Westside Park Memories

Say the word "summer" to a hundred people and ask for a memory and you'll probably get a hundred memories. Summer, especially to a kid, has always meant a certain kind of freedom. For sure, it's freedom from the shackles of school and homework, but it's also freedom to do and go and exist within a wonderful time span that is mostly one's own. For the kid who is a reader, it's three months at the public library. For the sports enthusiast, it's week after week of baseball or softball or swimming or biking or golf. For the lazy slug, it's endless mornings to sleep away. Add to that the family picnics and reunions, trips to the beach or nearby city museums, family vacations, visits from out of town friends and relatives, fireworks and watermelon,  and one could say that summer is probably the best part of a kid's calendar year with the possible exception of Christmas Day.

My own summers were a little of all of the above. We played neighborhood baseball and kickball games, we biked all over town, we hit the public library at least twice every week and spent lazy hours sitting out under the pear tree reading, and we helped our mom can and freeze for the coming winter.

We lived in a small city in the Midwest in the 1950's. WWII was still discussed by our parents who lived it. Every few blocks there was a one room corner grocery store where a kid could get a bottle of Coke for seven cents and penny candy for a penny. TV was for Saturday morning and after supper. And the music of the day was rock'n'roll of a gentler sort than today's music. Kitchens were formica and chrome, the freezers in our refrigerators held one box of ice cream, an ice cube tray and maybe a can of frozen orange juice. Going to the movies could mean an entire afternoon as we watched cartoons, the feature film, and then maybe another film. But the mecca of summer kid happiness in my elementary school days was our neighborhood park program

Every day was something special. The Pet Parade, the Watermelon Eating Contest, the Water Balloon Battle, the Talent Show, the Doll Show, the Hobby Show, Ice Cream Day  to name a few. Add to that a terrific collection of stilts, pogo sticks, badminton gear, hoola hoops, baseball equipment, basketballs, a vast assortment of board games, and the fact that the ice cream and popsicle vendors knew every park in town,  and there was literally everything a kid could hope for on a summer day at our disposal.. 

The Park Board supplied us with high school students who organized and monitored our activities and who became heroes to many of us little kids. In their khaki shirts and shorts, they were the US Park Rangers of our small town, answering every conceivable question a pack of noisy kids could ask, bandaging up our scraped knees and elbows with plastic bandaids, and maintaining an enthusiasm and cheeriness that kept us all high on "going to the park."

There were several parks within walking or biking distance from our house. Every neighborhood had a park and the town wasn't that big. My favorite was Westside Park which was just a couple of blocks away from our house. Westside Park had two entries, one at the dead end of Prospect Street, and one at the dead end of Madison Street. If the park hadn't been there, either Prospect or Madison Street would have gone clear through the park, met the other street head on, and eliminated the need for one of the two street names to exist.

We entered from the Madison Street dead end because it had at least thirty railway tie steps leading down to the park below. The park itself was in a basin of sorts, surrounded on all sides by high hills which made entering the park a somewhat magical experience in itself. For my younger sisters and I, running down those thirty steps at a break-neck pace was part of the adventure of going to the park. Rolling on our sides down any of the hills to the park at the bottom was another. On the far side of the park, behind the high school, was a tire swing hanging from a huge old tree that when one really got to swinging back and forth allowed him to arc far out into the open over the floor of the park fifteen or twenty feet below. More than one kid let go just to see what would happen. They usually hit the ground with a great resounding "thwump" and after the shock of impact wore off,  got up to continue their play.  

We also had very tall swings, the kind you rarely see at city parks anymore because of fear of lawsuits by city officials. The champion swingers, those with great style and practice, could get their swing so high that those watching were certain they would complete the circle and go over the top. I personally never saw that happen, but there were legends that said it had been done.

The monkey bars were similar to the kind that the military uses today to train recruits, but we were kids who knew no bounds. We were serious about play. What was a fall of eight feet from a maze of iron bars? We were tough kids. And besides,  that's what doctors were for. We scrambled all over the monkey bars, up and over other climbers, even playing games of tag on them. Occasionaly some brave souls actually walked across the high horizontal ladder at the top like a circus high wire act, the rest of us watching from below with our hearts in our throats and great admiration.

And the merry-go-round could have been named "The Puke Machine"  because of all the kids who got car sick but still thought the merry-go-round was fun. Nothing like the small plastic jobs of today's parks, ours was an old two-tiered wooden job with almost no safety handles and only a rut of dirt beneath it (created by the feet of  zillions of kids over the years kicking their way to high speeds of centrifugal force) to break their fall or catch their vomit when they eventually hit their limit of good clean fun. At least once a day some kid would let go too soon and go flying out into the grass. This was always fun to watch as long as it wasn't you.  

And of course, the slide, as tall as a skyscraper, all metal, and  hot as blazes on a ninety degree day was the zenith of delight. Clambering up the steep steps, trying to push off any guy behind you who was trying to pass ( yes pass) you on the way up, you made it to the top and in that one second of giddy glory you surveyed your domain. Your park. Your world. Heck, you could almost see China from up there. And then some kid behind you accidently or otherwise pushed you forward and suddenly, and always before you were ready, you were plummeting downward on a surface as hot as a frying pan until you landed in the gravel below. And then you ran back to the steps to do it all over again.

Hunger was usually the reason most kids left the park around noon. Mothers and chores or piano lessons or swimming  or baseball practice were the only reasons some of us didn't return immediately.  But if you couldn't go back that afternoon, as my mother used to say, "the park will still be there tomorrow."

The park is still there, all these tomorrows later. We've taken several sets of grandchildren rolling down those hills and spent many happy evenings watching them play on much safer equipment.. It's all they know, and they don't seem to mind. The park has a different name now, too, in honor of  two much-respected  educators who have passed on. 

