Memory

When Anson was grown and he would talk of his life, people were always amazed at what he remembered from the very early years and what he could not recall from last week.

A pale lavender wall paper with a busy floral design of wine-colored roses and celodon leaves, repeating and repeating. That was in the livingroom which was also the bedroom of the apartment in the old Victorian house he and his mother and father lived in on 11th Street in the Heights. He was only a year or so old at the time but at 45 could pick up a pencil and sketch the design and tell how, when he had the big measles, his mother pulled the roll-up shades down and covered the windows that looked out to the street and the east yard with heavy quilts. Measles could leave you blind, they said, and it was very important to keep someone with measles in the dark. (At times he would think that keeping him in the dark was a life-long mission of his parents.) He remembered the spinner that his dad brought him, a marvelous toy with a plunger-type handle that you pushed to make a 5 inch wheel spin. The red and white spiral on the wheel was hypnotic and there were three flints mounted on the back that would make sparks fly out when it spun. His mother would not let him play with it until he got well, sure as she was that the sparks, small as they were, would damage his eyesight. He also would tell about the full moon that came up while he was sick. He loved to look out the big windows at the cars going by and the people walking up and down the sidewalks but that wasn't allowed while he was sick. He begged but it did no good. But early one evening during that part of the day that goes purple and dark blue, his mother told him there was a golden full moon coming up and that she would let him watch it rise, but just for a few mintues. She pulled the quilt back and he stood at the window under the pulled-down shade and looked out across the yard next door. Through the leafless trees hw saw the moon coming up. It was huge and butter-colored and he could see it move behind the branches of the big sycamore. He watched for maybe five mintues and would have watched longer but his mother pulled him back, let the quilt fall into place and the room go dark and they listened to Beula and Fibber McGee and Molly on the big console radio. For the rest of his life a full moon rising in a early spring evening would put him back in that living room looking out that window.

A year or so later he looked out another window at another phenomonon that would also stay with him. It was late summer and they had moved a few blocks to a garage apartment on Arlington Street, just across from the house hid grandfather built and his dad was born and grew up in . The garage apartment belonged to his dad's best friend, his growing up buddy, and his new business partner. It was bigger that the apartment around the corner and a couple of blocks down on 11h street. You entered a front door and the north side of the building at ground level and went up a long flight of stairs to another door and into the apartment. There was a living room to the left, an eating area immediately in front of you and a door from that into a small galley kitchen. Behind the kitchen was a tiny bath. In the southwest corner was a bedroom that you could get to from the living room or the bath. He still sept in a baby bed pushed up against the windowns on the south. This looking out the window memory happened during a hurricane. His dad had put tape in big X shapes across all the windows and the window shades and blinds were pulled down. It was almost dark and the storm was in full blow. Lights flickered and went out. His dad lit a lantern sitting on the little kitchen table. The fear-excitement was a metalic taste in his mouth. He wanted to see out. He wanted to watch the trees out on the street shake and bend and swing back and forth, the lightening making great flashes that stuck like a picture on the eye. He had gone to the windows a coule of times but his mother would pull him back and tell him it was too dangerous, that the windows could break from the wind or from something the wind might blow against them and the glass would cut him and hurt him bad. But he wanted to see and kept watching the east wall of the room, the storm side. The building would shake in the wind gusts. They sat at the table in the little dining nook on the west side, as far away from the storm as they could get in the little apartment. Just when it seemed the wind could not blow any harder, Anson pointed to the windows. "Look" was all he said. They looked and could see water running from the window sill down the inside wall, beginning to puddle on the floor. His mother got up and went into the bathroom and got towels. His dad went to the window, pulled up the blinds and shades to see what was happeneing. He followed, hoping to see out the window at the storm in angry fury. But you couldn't see anything in the dark. As his mother began to put towels under the windows to catch the water and the lightening flashed over and over, they could all see the rain was being blown against the bulidng so hard that it was actually stacking up between the window panes and the screens. His mother grabbed him up and they retreated back across the room to the small table and chairs. She held him and hugged him and reassured him and there was the sound of crying in her voice. His dad was busy carrying dripping towels to the sink to wring them out and take them back to sop up more water. Later, he would not remember how long the storm lasted, or falling asleep while his mother held him, or her putting him down on a pallet in the kitchen. But every thunder storm that came through his life would bring with it the flash image of that water piling up between the window panes and screens and the look of terror on his mother's face.

