Mad as a Hatter

bless the Rolling Stones.

2006-11-02T17:13:00.000-08:00

Bless the Rolling Stones’ hearts that they are still writing, recording, performing, touring and selling out stadiums. Bless their hearts for continuing to be the Rolling Stones, for not breaking up or dropping dead or loosing their hair or burning out before I fell in love with them. Lord knows, I took my time.

In April of ‘62, the United States was basking in the warm glow of Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s Camelot. Across the Atlantic two 19-year-old Brits, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who had already been playing music together for two years, teamed up with Brian Jones and formed the Rolling Stones. With Ian Stewart on piano, Dick Taylor quickly replaced by Bill Wyman on bass and Charlie Watts on drums the first enduring version of the Rolling Stones was formed.

While I went to OK Elementary School and then Hadley Junior High, the Stones were performing, touring and making a name for themselves as the rougher, cruder second wave of the British invasion. Until I was in fourth grade when their cover, “Time Is On My Side” hit the top-40 radio stations, I knew nothing of the Rolling Stones. I had my eyes on the Beatles.

In high school I started going out with boys, and boys listened to the Rolling Stones. “Get Yer Ya-Yas Out” and “Sticky Fingers” were the Stones albums of choice for my boyfriends and their buddies. I went to college and the Stones were there–on cassette players in the ceramic studio and the life drawing class. I never bought an album. I never owned a T-shirt or a poster, and yet somehow I learned the words to their songs. I got married and had babies and the Stones kept playing. Still I didn’t cave, didn’t buy an album, and yet I could usually recognize their hard-driving sound and Charlie Watts’ persistent drumming.

Now my babies are teenagers and both of them listen to the Rolling Stones. Jesse has several Stones shirts including a Simpsons version. The Stones are on his iPod and he’s teaching himself Stones songs on the guitar. And now, after 44 years of taking the Rolling Stones for granted, after being part of my world if only through my subconscious for years, the Rolling Stones were about to take a giant leap into my conscious waking life.

I’m 51 years old. Since I was 7 years old the Rolling Stones have been writing songs, performing and touring, earning the status of “the longest-lived, continuously active group in rock and roll history” according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And they are, by their own pronouncement and popular consensus, "the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band." After assuming that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and now Ron Wood would always be part of my world, part of my consciousness and making music, just as the Stones have always done, the Rolling Stones emerged from the periphery of my subconscious and became a band I wanted to see. The Rolling Stones were coming to Wichita, Kan.

As the concert date drew near, people said to me with one eyebrow raised, as if to say I didn’t really deserve to go, that they didn’t know I was a Stones fan. My reply was this. Twenty years ago, when the Stones were in their 40s and they were still together, still playing, still writing songs, still touring, I started to sit up and take notice. The fact that they are now in their 60s and still writing songs, still releasing albums, still touring–hell yes I’m a fan.

When I asked Alex, my 18-year-old nephew, if he was going to the Stones concert his reply really should have been accurate. “I would go if it was still the original guys,” he told me. As logical as his answer surely seemed to him, Alex had stumbled into one of the most impossible and unlikely strange-but-true stories of popular culture and in doing so revealed he knew absolutely nothing about the Rolling Stones, then or now. “These are the original guys,” I told him, and it hit me–

When I was 16 years old and “Brown Sugar” was all over the radio, if you had told me that 35 years later I would have the chance to see the Rolling Stones in concert with my own 16-year-old son, I would have said you were crazy. I would have told you that those bad boys would not live another 10 years. They partied too hard, played too rough and took too many chances to live much past 30. As I saw it, Brian Jones’ early death at 27 years old put the writing on the wall for the rest of the band.

I was wrong. The Rolling Stones were coming to town Oct. 1, 2006, three weeks to the day before my son turned 16. A band I should have seen 35 years ago, when I was his age was, through some miraculous twist of fate, is not only still alive, still playing, still touring, but coming to town. There was something very perfect about this. It was balanced, like an algebra equation, like a haiku poem, like perfect karma. Jesse and I needed tickets in celebration of his 16th birthday. I purchased two: “Section A, Row 51, Seats 5 (and 6) $95.00 West Section A. RadioShack Presents The Rolling Stones. A Bigger Bang. Cessna Stadium. Rain/Shine-No Cam/Rec. Sunday, Oct. 1, 2006, 7 p.m.” We were going.

At parent-teacher conferences, Coach Hansen, Jesse’s golf coach, told us he asked his wife for tickets for his birthday. She didn’t get come through for him. It was hard to imagine bald coach Hansen in his golf shirts at a Stones concert. Still, he looked disappointed telling us he wouldn’t be there. “Do you even know who the Stones are?” he asked. Jesse simply unzipped his hoodie to reveal a Stones T-shirt with the signature lips and tongue and said nothing.

“I guess you do,” coach said looking back at me with a smile. “What’s your favorite Stones song?” he asked as if he’d catch him on this one.

“Sympathy for the Devil,” Jess said.

“I’ve never even heard of that one,” coach said. Jesse seemed disinterested in coach’s level of Stones knowledge, but Coach Hansen seemed convinced that Jesse would appreciate the concert. “Jagger’s a hell of a showman. It’ll be a hell of a show,” coach told us.

Showman. I think of showman as performers like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong. Old guys. Showman is a term from another generation. I had to think, who is the showman of our generation? Mick Jagger was the only name that came to mind. I thought of other big names, but no one else had the talent, the antics, the dance moves, the rapport with the audience, the reputation or the energy of Mick Jagger. I wondered what he would be like at 63 years old.

Saturday afternoon before the Sunday-night concert, Terrylee and I drove over and checked out the parking situation around Cessna Stadium. We peeked through the sheathed fence as the fourth day of construction continued on the structure that would become the nine-story stage with a 50-by-49-foot screen to project Mick Jagger’s big trademark mouth, Keith Richards’ bejeweled fingering, Ron Wood’s embarrassed looks and Charlie Watt’s steady, bouncing quarter profile.

The three construction cranes had finished setting the steel scaffolding in place and now workers crawled all over it stretching wire and hooking lights. “I could do this,” Terrylee said looking at a technician in a harness on top of the scaffolding running wires. Terrylee is a tree man and frequently straps himself into his own harness to shimmy up trees that need trimming. “If I wanted to start all over again,” he said wistfully, “I could do this.”

Lining 21st Street and blocking traffic, trucks painted with “Truck and Roll” on the air deflector above the cabs were waiting to unload. A dozen of them moved into the parking lot south of the stage. Roadies in black T-shirts and shorts pushed rolling carts of equipment from the trucks, down a ramp and toward the stage. As the trailers were unloaded, the trucks were sent to the Kansas Coliseum north of town until Sunday night when they’d come back and start picking it all back up. It took 70 18-wheel trucks to bring the stage, sound equipment, lighting and pyrotechnics to town. Three complete stages in 210 trucks are leap frogging their way across North America full of Stones stages right now. Each stage takes 85 people working five 10-hour days to construct. The stages take longer to set up than the band has between stops, so after teardown the trucks are sent three venues ahead for set up. This particular stage will head to Chicago where the Stones will play Soldier Field after their concerts in Missoula, Mont. and Regina, Saskatchewan. The logistics of a tour this size boggles the mind.

Terry and I had a simple plan for parking. We’d park two vehicles at 9 a.m. Sunday and go home. Later that day we’d use my Land cruiser to haul everyone back to the parking lot in shifts if need be. Plan intact and heading for home Terrylee said, “Name a band who could fill a stadium.”

