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.

Digging into History

I was outside working in the large vegetable garden yesterday. I never completely clear it in the fall because birds and squirrels will eat the seeds I have left behind over the long winter, but there comes a day every spring when I can't stand the mess out there one more minute, and I go forth to conquer the chaos.

As I pulled up the hundred feet or so of giant zinnias and marigolds which formed  a double border around last year's garden, I was impressed with how soft the soil was. I found the same soft soil in the potato patch, the squash patch, and the tomato patch. Usually I have the garden rototilled by a neighbor, but it occurred to me yesterday as I was clearing the land, that I could work the soil myself with a hoe if I did it now while the earth was so soft from its winter rest.

Once cleared, the garden just begged to be turned over, and even though my muscles were begging for a rest, I told myself I would do just a bit. Just for the fun of it. Just because the sun was shining, and it was a perfect day to linger outdoors. Of course, I have lied to myself like that for years, and this time was no different. I continued plugging along until the entire garden was worked and rows and hills were formed and marked for future planting.

People who live in new sub divisions don't experience the archaeological aspects of gardening that our family always has known. The family home on Campbell Street was built in the mid 1800's. In fact, it was the very first house on Campbell Street, a very busy and now well-established thoroughfare in our fair city. Trains pass under the bridge three blocks up the street giving cheery whistles at all hours of the day. School buses roar back and forth carrying students to both the middle school on our corner and the high school one mile north of us. And Campbell Street has always been a hospital route so we have screaming ambulances not to mention fire trucks and police cars zooming past our house at all hours of the day and night.

Because our house has stood here for well over one hundred years, digging down into the soil of any part of the yard is much like an an archaeological dig in the truest form. When we were kids, we found all sorts of things while digging in the yard including old reading glasses, bent forks and spoons, wooden spools for sewing thread, tin cans, string and rope, pennies, nickels and dimes, broken toys including trucks and cars with no wheels and dolls with no heads, all circa 1920-1940. Now and then we'd find the metal part of a tool or farm implement or old square nails. Once we found a cabbage cutter, the kind used for making saurkraut.

In the seven years that Gary and I  have lived here, we've found marbles, Cracker Jack toys, buttons, pieces of porcelain and pottery and unusual colored glass, a watch face, a piece of a cheap necklace, and the blade for an old garden scythe. We've also dug up an amazing quantity of walnuts, acorns, peanuts, and feed corn, the latter two of which we bought and put out for the squirrels who must have thought better of eating it and so they buried it just so I could dig it up again in the spring. Our yard has always produced an abundance of walnuts owing to the fact that we have four walnut trees in the yard. Then there are the twelve or so walnut trees on the same block. This is walnut heaven for squirrels, and after they've stuffed themselves on a warm autumn day, they have nothing else to do but bury the darned things all over the yard.

When I was a kid autumn was a glorious time. School had just started up for another year, leaves were turning colors, that brisk chill was in the air that made one shiver with delight for no reason at all, and then, once all those colorful leaves hit the ground, it was time to rake them.

Raking leaves today is nothing like it was in the 1940's and 50's. Today we rake the leaves into paper bags that first we have to buy so that the city street dept, whose salaries we also pay through our taxes, can pick them up. Sometimes we  pay someone else to do the raking, but even when we do rake the leaves ourselves, we consider it more of a chore than a recreation. And no one considers burning their piles of leaves for fear of getting a ticket from one governmental department or other. 

Today burning leaves is verboten in most every state except perhaps Alaska, but when I was a kid, pyromania was only a crime if you burned someone's house or barn. Everyone dreamed of the massive bonfires of autumn and the surrounding activities that were traditions for each family.

In our house, any tradition was accompanied by general hysteria. Our family couldn't do anything without running in circles and shouting at each other. I think this came from the fact that neither of my parents had much patience and the added fact that my sisters and I were aborigines. 

I noticed that our neighbors were peaceful leaf rakers. They moved slowly,smiled at each other and spoke civilly in the course of the task. Parents and children together raking leaves down to the curb. Happily.


