You can do this

When Beth lived upstairs on Whitcomb, Jan and I were just starting our weaving business.  Back in Mentor, every time a daughter moved out, I put a loom in the bedroom.  First Beth’s room, then Shelly’s.  Then in the dining room.  Down in Akron, after she and Tom married, Jan put a loom in her old bedroom.  Then one in the dining room.  They still ate meals there, until a second loom went into the dining room.  That’s when we bought this house, with the studio.

In the beginning we bought far too many looms.  Good looms are never a bad investment.  We learned from our looms, and then sent them back into the world, generally at a profit and never for a loss.  Until we learned a good deal more about them, we gladly went to look over looms that folks wanted to sell.  

The only Union Loom we ever owned we purchased in a distress situation.  The owner loved it, but needed the money.  It was a wrench for the woman to part with it; she had happy memories of learning to weave on it when she was a teen.  But, we paid up and loaded up and the deal was done.

Driving back we knew we really didn't want it, but…..   Let’s give it to Beth.  She can weave rugs!

I knew Beth was away on a business trip.  I also knew Chrissy had a key to take care of the cats.  Chrissy was very reluctant to agree with my request to let us into Beth’s house, as she should have been.  It was extremely presumptuous of Beth’s mother to put a loom in Beth’s dining room and wait for Beth to come home and find it.  But she let us in, and Jan and I hauled the loom up a long set of stairs and set it up in the dining room.  We put on the first warp and threaded the heddles and the reed.  Then we went home and waited for the phone call.

When it came I caught heck for involving Christina, but not for the loom, which really interested her.  In our ignorance of Union Loom braking systems, we put the first warp on the wrong direction.  Beth fought her way through it, and was a downhill weaver thereafter.  

She bought several looms and wove steadily for us until Bill came along and distracted her. Beth owned her house by then and all the looms lived in the garret.  Shelly and I finished emptying the looms up in the attic of desperately needed fabric while Beth and Bill made goo goo eyes downstairs.  By the time they married, all the looms were out of the attic and sold.

The Union Loom never made it to her attic; it did its service on Whitcomb. That’s where Ann learned to weave.  The Union had been pressed into service for fabric by then and Beth wove a couple of yards each night, when she came home from work.  Ann moved in with Beth temporarily, after selling her home, before moving to Wisconsin.  She came home from work earlier than Beth, and looking for something to pass the time, picked up a shuttle.  She accumulated her own looms in Wisconsin and wove for us until we retired. 

The  Union Loom we sneaked into Beth’s house?  The original owner said she’d like to buy it back.  So, having done its job, the loom went back to the person who loved it most.

Christina, the cat sitter who let us in.
During her harpsichord phase, twenty years ago.
She grew up to be a New York attorney.

Nothing changes

My daughter sent me a link to a Plain Dealer piece; a grandmother whose still illiterate grandchildren could bellow the lyrics of any Irish song from the back seat. She tried to steer them off the whiskey, onto ships and love songs, threading her way through the minefield of the implications of “bottom of the sea.” To quote Sheridan, the land of happy wars and sad love longs. Or Freud, with whom this grandma ended her piece, one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

“Sound familiar, Ma?” my daughter asked. I wrote it up a couple of years ago; here it is again.

I unpacked my folk albums when I divorced, and the girls and I did a lot of Saturday morning housework to the beat of an Irish group downstairs on the stereo.  Along came the magic of 8 track tapes and recording equipment, and I was in business; all my albums could be played in the car.  The drive to work was a lot shorter.

My girls liked the music, too, apparently. At least they didn't complain.  There often was a third girl in the car, too, Chrissy, who lived next door and was Beth’s good friend. Here’s an old 110 film snap.  You can see Beth’s black Irish hair, Shelly’s Teutonic blond hair, and almost make out that Chrissy and her brother Mark have beautiful red hair.  I turned heads when I walked through a store with those three girls!   I could hear minds turning and opinions forming.

The girls each were a year apart and their average age was about eight when Chrissy’s mother dropped by one day to tell me I was enabling the girls to form good opinions of reprehensible behavior.  The three of them were enamored of the Clancy Brothers version of William Bloat and could be found and heard singing it in both back yards and out on the street.  “It glorifies murder and suicide,” Mary said.

I told her I’d heard worse versions that included clotted blood and thought it could even be considered an early advertising jingle.  Or, heavy handed chauvinism.  In any event, the girls didn't unlearn the song and Chrissy was still allowed to come over.

