Number, Please

I was just thinking about cell phones in terms of my parents

.My dad was born in 1910 and my mother 1913 and I have no idea whether or not phones of some sort were part of their childhoods or not.

 I do know that in my earliest memory, we had one black phone, on a desk in our kitchen, that in order to use you had to pick up and ask the operator to dial your number. We were told if we ever had to call Dad at his store we were to say ""615R3, please" Imagine. 615R3 was the magic "open sesame" to our father's store, three miles away.

 In later years we had a "party" line, and oh, that translated so literally for us kids! We listened in on all the conversations we could whenever we could sneak it in! And the inconvenience was mammoth if you had talkers on the line. We were civilized, after all,and didn't just break in, but on the flip side I can remember Mother, taking a break from her endless work, and sitting down at the desk, fanning herself with her apron, calling Aunt Anna to catch up on all the latest news. That catch-up went on and on!!

But just think how their lives would have unfolded differently if they had been in continual contact with everyone like we are. While the distance then often contained important information missed, it also contained a bit of lovely mystery.

Sometimes you just don't need to know.

Beyond the keep

Beyond the keep.

The phrase popped up in a novel I'm reading about a woman pilot in WWII. She savored the thought first when she was in bomber flight training. Now she was in a Nazi prison.

The story is one thing. The phrase is another.

Don't you just soar when you break free of the keep of convention, culture, education, church, family, friends, neighborhoods, sometimes even yourself. You are out there without restrictions of any kind.

Its like the dream of flying - I mean by flapping your arms and flying high above buildings. I don't get it often, but I am ecstatic when it happens because the sensation is so overwhelming.

Being kept is a good thing most of the time. But those moments of breaking free are ether.

rosie, you go girl!

did I remember to take my pills? (is the bathroom glass wet?)

why did I climb three flights of stairs? (go back, go back, go back)

what have you read lately that you loved? (er, duh, er, duh....)

aging.

it ain't pretty.

years ago, I could juggle 100 mental balls at once and remember each journey clearly.

100 years ago.

now, if I have a grade A thought in my head, the noting of all other involuntary  lesser actions fall by the wayside - sometimes to be easily retrieved, other times irreversibly lost.

I mourn that.

but last night I saw on the news Rosie the Riveter still riveting at age 93 and thought, hmmmmm.

I gotta shape up!

breakfast with four friends

around the table
over bacon and eggs,
we discovered 
we had lived in
France,
England,
South Africa,
Southeast Asia,
England.
Newfoundland,
and more.

we had survived
cancer,
serious illness,
divorce,
deaths,
heartache;

yet

sunshine and
sisterhood
bound us

and all the oceans
slipped away.

Labor

I was pregnant with our first son at the tender age of 28 and I eagerly read all the current literature on childbirth. La Leche and Lamaze were very big in the 70’s. One passage read “labor is so-called because it’s really just hard work, not pain.” And so I proceeded, smug in my knowledge and preparation. Months later, when that first tsunami contraction hit, I would have happily strangled with my bare sweaty hands the writer of that passage! I was grateful for all the breathing techniques I had practiced and clung to them like a drowning person through the zig-zag of intense pain. It was not the elegant give and take I had envisioned.

 

So, though I know that’s not what this day is all about, it’s what I’m celebrating. To all the mothers who have passed through the hallowed channels of birth-giving, I salute your labor, your hard work, your intense pain, your overwhelming joy for what followed immediately after the physical battering.

 Forty-two years later I'm still saying thank-you.

Elsewhere

The quote was - "Reading gives us a place to go when we have to stay where we are."

That's it!

If you are:

bored,
happy,
sad,
romantic,
disgusted,
fearful,
hopeful,
optimistic,
pessimistic

There is an app for that.

Books. Always and forever the window to somewhere else.

last hurrah

September slip
to Jersey Shore.

High blue skies
with hoodie mornings

French fries seasoned
by sea breezes

white sugar sand
between tan toes

gulls salvaging
summer

me, too.

