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.

Crocus

I enjoy looking around at the magnificent homes in Hudson on my several trips weekly to the high school. This year is my first time through in spring; Hamilton’s jazz group practices after school twice a week.

Crocus in Hudson.
The house is being repainted.

Last night I pointed out a discovery to Hamilton—a yard full of crocus. It is so wet this year they do not look their best, struggling up through puddles as they are. They made me smile, and remember planting crocus around my brother’s grave. 

Today I enlisted my sister to be the driver when I took pictures. Not to mention, she’s the only person who can still find our little four square of family graves, our brother, our uncle, mom and dad.

Mom and Dad

Uncle Bill and Mel

The four of them are together in Crown Hill cemetery in Twinsburg. I wanted to see if, almost forty years later, there still were crocus around my brother’s plot. I've been to the cemetery three times before. Mom was too pragmatic to take us there when dad was buried; it was twenty below and chest deep snow the winter of ‘77. I do not remember Uncle Bill’s funeral. I do remember Mom’s and Mel's. And, once we took Michelle to show her Grandma’s grave and her dad’s.

The story is the cemetery, not the crocus. I was going to tell how Shelly and I got locked in the cemetery the night we planted them. As we drove Jan said she was sure all crocuses were drowned by now. We arrived, and the poor place looked shabbier than ever. The detritus of winter, soggy all over the grounds.

It’s a perpetual upkeep memorial grounds. It’s always struck me as a Hansel and Gretel kind of place, Crown Hill cemetery, crooked fences, funny stone houses. There are no monuments, only flat markers. That appealed to mom, but it didn't work out so well at Crown Hill.

I wish I knew a little more about the history of the cemetery, but I didn't find much on the internet. I won’t call the office; they want me to preplan my use of the three plots mom gifted me.  They call me so often I may need to see what I do to get rid of them.

When I was a child passing these walls they all were intact. Now they are falling and fallen, sections filled in by old iron fencing. We stopped for a closer look and think the walls were built of old paving stones, blast furnace slag and even big chunks of coal. 

I cannot believe the walls and buildings of a cemetery were folk art fantasy. The cemetery was founded in 1929 and I wonder if the depression influenced the construction.

Instead of planting crocus and being locked in the cemetery, I think I’ll follow up with the story of Mom’s funeral. Everyone has a good funeral story, and I have hers.

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

Whose job is this

My husband, when I was married, liked to fish.  He’d go off with Warren, who was married to my high school friend Judy.  They came home with strings of blue gills and small mouth bass.  I wouldn’t clean them, but I was happy to cook up a fried potato and fish night for the four of us, after Jim and Warren had a freezer full.  I recall the two of them bursting into our apartment one night to show off their take to the pinochle club.

They fished often at the Holden Arboretum.  Judy and I went occasionally, and played with Beth along the many lake shores.  That’s where Beth learned she couldn’t walk on water.  She had no realization the surface would not be solid and walked straight in. 

The guys only kept fish six inches long or better.  The rest went back in.  However, they had a “secret pond” somewhere on the grounds and used the little fish to stock it.  I do wonder how that came out.

Shelly was two, going on three when we bought the house in Mentor.  The Arboretum was even closer, just down the road in Kirtland and Jim fished often in the evenings and weekends.

He had a lot of fishing equipment in the front closet, and, to my complete dismay, kept live bait in our refrigerator. Little wiggly things in flimsy Styrofoam containers lived in a condiment shelf in the door of the refrigerator.

One night I accidently flipped a container into the open vegetable drawer and before I could retrieve it the lid flew off and little wiggly things invaded the salad.

“Shelly,” I said sweetly and calmly to my toddler.  “Come here.”  She did.  “Please pick up those pretty little wormies and put them back in the container.”

Shelly looked over the crisper edge.  “Pick them up yourself.” 

