Tonight's diary is short but necessary.
It's short because I have once again ventured to the wilds of Boston for my annual pilgrimage to Arisia, the mid-January SF/fantasy/gaming/costuming/what-have-you gathering of fans, nerds, geeks, and lovers of the esoteric, the unusual, and the out of the ordinary. This year I'm on several panels plus a joint reading by members of Broad Universe, the networking group for women writers I joined last year at Pi-Con.
Needless to say, all of the above means that my time is limited. Due to money issues I'm only here for two days so I'm cramming as much as I can into the hours available, which means I won't be doing as much writing this weekend as I normally would. And since my main Saturday writing is this diary series, it's going to be short on books and long on pictures tonight.
As for the subject....
When I was first asked to write these diaries nearly four years ago four years, where the !#@$#@$@!$! has the time gone????, I was told only that they should concern the literary equivalent of Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s, cinematic oeuvre. As long as the series touched in some way on terrible, risible, enjoyably bad books, the rest was up to me.
As long-time readers know, I've branched out a bit, with occasional diaries on Good Things rather than Bad. I've discussed books, music, bookstores, day trips, my ongoing love affair with New York, my residence in the Pioneer Valley, my pets, my family...
And given how often I mention my family, isn't it about time that I gave you idea of what they looked like?
So! Here are some of the people and pets that turn up on a regular basis in these diaries. Each may seem perfectly ordinary, and on some level they were, but each enjoyed that undefinable something that made them worthy of attention.
Let's start at the very beginning:
The Nuclear Family:
My mother, the bobby soxer.
My mother in 1943. One of her brothers was in the Army Air Corps, a second was driving a tank destroyer in Italy, and the rest were farming in Western Pennsylvania. Her only sister had moved to Pittsburgh to work in an office, so Mum was left to cook for the harvest teams, keep up her grades, and tend the large numbers of cats that she seemed to acquire no matter where she lived. She's a quintessential American teen in what seems to be a vacation snapshot, and if being the youngest child (and only girl) left at home bothered her, it sure doesn't show.
Mum's future husband.
And this is my father, proudly sporting the Combat Infantry Badge he earned helping to clean out a Nazi stronghold near Lorient early in 1945. He didn't meet Mum for few years, after they were both done with school and found themselves teaching at the same high school. He was crazy about her from the beginning, but they almost didn't survive their first date; Dad took her to what had been a jazz club a few months earlier, not realizing that it was under new management and was now a gay bar. Fortunately for me (and everyone who's reading this diary), she didn't hold it against him.
The beautiful streets of Palma were never quite the same after I vacationed there as a wee lass.
This is the fruit of their love (in other words, me), at the tender age of nine. Mum's sister Betty had won a trip to the Iberian Peninsula and decided to take Mum along as a treat, and since my father was incapable of preparing any meal more complicated than crackers and peanut butter, they decided to take me along so I wouldn't develop a nutritional disease while Mum was in Europe. It was a great trip, marred only by Betty refusing to eat paella on the grounds that it looked funny, nearly walking in front of a crazed cab driver in Madrid, bewildering shop girls by attempting to use her barely-remembered high school Spanish, and proclaiming "MARTHA! LOOK AT THE CRUMB BUMS IN THE POOL!" from a hotel balcony in Mallorca while pointing directly at the other people in our tour group.
Two Uncles and An Aunt:
Mum was the youngest of eight, six boys born between 1909 and 1920, and her older sister Betty, born in 1924. Of the boys, I was only close to two of them, as three (Dan, Bob, and Charlie) were farmers who lived about two hours away and a fourth (Julius) died long before I was born. Betty and the two remaining boys (Oscar and Louis) lived about two miles from our house, and I was over at their place so often it was almost as if I had three fathers and two mothers:
Oscar, newly drafted and a little bit stunned that he'd actually made it through Basic.
Oscar was the oldest surviving boy, and in many ways the head of the family. Quiet, intelligent, and studious, Oscar was the senior partner at the Pittsburgh branch of Sweet Sixteen accounting firm Main Lafrentz when I was a child. He'd gotten his CPA during his service in the Army Inspector General's office during the war, which was probably as well considering that his build (skinny) and eyesight (myopic) would have made him a less than desirable foot soldier. He was one of the finest men I've ever known, innately honest and kind.
Lou on the golf course with his Army buddies
Louis was a few years younger than Oscar, with a more outgoing personality and a penchant for pinstriped suits in his youth. He served on the front lines during World War II in a tank destroyer unit, fought his way from North Africa to the gates of Dachau, then came home, went back to the steel mill, and worked there until he retired. He loved to golf (especially with his fellow tank destroyers), stepped in as the Man of the Family for Mum and me after my father's early death, and was the only member of my family who ever used profanity, at least until I discovered the joys of certain words beginning with "f" and "s" when I was an innocent little college student. He was the type of uncle who always slipped me treats, patiently waited while I picked up comic books and pulp novels at the newsstand on Friday nights, and loved Mum's dogs nearly as much as she did.
Betty, young, fresh, and so beautiful it's almost painful.