Gift

This morning Valerie Harper, diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and told she has three months to live, said upon receiving word that the tumor has shrunk a bit, "How exciting! I may make it to Christmas." There was such a look of joy on her face.

I want to bottle that.

When threatened with total darkness, the teeniest wavering flame is meaningful. And yet we natter away our full, healthy, promising days with inanity.

I want to remember.

Just between us

The little boy hair was tousled. The fingers were grimy that began to drum quietly at the edge of the information desk as I answered another patron's question. But the mother encouraged patience.

Finally I turned.

"How may I help you?"

Now up to bat he smiled,  "Do you have the book called..... do you have the book called...." he stopped.

"Do I have the book called..." I encouraged.

Suddenly the three-year old dashed around the desk and into the inner circle to my chair, stood on tiptoes and whispered into my ear, " Do you have the book "Everyone Poops"? (!!!)

We did. (a humorous picture book by Taro Gomi)

And glory be, wouldn't it be lovely to cultivate such a sense of delicacy beyond the age of three?

Grammy's cake

Before my time, my grandmother purportedly made a dynamite chocolate cake - very moist, almost wet, chocolate cake with caramel icing. After her death, my aunt produced the same type of cake - very successfully, and it was lavishly praised but always referred to as "Grammy's cake". This irritated her no end!

Why? I guess because everyone wants to stake a claim - to be unique in some way. I think it would interesting in a family setting to see if people could come up with one dominant aspect about those who passed and see if the answers were similar - being remembered for singing, gardening, potato salad, humor, athleticism, fried chicken, sewing, writing, beauty, wealth, date-and-nut pudding!

All I can say for sure is, right now I would love to sit down to a large slice of Grammy's chocolate cake!

Sorry, Aunt Esther.

Subterfugue

A delightful new juvenile fiction book called Paperboy by Vince Vawter, about the struggles of a young boy who stuttered, contains a line from Voltaire - "Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts".

I've thought a lot about that quote.

How often do we say the direct opposite from what is flitting through our minds?

Grin or grimace inwardly.

If they only knew.

Corn Husking Time

Sitting on the front stoop steps, I stripped the yellow green sheaths from this morning's farm market corn. One quick yank of a handful of husks and a backward snap of the stem, and then a gentle stroking of the ear to rid it of its silk - a practice that I have been performing since I was about five years ago.

 At home we would set up outside under the pear tree, or in the bay of the barn, or on the front porch. The smallest person had to help husk the endless dozens of corn for our family of seven. Sometimes we blanched them for freezing, or just boiled them for a meal.When Mother bore platters of steaming "roastin' ears" to the supper table they were the cuisine highlight of the summer. She always melted a bowl of butter that we lavishly brushed onto the corn, sprinkled with salt and dug in! The rest of the meal was negligible, but she usually had something like brown-butter potatoes and tomatoes with a sweet dressing to go with the royal corn fare. Biting those sweet kernels off the cob, was the messiest, most delicious meal ever!

Today I had four ears of corn to husk.

The times they are a-changin'!

Pioneering

I reread - at light speed - These Happy Golden Years yesterday. For the millionth time. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but I almost know whole passages by heart, certainly the dialogue. And while  that whole Laura series is idealized and stripped to the bone, there is a lovely purity of purpose in them. Life was tough, but the people were tougher. Those pioneers endured momentous challenges, as in life and death challenges, not alas- alack- I'm-caught-in-traffic-and-will-be-late-for-work challenges. Look at yourself, your children, your friends, your neighbors - pick out the ones you think could have made it, living on an undeveloped parcel of land for five years, in a shack, amid extreme weather conditions and no conveniences, in order to claim it.

Sobering.

And yet, I look back at my primary family I feel that my parents tried to instill the basic civilized rules in us as Pa and Ma did for Laura way back in the late 1800's. Hopefully as life gets easier and easier, the tenets of goodness are still rising to the surface.

 But that pesky self-indulgence is sure making it tough!

