Goodbye, Mom

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Word of the Day:  Grief (grēf) “Intense emotional suffering caused by loss, disaster, misfortune, etc.; acute sorrow; deep sadness”

Today marks the first anniversary of my Mother’s death.  Some of you may have wondered why I haven’t written quite as often about my Mother in my blogs as I have about my Dad.  It think it is because the loss of her is still too fresh.  My Dad has been gone almost thirty-four years, and that wound has healed over, plus as I have mentioned in earlier blogs, I have a sense of closeness with him from the Other Side.  When we lose a loved one, often we insulate ourselves from the pain by sealing off the emotions until the inner wound begins to close.  The tears and the anguish lie too close to the surface.  I find it is the little things that often trigger the sense of loss in us, not the big tearful moments.  I have to remember to tell her that the first hummingbird showed up today, or the boys are playing hockey now — all of those little day-to-day things that we can no longer share with a loved one who has left us.

My Mother lived a good life.  She was ninety-one and was ready to go.  In honor of her memory, I would like to share with you some excerpts from the remarks I made at her memorial service a few weeks after her death.  This is a bit longer than my usual blog, but bear with me!

Some of you knew Evelyn for many years; some of you knew her for only a few years; and a few of us have known her for our entire lives. When we were painfully cleaning out her apartment downstairs a couple of weeks ago, one of the things we found was a Journal addressed to Suzanne and me. When I went to read it, I realized she was not a very prolific journal writer–only five entries, but each one packed with meaning!

Born in 1923, Mother was definitely a child of the 20’s and 30’s! She grew up during the great Depression. One of her journal entries said “the kids today think life is tough. They should have lived in the 30’s and 40’s. In some ways, I’m glad I did. It has given my generation a deeper appreciation of many, many things in life.”

When she was only 15, she met the love of her life, Harvey Waldman. He was 20 at the time. I don’t think my Grandmother was too pleased at that age difference! After they had dated a couple of years, the tragedy of Pearl Harbor came along followed by the entry of the United States into World War II. Our Dad enlisted in late 41, and our parents married in early 42 when she was only 18. Not too long after that he completed basic training and officer’s training school and was shipped out to the North African and Italian campaigns.   As she put it in her journal, “your Dad spent most of the war in North Africa, either chasing Rommel or being chased by him!”

At long last the War came to an end, and he returned home to a wife he hadn’t seen in well over two years and to a daughter he had never met. That would be me! I guess things were a little rocky for a while there. Dad had been a Captain, and as Mother succinctly put it, “Harve’s world had changed. He was used to telling everyone else what to do and that changed us. I had also grown and was not the same girl he left behind!” I guess the sparks flew for a while there, but fortunately for us, they moved on with their life.

Mother hated war, she said, “Your Dad was lucky, he never suffered any physical disability, but everyone who goes to war suffers all of their lives in other ways. Harve never talked about the war, the killing, and what it did to everyone. Can’t we ever learn to love and stop the hate?”

We had a great childhood growing up in Dallas in the ’50’s and 60’s. Mother was not your typical Ozzie and Harriet sort of Mom. She worked outside of the home at a time when very few woman did so. She was never what you would call the domestic type! One of our standing jokes was that when it was time to take treats to school for birthdays or holidays, we always took Oreo cookies, very seldom home baked cupcakes. A few year ago, during a rehab stay at LifeCare, the occupational therapist wanted her to bake muffins. We laughed and told her that Mother had probably never baked muffins in her life, why start now!

In late 1981 she lost her beloved Harvey and her father within a month of one another. As you would expect, she went through a period of depression. To help get out of that dark period, she started to travel, and definitely got bit by the travel bug. Some of you here traveled with her on several trips! She made her first trip to China in the early ’80’s and was among the first foreign visitors allowed into China when that country began to open up to the outside world. She fell in love with China. She once told me that she must have been Chinese in a previous life!

On one of her trips to China, she went out to the Gobi Desert to the end of the Great Wall of China. The tour guide gave the usual admonitions, “Don’t touch anything. Don’t pick up anything.” When she got home, she came to visit us in Greeley and proudly presented a handful of small stones from the Gobi Desert to Chris and Greg! Oh Mother, what have you done! On another trip she visited the excavation site of the famous Terra Cotta warriors at Xian. Again the admonition, “No pictures!” Needless to say, she managed to surreptitiously take a number of pictures, which she proudly shared with us!!

For those of us old enough to remember the movie of the same name, Mother was sort of the Auntie Mame of our family! She once did a cruise of the Greek Islands with a close friend. One night while anchored off one of the Greek islands, huge waves rocked the boat, dumping both Mother and Helen out of their beds onto the floor. Later she nonchalantly said, “Oh, it was just an earthquake!”

When she went to Africa to see the silver-back gorillas, the famed gorillas in the mist, she made it just fine to Nairobi, but alas her luggage went on some other excursion of its own! A lot of people would have been upset about heading off on a trek into the wilds without their luggage, but it didn’t faze her! She went shopping in Nairobi, bought a couple pairs of khaki shorts and several tee shirts and off she went. She was so moved by the poverty she saw that she gave away those new garments at the end of the trek, plus several other articles of clothing (when her luggage finally caught up with her) to the porters who accompanied her on the trek!

In 2000, Mother and I did a magical trip to Peru as part of a group with Wayne Dyer (if any of you have read any of his books). We did the usual sites, Lima, Cusco, the Urubamba Valley, and the awesome ruins at Manchu Picchu! When the rest of the group left to head for home, we stayed an extra week and went on to the southern parts of Peru. We especially wanted to see the famous Nazca lines. We went up in a four-seater Cessna to see the amazing lines and carved images. As we were getting into the plane, we looked at each other and said, well, let’s hope they do good maintenance around here! As we soared over the Nazca plain, the pilot did 360’s on the wing tip around the various carvings and lines below so we could get a good view.   Didn’t scare her in the least! She was busy looking below and snapping pictures!

