Most families have at least one eccentric, someone whose habits, appearance or lifestyle depart from the conventional. In my family it was my sister, Joanie.

She wasn’t eccentric in a bad way. In many ways, she was a remarkable person. She went halves with me on my first guitar. When my parents couldn’t afford it, she paid to have my teeth straightened. Though her own vision was fine, she learned to read braille to teach it to the blind. She prepared meals for the homeless. Most of her charitable works she kept to herself. When she died, most of the family knew nothing about them.

At her funeral, the thing that struck me most was how normal all of her friends looked – stylish, contemporary women living in the here and now. Joanie lived, to the extent she could, in a world of her own making.

If you happened to see her at one of her hangouts — Albertsons at 16th and State, Arnie’s Beauty Salon or the Elks Rehabilitation Hospital, where she worked almost until her dying day at age 75, you’d have remembered her. Her hair was a ’60s bouffant lacquered into submission with copious amounts of hair spray. Her makeup in her later years: vintage Sophia Loren. Her unfailing attire: black, low-heeled slip-ons; black, polyester slacks and a billowing, brightly colored print blouse.

Her habits didn’t die hard; they didn’t die at all. She drove her cars until they expired of old age, literally. When one ended its requisite decades of service with a repair bill exceeding the value of the car itself, she mourned. Then she bought a newer car and proceeded to drive it till its wheels fell off. She drove for nearly 60 years, and in all that time I remember her having four cars. If one hadn’t been totaled, it would have been three.

Long after color television sets had become the norm, she defiantly stayed with a black and white. The telephone in her kitchen was a bakelite Bell with a dial, dating to at least the 1950s and possibly to Alexander Graham Bell himself.

“Why should I get a new phone?” she would huff. “This one works perfectly fine!”

She could huff with the best of them and was particularly hair-triggered with our mother. They regularly got into arguments over such profound matters as whether the trim paint on our old house was pink or salmon. The spats would escalate until, in a terminal huff, Joanie would deliver one of her trademark  epithets – “Oh, my aching foot!” or “Gadfrey Agnes!” – grab her cavernous black purse and storm out of the house.

The flip side was that she could be infectiously cheerful. She loved to retell stories about funny things that occurred years ago, laughing as much as when they actually happened. It made everyone else laugh along with her, no matter  how many times we’d already heard the story. It was those times, I think, when I loved her best.

She was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. She had a nursing degree but worked at a clerical job beneath her training or encyclopedic knowledge for the simple reason that she didn’t want to make a change, even if it meant moving up.

Change of any kind she abhorred, resisted, railed against. She took the same route to work every day, went shopping on the same day at the same store every week, lived in the same house with the same furniture for half a century. Her clothing and hairstyle didn’t change from the time she was a teenager. She had a standing hair appointment at the same time on the same day at the same place every week. While the rest of the family traveled, she stayed home. Including the family vacations of our youth, I can think of four times when she left Idaho, and rarely the city limits of Boise.

Her five-room home was the one she and her husband purchased as newlyweds and where they were living when both of their sons were born. It was painted gray, a color that didn’t change throughout her tenure there. If his tenure had been longer, there might have been changes. They divorced when the boys were small.

He remarried; she didn’t. She raised their sons alone, remaining on good terms with both of them for life. If you know a single parent or are one, you know what a feat that is. She’d have done anything for her boys. Family and her faith were everything to her. She was an unreconstructed, old-school Catholic who believed that the church had taken a wrong turn at the Vatican II Council, which  decreed that mass would be said in the vernacular, and that the true faith was that kept alive by a handful of itinerant priests who said it in Latin and otherwise clung to the old ways. Years passed without a visit from one of these increasingly aged and idiosyncratic men, but she continued to pray her rosary and read from her dog-eared prayerbook almost to her dying day. At its heart, Vatican II was her old nemesis:  change.

Our extended family had a tradition of getting together for Sunday dinners. The hosts  rotated weekly, from Joanie to our parents to my wife and me. One of the many things my sister did well was cook. Her baked-ham dinners and pineapple upside down cakes were universal crowd pleasers. She had an unsettling predilection, however, for trying new recipes gleaned from women’s magazines. Most had at least an even chance of backfiring. And over time, the strain of the  mandatory Sunday dinners took its toll. They consumed a big part of the weekend that could have been devoted to other things and were resented by those who had to cancel other plans, mainly me. In time I would come to regret that.