Not us. The street was our enemy. Every summer our parents made an Olympic sport of chasing us and yelling at us if we went anywhere near the street. Maybe they'd been told by a fortune teller that one of their children would be mashed beneath the wheels of a '49 Chevy or that one of the kids would hitchhike their way to freedom when her mom and dad weren't looking. Whatever generated their fear, all we had to do was step off the sidewalk and a head would appear out of nowhere screaming, "Stay out of that street!" 

So until we were older, we were given backyard raking assignments, which in general stank because raking the huge piles of leaves into the street and setting them on fire seemed the best job because of its proximity to the dangerous street we were always warned about.  But there were perks to chasing each other around the backyard and putting hands full of leaves down each others' shirts as well as jumping into the large piles of leaves waiting to be burned in the garden. And the garden fire was by far better than the fires at the curb anyway. 

At the curb you could have a burning leaf pile only so far out into the street before you obstructed traffic, but in the garden, you could pile those leaves into a pyre twenty feet wide and six feet tall. My dad took an engineering point of view to his bonfires. He had rules. First, all leaves were to be first compacted in a wooden basket. This was done by an older child stuffing leaves into the basket and a younger child stomping on the leaves much like grape stompers at a winery. Second, he was the only one to place the basket contents in the garden so he could create a symmetrical mountain of leaves. And third, walnuts and acorns were to be separated out before the leaf compacting began. 

As small children we didn't understand his reasoning. Green walnuts are moist nuts within a green rind that covers the familiar brown shell that most of us associate with walnuts. When they are roasted to high temperatures, the moisture on the inside expands and eventually explodes much like popcorn, but much larger. 

Once my younger sisters and I realized this fact, autumn raking had a possible edge to exploit. We raked. As usual. We stomped down basket after basket for the bonfire. As usual. We separated the walnuts and acorns. As usual. We stashed a bag of walnuts behind a bush. Not usual.

Our plan was simple. If one walnut would explode and go "boom" how much more would a bag full? We waited until Dad went in for some reason, and then hurried out to the garden with our paper grocery sack half of walnuts and acorns. We shoved  as many as we could deep into the pile of leaves, being careful that none could be seen. And then back to raking, basketting, and stomping. 

Around dusk, the moment we all had waited for arrived. For dad, it was seeing another engineering masterpiece ignite and light up the whole back yard. For my fellow saboteurs, it was the delicious expectation of something unknown but decidedly bad since we had been told in a way not to do something we had done in a big way.

Dad tossed on a little lighter fluid to give things an oomph and the fire blazed. We kids danced around the edge of the garden feeling the heat farther and farther out into the yard as it grew hotter and hotter. You could feel your eyes drying as you gazed at the flickering yellow and orange flames licking higher and higher. Little bits off ash flew off into the wind like so many little ghosts. It was a wondrous night. We kids were so caught up in the dancing and yelling and chasing each other around the edge of the garden that even we were taken by surprise when the first walnut went off.

Out of no where we all saw an orb of bright light fly out of the flaming bonfire and explode with a loud bang. Before anyone could accuse or comment, a second one went off. My dad started to ask something but a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth went off almost simultaneously causing everyone to run for cover. And then for the next ten minutes or so, we had our own fireworks exhibit as walnut after walnut exploded into pieces as they emerged from the flaming pyre. The acorns, much smaller but still mini grenades, offered a kind of texture to the exhibit, a contrapuntal line to the percussive melody of the night.


I remember getting spanked, no small thing when my dad was the one spanking. But, you know, I don't remember the pain. I do, however, remember in detail how much fun we had salting my dad's carefully piled bonfire with nuts and our delight at the result we had all been told would be terrible, but which, in fact, was a hoot.

MaryEsther and Louise Read A book

“I heard some ladies talking at the supermarket, Louise.”

“Some new packaged food? I hate those things. If God wanted food cooked fast, He wouldn’t have made raw meat.”


“No, they were talking about a book club.”


“I’m not signing up for any book clubs. You know how they work...you get a book every month whether you want it or not because you lose that little card that says, “don’t-send-me-a-book-this-month.”  I know all about those book clubs.”


