The Easter Basket and the Melting Pot

BEFORE WE GET TO THE POST BELOW I want to thank everyone in the blog community who posted comments regarding my brother's passing and who contacted me by other means. Your condolences, prayers and shared experiences means a lot to me. I apologize for not replying individually as I normally do with blog comments. (There's been a lot going on.) This community is so supportive and let's admit it, we often know each other better than the people we see off line on a daily basis. I know I share far more here than anywhere else. This past week I've felt the warmth and well wishes you've all sent my way and it's appreciated more than I can express. Jean

Why do all my best ideas for what I want to write about come when I’m doing something without a pen and paper or keyboard near by? This morning in the shower I heard a noise from my upstairs neighbor that triggered a memory about my mom which in turn brought a flood gate’s worth of connected thoughts flowing like the proverbial river. So I used my finger to write on the steam-covered shower door the words, “Labelle Street, old country and genealogy” knowing the words wouldn’t last. I did, however, think they’d last long enough for me to use my squeegee on the glass to wipe them away. Words written on steamy bathroom mirrors in scary movies seems to have a life span longer than it took for them to disappear into unreadable streaks in my bathroom. With the luck of someone who plans ahead for times when I want jot myself a note I had a pad of Post-It Notes and a pen on a small desk near enough into my bedroom that I barely had to step out of the bathroom to grab them. What were those words again? Apartment house, family history and what else? 

On the floor next to the desk where I fetched the pen and paper is basket that was my Easter basket for my entire childhood. I stubbed my toe on it fetching the Post-it Notes. Ouch! My parents practiced recycling before the word was even coined. Year after year that basket was brought out of its hiding place by the notorious Easter Bunny. He filled it with a cellophane covered chocolate bunny and assorted candy and on Easter morning I’d remove the rabbit, bite off his ear and take my basket around the yard or house (depending on the weather) to gather dyed, hard boiled eggs. Then one year no basket was brought down from its hiding place in the attic. There were no eggs to find. No chocolate bunny to eat. Instead, on Easter morning I found a small box made out of cherry wood waiting for me on the kitchen table. Inside was a note that read something like this, “You will be ten in a couple of days and you’re getting too old to still believe in the Easter Bunny. This is his last gift to you.” Also in the box was a necklace nested in a bed of jelly beans. I still have the box but the necklace is gone now. I'm pretty sure my mom heard my brother and me arguing about the Easter Bunnies existence a few days earlier and he was responsible for the dreadful note and the disappointment that followed.

The basket, now, holds a life-sized sleeping cat. Its an aqua, pink and gold gilded porcelain cat adopted from an auction house over a half century ago. Back then I was newly in love with the man I’d later marry. I thought he was crazy to keep bidding that cat up to a whopping twenty bucks just because I admired it when I walked by it before the auction started, but a quick google search of its value today had my eyes bugging out and the word, “Wow! escaping my lips. The cat has never had a name but she’s rests on a pink blanket that kept me warm in my baby’s crib eighty-some years ago.

I’ve walked past the cat-in-the-basket ever since I placed her in it after the auction. Sometimes I ignore it and others times it makes me smile but one thing remains the same: I’m too sentimental for my own good. I worry about what will happen to “my treasures” when I have to move to assisted living or I die. I wonder sometimes if I’m not related to Egyptian Royalty who also felt strongly about taking their treasures with them and they found a way to do it. At least they thought they’d accomplished that goal. Not having a thousand slaves to build me a pyramid I’ll have to be satisfied with the idea that my nieces will arrange to get my stuff into an auction where people who bid on it will treasure what they win. I have a niece who collects white ceramic cats and I briefly thought about giving it to her but like me with my collectibles, it's the thrill of the hunt that she likes about finding her cats plus mine is too old to get along with hers. Look at me personifying hunks of china.

My Easter basket and the porcelain cat have nothing to do with the words I wrote on my shower door. Hearing a loud noise from my upstairs neighbor reminded me that my mom and dad once owned a house that they converted into a two family. It was just after WWII when housing was in short supply for returning soldiers and their new brides and that gave my mom the idea to do some renovations and rent out their upstairs. My mom then saved the rent money for a down payment on a house in the suburbs that would get them out of a declining neighborhood. For their entire married life my mom had my dad building and remodeling one project after another. He always credited her for how far they’d come…both living in poverty as kids, both losing their mothers in grade school, neither one getting much of an education but in their twilight years they were able to enjoy living on a lake in a cottage they converted to a year-around home plus they had lake property up north where they camped. 

