April 2007 Archives

Joan will have died three weeks ago tomorrow.  I still haven’t got the paper work I need to do from the damn lawyer.  And last night I realized, trying to fall asleep, that I don’t know where her ashes are.  The mortuary was going to mail them.  And I remember having given somebody the address for the Ora Church, and I remember having spoken to Reverend Roper about the sending along the ashes.  But I don’t know if the mortuary mailed them or not.  Damn, it would be a bummer if her ashes got lost in the mail.

We are trying to figure a date when we might all get back there to the little graveyard in Ora, SC.  We are aiming I think for June 10.  Brother Dave can make it then, and it looks as if Brother Steve is going too, and perhaps Nephew Brian, and Brother Dan wants to go I think.  But it’s hard for him to make plans.  He wants to go back to work of course, and he has some sort of meeting with the people at his former work this week.  At the same time his therapy people want him to concentrate only on getting better and not thinking too much about getting back to work.  So it would be awkward for him to go back to work, if that happens, and then say he has to split for a week to go to a funeral.

On top of that, his doctor people are talking more and more about working on the artery that is half open.  And that makes going back to work even more awkward.  Because no sooner would he get back to work than he might have to go to the funeral or have an operation, whichever comes first, and there is no telling at this point how long the recovery from the surgery, if done, would take.

So I had a talk with him about all this yesterday and given the very, very uncertainty of his plans, I said we would just have to aim for June and see how the chips fell and he seemed to go along with that. 

Which reminds me, I need to contact Wilson Memorials and get Joan’s departure date chiseled into the Tingle Stone next to WB.  I seem to be fretting about the etiquette of this though.  I wonder what Emily Post would have to say.  Is it more proper to have the dates already chiseled in at the time of the burial or more appropriate to leave the date blank until after the funeral.  I would hate to make some sort of gross funeral faux pas.

Brother Steve said that Joan’s obituary appeared in the North County Times:

Joan Tingle, 84

ESCONDIDO -- Joan Kaller Tingle, 84, died Tuesday, April 10, 2007, in Escondido.

Born May 20, 1922, in Canada she lived in Spring Valley for one year. She was a homemaker.

She is survived by sons William Tingle of Santa Barbara, Stephen Tingle of Escondido, David Tingle of Spring Valley and Dan Tingle of Santa Barbara; six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Inurnment will be at Ora Associate Reformed Church, Gray Court, S.C.

Alhiser-Comer Mortuary is handling arrangements.

Joan lived in Spring Valley for a good twenty years.  So that was wrong.  And there is no William Tingle.  I am Nicholas Tingle, even though my name is legally William Nicholas Tingle.  William is WB’s name.  Not mine.

 I hereby declare to whomsoever might be interested that when I die I want Nicholas Tingle only to appear on whatever form of memorial, if there should so chance to be one, (stone or little box) that signifies my final resting place.

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That's Joan in 1936.  Not the person I knew. 

Wham!  I think I have hit the wall.

Did I make a joke:  People say the grief process goes: denial, anger, and so forth.  And that I have jumped straight over denial into anger.  I don’t think there is a so called grief process.  Hell, there’s just grief and more or less of it.  Today, I seem to be at the more rather than less stage.

For a while I had this sort of hectic energy as if deep down inside of me I had this little engine running that just wouldn’t shut off.  To rest, one needs to relax, but this little engine wasn’t letting me relax.  Well, now the engine has stopped and the result is not relaxation but generalized misery, approaching my old colleague torpid depression in which the meaning of it all become elusive.

I woke up vexing myself about the political and emotional correctness of a song I wrote yesterday.  Perhaps it was a signal that the engine was shutting down.

The last stanza goes:

Old Buddha say the worst thing is to be born
I guess that makes old Buddha seem pretty damn forlorn
But maybe that old Buddha was onto something we forgot
Being dead is easy; it’s life that is the shock

A big wind comes straight out of nowhere
And knocks down anything that is standing there

If you are alive right now
You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time….

So I start chastising myself for suggeting maybe life itself is a horrid mistake and nothingness is better.  And so I should change the lyric, if I had the energy to do it, to something more upbeat.  Talk about a loss of perspective…

Big Wind. It’s an MP3.

I was not looking forward to my May appointment with my pulmonary guy.  Any doctor stuff having to do with my lungs puts me in the throes of anticipatory anxiety because of my forty year bad habit. Actually, Dr. Flaster was not originally my pulmonary guy; he was my sleep apnea guy.  I had to go to him to get a test for sleep apnea and later to get my sleep apnea cure stuff.  I guess sleep apnea does involve the lungs.

He became interested though in my lungs per se when he heard about my bad habit.  He ordered an extra x-ray.  The problem with lung cancer—as yet no early detection.  And then when I got the pneumonia he insisted on checking me out.  I had an x-ray again and had to take a breathing test that turned me blue in the face and made me almost passed out.  He had told me after the first x-ray that I had the start of asthma and this time he said, over a month after the pneumonia was supposed to be over, that my lungs still showed signs of the pneumonia.

I liked Dr. Flaster pretty well.  I had worked to establish a rapport.  The nurses said he was one of those geniuses and that he had a wicked sense of humor.  He had a PhD in chemistry and was of course also an MD.  I asked him if he still had time for bench work and indicated that I had a PhD myself in literature though.  I figured phrases like “bench work” and PhD might make him more inclined to remember me.  In fact, he took to calling me Dr. Tingle when he remembered my name at all.

