Category Archives: Tingles

I have been visiting Brother Dan for the last few weeks after my guitar lessons on Friday.  So first I go to Dan, the guitar teacher, and then I get on the freeway for a little bit and visit Brother Dan.  He went back to work .50% about two weeks ago.  It’s hard to tell how he is doing or what he is doing for that matter.  But then, since he got into the computer game, I have never been sure exactly what he was doing.  But whatever it was he was successful at it; he kept moving up and getting paid more and more.

Generally, he seems to have been hired as a communicator.  He had some technical knowledge, I guess, and he would translate that technical knowledge into even less technical language so the sales staff would understand it.  He would be like, sell this and sell that and tell them what it was exactly they were selling and what it was worth.  At his old job this meant selling stuff of the kind that Cisco Systems makes, like enterprise multi-protocol routers.  Whatever the hell that is.

But after the big dot com crash, people all over the country were stuck with mounds and mounds of technical stuff that they couldn’t use.  The company he worked for—which he called a computer junk yard—bought up this stuff, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, and still in the original packaging, and would sell it again sometimes to small municipalities that wanted up to date stuff and sometimes overseas.  I seem to remember something about a connection in Rumania.

So he would be on the phone and make an offer, pennies on the dollar, for a bunch of stuff sitting in an abandoned office somewhere in Indiana, and the guy on the other end would be practically crying, like you can’t mean that.  And my brother would say, because it was true, I am sorry but that’s what it’s worth.  Like “Take it or Leave it.”

Maybe because he was in charge of making million dollar purchases of this stuff and was about the only person who knew what the stuff was and why they were buying it (because Brother Dan knew what was valuable and could be resold), he was put in charge of the company warehouses.  One of the warehouses—the biggest one I think—was in Dallas, TX.  So he would have to fly there from time to time and walk around the warehouse.

And that warehouse was a mess.  Nobody knew where anything was.  Valuable stuff would be piled over in a corner  unprocessed, other stuff would be mislabeled.  This was a pisser because you can’t sell stuff if you don’t know you have it, where it is, or what it is.  So he would go down there and give them a pep talk or tell them to concentrate on this and that, though he seemed to know whatever he did was going to be a lost cause, since the real problem was the company wasn’t paying its warehouse guys nearly enough to make them pay attention to any sort of details.

He worked for that place for a goodly amount of time.  God, could it have been ten years?  And before that he was at another computer place.  And before that he drove a beer delivery truck for 12 years. He was good at that too and I could understand what he was doing.

Brother Steve had a burst of energy and went to the bank in Escondido to see if he could get into Joan’s safety deposit box and perhaps locate her original will that the lawyer wants (along with a death certificate).  He had the death certificate, but no key to the deposit box, so they said he had the right to get into the box but they would have to get somebody to pull the lock.  Then he remembered that maybe he had seen the key in one of Joan’s purses that might be in the storage area where we put the stuff from Delridge.  So he went there—sure, enough—found the key, went to the bank, got in the safety deposit box and located the original will along with Brothers Dave and Dan and my birth certificates.  Then he went over to Joan’s lawyers and dropped off the original will as well as the death certificate, and so—thanks to his efforts—we have got the ball rolling on the lawyer side of things.

Brother Steve reports he got a T. Rex CD, which was sort of odd since the day before I had been humming “Bang a Gong” in my head.

I am waiting for the lawyer paper work.  All sorts of things to fill out, and of course they want a 2000 dollar retainer.

I brought up the coca cola vigil thing with my students, showing them some pictures from the web.  I huffed and puffed about how tawdry I thought it was—displaying one’s grief with coca cola cup. And then said, though, maybe I was overreacting and what did they think.  They didn’t say I was over-reacting, but then they didn’t find anything particularly wrong with it either.  Well, a little bit maybe.  Though all seemed to accept the coca cola cup thing as an indication of how much the consumer culture has become part of all we do…for better or worse, I guess.

