When Peculiar People Decide That You Are Acting Peculiar!

(written 11/5/22 to 11/2022)

In April of 1946, three of my mother’s siblings decided my mother was acting peculiar.

Peculiar enough to permanently end her college pursuits and dreams (it is appearing she was interested in getting a degree in music rather than business), by withdrawing her from West Virginia University without her consent when she was a student in good standing, gainfully employed and a twenty-two year old adult.

Peculiar enough to be violent with her.

And peculiar enough to throw her to the curb at the old Weston Hospital – now known as the Trans-Alleghany Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia – and enumerating on the intake records why they thought she was peculiar.

This torturous place was a well-known, convenient drop-off in that region at that time for the likes of un-submissive wives, burdensome elderly and family members deemed peculiar (or otherwise an uncooperative nuisance).

While I can’t yet write my speculations with any certainty, part of me wants to say my mother was thrown to the curb from birth by her family and older siblings. Every family has its secrets, some darker than others, and the idea of the scapegoat goes far back into human narrative and well-known stories of family dysfunction. But, that part of my mother’s story is still incomplete in my research so as to incisively speak on some things.

__________

When my Aunt Mabel (my mother’s second oldest sister, born in 1910) went into a nursing home, I was invited into her home to look through some remaining items and take anything I might want. The bulk of this expression is about my peculiar selection of one item, in particular, but seems to toy with some other things currently percolating (or peculiar-rating) in my contemplations and upcoming writings.

I took away an amount of photos that I was told remained and were available, and might have some of my mother in them. I also selected one single item – a turquoise blue plastic pitcher.

I have this pitcher on my porch to water plants, and have kept it in various spots in my kitchen(s) throughout the years.

When homes are cleaned out and relatives decide which items to keep and which to let go of, I imagine many little and seemingly peculiar decision-making is involved in the process.

Surely there were little knick-knacks and other more semi-valuable or visually interesting items that I might have selected from, but I chose this cheap, celadon blue (to be precise) plastic pitcher.

I imagine this pitcher was brought home from one of the restaurants Aunt Mabel waitressed at. I recall she worked at Sambo’s and later, another (I think). I recall times of visiting in her kitchen and her having various foods served up on various interesting table cloths, utensils and otherwise.

First, the color of that item smells like the 1960’s to me, even though it probably dates to the 50’s before I was born. No doubt, it is why I can smell this color in my mind’s eye…

In my mind’s eye I not only smell the celadon bluish plastic pitcher, I taste the sounds of my mother and Mabel bickering over family stuff I couldn’t begin to make sense of, while another bowl of applesauce was shoved in front of me and my father smoked Marlboros with more coffee.

I can feel the taste of his 5th cup of coffee (but hey, did I really count…it’s just some impression) as I see him head out to the porch, possibly passing by one of the rooming tenants.

I hear my feet see to follow him – past the glass dishes filled with wrapped butterscotch candies and Wrigley’s gum and hear the feel of the metal coal furnace grate in the hall as it smells my skipping out after my Daddy.

We sit on the porch – maybe play checkers for the twentieth time or walk up to some little nearby market. I feel the vibrations of the train that slowly rumbled within about 20 feet of that house at 300 East 3rd Street, Frederick, Maryland.

An address that will live in family infamy, apparently!

And then, somehow we are back in the kitchen and Aunt Mabel has her waitress uniform on and is raving and shouting at my mother in some type of West Virginia-ish accent and my mother raving back.

In my mind’s ear I remember Aunt Mabel – all frenetic, nervous and revved up – dramatically shouting things along the lines of “calm down now Marget…Marget (or maybe Margot, some weirdish pronunciation of my mother’s name) settle you down now.” (This caricature of my memory is probably enhanced from my mother’s actual recordings of her and Mabel on the phone, made during the 1970’s).

Likely there are papers – documents and notes – and all sorts of stuff going on and my mother has layed them all over the counters or table, and my father has smoke coming out of his ears in Aunt Mabel’s kitchen just as he has smoke coming out of his ears in our little house in Delaware.

And back we come inside Aunt Mabel’s house from the summer heat…I’ve probably smelled every rose in her gardens and peeked into every shut bedroom door in the house, maybe once or twice sneaking to the upstairs.

In the downstairs of this city rowhouse in Frederick, Maryland, we usually slept (all three of us) in the very front room. Piles of clothes and messes were cleared away and I have vague impressions of late-night arguing over getting clean sheets and fans going and the train and…the strange city lights outside in the darkness…and the smell of Aunt Mabel’s “rooming house.”

I remember my mother’s suspicion that Mabel may be secretly married to Figgie…a long-term male roomer. Because, that would negate the convoluted will being endlessly debated amongst siblings that stated Mabel could live in that house as long as she never married.

Ha.

