An old story

Long ago, in the seventh decade of the last century, my daughters wanted their ears pierced. I asked our family doctor if he would do it, and the unequivocal answer, “If God wanted women to have holes in their ears they would be born with them.”

That was the exact attitude of my husband, too, and consequently my ears were not pierced until the week I told him I was divorcing him. Armed with alcohol, a large darning needle, ice cubes and a set of gold studs, I leaned against the bathroom sink and pierced my ears. The path through the right ear takes such a decided jog, I thought I would have the job professionally done for my daughters.

Male attitudes uncompromising, and ear piercing kiosks unheard of, each got their ears pierced by Dr. Mom. And so we went on for several years, until Beth announced she wanted a second set of ear piercings. Mall piercing kiosks were common then, but the age of majority was 21, and I denied her, reminding her that were I still married to her father, the first set of earrings would not have been, and I considered extra earrings rather vulgar.

We happened to be at a mall one time with my mother, and while I was on one errand, they wandered off. I wonder if my mom would have denied her first grandchild much; she certainly did not deny her permission for more earrings through her ears.  Beth’s smile of triumph when we met again was glorious, and I could only observe “Lovely new studs!”

Emily arrived with earrings through and through, and Laura had her ears pierced before her first birthday here, her eleventh. We had an awful time with her with infections because she would wear any piece of trash she scored from people she liked. Almost a year with no rings in her ears, except possibly in the dark of night before she went to bed, and a ruthless scouring of her earring collection, returned us to a normal family with two earringed children.

At the end of the last school year they appeared as one, with a carefully thought through plan: “Gramma, if we don’t have any birthday presents this year, could we get our ears pierced again?” It was only April or May, and their birthdays aren’t until December, so I smiled and said we would do it before school started in September.

The powers that be caught me unaware; school begins in a week. Time was short to get earrings in and relatively unbothersome. We went today. And, don’t be misled by the banner; piercings are only free with the purchase of earrings, which I doubt they will save to put in until their birthdays. Asked why they wanted more earrings: “They will be so cool, Gramma."

Miss Orange Nails thinks blue hair will be “so cool” too. Fortunately, I know an excellent hairdresser.

 For bravery.

The kitchen towel drawer

The kitchen was not large in the house where I grew up.  It was remodeled after I left; the refrigerator swapped with the stove, yielding counter and prep room.  But when I grew up no one thought about those kinds of things.  Mom cooked on a stove standing alone in a corner and the first refrigerator I remember was an ice box on the front porch.

We were put to work at an early age.  I remember sitting on the counter, drying dishes my mother put into the drainer at my right elbow and stacking them on the counter at my left.  Mom would put the dry dishes into the cupboard when she finished washing up.

All children in turn, then grandchildren, spent time sitting on the counter for a job.  Another counter job was to put peach halves face down in to a quart jar, my mother’s canning method.  The peaches spiraled around until the jar filled and the next jar started.  The years there were fork tine holes in the canned peaches were the years mom had no child available whose small hand fit into the quart jar and left a peach behind.  

    

The kitchen towel drawer was the last drawer before the back door.  Folding clothes was a job assigned at an early age, and there was only one way to fold towels in my mom’s kitchen.  In thirds.  The towel went on a flat surface, was folded in thirds lengthwise, then in thirds again; a compact little bundle that could be stacked two or three towels high, two towels across, four or five towels deep. 

We did not mess with the system.  Bad towel folding was among the few things that irritated mom. Shoving towels in the back to avoid the routine could have you folding towels long after bedtime, lifted from slumber and sent to the kitchen to correct the oversight.

When I kept my own house towels were not folded in thirds unless my mom was visiting and took it upon herself to redo the entire drawer.  When we all moved in together the subject came up again.  Jan and I both said towels could be folded in any manner that pleased the folder. You know how mom folded the kitchen towels she washed.

And then there were the sheets.  Mother owned more sheets than were in a department store and rotated them.  When we changed our beds, almost weekly as I remember, we had to take clean sheets from the bottom of the sheet stack in the linen closet.  When we folded and put away the laundry the clean sheets went on top of the stack. 

I always took my clean sheets from the top of the stack and mentally defied mom to figure it out.  

Under the bridges

Until I was ten or eleven, the forty feet of our back boundary was marked by a raspberry hedge. The same raspberry canes marked the back boundary of our neighbor, Mrs. Smith, except she told us she poisoned hers, and little children who ate hers would die.

We picked quarts and quarts of berries for our mother, and any mother whose kid would stand for half an hour, picking berries into a container. More than a few of Mrs. Smith’s berries went into containers, on the off chance a sibling would be poisoned.

