Chuck and Cookie Dillingham, circa 1927.

My grandparents on my mother’s side.

(click to embiggen)

He was from southern Oklahoma. She was a daddy’s girl from Sherman Texas; her name was Hazel, though I never once heard her called anything but Cookie. They were drinkers, card players. She was a flapper with temper – he was an inveterate ladies man, a baseball fanatic, a guy who liked to dance. He was ten years her senior, a dashing, masculine figure who loved fast cars and what she called ‘dirty blonds’.

He worked for the merchant marine in the years after WWI, then later, after they married and had their one daughter, they ran a diner in Long Beach (Chuck ‘n Cookie’s Diner). Later, they lived in Reno where he made a living playing poker (often as a shill for casinos, one of those guys paid to play on the house’s dollar, to dither people to the tables).

Cookie named her daughter Greta, after Greta Garbo. She loved movies and elegance, and felt deep shame over her own working class background. Low-class, she’d say, her favorite adjective for anything she didn’t like. There was nothing more loathsome to her.

The list of things I don’t know about them is far too long; things I should have asked my mother to write down. I have only a handful of photos, and an old photo-diary of Cookie’s. I don’t know when or where or how they met – I don’t know if it was at some bonfire my lake Texoma, or at some wild jazz dancehall, or if they met in Long Beach where he worked in the ship yards.

When I knew them, they were a retired couple. He smelled like tobacco and smoke, from the pipe he always had in his mouth or his hand. She smelled of gin and butter mints, and always had a jar full of cookies (which as a child I found ironic – gramma Cookie gave us cookies). When I knew them, they lived in an odd, incredibly tidy upstairs apartment in Long Beach. We saw them rarely – we lived in mostly in norther californis, they in southern. A couple if visits a year at most, apart from the one year we spent in east north-east LA when my father worked at at Cal State).

Later, her drinking got away from her. She’d struggled, my mother told me later, for most of her life. She was the vodka-for-lunch type of drinker, the flask in the purse type. She was also, most likely, bi-polar or something similar; the mood swings were worse when she drank. One day she had what people used to call a ‘nervous breakdown wandered away, and no one saw or heard from her for a week.

My grandfather faded after that; Cookie was in and out of a home, never really the same. As his health failed, we moved him north. He lived with us for a couple of years, before his heart finally gave out. he was near 85, and still fierce and proud, listening to sports on the radio and smoking his pipe.

Cookie held on longer. Her mind trickled away slowly, and each visit was harder for my mother, as Cookie asked who are you and what have they done with my daughter.

I never knew them, not in any real way. My mother’s relationship with her mother was strange, hostile and bitter, and I Cookie only as a plump little story-book gramma who cooked and handed out snacks.

What I have of them, the image that for me most defines them, is the picture above. That picture sat on our mantle from the time Chuck moved into our house; I saw it every day when I lived at home, every time I visited my mother after I moved out.

Who knows what story lives behind that picture; honeymoon? Road trip south, for the wild border-land fun of 1927 mexico? My mother was born in late 1928, so cookie would soon lose her flapper’s figure to pregnancy (she never regained it.)

In my head though, they are Bonnie and Clyde. There’s a shotgun under the seat in the car, maybe a tommy gun in the rumble seat (hidden in a violin case, of course.) He’s got a .45 under that jacket, and a straight razor in his pocket. She’s got a little pearl-handle .25 in her bag, and has used it more than once.

The money they’ve been spending, on a romantic trip to Tijuana, is ill-got and quickly gone.

And whose shadow is it in the foreground? She took that picture? It’s ominous, somehow, and all the more when we imagine them wheeling away in a hail of bullets, maybe minutes after this picture is taken.

My grandparents never were gangsters. He was an average guy, who worked average jobs. They didn’t own weapons, or have a secret past. But that’s how I know them; the wild and dangerous young couple on the back of a model-T ford. She’s the very image of a moll, and there’s something about his shadowed eyes and the un-easy set of his hands that says potential for violence.

I love these people – these grandparents who never existed. I want to meet them, and hear the stories they’d tell. I want to visit Cookie in jail, bring her cigarettes, and ask her about the day the road ran out for them, and how it ended.

They have a story to tell, those two. I just don’t know what it is, yet.

My relationship with my father was deeply immature.

By that I do not mean that either one of us individually was immature; though in fact we were, both of us.

I moved out, for all intents and purposes, when I was sixteen; living most of the time at a girlfriend’s house. When I was home, it was mostly to party with my brothers’s friends, or with my cousins who lived with my family at that time.

When I turned 18 I took a night job, sleeping all day and working til after midnight. We saw each other rarely, and I moved out officially not long after.

So when I describe our relationship as immature, what I mean is, the development of our relationship ended when I was still a teenager.

Once I was out of the house, my life went off it’s own way. I developed a career, a social life. I grew up. I made that glacial crawl from boy to man, with every mistake and triumph, every lesson in love, finance, job, every mistake with the law.