Two, going on three

Another Krueger, another bird

The Krueger who survived his encounter with the Bobwhite Quail in 1961 was a bold and enthusiastic young fellow with a culinary habit may have led to his demise a year or two later.  He loved Japanese beetles and patrolled the top of the grape arbor, feasting.  Dad found him under the grape arbor, beyond resuscitation by the vet, and blamed it on the damn beetles.  Who knows.

Fast forward to the summer of 1966.  Beth could walk, I was hugely pregnant with Shelly and my husband brought home a kitten.  Because pets were not allowed we drew all the apartment curtains and lived in semi darkness until we moved the week after Shelly was born.  Krueger was named in honor of the late Krueger, who was named for college friend.  I’ve named many cats after friends.

In spite of living in semi darkness the first five months, Krueger had a happy and expansive personality.  He and Beth were fast friends and playmates.  She drug him around; he invented the game of chase Beth and knock her down.  Round and round the short dividing wall between the kitchen and living room, then Krueger would double back and jump on her chest, knocking her down.  Laughter, squeals from two year old Beth and the game recommenced.

We moved from the apartment to a house to another house in Krueger’s long life, without ruffling a whisker, but most of his years were spent in our Mentor house.  Krueger started the cat trail that led from one corner of the back yard, diagonally to the elm tree then straight into the back garage door that led to the door into the house.  In twenty years there I watched that cat trail, used by all my felines, turn to hard pack with no grass and visible as a depression under the snow.

My neighbor across the street called me one evening to come get my cat’s litter out from under his porch.  “But my cat is a male.”  “Well, he’s the father!” “My cat is neutered.”  “Oh, please get these kittens!”  I don’t recall if I did.

I was gifted a canary once, in a Taj Mahal cage.  Harry Canary led to Carrie Nation, the finch, and her husband and babies, and a parakeet each for my daughters. There was a cat population to deal with too; Krueger, Phoebe Snow and BoomBoom.  The solution was to hang the cages by hooks in the ceiling.  This led to hard packed areas in the carpeting underneath; cats sitting patiently, waiting for a bird to fall.  It never happened.

Somewhere around the age of thirteen or fourteen, Krueger began to decline; his liver rapidly failing.  Dr. Kroh, our wonderful vet, took good care of all my animals.  He put Krueger’s throat back in his body after a failed encounter with a pair of Airedales.  He put a pin in BoomBooms front leg when the shattered bone couldn’t be rejoined.  The last time he saw Krueger Dr. Kroh said take him home, make him comfortable for a few days.

We put Krueger on a warm bed under the kitchen table, food and water under his nose.  We carried him out occasionally to relieve himself, and he watched the family activity from his spot.  At Saturday chore time Shelly spread papers on the table and took down her parakeet to clean his cage.  The first time ever the parakeet jumped straight out to have a look at the big world.  He escaped outstretched hands over and over.  He landed on the floor, strutted right past the helpless cat.  Krueger stretched his neck, went chomp and had his bird.

Krueger died the next day.  But think about it.  All his life waiting and then the bird walked straight into his mouth.

Krueger was borrowed from the internet

What’s in this name

My surname is Noragon.  I married it.  I was not interested in its origins back then; I lived every moment in the present.  My husband told me he was a Polish prince, which made me laugh.  He was German to the core.  Blond hair, blue eyes, fair.  His mother’s maiden name was Siebert, for crying out loud.  Explaining their heritage to my daughters, years later, their grandma said Bohunk. That makes me smile.

When I divorced my husband I kept the name.  Back in 1973 it was becoming common for women to resume their maiden name after a divorce.  I had two children, and felt they didn’t need their mother to dump their last name, together with their father, so I didn’t.  He married my (former) best friend shortly thereafter.  Sadly, he died of a massive heart attack at age 44.  At the graveside his wife said, in front of my (her) in-laws and daughters, that in the event we wondered why she was burying him in a single plot, she intended to marry again.  I’ve waited for a story to drop that nugget!