Just before Christmas, after the storm, they moved down to the little house between the garage apartment and street. His mother had told him he was going to have a little brother or sister. They needed more room. It was February, the weather was warm in Houston. His mother sat on the porch steps and he played in the small yard. "Hey, boy." He looked up and saw his grandfather - his father's father - coming down the sidewalk. He was tall and thin, white haired and had a big white handlebar mustache. He wore dark slacks with tiny vertical stripes and a matching coat. He always wore a vest over a white shirt and kept a pocket watch that Anson was allowed to take out, open, look at. And he smoked a pipe and smelled of tobacco and other unknown scents. Anson ran over to him and he kneeled down, arms out to grab the boy. Anson's mother just sat on the steps watching. He sat on his grandfather's knee, asked what the old man was doing. "Just takin' a walk," he told the boy. Anson did not see a lot of the old man but accepted that he stopped by every once in a while in much the same way he accepted that the moon would grow until full, then shrink and disappear. He didn't understand why the old man lived only a couple of blocks away but was seldom seen. It was just the way it was. He looked up at the old man's big nose and the white hairs that grew out of his nostrils and made a part of the mustache. His grandfather's eyes sparkled as he glanced over toward Anson's mother. "How's your sister doing?" he asked.

"We don't have her yet. When she's ready, Willota will go to the hospital and get her." Anson refered to all adults by their first names.

"Not that one, boy. Your older sister. The one you already have."

"I don't have a sister," he told the old man.

"Yes you do. Ask your mother about it when I leave."

Frank asked his what he had been doing and Anson told him. He told him about the streets he built for his little cars to run on and that he was going to build a whole city. "You do that, boy." Frank reached into a vest pocket with a nubby finger and pulled out a nickle. "Here you go. Buy yourself a pop."

"I can't have pop. Willota says they're not good for you."

"Well, get something when you go to the store. And don't forget to ask your mother about your sister."

Frank lifted Anson off his knee, stood up, tipped his hat in Willota's direction, and walked off down the street. Anson watched him walk away, looked at the nickle in his hand, turned and ran over to Willota. "Look what Frank gave me," he said. "A nickle"

"We'll put it in you piggy bank." she said. "What was grandpa saying to you?"

"Oh, yeah. He asked how my sister was. I told him we didn't have her yet. He said it was my older sister he was talking about. I told him I didn't have an older sister. He said to ask you about it." Anson was paying more attention to the nickle than to his mother, but sensed almost immediately that his mother was suddenly angry. She looked off in the direction Frank had gone. "Damn that old man," she muttered. Turning back to Anson, "Don't pay any attention to him," she told the boy. "He's old and crazy and doesn't always know what he's talking about. Now, let's go inside. It's time for your nap."

Anson thought no more about it until after he was put to bed that night. He lay in the dark listening to the radio programs and heard Willota and Bob talking in the living room. At first he couldn't make out what they were saying, but their voices got louder as they talked. He realized they were talking about Frank. Just before falling asleep he heard Willota say, "Well, you tell that old man he's not welcome around here. He's an old drunk and he's mean. I won't have him coming around and telling the boy all that nonsense."

Anson never saw Frank again.

A Beginning

The boy was born late one snowy early February night not long after the end of hostilities in Europe, but it would be many many years before the man was whelped. 9 pounds, 8 ounces. His mother told everyone who would listen that first he robbed her teeth of most of their calcium, then he almost killed her trying to draw that first breath, almost ripped her freckled, 110 pound, red-headed body apart over many, many hours. (This belied the boy's birth certificate that indicated a normal, 3 hour labor.) She had an unhealthy, obsessive love for him and she hated him, too. She felt much the same about the boy's father.

The father was a product of the early 20th century working class, one of 4 born to a tall, stringy man and a short dumpy woman. His mother had married 'beneath her station' and her family had cut contact as soon as they found out. His father, a master carpenter who worked on bridges and big buildings, houses, and stores, built the house where he was born on the east side of Arlington, just half a block south of 11th street in the Heights, the oldest neighborhood of a young city. He was abusive to his boys who were, in turn, wild and rebellious and desperate to gain his approval. He was protective of his two daughters who were always perfect in every way. He ignored his wife. She died, with a long sigh of relief in a diabetic coma during an August hurricane. The two girls finished raising the boys. The old man walked away from the two story he had built, the family he had made, rented a small back room in a boarding house several blocks away. He continued to work enough to buy the weekly fifth of Old Crow and he played dominoes with his buddies at the corner ice house. He never remarried, became thin, crusty, spare, living close but at a great distance from his kids. The grandfather haunted the boy all his life, cast a showdow even on a cloudy day.