As she struggled with more and more health issues, the day came all too soon when she had to sell her condo and give up her brand new, bright red Toyota Rav4! That was when she moved here and made many new friends as well as reconnecting with some old friends who had also moved to Lakeview.

I’d like to share one more entry from her journal from March of 2007, “This morning I had cherry pie for breakfast. Good! I haven’t had cherry pie since Harve died. It was his favorite pie. Today I’m going to the Red Hat Luncheon. I wonder if I should wear my Tibetan hat? Better not. It’s raining.” And then she went back to the pie thoughts, “I never eat pie for breakfast. At 83 I can eat pie whenever I care to!” Her last entry in 2013 said, “Harve, I still miss you. I guess I always will.”

In conclusion, I hope she and our Dad are sitting up there, smiling and waving at all of you and munching on a huge slice of cherry pie, with some crumbs on their lips and a dribble of cherry filling on their chins!

Mother, we all love you so much! Bon Voyage!

©2015, Home Again, A Spiritual Journey

 

 

Meet the Dogs!

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“The Irish Setter has been termed by artists to be the most beautiful of all dogs. With its flowing, silky red coat, long ears, soft expression, and regal bearing, this dog turns heads wherever it goes.”            The Irish Setter Club of America

I know exactly when the Irish Setter breed captured my heart, never to let it go. It was in about the third or fourth grade when I first read Big Red, by Jim Kjelgaard. At that point in my life I don’t know that I had ever actually seen a live Irish Setter, only the wonderful illustrations in this book, but that was enough, I was hooked on the breed! The descriptions of Danny and his beautiful and valiant companion red dog convinced me that this was the best of all dog breeds. When I decided to write about my experiences with this loving and carefree breed, one of the first things I did was to go back and reread the Kjelgaard books. Not too surprisingly, I still found the story and the descriptions riveting, even though my reading tastes have certainly matured and expanded since that day long ago when I first experienced these books.

I was fortunate to be born into a dog-loving family, but the breed of choice around our house was the Dachshund.  While I was growing up we had two standard sized male Dachshunds, named Freddy 1 and Freddy 2.  When Freddy 1 died, we got Freddy 2;  I told you my family wasn’t very creative on pet names; remember Spot the horse?  Now I don’t know how much you know about Dachshunds, but they are hounds, originally bred in Germany to hunt badgers, which are not the friendliest of animals.  Dachshunds are feisty and can be quite stubborn and difficult to train.  Ours were no exception.  My Dad, also of German ancestry, was  pretty feisty and stubborn as well, which often led to a conflict of wills between the man and the dog.

Now some people don’t give dogs much credit for intelligence and reasoning, but I’m not so sure about that. Freddy 1 appeared to be quite capable of holding a grudge and acting upon it.   Two occasions come to mind. The man and the dog had a conflict over something or other, and the dog was scolded and received a smack on the butt.  Later that day Freddy jumped up on my parent’s bed, carefully pulled the spread back, and peed on my Dad’s pillow.  I don’t know about you, but that certainly seems like a deliberate act to me.  I thought pulling the spread back was especially thoughtful!  On another similar occasion, Freddy showed his disdain for my Dad by peeing on some freshly laundered shirts just back from the cleaners which were hanging on a doorknob.  Needless to say,  that did not go over so well!

After Bill and I married, our first dog was a sweet little black and tan miniature Dachshund named Gretchen.    It is interesting how when we first leave home and marry, we mimic our parents’ lifestyle in so many ways.  Perhaps it takes a while to establish our own married identities and develop our own traditions and lifestyle.  I suspect this may be why some couples have in-law issues as both generations strive to adapt and change.  Anyway, Gretchen was a sweet and loving little member of the family.  In those days there was not the widespread, and appropriate, emphasis on spay and neuter programs that there is today.  As a result, Gretchen was not spayed until well into her adult years.

Once or twice a year, she would come into “season,” as it is euphemistically referred to.  What we didn’t know was that dogs can have false pregnancies.  She looked pregnant with a swollen abdomen and little teats ready to nurse.  We had a moment of panic.  Did a hopeful male dog somehow get to her?  No, we were way too careful, and she was never unattended by one of us.  After several of these episodes, our vet suggested getting her spayed, which we gratefully did!  Alas, she never completely lost her pregnancy weight gain, a problem shared with many of the human species I fear!  Gretchen definitely had a strong maternal instinct.  When Chris was born, she would sleep under his bassinet.  Remember those lovely bassinets with long eyelet cotton skirts all around?  At the slightest whimper from the new arrival, she would come to alert us and would not take no for an answer!  There was no waiting to see if the baby went back to sleep by himself.  We had to go check him out so his four-legged nursemaid would give us some peace.

Despite her small stature, she had aspirations of being a watchdog.  On one occasion she alerted us to a would-be night-time intruder.  At that time we were living in a small duplex in Fort Worth close to the TCU campus.  Bill was in graduate school, and I was teaching high school English.  Gretchen, who always slept in bed with us, awakened us in the middle of the night with a low, guttural growl.  Sure enough, there was a rattling at the doorknob on the back door.  A thief or worse was trying to break in!  Bill hopped up and quickly popped two shells into his 12 gauge shotgun.  There is a very distinctive sound to a bolt-action shotgun being cocked.  Apparently our intruder also recognized that sound as he made a rapid retreat over  the back fence and disappeared down the alley.  Gretchen earned herself several treats for her courageous actions!