My May appointed was for a final pneumonia check: x-ray again followed by a meet and greet. But of course I lost the card with my appointment time on it, so Carol called for me to find out the time, and told me to sit down, because she had just found out that Dr. Flaster had died in his sleep just two nights before.  He lived alone and his dog had died just a few weeks before.

In light of my recent Job like travails, I thought, what the hell is this?  What does it mean when your doctors start dying? I was glad the appointment was canceled on account of death but pissed that I would have to make another.  And on top of that I would have to try to cultivate a relationship with another pulmonary person.

I wasn’t surprised though.  Dr. Flaster was bald, about 5 foot four and had that Babe Ruth figure:  built like a bowling ball with tooth pick legs sticking down.  Also he was positively disheveled.  He had this overlong belt that flapped around in front of his half pulled up fly, and his shirt kept coming out of his pants. Given his weight and my guess that he had never worked out in his life, he looked like a walking time bomb to me.  And he sweated real easily too, like guys I have known who are overweight and also alcoholics.

I liked this guy.  He was Jewish and they buried him right away. 

Here’s looking at you Flaster, a real mench of a guy.

I go to a club to workout.  I try to go everyday.  I met a guy there named Ben.  He’s well over six feet and has sort of folds of flesh hanging around his abdomen.  I expect he was really heavy at one time and lost a lot of weight.  He is also brown as berry all over.  You see this stuff in the locker room where people change their clothes.  He is retired now, formerly an engineer, and very smart.

Also he complains about something all the time.  He has been going to the club longer than anybody I know there, over 20 years, and all he can do is complain about the place.  You figure he would go somewhere else with all the complaints.  They were playing some sort of music over the speakers in the locker room, and he would go around with his hands over his ears complaining about the crap.  He complained so much they stopped playing the music.

He has his own house with a big front yard with grass and he started into talking about this war he had with the gophers.  He waged a war on them for years, using all the traditional devices—flooding, sticking flares in their holes, traps—but he couldn’t get rid of them.  There was one really big one that he came to recognize, that he just couldn’t get rid of.  The thing would come out of its hole and like taunt him, Ben said.

Being an engineer Ben eventually went high tech; he bought or built this device that stomped the ground. He thought maybe the vibrations of the stomper would drive out the gophers.  But all it did was leave a big hole where it stomped.  Then he hit on sound and bought a high frequency noise emitter that was supposed to produce a sound, inaudible to human beings, that drove gophers crazy.  The problem was that cats and sometimes dogs that would come into his yard and go nuts when they heard the sound.  Cats would just flip into the air he said and go into convulsions.  He didn’t like the cats and dogs coming into his yard—people should know better—but he didn’t like having to cart them out of the yard and put up with neighbor’s complaints either.  That could have been worse; the noise didn’t out right kill the animals.  Just flipped them out.

Over time, he managed to adjust the frequency of the noise emitter and he said it pretty much worked.  But he couldn’t get rid of that big fellow that taunted him.  I could tell he had a grudging respect for that recalcitrant gopher.  He had an Ahab and the Whale thing going with that gopher.  The big gopher had turned old and grey over the years of their fight, and the way Ben figured it, the old guy was now deaf and that’s why the sound didn’t disturb him.

Turns out Ben is brown as a berry because he has psoriasis.  He has a good thatch of grey hair, and said I wished I had his thick hair since mine is becoming all thin and stringy.  Oh, he said, that was nothing; it was really much thicker than that but he had to use some super powerful shampoo to keep the psoriasis off his scalp.  One of the ways people fight psoriasis is to get a lot of sun; thus the brown as a berry effect.

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I have been hearing songs on the radio for a bit now from a CD called “The Road to Escondido” by JJ Cale, with Eric Clapton.  I figured it couldn’t be our Escondido, the one where Brother Steve lives, and near where the folks live.  But I was wrong.  JJ Cale lives in Valley Center which is exactly where the folks lived.  That was their address “Delridge, Valley Center, CA.”  I guess he titled his album the road to Escondido because it would’t sound as mysterious or something as the road to Valley Center.

Brother Steve had a burst of energy and went to the bank in Escondido to see if he could get into Joan’s safety deposit box and perhaps locate her original will that the lawyer wants (along with a death certificate).  He had the death certificate, but no key to the deposit box, so they said he had the right to get into the box but they would have to get somebody to pull the lock.  Then he remembered that maybe he had seen the key in one of Joan’s purses that might be in the storage area where we put the stuff from Delridge.  So he went there—sure, enough—found the key, went to the bank, got in the safety deposit box and located the original will along with Brothers Dave and Dan and my birth certificates.  Then he went over to Joan’s lawyers and dropped off the original will as well as the death certificate, and so—thanks to his efforts—we have got the ball rolling on the lawyer side of things.

Brother Steve reports he got a T. Rex CD, which was sort of odd since the day before I had been humming “Bang a Gong” in my head.

I am waiting for the lawyer paper work.  All sorts of things to fill out, and of course they want a 2000 dollar retainer.

I brought up the coca cola vigil thing with my students, showing them some pictures from the web.  I huffed and puffed about how tawdry I thought it was—displaying one’s grief with coca cola cup. And then said, though, maybe I was overreacting and what did they think.  They didn’t say I was over-reacting, but then they didn’t find anything particularly wrong with it either.  Well, a little bit maybe.  Though all seemed to accept the coca cola cup thing as an indication of how much the consumer culture has become part of all we do…for better or worse, I guess.