In many ways, the park is just the same. The beautiful back yards that surround the park are there. So is the stalwart dark brown wooden shelter with its gathering of picnic tables. Madison Street and Prospect Street still lead up to the park. The huge tree with the tire swing is gone. Probably just as well. Kids today don't seem to bounce as well as we did. 

And the old entrance to the park from the Madison Street dead end is there, but the railroad tie steps we used to run down have been dug out leaving another grassy hill. Everyone enters by a new safer portal off of Prospect Street. That's OK. If a silly old-timer like me wants to enter by Madison Street, who need steps? I'll just roll down that hill one more time.

Thoughts At A Wedding Shower

Recently I attended a bridal shower for my oldest granddaughter given by her new mother-in-law. No detail had been spared to make the room an elegant, welcoming, and enjoyable place for a young bride to meet her new family as well as her mother-in-law's friends, and to greet her own church family.

I, who had always been part of her inner circle of close family, was now a stranger to most of these women. They didn't know the inside jokes we had enjoyed throughout her growing up days, the bonds of family love we have always shared with her, the twenty plus years of family Christmases, weddings, funerals, birthdays, picnics, graduations, illnesses, sorrows, joys, and triumphs that have been part of the mosaic of her life and ours. Today I was someone to meet. A face with a relationship to the bride whose name most of them wouldn't remember by the end of luncheon.

But as a grandmother who knows the little bird must fly the nest, it was wonderful to see our girl move from person to person, hugging, laughing, welcoming, introducing, moving throughout the room as a young guest of honor/ hostess should, taking her new responsibilities in hand as well as truly enjoying enlarging her borders as she acknowledged this new family and circle of friends that was now hers. My heart swelled with gratitude as I recognized that hers would be a life rich in family, friends, church, country life, and both new and old traditions. I could not have wished more for her.

As the shower progressed and our watches told us that soon the opening of gifts would begin, our bride suddenly looked up, and there was her beloved walking in the door of the hall. In a flash, she left us to greet him with a radiant smile, a few words that only they could hear, and an excitement I pray she feels every time he enters a room for the rest of both of their lives.

A door was closing for her family. She didn't know it, but I could see it. It wasn't a bad thing. It was a good thing. It was as God intended. This tall young man would soon be her home, her life, her shelter in the storms of life. He would be her best friend, the one she loved, the one she would be angry at, but turn to because he was the one she always turned to. They would have secrets that none of us would know. They would live together, pray together, rejoice and grieve together. And as we faded and passed from this life, they would remember us. Together. Always together. The two of them.

It was right. It was part of God's plan. It was what I had prayed for throughout her life. And the rest of us, who would always be her family, would continue to be her family, but now the center of her family would be her husband. For a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife. And the two shall be one flesh.

Memories of Grandma's House

Years ago, people regularly took Sunday afternoon drives. My mother loved to tell us stories about her family's adventures with horse drawn vehicles. On Sundays, they packed the children and a hearty picnic into the wagon and headed to church.  Everyone had a picnic after the morning service, visited for a while, and then made the long trip back home. Later, when the car got them there faster, the desire for a leisurely Sunday afternoon ride prompted them to take roads less travelled, to see other places and things before returning home to milk the cows and prepare for another long hard week of farming.

My father, whose own father was an alcoholic barber, had much more colorful experiences to tell us. Like the time his dad was under the influence and piled the family of eight into the old Ford, the kind with the little round glass window behind the back seat. Granddad thought the car was in drive, but it was in reverse, slamming the car into a telephone pole, the old fashioned kind with metal climbing spikes sticking out of the sides. One metal spike broke through the round glass window, conked a family member on the back of the head, knocking him out cold.

When we were kids, our folks had a Mercedes Benz. Not really. That was a family joke. Each of us had a right foot named "Mercedes" and a left foot named "Benz." You got it right. We walked. Everywhere.

On almost any Sunday afternoon, our little brood could be seen marching in single file, like a camel caravan, across town, over the Joilet Bridge, and out into the extremities of our town to our grandmother's house. Warm weather or cold, we made that trip every Sunday afternoon unless we were sick.

We didn't think twice about walking. We walked everywhere. To the grocery store, to the doctor, to the library, to church, to local events, to school, to our friends' houses. At first, we didn't know there was another way. When we noticed that our some of our neighbors had cars, it was simply that. They drove. We walked. 

On our Sunday walks, sometimes a couple of us kids would speed up and make our way to the far front of the caravan, mostly to be able to talk and kid around without constantly being told to behave. And if one of us really was bad, she had to walk with my mother and hold my her hand, which had a really fierce grip that took the life right out of your fingers rendering them numb in no time at all. My father was not a hand holder. He had a thing about germs. He knew we were a germy bunch by nature. His kind of discipline was a thump on the head.

The route to Grandma's house never varied. Down Campbell Street to West Lincolnway, then over the bridge and down Joliet Road. The only negative to our trips was that the route was so predictable. In my mind, I could see a dozen different variations, all more interesting than the go straight, turn right, then turn left route we always took. In warm months I would have loved to have walked past the root beer stand on Chicago Street. It would have been so easy, so within the desired direction. I knew my mother just didn't want to buy us root beer. My dad wouldn't have objected. He loved root beer, but he also loved peace and quiet. Everyone in our family knew better than to cross my mother.

But even on such an unrelenting route there were things to see. People out in their yards. Children riding bikes or playing together. Wading pools. People doing yard work even though it was the Sabbath. Flower gardens and later in the season vegetable gardens. And swing sets. 

