• I would have had an Uncle Harold except that he died when he was 6 years old. This was in 1936. My mom’s mother, my Grandma Steib, said that he had the sweetest little smile. What happened was that Harold had a stomachache, so Grandma put a hot water bottle on his tummy. The stomachache was actually appendicitis. His appendix burst and subsequently he died at the hospital. The idea of this charming little boy with that sweet smile suffering like that, and then my grandmother doing what she thought was the right thing to do, only to have it turn out to be the worst thing she could have done, haunts me in ways that horror stories do not.
Harold would have been my third uncle on my mom’s side. Grandma was married and divorced twice, surely unusual in the 1920s. I don’t know much about the first husband except that his last name was Ryan. Their son was my Uncle Chuck, my mom’s older brother. With her second husband, the man named Steib, she had three daughters and a son—my mom, Clara; Frances; Elvira; and Robert, Bob. The women’s names give you a clue as to when they were born, their generation, don’t they? Not many women are named Frances or Clara these days, and certainly not Elvira (except for the Mistress of the Dark, of course). Anyhow, the guy who would have been my Grandpa Steib, if I had ever met him, was an alcoholic, my mom said. He’d stop off at the beer garden or tavern and leave the kids in the car while he went in and put it away. This would have been in the 1930s and 1940s, of course. On Sundays, he didn’t drink but recited from the Bible; the kids would try to hide anywhere other than have to sit there and listen to him preach scripture. He also refused to give my mom permission to marry my dad when she was not yet 21; that’s how it was back then. So she and my dad had to wait until mom turned 21 years of age and do it on their own. This was in 1949. So whenever you watch an old film noir or something from 1949, think about young kids back then wanting to get married but having a guy like my mother’s father stand in their way, and it was all legal. Guys ruled. I grew up with these stories.
One nice memory is that Grandma Steib and my dad’s mom, Grandma (Claudine) Smith, used to sit and do needlework together. They got along well. I have a black-and-white snapshot of them from the mid- or late 1950s, sitting together on a couch. God knows what they had to say about their husbands, being that it was a man’s world and all. My own memories of those two women are nothing but good; I still have Danny and the Dinosaur, a storybook Grandma Smith gave me when I was around 8 years old. I read that book until it almost fell apart. She liked horror movies, too, and Alfred Hitchcock, and The Twilight Zone, and Halloween. Turns out we had a lot in common! Maybe she sensed that appreciation of the gothic in me from an early age.
Anyhow, the story about Uncle Harold and my Grandma Steib, then when I think about her later, knowing her as I did when I was a boy and young man…what must it have been like, to have known what she’d inadvertently done to the little boy with the sweet smile? Haunting, as I say. And in 1936, during the Great Depression. It serves to remind me how dark and shadowy that period must have been for many Americans, especially Grandma Steib and her husband. The house I remember from my childhood is their little farmhouse on Keefer Road in Liberty Township in Trumbull County, Ohio, where I grew up, but their first house was in Pennsylvania. They lost that house when the bank foreclosed on it. My mom said that her mom told her that Grandpa Steib struggled to get the money they owed on the house but got to the bank after 12 noon, the deadline to prevent the bank from foreclosing on the property. So they lost their house. Grandma remembered looking out the back window of the car, looking at that house, as they drove away and came into Ohio. This is a world that I’m glad we have gotten past, although we still do live in a world where banks rule. Maybe that’s why Grandpa Steib drank so much.
• One of the best comments I’ve ever read is by Alphonse Daudet, the nineteenth-century French author. Naturalism; social observation; a very clean, almost conversational style from the little of him that I’ve read. Found this in a book called The Practical Cogitator, the 1970s paperback (originally published in the 1940s). Here it is: “Music is another planet.” Perfect. Perfect.
• When I think of death, I think of the birth and death dates in the articles about personages included in encyclopedias. I’m sure this comes from all the hours I spent reading many of the articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica my Aunt Nancy, on my dad’s side, gave to us in the mid-1960s. It was the 24-volume 1964 edition, and I kind of fell in love with it. One reason for that is because I am a word nerd who loves to read. Also, when I was young, I wanted to know everything. I failed in that regard in terms of, oh, chemistry, higher math, physics…many of the sciences, although I love science, at least in the way a lay person does. (I’m there for Nova every week on PBS, and I scour the Web for all sorts of stuff, chiefly archaeology.) Anyhow, I was not a sports-minded kid, so when my dad and brother would settle in to watch football on Sundays, or when there were no interesting old movies (I am also a movie nut) showing on TV on rainy Saturdays, I’d sit on my bed and read Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, this or that odd science fiction novel, or stuff in the Britannica, all sorts of things. I still recall reading the article on fashion, clothing, attire…whatever it was called. Fascinating. The movies, especially silent movies. Architecture and buildings. Musicians, artists. Anything about ancient history.
But the articles on famous individuals were interesting because who they were and when and what they had done, or not done, was now complete. Their years were there to prove it. Born this year, died that year. What must it feel like to have one’s name and the pertinent aspects of one’s life concentrated in that way into an article and facts weighed, conclusions drawn, because one has passed on? I wondered if there were anything I could ever accomplish that would make it worthwhile for me to be included in such an encyclopedia or register. When my wife, Janine, and I moved to Chicago, I found a copy of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, published in 1997, on the shelf at a Barnes & Noble store Janine and I used to visit with our friend Joe Bonadonna. I remember pointing it out to Joe and saying, “We know who isn’t going to be in here,” meaning me. I looked. I was in there. Really? And still am in there, I guess. It’s now all online. And I have a Wikipedia page, too, which is really something. A fan of mine at Stanford University created it years ago. I was amazed to learn that. Other friends of mine update it occasionally. So now I have my birth year in parentheses after my name and eventually—but not too soon, I hope—will have the closing date. I have my family, whom I love, and I want to stick around for them (and they want me to, too), and I still have things I want to write, including some very creepy little horror stories and a couple more novels, at least, including a ghost story. So we’ll see. I’m at the keyboard every day; it’s a habit formed in high school and one I cannot break. So we’ll see. But it still does something to me to see myself listed along with people who’ve really accomplished a lot of things as an entry in some book or list online. I guess I am still the twelve-year-old who read Poe and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Marvel Comics and Famous Monsters of Filmland and science fiction novels and wondered how they did it, writers. Where did they get their ideas, and how did they ever get published?