me, an especially  powerful portion of the book is Frankl's discussion of memories. The advantage of aging is the accumulation of memories...almost like a growing bank account.

Today is a very light day for me...I need to make some phone calls. Otherwise I have the time to myself and time to cash in some of my memories and share them.

There are so many players in my Mother's family. I'll try to introduce them over time. Some of these thoughts  may only be of interest to family.

My grandparents on Mom's side were Walter Carter and Elizabeth Maisak.

My Grandfather, Walter Carter

Grandmother, Mary "Elizabeth" Maisak

My mother, Eleanor, fifth born and nicknamed "Big Red"

Mary Agnes Maisak  "Granny"  My great grandmother.

There were eight children of Walter and Elizabeth Maisak. In birth order they were:

       Kathleen, Ruth, Phillip, Marjorie, Eleanor, Mary Jane, Virginia, and Shirley.

Notice that only a single Y chromosome managed to survive the race to the eggs...my uncle Phil and what a man he turned out to be. Eleanor, the fifth born, was my mother.

Walter was one of the partners of Carter Brothers Motors. At the time he met Elizabeth he was relatively well to do. They married and propagated as commanded by the scriptures. Elizabeth's mother, Granny, was not so happy about seeing her child becoming a baby factory and appears to have been disposed to be critical of Walter.

Granny moved into the Carter household in about 1925, around the time of the birth of Virginia. With Granny came son, George, a talented plumber and pleasant alcoholic who apparently spent a good bit of time sleeping on the couch.

A pivotal event for my mother and her sibs was the death of Momma, Elizabeth, at age 39 in 1930 from Tuberculosis. This was followed four years later by the loss of the most vital and physically talented child, Ruth.  The early death of a mother increases the risk of major depression. My mother's early losses and her adult onset deafness contributed to her lifelong struggle with mood.


Amidst the slow deaths from Tuberculosis in our clan, the country entered the Great Depression. Carter Brothers Motors, one of hundreds of independent automobile manufacturers in the U.S., was an early casualty.  The failure of the business pushed Walter and Elizabeth Carter with their eight children out of the comfortable middle class into penury. 

Elizabeth Carter's T.B. accelerated while she carried the last child, Shirley. At that time, Elizabeth's mother, Granny, remained in the home to cook and "be there." The two oldest girls took on the major chores involved in raising and managing a large family. Kathleen became responsible for the all the younger children. Ruth nursed mother Elizabeth. Elizabeth died in 1930. Ruth acquired tuberculosis while nursing her Mom and died four years later.

With the failing finances, the third child, Philip quit Gonzaga High School and his full scholarship to begin working as an apprentice plumber for uncle Georgie, Granny's alcoholic son. Phil was fifteen. 


By 1934, the family was completely dispersed. Father Walter lived in a single room in a boarding house, the youngest girl Shirley lived with older siblings, and my mother Eleanor and sister Virginia roomed with a family in Brookland and took meals next door with distant relatives. What was most remarkable about the Carter "diaspora" is that the siblings remained very close for the rest of their lives. There were scheduled family picnics on Memorial Day,  Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Easter Monday. On New Years Day, there was a family dinner at Kay's house that included all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins.  As a child, these family gatherings were much anticipated. We had the opportunity to see our aunts and uncles in play, competing with us in baseball and football. I was never so exhausted as the night after one of these events. As I fell asleep, I would have muscle jerks and odd sensations of falling...totally played out.

Here is the last known photo of all of these remarkable people gathered in one place in the 1990s. My daughter titled this picture "The Carter Chicks."

Kathleen (Kay), Shirley, Phillip (Phil), Virginia (Ginny), Eleanor, Marjorie (Margie)

To use the metaphor of Kirk Vonnegut, my peephole opened on March 12, 1943 in Walter Reed Hospital in D.C.  My father was in the service on the West Coast. After the lying-in period, my mother took me back to a one bedroom apartment on Quincy Street NE near Turkey Thicket Playground and Little Rome, the area around the Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

I was one of those early Spock babies. After failures at attempts to breastfeed, I was put on a fixed feeding schedule. It didn't matter if you were hungry or not, you only got to eat at certain times. Apparently Granny disagreed with this philosophy and no doubt decreased my sum total of squawking by interfering with Dr. Spock's foolish instructions.

