Potty mouth

Actual quote from an e-mail my grandmother sent me today:

"I would go to your blog but I am not mature enough for the language sometimes. If 'mature' means finding profanity and vulgarity humorous."

Obit

Papa's obituary as it ran in his local newspaper:

James C. “Jim” Cope, writer, age 80, of West Columbia, died Oct. 31, 2007, after a lengthy illness.

He was a loving husband who cared for his wife, Joie, during her own lengthy illness.

He was a great father and grandfather, providing guidance when needed and freedom when ready. He had a quick mind and a sharp wit, was a great reader, a lifelong sports fan and a loyal friend.

He came to Brazosport in 1961 to be the public relations director for Dow’s Texas Division, working at Dow until he retired. Born in Paint Rock, Texas, he was quarterback of the high school football team, then joined the Navy and served in the Pacific at the end of WWII. He graduated from Texas Christian University as a journalist. He was a writer and editor at the Denton Record-Chronicle, a sportswriter for the San Antonio Express-News and sports editor and columnist for the San Angelo Standard Times before joining Dow.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Joie, and by his son, Whitney Dirk.

He is survived by his sister, Johnnye Louise Cope of San Angelo; his sons, James Steven (Cece) of Bloomington, MN, and David Shawn (Kelley) of Lake Jackson; grandchildren, Chris of Cardiff, Wales, Jon of Burnsville, MN, Garrett of Carthage, Texas, Josh of Angleton, Shawn Jr. of West Columbia and Christy-Lynn of Lake Jackson; and eight great-grandchildren.

A memorial service celebrating his life will be held at 4 p.m. Monday, November 5, 2007, at Chapelwood Methodist Church in Lake Jackson.

Garden seed

This is a picture of Eric and me shortly before I left for Britain. Although it's not the most flattering (we both look like dopes), it is one of my favourite pictures of myself because in it one can see a resemblance between me and a younger version of my Papa.

Papa died Wednesday.

Having spent all my life living relatively large distances from Papa, I find myself now scrambling to collect in my mind every single memory I have of him. Because even though I saw him far less than the other grandchildren, he has strongly influenced the person I've become and that I try to be.

Perhaps that's somewhat by design. I was remembering today the time when he refused to let me take his golf cart out for a drive, and the strangely brilliant logic he used in so doing.

Papa lived in the gated golf resort community of Columbia Lakes, where golf carts are the mode of transport de rigueur. No childhood visit to Papa and Joie's house (a) was complete without forcing one of my grandparents to take me for a ride on the cart. Often the other grandkids would come along, which meant that I got to stand on the back of the cart where the bags were supposed to go. For reasons that now escape me, I always envisioned that we were storm troopers out on patrol. Other kids grow up wanting to be firemen; I wanted to claim East Texas for the Galactic Empire (b).

When I was 12 or 13 years old, my cousin, Shawn Jr., and I were allowed to take the golf cart out by ourselves to go fishing at one of the resort's lakes. When I say that we went fishing, what I mean, of course, is that Shawn fished and I watched. To this day, I have never caught a fish. I am such a bad fisherman that Jesus would lose his patience with me. Shawn drove the golf cart because he is a few months older than me and, more importantly, he can kick my ass. Shawn decided that the best way to the marina was via bumpy fields, where he simply mashed down the accelerator and tore around in circles, treating the golf cart as if it were some kind of off-road sport vehicle. Obviously, my reaction to such blatant mistreatment of my grandfather's property was an immediate and acute desire to do exactly the same thing.

A few months later, I found myself back at Papa and Joie's and with no Shawn around to act as the Responsible Grandchild, so I immediately made my case for being allowed to take the golf cart out on my own.

"Well, hoss, I don't think that's a good idea," Papa told me.

"Why not?" I asked, indignant. "You let Shawn Jr. drive the golf cart. I'm the same age. Almost."

"But I see Shawn Jr. more often, stud. We don't get to see you very often. If you do something stupid with the golf cart, and I get mad at you, that'll be something that just sticks with you. If Shawn Jr. does something stupid, well, I'll see him again in a few days and we'll get over it."

