Rong or Wright

By Michael Shannon

When I was a little guy I would sit at the kitchen table and listen to my parents talk. I wasn’t home schooled, I went to a regular school, a two room one nearly a century old but my real education came as I sat at that grey Formica table and listened to lessons from my parents and their friends. I don’t think they saw themselves as teachers but those little lessons have been rattling around in my head. I’ve been trying to catch up with that time all of my life.

My dad was a big teaser. He loved to tease his mother, my grandmother, who was easily embarrassed and would blush at the drop of a hat. He especially he liked to work on us, his three boys. Almost every thing he said had some little joke woven into it. Some play on words that he knew would confound us. Teach us too. What would you expect from a man who kept a very well thumbed World Almanac right on the kitchen table next to the salt and pepper.

Some of his talk made no sense to me. Such as, who was Leonard Rong and why was he the opposite of Leonard Wright. I heard right and wrong. No one explained this to me. They just tossed out names as they spoke with no explanation added. I’m sure mom and dad never thought twice about explaining who these people were, we were just little kids and didn’t know those men. I had seen Leonard Rong and he looked all right to me, nothing about him seemed wrong. When I asked why he was wrong, dad said, “Why he’s a man out standing in his fields.” What did standing in the field have to do with it. The little mind tried to fill in the gaps.

I mean, did “Dick Dock” have a real name or was the eponymous one just too good not to use. And how about George Arita? George, what Japanese man used the name George? I knew Kaz, Stone, Sab, Haruo and Aki, but George, it didn’t seem correct. There was no explanation for “Jinks” either, or “Ace,” “Bunny” “or “Arza.” Ace was a cool name, Arza seemed weird and what grown up is named Bunny. Seriously, we just though they were making a joke.

My dad sold some of his vegetables to a Mister Get in Los Angeles. I gathered that he was a Chinese man which confused me because I wasn’t sure whether Mister was Chinese or not, and did he go get something, was that his job, getting things. So confusing. Later on I went with my father to Mister Get’s home in Silverlake and had dinner with he and Mrs. Get. It was pressed duck. What! What did they mean pressed duck? Did they mean it was picked up off the highway or was it smashed by a heavy weight. Dad said it was cooked with a brick. How is that even possible. There was no telling.

What about “Coot?” I didn’t think that was real name for a person. I mean the little black ducks with yellow feet that swam in the Oceano lagoon were Coots, but a person. I didn’t think so but when I asked Pop about it he just laughed and said, “Silly Boy.”

My great aunt Anna lived in Santa Ana. Well, OK, but who was she and why was she ever mentioned? Dad said she was a spinster. A What? Was she good at spinning around, did she spin webs? Please explain. I saw her once, she was dumpy, another confusing word, had her hair tightly curled as maiden aunts did in 1955 and turned out to be a seriously vague person, at least to me. She wore a blue dress, pointy spectacles and sturdy shoes. There was no spinning.

We wondered why aunt Mickey was named after Mickey Mouse and my aunt June after the sixth month. Was she born then? Were grownups deliberately trying to confuse their children? Maybe it was a trick my aunt started so that we’d remember her birthday and get her a present.

My dad did not swear, or if he did he sure didn’t do it in front of us. He did have a few choice words he used though. Once he called a man a chiseler. I thought that meant he was a carpenter and built things but at the same time I knew the man sold groceries so how could he be chiseling? It just didn’t make any sense. Dad once called someone and S. B. in my hearing and being about six or seven, I said, “Daddy, whats an S.B.?” He explained that it meant the Silva Brothers, Manuel and Johnny who farmed next to us. When I mentioned it at school, Manny jr. took a swing at me which made it all the more confusing.

My uncle Jackie had some phrases he liked to use. He would say “It’s the Berries.” What in the world were the berries? Did he mean we were going to eat some or pick them, he never explained. How big was a bunch of malarkey? Was it something that needed to be counted or possibly weighed. I once heard him call someone a “Dumb Dora,” to which my dad replied, “She ain’t so dumb.” They both laughed at this. Was it some kind of secret code? We didn’t know. Made me feel like a “Dumb Cluck.”

My mom told dad that my cousin Brucie was a Holy Terror. I thought she meant he tore up hymn books or Bibles in church. Later on I learned from himself that he really was, he smashed my toy truck and hit me with the same stick for telling on him. Mom was right as she so often was.

Gobbledygook, Hodgepodge and flabbergasted were enough to make your head hurt. Parents could talk in a language that was almost foreign or maybe it was and children were not supposed to understand.

My aunt Eva talked to me about her dog Skipper and said that after Thanksgiving dinner she was going to walk him. What in the world did that mean? Every dog I knew could already walk. We never had any dogs that couldn’t. Matter of fact they almost always ran. From here to there and after the pickup, the tractors or they ran in circles around my dad when he was in the fields. Aunt Eva lived on Orange Street in Santa Maria which was the largest city I had ever seen so I assumed that strange goings on happened there which I knew nothing about. The street wasn’t orange either, it was grey colored, so, see what I mean?

My parents being silly. 1943. Shannon Family Photo

Then there was the cornbread. Cornbread was a staple of our diet in the fifties and I’d say all the kids liked it. My mom didn’t use recipes much, she cooked from scratch, another word that didn’t seem to make any sense but cornbread was easy and in lean years it might be the main course. The kids ate it with butter, my dad did too but my mother put it in a glass of milk, stirred it and ate it with a spoon. That seemed so strange to me, I mean, we were four against one when it came to eating it the right way I think. She said it was because she was from the south but like all confusion she wasn’t from the south, she was from California, born and raised. Her great grandparents were from Mississippi and came through Texas to Anaheim but that wasn’t her. She never traveled there. I just though that parents would naturally be on the same page. Boy was I wrong about that. And what exactly is the same page?

Another one; what’s a Mairzy Doat? It simply could not be explained. Dad said it was a song. Must be in a foreign language because I’d never seen either a Doat or a Mairzy. Maybe like a horse? I don’t know.

When my dad got a little transistor radio he told me that, “It was the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Come on Pop, everybody knows all bread is sliced. It comes in a blue and white checked plastic wrapper and its in pieces, nobody has to slice it. I knew he was pulling my leg then.

He once told me he drove out to the See Ranch and that it was out past Bunny’s on the way to Stony Creek. See the problem?

Was there no end to it? Please explain these things to me Dad. He said “I’ll do it when the cows come home, O K?”

He didn’t though, we lived in a time where children were seen but rarely heard. We would have to figure it all out ourselves. Maybe it would all be clear under the Blue Moon. I don’t know. I could be Rong.

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Michael Shannon is a writer, surfer, teacher and a world citizen. He writes so his children will know about their family.

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