Past, Present and---What Comes Next?

Sometimes things dovetail so perfectly in my life that it’s spooky. Weeks ago I signed up for a lecture billed as, “Honoring Michigan’s First Veterans” and two days after our election I sat down to this fascinating presentation about the Civil War. An author and former history teacher, our dynamic speaker started out by repeated what both Clinton and Obama said this week about our peaceful transfer of power. One hundred and fifty-five years of peaceful transfers is something to truly be proud of, isn’t it. That’s democracy at its finest and hopefully, we'll continue the tradition.

Then our lecturer talked about how while Abraham Lincoln was being inaugurated (1861), eight lawmakers from south of the Mason Dixie Line went over to the White House, took down the American flag and they literally cut the stars out that represented their states---talk about symbolism---and they sewed them in a circle on another flag known now as the Stars and Bars. Thus the Confederacy was born. Lincoln, as we all know, told these guys that secession from the Union would not be allowed and if they tried he’d have no other choice than to bring them back in by force. It took four years to break the Confederacy and by then more 620,000 men and boys had been killed. Compare that to the 644,000 who died in all our other wars put together from the Revolutionary War through to the Gulf Wars and it drives home the reason why the Civil War is still known as our bloodiest war. I won’t repeat all the interesting things I wrote down in my notebook during the lecture but the aspiring wordsmith in me liked learning that the phrase, “Bite the bullet” came from the Civil War. Wounded soldiers in the field were told to bite down on an actual bullet while medics tended their wounds. Among the many artifacts on display at the lecture was a bullet full of teeth marks. 

This week I also went to my book club where we discussed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. It was written from the point of view of a fifteen year old autistic savant who’d cover his ears and do numbers in his head when he got sensory overloaded. I finished up reading the book while I was in sensory overload just before the election and I count that book as part of the spooky dovetailing the universe brought into my life. It wasn’t the type of book I would have ever read on my own but our discussion was interesting and insightful. Four women in the group were teachers before retirement and had stories of their own to tell about children they’d taught. We got a new book club member this month, a man that I’ve never met and didn’t like from the minute he walked in the door. I’ve got a bad habit of making snap judgements about people, I’m ashamed to admit, so it will be interesting to see if I warm up to him in the coming months. I usually don’t change my snap judgements but I’m always hopeful I’ll learn to be a better person and stop judging a "book" by the cover---lame, over used analogy here but I couldn’t help it.

New Topic: Last summer a woman and her two teen-aged sons moved in across the street. She has Parkinson’s disease and up until this week I thought she spent all her time in a wheelchair because I’d never seen her any other way. A few weeks ago she was sitting outside waiting for the Go-Bus that takes her to adult daycare/socialization once a week so I went over, introduced myself and I learned she can barely speak above a soft whisper. To my surprise, a few days ago I opened my front door to find her leaning on a walker and she had a paper in her hand explaining why she was there. I invited her in and quickly skimmed the message. She was inviting me over to her house for a "girl’s night" with some friends from her old neighborhood. I accepted and after she left I read the paper more thoroughly. It will to be a movie and fellowship night featuring a Christian movie “we might like all like to see.” 

Actually, a Christian movie is the last thing I’d like to see but it wouldn’t have made a difference had I known that before accepting the invitation. It was an opportunity to get to know one of my neighbors. I’ve been feeling sorry for her for months---another snap judgement---knowing she didn’t know anyone on our street and she spends so much time alone. When it was time for her to leave, I asked her if she’d like me to walk her back across the street. It’s a long way and she’s none to steady with that walker. She did and I got to meet her sons. Nice boys with good manners. Getting the back story on what happened to her husband is going to be hard but I’m guessing she’s in that statistical pool of woman whose husband’s leave them when they are severely disabled. I’m planning to give her my email address on movie night in the hopes we can communicate that way---someone had to type out the invitation. Wouldn’t that be a spooky twist of irony if I developed a penpal that lives across the street after a lifetime of having penpals from all over the world? ©

Finding the Past, Seeing the Future

Family is so important---past, present and future. This fact was driven home on Monday when I spent a beautiful summer day with my niece roaming a couple of cemeteries looking for ancestors. We found my great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, within two minutes of entering the veteran’s cemetery. The lots, plots and rows were well marked and easy to find without even getting out of the car. As my niece said, “That’s the government.” Given the fact that he died in 1917, his stone was in remarkable condition (see photo above). He was only in my mother’s life for six years before he died but his life and military service took up three pages in the family history book I wrote last winter. It still amazes me that I was able to find details about the type of bullet he took in the head and the various hospitals where he recuperated but I don’t know how he took his morning coffee. Note to future family historians: I like mine with Italian sweet cream.

