Mum's Birthday, 2010: Connecting the dots between my Parents and Groucho...

Every year, on the anniversary of my Mother's birth, I post a little something about her on my blog. This year, I missed it. Her birthday comes a day or two before Father's Day this year - a chance to remember my Dad. I missed that too.

So now I'm taking time to raise a glass (a Grande Americano, really) to each of my parents, and spend some time reflecting on their personalities.

Angela Huntley Love (nee Clarke) was a complicated woman: a talented musician and singer, an amateur actor (Victoria Gilbert and Sullivan Society), and generally full of lively talents both realized and unrealized. Angela could be loud, boisterous and manic (literally), or quiet, withdrawn and depressed. Each of us has our polar extremes of behaviour, but her poles were a bit farther apart than most people.

Angela would sometimes doodle this little cartoon bird for fun. It looked kind of like a crane, with a round head, large pointed beak and long flowing neck. He always had glasses and smoked a big fat cigar. It was obviously inspired by Groucho Marx. Even as a little kid, I could recognize Groucho's face, even if I didn't know his name.

The maiden name of Angela's Mother, Edna Ursula Marks, might phonetically have spurred in her an affinity for Groucho too. I can only guess. Angela was also a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, as was the famous Mr. Marx.

So nowadays, while I'm re-reading Steven Kanfer's excellent biography of Groucho, I'm hearing little refrains from Gilbert and Sullivan, and thinking of Angela.

My Dad, James Evan Love, loved Groucho's speed and wit. Intelligence, and a fast mouth with which to use it, equated to a form of strength or power - something to be admired. Groucho was the comic rebel of my parent's generation.

Dad used to love to paraphrase Groucho, saying "I'd never belong to any club that would have me as a member." True to his word, Dad belonged to no clubs.

Well, maybe both of them were members of The Lonely Hearts Club.

Hello, I must be going.

I love you Mum and Dad.

Here's to you both...

The Good Son

The Good Son writes love letters to his old family whenever he can. He writes of how he remembers them, together and whole, with sun peeking down from between the pine trees and the smell of freshly-cut lumber in the breeze. These are some of the nice things that he wants to remember and memorialize. The Good Son feels loved now, and wants to portray to his world a lasting image of a family that did love each other once.

The Good Son writes other letters sometimes: letters asking his parents to forgive him for not saving them if he could. Or, he writes angry letters asking why they did unforgivable things to each other and themselves, and he wonders how he can forgive them.

The Good Son tries to be the Good Husband, the Good Uncle, the Good Colleague, the Good Friend, and the Good Samaritan. He wonders how good he is, or why he needs to be good at all.

One Good part of him builds and maintains a relationship with his familiar family of ghosts. The other Good part is in training: learning more and more each day to reach out to the descendants of those ghosts, and build real relationships for the future.

Bittersweet, those little twinkling lights...

Do you know that quiet moment, that happens around Christmas time? That beautiful, gentle, sweet moment? That calm, peaceful moment when all the lights in the house are off and everyone is in bed, but you're still awake? That moment when you get up and the only lights that are still on are those on the Christmas Tree or on that string of lights that you hung up as a decoration in the living room?

Although the lights are very small, they seem to emit more than their capacity in brightness and warmth. Joy isn't even physically possible from a light bulb, yet somehow they seem to beam that out too.

I have the same reaction every year: The warmth I feel is the warmth of security, where I'm part of my own loving little family. The satisfaction of having built a home where the lights can shine warmly, and where a boy doesn't have to decorate the Christmas tree all by himself because his parents are passed out.

Christmas can be bittersweet. Indeed, there were a few sad and nasty, painful Christmases, but that same kid remembers lots of good ones too. The kid remembers a real tree that smelled like pine, and the texture and weight of 40-year-old Christmas lights that probably were hung up dozens of times by his Dad's Dad, with their wrinkled cords and cracked, faded bulbs that had all but lost their tint.

The kid remembers elegant and beautiful tinted glass baubles that spoke of his Mother's family with their sense of fashion and style. Then, there were also those home-made decorations composed of egg cartons, pipe cleaners and glitter that spoke of school projects, leaner times, or of your parents back when they were kids themselves.