The get-togethers ended abruptly with a family rift that never entirely healed, the cause of which is best left unsaid. All families have things they don’t talk about; that’s ours. It’s enough to say that for the last  nine years of her life, we rarely saw my sister. We invited her repeatedly for Christmas and Thanksgiving, but the response invariably was silence. The chasm was too great for her to cross.

She was ten years older than me and as much a second mother as a sister when we were growing up. She was my only sibling, and it was important to win her approval.

The night before her older son was born, she came to hear my band play for a prom at Boise High School. We used to joke that it was climbing the gym bleachers that brought Kevin into the world. That night was the first and one of the few times she ever heard us play, and I wanted desperately for her to say we’d done well. The truth, however, was that to her we most likely were unbearable. She was Lawrence Welk and Rodgers & Hammerstein; we were the Beatles and Buffalo Springfield. She never said we were bad, but she almost never said we were good. Though I didn’t expect her to like our music, the withheld praise stung a little. It was she, after all, who had started me down that road with a pawnshop guitar.

Did I mention that she was actually my half-sister? My parents didn’t, either, until I was 16. Mom dropped the bomb casually on her way out the door to work one morning.

“Did you know that your father and I were both married before?” she asked, which was a little like asking whether I knew the house had been struck by a tsunami.

“Well, we were,” she continued. “That man who brings a Christmas present for Joanie every year is her father. Any questions?”

Only a hundred or so, none of which was ever asked. My folks only discussed their past lives on rare occasions when they thought circumstances demanded it, and then briefly and in tones that said “don’t ask.” They’d both been dead for years before I learned some of their  secrets.

Different fathers went a long way toward explaining why Joanie and I were so different. Physically, we looked nothing alike. And our tastes and temperaments were entirely different.

I liked John Lennon; she liked the Lennon Sisters.

She was a homebody; I was and still am smitten by the desire to see the world. She often asked when I returned from a trip to some distant place what it was like. She was interested in the world, just not in seeing it.

While she kept her home looking almost exactly the same for half a century, seldom changing or replacing anything unless it broke or wore out, I was continually buying different houses, moving, remodeling, changing. And with every change made during what I came to think of as the lost years, I wondered what she would think of it.

She was the last member of the family I grew up with, and losing the last relative you shared your childhood with is a game changer. In a flash, you appreciate more than ever how mortal you are, how little time you truly have left. You also realize that no matter what you do, none of the people who once meant everything are left to impress.

Do we ever fully outgrow our childhoods? I’m a father of three and grandfather of four. I’ve traveled the world, written books, retired from a job I loved, made a bit of a name for myself. I’m a big boy now. And I’m still, and always will be, looking for approval from my big sister.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman’s Life section. For readers who don’t take the Statesman,  it is posted on this free blog, http://www.woodwardblog.com, the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

 

 

No one who knew him will forget the late Grady Myers. He was an imposing figure: six-foot-four with merry blue eyes, strawberry blond hair and a Yosemite Sam mustache. He was, among other things, a combat veteran, a gifted artist and a collector of preposterous vehicles, from British Morgans to an ancient, hulking Imperial. Now he’s a posthumously published author.

Those who knew him couldn’t be happier about that. It was as a storyteller that many of us knew him best.

Grady and I became friends during his years at The Statesman, where he worked as the editorial department’s graphic designer and cartoonist. He should have been syndicated. His cartoons could make John Boehner laugh. He was one of those people who could effortlessly tell a tale, complete with sound effects, in a way that had everyone within hearing distance pounding their desks with laughter.

One of my favorite Grady stories was about his fleeting experience as a Borah High School football player. He went to Borah when its team was the best in the state and one of the best in the Northwest. His size made him an obvious candidate for it, but he hated practicing and wanted to quit. Told by everyone from his father to the coach that no one quit the mighty Lions, he thanked them for the advice, quit anyway and retired to a pleasant perch on a hillside, drinking beer, watching his former teammates run laps and making bets on who would throw up first.

He was a founding member of the Fenwick Club, patterned after an “exclusive” club begun by a New York tycoon who admitted homeless people but rejected applications from the rich and famous. A faded Fenwick Club shirt, graced by Grady’s artwork, remains one of my treasured possessions.

