By
George S Geisinger
Here it is early evening, when I'm just getting started on a new blog post. That patriotic post I've just registered on my own blog was way too much of my own opinion to put on someone else's blog, by my way of reckoning. What I'd like to do is write under a thousand words again, and post it on that site that only takes flash stories.
Or, if I get too long winded, I'll put it up on Yezall Strongheart's blog, just for the heck of it. Therefore, this blog needs to be generic enough that I can post it on any blog I can get into. I'm going to have a little fun writing something here that's a little bit more carefully innocuous than usual. Or so I thought.
That's a nice word, innocuous.
How do you like that word?
I won't insult your intelligence by defining it for you. I'm going to assume you are in possession of a dictionary around your house, if you find yourself at too much of at a loss as to how to interpret some of my language in this writing, or in any of my attempts to wax philosophical whilst I write away on my text editor.
I've come upon my vast vocabulary in the English Language honestly enough. My parents and grandparents were all avid readers, with better than average educations, and I must say, I learned more about the English Language at home, that I ever learned in school.
Mother's education was as an English teacher, and my father's stilted language never once lost me, in the process of understanding anything the man ever said, whether his vocabulary was obscure or direct, I was always proficient at comprehending my own father's meanings well enough.
I've always doubted whether my understanding or interpretation of my father's pompous language, was something that my very survival might have easily been derived from, or, if I ever got lost in my father's specific meanings of the things he said to me, whenever he said something and I was there to hear him say it, I always understood his meaning.
Mother always said that my Dad habitually used the biggest words to say everything, and it was always getting him in trouble with the back woods people he was trying to preach his sermons to on Sunday mornings. It was always because he had been a voracious reader, and possessed a extensive vocabulary, replete with options for the most obscure words to use in the English Language.
Dad was an unsuccessful Methodist Minister, who got moved around every single year, when I was little, to give him yet one more opportunity to prove himself to be a competent minister of God, in the SW Pennsylvania Conference of the Methodist Church.
Nonetheless, Dad was summarily discharged from his job with the church. He was always talking over the tops of the heads of his parishioners, Mother said. I think she was making excuses for my Father's incompetence, just because she was his wife, and the mother of his children.
Mother was always saying that Dad's vocabulary was well over the heads of all or his back woods parishioners, who could not understand his way of putting things in his pulpit, which was what cost my Dad his affiliation with the Methodist Church, in the first place.
But Dad was never a theologian; he was always a philosopher. He always ran his church services over at least fifteen minutes, to get across all of his pearls of wisdom, which I think people didn't like. I think Mother was in denial about Dad not being unqualified to be a minister of God for any kind of a church.
Anyway, it was Mother's rationale for Dad getting fired from having been an ineffective Methodist Pastor of a long series of assignments to a number of Methodist Churches, which turned out to be a devastating fact for my Dad to have to live with, as an individual and a self-imposed minister of God.
He was found to be incompetent.
He went back to school and earned himself a Masters and a PhD, which was all a waste of time, because the man refused to get a job with his PhD, in spite of the fact that we all knew he got job offers in the mails from several colleges and universities, to become a professor in their school.
The old man never would respond to any of the job offers he got. He just chose to desert us, and took off for the beaches of Florida, to sun himself, I suppose, while he left a family of four teenage children and a wife to starve in a small, coal mining town in SW Pennsylvania.
And I said I was going to write innocuously! More like writing another poison pen letter to my late father, is what this reality show of mine has turned out to be, whether I intended to write this way or not. I'll never tell. I should come up with more ten cent words to augment this paper, like my late father would have done.
He was definitely a pompous bastard, I'll give him that.
In some way, I think this is all a cheap shot at my father, now that he's dead and gone. He is not here to defend himself against my endless list of accusations and indictments of his misdemeanor during and after he disabled Mother, by attacking and breaking one of her arms, and leaving us all with nothing to live on in a small, coal mining town, to fend for ourselves in our impressionable adolescence.
Mother always had a Bachelor's and a teacher's certificate, from before she got married. But she always said she didn't really enjoy teaching, and didn't care to pursue it any further. Aunt Vi, whom we all moved in with after Dad deserted us, was a mathematical genius, who worked on some of the first government computers the world had ever known, back in the 1950's and the 1960's.
She had a Masters Degree in mathematics from Stanford University, of all places. Aunt Vi was a mathematical genius, and understood things about me that I never understood about myself. I kept forgetting that Aunt Vi always told me, that I should never try to sell anything, because I never had the constitution of a salesman.
My sister eventually achieved a Masters Degree in deaf education, and learned sign language, as well as everything else she needed to know about how to educate the deaf. But there were no jobs in her field, when she moved in with and married a college professor in Oregon, who was local to the university that had granted her, her Masters.
My sister has always been the most successful of the four of us siblings, who works for an agency, as a professional case manager in the mental health field, which encompasses the majority of her professional experience, up until the present moment, and her husband's son, and the son's family, sound like a revelation to my sister, as she cannot have any children of her own.
