I’ll recap again, late May and June was spent in Illinois. Grandma Maggi was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I became better friends with my cousin Leesa.
July was the tense, bellicose month in Florida despite visiting Disney World, EPCOT and getting to know the Tampa faction of Maggis.
August wasn’t completely as awful as July’s conclusion had been. The accusations, name-calling and hostility died down once we got resettled in Bloomington. Any immediate plans regarding the upcoming school year were then put on hold because Grandma Maggi’s situation had deteriorated after returning. Off we went to Minooka to hang with cousins Jason and Leesa, I knew I was looking forward to the like-minded company.
It was through this sad event I made a great discovery regarding my paternal grandmother, our mutual love of Science Fiction. For years it was a mystery on where it came from. Neither parent read those books and they were ambivalent over the movies; Dad was a mystery fan, Mom preferred non-fiction and my brother Brian despised the genre. Therefore I felt like a minor freak. While Grandma was still coherent, she worked with Leesa about what to do with her personal belongings. I recall Leesa recommended me for Grandma’s collection of paperbacks. Uncle Chief received the hardbacks she owned of Dune and Tolkein. I have no idea why, I didn’t feel jealous about those, I was more touched to receive almost 200 novels from her. To this day, I feel a bit cheated over this realization. Not for her generous, thoughtful gesture but for having this connection to her being pointed out too late. Thankfully, I did have a great bond with the maternal set, tumultuous as it was. It’s what family is all about!
The end came for Grandma Maggi in a slow manner as she gradually faded away over a few days until she stopped breathing. It was rough on everybody, especially Aunt Letty, Uncle Cliff, Leesa and Jason, they were the closest to her those last several years as housemates.
Then came the funeral which was the only time I have ever seen Dad with all of his siblings. Uncle Skip lived nearby in Ottawa. Chief, Dad, Loren and Michele flew in from Florida, North Dakota, Alaska and Hawaii respectively. My maternal grandparents showed up too. I was initially surprised since I had never seen these disparate relatives together before. However, I knew their sense of respect for Grandma Maggi overrode anything else: they didn’t dislike her, they just never fraternized. There were also some distant relatives Skip introduced Brian. Hard to believe there were Maggis in farming. I had always thought we were city folk.
Being a Protestant (I think Grandma Maggi was a Baptist), the ceremony was presided by a minister who rankled the Catholic faction during the eulogy. There was one thing he said which made him come off like a pushy missionary. I let it slide due to it being a sad, somber occasion. It didn’t stop Uncle Skip when someone asked at the after-funeral dinner, “How was the minister?” His reply, “He was recruiting.” Aunt Letty surely gave him the evil eye for saying what was on many people’s minds. (Skip is also where I inherited my humor and blunt, troublemaking tongue.) Still, I was more touched seeing my Uncle Cliff cry over Grandma’s demise. For years, Cliff was always perceived (by me) as a gruff, tough but well-meaning guy. He worked on the assembly lines at Caterpillar, he was blue-collar to the bone and seemed to be a rock. It didn’t mean he was emotionless or heartless. I just figured he would be stoic, hide his feelings like most men his generation were ingrained to do. Cliff proved that the all the mother-in-law antagonisms are really sitcom bullshit.
There was one final gathering at Skip’s house, namely to get a photo of the six Maggis together before a couple had to fly home. Leesa, Jason, Brian and me were the only grandchildren present: the others couldn’t make it due to costs, logistics or previous commitments. It would’ve been nice to see them. Maybe help them out since Loren’s kids (Ronnie, Angie and Cora) were closer to Grandma before they moved to Alaska or see Skip’s three D’s: David, Denise and Dana.
Other strong memories I have about hanging with the Maggis:
- Uncle Skip had a talking bird in a cage next to the TV. If you sat quietly for a few minutes, it would spew a torrent of profanity it had learned from HBO…and Uncle Skip.
- Seeing the 1985 new comedians special hosted by Rodney Dangerfield. This one-hour showcase was the national debut for Sam Kinison and Rita Rudner.
- Music shopping with our cousins. Plus mix-tape exchanges between Leesa and me. I’m sure Brian and Jason compared notes on Oingo Boingo.
With all these matters concluded, time was running out regarding school. As I mentioned earlier, any hopes of attending University High were dashed. Mom had unrealistic expectations which infected us with false hope. There was a waiting list or enrollment required a parent who worked at ISU. It didn’t matter anymore. I had scoped out Bloomington High School during my driver’s ed course. It wasn’t fantastic. I put it on par with Lawrence Central for its facilities. After attending three other public schools and figuring there was a need to save money, I (stupidly) assumed I could focus on the more pressing concern, getting a part-time job.
I can’t remember the specifics for my failure. It was likely a combination of unrealistic expectations (I think I wanted to wait tables) and the local market being tight (higher density of college students than the suburbs in India-no-place). I probably didn’t try too hard, figuring I could keep pursuing this while attending school.
Bored, unemployed and seeking entertainment away from Grandma Maier’s house, my brother and I decided to hoof it near ISU’s campus. We figured the video games at the Garcia’s Pizza under the giant dorm would alleviate the doldrums. What we found along North Avenue (ISU’s main drag, short as it is compared to UT or Marquette’s) blew our teenage minds. There was a decent arcade, a used book store, a comic-book store (pre-Metropolis days), a head shop (these were still good for finding cool posters despite the smell) and best of all, an Apple Tree record store, the music shop we got started with when we resided in Springfield. How I had missed this stuff before was beyond me. I don’t think my parents were hiding it from us.
With this stuff in Normal, Adventureland over in Bloomington, life there wasn’t going to be as awful as I feared. It was certainly better than what Beulah had to offer and was more accessible than the metropolises we spent 1982-85 in.
By the following week, we scraped up what money we had to go shopping at Apple Tree Records on our next expedition. The two purchases burned permanently into my memory were Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam & the Ants and Waiata by Split Enz (really known elsewhere as Corroboree), the latter became the launching point for making Neil Finn my favorite songwriter of all time. Originally, I wanted to buy True Colours but they didn’t have it and nothing seemed familiar on Time & Tide. I had known the hit “History Never Repeats” because I had seen it on MTV years ago yet I was amazed by the rest: “Hard Act to Follow,” “One Step Ahead,” “I Don’t Wanna Dance,” and “Iris.” The other side was a bit more experimental with “Ships” and “Walking Through the Ruins,” the former track seemed like a dry run of what would follow in Time‘s “Log Cabin Fever.”
Years later, many critics usually rip on Corroboree for being a mediocre, rushed sequel to Colours because the material wasn’t as strong. To me, it became the best starting point with Split Enz. Thanks to MTV, the band was perceived by many Americans as an Aussie New Wave act. Corroboree was released around the height of the genre’s heyday, 1981, thus it did deliver to my expectations. Had I gone with their later material, I probably would’ve been puzzled, got into something else and their very early stuff I didn’t learn about until college, when they were trying to be New Zealand’s answer to Genesis. That material, I’m certain I probably would’ve hated at 17. Colours is their most successful album (something like one out of nine people in Australia owned it in the late Seventies) so had I received my original wish, it could’ve set the bar too high.
Critics be damned in general. Corroboree really related with me more in its subject matter than my previous favorites did: Duran Duran had drifted especially through those side bands in 1985. So I spent many hours for the rest of the Summer, playing my brother’s stereo, making my personal connection with the Finn brothers’s lyrics which finally culminated when I actually met Neil Finn this Summer.
Coming up…the Summer of 1985 ends disastrously around Labor Day weekend. Part IV which happened because I couldn’t squeeze it into Part III and it really deserves its own section.