I loved swing sets. Ours was two discarded pieces of telephone poles with a plank nailed between them to support two homemade wooden swings on ropes. My dad, always a clever fellow, built the whole thing out of scrap wood. And though I admired the brightly painted metal swing sets of other neighbor children, I was assured that ours wouldn't fall over in time or rust. 

Early on summer mornings, I would get up, dress, unlock the kitchen door quietly so that my parents wouldn't wake up and start the shrieking that always followed the thought that there might be a prowler in the house, and I would go out to the little fenced in yard to swing to my heart's content.

Sometimes I would swing and sing. Sometimes, I would swing with my eyes shut and imagine I was flying. But mostly, I just listened to the birds singing, the trucks and cars wooshing past on our busy street, enjoying the feeling of being somewhere by myself. In a big family, and especially in a noisy family, one is seldom alone, but in that early morning half hour or so, I loved the feeling.

One of the few times I was glad I wasn't alone was when we were at our grandparents home. My grandfather was a retired farmer. When he moved to our town at the age of sixty-five, it was to buy his first house and land. He had always rented before that. He took a one acre parcel of land and turned it into the most compact food-producing tract of land for miles around. He had an apple orchard, plum and cherry trees, blackberries, raspberries, boisenberries, and strawberries. And then there were the usual garden items like tomatoes, potatoes, beans, carrots, turnips, squash, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers, etc. I learned the joy of farming from my grandfather.

My grandmother had a green thumb for flowers and houseplants. In the winter,  every room in the house had a plant or two on any available surface. In the summer, the plants all went out on the big front porch on tables that my grandfather built. He also made her long window boxes for the front of the porch which she filled with vinca, primroses, petunias, Sweet William, and other bright colored flowers. From the street, her filled flower boxes looked like the hanging gardens of Babylon as they spilled over and cascaded down the front of their big white house. Later in the summer she set up a table at the roadside where she sold fruits, vegetables, and bunches of flowers for what she called her "pin money."

My sisters and I knew the route to our grandparents' house very well. In the summer, we were often called to help Grandma and Grandma by picking produce from their garden. They always rewarded us with lunch before they brought us home. Grandma was a great cook. And baker. She always had fresh cookies stored in a large silver electric skillet, and she never counted how many we ate. 

Theirs was a tall square white frame house, like many houses built in its day. Kitchen, dining room, and living room on the first floor, two bedrooms a bath and a sewing room on the second floor. The basement had the furnace, hot water heater and a wringer washer.

I remember thinking that Grandma's living room was elegant. It wasn't. It was just spotlessly clean as was her entire house, and it was tastefully decorated. It was homey, and it welcomed any guest to be comfortable and at ease. On Sunday afternoons, after being welcomed with the usual hugs and smiles, we all went to the living room to pull the board games out of the cupboard in the bookcases. We all sat at the dining room table and played games. Parcheesi, Rack-O, Checkers, and Milebourne. Grandma was good at games and she never let us win. If we won, we took great pleasure in the fact that we had done it on our own. 

After a while, Grandma would let us play among ourselves and then we'd smell the popcorn popping. Pan after pan she would make until her large canning kettle was full of buttery, salty fresh popcorn, cooked the old-fashioned way on top of the stove. We'd line up with our bowls to scoop popcorn and then we were off to watch TV. Family Classics came on at four o'clock on WGN. During commercials we ran to the bathroom or back to the kitchen for more popcorn and pink lemonade. 

"Lassie" came on next, then "Disneyland", the first hour long Walt Disney TV show. Mickey and Donald and Chip and Dale made us laugh and scream in delight. Later, it was "Davy Crockett," excerpts from "Dumbo" and "Bambi" and even "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea." 

It all ended too soon, and we'd clean up our spilled popcorn, kiss Grandma goodnight and pile into Grandpa's car for an exciting if slightly squished ride home. Watching the lights in the houses along the way as we drove home was a novel experience for us since we didn't own a car, but although the car made the long trip home much faster, we never once asked, "are we there yet?" We all wished we were still back at Grandma's house.

  

No Trash Day in Heaven

Our trash truck ambles down Campbell Street every Thursday morning around 7:30 AM. In recent years it has been preceded by the recycling truck. Both take away all those things we don't want or need or that have no useful purpose. I've learned a lot from those reality show on TV that present houses bulging with decades of clothes, furniture, Granny's disintegrating relics, and boxes of empty cat food cans. We all save stuff we should have dumped years ago.


I suspect we keep it to preserve memories and to stave off the responsibility of making a decision we fear we may later regret, but whatever our reasoning, there comes a time when the most stalwart collector says, "Enough!" I mention this because this year I have said the word. 


My mother's basement was a place of fascination for me as a child. The rest of our house was such a wreck that I never saw the basement as anything but a continuation of the rest of it. I loved the smell down there. The earthen floor showed beneath cracked bricks and a poor attempt to spread some concrete over it all. An open crawl space with cracks of light attesting to the less than air-tight foundation allowed small green things to grow, and at one time there was a seven foot Tree of Heaven sapling growing sideways that protruded into the basement. I remember suggesting ways my dad could cut down that tree, the problem being that he was decidedly round and couldn't fit into the tiny crawl space to carry out any of them. The fact that it's not a fifty foot tree today, and in fact is gone, is testament to someone's cleverness in removing it.


Our childhood black cat Princess loved exploring the crawl space because it was like any other dark, mysterious, earthy place and it probably had rodents which she loved to hunt. I remember trying to lure her out of there, sometimes being successful. She ended up dying because of something she ate in the basement.


Our house has Michigan banks, which are not money-storing devices invented by backwoods Michigan folk, but are four to five foot tall brick ledges, also four to five feet deep in places. I'm not sure why they were popular, but I would guess they provided a good place to store things such as jars of home canned vegetables and fruit and anything else, especially if there wasn't a garage.