There were raspberries on our cornflakes, raspberry crumble, and the very best, raspberry jam.  Dad loved raspberries. He ate them one at a time, savoring them and swallowing them. He seldom ate raspberry desserts, and never put jam on his toast or ice cream. I remember him pushing away a dessert one night. “Damn! They’re under my bridges.”

Now that was something to ponder. A dad who could wiggle his ears, lift one eyebrow at a time, and pull off his thumb also had bridges. A look around the dining room revealed no bridges, and so it was a mystery for another day.

When dad built the garage and drive along the back line he moved the raspberries on the hill, and there were plenty for everyone to pick. Time went on, I grew up and left, assumed responsibilities, moved into my thirties and found myself asking my dentist what he was talking about. “You have two baby molars with no permanent teeth beneath. You’re very fortunate to keep them this long!”

Within five years I had my first bridge and the second another five years later. More than a few things wander under them, but raspberry seeds are the worst.  I suspect my dad never chewed a raspberry; I bet he extracted the juice and swallowed the pulp, a raspberry food mill, as it were.

Phil, my dentist, gave me a complimentary Zahn’s bridge cleaner and told me to buy more at the drug store. A nice product that also does a great job of threading serger needles. My favorite little tool now, for pursuing the errant raspberry seed, is a little green Gum brush. I’ve littered an acre of landfill with used up and bent up little Gum’s, with no regret. I am sorry that for all the technology dad lived to see, bridge cleaners eluded him.

Source

She always had a window

When I was small, my brother and I had a window to ourselves in the backseat of our little car, and it was the safest form of entertainment. Standing up was tolerated until we also were hanging over the driver or passenger. Room was limited, but shoving against the back of the front seat to rearrange our bodies in our space drew even sharper rebukes. Best just to glue the nose and watch the cows graze and the corn grow.

Eventually my youngest brother was big enough to be intolerable in the front seat. He never sat still. He was sent back. At first I think Mel didn't notice he retained his relative seating position, between two people. But one day, and we were all dressed up, and probably going to visit a grandmother or cousins, Walt and Mel were in a spirited round of fisticuffs outside the car’s back door. It was over seating by the window.

Our father settled it on the spot. He told us the date and divided it by three. The scheme was, if the remainder was one, Joanne sat in the middle. If the remainder were two, Walt took the middle. If the number divided evenly, Melvin sat in the middle.

The plan proceeded beautifully. Well, the one in the middle often was miffed and engaged in surreptitious poking, there were admonitions from the front, but eventually we arrived somewhere, tumbled out and were pleasant until the drive home. The plan did not change when I was ten and one half years old and a new baby arrived.

As usual she lay on mom’s lap, then sat in the middle of the front seat. But before Jan could be sent to the back seat my parents were driving a big Dodge station wagon, a mobile living room, so to speak. A rear facing seat at the back, a regular bench seat in the middle. My brothers sat in back, where they could hang over the gate, as the window rolled down into the tailgate. By a push button up front!

I don’t know what became of the middle rule. Jan was seven when I left home, nine when Walt joined the military. Families had more than one car in the sixties. As I recall, there were two cars when I was a teenager, then a third that Jan drove. Melvin bought something candy apple red. Walt was stationed in England.

I asked Emily and Laura how they determined who sat in front. I expected an even or odd day answer, but learned it was whoever touched the door first. At least they worked it out.

Mel and his candy apple red, two door car. Best man at his best friend's wedding, I think 1966. Two door cars are another story, together with cleaning Beatles albums with alcohol (vodka!) Another day.

Fried eggs

I've mentioned on more than one occasion my mother was not a good cook, except pot roast on Sunday. 

I've spent most of my adult life avoiding cooking, too, but there was a ten year stretch when I did cook.

I was married, and my husband expected three meals a day. Yes, he came home for lunch. There were kids to feed, too.

My mother-in-law was an exquisite cook. Standing roast beef on Christmas Eve. You should have been there. I learned more about cooking from her than I learned in the kitchen of my childhood.

My memory of eggs at home is scrambled eggs, served for dinner, with spinach. (Mine went under the table.) 

I recall fried eggs as an outdoor camping dish, my brothers frying a lot of bacon and throwing in eggs at the end, while I toasted bread in a toaster that fit over another burner. It was a three ring Coleman, and I know a pot of coffee was on the third ring.

Fried eggs as an indoor breakfast dish did not cross my mind until my husband requested them. He watched from the dining card table in our miniscule apartment kitchen, and I do recall the instant I had the eggs nicely in the skillet he was at my shoulder, adding a tablespoon of water and clapping a lid on. OK, that’s how you fry eggs indoors.

