galoshes blog

By Gavin Murphy

Memory is porous. It leaks like a sieve. What you think you recall is processed through filters – refracted, diffracted and diffused.  So it can’t possibly be anything resembling reality. What follows here is a collection of memories, with the occasional attempt at interpretation of their meaning, daresay significance. Accuracy is not guaranteed. Some names may have been changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent.

First Memories

Tacoma, Wash.

I think my earliest memory is of sitting in dog ****. 

It was the late 1950s and I was about 3 or 4. I remember sitting side by side with a young friend on a small hill near my home in Tacoma, Washington, discussing whatever it is that boys our age talked about. As was often the case in the Pacific Northwest, the sky was leaden and it was damp on the ground. 

When we stood up I detected that the seat of my pants seemed a bit weightier than when I had sat down. Naturally, I reached back with my hands to investigate. The fingers felt a cold and moist substance, which they instinctively attempted to wipe away. When the hands were pulled back in front for inspection they were sure enough caked with dog crap. A quick sniff of the substance only confirmed what the eyes saw.

While I was knowledgeable enough to know what dog crap was, I was not yet smart enough to know that the only thing worse than coming into contact with excrement is spreading that same excrement about. Accordingly, I attempted to clean the hands by wiping them on the front of my pants. When that yielded less than satisfactory results, I wiped them on my shirt and it wasn’t long before I had dog shit on my face and in my hair as well. In short order, I was basically covered with dog shit from head to toe.

When I made it back to the house, I said something to my mother about having a “little bit of dog poop on me.” I can’t remember her exact reaction but it was to the effect that I was never to get into “dog-doo” again and, if I did, not to use my hands to remove the stuff. Taking mom’s advice to heart, I have endeavored ever since then to avoid sitting in, or stepping in, the shit.

Of course I have other memories from my very early life, such as when my black cat, who was supposed to be a male, gave birth to a litter of black kittens. I believe this biological event provoked my first inquiries about sex. There was the time I crawled behind the neighbor’s decorated Christmas tree and knocked it over. And the sudden appearance of my younger brother Tim, followed shortly thereafter by the arrival of my other brother Brendan.

And I remember the mountain – Mount Rainier – a snow-packed peak that, at 14,000 feet, seemed to always be looking over my shoulder wherever I went, to school, to church or whatever.

I Attempt Suicide at 3

We had a dog, a sort of collie. The dog had a glass bowl.

One day when I was 3-years-old I apparently picked up the dog’s bowl, ran with it, and fell. The bowl shattered and the broken glass slashed my right wrist.  

I was hustled off to the emergency room where a doctor stitched me up and told my parents they were lucky, because the gash had cut close to an artery.

Apparently about a year later I did something similar to my left wrist, but that wound was not as bad.

Once, many years later, a young woman noticed the stitch marks still visible across my inner right wrist. She said nothing, but stared at the scraggly scar, her face betraying surprise and apprehension at the same time.

“Yeah, I was a precocious kid,” I said. “I tried to kill myself when I was three.”

I was born in Chicago, where my parents met and married and where my dad – John R. Murphy – worked as a newspaperman until some unfortunate indiscretion on his part, possibly related to drinking, had led to his departure from The Chicago Daily News. For a time he returned to his former duties as a fireman for the Illinois Central Railroad. But this line of work wouldn’t do for a future and in order to get back into the newspaper trade, he took a job at a small newspaper in the then quite remote Pacific Northwest. My dad said goodbye to his friends and family in the old neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, where he had lived most of his life outside of time spent in the service and the South Pacific during the War, as a seminarian in Canada and as a GI Bill student at the University of Illinois. He had worked briefly as a cop right after the war. My mom – Geraldine “Gerry” Trager – had attended the University of Chicago and left behind relatives in Peoria and friends she had from her own days as a journalist for City News Bureau and the Associated Press. I was bundled up, loaded onto the train, and we settled into a new life at the foot of the Cascades.  

I really don’t remember too much from those days. I know my dad did well at his new job and got a job soon at a bigger newspaper in the area. My parents had new friends and my dad was active in an amateur theater group. (He was good with accents and such.)  

I do remember one day when I was in kindergarten, which may or may not prove insightful into my personality. One morning my dad dropped me off for kindergarten, depositing me across the street from the school. (An urban lad, dad only learned to drive after moving to Washington.) Dad was in a hurry to get to work or some other pressing adult appointment and in those more secure times I guess he didn’t feel the need to see me safely enter the building. Off he went.

I stood there for a minute, looked across the street at the classrooms and decided that I really didn’t want to go to kindergarten that day. So, having opted to play hooky for the first but not the last time in my life, I turned and started walking home. There was only one problem. I didn’t know the way home. These were suburban streets, with few people in sight, just houses with women inside ironing clothes and gearing up for the afternoon soaps on TV. So I wandered through the desolate neighborhood for an hour or so before I finally stumbled onto some familiar landmarks that led the way home. My mother was surprised when I walked into the house but I don’t remember her being angry. Perhaps she was concerned that I was shy, or worse yet, moody and melancholy.