The boy's mother and father had traveled during the war years. His asthma and a busted ear drum effectively kept him out of any of the military services. He tried to get in the Marine Corps but lasted only a couple of weeks. The Navy agreed to give him a try and tried to make a medical corpsman out of him. But blood brought on a serious lightheadedness and he knew at least 3 ways to convert medical supplies into a drinkable alcohol product which made him popular with his bunkmates, but got him classified to 4f and shown the door. He had marketable skills, was a journeyman plumber, a liscensed welder. There was no shortage of demand for his abilities during the war years. They went to Cor D'alene, Idaho where he worked on a secret submarine training base high in the mountains in a clear, pristine lake. There was another job in Seattle, something in Neuevo Lorado where they lived in Mexico and the border people followed her around wanting to touch her red hair. They traveled with friends of his and it was a loose, free time they both loved. But after the war when she found herself pregnant the traveling days, the honky tonks, the new horizons and places that she had grown up reading about had to come to an end. They went back to Houston to settle. They rented an apartment, two rooms in an old victorian back in his old neighborhood. And, as the time for delivery approached, she announced she was going back to her home in Arkansas for the event, needed to be with her mother, needed to be with the doctor that had cared for her when she had diptheria as a girl. He drove her back to that little town in the Arkansas River valley not far from the western border and left her there saying he had to work, they needed money, he would be back.

It was ok.

Her father had built a house for her and her mother in 1939 just a mile west of town, a sturdy rock story and a half, upstirs with one room finished for the girl, the other open attic where, later the boy would sleep and his imagination would be nurtured by dark shadows and boxes of memories. The house hugged a little creek about halfway between the highway and the abrupt rise of Short Mountain. The mountain was an unlikely geologic event bursting up out of the alluvial river valley, a capstone top, flat, forrested in pine, oak, cedar, hickory, wild cherry, elm. Once a monestary, a community of Benedictines had considered locating there. It was close to the little town of Athens, but the narrow dirt road giving access to the top acted as an effective barrier to the material world. But water on top of the outcrop was problematic. There was a spring that locals said never quit running even if at times it was no more that a cold trickle. There was a hand dug well at an old farmhouse but it woudl go dry in August and September. The monks decided on a more hospitable site east of the town with much better water. The mountain filled the view from the house and her father developed an almost physical attachment to the land. He was disabled from the first world war and when he worked it was clerking in a local grocers for someone he had known all his life who would overlook his physical shortcomings and tolerate his eccentricities. But he would keep a cow or two and had a horse. He had loved to ride as a younger man, back when men rode horses and there were no cars. The redheaded woman never liked the house that she had moved to when she was a senior. She had deeply resented the move to Athens from the little town twenty miles away where she grew up, the separation from her friends, the stability she had known. It was a threat to her and although she was devoted to her father she never quite forgave him for it either. She was not a forgiving woman.

It was just before Christman in 1945 when she went home. The truce between her and her mother was still shaky, frosty. She helped with the holidays, took long walks with her father, visited with friends. And then, on that February afternoon, just as her father was coming back from the barn with the pail of fresh milk, her water broke. It was cold and raining as they loaded up and drove to town, to the hospital on the hill just north of the square, up under the watertower. A few hours later as the rain changed over to snow, Anson first yelled out at the world.

Welcome to the Autobiography of Anson Greer

This will be an ongoing project, a little something I'll be doing in my spare time. On this site you will find the lifestory of Anson Greer along with the occasional doodle, drawing, collage. Opinions may be expressed, but they should not be taken too seroiusly. Afterall, everyone has them and in the end they are as significant as a March wind.

So, why would anyone be interesed in the autobiography of Anson Greer? I don't know, really. After all, he's about the same as anyone else. Call it an exercise in ego or a creative project or just something to pass the time. Come back and see how it all unfolds. There's no plan to it, no plot, no overall picture to be drawn -- just little snippets of an incomplete life. It's fiction, but some think that in fiction lies the strongest truth.