I am running on empty.  Last night I was trying to respond to a student’s email and I kept putting my fingers on the wrong keys and coming out with stuff like akjoaduioa—and I just couldn’t stop doing it.  I need to rest somehow but it’s hard to rest when you can’t relax, and I can’t relax because it seems like I have this little engine down there some where that is running at full speed and I can’t shut it off.
 

 Cousin Beth sent along the image of the Pepsi Cola Vigil.  This is a picture of students at Furman College, in Greenville SC, honoring the dead students at VT.  Cousin Lucy who works in the public relations office at Furman says the students at Furman were pretty deeply affected by events at VT.

 I was a bit surprised at the Pepsi Cola cups since in the South, as I understand it, Coke is king.  A high school in Georgia held a Coke day and all the students came to school wearing Coca Cola t-shirts, except for one maverick who came wearing a Pepsi shirt.  He was sent home for the day.

 Coke is king according to my understanding because it was developed by a man named Pemberton of Atlanta, GA.  I think the Coke headquarters are still there—in Atlanta.  But I am not sure.

Brother Dave and Sister-in-law Teresa drove up to SB to check in with Brother Dan and see how he was going, what with the stroke and all.  Later in the day they drove out to our place on the edge of town and we found ourselves swapping tales from the Joan and WB story book: aberrant acts of random violence.

I have already recounted in these pages, WB’s death threats towards Joan, involving a truck and a two pound hammer; I have also mentioned Joan’s attempt to stab WB with a kitchen knife.  Actually, the word “attempt” is wrong; she completed her action.  She stabbed WB but managed only to stick him in the arm.  She failed to realize her full intent.

But we started at one point swapping tales that we didn’t all know.  I hadn’t known for example that Joan had struck WB on the back of the head with a skillet, but, failing to render him unconscious, managed only to stun him.  I was perhaps digesting this story and sitting there in a daze I followed the rough outlines of the pieces of a story that once in focus caused me to laugh as hard as I have in weeks.

Towards the end, if one remembers, Joan was prone to falling down; this was particularly troublesome since once down she could not lift her flaccid body from the floor.  She was felled, one might say, and WB by that point was so withered up and weakened that he could not begin to get her back on her feet.  So as they had done on previous occasions and would do later, they put in a call to the fire department to come pick her up off the floor.

When the fire persons came to the rescue, however, they found the doors to the house locked.  WB had forgotten to unhinge the bolt, and so to rouse the inhabitants to action the fire persons went around the side of the house to see of the sliding plate glass door that allowed a view of the living room was open.  As they tried the door, itself locked, they saw WB in his withered and worn down state kicking at the prone and flabby Joan.  Apparently she was making some attempt to get away from the kicks because he had planted one foot on her chest to hold her down while he went at it with the other.

I could just see it there in my mind’s eye.  WB in his weakened state expending the little he had of energy kicking his prone wife of over 60 years while sputtering profanities—goddam cunt, fucking bitch, and so on.  For he could be profane, while she just lay there, well protected by her flab in all the stunning passivity by which she had exercised power and ruled the roost for so many years.

I just laughed.  A hard laugh.  And, to take the joke a step further, I got up and mimicking WB’s bent and feeble posture began to kick little feeble kicks at an imaginary Joan while muttering in a squeaky voice, take that you fat cow and so on.  Whereupon the others in the room, requested that I “stop it,” so I did, but got a deep chuckle every time I thought back on it.

Of course I did not sleep for shit.

Lately I have felt a bit like Andy Capps’ Joe Btfsplk.  Not because I feel I am a jinx as Joe was (I leave that to Jonah, king of jinxes), but because of that perpetual cloud over his head:

Dan called to say he had been in the hospital, Thurday night I guess it was.  But because he has a hard time talking, he wasn’t too clear on details.  So I drove to his place Friday and came away feeling upset because I woke him up from a nap, and while he made it clear something had happened, I left not knowing exactly what that was and feeling anxious.  So I drove down again today and Dan’s wife, Kim, said Dan had a mini-stroke. He lost sensation in his left hand but it came back.  At the hospital they did a catscan and pumped him full of a stronger blood thinner.