When the mood struck him, he would spin yarns about his time as an army private during the Vietnam War. Most gave the impression that the war was one comic incident or absurd foulup after another. He didn’t sugar-coat it – he told us about being shot and sent home with a Purple Heart – but he preferred to focus on the war’s antic qualities. Listening to him was like watching a M*A*S*H episode. I sometimes wondered what his war was actually like, the one with fear and suffering and the ever-present threat of death. Now, thanks to his book, I know.

Julie Titone, his ex-wife, helped him write and recently published his Vietnam memoir – “Boo Coo Dinky Dow: My Short, Crazy Vietnam War.” (Bocoo Dinky Dow means, in a word, nuts.) She said she hears “repeatedly from people that it’s the only book about Vietnam they have been able to read without dread, or to read at all. Grady’s bursts of humor, powers of description and engaging drawings pull them through.”

His perspective on the war was unconventional:

“The next five days brought me in contact with soldiers whose duties were at opposite ends of the mundane-to-murderous spectrum: an ice-cream machine repairman and members of the Iron Butterfly squad.  (The repairman) told us he hated to see us go out and fight and maybe get killed. He wouldn’t, he said, trade places with us for anything in the world. I just savored my vanilla cone and speculated that I, for one, would rather get my licks in behind a rifle than an ice cream maker.”

I don’t know how many Vietnam books I’ve read, each dispensing liberal doses of horror. At no point did any of them include the perspective of an ice-cream machine repairman. Only Grady would have thought of that.

He soon had second thoughts, however, about getting his licks in behind a rifle or, in his case, a machine gun. Gentle Grady’s response to his first order to kill someone was, to me at least,  the book’s most touching passage. His unit was entering a village where the first person they saw was an old man carrying a bundle of sticks. The big guy carrying the machine gun was told to shoot him.

“I flinched. We’d all heard stories about the papa-sans and the toddlers who hid explosives in their packages and playthings.”

Told again to shoot “the pathetic figure” in his gun sight, he refused.

Inquiries later revealed that the old man most definitely was not an enemy agent hiding explosives. He also was blind.

The day came, of course, when my friend the gentle giant had little choice. His squad had encountered some North Vietnamese soldiers who may have been involved in a massacre of children and a priest.

“I fired a long burst,” he wrote. “My eyes squinted, following my sight line to three squirming figures falling awkwardly into the churning brush.

“‘My God,’ I thought. ‘I’ve actually killed those people.'”

The gentle giant’s reaction?

“After Grady told me that part of the story,” Titone said, “he never discussed it again. I never pressed him on it. His attitude in the original telling was, ‘This is what the army trained me to do, and it was a kill-or-be-killed situation for me and the men behind me.”

In any case, he didn’t have time to think about it. Moments later, he was hit.

“It felt as if someone had welded a 10-penny nail to a sledgehammer and slammed it into my left shoulder.”

He was in a no-man’s-land, his fellow soldiers on one side, the enemy on the other. If he moved or yelled for help, he’d be shot again. To the Americans’ shouted inquiries of whether he was alive and whether he could move, he remained silent. But he also was afraid that he could bleed to death. Desperate, he eventually called out, and was shot two more times.

A medic who should have gotten a medal for it risked his life to give him first aid, and six more soldiers risked theirs to pull him to safety. A helicopter ride, a succession of hospitals and a trip home followed. Grady spent the rest of his life working as an artist. His health deteriorated and, sadly, he spent his last years in a wheelchair and then a nursing home. He died in 2011, at 61.

No one will ever know how much of a role Vietnam played in his demise. His war injuries caused pain, lack of sensation and difficulty walking for the rest of his life. He suffered from cluster headaches that literally laid him low. When we worked together, the current site of the Bureau of Reclamation building across Irving Street from The Statesman was an abandoned farm. When the headaches were bad enough, he’d go there, lie down in the grass and weep from the pain.

Titone doesn’t think he had “classic PTSD.” But she adds that he was reluctant to seek help for depression because he didn’t want to be thought of as a crazy Vietnam vet and that “it seems pretty clear that he self-medicated with alcohol, which led to an avalanche of health problems, including obesity and diabetes.”

This was the man who could, and did, make all who knew him laugh until they cried.

Parts of his book came close to bringing me to tears. Reading his stories as only he could tell them made me miss my friend more than ever. There were times when I could almost hear his voice.

Mostly, his book made me realize for the first time how much he suffered. The next time you see a veteran, of Vietnam or any other war, be sure to say thanks. We owe them more than we know.

 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in the Idaho Statesman and is posted on http://www.woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.