The Rolling Stones was my only answer. “Could Queen?” I finally guessed. Terrylee had to tell me their lead singer died of AIDS and asked why I thought they were called Queen. I’d never put that together before. Terrylee said maybe U2 or Bon Jovi.

“Could Sting?” I asked, “Or Billy Joel?”

Terrylee shook his head, “Not any more. Hell, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson together couldn’t even fill Lawrence Dumont Stadium.” Terrylee had a point. They aren’t making powerhouse mega-rock-and-roll-band superstars like they used to.

The Stones were staying in the Hyatt. They had 135 rooms for Saturday and Sunday nights. They flew into Mid-Continent Airport with 96 people in their entourage and had a police escort to the hotel. The night before the show, I was at home enjoying my little house on the river as neighbors walked by with their dogs. Some stopped to chat. I thought of the poor Stones, stuck in the Hyatt on such a beautiful fall evening. I started dreaming of calling the guys and offering my house to them for the night. You know, a real house where they could poke around, do some laundry, watch a little television, snoop through the refrigerator. I’d go somewhere for the night and let them slip into real life. Then I realized an evening in my house would not seem like real life to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger had the presidential suite at the Hyatt complete with exercise bike and piano. I guess that’s what normal is for him. Keith Richards had the vice-presidential suite for him and his dog. Charlie Watts and Ron Wood stayed in hospitality suites. I could suddenly see that the Stones are at home in hotel suites and mansions, not cottage bungalows in quaint old neighborhoods that follow the river.

Jim Rosencutter called early Sunday morning to make plans for his son and Jesse to rendezvous at the concert. Jim was going with his friend Jake, his son Caleb, his ex-wife Elizabeth and his new girlfriend Jill. “How rock and roll is that?” he asked about taking his ex-wife and his new girlfriend.

Jim had been to dinner the night before with his old friend Brent Geissmann from The Embarrassment, a local college-days band. Geissmann was the Embarrassment’s drummer and later became the drummer for the Del Fuegos. Somewhere along the line, Brent put down his sticks and picked up substance-abuse counseling. He was traveling with the Stones entourage as founder of “Right Turn,” a non-profit, substance-abuse-treatment organization. He was along in support of a person who had given up drinking and who, in the spirit of Alcoholics Anonymous, shall remain anonymous. Of course, I’d like to clear Mick Jagger’s good name of any suspicion. I’ll also surprise everyone by saying he was not along for Keith Richards.

Jim Rosencutter, feeling as bad for the Stones as I had, told Brent to invite his buddies along to dinner Saturday night. Brent said the boys in the band couldn’t really leave their hotel rooms without being mobbed. I thought about this. Imagine living in hotel rooms and ordering room service not as a temporary lifestyle, but as a life. After all, the Stones had been doing this for nearly half a century. The good news is, this is how it has been for the Stones always, so maybe it seems natural to them. Still, I’d like to ring them up and offer the house. They could sit on my front porch, read the paper, feed my dog.

In 1972, as a senior in high school, I went to see James Taylor at the University of Kansas with three girlfriends. We entered Allen Field House to find an empty stage but for a chair and a mike lit by spotlights. James Taylor came out with a guitar and that was it. While the Stones’ Sticky Fingers tour kicked into high gear, I fell in love with James Taylor’s soft ballads and troubled life. He had connected to me. That simple concert has always remained my favorite concert. Maybe because in its simplicity it stood out. I think of all the concerts I’ve been to since. Moody Blues, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt, Ray Charles, B.B. King, Elton John, Robert Cray, Crosby Stills and Nash, Allison Kraus, Dwight Yocum and Loretta Lynn. I had to wonder how The Rolling Stones concert would stack up.

When Mick Jagger came running out on that stage in his green satin cut-away coat singing, “I said I know, it’s only rock and roll but I like it,” followed by Keith, Ron and Charlie, a crowd rocked to sleep by the warm-up band, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, woke up. “I know it's only rock 'n roll but I like it, like it, yes, I do. Oh, well, I like it, I like it, I like it.” Fireworks went off, fans were up and clapping and my face broke into a wide grin that I couldn’t hold back, didn’t want to hold back, for the entire concert. Mick and the boys were having so much fun. On through “You Got Me Rockin’,” “Monkey Man,” and “Sway,” until Mick Jagger picked up a guitar and sweetly sang a few lines from “Wichita Lineman.” The Stones were so generous to their Wichita audience and absolutely charming. And, as I stood next to my soon-to-be 16-year-old son, trying not to embarrass him by dancing to “Let It Bleed,” acting too starry-eyed during “Streets of Love” or acting too foolish during “Bitch” and “Tumbling Dice,” I began to think of all the things in the universe that had to line up so that these four guys would still be alive, writing new songs and touring.

First, of course, it is nothing short of a miracle that Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ron are even alive. My money had always been on the Beatles for longevity. That didn’t work out. Even though in 1969 as a ninth-grader I was not savvy enough about the Stones to understand the significance of Brian Jones’ “death by misadventure," I still thought any fool could see, none of these guys would be around long. A girlfriend told me of a concert in California where the Stones hired the Hell’s Angels as bodyguards and an audience member ended up being killed. I think of the drugs, drug busts, wives, children, divorces, money and music these men have been through on their long strange trip. Miraculously, Brian Jones aside, here they are, still having fun and making music together.

From his first song and all through the concert except during a brief encounter with a troubled cordless headband mike, Mick Jagger had been running the full 204-foot width of that stage back and forth, running, skipping, shimmying and shaking all the while singing. He never sounded out of breath, he never missed a beat and he hit every note. I get winded going up the basement stairs while trying to talk on the phone and I’m 12 years younger than Mick. How does he do that?

I read once that orchestra conductors have the best longevity record among different professions because they spend their lives exercising their arms above their heads and their hearts. Mick Jagger might live a very, very long time. Who would have thought all that beckoning to his audience, clapping above his head, would be the Dorian Gray factor that keeps the whole machine running so smoothly and looking so young. And, of course that hands-above-your-head clapping is not just keeping Mick going, it’s keeping the Stones going. The Rolling Stones wouldn’t be the Rolling Stones without their front man, their showman, Mick Jagger.

Other than sheer orneriness, I have no explanation for what keeps Keith Richards’ little heart ticking, but he, too, is an absolutely necessary component of the Rolling Stones. Without Keith Richards, we’re back to Mick’s Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys aren’t we, which is where Keith Richards found Jagger 46 years ago. I watch and listen as Richards sings “You Got the Silver” and think of Annie Leibovitz’s 1972 presumably backstage portrait of Keith passed out in a chair, shirt open, arms dangling.

I look at the monitors and see that same skull ring from the Leibovitz portrait. A pirate ring if ever there was one. He’s had that ring for 20 years at least. I wonder if maybe it’s the reason he was cast as Captain Jack Sparrow’s father in the next “Pirates of the Caribbean” film. He looks like Sparrow now on stage with his wide headband and crazy-ass black hair curling over the fabric. I used to think of Keith Richards as ugly. Tonight he looks down right sexy as he leans down into a guitar lick, playing with the darn thing at his knees, long trench coat parted and skull ring catching the light and dazzling my eyes through a camera lens into the monitor.

I own opera glasses. They are French and very old. “Paris” is inscribed in the mother-of-pearl eyepieces. We've been through a lot together. I used them to watch one certain now x-husband get served his divorce papers from across the river. I had them with me at the Stones. The small monitors, those facing us in the very-oblique-angle-to-the-stage Section A seats, were the perfect size and distance for viewing with my opera glasses. Using this method, I could see Ron Wood was wearing bling! A flashy belt threaded through the belt loops of his low-slung, boyish black jeans. The black jeans that are apparently "de rigueur" for the entire band.

