Paradigms...where shift happens!

Memories of Mom

Some time ago I wrote here about struggling to come to terms with the death of my mother in the sense of not having many memories of those special moments. Last night a friend sent me the following and gave me permission to post it here. Savor the reading of it as I did:

My Mother--Margitta Maria Albert Newman

by Ruth Golden


My mother used to crack me up. Margitta, or Gitta as her friends called her, was a feisty German woman who came to live in the United States after marrying my Army father.  They were wed a few short months before my birth.  He returned to the States and my mother stayed in Germany until after I was born.  Six weeks after that monumental event, she left her tearful family and hopped a plane to follow my dad first to Mississippi (where she first encountered severe racism and then culture shock), to France, then to Virginia, back to Mississippi, and then to various other locations in Virginia before my father left the service for good after 12 years' time. They finally planted roots in Virginia.

During her travels, my mother picked up another language or two besides her native German; first English and then French. It was hilarious to hear her on the phone with our former French neighbor from the farming village outside Paris where we had lived; it was not unusual for my mother to start the conversation speaking French, pepper it with a little English, then switch back to French, and I swear I once heard her throw in a side of German. What her friend though of that, I'll never know.

When I was little, my mother had a saying that she would use a lot at bathtime. My two sisters and I would strip down and get into our big claw-foot bathtub to play in mountains of bubbles. She would always call us "naked chabers," as in, "You're a bunch of naked chabers!" Even though I hadn't a clue, I never asked what it meant; at the time, I figured she knew what she was talking about.  Can you believe that, just in the past year, I finaly realized what she was trying to say? Have you figured it out? What she had somehow been able to mangle between hearing and repeating was "naked as a jaybird." When I finally got it, I laughed and laughed. (I'm laughing now as I write this.)  I wish I could let her know that the riddle has been solved.

My mother was a very funny person, even when she was not trying. She once sneezed 37 times straight – we know, we counted. To this day, I love a good sneeze, just not that much, although I do a three-count sneeze that knocks me off my feet sometimes. 

We used to play a word game, you know the one, where you would start with the letter "A" and name something you could bring camping and then go around the circle, with the next person repeating what you said and then adding their own word that began with the next letter.  My mother got the letter "W" and after carefully reciting the full list from the others, she yells out for her entry, "Met watches!" (Wet matches.)  A few years ago, I visited the friends in North Carolina we played that game with (I consider them as my second set of parents), and they still get a chuckle out of my mom's "met watches."

She never quite got the hang of pronouncing the letter "J."  So, she'd tell us to "chump" into the bathtub, instead of "jump." She could never remember how to spell the word "eight."

My mother's favorite song was "Shenandoah"; her efforts at warbling it were just awful, but she would keep on singing, much to the family's chagrin. Last year, after tying up our sailboat at a marina after a full day of sailing, my husband and I heard a sailor sitting in his cockpit in the next slip playing "Shenandoah" on his harmonica. The tears that sprang to my eyes startled me, even though they should not have; I cry every time I hear that song.

One of my favorite things to do now is to look at old pictures of my mother as a child, teenager, adult, and see how much of her I can see in my own children. One trait that was definitely slipped into the gene pool was her sense of humor. There are also some quirky facial expressions in my kids that take me aback until I realize where I'd seen them before.

Becoming an American citizen was a very, very important event for my mother. I remember her telling me that when she was asked the current President's name at her swearing-in, she stuttered horribly because she was so scared: "K-k-k-k-kennedy!"

My mother died suddenly the day before Mother's Day in 1980.  She was 43 years old. She'd had heart trouble, but never took it seriously enough, nor felt her own self worth enough, to regularly take her medications or to change the habits that were slowly killing her. It took me a long time to finally accept that she was gone from my life for good.

I am thankful for the good memories of my mother—I won't kid you, we fought like cats and dogs (both being Geminis . . . enough said), so there were bad times, too. But I can block those memories out in favor of the good ones; there are enough of those to keep me busy for a long time. Thanks, Mom, and, even though this time of the year is bittersweet, Happy Mother's Day.

When I got home from...

...the re-enactment and downloaded my pictures from the camera to the computer I was anxious to see if my efforts at continuous shooting had worked out at all. Much to my surprise the blind squirrel had found an acorn with this shot of the muzzle flash from a Union weapon. Click on picture for a full size image.