My father, though, never saw me group up. He knew me as that son who left, the one who’d visit on holidays. And I never got to know my father, the man. I only knew him as my father, the father.

My father, I know now, was a deeply cerebral man. A deep thinker. He taught himself mathematical systems; he studied statistics, semiotics, symbolic logic. He transcribed music into different keys for fun; not to play it (he had only a rudimentary ability as a musician, and no real appreciation for music in it’s own right); he did it because the intellection exercise of the system was, for him, relaxing.

When I was 19, I knew little of that, and understood none. I knew my father as an emotionally distant man, a man who was uncomfortable with teenagers. A sensitive man whose feelings were easily hurt. I knew him as a man who backed down too easily when his kids challenged him, and who never stopped thinking of them as babies.

It wasn’t an easy relationship for me; I am aggressive, argumentative, dominant, intolerant of weakness. Everything about me challenged my father. I had no respect for him; I had no idea there was anything to respect. In my brash teenage arrogance, I felt I already knew everything there was to know about the man.

There would have come a time, I think, when we’d have ‘met’ each other; when we’d gradually have found common ground and begun to listen, more than talk. We shared interests in science, semantics, logic. We shared interested in engineering and problem solving, in sports, in art, in jewelry, in language.

My brother Ian’s illness interrupted us.

It wasn’t simply that my brother was there, living with my parents for the last several years of his life. It was that my brother utterly dominated my parents life. It’s hard to say exactly why; something was fundamentally broken in the relationship. Certainly, the injury he suffered as a infant was the root of all this; my mother never in her life forgave herself for it. But more, it was the system they built around him. One in which his needs must be met, his well-being insured. In which all else was secondary to his care.

My parents were obsessive people. It’s why my father was so good at what he did; why he overcame his handicap (dyslexia) to become an expert is his field. It’s why my mother was so incredibly clever with language; she studied it every day of her life. They were incredibly organized, with filing systems I can’t even imagine building and maintaining. When they committed themselves to something, they would not let go of it. Once they accepted that my brother was broken and needed care beyond what a child normally needs, they never let go of that commitment.

Typically, when one has children of one’s own, the playing field levels somewhat. Parents relax into the easy role of grandparents; they witness their children as peers and parents. For some, this becomes a battleground, but for us, it would have been the opposite. MY mother, certainly, only got to know me as I am now after my father and brother were both gone.

Timing can be a bitch though. Ian’s decline began around the same time my first daughter was born. And my parents, with typical single-minded commitment to the role of caretaker, pushed the lesser task of grandparent aside. Later, they seemed to say; when Ian’s better and we have time.

We never had time. My brother’s care went on and on; he never got better. My father’s heart, weakened by a life of too much food, too much drink, and too much smoke, gave out under the stress. He died one morning, while I was in europe with own family.

He died without ever getting to know the grand child who was so much like him, and without he and I ever having a chance to know each other as men.

Today, I was clearing out files in what was once my father’s office, digging through decades of incomprehensible tests and papers, still in perfect, obsessive order. And I found words of my father’s, neatly filed.

I found business correspondence; letters between faculty members at San Jose State and Cal State LA. I found scholarly papers and cover letters to journals requesting consideration for publication.

I found letters to the editors of various newspapers, and a fan letter to Phil Frank, the writer of the comic strip ‘Farley’.

I found a poem or two, a number of essays, and even several short pieces of fiction.

I found my father’s voice in all this. I could hear him in my head; but not as he spoke to me. I heard him as he would have spoken to his colleagues. As he must have spoken to my mother when they were dating. I heard a strong, confident writer’s voice. A man who knows that his greatest gift is with language.

I felt as if I’d found a window into time, and could see the man – not the father, but the man that I never knew. Yet it was one-way; like a recording. I could hear this sliver of who he was, and I wanted to say, look, dad, that’s me too. You never met the man I am; you never heard my writer’s voice. You never saw me as I am with my peers, my friends, my co workers. YOU never saw me parent my children. You were gone too damned soon.

I sat on a dusty floor in the room that was once my pernets, with old type-written, hand corrected paper around me, and struggled to understand what my father did for a living; his words and obscure symbols as foreign to me as the code I write is to my children. But it didn’t matter that I couldn’t make sense of some point, debated in memos between my father and his his friend Lou. What mattered to me was the profound intellectual respect in the dialog. The confidence.

My father rarely showed his creativity and brilliance to his children. Once we’d passed the age where he could tell us bedtime stories, he seemed to lose track of who we were, and we of him. While our house held his paintings, I never saw him paint, and had no idea he could write.

There is so much there; drawer after drawer. I’ve only begun to delve into it, in all the dusty work of clearing out the fragments of my parents lives. But I look forward to something I never was able to do while he lived; getting to know my father, the man.