Author Archives: gail chumbley

Living Life Forward

It was the night of February 9, 1964, a Sunday, when my older brother and I had to make a crucial decision.  We were both over stimulated, frantic, not one of our four feet remaining long on the floor. The house vibrated with our excitement and the weight of our impossible dilemma. For starters our birthday was the following day–the 10th, (though we’re not twins–he’s a year older). Still, that pre-birthday fuse had already ignited and by the 9th the two of us were banking off the walls.

The quandary we faced that Sunday night was whether to watch “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” starring Fess Parker on Disney (The Alamo!), or the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. This was that first historic Beatles broadcast, live on American television, and we agonized between the two choices.

In 1964 there were no video players, no DVD players, no home computers, or dvr’s, in fact televisions were the size of Volkswagen’s and transmitted in glorious, flickering black and white. This difficult decision counted because there was no rewind, there were no do-overs. One gain meant one loss.

We liked Davy Crockett an awful lot.  We had watched all the previous episodes, and Davy biting the dust in San Antonio was the much anticipated grand finale. But, oh, the Beatles! And the adoration was real, palpable, an injection of adrenaline without the needle. We worshiped at the warmth of our bedroom radios, perpetually tuned in to our local AM radio station. Reverent silence accompanied replays of “She Loves You,” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand.”

What could two grade schoolers, sick with anticipation do with such a weighty conundrum?  It was 1964 and we had to choose.

Before the proliferation of electronic media, this little girl of the 1960’s viewed momentous events as they beamed across the screen. MLK’s elocution at the Lincoln Memorial, President Kennedy’s inaugural address, his assassination, and the escalating war in Southeast Asia–all experienced as reported at that moment.

In an earlier era, when Chum flew in his air race, and Helen danced in Rio at the Copacabana, there were no camcorders or Iphones. His signature landing and Helen’s near disastrous opening night grew silent as the applause subsided, then faded in time. Much like my brother and myself in 1964, they lived life forward, one opportunity at a time.

Silent photos and written records are all that remain verifying Chum’s aerial dash through darkened skies, and Helen’s energetic dance routines. They lived life forward, embracing events as they unfolded–experienced once, then gone. I would love to see footage of Chum’s Waco airplane lifting off at dusk, or watch Helen spring across the stage. But those wishes are pipe dreams, never to happen. No vintage film or recording, (except one I found by accident) exist in the historic record. The best I can do for myself, and for readers, is try to recreate the magic of the first time around in the pages of my River of January.

Oh, by the way, I’ve never seen “Davy Crockett at the Alamo.”

ImageGail Chumbley is the author of the memoir, River of January. Also available on Kindle.

Reverses in January

I recall a quote, used everywhere it seems, that January is the Sunday month of the year.  Where we live the weather becomes more gray than sunny, and the snow isn’t quite as exciting or welcome as in December.  This is a tough month for disappointment, too.  Shoulders girded, body braced, we of the upper latitudes plow forward to survive the dismal weeks of January.  The last thing any of us need is outside disappointments or frustrations.

I was married.  I was.  Not the other person.  And I had two little children.  It was January, and he had overdrawn our bank account once again.  I didn’t realize that as fast as I wrote checks for bills he went to the bank and took out the cash.  Checks bounced.  We had overdrafts and poverty.  And my little boy had a birthday coming up, and this man, who was supposed to be a responsible father had spent all our money.

I tried to sew up a little pair of brown pants made of corduroy but they turned out to be too short.  I had some remnants left and had to turn the fabric the opposite direction to lengthen and make wearable his little birthday present.  That was all I had to give him that year.  It was a painful and memorable January.

Much has changed since then, life is stable, the ex-husband a bad memory and that little boy is turning 30 with plenty of clothes.

I didn’t share this tale to illicit a pity-party.  Part of my motivation is that it is indeed January, and my boy is indeed turning 30.  The other reason is how unwelcome impediments, and other barriers crop up constantly.  And they appear at the worst times, times when we feel we can’t handle another disaster.  And it feels to me that the first of the year is the toughest time to cope with problems and losses.

