There She Goes Again...

Here's what my grandmother taught me:

I guess I first heard it when I was only nine or ten years old: During Thanksgiving dinner at my maternal grandmother's house, while the last crumbs of pie crust were being forked into our happy mouths, Gram would say, "This might be my last Thanksgiving..." As the years went by, this declaration wouldn't be cause for somber reflection, but rather some good-natured speculation as to what Gram might want for Christmas that year -- A cruise? Pearl earrings? Every year we knew "it" was coming, and it seems that the saying of "it" kept the actual possibility at bay year, after year, after year...

Gram went on to make that same "last Thanksgiving" proclamation for another thirty years or so, surviving cancer but living what could be considered a healthy life well into her eighties, and sharing Thanksgiving and other holidays with great-grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren. She finally had her last Thanksgiving at age 89.

Her life was surely full of challenges -- two World Wars; raising children through Depression, flu and polio breakouts; and widowhood. Those events and influences can color a person's perspective. But Gram didn't behave as though she was waiting for the next disaster to happen, at least not while I knew her. It's taken me a while, but I think I finally figured out that my grandmother had her own way of saying we should make the most of every day. I am still perfecting that knowledge, but the lesson has stuck with me. With practice, I think I'll get it right, before my own last Thanksgiving.

She Never Had Nothing

[Topic for this cycle: What My Grandmother Taught Me]

Ethel

There were lots of mothers in my life, including this doll-like creature, all 4'11" of her: my maternal grandmother, Ethel, the toughest woman I've ever met. I don't have a date for this picture, but I think she was about eighteen, so that would have been 1918...just about the time she'd been declared Miss Draper, NC.  Ethel taught me how to have nothing.

Draper is a town that no longer exists except in the memories of people my age who were there before it was eventually folded with Leaksville and Spray into the larger town of Eden. She might have been Miss Eden, then, but for a matter of timing. There's so much irony in that, it hurts my mind; a girl who was named Miss Eden should have a charmed life. Instead, she had a third grade education, a twin sister who died at the age of thirteen (of scarlet fever, I believe), and a life that our generation would think of as impossible.

Ethel, on right

Think with me about her life. Shortly before this picture was made, my grandmother was courted by a handsome young baseball player for Elon College--my grandfather, Clark, of Greensboro, NC, and they soon married on the heels of Armistice Day and into the teeth of that great pandemic, The Spanish Influenza. The virus attacked the body by taking the immune system hostage, so healthier young adults were hit hardest because their immune systems were most robust. By the time the flu reached their small town, Ethel and Clark had one baby girl, Ruth.

Clark was working part-time delivering drugs for a local pharmacy to the victims of the influenza, when he felt suddenly exhausted and sought the nearest bed in a friend's room in a boarding house that was emptying for the summer. No one knew where he was, so he lay untended and dehydrating for days. He barely survived, but shortly thereafter he suffered a massive blood clot that rendered him paralyzed from the neck down. With the help of Clark's parents to provide housing and tend to the child, Ethel was able to go to work at the textile mill. She fed and tended to her quadraplegic husband in the morning, walked to the mill for work, came home to feed and turn her husband at lunchtime, walked back to the mill, then back home again in the evening to cook, nurse Clark, and care for their daughter. 

There were trips to specialists in Maryland and physical therapy for Clark to carry on at home with his wife's help. If there was one thing Ethel could do it was follow instructions. One day Clark move his own big toe. From there, over a long and unbelievably hard time, he eventually regained enough movement to walk with crutches and braces. Eventually, Clark inherited the small corner grocery his father owned and the couple lived in a house on the family's large property. Five more children followed Ruth.

Ethel and Clark, approximately 1918

So, Ethel spent the 1920's caring for her husband, working at the mill, living under the wing of her in-laws, and having child after child. Eventually, they moved into the large farmhouse next door to the grocery store.Those must have been the good years. 

My grandfather's job was, ironically, secure when The Great Depression occurred in 1929, but his neighbors' jobs in the mills were not, so the little corner grocery fed not only a family of eight, but at times, the members of its small community. 

Just as the oldest of the children were finishing high school and starting their first jobs, World War II turned Greensboro, NC into an Army base. Soldiers marched and drilled on the family's small street, waving to the pretty daughters and taking the first son with them. Ethel got letters from her son in Patton's Third Army. She watched her daughters start their lives in wartime.

And, shortly after the war ended, the grandchildren appeared. In the booming post-war economy, Ethel's married daughters and daughters-in-law went to work and Ethel provided childcare. Her weight had crept up, making her almost as round as she was tall, and she suffered from varicose veins, but she couldn't move less so she moved more slowly. The polio epidemic threatened those grandchildren and Ethel was not one to take the threat lightly, so she fussed us into health and safety.