Kim drew a picture for me and I felt more secure looking at the picture.  It was something like this.  The big red area to the right is the first stroke, and the little red area below the big read area represents the mini  stroke.

In search of Joan’s mother’s first name, I emailed saying maybe it was Bernice, but next morning Brother Dave emailed to say that Aunt Betty’s first name was Bernice and since women, unlike men, do not seem to feel some need to name their girl children after themselves, that pretty much ruled out Bernice.

Brother Dave had found that info by going through stuff on the web; he found Aunt Bernice’s obituary.  So I thought, OK, I will check out the web too, and went to Ancestry.com that has mounds of documents and data bases.  All I had was Joan’s Mother’s last name:  Barrett.  So I started to search for Barretts born in England (that was another bit of info) and, man, you wouldn’t believe how many Barretts were born in England.  And then I remember I search births for England and Wales.  I knew she had grown up in Dorset, but, man, it was like every Barrett born in England was born in Dorset.

Finally I noticed the 1930 Census for the USA.  And bingo, I had it.  On a census children are recorded.  So I typed in Joan Kaller (Joan’s mother’s married name), and up comes one Joan Kaller from San Diego, California.  She is categorized as “daughter” and she is believed to be about 8 years old.  Then I type in Bernice Kaller, for cross confirmation, and up comes one Bernice Kaller in San Diego California in 1930.  And she is listed as about 10 years old; she also is listed as daughter.

And the mother of both was named Mabel.  So Joan’s mother’s name was Mabel Barrett Kaller.  In 1930, she was 41 years old and was indeed born in England in 1881.  Based on what Joan said—that her mother died when she was 12 years old—Mabel must have died in 1934 or 35.

Just to see what the old degenerate, reprobate was up to in 1930, I checked out Joan’s nerdowell father, Barney. He was born in 1888 in Canada, was 41 years old at the time of the census and is listed as “Lodger.”  His occupation is listed as restaurant Chef and he was in the army in WWI.  He apparently lived in a boarding housing with about 15 other people.  The head of the household was one William Crapp.

The categories for people in a household for the 1930 census are interesting.  One finds the usual, head, spouse, daughter, son, cousin, nephew, and so on, but also lodger, renter, boarder, roomer, hired man, and servant.

In any case, we were able to fill in the spot on the death certificate that asks for "mother’s name."

Mabel.

I woke up way too early again thinking, “Bernice?”

After Brother David called the night before last to say Joan had died I couldn’t sleep for a bit and while I was lying there it came to me out of nowhere that I didn’t know Joan’s mother’s first name.  I knew I had asked Joan once, “What is your mother’s first name?” and she told me, but I couldn’t remember.  I never met Joan’s mother; she died in 1934 as I figure it of breast cancer.  And when Joan spoke of her mother, she always called her “mama.”

I guess my unconscious was working on something because late yesterday I get a call from Brother Steve asking me if I knew Joan’s mother’s first name because they ask for that information on the death certificate.  I said I didn’t.  And then Brother Dave called asking me the same thing.

What the hell is a death certificate.  Whose business is it anyway?  Apparently though one has to be filled out before a cremation.

But I went home and tried to plow through the papers and pictures I have and couldn’t find a thing, and tried also to find the phone number of Joan’s one and only friend whom she had known since HS.  But her last name is Smith.  Try finding anybody named Smith. 

So I went to bed thinking “Elizabeth.”  But was pretty sure I was getting Joan’s mother confused with Elizabeth Barret Browning.  And then I thought “Anne” but I am pretty sure that was the name of our little sister who died before she was two weeks old.

This was all sort of funny in an odd way because the logical person to ask what her mother’s name was no longer available for questioning.  Is this what is called “missing somebody.”

———————————————————————————————————–

On the back of the above, Joan wrote: "This was one of mother’s favorite pictures of me.  I was 8 years old then." 