I love that line of thinking. And to his credit, I don't have any negative memories of him.

I also love that he was taking it as a given that I wanted to drive the cart around like a maniac. It's a defining characteristic of Papa that he was so subtly straight-forward. He was honest, but in that veiled manner that comes from a career in public relations.

I remember when Sara and I were down in Texas and went to see him. One of the first things he said to her was: "Well, you look pretty smart. I hope you are smart. We don't need any more babies. I like the things, but we don't need any more of 'em in this family right now."

Actually, he probably said it a little more cleverly than that. My grandfather was good with words and especially good with brevity. When I was in my 20s, I would write to him often and his letters back were like news bulletins. Whole events were put into single sentences.

That brevity, though, and the limited times that I saw him -- especially after I moved to Minnesota -- leave me with little to remember him by. I feel frustrated and upset that I don't know more stories about him.

I know that he grew up in West Texas. When he joined the Navy they sent him to San Diego for training and the journey was hot and he hated it. I know that he spent most of World War II in the Marshall Islands. After the war, he bounced around Florida and ran into Joie, who was, in my dad's words (c), "probably a little too fast for him." Somehow they landed back in Texas. There was Denton, and San Angelo, and then Papa got work doing PR for the company that gave the world napalm, Agent Orange, and faulty breast implants. He retired and rarely left Columbia Lakes. He drank whiskey. He smoked Merit Ultra Light cigarettes. That's a life in a paragraph, and there is so much I don't know and probably won't ever know.

I am left with soundbites -- a collection of cool slang and maxims. And I am trying now desperately to gather them in my faulty brain. I am afraid now of losing these things, wondering how I can hold them in. But at least I know I'm always carrying some part of him.

Once, when I was in high school and my Papa was in a rare chatting mood, he showed me a picture of his football team in college. He pointed to himself and said: "Shawn Jr. saw this picture and said that you look a lot like I did back then. That was a pretty mean thing for him to say."

I took it as a compliment.

--- This post gets its title from a phrase that Papa would use in place of "goddamn it" -- to be said as "Gar-den seed!" ---

(a) Joie was my cantankerous grandmother, who died in 1993. I say "cantankerous" because that's how everyone seems to remember her. I take a certain glee, then, in the fact that she was always sweet as pie with me.

(b) This pro-Empire stance is almost certainly at the root of those really bad years when I was voting Republican.

(c) My dad often displays his father's talent for stating things in amusingly polite terms.

Half the Fun of Not Travelling

My latest column is out. My favourite part is when I refer to myself as a "wistful girl's blouse."

Also, I claim in this column that I am not being forced to sign statements of allegiance to Len Goodman. You'll note, however, that I conveniently left out the fact that I so totally would. Len Goodman should be king.

Female Army Lays Siege

My latest column is out and it's a pretty easy guess that I was going to write about my sisters-in-law. My favourite line this week is: "Westerners are bulls in a china shop where all the china has a little picture of a matador on it."

Green Card wanted*

The child bride is enjoying so much having her sisters visit that she has decided one of them should stay. In light of the immigration issues that raises we've decided that the most expedient way to keep Ya-Ya here is to marry her off to a citizen of the European Union, mail-order-bride style.

But in this case, you don't have to be some wealthy fella willing to pay for false affection -- you simply have to be someone that Laura would want to marry. Which means that you should probably be Mike Phillips or Gordon D'Arcy .

Ya-Ya is charming young lady who enjoys dancing, singing, photography and verbally assaulting her brothers-in-law. She can speak Spanish fluently and is instilled with a cooking skill that, while not equal to that of the child bride, is certainly better than any of that takeaway crap you've been eating lately. Sure, you'll find yourself with parents-in-law who think Rush Limbaugh is too liberal (no, really), but the Atlantic Ocean provides a nice buffer from that sort of thing.