My grandmother also was an excellent cook, and gave me some cookbooks. They were old, from the beginning of her marriage, now a hundred years ago. These actually were “housekeeping” books, and I could read about running a vacuum cleaner and dusting, where my skills were adequate.

The directions for frying eggs were so ludicrous I shared them with some other young wives at work, in the break room. Can you believe, you crack the egg into hot bacon grease, and then you can spoon the hot grease over the egg to hasten the cooking.

Silence. “Well, that’s what I do. How do you fry an egg?” from a person l admired.  I was so tongue tied by the realization that exploded in my mind I could not speak. First, my fried eggs actually were “fried” in water. Second, do not denigrate anything I did not understand well enough to have an opinion.

I never answered Meg’s question and the topic turned, of course. At my first opportunity I asked my mother-in-law, what’s that called, how you make eggs. “Oh, they’re steamed, my dear.”

I still have fried egg moments.

Tying my shoes

Some childhood moments remain with me in complete clarity.  Learning to tie my shoes is one. I was between three and four years old.

The staircase to upstairs had one landing.  I sat on the first step of the top landing, tying the shoelace of a brown Buster Brown, overhand knot after overhand knot. I wanted to make the laces short enough not to step on.

“Damn shoe won’t tie,” I said repeatedly under my breath. “Damn shoe won’t tie.”

I became aware of my father looming tall over me. “Would you like to learn to tie your shoes?”

I nodded a vigorous yes.

He walked down a couple of steps, and then sat down behind me on the landing, his feet below mine. (Dad was about 6’6”, and could stand on the bottom step, bend over and put his palms on the floor.)

I watched as his long fingers quickly untied several inches of knots.  Then he demonstrated.  Then he untied my shoe lace and guided my hands through the motions.  Then he untied my shoe and I tied it myself.

Dad stood up and said, “Very nice.  Your cousin Bobby can’t do that yet, and he’s in school.”

My brother Walt and me, April 1946.  The sibling on the left could tie shoes.

With thanks to Handy Andy for stirring up such a fun memory.

With 26 leaden soldiers I can conquer the world

When I was a kid I said endlessly, and surely annoyingly, “I read in a book,…” and would add my morsel to the conversation.  I don’t recall the point at which I put it all together and derived my own opinions.

I still read endlessly.  On line magazines, newspapers and blogs have saved me from subscribing to more newspapers than I could conveniently recycle. 

Our childhood library contained books with stories of famous people and events, or historical turning points.  They arrived monthly.  I have no idea how my parents subscribed to them.  They were bound with green dimpled covers around inexpensive paper.  In retrospect, American people, events, history. 

I read about Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, The Santa Fe Trail.  Flatboats on the Monongahela, Alleghany and Ohio Rivers.  Paso por aquí on a rock face in the southwest. I found even more books in the library.

For a long period I devoured histories of the settlement of the Western Reserve and the Ohio Valley, and the spread into prairies of Indiana and Illinois.  In a book that must have been about the movement of newspapers into the west, I read that line, “With 26 leaden soldiers I can conquer the world.”  It was put into the mouth of a newspaper editor, who ascribed it to someone whose name I could not remember.

I recall in the history the printing equipment crossed the Kankakee River.  How strange I can recall that, but not the person who owns the line.  My friend Google tells me it must be Benjamin Franklin: “Give me 26 lead soldiers and I can conquer the world.”  I was struck when I read it, and even now, the verb is “can,” not “will.”  Sorry, the auxiliary verb.  No arrogance, but ability.  I’ve read a lot by and about Franklin, and that was his style.

The news last night had a piece on sleep being essential for moving short term memory from the front of our brains to the hard drive, long term memory at the back.  Now that is a new problem for me, and I need to read more about it.

 The word is from....

Sparks was the Radio Officer

Sparks was a radio operator on Great Lakes freighters in the 1930’s.  He had been a radio operator and instructor in the Army, but was medically discharged in 1931, six years after he joined.  The diagnosis was chronic ulcers, treated by adhering to a bland diet.  He spent time in an army hospital bed, and developed special skills such as ear wiggling and eyebrow lifting, enormously useful to entertain his nieces and later his children.

The skinny young man worked his way north from Georgia to his sister’s home in Ohio.  He didn’t eat much that year, he claimed, but it was later noted he did accumulate a trunk full of tools.  His plan was to end up in Cleveland and find a job at a radio station.  He did go to Cleveland, but he didn’t find a job at a radio station.

Sparks did get a job as a Great Lakes freighter radio operator.  He stayed with the freighters on and off for the next nine years.  Mostly on, except the year he spent at TriState College in Angola, Indiana.  He had saved enough to spend a year at college and he got his money’s worth, completing two years courses in the year he spent there.