People inquire about the origins of the name and I’ve always responded I didn’t know, I married it.  People wanted to know if I was related to Hal Naragon, the Cleveland Indians catcher.  Especially as his wife’s name is Joan.  I would say my name is Noragon, pronounced like Oragon with an N, and that’s all I know.  Oh, and my grandmother used to take me to the ball games and from the upper deck over first base I saw Hal Naragon catch.

I used, occasionally, to clear clutter from the house via EBay.  Selling their heritage according to my daughter Beth.  It’s a joke; the girls were always offered to re-home the stuff first.  My email address always displayed my last name to my buyers, and I received more than a few friendly inquires about my name.  I can’t believe how many people knew about Hal Naragon!

One fellow from the Midwest would not let me off the hook with my usual dismissal of “I married the name.”  “Just hold on,” he said, “I will make an inquiry of my friend on the west coast, (I don’t recall her first name) Naragon.  She has traced the genealogy back to Europe and was telling me something interesting about it not long ago.”

And several days later he forwarded an email from a lovely sounding lady who assured me that her research showed that every variation of Noragon, Naragon, Naragan, Narogan, you get it, can be traced back to one Hessian soldier, sent over to fight for King George, who did not go home.  His name was—and she gave me a great long name that began with N, contained an excess of consonants, and had an Eastern European ending.  I passed it along to both my girls, one of whom was interested in genealogy, and parked the email in a Save Forever folder.  Of course that was fifteen years and umpteen computers ago, it is long gone.  Neither girl was interested enough to hang on to the information, either.

I thought I’d leave reseaching their father’s genealogy to my girls, but the little green leaves on Ancestry.com are compelling.  I’ve begun plunking in the facts I know about my husband’s ancestry.  I’m not back to that Hessian soldier yet, but I do know my lovely mother-in-law was right—Bohunks.  I wonder if the Hessian was Bohemian.

Getting ahead

I’ve worked for others, I’ve worked for myself; half my career in the corporate world and half a company run by my sister and myself.  In retrospect, I did it in the right order.  I've been  employed every year from the time I turned seventeen. For years I bounced around corporate office jobs, acquiring that essential set of office skills. 

Then I was divorced and needed to support a family. I opened the classifieds and studied them to find a profession I could master that would provide the income.  Engineering was very tempting, but time was of the essence.  I had no credentials in any field except American Literature, which would not pay three months arrears my husband left on the mortgage.

Accounting it would be.  I bought an entry accounting text, read it, tested out of taking the classes.  I enrolled in a local college to take the other classes I needed for a BS degree in accounting.  And, I began applying for accounting positions.  Forty years later, I can hardly believe the chutzpah.  Most interviews ended on the first meeting, but one small company was willing to take the chance and hired me.  As the controller! We grew together.

Saturday mornings often saw various offices occupied by staff catching up.  My girls were too young to leave home alone at nine and eleven, so I brought them along.  There was one office filing job my staff routinely put off, the dreaded “file of last resort;” the numerical file of all invoices typed.  Wouldn’t you just know, it was the file “the bosses” went straight for when a customer called!  Perfect for two little girls to sit on a floor, sort by number, punch holes and put in a binder.  I paid them a quarter an hour.

This quiet and efficient arrangement went along fine for at least a year.  But one Saturday morning I looked up to find my boss in my door, a little girl on each hand.

“I understand you pay these workers twenty five cents an hour!”

I admitted I did, and hastened to add I paid them myself.

“I want you to pay them a dollar an hour.  Effective immediately.  Out of petty cash.”

I still smile when I think of them slipping off to the Vice-President’s office to ask for a raise.

Beth

Shelly

The way back from Camp Fitch

Cousin Camp, as my daughters call our house in the summer, did not originate with us.  Just carrying on an old family tradition, as some song goes.  Mom had six grandchildren, three of whom lived across the street and dropped in for a drink of water at grandma’s as often as at home.  The other three, my two girls and my niece, came for summers. This pensione arrangement was punctuated by other activities closer to their homes for the three girls. 