I am running on empty.  Last night I was trying to respond to a student’s email and I kept putting my fingers on the wrong keys and coming out with stuff like akjoaduioa—and I just couldn’t stop doing it.  I need to rest somehow but it’s hard to rest when you can’t relax, and I can’t relax because it seems like I have this little engine down there some where that is running at full speed and I can’t shut it off.
 

 Cousin Beth sent along the image of the Pepsi Cola Vigil.  This is a picture of students at Furman College, in Greenville SC, honoring the dead students at VT.  Cousin Lucy who works in the public relations office at Furman says the students at Furman were pretty deeply affected by events at VT.

 I was a bit surprised at the Pepsi Cola cups since in the South, as I understand it, Coke is king.  A high school in Georgia held a Coke day and all the students came to school wearing Coca Cola t-shirts, except for one maverick who came wearing a Pepsi shirt.  He was sent home for the day.

 Coke is king according to my understanding because it was developed by a man named Pemberton of Atlanta, GA.  I think the Coke headquarters are still there—in Atlanta.  But I am not sure.

As indicated some time before on these pages, I bought a used guitar about 4 years ago for 350 bucks, and since that time, I have been trying to make up songs using my computer as my recording device.  I use a software program called ProTools that includes another program called Reason.  With this piece of software one can mix in a drum line and other effects with guitar, voice, and base that are produced by me and directly recorded.  Finally I think, after fiddling for I don’t know how long, I managed to start making decent drum lines.

I made up this song yesterday and I expect it reflects my current mood.

It’s an MP3 and should download pretty easily.

I call it:  “Broken Hearted Melodies.”

Perhaps significantly too in responses to pictures of this kind on Flickr one finds no mention of the cups.  Rather, repetitiously, “awesome shot,” “thanks for sharing,” “very moving.”

I didn’t notice this myself because I did not watch TV coverage of the event or look for coverage of it online.  But after class this last Thursday, a student came up and said, “Hey, I noticed something because of this class.”  We are discussing and writing about the consumer culture.  When he told me about the coca cola cups, I was outraged at the pure insensitivity and just plain vulgarity displayed by people mourning the deaths of comrades with candles in coca cola cups.  I can’t at the moment quite find the words to express my feelings about the inappropriateness of this particular product placement. 

I suppose there might be many reasons for this sordid vulgarity.  One was in a rush to mourn and perhaps lacking a cup in which to stick one’s candle, one takes a coca cola cup because it is handed to one, as free of charge.  Still, had a coca cola cup been handed to me on such an occasion, I would have thrown it to the ground and stomped on it.  I wouldn’t in any case have wanted my grief  associated with a sweet, sticky substance, that rots teeth and contributes to obesity.  Not to mention its association with the predatory capitalism of the Coke corporation.

But this reaction marks me I suppose as pretty old school.  I was not born and raised in the consumer culture as it flowered since about 1980.  The students I teach seem to find nothing wrong with acting as walking billboards for whatever clothes they are wearing or rock groups they support.  And they find nothing wrong, I guess, because acting as a walking billboard serves as an identity marker, as way of asserting one’s allegiance to a particular product and all the other unknown people who also pledge allegiance to this particular product.  Who knows but some students carrying those coca cola candles may have felt, albeit unconsciously, soothed by those cups and their associations with that sweet, sticky beverage that has marked so many happy and unhappy occasions.

Brother Dave and Sister-in-law Teresa drove up to SB to check in with Brother Dan and see how he was going, what with the stroke and all.  Later in the day they drove out to our place on the edge of town and we found ourselves swapping tales from the Joan and WB story book: aberrant acts of random violence.

I have already recounted in these pages, WB’s death threats towards Joan, involving a truck and a two pound hammer; I have also mentioned Joan’s attempt to stab WB with a kitchen knife.  Actually, the word “attempt” is wrong; she completed her action.  She stabbed WB but managed only to stick him in the arm.  She failed to realize her full intent.

But we started at one point swapping tales that we didn’t all know.  I hadn’t known for example that Joan had struck WB on the back of the head with a skillet, but, failing to render him unconscious, managed only to stun him.  I was perhaps digesting this story and sitting there in a daze I followed the rough outlines of the pieces of a story that once in focus caused me to laugh as hard as I have in weeks.

Towards the end, if one remembers, Joan was prone to falling down; this was particularly troublesome since once down she could not lift her flaccid body from the floor.  She was felled, one might say, and WB by that point was so withered up and weakened that he could not begin to get her back on her feet.  So as they had done on previous occasions and would do later, they put in a call to the fire department to come pick her up off the floor.

When the fire persons came to the rescue, however, they found the doors to the house locked.  WB had forgotten to unhinge the bolt, and so to rouse the inhabitants to action the fire persons went around the side of the house to see of the sliding plate glass door that allowed a view of the living room was open.  As they tried the door, itself locked, they saw WB in his withered and worn down state kicking at the prone and flabby Joan.  Apparently she was making some attempt to get away from the kicks because he had planted one foot on her chest to hold her down while he went at it with the other.

I could just see it there in my mind’s eye.  WB in his weakened state expending the little he had of energy kicking his prone wife of over 60 years while sputtering profanities—goddam cunt, fucking bitch, and so on.  For he could be profane, while she just lay there, well protected by her flab in all the stunning passivity by which she had exercised power and ruled the roost for so many years.