Out on the Great Lakes, Sparks’ freighter picked up wheat in Minnesota and generally took it to Chicago, through the great Soo Locks.  Fall and winter crossings of Lake Superior were the most treacherous.  Sparks walked ice covered decks and wrestled with ice covered hatch covers.  Once he saw waves breaking totally over an island at the height of a winter storm.

Sparks office was the radio shack, a “shack” added to the superstructure of a ship to house the radio equipment.  Sparks was the Radio Officer; he monitored ship to shore radio traffic to find a frequency he could use to send messages to shore, where they were relayed by phone to the shipping company.  Sparks was the main figure in keeping the Captain of the ship in touch with land.  If Sparks could not find a frequency or establish a connection, the Captain was on his own. 

A ship could not sail without a Radio Officer.  When Sparks was ashore he made it a point to be back aboard in good time.  Sparks knew eccentric Radio Officers on other ships.  Perhaps too many years of static, hissing and straining to hear the Morse code taps made them especial curmudgeons.  One Radio Officer he knew needed wheedled, cajoled and even bribed to go back on ship, which could not sail without him.  A moment of power.

Sparks saw one disastrous elevator explosion in his years on the Great Lakes.  The ship was docked in Chicago, and it was a day like any other when something set off the explosion.  The fire and sparks went up like the Fourth of July and went on for several days.  Sparks didn’t know if some stray spark ignited the wheat dust, but he hoped it wasn’t “some damn fool who disobeyed all regulations and lit a cigarette.”  Sparks ended the story there; he didn’t tell his audience how the affair ended.

Sparks was a loner, on the ships.  He spent his day in the radio shack, monitoring, keeping logs, sending messages.  He went down to the mess for coffee fairly often, and on a slow summer day might join seamen at the rail and watch some gull baiting.  Sailors put a chunk of bacon on a line and tossed it out for gulls to squabble over.  When one swallowed it, the bacon was reeled back up, to be tossed again.

Sparks was making his way down the deck one evening in a bad storm.  He was holding the guide cable when it snapped and coiled out of his hand.  The loose cable coiled about his ankle, simultaneously  snapping the bone and hurling him overboard.  He was rescued, of course, and put ashore as soon as practicable. 

Sparks made his way back to Cleveland and recovered at the home of friends.  The same who stood for him when he married two years later.  Sometimes Sparks used a spoon on our dining room table to tell us things in Morse code.

Sparks in 1942, when he married Mom

My dad’s army

I don’t know how it began, but around the supper table at 729 Moraine, three children piped up, "Dad, dad, tell us a story about Sarge".  When I had been a teenager for some time, and long after stories about Sarge weren’t requested, I realized my Dad was Sarge.  Curiously, I never asked him.

Sarge was an NCO in this man’s Army.  Dad joined the Army in September, 1924, days after turning 17 on August 28.  At that point he was bouncing between the Akron Children’s Home and Charity Latch School.  I can find no information on Charity Latch School, but it sounds like an ominous destination for a tall, smart and probably willful young man.  Dad was more than six feet, and certainly that tall as a teenager.  Like many young men, the Army was his alternative to having no future.

The 1930 Census had my dad in Ft. Benning, Georgia, the locus of his stories.  He loved the south and the heat; he hated the lingering effects of malaria.  Sadly,  I don't remember a lot from the stories we demanded almost every night.

Before the good stories, though, here are a couple of snippets.   They stole watermelons from farmer’s fields, punched their fist through to get the seedless core and left the trail of destruction behind them in the field.  I wonder how they saw so well in the dark.  Narrow escapes from buckshot were recounted.  Mom didn't like the watermelon stories.

In those days there was a soft drink bottler, or two, in every town. Cliquot Club and White Rock ginger ale.  Nichol Cola.  Barq’s root beer.  Nehi.  Orange Crush.  You could buy stock in any of them, pennies a share.  Coca Cola stock was the same crap shoot in 1924 as any other bottled drink company.  Apparently dad took a flyer on the stock market with his pay; his reminiscence was only the guys who bought Coca Cola got rich.

Dad was a communications officer.  A  telegraph and radio man.  His equipment was big, and went on maneuvers packed on mules.  He had a large brown discoloration on his shin that mom told me much later came from a mule kick.

Then there was the new recruit sent to find a left handed spanner.

But the story we hollered for over and over was the pie stretcher.

A new recruit was assigned to KP duty there in Company A.  When he worked his way through peeling all the potatoes Cook scratched his head for a bit for the next job and then realized he didn’t have enough pies for all the men for dinner.  “Son, I want you to go over to Company B and ask Cook to borrow the pie stretcher.”

Over at Company B, of course, the pie stretcher had just been lent to Company C, so the new fellow was sent over there to retrieve it.