Looking back I think that I was born into a modern hunting-gathering society.

In hunting-gathering societies, there is generally a separation of labor. Men are occupied with hunting (probably also whoring, drinking, gambling, and fighting) while women are busy with gathering, cooking, making clothing, and caring for the small children including the males who are too young to keep up with a hunting party. The women's work of gathering guarantees at least some food on a daily basis, freeing the men to engage in the much more hit-and-miss occupation of hunting. There won't be fresh game every day, but often enough to supplement the women's contribution with occasional large infusions of protein from the meat. In return, the male hunters are guaranteed at least some food on a daily basis, the results of the women's labor.

Virginia (Ginny) and Eleanor were more modern gatherers. The war was responsible for a substantial increase in the size of the Federal Government, particularly in Washington. All of the Carter women had managed to find employment during the War. Unlike the foremothers who had planted gardens, kept fowl, dug roots, picked berries, and woven baskets, our modern clanswomen gathered government pay checks, military dependents' allotments from the hunter men, ration tickets for meat, sugar, milk and other staples, and S&H green stamps that were carefully pasted into books that could be exchanged for merchandise.

In addition to their gathering duties, the women of the clan also had responsibilities for initiating the training of the young males who were left behind as too immature by the male hunting party.

One of the first tasks of the hunter (after he has done the necessary preparations with proper maintenance and care of weapons, gathering of provisions needed for the journey, proper prayers and rituals, etc.) is to identify the prey, the object of the hunt.

In our home range, my mother began my initiation as a hunter with a game. I recall two instances of playing the game. The prey selected for me was a natural one in “little Rome.”

I was taught to identify nuns as the first part of the game.

It would seem to be easy given that nuns wear special uniforms, called habits. But remember, this was wartime Washington, and lots of people were wearing uniforms. Although you may think that color alone would suffice, it was not necessarily a reliable indicator. Although most nuns’ habits were black, some were white and some were mixed.  Also, some men, called priests, wore black uniforms that included cassocks that are similar to dresses as well. Sometimes priests wore regular men’s hats that were black, and at other times they wore wider, wide-brimmed black hats, still other times they wore skullcaps or black square hats with a tassel on the top. There were also men who wore brown robes and had hoods. They were called brothers but this was a term that was confusing to me since I was just learning about relationships in a family. 

So my targets were nuns. I was to run to the nun and identify the crucifix that often dangled from a chain of beads sashed around their waists. I was expected to make sure the nun had a crucifix and to pass up any nun that was not wearing one.

Indian warriors could attain high status for sneaking up on an enemy and getting close enough to touch him and to forego killing or wounding the prey. This was called “counting coup.” In my case, rather than touch the nun, I was to kiss the cross. So by the age of 2 I was “striving for the cross” and becoming aware of the importance of this symbol in the life of mother and in the life of the clan. 

As my memories begin both Eleanor and my Aunt Virginia were pregnant and I am sitting across a table from my mother while she smokes a cigarette. She may have lit the cigarette on the gas stove in the galley kitchen. She did that frequently, rather than search around for a match. 


As she sits there smoking, her eyes and face are quiet. She is focused out into the distance, looking through me, rather than at me.

Even at two years of age, I am aware that my mother is not present in some important way. She is maintaining a pose that I will see hundreds of times in my childhood. Although she is not aware of me, I know that I can rouse her. She’s become "available" or "on call" rather than actually being here. I can “page” her by tugging on clothes or raising my voice. I am too young to understand that she is becoming deaf.

It is at about this time that I have become particularly aware of a “crack” in the center of her chest. It could be that the pregnancy and associated development of the breasts had accentuated the cleavage. “How far does that crack go?” “Why don’t I have one.?”

In another early memory  my mother is writing . On this occasion, she said, “I’m writing Bill, your father.” What a funny name,..”bill”  “bill” “bill” “bill” “bill” “bill”  I loved practicing words and repeating them over and over until they lost all meaning, a separation  of sound from its assigned symbolic—down to the pure sound, the music of speech itself.

She had to say, “Bill, your father” because aunt Virginia’s husband was also called “Bill.” He was Navy Bill and my father was Army Bill. Navy Bill had also married into the gathering Carters. Like Army Bill, he was also a hunter but was searching for Japanese ships and sailors from the deck of the Aircraft Carrier Intrepid.