In terms of my book title, River of January, remember the name is translated from the Portuguese Rio de Janiero.  That was the place Chum met Helen, and where they subsequently fell in love.  As I write, I see that the high today in Rio will be 91 degrees.  I wonder, are problems easier to handle when January is a summer month?

Could I have kept my little boy in shorter pants?

Mentally Constipated

Writing isn’t a skill that comes naturally to me.  And I know what good writing looks like when I read it.  I have had students who were naturals, fashioning well constructed sentences, laced with alluring imagery.  I have friends who make words sing, in fact some have earned their living producing written words for money.  Many teaching colleagues who literally drip poetry were my neighbors in nearby classrooms.  Not me.  Not this kid.  When this story, River of January, fell into my lap I didn’t know where to turn.  The idea of me writing a book was laughable, astonishing, the last thing an old girl like me would take on.

I tried to outsource the effort at first.  I beat the bushes to get help from a number of people. who would essentially write it for me.  You know those friends.  The one’s who would love to put their lives on hold to unravel my convoluted sentences.  And in fairness, some individuals actually did that for me, I am deeply grateful and indebted to them.

Still, sitting down at the keyboard, I know what it is I want to say.  I know there is passion, anguish, ethereal joy.  But my brain flushes, just like a toilet.  The harder I push, the more words elude me.  It’s as though English becomes somehow unintelligible, and foreign.  I thumb through Roget’s, scan Webster’s, and finally have to walk away leaving my mental firewall to soften up.

Much later, while making my bed, eating red licorice, or watching “The Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler” on the Military Channel the words form in my mind, elegantly phrased.  Then look out, I’ve got to jot them down before they evaporate, never to reappear.

I figure this writing business is a lot like golf, not that I play golf, mind you.  But my husband does.  He’ll come home from eighteen holes and it’s easy to see how his day passed.  I get a tapping Fred Astair through the front door when the links played well, or he stomps in cussing, fit to be tied with frustration.

Can any of us control the flow of magic when it visits?  Can any of us make magic appear at will?  I can’t.  That neuron synapse-ed mess I call my brain does not tolerate fools.  It shuts tight when I squeeze too hard.  And we have words, my brain and I, when the disconnect seals off from my head to my fingers.

To finish this bathroom-themed post, I must return to the natural.  Writing isn’t easy to fake.  I can push and bargain and swear, but the fluency of truth, of an honest phrase or an essential certainty is a gift of grace, not a product of stress.  When I am anchored to my spirit, not my head, the magic has half a chance.

A Malleable Girl

In my dating days I employed the habit of acting the way my dates expected.  There I said it.  I submerged my identity for a guy.  Now if you are reading this post thinking “what a bimbo,” take a moment to recall your own dating history.  We lose weight, we drink less, we put makeup on for an evening of television, we attempt to be funny and charming–we wear a mask.  You know, the Bridget Jones school of dating.

I’m not absolute about this, but I think Helen always remained Helen in her single years.  Back reading for River of January  I got the sense that she didn’t play any coquettish games to land an evening out.  My observation of this girl was that men saw what they wanted in her, attached their own sense of who she was.  And their frustration trying to put a ring on her finger stemmed from a deep misunderstanding of Helen Thompson.

Aside from the reality that her mother called the shots in Helen’s life, three men attempted to win her heart, and take her for their own.  And I suppose we could start by looking first at the last, Mont Chumbley.

The young pilot became infatuated with Helen nearly from the first time he laid eyes on her.  Those spotlights hitting the stage, in hues of blue, pink, yellow, and white can intensify an already dazzling girl.  Once he decided he loved her, he posted himself every night at the club until her contract ended.  If any drunk (or sober) patron made advances, Chum  intervened assuring her safety.  And that is how he saw himself, her protector until she could leave show business.  It never seemed to occur to him that she loved performing and had no intentions of giving up her art.  That caused big problems later.

Her middle admirer, the boy who courted her the longest, across continents, was Elie Galeki.  Now Elie was a person who lived life systematically and deliberately.  He worked hard to establish his own photography business, caring for his mother and sisters in Brussels.  His suits were pressed, his appointment book organized, his expectations orderly.  However, with Helen he had his hands full.  To is way of thinking, once he met “the one” she would naturally love him back, and they would marry.  Elie, too, expected Helen would give up the stage and settle down as his dutiful wife.  That wasn’t actually Helen’s style, and she knew he wasn’t the right guy.