Ultimately, I didn’t need my opera glasses to see what was really amazing about the Rolling Stones. Looking into their souls, I saw four old friends, four boys, Mick, Keith, Ron and Charlie, having fun. I saw four men still doing what they’ve always done and loving it.

I don’t know who I was happier for that night: the Stones themselves, that they could still have such an obvious blast performing in front of 30,000 fans to a nearly sold-out stadium; for Jesse, who at almost 16 was experiencing the best concert he may ever go to; or me. In the Stones, we are young again and anything is possible–love, peace, saving the planet, having a rockin’ good time.

I consider the parallel universe the Stones live in. They started out like you and me. They were kids in a neighborhood with moms, or mums as it were, and rules and homework. But a simple twist of fate launched them on an unbelievable path that only last night collided with my own. In that collision I could see them as men and appreciate, more than ever, what an amazing gift, what a spectacular treasure they are. What a rich journal of my life the Stones’ music has provided while I hardly paid attention. I feel bad. They’ve been working so hard for so long, they’ve been performing year in and year out for so long, while I just took it for granted that, “yeah, another new Stones song, another CD, another Stones tour,” was in the news. But having the Stones play in my hometown, having them arrive in my backyard was a big enough bang that I woke up. I came so close to missing them.

In one night, the band that has always been inside my head, in my car and on the stereo became real. I fell madly in love with the Rolling Stones last night. I’m so glad they waited for me.

my 51st birthday.

2006-09-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

Birthdays aren’t what they used to be. On my 51st birthday I celebrated by changing the sheets on my bed, something I’d meant to do every day for the past two weeks.

On my 51st birthday, I sorted through my ill-begotten trousseau of vintage bed linens and sorted them, top sheets from bottom sheets. Then I stacked them in piles of pink-scalloped stitching and green-scalloped stitching. I found only one sheet at the bottom of the drawer to be sent to the basement to the “old sheets for backdrops” box. It was a plain white J.C. Penny’s TownCraft and its only shortcoming, for Lord’s sake, was its lack of scalloped stitching. Still, down it went. I had to make room for more treasured sheets.

I buy sheets at estate sales, which, when you can find them in good shape, is the only place for purchasing those old heavy 100-percent cotton sheets with the pink, blue, yellow or green scalloped stitching along the top hem.

Because cotton was truly better 50 years ago, these sheets have a smooth-as-silk finish but with some weight to them, almost like a light canvas instead of that annoying, flimsy, get-tangled-in-your-nightgown weight of new sheets. There are new retro versions of these scalloped-stitching sheets. They sell in sets in specialty catalogues for about 100-times more than the standard $2 estate-sale price. They may imitate that vintage scalloped embroidery, but not the craftsmanship of American sheet making in the 1950s, and not the feel of good, thick, quality cotton.

I have collected top sheets with both pink and celery-green scalloped stitching. However, I am almost irresistibly drawn to buy the blue and yellow scallops, too just because any color is getting harder and harder to find. But my colors are pink and green, dictated by my children’s great-grandfather’s pink-cabbage-roses-on-a-deep-wine-background antique wool carpet on my bedroom floor. Only sheets with pink and green scalloped stitching are allowed in my late-blooming trousseau.

I sorted my generous stacks of antique pillowcases into piles, too on my birthday. A stack of pink scallops, green scallops and scallop-less white cases with crocheted edges. I wondered, putting all the sorted piles back in the linen closet, if I might be a tad obsessive compulsive when it comes to antique linens, but I shut the drawer and made my bed with beautiful, clean, crisp cotton sheets. For my birthday I had chosen the sheets with pale-pink-scalloped stitching along the top hem.

Generously folding the top sheet over my quilt, the beautiful scalloped pattern runs in front of the feather pillows stacked two deep on either side of my double bed. It looks subtly stunning. The two top pillowcases, adorned with the same pink-scalloped stitching, sit plump and happy on top of the bottom pillows. The bottom pillowcases are gorgeous masterpieces of crochet work and remind me that not so long ago the decorative arts were flourishing in America.

Mimi, a photo-client-turned friend, told her girls years ago when they were here for a portrait that my bed looked like a birthday cake. I consider it now. A lofty square of celery green quilt on a stand of craftsman-mission antique bed frame, trimmed in pink scallops and off-white crochet work done by hand. I tucked the hospital corners in at the foot of my bed, stood back, and admired my birthday bed with a smile, as if I’d just blown out the candles. Happy birthday to me.

slipping out of a marriage.

2006-05-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

Sept. 11, 2005
Slowly, we drift, he toward his, me toward my. My, my, my, it’s so easy. We are slipping out of our marriage. Drifting away from our partnership. Jockeying to get out of position. Learning to live without each other while under the same roof.

Worn down by the endless talks it takes to make progress, we gave up on progress. Not big things. We’re not talking sell the house and become missionaries. We’re not talking adopt a third-world baby or choose a college for the kids. We’re talking, “We need a new refrigerator.” We’re talking, “Honey, I want to take a class on Tuesday nights. Could you feed the boys when you feed Caitlin?” We’re talking, “Why don’t we keep your mom’s old car for the kids? Between you and your brother we have three teenagers learning to drive this year.”

We gave up on the kind of progress a home can realize only through projects. I wanted to finish the attic. I wanted to brick in the backyard and make a courtyard. All I’m doing is dreaming. All he hears are honey-do projects. We used to dream together.

Lately my dreams are met, without fail, with a very awful face and some horribly practical question about, “how are you going to pay for that?” He sees this as his “contribution.” I see it as slamming the brakes on my dreams. So I plan without him. A sure-fire way to drift away from your husband is to quit including him in your dreams.

He has become a present-day ghost, living among us, but not part of our future. I have no plans to get rid of him. I, also, have no plan that includes him. He isn’t part of the dream.

I start working on our backyard courtyard when a friend offers some free bricks for the hauling. I offer to pay my son and his friends to help me load and unload. My son tells me, “Don’t spend your money that way. I’ll help for free.” My sweet son.

“OK, maybe you and Barney and I could go get those bricks,” I say at dinner.

Barney snarls, “I never volunteered for that! That’s not my project.” Like so many other times, that’s his contribution toward the dream. Does he mean it as a lesson, a better way to think, a way to think like him? I’m learning not to count on him. I feel it as a cold slap across the face. Whack! “I’m not participating in your dream!”

Barney doesn’t mean to, but he hits hard when he slaps down my dreams. “I just don’t get much bang for my buck on those Christmas cards,” he told me. Whack!
I’m a writer and a mother. Christmas cards are my dividend at the end of the year, when I get to do a little creative writing on one of my favorite subjects–my family. Whack! Christmas cards just got cut from the budget. I try to focus on other dreams. My dreams don’t die, they just don’t include him any more.

Drifting to the basement, his cave, he has his recliner, and the shows he likes to watch on TV. On Wednesdays and Saturdays he visits his dad. On Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, his nights in a shared-custody schedule, he cooks for his daughter. Some Thursdays he gets a haircut, but every Friday he meets his brother for a drink, or two, or three. And on Sundays he is my church lady and goes to church. I wonder what church gives him if not the faith to dream.

“Why did you marry him?” my 14-year-old asked one day.

“It’s not his fault,” I say. “He has not changed. He is exactly how he was when we dated. It is my fault. I didn’t realize how important dreaming was to me.” I didn’t realize how little patience he really has for kids, and dogs and barbecue grills that flare up and dreaming. I didn’t realize how long three years would seem while not sharing cars or kids or dinner menus, not sharing walks or hobbies, vacations, projects, or retirement plans, because all of that involves sharing dreams.

