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Thursday, September 9, 2010
This Month's Guest: Tim Sale
Rich: Growing up, were you closer to your mother or your father? Well, I'm very close to both my parents. I've always been, although in different ways, and I'm probably more comfortable with them now than I ever have been. I was very outgoing until I was about four years old, and then I guess I withdrew and became quiet. My mother was concerned that I was okay. I don't think she felt there was something WRONG really, but she remarked on the difference. I think that she had liked having an outgoing son, and suddenly I was keeping to myself and drawing and reading and things like that. Rich: Did your parents worry that you were becoming anti-social, a bookworm? It wasn't that I was a bookworm, just that I had changed so much, I think; it was hard for them to know how I was feeling about stuff. I was very sensitive and I took things very seriously. They told me later that they used to talk about how much they would anguish over ever having to scold me about something because I would just withdraw and sulk for a couple of days. I really was very sensitive; I took criticism hard. Sulking was a way of getting back I suppose. Rich: Who did the scolding, your mom or your dad? Both. But there was very little of it, which was partly why they were so anguished when it happened. Some of that may have just been that one of them was in a bad mood and they said something and Oh God, it's gonna be two days before he opens his mouth again and that kinda thing. Rich: Were you like your dad in that respect, did he sulk? Yeah, a little bit, he was a pouter, but not for days or anything. He would take things personally. Dad has a powerful presence, his mind moves and wants yours to move too. He was thoughtful, in both senses of the word: he thought about things a great deal, he has always been very interested and intellectual, and he's considerate. I try to be like that. Trying to imagine other viewpoints allows you to figure out your own, allows you to develop your own opinions. The danger there, and I share this with Dad, is that it can feel stifling and intimidating to others. But I was encouraged to think, and I was encouraged to figure out where my emotions were coming from. Rich: In what way would your dad encourage that? ? Well he came at it intellectually. He challenged us: "How would you expect him to feel?" That kinda thing. I know that I would play in my head scenarios or conversations where - - what I didn't wanna do was to say something that would appear to be obvious 'cause I hadn't thought of the next step or the next two or three steps in the scenario or what would be the most likely scenario. I remember thinking that, in terms of a, like a Perry Mason mystery where you know if I was asked to testify on the stand, "What would I say?" I don't know how much of that was directly from him or how much of it was my own. But I know that he grew up in a family where the intellectual competitiveness was fierce. His father was an English professor also. And he was the middle brother of three brothers. There was a kind of challenging, dramatic, glib and gripping way of speaking that had high praise in Dad's family. There'd be trivia contests and they'd make fun of each other - - "What are you an idiot? Everybody knows that!" My father's command of baseball trivia is still staggering. Rich: So your Grandfather was an English professor, your father was an English professor -- was it a great disappointment to your Dad that you didn't become an English professor? No, fortunately he did not have any of that. Rich: Did he become an English professor because of his father? I don't know, I can't believe that he did. I don't know how much he fought it but I would imagine that he did. My sister, Maggie became an English teacher and she fought that for a long time. She started out in dance. She did a bunch of different things. She actually started out in math. She was a math major in her freshman year and went on to Dance, then to English. She ended up teaching Women's Studies at Columbia University in New York for a number of years until the politics of academia wore her down and she quit. 