Her earliest boyfriend, and vaudeville partner, Grant Garrett, was an entirely different sort of character.  He was a comedy writer, dancer, and singer, and Helen did respond to his charms.  Grant was ready with a zinger, usually targeted at Helen’s intransigent mother.  He was smooth in style and rough in attitude.  He liked to fight for money around bonfires in hobo camps, and he drank hard.  Of all three blokes, he may have been temperamentally the best suited to Helen.  He treated her as an equal, and understood her drive and ambition for the stage.  She was a professional, and so was Grant.  They shared their love of performing.

I don’t believe Helen submerged her personality for any of these three suitors.  But Grant was the one her understood her the best. Mostly they saw what they wanted in her beauty, grace, and bubbly sense of fun.  I suppose that if any of these gentlemen became frustrated with the girl, they only had their illusions to blame.

Memories of Telephones Past

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My parents kept a beige wall phone when I was growing up.  The ring could wake the dead.  Both sides of grandparents settled for basic black, one a desk phone the other fixed to their kitchen wall.  If my paternal grandparents were expecting a long distance call we all waited in the living room, reverently, as though it was God calling.  And God help you if you made any noise while my grandmother was on that phone, conversing with her relatives back in Minnesota.  Those calls were an almost holy occasion.

Their phone exchange was Fairfax, ours, on the other side of town, was Keystone.  My husband remembers their phone exchange began with Plaza, and his mother, Helen, growing up, used the famous prefix, Murray Hill in New York City.  I think that’s the same one actress, Barbara Stanwick requests in one of her old movies.

It is my understanding that many rural Americans had a phone installed before even electricity was available in vast tracts of the country.  My Minnesota relatives, for example, didn’t have an indoor toilet until the early 1960’s, yet had that telephone on a doily covered end table as early as the 1920’s.  Chum recalled that their phone on the farm had a different ring for each home connected along a party line.  He remembered that the different rings didn’t matter because everyone eavesdropped on everyone else.

Operators, or “hello girls,” as they were known, plugged connections on regional calls offering choices for long distance service.  There was “Station to Station,” which meant you talked to anyone at the number dialed.  Then came “Person to Person,” where you hailed a specific individual.  I remember dialing collect calls, which were long distance too, connected through a live operator, costing my parents a bundle if they accepted.  And they always accepted.

The telephone of yore was a mysterious device.  The phone company, AT&T held a monopoly and innovated very slowly.  I recall when the clockwise dial was replaced by gray push buttons.  Then there was the desk phone offered in green and red, as well as black and beige.  I vaguely remember “Ma-Bell,” as we irreverently referred to the company, marketing blue, white and pink “Princess Phones,”.  Geez, how sexist.

But what telephones held then, which is gone now, was a sense of mystery.  When that device rang it was a crap shoot who waited on the other end.  We could only call on land lines, and if no one answered there was no evidence of our call.  If that certain someone called me, and I missed it, well, I missed it.  We had no call waiting, no answering machines, and certainly no ‘missed call’ record.

And long distance calls were fashionable and expensive, folks largely opting to stay in touch through less expensive letters.  While Helen toured Europe from 1932-33, she had no cause to use a telephone.  If Elie wrote to her and scheduled a call, she would take it at the prescribed time at her hotel.  But calling her mother back in the states was never an option.

Public phones could be found on nearly every city block as I grew up.  Now they are as scarce as manual typewriters.  Formality, phone etiquette, the necessity of saying hello to mother’s or father’s who picked up, are all gone.  I would sit in the stairway of our house for some telephone privacy, because my family was everywhere, my brothers especially snoopy and irritating.  Even that modicum of supervision is gone for teenagers.  They can call, text, Facetime, use Facebook, stay connected all day everyday.

Perhaps the extra effort required for telephone calls gave them a higher value.  Our capacity for electronic interaction is nearly effortless today, but also somehow has cheapened a once-regarded gesture.

Who Takes The Blame?