Our banks lined both rooms of our basement. I suspect there once was a door between the two rooms because there is still a free standing doorway in the middle of the room today. My dad nailed a couple of cheap Montgomery Ward metal kitchen cabinets to it for additional storage, but it's obviously a wooden doorway.


As a kid, I saw the items piled on the banks as pieces of our history, and I was right. There were old farm tools, stacks of chipped plates and saucers and bowls, large and small kraut crocks, one big enough for a three year old to sit in, and there was a mysterious glass jug imprisoned in a wooden crate that appeared to have been purposely built around it. Antique fishbowls, lamps, a chamber pot, scrap lumber, good lumber, bottles marked "poison" alongside jars of canned peaches collected the dust of years on those banks. On one bank was a vast collection of returnable empty glass pop bottles which I slowly diverted to the local corner grocery store over the years in exchange for candy and pocket money for my Saturday treks downtown. 


Probably the most intriguing thing for me, though, was the bricked up doorway under the basement stairs. There was a large, rounded brick step up and then a bricked up doorway. No one ever told me why it was there, and from the time I discovered it, it became a source of speculation and daydreaming for me.

When I asked my mother, she shrugged me off, and I got the impression it was a family secret. You should never ignore a kid's question more than once. Ten year olds have incredibly fertile imaginations, not to mention fairly poor reasoning powers, and they can come to some pretty weird conclusions.

I wondered if there were people living on the other side of that bricked up door. That would mean that they lived somewhere out under our backyard or vegetable garden. Mole people? Aliens? I watched Shock Theater every Saturday night on TV. I knew what aliens, ghouls, monsters, and crazies were. The fact that they were often restrained by things like heavy doors and brick walls made me even more certain that something was down there. And how about those two bamboo fishing poles that leaned against the bricked up door? Were they there so my dad could clobber a mole man or alien if either dared to come through the door, or did the mole men and aliens go fishing at night while we slept? These were things that troubled me as a kid, and they took away a good chunk of my peace of mind.


I became hesitant to go downstairs alone. I'd grab one of my little sisters (as if they could or would protect me from a drooling ghoul) and make up some excuse of wanting to show them something. Or I'd go down when my mother was doing battle with the wringer washing machine or my dad was tinkering around on his tool bench. Never would I go down there after dark or if I was the only one at home. Never would I go down there if I heard a loud clunk or thump or clanging sound or creaking board.


Today, the basement is much the same as it used to be. It still smells old and musty. The Michigan banks are crumbling but still standing, a tribute to the guy who built them over a century ago. The crappy concrete job on the floor is really coming apart, and the ancient red bricks beneath are more and more visible. The largest kraut crock and the mysterious bottle in the wooden crate are gone, stolen by a workman who came to do repairs once. 


When we moved in seven years ago, we were guests in a way. It was still my mother's house. In these seven years she has become helpless, and the burden of de-junking the house has fallen to us. We have successfully de-junked the entire house, saving the good, tossing the broken, the greasy, the useless, but the basement is still a sinkhole of procrastination.  Maybe it's because I have such vivid memories of imagined mystery, or maybe it's because it is such an overwhelming task because it hasn't been properly sorted or maintained since my dad died thirty years ago.


On several banks are stored more than a hundred canning jars filled with canned tomatoes, peaches, green beans, and applesauce, now blackened with time until they look like something Dr. Jekyle  would have concocted. Gary has been hauling some of them up on trash day all winter. Happily, they are nearly gone. My nephew Isaac has been helping me with the basement this year, hauling endless boxes of trash up to wait for the trash man or pickers, whomever ever gets to it first. Last fall we finally got rid of my mother's broken fan collection. Even Isaac, who loves to explore the basement as I used to, couldn't understand why anyone would save five box fans and ten oscillating fans, all of which didn't work. We found bits and pieces of broken and rotting furniture, rusty metal bed springs, broken umbrellas and lamps, boxes of old clothing, musty beyond washing from years on a bank. By the time we finished hauling junk up, we had lined nearly the length of the property line on Campbell Street, a full one hundred fifty feet. 


Today, we are tackling another day of marathon sorting and trashing, and though it is unpleasant and dirty, it will have an end. Someday, the basement will be empty and so will the house. We will vacate this shell of what was our family home for nearly one hundred years, the only family home that my sisters and our children and grandchildren have known. It will no longer be our responsibility to care for nor our right to inhabit. 


It occurs to me that our lives are like this. We have one life. We either fill it with good and productive things, regularly cleaning out the bad, airing any dirty corners to the sun, taking inventory of what is there, or we let the crud accumulate, thinking at first that it isn't so bad then procrastinating about doing anything to fix it until it is such an overwhelming task that we don't know where to begin. We all know people who are carrying baggage and chains. Dickens' CHRISTMAS CAROL aptly portrays the soul burdened down by chains of one's own making.


The beauty of the Christian faith is the concept of forgiveness and redemption, of being made clean and whole, of having the basements of our lives emptied of the rubbish that has accumulated there. For some, it is the memories that hurtfully linger and so we store them under the basement stairs. For others it is things we have done wrong that we aren't ready to get rid of so we store them on the banks next to the jars of rotten fruit and vegetables. For others it is the inability to decide that keeps theirr lives in a state of crumbing brick like the old floors, and we can't seem to find the time or energy to do anything about it.