Joan K. Tingle
 

May 20, 1922—April 10, 2007

 I am glad I was able to speak for a few minutes with Joan this last Saturday, I guess it was.  She was pretty much out of it but we had a form of conversation.  We hooked up on something we frequently hooked up upon.  Family.  So I gave her the news about folks back in South Carolina and she asked about people and together we tried to recollect the names of people.  Perhaps because Joan had no family at all to speak of, she was interested in WB’s brothers and sisters and wanted to know what was up with them.  So I guess you could say we gossiped for a bit.  And then her concentration faded.

Here is something Joan wrote.  The top little blurb is by the now deceased editor of the former Tingle Family Newsletter:

Literary talent continues to surface from among many Tingle descendants. On the following pages we are pleased to include a well written and documented article by Joan K. Tingle of Valley Center, California. She is the wife of William Berner Tingle, Jr., a sixth generation descendant of John Tingle of Craven County, N.C. and the latter’s wife, Sarah Purifoy. His ancestor chart appeared in the previous issue (Fall 1988) of the newsletter. Her story, titled MONROE MEMORIES, starts on the next page:

MONROE MEMORIES

Joan Tingle

By May 1862, the alarming news of the critical defeat of the Confederate forces at the Battle of Shiloh, near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee on April 6 and 7, 1862 must have been known throughout the Confederate states. The South had suffered heavy losses in the Western theater of the war and replacement troops were being urgently recruited.

On May 6,1862 ,the four youngest Sons of Daniel and Parthenia Tingle of Monroe County, Georgia enlisted in Company H, 32nd Regiment Georgia Volunteer Infantry—Army of Tennessee.¹

Daniel Tingle, the eldest son of John and Sara Purifoy Tingle who migrated to Georgia from North Carolina in about the year 1803², had married Parthenia Hatcher in Jefferson County, Georgia in 1 823³ and had settled near his father’s home in Monroe County by 1 830.⁴ By the Civil War era, the Tingle family was well established in the Blount Community and active in the Paran Primitive Baptist Church there^.5 Sons and daughters of Daniel and Parthenia had married into neighboring families and were established on their own farms in the area.⁶ Monroe County was not an area of large plantations but rather one of substantial farms cleared from the gentle pine covered hills.⁷

Solomon Willie, the youngest son of Daniel and Parthenia was a lad sixteen years old when he enlisted on May 6. l862.8 His birth date was October 20, 1846. It is recorded that he was in an army hospital in Savannah, Georgia in July 1 862,but he later returned to his regiment and served until April 26, 1865 when he surrendered in Greensboro, North Carolina at the end of the tragic conflict.⁹ Solomon married Georgia Ann McCallum in 1868, settled in Henry County, Georgia, had a family of ten children and is buried in Beersheba Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery in Locust Grove, Georgia.’°

Another son of Daniel and Parthenia, McCarroll, who was horn November 9, 1833, had been married in 1858 to Nary Ann Persons Castleberry. and when he enlisted in the Confederate forces he left his wife with two small daughters and a newborn son.¹¹ On February 20, 1864, McCarroll was wounded in the left leg at Ocean Pond, Florida Records show he was captured at Macon, Georgia April 20—21, l865.¹² He returned home upon his release to farm and care for his wife and children. He is buried near his father and mother in Paran Cemetery in Blount, Monroe County. 13

The third son of this Tingle family who enlisted on that day in May 1862 was James Lafayette Tingle. Pension records show he was wounded in the left leg and permanently disabled at Ocean Pond, Florida February 20, 1864, and never returned to his regiment.¹⁴ His birth date was December 25, 1840, and during his long and active life he married twice. His first wife, whom he married December 26,1866, was Sarah E. McCallum. After her death, he married, on February 26,1884, Tommie Tucker. He fathered eight children by each wife and has hundreds of descendants throughout the South.¹⁵ James Lafayette lived to be almost ninety

years old and died April 21 1930.¹⁶

The fourth son of the Daniel Tingle family who enlisted on this same day in 1862 was Archibald Daniel who was born February 5,1835. He and Mary Mahala Treadwell had married in 1856, and they had three young Sons at the time Daniel Archibald left home to fight for the cause in which he believed. He served for three years and surrendered at the cessation of hostilities in Greensboro, North Carolina on April 26,1865. 17 To quote from the obituary of Archibald Daniel Tingle in a Monroe County newspaper,” At the close of the war he came home to his wife and children to begin again with what the Yankees had left him and to live in peace the rest of his life”.¹⁸ ”Mr. Archie” and “Miss Haley” had six more children, and he was a prosperous farmer and storekeeper in the community where he was born and lived all his life.¹⁹ Daniel Archibald Tingle died March 3, 1917. He is buried in Mt. Vernon Baptist Church Cemetery in Butts County, Georgia.²⁰