145 years later

Civil War buffs filled the streets of downtown Fredericksburg with the sound of musket fire and the smell of black powder as they re-created the Battle of Fredericksburg. There was no way I could ignore a photo op like this.

From my oldest daughter

I got an e-mail from Ruth over the weekend. I like good memories a lot and this one had stuck in her mind although I have no recollection of the incident at all. It did do wonders for me though to read how she remembers it:

"I just had a memory come to me and I wanted to share it with you-

Rob is fixing the kitchen sink and he is replacing the P-trap. Seeing the piece of PVC filled with gunk reminded me of how once when I was brushing my teeth as a little girl, my tooth came out and was washed down the sink before I even realized it had fallen out. I remember my panic as a tooth is a valuable commodity to a little kid. I also remember the most important part though and  that was you coming and taking the P-trap off the plumbing under the bathroom sink and saving the runaway tooth. I remember being so impressed with you making the effort to save it and I wanted to make sure you knew that and 20 some odd years later I am still impressed that you did that for me. I can only pray that my girls remember such things about me-

Thank you daddy for saving my baby tooth-

 

All my love  from your big girl,

Ruth"

Has anyone seen my old friend...

Yesterday marked 43 years since two college friends and I stood on a sharply cold and clear morning in Washington  , D.C. watching John Kennedy’s funeral procession. We had hitchhiked to DC the day before and dragged ourselves out of bed well before dawn to get downtown early enough to get a good spot where we would be able to see the procession. I wish I could tell you that I was introspective enough at the time to understand what a momentous time that was but that would be a bit of a stretch.  How could we have imagined that within 5 years two more bullets would punctuate the death of a dream some called Camelot? 

Perhaps that memory is part of the reason that I couldn’t sit through the last moments of the movie “Bobby” when I went to see it Saturday night. The movie was just too real. The sixties, although I never got arrested or tear gassed or anything, were just too much a part of the fabric of my life. I couldn’t make myself sit through a re-creation of one of those punctuating deaths. I couldn’t watch the dream die again.

Returning to Charlottesville that Sunday night we caught a ride with Mutual News radio reporter, Joe Campbell. I'll never forget the comment he kept repeating. "He was just so damn young!"

All of them were.

The Summer place or maybe not so much anymore!

Last week I got a call from my sister in Birmingham to let me know that my mother was sick and in the hospital. She had a heart attack and at age 89 was not doing well. This of course triggered the flurry of family phone calls and the job of keeping my two uncles up to date fell to me.

Last night, I talked to the uncle who lives in Bedford Virginia, right next door to the old home place AKA The Summer Place. He mentioned that they had finally torn down the old house that I talked about in A Summer Place . That there were mixed emotions at the news would be an understatement. As I thought about the odd timing of that news with my mother's illness the introspective portion of what passes for my brain was working a second shift. The fond memories of summers there bubbled up to the surface but to indulge them totally was just too difficult. Especially so as I faced the prospect that the twig that attached me to the family tree was very close to breaking.

The good news I suppose is that I was spared a trip over there for a last look and I did not have to watch the bulldozers. No need to add that memory, is there?

Reunions

It’s been about a year since my first trip to California. Tomorrow afternoon I’m heading out again for another visit with Alain, "She" and "Duck Boy" in Southern California. Last year I went for two reunions, one was with Alain whom I had not seen for 20 years. Our life paths simply diverged and neither of us, I suppose, had the will to do anything about it. The reunion was sweet with multiple passes down Memory Lane and we both learned that maintaining a relationship takes effort.

The second reunion was after only a 5 month separation. I gave that one everything I had; more perhaps than I should have since it died. I think she had too many scars from too many decisions that didn’t turn out well and now, as it turns out, I have one as well. But still, we both did the best we could with the light we had to see by.

Best Dog I Ever Had

It must be twenty years now since I saw the article in Reader's Digest entitled "Worst Dog I Ever Had" about an old man and a dog. This particular old man, according to his granddaughter, would seize on any mention of the dog to give it a blue streak cussin' and passed up no opportunity to tell anyone who would listen what a 'no-account, good for nothing" chow hound this dog was. It was he said, "the worst dog I ever had."

