Winter Fundraiser 2014, Day Four

For a long time the Baron has been voting for this theme — “Odd Jobs” — of our checkered careers as a good choice for these week-long fund raisers. After all, if our readers were going to fund part of this undertaking, they deserved some information on the proprietors. Besides, I think he’s rather proud of his perseverance. He’s entitled, methinks.

I’m not sure what made me hesitate; probably my reluctance to face the fact that I’m not healthy or robust enough to ever rejoin the ranks of workers or volunteers in tasks that formerly brought such pleasure. And frankly, I’d rather talk about his work than I would my own. It was not only more varied, but his temperament — an optimism which permits him to live in the sunlight — was less fraught than my own experience.

So let’s begin with our differences in talent and temperament, since those are basic to who we are no matter what we’re doing.

Perhaps this part should have come first, before describing any of the various jobs we had. But after digging through our memories of those times, it now seems important to point out how this most unlikely proposition called the Baron and Dymphna @ The Counterjihad came to be. That means differentiating the components. Even as I write, I feel the Baron ducking as he has to edit this later, and I hear echoes of “too much information” from some of our readers, but c’est la guerre, y’all. For our readers who would rather not know, it’s easy enough to move past this post and on to less Alice-in-Wonderland essays. For the readers who are mystified by some of the glosses I used to save making this any longer than it is already, feel free to ask questions.

Consider this post the basement for a structure from which you can see more coherently the reasons and seasons for the life we built together, a life which improbably ended up as mere prelude to Gates of Vienna. In order to have you standing there on the first floor, first I have to dig the foundation, put in a few joists to hold the thing together, and only then can we get back to all those unlikely jobs.

Beginnings

The Baron describes his family of origin as “boring”. By that he means no dramas, no secrets, no flouncing out of the room or the relationship when the ship hit turbulent waters. His mother went to college, working briefly at a local paper and then as a history teacher before she married his father. The Baron’s dad missed out on college: that pesky Depression meant there was no money to attend Williams College, where his own father had studied. And then the war came along and sent millions of men scattering in new directions, at least the ones who survived. For his dad, the army decided, in its infinite wisdom, to send him south, to Virginia, and based on his aptitude tests, to put him in a new division of military work: intelligence-gathering (or more specifically, cryptography). The Baron never knew exactly what his father did except that he couldn’t talk about it to his family. The job required that the family move to England while when the B was set to begin high school. Once stationed there, his parents decided their son should attend a local school rather than the alternative American version.

Their family took annual vacations which he remembers fondly; his father and the Baron enjoyed sharing the Guardian crossword puzzle and other brain-teasers. His mother liked being a wife and mother in a period when that was an acceptable ‘job’. She also liked bird-watching and sewing.

On both sides of his family the Baron was American back to the beginning. His father’s New England forebears were not penurious when they arrived straight from England. The family lived for generations in Massachusetts; some still do, and he has the variously updated genealogy books to prove these antecedents. His mother’s family, Virginian to the bone, had once owned slaves — not a proud fact, but for most old-time Southerners it’s a reality. The family also included Civil War heroes and a mixture of German, Scots, French, and Lord-knows-what-else — all safely WASP, however. Well, maybe not so safely A-S, with those annoying Celts and Franks and Teutons — but definitely no Papists in the mix.

I believe he did find a maternal cousin, once removed, who was known to have had a “problem with drink”. And if I have the story right, a great-grandfather ran off to West Virginia to run a casino and acquired a common-law wife. In a small Virginia town, that must’ve raised some eyebrows — though this rake continued to support his real family, of course. Things were different then.

The B finished his A-Levels in Yorkshire before returning to America to William and Mary, the same college his mother had attended. He says he missed honeysuckle and turtles and lightning bugs too much to have seriously considered Oxbridge or a deeply academic life.

In that we are similar. I’m an “intellectual”, but graduate studies were stifling, though I did consider it before divorce and the ruination of my first family left me destitute and eventually disabled. Continue reading →