Tag: Les Green

Dad’s green sweater, and other things

The events surround his death 17 years ago are still as vivid as if it had happened a few months ago.

LesGreen.sweaterThis is unprofound: one’s age is frozen in time when one dies. Dad was 26 when I was born, so he was mostly in his 30s and 40s when I was growing up, in his 50s and 60s, when I visited him when he and mom and the “baby” sister moved to Charlotte, NC from Binghamton, NY.

But he was never young, a boy or in his teens or early twenties, at least not in my self-centered reckoning. This picture I don’t remember, and I don’t know how old he was. But I think I remember the sweater. It was a forest green sweater, and it was cream-colored, rather than white. Or so I recall.

He used to paint trees, but they were almost always barren, often in wintertime.

He was a month and a half shy of 74 when he passed away on August 10, 2000, before 1 p.m. As I mentioned previously, I got to sign a document that the hospital needed in order to provide the death certificate; the joy of being the oldest, I reckon.

The events surround his death 17 years ago are still as vivid as if it had happened a few months ago. And I still have residual stuff to deal with.

A book of his poems I should do SOMETHING with, for instance. The Daughter had a poetry day at her school a few years ago; maybe I could have tried out a couple of his pieces for human consumption. The one thing he did, though, was to go wild with ellipses. Where you and I might use three dots, he might use three dozen. If I were ever to try to get them published someday, am I bound by his crazy use of punctuation?

I’m still no closer to finding his biological father than I was last year, though I haven’t given it much effort, truth be told. I fear microfilm will be in my future, probably in northern Pennsylvania.

Dad and his three kids on Father’s Day

“Everything looks better in black-and-white.”

My sister Marcia posted a picture on Facebook. It was all pinkish, and I couldn’t even see her in the photo. So I asked Arthur the AmeriNZ guy, who must be related to Annie Sullivan, because he’s a miracle worker, if he might have a go at it.

He noted, “The original photo appears to be a low-resolution scan of the photo, and that means there’s not much to work with. If it was a higher-resolution version, I’d have more to work with.

“The pinkish cast to the photo is because of natural deterioration in photos from the 1940s through the 1960s and 70s. The dyes used turned out not to be stable, and photos taking on a reddish hue is common.” Yes, I do have a few of those in photo albums.

I suspect the original negative from 1958 is long gone, and a higher-resolution scan seems to be beyond the capacity of my sister’s machine.

He actually did three versions, one “with the colours lightly corrected”, another with “a little more intense colour correction, with the focus on making the skin tones a little more natural (which makes the background even worse)”, and the one I chose, “a black and white version, with some of the dust and defects caused by the low-resolution cleaned up. This version, because the colours in the background aren’t weird, is a little less distracting.”

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. As Paul Simon, in his corrected lyrics, once said, “Everything looks better in black-and-white.”

I have only a vague recollection of this photo. I’m sure I saw it at the time, but that was long ago. I assume my mother took the picture, and based on the baby’s size, probably on June 15, 1958. This is the only one I recall with just these four people, Dad, Roger, Leslie and Marcia.

Happy Father’s Day to you, and to me.

Music: There Will Never Be Another You

The painting in the background with the guitar was by our father.

Marcia, the younger sister, in very many ways, has become the keeper of the flame, not only for the history of the nuclear family in which we grew up back in Binghamton, NY in the 1950s and ’60s, but for the extended tribe as well.

It’s logical. She was the only one who moved to Charlotte, NC with the parents. Leslie and I were already ensconced in college, though of us lived down there for brief periods in the late 1970s.

After my father died in 2000, Mom and Marcia took care of Marcia’s daughter Alex and each other, though as time marched on, Marcia and her daughter were tending more to Mom until she died in 2011.

She still is tending to our parents’ memory, as she has access to decades worth of photos and other material.

As all three of her kids knew, my mom LOVED Nat King Cole. She had a whole bunch of 78s of his, but I have no idea whatever became of them. There were some items in my maternal grandmother’s house, the house my grandma and mom grew up in, and where my sisters and I spent a lot of time. The stuff went into storage and ultimately disappeared long ago, including some photographs of mine.

Marcia was musing about my mother back in November, just before Mom’s birthday. Our mother particularly loved Nature Boy and other familiar tunes by Cole. But neither Marcia nor I had heard him perform There Will Never Be Another You. It’s become one of Marcia’s favorite Nat King Cole songs. And I can hear why.

BTW, neither she nor I ever really learned to play the guitar, though Dad and Leslie did. The painting in the background with the guitar was by our father.