Some years ago, Valparaiso University professor Walter Wangerin wrote a story called, "The Ragman, The Christ" in which a mysterious rag man wanders through city streets offering new items for old. The story steps beyond our imagination when the Ragman takes a man's wounds and gives him wholeness. This continues until the Ragman, broken and bleeding, shoeless and shirtless from giving away all that he has and is staggers into a junk yard and dies in the backseat of a wrecked car. Three days later, as the dawn's rays are starting to illuminate the junkyard, the Ragman gloriously appears, whole and shining. 


We all have junk we need to take out for the trashman. And we all have junk we need to take to the Ragman, the Christ. There will be no trash in heaven. Wouldn't it be great to get rid of it now?

Trolls, The Amish, and Cows

When my kids were small, I didn't have a car. I lived in the heart of town, and most everywhere I needed to go was easily accessible on foot. Our weekdays consisted of little treks about town, playing in the backyard or the park, and my piano teaching schedule. My three children were very close in age, so they always had playmates.

On weekends, however, my parents often dropped by to visit, and more often than not  they asked if we would like to go for a ride. This was a novelty for them, too. In fact, my parents bought their first car after I was married and had children. Their reason for being car-less was the same as mine. They, too, lived close to everything and walking was much cheaper and healthier. But once they had a car, they wanted to go places. 


First they visited local sites, and then they took extended road trips. Their first long road trip was to drive up one side of Lake Michigan and then down the other. It took two weeks, which was just fine with them. They stopped along the way and explored towns and festivals and museums. We benefitted, too,  by virtue of all the souveneirs and treats that they brought us.

But weekend rides were something that all of us looked forward to. For my dad, who never did learn to drive, it was a chance to sit up front and ride shotgun. For my mom, it was her moment to have something no one else in the family had. A driver's license. For my children, it was an outing with an eagerly anticipated lunch somewhere along the route. And for me, it was a chance to relax, knowing the children were safe in the car and I didn't have to entertain them or constantly be looking out for them. My youngest sister Mary still lived at home, and she almost always came along. 


These were the days before seatbelt laws. Up front, my father held my three year old son Matt on his lap. In the backseat were Mary and I and five year old Sarah. I usually held one year old Rachel. Of course, along the way, all three children swapped adults so it wasn't uncommon for Sarah to end up front with Grandma and Grandpa, and Matt to be on my lap with Mary holding Rachel.


My father never had a son that lived past infancy. He wanted a son. When the fourth daughter was born and my parents stopped producing children, my father had two choices: admit he would not have a son or compromise somehow. He chose the latter. My sister Mary had a farm set at age three, a foot long steel army jeep when she was five, and pretty much any boy toy she asked for along the way. She was a tough little thing anyway because she was the baby of the family and lots of allowances were made for her. She had the legendary family imagination, creating imaginary friends. She had a stuffed dog named Morgan who on at least one occaission clobbered me over the head with a five inch thick book while I was watching an episode of  Disney's "Zorro" on TV. When I chased her into the kitchen ready to reciprocate the clobber, she told my mother that, "Morgan did it." She wasn't spanked. After all, she was the baby. 


Later when my son Matt was born, joining his cousin Dan in the ranks of highly honored males in our female-dominated family, the mantle of "special" was lifted from Mary's shoulders and placed on the little boys. Mary didn't care too much at that point in her life. She was looking at the world through high school eyes, and babies were hardly competition.


So Saturday would arrive after a long week of work and struggle. After a morning of cartoons for the kids and piano lessons for me, we would wait for the phone call from grandma and grandpa inviting us to go for a ride. Since my parents lived less than five minutes away at the time, we barely had time to rush everyone to the bathroom, grab jackets, and be waiting outside when they arrived.


My father always wanted Matt on his lap. The girls and I piled into the backseat with Mary. All of the kids loved Mary. They still do. 


My mother would ask my dad which way she should drive. He would point in one of four directions: straight ahead, straight behind, to the right, or to the left. We all knew his pointing was random. That was the fun of the Saturday trips. Even he didn't know where we were going. It was the luck of the draw. Literally. Every time we came to an intersection or crossroads, my mother would ask what she should do and Dad would do his random pointing thing. We  meandered down big and little roads, often ending up several counties away, and always finding interesting things to see, always having a great lunch somewhere along the way.


Sometimes, we would end up on a dirt road to nowhere or in a woods or on a dead end road. Once we had to back up for a quarter mile because there was no other way back from the dead end narrow cowpath we were on. Another time we ended up in the vicinity of the area where my mother grew up. It was in farm country, a place she hadn't been back to in thirty years. Things change a lot in thirty years, and she couldn't find the farm. Not from lack of trying. We drove back and forth over the same area, over and over, looking for a farm that looked like the way she remembered it. At one point, she saw a narrow gravel path with chains across the entrance. She was sure that was the road she should take, but of course, couldn't. We all sat for a spell and speculated why the road was blocked. Amidst the adult conversation, five year old Sarah blurted out, "Maybe there's a dead cow in the road," which has become a family joke ever since.


Other times, we would just plain be lost. My father, who was the chap deciding which way we should go, never admitted that we were lost. He would go into creative overdrive and fabricate an elaborate story about why we were where we were. One time he said we were in Amish country and told my mother to keep on driving. After twenty minutes or so and still we saw nothing but trees, my mother muttered something about there being no Amish in sight to which my dad quipped, "Oh, those Amish people are shy. They hide behind trees so you won't see them." My children grew up with a somewhat distorted view of their world.


My son Matt's favorite Saturday afternoon ride scenario was the one where my dad swore we were in troll country. He described green skinned, drooling, fanged trolls with red eyes who were looking for children to eat. Matt was only three, but he loved the troll stories. "Oh, Matt," my dad would say with a faux tremor in his voice. "We're in troll country now. You watch out the window and tell us if you see one of those ugly red-eyed trolls." Matt stared out the window at every tree and rock, ready to defend his family by calling out the sighting of a troll if there was one. This happened almost every week. When Matt was in kindergarten he saw a boy on TV with a troll doll collection. "See, " he yelled across the room to me. "Grandpa was right! Look at those trolls. They're real!!"


