For a short time, I have debated between the current title of “It Ain’t Natural” and another title, “Ez-ree Revisited.” But in the end I selected the title of the business about naturalness. There is a certain amount of nostalgia in this essay because it has to do with the original Ezra, my father. Ezra Senior departed this vale of tears at this time of the year in 1958. This means that he has been gone now for 51 years, but one way or another a thought or two about his memory keeps slinking into my alleged brain.
The fact of the matter is that my father and I were strangers to the end. I never exchanged a cross word with him, nor did he with me. But no matter how you cut it, we were never reading from the same page. He was given to fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, which even at age 6 to 10 or 12 years, I found absurd and laughable. Of course, I never laughed about it when my father was present, but by the time I was 7 or 8, he had concluded that church going for me was not going to save my soul. I shared that viewpoint.
In spite of our differences in outlook on life, I find that after the 51 years following his death, I still think of him. It is not an obsession but from time to time, some of his thoughts creep into my consciousness. For example, I remember the time when I was 8 or 9 years old, when a young man interrupted my father’s work on the garage doors. The younger man told my father that it appeared that his girlfriend was pregnant. My father’s words still ring in my memory. He stood up and said, “Boy, be a man. Marry that girl today.” For all of his lack of education, my old man was a standup guy. He played by the rules, and I suspect that he was mightily offended that this young fellow had brought this problem to him. He would have expected this young man to do the proper thing without outside encouragement.
On another occasion when he was killing crows, I must have asked him, when I was 6 or 7 years of age, why he did not shoot other birds. He said that the crows were stealing corn from the chickens that we kept in the backyard and that this would teach them a lesson. As for the other birds, he told me in words that still are embedded in my memory that he would not bring harm to the other birds because “they loved their lives just as much as I loved mine.”
I wish the old man would have been around to instruct Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court and the former Vice President of the United States who periodically went to vacation spots where they would slaughter birds of all sorts to augment their diet. Scalia and Cheney never appeared to be starving. They considered their expeditions to slaughter birds as “sport.” A sport which results in murder is murder and not sport at all. In effect, the old man’s words to me after 85 years made a great impression.
There was another occasion in 1947 when the six-week telephone strike was taking place. I worked for the telephone company at that time and was an officer in the union there. Midway through the strike my father, as part of his job, was trimming a tree and in his blindness stepped on a branch that did not exist. He fell from the tree and fractured his skull. He was 66 years old at that time. One day when I went to visit him in his room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Clayton, Missouri, he told me, “You haven’t had a pay check for quite a while. I have some money and I want to give it to you.” I did not accept the money, as I had saved in anticipation of the strike, but I told him that I appreciated his offer very much and if the strike lasted much longer, I would come back to see him. So you see, in spite of the strangeness in our relations, the old man wanted to be sure that one of his own was taken care of.
But there was another side to the original Ezra Carr. He was given to mispronouncing words which I concluded probably was deliberate. For example the word “exercise” was pronounced by Ezra as “ex-ree-cise”. Perhaps he used that construction to make it close to a rhyme with his name which was spelled Ezra but which he pronounced as “Ezree.” My elder sister, Verna Eva, frequently chided my father’s pronunciation of English words which only caused him to dig his heels in and to reject her advice. I never tried to correct my father’s pronunciation of English words because I knew that it was pointless and I knew that some 70 or 75 years later I would be writing these essays. Those mispronunciations would come in handy as subjects for these essays.
My father also had a penchant for denouncing progress in the course of human affairs. For the last 12 years of his life, he was blind as a result of the hereditary disease, glaucoma. He sat in a red velvet chair in the living room of our home in Richmond Heights, Missouri and had only the Atwater-Kent radio to entertain him. He used the radio sparingly. It was not a matter of use of the electricity but he thought that various advances in the human condition were not natural. Among those advancements in the human condition was air conditioning. My father denounced air conditioning as “It ain’t natural.”
Then there was the matter of automobile engines. The old man drove cars that had six cylinder in-line engines. The term “in line” means that the pistons are arranged in a straight line from front to back. When Henry Ford produced a V8 engine in his 1931 or 1932 models, the old man said that “It just ain’t natural.” He predicted that V8 engines would cause undue wear on the piston rings which permit escape of the crankcase oil to the exhaust. I am quite certain that Henry Ford had thought of this problem before the cars were produced. But there is this much to say. When I was in the filling station business, whenever we saw a Ford car with a V8 engine approach the gas tanks, we knew that the owner could be sold a quart of oil. The engines on Ford automobiles kept the oil companies rolling in prosperity.
Well, so much for my nostalgic thoughts about the original Ezra. Like every man, he had his flaws but he was a standup guy who did the best he could for his marriage and his children. He died after a long period of confinement in his bed for reasons that now escape me. At his funeral service, the man who had comforted him in his spiritual needs during his confinement was Hurley Fitzwater. He was what was called by my mother a “jackleg preacher.” That means he had no theological training but just rose from the congregation and started preaching.
At the time of my father’s death, Hurley was approximately 60 to 65 years of age. At the funeral, he felt called upon to deliver a sermon called “There the Sun Shall Not Shine.” I have never figured out over these many years what the hell Hurley Fitzwater was talking about. I suggest that my old man, regardless of his religious bent, would have been just as mystified as I was and the rest of his friends were.
In the final analysis as I think about my father’s life, he did what the rest of us have to do, which is to play the hand that we have been dealt. I suppose that he could have played his hand better, but at this late date I will not criticize him in any way. I will remember him as a standup guy who did the best he could under circumstances that were not generous to him.
E. E. CARR
July 18, 2009
Essay 398
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Kevin’s commentary: I think this is the first essay I can think of where Pop liked a title so much he used it again later on. Of course an exception can be made for the multiple iterations of “The language of the anglo saxons” but those usually have numerals appended. The fact is that there were several other things that Ezra senior considered to be unnatural, which you can read about in this essay’s sequel if you’re interested.  My impression of my great grandfather remains the same — an upstanding fellow to the end, even if he may have had somewhat antiquated views. These essays actually constitute 100% of the things that I’ve ever heard about the man. I’m very glad that I have them.