Children of the City of Certainties, part 2.
“Everything we have said about Des Moines has been found to be exactly true.”— “Des Moines the City of Certainties has Made Good.” In: The World’s Work, vol. 23, 1911.
Image to the right: “Krug’s Woe is a Tabloid Wow.” Life, August 4, 1947, pp. 26-28. Caption: “THE WHAM GIRL, Judy Cook, was employed at Lockheed Factory as a riveter during the war but also helped entertain Hughes’ guests. Company newspaper said she made ‘wham by day and trouble for the Japs by night.’
My Uncle Spike told me a joke from his college days when I was 13 years old.
There was a newlywed couple who went on an ocean cruise for their honeymoon, and the virginal bride was taking quite a conjugal pounding as they crossed the ocean. Full story »
Part 1 in a series.
Children feel both overawed and utterly repulsed by their parents. We are children, going from literal to hidden to metaphorical to crisis childhood, careening from pillar to post across the jukebox townships that are our lives. All of us, all, spin out skeins of push and pull, memory and revision, a miserable, familiar, exquisite chrysalis of family that promises a moth that cannot emerge.
I interrogate my brain, history, my old Child Development textbooks for evidence that this is not so, or, as is true of many things I hold true, that the idea is so thoroughly midcentury, Midwestern, middle class as to be precious bullshit. But so far it stands up. It stands up, gains speed, and runs backward and forward in parabolas across geography and time, first across Polk County, then Iowa, then the US, in grand slicing arcs of nicotine, nail polish and brick, that leads now to an entire country caught under the bowl of my family, sewn up in bedclothes, smothered by my family romance. My family has you surrounded. Full story »