“No, you’re not listening. It’s a real club with real people.”


“Well, of course, they’re real people. Who else would they send a book to...a horse?”


“Louise, it’s a group of people who like books. They meet every week to talk about them.”


“Talk about them? Well, that’s new. In my day, people read books."


MaryEsther sighed. Sometimes it was so hard to be understood.


“Louise, you are exactly right. These people read the book first and then they talk about it.”


“Why? If they all read it in the first place they should know what happened. Is it to help one of them who doesn’t know how  to read? They should hire a tutor or go buy the video.”


“No, Louise, it’s like when we talk about recipes or politics or our grandchildren. They talk about what they like or don’t like about the book.”


“What book?”


“Lots of books. All different ones.”


“That’s crazy. Do those people just sit around reading all day? How can anyone read so many books? Some of us have doctor’s appointments. Some of us need naps.”


“They all read the same book, Louise. It’s just one book.”


“Oh, that would take forever. I can see it, now. First you read the book. Then you send it to Charlie Fletcher. Then he sends it to me. Then I send it to someone else.”


“No, Louise, everyone buys his own book.”


“What? Who’s selling all those books? Maybe we should sell the books. We could make some money.”


MaryEsther took a deep breath. “They read the book and then they talk about it. They see what each of them liked about it. That’s all there is to it.”


“And what if some of them don’t like it? There are always two sides to a story, I say.”


MaryEsther sighed and closed her eyes. It was time for a nap.

Root Beer Memories

When I was a kid, we never ate out. Not as a family. I'm not sure why. Money probably. Also, for many of my growing up years, my mother was not comfortable outside of our house and yard. The exceptions to this were events at her mother's house across town and attending church, but even church was uncomfortable for her for some years. This was never spoken of in our family. It was just how things were.

I saw the kids next door pile into their old Chevy in the 1950's to go to one of several of their favorite restaurants. In the summer it was drive-ins. In the winter it was various local cafes. My experience with restaurants was limited since we didn't own a car. I saw several cafes on my walks around town. Little holes in the wall they were mostly, and blue plate special lunch counters at the drugstore or dime stores or taverns.

Franchising was just getting a toe hold in America after WWII. We had a Spud Nut Shop in Valpo, but at the time that was it. Mostly we had places like the small locally owned  Waffle Shop, but there were also fancier sit down places like Marie's Restaurant and Strongbow's and the Hotel Lembke that were simply unimaginable to a gypsy like me. This was life pre-television so I had absolutely no frame of reference for such places.

On Saturdays when I took my escape treks to the public library and the general downtown area, I always walked slowly past the Hotel Lembke and inhaled deeply as I approached the restaurant kitchen exhaust vent on Lafayette Street. What is it about the smell of hot grease meeting fresh air that makes one ravenous? 

I didn't have a clue what was on the menu at the hotel. To be honest, at ten years of age, I didn't know such things as menus existed, but I knew what smelled good and that grease smelled wonderful. It was lucky for me that Harvey's was right across the alley from the Lembke because once I started salivating, I had to have something, and I usually trotted through the side door of the dime store to the candy and nuts counter for a quick fix.

On Sundays, we usually walked to church which was in the heart of the downtown, and afterwards we often saw people we knew walking into the Lembke for what I knew in my heart had to be a scrumptious Sunday dinner. A few times I asked my parents if we could eat there, too. I was told that it was wrong to work on Sunday. When I explained that eating wasn't work for me, I was informed that the people who had to cook and serve the food were working and if we ordered food from them, we were making them work which was just as wrong. When I argued that the Coopers, who were highly respected members of our church, had just that minute gone into the Lembke, I received a hard thwap on the head for my logic.

To eat in a real restaurant became for me a kind of quest. When kids at school said they'd been to a fish fry at Lake Eliza, I made a mental note that Lake Eliza had fish. When someone said that such and such restaurant had this or that, I filed it away just in case someday I might actually get to go to that place. These eatery names became neon signs in my head , beckoning me to come to visit them, to explore what they had to offer, to eat, drink, and be merry. But none of them was ever more appealing to me as a ten year old than the local A & W Root Beer Stand.