And so we took rides to troll country, to see shy Amish behind trees, and to spend long Saturday afternoons together as a family, my mother and father, my sister, and my three small children. Today the children are all grown up. Grandpa is gone. Grandma is frail and house-bound. My three children all have families of their own. I hope there is a shard of that nutty creativity of my dad's in them....in their children.. ... that quirkiness that takes a bland moment and weaves it into the awesome, the unbelievable, the forever remembered moment the way my dad did. 


Mark Twain once said that Tom Sawyer was the boy he was, but that Huck Finn was the boy he wanted to be. Stories allow us that flexibility between reality and fantasy. They let us escape for a moment our everyday details and take a breath of fairy tale air, fly to other worlds, speak with other voices. We were so fortunate to have a funny and creative father who loved us and enjoyed making our Saturday afternoons great adventures. They could have been humdrum, go-to-the-grocery-store-and-back-home times. But they weren't They were wonderful. Thanks, Dad, for the rides, and a million other things I'll never forget.

A Story of Shorts

It's still spring and yet many of the kids in the neighborhood are wearing shorts. The robins and daffodils and people raking their grass all say that summer is coming, and with summer comes the wearing of shorts.

When I started school in the 1950's, not a lot of people I knew wore shorts. The women in our neighborhood mostly wore cotton house dresses with their hair pinned up or in some kind of cloth turban or scarf. One has only to watch an I LOVE LUCY episode to see what I mean. Some little girls wore shorts, but many more wore little sundresses even to play outside. A few boys wore shorts, but most wore blue jeans. No men or women I knew wore shorts. Not in our neighborhood. Not in our town.

Then came the 1960's. A lot changed. Girls and women not only wore shorts, some wore short shorts. My older sister who was in high school got into the very short shorts thing right off. My mother didn't seem to mind, but my dad went ballistic every time he saw her wearing them. He was an old fashioned guy. In his book men wore pants, and women wore dresses and neither were short. Children were just small adults. What their parents wore, they wore.

But over time, it became apparent to even my dad that those who wore shorts at the very least looked cooler than those who didn't, and at the most they really were cooler. I'm sure he thought about this as the scorching heat of our Indiana summers beat down on him while he mowed the lawn with a rotary mower, when he bent over to weed the large vegetable garden by the hour, as he sat in our stuffy little living room with its one window fan and tried to cool off, and especially as he increasingly saw TV commercials and magazine ads that showed people appearing to be as cool as a cucumber wearing their one hundred per cent cotton shorts made by union workers and bearing the trusted union label.

My father was the sort of guy who would give you the shirt off of his back, but he would also be sure that he had put another shirt on before he let you see him in his skivvies. I don't know if he was overly modest or just insecure, but he always appeared fully dressed, and he wore the same thing: dark pants, and a buttoned-down-the-front shirt. It was like a uniform. Newer ones for work on Monday through Friday and older rattier ones consigned for yard work and relaxing. And, of course, all the time my mother was wearing her trademark cotton house dresses which she often made herself from cheap printed fabric she bought at Harvey's Dime Store.

But then one day, it happened. My mother bought my father a pair of blue plaid Bermuda shorts. Who knows why. Maybe she thought he would look thinner, sexier, younger. Or maybe she felt real sympathy for his capacity to sweat and get red in the face wearing what he did to work outside all through the hot summer. 


Whatever her reasons, it was easy for her to produce a pair of shorts. She knew his size. He never bought his own clothes anyway. And so one day, certainly knowing the volcanic eruption it would cause, she presented him with the blue plaid Bermuda shorts and told him to go try them on.

We lived on Campbell Street in the house where my father grew up. Around the time I was born the property to the south of us was sold to a young couple who promptly built a small one story house on it. Across the street was a large ranch-style house, the first one built in our town. And right next to us to the north, was a small two story house, much newer than ours, but still pretty old as houses go. Bob and his lovely wife Dorothy lived in that house with their three children. 


I liked Dorothy because she seemed to be everything my mother wasn't. Dorothy smiled a lot. She had curly hair. She was slender and even though she, too, wore cotton house dresses, hers always looked good on her. She always greeted me with a smile and a kindly word when she saw me. Sometimes when I was out in the yard working she would come over and offer me a drink or a cookie, something my mother would never do. If my sisters and I came inside on a hot summer day to raid the cookie jar, our mother would yell at us to go back outside and stay out of the cookies. She probably was conserving food and being frugal, but the contrast couldn't have been clearer to a ten year old. Dorothy passed out cookies. My mother hoarded hers.

Dorothy's husband Bob was the only man I knew at the time who always wore blue jeans. And not nicely fitted ones like the guys wear today. Bob wore the boxy carpenter's jeans with loops for hammers and other cool stuff. My mother thought jeans were for hillbillies. I didn't know what a hillbilly looked like so I couldn't comment at the time.


Bob was a squarely built guy, not tall, not fat. He had a thick head of dark hair and he liked beer. That was another big no-no for my mother. Anyone who drank beer wasn't to be trusted. For several reasons most of which I never knew, my mother neither liked nor trusted Bob. 

No one in our neighborhood had a clothes dryer. Clotheslines criss-crossed every backyard in a patchwork display of socks, underwear, tea towels, sheets, and everything else that people washed in their wringer washers. There was still ingrained in many housewives the weekly schedule thing. Monday was Wash Day. Tuesday was Ironing Day. Wednesday was Baking Day, Thursday was Mending Day, Friday was Cleaning Day, Saturday was Shopping Day, and Sunday was a day of rest. If you followed the directions, presumably you'd get all of your work done in a week, and your kids and husband would know exactly what to expect on any given day and never run out of fresh baked bread or clean socks.