I do not want to sleep with him, kiss him, look at him. We do not talk. We don’t go out. We don’t make love. And he sees me slowly slipping away from him and I tell him why I’m slipping away. He answers with, “You knew what I was offering.”

I knew what I was dreaming. I thought he was offering to share my dreams. I wonder what he thinks will come of all of this. I wonder what he thinks, unwilling to change, unwilling to compromise, how he imagines this will work out. But I don’t even wonder any more what he dreams about. He’s not part of my dreams.

beware being grounded on the ides of March.

2006-03-17T17:28:00.000-08:00

March 15, 2005. “I can’t get up. I’m not going to school. I’m sick. I’m staying home. I need to sleep. I can’t just go to the homework room and then come home. Everyone will make fun of me. Mr. Bolan will yell at me. I’ll get in trouble. It can’t be done. I’m not going. I’m caught-up enough. I don’t need to go. I can’t just go and then come home when school starts and rest. They won’t let me. Why are you doing this to me? You don’t care about me, all you care about are my grades.

“Ok, if I have to get up early and go to the homework room, I’m staying all day. You can’t pick me up and make me come home and rest. You can’t make me sleep during the day. I need to sleep now, when it’s dark. I’m not sleeping when it’s light out. Never mind. I’ll just stay at school. Don’t pick me up. I’m staying. What’s a martyr?

“I am not going snowboarding with Barney and Caitlin! They are annoying! Even you say they’re annoying. I’m staying home with my friends. I’m staying home and hanging out. I’m going to the mall and talking on line and blowing up bombs at the river. I don’t want to snowboard. I don’t need to get better at it. None of the other scouts are getting better, because they aren’t snowboarding right now either. I’m not spending MY spring break snowboarding. I’m not going.

"I don’t care if Luke’s going to Mexico, I’m not going to Colorado. I don’t care if you take away my computer. I don’t care if you take away my TV. I don’t care if you take away my cell phone. I’m not going. What’s in it for you if I go? What do you get out of this? I’ll go live with Dad if you make me go snowboarding.

“I’m going to church with Stacia. Her mom wants me to go. I want to go. It’s church. I can go mom. This isn’t like going to the mall, it’s church. I’m going. They are picking me up. I have plenty of time for homework. I have plenty of time for chores. I already said I’d go. I’m going. You can’t tell me not to go to church. It’s church mom.

“I’m not going to East. I got accepted to Northeast and I’m going to Northeast. All of my friends are going to Northeast. Any of my friends going to East are in IB and I’m not in IB so I’m not going to East. I didn’t like East. You can’t make me go to East. I shadowed at Northeast and I like it there. I’m going there. Why should I care about East? Northeast isn’t too small for me. I’m going to East. You can’t make me be in band. I don’t care about drama. Northeast’s journalism is good enough. Why are you trying to do this to me? I’m not going to East. What does it matter? You can’t just ignore me into going to East.

“Mom! Stop ignoring me!”

san francisco.

2006-01-21T13:01:00.000-08:00

Traveling north up Highway 101, following the dips and turns of the Pacific coastline from Monterey to San Francisco as if plunked into a Joni Mitchell song, tears are streaming down my face. There are a lot of things I’ve done badly in my life and a few things I’ve done right. Taking my 14-year-old son, my first baby, my love, to San Francisco before he started high school, before he was too old to want to travel anywhere with me, was one of the best things I’ve done in this world. It’s rare, but I had to pat myself on the back for this one. Good job Mom!

My head and heart are absolutely full of California and I am filled to the brim with love for my teenage son riding in the car next to me. The blue-grey Pacific sprays against rocks as we twist and turn past deserted beaches at dusk. Understanding you can never see too much ocean, Jesse soaks it all in with his big brown eyes–my big brown eyes–mesmerized by everything outside the car windows. As we wind our way north toward the city, I remember how it felt just 30 short years ago when I, too, first saw California, when I saw infinite possibilities almost within reach.

I moved to San Francisco once. In 1975 a boyfriend and I hitchhiked to Oregon, barefoot of course. Jeff was my mystic, spiritual boyfriend, I realize now, looking back on the line-up. The world fell into such a logical order with him, yin and yang, male and female, he and I. We returned home just long enough to pack all our worldly goods into a trailer, hook it to my vintage-even-then 1951 Hudson Hornet and haul ass out of Kansas. He was a woodworker and craftsman with hair as long as mine, who would rescue me from my job in a juice bar in Lawrence, Kansas. “Squeezer’s Palace” was a fabulously hip first job and a wonderful place to work until I realized I desperately needed to see something, anything outside of Kansas. We drove to Oregon and stopped for a summer until our money ran out. Then we headed to the city by the bay.

I felt part of something in San Francisco. We rented a studio apartment in the tenderloin district and I was Connected with a capital C. I loved living in the city. I loved riding the cable cars and street cars. I loved the old houses, the hills, Chinatown and Golden Gate Bridge. I loved ocean beach. I loved the street musicians and the street people. I loved the hippies and protestors in Golden Gate Park. I loved the old-lady twins who dressed impeccably alike, from their hats to their handbags. I saw them downtown every day. But mostly, I just loved being in San Francisco. I felt I was at the epicenter of a place everyone wanted to be.

I lived in Haight Ashbury. I lived in Chinatown. I lived on Magellan Street. I moved out to the Avenues. I moved to Marin County. I moved back. I became a vegetarian. I cut off all my hair. I learned to meditate. I did yoga. I was part of history. Everything, anything was possible. I would marry for love and stay in love with a beautiful, peaceful man–a liberal. He would cherish me. We’d have beautiful children, California children. They’d grow up to be fascinating, creative people. I would live in perfect harmony with myself, my family and the earth. It was all within reach not too long ago, but somehow it slipped through my fingers. Three husbands later I see I had the right dream, just no tools for making it a reality.

“I’m moving here!” Jesse informed me. It was our second day in the city. “Caleb and I are getting an apartment here!”

I smiled. “You go son!” I thought to myself, “I hope he doesn’t move here before he finishes high school, but I’ll not be the one to say no.” Jesse fell in love with the city like I did. He loved the geography–the hills, the bay, the ocean, and, crossing Golden Gate Bridge, he loved the redwoods of Muir Woods. He loved the clash of cultures–Chinatown, Castro, Japantown, downtown. He loved riding the Muni (the municipal transit system) and walking, walking, walking. He could walk to Mr. Bazouzi’s market for a Snapple. He could walk to the Cali Foods for sushi or Krispy Kreme doughnuts. He could walk to bookstores, the post office, anywhere! He did not seem to miss AIMing his friends, or internet gaming or being home with any of the enticements our ordinary life held. He understood completely, he would be immersed for a short time in something far grander than anything found in Kansas. He soaked it all in.

Jesse watched young professionals push through the ground-floor doors of tall office buildings holding their Starbucks. He watched gay couples window shopping and holding hands. He watched young families riding the Muni with strollers and diaper bags and babies in backpacks. Their tattoos as ornamental as their homes, he watched San Franciscans with beautiful body art unlock the gingerbread doors to their Victorian houses and disappear inside. He watched old people pushing their filled market carts up hill to their apartments. He saw kids just like himself negotiating the city by riding the Muni, able to go absolutely anywhere for 35 cents. “That would be so cool if me and my friends could just go anywhere we wanted,” he said once he figured out the freedom a public transit system offers to pre-driving-age teens.