Ha???
__________
I’m not certain who wrote the will (possibly another sibling, Roderick, and I do not have the document or know how it was composed and especially, why it was composed in that way) but it went along the lines of: The house had belonged to Ora, but Mabel lived there. After Ora passed away, Mabel could keep living there as a “lifetime estate” so long as she never married. If she married, or passed away, the proceeds from the property were then to be divided between the remaining living siblings.

I believe at the point of my Aunt Ora’s (the oldest sibling in the family) death that eight siblings were living. I can recall my mother’s obsession about sizes of the shares, whether they were equal shares or otherwise – should Mabel die – and it seemed that among some of the siblings there had been verbal (or perhaps written) trading going on for other reasons.

It could best be described (if one had to listen to it all) as some type of convoluted shell-game going on and everyone arguing over it. It felt very “Hatfield-McCoy-like” to me! I still have a few letters that went back and forth between my mother and some of her brothers over the matter. My mother seemed to believe that some of the siblings had verbally “given her” their share at some point.

In retrospect as I sift through various things I have from my mother’s stuff, I begin to ponder what the genesis of the actual underlying dispute(s) was but it is a matter that can never be quite understood at this point. Whether some of her siblings may have felt some remorse over their abusive and damaging behavior toward my mother in 1946 and its possible consequences upon her outcome and trajectory, I can only speculate as one possibility.

__________

But, back to my Aunt Mabel’s house circa 1973…

As I dare to peek into other closed rooms there are piles of stuff everywhere. I remember a few times Aunt Mabel letting me look in her attic and finding old, fancy women’s clothing and shoes that perhaps she gave me a few of on occasion to take back to Delaware to play dress-up with my friends.

I recall a visit made there the summer after my high school graduation where I proudly drove my mother’s vehicle (and her) all the way to western Maryland and ended up at 300 East 3rd Street to visit Aunt Mabel, along with a visit from another aunt, uncle and cousin.

Aunt Mabel had a polaroid camera in one of her kitchen cabinets as I recall, and given my interest then (and now) in artsy images and photography, I have a few gems of myself and this cousin posing with some of Aunt Mabel’s (or perhaps even my mother brought jewelry along) paraphernalia in her kitchen.

I can remember the grease, and the sagging floor. I can remember my urges to help by deep cleaning surfaces, washing dishes, sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor and scrubbing her bathroom. If my mind’s eye serves me correctly, her bathroom was tiled with some shade of blue/celadon as well.

I can smell the cleansers and whatever brand soap she kept in there, vaguely…and surely my youthful cleaning escapades are all blurring together and did not exist in this singular visit the summer of 1981.

But, I can recall as I matured into late middle school and high school the satisfaction I seemed to get in asking Aunt Mabel whether I might deep clean that downstairs bathroom. Walking away from the bickering in her kitchen and doing something useful made me feel like an adult, I suppose.

And likely, a part of me wanted my own father’s admiration that I was becoming a domesticated young woman-girl.

But…yeah…likely my Daddy and I wandered back in, more than once, to that kitchen and likely that celadon blue pitcher was filled with cold water for us. My memory is non-specific…it just visually looked like something I might smell there.

Isn’t that how our memories are, to some extent?

They exist in some realm where senses cross over typical neural pathways.

They exist in some place that has prompted me to repeatedly dream throughout my lifetime that I’m in Aunt Mabel’s house…

In the dreams, I am always opening new doors and finding new rooms and items...

In the dreams, I feel I am someplace I am not supposed to be…

In the dreams, I am imagining possibilities – I could clean the dust and grime, organize the stuff or clear it out…I could paint and remodel…and…and…I could somehow live there in this dream location of some rambling city rowhouse that existed in some other time, space and geographic location…

So, when invited to take something from my Aunt Mabel’s lifetime of stuff,
I saw that pitcher and claimed it.

That was nearly thirty years ago.

I think back to conversations with a family member that if I held now, I would ask different and new questions.

In the spaces between various words and stories I was told about my mother’s early life, why now do the most obvious questions that should have leapt into my mind now appear?

Truly, our abilities to process and inquire into family histories evolve as we age.

It is likely why people of my age become interested in family genealogy and preserving of stories in various ways.

Here’s the thing.

If today – in 2022 – I was somehow in the position I was in back around the mid-1990’s and knew Aunt Mabel’s house was being cleaned out, you know what I would do?

Well…I’d wave a magic wand…and…somehow…in this impossibility of retroactive scenario for many impossible reasons…I would volunteer to help.

Yep, I would work alongside others to go through Aunt Mabel’s possessions – every attic box, every bedroom trunk, any crawl spaces, dark, dank basements – with a fine-toothed comb.

In fact, I would do an even more careful job in my mother’s house, too.

I certainly saved a number of items that help tell not only my story but my mother’s life story, yet, new situations, information and lenses of questioning and understandings I have in 2022 would prompt me to look for and save other things.

Items I probably glanced at then and disposed of as having no possible future need or meaning.

