Memoir, from just outside the box

TABLE FOR THREE

GOOBYGOTS (GOO-bee-gots)

My sister Gayl, 73, asked ChatGPT a question and she sent me the results.

My mother, born in 1923, often used the word goobygots. Did she make this word up or did she read it somewhere?

our mother Marge / 1923-2005

Chat replied…

Goobygots isn’t a common dictionary word, but it has appeared here and there in oral and regional slang. The word is usually used by older generations in the U.S. and Canada. Its meaning varies, sometimes referring to a mess of leftover food and sometimes referring to grubby little kids.

In the early 20th century, many families, especially those who were new immigrants, coined playful nonsense words to describe messes of all kinds. Some linguists point to a link to the Italian word gubbagots. In Italian-American communities, gubbagots humorously referred to miscellaneous odds and ends.

There are scattered online recollections from people whose grandparents or parents, who were born around the 1910s to the 1930s, used the word goobygots in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest. The word seems to be a local colloquialism, not something from a widely disseminated source like a book, radio program or movie.

Your mother did not invent the word goobygots, but she almost certainly grew up in a time and place where that kind of homespun, comical word was in the air and passed along within families rather than in print.

TABLE FOR THREE

With the goobygots still on the dinner table, my two old friends and I kept the conversation alive until our reunion energy was completely spent. It is after two AM and they have gone to bed in the guest rooms upstairs. With the lights turned low and a nightcap in hand, I sit at the table and survey the empty wine bottles and our gastronomical debris field, and I replay the conversational highlights that linger in the air…

JWD

I do understand the compulsion to write. I want to write about my ancestors, but only in a tonally correct way, expressive of my ambivalence about these guys. I’m having problems finding the starting point. How do I deal with ancestors who owned slaves but who, on the other hand....were highly accomplished, admired people in their times. My great great grandfather, a revered physician in Hagerstown, Maryland, was a presidential elector for Martin Van Buren, appointed to the Board of Visitors of West Point and a buddy with the Governor of Maryland. But for all that, at the start of the Civil War, he was considered by the Feds a very dangerous man for his Southern sympathies. He was seized by the Yanks in his home and imprisoned without trial for fifteen months as a consequence of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. He went South with Lee when Lee’s army hightailed it homeward to Virginia after Gettysburg, his wife and daughters harassed by the Feds in Hagerstown… yet hanging on to their home… four of his sons and a son-in-law already gone to Virginia… Rebs… all of them.

DTN

My 60th high school reunion? It was worth the 7-hour drive. After I exited I-71, I drove through a lot of small Ohio towns, each town emitting cadaverous Rust Belt vibes. Mansfield was the worst of the bunch, almost unrecognizable.

At the reunion, a classmate I barely knew told me he had served three tours in Vietnam. His whole family, five brothers, three sisters and mom and dad, had all passed away. He was the sole survivor.

This was the same guy who, in our senior year, sucker punched me because he’d been drinking and he was jealous that I was dating the girl he loved. It was the only time I was ever hit in the face. I immediately decked him. Rob and I became closer after that, but we never communicated past graduation.

One guy brought a 3-D-printer model of the gallbladder, pancreas and spleen, given to him for Father’s Day by his 3-D expert son. Doug had a touch of cancer in a really bad spot among those three organs, so the doctors took out all three. That procedure immediately turned him into a type-1 diabetic. He’d lost fifty pounds and he looked gaunt. With a bit of a rasp in his voice, he said, “The prognosis is good.”

A woman I never trusted came up to me and said, “I’ll bet you don’t recognize me.” Carla was as coy as ever. No name tag. Still playing games.

I talked to two women I dated briefly in high school. Both had lost their husbands and seemed quite chipper, like a weight had been lifted. Another woman, Cindy, whom I always thought of as a very bright introvert and bookworm, was an absolute knock-out at 78. No work done. Just gorgeous.

You both warned me to refrain from talking about politics at my reunion, but Cindy and I experienced an unspoken recognition and we found a way. We sat down at a small table across from each other and discussed the state of the union by revisiting the fascist dystopia created by Margaret Atwood in her scathing satire, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” That book taught us both to never forget the “repressive intolerance of America’s original Puritans,” and to always keep a close eye on “the dark corners hidden behind the establishment’s disingenuous facade.”

Bernie Carbo

GAL

I told Sutton it would take me more than one email to respond to former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti’s flashback to the 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox. When I came to the name... Bernie Carbo... my baseball emotions skidded to a halt. How did Bernie Carbo make it into my Baseball Hall of Fame? Two reasons were glued to that flickering synapse: his home run... and his hair salon. I consulted Wikipedia…

In game 6, Carbo’s pinch three-run home run tied the score 6-6, paving the way for Carlton Fisk’s game-winning homer in the bottom of the twelfth for a 7-6 Red Sox victory. In 1978, he was sold to the Cleveland Indians. His major league career ended in 1980 with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

After retiring, Carbo went on to cosmetology school and opened a hairdressing salon. In 1985, in a federal drug distribution trial, former St. Louis Cardinal Keith Hernandez said Carbo was the man who introduced him to cocaine. Carbo subsequently lost his house and his salon because of the bad publicity.

In 1990, while playing in a senior league in St. Petersburg, Florida, Carbo hit rock bottom. His mother had committed suicide, his father died two months later, and his own family was disintegrating. He was spending $32,000 a month on drugs, mostly cocaine. An old friend took one look at Carbo and said, “You need Jesus.”

Bernie Carbo has since become a born-again Christian. In 1993, he founded the evangelical organization “Diamond Club Ministry” and now spends his time ministering to families and their children through his love for the game.

On April 1, 2010, in an interview with the Boston Globe, Carbo admitted to doing drugs during the 1975 World Series. He states, “I smoked two joints, drank three beers, got to the ballpark, took some speed, took a pain pill, drank a cup of coffee, chewed some tobacco, smoked a cigarette, and got up to the plate in the 8th inning and hit that home run.” It was not just a one-time binge. In the same article, Bernie Carbo states, “I played every game high. I was addicted to anything I could possibly be addicted to. I played the outfield sometimes where it looked like the stars were falling from the sky.”