Aunt Vi and her Masters in Mathematics, had a wonderful time with the Federal Government computers, back when one computer took up a whole room, when each cell was occupied by a vacuum tube. She earned her a good living there, and what Mother needed after Dad left for Florida, was a job. The Proving Ground that employed Aunt Vi, was versatile enough to employ Mother as well.
My two brothers and I all managed to eventually be awarded Associates Degrees, the oldest becoming an EMT, and subsequently a Paramedic, in addition to being an Electronics Tech for the Navy for sixteen years, as well as doing something or other for the Air Force for about four years there.
He still works telemetry in a local hospital setting, though he is, technically, old enough to retire. His wife secretly tells me that my brother is being held by his employment, by the strength of her will, because of none other reason than doing his job at one of the local hospitals, that otherwise the poor man is a couch potato.
I've been an insatiable reader, and a voracious devourer of books, for several years, until I finally became a person who could write as insatiably and voraciously as I once read classic fiction and philosophy. Recently, I've become a prolific, self-published author of autobiographical stories, and a little bit of fiction writing mixed in, every now and then.
As my one of my fellow Indie authors has commented, I've become my own reality show, to find myself writing an awful lot about my own life, and the lives around me, to be a spokesperson for a Lost Generation, as I've begun to think of My Generation, which is the Baby Boomer's of this country.
I became a prolific author, because of my otherwise unfortunate happenstance that I accidentally overdosed myself on my psych meds on a regular basis, and during the span of six to eight weeks, I was rendered virtually incapable of speech, at least twice in recent times.
Eventually I became especially gregarious and verbose, struggling to write down every thought and word that comes to me, which makes my speech quite stilted and long winded, to a fault I'm afraid. I'm not any less of a philosopher and propound-er of nonsense than my father ever was.
But, at least I've made some attempt at not becoming a father of schizophrenic children that I never could have supported anymore than my father ever could. I had a great state of a very healthy libido, by the same token that I'm to understand that was my father's state of being was when he was young, as well.
But my Father had this very wealthy family who pressured my Mother into marrying him, to “fix” my father from some kind of malady, which was known by his parents to be whatever my father's “condition” was after WWII. That was 1946, when my parents finally got married, I think, and Dad didn't go through a breakdown until 1950.
My parents were friends in their own childhood, and used to play with each other when they were small. I've been given to understand that my father was a very thoughtful, very kind man, who eventually took on a role of harsh disciplinarian, to which he could not apply any measure of reason or moderation.
Nonetheless, my grandparents knew something of my Father's “condition” before he and Mother were ever married, and in those days it was a wife's duty to submit herself to her husband's will as much as he demanded her to obey him.
Dad's concept of being obeyed was way over the top, and he was still being a bully with me, when I was a full grown adult, because I obviously disobeyed him. When he was giving me a ride to the airport, to fly back to mother, after I was grown, my father tried his best to start something with me from behind the wheel of his car, at sixty MPH.
Mother fell for all of that old fashioned nonsense. She owed it to her husband to obey him, and submit to him, whether he was reasonable or rational, or not. Her marriage vows were more sacred to my mother than the safety and security of her own children were.
What she found out was that her two sons and her unborn child, (me), were all threatened by my Father's untimely, and irrationally violent nervous breakdown, until she had to pray for our safety when I was still a bun in the oven, as far as my Mother was concerned.
She told me about the whole ordeal when I was an adult, myself.
Happily, my father never took the lives of any of us, the way I always thought he would do, when I was growing up in his house. Dad liked to whip us all, and used us all as his personal whipping post, to be his inspired, aberrant children, to be expected to obey him, regardless of the fact that my Father never wanted anything worthy of being obeyed anyway, as far as I was concerned.
But, notwithstanding the beatings, my Father's bark was much worse than his bite, and the man finally proved himself to be a very well educated, coward and bully, who liked to pick on his own little children and his devoted wife, who would do, mostly, whatever the hell his irrational will was, anyway.
We, his children, were all subjected to suffering, more or less, from the schizophrenic gene which Dad had in his parental gene pool, until all of us got sick with the schizophrenia, at least as much as to be noticeable to the people around us as Dad's illness was.
We are all four of us a bunch of fruitcakes, to become some kind of schizophrenic mirror image of our father, in one way or another. My grandfather was a brilliant and responsible man, who made a singular contribution to the war effort, in WWII, which is another story.
But my paternal grandmother's side of the family was the culprit, who all had the reputation of having “skeletons in her closet,” of people in her family, who were mentally ill, like my father was known to be, to pass it on to all the rest of us, as Dad's kids.
Fortunately for all of us, Dad and Mother both had some money in their families, such that we have all got a modest amount to be relied upon to be utilized for our care, now that Reaganomics has slammed the door shut on all the Federal social programs; nonetheless, we are all somewhat taken care of.