One of her other watchdog episodes almost had a disastrous ending for the three of us.  We were camping at a Texas lake, sleeping on the ground in our sleeping bags with Gretchen between us.  In those days, camping was about the only recreational activity that we could afford.  Again Gretchen awakened us in the middle of the night with her low growling.  Only this time there was no thief, no  criminal waiting to attack us; there was a family of skunks parading by a scant two feet from our heads!  Just as she was about to erupt into a barking frenzy, I quickly grabbed the truant night watchman and stuffed her into the sleeping bag.  Bill and I lay motionless, waiting for our striped visitors to move on while my sleeping bag thumped around vigorously with the guard dog wanting to get out and chase our smelly guests away.

Many years and five Irish Setters later, we still fondly look back on our first little dog.  Gretchen, you were a big dog at heart and had the spirit of an Irish Setter!

©2015, the Irish Girls

 

Death Comes to Willow Brook Road

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Everything was not always completely happy on Willow Brook Road so I don’t want to give you a false Pollyanna vision.  We lost several pets to neighbors’ dogs and to vehicular accidents.  Freddy 1 sadly met his demise on the road, probably a victim of one of the many gravel trucks shuttling up and down our road on a daily basis.  Despite our best efforts to keep him in the fenced in yard, he loved to burrow under the fence and go exploring around the neighborhood.  Dachshunds were bred to burrow, so he was a natural at it!

Most of our pets were outside pets except for the dogs who lived inside with us.  On more than one occasion Suzanne and I did bring the horses into the house, to our Mother’s dismay.  No doubt Bess and Princess thought this was a strange sort of barn, but they willingly followed us up the stairs and into the house.  Cats were to be strictly outside pets.  At one point we acquired two six-month old kittens.  With our usual skill at naming pets, they were christened Cupcake and Muffin.  They were quite affectionate and generally slept in the playhouse or the garage.

Our neighbors on one side were a spinster by the name of Sereatha Peacock, her widowed sister, and their very elderly mother whom everyone called Momma Peacock. Sereatha sticks in my memory for two main reasons.  I still have a wonderful pound cake recipe called “Sereatha’s Pound cake” which I still bake from time to time.  She also owned a beauty salon in the more hoity-toity Highland Park area where all the little blue-haired ladies got their hair done.  On one occasion my Mother took me to her salon for a perm.  I came out looking like the lead character in Little Orphan Annie.  I don’t know who was more horrified, my Mother or me!  Needless to say, we didn’t become on-going patrons.  That is why you never go to friends or neighbors for any type of hair services I’ve learned.  It is easier to ditch a stranger if you don’t like the results.

These three ladies had a Pit Bull who resided in a small dog enclosure behind their house.  He was very aggressive, and all the neighborhood kids feared  his charges at the sturdy chain link enclosure accompanied by fierce barking and growling.  As I look back, I suspect the poor dog was probably an unfortunate victim of poor training and neglect, but he was one of the few dogs I have ever genuinely been afraid of.  On one awful day he got out of his pen and headed to our backyard where in front of our horrified eyes, he found the two unsuspecting kittens and quickly killed both before retreating back to his own yard.  My father came running out of the house to the hysterical screaming of his two little girls.  Always a person of quick action, he grabbed a heavy pipe wrench and took off in hot pursuit of the killer.  The Pit Bull had wisely retreated back into the doghouse in his pen.  Daddy was fully prepared to become the Old Testament dispenser of justice, “an eye for an eye.”  The only thing that saved the dog was old Momma Peacock, wearing her usual sunbonnet and apron, standing in front of the pen and begging our Dad not to kill the murderer.  Daddy finally relented with stern admonitions about what would happen if the dog ever put so much as a paw in our yard again.  Soon thereafter they got rid of the Pit Bull to everyone’s great relief.

Our neighbors on the other side were a very ecumenical couple named the Cottons.  Alvin was a fallen-away Catholic, and Sylvia was Jewish.  She had the bleached blond hair of the 50’s and was, shall we say, pleasingly plump?  I did learn quite a few Yiddish phrases from Sylvia, most of which were probably best not repeated in mixed company.  I learned about Hanukkah, which always occurs close  to our Christmas.  How wonderful to have seven days of celebrating with gifts.  Being somewhat mercenary, I thought my family should celebrate both holidays–more presents!

The Cottons had an only child, a son between us in age.  He was somewhat spoiled, or so we thought.  For a very brief time he also had a horse, but boys just don’t seem to have the natural affinity toward horses that little girls do.  I think we were sort of little stinkers as one of our great delights was climbing up on the roof of the stable with a good stash of horse “missiles.”   We would lie flat on the roof until our unsuspecting target happened to come into range, and then we would pelt him with our little horsey bombs, frequently bringing him to tears.  His threats of “I’m going to tell my Mother” just produced another volley at our poor target!  With two horses, we never ran out of an ample supply of ammunition!

The Cottons also had a series of miniature white poodles with little jeweled collars and painted nails. How disgusting, I thought!  One of the fiendish little poodles made an excursion into our yard on one horrific day, killing a number of our tame Mallard ducks.  I still remember the sight of my Mother, with tears streaming down her face, picking up those poor, broken  bodies.  The same beastly poodle also killed  our replacement kitten, a long-haired little white cat creatively named Fluffy.  Our next cat was a tailless Manx cat with a bit of a temper and very effective claws.  Since he weighed about the same as the poodle, we had no more problems with incursions from the effeminate little beast next door!

To this day, pit bulls and poodles are my least favorite breeds of dog, although I know you shouldn’t judge an entire breed by the actions of a few miscreants!

 

 

The Judas Goat

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Word of the Day:  Peccadillo ( )   “A small relatively unimportant offense or sin.  Synonyms:  misdemeanor, petty offense, indiscretion, lapse, misdeed.”