In another cemetery it took us quite a while and an iPad with a screen shot of the cemetery map plus counting plots, rows and tombstones to determine that my grandparents never got markers placed on their graves. Nothing that says, “I was here, don’t forget me.” Guessing the reasons why makes sense when we thought about what was going on in the family in 1922 and 1945, when they died, but it was a bit of a let-down for our “stones and lunch quest" and it made me sad that they ended up in unmarked graves. I never knew my grandparents. Still, the stories told over the years made them “real” to me. Growing up, I was so jealous of my best friend because her grandparents lived within walking distance and I’d go there with her after school sometimes. I credit them for teaching me to love antiques. Her grandfather’s face lit up when he’d tell stories about his treasures. Now I’m the one with stories about the obsolete things I have collected over years. Hopefully, what goes around comes around and I’ll spark a love of old things in someone born in this century.

I asked my niece if she thought her descendants will be walking around a cemetery in a 100 years looking for her granite marker. She didn’t know but afterward I thought about it and I realized that in the not so distant future it won’t be necessary. With the popularity of “living headstones” aka QV codes growing rapidly, GPS will take people right to a grave and when they get there they’ll be able to use their smartphones to view pictures, movies and the eulogy of the deceased. I keep thinking I want to get the QV code for Don’s stone---they only cost $50, the last time I checked---but that task keeps hanging down at the bottom of my ‘to do someday’ list.  Maybe I’ll put a clause in my will requiring my heirs to create QV files for both Don and me before they get any money. “That sneaky Aunt Jean,” they’d say, “reaching out from the grave like that to blackmail us into doing her bidding!” 

My niece and I had lunch at a quirky restaurant, a former railway station that only has two booths and thirteen counter seats for customers. They make the best malts and hamburgers in town---not just my opinion. They’ve been voted as such a few times. The place has been “in the family” since, well, forever it seems. Owned by my cousin then passed down to his daughter and son-in-law, it’s a city landmark that’s fun to visit. It’s too bad restaurants with L-shaped lunch counters lined with stools went out of fashion. No one stays a stranger long in a place like that. It’s the kind of place where the customers introduce themselves when you sit down. Cooking in that fishbowl on the other side of the counter, though, would be my nightmare job. You’d not only have to know what you’re doing on the grill but you’d also have to be able to kibitz and kid with the customers, tell jokes and keep the politician debates from getting out of hand. I don’t multi-task well when cooking is involved and I’d probably want to burn the burgers of a few people whose outrageous political views seem to come straight out of the twilight zone. 

When I got back home I got a call from my nephew’s very excited wife. She had good news. Both of her kids have been married awhile and both of them just found out they are having their first babies within weeks of each other. Her son’s baby---my future great-great nephew or niece---gives the family a 50-50 chance of having someone to carry on the family surname. That’s something I’d very much like to see before I die. Whether my nephew and his wife become the grandparents of two boys or two girls or one of each, I will need to get my knitting needles back out. Life is good when you can see family far back in the past and far into the future at the same time---that’s the pure joy of continuity that bridges the centuries. ©

Laughter, Politics, War and Race

LAUGHTER: Monday morning I had brunch with my Red Hat Society sisters before we went to the multiplex movie theater near-by. I hadn’t been to an I-Hop in over a decade so I was looking forward to it. Where else can you get an enormous sugar high before noon and we should do it more often. We were being old, honest women opening up about our changing bodies and our sense of humors were operating on all their cylinders. Yup, I had a great time. After the movie we stopped for ice cream at one of those places where you build your own sundae and pay for it by the pound. I was relieved that my sundae wasn’t the heaviest one in the group. It was a pig-out-day, and I paid the piper with a pair of tighter pants. Next time I’ll remember to wear an elastic-waisted model.

