plant & ghost: August 2016

Gram gets frequent dizzy spells, and she feels weak. She's seen doctors about them, and they don't appear to be heart-related. I zero-percent want to think about her mortality right now, but it's brought up in subtle and overt ways this trip. Seeing all the family gravestones, talking about long-dead (and short-dead) relatives, Gram talking about this or that in her will for "the kids" or me. I'd rather have her alive and happy forever than her gorgeous Mexican-silver squash blossom necklace. And I fucking love that necklace. But there it is: we will all die, eventually. They don't name the feral cats anymore because most don't survive coyotes, owls, roads, disease.

Waiting for Gram to come back inside

Closed motel sign

Adult video store off Route 66

Mama, Gram and I go to the Precious Moments Chapel & Museum. It's so bizarre, and the grounds are so much more expansive than I expected. A parking lot opens up into a weirdly-roofed stucco building: it looks like it could house either a motel or really big Pizza Hut. Going through the doors, I think it'll be like a museum or a church: instead it's like a low-budget Disney village. Inside this wide, winding hall are fake building exteriors, with 3-foot Precious Moments figures fixing houses, kissing geese, being princesses and knights. Fake stone arches are multiple entry points for most of the building: the gift shop.

Destination spot

The main walkway

Visitors loved posing with this fountain

"Village" with gift shop adjacent

Husbear was not appreciative of my gift

I don't like Precious Moments. They're so saccharine and overtly religious and fawning and weird to me. But I will say this: Precious Moments seems to make a lot of people happy. I think the figurines and illustrations have tried to be racially inclusive, albeit uncomfortably. There are lots of "Native American" characters in buckskin and feathers, and "Eskimos" in white fur. In the gift shop, a woman breathlessly asks a saleswoman if they "have any Hispanic-themed figures?" and audibly squeals with delight and clutches her chest when she hears they have a quinceañera figure. I notice a few black figurines, but most are overwhelmingly beige. Later on the Precious Moments website, I can't find racially diverse figures by searching either "black" or "African American".

Uncomfortable

I didn't realize that this is actually a theme-park. It used to be much larger, with a "Wedding Island", "Souper Sams" (maybe a diner?), and the "RV Park" to accommodate all the folks who over-nighted their trip. Gram feels sickly, but insists we see the rest while she sits in the weird village. Mama and I wind our way out of the first building and back into the park. Avenues are lined with formally manicured shrubs and punctuated with concrete angel statues. I can't figure out why they painted only the eyes: they're flat black and look soulless. We go into another large building, now the "Museum" but it used to be "the Gallery." It tells the history of Precious Moments, how it was founded by two friends in the 70's and is now "among the most recognized art in the world".

Black-eyed statue

The museum shows prototypes, old photos of the chapel being built and painted, a story about how a little girl wrote to them and asked would they please make a figurine without bangs so there was a doll who looked like her and they did. The "Gallery" is a big, red room lined with shelves and shelves of figures. Some woman donated her collection, and here it sits on display. I wonder if the company has kept a copy of each figurine produced, because I would find that pretty fascinating to see. There's an empty auditorium, too, where a video about the PMInc's history plays on loop.

Museum start

Panorama of one collection room

More grounds, more manicured lawns and flowers and hedges and weird baby statues. Mama and I come to the chapel; its tall doors swing open like a fake castle. Directly inside is the chapel space, a baroque, overwhelming cavern "inspired by the Sistine Chapel". Tiny painted cherubs cover the ceiling, and big painted panels depict biblical scenes. A docent is eagerly telling the story of Christ to a family and pointing out corresponding paintings. Side halls have stained-glass windows full of more cherubs and a young white Jesus and lamb. The light coming through the windows is really pretty. A room at the back of a chapel is for meditation and contemplation. The back wall is a painting of a weeping family around a hospital bed holding their dead son; above, the son ascends as a Precious Moment angel up to a Precious Moment heaven. I'm glad no one is in here mourning, because two women have let their eight children run around screaming while they talk about whose name they should put in the memorial book.

