alcoholism – shoutforjoy.us

The Youngest

Concordia students seeing me off at the train station, Taken with my Brownie camera. It didn’t have a focus feature. I don’t know how it sensed the residual alcohol in my system.

As the youngest child of four I was always referred to as “the baby” of the family. My older sister, Alison, would delight to introduce me as her “little brother” once I was at least five inches taller than she was. She is four years older. Tic, the oldest (six years older than me) went from beating me up regularly, to taking me along on his dates without warning them. This happened at least four times. All but once, the girls would spend the evening talking and dancing with me and ignoring him. I think that was his intention. These girls were ones that my mom had set him up with. I always had a good time. The one girl who was not put off by my presence was a farm girl in Wisconsin. We went to the drive-in movie to see Psycho. I was in the back seat, and kept leaning over the back of the front seat saying, “psycho!” Tic had a hard time deterring this girl, even with my assistance.

Sue Ann was short and I was tall. I surpassed her height when I was in 5th grade and she was in 7th. Many times people either thought we were twins or dating. At one ski resort, the man setting up the T-bars thought we were on our honeymoon! We set him straight in a hurry! We were 15 and 17. Of course, we were in snow gear. She took me to her jr. high dances at Carl Sandburg. I would dance with five or six girls at a time. The silly 7th and 8th grade boys were all lined up against the walls, afraid to make a move. I would help her and her friends with their math and algebra. I was a year ahead in class. They were a year ahead of that. It didn’t matter. I have a freakish thing for math. I had “Elementary Functions” in my junior year of high school. It was basically intro. to calculus. Mr. Kadieski was giving a notebook test to grade our homework. I never bothered with homework, but aced the regular tests. He said, “This next one is a gimme. It’s the quadratic equation.” I said out loud, “Oh oh!” The other students were incredulous. They asked me how I got this far without memorizing the quadratic equation. I said, “I don’t know. I just look at the problems and I solve.” My brain plotted them on the Cartesian graph. The answers were always right. They hated me.

How does this relate to my siblings?

When my parents took a vacation to Hawaii, they asked Jean Hosterman to watch us while they were gone. Jean was in graduate school for her psychology degree. She took the opportunity to give the four of us a battery of tests. She let it slip that on the intelligence tests, we tested equally on the raw scores. She was flabbergasted. Tic was slightly above average for his age, which meant that my eleven year old self tested as a slightly above average 17 year old. She gave me a whole bunch more tests with blocks and puzzles, etc. Thinking back, this, along with the Iowa test I had taken the year before, set me up to be my dad’s greatest disappointment.

Tic went to Concordia College in Moorehead, MN, for a couple of years after high school. One weekend, I took the train from Minneapolis to visit him. I was twelve or thirteen. Tic shared a two room suite in the attic of Brown Hall with Curt from Dent, MN. One night that I was there we went to an upper classman’s off-campus, basement apartment with a bunch of theology students. They started me off with a Singapore Sling. Then I had a Whiskey Sour followed by a Screwdriver. Now, I was all of 95 pounds and 5′ 9″, maybe. I still remember the discussion we had about Luther, Melancthon, etc. These guys and gals were amazed! I not only didn’t pass out. I kept up with them or bested them in theology and church history. When it was time to go, a couple of the guys were sympathizing with my brother, figuring I was going to be a mess the next day. We went up the basement steps to leave at about 2am. There was snow on the ground. I took a step straight off the back of the steps, falling headlong into the snow. I slept in a recliner they had bought at a yard sale, until 4pm. I was just fine when I got up. It’s the family curse: no hangovers.