Have you ever had a pet goat?  We had Mabel the goat.  Like many of the animals that crossed my path in childhood, I really don’t know exactly when or where my parents acquired Mabel.  My Dad seemed to have a knack for finding animals to add to our menagerie.  Anyway, Mabel came to us as a kid and grew rapidly into a full-sized, adult goat.  She was quite the little buddy with the horses and hung out with them in the pasture.  Goats bond pretty quickly with their human companions as well as with other animals and are quite affectionate and often equally mischievous.  Mabel knew her name, and when you went to the corral and called “Mabel, Mabel,” she eagerly responded with a resounding  “Baaaa, Baaaaaa!”  Mabel loved treats, and being a highly successful escape artist, she often found delightful and tasty morsels in the neighbors’ yards.

Her eating the spring daffodils and the iris was a nuisance, but sometimes her escapades exceeded that.  We had one neighbor down the street who had a greenhouse where he raised prize orchids.  I bet you can see this one coming.  On one of her many sojourns around the neighborhood, she found the greenhouse, filled with a delightful salad bar.  Being a hungry and not very discriminating goat, she nibbled every plant down to the nub and then wisely headed for home with the neighbor in hot pursuit brandishing a shovel and uttering a variety of deprecations that my young ears should probably not have heard!  My father managed to save Mabel from any bodily injury, but relationships with that neighbor were pretty strained from then on.  Apparently there was an up-coming flower show, and his entire stock of entries was now residing in Mabel’s very hardy digestive tract.  It is only now as I have, often unsuccessfully, tried to coax my grocery store orchids to rebloom that I can truly appreciate the depths of his wrath.

As she matured, Mabel grew a very nice set of horns which she took great delight in using on every possible target she could find.  Once again, the smallest target, my little sister, was the most desirable one to become the butt of her attention, so to speak.  Walking across the corral in an inattentive fashion was a sure invitation to find yourself lying flat in the mud.  Despite our affection for her, she was given to our landlady Bess’ brother,  who owned a large ranch close to Grapevine.  That land is now probably included in the site of the Dallas Fort Worth Airport. I do hope he sold it for a nice profit.  I don’t recall the rancher’s name; it might have been Robert.

Robert kept about twenty or thirty horses and ran cattle on his land.  On many a wonderful Saturday morning Bess would take me along with her to the ranch to ride horses with her and to check the fences.  It was on one of those rides that I first rode a pacer.  Now you may be wondering what a pacer is?  Most four-legged animals trot or run with opposite legs moving forward together–right front leg and left rear leg, left front leg and right rear leg, and so on. We do essentially the same thing when we walk.  Our left leg and right arm move together and then our right leg and left arm.  A pacer moves both legs on the same side together at the same time, resulting in a very smooth, sort of shimmying type of gait.  If you’ve ever seen harness races, the announcers will talk about the trotters and the pacers.  I don’t know what the incidence of pacers is among horses, but it is apparently an inbred genetic trait.  Incidentally, trotters and pacers do not race against one another in harness racing. They have separate races for each.

So sweet little Mabel went to the ranch where she became the darling of the family and learned to be a Judas goat.  The Judas goat leads unsuspecting cattle or sheep into the pens or chutes, often sadly heading to the stockyards, and then jumps aside at the last minute.  As a sign of her importance, Mabel wore a large  bell around her neck to help encourage the cattle to follow her.  On one occasion she was leading the cattle up pto the chutes to run them through the cattle dip, a nasty smelling black liquid which I assume killed off various bugs or parasites.  Robert was standing looking down at the cattle running through the dip when apparently Mabel grew concerned that. he might also be infested with some kind of bugs.  She did the only thing a responsible, caring goat could do; she gave him a firm butt in the rear end, sending him flying into the cattle dip!

Luckily for Mabel, Robert had a good sense of humor, or she too might have ended up on the dinner table like poor old Horace the rooster.  She lived out her years on the ranch, and hopefully didn’t get into too much more trouble.  At least we never heard about any additional peccadillos!

2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Next week it is time to “Meet the Dogs.”  Hope you can join me!

The Menagerie on Willow Brook Road

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Word of the Day:  Menagerie (me naj’ er e) “A collection of wild or strange animals kept in cages or enclosures for exhibition.”

I was fortunate to grow up with quite an array of animal friends.  We had the usual dogs and cats, of course, but we also had the infamous chicken herd that I told you about in an earlier blog, ducks, a goose, the horses, and an ornery goat.  Virtually all the animals were named, which is probably not the wisest approach if you ever have plans of eating them or their offspring.  My sister recently reminded me of the time my Dad wanted to get a calf with the idea of raising it and then butchering it for the freezer.  I can only recall my Mother ever using the F-bomb twice in all the years I knew her.  This was one of the two occasions.  My Mother firmly replied, “F-bomb no!  We’ll name it and make it a pet, and no one will eat it!”  Incidentally, the other occasion when she dropped an F-bomb on my sister’s and my shocked young ears, was going over a very scary jeep trail in Colorado with a rather precipitous drop off on the passenger side of the car.

If I might digress for a moment on the famous F-bomb word, that amazing, multi-functional word that can send even experienced news media personnel into an embarrassed tizzy, I learned a rather amazing bit of trivia about its origins many years ago.  In a graduate school class in Old English, the forerunner of our modern English, I had to read the epic poem Beowulf in the original Old English.  You may remember the tales of the Viking hero, Beowulf, and his encounters with the evil Grendel and his even more evil mother?  If not, no great loss!  With the passage of time I have forgotten much of the subtle linguistic nuances of the poem, but I never forgot that the famous F-bomb word is found in that poem, the earliest known citation of the word, and the meaning was much the same.  It is quite a versatile word; it can be a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, depending upon the occasion.  So, if like me, you slip up and use the “word” from time to time, you can rest assured that you are following a long, if not honorable, tradition!