Indeed, the only down side to this union is that occasionally your sisters-in-law will invade your home, shaking its foundations with their bunker-buster laughter. But fear not, you'll have me to commiserate with. We can drag a television and microwave oven into the attic and exist on frozen curries and televised sport until they go away. Assuming they do go away.

Oh, no. What if they don't go away?

*Admittedly use of the term "Green Card" in the headline is misleading, since that is something that allows a person to live and work in the United States. But that is indeed an added benefit of hitching yourself to the Ya-Ya Wagon -- she gets legal status in the EU, you get legal status in the U.S. It's a win-win situation.

Assaulted by train staff

Two of the child bride's sisters are visiting the Cope estate at the moment, which means the days and nights are filled with the sounds of their virtually yelling at one another, punctuated by frequent explosions of cackling laughter.

The child bride comes from a large family, and the best way to be heard in a large family is to speak louder than everyone else. When the family members get together, the house reverberates with a noise that is almost physical; it pushes you around and makes you feel claustrophobic. Well, it does that to me.

And now that experience has come to my tiny house, in my tiny space on this tiny island. Rachel and her sisters seem to have lost any sense of the concept of "inside voice" and bellow at one another like excited deaf people. They quote lines from films they watched as children (almost always in that loud and high-pitched Queen Victoria voice that everyone does), gossip about so-and-so who lived down the street and is probably gay now, and cackle with laughter over every little thing.

It's that sisterly thing, of course. I know several guys who are very close with their brothers and they just don't act like this with each other. When my brother and I get together, we more often than not stare at each other until he asks me a question out of politeness ("So, how's that book going?"), and I accidentally answer in seriousness and he says, "Yeah. That's cool," which is Jon Code for: "I'm not going to make fun of you right now, but I reserve the right to do so at a later date."

Thursday found the sisterly triad and me wandering the streets of Bath, where the presence of other loud American tourists helped to lessen their effect just slightly. I was secretly happy when Jenny didn't respond to the text I sent her about our being there. For the sake of our friendship, I wasn't particularly eager to subject her and Chris to this mobile theatre of cacophony, but I felt it would be rude to visit their fair city without so much as a hello.

Anyway, we had an alright time, eating dinner at a Spanish restaurant in city centre that is effectively buried underneath the road, and were in good spirits as we arrived at the station to catch our train home.

As we walked into the station, I heard the announcement for the train to Cardiff Central and shot off up the steps. Now, I am one of those people who prides himself on being able to catch trains. If I had somehow been able to transpose my train-catching skills to rugby, I would have been Eastside Banshees RFC's top try-scorer, because I bound up steps, leap over things, break through crowds and run at shocking pace when trying to save myself 30 minutes of sitting around waiting for the next train.

For those of you playing along at home, most of the train doors here are automatic. They will all close at once but for one, that one being where the conductor stands. He/she leans out of said door while the other doors close, gets the signal from the platform conductor, shuts his door and signals to the driver that they are good to go. In that space of time that the other doors are closing, one can jump on the train via the conductor's door.

And so it was that I flew onto the 20:08 train from Bath Spa to Cardiff Central.

"Alright, mate," said the conductor as I got on. "Let's go."

"Just a sec, my wife and her sisters are right there," I said, pointing to the three-woman hurricane that was now about 30 feet from the train.

"No time," the conductor said. And he pressed the button to close the doors.

"Whoa. Hold on," I said, putting my shoulder into the doors to stop them from closing. "I can't leave without them!"

"Well, get out, then," he shouted. And he pushed me out of the train.

By this time, Rachel and her sisters were standing outside the door, looking shocked that I had been forcibly removed*. I spun around and shouted back at the conductor through the half-closed doors: "Come on, mate. They're all here. We're all standing right here."

"No!" he blustered, frantically pressing the button to close the door.

But then karma kicked in.

The doors refused to shut. He had fucked them up by throwing me into them. When it became obvious that he was going to have to completely reopen the doors to shut them, he grumbled permission for us to get on. He was still fussing with the thing as we sat down.