My mother was not an organized person. I'm sure she meant well, but it wasn't in her genetic makeup to adhere to any plan for long, so although she  attempted to follow the universal schedule, she often got behind. She used to quote the old Amish saying, "The hurrier I go, the behinder I get." As a kid, I didn't see the humor in it, and like a lot of kids, I thought the way things were done at our house was how they were done in everyone's house. But over the years and the more I explored my world, the more I discovered that this wasn't necessarily true. And because my mother, for various reasons known only to her, let the schedule slip time and again, it then would follow that she might end up doing her washing on Ironing Day or even on Cleaning Day or Shopping Day.


Which is why she didn't like Bob. Bob's wife religiously stuck to the schedule, so he must have assumed that all of his neighbors' wives did, too. That's the kind and forgiving explanation of what happened. And maybe that was true at first. Maybe he innocently hauled his nasty, smelly rubbish out to the big hundred gallon metal drum that all of our neighbors had at the back of their property to burn his trash. Trash in those days could include just about anything you didn't want. Bob burned garbage, old rubber things, clothes, paper, etc. 

Here's the scenario: that morning my mom had just washed six large loads of clothes for her husband and four daughters and herself in a wringer washer, which in itself was ordeal. Then she lugged the heavy baskets of clothes up from the basement, carrying each out to the backyard where she hung them on long cotton clotheslines. All of this took several hours and needed to be done early in the morning for the clothes to have the time to dry properly before the dew began to fall at dusk. By ten in the morning, my mother was ready for a rest. At exactly noon, the big factory up the street from us, the same factory where Bob worked, blasted its steam whistle telling its workers to take a break for lunch. 


Bob always ate lunch at work. Every morning we saw him leave his house carrying his large black metal lunchbox and head up the street to work. Our dad never carried a lunch box, so we liked to speculate about what Bob had in his lunch box. Bob left in the morning. He came home when the whistle blew at four o'clock. We all set our clocks by those whistles, and as children, we knew when the factory's lunchtime whistle blew, our dad would be walking home for lunch from the other side of town where he worked. There was a predictability to our lives and a lot of it revolved around the factory whistles.


But on this day, for some reason, instead of eating from his big lunch box with the other factory workers, Bob walked the three blocks back down Campbell Street at lunch time and then before returning to work, walked out to the backyard and lit a match to whatever trash he had earlier thrown into the metal drum incinerator, starting a roaring fire before he walked back up the street.

Now there were no covers or screens on the incinerators of that time. They were nothing like the neat little fire pits people use today, all the ashes carefully kept from floating across the yard by a snug mesh screen. No, Bob's incinerator was the kind that belched great chunks of sooty ashes and little bits of singed paper fragments and garbage and depending on how the wind was blowing on any given day, those ashes might fall in his yard, or they might float over into ours. 


On this particular day, pieces of Bob's flaming trash floated  across the wire fence that divided his yard from ours and over my mother's laundry hanging innocently on their lines where she had left it. One by one, sooty pieces of discarded rubbish landed on my dad's white Sunday shirt, our tablecloths, my mother's house dresses, our bath towels. Everything. It all had sooty pieces staining them black. It all absorbed the smell of burning garbage that always filled the neighborhood when Bob burned his trash.

My mother had never liked Bob much, but after this incident, she loathed him. And in fairness to her, this wasn't the last time Bob committed this attrocity against our clean clothes. She claimed he did it on purpose just to torment her. It certainly was a torment for her to have to haul all those loads of freshly washed laundry from the clothesline only hours after she had hung them there, now needing to be rewashed and then hung in the dark and musty basement when they should have had the sweet fresh smell of the sun and the outdoors on them but now there simply wasn't enough time for them to dry before dark.

My mother ordered my dad to go over and give old Bob the business, long ago speak for telling him off. Maybe he said something to Bob. I don't know. I do know that this became a fairly frequent situation. Maybe my mother had irritated old Bob or maybe he just liked to put my dad in the middle of what anyone could tell by hearing my mother yell was a real pickle. In hindsight, it could have been avoided entirely had my mother adhered to the neighborhood schedule, but either she couldn't or wouldn't so the dance continued.

And then the day arrived that my mother presented my dad with his new pair of blue plaid Bermuda shorts. There was the usually explosion from him, but I think my mother knew what was bluster and what was not. Or maybe she just had a way of wearing him down with repetitive nagging, but the result was the same. One  particularly hot summer's day, my dad put on his blue plaid Bermuda shorts.

My father was five foot three inches tall. He was heavy. At his heaviest, he weighed almost three hundred pounds. He wasn't that heavy at the time, but he was heavy enough to look like a blue plaid refrigerator wearing those shorts. His was not the lean athletic image that my mother may have envisioned when she bought the shorts.  And because my father was so vertically challenged, the blue plaid Bermuda shorts hung down way below his knees. My mother assured him that she would shorten them for him, but that they would be so much cooler than his work pants and that he should just enjoy them until she shortened them. He believed her.

As he walked out into the sticky hot air of a late summer morning, I imagine he was momentarily happy that my mother had worn him down because he could feel the slight breeze blowing across his short hairy legs. The blue plaid fabric was so much thinner than his work pants, and like a sheep shorn in the spring, he must have felt lighter in many ways.

That is, until Bob came out of his house and wandered across to our yard.