Yesterday my car was totaled.  True story.  I don’t think it has quite sunk in that my familiar, comfortable, Sirius radio equipped car will never move again.  And I didn’t cause the demise, either.  And I can’t even really blame my husband, though he was behind wheel at the time.  The actual culprit was mother nature.  I need to explain.

We live in the mountains.  There is a small grocery store in our little town, but for real shopping we have to drive to the city.  The highways we use were cut out years ago from the granite walls of the Northern Rockies.  The rivers below the road and the hot springs alongside maintains a perpetual cloud of steam, that quickly sets up into ice when the temperature hovers around 20 degrees.  The canyon itself is so narrow that the sun’s rays rarely touch many sections of route.  The point is that the highway is a damn treacherous roller coaster ride.  My husband lost control on a particularly slick curve, though his speed was slowly cautious.  He hit another oncoming truck, and the impact destroyed both vehicles.  The two drivers are okay.  One broken arm, lots of bruises and scrapes.

The state troopers wrote a ticket placing the blame on my husband and my poor smashed up car.  They explained that though the accident couldn’t quite have been helped, someone had to assume responsibility.  The blame game in this case feels unjustified, but the trooper explained that with the damage and injuries blame has to be assigned to someone.

Her explanation has set me to thinking about assessing blame for damages and injuries that cannot be seen.  In River of January hurt abounds among the main characters.  Pain plays an instrumental part in moving the characters emotionally and geographically throughout the pages.  Death, all kinds of abuse, fear, and manipulation steer my central figures as they move through their lives.  Where is blame to be assigned for all that type of damage?  The father who abused the son?  The mother who died abandoning a lone and sensitive child?  The daughter who attempted to live her own life apart from her overbearing mother?  Where did the legacy of hurt begin?  When exactly did it start?  Who’s name would appear on the ticket that initiated all that multi-generational sorrow?

The police have their set definitions assessing blame and culpability for inevitable, unpreventable collisions on the road.  But where do we as members of a family pinpoint where our unhappiness began?  How many generations must we trace back to isolate the first fateful hurt?

Perhaps we all live on figurative ice, and cannot place blame on any other soul.  There are no traffic tickets for operating a life while bearing inevitable injuries.

Time and Words

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Written records have provided a wealth of information for my book, River of January.  It’s rather interesting that I have carefully read and analyzed these letters composed in ink and soft lead, and they have taken me into vibrant lives, flowing with adventure and color.  So much feeling lives in those envelopes–devotion, pain, fear, reassurance all scribed into hand written correspondence.

A character in the story, Elie Gelaki, a Belgian boy who pines for Helen, produced volumes of letters and postcards.  Just picking up a handful of his letters are vivid proof of his perpetual love.  Helen’s letters to her mother bear updates, stories, and news (and promises of money) filling 4 plastic containers.  I can see that her mother was important to her, just by looking at her blizzard of correspondence.  In the same vein, Chum’s letters to Helen, are steeped in longing, with loving language that reached her from across hemispheres, time zones and war zones, placing the reader directly into the deepest reaches of his heart.

Sadly, today, personal letters exist somewhere in the same black hole as slide rules, floppy discs and cassette tapes.

The beauty of cursive writing, the artful style has disappeared.  Take a look at the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution and notice the intricate flourishes that embellish the words.  People made their living writing script, and the hands that penned these two documents were skilled for sure.

And another feature of handwriting is what it reveals about the writer.  A former student became enthralled with handwriting analysis, fascinated by the personality traits exposed in cursive writing.  I’m not sure I buy all that hocus pocus, but the change of Richard Nixon’s signature from his heyday to his resignation is remarkable.  He signed his name at the end of his presidency in an almost straight line.  Nixon’s signature looks pissed-off.

I would argue that a person’s handwriting is as unique as their fingerprints.  It is a shame that most informal communication between any two people today is through cryptic, brief electronic texts.  I won’t argue that electronic communication can reveal a story too.  It certainly can.  I think that was how Martha Stewart got caught violating SEC regulations and ended up in jail.

But in the realm of the heart, the messy, dramatic, embarrassing human heart, driven by love to hemorrhage passion on stationary has sadly become a casualty of neat, quick technology.