I just laughed.  A hard laugh.  And, to take the joke a step further, I got up and mimicking WB’s bent and feeble posture began to kick little feeble kicks at an imaginary Joan while muttering in a squeaky voice, take that you fat cow and so on.  Whereupon the others in the room, requested that I “stop it,” so I did, but got a deep chuckle every time I thought back on it.

Of course I did not sleep for shit.

The massacre at Virginia Tech has upset me.  After all, I teach at a university and work with students.  So maybe that’s natural.  And a few years back, at UCSB, a student used his automobile as a lethal weapon and drove it directly into a group of students.  Four died as I recollect.

For some reason I started thinking about loner students I have known over the years.  Maybe 15 years ago, I got to teach some classes that were designed for low income and minority students.  This was back when affirmative action was still legal.  The special think about the classes really was that they were smaller (18 per section, rather than our regular 25) and all students were members of EOP (Equal Opportunity Program).

Calvin was in one of these classes.  He was a black guy from East L.A.  He had one of those faces that seemed prematurely gnarly and aged.  Also he clearly was not a stereotypical black athlete.  This dude did not pump iron.  His father was a minister and his mother was a police officer.  He had braces, huge ones, and I don’t know where he got his clothes, maybe from a golf shop because he word that golfer pants, with plaids I think they are called.

Calvin did not fit in anywhere.  The number of black students where I teach is pathetically small, but I expect Calvin didn’t fit in exactly even in East L.A.  Not with a minister father and a policewoman mother and those damn plaid pants.  And a name like “Calvin.”  I would see him now and again around campus and just like me he was always walking alone.  He would call out, “How’s it hanging.”  I would say, “A little to the left.”

One day in class, he said a lot—for Calvin I mean—something like:  “Like high school is supposed to prepare you for college.  Middle school is supposed to prepare you for high school.  But middle school don’t prepare you for nothing but middle school.  And high school don’t prepare you for nothing but high school.  And college…”  And then he shrugged.

He said he was sleeping way too much and without his parents constantly looking over his shoulder, he was “drowning in freedom.”  I liked Calvin, but I figured he wouldn’t make it, and sure enough when I asked around the next year, I found he had not returned.

I have thought about Calvin over the years and wondered how he made out finally.

The murderer at VT has been described repeatedly as a “loner.”  The way the word is used and the context in which it is employed might make it seem as if being a loner is a bad thing.  It’s not.  Calvin was an OK guy and actually pretty interesting.  I mean just because a guy doesn’t have friends and eats alone in the student cafeteria doesn’t make him any more a threat to society than all those non-loner people.  Hell, if you don’t believe me, take a loner out to lunch.

Joan died a week ago today.  Brother Dan had that so-called mini stroke this last Thursday.  This has been one of the longest weeks of my life.

I have been reading a little in a book that says depression is the result of the inability to grieve.  I am not sure that’s what the book is saying exactly; maybe more like one is unable to grieve because one is stuck in grief.

In any case, I thought denial was supposed to come first and anger later on.  Of course, the process model of grief is BS.  But I seem to have skipped directly to the pissed off stage.

I went to bed and couldn’t get to sleep and was suddenly raging pissed off when I remember that damn lawyer has not gotten back to us yet—after three calls and an email—about what, if anything, we are supposed to do to get the trust filed and any final paper work that might need to be done. 

And yesterday I got really pissed when I heard about that massacre at Virginia Tech.  33 students dead, including the killer.  I started in ranting about the fucking incompetents that run the country and the fact that it is possible to buy automatic and semi-automatic weapons in this fucking barbaric country, and so on and so forth till I wore myself out.

The students were sort of stunned—not by me—but the event; some had heard about it and others had not, and they were whispering to each other, and one student said, because I had the web up, go to U-Tube for some action footage, and I said I didn’t want to look at any pictures of the fucking shooting or of students jumping out of windows for fear of their lives.

The parents and friends of those poor students are going to have one damn long week too, I expect.

Lately I have felt a bit like Andy Capps’ Joe Btfsplk.  Not because I feel I am a jinx as Joe was (I leave that to Jonah, king of jinxes), but because of that perpetual cloud over his head:

Dan called to say he had been in the hospital, Thurday night I guess it was.  But because he has a hard time talking, he wasn’t too clear on details.  So I drove to his place Friday and came away feeling upset because I woke him up from a nap, and while he made it clear something had happened, I left not knowing exactly what that was and feeling anxious.  So I drove down again today and Dan’s wife, Kim, said Dan had a mini-stroke. He lost sensation in his left hand but it came back.  At the hospital they did a catscan and pumped him full of a stronger blood thinner.

Kim drew a picture for me and I felt more secure looking at the picture.  It was something like this.  The big red area to the right is the first stroke, and the little red area below the big read area represents the mini  stroke.

In search of Joan’s mother’s first name, I emailed saying maybe it was Bernice, but next morning Brother Dave emailed to say that Aunt Betty’s first name was Bernice and since women, unlike men, do not seem to feel some need to name their girl children after themselves, that pretty much ruled out Bernice.