Yes…if only I, also, could have explored Aunt Mabel’s “stuff.” One item in particular, after reading and re-reading parts of my mother’s 1946 diary which thankfully, I possess, an item my mother wonders if Aunt Mabel took into her own possession (to apparently, hide some dark family secrets and truths about a situation) is something I would have kept my eye out for.

Sure, this is fantasy…purely to add to the intrigue of things, currently. That situation would have never been possible, nor otherwise available to me. I just wasn’t involved in that way with Aunt Mabel.

But currently, I am re-reading my mother’s 1946 diary and there are a number of references to Aunt Mabel which intrigue me.

I am seeking a variety of information from places one can legitimately seek various documenting records.

It is becoming an ever-increasing fascinating journey. Better than mindlessly watching TV in the evening. But, a slow journey that I can’t devote full-time energies to, of course.

Which, keeps me in some state of backburner frustration and suspense as I would love to waive some magic wand of storytelling, writing, illustrating and information-gathering and proudly hold some form of a completed work and then move on to my next pursuit(s)…

Yes, I struggle to not let it consume me! And, I celebrate a couple of close friends who dialogue regularly over my findings, theories and questions and find it so fascinating, as well.

It certainly is a huge task. It is a huge organizational and writing project, with a seemingly unknown end point.

And as mentioned, frustrates me, artistically and personally.

I see things in my mind.

In my mind as I go through my waking work and responsibilities, there seem to be some files and programs running here-and-there in the background of my brain’s hard drive systems…where I’m working out the sequence, expressions and presentations of the many stories and things I’m attempting to put together.

I do this first for my own self, secondly for my sons (hopefully one day they will want to better understand their own life story, which includes mine…and mine includes my mother’s…and generations before that…) and lastly (though part of me wonders if eventually, this person will move to number one) for my mother.

Yes, you read that right.

I’m having an amazing growth experience through this process in certain unexpected aspects.

Currently, some of my drafts of essential life stories are somewhat on pause as somehow I have taken a turn for exploring more deeply the events of April 1946 in my mother’s young life.

The best approach that I can see at the moment, in terms of written expressions, is to just leave some trails of breadcrumbs.

Like a good and captivating book or show…it is the slow unfolding of various chapters or episodes in the series that keep us coming back.

What is going to happen next?
We wonder!

Today, the thought crossed my mind (as it relates to accusations or descriptors made by 2-4 family members on the intake report of my mother’s admission to the old Weston Hospital, now known as the Trans-Alleghany Lunatic Asylum) that inarguably the John Curry Linger family, collectively, by their own statements in book-form family histories, as well in general internal understandings long passed around in-and-between various family members… has got to be one of the most “peculiar” collection of humans I have ever encountered!

(Please note, on the above YouTube link my goal is not to affirm or emphasize the current marketing of the old Weston Hospital as part of the haunted industry, but, some points made in the video do shed light on how awful of a place it was, in the seen realm and also, the unseen spiritual realms. Early in the video comment is made that family members could easily be dropped off there if they became too problematic, and then labeled as “crazy.” I am highly interested in the truth of what led to my mother seemingly and potentially being the victim of this familiar behavior. My trip over the summer to Buckhannon was eye-opening in various ways, and I repeatedly heard how this local hospital was used by the locals).

Humor has been incredibly valuable to me during my lifetime. The best humor comes from the ability to connect (or re-assemble, as I name this ability) seemingly disparate things into some new connection that is truly funny.

The dark comedy, in particular, does this quite well.

Many families possess traits associated with the highly intelligent, highly creative and highly functioning folks that society so admires, values and benefits from.

Rapid thinking and loose associations are some of the essential building blocks of humor, innovation, poetry, novels, music, film and an endless amount of both ordinary and extraordinary things.

In my recent searches and contacts there are now at least five individuals (four women and a man) – one from New York City, three from West Virginia and one from Virginia whom I have only engaged with by phone and email that have made it a point in various ways to be helpful, go the extra mile and even cheer me on in my pursuits.

Today, one person by phone said, “I did this for my own family a few years ago.”

In another email earlier today, a person said, “I love what you are doing!”

In another email, a clerical person made an insightful comment/observation about a certain record and the my mother’s story associated with it…and ended her sentence with a sideways laughing emoji.

Both of the couple closer friends I mentioned earlier have had valuable insights into a few things – angles of perspective that are aiding me in fleshing out and exploring what really happened in Morgantown, West Virginia between April 3-April 5, 1946.

But, back to the theme of peculiar.

I pause for a moment to ponder…
when peculiar people call someone peculiar.

My mother was in fact (as I knew her) quite peculiar. I am not questioning that fact.

I’m just not so sure she was always that peculiar…nor that her pursuits at that age were far more understandable than she was given credit for.

I do believe she was definitely the victim of a quite peculiar – and potentially treacherous and undoubtedly damaging – web of people, places and events.