Dad has written maybe a dozen books, primarily literary criticism. He got his job by being a Shakespearean renaissance specialist. He could not be more bored with that now, but he has continued to be interested in words and books and in thinking about them. Rich: He sounds like a hard-bitten intellectual. Yes...well "hard -bitten" is not a term I would use for him; he's not aloof and he is demonstrative with mom. He's more demonstrative than he used to be, a great deal, both verbally and otherwise. But mom has always been much more of a sort of openly physically generous person -- "huggy" -- whereas dad would shake hands. At least in the old days; he's quite "huggy" now. I dunno, I may be reading my own traits into his; I've never been a particularly demostrative person with my family. Different with girlfriends, thank god. Rich: Did your parents argue, or did intellectual discussions become arguments? Both. And sometimes fights, and they would fight in front of us. Maybe not the bigger arguments they wouldn't, but I definitely remember hearing them arguing. I suppose most kids do. Rich: Were they the kind of fights you would have to hide from? No, but Maggie was very sensitive to all that, much more than I was. Dad and I created a camaradie through teasing each other, and it was easy and fun and comfortable for us, but when he teased Maggie, she would take it personally and start to cry and run upstairs. Mom would turn to Dad and say "When are you gonna learn? She's not like Tim." Dad's philosophy as a teacher and a parent was that you don't TELL people, you don't INSTRUCT people, that's not how you teach, you teach by helping them learn on their own. The problem was that Maggie and I were very different children, and that while I took my own lead easily, and was happy in my own skin from a very early age, Maggie wasn't. Even as an adult Maggie continues be on a quest to find who she is and how she relates to the world. She's a very smart, vibrant, interesting woman, but always searching. I'm Mr. Stick-in-the-Mud. Rich: Was your mother that way? No, neither of my parents were like that. Rich: They were never down? It's not that they didn't have moods, it's just that even at their most confused points, my sense is that both of them always had a core belief of who they were, and a confidence and quiet because of that. At some time in her thirties, when we were going to school, Mom recognized that she needed more to her life, so in the early seventies she identified with feminism, the Women's Movement, she became active in that. And she was always active locally and politically. She has an ability to organize and to lead and took a great deal of interest in the League of Women Voters and various local groups. She's very smart, but personally she recognized that she needed more. Dad already had more, a life outside of the family. Rich: Was she frustrated? I mean she worked while you were growing up, right? She's never made a salary. She's worked incredibly hard, and I'm sure it was frustrating at times, but not as frustrating as not working. Rich: It's all been volunteer work? Yes; after I was out of school she became a regional coordinator for NOW, the National Organization For Women. It's an organization of men and women who work to affect equal rights for women, and it was a big power behind the Equal Rights Amendment. My mother went to states other than Washington -- Oklahoma and Montana and places like that -- to work for the passage of the ERA. At a certain point, I think when I was maybe a sophomore, about sixteen, so that would have been 1972, Mom's awareness and political activity changed their relationship, my mother and father's relationship. 
Rich: In what way? Well, I distinctly remember hearing my father reading Germaine Greer's THE FEMALE EUNUCH and Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE and Simone de Beauvoir's THE SECOND SEX, out loud to Mom, and learning different ways to perceive what it's like to be a woman, and what it's like to be a man. They recognized that they were both constrained by the sex roles they had been accustomed to growing up. Mom in particular felt "I want more." Rich: Your parents moved to a black neighborhood and sent you to a predominantly black school. How old were you when that happened and how did you deal with it? I was seven, but it was much later that I realized exactly what they'd done. We moved from Amherst, Massachusetts to the West coast and for the first year we were in public housing. I can't remember ever seeing a non-white person before leaving Amherst. We moved to faculty-subsidized housing that was set up for first-year faculty at the University Of Washington, sort of middle class projects. We shared a sigle unit with two apartments in it, side-by-side. In the other apartment was a couple from Japan. And it was the first time I remember wondering if they THINK in Japanese too -- and mustn't that be confusing? ? It was somehow more confusing to me as a concept that they thought and spoke Japanese than thought in English but then translated to Japanese when they spoke. A real lesson in "other". They may have been the first non-white people I ever met. It was definitely different, but intriguing and without judgement, I'm happy to say. So it was 1963 and my parents