No tall people in our family

I visited my daughter Beth and the other two grandchildren not long ago. My daughter’s house is a revolving gallery of children’s art. It’s always on the walls.

Caroline, the mistress of cats, had another portrait on display. By the arthritic knees I’d guess this to be Kipper, the cat as old as Caroline, nine, going on ten. I understand cat years are exponential.

Francis current piece was on another wall. This is the young man who bolted the Paint like Picasso class at Cousin Camp two summers ago. Georgia O'Keeffe and he was gone. He said he wasn't interested; I figured being the only boy among girls was a contributing factor.

Francis' O'Keeffe, 2012

On display by Francis, an obvious self portrait. Eyes didn't interest him that day, he said. Before I left I made an estimate of his height, and he’s in the 5’6” range. At twelve years. And I was reminded of an incident when he was not a year old.

Francis was crawling, making his way somewhere. Passing my foot he helped himself to handfuls of blue jeans and pulled himself up.  His face was above my knee, and I said “Oh, my, you will be a tall one.”

His father looked over. Now, Bill is a respectable 5’10”, as was his father. “How tall?” asked Bill. “Over six feet,” I replied.

“There are no tall people in our family,” my son-in-law responded.

Some of us in the room had a good laugh before we reminded Bill he was responsible for only half the boy’s genes, and he’d never meet most of Beth’s forebears.  Both her grandfathers were over six feet. Both my brothers were taller than our dad. And in case Bill needed more convincing, my father had one six foot tall grandmother, not bad for a nineteenth century woman.

No tall people in Bill’s family, but more than a few in his son’s. I attribute France’s black hair to my dad, too, although his Welsh father and grandfather probably contributed.

A black Irishman

My dad was black Irish, undoubtedly through the Ulster ancestors on his father’s side. His mother’s ancestors were County Cork, the source of all the enviable red hair of his many cousins. Both sides left the old country in the first potato famine.

They tended to marry more Irish of their own persuasion, until his not strictly Methodist father married into his devoutly Catholic mother’s family.

I cannot imagine why George Marion Lytle married Mary Emma Hogue, almost two decades younger.  I believe she wanted to leave the chaos of a large family where she was the oldest sibling. George Marion took her back to his hometown in Pennsylvania.

Marriage did not suit Mamie; fatherhood did not suit George Marion. He deserted the family when Mamie was pregnant with the fifth child in seven years, and Mamie took them back home to Ohio, to her large family.

My dad’s childhood may have been little different than any other poor child of his generation. He was born in 1907, not a prosperous time for most, and certainly not the unskilled Mamie. Her domestic service wages bought little. My dad fed his little band of siblings from the pot of cold oatmeal his grandmother provided most mornings, and coffee soaked bread for supper. Coffee-sop, according to my aunt. He was ten years old.

Many things angered my father, probably as a child as well as thinking back as an adult.  The foremost was that his mother’s Catholic relatives and church did not care for the children. When the family did intervene, the children were sent to the Children’s Home and his sisters educated by Catholic charities. Aunt Laura was deemed secretarial material, Aunt Ruth convent material. Uncle Bill went to a state school for retarded boys. Dad was helpless against all. In fact, he and mother could not reclaim Uncle Bill from the State of Ohio until 1975.

Education was the ticket out, and dad started where many poor young men began. At the end of his sixteenth year he joined the Army. Stomach ulcers sidelined him; he was medically mustered out after six years, a non commissioned officer with a background in radio communication. He spent his mustering out pay on a year of college, where he packed in two years of physics and mathematics.

Money at an end, Dad took to the Great Lakes as a radio operator on freighter. A cable snapped in a storm, caught and broke his ankle, throwing him overboard in the process.  He was rescued, put off at the next port, made his way back to Cleveland, Ohio, where he met and married my mother and I wound up with the father I've written about from time to time.

A tall man, my dad came from the time when few young men carried extra pounds. The ulcer surgeries reduced his probably 160 pounds to 140, not much for a 6’2” frame. And so life went on, until my late teens, when dad developed a chronic cough eventually diagnosed as histoplasmosis, a deadly fungal infection contracted when he tore down the backyard chicken coop to build a patio. 

Two surgeries eventually removed all of one lung and part of the other. At the second surgery he refused to have the suspension sling that would allow his ribs to reform, again.  He likened it to rowing the Atlantic in a gale. With a set of ribs removed, his spine curved, his shoulders dropped. He left another twenty pounds behind at those surgeries.

Dad retired from Goodyear Aerospace at sixty five; he and mom vacationed and camped with children and grandchildren, but not for long. To add insult to injury, as it were, dad developed something called adult onset seizure syndrome. He called it falling asleep in his chair and waking up in the hospital. He hated it. His body was frail and his spirit gave up, too.  He did liken the process of dying, that subzero winter of 1978, to riding a train to Siberia, naked.

We used to remark when a parent became twice as old as a child. When mom was fifty I was twenty five. It came to me that dad and I surely had such an anniversary. Then I realized he died in a February, at seventy, and I wasn't thirty five until March.

This isn't a sad story. The parts my dad didn't like happened in a childhood he couldn't control.  He fulfilled his adult plan; he married and had a family. He remodeled our house, built a garage, took us on vacation, had a workshop for puttering about, enjoyed his grandchildren. He absorbed illness, until the end.  

He didn't talk about his childhood. He never admitted being Irish; I had to dig through the archives to learn it. That is too bad; he would have enjoyed knowing he was a black Irishman.

Dad and  brother Bill, 1910

On the patio that once housed a chicken coop, about 1956

First five grandchildren, early seventies

The hair brush in my bed

In the middle of the night, long, long ago, I woke up wild, thrashing, struggling with the covers. I was in terror, sobbing deeply.