The story of the adventures of this new recruit looking for the elusive pie stretcher always went on until mom said it was time to clear the table.

 early 1900s photo Pack mule of U.S. Army Signal Corps, used for carrying storage batteries for the field wireless telegraph  

D Bye

Moraine Avenue was a dead end street.  It had a sort of alley at the end that went back to a rental house and then continued on through to Gardendale.  Very convenient for circling the neighborhood.

Mr. and Mrs. Davis lived almost at the end of the street.  The house Jan went to to dry out and miss an afternoon of school after she fell in the puddle.  My parents and the Daviess were friends in the way parents had back then of bringing a chair and their coffee and sitting in some backyard while the kids played and caught fireflies until the street lights came on.

The Davis’ were warmly mysterious.  They were from “the South” and each spoke with warm, soft accents we didn’t hear at home.  They came with names we had never heard.  Rankin and EllDean.  There was a contest on an afternoon radio show; if you had the first name of the day and called the station first, you won something from the local grocery.  EllDean called the station to comment on the unfairness; she would never hear Rankin or EllDean among all the Johns, Larrys, Sues and Marys they called out.  The very next afternoon the name was EllDean!  Everyone on the street listened for her to call, and as the minutes ticked away and someone ran down to find everyone gone at the Davis house, the women of the street began calling in and explaining she wasn’t home but surely would call if she were.  I believe EllDean won their daily prize.

Rankin and EllDean had a Scotty dog.  He came as a pup about the time I was four or five, and joined the neighborhood kids daily as soon as he was big enough to go out and play.  His name:  D Bye.  D Bye ran with the bikes, watched ball games, went off with one bunch of adventurers or another.  Like the rest of us, his basic rule was to be home for bed when the streetlights came on.

D Bye never gave up on kids; when the interests of one set turned to dating or cars, he took up with the younger siblings.  His sturdy terrier legs carried him miles around the neighborhood.  But as he got up in age, his eyesight began failing.  Sadly, Rankin and EllDean confined him to home and got a raggedly little mutt to keep him company.  Ever the terrier escape artist, D Bye left home every day, his mutt in tow.  D Bye eventually became totally blind, but not before he taught his mutt everything.  For years you could still see a totally blind Scotty trotting down the road, his mutt against his shoulder, manning the wheel.

I asked Rankin, years later, what was D Bye’s real name.  He said they’d always just called him D Bye.

“But what does that mean,” I asked.

He enunciated carefully.  “The Boy.”

Charge, please

When I was little Mom made most of her purchases at O’Neil’s Department store, right there on Main Street and directly across from Polsky’s, the other major department store.  Shoes, socks, clothing, linens, furniture…if we needed it, Mom went to O’Neil’s.  The clerk would stack the selections on the counter, write up a bill, ring it on the cash register, and then ask “Will that be cash or charge?”  Sometimes Mom took cash from her billfold; sometimes she took out the little blue leatherette case that held her revolving charge card, a small piece of metal the size of a dog tag.  The card went on an imprinter, the top of the written bill went over the card, the handle was pushed down and mother’s name and address imprinted on the top of the bill.  Then the card and the bill went into a metal cylinder and were whisked away by a pneumatic tube, off to the credit office.  The clerk bagged the purchases and chatted with mom, the cylinder whooshed back in the pneumatic tube, credit approved.  Mom signed the bottom and home we went.

Fast forward twenty or so years; I was a young mother and the store was Higbee’s in Cleveland.  Beth was just two, Shelly was imminently due and we were in the dry goods department.  I couldn’t find what I wanted, so I took Beth’s hand and set off for the down escalator.  Just as I had both feet and a very pregnant belly on the escalator, ready to get her onto the step too, Beth yelled “My purse, my purse!”, wrenched her hand away and ran into the crowd.  Every mother’s nightmare.  I rode down the slow, rackety wooden steps, swung around and got straight on the slow, rackety wooden up escalator.    I found her in the middle of dry goods, looking around and realizing at last she was lost, but clutching the little purse she had set down.  We set off again to the lower floor, where I made my final selection and laid it on the counter.  Beth and the clerk chatted like old friends as my purchase was rung up.  Beth flipped my blouse up to my chest and told the clerk “There’s a baby in here.”  I pulled myself back together and took my purse off my shoulder as the clerk asked “Will that be cash or charge?”

“Charge, please,” said Beth, opening her purse and handing a red seat belt retractor up to the counter.  The clerk gravely took it, completed and bagged the purchase and handed Beth back her charge card.  “You take good care of that baby.”

