Baseball, War and a Month of Memories

I’d rather watch grass grow than to go to a baseball game. I’m not a sports fan of any kind but I am a fan of cultural history and when the senior hall offered a lecture on the history of baseball during the Civil War I signed up. The bus picked us up Thursday evening for the event that took place at our state’s presidential library which is located in a city near-by. The speaker, a professor/author and well-known baseball historian is a member of The Chicago Civil War Round Table, an organization a Google search tells me is very large and active in its endeavor to preserve all things related to the War Between the States. It seems odd to me, at times, that we’ve romanticized a war to the extent we do with that war, but that’s a debate for another day. It’s enough to say the results of the Civil War merit that treatment on one side of the debate and on the other side, yearly reenactments of the deaths of so many men seems beyond morbid. The older I get the more of a pacifist I become so you won’t see me in the role of camp follower, doing what some women did during that war. The reenactments remind me that fighting is so deeply bred into humans that, I guess, romanticizing fake fighting is better than the real thing. Too bad we can’t get the rest of the world on board with that thought. Keep them so busy with reenacting past wars they don’t have time for new ones. 

Back to baseball: Dispelling the myth that baseball was invented during the Civil War by Abner Doubleday, a general in the Union Army, was the centerpiece of the lecture. The fact is scholars all agree, now, he had nothing to do with baseball---the game actually evolved from games played with balls during medieval times and no one person invented it. But the myth held on long enough for the National Baseball Hall of Fame to be built in Doubleday’s home town in 1937. An interesting and often funny lecture, I learned that the soldiers on both sides of the war spent more time playing baseball than in actual battles. It was also interesting that Lincoln had a ball diamond on the White House lawn. Who knew!

Speaking of Don---I wasn’t? Oops, that reference got lost in a rewrite. Anyway, April is a month filled with memory triggers for me. Don’s and my birthday fall in April as well as our anniversary and that of my mom and dad’s. My mother died in April and both my brother and brother-in-law share a birthday on the same day in April. And now I have a great-great nephew with an April birthday and soon they’ll be a great-great niece’s birth to celebrate in April. Last weekend I went to the first ever birthday party for little C.S. His mother made an assortment of homemade quiches and the best ever strawberries dipped in dark chocolate. Gifts and cake, too, came with the afternoon. It was good to build some new memories for April, happy memories filled with hope for such a young life. What a bright little boy. Already he’s learning how to point to letters on a wall chart. I may not live long enough for him to remember me, but I’ll bet one day he’ll read the words I wrote in the family genealogy books and learn about his connection to the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. His grandparents, both retired teachers, will see that he learns to love written words. And that pleases me.

I’m looking forward to summer and one of the first signs I get that its coming comes from my neighbor. They are so deep into medieval reenactments that they actually use handwoven clothe to hand stitch into costumes that are very specific to certain centuries of medieval life. Every summer weekend they’re off to reenactments, medieval fairs and jousting tournaments. I’d like to go to one. I heard the pig roasts are great. One day soon they’ll empty out the shed where they keep all their medieval gear---lances, shields, chain-mail, goal posts, a white tent with a pointed “roof” and colorful flags---no horse back there, but someday I expect to see one. Every knight with shining armor needs one. Can you believe it, they actually met at a jousting tournament. How’s that for a romantic way to meet. I can’t wait to ask them if the fairs include ball games. It’s nice to see a young couple so emerged in something fun that teaches at the same time. And maybe that’s the value of Civil War reenactments, too. Maybe it’s not so much about romanticizing war as it is about teaching history. ©

Note: The lithograph at the top is of a baseball game at the Civil War Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. A prisoner from the north recreated the scene when he got back home after the war. 

Tattle-Tales and Doctors

Spring and fall I see my internist and in recent years all I ever see of him is his back as he types my answers to his questions into a computer. A few days before my appointment, this week, something new occurred. The internist’s office emailed me the questions he usually asks, “to save face time with the doctor.” I was to email the questionnaire directly back to my medical chart that I can now access online, including the results to all the blood tests I took in preparation for this appointment. I don’t see the point of going to a doctor’s office anymore. Even getting weighed and your blood pressure and pulse taken can be done with a fancy-pant gadget that sends readings through cyberspace. My sister-in-law has one those gadgets/scales and it’s connected to a nurse sitting in an office miles away. Every morning she hops on her space-age scale so her readings can tracks her water retention, heart rate and who knows what else and if adjustments in medications are needed she gets a call. If she doesn't get weighed by a certain time, a computer calls to remind her. At what point do they do away with the human element altogether and just let computers diagnosis us? It’s coming, like cars that drive themselves. Can you imagine the headlines in the future? “Hacker Accessing Medical Charts Kills Hundreds in Ohio!”

I became the village Tattle-Tale in Chief over the weekend. If you don’t want to hear the back story, stop reading because I’m going to tell you about the up-for-sale-and-empty house next door. When I work at my computer its backyard, with its enormous and ugly two story deck, is in view and that deck has become a gathering point for six or seven kids from the cul-de-sac. One side of the lower level of the deck is open so you could dive into an above ground swimming pool the previous owners took with them when they moved. The kids---ages 6 to 12---are kicking slats out along the sides of the deck, throwing landscape stones all over the place and uprooting outdoor carpeting. And the roughing housing is going to get one of them seriously hurt in a fall. One time a girl was getting picked on by three others as I debated with myself about getting involved and I hated being put in that position! Just when I decided to go out there, she was able to break free and I was left wondering if this is how it starts, that old person thing where you find yourself yelling at the neighborhood kids to quit doing anything and everything that resembles fun in their eyes. 