Suddenly my father appeared, untangled me from the winter blankets, asked what frightened me so. It was formless, but he put a word to it—fright. What caused it.

The hairbrush in my bed, I sobbed. He kindly explained there was no hair brush; I didn't believe him. A hair brush was hurting my feet. He took all the covers off the bed to show no hair brush.

He sent me to the bathroom and to get a drink; when I came back the bed would be made up again. I left, but I knew the terrible hair brush must be there.

When I returned the bed was turned down. I was doubtful and reluctant. “I found the brush,” my father said. “It’s there on your dresser.”

The awful stinging in my foot was gone, and the culprit hairbrush was safe away on the dresser. I went back to bed.

I remember my young interactions with my father as his little acts of kindness. Locating the hairbrush, explaining quarters were big nickels, five of them, teaching me to tie my shoes, reading books to me, reading Heidi. We began the book one evening, and he got Heidi up the mountain and to her grandfather’s door.

The next day he was taken to the hospital. When he came home two thirds of his stomach was gone, in removal of ulcerating lesions. It was 1949 or 1950. He was still a young man, in his early forties, but he became old and withdrawn.

Dad was unapproachable when he came home from the hospital. I remember him at the end of the supper table, eating little dabs of baby food from his plate. I remember him coming home from work, exhausted, asleep after supper

Several months into his recovery he asked me to get Heidi, for us to finish. But I had pushed my second grade reading skill to the limit and finished it while he was in the hospital. “Oh, I finished it.”

More illness faced my father; each decade saw him less able, more frail.

We occasionally reached out to each other, but the connections weren't satisfactory. Mother was a buffer. And child rearing those decades was rather hands off. Perhaps it made children more independent. Our obligations were to go to school, do homework and come home in summer when the streetlights came on.

Do I wish differently? Not really. He was always there when I needed him, especially to take me to the emergency room for stitches.  My father passed away years ago, on President’s Day in the midst of another record cold winter, probably why I've thought of him today.

The hairbrush in my bed is one of my earliest memories of my father; him surrounded by his grandchildren among the last. This picture is the last one from dad’s camera.

Storm is over

I went to work yesterday afternoon, after Tom cleared the drive.

My road was rough, the county roads were rough.

The state highway through Peninsula was passable.

There was surprising little traffic on the steep hill down into the valley and back up to the town hall.

Snow in the courtyard yesterday:

I was going to work yesterday come hell or high snow.

The accounting close manual ran over a hundred pages this year.

Unlike previous years, there were no bold headings and check boxes.

I read and reread to see what applied to me.

The snow was relentless.

Several more inches overnight last night and it kept snowing today.

The snow on the wall was two bricks high yesterday 

and three bricks high today..

I soldiered on. I closed the year.

Tomorrow I'll sort out all the reports, collate the W-2's, get tax reports ready,

Enter the 2014 revenue and appropriations....

Too much information, I know.

The sun was out when I left at one this afternoon.

Hole is dug and ready to pull in behind me

I met my friend Patty Barker to walk to junior high school.  One morning I left my lunch on her kitchen table, and when I retrieved it that afternoon her mother said “I felt for you, but I couldn’t reach you.” I love that quip. I believe the disappearing hole came into my repertoire about the same time. My dad said of a fellow engineer, “D’Arcangelo (they called each other by last names, very grown-up) is so tied up in this project he might as well have dug a hole and pulled it in after himself.”

I’m geared up for my annual accounting close marathon.  It doesn’t have to be a marathon, but it’s my close, I prefer it done and for ten years I’ve come up for air when it’s over. Some planets lined up with the asteroids this year, and I am taking Wednesday off. Thursday, too, if it snows all day.  Then the other me says I must have the framework of 2014 established, in the most un-“ intuitive” piece of software any geek could put together, by six pm next Wednesday, and I know those plows better be running Thursday or I’ll commandeer one.

The children have been on winter break these last two weeks; the school bus doesn't stop at the end of the street each morning and a fair number of library books have gone back and forth. Emily has met up with her Science Fair project partner several times over the semester and the two of them are using the break to finalize the project, due in a month. She also has a Spanish class project that assigned three students to be fashion editors and do a layout for a Spanish magazine. A fun project, it seems.

One girl could not come to the first session for reasons not given. I gave Emily some suggestions to complete the project, and she thought it would be fine after the three got together for the second work session. But that one was sabotaged by the same girl, who hosted, who had to leave in an hour with her family. I picked up a rather grim lipped Emily who told me she had done her part; the other two could put it together.

She and her Science Fair partner have worked diligently this semester on measuring arsenic in rice. I picked her up last weekend and made the usual inquiries. They are nearly done with their presentation, except their pictures. “Do you need a camera?” “No, I have one.” “Is something wrong with it?” “It’s in my locker. At school. Full of pictures.”

But the best lunch bag moment was from Hamilton.  Perhaps I mentioned his little sister no longer watches out for him. It didn’t occur to Hamilton to staple together his data sets for his Science Fair project. Of course they were mixed up, and the project stalled there.  Last weekend I asked how it was coming and heard his dilemma.  I knew his project involved a number of people taking a test. I suggested he try matching handwriting or else proposing some string theory result. He looked at Emily. “Matching could work,” she said. He looked at Emily harder. She looked away.

Today at lunch I asked how it was going. Well, in fact he had been thinking of starting that after lunch. I asked at supper how it went. “Perfectly,” he said.

There was a solution. Imagine that.

Laura’s project for the break? Rubber band bracelets. Almost beyond my comprehension.

Rubber Band Bracelet