Back to the menagerie.  As I noted, we had ducks, chickens, a goose named Suzy,  and several little bantam chickens, little miniature versions of the big chickens.  They all laid eggs, so we had normal white eggs, greenish duck eggs, huge goose eggs, and little tiny bantam eggs.  At Easter, we had all sizes of eggs to dye and hide.  Easter was the only time of the year that we actually bought a couple dozen eggs at the grocery store.  Really fresh eggs are virtually impossible to peel when hard-boiled, so we needed some of the not so fresh ones from the store. I learned that scrambled goose egg is OK, but a bit more pungent than the usual chicken eggs.  The little bantam eggs made cute little fried eggs which appealed to us as youngsters, somewhat mini sized for mini appetites.  We often found double-yolked eggs, something one rarely finds in today’s store-bought eggs.

We even had one white hen by the name of Lucy who always came up on the back porch to announce loudly that she had presented us with her daily egg.  She never laid her egg in the hen boxes with the rest of the chickens.  She preferred the bushes by the back door.  The matriarch of the ducks was a female Mallard by the name of Mommy.  She and several generations of her offspring had the run of the yard.  She would come when called and would fly into your outstretched arms for some ducky stroking of her sleek feathers. Suzy, our domestic goose, was the undisputed queen of the barnyard.  The chickens and I all had a very healthy respect for a bite from that large beak!

The little bantam flock was ruled over by a feisty rooster by the name of Horace.  I have no idea where we ever came up with that name!  As one of the smallest members of our little menagerie, Horace suffered from the little man attitude, the Napoleon complex, and attacked anyone he could, flying at his unwitting victims with spurs out.  Unfortunately, his favorite target was my little sister, probably because she screamed and ran in such a rewarding fashion whereas the rest of us were more much likely to swat him with a broom or a rake.  After a number of such episodes, the decision came down from on high; Horace had to go.  The penalty for Horace was to become Sunday dinner.  Horace was duly roasted and served.  My Mother, my Dad, and I all sort of gulped, looked at one another,  and quickly lost our appetites.  Suzanne, on the other hand, waved a little drumstick in the air and uttered what was to become a classic family quote, “Horace sure am good!”  It reminds me of the line from the Bard, “Alas, poor ‘Horace,’ I knew him well.”

I have a feeling that the Horace episode may have contributed to my Mother’s reluctance even to consider raising a calf!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Do you know what a Judas goat is?  Join me next week for the answer!

Clowns, Cancer, and Clairvoyance

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Word of the Day:  Psychic (si’-kik) “a person who is sensitive to influences or forces of a nonphysical or supernatural nature.”

It is still hard for me to grasp, but my father has been dead almost 34 years now. He was a WW II vet, a dreamer, and like so many of his generation, the Greatest Generation, a cigarette smoker. Back in those days, the Army actually provided each GI with a carton a week. It was those cigarettes that ultimately resulted in his early death at age 63.

About six months before we learned about my Dad’s lung cancer and were still living in a state of unaware happiness, I had a reading done by a psychic who was a friend of a friend. This guy, I don’t even recall his name today, accepted no money for his readings. He said he didn’t feel it was right to take money for a gift that he had been given. He used a deck of cards in his readings, not tarot cards or anything esoteric like that, just plain old playing cards. He said the cards just helped him to focus. He did suggest that I take notes on what he said as he often didn’t recall the details after the reading. I still have those notes. I’m not usually a “keeper,” but I have held on to those pages of notes.

The information he passed on to me from whatever source made no coherent sense, but nonetheless, I carefully wrote down all he revealed to me. He told me that he saw a serious illness in someone close to me. I have always heard that responsible psychics are very, very careful about how they convey bad news or death, and he was certainly circumspect in what he said. He told me he saw a forest with no trees, a pond with ducks swimming, and kept seeing the number 7 over and over again. Then to add another seemingly disjointed component, he said he saw circus scenes and a sad clown holding a bunch of balloons. Now, that is certainly an unrelated and seemingly meaningless bunch of items! I thought, “How strange,” and tucked my notes away in my desk. There didn’t seem to be anything in his comments that pertained to me.   I never talked to the psychic again and certainly never gave him any feedback on his rather unusual litany of items.

That reading took place in the fall of 1979. In the spring of 1980 I received a distraught call from my parents. During a routine annual physical, a chest x-ray revealed a highly suspicious black spot on one of my Dad’s lungs. Surgery was scheduled for a week or so later. I flew home to Dallas to be with my Mother for the upcoming surgery. The day of my Dad’s surgery has to be one of the darkest days of my life! As a an ICU nurse, a Critical Care Instructor, and at that time a Director of Nursing at a large hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, I knew so well the poor prognosis for lung cancer. When the surgeon walked out to the waiting room where my Mother and I sat anxiously waiting, I knew from his face what he was going to say before he even began to address us.

My Dad was what is often referred to as an open and shut case. The cancer in the lung was extensive and had already metastasized to the surrounding lymph nodes, bone, and pericardium. There was no point in removing the lung at this point.   It was no longer an if; life was now a when. We stayed at the hospital long enough to see my Dad safely ensconced into ICU, then headed back to my parents’ house. We were both in shock and grief. A few days later we attended a support group meeting for newly diagnosed cancer patients and their families. This meeting was held on the Oncology Unit, where my Dad was transferred after a few days in ICU.

Now, you are probably wondering, so what does this have to do with the psychic’s visions? The hospital was Medical City Dallas, opened in 1974. The hospital’s location is 7777 Forest Lane– a forest without trees. In those days, before the extensive development of today surrounding the area, there was a pond alongside the drive up to the hospital, with ducks swimming in it, and then there were all of the 7’s.  The address of the hospital was 7777, the Oncology Unit was on the 7th floor of the hospital, and the cancer had spread to the 7th rib. Coincidence? I don’t know. When we went to that support group session in one of the conference rooms on the Oncology Unit, it was decorated with large framed prints of circus scenes, one of which was a sad-faced clown holding, you guessed it, a bunch of balloons!