Mary Rita Lyons owned the A & W Root Beer Stand on the west side of town. It was small as most places like that used to be, and it stood on a corner, easily accessible to both driver and pedestrian. If you drove up, you were immediately greeted by a teenaged girl in cap, apron,  white shirt and black shorts who asked you what you wanted. In a jiffy, your food was brought out to you on a metal tray that attached to your slightly raised car window where you ate in a kind of post WWII al fresco experience. If you were on foot, you could seat yourself on one of several plain metal stools at a counter attached to the side of the stand. It was a busy place on hot summer days catering to workers at lunch time, students from the nearby high school who were getting out of summer school classes, and lots of neighborhood kids who just loved root beer.

I discovered the A & W the same year that my older sister got her first job working there as a car hop. She was fourteen and I was ten. She worked evenings, and I showed up any time before that so she couldn't tell my mother I'd been there. For a kid who had dreamed of restaurant food since she was five, this was a little bit of heaven.

Mary Rita, as everyone called her,sold the usual root beer stand stuff. Root beer served in frosty mugs, root beer floats, hot dogs, and chips. But that's where any similarity to other shops ended because Mary Rita had two items that made her A & W stand out. First and most simply was her frozen candy bars. Just the usual...Snickers, Milky Way, Three Muskateers, and Hershey Bars, but once frozen they became something unspeakably refreshing on a hot Indiana day. They were cheap, fast, and they hit the spot, and the fact that I could have one in the five minutes it took me to ride my bike from my front door to hers spoke volumes to me. 

But the other unique offering at Mary Rita's was her mexiburger. The mexiburger was a sloppy joe made from her own secret recipe. Rumor had it that it had been handed down from her mother who had created it herself. It could have been handed down from Mt. Olympus it was that good. Fifty years later, I can still remember it in detail. Made with premium lean ground beef (from Ruge Meats, a locally excellent butcher shop) and tomato sauce and spices, it's unique ingredient always baffled me: sesame seeds. I don't know what they added except perhaps mystery and a slight nutty taste and some texture. All of the ingredients were cooked for a very long time because the meat had a consistency more in line with well cooked roast beef than quickly cooked ground beef, and when  served on a steamed hot dog bun, it was perfect. 

A mexiburger cost twenty-five cents. A mexidog, which was a hot dog smothered in the mexiburger mixture, was thirty-five cents. A frosty mug of A & W was fifteen cents. You do the math. It was cheap even for the 1950's and it was like nothing my mother ever made for dinner.

My mother had a thing about people eating out that I never understood. She told my father any time he left the house, "Now, don't you do gedunking!" She used that word to refer to eating anything she hadn't cooked herself. That limited all of us, but I'm sure may father, who also loved to eat, must have found his own ways of grabbing a burger or a fried egg sandwich or a hot dog or two that she didn't know about. I always thought it stood to reason that he must have had some goodies on the sly since she reminded him every single time he left the house not to.

But no amount of admonishing could take me away from my root beer stand love affair. It was meant to be. My soul needed that root beer to survive. And all these years later, I can see the ten year old me hopping on my rusty, balloon-tired old Schwinn bike on a sultry summer's day, racing down west Chicago Street towards the A &W, all the way anticipating in my mind the sweet fragrance of the exhaust vent, the softness of the steamed buns, hopping onto a hard metal stool and placing my order, and then experiencing the wonder and delight of Mary Rita's wonderful mexiburgers. And for those brief moments in my childhood, life was good and perfect 

Gates of the Soul

When I was a kid, my parents caught the fear bug that roamed freely around the Chicago area at that time. Kidnappers! Sadly, it was a real thing. Children disappeared on the way to and from school. Offers of candy and a ride in a nice car tempted innocents, and with the increased presence of regional news that TV brought to the 1950's, it wasn't difficult for fear to grip whole towns.