Beth's charge card, the black issue

Yankee

When we moved to 729 Moraine in the summer of 1945, the houses were different, but all the families were much alike.  Young mothers and fathers starting their families.  At thirty six or seven, my dad may have been the oldest father on the street.  We did move into an established neighborhood, and Yankee, the tiny, dark eyed, dark haired Italian whirlwind of a housewife next door seemed to be the center of it.

Yankee was married to Andy Yankovich, and had two children.  Laureen, my age, and three year old little Andy.  Women gathered for afternoon coffee in her kitchen.  Children were always in her backyard, running among the chickens, but never, ever running in her vegetable garden.  A section of the wire fence between our yards was folded back, and we had the run of both yards.

Events seemed to emanate from Yankee’s back yard, or be centered there.  Summer afternoons mothers brought kitchen chairs and kids and we ate lunch at a long table—boards on sawhorses.   I’m sure we had a variety of lunches, but I do remember spaghetti!

She was first generation; her immigrant parents lived not far away and Yankee and the children were there often, working in her parents’ garden.  I was there once, and to a three or four year old, it seemed like fairy land.  In a standard forty foot wide city lot, her parents grew everything in neat beds.  The wonder was all the fruit trees growing up the perimeter walls.  In my mind’s eye, all the leaves and branches touched overhead and made a leafy ceiling that was filled with sunshine.  Yankee brought peaches, plums, figs, apricots, grapes home from her parent’s house. 

Every so often some of the neighborhood mothers would go to the chicken market at the end of Dan Street.  A little brown glazed brick building full of chickens.  They came home with the neighborhood order, and then the bustle in Yankee’s yard was extreme as the women set to work.  Only years later did I realized all those brown chickens hanging by their feet from the fence were being turned into chicken for dinner.

In the fall all the children were piled into the back of a pickup truck, and two or three mothers in the cab drove to the farms and orchards out on Quick Road.  On the way home we squeezed around bushes of vegetables destined for the canning jar, to supplement the tomatoes from our own gardens.

Laureen and I started kindergarten together, walking hand in hand, supervised by the big kids.  In a few days, of course, we didn’t need them anymore!  We walked home for lunch one September day from our morning kindergarten.  That afternoon Yankee took her two to her parents’ to work in the garden. At home my mom called us in when it began to rain.  I never saw Yankee again.  Over at her parents’, when it began to rain, Yankee reached up to unplug the radio and take it in from the garden when she went in.  Yankee was electrocuted.  I saw Laureen a few times over the next week, but she never went to school with me again, and then they moved away.

I heard that Mr. Yankovich remarried.  I always hoped Laureen got a good stepmother.

Mrs. Smith

When I was five years old, my first friend, Laureen Yankovitch moved away.  She left because her mother died and her father took the children to be cared for by relatives.  Mr. and Mrs. Smith bought the house. 

Mr. Smith died during my childhood, but mean old Mrs. Smith took many, many years to go away.   A a screaming, ranting woman charged the line of five year olds eating raspberries from the bushes that lined every back yard when she moved in.  The rake brandishing, screaming demon told us not to eat her berries; she would poison them.  At our next encroachment we learned the berries indeed had been poisoned and we could go home and die.  So, we quit eating her berries.

The house she bought had a tidy Italian vegetable garden but a back yard barren of grass as two small children of the house and all their neighborhood friends ran, slid, rolled and tore through.  Mrs. Smith announced that such a fine Italian gardener as had been in this house would have left fine flower beds; because there were none, all the neighbors had stolen the flowers.

The neighbors were dumfounded.  I was five, but I remember my father finding a large cutting gone from his August lily; it was planted in the yard next door. Mrs. Cole, our neighbor on the other side, had a dense rock garden that suddenly sported large holes and missing chunks of hens and chickens, pinks, and tiger lilies.  Plants up and down the street went missing, and between spring and fall, Mrs. Smith grew a lovely back yard of flowers. Everything disappeared in the middle of the night, and no one caught Mrs. Smith at it.

No one accosted Mrs. Smith, but no one befriended her, either.  On the whole, neighbors let it run its course and pass.  There is a limited amount of room in a forty foot lot and eventually she had to quit.  Then the guarding began.  She was especially bellicose toward my parents and the little widow who lived on the other side of her, Mrs. Reich.  Dad leaving for work in the morning would be confronted by the rake brandishing woman on the other side of the fence, warning him not to take her flowers, or come in her yard.

After dad was gone and Jan and Tom were married and living there, Tom’s encounters with Mrs. Smith were increasingly bizarre.  On his way to his truck in the morning Tom might find Mrs. Smith aiming the garden hose at him.  Mom quit weeding her side of the fence to avoid being hit by Mrs. Smith. 

And then one day Mrs. Smith was gone.  Jan inquired, learned she was hospitalized with a terminal illness.  After considering some, Jan sent her a plant with her best wishes.  Mrs. Smith called.  “Why did you send this plant?”