Tic’s real name is Thomas Ingham Coulter. Our dad gave him the nickname, Tic, from his initials. I don’t know if he still uses it. Ali and Tic don’t talk to me. When Sue Ann killed herself, my dad was so ashamed he convinced her husband and kids not to tell anyone else. Tic knew, however. The funeral was creepy. Ali and I knew something was amiss. I sat with Ali and her husband. When we processed out of the church, Ali grasped my hand tightly and said, “What the fuck just happened, little brother?” My dad had invited the extended family to dinner at a restaurant near the church. Last minute, I was invited and seated with my step-sister, Kris, and her wife. My dad had figured I would be offended by this, since I had been a fundamentalist Baptist the last time he had paid any attention. I found out later that he was not going to invite me at all. My Uncle Pete (Cranford Arthur) suspected as much. When my dad invited him, Pete asked him if he had invited “young Cranford”. My dad told him no. Pete insisted I be invited and that he and Barb would not come if he did not invite me. My dad relented. Pete and Barb did not come. They were so upset. I had a great time with Kris and her wife.

Ali called me from Minnesota a couple days after I got home to Pennsylvania to discuss her suspicions regarding Sue Ann’s death. Death certificates are private in Minnesota. She and I started to investigate on our own. After a month and a half on the phone for an hour or so every night, we finally got in contact with Sue Ann’s friends who had discovered her body and suicide note.

“Did your mother drink?”

On Saturday, I was taking a break from wrestling with the lazy Susan. I was sitting on the Jimmy Hoffa bin on the front porch with our good friend and co-quarantiner, Tony. He is one of the many people who has encouraged me to write my life story in a book. So I shared with him a few more chapters. This is one of them. Oh yes, the “Jimmy Hoffa bin” is what we call the plastic poolside storage bin that we use to store our recycling and our garden tools, etc., on our entry porch. We nicknamed it that, because it is large enough to hide a body in.

As I mentioned previously, my dad built the house in Golden Valley in the summer of 1961, where I lived from first grade until Bethann and I got married in July, 1975, after my second year in college. Until we bought our first house, just after Thanksgiving, we lived in a tiny, one bedroom apartment on 19th and Upton in Minneapolis. I was going to grad school full time in the mornings. We were both working full time, 3pm to 11:30pm in housekeeping at North Memorial Medical Center. I am the youngest of my parents’ four children. The other three were already out of the house and had houses and kids of their own (or at least on the way). So my parents decided to sell the big house with the big yard, and move into a condo on the other side of Golden Valley.

One large house with six people for fourteen years can accumulate a lot of stuff. One Friday afternoon in October, between school and work, B.J. called. (B.J. is my mom. It’s short for Betty Jane.) She said, “We’re having a garage sale tomorrow. If you want any of your things, come early, so you can buy them. The sale starts at nine.”

Now my other siblings are all older than I am and had been out of the house for years. They had been living in their own houses, with real closets and attics and garages. So they had room to put things and opportunity to retrieve things that they may have wanted to keep. I had been out of the house for three and a half months. During that time, I had gotten married in Pennsylvania, started seminary full time, taking Greek and Hebrew and a senior theology elective, and was working full time.

My car wasn’t nearly this nice. It was about 18″ long, went straight forward and turned left in reverse.

I arrived at B.J.’s garage sale at 8:30am. I helped bring up the last of the stuff from the storage closets in the basement. I said good-bye to my childhood toys and games. I thought twice about buying my large “remote control” red sports car, but decided I had been too old for it when I bought it the first time. (Remote control is in quotes, because it had a 6′ cord from the controller to the car.) I think that all I went away with was a few books, some brass bells, and the chalk painting of my grandpa Ingham’s horse, Lady, which Wathena, his wife and my godmother, had given me when I was 10.

When I was done telling Tony the story, he looked at me and asked, “Did your mother drink?”

Why write?

For years, in all sorts of conversations, all sorts of people told me I should write my life story in a book. Perhaps they were suggesting this because a book silently sits on a shelf and gathers dust. It is much easier to ignore than a living, breathing, speaking, shameless agitator. I have read a few memoirs, many biographies, and several autobiographies. Not all of them were by famous people. Several of them became famous after their memoirs became bestsellers. I don’t hold any illusions of grandeur on that account. I’m not from the right demographic. I was born at the peak of the baby boom, in a lily white suburb in middle America to parents who met in law school, the youngest of four children: two girls, two boys, evenly spaced, two years apart each, boy, girl, girl, boy.

