No Regrets

Wednesday Rotogravure: Babies, Bug and Barbell

Last Sunday was Father's Day, and Megumi brought this useful book to the gathering, thinking Jonathan was going to be there. (Jonathan and Mandra are expecting their first baby.) Megumi comes from a culture in which gift-giving is considered an art form, one which she has clearly mastered.

Good advice.

Keep insects away from Baby, too.

Don't squish Baby's little cheeks, either. That's my Grandma Lydia holding me; she's 37 in this picture. I still have the little crocheted shoes I'm wearing in the picture, but what I'd really like is Lydia's ankle straps. That woman had style.

Natalia has style, too. Here she's holding Jessica, one day old, while Ravi gazes intently at the camera.

No kids, style to burn: one for the growing Aunt Gene fan base. From 1931.

My father Roman, a skinny kid embarking on a body-building program, circa 1942.

Apparently, it worked. 1946

Last week I had my first hot dog in decades, at Absinthe: housemade frank, bun, sauerkraut, even potato chips. Your basic 12-buck hot dog, and a damn good Sazerac to wash it down.

Here is one reason I generally don't eat hot dogs: an intense early experience with Little Oscar and his Wienermobile. The actor was also one of those creepy Lollipop Kids in the Wizard of Oz.

Deer of The Week. This is one of the young bucks who chomped the new landscaping to the ground.

Sheep o' The Week, from the collection.

Wednesday Rotogravure: Guns, Guts and Bathing Beauties

Why did the deer cross the road? To get to our yard, where I just installed $100 worth of "deer resistant" ground cover and grasses on a wee bit of turf I tried to claim for human use. The plants lasted about 12 hours.

Like many gardeners attempting to share space with deer, I've been driven to violence. This water gun will shoot 37 feet, an oddly specific range. I'm dressed to kick ass in my Gogol Bordello T-shirt. Thanks, Natalia!

I'm not the first person in my family to bear arms against wildlife. Here's my great aunt Gene, circa 1925.

Serial killer cat Murphy doesn't need a gun. He can't be bothered to eat the whole bird, just picks out the choice bits and leaves the rest.

A typical scene in Memphis: car carnage and an ad for the Cochran Firm. Even in death, Johnnie Cochran litigates; his image beams down from billboards about town, urging Memphisonians to sue. Wonder who got this case?

My father took the picture on the left when my sister Chris and I were about 9 and 11 years old. Thirty-some odd summers later, my mother staged and shot my daughters Natalia and Jessica in a similar fetching and oh-so-natural tableau.

Aunt Gene, 1931. She's pretty fetching, too.

Deer of The Week. PETA, save your protests until after you've clomped a mile in my gardening clogs.

Sheep o' The Week, from the collection.

Wed. Rot. on Thursday: Catch, and Eat

My father catches a ball in a vacant lot in Chicago by means of levitation.

Thirty-one years later, he staged this shot of his grandson trying to catch something in Dolores Park.

Farmer's market truck, Chicago 1944. That's my babcia hefting the cabbage.

Antique cabbage print from an Italian flea market.

My father rides a motorcycle in Texas, 1946.

Not as cool as this one, snapped last night in San Francisco.

Hanging fig, in our yard.


 
Hanging fig, from my archives.

Deer of The Week, part one: doe and fawn in our back yard in Marin County.

Deer of The Week, part 2: venison on our table in Memphis. No relation to the deer above; we got it at the local Whole Foods.

These desiccated critters were found in my mother's house and yard in Florida; my sister Chris sent them to me. She knows what I like.

She also sent the three little sheep, this week's featured ovines.

Wednesday Rotogravure: Suburban Archeology & More Drinking Grandparents

A rare picture of my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born. He usually looks stern and stuffed in photos; I like this one because he looks like he's having fun.

My father and a chum, pre-marriage, pre-paternity. His buddy looks like a monster, lurching down the street, sucking on a stogie.

Working in the yard, I've uncovered some interesting artifacts left behind by the previous owners. I'm sure any 10-year-old could tell me the name of this pinheaded monster.

Another monster. Godzilla? Nice wings.

Were the previous owners Republicans?

Cleaned up, this buried pewter candlestick fits right in on the mantel.

This wasn't buried in the backyard; it was found on the top shelf of the master bedroom closet. Not the original artifact; stock photo.

There must be a million of these things around the property; Murphy, the serial killer cat, brings them to me daily, mostly dead and sort of pretty.

Deer of The Week, I wish. They've exfoliated a huge jade plant and are munching ground cover that just started to fill in.

Sheep o' The Week, from the collection.

Gloria and Gene FXN

 

Part 1 is here
Part 2 is here
Part 3 is here
Part 4 is here

Chicago, 1937
In multiple-kid families, you can see a range of shared and specific variations on the theme of the parents’ DNA. All four of Lydia and Howard’s offspring inherited their father’s prominent, pointy chin; the younger three also got his dark wavy hair and deep brown eyes. A pair of recessive genes, one from each of her parents, made the eldest, Doris Gene, the only blue-eyed  blonde within memory on either side of the family. In the third child, Gloria, a different pair of recessive genes was expressed as a mutation in gene FXN residing on chromosome 9. This couldn't be seen, and its effects took several years to emerge.

The little Tatros were urban kids who did most of their running around in Hamilton Park, where their mother accompanied them daily, pushing the current baby in the worn wicker pram purchased back in the days before Lydia figured out how babies get born. At about the time that the youngest, Jackie, was getting old enough to clamber out of the carriage and start toddling to the park under her own steam, Gloria was suddenly,  unaccountably clumsy, lagging during the 3-block walk and sometimes tripping over her feet when Lydia gave the OK for the kids to tear across the grass to the playground.

At first, Lydia thought it might a weird phase, some temporary glitch in the so-far seamless development of the children that delighted and exhausted her in equal measure. But it wasn’t temporary. Gloria was pale, and she tired easily. Smart, sweet and heretofore healthy, she was not a kid who complained, but something was clearly wrong. When she had a nasty fall and cut her scalp, Lydia took her to the hospital to get stitched up and talked to the doctors about her concerns. Gloria was hospitalized for days of tests. When Howard and Lydia were summoned for the results, they were told that their daughter was suffering from a disease that neither of them had even heard of. It had someone else's name, but Gloria had inherited it from them. There was no cure.

Friedreich’s ataxia is a wasting neurological disorder that results in the inability to coordinate voluntary muscle movements—that’s the ataxia part, caused by degeneration of nerve tissue in the spinal cord and the nerves extending to the arms and legs. Mental capacity is undiminished. Gloria’s mind would continue to develop, but her body would grow weaker and weaker. She would lose the ability to walk as her muscles deteriorated.
Of the host of medical problems associated with the disorder, heart disease is the worst. At age 5, Gloria's heart was already damaged, said the doctors. Her parents were told not to expect her to live to adulthood. Hearing these words, terrible beyond telling, Lydia reached out for Howard. Although his body could still be seen in the chair next to hers, the rest of him was in fact far away and would not be coming back, ever. Howard was already gone, for good; what remained for him now was refining the details of how to leave his wife and children, as soon as possible, before things got really tough.