The Civil Wa
r years were a sad and trying period for parents both in the North and in the South. Daniel and Parthenia were fortunate that all four of their soldier Sons returned home to live long and useful lives. Their daughter, Louisa Jane, lost her husband, Enoch Tollerson, during his army service, and Daniel’s nephew, Jesse Tingle, the eldest son of John J. and Duemma Tingle died of variola fever while on active duty in 1863.²¹

So that homecoming in the early summer of 1865 was a dichotomy of joy and sorrow, hope and despair. But hope prevailed—hope for the future of the South and for the whole nation united once more.

Sources:

Muster Roll of Company H,32nd Regiment, Georgia Volunteer Infantry Army of Tennessee, C.S.A., Monroe County Georgia. Georgia Department of Archives and History.

2.             Hancock County, Georgia Wills and Estate Records 1794—l804. Volume A—AAAA.

3.             Marriage Records of Jefferson County, Georgia.

4.             Census Records of Monroe County, Georgia.

5.             Research of Edna Brown of Milner, Georgia based on records of Paran Primitive Baptist Church,

6.             Lot map of Monroe County, Georgia which shows property and owners thereof in Blount community.

7.             Appendix l, Monroe County Land Lottery of 1821 shows lots were 202 1/2 acres.

8.             Muster Roll of Company H.

9.             Ibid.

l0. Records of Daisie F. Duncan, Lawrenceville, Ga.

11 . Ibid.

12.         Muster Roll of Company H.

13.         Monroe County History.

14.         Muster Roll of Company H.

15.         Records of Edna Brown Milner, Georgia.

16.         Records of Daisie F.. Duncan, Lawrenceville, Ca.

17.         Muster Roll of Company H.

18.         Monroe Advertiser, 30 March 1917, p. 1.

19.         Records of Mary Tingle, Athens, Georgia.

20.         Tombstone in Mt. Vernon Cemetery, ,Butts County, Georgia.

21.         Muster Roll of Company H.

22.         Records of Tollerson family of Monroe, County, Georgia as compiled by Lorene Saario of Oceanside, Califorriia and based in part on Muster Roll of Company H.

The author, Joan K. Tingle, adds a footnote

I have been waking up at good awful hours for over a month.  At 530 am this morning and it’s still pitch dark outside.  I try to go back to sleep but just can’t.  Other things are involved, but at some deep level I have been anxious about Joan, I think.  Also I was talking to the guy a couple of doors down.  He is in his seventies and wakes up a 300 in the morning and sometimes can’t get back to sleep.  I have heard a person’s sleep patterns change with age.  Maybe I will just have to get used to this.

Right before going to bed, I read the following from Brother Dave:

We just got home. I guess we left j about 8:45 and her breathing really sounded bad. They kept cranking up the morphine but she never slept. I’m not sure if our being there wasn’t keeping her up some how? I mean just being there.Hard to explain I guess. Well, a new nurse came on and we got them to do the suction thing a couple of times. I did sign all the hospice papers and so on. I’m going to LVDN and then hospital in morning AT….after traffic.

“Hard to explain I guess.”  Maybe dying for some one in Joan’s particular condition requires letting go somehow deep down.  The unconscious is a beast.

David and Teresa sat with Joan nearly the whole day, this in spite of the fact that Teresa had been concerned about our having to wear masks when with Joan.  She wrote a day or so ago:

I was concerned about the fact you had to be masked when visiting Joan. I called the nurse to ask what Joan had. She has MRSA (methicillin resistant staph aureus). I was worried because Stephen and David took Jacob last Wednesday without the masks. Joan got this at Palomar Hospital, there’s no doubt. I did find the following info. 

