I don’t remember anything about the ride to the airport or the flights themselves except I had the middle seat and slept soundly from takeoff to landing both times. I’m sure the folks next to me were each a captive audience to my pharmaceutically enhanced snores, but I truly needed the sleep and was happy to escape the normal boredom and confinement of cross-country air travel. Then all of the sudden I found myself standing outside the busy terminal in Portland, squinting in the cold blue-sky Pacific sun, looking for my dad in the rental. I was beat.
We first took the 205 down to Aunt Lizzie’s house and shot the shit with Uncle Paul for a bit, then to the Oxford Suites in Clackamas where we shot even more of it with Ron and Marcia in the hotel lobby. Marcia is my grandma’s youngest and only surviving sister; she and husband Ron live in Dubuque, Iowa, where they raised three daughters of their own. (The first trip my parents ever took me on, when I was five months old, was the ten-hour drive from Norman to Cedar Rapids for one of the daughters’ weddings.) Presently I got all suited up with the formal clothes I’d brung—I mean brought—and then we carpoold together back over to Liz and Paul’s where my cousin Mike had arrived to take us all to Portland Memorial. Amber and her kids were meeting us there. The sun still shone and it was clear enough to see Mount Hood when there was nothing blocking the view. Along the way we passed the assisted-living facility in Milwaukie where my grandma spent the last years of her life, where I’d last seen her alive. There was a brief, nondescript service at the chapel on site (she was raised Lutheran but she and my grandpa were, for practicality’s sake, secular humanists) and then we accompanied her remains over to the mausoleum to be interd next to my grandfather’s.
“The weather is always so nice when you two visit!” said Liz to Dad and me after. “You don’t have to deal with the days and days of rain that we do.”
As it happens both Aunt Liz and Dad, at different times, lived on the street perpendicular to this funerary complex (the neighborhood is known as Westmoreland; a town of the same name can be found in Middle Tennessee northeast of Nashville—right next to Portland, Tennessee) back in the seventies when they were still in college. Now they live on opposite coasts, while their parents are resting in ashes together here in this strange utilitarian structure suspended over swampland on the eastern bluffs of the Willamette. It was humbling to see YARDBORO engraved on those urns. How have I come to bear that name?
That night I began to find some answers. After letting me crash on his couch all afternoon and evening, Mike showed me around Portland and introduced me to his girlfriend, Caitlyn, and a bunch of their dental school friends—like the rest of my Oregon family, Michael is committing himself to a career in dentistry. We first went to the Blind Onion for pizza and then to the Blue Moon tavern in Nob Hill for pitchers, where I was apparently the only mixt person in the place. I was able to down a few beers before someone from the bar noticed me and askt for ID. “That is such bullshit,” Caitlyn griped. “We’d always come here back when we were underage and they never carded us.” Mike and I assured her and everybody else that it was cool, we were going to do some cousinly catching-up at the one spot where teens like me could hang out all hours of the night: Denny’s. We had soup and sodas and caught up on nearly two decades’ worth of news; discoverd that we have much in common, like our tastes in music and standup comedy, despite our differences in age, home town, and DNA; I mean, my dad is his uncle. Mike actually looks a lot like my dad right in the face, but he’s built more like his own father—not Uncle Paul, but Lizzie’s first husband: Chuck Mason, DMD. (“Masons Build Better Smiles!”)
So we started talking about family: Mike’s been doing some research on the Yardboro side (his mother’s side) and has found out all sorts of things we didn’t know about before. Like that our great-grandfather, Dennis T. Yardboro, used the alias “Eugene” or just “Gene” for most of his life, which is the actual name of one of his four sons—my dad’s uncle Gene—and we have no idea why, exactly. Dad always told me his dad never talkt much about his folks, and he assumed he must have had good reason not to. “Mom told us pretty much the same thing growing up,” Mike says. “Tho she did say Grandma once told her that (Great) Grandpa Yardboro”—a trainman for the Great Northern Railway—“had ‘a girl at every stop.’ So he was a bit of a… serial philanderer, I guess.” He goes on to tell me that his mom and my dad, on family road trips to visit Uncle Gene in Idaho, would be kept at a safe distance from their grandfather who was living in a single-wide next to the main house at his son’s homestead. “It really does seem like it was a ‘wave to your grandpa, kids!’ type deal. No hugging or sitting on knees. And our Grandpa wouldn’t let the girls (Mom and Grandma) out of his sight. Now what does that tell you?” Certainly nothing wholesome. But there’s more.