Our Lake County Y was my other resource. The big diversion for a couple of years was a week at Camp Fitch, a Y camp in western Pennsylvania, and about an hour east from the house in Mentor, straight out Interstate 90, then a few back roads to the camp.  I dropped them at the lodge on a Sunday afternoon and retrieved them the following Saturday afternoon.

Mom,  my brother Walt and his three boys were visiting one Saturday when it was time to get the girls.  So we all piled into my car, the Dodge Colt wagon, to go to Camp Fitch.  It was possible to fit five children and three adults inside that car, in a configuration that would have all adults imprisoned today.  They were kids; they didn’t know they shouldn’t like sitting cross legged in the back, playing cards for an hour, and signaling passing semi’s to blow the horn.

When the girls were stowed and we were heading out the camp gates, Mom, the queen of alternate routes, told Walt, the driver, take this road and that, not that road and this. We could drive home a short part of the way along US Route 20, right along Lake Erie.

Of course she had an ulterior motive.  In Conneaut, all of five miles from the camp, she told Walt “Pull in at that Dairy Queen®.”  She treated to ice cream all around; five kids and three adults, with ice creams, settled back for the rest of the trip. Walt headed west again, down US 20.  He saw the Dairy Queen® in Ashtabula first, pulled right in and filled up on ice cream again. 

 Five kids hoped they really were in ice cream heaven as we continued down the road. Oh, the speculation.  As we approached Geneva ten eyes were scanning the horizon.  “There it is, Dad!” “It’s just at the next light, Uncle Walt!”  Another Dairy Queen®.  Another round of ice cream.

I’m sure the grown-ups dropped out, but those five kids were up for it.  They found the Dairy Queen® in Painesville, and of course my two knew exactly how to get Uncle Walt to the Dairy Queen® in their home town.

The Great Dairy Queen® run became legend in our family.  All those kids in the Dodge Colt thought Uncle Walt was the hero.  I wonder if they remember Grandma Lytle started it.

Here is most of the gang, a year or two before the JGreat Dairy QueenJ Run.  Walt’s boys, my girls.  Roy, Beth, Grandma Lytle, Shelly, John, and Mark on Mom’s lap. I know this is early; Mark is too young to eat that much ice cream.  I think.

Carol and Frank’s wedding, and the trip home

Frank and Carol were together more than a year when Frank had the epiphany and proposed marriage.  They were married late in February of the next year, 1978.  Saturday, February 25^th.  My dad passed away on February 20^th, in a bitter, cold winter.  His funeral was over and Mom said “I need a wedding!”, so she rode shotgun and we went to Carol’s wedding with Beth and Shelly in the back seat of my Dodge Colt wagon.

It was a clear, sunny day when we set out from Mentor, Ohio to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.  I remember a small and wonderful wedding.  Carol reminded me they ran out of food, and the photographer was working for his dinner.  No one was flush back then.  Problems with the reception hall are crystal clear in her mind and I only remember a wonderful wedding.  And the memorable trip home.

It was after dark in the mountains, but still early evening when we set out to leave.  We changed from party clothes to winter clothes and boots we brought with us, said our goodbyes and opened the door of the hall to leave.  A gentle snowfall was illuminated in all the streetlights.

We were dressed for the weather; I had snow tires on the wagon, two fifty pound weights in the back, one over each wheel, and Mom for shotgun.  I figured we could cross the three mountain ranges on old US 22 to Pittsburgh and pick up the turnpike before the snow was more than a nuisance.  The turnpike would be clean and green, a trucker term I often heard on my trusty CB radio.

Beth and Shelly were twelve and ten, and seasoned travelers; they folded down the seat in back and went to sleep with their pillows and blankets.  Mom and I chatted our way over the first two mountains.  The little Colt stuck the road, the girls slept on in the back and it had been a lovely wedding.