Jan said she was sorry to learn Mrs. Smith wasn’t able to be out tending the plants she loved and she’d sent one to have in the hospital.  “But you hate me,” Mrs. Smith said.  Jan said she hated no one.  At the end of the call Mrs. Smith said to Jan, “We could always have been friends.”  She lived a month or so from the time she came home, and she and Jan were friends for the rest of her life.  True story.

Tomboy childhood

Once I thought I was going to write a thesis on how their environments differentiated southern writers from northern writers.  Fortunately I never did, and saved myself from being found guilty of terminal pretension.

I grew up easily classified as a tomboy, and I do have some theories on what makes a tomboy.

1.       The neighborhood is populated almost exclusively by boys.  On looking around, the tomboy finds no one to play with but boys, excepting the sissy girl next door who won’t play with you anyway because you play with the boys.

2.      The tomboy realizes early on to be part of the gang you have to play fair, not rat anyone out and take a hit on occasion.

3.      The tomboy is rational about not being a boy.  I almost quit being a tomboy when I got glasses in the fifth grade.  We settled it as follows:  someone held my glasses and I wrassled my challenger to the ground.  Having settled there was no need to do that again and risk breaking my glasses, I remained a tomboy for another few years.

4.      The tomboy’s parents have few expectations past doing well in school, helping around the house and staying out of trouble in the neighborhood.  And coming straight home when you need the emergency room for stitches.  It may have helped my mother was a tomboy with only a brother and boy cousins.

5.      The tomboy knows when to exit the field.  There’s a change in the air.  The side lot fills up for a pick up game, but the only hearts really in the game belong to the little kids who have been coming up.  Their big brothers would rather be under a car hood, and to tell the truth, you are packing your pj’s for a sleep over with the girls you’ve meet in ninth grade.

It’s sad that children don’t know childhood until they look back on it.  Hopefully they can appreciate it.  The concept of childhood didn’t exist until the late 19^th century, and even then, as now, not for all the children in the country and the world.  Children have the same amount of time free today as in my childhood, but it seems filled with endless structured activity.  I won’t be around to see how that turns out.    Probably just fine; they’re all in it together.  And there will be a new generation of grandmothers fussing about the past.

Jan and neighborhood buddies enjoying an apple on a fall afternoon.

Devil with the blue dress on

Joanne 1944

Maybe.  Maybe not.    The dress certainly is a beautiful little blue dress.  I do wonder where the rocking chair went; it’s a beauty,too.  Google Earth took me right over there yesterday morning, to 4214 West 21^st, in Cleveland.  The closed in front porch where the rocking chair rocked and Grandpa Rolf’s W.E. Rolf, Watchmaker hung in the window, has been restored to an open porch.  It appears to have the same garage as housed his shop.

 The road is still paved with bricks, although the horse drawn milk wagon isn’t using them now.  Brick pavement seems such a time consuming undertaking………

Just back from a side venture into brick road paving, which may be making a comeback.   Jane Street Clayworks says a brick road lasts fifty years, as does concrete, but does not have concrete’s pothole problems.  Asphalt needs resurfaced every fifteen years.  And, only specific failing bricks need to be replaced.  Learn something every day!

Our neighbor has lived here all his life, up on the corner of the main street.  Actually, it is many years past “main,” having been replaced by a freeway bearing its old route number.  When Skip was a boy the road was brick.  The sub-road still is brick, we could see it when the asphalt was ground up and re-laid last year.  Skip says on really, really hot summer days, when it had been ninety plus several days in a row, he and his grandmother sat on the front porch and watched bricks shoot up out of the road.  Occasionally they shot a radiator.  Our town historian doesn’t really believe that, but I do.

Memorable words

Dad taught us a couple of songs.  I actually remember three, but one is too politically incorrect to pass my lips.  I’m sorry I still remember it.  He also knew all the words to

A capital ship for an ocean trip
was the "Walloping Window Blind."
No wind that blew dismayed her crew
or troubled the Captain’s mind.
The man at the wheel was made to feel
contempt for the wildest blo-o-ow,
Tho' it often appeared when the weather had cleared,
That he'd been in his bunk below.

I think our childhood favorite, the one all three of us still recite by memory, is

We had a cow down on our farm

Golly ain’t that queer.

She gave milk without alarm

Golly ain’t that queer.

One day she drank from a frozen stream,

Froze her tail like an iron beam.

And ever since she gives ice cream.

Golly ain’t that queer.

To the tune of Old MacDonald.

I was looking through Jan’s stash of Em and Laura’s art work the other day, and found Em’s attempt to get an Uncle Tom ditty down on paper before she forgot the words.  What a girl.  I should have written out what I heard from my elders.  So much less remembering, so much more writing.