"Waaal, if et ain't Harry Lauder!!!! Ha ha ha. Yeah, it's Harry Lauder! Are you gonna dance for us, Harry?" Minutes later my dad stomped into the house and into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him. When he came out he was wearing the usual dark work pants. He silently handed my mother a blue plaid wad of cloth. It took some time for my dad to calm down.

Of course everyone in our house heard the insulting words many times over that day, that week, that summer, and for years to come. As children we had no idea who or what a Harry Lauder was, but being called that seemed to be a very great insult to my father. Years later I learned that Harry Lauder was a Scotsman who was a nimble dancer and singer on the old Vaudeville stage. He dressed in a long plaid kilt and tam o'shanter and he carried a crooked walking stick as he first sang and them danced his way across the stage.

I suppose Bob thought he was being funny when he made the connection between my short dad wearing long plaid shorts and Harry Lauder wearing a long plaid kilt. Maybe he was just kidding as neighbors kid each other. But based on the ongoing burning trash thing, maybe he had a mean streak and was just trying to make my dad feel stupid. 


And just maybe even my father might even have privately thought there was something to laugh at in the incident. If he did, he never mentioned it in that light and the whole affair kept my father from wearing shorts for several years after that. And when he did at last buy a pair of shorts, he insisted that they be properly altered before he wore them. Forever after, my dad's Bermuda shorts were worn only in the yard and they were always a plain color. Never plaid. 


I wonder if Bob ever noticed that?

MaryEsther and Louise Write Their Obituaries

MaryEsther and Louise were sitting in their rocking chairs on the front porch, reading the morning newspaper.

“Do you have the obits?" asked MaryEsther.


“I’m almost finished,” Louise replied, turning a page. “Bernie Schlossheimer died. Remember Bernie?”


“Yes, he was the fellow with the dog bakery that didn’t work out.”

“And before that he had a vegetarian grocery store in the German neighborhood.”


“That didn’t do too well, either. Those Germans like their meat. It says here he was selling plots for Pine Acres Cemetery when he died.”

“That was opportunity knocking, wasn’t it?” 


“Louise,” said MaryEsther, folding her section of the paper and placing it in her lap.


"Yes.”

“What will they say about us in our obituaries?”

“Something nice, I hope. Who’s on the social page these days? I hope it’s not that snippy Barbara What’s-Her-Name.”

“Who?”

“You know...that red-haired floozy who tried to get Charlie Fletcher to marry her last year. Remember how nasty she got when we told Charlie all about her and her charge cards?”

“Well, a man has to know that his wife will stay up all night watching QVC instead of soaking his socks and dentures. We just did our Christian duty, didn’t we?”

“Yes, we did.”

“Why don’t we write our obituaries now and give them to Charlie Fletcher for safe keeping? We can trust him to get it into the paper just the way we wrote it. After all, we voted for him three times.”

“And we make him cookies at Christmas.”

“And a cake on his birthday.”

“OK, that’s settled. Now what do we write about ourselves?” asked MaryEsther.

“Well, something nice. Something that will make people remember us and maybe cry a bit,” said Louise.

“Let’s say we were clean people. That’s a highly underrated quality these days. You just don’t hear people talking about taking baths anymore. Have you noticed?” 

“You are absolutely right,” said Louise. “Remember last month at the Ladies’ Guild meeting at church when Sarah Perkins was reading the devotional about being whiter than snow and she asked for comments? I stood up, and in my best elocutionary style explained how I’ve kept my underclothes so white all these years, and from there it was just natural to describe how I keep my toenails so clean. The secret is soaking them in lemon juice before my bath and then adding the lemon juice to my bubble bath water. ‘Don’t you just love lemon?’ I asked the ladies, and no one answered me. No one at all. They just stared at me like I had three heads. I do believe that bathing is no longer a priority in our culture.”

“OK," said MaryEsther, writing on a piece of lined paper. “We’re clean. What else can we say about us?”

“We volunteer every year to go door to door for the Heart Association.”

“But we only do two doors. Does that count? “

“MaryEsther, a door is a door. Someone’s heart might stop beating if we didn’t do those two doors every year. Did you ever think of that? We are every bit as important as doctors and nurses. We are single-handedly responsible for several people being alive. Now, that sounds much more important, doesn’t it?”

“OK. Now, how about awards or distinctions? Prizes, public recognition?”

“Hmmm. How about the time we won second place at the fair for our watermelon  pickles? That was 19....1956, wasn’t it? Everyone loved our pickles. Do we still have the ribbon we won? We could attach it to the obituary for proof. Maybe they’d like to put it in the Historical Society’s display case at the Court House.”

“OK.  We made pickles. But, Louise, that doesn’t sound very exciting. Haven’t we done anything exciting? I mean, the best obituaries are really exciting. Remember Wilbur Johnson’s obit? It said he was the one the firetruck ran over when they hired that silly Russian fellow to drive for the fire department back in 1973. There was even a picture of Wilbur on the ground and that great hairy Russian standing over him waving his arms like he was Leonard Bernstein. Remember? Everyone thought it was a Communist plot to get rid of Wilbur’s chicken farm. The John Birch Society had a heyday with that one.  They all came to Wilbur’s funeral and passed out literature about the Commies. Don’t we have ANYTHING exciting in our lives?”

Louise thought for a long moment. “Well, we had husbands...but...well.. you can’t write about ‘THAT’ .”

“OK. This is it, then. MaryEsther and Louise were clean people. When they knocked on two doors every year to keep other people’s hearts beating , they were known as those clean women who made pickles and knocked on doors. They had husbands. They had husbands who were happy and clean and ate a lot of pickles.

MaryEsther and Louise nodded. That about said it, they thought as they closed their eyes for a nap. 


It would be a good obituary.