That night, back at the house, I shared these strange revelations with my Mother. Neither of us knew what to make of this information, and I still don’t. Several years ago I had occasion to go back to Medical City Dallas on business. The hospital looked much the same as I remembered it, but the surrounding area had greatly increased development and congestion. It gave me an eerie and uncomfortable feeling to be back at the scene of so much pain and sorrow.   My Dad lived another 18 months after that diagnosis and surgery, which is a long survival time for lung cancer. To this day I don’t know what to make of this information. Are some people able to tap into different or higher levels of knowledge than the rest of us? Are these guaranteed outcomes or just possibilities?

©2015, Home Again, A spiritual Journey

Next week let me introduce you to some of our menagerie on Willow Brook Road.  See you then!

 

 

 

 

My Modelling Career Commences

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Word of the Day:  Posture (päs’ chər)  “The position or carriage of the body in standing or sitting, often with reference to the alignment of the back shoulders, and head.”

A professional photographer and his wife lived across the street from us on Willow Brook Road.  Their property was much swankier than ours with a fancy house, a studio, beautiful grounds, and a large in-ground swimming pool.  Apparently he had the contract for the Sears Catalogues.  Remember those old Sears Catalogues that came out a couple times a year?  Sears would ship him stacks and stacks of clothing for him to photograph, using live models.  Enter Lynn and Suzanne!  I really don’t know how it all came about, but a couple times a year we were enlisted to try on an assortment of beautiful new clothes and pose before the cameras.

I assume that some payment was involved in these camera forays, but I don’t think we ever saw any of it.  Someday, in the next life, I’ll have to ask my parents about that!  Of course, if it helped to meet expenses, I think we would have been fine with it, especially if it meant less pheasant for dinner.  The photographer, I think his name was Frank Randt, was a hard task master.  We learned to stand exactly right, with feet and hands in the precise positions he required, while still trying to look natural and unposed.  That was somewhat of an oxymoron, I think.

We both enjoyed the glamour shots, the new shorts and tops outfits, the Easter dresses, and the winter coats, but there was a downside to this modelling business.  We also had to do the underwear fashions. I hated that! At that point, I was as straight as a board as the saying goes.  Little slips, petticoats, undershirts, and even panties.  Who ever wore undershirts anyway?  What could be more mortifying for a cowgirl like me than to be caught in front of a camera in my underwear for all the world to see?  Our career phased out after a couple of years.  I suspect he either lost the Sears contract or we outgrew his criteria for being the right sizes.

There was, however, one amazing side benefit to our short-lived modeling careers. We were invited to use that glorious swimming pool as often as we wanted.  It was surrounded by a chain link fence and totally shielded from view by a number of large trees.  I don’t recall the size of the pool, but it was large enough to have a diving board in the deep end.  Sometimes my Mother, sister, and I went together.  Other times I was allowed to go by myself. At moments like that, I could revert to my Esther Williams persona or, my new favorite, Jane.  Now you are probably saying to yourself, “Who is Jane?”  She, of course, was Tarzan’s consort.  There was a weekly Saturday morning television show about Tarzan, Jane, and the chimpanzee.  They all three went swimming in deep rivers and swinging through the trees on long vines that miraculously never broke and always took them to the  exact right landing spot!  I wonder if Tarzan and Jane ever got married, or if she was a fallen woman?

As I recall those lazy days of swimming, I am somewhat surprised that I was routinely allowed to go unsupervised to a pool like this, but I loved it.  For those of us growing up in the fifties, our days were generally free and unstructured.  Often I left in the morning and didn’t return until hunger or fatigue brought me home again.  I don’t think our parents were any less caring or loving than today’s parents, but there was more of an underlying assumption that kids were basically safe and could take care of themselves.  I don’t think I would have ever let my boys swim alone at a neighbor’s pool as I was allowed to do.

Not too far behind our house there was an old gravel pit where we often rode our horses.  We went up and down the huge piles of sand and gravel and swam the horses across standing bodies of water.  Looking back, I can only shudder at what a dangerous spot this really was!  I am sure all children have tales that they have never shared with their parents, at least not until adulthood, but I never did tell my parents about the gravel pit escapades.

When I became a teenager, I had visions of becoming a fashion model, probably as an aftermath of those early days in front of a camera.  I posed incessantly and often walked around the house balancing a book on my head to ensure good posture.  My Dad never lost his military bearing, and my Mother was somewhat of the posture policia.  “Stand up straight.”  “Hold your shoulders back.”  “Don’t stand there sway-backed.”  I suppose all those admonitions took hold as I do have pretty good posture to this day.

Outside of a few brief stints in high school, my modelling career never quite materialized, and my interests quickly moved on to other visions of the future.  When I was around thirteen or fourteen, I did make my television début.  Unfortunately, it was as the Easter Bunny on some stupid children’s program on one of the Dallas television stations, but it was live television, even if I was totally concealed in my Easter Bunny outfit!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Time for a change of pace next week.  Join me for “Clowns, Cancer, and Clairvoyance.”

More Tales from the White House

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Word of the day:  Sunflower (sun flou’ ər) “Any of a genus (Helianthus) of tall plants of the composite family, having large daisylike flowers with yellow, brown, purple, or almost black disks containing edible seeds”

I probably owe you an explanation of why the memoirs of my childhood are called Black Dirt and Sunflowers.  The farm house on Willow Brook Road was set on two acres of land.  It was a long skinny plot of land with the house and garage on one acre, and the pasture in the back.  Our neighbors didn’t have any livestock, so we also had access to their back acres as well, giving us a three acre pasture for the horses and those pesky chickens.  The soil was heavy black dirt, from some ancient  river bottom.  When it rained, the dirt acquired the consistency of heavy clay, sticking to the horses’ hooves like giant black dinner plates.  I don’t know how they even managed to slog around the pasture.  They also loved to roll in the black mud.  They ended up so caked in mud that they looked like some modern version of the terra cotta warriors!