Listening to the old man, one would wonder that he hadn't dragged the dog off into the woods, tied it to a tree and put a bullet between its eyes. The true tale was told though after the dog died. As he shoveled the dirt back into the hole, the old man 's muttered, almost whispered  "Worst damn dog I ever had…" was spoken in a shaky broken voice, quiet enough that it was obvious he spoke only to himself and to the dog. 

I had a dog like that one time. His name was Charlie and he landed in our home direct from some animal rescue shelter out in King George County after a $300 stay at the vet's for heartworm treatment. We lived out in the country then and had a lot of animals already so I was somewhat less than enchanted at the prospect of another mouth to feed especially one the size he was. He was a big guy, weighing well over 100 pounds. We even ended up giving him a nickname, Bear. (Why in the world would a dog need a nick name?) Think of a smallish, almost totally black Great Dane and you'll get the picture of what I saw moving in on our critter food bill. Between the goats, rabbits, chickens, geese, cats and other dogs we were already spending more on animal food than I felt we could afford.   

Charlie turned out to be an OK dog in the brief time he was with us. Other than the time he swallowed my daughter's gerbil whole,  he never hurt anything. Ruth had decided to show Charlie her little pet, holding it out in her hands with appropriate little girl style narrative. I'm guessing she was about half way through her second sentence, holding the critter more or less nose to nose with the a huge dog head which apparently perceived it as a snack. In a flash, he somehow sucked it in and Ruth was left not only with two empty hands but a now unoccupied empty gerbil castle in her room. We were all stunned at how fast it happened and I immediately zoned out on this little unfortunate scurrying around in a very dark dog stomach, looking for the "Exit" sign.

He was fine with all the other animals in the yard and in the house. One day he was stretched out on his side taking a nap when our parrot fluttered off his perch and landed on Charlie's hip. I figured the bird was a goner, headed for where the gerbil had ended up. Charlie slowly lifted his head and kind of looked back towards his rear end. His expression was almost one of "Oh, it's just you". He resumed his nap and the bird lived to scream another day.

One more than one occasion when a stranger showed up at our gate, Charlie placed himself between the stranger and any of us including my kids. As soon as he sensed that we were OK with whoever it was he settled down and all was well.

If you're wondering how I, the pet Scrooge, accepted this dog into our home, here's what happened, exactly as it happened.  The corner was turned the first night he was there. After dinner we were sitting on the couch in the family room watching TV. Charlie walked around to where my wife was sitting and put his head in her lap. (The oldest trick in the book, right?)

She scratched him behind the ears and said, "Don't talk to me; you want to stay, you better talk to him." He immediately picked his head up out of her lap, walked around the coffee table and put his head in my lap. He didn't even look at me, just rested his head there while I scratched him behind the ears.

Folks, there are some messages that are loud and clear without a sound being heard and there are some things you  just don't mess with. Charlie was there to stay for the next seven years. I think he already knew what we would later conclude, that he had been misplaced and wandering for years until our paths finally converged. He was meant to be ours all along. Sometimes things don't quite come together just right at first.

When his kidneys finally began to fail he went downhill quickly. The day he died, when we went down to pick him up, the vet asked if we wanted him to take care of Charlie since he was so large. I managed to say that we would take care of all that. I don't know quite how but I picked up that limp 100 pound dog by myself and carried him to the back of the car.

When we sold that house in 1994, the back flower garden included the stone marker we had made for him. It read "Miss you, Bear" I still do.

A Summer Place III

I was in Bedford, Virginia a year or two ago to pick up an old table from the Summer Place. It was in my grandparents’ house and when my uncle and I went in there to move it out we spent some time looking around the old place, now musty and mildewed but not very dusty. I suppose dust needs people or pets moving around to make it move around and settle on things.

Grandma had two kitchens in the Summer Place. She and Granddaddy called one of them the Front Kitchen and the other one was (you guessed it) the Back Kitchen. The Front Kitchen was where all the kitchen work went on. She had two stoves in there, one electric and one wood. I can’t remember anything ever being cooked on the electric stove although I’m sure she must have trusted it enough to boil the occasional pan of water there.