The last town before the turnpike, we were tested.  A long hill up and the rail road crossed at the top.  Signal lights were flashing and all the cars stopped for the train crossing were gently sliding down the hill.  Mom knew what to do about that.

“Turn left and we’ll keep looking up the side streets until we find one the train has cleared.”  It was the perfect plan and I followed it at once.  Two or three blocks produced a train free crossing up the hill, and I started up in first gear.  Only a third of the way up, we lost traction and slowly slid back down, like cartoon characters in a cartoon car.  At the bottom I revved up some more RPM’s on the little engine, gently engaged gears and started again.  Half way, and the ignominious slide to the bottom.

Determined not to be defeated, I got a few more RPM’s on my side, engaged the clutch and started back up.  Almost as far as the second time, then the gentle slide backwards.  This time I lost control of the back in the drifting snow, the gentle slide turned a little sideways until thump and we stopped with the back bumper against the front bumper of someone’s parked car.  Stuck!  We needed the owner of the car to back up a bit and we would have room to push the Colt free.

I left Mom with the car and the girls and went door to door.  I found the owner pretty far up the hill, at a bachelorette party. She was happy to oblige, Mom gave the front fender an assist and we came back down the hill front first. 

 We went back the way we came, and with plenty of hill climbing experience behind me, tackled the previous street up to the rail way crossing, topped it, and worked our way back to the highway. The hill below was a tangled mess of cars. We kept on US 22 to the turnpike.

Once there I dropped into the line of headlights and tail lights illuminating the night.  Then I pulled into the passing lane, and was immediately blinded by snow that blanketed the air as well as the highway.  I asked Mom if I could pull back.  She couldn’t see a thing, either.  I crept along until my CB roared out, “Breaker, brown car!  If you have a CB pick it up NOW.”  Mom picked up. 

We were, a trucker said, bringing the entire Pennsylvania turnpike to a virtual standstill because the fool in a brown station wagon was straddling the middle line at thirty miles per hour.

“What would you like us to do?” Mom inquired.

“Move the hell over.”

“Now, young man, there’s no need for that.  We want to get home as much as you do, and we can do this together.”

“I’m very sorry, m’am.  Now, if you ease a little to the right you’ll be in your lane.  I’ll pull in ahead of you and you can ride my slip stream for a bit.”

The little brown car and I had no fear behind the semi and stuck like glue back to Ohio, where we said goodbye and headed north and west to home.  We were the only people on the road.  We watched the sun rise as we crunched along about forty miles per hour.  We ate breakfast at an all night truck stop.  We pulled into the drive about noon, and we were all talked out.  It had been a mighty fine wedding.

 Left to right, Joanne, Janice, Beth, Mom.  Probably 1981.  At Carol and Frank's house; one of Carol's memorable Christmas parties.  Beth is not old enough to drink, and proud of it.

Carrie Nation

Way back in the seventies, when we lived in Mentor and the girls were little, we had birds.  Beth and Shelly  each had a parakeet, I had a canary, and we all had the finch.  We also had cats, so all the bird cages were suspended from a hook in the ceiling.  Our plants were similarly suspended, in front of windows.  My Uncle Hank said he didn't understand how my entire ceiling didn't land on the floor.  Like I didn't know about mollie bolts.  The folks who bought the house certainly had a job fishing those little devices from the drywall.  Perhaps they replaced the ceiling.

The girls each had a name for their birds; the canary’s name was Harry, but the finch just didn’t suit herself to a name.  She was The Finch.  One evening she didn’t look well.  Puny and unhappy.  Jan and I looked in the encyclopedia and pet books we had, and decided she was dying.  We put her in a shoe box with a blanket and a light bulb for warmth, and sat up half the night keeping her warm and giving her water.  In the middle of midnight she laid an egg. 

I went straight to the pet store in the morning and learned as much as I could about taking care of a finch who laid eggs.  At their recommendation I also brought home another finch, extensions for the cage and a nesting box.

