Slipping In & Out of Eden

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“If you believe in your dreams, you run the risk of spending your entire life asleep.”—Chinese Proverb

“The ability to delude yourself is an important survival tool.”—Jane Wagner

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—12/20/10—The history of antebellum South Carolina is replete with stories of dashing cavalrymen and hoop-skirted women who vow to wait till hell freezes over. The initial phase of romance is what Anita Brookner called “that wonderful beginning,” since the middle and end are anyone’s guess.

The middle, for Charleston, began in the winter of 1863, when the frozen city faced the flames of its endgame. This complex romantic saga is neatly encapsulated in the story of Lt. George Dixon and his sweetheart, Queenie Bennett. When the war began, Queenie gave her betrothed a newly minted twenty-dollar gold piece with an embossed portrait of Miss Liberty resembling Queenie, or so Dixon thought. At Shiloh, a Union bullet hit the coin in Dixon’s pocket and ricocheted away. As soon as he recovered from the bruising, Dixon had the reverse side of his coin sanded and engraved, “Shiloh/April 6, 1862/My life Preserver/GD.” Less than two years later, Dixon drowned minutes after sinking the USS Housatonic. The CSS Hunley, piloted by Dixon, had accomplished the first successful destruction of an enemy vessel by a submarine. In 2001, Dixon’s remains, and Bennett’s coin, were recovered from the rusting hulk of the ship that took Queenie’s beau to the bottom of Charleston harbor.

“Bless their hearts,” many South Carolinians might say of Dixon and Bennett, but I grew up in a feet-on-the-ground family that subscribed to a newspaper, Time, National Geographic, and several other publications of a similar ilk. I cannot recall my mother watching a soap opera or my father escaping into fiction. The only exception was the time Dad injured his leg in jump school at Ft. Benning. Someone brought him Thomas Costain’s Below the Salt, a footstool-sized historical romance, and he surprised everyone by finishing it. But as soon as he was off the footstool and on his feet again, it was back to magazines like The Military Engineer.

When my father found himself without a war to fight in Germany, he promptly volunteered for the invasion of Japan. When that “theater of operations” resolved itself while he was sailing toward the Pacific, he came home, warless. However, he soon found himself in Korea, and I don’t recall that he regretted the transfer. To Dad, wars were not glorious, flag-waving adventures; instead, they offered a chance to be promoted.

Knowing what I know of my father’s upbringing, I should not blame him for the failure of his romantic imagination. When our family went to visit our paternal grandparents in 1957, my younger sister, who was nine at the time, asked Dad if he would stop the car about half a block short of his old home. While I watched from the back seat, she ran to the door with a hat pulled down to her eyes, knocked on the door, and asked the lady of the house, “Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?” Said her grandmother, who had not seen her in several years, “I know you’re Karen. I saw your father stop down the street. Now take off that silly hat and come inside.” Over 50 years later, my sister says she still remembers the keen disappointment when Grandmother Eisiminger refused to indulge her.

Perhaps this incident and my parents’ influence in a roundabout way help to explain why I prefer reading non-fiction, though I have written poetry for 40 years. As my wife of the same period claims, “Skip would rather carry a box of tampons to work than a Harlequin Romance.” She’s right, but I have not always been that way. As an adolescent, I reminded myself of Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage. This was largely due to my obsession with the Victory at Sea television series, which dealt with the naval battles of the Atlantic and Pacific in World War Two, not Henry’s tales of medieval chivalry. When I went to the firing range in basic training, the closest thing to a hot war I experienced, I wondered where the resonant voice-over and Richard Rogers’ music were.

There’s an old story about a woman who wheels her granddaughter into a photographer’s studio. The elderly female clerk says, “Oh, what an adorable little face!”

Says the grandmother, “Wait till you see her pictures.”

Realist that I am, I don’t embrace photographs, but I usually indulge the fantasies of those who do. Sometimes, however, the temptation to re-anchor the feet of those I love is overwhelming. When our children were growing up, I was the parent who pointed out that Jack may have run up the hill to fetch a pail of water, but there was little likelihood of a well on a hilltop when wells were dug by hand.

Moreover, I was pleased when our daughter compensated for the loss of her father with an imaginary friend while I was absent in graduate school. But I was even more pleased when Ookpick disappeared on the heels of my return. Yes, I was jealous of a fictional surrogate.

Vibrating near the leading edges of my frontal lobes is the memory of my first landlady, a widow of many years. I did not know her before her husband died but, like Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, Carrie was apparently compensating for what life had neglected to provide her. She lived in a world with no PMS, acne, or colonoscopies, but with lots of amnesia, sudden paralysis, and temporary blindness.

In her world, all the firewood was cut, split, and stacked in the basement, or as one kindling dealer put it in his newspaper ad, “all the romance without the heartache.” In her world, Tuscany was good, South Dakota bad; lighted castle towers white, silos black; and yin never mixed with yang. In her Tuscan towers, work was a soul-baring chat at the water cooler with a sensitive guy named Lance.

I’ll never forget how crushed Carrie was when CBS’s Dallas came to an end and Bobby Ewing revealed that the entire 14-season run had been a dream. I’m told that before Carrie died, the names most frequently on her lips were those of the Pierces and Glorias who had come into her home for 60 years every weekday afternoon. Reva, one of the women from Guiding Light, had been married nine times and thrice resurrected!

“Bless her heart,” as Carrie would say.

Having said all this, I must admit that my wife and I are fans of ABC’s Desperate Housewives. We have never missed an episode in six seasons and, regardless of what concert is on PBS or football game is on NBC, every Sunday we take a trip down Wisteria Lane to watch “the wives.” Like Shakespeare’s “penny stinkards,” we cheer and boo as our favorites rise and fall. It’s all great fun. Our friends and family think cups are missing from our cupboard, but we’ve never felt a need to justify how we furnish our kitchen. We are not exhibiting the romantic folly of the Polish cavalry when the Wehrmacht came calling in tanks; we’re just slipping back into the Garden of Eden for an hour. (You won’t believe how the garden’s snakes have multiplied.) We resume our responsibilities at ten.