Brother Dave had found that info by going through stuff on the web; he found Aunt Bernice’s obituary.  So I thought, OK, I will check out the web too, and went to Ancestry.com that has mounds of documents and data bases.  All I had was Joan’s Mother’s last name:  Barrett.  So I started to search for Barretts born in England (that was another bit of info) and, man, you wouldn’t believe how many Barretts were born in England.  And then I remember I search births for England and Wales.  I knew she had grown up in Dorset, but, man, it was like every Barrett born in England was born in Dorset.

Finally I noticed the 1930 Census for the USA.  And bingo, I had it.  On a census children are recorded.  So I typed in Joan Kaller (Joan’s mother’s married name), and up comes one Joan Kaller from San Diego, California.  She is categorized as “daughter” and she is believed to be about 8 years old.  Then I type in Bernice Kaller, for cross confirmation, and up comes one Bernice Kaller in San Diego California in 1930.  And she is listed as about 10 years old; she also is listed as daughter.

And the mother of both was named Mabel.  So Joan’s mother’s name was Mabel Barrett Kaller.  In 1930, she was 41 years old and was indeed born in England in 1881.  Based on what Joan said—that her mother died when she was 12 years old—Mabel must have died in 1934 or 35.

Just to see what the old degenerate, reprobate was up to in 1930, I checked out Joan’s nerdowell father, Barney. He was born in 1888 in Canada, was 41 years old at the time of the census and is listed as “Lodger.”  His occupation is listed as restaurant Chef and he was in the army in WWI.  He apparently lived in a boarding housing with about 15 other people.  The head of the household was one William Crapp.

The categories for people in a household for the 1930 census are interesting.  One finds the usual, head, spouse, daughter, son, cousin, nephew, and so on, but also lodger, renter, boarder, roomer, hired man, and servant.

In any case, we were able to fill in the spot on the death certificate that asks for "mother's name."

Mabel.

I woke up way too early again thinking, “Bernice?”

After Brother David called the night before last to say Joan had died I couldn’t sleep for a bit and while I was lying there it came to me out of nowhere that I didn’t know Joan’s mother’s first name.  I knew I had asked Joan once, “What is your mother’s first name?” and she told me, but I couldn’t remember.  I never met Joan’s mother; she died in 1934 as I figure it of breast cancer.  And when Joan spoke of her mother, she always called her “mama.”

I guess my unconscious was working on something because late yesterday I get a call from Brother Steve asking me if I knew Joan’s mother’s first name because they ask for that information on the death certificate.  I said I didn’t.  And then Brother Dave called asking me the same thing.

What the hell is a death certificate.  Whose business is it anyway?  Apparently though one has to be filled out before a cremation.

But I went home and tried to plow through the papers and pictures I have and couldn’t find a thing, and tried also to find the phone number of Joan’s one and only friend whom she had known since HS.  But her last name is Smith.  Try finding anybody named Smith. 

So I went to bed thinking “Elizabeth.”  But was pretty sure I was getting Joan’s mother confused with Elizabeth Barret Browning.  And then I thought “Anne” but I am pretty sure that was the name of our little sister who died before she was two weeks old.

This was all sort of funny in an odd way because the logical person to ask what her mother’s name was no longer available for questioning.  Is this what is called “missing somebody.”

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On the back of the above, Joan wrote: "This was one of mother's favorite pictures of me.  I was 8 years old then." 

Joan K. Tingle
 

May 20, 1922—April 10, 2007

 I am glad I was able to speak for a few minutes with Joan this last Saturday, I guess it was.  She was pretty much out of it but we had a form of conversation.  We hooked up on something we frequently hooked up upon.  Family.  So I gave her the news about folks back in South Carolina and she asked about people and together we tried to recollect the names of people.  Perhaps because Joan had no family at all to speak of, she was interested in WB’s brothers and sisters and wanted to know what was up with them.  So I guess you could say we gossiped for a bit.  And then her concentration faded.

Here is something Joan wrote.  The top little blurb is by the now deceased editor of the former Tingle Family Newsletter:

Literary talent continues to surface from among many Tingle descendants. On the following pages we are pleased to include a well written and documented article by Joan K. Tingle of Valley Center, California. She is the wife of William Berner Tingle, Jr., a sixth generation descendant of John Tingle of Craven County, N.C. and the latter’s wife, Sarah Purifoy. His ancestor chart appeared in the previous issue (Fall 1988) of the newsletter. Her story, titled MONROE MEMORIES, starts on the next page:

MONROE MEMORIES

Joan Tingle

By May 1862, the alarming news of the critical defeat of the Confederate forces at the Battle of Shiloh, near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee on April 6 and 7, 1862 must have been known throughout the Confederate states. The South had suffered heavy losses in the Western theater of the war and replacement troops were being urgently recruited.

