Don't Be Like Me

Today, in Huckleberries, D. F. Oliveria, the Huckleberries' executive editor and justice of the peace, wrote the following:

This day is a defining moment in my family's history. Thirty years ago exactly, my father (Franklin Simas Oliveria) was killed in a vehicle accident that shook the foundations of our family and extended family. He was small and stocky with massive arms, built from milking cows and hauling hay, and a wonderful ability to laugh. I inherited his sense of humor. And I remembered his one word of advice as I started out into the world: "I made my living with my muscles. In the future you won't be able to do that. You'll have to make your living with your brains." I was the first of my generation to make my way through college. If he'd lived, he would have been proud that his grandkids are becoming doctors, college professors, special-needs experts, geologists and more. Not bad for a man who never graduated from the eighth grade but had the street smarts to provide for six kids and his aging parents.

When my Dad had imbibed a Heidelberg or ten beyond the limits of sobriety, he sometimes wanted to talk man-to-man with me. Sometimes he came down to the basement where I was shoveling coal into our furnace's stoker. He was a heavy man and I dreaded hearing the door to the basement squeak open and the stairs strain under his weight. Dad would hold me near him. He smelled of Camel straights, Alberto VO5, stale yeast, and salami, even if he hadn't been eating salami. My dad had salami body odor.

He told me he loved me. He told me he'd swim a river of shit for me. He was a strong man. His holding me near almost suffocated me. Then he would hold me at arm's length, his eyes filmed over, and say, "Son, don't be like me."

I was about eleven or twelve years old when these talks occured. I loved my father. He taught me to play baseball. He coached our very successful IOOF Little League team. Dad worked hard at the Zinc Plant during the week and, to earn extra money, he tended bar at the Sunshine Inn on Friday and Saturday nights. Friday nights featured the fish feed. It started at five o'clock. Dad barely had time to walk in the door after his Zinc Plant shift to get on a white shirt, shave, splash on some "foo foo" and start serving beers and well drinks at the Sunshine Inn.

I knew he worked hard. I knew he drank too much beer. But I did not want him to tell me, "Don't be like me." I wanted my dad to be someone I'd be the same as, that I could emulate.

As I grew older, I began to realize that what Dad meant when he said, "Don't be like me" was "get out of Kellogg" or "don't do what I did and spend your life in the Zinc Plant". I understood this even more when I turned seventeen and went to work in the Cell Room and worked as a stripper, pulling and replacing cathodes from electrolytic cells and then stripping and stacking the zinc from these plates. Dad had told me since I was about twelve or thirteen that I had to go to work in the Cell Room so that I would never want to stay "in that shit hole" and would be motivated to, in Franklin Simas Oliveria's words, "make a living with [my] brains." It was my dad's form of revulsion therapy.

I'll never know if the revulsion therapy worked. My days working in the Zinc Plant ended when I was nineteen and nearly killed in a Flash Roaster accident. That accident meant I'd never be like my dad. I would make a living with my brains.

I would get out of the Silver Valley. I became an honor student. I graduated from North Idaho College and Whitworth College and came to the University of Oregon and studied for many years at the graduate level.

I never felt at home. The part of the equation my father never understood when he said, "Don't be like me" and the part of the equation my Kellogg teachers never understood when they said, "You've got to get out of the Valley" and the part of the equation I never understood as I pursued and achieved my dream to become a college teacher was that my body and my mind might be in Coeur d'Alene or Spokane or Eugene, but my soul is always in Kellogg.

Home is familiarity with how people think and talk, even how they greet each other. In Kellogg, language and greetings and ways of thinking were (are) often coarse, profane. And I love it. A lot of it was (is) loud, gregarious, cocky, very friendly; today pop psychologists would say we people from Kellogg had (have) "boundary issues." I didn't used to be careful about these things when I began to move and live outside of Kellogg and in academic settings or in other social situations, I would embarrass myself and so I quieted down, got more careful, and became more, God strike this next word from our language, appropriate.

When Dad said, "Don't be like me", I don't think he knew how difficult that would be. He thought what we Americans tend to think: it's a free country; we are mobile; we can dream and achieve; we can be who we are where ever we are. This American story, however, doesn't seem to take into consideration the soul and where its home might be. I'll never know if I did the right thing. Am I better off as a successful college teacher, living in a mild climate, in a place where, after living here for twenty-seven years, I've never felt at home. Or would I have been better off to stay in the Valley, where my soul feels at home, but where I couldn't have made a living with my brains in quite the way I do now? When Kellogg parents, and other parents in similar small towns, tell their children to crawl out of the crab pot and get out of this backwater burg, in many ways, it's sound advice. On the other hand, it might be advising our children to break the bond with the very ground of their being.