As the oldest of Ethel's grandchildren, I don't remember the sweetness I see in this picture. My cousins and I were a handful for her. I see her sweeping, sweeping, mopping, cooking (rather badly), planting zinnias, chatting too briefly with the neighbor women. Ethel, Ada, Oneida...they were born into an era of ugly names for baby girls. They were born into lives that history treated so badly, you'd think there was a grudge at work.

At Granny's house, we weren't allowed to play cards or play with the neighborhood boys. When my rowdy cousins and I galloped through her living room to launch ourselves hard at her beleaguered sofa, vying for who could get closest to the bad picture of The Little Rascals or Annette Funicello on the Mickey Mouse Club on her her unreliable little black and white television, my granny would admonish us by announcing flatly, "I just can't have nothing." It wasn't so much a complaint as a fact, observed.

She wasn't a fun grandmother, although she had a wry sense of humor when she wasn't too tired to indulge in it. She was brisk and dogged and determined, most of the sweetness knocked off by the early fifties, but she knew children should have fun without getting under foot. She provided a wonderful big box of dress-up clothes from her own children's old clothes. And she had a wealth of soft, ragged old quilts to spread under the big oaks in her yard for hot days or to throw over the clothes line for tents. There were my grandfather's Readers Digest Condensed books that we devoured and kite string to weave between trees to make "rooms" for playing house. There were kittens. And Red Chief note books to journal in. She taught us old songs from her childhood: "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" and "Playmate" and "Barbry Allen"...not exactly cheerful songs, but dear to her. If we napped properly every day from 1:00-3:00 p.m.--a habit I could never fully break--we were given a nickel to spend at my grandfather's store for ice cream, a Pepsi, or penny candy.

Clark died suddenly from a heart attack in 1957 while driving his jeep into town; that clotting disorder struck again. Granny continued to care for us and a neighbor's child after school and in summers. She taught us to iron by having us press the huge box of real ribbons collected from the wreaths at her husband's funeral. She said she'd make a quilt with them someday. We'd twist off the cruel florist wire and take turns standing at the ironing board telling stories about our idolized grandfather, turning the bows into shimmering falls of wide satin that folded themselves back into the box. There's a smell I'll never forget...hot iron on satin.

Until she went to a nursing home following her own stroke, to my knowledge Granny "never had nothing" but dogged determination to plow ahead no matter what. She was known for perseverance and a a fierce commitment to taking care of the people she loved. She taught me that resignation is not the same thing as giving up.

She taught me to recognize the sheer good luck we think of as a normal life.

I Blame Freud, Ford, Mom, And The DOD

[Topic for this cycle: Location, Location, Location]

Home, Sweet Home

Lately I begin to wonder if I might be stuck forever in my present location, unable to sell and unwilling to walk away from a home of twenty years. Disabled by the economy to buy before I've sold, and without a feckin' clue where to go from here. It's a situation that recalls the first joke I learned as a child: "If we had some eggs, we could have bacon and eggs, if we had some bacon."

Once upon a time, families lived within a buggy ride, at most, from each other because they had an undiluted awareness of the necessity of those primary ties. They probably did not want to be in each other's back pockets at all times, but they knew intimately and intuitively the cycles of need and longing for family that we all experience, and they were practical. Then, as a nation, we graduated from an agrarian society where we worked for ourselves and each other to a mechanized industrial society--first the precursors and then the progeny of Ford's assembly lines--where nobody really had our backs anymore.

Ford's Mother's couch, lovingly recreated to
his specifications to satisfy his yearnings for home.

In the same era, Freud introduced the family as the source of all our neuroses, a concept that took a generation to reach blanket acceptance in the US, to color all our thoughts about who we are and what could be wrong with us. And world wars taught us that our lives and our closest ties were subject to disruption at the command of our national leaders, lawmakers and the ironically named Department of Defense.

Freud's London Couch from Wisdom Quarterly

 Since then, we have all watched helplessly as the pursuit of education and a living wage has pulled our loved ones and ourselves all over the continent. Right up to 2008, Americans thought nothing of relocating to gain a promotion and then doing it again in two years for the next promotion. As a military family, we moved, bought houses, sold houses from one end of America to the other, averaging a move every three years whether we needed to or not and we thought nothing of it. It was adventure. We simply took to the roads and the airways to maintain our ties to family, to the extent we still had them. Whether at the whim of corporations or the military or whatever, we all moved and moved and moved again, a nation in constant motion.

