I’ve been thinking about my high school friends because I’m going to talk at the memorial service of one of my pals of those days, my cousin Mike. He was a few years younger, but into ham radio and backyard rockets, so he fit right in with the guys I knew. We played together some as little kids, but by the time I was in junior high we were both living in the LA area, his father had died, and I think the grown-ups felt he could use a hit of father energy, so he came to stay with us at Christmas and Easter and for a couple of weeks every summer. He lived in the Valley and I lived in Long Beach, so we didn’t see each other in between. We were both only children, so we were each other’s sort-of siblings, but without the sibling rivalry, and we were never together long enough to get on each other’s nerves.

 

We would play Monopoly till he got bored and grabbed all the money and threw it in the air, crying “I’m filthy rich!” He got a chemistry set one Christmas we both played with; I remember turning “water” into “wine.” One year I got what I thought would be the makings of two cigar-box spectroscopes (I’d been reading about the discovery of helium) but I think I got the wrong kind of lens because we couldn’t get them to work. Edmund Scientific probably has kits now. Mike had the idea of stringing a radio aerial on the roof of our one-story house but got dizzy and had to sit on the shingles with me for a while before he could get back on the ladder. I was better at heights, but he was better at thinking up things to do; for instance, putting bluing in the water in one side of the double sink and siphoning it into the clear water in the other sink. Much more fun than drying the dishes, which is what we were supposed to be doing. My favorite was when he took an empty quart milk carton, they were waxed in those days, filled it a quarter full of water, put it in the middle of the kitchen floor and lit it. It burned nicely and then always put itself out. Of course when my mother came in in the middle of one of the burnings, she didn’t know that.

One day when his mother came to pick him up I had my ballet practice barre up, my mother’s typewriter was on my grandmother’s old dining-room table by the window, her music on the piano at the other end of the room, and Mike and I were testing probability theory by throwing dice at the dining-room table in the middle, the one we actually dined on. Aunt Lil said “This looks like a scene from ‘You Can’t Take It with You” and when I read the play I had to agree.

I’ve been listening to some interviews of Mike done in the eighties for the biography of my mother. He was so articulate about the changes in her voice and performance over the years, things I was too close to notice. He was a good singer but also a perceptive listener. I’ll miss his inside-outside perspective on my family.

©2010 by Nancy Schimmel