So, during these nights, sitting with that little string of sparkling lights glowing warmly at you in the dark, many of those old memories and feelings will creep out as you look back into your past. They're the tiny, twinkling reflections of you as you once were. They're the last remnants of the people you loved, and the magic moments from your youth, streaming back out to your adult self like million year-old light from ancient stars.

Not crossing that bridge...

I've only ever mentioned this story to a few people. It's one of those sad and embarrassing episodes that is uncomfortable to tell, and yet, important to talk about.

When I was about 10 or 11, my Grandfather came over from Victoria to visit with us. While in Vancouver, he stayed at the old Alcazar Hotel (long gone now, I believe). Poppy, as my sister and I called him, was formerly a Corporal in the RCMP, and by all accounts, a gentleman and as they say, "a stand-up guy".

My mum wasn't with us, so I assume this was during a time when she was temporarily under some Doctor's care, perhaps at Riverview or somewhere else. As kids, we just knew that Mummy wasn't well, and that she was away and we really didn't know when she'd be home again.

We all went for a car ride in Dad's 1968 Plymouth Valiant. Dad was dressed in a white long-sleeved dress shirt, no tie, and dark dress slacks. Normally, he'd wear a coloured or patterned shirt and roll up the sleeves, so the white dress shirt meant that this was a somewhat formal Sunday event. Kim and I were dressed in nice clothes as well. For the life of me now, I cannot remember if this "Sunday drive" included a visit to see our Mother, but it's a distinct possibility. My Mother would be the first person Poppy would want to see, and a major reason for his visit to Vancouver. My Mother was always very dear to Poppy, and he to her. For all I know, as genial and respectful as my father always was to his father-in-law, there might have also been a bit of tension between them, or some resentment from my Dad, seeing how much his wife idolized her father. (I can only speculate, and will never ever know.)

Anyway, Dad drove us all through town, with Poppy in the front seat and Kim and I in the back. The day was a clear and cool, with sunlight coming through the occasional cloud. We drove quietly through the West End of Vancouver and into Stanley Park. This was probably my first look at Stanley Park, and I enjoyed seeing how green everything was, and how many trees there were.

Dad seemed very quiet and didn't say very much at all. I thought his mood was strange. I didn't realize what was really going on with him.

As we approached the Lion's Gate Bridge, I saw Dad look in his rear view mirror and say something. Just before the bridge, Dad pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. A Police Officer came up to his window and said something to him, and Dad went into his pocket and handed over something. We all got out of the car.

Dad's face was down, and his expression was very dark. We stayed by the car with Poppy while Dad was led over to the police car. The policeman put Dad's hands behind his back. I saw the glint of the handcuffs and heard the clicks as they were fastened around Dad's wrists. My Dad had been arrested for driving drunk. I'm certain that he was deeply ashamed of himself. Back then I felt so disappointed in him, and also sad for him.

The bottom had completely fallen out of our strange Sunday family drive, and we stood by the side of the road with the cars rushing past and no more sense of purpose. Kim asked Poppy something, and then Kim and I began finding a way to place or distract ourselves until a cab would come and take us home. I don't remember Poppy getting angry or even saying much at all. He kept his opinions to himself for our sake.

Thank god Poppy had been there with us. I loved my Dad, but this time, it was Poppy who was the one I looked up to.

That faint artistic thread...

As I've slowly, gradually backtracked through my family history a little, I've come to see a number of artistic abilities in my relatives. This became one of the first commonalities that told me I shared some kind of values with someone else: the artistic urge.

That lousy lost feeling, growing up...

When I was in my tweens (like, 11, 12, or 13), I didn't know much about my family history. Perhaps this is the same for many kids from a dysfunctional family background: the sense of not belonging, the detachment from family, or sense of "being different". On the other hand, maybe that was just what was going on for me... As a kid, a sense of belonging felt important, and it never seemed to materialize in my life to that point. I always felt like a bit of an outsider to the world around me, like I didn't fit in, or was not fully integrated. I wasn't part of it - just watching it.

