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.

Cancer Ward

Scott has had cancer surgery. He had a testicle removed. He woke up from surgery and Ed talked to him on the phone. "Hey, Scott, look out the hospital window. " Scott does. "Is there a Corvette out there?" Scott: "No." Ed: "Shit. I thought there would be. You always said you'd give your left nut to have a Corvette."

The ice was broken. Now Ed and Scott could talk about cancer.

Bruce has melanoma. Scott just had cancer surgery. They arrived with Ed in Portland for our first Thanksgiving weekend blowout. We arrived at our Marriott suite. Someone had to sleep upstairs. I said, "Scott, you and Bruce can have the cancer ward upstairs." The ice was broken. We could talk about their cancer.

Cancer is prevalent in the Silver Valley. My father died of it. My mother is in remission. My mother taught at Silver King school, located about a quarter of a mile right below the Zinc Plant. Almost all the teachers she worked with at Silver King have died of cancer. Dolly, Alene, Sylvia, Betty, we rattled them off one night. I expect to develop cancer. When I was nearly killed working to help overhaul a flash roaster at the Zinc Plant, what nearly killed me was inhalation of sulfur dioxide and zinc/cadmium/lead and other mineral dust. I listen to my upper chest rattle, the way it has for over thirty years now and I listen to my chronic cough and clearing of my throat and I can't help but think a cancer will grow in there some time.

It's serious business for those of us who have lived or do live in the Silver Valley. The mining of ore and the smelting of it meant economic stability for a relatively short period of time. Looked at even in relation to the short life of the USA (230 years old this past July 4th), the times of stable employment in the Silver Valley didn't last long. Sixty, seventy years tops. The impact of that short period of time, however, is much more long lasting. Health concerns remain.

This all came to mind over the weekend when the news broke that sportscaster Steve Lyons had been fired by Fox Sports. On air, Lyons joked, after fellow broadcaster Lou Piniella constructed a wallet metaphor, that his own wallet was missing, suggesting that Piniella had stolen it. Fox fired Lyons' for making statements that were "racially insensitive" and "inappropriate."

If Lyons joking was "inappropriate"(rather than wrong) , then those comments must also be appropriate if said in a different setting. In what setting would his comments have been appropriate? The baseball clubhouse, a place familiar to both Lyons and Piniella? The hotel lobby? The water cooler?

And, under these restriction upon speech, would Ed have been fired had he joked on the television airwaves about Scott and his Corvette? Would his joke have been oncologically insensitive? Testicularly inappropriate?

In the Silver Valley, everyone joked about everyone else's ethnic background or their disabilities. My father was blind in one eye. Dad's friends blamed everything he did wrong from missing a putt on the golf course to not having sex to his blind eye. His nicknames were Cyclops, Rooster Cogburn, and you fat, one-eyed son of a bitch. Called fat, my dad would retort, "You laugh now, pup. But at midnight this big old gut turns into cock."

Joking about cancer, about Italians with Italians, about Bulgarians with Bulgarians, about blindness, about religious convictions (he wouldn't say "shit" if he had a mouthful), made the Silver Valley a place, for me, of free speech.

I understand hateful speech exists. I understand that racial slurs and attacks are violent and aggressive and dangerous. I also understand that not that long ago, when a cancer patient underwent radiation treatment, the radiation irradiated the cancer, but often burned healthy tissue, too. I think we are at a stage of trying to erradicate offensive speech that is similar to the old radiation therapies. We are unable to pinpoint the cancer. We are not always accurate. We discourage and erradicate joking around and healthy teasing because we cannot distinguish between speech that is racially inflected and fun and that which is harmful. So we erradicate it all. As with cancer therapies, when it comes to speech, we have to be asking ourselves just what is the cancer and what is the cure? Could the cure be causing more longlasting damage than the cancer it sets out to eliminate?

PS (Added on October 17th. Piniella comes to Steve Lyons defense:

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2006/news/story?id=2630050

Thanksgiving Weekends with the Valley Boys....and Patty, too

Back row: Ed, Bruce, Terry, Scott, Jake
Front row: me, Mike
The serenity glowing in the center: Patty

I don't think it had to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I'd survived a 1974 Zinc Plant accident, Scott survived testicular cancer in '00-'01, Bruce is always under observation for melanoma and has been through treatment, I survived an attack of spinal meningitis in '99, and Ed drives log truck and has been speared, busted, bent, and bruised in every way possible, plus he fell off a roof in '03 and busted up his pelvis and leg. He was back in the log truck in about three months. Jake's diabetic. Terry has an ulcerous job in management at Xerox. Mike helps juvenile delinquents. He knows stress.

So, it was coincidental that this bunch of old friends from Kellogg High School Class of '72 started in 2001 getting together every Thanksgiving weekend and that it was the same year that the twin towers fell. We thought we'd better start meeting every year before 9/11 and we decided to do it not because we thought the world could end any day now, not because the 9/11 attacks "put things in pespective" for us, not because we "got our priorities straight" after the day America would never forget and that changed the course of history forever. No, we just figured any one of us could die any day now. We figured it out on our own. We didn't need 9/11.

I live a very responsible life. I worship, work hard, invest myself in my students, provide for my family, and try to do what's right by people. It's the Silver Valley way. It's also the Silver Valley way to drink hard, tell profane stories, mock sports teams, complain about how things have changed for the worse, gamble, eat bad food, and watch sports on television. Starting the day after Thanksgiving and lasting until Sunday, Bruce, Scott, Ed, Mike, Jake, Terry, and I pack all of this into a weekend. We get drunk. We get loud. We get hungover. We eat crap. We play cards. We play slot machines. We glorify the past. We complain about past injustices. We deride the way world is changing around us. We tell stories again we've told 5,000 times already. We pick on each other. By the way, picking on people is not a normal part of social life here in Eugene, Oregon. Because, in Eugene, actions are always seen as an expression of one's menacing and racist/sexist/masculinist/homophobic/enraged subconscious (known in Eugene as "issues"), it's implicity forbiddened to pick on people or get picked on. It would be seen as masking real aggressiveness toward others behind a facade of joking around. Jokes are never jokes in Eugene. In this humorless, self-congratulatory, Narcisstic town, speech is not free, but measured.

In Kellogg, I guess we never got far enough in our Freudian Studies class to recognize all the cruelty and violence that underlies flipping each other some shit. In Kellogg, we just love to pick on each other. In Kellogg, harrassment is a positive word. I go to Kellogg as often as I can so that I can get picked on. I want to wear a sign in Eugene: "Please give me some shit! Pick on me! I'll pick on you. We can do it together!" But, it ain't that way here -- although I have some fellow teachers I can pick on and who pick on me and I have found a few select students who enjoy it. By and large, in the eggshell environment of Eugene and its institutions, where being offended is a sign of high character and where anything from wine served at a function welcoming new faculty to wreaths of Douglas Fir at Christmas time (a holiday I've joined my wife in calling Winter Day) to a Poltergeist derived jokey comment can offend, it's just not much fun to be yourself. Someone will be offended and in high dudgeon.

So, you ask, what's Patty doing as the serene center of this picture? Last year, after our 40 some hours of man-fun in Lincoln City, the boys and I looked up Patty Reasor, another classmate, in Newberg, Oregon where she's a nurse. We invaded her hospital looking for her and scared the stuffings out of some nurses and desk attendants who evidently hadn't seen this kind of tonnage moving together as a merry pack before. Patty had called in sick. We reached her by phone, met for coffee, and had a terrific visit. I think all of us guys would agree that we enjoy each other's company, but that the highlight of last year's trip was spending an hour in the company of our beloved Patty.