In Castro, the gay district, on the main floor of a beautiful old Victorian, we stayed with Peter. Peter Peter Pumpkin eater. “Why didn’t you marry Peter, mom?” Why indeed I think to myself. We never dated. But with Peter as the editor and myself as the art director of our college yearbook, Peter and I were married once.

“What are you doing with the rest of your life?” I’d asked him after being told he was the only possible hope for a decent yearbook editor. It was a loaded question and his response was not direct, he did however take the job. Now we’re married for life. Never mind that Peter got really mad about something-or-other and didn’t talk to me for most of our tenure, we put out a nice yearbook. He got over it, and when he started talking Peter told me he’d be one of the best friends I’d ever have. Twenty years later, it was time to test that friendship.

After college Peter moved back to San Francisco where his family has lived for at least three generations. He teaches at San Francisco State University. Jesse and I were going to visit between the end of summer school and the start of classes in the fall. We both started saving money and planning this “eighth-grade trip.”

Peter did not disappoint me. He was the San Francisco host to beat all hosts. Always a little awkward as a Kansan, I found Peter absolutely comfortable in his skin in San Francisco, effortlessly moving about the city whether by bicycle, car, Muni or on foot. We followed Peter’s lead. We ate Udon noodle soup in Japantown and visited Soko Hardware. Along with Ellie, Peter’s perfectly Persian princess fiancé, we followed Peter, market bags over his shoulder, to the Ferry Building Farm and Art Market and watched as he bought fresh basil, artichoke and Portobello mushrooms. From the fish seller he bought skate. Everything was taken home on the Muni and Peter and Ellie prepared a Saturday afternoon feast.

“I like this food,” was all Jesse said. Peter and Ellie could not know how big that statement was. They had not helped me raise this boy from my nursing rolly-pollie baby, through the tofu hot dog stage and then the cheese tortillas into now, sadly, the ham sandwiches and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup phase of his cuisine development. Liking a fresh basil, mozzarella cheese and sourdough-crouton salad was huge! Incomprehensible just 2,000 packages of ramen noodles ago.

Chef Peter and sous chef Ellie seem to be perfect partners as far as a pumpkin-eater and a Persian princess go. Peter and Ellie are engaged. She wears his grandmother’s diamond and plainly, they seem perfectly suited to each other. Peter is nervous. She is not. She wants to scream an engagement announcement from the rooftops. He does not. Peter is 45 and his parents divorced long ago. Ellie is 30 and her parents did not. And I look at Ellie with her big dark eyes and her beautiful Buddha lips with the dramatic kiss on them and I think, marry her Peter! Oh my God, what are you waiting for? I’d marry her in a heartbeat. It would be my first homosexual marriage, but what the hell. She is darling. She is full of life.

“Peter!” I say, “She is darling. She is wonderful. Embrace her energy. Embrace her optimism. Believe me, you cannot buy what she is offering. Peter, her energy is contagious! I am around 50-year-olds all the time and they are tired. They are slow. Their knees hurt. Their backs hurt. They’d rather stay home. Oh my God, I love her to death.”

Peter is so Peter as he answers with his understated, “I know.”

Traveling to see someone also means leaving people behind. Serendipity. Jesse, Ellie, Peter, his dad, Bruce and I went sailing on the bay with Peter's student, Nyri, and the Bay Area Disabled Sailors. From her wheelchair Nyri sailed with a joystick instead of standing at the wheel. Jess and I left our own ticket into the disabled world in Kansas. It is bittersweet to travel without Tanner, a child who fills a room faster than any politician, any celebrity, any athlete. And although his Down syndrome opens many doors, it too easily takes over the show. Ten days of enough quiet to really be with Jesse was really my gift from this trip. Suddenly, under my very nose, my unsure little boy had become a capable, confident, helpful young man. He walked to the corner store for polenta. He carried on intelligent conversations. And he was a window back in time, when I, just four years older than he is now, moved to San Francisco and negotiated this city.

We walked across Golden Gate Bridge and Jesse spit off the side, and spit and spit until Peter could take it no more and slipped into science-teacher mode, lecturing on the delicate balance of the bay ecosystem. Delicate as it may be, that spittle looked awfully insignificant as it broke apart on the way down. We walked through Muir Woods, climbing inside big hollowed out trees and Peter showed off with the names of all the lichen.

We spent a day in Golden Gate Park, the park William Hammond Hall carved out of shifting sand dunes after the landscape architect responsible for the design of New York’s Central Park said it couldn’t be done. We walked through the park’s “Crystal Palace,” a Victorian masterpiece in glass, still home to its first 1879-resident plants, wide-eyed at both the architecture of this gingerbread greenhouse and the giant lily pads, banana trees, orchids and Venus fly traps.

And finally Peter took us to the ocean, the ocean, the ocean. The ocean at ocean beach, where Golden Gate Park ends and the rest of the world begins. Peter, Ellie and Jesse sucked down root-beer floats before we ran across the highway to the beach. Jesse laughed and ran and played in the waves with the abandon of a kindergartener. We saw seals’ heads bobbing way out, past the waves and Jesse couldn’t resist splashing into the freezing cold water, too. The kid in Ellie could not resist either, and finally I, too, so seldom able to stand at the edge of the Pacific, had to get in. But it was Jesse who got his feet wet, then his legs and finally his jeans and sweatshirt until he was soaking wet, laced with sand and laughing.

And suddenly it didn’t matter how cool he tries to look, how perfect his hair, how hip his clothes, how trendy his shoes. Jesse lost himself in the ocean and laughed and splashed and played like a toddler, although even as a toddler Jesse didn’t lose himself often.

And in the quiet space, away from Tanner and the phone and the dog and the oil-sucking Land Cruiser and all the thirsty flowers, it was absolutely lovely to watch Jesse. He was transformed before my very eyes, from a Kansas boy, a tourist, taking photos of all the rainbow flags, in a land where everything was shocking to him, to nothing shocking him. Two men kissing? No problem. My little boy, whose middle name is Kansas, has grown up in the city by the bay and become steeped in its charms and wise to its ways.

Leaving the Monterey Bay Aquarium with it's waltzing jelly fish and circling bat rays, we're traveling north up Highway 101, following the dips and turns of the Pacific coastline from Monterey to San Francisco. Peter is driving with Ellie riding shotgun. Jesse and I are in back. When his eyes can look no more, when his head and his heart are completely full of ocean and California, Jesse lays his head in my lap and falls asleep. His long blonde hair spills everywhere and he sleeps heavily like a baby. I can’t think of the last time Jesse fell asleep on me. We used to nap together every day. I nursed him to sleep sitting in the rocker in his room and the two of us sat there all afternoon because I couldn’t bear to put him down. I couldn’t think of anything more important or more fun than holding my fat sweaty baby boy and smelling his sweet breath.

In this moment, I am absolutely steeped in my love for Jesse, for Peter and Ellie, and for California. I am thankful for my adventurous life which has taken its share of dips and turns, following the melody in my heart. Riding along in the backseat with Jesse asleep in my lap, I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I held Jesse as he slept, but I drank in every minute, I soaked up every breath, I closed my eyes and tried to engrave this drive, this feeling in my mind forever. Because I knew this would be the last time I would ever have my sweet boy fall asleep in my lap.

In a trip to San Francisco, I have given Jesse, my 14-year-old son, my first baby, my love, the very wings he will use to fly away from me. Go sweet boy with your eyes full of wonder.

ice storm.

2006-01-17T11:44:00.000-08:00

january, 2005
Remember our city one year ago?

