Q is for Questions—The Ones I Wish I’d asked my Mom

Thanks to fellow blogger, Beth, for suggesting this topic, I have something to write about for this edition of the A to Z Bloggers Challenge. My mom was in her early seventies when she died and I’ve written about that before so I won’t go into detail. But I will quote myself below so new readers will understand why it was traumatic, and why it left me with no time to ask the questions I didn’t yet know I’d want answers to.

“She’d been going to the doctor every week for a dozen weeks complaining of pain. Near the end my brother started going with her to get some answers about what was going on and the doctor told him Mom was just getting old and looking for attention. Mistakes one through ten. Unbeknown to anyone she had a small hole in a kidney and blood was slowly seeping out and filling up her body cavity. Mistakes eleven and twelve came the day she died and the ambulance got lost trying to find my parents’ house. (They lived on a lake in a rural area where the township didn’t keep their maps up to date.) Mistake thirteen through fifteen happened on the way to the hospital when the ambulance caught on fire and they had to wait for another. She died of septic shock ten minutes after arriving a the hospital and a doctor told me later that dying that way is very painful. Her death was a series of human errors and oversights and it was filled with the kind of shoulda, coulda anguish that only comes with hindsight.”

My mom had a way of answering questions that didn’t really tell you anything. (Remember me writing about how when asked what's for dinner she'd say things like, "An old dead cow.") Another example of her non-answers was when I asked her where I came from and I thought I’d get the birds and the bees story I heard rumors about. The idea that the daddy bee stings the mommy bee with his—gasp!—penis was so outlandish that I counted on her to set the story straight. She did. She told me she found my brother and me under a pile of rocks. A few years later she finally did set the story straight—not with a conversation, of course, but by handing me a pamphlet from the health department.

One of those things she didn’t want to talk about was a screw-back, silver and blue Air Force wings pin that I found in her jewelry box. I didn’t have any uncles or grandfathers who served in the Air Force. Where did it come from and why did she let me wear that pin to high school during the period when I had an imaginary boyfriend named Roger who was off serving our country? And did she know about Roger? Did she read my diaries when I was at school? Years later I thought she might have had a boyfriend before she married my dad who died in a ‘dog fight’ in the air space over Europe during WWII. In my golden years I still think she had that boyfriend, but if so, why was she willing to let me wear that keepsake? I would have snatched it out of any daughter of mine’s hands and locked it away. Maybe she trusted me more than I realized. Or maybe she didn’t think of it as a keepsake at all. Maybe she found it under a pile of rocks.

After she died I went through her cedar chest and another mystery was discovered among the mostly photos and knickknacks. A pair of soft pink satin and cream-colored lace panties that buttoned down the side. 1940s boy-cut style. Why did she keep them for thirty odd years? Who does that? My parents were married in the late ‘40s so maybe it was her version of keeping a wedding dress? She was married in a drab gray suit trimmed in brown fir over a weekend spent in Chicago. I have pictures of that trip and she and my dad both looked really happy. Oh, and that drab suit? Mom cut it up to make a coat for a doll I got one Christmas and I still have them both.

What did I do with the panties? You ask. I put them in a fresh plastic bag with a note about when and where I found them and put them in a small trunk that is earmarked to go to my oldest niece. She still has the cedar chest I found the panties in and I suspect they will end up back in that chest for my great-niece to discover one day. Some families hand down grandfather clocks and quilts. I’m thinking I might be starting a tradition of handing down underwear.

In all seriousness. The questions I wish I’d asked my mom before she died are about gaining more details of her childhood and her parents. I know the basics of how her own mother died when she was nine and all seven siblings where separated and sent off to various places. It was like an informal foster care known as ‘farming children out’ that was arranged between families rather than the state. But knowing my mother, she probably wouldn’t have told me very much. Her childhood ended too soon, when she went off to live with a grandmother who ran a boarding house where she was expected to work for her keep. In her teens she was working in other people's homes as a housekeeper and by the time she met my dad she'd been a waitress for several years. 

My mom was not a reminiscing type like I am. Maybe the past held too much pain? She focused on the future, always planning and plotting for ways to hedge her bets against bad luck and foul play, so to speak. We all leave a few blank pages behind; but with the brief outline she did leave, I’m pretty sure I could flesh her story out. But I know the important part: she was a strong woman who loved her family and I wish I'd have told her more often how much I loved her. ©

Photo at the top: Mom and dad on their honeymoon. 