Of course, we were indoctrinated in the "don't talk to strangers" dogma, as well as the "stay in the house after dark", "if  a car slows down, run," and "if a stranger talks to you, run to any house and scream 'Mama, Mama, Mama,' and you'll trick the bad guy into thinking it's your house and he'll run because he'll think your mama is going to come out and save you by bashing a broom over his head" dogmas. I learned quickly, and I tried out all of the above several times, much to the horror of cars slowing to turn the corner and a few clueless gents who just happened to be taking an innocent walk down our street.

I was old enough to run, which I did, almost for any reason because I really bought into the fear thing. Hey, I was ten years old. I didn't want to be kidnapped by some Commie Pinko  which was what my mother called anyone bad.

My parents knew that me and my older sister could run pretty fast, but that "the little guys," as we called our two younger sisters, probably couldn't outrun an adult for long so my father constructed a small fenced in area where the garage currently stands to protect the little guys from all evil.

Protection was a point of view. My mother and father felt more secure that their two youngest daughters weren't going to be carried off by strangers in broad daylight. However, the little guys felt caged and soon tired of digging in the dirt with old kitchen spoons. The newly fenced in area wasn't landscaped by any degree, and consisted of dirt, a few scrubby bushes, a snowball bush, and more dirt. Here and there were a few anemic blades of grass, but it was no Eden and the little guys knew it.

I remember planting a tiny vegetable garden within the fenced area which interested the little guys for about twelve seconds. They had one thing on their little agendas: freedom. They were pretty good at escaping, too. A gate left unlocked resulted in tiny escapees toddling across the large back yard which must have seemed like the great state of Kansas to them after the little dirt pile they usually played in. My mother whose eagle eye was always scanning the fenced area for the two prisoners would go ballistic if she couldn't see them, predictably running outside and shrieking their names as if once escaped they would really run back into the fence just because an adult was loudly screaming at them. Those kids were smart. They usually hid behind the tool shed or in the neighbor's yard, but never far enough away that they weren't found and hauled back to their own little GITMO.

My mother decided that the solution to keeping the little guys safe was for my older sister and I to take turns staying in the dirt pile with them. Because my older sister had a social life (what thirteen year old doesn't?) I was most often the prison guard on duty.

It wasn't the worst thing a nine year old could do with her summer, but it was close. Bugs gave us a great diversion. We had a lot of bugs. The under the rocks kind, the crawly kind, the flying kind, and occaisionally a butterfly or some really pretty thing like a dragonfly. We made bug zoos with old jam jars
filled with (what else?) dirt and a few leaves from the bushes. We fed them sugar which we put in our pockets at breakfast. We had the fattest bugs on Campbell Street, but they didn't live long in jars so we were always catching new ones.

Often I read to the little guys or concocted some silly game for us to play. Hide and seek was disasterous in an area the size of a livingroom with no place to hide, but "I Spy," "Mother, May I?" and "Who Am I?" were favorites.
And there were tea parties using leaves for plates, and little stones and twigs for foods that with a little imagination was a feast. Mud pies were our specialty. Sometimes we looked at clouds. Others we counted cars going by on Campbell Street. Sometimes we had tickle contests. And sometimes we pounded on each other.

It wasn't the best of times, but it certainly wasn't the worst of times either, because we learned to make our own fun. We laughed a lot, and we made the best of our situation. In time, the little guys grew and the fenced yard was dismantled, but at the time, being fenced in seemed endless.

Of course, all three of us would rather have been outside the fence, running and laughing and picking the greener grass that always grows on the other side, but we had some pretty good times inside, too, and we could imagine we were elsewhere, doing amazing things and loving it. 

I call that kind of imagining "Gates of the Soul" because if the soul feels trapped or fenced in, no amount of freedom for the body makes you believe you are free. On the other hand, if your soul is free, no fence can make you feel trapped.

It takes less work and stress to imagine a good thing than for the mind to bear up under the facts of a bad thing. It's easier to enjoy something imagined than to hate something real. It's better to walk though gates of the soul than to sit by the fence and long for all your worth to be on the other side.

And that's how it is these days for Gary and I. By our own choice, we are fenced in by our circumstances as we care for my mother in her last years. We rarely have more than one hour away from the house at a time, and that, never more than two or three times a week at most. We haven't had a day off in a year. No vacations. No trips to the movie theater. No eating out. No weekend getaways. No sleeping in. Ever. No concerts or lectures. No visiting friends' homes. No church. No trips to visit the grandchildren out of state.