Chapel, outside

Back wall of chapel, inside

We take Gram home to rest, and Mama and I drive around more. We end up at the sketchy-looking "Cimarron Antique Mall & Native American Museum" we saw the first day. The building is surrounded by shacks of stuff, hoarder-like piles of rusted metal and glass and wood in loosely-defined groups. We pick through a few piles, but it's so dirty and hot outside. The front door of the main building asks you to wipe your feet, which is funny because inside it's just as gnarly. Stuff, so much stuff is piled in stacks and on shelves in narrow rows up and down the building. A round woman sits on a mothy chair with her fat dog behind the counter. The place smells faintly of urine. We've come too far to turn back, so Mama and I plow through the rows, finding mostly garbage but occasional treasures (a whole cubicle of antique ceramic crocks, another cubicle of dishes from a local pottery.) Dad calls on the cell phone, and Mama has to duck out of the metal building to get signal. The dubious "Native American Museum" is the sketchiest thing of all. It's a room, or maybe it's beyond this room, right off the front door. Taxidermied mounts, animal pelts, some leather goods, wooden Indians, and more junk hang about the room. A sign on a door at the back says AMERICAN INDIAN MUSEUM but I'm sure as sugar not going through that door to see what's back there. Today was a day for weird museums.

Legit

Satanic lamb

Mind your manners

The most traversable aisle

Native American Museum

Back at home, and we make plans for the evening. We are going to meet a distant relation of Gram's, and her daughter. Their closest common ancestor is Gram's great-grandparent. They only met recently when both were doing independent genealogy research. We meet Marge and her daughter Kathy at a buffet. Kathy talks to me the whole time about customers she used to have when she managed a hotel. Marge is in her 80s, and volunteers often at Jasper County's records office in Joplin. She takes us for an after-hours tour and it's really cool. They have huge metal racks full of banker's boxes of records that stretch back over the history of the county. All of the old court records are here, in leather-bound books. She lets us open them, and the copperplate handwriting in the pages is just beautiful. I love the smell of the old ledgers. Marge has a relative in Seattle, some elderly gentleman named Morty that she wants me to get in contact with when I get back to Washington.

Counterclockwise: Marge, Mama, Gram, Granpa

Down one stack

Old legal document

This is from "Record of Wills, 4/11/1842 to 6/11/1860, Jasper County"

Our last day, and we try to help Granpa troubleshoot the printer and a document he wants to edit the format of. I know I could make it work if he'd let me drive the mouse and leave the room for 10 minutes, but he wants to be in charge of it and for me to just tell him what to do. I give up after about 20 minutes of "try this, maybe that?" and he tells me all about the novel he's writing. We're not related, but I probably get my run-on sentences from him. We get to the airport early, but Springfield's airport is so small it wasn't really necessary. No line at security, and only a few gates. Mama and I fly together back to Denver, where I'm supposed to catch a Seattle-bound flight right away while she waits for hers to Spokane. Thunderstorms are moving in, and are in full-force just as I'm boarding my plane. Our pilot announces we can't leave until the storm lets up. We wait for 30 minutes at the gate, and he makes another announcement that we can debark if we absolutely need to, but have to be back in time for takeoff. He doesn't say how long we would have, so I wait on the plane. I should have gone back in the terminal and had dinner with Mama, because we end up waiting over 2 hours before we're cleared for takeoff. The flight is so turbulent I'm surprised I don't get sick. With the delay and the long drive between the airport and home, it's already tomorrow when I walk in my front door.

Three generations (I win because I'm the biggest)

Grampa fixing the belt on a tractor

Lucky waits

Clouds over Missouri

Grounded, in Denver

Mama's younger older brother (Bruce), his wife (Martha), and daughter-in-law (Megan) got in late last night. Uncle Bruce has always fascinated me: he wears a leather cowboy hat, is quiet when he's not being hilarious, and is a gifted artist. I'm not exaggerating about the gifted part: his photo-realism drawing ability is astounding, and his cartoons are dynamic and quirky. He plays guitar. He flies really big kites. In high school, his nickname was "Mouse" because he was so small. He's still short, for a man, and has a light frame. He seems self-contained, to me, like an island. But a really funny island. His wife Martha is a little spitfire, her hair in a braid down past her waist. It's my first time meeting their son Jeremy's wife, Megan, and I like her.

Late night cats

Early morning cat

Martha sticks around the house cooking and waiting for Mama's older older brother (Biff) and his wife (Pam) to arrive, while Gram, Mama, Bruce, and Megan and I go into Carthage to see the old buildings and poke around in antique stores. Grampa putters around his garage, I think trying to avoid antiquing and talking to Pam both.

A wall in Grampa's garage

Mama and Bruce

Carthage has a town square, a real one. It always seemed like a folksy turn-of-phrase to me, but in Carthage, it's an actual square-shaped block of buildings surrounding the court house, which sits on a square of green lawn in the center. We don't go inside, but I imagine Atticus Finch would look at home in the courtrooms.