In a mean abode

On the Shankell road

Lived a man named William Bloat

And he had a wife

The bane of his life

Who always got his goat

And one day at dawn

With her night dress on

He slit her bloody throat

Now he was glad

He had done what he had

As she lay there stiff and still

Till suddenly all of the angry law

Filled his soul with an awful chill

And to finish the fun

So well begun

He decided himself to kill

Then he took the sheet

From his wife’s cold feet

And he twisted it into a rope

He hanged himself

From the pantry shelf

Was an easy end let’s hope

With his dying breath

And he facing death

He solemnly cursed the pope

But the strangest turn

Of this whole concern

Was only just beginning

He went to hell

But his wife got well

And she’s still alive and sinning

For the razor blade

Was German made

But the rope was Belfast linen

Tasty pesto

Beth used to live upstairs in a two story on Whitcomb.  I love the name of the street.  It was only a little seedy back in the ‘80’s.  Beth’s friend Carol and her son Joseph lived downstairs when Beth moved in.  Their cat, Neighborhood, eventually became Beth’s cat.  When Carol and Joseph moved, Shelly and her husband and Bekka moved in.  Hammy came along shortly thereafter.  That’s enough of the group to be getting on with, although no one figures in this story except Beth and her friend, Christina.  The redhead who grew up next door in Mentor.

Beth always favored ethnic neighborhoods.  Her stock argument for living in the city was “If we don’t live here, Mom, who will?”  This was a fairly old Italian neighborhood of small lots, tidy homes, occasional two family homes, built that way in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s; the upstairs and downstairs identical.  There were sidewalks, flower gardens and adventures.  Like police helicopters overhead, illuminating the bushes looking for a suspect, and all the neighborhood out on their first and second story porches, watching.  Stories any mother likes to hear.

Chrissie must have finished her degree in harpsichord because she was back in Cleveland, taking her law degree at Case.  Beth may have been back at school, too, earning a degree that earned a living.  I think they were between boyfriends and especially partial to cheap entertainment, like the second run movie theater on the corner.  Experimenting with cooking, having parties that involved a little money and a lot of friends.

Beth invited me to come to supper one night for a spaghetti and pesto dish Chrissie was making as a trial run before trying it out live.  I arrived and found the table prettily laid and the two girls working in the kitchen.  Basil leaves, garlic cloves, pine nuts and olive oil was disappearing into the mortar and pestle.  I hung out in the kitchen door, watching the two girls working.  They decided they needed more basil.  One of them went out on the back landing and returned with a flat of tall and leggy basil seedlings.  Past their prime they cost a pittance at the corner nursery.  They made excellent pesto.

The dulcimer and the harp

Newly divorced in 1973, one of my first acts was to contact a shop in North Carolina and see if a Mr. Sams dulcimer was still available.  Jim Sams lived near Asheville, North Carolina and made dulcimers. They were sold in a little shop for a very reasonable price.  Less than a hundred dollars, I recall.  I thought they were beautiful to see, as well as listen to.  My husband pronounced them a waste of time and money and we left.   The owner of the shop remembered our visit and even said, as our conversation progressed, “I wondered if you might be fixin’ to be done with him.”  They had several Sams dulcimers and we worked out an arrangement in which I paid for the dulcimer “on time.”  I was more than a year paying it off, and when the dulcimer arrived it had a note that it was one of the last dulcimers Mr. Sams made and she had held it back for me.  He made stands for them, too, but I was too late to buy one of them.

I could play songs on my dulcimer if someone else tuned it for me.  That was my sister, who lived with me for a few years back then.  I was really good with Moon River.  After Jan moved Mr. Sams’ lovely dulcimer had a place of honor in my living room and was played a few times by people who understood stringed instruments.  I sent it to live with Beth years ago.  Some day it may encounter someone who can play Moon River.

I can’t remember anything about the three men who made the harp.  Can you imagine browsing an art show early in the morning and encountering a fully stocked harp booth.  I knew I needed one just to support the audacity of three men who believed they could sell harps at an art show in the Midwest.   I selected the least expensive harp available and spent the weekend scheming how to find the money.  It was close to Beth’s birthday, and that became my excuse.