Stated like that, it sounds like we are in the little fenced in yard once again, digging in the dirt with spoons. But in reality, we traverse the globe,  meet interesting people, see breathtaking sights, take train rides, fly hang gliders, go to the opera, and travel through time. How? Through books, and DVD's, through radio, CD's, the internet, and television. 

We know ourselves well enough to know the things that bring us delight
and in every way possible, we try to create those within our fences. It requires imagination, creativity, and a heart that wants to help one another and build each other up, but those are small prices to pay for being free.
And so on a rough day, we can smile and know that over dinner that evening we will be once again dining in Wales or Ireland or Paris or Italy as we watch a DVD or read a book together. We can look forward to an afternoon at the opera via the radio. We can go on vacation again and again as we look at photos from past visits with our children and their families and recall sweet moments with them all. We can plan the trip of a lifetime online by creating an itinerary, looking at hotels, attractions, photos, and reading other people's travel memoirs. In short, we can be as free as we choose to be. 

It's not a perfect scenario, but what is? We are here until our job is finished. We are strong, creative, imaginative, and basically fun people who enjoy each other's company. We are happy and content and  madly in love and isn't that what really counts? It certainly beats digging in the dirt with spoons.

Jake the Plumber

When Gary and I were first married, among the many firsts for both of us was the "first" of having our three grandchildren for holidays and summer vacations. They were nine, five, and one. We didn't take Sami, the one year old, til she was three, but Jake and Cassie were packed and ready to go to our house in Madison, WI, every Christmas vacation, spring vacation, and two weeks every summer. 

All the way to Madison they played rocket ship in the back seat, constructing an elaborate system of communication between each other using Jake's K'Nex. When we stopped to eat along the way, they had to carefully slide out from underneath the rocket ship paraphernalia before they exited. The same happened getting back into the car.

"Captain! Captain! The aliens are coming!" Cassie would say.
"I see them. They won't get away," Jake would respond sounding like William Shatner. "Take that!" and the gun spluttering sound that only boys can make would commence.

Over the years, the three of them learned to hoe a garden and pick vegetables, make quilts and pillows, make homemade egg noodles for chicken and noodles, roast marshmallows over the gas burners on the kitchen stove, construct tents over the clothesline, take nature walks (with a detour to Dairy Queen,) and eat out a lot. They were good times, funny time, times of just being glad we were all together.

One year Sami was old enough to come along. She woke us up late at night to kill the 'pider on the ceiling of her room. She made Godzilla faces. She did everything the big kids did and that was something. And so we all went to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum on campus, we went underground to explore the Cave of the Mounds, we explored The House On The Rock and Ronald Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon, IL. We toured the Veteran's Museum in Madison, the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, IL, and a host of other places. In between we went to lots of movies and parks.

And then, they grew up. And we moved closer. The same town, in fact. At first we saw them all the time. We drove them to museums around here, we ate out, we maintained some of the traditions we had created in Madison. But over the seven years we have been in Valparaiso, they have grown beyond most if not all of what we used to do together. Cassie and Jake are in college. Sami is halfway through high school. And we are feeling old in so many ways.

Today, Jake and his friend Andrew are installing new kitchen sink faucets for us. The old ones were installed in 1962. That about says it. Last fall they tore out a basement window frame that was rotting away, and completely constructed a new one. As I am writing this, they are under the kitchen sink, yanking out the old fittings, asking do I have this or that, and otherwise chatting back and forth the way men on the job do. It is also the way Jake and his sisters used to chat while their hands were busy sewing, painting, cooking and baking, and making gifts and crafts, and it occurs to me that all of that play when they were little, the making things, the working with us on new projects and learning new skills, all of it is like so many tiles in a beautiful mosaic that is our family's life together, that is their own individual lives.