My city is rise-and-shining today, getting dressed and coming out after a day in pajamas, a day of grey skies, a day of sub-zero cold, a day-after an ice storm.

Me, too. I left my cozy warm home with the Christmas tree still up, full of cousins, little boys whose power was out, older boys who played poker all night and were eating ice cream for breakfast.

“Jesse, grab your camera and get outside. Today is the day for pictures! The sun is out and hitting all the ice.” Today is the day, right now is the time, when the sun is low and the city’s still sleepy and the ice still covers every leaf and twig in thick clear gobs. My 14-year-old, the as-of-Christmas new owner of the only digital camera in the house, promises he will. He is in boxers and eyeing his electric guitar while cousins play War Craft on his PC and Time Splitters on his PlayStation II.

I grab a few shots of Tanner squinting, with all the ice in his background–good ice and bad ice. Good ice, prettily coating our pins-and-arrows wrought iron fence. Bad ice bending the neighbor’s clump river birches into arches that sweep the ground. Good ice coating each sycamore ball until it’s fit for the Christmas tree. Bad ice that weighted the old heavy limbs of our ancient elm until they could take it no more and gave up, hitting our front yard with a thud that sounded like death.

Late last night on a moonlit walk I stood by another huge elm on the river, a grand old dame at a ball with her best jewelry on, arms outstretched as if to dance down the frozen grand staircase to the river’s edge. Like ocean-bottom trips to the Titanic reveal, she was dripping with ice barnacles, majestic in the dark, and freezing, cold.

With a horrible cracking, not quite like thunder, one of her limbs, as big as her trunk, fell to the earth. The ground shook and I could feel what death would be like for me, cold and alone at my finest hour, dressed up and marvelous, but sudden and final. Another loud crack and another big piece of her hit the ground obliterating the redbud seedling that had taken comfort under her shade the last three summers. The ground was littered with pieces of her and I knew this would be the end of her, no matter what was left standing.

This morning I see all the trees have suffered amputations. Tanner and I take a few pictures and jump in the car. Fallen trees in the park force a detour and we can’t drive past the pond we check daily. Turning around before the “Giant’s Bathtub” takes us down a new path, which brings new discoveries. The trees on Forest Street make an ice-crystal canopy. “Tunnel!” Tanner shouts and we drive through it toward the river. Icicles hang so perfectly from the 11th Street Bridge they look like part of the fancy ironwork railing, perfectly spaced, not one is missing.

Tanner starts pointing and laughing at all the trees that are down. “It’s not funny,” I think to myself. But it is. The world is upside down. Treetops tickle the ground and Tanner’s funny bone. Laughing. Pointing. Laughing. He jumps out at Grandma’s house, into his Dad’s arms with snow boots and a frozen hot dog in his backpack, his Brother Bear movie tucked under one arm and a deck of Santa Claus cards in his back jean pocket. “Goodbye! I love you!” I shout after him.

I drive on. On through my old Riverside neighborhood. I feel God all around me. God through Mother Nature saying, “I’m here. I’m all around you. I am big, but you’re ok. Don’t worry.” I drive until I can take it no more and jump out at the river to snap some pictures. All I have is the camera in the bottom of my purse, and one roll of film. River. Trees. Limbs. Leaves. Twigs. Electric lines. Street signs. Wide angles. Tight detail. And then, on a fence on Back Bay Boulevard I’m out. My film is gone and I’m late to work. I think of Jesse’s digital camera with back-up memory card and hope he’s out shooting.

I drive on. My heart breaks for every shot I cannot take. My heart aches for every shot I see but cannot shoot. Who will take them? Not I. Downtown, thick, clear ice coats the gold crosses atop the Cathedral’s domes. Both the crosses and domes catch the morning sun and sparkle. A million icicles hang from the old tractor parked outside the antique mall. Sparkly chains hold two bicycles to a pole outside the thrift store. And I drive to work thankful for the days I had when I could stop and shoot every picture. And I drive on, with a reconciled heart–hoping the Christmas-present camera won out over the electric guitar–hoping I’ve passed my photographer’s baton, but not knowing.

buried treasure.

2005-12-31T11:25:00.000-08:00

I post the following story, written in early 2005, in memory of

Orville Lee Stucker, Jan. 14, 1915-Dec. 22, 2005.

DeeDee has crooked fingers and blue eyeliner. She’s glad capris are back and wears them even in the winter. DeeDee is a vegetarian, but she eats NuWay hamburgers because she grew up on them. DeeDee has lived in Wichita all her life and knows a lot about the city’s history. Last week DeeDee threw Orville’s 90th birthday party. He couldn’t believe 27 people came. Neither could she.

DeeDee and Orville dated for 20 years before they got married. She knew he was no prize. His ex-wife used to rent a little apartment from them in the back. He went out there and talked to her every morning while she sat on the toilet, taking care of business. DeeDee thought it was odd but she didn’t stop him. She didn’t care.

“When Orville and I started going out, he lived in those new apartments up on Taft,” DeeDee starts telling a story about Orville. “Everywhere he went he took a tackle box. I didn’t think too much about it, you know. But we went over to that apartment one time and it was cold and icy out, it was just terrible out, and here he came with this tackle box. Well of course I began to wonder what was really in that tackle box. It had become obvious that it wasn’t fishing gear, so one time when I was alone with it I opened it up. It was full of those little metal tubes that Caron perfume used to come in. Remember that Nancy?” DeeDee asks her sister. “Remember how you’d slip the vial of perfume out of those tubes? Well I couldn’t imagine why Orville would be carrying around perfume so I opened one up and he had it absolutely packed solid, tight, tight, tight with rolled up folding money! He never used a bank. One day I just said, ‘Orville, why don’t you put your money in the bank?’ He was so tight with his money, he’d never had a checking account until I told him to go get one.

“I bought him a card for his 90th birthday and I brought it home and I said, ‘Orville, let me see your wallet.’ I wanted to give him $50 for his birthday. He’d had a $50 bill in there earlier in the week, but I’d forgotten, I had it changed into a 10 and two 20s. I was afraid he’d spend that 50 thinking it was a 20. He doesn’t see so good. So anyway, I got three 20s out of his wallet and Tammy made him his favorite cake.”

“Orville!” my sister Tammy says loudly, “Orville! What did DeeDee give you for your birthday?” Orville doesn’t hear so well either. He just smiled at her without answering. Orville is a drinker. Tonight he looks plastered. His pale blue eyes are red and watery. He stands in the kitchen, leaning on his cane and thinks for a minute.

My sister Tammy lives next door to Orville and DeeDee. Her house is too small for her family, but she can’t move because she loves DeeDee. She is a grandmother for Tammy’s kids and a mother for Tammy. My other sister and I are jealous. Our kids don’t have grandmothers and we don’t have second-chance moms like Tammy has DeeDee.

Tammy and DeeDee have keys to each other’s houses and know everything about each other’s lives and families and fears. DeeDee never had kids. My sister and her kids are a blessing in DeeDee’s life. She will go over while Tammy’s at work and throw her washed clothes in the dryer, or do her dishes or start her dinner.

Orville is still standing there thinking about that birthday present, kind of wavering on his cane. Just before he came up into the kitchen Tammy had topped off his gallon of scotch whiskey with tap water. He keeps it in the upstairs refrigerator and just tips it up and drinks it like water. Diluting it can’t be a bad thing. DeeDee says he is pickling himself. He looks pickled right now.

The upstairs refrigerator doesn’t have a lot in it. DeeDee and Orville really live in the basement. There is another whole kitchen down there. There is another whole world down there. “During the war Daddy got real sick and couldn’t work. Mother had to do something, so she moved us all to the basement and took in boarders, lady boarders from Missouri and Arkansas who came to Wichita to work in the airplane plants,” Nancy says.