A few days after the fight, I saw the dad to three of the kids working in his yard so I went out to talk to him. I opened with, “You might want to have a talk with your kids about respecting other people’s property” and I told him what was going on. He wanted to go see the damage for himself and I was thinking, Jeez, now the kids will know who ratted them out! After the damage tour, my neighbor assured me that his kids will not be playing back there again and “they will be punished.” I hoped he meant a take-a-cell-phone-away kind of punishment rather than a physical one and then I started worrying about that! But the thing I hated the most about the whole episode with was feeling vulnerable, like the cul-de-sac kids would see me as a cranky, old woman they could target next for mayhem and destruction. Feeling vulnerable and my old age seems to go together like Google and maps.

Later on in the day I ratted on the kids, their father walked them over to my house. He said they admitted to doing exactly what I reported and he told them it wasn’t a tattle-tale situation on my part because I had talked to the kids about the stone throwing a couple of weeks earlier without telling their dad about it at the time, “Giving you a chance to do the right thing all on your own,” he said to the kids in a soft, teaching tone. Then the oldest boy says, “We’re sorry, Miss Jean, that we didn’t listen to you the first time.” What a great dad! I guess every village needs a tattle-tale, I just wish it didn’t have to be me.

Oh, and the results of my bi-annual wellness physical in case anyone cares... I got my Medicare mandated hug from the doctor, a clean bill of health and a vaccination to protect me against whooping cough and tetanus. (I've never liked shaking hands with doctors who are around sick people and now I have to get hugged?) I didn’t think I needed the vaccine but the doctor says that three quarters of the people who get tetanus in the USA are the elderly. Now that I’ve been vaccinated I can walk barefoot in a garden filled rusty nails, use dirty needles to shoot myself up daily with my osteoarthritis medication and get surgery done in a less than sterile operating room and not worry about those nasty lock-jaw bacterial spores getting in my blood. Not that I was planning on doing any of those things but it’s nice to keep all your options open. ©

Red Hats on Memory Lane

 

It’s been a while since I’ve made it to a monthly Red Hat Society tea or a walk-about---since the Christmas party to be exact. The roads conditions last winter was the biggest reason but Wednesday that streak was broken by our annual spring thrift shop crawl. I’m not a big fan of shopping with other women---I like to form my own opinions on whether or not something is right for me without the pressure of someone else, perhaps, egging me on. But where ever there is a group of women, shopping seems to be a common denominator to get together, like bowling or golf for guys.

There was a time when I knew the location of every antique store and mall, every flea market, and all the pawn shops, thrift and junk shops in a tri-county area. Don was addicted to them. So image my surprise when the thrift shop crawl took us to a large mall less than two miles from home that I didn’t know had been there for the past three years. It was a collection of booths filled with re-purposed goods, antiques and crafts and I ran into a showcase I sold last year! I know it was the same one because the same chip was in one of the glass shelves. The spooky part was it was filled with the same kinds of gas station memorabilia "smalls" that Don and I had it filled up with. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if the guy who now owns it was one of my best customers the year after Don died, when I had a booth in an antique mall. Was it serendipity running into my old showcase? Only time will tell. I left my phone number with the mall owner to ask the showcase owner to call me if he's interested in a wholesale deal on more "smalls."

To keep the trip down Memory Lane going, the restaurant the Red Hatters picked to eat lunch at was decorated in antique gas station memorabilia like Route 66 and other porcelain signs, oil cans, gas globes and pumps from the early 1900s---like what once covered the walls of our three stall garage. There were twelve of us at lunch and the conversation at the long table went on so long after we had finished eating that I was getting antsy to get out of there. Spending a childhood where I wasn’t allowed to leave the dinner table until bedtime if I hadn’t eaten all my food still haunts me after all these years. I was a stubborn kid, I wouldn’t eat anything orange or the liver served once a week. No matter how stimulating the conversation might be, I can’t get past the feeling of being punished if I have to sit at a dinner table too long and I get obsessed with why people aren't cleaning up their plates or getting take-out boxes. Get that food out of my sight, for crying out loud, before I feel compelled to eat your left overs!

I still have one winter project to finish up before moving on to spring things---getting my 2014 blogs enters ready to print in a hard-copy book. The book is just for me. I’ve always been a diary person and turning a blog into a book is just a modern way of doing a diary. Proof reading a year’s worth of posts, though, tends to get me side-tracked into reflecting on past feelings and actions which, of course, is one of the values (or curses) of keeping a diary or blog. I’m finding things that indicate growth in acceptance of a life lived alone and in finding a direction to go that will truly make me happy. I’m not quite there yet but I can see it on the horizon. I still feel the sense of pressure to hurry up and get there and being with the Red Hat Society ladies again drove that feeling even stronger. Three of the ladies have had breast cancer treatments recently and a couple of our members have died since last fall. 

Life is short and I waste too much time thinking about the future (and perhaps the past) rather than living in the present. One of my Red Hat sisters is quite the opposite. She's a member of four chapters and a bunch of church groups. She gets up a 4:00 AM, does her house work and is on the go every single day and most evenings. She’s a widow, too, and I wonder sometimes if she isn’t running from the loneliness she feels if she stays home but in the end, does it matter? She says she’s happy when she’s busy. She’s found her way. Me? I like being alone and I like being with other people; it’s finding the right balance between the two that I’m still working on. Or rather it’s finding the right combinations of quality activities to get me out of the house. Otherwise, I might easily take the lazy way out and aspire to be a hermit, a misunderstood dreamer who stays in her bathrobe until noon. Which reminds me of an interview I saw recently of a young movie star. He was asked why he's so often photographed without his shirt on and he said, "Because I hate doing laundry." Ya, me too, I thought while trying to keep a straight face, that's why I don't rush to get dressed in the morning. If you believe that, I've got a bridge for sale.... ©