Thinking about an eight year old reciting this over and over between the wood pile and the house, desparate to get to the note book and write it out, makes me smile.

Calling

One way of arranging play dates back in the olden days was calling.  Children used it probably up to the age of ten or eleven.  Not calling on the phone, we didn’t have access to that grown up device until we were well into our teens.  We really called.  As I’d reach for the back screen door mom would turn from the sink and ask “Where are you going?” 

“To call for Patty.”

“Come home when I call you for lunch.”

I’d walk the block and a half to Patty’s, or ride my bike when I had a bike, go up her drive and round to the back door.  Standing in front of the screen door I’d call out “Patty.”  Inside the house her mother or older sister would call out:  “Patty.  Someone’s calling for you.”   And Patty and I would amuse ourselves for the rest of the morning.  We always used back doors.  Unless the house had a side door, instead.  We went home when our mother called us.

 If we strayed from earshot some neighborhood friend we’d passed on the way probably would run and find us.  “Your mother is calling you.”  Telling someone their mother was calling was a sacred obligation.  Childhood was most enjoyable when your mother was happy and lunch was hot.  I can’t remember anything except Campbell’s soup and sandwiches.  Toasted cheese for tomato soup and bologna sandwiches for every other soup.

Mothers passed the calling home job down the line as children were old enough to lean out the back door and yell with high childish voices for their siblings.  For the person being called home, this one could be ignored a little longer, but no longer than when you heard your mother’s follow up call.

In our neighborhood there was one call that everyone knew and everyone passed it along.  It was my sister Janice calling for her big brothers, Walter and Melvin.  WATERMELLON!  WATERMELLON!

Water

Mellon

Ironing

I write these little bits about household chores when I was young and appreciate it was mom’s full time employment.  She went back to work when I was in the 7^th grade and her youngest was in school all day.  And, when dad’s shirts went permanent press.  There was a lot of work to running a house. 

Washing laundry for a family of six took up a day or two of each week.  Ironing took up another day or more, between bed making and meal preparation (elementary school walked home for lunch!).  When the clothes came in from the back yard or up from the basement, most had to be ironed. 

Mom spread a plastic tablecloth on the dining room table and the clothes were sprinkled.  No steam irons.  Mom didn't care for those sprinkler corks that went in pop bottles.  Perhaps because there was no pop at our house.  Sprinkled by hand, with water, folded and rolled into a cylinder to dampen properly.  They had to sit while the dampness went through and through, so often sprinkled items were stored in a plastic bag in the refrigerator overnight.

Mom ironed e v e r y t h i n g.  Sheets.  Pillowcases. Handkerchiefs.  Dad’s boxer shorts.  Shirts, blouses, dresses.  Everything.  She had a mangle, and I don’t even remember its arrival.  It was just there, in the corner of the kitchen.  The mangle chair was a bentwood ice cream chair, painted red.  My Grandma Rolf had a mangle, too.  Hers was in the basement.  It may not have been an Ironrite.  It was always closed; I never saw it in action, but I slept on ironed sheets at her house.

About the time I was ten or eleven, mom decided I needed to learn to use the ironer.  I didn’t particularly care for ironing on the ironer, but there were fewer choices for children back then.  I acquired a small proficiency.  Then mom decided I could earn some money doing the ironing for working women of the neighborhood whose husbands and sons wore shirts.  I did, and delivered the finished goods on hangers, as I refused to learn to fold a shirt.  I got the coat hangers from a cleaner behind the elementary school.  Rode up there on my bike. 

Mom collected all our earnings at the back door and banked them.  When I started college there was enough ironing, baby sitting and grass mowing money to buy books for a couple of semesters.

Mom never let me iron dad’s shirts, but she didn’t have the same standards for my brothers’ shirts.  I ironed them just as well as I ironed shirts for neighborhood boys, and for no pay, but neither brother was satisfied.  They were teen agers who felt they were not making just the right appearance.  Each complained to my mother about wrinkled yokes or some such.  Not a problem.  She taught each how to set up an ironing board, plug in the iron and iron a shirt.  When I left home, they still had to do their own ironing.

Ironing was still a chore when I went to college.  I had an iron among my possessions and there was an ironing board in the dorm laundry room.  Many of us ironed our boyfriend’s shirts.  Dumb.  Back home, the Ironrite mangle was used less and less and finally sent to the basement.  But, when Jan and I began weaving, it was worth its weight in iron.  Invaluable in the fabric fulling process.  What those medieval weavers might have given for automatic washers, dryers and ironers.  That ironer, born in the 1940’s, lives on.  When we retired, I passed it on to another weaver.