Anything that counted happened on the wood stove like biscuits and cooking off egg shells. I should have some folksy piece of Appalachian style wisdom here about what happened to the egg shells after they were cooked off on the stove top. The truth is I cannot recall other than Granddaddy crushing them to put in the garden or feed to the chickens or something. I do recall the smell though. It was noxious and since there was no ventilation in the Front Kitchen it persisted all day long.

There was only one hanging light bulb in the Back Kitchen and it was burned out almost all the time. If I had to speculate today I would say that it was never replaced because my grandparents saw no need to replace it since they knew where everything in there was by touch. For my brother and me though, it was a Dark and Evil place but not because anything bad had happened there. It was just dark and in the minds of 5 and 8 years old boys, dark and evil were the same thing. If we came into the house from the back door we had to pass through the Back Kitchen. I’m sure that our theory was that the faster we moved through there the less time the Evil had to get us, so we moved expeditiously, always slamming the door to the outside shut. That way, it would catch and we would not have to back track to close it thus give the dark things a second shot at us.

The Back Kitchen was also where they scabbed on the indoor bathroom that we finally got when my Uncle Buddy paid to have it installed by Sears & Roebuck. Before that addition, a night time nature call entailed a trek across the back yard, though my Uncle’s beagle pen and up to the new outhouse featuring rough cut pine boards for our voiding pleasure. Since Uncle Buddy was not terrible fastidious in his maintenance of the landscaping in the beagle pen, these night time sojourns also functioned as a chigger harvest, the fruit of which never became evident until a day or two later.

Don’t we remember the oddest things from our childhood? Anyway thanks for walking along with me on this little jaunt down memory lane….

Those good old days at UVa

While having a cup of coffee with friends the other day the conversation turned to our kids and how they were doing. They told me that their oldest son was a student at William & Mary and was doing very well there. It’s great to hear about parents who don’t have to worry every spring that Junior will be coming home for the summer in a few weeks with 300 metric tons of dirty laundry and will immediately begin to prepare them for a sub-stellar semester report card. My parents were not so lucky and I’m not talking just about the laundry that I came home with.

My youngest daughter made the Dean’s list her first year at Longwood University; my grades my first year didn’t total Dean’s list much less average that. There were a number of reasons for that, none of them good ones. In fact, my grades would not have been as good as they were had it not been for my required math class. Back in ’63 at the University of Virginia (that’s 1963 not 1863, thank you very much) one part of the requirements for a degree was successful completion of one year of mathematics. I can refer you to 12 people who will testify that teaching me math was quite possibly the most futile pursuit of their professional lives.

The first semester of math was something called Analytical Calculus. I had no idea what that was since I had always thought that a calculus was something that happened on your elbow if you played too much tennis. Complicating the issue was that my instructor was from Taiwan or someplace like that and had an accent so heavy that it was three weeks before I understood that when he said “yeentiger” he wasn’t talking about a young striped feline jungle predator. He meant “integer”. Who knew?

Now the good news: He graded on a strict curve and there were 5 scholarship football players in my section of twenty students. These guys took up all the F’s the curve allowed for so by the time he got to my grade there were no F’s left for me and he had to start handing out D’s. I was passing with exam grades in the high 30’s and low 40’s.

So first semester was not the math debacle I had expected. Second semester did not look good, however. That course was something called Matrices and Vectors. I always thought that “matrices” were the snotty guys you slipped a couple of bucks too for a table that was actually inside the restaurant and not in the alley. I almost panicked at registration but then it dawned on me, follow the jocks. I found where they were in the lines waiting to register for second semester classes. I passed “Matrices and Vectors” as well, hanging on to the coat tails of 5 very large sweaty men without necks. 

My academic career was, on the whole, undistinguished. As I tell it today, I crammed a 4 year course of study into 5 ½ years and three summer sessions. Someone had to make the upper 90% of the class possible after all, right? As poor as my transcript was, though, I’ll always have memories of one or two academic victories; I’ll always have Math.

A Summer Place II

I was reading something the other day on why people blog and began to consider not so much why I began to blog but why I'm still doing this. I posted my 100th entry yesterday and I never really thought it would continue this long. This summer will be two years since I started.