I saw lots of disparate pieces of life, but could not draw them together into any sort of cohesive whole relationship; there was no overall structure or system that bound life together for me. Stuff just happened, and it was hard to make sense of it all.

I also had no religion, nor any real spirituality. I didn't (and still don't really) believe in god, and saw many organized groups as havens where misled suckers consoled and supported each other. As I have grown older, and learned more about religion and spirituality, I've developed a healthy respect for religious belief and a healthy skepticism of much of organized religion. (I have great respect for another's right to believe whatever they wish, so long as they harm nobody else while doing it.)

I liked rationalism and science a lot. Practical, scientific inquiry always made some sense to me, and nature continues to awe and impress me. I'd never seen a club for atheists (why would people who don't believe in something need to come together in common cause?), and science and rationalism were everywhere I looked for them. Affiliations seemed useless.

The closest thing that ever approached a sense of the mysterious or spiritual for me was the peace that I experienced when drawing, or when absorbing myself in some literature, including pulp fiction and comic books. Something fascinating and special happened whenever I drew, coloured or looked at art that I liked: a feeling of calm, and happiness, a sense of peace. That's as close to a spiritual mystery as I have ever gotten then and since.

In the family...?

I had always known there was a little artistic flair in my Mother's family. My mother, Angela Huntley Clarke, was a talented amateur singer and pianist, and had acted in amateur theatre productions with the Victoria Gilbert and Sullivan Society in the '50s. Something in her loved music and expressing herself.

My Mum's father, Ernest Huntley Clarke was a prolific amateur photographer, documenting his life, his wife and his only daughter with hundreds of stills and moving images over the course of 40 or 50 years. "Poppy" (as my sister and I called our maternal grandfather) was also a dabbler in oil painting, and we had a few little landscapes he'd done in his later years, in his cramped little basement studio. I still have Poppy's old Walter Foster art instruction books in my bookshelf.

My mother's cousin, Shirley Nash (nee Marks) has always been a passionate oil painter in traditional still life and landscapes, and taught and encouraged painting privately for many years, in her community in Apple Valley, California.

As for my Dad, James Evan Love, although I never saw him play an instrument, apparently he could read music a bit, and could carry a tune. My Dad's brother's wife, Palma Love (nee Lovstad) was an incredibly skilled self-taught painter, who made many oil studies of local boats, and harbour and river scenes (including water traffic along the historic Skeena River) for many, many years, from her home up in Prince Rupert, BC.

To refer to my eldest sister Maggie as "quite musical", would be an understatement. Maggie has taught music to elementary school kids for years, and in her previous career, picked up a couple of Junos. Her partner, Bill Usher, has four of his own, and according to my brother Dave, this collection, sitting in their livingroom floor, is affectionately referred to as "The Clutter".

Maggie's eldest, Michael, is a musician as well, and has recently worked as an actor. My sister Kim, writes poems for herself and for friends.

For my own part, I feel very fortunate to have been able to develop a love of doodling and colouring into a professional career that has expanded on those basic impulses in shape and colour, and has projected them into modern media, in pursuits like web or graphic design. On a more personal front, fiction and storytelling has become my favourite art form in recent years.

So, there is this tendency, this artistic thread in my family, this need to create and express in some tangible way, whether it is for entertainment or as part of a profession, or whether it's for pure personal, emotional, or spiritual completion.

In that way, I think that I feel more connected than ever to my family, and to a lesser degree, somwhow connected to a long line of artists and designers going back through history, who, I expect, also probably had their own personal creative and spiritual revelations by making art.


My novel, "Owe Nothing", is now available for purchase at Trafford.com:
http://books.trafford.com/08-0266

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Related Links:

Fiction by E. John Love: http://fiction.ejohnlove.com
http://ejohnlove.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-fiction-do-over-of-real-life.html

Owe Nothing - A Novel by E. John Love

Order "Owe Nothing" from Trafford Publishing

Also available at Amazon.com
and Barnes & Noble
E. John Love's Amazon Author Page

"Owe Nothing" is an adventure-drama based on real people and places that I knew back when my family lived in dodgy Vancouver Motels for over a year. (PG-13 - Not for children.)