My folks came from very different backgrounds. My mom grew up in a small town in Wisconsin until she was about eight, when they moved to Edina, the new, rich suburb of Minneapolis. They had live-in maids and nannies all through the Great Depression. Her father, my first namesake, Cranford Williams Ingham, was an executive with State Farm Insurance. Cran considered himself to be a very proper man. He smoked a pipe, was Episcopalian; to say he was thrifty would be a major understatement. He couldn’t bear to watch or listen to children eat, so he made my mom and her younger brother, my uncle Pete (Cranford Arthur Ingham) stay in the kitchen with the help to eat. They received quite an education on the ways of the world from the help. By the time I was born in June of 1955, Cran had married his third wife, Wathena Meyers Ingham, whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”. She had been one of my dad’s legal secretaries and my folks set her up on a blind date with grandpa, and they got married within the year, and it lasted until they died, he in 1977, she a couple of decades later. Aunt Wathena became my godmother at my infant baptism in the Episcopal Church.

Cran divorced my grandma, Jane Edith LeMay Ingham. She suffered depression and was alcoholic. Of course, Cran was also alcoholic, but he was higher functioning. Jane’s mother was a nasty woman who destroyed both of her daughter’s marriages and lives by never accepting their husbands and always saying terrible things about them and setting up impossible situations, etc. It was so bad that before my older brother was born, my mom told our great-grandmother that we would never know that she was related to us. She had ruined her daughters’ lives and damaged her grandchildren’s lives. She was not going to have a shot at another generation. My mom was good to her word. As it turned out, we did meet her once without knowing who she was. We did not find out that we had a living great-grandmother until we went to her funeral in Menomenie, WI, in 1969. It turns out, she had outlived both of her daughters, so it fell to my mom to make the arrangements. We stopped by the funeral home on our way out to Ohio to visit my dad’s mom. The place was empty for the visitation. I wandered into another room. It was set up with an old man half sitting up in an open casket for a viewing. That was the first time I saw a corpse. I hung out alone there with him until it was time to go. It was more comfortable than with my family and the closed casket in the next room.

We proceeded from there to Racine, WI, to pick up my dad’s older sister, Aunt Betty Lund. We continued on to Youngstown, Ohio, to visit my dad’s mother, Mae Wise Coulter, in a convalescent home. She would come home again, once after that to her house that she shared with her longtime boarder and housemate, Aunt Phoebe. Mae was Holiness Methodist, but not fanatical about it. She was a practical woman. Her husband, my second namesake, Joseph “Freeman” Coulter, was an atheist, or as they called them back then a “free thinker”. No one called him by his name. they called him Free or Freeman. He was an auto mechanic. He loved his work. He liked his drink. He worked hard. He made decent money all during the Depression. He managed the business and brought the profit home for Mae to manage. Mae gardened and had a little Upjohn business on the side as well. During the Depression, Mae was always sending one or another of the four children out the door with meals and sacks of produce, sometimes with envelopes of cash included to various neighbors who had fallen on hard times. At any given time, they were supporting two or three other families. They were wearing threadbare clothes and going with very little to do it. Free was happy working. As long as dinner was on the table; his work uniform was laundered; his lunches were packed and he had a bit for the pub on Friday night, he was happy as a clam. Times were tough on everyone. From the stories my dad, his sisters and brother told, I think the Great Depression were the happiest times there were in America! And they seemed to be much happier for those who were sharing than for those who were not.

So, why write? After 30 years of working as a Christian minister, I have abandoned that faith and now view the world more similarly to my father, who described himself as a “Buddhist atheist.” Unlike my father, I am a communist, not a Republican. I have come to regret raising our four daughters in the naive faith in Christian mutual care. It just plain does not exist. As soon as charity has the name of a faith attached to it, it ceases to be charity, and it has become bait for a con. All during my years of ministry, I refused to approach it this way. For that stance, I was abused and bullied by Christian clergy of every stripe. One Mennonite pastor even threatened to kill me. So I write my story as a cautionary tale.

The stories families tell shape the lives of the people raised in those families. Some of the stories are true.