When I brought it home I handed it to Tom, who makes music on anything.  He could not play it.  In a flash I called Christina, Beth’s friend since childhood.  At the time Christina lived very close by and was just embarking on a career as a lawyer.  Best of all, Christina, a gifted musician, has a master’s degree in harpsichord.  Maybe the degree is music theory, but Christina and harpsichord are synonymous to me.  Christina arrived promptly, announced the harp first rate, and tuned it.  She gave Tom a two minute lesson in the theory of plucked instruments, and he could play it.

That’s how my daughter got a birthday present to keep dusted.   Some day it may encounter someone who can play Moon River.

Christina at the harpsichord.  A long, long time ago.

Jobs we’ve had

Driving home from work today, a satisfying morning’s effort behind me, I thought about the kinds of jobs I’ve held, then burst out laughing at the kinds of jobs my oldest daughter had.

To pay room and board I worked food service when I left home and started college.    The dorm cafeterias were not open in the summers; I worked at the Student Union cafeteria.  Only open five days a week, weekends were iffy for food.  Bread was most easily smuggled, not enough to last two days.  I had no allowance the last two years; my dad was in a hospital in Columbus, recovering from histoplasmosis.  I was grateful to be able to go to school.  I worked odd filing jobs around campus and typed papers for a quarter a page.  I scraped by, unimaginatively.

Shelly, my youngest daughter, worked food service jobs, too, at college.  The same job I did for room and board in my day only covered board for Shelly.  She left school after two years, went to English Nanny School.  It was a perfect fit and she was a nanny for several years before she married.  Shelly and I both worked the usual college jobs.

Beth, however, just didn’t do things usually.  She’d already graduated high school a year early and entered college younger than most.  She needed to work, too, to stay in school and had clerical jobs the first year.  By the end of that year she assessed her experience and decided she could do better.  I took a deep breath.

She picked a vehicle to suit her life style.  A Volkswagen bus, named Grumbelly by her friend Christina.  For the sound it made.  Then, she moved off campus, into a series of homes to make mothers cringe.  She made life-long friends of some of her roommates; one is married to my friend Ann.

One summer she had a job inventorying Cleveland’s trees.  I learned about that job from a friend who said he saw my daughter unloading a van of inner city kids and supervising them recording the size and type of Cleveland’s tree lawn specimens.

Another year I learned of her gainful employment through the W-2’s that came in the mailbox the next January.  She was a hot dog vendor at Cleveland Indian home ball games!  Don’t think I didn’t see her for four years.  She called home for money, if needed, and came home to do laundry occasionally.  Grumbelly was infrequently serviced by my mechanic, and since his wife worked with me I’d hear from Gail that Ed had found Beth broken down or out of gas along the freeway, and bailed her out.  For over a year she worked in a deli that specialized in wine and cheese, an education that fostered her current career.

When she finished her undergraduate degree she went on to a masters in anthropology.  She earned her spending money working at Kinko’s, where she learned everything to be known about graphic design.  This lead to a part time marketing job at a major manufacturing company.  Eventually she replaced her boss.  She says it was because she could never teach him how to use a roller ball mouse.  Mouse design was rather fluid in the early days of computer.

I was quite satisfied, this morning, with what I’d accomplished at work, and driving home my mind flicked over job satisfaction.  Mine, Beth’s with her restaurant, Shelly the nurse.  Long way from hungry weekends at college, I thought.  Well, that was pretty mundane stuff Shelly and I did in college.  Then I burst out laughing remembering Beth, the van of inner city children, and all those W-2’s. 

 I drove Beth’s Grumbelly to the junk yard on his last gear, with no brakes.  Mom followed, to bring me home if I arrived safely.

A folk story

The folk revival was firmly established when I started college.  Heck, I even knew about Pete Seeger.  My dad didn’t agree with his politics, but he agreed with McCarthy’s even less.  Around the house mom sang the big band tunes.  Dad played Latin stuff like Tico Tico.  I listened to WAKR on my red transistor radio and didn’t have an opinion on either Pat Boone or Elvis.  But when I went to college I went right down the folk rabbit hole. 

I saw the Lettermen, the Kingston Trio and more.  Folk music was the topic among the kids I hung with.  We spent afternoons playing albums.  I don’t remember the first time I saw the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, but I did, and they went straight to the top of my chart.  They had two or three albums available in the very early sixties, and I played the vinyl off them. 

When I married my folk albums were packed away.  My husband hated them.  But they were unpacked and back on the stereo when we divorced, nine years later.  Along came the magic of 8 track tapes and recording equipment, and I was in business; all my albums could be played in the car.  The drive to work was a lot shorter.