Our parent gave my brother and me the conic childhoods that were romanticized on TV shows like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best with their wise fathers and hard working moms and the carefree fun of being a teenager during the ‘50s that were portrayed in the Happy Days sitcom. We weren't exactly spoiled---we did chores and a lot of them---but we were rich in after school activities and opportunities. I've always thought my mom was creating the kind of childhood she wished she'd had or she was she living vicariously though us.

As for the words written in steam. My parents once rented their upstairs apartment (on LaBelle Street) to a deaf couple and they said were the noisiest people who ever lived above them because they couldn’t hear themselves making loud noises. My upstairs neighbor (who had all her brand new carpeting removed) is hard of hearing and I’m about ready to shoot her. I swear she's giving bowling lessons up there.

How does genealogy enter into all this---one of the words written on my shower door? My upstairs neighbor is of German descent and speaks with an accent not often heard in my part of the world. It hit me in the shower that younger people don’t care about family history like many people in my generation do because they are homogenized into society in a way like we never were. People all over my campus are working on genealogy (me and Miss Upstairs included) thinking we are going to connect to the youngest members in our families someday when they are old enough to read what we so carefully created. Giving us a false sense of immortality, a way to be remembered after we're gone.

Many of us born before or because of WWII grew up hearing stories of the Old Country, we knew our families came from some place else. Young people, if they think about their family lines at all, don't care about the Great Melting Pot of immigration or the Salad Bowl of immigration that followed and that lack of homage to our history seems to be leading us to isolationism in our politics. Our American Mosaic which has always been our strength is being judged as a bad thing, a scary thing. But that's a topic for another day, another blog post. In the meantime I'll just say I'm thoroughly disgusted with the MAGA Republicans for tanking the latest, fairest and toughest bipartisan border deal to come along in decades just because it will help Trump's campaign not to implement real solutions to real problems so he can keep on campaigning on the crisis at the border.

Until Next Wednesday! 

 "

Steamboats and Guilty Trips

A powerful storm torn through our campus several hours before twenty residents from the Independent Living building were booked to go on a steamboat ride down the Grand River. When the severe weather alerts went out we were all thinking the trip would get canceled, but it turned out to be one of those slam-bang-thank-you-mam kind of storms and by the time our bus picked us up we couldn’t ask for better weather. 

Sitting in the lobby waiting for the bus someone pulled the paddle boat’s website up and read a listing of things we’d be seeing: “Trees, streams, flowers, boulders, boaters and paddlers, people fishing, jet skis, fish, Bald Eagles, Herons, Cranes, Ospreys, Swallows, waterfowl, turtles, islands, trash traps (unfortunately), bridges, dead trees…and so on.” By the time the list got to “trees with woodpecker holes” we were all making fun of that dorky list and the Activities Director said if she had time, she’d make us some bingo cards based on that list. Imagine our silly delight and laughter when we got on aboard and they handed out bingo cards like that. It doesn’t take much to entertain old people.

All kidding aside, the steamboat has two paddle-wheels that operate independently so it can maneuver better through narrow channels and sandbars in depths of water as shallow as 22 inches. We’re talking a structure that’s 105 feet long, 25 foot wide and 20 foot tall and holds 144 people including the crew. I don’t care who you are that’s impressive. And the fact that steamboats just like this one have operated from that very same loading dock since the 1830s with it’s hey days ending in 1910---well, all I can say is my generation may have given mankind computers and cyberspace but other generations have built some pretty amazing things as well. Steamboats were an important part of commerce at one point in our history.

Did you know the units we use to measure energy output was named after the guy who invented the steam engine (1769)---James Watt? I didn’t until I started doing research for this post. A steam engine converts water into steam and the steam is what moves the paddles and other things like the wheels on old farm trackers. Not that I needed to research to know how steam engines work. Michigan hosts the biggest steam engine shows in the world and you can’t go to them without learning a thing or two.