Even though it was dangerous to shove me from the train -- my foot could have gone into the gap, my foot could have caught the door or I could have been turned and gone head-first into the concrete platform -- I've decided not to file a complaint with First Great Western. It's just as effective to blog about it and less likely to result in any kind of unnecessary disciplinary action for a conductor who was probably just having a shit day. After all, this train had come all the way from Portsmouth; I'm sure he had been dealing with charming idiots all night long. And besides, he was polite to us once we were seated.

Still, one has to wonder sometimes why I am such a Britophile.

*Well, perhaps Rachel didn't look shocked. My being attacked by someone wouldn't surprise her at all -- she would assume I had done something to provoke them.

Whatever happened to that one guy?

One of the seminal novels of Welsh-language literature is Traed Mewn Cyffion, by Kate Roberts. The title literally translates to "Feet in Chains," but the book could just as easily be called "101 Things to Be Miserable About."

It is that kind of novel that so often appears on lists of classics, in that it is about miserably poor people living their miserably poor lives. These novels always annoy me and cause me to react like some sort of 1920s Tory, growling at the book: "What's wrong with you, man? Pull yourself together and make something of yourself, why don't you. What?"

To her credit, Kate Roberts tries to answer that question in the title and in a dialogue late in the book that was probably put there for stupid people like me that need things spelled out. In life we are bound to all kinds of things, we are chained to family and poverty and place and station and on and on. More often than not these bonds are mental, and more often than not the mental bonds are the hardest to break.

Oh, and World War I was a shit war.

Anyway, in the book, the character that stood out for me is one whose name I can't even remember at the moment. The eldest of the Gruffydd children, he basically gets written out of the story about halfway through. He is a sort of incidental character who spends all his time working or sleeping, thus demonstrating the exhausting monotony of working at a slate quarry. Then his character gets frustrated with life and demonstrates how hard it was to get people to join the union. Then he demonstrates that trying to get people to join the union was likely to get you the sack. Then he demonstrates that a lot of people moved down to South Wales to find work. Then he pretty much disappears. A few years later he is married and doing alright in the south and no more than a paragraph is spent on him.

The book carries on and everyone else is miserable and poor and can't ever seem to get a leg up and Sioned's a slag and Twm dies in the war and Owen spends several pages telling us how much life sucks and if we have anything in life we only have our family and war sucks the biggest suck that ever sucked because it kills your little brother and now you've got nothing and no one. So you might as well just sit there and smoke your pipe. And the book ends.

So the thing I found myself growling at the end was: "What about your older brother? Ay? He's still alive, what?"

But the older brother is out of sight, out of mind. Which is, I suppose, testament to Roberts' famed ability to capture real life. If you live far away from family, you quickly fade from the family picture. You become peripheral -- a family member by title only.

It's like this that the child bride has been feeling lately. She comes from a big family that revels in being a big family. When she calls to see how they are, she gets the sense that they are just fine. Without her. Not thinking about her. Not wondering how she is doing. Almost certainly they are wondering these things but they are difficult to convey over distance and phone calls that must conform to seven-hour time differences.

Meanwhile, I've been feeling lost in my own way. And I think a lot about George Berkeley who said that reality is simply God's perception. That's troubling since reportedly I am made in God's image and I have a shit memory. If God's memory is at all like mine, I am in woeful danger of ceasing to exist. I feel a terrible sense of needing to do something so as to be memorable, to make a mark, but not really feeling that I can or ever will. I feel fading.

Much like this post, the child bride and I feel as if we have lost the plot a little bit. There is homesickness and more and we're not really sure how to shake it. This is the drawback of setting off on far-away adventures, I suppose; sometimes you feel far away.

'Writer'

I don't remember which Christmas it was. We were still living in Texas at the time, but I was old enough to have been questioning the veracity of Santa Claus for a few years. We had come over to Papa and Joie's house on Christmas afternoon to open presents and run about and pester Papa to take us on rides in his golf cart.