The Finch kept laying eggs on the bottom of the cage, and she did not take kindly to the second finch.  She pecked him into a corner and pretty much kept him there.  We named her Carrie Nation, and listened to two finches who each had much to complain of.  Then one day the eggs weren’t on the bottom of the cage, they were in the nesting box.  Carrie Nation settled in on them and the other finch came out of the corner and spelled her.  He was a good father, too, and did his share of baby tending and baby feeding.  There is nothing noisier than hungry baby finches in the kitchen!

When the little finches were big enough I took them to the pet store and traded them for a lot of bird seed.  Carrie Nation sent the other finch back into his corner.  But after some time the two of them were busy tidying up the nesting box. There was a new clutch of eggs, Carrie Nation settled in and the other finch did his job.

The pet store was very nice about taking baby finches back, but I felt a little guilty, and distributed a few around the neighborhood, too.  My next door neighbor, Mary, was happy to take one.  Mary is Christina’s mother.  Their finch lived happily in a corner of their family room for several months and then one morning they found him on the cage floor, dead.  Mary was very distressed, but her husband was very suspicious.  It was a young finch in good health when they went to bed.  Mauricio called the gas company.

Their furnace was leaking carbon monoxide!  Mary was several months pregnant with April at the time, and the whole family could have died of carbon monoxide poisoning without the warning they got from that little finch’s life and death.

Mary and Mauricio took another baby finch from Carrie Nation’s next brood of babies.  That little finch lived a normal finch life for several years.  Carrie Nation did the same.  We took the nesting box away, Carrie Nation kept the other finch away, and eventually he passed away, leaving her queen of the cage for the rest of her years.

The Ringer

 I’ve knit for most of my life, and eventually realized I needed to make yarn, too.  Sourcing a spinning wheel in the pre-internet early eighties involved a good deal of asking, and eventually my younger daughter Shelly brought home a card she picked up at a festival in Kirtland, Ohio.  It was for a spinning and weaving shop down in Chagrin Falls, tucked away in a nice enough alley.

The owner of the shop was very knowledgeable, but couldn’t read my mind or my future, and in my ignorance I left the shop with a double drive band Saxony wheel with the most tichy mother-of-all ever.  I spent more than a year teaching myself to spin on that wheel, and really didn’t become a good spinner until I bought a chair style wheel from a local craftsman.  His wife spun; he watched her and figured out how to do it better.

Of course, one thing leads to another.  If you spin you may learn to weave.  You’ll probably find a guild to join and then you learn a lot faster.  Pretty soon you’re caught up in the whole thing—washing fleece.  Dying fleece.  Carding fleece.  Signing on with your fellow guild members to be a team in a Sheep-to-Shawl contest.

A sheep-to-shawl contest is a juried competition of several teams of spinners and weavers, generally held in a fair or festival context, offering a cash prize to the team that spins and weaves a shawl, washes and dries it and presents the shawl for judging according to the stated rules.  Beside judging at the end, the end, the judges walk around observing warping, weaving and spinning technique.  It can be a long three hours.

Along with some other local guilds, ours sent a team to a local contest.  We began gathering about nine in the morning, getting space assignments, setting up looms, leveling spinning wheels.  Then two out of county trucks pulled in and another loom was unloaded, together with three more wheels, and assigned a spot.  A local judge whispered to one of our more experienced members and the word spread quickly.  The Washington Court House team!  Four hours south.  They got up mighty early in the morning!

I was the weaver that year and Jan was one of the team of three spinners who produced the yarn I wove.  I wove to the end of my warp, we set about the finishing, turned it in and waited.  When we got the results, our weaving was good, our spinning was good, our shawl was judged short of the required length.  The team from Washington Court House took home the money.

Undeterred, our guild put together two teams for a contest the next year.  Jan would be the weaver on our team, and we made at least one practice shawl.  Then, with days to the contest, one of our spinners had to drop out.  Fielding two teams meant our guild didn’t have a reserve spinner to make up the required team of three spinners and one weaver.  The two of us left spinning knew output was not the problem; the two of us could keep up with Jan.  We needed a ringer.