There are many other tiles, from times and experiences with their other grandma and grandpa and relatives, from school and friends, from gains and losses, from pets, from jobs, from school, from sports. But my heart is full today as once again Jake (this time Jake, the plumber) is back at Grandma's house and for this short time, I feel like the years have not passed, that I am not old, that he is that cute little guy who posed in a photo holding a huge zucchini squash because he thought his mom would like it, that time has stood still by virtue of all of the similar memories.

I took pictures today. From under the sink Jake asked why I always take pictures. It's so that when I am too old to remember all of the wonderful times with the people I love, I will have pictures to remind me.

Thanks, Jake and Andrew, for giving me more pictures to remember and for a job well done!

Why Gary Is My Valentine

I was in second grade when I first heard about Valentine's day. I'm not sure why it didn't resonate with me in first grade, but Mrs. Steffey, my second grade teacher was very big on holidays and explained the origins, customs, and related hoopla to us. Mind you, we were seven or eight years old and not everything got through to us on a permanent basis, but enough did that I always thought it was a neat celebration, if only for the fact that we pretended to have mailboxes on our desks, and on Valentine's Day, those were filled with colorful Valentines Day, mail which was something I never got at home being the age I was.

The second reason I loved Valentine's Day was candy. I have loved those little hearts with the mushy words on them for more than fifty years. The fact that no one at our house ever talked that way even in jest made reading such things, especially on candy, all the more exciting. I would read things like "Sweetie Pie" and "Oh, You Kid"  and "Darling" on a little heart and then pop it into my mouth trying to understand it all. Such drama! Such luxury!

As I grew older, I realized that some people really went all out for Valentine's Day. Men took their wives out to dinner. People sent each other bouquets of flowers and entire boxes of chocolates. Knowing this made me long for more, for bigger, for flashier, and for the kind of love that thought of others that way.

In fourth grade, I raised my hand high when Mrs. Picard our teacher asked who would like to help plan the Valentine's Day party for the class. Who wouldn't? This was the rooster of my holiday obsessions coming home to roost. Our little committee met and decided on the games to play, decorations, which mothers to ask for to bring treats (by then we knew the ones that went all out for school parties) and how we were going to pass out our valentines.

Another girl and I were in charge of making a giant decorated mailbox. We used a large cardboard box which we covered with elegant heart and cupid gift wrap leaving a slit for the valentines to be deposited anytime the week leading up to Valentine's Day. I also was charged with making a decoration for the table that held the Valentines Mailbox. I was thrilled that I was chosen even though I hadn't a clue what I would make.

Stopping off at the public library after school, I dug my way through books about holidays in the children's section of the library. Most of what I found there was pretty sappy but by the time I went home that night, I had an idea of what I wanted to do.

Of course, when I told my mother, she told me it was a stupid idea. My dad just looked at me when I explained it to him, but I didn't hold that against him because his mind was always a light year or two away, and he rarely heard anything I said. My little sisters were so little as to be insignificant. My older sister said I was childish. I was on my own.

My centerpiece was based upon an idea I had seen in a magazine once in the doctor's office. It was also based on the many cakes I had seen my mother decorate for birthdays and other special occaisions. My mother knew her way around a pastry bag. Give her some frosting and she was the Picasso of cake decorating. The Campbell Street "Cake Boss," if you will.

I wanted to make a cake that would be the flowing skirt of a beautiful woman, highly decorated with frosting flowers and ribbons of various shades of pink and red, and, of course, hearts. Her hat would be frosting. The bodice of her dress would be frosting. Everything she wore would be completely edible. I salivated at the thought.

Once my mother saw the drawn plans I had made, the recipes I had pulled from her Woman's Home Companion cookbook, and the naked doll I had purchased from Harvey's Dimestore for ninety-nine cents to stick into my cake, she could no longer say that my idea was stupid. I had laid it all out in careful detail. What I needed was help with the oven and some skilled hands at baking and decorating to assist me. All week I discussed with my mother how to make the flowers and lace on the doll and her flowing skirt.

When the day to make the cake arrived I was almost giddy with anticipation. Now I would see my drawing take shape. No no one could say it was stupid. It would be fantastic. I knew it.