P is for Philosophy— Lessons from my Dad

I’m going to live dangerously here for this edition of the A to Z Bloggers Challenge and try to form a picture of how, why and where my interest in philosophy came from. Hopefully it won’t look like I’m bluffing my way around a topic I once knew something about...more than a half a century ago. Any "book learning" I had decades ago is running for the hills as if Godzilla just stomped into town. If the Blogging Police want to tisk‑tisk me for bluffing, I can live with it. But stick with me to the end and I may eventually write something profoundly philosophical—and I don’t mean a review of the perfume by that name. (Which I do like, in case anyone wants to know.)

AI defines philosophy this way: “The systematic study of fundamental questions concerning existence, knowledge, ethics, reason, and language. Derived from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom,’ it uses rational argument and critical analysis to understand the world, rather than relying on empirical observation alone. It analyzes concepts like truth, reality, and morality.”

My ideas on philosophy are deeply rooted, and they got their start at my dad’s side. I absorbed them by listening to his Will Rogers‑style way of viewing the world. I don’t know how he picked up his respect for knowledge and education. He dropped out of school in grade school. Except for the newspaper, he wasn’t a reader. Yet when I was in college taking classes in philosophy, world religion and logic, we could discuss those topics and he held his own talking about Socrates, Plato, mythical utopian cities, and the origins of our values and laws.

Life was his teacher. He’d witnessed Ku Klux Klan hangings while hiding in the woods as a kid. He saw the unfairness of Blacks, Italians and Irish getting paid less than whites in the coal mines while they all worked side by side. And I’ll never forget the look of horror and disgust on Dad’s face on Bloody Sunday in 1963 when the nightly news showed fire hoses and attack dogs turned on the peaceful marchers in Selma.

I’ll also never forget the look of sheer happiness that lit up his face when Tiger Woods won his first PGA in 1999. He was proud of Tiger for breaking the color barrier in a game Dad loved his entire life. I’m glad he isn’t here to see how far Tiger has fallen, but Dad was the most fair‑minded person I’ve ever known. He’d probably express forgiveness. Why? Because he knew Tiger spent his whole career carrying a heavy load as a role model for an entire generation of dark‑skinned kids. Dad always looked for the story behind the actions of others, and the story usually came with an empathetic twist.

Case in point: decades ago my cousin and brother took my dad to a strip joint, thinking they’d shock him and prove how “grown up” they’d become. After the stripper did her act, my cousin asked what Dad thought about a woman who’d do that. He expected a lot of things, but not Dad saying, “Well, she probably has a baby at home that needs milk, and this is the best job she could get.”

When I downsized nearly five years ago, twenty‑seven books on philosophy and religion made the cut. And I’ve read every single one cover to cover. I can’t say the same about all the other books on my shelves. Some of the titles range from the Bible and The Good Book (aka The Humanist’s Bible) to Aristotle Would Have Liked Oprah, Working on God, The Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy, Seinfeld and Philosophy, Man’s Search for a Soul, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, The Nature of Man, and The Republic of Plato.

Many of my books aren’t hard‑hitting textbooks. But books like Seinfeld and Philosophy (by William Irwin) can teach concepts in a way most of us can understand. One blurb on the back says the book “nicely illustrates how the comic can illuminate the profound.” Yup. Jerry’s constant questioning of everything is very much like what Socrates did to teach. As the book puts it, “Both Socrates and Jerry Seinfeld manage to make something considerable out of seemingly obvious questions and trivial subject matter.”

Kramer, in the same book, is portrayed as being stuck in Søren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life. In case you’re rusty on your Danish philosophers, Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was the father of the Three Spheres of Existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. The first stage is marked by pleasure‑seeking. Kramer is in constant pursuit of whatever interests him, and what interests him changes daily. He has no ability to commit to anything.

If I believe in the three spheres — and I can certainly name long periods when I was stuck in the aesthetic stage — then I can also pinpoint when my ethical stage began, when I started taking on more responsibility and living a more purposeful life.

But Kierkegaard believed it takes a leap of faith to enter the third stage, and that most people remain in the ethical stage, never taking that leap to fully commit to God. Think nuns‑and‑priests‑level commitment. You can be a steady churchgoer and still not be in the third stage if you’re not willing to give up your creature comforts.

Right about now, if anyone is still reading, you’re probably asking what does it matters what some old Danish dude thought. To answer that, I’ll share a quote from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy: “Kierkegaard’s work gave rise to the major trend in twentieth‑century philosophy known as existentialism, a philosophy that focuses on the meaning of existence for the individual.” And I dare say nearly everyone reading this flirted with that branch of philosophy in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the counterculture years—when we were all searching for meaning and purpose. Some of us still are. I know I am.