I think the reasons I still do this are quite simple but they work for me. My hopes for this blog are that it will move you in some way, amuse those of you whose sense of humor is as warped as mine and in some cases provoke thought and reflection. The post about my grandmother's house, "A Summer Place" prompted more comments than I usually get on here, 4 to be precise plus one more that came to me directly by e-mail. I really like that it prompted some reflection (catch the "Rear View Mirror" reference?).

I was privileged a couple of years ago to visit a high school classmate's old family place and here is the comment that came from that person:

"I relate to those kinds of old memories - pine trees and birds twittering at dawn do it for me.
Before, when I was working in Toronto and Kingston and only got down on weekends, I would arrive late on Friday night and spend a few minutes in the yard just breathing in the air.  Then I would open the windows in the bedroom so in the morning, just before dawn, I could awaken to the sound of the birds.
Interesting that you mention fans.  We never had fans at the farm house until 1997.  How we got along without them I don't know.  Now I have installed two ceiling fans and portable a fan for every room!  And just hope the fuses don't blow!"

Objects in the mirror really are closer than they appear!

A Summer Place

A bit over half a century ago, this was our summer house. Actually it was my grandparent’s house down in Bedford, Virginia where my younger brother and I stayed during my ninth summer. The front porch railings when they were all there, were covered with kudzu vines. The way that weed grows it might have been their weight that pulled the missing railings down. In the gable at the top you see two boarded up windows. The one on the right was the window off what we called the front bedroom.

That was where my brother and I would sleep because that was the only one that ever offered any semblance of cross ventilation during the humid Virginia summers. We would get our faces as close to the open window as possible and any tantalizing hint of a breeze was as welcome as a sip of water to a thirsty man. As I recall there was only one fan in the house and 9 year old and 6 year old boys were off the bottom of the list of fan users. We used to lay there at night and listen for the sound of approaching cars, trying to guess whether it was going east or west on Route 221 or as it’s called now Old Forest Road. We lay so close to the screen that we could actually smell it or the dust on it anyway. To this day, if I press close to a window screen, the smell of it reminds me of those simple summer nights when our biggest worry was whether or not we would catch a few seconds of summer breeze. 

When you pass an old house on the road that looks as if it’s hanging on to existence by the skin of its teeth, be kind and remember that it had happier days that someone someplace remembers.

There are more things to tell you about our summer house but I’ll hold them for later perhaps.

The shadows of my mind, indeed...

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The UPS guy just came and delivered a CD from “slowazon.com”. I ordered it over 3 weeks ago and it finally got here. Into the CD player with it and it’s 1965 all over again. I am only 19 idealistic years old…at a free concert back in Cabell Hall at UVa. From the stage, the crystalline voice of Carolyn Hester floats above us, a sound so delicate we are afraid to breathe for fear of disturbing the air and shattering the sound.

It was the peak of the folk music era. We thought we were out there on the cutting edge of the free thinking sixties but nobody even had a car, much less a VW bus with flowers on it. A few were into a little pot from time to time but Budweiser was the drug of choice. Most of us at UVa didn’t so much do the sixties as watch them on the evening news. Charlottesville was a difficult venue for any movement but conformity. There were a few rebels among us but this was Mr. Jefferson’s “academical village”after all and professors were still known to excuse a student from class who was not wearing a coat and tie. Our biggest concern was keeping our student deferments so we didn’t have to exchange our UVa uniforms for olive drab.

Women were not admitted to the school until 1970 so ‘out of class’ activities were driven less by social consciousness than by testosterone. Downtown by the ABC store, black men would hang out, waiting for the under 21 students (the ones without fake ID’s) to give them a couple of bucks to go in and buy liquor for them. Each transaction was furtive as if we were selling secrets to a foreign power. We were nervous, certain we would get caught and I’m sure our “connections” were snickering at the dumb ass white boys with enough money to pay someone else to buy liquor for them. Most likely it wasn’t legal back then either but nobody cared enough to enforce whatever law there was.

So what does this little trip down memory lane have to do with my new Caroline Hester CD? Not much really except that the songs playing now lit up some corners of my memory.

I cannot remember now what my dreams for the future were in 1965 but that’s probably a good thing.

To paraphrase: “That’s my recollection and I’m stuck with it….”