Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, Great Books and Family Parties

Book Club: We read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan and all twelve of us were all on the same page in our opinions of this well-written and well-researched non-fiction book about the largest mass of freshwater on the planet. (20% of the fresh water in the world is in these five, giant lakes.) The history, science and threats to the water’s safety and sustainability reads like a novel and at the end suggests what we need to do to protect the Great Lakes and the 40 million people who depend on them for our water supplies. Each invasive species is explained in detail--how they got here, what damage they are doing and how species like the quagga mussels have spread across the country on the bottoms of boats. They are a serious problem to the pipelines that bring water to our cities’ taps. The book made me want to go out and buy a  bunch of bottled water because a water crisis in a major city is just a matter of time and then our water processing plants will all fall like lines of dominoes, if we don't take action soon. And that is just one of several complex problems facing the Great Lakes.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, the woman who rattled me to the point I couldn’t express myself the last time our book club met didn’t come back and we were back to our harmonious selves.

The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile: It was in our town last weekend. I know this because one of the my neighbor’s here at the CCC left a message on my phone while I was at my niece’s cottage saying she and a couple of other women where going downtown to see it and did I want to go along. The next day I saw her and explained that I didn’t get her message until late and I thanked her for the invitation. She said, “I was trying to think of who would be up for a spur of the moment adventure and I knew you would be.” Boy, does she have me pegged wrong. I’m not usual ready to just pick up and go because I have a bad habit of not doing a shower or sponge bath first thing in the morning...I wait until a couple of hours before I’m supposed to be some place. But when I thought about her experiences with inviting me to a half dozen places like the movie theater, a impromptu party or out for ice cream I just happened to have been dressed for the day. She’s very social and she's the reason I keep a wine bottle, a cheese ball and crackers on standby. Not long ago she invited 15 nuns to dinner to help her use up her food allowance rather than loss it at the end of the month. She’s one of “The Catholic Kids” who goes to church every day of the week and, boy, was it delightfully weird watching ladies in brown habits go by my window. I almost wished I'd had dinner reservations that night so I could eavesdrop on their conversations.

I missed Oscar because I was at a birthday party for a great-great niece, a five year old whose widowed mom is moving out of state soon. My brother was there and the child’s other set of great-great grandparents. The great-great grandmother asked me if I remembered the first time we met many decades ago. I didn’t. So she told me at a similar family party she walked up to me and said, “Hi Aunt Jean! I’ve been wanting to met you.” And apparently I didn’t waste any time telling her I wasn’t HER aunt Jean and I walked away. I thought I'd learned a few manners since then but when her husband started calling me "Aunt Jean" at this week's party I couldn't help myself from asking, "What did you just call me?" What can I say, I treasure my 'aunt' title and I don't want someone nearly a decade older than me wearing it out.

At 80 I was the youngest of the older generation there and we sat under a sun tent at the water’s edge, pampered by my nephew who ran up and down the hill to get us drinks, helped us in and out of beach chairs and he brought me a pillow for my back while his wife and daughter fixed us all plates of food like they'd just done for the children. That hadn't happened to me before, and it felt like I'd officially graduated into The Golden Years and I wasn't sure I if I liked it, or not. In the past I would have mingled more with the generation below me. But hasn’t it always been that way, where the oldest generation are grouped together by choice or design? 

I remember being as young as the seven kids at the party and seeing a line of elderly aunts in flowered print dresses, straw hats and clunky black shoes. I probably gave them the same weary eye and a wide berth the little kids at this party were giving me. But we all commented on how well my niece interacted with the youngest generation. At one point she had them all playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie. 

The game is based on an English nursery rhyme that’s been around since the 1790s and a widely spread rumor claims its about the plague while scholars dispute that. Wikipedia says, “English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom ‘and they’d all fall down’…The line ‘ashes, ashes’ in the colonial versions of the rhyme is claimed to refer to cremation of the  bodies.” 

The more things change the more they stay the same. Children still learn the games their mothers and grandmothers teach them. And conspiracy theories are still around and are believed above the careful research of scholars. ©