On May 6,1862 ,the four youngest Sons of Daniel and Parthenia Tingle of Monroe County, Georgia enlisted in Company H, 32nd Regiment Georgia Volunteer Infantry—Army of Tennessee.¹

Daniel Tingle, the eldest son of John and Sara Purifoy Tingle who migrated to Georgia from North Carolina in about the year 1803², had married Parthenia Hatcher in Jefferson County, Georgia in 1 823³ and had settled near his father’s home in Monroe County by 1 830.⁴ By the Civil War era, the Tingle family was well established in the Blount Community and active in the Paran Primitive Baptist Church there^.5 Sons and daughters of Daniel and Parthenia had married into neighboring families and were established on their own farms in the area.⁶ Monroe County was not an area of large plantations but rather one of substantial farms cleared from the gentle pine covered hills.⁷

Solomon Willie, the youngest son of Daniel and Parthenia was a lad sixteen years old when he enlisted on May 6. l862.8 His birth date was October 20, 1846. It is recorded that he was in an army hospital in Savannah, Georgia in July 1 862,but he later returned to his regiment and served until April 26, 1865 when he surrendered in Greensboro, North Carolina at the end of the tragic conflict.⁹ Solomon married Georgia Ann McCallum in 1868, settled in Henry County, Georgia, had a family of ten children and is buried in Beersheba Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery in Locust Grove, Georgia.’°

Another son of Daniel and Parthenia, McCarroll, who was horn November 9, 1833, had been married in 1858 to Nary Ann Persons Castleberry. and when he enlisted in the Confederate forces he left his wife with two small daughters and a newborn son.¹¹ On February 20, 1864, McCarroll was wounded in the left leg at Ocean Pond, Florida Records show he was captured at Macon, Georgia April 20—21, l865.¹² He returned home upon his release to farm and care for his wife and children. He is buried near his father and mother in Paran Cemetery in Blount, Monroe County. 13

The third son of this Tingle family who enlisted on that day in May 1862 was James Lafayette Tingle. Pension records show he was wounded in the left leg and permanently disabled at Ocean Pond, Florida February 20, 1864, and never returned to his regiment.¹⁴ His birth date was December 25, 1840, and during his long and active life he married twice. His first wife, whom he married December 26,1866, was Sarah E. McCallum. After her death, he married, on February 26,1884, Tommie Tucker. He fathered eight children by each wife and has hundreds of descendants throughout the South.¹⁵ James Lafayette lived to be almost ninety

years old and died April 21 1930.¹⁶

The fourth son of the Daniel Tingle family who enlisted on this same day in 1862 was Archibald Daniel who was born February 5,1835. He and Mary Mahala Treadwell had married in 1856, and they had three young Sons at the time Daniel Archibald left home to fight for the cause in which he believed. He served for three years and surrendered at the cessation of hostilities in Greensboro, North Carolina on April 26,1865. 17 To quote from the obituary of Archibald Daniel Tingle in a Monroe County newspaper,” At the close of the war he came home to his wife and children to begin again with what the Yankees had left him and to live in peace the rest of his life”.¹⁸ ”Mr. Archie” and “Miss Haley” had six more children, and he was a prosperous farmer and storekeeper in the community where he was born and lived all his life.¹⁹ Daniel Archibald Tingle died March 3, 1917. He is buried in Mt. Vernon Baptist Church Cemetery in Butts County, Georgia.²⁰

The Civil War years were a sad and trying period for parents both in the North and in the South. Daniel and Parthenia were fortunate that all four of their soldier Sons returned home to live long and useful lives. Their daughter, Louisa Jane, lost her husband, Enoch Tollerson, during his army service, and Daniel’s nephew, Jesse Tingle, the eldest son of John J. and Duemma Tingle died of variola fever while on active duty in 1863.²¹

So that homecoming in the early summer of 1865 was a dichotomy of joy and sorrow, hope and despair. But hope prevailed—hope for the future of the South and for the whole nation united once more.

Sources:

Muster Roll of Company H,32nd Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry Army of Tennessee, C.S.A., Monroe County Georgia. Georgia Department of Archives and History.

2.             Hancock County, Georgia Wills and Estate Records 1794—l804. Volume A—AAAA.

3.             Marriage Records of Jefferson County, Georgia.

4.             Census Records of Monroe County, Georgia.

5.             Research of Edna Brown of Milner, Georgia based on records of Paran Primitive Baptist Church,

6.             Lot map of Monroe County, Georgia which shows property and owners thereof in Blount community.

7.             Appendix l, Monroe County Land Lottery of 1821 shows lots were 202 1/2 acres.

8.             Muster Roll of Company H.

9.             Ibid.

l0. Records of Daisie F. Duncan, Lawrenceville, Ga.

11 . Ibid.

12.         Muster Roll of Company H.

13.         Monroe County History.

14.         Muster Roll of Company H.

15.         Records of Edna Brown Milner, Georgia.

16.         Records of Daisie F.. Duncan, Lawrenceville, Ca.

17.         Muster Roll of Company H.

18.         Monroe Advertiser, 30 March 1917, p. 1.

19.         Records of Mary Tingle, Athens, Georgia.

20.         Tombstone in Mt. Vernon Cemetery, ,Butts County, Georgia.

21.         Muster Roll of Company H.

22.         Records of Tollerson family of Monroe, County, Georgia as compiled by Lorene Saario of Oceanside, Califorriia and based in part on Muster Roll of Company H.

The author, Joan K. Tingle, adds a footnote

I have been waking up at good awful hours for over a month.  At 530 am this morning and it’s still pitch dark outside.  I try to go back to sleep but just can’t.  Other things are involved, but at some deep level I have been anxious about Joan, I think.  Also I was talking to the guy a couple of doors down.  He is in his seventies and wakes up a 300 in the morning and sometimes can’t get back to sleep.  I have heard a person’s sleep patterns change with age.  Maybe I will just have to get used to this.

Right before going to bed, I read the following from Brother Dave:

We just got home. I guess we left j about 8:45 and her breathing really sounded bad. They kept cranking up the morphine but she never slept. I'm not sure if our being there wasn't keeping her up some how? I mean just being there.Hard to explain I guess. Well, a new nurse came on and we got them to do the suction thing a couple of times. I did sign all the hospice papers and so on. I'm going to LVDN and then hospital in morning AT....after traffic.