Maybe that’s why the recent Walk for Peace fascinated me so much. It reminded me that there are still people willing to give up their earthly comforts to reach a higher plane of faith.

Sometimes life is a gentle ride in a canoe, and other times it’s like riding in an overloaded ferry boat while holding your breath until you reach the other side. Have you ever written or said something, then Googled it to make sure it originated in your own brain and wasn’t something your subconscious coughed up like a cat with a hairball? That’s what I did with the first sentence in this paragraph. I wrote it as a reply to a comment on my blog, then deleted it because it seemed too richly philosophically for me to have “invented” it. Google couldn’t find anything remotely similar, so I’m pretty sure I can claim the line as my own.

And with that, my promise to write something philosophical is fulfilled. © 

Note: The painting at the top was by Raphael and its titled The School of Athens. I still have the term paper I wrote in 1961 about the gathering of philosophers portrayed in the piece. It's the only term paper I've kept all these years. I read it very few years just to remind myself that I once knew things. 

O is for Overtime—When Work Was Just What You Did

 

A few posts back in this A to Z Blogger’s Challenge, I wrote about my dad working long overtime hours during WWII, and that got me thinking about all the overtime Don and I worked over the years. At no point in my adult life did I ever have a tidy nine-to-five job like Dolly Parton sang about in her 1980 movie song with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

I never “tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen” to pour myself a cup of “ambition” before heading off to a predictable shift. In the floral industry, where I worked for twenty years, there was no such thing as nine to five. We worked when there was work to do. Funerals, holidays, and weddings didn’t care what time the shop or greenhouses closed. Brides often needed evening appointments, and grieving families needed casket sprays and pedestal pieces with gold-foil letters proclaiming labels like “Mother” or “Grandfather.” Those letters are still the same fonts they were sixty years ago. And yes, I still have the same hand-held Clipper #700 stapler I used back then. The letters, however, now come with sticky backs.

Funerals were unpredictable, but weddings guaranteed overtime on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Not ideal for my man‑hunting days. (Girls who met their spouses in high school or college missed the era of wondering where on earth you’d find a decent man.) Most of the guys I worked with were either married or gay. One was deep in the closet, circa the ’60s. With my hours, my default social life became Sunday skiing or after work bar‑hopping with two single co‑workers—a gay girl and a gay guy. None of us ever found what we were looking on those after work bar hops. Surprise, surprise .

We did have some fun after hours, the kind you can only have when management is nowhere in sight. Flowers came in from all over the world, and once in a while cockroaches hitched a ride. One shipment must have included a pregnant one because they multiplied fast. When we told the boss, he said the monthly spraying would take care of it. We didn’t want to wait. So we trapped a dozen in a jar and planted them in his desk drawers. The next morning, he walked into his office with his coffee and came shooting right back out like the hounds of hell were after him. That night the chemical guy was waiting for us to punch out. The boss? We didn’t see him again all day, and he never found out what we’d done.

Holidays were the worst for overtime. My bosses did wholesale as well as retail, so we prepared artificial arrangements by the hundreds to ship to four states before switching to retail fresh flower orders. We also decorated houses—inside and out—for wealthy clients and big parties. Twelve-to fourteen-hour shifts weren’t unusual. I learned early on to finish my Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. I also learned that if I wanted a break, I had to learn to drink coffee, because my boss didn’t like the image of someone sitting in the break room “doing nothing.”

When I left that job, I started my own weddings‑only service out of my home. A one‑woman operation with part‑time help from my nieces, my mom and Don. Anyone who’s ever had their own business knows who ends up working the longest hours. After ten years of that—and more than a few Bridezillas—I gave it up and went back to college, which I wrote about in E is for Education. At the same time, I worked part‑time for Don, plowing snow in the winters and doing parking lot maintenance the rest of the year. He had five or six part‑time workers, but it was he and I who worked the most overtime. Exhausted was our default condition during the nineties. Oh, and did I mention he also worked a full time job at GM where, went we first met, they had a lot of mandatory overtime?

Those years blur together now—the late nights, the early mornings, the holidays spent working instead of celebrating. At the time, it all felt ordinary, just the way life was for us. Maybe that’s the thing about overtime—you don’t notice the hours until you finally step outside and see how far they carried you. ©