Paradigms...where shift happens!

My little girl

Bear with me a bit as I share a father’s memory. When my two daughters were little we lived on a 27 acre place out in the western part of our county here in Virginia. At the time we were using a couple of woodstoves to help heat our house. The supply of wood was a combination of what I could cut and split on my own and truckloads that I bought from a nearby farmer. He sold a good dump truck load of wood, seasoned, split and all hardwood. Since he had to dump it in front of the house and I needed it near the back of the house I gave my two daughters the chore of moving one wheelbarrow load per day after school. They were to move it about 40 yards at the most around to the end of the house near the basement door. One afternoon a couple of days after a snow storm I looked out through the front window  to check on what progress my youngest daughter, Wendy was making with her wood toting.

Wendy was always a very focused and persistent worker but she would insist on doing things her way. With the wood moving chore she had apparently decided that the wheelbarrow was too hard to use for someone her age and size. I can’t recall how old she was at the time but she wasn’t very tall and still in elementary school so she was probably right in her judgment. She had decided that the most effective way for her to move wood was by carrying one piece of wood under each arm and making several trips rather than one or two. Always one to find a way to maximize return for effort,  she realized that with the hard packed snow on the ground she could move an additional piece of wood on the ground by nudging/kicking it across the snow with her foot. My vision from that night was of a little girl in her snow suit, looking a lot like a brightly colored Michelin Man with a stick of firewood under each arm trudging across the snow covered front yard and propelling a third piece in front of her with a forceful nudge of her snow booted foot.

People measure time in different ways. A calendar, a watch, a sundial, an hour glass or in my case by memories. Wendy called me this morning from Monterrey, California where she had been sent by her company to do a training class. She was full of stories, confident and sounded totally comfortable there 3,000 miles from her home in Northern Virginia. All during our 30 minute conversation I was remembering my little log kicker who was now jetting around the countryside for work, taking advantage of the chance to see the sights and experience the wonders of a new part of the world. It seemed like another lifetime back when she was kicking firewood through the snow. I can only hope that when I am gone my kids are as proud of me as I am of them.

A century ago...

...this was what life was like in this country.

 

Show this   to your children and grandchildren               THE YEAR   1908     This will boggle your mind, I know it did mine!   The year is 1908.   One hundred years ago.   What a difference a century makes!   Here are some statistics for the Year 1908 :   ************   ********* ********* ******     The average life expectancy was 47 years.     Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.     Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.     There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles   Of paved   roads.     The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.     The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower!     The average wage in 1908 was 22 cents per hour.     The average worker made between $200 and $400 per year .     A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year,   A dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian between $1,500 and $4,000 per year,   and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.     More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME .     Ninety percent of all doctors had NO COLLEGE EDUCATION!     Instead, they   attended so-called medical schools, many of which   Were   condemned in the press AND the government as 'substandard. '     Sugar cost four cents a pound.     Eggs were fourteen cents a dozen.     Coffee was fifteen cents a pound.     Most women only washed their hair once a month, and used   Borax or egg   yolks for shampoo.     Canada   passed a law that prohibited poor people from   Entering into   their country for any reason.     Five leading causes of death were:   1. Pneumonia   and influenza   2. Tuberculosis   3. Diarrhea   4. Heart disease   5. Stroke     The American flag had 45 stars.     The population of Las Vegas , Nevada, was only 30!!!!     Crossword puzzles, canned beer, and ice tea   Hadn't been   invented yet.     There was no Mother's Day or Father's Day.     Two out of every 10 adults couldn't read or write.   Only 6   percent of all Americans had graduated from high school.     Marijuana, heroin, and morphine were all available over the counter at the   local corner drugstores. Back then pharmacists said, 'Heroin clears the   complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind,regulates the stomach and bowels, and   is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health.' ( Shocking? DUH! )       Eighteen percent of households had at least   One full-time   servant or domestic help.     There were about 230 reported murders in the ENTIRE ! U.S.A. ! Please note, I did not research this info. It was forwarded to me by a friend. I don't normally post things sent to me by others but this was interesting enough that I though an exception was in order.

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.