And this, my friends - this is my aunt Betty. She was in her 20's when this was taken, young, beautiful, and serenely poised to take on the brave new world of post-war America. Her sister thought she should have become a buyer for a department store, her brother thought she should have been an attorney, and I made her pretend to be Batman to my Robin. She never worked for a department store or went to law school, but the mere fact that such an elegant creature was willing to get down on her hands and knees to pretend to be Adam West gives her major props in my book.
Animal Friends Who've Lived With Me:
I've always had pets of one sort of another. Mum and Dad acquired a an intelligent, good tempered wire-haired fox terrier soon after their marriage named (imaginatively enough) Terry. His successor, Toto Barbarossa, was a smart, irascible, independent Cairn terrier who adored Baroque music, hated Beethoven, and loved to sleep on his back, all four feet up in the air. He went belly-up so often, and so early that Mum thought he'd died as a puppy and was badly startled when the pathetic little "corpse" moved when she went to gather him up from his eternal rest.
Toto finally did go to his eternal rest when I was in college, and his successor, Skye Shrewsbane, was Mum's, not mine. My next pet was the first of the six felinoids who've ruled my life, shed on my clothes, and killed the occasional mouse, moth, or katydid to justify their existence in the Last Homely Shack.
The first two felinoids, Arwen and Arrow, were related. Arwen, who was much more Wingding's than mine, was a small, lovely, and somewhat paranoid gray longhair. She was very soft, not especially affectionate, and had a habit of hissing at or whacking anyone she didn't like. Her nephew, Arrow, was the complete opposite in personality; he was a gentle, somewhat OCD brown tiger cat who may have been a Border collie in a previous life if his habit of herding me upstairs at 10:00 pm sharp every night is any guide.
Siren Stumptail, who spontaneously generated from a pile of camping equipment on the corner of my porch one fine April day, was a part-Siamese tiger cat with a loud voice and a love of fresh strawberries that continues to bewilder me. Supposedly cats can't taste sweet things, but Siren's habit of stuffing herself on berries, cherries, and (peeled) grapes makes me question this.
The late, great, Malfoy-the-cat (left) and the alive alive-o Gil the Wonder Cat (right) chowing down.
My next three pets were the infamous Triple Felinoid who turn up in these diaries from time to time. Malfoy-the-cat, who passed from this vale of tears in 2013, was a gorgeous, polydactyl, and severely stupid flamepoint Siamese mix with crossed eyes, a habit of kneading the blankets for twenty minutes at a time, and a complete inability to finish off his prey even if it was six inches in front of his nose. He would have lasted approximately thirty seconds, tops, in the wild, and if he'd been a little yellower he would have been a fine example of a Dumb Blond of the Feline Persuasion.
The current Double Felinoid, Diamond Girl and Gil the Wonder Cat, are both gray, both smart, and both quite domineering in their individual ways. Diamond, a tiny and camera-shy gray tabby, is the true owner of the Last Homely Shack, never mind that I pay the property taxes and utilities. Gil, who is easygoing to the point of acting comatose a good part of the time, is huge, fluffy, affectionate, and likes to drink the bathwater while I'm in the tub.
Two Mascots, Neither of Which I Own:
The above should be of use to anyone who wants to know just who I'm referring to when I mention my aunt, my cats, or my parents. There are two more entities that show up from time to time in these diaries that deserve a mention, even if I can't actually embed a picture because of intellectual property concerns (or, I don't want to get sued):
Captain America - my favorite male superhero, as anyone who's bothered to read my sig line knows, was created to advocate a then-liberal public policy: intervening in World War II before the Axis destroyed what was left of the Western democracies. Since then Cap, who could all too easily be a bombastic example of American imperialism and a patriotic bullyboy, has instead come to exemplify New Deal liberalism. He's been a WPA artist, an advocate for interracial and same-sex marriage, pals around with an African-American social worker, and generally is an example of what this country could and should be if we'd stop discriminating and actually live up to our lofty ideals.
He also fights evil with a piece of armor instead of a great big gun, and if that isn't the anti-Jack Bauer/Rambo/Ah-nold, what pray tell is?
The GIANT TURKEY PUPPET O'DOOM - I'm not quite sure how the GTPOD, aka the titular character from an execrable monster movie called The Giant Claw, ended up as an unofficial mascot of these diaries. I think it's MT Spaces' fault, but it could be a collective decision that this long-necked marionette with a taste for snacking on the Empire State Building is the perfect accompaniment to these weekly excursions into Badbookistan. Regardless, the GTPOD shows up here almost every week, often for no discernible reason, and if some other hapless wight didn't own the copyrights to this fine entertainment, I'd probably be selling t-shirts on Cafe Press right now.
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So there you have it, my friends and faithful readers: a visual guide to the people, pets, and mascots that besmirch this website appear like magic on Saturday nights for your dining and dancing pleasure. I'll be at parties and networking events tonight so may or may not be around, but if anyone has questions about my pets, weird relatives, or my crazed desire for fanart of Captain America fending off the GTPOD while it tries to eat the Chrysler Building taste in popular entertainment, ask away....
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