LISTEN to There Will Never Be Another You

Arturo Sandoval

Nat Cole

Doris Day

Happy birthday, Marcia!

How I drove my parents bonkers as a kid

My mother was usually oblivious to the reference.

Jaquandor asked what I believe is the last of the Ask Roger Anything questions for this round, which I held off answering until now, because today would have been my parents’ 67th wedding anniversary:

What’s the thing you remember doing as a kid that drove your parents bonkers? (I’m talking harmless stuff here, nothing like playing with matches. Mine was to flick those spring-things with the rubber tip that keep the door from smacking into the wall as it opens. You pull those things over and let them go and you get this fun, loud BRRROOOOIIINNNGGG! sound as the spring snaps. Drove my mother NUTS.)

First off, I’m SHOCKED by your behavior as a child.

Secondly, I had the hardest time coming up with an answer to your questions. I even asked my two sisters, and they couldn’t think of anything.

I mean, I drove my father bonkers, but I didn’t see him feeling that it was harmless stuff. For instance, when I was in elementary school, I would watch the other kids play softball on the playground. And then those kids would go home, and other kids, who had already gone home, would return to the playground and play, and I’d watched them.

I almost never played myself, unless a team was really shorthanded, and they’d stick me in right field. I loved the game, but I wasn’t particularly good at it. I got better by the time I got to college, but not in 4th or 5th grade.

So I wouldn’t get home for hours after classes ended, and sometimes this would really anger my father, so much so that he’d pull out the strap – or worse, make ME go get the strap, so that he could use it on me. Well, at least once.

As for my mother, I did use to take words she said and add lyrics from the popular songs of the day. So if she were to say, “We go to get,” I’d respond, “if it’s the last thing we ever do,” evoking an Animals song. Or if she needed some help, I say, in my best Beatles voice, “you need somebody, not just anybody.” I don’t recall using these exact examples – and I can’t remember what I DID say – but it’d be something like that.

Truth is that my mother was usually oblivious to the reference, which was actually quite entertaining to me. I don’t think it really irritated or as much as mystify her. “What IS he talking about?” she must have thought.

Dad would be 90

Dad always did a spot-on impression of FDR.

lesgreen.vest
Dad was always about 47, give or take a decade. It’s like Willie Mays was always 30 to me. When I see those pictures or that string bean of a young man, that wasn’t my father (and he was not yet my father, for most of that time). And in the early days, I don’t recall that much.

Les Green had a lot of different jobs, including floral arranger, sign painter, and singer/guitarist. But for six years or so, he worked at IBM, driving these electric trucks around, moving material from place to place. It was at night, so we seldom saw Dad, except on weekends. This was the period our mom would take us to W.T. Grant’s almost every Friday night to have the all-you-can-eat fish.

Still, we did see him on weekends, when he’d make spaghetti sauce that would cook on the stove for hours. Or he’d make waffles in a waffle iron with a certain panache, and tell stories about him making breakfast for General Washington, which I believe to be untrue.

But you can never tell. Since his early days were such a mystery – and still are – maybe he WAS a time traveler, There’s a song he used to perform called Passing Through, written by a guy named Dick Blakeslee in the 1940s, and popularized by Pete Seeger.

The lyrics were about the narrator seeing Jesus on the cross, and Adam leaving the garden, Washington shivering at Valley Forge, and this one:Dad
I was with Franklin Roosevelt’s side on the night before he died.
He said, “One world must come out of World War Two”
“Yankee, Russian, white or tan,” he said, “A man is still a man.
We’re all brothers now, and we’re only passing through.”

Dad always did a spot-on impression of FDR when he sang “one world must come”. He started being a ‘singer of folk songs” back in the late 1950s around our hometown of Binghamton and would sing for Leslie’s and my elementary school classes each semester for three or four years, which was a treat, in part because he wrecked his sleep schedule to do this.

I’ve noted that when my father quit IBM in 1968 to work in a federal Office of Economic Opportunities program called Opportunities For Broome (our county), my homeroom teacher, Mr. Joseph told me straight out that my father was “crazy” to leave IBM. And maybe he was.

Or maybe being away from his family, and working at night in a job that did not challenge him intellectually or artistically, was making him crazy. His decision always made sense to me.

My father, sister Leslie, and I singing together started just before he left IBM, but thrived when he got to work in the daytime.

I went away to college at New Paltz in 1971, and he, my mother, and my sister Marcia moved to Charlotte, NC in 1974, and, of course, I’d see him far less frequently. But, for most of his time, he looked the same. He looked like Dad.

His 90th birthday would have been September 26.

Ramblin' with Roger
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