Back to the human side of the trip down the river. Five of us from my group lucked out and got a table right next to the captain’s pilothouse so we got the wind in our hair and a forward view that didn’t include other tourists. Two others at our table were from a group of 35 widows and widowers. One of the ladies had been a widow for 15 years, the other less than a year and they hit it off with a newly minted widow from our group. They told us their club meets for lunch once a month and for dinner once a month. They also hold support groups weekly plus outings like we were on four times a year. My brother went to one of their support groups after his second wife died and said he’d never go back. “I couldn’t take all those crying women,” he said. Judging by the guys from this group of widows and widowers---who were keeping the dance floor busy on the steamship---other widowers aren’t as allergic to tears as my brother.

Summer is going by too quickly, isn’t it. It seems like yesterday when this place was hanging flags for Memorial Day. Residents with occasions to celebrate have been keeping the community room busy with their private parties and sometimes that puts me on the spectrum between jealousy and melancholy. But it is what it is. I can’t compete in that arena when others have four to six kids and countless grandchildren and great-grandchildren to help them commemorate special occasions. Not only don't I have any wiggly little ones of my own I don’t even know the youngest generation---my great-great nieces and nephews---well enough to keep most of their names straight. Not to mention they live too far away for me to see more than a couple of times a year. The most I can hope for is one day when they're adults they’ll know my name from reading the family history book, assuming at some point they want to find out more about one of the branches in their family tree. I suspect, though, that having an interest in genealogy is a dying hobby with interest waning the farther way one gets from their immigrant roots.

Whenever I get into this kind of poor-me-I-don’t-have-little-kids-in-my-life mood it reminds me of my Aunt Maggie and I feel guilty that I wasn’t warmer to her growing up. She didn’t have any children either and she had some learning and/or mental disabilities. She worked her entire adult life scrubbing toilets and floors in a Catholic hospital so she couldn’t have made much money. Even so she never missed sending me and my brother a few dollars in a greeting card on our birthdays and holidays. Sometimes she’d take a bus out to see us from her tiny apartment near the hospital. 

My mother couldn’t stand being around my aunt and whenever my mom got frustrated with my then-undiagnosed dyslexia she’d say, “You’re just like your Aunt Maggie!” It also took me a very long time to break myself of the brain fart that made me repeat the same things twice which is what my aunt did constantly that drove my mom up a wall. Technically, those brain farts are called Palialia which is on the Tourette's spectrum. Ya, I know, if only they'd had labels for syndromes and conditions back in the '40s and '50s then the mom's of the world would have done better. One could compare this with the awaking happening now regarding the biological causes of transgenders and non-binaries. Scientists know, now, how that (faulty) brain wiring happens but it's taking the general population awhile to catch up and universally accept that's it's not a choice.

Back on point: My cousins treated my aunt better than I ever thought of treating her. There was a genuine warmth between them. Me? I was as stiff as a board when I'd have to accompanying my dad when he'd visit his sister. He loved and was protective of her, knew how hard a life she had---lost her mother at five or six, bullied in school, and was even purposely set on fire once. If I wrote a book about my aunt and I'd title it The Hard Luck Life but I need get off this guilt trip I’m on because it’s heading towards Sadness Lane and it’s too nice of a day for regrets rooted before my teen years.  

Until next Wednesday… ©

Where the Past and Future Collide

Like many people who grew up poor, my husband saved everything. And even though he died three and a half years ago, and I e-Bayed my brains out in the first two years, I’m still sorting through the remnants of his life. Recently, I’ve been purging in the basement---stuff that never should have been put down there fourteen years ago when the house was brand new. In my defense, after Don’s stroke every object from his past became a battle ground and I gave in way too much. How could I tell someone who'd just lost the use of one side of his body and his ability to community with words or written language that it was time to let go of even more? Half the time I feared he’d have another stroke as he tried to make me understand why certain things had 'special' meaning to him. That’s the long version of why I’ve been on a madcap mission to finally sort through the stuff downstairs. The short version is I want to move to a condo and my past and future are colliding. 