Shelly was in the tenth or eleventh grade then.  Heck, she could have been in first grade as long as she passed as a spinner.  I broke the news as soon as she was home from school.  You’re going to be a ringer in the Sheep to Shawl contest Saturday.

The only wheel I had for her was my double drive band impossible to tension mother-of-all Saxony wheel.  I didn’t tell her all that, I just told her she had to make it look like she could spin.  By the day after tomorrow.

Shelly did nothing on faith.  She had to question everything.  Understand everything.  Analyze everything.  Eventually I grabbed my car keys and told her I would be home when she passed for a spinner.  I came home from my girlfriend’s house, hours later, and found her taking off a bobbin of nicely spun yarn.  My ringer was the real deal.

At the Sheep to Shawl contest our guild’s teams took first and second places.  Washington Court House was disqualified.  They thought they had tipped the scale by appearing with a painted warp.  But the other teams protested the violation of the plain wool warp and they were disqualified.  Shelly’s bobbins of wool went right into that shawl, along with mine and the other spinner’s. 

I was so pleased with her skill and effort that after the event I offered her to buy her a wheel.

“No thanks, Mom.  I got my ribbon.  That’s all I wanted.” 

The Ringer

A Saxony wheel.  Image borrowed from the Michigan Fiber Arts Guild.  The drive band is twice as long as seen, and doubled.  One  strand of the band rides along each side of the wheel.  The other end of the drive band does two jobs.  One side drives the flyer that holds the bobbin and the other side drives the bobbin.  The entire assembly, two uprights with the bobbin between, rides in a groove and is connected by a screw thread on the knob in front.  This assembly is called the mother-of-all, and must be tensioned properly in order to make wool spin to yarn and take up on the bobbin.  Wooden screw threads don't lend themselves to fine tensioning.

Names happen

When I was ten or eleven, and had a new baby sister named Janice—Janice, Dad said.  “I didn’t name her Janus"—my friend had a new baby sister named Kimberly.  It sounded wrong.  How could a kid go through life named for Kimberly-Clark, the Kleenex company. I come from a family that swapped names around, generation to generation.  

In retrospect, it was the cusp of not your father’s name.  Or mother’s, either.  It happened in my own family, right on the heels of Kimberly.  My Aunt Flo, faced with naming her daughter Ethel, after her mother, or Ethel, after her mother-in-law, named my cousin Barbara.  When my next cousin was born two years later, she named him Kenneth.  Barbie and Ken.

My mother was named Lenore Caroline, matriarchal family names.  Her brother, my Uncle Hank was named Henry Melvin, from his grandfathers on both sides.  His paternal grandfather, Charles Henry Rolf, actually had the same name as a sibling who died as an infant.  Except, the sibling was Henry Charles.  Thrifty people, those German immigrants.

My grandfather expected my mother to be a boy.  No girls had been born in the family for generations.  He was so surprised he dubbed her Nicodemus, and she was called Nikki by everyone except my grandmother.  All my aunts, uncles, cousins called her Nikki or Aunt Nikki.  My dad called her Nikki. 

When I married the naming situation was serious.  My husband was adamant our first child would be a boy, and would be named after him.  Another Junior.  When she surprised him, he named her Joanne (after me) and Elizabeth (after the girlfriend who dumped him after high school).  I was not about to have a big Joanne and a little Joanne in the house, and had no problem with Elizabeth, except for its length, so I told everyone to call her Beth.  It’s worked out well.

My second daughter also acquired a name she wasn’t given.  Her father again intended her to be a boy and be named junior.  Foiled again. I suggested a name to honor her Irish heritage, but quit that idea immediately on learning he would convert it to an ugly nickname.  For a girl, he said, he wanted Michelle. The name du jour in 1967.  Of Beetles renown.   She was Michelle from September, 1967 until July, 1968, when my brother and sister-in-law had a baby, and named her Michelle.