DeeDee and her sister Nancy were born in this house. Nancy is visiting from Michigan. She loves it that DeeDee still lives in their house. It is beautiful. DeeDee’s living room and dining room are painted a pretty sea green. It’s an odd combination with the oak woodwork and dark brick fireplace, but somehow with all of DeeDee’s flow blue china, black baby-grand piano and froufrou antique furniture it is perfect. Everything in DeeDee’s house has a story. DeeDee’s house is a story.

“A neighbor came over and rigged up a little two-burner gas stove down there to cook on,” Nancy says of the early beginnings of the basement kitchen. “And Mother was wonderful. She made it like camping. She made it an adventure and we didn’t mind a bit. She had the stairs taken out so she could have the piano moved down there for Daddy and we just lived in the basement!” Work has been done on it since then. There’s an entire kitchen now, an entire house in DeeDee’s basement. It’s just as nice as any upstairs house.

DeeDee still lives in the basement. Her upstairs is an immaculate museum. There are no televisions, no DVD players, no computers or cell phone jacks charging cell phones on the tables. DeeDee’s upstairs is a trip back in time. The tables, cabinets, walls, mantle and even the top of the baby grand are filled with all sorts of interesting objects, most of them antique, all of them with a story.

“Now this is the Staffordshire flow blue cheese server that Jay gave me,” DeeDee says caressing the handle. “I didn’t even know Staffordshire made flow blue, but they did. I have another piece of Staffordshire flow blue, a cookie jar. Jay, Nancy’s husband, gave me that, too. He gives me nice pieces. But the handle was put on just a little crooked. You know, that just drives me crazy! So I sent it down to that fellow in Oklahoma City to sweat the handle off and see if he couldn’t reposition it so the flow blue pattern is on there straight. He called me today and said he’d got it done.”

DeeDee worked at Hewitt’s Antique Store on the Shopkeepers’ Mall side every Tuesday and Saturday for years. She says she has never taken home a paycheck because there is always something she owes on or has on layaway or wants. The empirical evidence is all around us. Good things. Lovely things. She still works an occasional Friday and Saturday when the deceased Mrs. Hewitt’s e-Bay-crazy son wants to take a three-day weekend. He runs the shop now. DeeDee doesn’t seem to care for him much.

“When Grandmother lived next door,” DeeDee says, then she interrupts herself and gives us an aside, “Well, she didn’t always live next door of course. She lived in that house always, but it used to be up by Wonderland Park, the amusement park on the land between the two rivers, up on Second Street. Daddy thought she needed to get out of there but no, no she had lived there with Granddaddy and he had died in that house and she wasn’t leaving it, so my Dad picked up the house and moved it over here next door to us with Grandmother in it. He had it put four feet inside our property so she could yell from her bedroom window and Daddy could hear her as he lay in bed, because of course Mother and Daddy always slept in there,” DeeDee says, giving the only ground-floor bedroom a nod with her head.

“She was a stubborn southerner!” DeeDee says of her grandmother.

“Granddad was an officer in the Union Army stationed in the south during the Civil War,” Nancy says, “and it’s interesting how they met. Our Grandmother was out after curfew getting water and Granddaddy rode up on his horse and told her she couldn’t be out after curfew. She took a broom to him!”

“She hit him with that broom and said, ‘Get off my land! Get off my land!’” DeeDee says. Her voice trails off as if somehow she can remember it happening.

Nancy takes the story over again and says, “And he told her, ‘When this war is over, I’m going to come back and meet you,’ and he did! I still have the ladder-back chair he put in the wagon so she could rest her back when he came and married her and took her away.”

“Orville!” my sister says again. “What did DeeDee give you for your birthday?” He continues to think. Orville was a carpenter. Maybe he’s the reason DeeDee’s home, the Hanna home on North Vine, still feels solid, cared for, well-kept. The candles on Orville’s birthday cake were little carpenter’s tools.

DeeDee laughs. “You know, I signed his card ‘Mildred,’” she says. “When Orville and I first met he used to call me Shotgun when we delivered trucks for Simon up on East Kellogg because I rode shotgun. But then we had a friend who always called me Mildred, so I signed the card Mildred. He was looking at his cards after the party and brought that one into me and said, ‘Look at this card. I don’t know any Mildred. Do I know a Mildred?’ He has completely forgotten.” DeeDee sounds disappointed.

“Orville! What did Virginia give you for your birthday?” my sister asks one more time. Virginia is DeeDee’s real name.

“God Almighty, I’ve forgotten.” Orville looks over at DeeDee, sheepish and shy with a look that says, “What did you give me?” He momentarily takes his weight off his cane and starts checking his pockets as if to find the answer.

“Orville!” DeeDee says sharply, disgusted that he can’t remember, “I gave you $60!”

pubic hair.

2005-12-15T00:16:00.000-08:00

The following story won second place in the 2005 Kansas Writers' Association, creative non-fiction category. Awards were passed out last Sunday. It was billed as a "holiday party and awards banquet." As winners' names were called, each went up on stage to receive their award and the name of their piece was read to the audience. Everyone had very nice names for their award-winning poetry and prose, "The Calling," "How I Met My Husband," etc., nice, tame little titles. I'm sure you can imagine how proud I was as my name was called, "Madeline McCullough, for Pubic Hair." OK, leave it to me to have the raciest title in the bunch.

Well, this was written last year, when Tanner was still in grade school, fully included in a regular education classroom. Now he is not only in middle school, but because we lost our $500,000 law suit against USD 259 (fighting for Tanner's rights to be included in a classroom with general education students) Tanner is for the first time in his life in a "MR Categorical" classroom, which means very secluded from the "typically developing" students at Robinson Middle School - you know the ones - the ones from whom he could learn appropriate behaviors and who could model for him what it is to read, write and do arithmetic.

There will no doubt be stories about this secluded placement in our future, but let me plant a seed here by reminding anyone reading this that "special education" is not a geographical setting, it is the services needed that support a child to learn and grow. Somehow Unified School District 259 has not caught on to this yet.

pubic hair.

I do not remember how my own pubic hair grew in. I remember not having it, then, one day having it. Tanner is getting pubic hair. So far he has two. They are long, straight and fine, very light brown and very unpubic-like. They’ve brought me to a day of reckoning I always new would come.

Tanner is my 12-year-old with Down syndrome. He is my youngest, so I think will forever be my baby. He was born 12 years ago and when diagnosed with Down syndrome I was sure God had given him to me by mistake. It was, as far as I’d heard, God’s first mistake. I had not ordered a child with Down syndrome. I had not been specific about if I wanted a boy or a girl. All I had ever prayed for was smart. I have come to realize that smart is highly overrated.

With a 13-month-old baby sleeping in his crib across the hall, Tanner was not the younger sibling I imagined we were making the night I got pregnant. He is a challenging brother. He is demanding. He requires patience. But he is also altogether wonderful. Quite simply, Tanner is the most happy, loving, accepting person I know. He is unconditionally nurturing and always speaks his mind. I think this makes him as enlightened as the Dali Lama, he’s just not as polite or well read.

Tanner has the heart, spirit and mind of a much younger child. He is small. He still wears size eight jeans. But he is not shy. He does not discriminate yet who to hug, who to kiss. Male and female friends alike, kids his age or adults might get a nice big wet kiss at a moment’s notice, and a, “sweetheart, how you doin’ today?” Tanner is not embarrassed. He is not embarrassed to get excited, jump up and down or shout, “yahoo!” over a snack, a ride in the car, a phone call or a movie. Tanner embraces life’s simple pleasures with gusto. “Good point!” he says with an exaggerated thumbs-up sign about almost anything at all.