Some stuff is easy. I pack it up and earmark it for a trip to the auction house or Goodwill. Other things I find are fun-but-time-consuming like a bundle of letters Don wrote to his mom and dad when he was in the Army. In several letters he was obsessed with getting his chainsaw shipped to the base so in his off time he could cut down trees. “Dutch elm disease is killing all the trees down here,” he wrote, “and I’m trying to get a contract from the Army to take care of them.” Several letters later he wrote, “Forget about the chainsaw. A dead tree will have to fall on a general’s jeep before anyone cares. I’ve never seen anything like the Army’s red tape, it’s terrible!” Even though life on an Army base kept him plenty busy it was so like Don to always be looking for a way to make some extra money on the side. One job was never enough for a guy whose childhood memories included people coming to the house to turn off the utilities. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s how workaholics are born. At least my workaholic. 

In the box with the letters I found a family history treasure---his mother’s 1918 high school graduation class photo---seven students! Rare for a woman in those days, she went on to college and eventually taught school for a few years before getting married and popping out four sons. She worked hard tending a garden, canning, cooking and cleaning for her boys plus a farm hand and a husband who at one point in his life had big dreams. Before taking up farming, Don's dad put all his efforts into building a bus line that ran from one end of the state to the other. He did that just before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and I found the receipt for, and a photo of his very first bus to prove it. You can guess how that investment turned out during the ten year depression following The Crash. The receipt, photos and a mantle clock from the family farm will be passed on to Don’s brother who after all these years is starting to get sentimental over family heirlooms. Yes, Virginia, you can mix Danish Modern furniture with antiques. 

But the memory trigger I found this week that choked me up was a Valentine’s Day card I created on the computer in 2000. My dad had died on the Christmas before and I was thanking Don for all the support he had given me over the long, hard year leading up to Dad’s death. Without his physical, emotional and financial support I never would have come through it with all my marbles still residing inside my head. As it was, by that Valentine’s Day I was still in a turn buckle arm cast from a freak accident I had two weeks before Dad died. I came close to losing the bottom half of my arm. But the hospital called in a crusty, old woman bone specialist who thought she could and did save my arm. The herd of doctors who came in to look at my before and after x-rays were totally amazed at her work but all I could do is cry and I didn’t stop crying until after Dad’s funeral. At the end of the ‘love letter’ I wrote: “Let’s make 2000 a year of positive changes and good times.” Two and a half months later, Don had his massive stroke and all chances for positive changes and good times left the building with Elvis.

In the twelve years that I was Don’s caregiver/spouse there were many changes, of course, but the thing that sticks in my mind as I write this is how intertwined each decade of our lives were. How they built on one another to create the people we became. A few people looked at our post-stroke lives and took away a snapshot of a mismatched couple. “Put Don in a nursing home and go on with your life,” they told me. That's easy for someone to say who wasn’t there when Don was my rock without complaint, through our four plus decades of give and take. How could I not do the same for him? That’s what deeply committed couples do. You stick with it even when it isn’t convenient, when it isn’t all roses and romance. Life balances. The yin always comes with the yang.

This will sound strange after three and a half year of living alone but I still feel like a bookend at a garage sale that’s lost its mate. But hopefully that bookend will have a new purpose in a new home and someday I hope to do the same. In the meantime, my past and future are colliding in my present. ©

NOTE: That's Don in the photo at the top.

The Widow's Vacation in Saugatuck

This woman has been on vacation! Yes, a genuine, long-overdue vacation where I packed my bags, put the dog in a kennel and took off for some R & R. I didn’t go far. My niece and I checked into a Bed and Breakfast in my favorite tourist town along Lake Michigan. I’ve been going to Saugatuck since my teens but I’ve never stayed overnight unless you count the times in my late twenties when my husband and I brought sleeping bags over to the beach and fell asleep under the stars. Those were the good old days when we were carefree and didn’t worry about getting caught with our pants down. Literally. (Raise your hand if you think I’ve shared too much information here.)

Our B & B had nine bedrooms with private baths and it was the oldest continuous use residence in town. My room had its original horsehair plaster walls and polished plank flooring with square, blacksmith-made nails and it was named after Susan B. Anthony. She stayed in the same house 136 years ago while she was in town to help organize a local Temperance Union and to give a speech on woman’s suffrage. The local newspaper of the era said “she succeeded in closing six of the fourteen saloons” and “that was a testament to her persuasiveness and organizational skills.” My niece and I tried to find a bar to have a drink in one evening and we only found two open, neither one enticing enough to draw us inside. Susan would be proud that we choose, instead, the only other business open that late---a chocolate and ice cream shop.

