Was It All a Dream?
Everything is All Right
No idea what got me started on these reflections, the march of time perhaps or phases of the moon. Almost deleted the lot and started over but I rewrote just enough so here you go. - JHF
THIS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU TOO if you live long enough.1 I’m the oldest, by the way, and I feel fine except for going crazy.
“She worshipped you, Johnny, did you know that?” my cousin Joyce emailed me in August, 2010, a short time after my sister Teresa died of liver cancer. Last October Joyce went too, the consequence of a stroke that left her on the kitchen floor for three whole days before the cops broke in. Kathy got her angel wings in ‘21 and I was with her through it all. My father died in ‘87 of lung cancer—you don’t want to know—while she who gave me birth passed away in 2012 in the best secure memory unit we could find in Tucson after years of terror basically, so that worked out. In 2016 my brother Bill died from damn near everything in a V.A. hospital just down the road from there. Most natural things in the world, or out of it.
My aunts and uncles are all gone as well except for one I may be wrong about. How can anyone not know if their mother’s brother is alive, though? That’s pathetic. Relatedly, I have this amazing document I accidentally found when looking up the dates I shared above. There’s a file cabinet right behind me with a hanging folder labeled “Death Certificates” holding large manila envelopes for documents. In the one for John H. Farr—my father, I’m a Jr. but gave it up when he died—was a map of family gravestones in the Parsons, West Virginia cemetery that Kathy drew up on a pilgrimage we made once long ago:
What we have here are my great-grandparents’ graves on my father’s side, Harriet E. and John V. (Valentine) Farr, next to Hamilton Young the preacher and his wife, Florene Bird Sheets Young. Yes, all of that is spelled correctly. I don’t know who the Marshes are exactly, but note that there are two routes to the cemetery and one of them goes by Big John’s Family Fixin’s. Before you say “how cute,” our motel room featured plastic Walmart porch chairs chained and padlocked to the balcony railing. 2
I remember the trip very well. It was summertime and the mountaintops were green all over and I hadn’t been there since I was a boy. At the time I was feeling gnarly toward “shoutin’ Methodist” Hamilton Young because I blamed certain of his descendants for making my life miserable as a grownup. That of course is nonsense since I always had a choice but I was young and stupid. He’d been a circuit-riding preacher and I had his saddlebags with me to authenticate my presence with the spirits. There was no one else around, so I stood on his grave and smoked a corncob pipe full of homegrown as a purification ritual. It might not have soothed his soul or mine but I feel more kindly toward him now in my own antiquity and even have his and Florene’s photos on a shelf six feet away. The saddlebags are gone because I sent them to Aunt Mary in Augusta, Maine in the early 2000s after we moved out here from Maryland. The background there is that my aunt (his granddaughter) was all a-flutter over the East Vassalboro Historical Society’s decision to feature a special exhibit about her in their dusty little building with the creaky wooden floors and she was after props. The saddlebags were mine, however, given to me by my long-departed grandmother from a stash of other relics in the attic back in Maryland which I also asked for and received. My aunt now wanted to reclaim what I’d been gifted (genealogy research, photos, hand tools), already in my possession for 20 years, for permanent display in a crossroads village far away where after she was gone a couple years no one would give a damn. I was apoplectic, had a fit, threw the saddlebags in with all the other junk, and shipped the whole mess off to Maine to cleanse the storage unit of the evil spirits. Now that I’m older I realize that the storage unit itself manifests a curse far greater than the family’s, which isn’t awful after all but ordinary baggage of the kind that gives one flavor. (“A little more neurosis, please...”)
How wonderful it is then, after decades of crime and bullshit but before I’m dead hooray, to realize that painful memories and what I dreamt they meant are only there because I pay attention. Of course I miss my sweetie and her presence lives on in the stars. So do others—in my head perhaps—but the images only light up if I think of them. And what are thoughts but flashes of electrical energy inside our brains? For that matter “brains” are too. Dragooned into believing things are real through naming, we muddle on in lockstep unaware of what we are.
Driving home from the hardware store on Thursday with 60 pounds of birdseed in the truck, I felt the clamps come off, and by the time I passed the Ranchos P.O. I was crying. “Everything is all right,” I said out loud in wonderment to see if it was true and maybe I was channeling but I don’t care. The only thing I trust right now is feeling good.
Take care,
Offspring might make a difference. I never had those.
West Virginia, y’all…
I'm the last in my family as well John. Out lived mom and dad and half brother, mother's side.
Dad died of bone cancer at home with us. Not a recommend way to go. Mother lost her sight but continued to live at home successfully untill a small stroke. I put her in the best home her Medicaid would pay for and a few years later held her hand as she passed.
My father had eleven brothers and sisters. A good dairy family in the depression. They weren't close, at least, with Dad anyway. Most being his age, some older, I'm pretty sure most (all) of them are gone.
Mom's father abandoned her mother and two sisters in the depression. Mom and an aunt went to an orphanage in Dallas, my other aunt to her aunt in Florida.
What my grandmother did during this time period was never disclosed to me. Where my family on either side is/was is a mystery.
I'm old with more ailments than I should list here. It's been forty years since I lost Dad and close to that mom, and I miss them both daily.
Glad to see you still writing. As one of my little boys used to say, "I miss you when I don't see you."