Logging

Creative Non-Fiction.  That is the category that River of January will market under.  I am comfortable writing in that genre because of the latitude I have in stringing together the story.  I don’t know exactly who said what to whom, through all those years, except for the letters that have been left for my keeping.  And those letters concern limited stretches of time.  So the story outcome is a combination of actual episodes and creative glue to keep the story cohesive

This approach has worked well . . .until now.  The major difference for writing in book two (yes, there is a second volume) are Chum’s logbooks.  The ramifications of possessing some twenty-odd logbooks, is that I know exactly where he was, and when he arrived and departed.  That exactness poses a problem for the creative side of composition.  Let me explain.

I placed my protagonists in Virginia at Thanksgiving, 1936.  But Chum’s logbook doesn’t put them there until the next month–Christmas of 1936.  I had to ask myself, ‘How anal is this process?’  And the answer was, Creative Non-Fiction.  I can place them loosely where I need them to keep the flow of the narrative moving.  But those damn logbooks really like to argue with me, demanding things that they are.

His literal trail is fascinating to read.  Chum carefully noted each flight he flew, the equipment, passengers, time in the air, where and when he landed.  He or should I say I can account for his whereabouts from the time he boarded his first aircraft in 1928.  The war years offer a particularly revealing journal of wartime aviation.  Added to his own notations are his official Navy orders, which are neatly attached together in a vertical file.

In so many ways Chum’s logbooks provide a connect-the-dots composition of his adult life.  Where he landed on any given day, where he was when big events took place around the globe, where he was the day I was born.  His notations provide a fine straightedge where his life took measure.

By the way there are mysteries in those logs.  He and his crew had some hush-hush missions during the war, and the logbook reflects that security.  For destinations he scribbled in some cryptic nonsense.  The only reason that I know the nature of those flights was because he told me later in taped interviews.  Thank Goodness for that.

There are some pretty cool names of places that I’d never heard of before.  Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania, Havre de Grace, Maryland, Fitler, Mississippi–FITLER!  And the war years mention islands beyond my geographic knowledge; Espirito Santo, Suva, and Numea.

I guess we would all benefit from a life logbook tracing where we have been, how long we stayed and when we left.  A picture would assuredly materialize, accounting a good deal for who we are now.

What Can I Do For You?

For inexplicable reasons there are individuals in my life that I need, to assess my quality as a person.  A thousand more people, family, friends, acquaintances breeze into and out of my days, leaving a pleasant warmth in their wake.  But somehow a tiny few slip under my shield, and inflict deep and lingering pain.

Now, I’m no expert on interpersonal relations, but I know enough to see my part in the dynamic.  I can see enough to watch myself set up for another emotional blast.  Perplexing as it seems, I continue to come back for more, with this miniscule group of perpetrators.  And what annoys me most is that I’m so pleasant in return, because I don’t want to escalate any rows.

Well, enough about me.  We all know that taking crap from loved ones is just one more inevitable, invisible gift under the tree.

Unraveling family interplay in River of January forced me to fall back on my own experiences with loved ones.  My female protagonist, Helen, was helpless to change her relationships with family members, so ingrained was her role.  The unthinkable pain of even trying to declare independence from her mother made the act impossible.  She simply could not see herself outside her position as daughter, trusting her mother’s judgement without question.  Any defiance was impossible, because Helen had no identity or definition without her mother. This matriarch was the center of her universe.

Manifesting her predicament, Helen trusted her mother’s decisions and directions, believing those decisions were for her own good.  As is true for the rest of us, she was blind to the manipulation behind her mother’s choices, such as keeping away suitors because Helen was to dance, not marry.  The girl never had the perspective to see that she was more a pawn, moved about by a stage mother who was equally blind to any harm she inflicted.

I often try to apply resolution to these postings, but when it comes to family interaction I’m not sure that exists.  We begin our lives together, mothers, fathers, children, and build from that starting point.  Most of us have no notion of the bad decisions or actions we take that hurt other members of the household.  None of us start out with a pain inflicting agenda.  It’s as though we fall into roles, behave as we read others expectations.  Helen acted in a way that pleased her mother.  She grew to please audiences, and tried to please her husband.  All that pleasing backfired, and in that there must be some kind of life lesson.

I’ll let you know when I’ve discovered the secret to perfect interpersonal relationships.  Happy Holidays.