I marvel to realize that I actually believed that I got along with my mother best when I lived in Alaska and she still lived at home in NC. I thought I needed to get away. From a perfectly nice lady, if a tad intrusive...very informed, fun, interesting, adored my kids...a good mother by almost any measure. Thanks to Freud and an out-of-town educational immersion in all things Freudian, I learned to focus negatively and almost exclusively on my mother's intrusiveness. When I met my husband, not the least of his many charms was that he had joined the Air Force and was seeing the world. I was so moved!--until retirement twenty years ago, when we bought what we thought of as a temporary house, where we've lived ever since. From here, we've watched our children move and move and move.

Shockingly, almost instantly, in 2008 the revealed whimsies of the big investment banks brought all our moving to a screeching halt. As if someone on the playground had yelled, "FREEZE!" We found ourselves frozen far from each other, unable to sell and buy, unable to take the time off for long driving trips (or, in my case, unable to tolerate them physically), and increasingly unable to afford airline prices. I speak for myself, here, and for at least two generations of middle class Americans. Many of us found ourselves longing for and needing family just when we could no longer get to them readily.

Now all those Twentieth Century ideals and philosophies of loyalty to the corporation, mobility in the service of self-interest, Freudian splitting of generations, and the never-ending demands of war begin to mean exactly squat-all to us. Those cultural icons are presently starting to smell, as all dying things do. And we are caught in the throes of massive cultural change and international recession, immobilized and puzzled at our loneliness. We are physically grounded, but psychologically and emotionally displaced.

Designs By Mom

For my part, I couldn't be more confused. I want to sell my house, but, when people ask me where I'm going, I feel stupid saying I don't know. Should I move to Nashville to be closer to my son? Will my daughter's Navy family be mandated to stay in San Diego or will they head toward Norfolk? Should I shoot for some spot somewhere in between Some Place and Some Place Else? Should I stay put in this All Sphincters Red State just because I know where my doctors are and how to get to Steinmart? Kind friends say try Tucson, try Wilmington, and I love them for it. Other kind friends wonder why we'd ever leave this spot. And we wonder if, in terms of our abilities to cope with stress, we might have just shot past our window for moving at all.

Listen to this. Tourism has been picking up locally this week and we had two--count 'em!--scheduled house showings all of a sudden--one for yesterday and one for May 1st. The storms that now regularly try to stamp out the South were threatening again yesterday, and ya'll know how I am about tornadoes. I'd been watching the news about my old sweet home in Alabama and grieving for beautiful Birmingham. I could make that Wundermap on weatherunderground.com prophesy in lurid color. So we called the realtor's scheduler and cancelled that first showing, which was set for just about the time all hell was due to break loose. We asked optimistically that the viewing be re-scheduled for the next day.

Thompson living room, Birmingham, AL, strangely untouched by the
tornado, despite extensive damage to nearby rooms in the house.

Somehow--by black magic, perhaps--the storm surrounded us, loomed at us, huffed and puffed but never actually threatened to blow our house down. Our little town might have had a teflon canopy. When we called the viewers to follow up on the re-schedule, we were told that they had settled on another house in our neighborhood! While I was preparing for tornadoes! What kind of people look at houses in the middle of killer storms? This house is used to careful people, thoughtful and prudent people, not impulsive vacationers who pay no attention to the news. Kismet? Karma? Shit happens? An unconscious resistance to change? Undeserved luck?

I blame Freud.

In a State!

If it's true that as Maine goes, so goes the nation, I think it's time to toss some underwear into the old handbasket.

It used to be that the South had dibs on outlandish politicians. Now that crazy has gone viral, whoever is in charge of The Crazy Rankings is going to have a tough job. Heck, it's hard to even know what IS crazy any longer. One doesn't even know where to start...!

How about Maine and Gov. Paul LePage?

You may recognize Gov. LePage's name because he removed a labor mural from a Maine Department of Labor office because it depicted... um... labor. (He was overruled--it's going back up.) Or maybe you heard when he wanted to relax some of the state environmental laws and chose to have the chemical industry write them for him.

The History of Map Making

[a poetess' take on "Location, Location, Location..."]

How simple navigation was
back in the day when all the known world
could be contained on a disc of clay
impressed with images to show
our house and the neighbor's field,
the river before it flooded,
and the smoking mountain on the horizon;
guardian dragons forbade us to roam beyond.
We always knew just where we stood.

Then measurements were made and
all around the land was round;
Eratosthenes observed the shadow of the sun
and was the first to tell how many football fields
it took to gird the world. Sailors journeyed
far across the sea, failed to be consumed
by monsters, and so, the horizon
disappeared.

Today the moon and stars are charted --
and beyond, destinations pinpointed,
never to be reached. Yet sometimes
I don't know just where I'm headed,
even though I've been around;
left my backyard, even been to hell and back.
But there, off in the distance, I see dragons
and they just won't let me pass.

Image: OnlineWebLibrary