“We can’t have two Michelle’s in the family,” Helyn informed me.  Yours will need a nickname.  I protested ours was named before hers was even conceived.  “But we liked the name first,” she settled.  I’d never liked Michelle; Shelly was fine with me.  In truth, I don’t think my husband called her anything but Shelly.  And, my brother’s Michelle has always been Michelle.  A good name for each of them.

My granddaughters have traditional family names.  Shelly used my dad’s sister’s names, Laura and Ruth, for two daughters, and Beth named her daughter Caroline Lenore to honor her grandmother, Nikki.  Her son, France, may still be on the road to his name.  Born William Francis, he got his first name from his father and his second name from the gourmet hot dog establishment in the lobby of the hospital.  In honor of its being open on Christmas Eve, when he was finally born.  We call him Francis, but I’m thinking he’ll grow up to be a mighty tall Frank.

Nikki, standing by her father

Walter Ernst Rolf, Lenore Caroline Rolf, Henry Melvin Rolf, Ethel Lenore Cox Rolf

Age resistant

Had I been able, I would have grown old wearing three inch heels.  I love seeing grey haired women in crisp trousers and jackets.  And heels.  I don’t even have grey hair.  The last time I wore heels was at my daughter’s wedding.  That was twelve years ago and they were the only pair I had saved, my beautiful Victorian boots with two inch heels.

The earrings were wonderful.  Corkscrew, ear specific.  I gave them to Shelly during the reception.  It had been so long since I wore earrings, even gold, they hurt.  The ring is my Grandma Rolf’s engagement ring.  A bloodstone cabochon, our birthstone. It’s put by for Caroline.

No, when I left the corner office (actually, a hallway passed my office in two directions) in 1988, my three inch heels were idled.  Can’t weave in them, could drive eight hours in them, but would have to change to sneakers to offload hundreds of pounds from my van and set up a show.  They just weren’t practical.  I did wear nice sneakers or nice Mary Jane’s at my shows.

Probably the fall I retired.  With Linda and her daughter Cara, right after Linda’s mastectomy.  Cotton was all she could stand to wear.  Fortunately, I wove cotton.  My Mary Jane’s were toward the end of their road.

I retired to get a new hip.  I stood right up against the wall and the technician measured me at 5’6”.  Which I was. That was to leave my leg the correct length on the operating table.  I remained 5’6” for another couple of years.  Then I started limping.  I was down to 5’5”, except where I had a titanium hip and thigh bone.  I put a quarter inch lift in my right shoe.

A couple years after that I fractured my back.  It involved a lot of stupidity on my part.  Now I ask those nice clerks to lift a carton of copy paper into my cart.  That was like getting on the down escalator for height. 

So, I’m 5’4”, and definitely in the vertically challenged group.  Adding the stroke to that, well…as they reminded me when they discharged me from physical therapy, I’m not a stable woman.  Give me a cane and I can get through Ikea with Beth and Caroline any day.  As long as my current pair of sneakers have gone to the shoemaker to have the sole sliced apart and a half inch rise inserted.  Actually, that’s pretty cool.  He just slices through the sole, glues on a half inch piece the same color, glues the sliced off piece back on and hey presto, both my legs reach the ground simultaneously.

I’m still fussy about shoes.  I like suede sneakers in the winter; far warmer.  Right now I’m wearing red canvas sneakers and have black and white plaid sneakers in my closet.  Oh, and a beautiful pair of oxfords for weddings and funerals and meetings.

But, my winter New Balance suede sneakers are pretty disreputable after several winters of snow and slush in the parking lot.  I went looking for a new pair.  They’re called Retro.  They haven’t been to my shoemaker, yet.

So, I’ll be seventy next March, and still have three inch heels.  Made in the USA.  Me and the shoes.  Thank you New Balance.

Now, about the grey hair...

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.