"Jack Owen has gotten himself in over his head. At his low-paying day job, employees are leaving suddenly, and there's a car full of bullet holes stashed in his boss's maintenance shed. It's starting to make him wonder what kind of car wash he's working for.

At home, his best friends Mike and Chris need to separate their mother Regina and their abusive step-father Ted before they kill each other. Maybe they can get rid of Ted somehow without Regina finding out...

Then there's that old drunk in the neighbourhood who's been beating his dog. Somebody should do something about that guy.

How did Jack's life ever get so complicated, and how will he keep it all from his Dad and his sister?"

• Owe Nothing - Chapter 1 (Adobe Acrobat, 184 Kb.)
  A lonely night in a trailer court, and something very bad happens to an innocent soul, again. Then, a new beautiful morning, Spring in Vancouver, and you are introduced to a Jack Owen, his father and sister, and their somewhat beaten up neighbourhood. Jack and his buddy Parm are late for work - again.


• Owe Nothing - Chapter 2 (Adobe Acrobat, 90 Kb.)
  Jack's days at the Paradise Car Wash have been familiar routine, up until now. A co-worker leaves suddenly, mysteriously. Jack sees his boss talking to a large, immaculately-dressed man with a swanky black car. Parm learns that something secret has been going on behind the scenes at the car wash, in the evenings - something secret. Maybe it's gang related or something. Whatever it is, it doesn't sound right for a car wash.


• Owe Nothing - Chapter 3 (Adobe Acrobat, 132 Kb.)
  Jack's father, Jim, daydreams and examines his past. How did he go from a cocky young runner with a world of possibilities and dreams of ripping through the clouds at supersonic speed, to a emotional burnout stroke victim with a dead wife and two tiny scared kids? Startled back to the present by a noise, he finds two tiny scared kids standing on his doorstep.

What Readers Have to Say... "With an effective balance of wit and suspense, Owe Nothing is an equally compelling and entertaining read. In skillful fashion, author E. John Love has crafted an enjoyable tale of a lovable loser in search of a bit of adventure. In Jack, Love has created quite the sympathetic protagonist: a ne’er-do-well everyman with which readers from all backgrounds are sure to relate. An engaging, endearing tale with a deft humorous touch, Owe Nothing is a rewarding literary treat." [Read Full Review] - Renee Washburn, Apex Reviews "I thoroughly enjoyed [Owe Nothing] and do hope there's a sequel in the works - what IS going on in that car wash? Firstly, I liked the book as a good yarn, I had no trouble at all going from cover to cover in a sitting. I liked your characters, no saints perhaps, but it was easy to empathize with them and their problems. Vancouver is a city without much appreciation for it's history, I think you've rendered a great service with such a vivid picture of that time and place." - Bruce, North Vancouver, BC "Awesome novel John! I enjoyed entering the world at the Mountain View and sharing in Jack's exploits. You have definitely brought back to life a place I can see in my mind and remember in my heart. I find myself thinking of the experiences that Jack went through and wondering where life is taking him next." - Nikki, Prince George, BC "I meant to read it later, but started reading the first chapter and couldn't put it down. A great read!" - Michelle, Coquitlam, BC "Chandler-esque!" - Jody, North Vancouver, BC "I received your novel and I started it right away. Read 50 pages at the first sitting, so I gotta tell you I'm enjoying it... It's so cool to read things you recognize - and I have always LOVED that little-houses motel on Kingsway!" - Karen, Vancouver, BC "I liked how the many plots were resolved. A real coming-of-age story..." - Mark, Anmore, BC "WOW. Your sense of storytelling is amazing and I was definitely moved and intrigued by the characters, their experiences and views of life. I am excited to buy the book and check out your other projects!" - Christina, Coffee News, Vancouver, BC "I really liked it! When's the next book coming out? I really want to know what's going to happen to these characters." - Lori, New Westminster, BC