Both Ginny and Eleanor had recent concerns about their husbands because each of the men had recent confrontations with death. Navy Bill had been on the Intrepid when it had been attacked by two heathen Kamikazes in November of 1944. The ship required extensive repairs. (Perhaps I'll have an opportunity to talk about my own analysis of that event in the future.)

Army Bill had just received a purple heart and a bronze star in an infantry action where his patrol had been ambushed by Christian Germans with the loss of a number of his buddies. Although Army Bill’s wound was relatively minor it brought the reality of the war back home to my Mom. After many years of training and training others in the states, Army Bill was now in danger on a daily basis.

Eleanor’s pregnancy with my sister Suzanne must have occurred in August of 1944 when she and I had visited Army Bill in Riverside, California and spent a month living in a rented out garage while Dad was receiving some artillery training in the Mojave Desert and shoveling pig manure as a part-time job in an orange grove. I have no recall of any of those events.

“bill” “bill” “bill”  At the end of this particular letter to Army Bill, I contributed my part and squiggled a message. At age two I was well aware of the power of adult writing and I knew there was something mysterious and meaningful in the orderliness of my mother’s penmanship. Even when she doodled I was amazed by her ability to generate closely spaced ovals that looked almost exactly like shredded wheat biscuits. My attempts at copying looked nowhere alike.  “Do it again. Do it again.”  Through childhood, I gauged my progress in learning to control pencils by my ability to reproduce such doodles.

At the end of the letter I got to write down kisses, in the form of Greek crosses, the letter “x,” probably the first symbol that most children are able to draw.  So, now I was able to produce a cross.

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Today I'm not having such good luck with Stanford. I am supposed to contact the radiology department to ensure that I have been scheduled for a PET/CT of the chest for Monday. I was put on hold for 18 minutes on my first try. Believing I had run into a problem with phones, I tried again. After 25 minutes on hold, my "smart" Iphone apparently decided they were never going to answer and said "f*** this" and hung up on them. So I've just put a call through to my nurse coordinator letting her know that I'm having troubles. I was careful to roast some coffee for her last week-end. I need to be in her good graces....I've been called back and they staff is working on it and assure me that there will be no problems receiving the test on Monday.

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I'm also trying to get the spare tire for my RV straightened out. 


About three weeks ago, after several months of a multiplicity of symptoms I finally called my primary care doctor again and told the staff, "I just feel like shit...please get me in." Since I was coughing and having some wheezing, he ordered a Chest X-ray. When I saw the film, I knew there was trouble. The left upper lobe of the lung had an extensive infiltration. Since I had a low grade fever, my doctor started me on an antibiotic and ordered sputums for tuberculosis and fungus. I live near the San Joaquin valley and actually work in a prison there two days a week.  There is a common fungus called coccidiomycosis which is endemic and I had blood testing for that as well. 


I was scheduled to meet my brother-in-law, Ed, in Vegas the following week and to travel East to D.C. On the way we planned to site-see and visit one of two surviving cousins of my father. I wanted to know more about his migration from New York to D.C. in 1938. I told Ed that I wasn't feeling great, but after three or four days of antibiotics,  I did feel some better. Realizing that I might never feel better than I did at that moment, I decided to go for it and to attempt the trip.


I went to our wonderful local tire shop to have them examine the wheels and brakes and they pointed out that my spare was gone. Unfortunately the wheel for a Sprinter Van is rare  and I was unable to find one locally. However, since I was travelling through Bakersfield to Las Vegas, I had no doubt that I would be able to acquire one along the way. Much to my surprise there were none to be had in any town along our intended route. So in Las Vegas, I ordered one online and had it shipped from Detroit to our destination, my sister's house in Virginia. In Las Vegas I picked up another tire so that if we needed roadside assistance, we could at least mount something on the affected rim.

Well, problem is that I wasn't able to complete the trip. By Flagstaff, I was starting to have back and jaw pain and knew that I needed to get back home and continue my workup. So, there was a 35 lb rim travelling to my sister's house in Alexandria, Virginia. When Ed returned home, he shipped the rim back to me. It cost an additional $60 and arrived yesterday. Our local tire dealer took care of it today. I now have a spare.

I think this is a wrap for today. It's beginning to drizzle here. Time for a nap...what a luxury. What is not nice about this!