Game time

In my previous blog I mentioned the name William Makepeace Thackery. I didn't want to diverge from the quote so I had to use another entry to describe what a rush of memories that name brings to me.

Authors. The game.

What child of six would otherwise know William Makepeace Thackery? But because of that card game, the gentlemen (oh, yes, there was the token Louisa May Alcott) Twain, Tennyson, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Dickens, etc., were friends to me. It was a deck of 52 with 13 distinguished authors and the goal was to achieve a set of four works for each. We have 50 year old family jokes stemming from that game! Like my father's famous, "Let me check" when asked about a certain author, grandly pulling one card out of his pocket and proceeding to ponder the question.

The point is not the game. The point is the fun. Family members gathered together, playing a card game, no tv, no iphones, no ipods, no computers. Just people, matching wits. Learning about wins and losses. Shared time, shared laughter, shared values.

Shared.

Cherished.

Ocassion

I posted a quote from William Makepeace Thackery the other day on our staff whiteboard.

It read, "When I walk beside you I feel like I have a flower in my buttonhole."

At first I smiled thinking a man and a woman.

But the more I thought of it, it is a lovely doff of the hat to anyone whose presence beside you is a celebration.

The ties that bind

Every Spring we took violets to Ellie in a cracked white creamer. She lived in an "old people's home" and was scarcely taller than my child stature. Her room had a radiator that billowed heat and Mother fanned and fanned. The purple flowers came from the edges of the wide open fields behind our house. But Ellie's world was small. And so that she didn't glimpse it all at once, she backed down the stairs, clutching the rail tightly. Good manners required only darting glances but we wanted to gape.

The floors gleamed with polish and sunlight. We quieted our steps and walked gently down the halls, hoping to see the lady with the chin stuck to her neck, and the one who was always needing to "fetch the cows" and the one who pushed a chair before her.

Our limbs were strong and whole. Our faces tanned. Our hearts curious. We were violets that heralded spring; they were the cracked pitcher. We needed each other.

Beaches

I love beaches.

From my early days, that word meant the coarse sand of Red Point, a beachside community on the northern rim of the Cheasapeake. That beach was cluttered with shells, sticks, seaweed - crude to anyone else except those of us who grew up with it and considered it the holy of holies.

Next came the Jersey Shore with the soft white-sugar sand of Ocean City, clean, vast, edged by an old-fashioned boardwalk with the smell of popcorn, pizza and french fries floating on the sea air.

Then came the  pristine Outer Banks with its dunes, birds and dophins cavorting through the surf.

I loved them all.

Now a Glick reunion took us to the Pacific Northwest, to an Oregon beach near Lincoln City. The craggy rocks and shrubs stretched down to the wide sand and a box of pastel crayons spilled into the vast stillness of sky and sea.

Alleluia.

Enclosed

A brief July respite from Northern Virginia's deadly humity and heat opened our evening windows to the sound of cicadas singing,  bedtime bird lullabys, summer trees stirring, and boisterous calls of that last game of hide and seek.

Air-conditioning, I praise you in my later years.

But I see too that you insulate me from the heady perfume of summer.

By heart

This morning's crossword puzzle had the clue "afternoon social time" and as I wrote "tea" my mother's voice came singing across the years '

"We're going out to tea today
So mind your manners well,
Let all accounts I hear of you
Be pleasant ones to tell..." 

And the poem ended with -
"And Fannie do be careful
That you do not tear your frock!"

Was it the name "Fannie" or was it the word "frock" that so intrigued me as a child? Or was it the concept of this mother instructing her children about a custom I only read about in books? Or was it the sparkle in my mother's eye as she recited from memory the poems from her battered brown readers that rested on our hall closet shelf? Was she remembering the days of her tiny schoolroom, lunch pails, clambering over fields and streams of Frogtown farms and the joy of learning?

Whatever the reason, she planted poem after poem in my heart, and they grew green and flourished.

Chanel No. Zero

Speaking of perfumed scent.....