In the summer, we plowed the pastures with Bess’ old International Harvester tractor and scattered rye and alfalfa seed all around.  I was entrusted with the tractor at a fairly young age, long before I could drive a car. We never seemed to grow a great  crop of pasture grass, but we grew sunflowers like crazy.  By August, the pastures were usually covered with six foot tall sunflower plants.  The horses made little meandering trails through them seeking out what little grass that had managed to grow.

We had two horse stalls, a feed and hay room, and the infamous chicken coop.  One of my weekly chores was scrubbing out the horse trough.  It stayed filled with a float valve, but with the well water, the hot weather, and horse slobber, it quickly grew a thick coating of disgusting green algae.  At least once a week, sometimes more often, it was my responsibility to scrub it out with a wire brush until it was once again gleamingly clean.  My Dad’s usual injunction was that it had to be clean enough for me to drink out of, so after thoroughly scrubbing and refilling the trough, I would typically stick my face in and take a few big gulps just to prove to the world that it was definitely clean enough!

My Dad, despite his tough guy exterior, was really an old softie.  In the winter when the cold, damp winds blew ruthlessly across the pasture, he would make up some sort of hot bran, oats, and molasses mash that he fed to the horses, some sort of a horsey oatmeal.  I am not sure what all went into the dish, but the two horses seemed to think it was pretty tasty and eagerly awaited his arrival with the goodies.  My Dad never ever rode either of the two horses, but he was quite fond of them and viewed them as some sort of giant lapdogs.  They reciprocated his affection and looked forward to a variety of treats that he typically carried for them, sugar cubes, carrots, apples, and the all time best treat ever, watermelon rinds.  Horses love watermelon and cantaloupe.  I can still see them happily munching with watermelon drool dripping out of their mouths, messy but tasty!

One morning as we ate breakfast, we heard the clippity clop of iron horseshoes on the gravel driveway.  Without looking up, my Dad said, “Some poor bastard’s horses got out.”  This was followed almost immediately by another loud expletive and “Those are my horses!”  The wayward escapees were quickly rounded up and returned to their pasture, while we all very carefully kept a straight face.  It would not have gone over well to have laughed at that exchange.

We also had a real playhouse, not some sort of little, snap-together plastic thing from Home Depot.  This one was about ten by twelve feet with electricity, screened windows, and a front porch. It had white siding and little red shutters.  Inside were a small table and chairs and a set of old bunkbeds, and the ceiling was tall enough for an adult to stand up in.  For a cowgirl, this was the bunkhouse, the real deal!  The wasps and the bees tended to build their nests under the eaves of the little front porch.  My friends and I learned to knock the nests down and then run like you-know-what out of the way of the angry inhabitants.  The playhouse was stiflingly hot in the summer and way too cold in the winter, but it was, nonetheless, our special place and sanctuary!

Daddy also built us a small above-the-ground swimming pool.  It was about ten feet by eight feet and about two and a half feet deep with poured concrete sides and bottom.  It wasn’t quite big enough to really swim in, but we still enjoyed it immensely on hot summer days.  Often we kids would be kicked out of the little pool, and our parents and their friends would hang out in the pool with a cooler of beer sitting right beside it.  Our flock of ducks, more about them in another blog, also loved the pool and thought Daddy had built it for them.  Of course, after the ducks were in for a while, the pool had to be drained and scrubbed before the human participants could use it again.  Luckily, cleaning the pool never made my chore list!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Join me next week for “My Modelling Career Commences.”

The White House on Willow Brook Road

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Word of the Day:  “Chigger (chig’ er) the tiny, red larva of a family  (Trombiculidae) of mites, whose bite causes severe itching.”

“The White House on Willow Brook Road”–sounds like the title of a children’s book, doesn’t it?   When my family moved to the old white house on Willow Brook Road, it proved to be the best place ever to grow up.  Looking back, I realize that it probably wasn’t quite as glamorous as I thought at the time.  We didn’t have a furnace; the house was heated in the winter by open gas heaters with no outside venting.  I suspect that sort of heat wouldn’t be allowed today.  Even as a kid, I learned how to strike a match carefully and light the heaters.  In fact, I still have a slight scar on my right leg as a reminder of a close encounter with one of those hot devices.   As a safety measure, the heaters in the bedrooms would be turned off at night, but the one in the bathroom was left on.  I can still remember running into the bathroom on cold mornings and feeling the wonderful heat from that glowing heater!

Summers weren’t much better! We had no air conditioning in the hot, sticky Dallas heat, but we had a huge attic fan.  Sleeping with that fan running was somewhat like lying under a jet engine during take off.  It practically sucked the sheets off of the bed, but it certainly provided air movement.  One wonderful summer, we got one small window unit air conditioner.  My Dad installed it in the room we called the family room.  I think in the original design of the house it was the dining room, but we had no dining room furniture so it became the family room.  Ah, delicious coolness!  We kept the doors to the rest of the house shut and watched television in the wonderful cool air.  At night the air conditioner was turned off, and the mighty attic fan was turned on. I wonder why it never occurred to us to sleep on the floor in the family room?

Television in the family room was our main source of at-home entertainment.  Saturday morning were replete with Sky King, Rama of the Jungle, Rin Tin Tin, Mighty Mouse, and who recalls what else.  Our old farm-house was also a repository for bugs of all sorts.  Now, I hate bugs, and I think it stems from my lying on the floor in that family room watching television when a scorpion goes strolling past, right next to my foot.   Of all possible bugs, scorpions were the worst!  Worse than wasps, bees, mosquitos, and even the nuisance chiggers.  I was petrified of the scorpions, although I was never unfortunate enough to actually get stung by that frightening tail.