Michael has uncoverd three male tragedies, one for each generation. Our great-grandfather Dennis/Eugene was the youngest of ten children, four boys and six girls, born to Jeremiah Yardboro and Margaret Holland, Irish immigrants homesteading in central Minnesota who had just recently moved there from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Five weeks after his birth, the eldest son and first-born, Thomas, died from causes unknown, eighteen years old (hence, Dennis’s middle name, and thus my father’s, is Thomas). The second premature death is Grandpa’s brother Joseph, who we all thought died in WW2 but was actually killed in an auto wreck in 1950 (the four brothers in order of birth: Henry, Gene, Joe, Jack). The third, and most shocking, is my dad’s cousin Bryan—shot in the head at a pool hall in Bozeman, Montana, while home on leave from the army in Vietnam. “Mom doesn’t remember him. And of course she was told he’d been killed in combat. He was Hank’s younger son, and I don’t think they visited Uncle Hank as much since he’s twice as far away in Montana, as opposed to Uncle Gene in Idaho. Bryan would’ve been a few years older, too.” About the same as Mike and me.
The latter two deaths are almost surely alcohol-related; but the former, original filial catastrophe, the demise of Thomas—which cast a shadow over his youngest brother’s life (and therefore all of ours)—could have been the result of almost anything. I wish I had more information. Mike says he’ll send me a copy of the essay he wrote summarizing his research. He dropt me off at the hotel and there I got the spins… on the tail end of that Valium, no doubt.
The next morning my dad and I doubled up on breakfasts: first, continental with Ron and Marcia at the hotel, then a real one at Aunt Lizzie’s with bacon, eggs, fruit, the works. Liz quizzed me about my night out with Mike and whether he had told me about the French side of the family. I said he had not—we mostly talkt about our great-grandpa “Gene” Yardboro, the Irishman. “Well—as ambivalent as he was about his father, Dad adored his mom,” a woman named Naomi Nadeau, herself the youngest of another large brood of Catholics living in central Minnesota, this one of French Canadian origin. She died before Liz and my dad were even born, just like Grandpa died before me or Mike were born; only Amber, as an infant, got to meet our grandfather. “One of her grandparents was supposedly a Mohawk Indian, or a Métis, maybe, I can’t remember. Michael really didn’t mention any of this?” There’s apparently just one extant photo of her, as a child, and nothing more. Liz seems to think she’s whence Grandpa got his good looks and that I should be imprest by her Native heritage as well, and connect it with my own—“You sort of resemble him, you know. We might be kindred after all!” She then promist to scan a bunch of old pictures and e-mail them to me. Dad was rolling his eyes thru all of this as he made room for, then demolished, his omelette.
Dad and I hugged and parted ways at airport security, his destination being Richmond via Saint Louis. Then I was back on a plane, this time to Chicago O’Hare where I had literally ten minutes to make my connexion. I landed safely in the Nashville Basin, just like I had in the Willamette Valley the previous day. Then that night, which was last night, I drove out to Spring Hill.
I do not know my way thru Thompson’s Station so I had to get step-by-step directions from Jordan via cell phone. Then we decided to go to Rachel’s because Heather was there but we got lost, ending up somewhere east of 65 near Bethesda. (Come to find out that her neighborhood is about a minute south of Jordan’s.) Once we found them—in Chapman’s Retreat—we listend to music and wasted time in her room, away from her younger siblings, tho her brother Walter did join us later. Ray told me she’d broken up with Duke Newell, which is sad to hear, but also exciting because it means she is once again the huge flirt I know her to be. I cleand her chillum for her; a huge gooey ball of resin popt out and I coverd it with shake from the bowl. Then the five of us walkt to an empty half-built house down the street where all but Walt toked up. And then something interesting happend: as the rest wanderd upstairs to explore, Rachel came to me and began to slip her arm around my waist, a single point of light glinting off each eyeball in the dark, so close I could feel a few stray strands of her hair against my face—but then Jordan came tromping back downstairs and she stopt herself. I was resin stoned, so I didn’t fully appreciate what had transpired till much later. Mercy!