We packed a lot into our vacation. After a leisurely breakfast each morning, seated on miss-matched oak chairs at a long farmhouse-style table, we’d take off to do things like: walk the beach, drive the shoreline of Lake Michigan, visit a neighboring town, and browse a few antique venues. We also walked along the marina, strolled a few residential blocks with gardens you can’t truly enjoy just driving by, and we even visited the place at the shore where we spread some of Don's ashes. One night we went to a summer stock production of First Date, a musical that was so funny I had tears running down my cheeks; another night we went to an outdoor concert in the park where we perfected the fine art of people watching. One afternoon we toured a restored 1920s, twenty-five room mansion with a third floor ballroom that was built by the inventor of comptometers, the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. His story was fascinating. Where the lumber industry clear-cut the woods along the lake, he managed to restore the land, stabilizing the shifting dunes with carefully chosen vegetation and now the property is a deep woods again. I wouldn’t have thought that was even possible.

Our Meals: When we first got to town we had lunch at a store-front restaurant with Andy Warhol style murals of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean on the walls. The next day we ate at the oldest structure in the county, originally built as a hotel for traders and people in the lumber industry. I lost my ‘fish tacos virginity' at another place across from where the ferry operates. But my favorite meal of all was when we decided to have dessert instead of lunch at a large pie factory-restaurant. It’s out in the boondocks---in the middle of apple orchards, wine vineyards and blueberry farms. They’d taken a page out of a near-by winery's book and had a pie sampler tray on the menu---various, warm pies served in squatty jelly jars with vanilla bean ice cream on the side. Then there was the day we had ice cream cones for lunch. Yup, I was a bad influence on my niece. But so was she on me. Did I mention her stop to purchase a couple of bottles of wine?

Saugatuck is a town with a history rooted in boat building and lumbering and it’s often called the Art Coast of Michigan because of its 100 year old, 115 acres art colony with ties to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The town is a mecca for people from Chicago who spend the summers or boat over on the weekends. A high energy town with a wintertime population of around 1,000 that swells to 3,000 in the summers. My niece and I wondered if my great-great grandfather could have lived in town during its boom town days when he was known to have made his living following the lumber industry around this part of the state. We romanticized him living in our B & B when it was a boarding house for lumberjacks or eating at the hotel where we had dinner. Using our imaginations doesn’t make it fact, though the idea could be an interesting, family genealogy ball to chase for a tenacious researcher.

However, we did get a heavy dose of family history while we were on vacation. Sorting boxes in the basement the week before our trip, I had found six cassette tapes made of my mom and dad talking---circa the early 1970s through 1984. My niece and I listened to half of them in the evenings while drinking wine and munching popcorn. It still blows my mind that tapes made thirty and forty years ago could so clearly bring my parents back into focus. At one point we laughed so hard I actually thought I’d pass out from lack of oxygen; I could feel my face turning red. I suppose you had to be there to understand the humor in hearing my folks say long good-byes to their two dogs. They were dropping them off for me to babysit while they spent the winter in Florida. My niece started prompting them to include me (their daughter) in their “good-byes” and I started prompting them to say “I love you.” The tape ended with me singing a 'lullaby' to the dogs, which reminds me I should erase that embarrassing section. 

It was a vacation filled with quality time and memorable moments with one of my favorite people in the world. I crossed a few things off my Bucket List but believe it or not, there are still things on my ‘Saugatuck To-Do List’---like take the chain ferry across the river, ride the paddle boat, visit the art colony, walk the entire length of the boardwalk and I can’t believe we forgot to go to the kitchen gadgets store! I love that place. But for the bonus point of vacationing, when I picked Levi the Mighty Schnauzer up from the kennel it was reported that he had a wonderful time playing with a puppy during the puppy's daycare/socialization sessions and taking part in group obedience classes at night where he was pronounced to be "well behaved and sweet." Levi came home as tired and happy as I did.  ©

Main Street, Saugatuck

Our Bed and Breakfast

The Susan B. Anthony Room

The Felt Mansion

The Marina

The pier in the distance, Lake Michigan. The photo at the top was taken looking in the other direction.

This is an elaborate set of brand new steps and wheelchair ramps at a county park leading down to the beach. Don would have loved it!