The Christmases of childhood seem to have such established patterns: we did this and this and this for 700 years. For my family, the 700 years was spent going down to Lake Jackson. We stayed at my mother's parents' house and had a big Christmas in the morning, then went over to Papa and Joie's for another Christmas and lunch.

I can't remember if my father imposed this rule or if I imposed it upon myself, having developed his sense of propriety from an early age, but the Christmas spoils of the morning were never taken to the second Christmas at Papa and Joie's for fear of sparking a diplomatic incident with the other grandkids. The policy had positives and negatives. I never got in a fight with Shawn Jr. over whose Christmas presents were better (thank goodness -- he would have kicked my ass), but I spent the time at Papa and Joie's wishing I could get back to my new toys.

That sense of propriety stems from Joie, my father's mother, who gave each of the grandkids the exact same gift. This was the Christmas that she gave us all little AM radios that looked like Sunkist oranges. These were items collected at the local Texaco, where they had been offered for 99 cents with the purchase of a full tank of gas. At the end of the day, my brother and I were piling into the minivan when Papa came out with a secreted additional Christmas gift just for me.

A pen set.

Who gives a kid a pen set? What the hell kind of gift is that? A pen set would be no match against my friends' invasion-force-sized G.I. Joe haul. I muttered a thank you and got in the car. On the way home, my dad told me that I shouldn't mention getting an extra gift to the other grandkids. Yeah, Dad. As if I would.

We moved to Minnesota and Christmas tradition became me barbecuing a rack of ribs in sub-zero temperatures. I started writing. My journal; insufferable poetry aimed at getting girls to make out with me or feel really bad about not doing so; short stories. I wore a pen around my neck. I went to college.

In my first attempt at college -- in Moorhead, Minn., some 12 years ago -- I was particularly fond of writing letters and so managed to stay in contact with Papa better than I ever had or have since. In one of his letters back to me, he told me that he thought I was a pretty good writer and that he hoped I'd do something with it some day.

And I thought back to that pen set.

For the past several months, Papa has been in hospital -- unresponsive and in an existence that arguably goes against the wishes of his living will. On Wednesday, the family were all gathered in his hospital room, discussing with doctors the possibility of taking him off life support, of finally letting him go.

Then, click. Papa was there. He was slow. He was groggy. But he was there, suddenly talking for the first time in four months. The doctor started asking him questions to check alertness: name, date of birth, etc. Then he asked: what do you do for a living?

"Writer."

He's been retired for years, and hasn't been a sports writer for even longer, but the answer resonates with me. If he had been at his most lucid, I like to think that he wouldn't have answered differently. It's what he is.

These days I go around calling myself a writer (it's catchier than "Z-list foreign celebrity"). And much of what I am, and how I approach writing is inspired by him:
- Most notably, my policy on using profanity comes from him: "Sometimes it just fits."
- From him I get an admiration of (if not necessarily adherence to) athleticism in writing: removing cliché, unnecessary adjectives, etc.
- And from him I get the life lesson that the dumb option isn't always the wrong one.

The only person with a copy of my novel is my Papa. And the greatest compliment I've ever received about my writing came from that:

"I had to put it down," he told me. "It was so real, man. Really real."

The family gathered in Papa's hospital room sat and chatted with him for two hours, exhausting him with any questions they could think to ask, almost fighting with him to not go gentle. Everyone but my brother and I was there -- Jon and I tied to our worlds hundreds or thousands of miles away -- and they all got to tell him that they love him. It tears me up that I wasn't there, too. To shout: "I love you, Papa. I steal all your ideas!"

If you call yourself a writer, it's one of those things you feel is imprinted on your soul. You hope that if there is a heaven, you will spend eternity wearing a little name badge with just that word on it: "writer." And if you give someone the tools of your trade, what you are trying to give them is the ironically indescribable something that means so much to you.

I don't know where that pen set is now. I think it may be in a box, inside a box, somewhere in my parents' storage area. It doesn't matter. I've got what my Papa was trying to give me.