POLITICS: The movie we saw was The Woman in Gold. What a good film! It was based on the true story of an elderly Jewish refugee who fought the Austrian government in the courts to recover artwork she believed---and eventually proved---belonged to her family. The Woman in Gold was valued at 135 million dollars and it was considered to be the crown jewel in the Austrian art world and they didn’t want to let it go. Sounds boring, doesn’t it, but it’s not by any means. There’s a lot of flashbacks to when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and the topic was kept from getting too dark by the interplay between the main characters, octogenarian (Helen Mirren) and her young lawyer (Ryan Reynolds) which was often laugh-out-loud funny. If you like story-lines that are ripped from the pages of the history books, don’t miss this movie.  

WAR: The next day I went to a lecture titled Mr. Lincoln’s War given by a Fulbright Scholar and history professor from a near-by college. He was born and raised in Texas, still had a southern drawl and he had a gift for making history relevant to modern times. He was also great at interjecting humor into his presentation and that kept it from being dry and boring. As I sat listening to him describe the ‘Velvet Glove’ approach to war as opposed to the ‘Iron Fist’ approach I finally got it---got why people join Civil War Round Tables. When he talked about how the Confiscation Acts helped to humanize the slaves that had been confiscated when found doing work for the Confederate military, I was fascinated. He made you want to hear more. Especially when he touched on how the war fed into West Michigan (where I live) becoming---at one point in history---the most segregated state in the union. 

When the lecture was over a woman came up to the microphone and she asked any women in the audience having ancestors who served in Civil War to come up front to see her. I did, along with seven or eight others. We were invited to join the Daughters of the Civil War. I asked what they do at their monthly meetings and she talked about their projects around the community. When she calls with more information, I just might give the group a try. If nothing else, she offered to take me to my ancestor’s grave at the Veteran’s Home. Her group actually plants flowers on his plot! 

RACE: Honestly, it gets increasingly hard to keep a blog and not write about current events. It feels weird sometimes to be writing about milk toast when the media is serving up chili pepper pie. However, I probably won’t shock anyone if I write about growing up in a white bread community where the only black people I ever saw were the bathroom attendants in the department stores downtown. It might, however, surprise people to know that here it is sixty years later and the only black people I see day-to-day are on TV. I thought about all this a few weeks ago when there was a panel discussion on a local news segment on how businessmen here in West Michigan are concerned about the lack of diversity in the community. Headhunters, they said, are having a hard time recruiting specialists, scientists, doctors, chemists, engineers, etc., to move here to work in our growing medical research facilities and their supporting industries. Surprise, surprise people of color want to live in a more diverse environment. The recruiters, it should be noted, are recruiting from all over the world. It seems we’re not producing enough professionals here in the States to fill our growing needs.... 

….And yet too many politicians want to bleed the schools dry, demoralize teachers by chipping away at their benefits and not invest in higher education. Does that make sense, especially in places where there’s so much civil unrest, due in no small part, to the fact that industrial bases have disappeared drying up all the middle class jobs? When I hear fans of FOX TV pundits parrot: "Baltimore is all the President’s fault” I can’t help wondering how it feels to live in such a simple-minded world where everything is Obama's fault, where history has no relevance to current events, and where white America never, ever has to accept an iota of blame for any chaos that goes on around the world. Please don't misconstrue that to mean I'm giving a free pass to those creating the violence and destruction in Baltimore. I'm not giving a pass to anyone; what's going down there is wrong, plain and simple. I'm just saying it's far more complicated than a catchy, baseless bullet point from FOX pundits and tweets from the likes of Donald Trump. We didn't blame Bush for the 1992 LA riots after the beating of Rodney King and to blame Obama, now, for Baltimore's disenfranchised is race baiting in its most insidious form. And it bugs me, can you tell?

Note: I'll go back to serving up milk toast in my weekend post. Maybe sweet, savory milk toast with a clown face gracing the top. ©