I always thought the purpose of wearing a scent was to beckon gently, to allure, to cause a pleasurable intake of breath when entering one's intimate circle.

Yet so often I feel sledgehammered with suffocating sweetness that precedes the wearer by a football field length and lingers long after Elvis has left the building. The come-hither factor shot clean out of the water.

Now if someone could distill the magic of lilac, spring grass, sunlight, lemons, or water over stones, on wrist and earlobes that would be delicious.

Legal Tender

For this morning
that jumps with sparkle,
bouncing off the wake
of velvet geese,
I give thanks.

nations

As I approached
the newly-flowering
Japanese cherry tree
by the Rembrandt bridge,
a black figure stood in silence.

"Mornin'' I greeted
as I strode by.

Her slow,
careful, 
draped
answer,
"Good Morning"
had echoes of golden rays
on faraway mosques.

Release

Spring

burst out

like one-room schoolhouse

scholars heading

for recess.

Another time

My morning crossword puzzle clue was "a town in Iowa" and the answer was Davenport. Suddenly my tongue caressed that word as foreign and yet so utterly familiar. I asked my husband if they used that word in his home and he confirmed they did. But when last have we heard that word? My trusty phone told me the word originated from a sofa firm in Massachusetts and soon became generic, like Kleenex. Who knew? Ask the next 13 year old you meet what a davenport is and I'm guess you will draw a blank!

But from my childhood, a davenport meant snuggling with a book, suffering on it during mumps/measles/chickenpox/whooping cough/pneumonia, settling in to listen to radio programs, lining up on it to play "Whisper Down the Lane", digging for stray change from Dad's pockets, sitting, bouncing, hiding behind, relaxing.

A full-bodied comfortable place for life.

suffering

I was reading at book the other day in which the heroine was comparing herself with a friend, she being the passionate one and her friend the passive one. And she mused, "like the Latin root passio - to suffer, we both do."
 
 From my perspective, passivity always brings suffering, but I had never really thought about it that passion does too. When we care too deeply about a book, a piece of art, a musical work, a lover, a child, a friend, a spouse, an ambition, that pictures are hanging straight, a career, we are going to suffer when it's slighted, denigrated, destroyed, betrayed, ridiculed. When you wear your heart on your sleeve it's going to get snagged. When you bury it, it's going to strangle.
 
Casual affection, anyone?

Ecstasy

Just as I sampled
a hand-crafted
deep chocolate
truffle,
its dusky smoothness
swirling
over my
tongue,
Beethoven's 6th
struck up
its pastoral frolic
and my smile went
head to toe.

Mind Over Matter

My library book club keeps expanding. One of our more recent additions is a 93-yr-old reader who walks, speaks, hears with a bit of difficulty but reads and perceives with perfect acuity. She came to the group for a few times before her daughter wrote to me and said that the group has changed her life. It's the first thing of interest to her since her husband died several years ago. My group of 11 years opened the circle of chairs and hearts for this veteran of life and its quite impossible to say whose life is richer for the overlay.

Please, God, at 93, let me be Mary.

Mabel, Mabel set the table

There is something so sweet about the slap of rope against the pavement in springtime.

A Japanese family moved into the house across the street - actually the father is Japanese and the mother, American and the girls, beautiful. They attend a local Japanese immersion program at one of the public schools. They are learning how to jump rope.

For days I watched the haphazard swinging and ill-timed jumping. But now we're down to a science. Father and youngest daughter "turn" the rope while the oldest daughter jumps. And jumps. And jumps. And my 69-yr-old mind pages backward to the muddy spring schoolyeard at school where, when the bell rang, we exploded outside and took our places with the thick stinging rope, Double Dutch or singles. And the sing-songed the ditties that accompanied them:

"Mabel, Mabel, set the table
Don't forget the salt and pepper "(furious fast jumping)

"Cinderella dressed in yellow
Went downtown to meet her fella
She sang, she sang, she sang so sweet
And along came _____ and kissed her on the cheek,
How many kisses did she get?",,,,,,

And so on.