Is it safe for healthy people to be in contact with a person infected with MRSA? Can children contract MRSA from being around an infected person?

Healthy people, including children are at very low risk of contracting MRSA. Casual contact such as hugging is okay, however, hands should be washed before leaving the patient’s hospital room or home. Persons should use gloves, however, before handling any body fluids of infected persons, and remove the gloves and wash the hands before leaving the infected person’s room or home. Before an infected person leaves the hospital ask the nurse or doctor what precautions they recommend be taken at home. In general, follow good hygiene practices, as previously described.

I hate Hospitals.

Who knows what this day will bring?

Brother David sent an email saying Joan had been removed from Villa Del Nortes and put back in the hospital at 3 am this morning.  The nurse had called saying they thought Joan had only a few more hours, so David and Sister-in-Law Teresa drove up to Escondido to the hospital.

As the day wore on (and it was wearing) every time the phone or my cell went off I was sure David would say that Joan had moved on.  But as of 6 pm, this Monday, she has not.  At the Villa she had been turning blue but with the hospital equipment she has done better; the doctor asked David if it was OK if he tried to make Joan more comfortable.  David said OK and so Joan is on a morphine drip.

The morphine drip for me signifies the end.  Indeed, the doctor does feel Joan will never return to the Villa; instead if she does recover enough to leave the hospital she will be sent to “hospice” care.  Of course, we in America know next to nothing about palliative medicine, so in SD there is only one real hospice.  Instead, people are sent to “homes” that have 24 hour nurses and these apparently qualify legally as hospice care.

We are barbarians.  Something needs to be done immediately to allow the elderly some determination of their destiny.  By this I mean, the elderly should be allowed, with minimum interference from a physician, to purchase drugs that would allow them to end their own lives at the instant of their choosing.  

As Walter Benjamin said, to date there has been no act of civilization that has not equally been an act of barbarism.  This is the case with modern medicine as practiced in the United States. 

I expect that laws will be changed.  The yuppies are coming of dying age; they are pretty vocal and well financed, at least for the time being.  Our sheer numbers and the weight we will place on the medical system will lead some to see the legalization of euthanasia as one way to get rid of the decaying elderly with more dispatch.

Brother Dan and Sister-in-Law Teresa visited Joan in the hospital.  She was quite unresponsive, scarcely able to stay awake.  Brother Dave says he has seen her in this condition before and she recovered.  That was from the bladder infection.  What’s next is up in the air.  She cannot stay in the hospital indefinitely.  Possibly she will be returned to the Villas where she was before in skilled nursing.  Or if the doctors think it appropriate she will be moved to hospice care.  That would be an indication they feel strongly that she will not recover.

Carol and I have made plans to fly down to San Diego this coming Saturday.  That’s a bit extravagant, flying I mean.  But we want to come back together so we can drive back together to SB in the one car that Mrs. Press is passing along to us.  While down there, we will visit Mrs. Press, and see David and Teresa and Steve too, I hope.  And stop at the hospital.

 I was surprised to see, visiting Brother Dan yesterday, that they had a dog.  They have never had a dog before.  I thought they were kidding.  But there the dog was sleeping in its little dog bed.  I thought maybe at first it was a pup because it was small, but I was told it was 3 years old, and then I thought, oh my god, they got a sickly dog, because it was so small and lying there completely out of it.  But then I was told Dan had just taken the little dog on a seven mile walk.  The darn thing was completely pooped out what with the walk and the new surroundings.

They got the dog from the humane society; somebody else had it before they got it and those people returned it to the humane society.  You have ten day trial period with the dog.  That’s worrisome, that somebody else returned it.  But the dog looks pretty mellow to me.  I mean I don’t see a problem unless it cannot control its bowels properly.

It will be good company for Brother Dan who is at home a lot by himself.  It’s a female and came with the name “Casey.”  But it doesn’t respond to that, so maybe they will give it another name. 

Above, that’s Savannah with the yet to be named dog.