Carthage Courthouse

I love antique stores. I have so many memories of visiting antique stores with my parents as a kid. My dad's parents had an antique store in Illinois, mostly primitives and folk Americana. I grew up sleeping in an antique rope bed, vaulting four-plus feet high each night to sleep. I just love the stuff: the age and the history and the cranky-fussiness of old hinges and wood. Seattle has crummy antique stores, which makes sense for a state that's barely old enough to be qualified as an antique itself. Missouri has 70 years of statehood and another 50 of white settlement before that on Washington. Anyway, that means that they've had time for families to get sick of their old furniture and sell it to us Yankees. And not just the furniture, of course. What fascinates me most are the old photos. Look at these people! Look at what they felt was important enough to document, in a time before the ubiquity of the camera phone.

Good advice

Antique fan quilt, made with black velvet and I believe silk from neckties

First: families; then places, then things. I sift through a pile of more than a hundred portraits, all snapped between 1900 and 1960. The oldest photos are, of course, mostly posed: professional portraits by a studio photographer. The photos from the 50's and 60's are mostly candid, the snapshots you'd find in a family photo album. Kids in front of Christmas trees, a new car, the family dog. I flip them over to read the penciled names. Irma. Judy. Robert. I buy ones that make me happy, and a few that are so artistic, have such perfect composition I can't believe they're "just" a snapshot. I buy one because the back says "Here's a photo of me for you, I'm not as fat as I am in it anymore (thank God)." I buy at least 6 of someone's fat dachshund posing in sunglasses (I make Mama and Gram go back on our last day in Missouri to buy more.) I feel obligated to the people in these photos. As a photographer, I love seeing photographs, and the feel of the old prints. As a museum professional, I want to horde as much history as possible, and first-person narratives are always the most interesting artifacts to me. And as a water-sign on the cusp of another water-sign, I cry when I think about these photos, about how the relatives of the people in these pictures didn't care enough to keep these relics. I have to rescue them.

Old scrapbook

This idiot is the best idiot

The indignities of dachshund-hood

Other items are less charming. The casual racism is in full force, with Mammy and Golliwog iconography in a variety of forms. I understand these items have a historical significance, and I don't think the world would be better off if they just disappeared from the lexicon: I think they're an important reminder of how thoroughly and seemingly easily one race subjugated another. But I feel like their place is in a museum or cultural center, with context clues and explanation. I don't like them for sale as curiosities, as something people buy for in modern times for novelty or collection. Part of my discomfort is how casually stuff like this is displayed by sellers, it's mixed in with the vintage Pyrex like there's no way it could harm. I wonder now about including a photo of some here, in case it's hurtful, or seen as shock-value.

More casual racism

Jason and I tried to get donuts from the Winchell's in Wallingford one night, but it had turned into a BBQ place. I didn't expect to see a Seattle reminder here.

I regret not buying this tiny cauldron

I did buy a new plate, though

Sidewalk

Back at the house, I greet my Uncle Biff and Aunt Pam. Martha, Gram, and Mama finish up the cooking. After dinner, there are too many people around, and I escape outside. I spend time knocking Japanese beetles off of Gram's hibiscus flowers- they've had a really bad infestation this year. Mama bought two dig-your-own-gem kits from the souvenir shop, and we each dig out a rock from our compressed bricks. I find a desiccated frog corpse, just skin and bones shriveled by the sun.

Lucky supervises dinner-making

Silver, in the window

Feral kittens waiting for dinner

Japanese beetles destroying a blossom

Digging

Desiccated

By the next morning, our company has all gone back to their homes. Mama, Gram and I check out another antique store in the morning, and then Grampa takes us for a drive. We visit a restaurant built into a cliffside that Grampa wants to buy and turn into a strip club featuring senior citizen dancers. We get lost trying to find the graveyard that has the "mother and father of Pitcher," my great+ grandparents. People have graffitied the small stone building next to the yard and dumped trash in the parking lot. More driving, and Mama and I are tense. Grampa's driving is scary: he weaves, he is apparently allergic to using his turn signal, and he tells story after story using both hands for emphasis. Every so often he drifts over the rumble-strip on the shoulder, and Gram shouts "I don't like that tune, change the radio!" He refuses to let Mama or me drive. When we get back home, we hang out on the porch with the pets until dusk and the mosquitos drive us inside.