“Hard to explain I guess.”  Maybe dying for some one in Joan’s particular condition requires letting go somehow deep down.  The unconscious is a beast.

David and Teresa sat with Joan nearly the whole day, this in spite of the fact that Teresa had been concerned about our having to wear masks when with Joan.  She wrote a day or so ago:

I was concerned about the fact you had to be masked when visiting Joan. I called the nurse to ask what Joan had. She has MRSA (methicillin resistant staph aureus). I was worried because Stephen and David took Jacob last Wednesday without the masks. Joan got this at Palomar Hospital, there's no doubt. I did find the following info. 

Is it safe for healthy people to be in contact with a person infected with MRSA? Can children contract MRSA from being around an infected person?

Healthy people, including children are at very low risk of contracting MRSA. Casual contact such as hugging is okay, however, hands should be washed before leaving the patient's hospital room or home. Persons should use gloves, however, before handling any body fluids of infected persons, and remove the gloves and wash the hands before leaving the infected person's room or home. Before an infected person leaves the hospital ask the nurse or doctor what precautions they recommend be taken at home. In general, follow good hygiene practices, as previously described.

I hate Hospitals.

Who knows what this day will bring?

Brother David sent an email saying Joan had been removed from Villa Del Nortes and put back in the hospital at 3 am this morning.  The nurse had called saying they thought Joan had only a few more hours, so David and Sister-in-Law Teresa drove up to Escondido to the hospital.

As the day wore on (and it was wearing) every time the phone or my cell went off I was sure David would say that Joan had moved on.  But as of 6 pm, this Monday, she has not.  At the Villa she had been turning blue but with the hospital equipment she has done better; the doctor asked David if it was OK if he tried to make Joan more comfortable.  David said OK and so Joan is on a morphine drip.

The morphine drip for me signifies the end.  Indeed, the doctor does feel Joan will never return to the Villa; instead if she does recover enough to leave the hospital she will be sent to “hospice” care.  Of course, we in America know next to nothing about palliative medicine, so in SD there is only one real hospice.  Instead, people are sent to “homes” that have 24 hour nurses and these apparently qualify legally as hospice care.

We are barbarians.  Something needs to be done immediately to allow the elderly some determination of their destiny.  By this I mean, the elderly should be allowed, with minimum interference from a physician, to purchase drugs that would allow them to end their own lives at the instant of their choosing.  

As Walter Benjamin said, to date there has been no act of civilization that has not equally been an act of barbarism.  This is the case with modern medicine as practiced in the United States. 

I expect that laws will be changed.  The yuppies are coming of dying age; they are pretty vocal and well financed, at least for the time being.  Our sheer numbers and the weight we will place on the medical system will lead some to see the legalization of euthanasia as one way to get rid of the decaying elderly with more dispatch.

 Then every time Carol called the first thing out of her mother’s mouth was, “When are going to come down and get the car.  When are you going to come down and get the car?  You had better come down and get the car before the battery runs down.”  So Carol said she was going fly down and drive the car back up.  But her mother said, “I don’t want you driving alone back up.  Can’t your husband come?”  No, her husband can’t come because the last thing he wants to do is drive through LA.  So she said she would pay for the airplane ticket for the husband to fly down and drive back up to SB with her daughter.

 So we flew down and of course she forgot she said she was going to pay for the husband’s ticket, not the husband cared any because he was pretty sure to begin with that he would see the money. 

 Brother Dave picked us up at the airport and drove us to his house and then out to where Carol’s mother is and then we drove over to where Joan is and met Steve there right after he got off from his job at the swap meet.  

 That’s really why the husband flew down to see what kind of shape his mother was in, given that she seemed to have been pretty ill. The visit was pretty scary because Joan did not look very good and they made the husband, and the wife, and Steve wear masks when visiting Joan because the doctor’s say she had a really nasty bug.  So now the husband thinks he will catch this nasty bug from Joan and die.

 The husband thinks that would be pretty ironic and is in a really crabby mood.

 

 

Above, a picture of the SD airport terminal, and the view from Brother David’s house.

Week one of spring quarter classes is now over.  I didn’t have a good time.  There were lots of people trying to crash both classes.  I hate kicking people out, but I don’t want to overload myself either.  Making matters somewhat worse was the fact that most of the people I had to kick out were seniors.

This makes no sense.  This is the last quarter of their senior year and these seniors have not yet taken the second class in sequence that they should have taken in the beginning of their junior year.  But they couldn’t get in or put if off.  I believe them.  I think some repeatedly tried but couldn’t get the class.  As it is over a third of both classes are seniors.  The research paper is at the center of this class; and most of the seniors have none multiple research papers, except from the couple of students from the biological sciences.

They have done lab reports aplenty.  But not research papers, and this is a class designed for people in the social sciences.  What the heck are two hard science people doing in my social science class?  They are in my class because they have to take it to fulfill their General Education requirements, and they don’t much care what class it is, just when it is.  All the rest of it—that they were supposed to take it as juniors and they are supposed to be in the social sciences--doesn’t make any difference.