My girls liked the music, too.  I guess.  It was all they heard.  But they didn’t complain.  There often was a third girl in the car, too, Chrissy, who lived next door and was Beth’s good friend. Here’s an old 110 film snap.  You can see Beth’s black Irish hair, Shelly’s Teutonic blond hair, and almost make out that Chrissy and her brother Mark have beautiful red hair.  I turned heads when I walked through a store with those three girls!   I could hear minds turning and opinions forming.

The girls each were a year apart and their average age was about eight when Chrissy’s mother dropped by one day to tell me I was enabling the girls to form good opinions of reprehensible behavior.  The three of them were enamored of the Clancy Brothers version of William Bloat and could be found and heard singing it in both back yards and out on the street.  “It glorifies murder and suicide,” she told me. 

I told her I’d heard worse versions that included clotted blood and thought it could even be considered an early advertising jingle.  Or, heavy handed chauvinism.  In any event, the girls didn’t unlearn the song and Chrissy was still allowed to come over.

In a mean abode

On the Shankell road

Lived a man named William Bloat

And he had a wife

The bane of his life

Who always got his goat

And one day at dawn

With her night dress on

He slit her bloody throat

Now he was glad

He had done what he had

As she lay there stiff and still

Till suddenly all of the angry law

Filled his soul with an awful chill

And to finish the fun

So well begun

He decided himself to kill

Then he took the sheet

From his wife’s cold feet

And he twisted it into a rope

He hanged himself

From the pantry shelf

Was an easy end let’s hope

With his dying breath

And he facing death

He solemnly cursed the pope

But the strangest urn

Of this whole concern

Was only just beginning

He went to hell

But his wife got well

And she’s still alive and sinning

For the razor blade

Was German made

But the rope was Belfast linen

When your mother is a book-a-holic

There were so many books in my house in Mentor.  All my college books.  Not being much good at anything at the time, I majored in English literature in college.  I sold the sociology and history text books back to the bookstore, but I kept all my English books.  After I was married I went on for an MA in American Literature.  All those books.  After I was divorced I got a BS in accounting.  All those books.

As it turns out, if I had known some things I might be good at, I’d have majored in old things.  Anthropology, Dr. Johanson and Tom Grey and Lucy.  Archeology, all the sites of the history that fascinated me as a child.  Mary Jemison.  Every Indian Nation from the Atlantic to the Rockies. Roanoke.  Virginia Dare.  I bought all the books and read them over and over.

My girl’s bedrooms were stuffed with books.  Mom passed on my childhood books; I gave them books for birthdays and Christmas.  One Christmas they even approached me as a united front, “No more books, Mom.”  They didn’t say what they did want, and they got more books anyway.  Neither remembers that confrontation and say I made it up.

I had bookcases built for their rooms.  I had a bookcase built for the dining room.  There were still stacks of books.  Not charming stacks, like ads for contemporary home décor.  No, there were stacks like my Dad’s stacks of National Geographic, behind his chair.  I never liked the look of that kind of hoarding and cast about for a solution (short of getting rid of the books, of course).

There was all that floor space in the family room in the basement.  My sister had lived there when she ran away from home for several years, but when she went back to be with dad, it was cavernously empty.  I seized the opportunity and bought cartons of industrial shelving, just like library shelving!  The girls and I assembled three rows, back to back, six feet long, five feet high.  Three foot aisles.  It was enough!

Beth and Christina, her best friend next door, started shelving the books alphabetically by author.  They did it after school, for days and days.  The shelved the Bible under God.  That made me chuckle when I came across it and puzzled it out.   I could go find old friends, shelve new books.  There was room for the girl’s excess books, although they had near and dear books that didn’t leave their rooms.  It was pretty near perfect.

Both my girls grew up and went off to college.  Beth majored in something and went on to take a master’s in social anthropology.  (I called it her degree in diarrhea in Bangladesh, and how she got from there to today, from mom’s point of view, might be worth a post.)  One day she called me, desperate.  She needed The Panda’s Thumb for a paper due tomorrow and every copy was checked out of every college library.  Would I please, please, please see if there was a copy at the Mentor library and get it for her.  She would wait right by the phone until I called her with the news.  It was long distance to the Mentor library for her, but not the house.  This was a ludicrously long time ago, I see.

“Have you considered asking your mother about her library?”  She drove right out and got it.