Now, my entire body rather shrinks from the imagined assault - wouldn't something shake loose??

Sunday Morning Abultions

sunshine pulled back the covers,
shoved me out the door,
and around the lake.

Carolina wrens chatted
Daffodils up and at em'
Yesterday's sleet hanging
by a glistening thread.

Gray-haired lady walking Scotties
whispered as I passed,
"oh, the sun!"

The universe said yes.

Prism

For a recent family gathering I created a quiz about our childhood household, including identification of hymns  from isolated phrases. They were puzzled by four words "in this glad hour" but when I sang the four accompanying notes, immediately from our group of nine came the harmonious tenor, bass, soprano, alto voices singing the entire hymn, "Come Thou Almighty King" - from memory, finding the words and melody like stepping over stones in a clear running brook, picking our way through the years.

 Beautiful.

Check the Box

Lately I have been immersing myself in British Masterpiece Theatre WWII series like Foyle's War and Island at War. I am mesmerized.

While too young to have absorbed any personal involvement I find it incomprehensible how this one man's racial venom could have been allowed to morph into cataclysmic world-wide tragedy.

I think today we have checks and balances.

But how deep is the moat?

Ham Off the Hook

My childhood attic was a place of mystery. Dark shadows under the eaves potentially hid mice. I dreaded hearing that quick scurry. But it also held trunks of treasures - Mother's wedding dress, books of jig-saw puzzles, Christmas decorations, pennants from trips, a rocker with a broken cane seat, rolls of old wallpaper, an old heavy tin camping set where all the utensils fit together in a snug lidded pot, and many other unexplored cartons.

But hanging from an east rafter was always a ham from the fall butchering, covered with fat and salt. From time to time, some adult person would go up and cut off a piece for our dinner. As I recall, Mother cooked it for hours with green beans and served it with mashed potates, a sweet/sour tomato cucumber salad and a sweet, creamy rice pudding that she simmered in her double boiler.

Heaven.

The anemic slice of ham slathered in plastic bearing the banner "Boars Head's Best" that I bought at Harris-Teeter yesterday should blush with shame.

January Morning

Pink tulips,
blue bottle,
white-paned window
framing
early snow.

my candle burns,
coffee steams,
the Post awaits.

Cocooned.

The world is full

Library patron - "I'm looking for the poem that begins - 'the world is full of a number of things'.."

Me - "I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

She stared.

I grinned. "Robert Louis Steveson, 'A Child's Garden of Verses." My mother quoted them to me all the time."

That small poem, like countless others, reside somewhere in my memory because my mother's mind was layered to the top shelf with verse. In her one-room schoolhouse they had few books. Thus, the blackboard's contents went from slate to composition books (in true Palmer script of course!) to mind. And there they stayed.

And as I was the fourth of five children, Mother had little time to read to me, but she accessed those shelves of memory and offered Longfellow, Whittier, Stevenson and all her school-day poets as she cooked and cleaned and ran the household.

I mourn the passing of memorization, because a mind is a wonderful thing to google.

More than that, I mourn her.

Catching Up

Nothing graces
a Saturday morn
like a long-line chat
with a long-time friend.

Too much time
elapses
with people you love
hovering on the edges
of silence.

You need a spoken
yes.

Now

When I was expecting our first child an acquaintance at the baby shower said, "Whatever else you do as a parent, enjoy the moment. Don't fall into the trap of saying - I can't wait until he rolls over, sits up, walks, talks, goes to school, marries etc. Just enjoy fully whatever stage he's in." And for some reason those words penetrated my 28-yr-old brain. I learned very quickly that the tides of anticipating the next development step pushed you along unless you were of stern will. But I think I courted the moment. And rewards for it continuously broke like waves over my toes at the beach - invigorating, dynamic, satisfying.

Forty-plus years later I have to conclude that happiness is like that, period. If you're always waiting to cross the street you're sure to miss the park bench on this side where you can sit and watch a slice of blue sky.