There was one time when she and my dad were angry with me. We lived in several rented houses during the few years we were in Washington, one in Aberdeen for a brief period when my Dad worked for the Aberdeen World and then a couple in Tacoma, where he worked for The Tacoma News Tribune. One of these houses had a backyard enclosed by a rickety fence constructed of one by eight planks or something similar. One of these planks was missing and we kids used the hole in the fence as a doorway to adventure in the field behind the house. One afternoon, a friend and I were in the backyard horsing around when we knocked another plank out of the fence. We decided that this was fun, so we knocked another one out, kicking it and sending it flying. Then we knocked out another and in a frenzy of childish destructiveness we soon had kicked just about every board out of the fence. The adrenaline rush eventually dissipated and I was left surveying the damage we had wrought in a feverish few minutes. I was now gripped with fear as to what would happen when my parents discovered the destruction. I especially dreaded the words my mother was sure to scream at me when she finally looked out the window and saw the backyard fence reduced to a sorry frame of sagging two by fours and naked poles. You just wait until your father gets home! My friend was still giddy from the afterglow of our fence obliterating orgy and since it wasn’t his backyard, he didn’t really share my escalating sense of impending doom. This was serious and I didn’t have the guts to confess and take my medicine, so I conspired to concoct a lie, the first significant lie of my life. 

We came up with a story about a stranger, a man, who appeared in the yard and kicked out the planks from the fence for no reason at all, then disappeared. When the inevitable interrogation came, I laid this preposterous story on my parents. My dad, who had briefly worked as a Chicago cop following the war, didn’t buy it for even a split second. 

Now I was really in trouble. Not only had I done something bad, but I had lied about it in a cowardly attempt to avoid punishment. I don’t think my punishment involved the corporal variety that time, but I was grounded for days, lectured sternly and shamed as a despicable fibber. There were lessons learned here: If you are going to commit vandalism, don’t be stupid enough to do it in your own backyard and, if you’re going to lie, at least think of a believable story. Better yet, I suppose the episode taught me that lying usually only serves to complicate matters.

I remember learning another lesson around this time also involving my good friend. The two of us were playing with toys at my house when I let him play with one of my favorite toys, a fire engine or some such thing. When it came time for him to go home, however, he claimed I had given him the toy to keep. I protested to my mother and to my horror she declared that if I had said that Peter could have the toy, then I would have to let him keep it and couldn’t change my mind. I threw a tantrum, which only served to further stiffen my mother’s resolve on the issue, and my “friend” left the house with my fire truck in his traitorous mitts, while I sulked and plotted terrible revenge.

I recall a lesson in etiquette about this time as well. One of our neighbors was a man who worked with my dad and sometimes I would stop over at their house and bother them, although they were always gracious. One day I visited them and the wife served up slices of pie to myself and her husband. We sat in the living room to eat this treat and when we had finished, he held up his plate, which he had licked clean, and said: See, now it doesn’t have to be washed. This was a revelation to me. Why hadn’t I thought of that? So that evening at home, when I had finished supper, I licked the plate clean and announced to my mother: See, now it doesn’t have to be washed. Well, instead of being grateful at my efforts to save her from washing dishes, my mom said I was a pig and shouldn’t ever to do that again as only uncouth slobs do such a thing. Well, I said, Mr. so and so taught me. Even so, my mother said, I was not to do it and I also wasn’t to tell our neighbor what she had said about people who do lick their plates.

I was left to grapple with the contradictions of life. Don’t lick your plate because only heathens do that, but don’t let on to people who do lick their plates that they are heathens.

Like I said, we lived in two or three rented houses in Tacoma, which I vaguely recall as the house where I kicked out the wooden fence, which I think also was the house where we could see Mount Rainier from the kitchen window. Then there was the house where I was stung by a hornet and the house with a tall lattice wood fence and a spooky old shed in the backyard.

The shed was dark and dank and didn’t have a light, at least one that worked. We were told to stay out of the shed as there were big spiders and such in there. Besides, it might fall down at any moment. Of course I took the first opportunity to sneak in there but within a minute I retreated because it was so scary. I climbed the trellis fence and almost fell off when my mother shouted at me not to fall off.

Dad was a city boy but we did get out into the wilds of Washington once when he and I were invited to spend a couple days roughing it at a rustic cabin. There are photos of this adventure taken by a professional photographer friend of my dad’s from the paper. In one we are standing side by side. Dad is striking a Paul Bunyanesque pose, leaning with one arm against a large axe propped under my much smaller arm. Dad was still a young man then, still ambitious about his career. Mom told me years later he was thinking about going to law school. I’m about five years old in the photo, happy, wearing a somewhat tattered sweater and muddy galoshes.

Next:

We move to California

Posted May 2024