On one particularly horrifying night, I was reading in bed, and all of a sudden I saw a scorpion walking across the top of my book.  I let out a blood-curdling shriek and hurled the book across the room.  Loud footsteps down the hallway quickly brought my Mother, Father, and little sister, all of whom were probably expecting to see an intruder accosting me or at the very least Bigfoot!  The positively scary part was that we never found the nocturnal little creature.  The thought that it had climbed up on my bed and onto my book without my seeing it was what really upset me the most. For a long time, I never went to bed without doing a complete check of the covers, pulling back the sheets and looking under the bed.  To this day, I never let my arm or leg hang out over the side of the bed.  You just can’t be too careful; they might have tracked me down after all these years.

I think my Dad contributed to my hatred of scorpions with his tales of the scorpions in North Africa.  A Captain in World War II, he served in the North African campaign, the invasion of Italy, and the horrific battle of Anzio.  Although he seldom talked about his war-time experiences, he would tell us frightening stories of the scorpions in Africa, six inches long and pasty white.  He said the soldiers never put their boots on in the morning without carefully dumping them out just in case they had an unwelcome visitor in them.  I suspect that I would have found the stories of the actual battles less upsetting than those sneaky scorpions!  When the war ended, returning soldiers were expected to tough it out and get back into civilian life.  There was no such diagnosis as PTSD in those days, but the nightmares my Dad suffered from up until the time of his death may have been the aftermath of the awful realities of that war.  We three, my Mother, my sister, and I,  all quickly learned that when my Dad was sleeping and we needed to wake him up, we gave a quick shake or poke and then ducked.  He always came up with fists flying and arms flailing

Although scorpions warranted my greatest fear, chiggers probably caused me much more misery.  For those of you not familiar with these little creatures, they are some sort of little red mite, almost microscopic, that burrows under the skin, causing hundreds of red welts and itching like crazy.  Not much helped to shorten their obnoxious little life span beneath the skin.  People tried calamine lotion, mercurochrome, and even clear fingernail polish, apparently on the theory that the polish would suffocate the little monsters.  Prevention was somewhat found in dusting your feet, ankles, and groin area with sulfur powder.  My Mother had little cloth pouches of sulfur which we applied generously, turning our socks and clothes a bright yellow color.  I don’t know if she made them or bought them ready-made.  It does make you wonder if the prevention might have been more dangerous to our health than the creatures themselves!

The other prevention was in having a lawn of St.Augustine grass, that lovely viney grass found so often in Texas and the South.  St. Augustine turns brown in the winter and a deep green in the summers.  For some reason,  chiggers don’t like it, and neither do the awful goatshead stickers that I managed to step on so many times!  Unfortunately, our lawn in that old rental house did not have the cool, green St. Augustine.  We had a bit of Bermuda grass augmented by a wide variety of weeds and stickers, just waiting to pounce upon the unspecting bare foot.  And the chiggers loved it!

©2015, Black Dirt and Sunflowers

Join me next Friday for “More Tales from the White House!”

 

Pet Peeves

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Word of the day:  Grammar (Gram’-er)  “the study of the way the sentences of a language are constructed, esp. the study of morphology and syntax.”

One of the nice things about doing my own blog is that I can write about whatever strikes my fancy at any given moment. Today I have to hit upon a few of my pet peeves about proper English usage. I certainly accept and have no problem with an idiomatic and colloquial style of writing. I can happily end a sentence with a preposition if it avoids a more convoluted sentence structure, but there are a few things that just grate on my nerves, somewhat like the proverbial old chalk on a blackboard. Screech! Screech!

My top prize has to be a draw between the correct use of  its and it’s and the proper use of the first person pronoun. I am not sure which makes me crazier, but let’s just start with it and it’s. This one is so very easy to fix that no one should ever make this mistake again. The possessive form of the third person pronoun is its with no apostrophe. In the same manner, the possessive form of her is hers, also with no apostrophe. If you use it’s; it is a contraction, a shortening of two words into one with the use of an apostrophe. An easy way to tell if you are using it’s correctly is to use both words, it is. If your sentence doesn’t make sense with it is, you should probably be using its without the apostrophe, e.g., The dog was chasing its tail versus it’s a beautiful day!

My other contender for top honors is the use of I, me, and myself.  Most people seem to do fairly well with I. It seems to be me and myself that give many people fits.  Myself is a reflexive pronoun; it is used when you do something to or for yourself: I treated myself to a hot fudge sundae, or I accidentally hit myself with the hammer when I was trying to hang the picture. If you are the object, use me. The dog bit me. The prize was awarded to John and me, not John and myself. Susan and I conducted the training session, not Susan and myself conducted the training session. I’m not sure where the excessive use of myself has come from, but I suspect a false sense of modesty and a hesitancy to use me?

OK, Lynn, off of your soapbox for now! For some future blog, I may hit upon the past participle (ate and eaten, saw and seen, among others) or the use of the possessive with a gerund, but that may be too high-tech for today. If you really want to check yourself out on contemporary usage, a great resource is Common Errors in English Usage by Paul Brians.   I also suspect the use of the autocomplete function on our many electronic devices and the numerous inherent errors in the spellcheck and grammar functions in our software contribute to many unwitting mistakes for all of us. Sometimes our fingers just take on a life of their own on the keyboard and type the wrong word when we do indeed know better.  I find I make oh, so many more errors on my iPad than I do on my PC with a conventional keyboard.

The other classic reference for grammar is The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. I’m so weird that I actually requested the leather-bound 50th anniversary edition for a Christmas gift several years ago! Now I realize that everyone may not be this far out in their reading interests, but it is a great resource for improving both your written and spoken English usage. In today’s competitive business world, your proper use of language may make or break an opportunity for you. I hope this little monologue helps you to condition yourself to the importance of using the English language in its best form, and if I offended you, I do apologize in advance.

©2015, Eclectic Grandma

Check in next week for “The White House on Willow Brook Road” with scorpions, chiggers, and World War II!