bought a house, and I found out later that because they were into the Civil Rights Movement, they looked in the areas of the city that were mixed racially. On the one hand, it was sort of an intellectual family exercise come to life. On the other hand, they didn't feel like they were the only people doing it, my parents were part of a movement that was strong in the country, and were emotionally and intellectually committed to it. It wasn't until after I was out of school altogether that I recognized that they had moved us there on purpose. All through elementary school it was sort of just the way it was. And I had a lot of black friends. I know that I felt "other" a little bit, and there were tough guys there, but it did not seem to be particularly about race. I had some soft black friends. I don't remember having any tough white friends, but you know I'm sure there were some. Junior High and High school were very different. Race WAS a big issue at then, almost the primary issue. Rich: Was reading comics a means of escape? Later, in Junior High, it was. Rich: Did your Dad want you to understand the difficulties of being in the minority? I don't know whether that's how they looked at it. They wanted me to be around and exposed to another culture in the same country, to be tolerant, to see people as people. I think being a minority was sort of an inevitable byproduct of my parents' proactive attitude. I've never asked them, so I'm just guessing. I'm sure that theoretically the idea of being sent to a black school was not just that we would see that everybody was the same underneath, but that we would recognize the subtleties of racism better than we would have otherwise, and I think Maggie and I are both grateful. Sadly, the schools we were sent to were not intellectual schools, so we weren't challenged in that way. Early on in high school, Maggie recognized that she was getting into trouble by not being challenged in school and so she ended up going to a boarding school in Massachusetts. But she was a very different kid than I was. The schools that we went to were not strong academically, but we're both interested, thinking, questioning people. Rich: Your dad stimulated intellectual conversation at home, right? I remember you telling me that he would read aloud to you. Yeah, mom, too. Dad reads aloud very well, he's proud of it. And he took that seriously as part of his teaching. He would read out loud to us at home, after dinner or at weekends, as would Mom. My parents still read aloud together, they usually have a book going. They read maybe a half an hour a day aloud to each other. And when we were kids, they read the OZ books to us and LORD OF THE RINGS. Dad read SHERLOCK HOLMES to me when I was ten, and I remember mom reading LASSIE COME HOME to me when I was sick. Rich: Was TV kept to a minimum? Not really, and we watched a fair amount of TV, more TV than some parents felt good -- and there wasn't that much TV available then. I remember once that we were all watching some show on TV, and a commercial comes on and mom starts going to great lengths to talk about how the commercial is lying, "They're trying to manipulate you," blah blah. And at some point I turn and say to her "Oh mom, IT'S JUST A COMMERCIAL." Dad said at that point he knew he didn't have to concern himself about our watching too much TV. Rich: Does your love of baseball come from watching games with your dad? When you go up to Seattle do you go with your dad? Yes, and we go with Mom too. My mother bought tickets to the Dodgers for their honeymoon because she wanted to go, how great is that? Very romantic, in my view, all the more so because it is unexpected, and yet a shared meaningful experience. Now when I go up to Seattle to see some games, the three of us go, and we're very much into the game. There is some chat at the game, but we're paying attention TO THE GAME; those are the rules. We're the serious observers, once again. Rich: In your twenties, you took a lot of stopgap jobs. Did your Dad get on your case about what you were doing with your life? No, no, he was truly relaxed about it. He had faith that everything was going to be okay. He wrote something in a local paper -- he doesn't specifically mention me -- but he says something like, "I have a friend who says that everyone he meets wonders when he's gonna get his act together." And that was true: almost everyone I met told me, "You can draw, you have this talent, what are you doing working at Taco Time?!" I just never felt like I was in a hurry. And I think eventually it paid off. I had a sort of life experience that has allowed me to be more thoughtful about my work in ways that only age and experience allow. It wasn't as though that was the purpose, but that's how it turned out. Dad never pushed that, no. He is proud of me now, but wouldn't have pushed it. Rich: Does your dad look at your work and comment on it? Yes, but not a whole lot, we don't have long talks. He does read everything, but I'm pretty sloppy about sending stuff. I'm much more of a fan of genre fiction than he is, and that's what I do, genre fiction, melodrama. But he tries, he's a very careful reader, he tries to find the good. I think he's proud of me. I think he's happy for me.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