This is a ridiculous and impossible class.  I had to struggle with being pissed off for all the classes this first week.  I would call roll and think well maybe I will have some open spots for the crashers and then the people who were on the list and officially enrolled would come in 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes late.  I want to shot them.  And, then, as I am trying to describe the class and get things rolling a bit, in comes a student and says he wants to crash and do I have room.

The water from the golf course (part of the flood plain) runs off into the above.  A slough.  It may look like a lagoon, but the water is only inches deep.  Come summer it will be mud flats with wet spots here and there.  A slough, in other and fewer words. 

That’s Penny there.  You can hardly see her because the picture is bad and that light thing is in front of her face and she is wearing her dental hygienist mask.  Penny has been cleaning my teeth for maybe 15 years and I don’t know her last name.  Probably I do know her last name, but I have forgotten it, so it works out pretty much the same.  Before Penny cleaned my teeth Marsha Cecil did.  I remember her name only because she lived in the apartment next to ours when Carol and I lived in downtown SB on Bath Street.

 Marsha had a husband name David and a daughter named Mary.  Marsha talked openly about her deep love for Mel Gibson.  Later they moved up north, I think, maybe to where David’s father ran a successful rice farm.  California is a major rice producer.

 As soon as I got dental insurance, the dentists starting insisting that I came in not twice a year, as is more or less customary, to have teeth cleaned, but three times I year because I had developed back then in my early to mid forties “gingivitis” or gum disease.  I expect a 100 years ago anybody who managed to live to 40 had gingivitis, chronic inflammation of the gums.  That’s why people back then when they reach 60 frequently had few, if any teeth; gingivitis, if not controlled, can cause your teeth to fall out.  So going to have my teeth cleaned 3 times a year suggests I am making a long term investment in my teeth.  I hope I die smiling so people will appreciate my high quality teeth and my responsible investment in them.

 I floss regularly and have one of those electric tooth brushes.  They really do a better job than the manual ones.

 Having my teeth cleaned always tires me out.

_________________________________________________________________________________________- 

 Brother Dan writes:

Puccini! 

That is the name of our dog. 

My brother is not a lover of opera, so I expect the name Puccini had more to do with a penchant for word play as in, “Where is that pooch?  Pooch!  Pooch! Puccini!”  --Like that, I mean.

I saw the name of a guy, Mark Bracker, that I know who writes about teaching, literature, and psychoanalysis in an email announcement, and I sent him an email just saying hello.  His return email indicated he had published a book, Radical Pedagogy, which I didn’t know he had published.  So I checked to see if it was in the UCSB library, and it was, and I asked Carol who was going to the library, if she would get it for me, and she did.  When she got back, she said, my book, Self-Development and College Writing, was mentioned a number of times in his book and did I want to hear what he had written about it, and I said, OK, why not? 

Turns out Mark had quoted from my book several times at some length.  It was odd and funny hearing myself quoted in that way.  I liked the quote best where I write:

            One is trying to write and to think in a way (to gain entry to that closed society [of academia]) that cuts one off exactly from those audiences from which one most desires recognition.  No wonder students become enervated.  No wonder they write things they don’t care about or don’t understand.  The psychological roots of BS run very deep.

I liked that—the psychology roots of BS—that sounded like me, alright.  And I didn’t remember having written it, though when Carol read it, I knew I had written it.  It has been almost 3 years since that book was published.  I haven’t opened it since even though I spent four years working pretty assiduously on it.  I think writing it wore me out; I don’t know if a single sentence from the first 300 page draft ended up in the book.  Also I write real fast and maybe because of that don’t always remember what I have written.   Maybe I write so fast as a way of hoping to hit the material down below my censor.  That censor is an evil guy who cuts me off at the knees and fills me with self-doubt.

Mark writes a lot more intellectually than I do.  My book gave him some sort of psychology of the writing teacher raw material to work with.  It was nice of him to quote from my book, and I was happy that what I had written was of use to him.  I was feeling blue and Carol cheered me up some by reading from Mark’s book.

 Above—that’s a picture Cousin BC a geologist by education, sent along of some gypsum crystals found in a cave in Mexico during a mining operation.  Those crystals strike me as pretty spooky.  They could be living things, that grow in the dark, like what a potato does when you leave it a dark place—those pale tendrils come out.

Carol and I have made plans to fly down to San Diego this coming Saturday.  That’s a bit extravagant, flying I mean.  But we want to come back together so we can drive back together to SB in the one car that Mrs. Press is passing along to us.  While down there, we will visit Mrs. Press, and see David and Teresa and Steve too, I hope.  And stop at the hospital.

 I was surprised to see, visiting Brother Dan yesterday, that they had a dog.  They have never had a dog before.  I thought they were kidding.  But there the dog was sleeping in its little dog bed.  I thought maybe at first it was a pup because it was small, but I was told it was 3 years old, and then I thought, oh my god, they got a sickly dog, because it was so small and lying there completely out of it.  But then I was told Dan had just taken the little dog on a seven mile walk.  The darn thing was completely pooped out what with the walk and the new surroundings.

They got the dog from the humane society; somebody else had it before they got it and those people returned it to the humane society.  You have ten day trial period with the dog.  That’s worrisome, that somebody else returned it.  But the dog looks pretty mellow to me.  I mean I don’t see a problem unless it cannot control its bowels properly.

It will be good company for Brother Dan who is at home a lot by himself.  It’s a female and came with the name “Casey.”  But it doesn’t respond to that, so maybe they will give it another name. 

Above, that’s Savannah with the yet to be named dog.