We used a large stainless steel bowl to bake the cake in. Inverted, it was as elegant a shape for a flowing ball gown as one could ask for. When it cooled, we stuck the ten inch fashion doll into the center, and then we went to town frosting and decorating. It was a wonder to behold. It was a doll. It was a cake. It was a centerpiece. I was so proud of it, and when I carried it to school for the Valentine's day party, I prayed I wouldn't trip and fall face down into it the way the Three Stooges would have done. 

The cake and I arrived in one piece. The party was a great success. For a fourth grader, I achieved a momentary amount of fame and adulation, and the cake was mine to take home that afternoon to then share with my family.

So what does all this have to do with Gary being my valentine? Gary is and will always be my valentine, my heart's true love, the joy of my life, and the only man I will ever adore because he makes every day become for me just like the time I made that cake.

He allows me to dream big. He never laughs at me or ridicules me. He offers assistance whenever I ask for it. He takes as much pleasure in my successes as I do. If we run into a snag, he researches it to find an answer and then rolls up his sleeves to help in any way he can.

Last year I published my first book. I dedicated it to Gary. He made it possible in a million ways. He is the biggest fan of my writing in general, my blog and my novels in the making. I read everything out loud to him. His reactions and criticisms inspire me to keep on writing. A lot of what I write is meant to be humorous. When Gary laughs til he cries and almost falls out of his chair, I know I have hit the mark.

I have many beautiful, well-planned gardens in our yard on Campbell Street. Gary never questions when I have an idea to dig up this or that, or try something exotic or new. He looks at my garden designs on paper and believes I know what I am doing. When I fill the car with annuals or buy a pound of seeds online, his support makes me all the more certain the new garden will be beautiful.

Two summers ago I gave our granddaughters Cassie and Sami one hundred dollars for paint and supplies at Ace Hardware and carte blanche to paint an original mural on the back of our two car garage. Gary watched with pride as an enchanted garden appeared to the delight and wonder of our family and friends. He never doubted the idea or their ability. Their mural is a thing of beauty and a memory for all of us as we look back on those days when they were perched on ladders and creating sky and trees and flowers and a few surprises for the visually alert.

We have eight grandchildren. Even though money is tight because we now have just one income, Gary cheerfully plans with me for birthday gifts, for our children's anniversary gifts, for Christmas and Easter and Valentine's day, for extended family birthday and anniversary gifts and for what-have-you gifts to let our family know we are thinking about them. Never once has Gary chided me for spending our money on others.

I send a check to the food pantry every month. We have provided as many as eight hundred forty meals in one month. Gary embraces my need to help others because he has a giving and generous heart.

Nearly three years ago when my elderly mother fell and it became apparant to all of the family that she would need full time personal care, Gary supported me as I reorganized her home to make her a two room suite with a new bathroom and to turn her back room into a piano studio so I could work from home and be with her all the time. It seemed an impossible task, but Gary believed in my ability to conceptualize and organize the transformation of these old rooms into something bright and functional. 

And when it became obvious that I couldn't handle teaching piano at home and caring alone for the ever expanding needs of my mother, Gary quit his job and stayed home to at first help me care for her, and then later to take over as her personal caregiver, doing things for my mother that no one else in our family could or would do.

Today he works fourteen to sixteen hour days, seven days a week caring for my ninety-two year old mother who, several strokes and one broken leg later, cannot walk or stand or rise from a chair, who requires someone to dress her, to help her use the bathroom, and who literally needs help with everything except feeding herself and using her TV remote and telephone. He hasn't had a day off in ten months.

He never complains. He does yard work in the summer and removes snow in the winter. He is available to fill in as extra driver for our daughter's family when needed. If someone calls and asks for his help, if it is humanly possible, he will. 

At the end of what always is an exhausting and sometimes thankless day of work, he enjoys the hour or two we have together reading or watching a video or talking with our children or grandchildren on the phone or via the internet. He always is cheerful. He always is kind. He always is thoughtful. He always chooses to think positively and to think the best of people

And every single night, when the lights finally go out and our weary heads hit the pillow, he reaches for my hand and says, "Good-nite, Beautiful" to me. That's why Gary is my Valentine.