He sees no limits for himself. Tanner recklessly plays basketball challenging any adult, any of his brother’s friends, anyone. He’d take on Michael Jordan if he came by the house. “Two points! Score! Home run!” he shouts. Tanner is a natural athlete.

My Tanner loves routines. He loves to be part of a family. “Well, hello my dear! How was your day?” is his standard greeting for us every night when we get home from work and after-school activities. Tanner greets me at the back door, takes my purse and hangs it on my desk chair and asks me about my day and tells me about his. He is a perfect June-Cleaver-style ‘50s housewife. “Come in! Come in! So, how was your day?” he asks.

“Pretty good,” I always say. “How about you?”

It is always the same report, “Oh, pretty good. Went to library.”

“Oh! You went to the library today? Did you check out a book?” He always reports that he did, but I’ve never seen any library books in his backpack. Then he tells me he went to art and made a cat. By now the art teacher must have a thousand cats in his art folder. I have never seen any.

Then he reports, “No hits!” and I tell him how wonderful he is that he didn’t hit anyone today. Tanner is the most loving person I have ever met, so it makes no sense that every once in a while he just hauls off and hits someone at school. He gets Smarties in his lunch every day that he doesn’t hit. Some days that is motivation enough. Sometimes he just clobbers the heck out of some unsuspecting grade-school kid. Those days his account of the day is, “No Smarties. I hit.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird,” his brother asks, “that Tanner’s favorite candy is Smarties?”

“Better than DumDums,” I always say. It is our family joke.

There are days Tanner is the reason I get out of bed. I love how he wakes up every morning. He is pouty and darling, like very young children are in the morning. His grogginess is still baby-like. He doesn’t have bad breath. He smells sweet and sleepy. Tanner likes to start every morning “warming up” on the sofa, no matter the weather. He climbs into my bed about five in the morning, so we’ve already been snuggling when the alarm goes off, but he likes to wake up, go to the bathroom, then sit on the sofa for a minute and “warm up.”

“Come here my sweetheart!” he says and stretches his arms out to hold me. I fall into his chest and after some hugging and patting he’ll take my face in his little, fat hands, kiss me and say, “So, go to Emerson today?” Emerson is his school and we then have to talk about what is happening that day and transition from warming up on the sofa to real life. If I rush it, he cries, or starts all over with another, “Come here sweetheart, warm up!” and I cannot resist falling into his chest and starting all over. “Oh, honey,” he says and rubs my head.

When the time is right I’ll ask, “How about some McDonald’s?” referring not to fast food, but to the Michael McDonald, “Mowtown” CD we listen to each and every morning.

“Lil’ bit harder!” he demands referring to the volume, no matter how loud it starts up.

“Mmm I bet you wonder how I knew,
‘Bout your plans to make me blue,
Some other guy you knew before,
Between two of us guys you know I love you more.”

By now Michael McDonald, Tanner Wilson and the spirit of Marvin Gaye fill the living room.

“It took me by surprise I must say,
When I found out yesterday,
Don’t you know, I heard it through the grapevine…”

Tanner gets dressed in the living room, listening to Michael McDonald and in general monitoring the house. “Want out McGuire?” he asks the dog. McGuire sleeps in his brother’s room, under the bed. “Jesse! You up?” Tanner yells down the hall.

I lay out Tanner’s clothes in the living room. Underwear, then jeans followed by socks and shoes on the floor. He sits at the top of the line-up and puts them on in order. It works. Undershirt and shirt on the sofa, face down, wait for him to slip on. If everything is in order, Tanner can dress himself. Special attention must be paid to that underwear. It is so easy to get both feet in one hole and that gets things all balled up. “God dog it! Fine! No underwear! No Emerson!” he shouts, mad as heck, and throws his underwear at me if things get hosed.

Then I have to ask, “Need help? Just tell me if you need help.”

All risk aside, I make breakfast and pack lunches, drink tea and leave Tanner to dress “all by himself.” Still, I love that I can look into the living room to make sure he is dressing. It’s so easy for him to get distracted by toys or dancing or the dog. I wonder how mothers with great big houses do it. What if I couldn’t see the living room from the kitchen? What if the bathroom were not just six steps away?

Underwear up, some days I get a little dance show a la Tom Cruise in “Risky Business,” with a lot of good hands-above-your-head, underwear-only bootie shakin’ before he sits down to his jeans. Tanner is a very good dancer for a white guy, let alone one with Down syndrome. I think the teenage girls at his summer program must have taught him some special bootie-shakin’ moves.

It is a big deal in the developmentally delayed world to be an “independent dresser.” We make accommodations to support this independence. Tanner’s shirts are pull-ons, no buttons. His jeans are elastic-waist Gap. I suspect he does not snap and unsnap his jeans during the day, but just tugs real hard to get them up and down. His shoes don’t tie, they zip. Still, it’s so tricky getting them on the right feet. Do the math. He only has a 50 percent chance of the correct shoe getting on the appropriate foot.

“So, how do I look?” he asks every morning, standing in the kitchen now, dressed, arms out and twirling so I can see how he looks front and back. Even when his shoes are on the wrong feet, even when his jeans are unsnapped, he looks fabulous.

“You look wonderful!” I tell him every day, because no matter what, he does.

Last night, helping Tanner dry off after his bath, I noticed two fine little pubic hairs. They caught the light just right. I don’t think it will be too darling to have a man with pubic hair getting dressed in the living room. I don’t think it will feel so natural to help a guy with pubic hair snap and zip his jeans. I don’t think I’ll be able to tell myself, “lots of people his age need help getting their shoes on the right feet,” when he has pubic hair.

A child with developmental delays is still a child and all children need our help. “Delayed” or not, that’s what moms do. They help children. But my baby, my child is getting pubic hair. His body, is forcing me to think about how long he’ll need my help.

When speaking of a child with retardation one says the child is, “developmentally delayed,” as if something good might develop later. In adults it’s called a “developmental disability.” My child is just developmentally delayed, but two little pubic hairs are demanding that I accept my adult son will always have a developmental disability.

parent/teacher conferences.

2005-12-06T23:46:00.000-08:00

He’s quick. He learns quickly. He’s bright. He’s smart. He’s sharp. He’s so creative. He does so well with so little effort.

He doesn’t pay attention. He’s missing assignments. He doesn’t listen to instructions. He doesn’t hand things in. He’s late. He doesn’t seem interested.

He doesn’t listen to instructions, but he’s so quick he can usually guess what to do anyway. Although he doesn’t listen he’s bright enough to understand what I’m looking for. Although he has procrastinated all year, once he got started he caught up quickly.

I am not reaching your child.

Parent/teacher conferences are one of those things you just don’t think about when you’re planning a family. Parent/teacher conferences are an absolute unknown as you hold a new baby in your arms. There is no way in the midst of wiping bottoms, or helping your child learn to drink from a cup or reminding them to keep their pants dry that you could foresee the pain of a middle-school parent/teacher conference.

My son, who got As and Bs in grade school, started a slow steady slide toward Bs and Cs in 6th grade. Closing in on the end of a spotty middle school career, my son’s 8th grade, second nine week’s progress report sported two Fs, two Ds, two Bs and one A. “It’s just a progress report Mom. Chill,” he said.

My sweet little blonde, brown-eyed boy, having thrown out all his clothes with color, stands in the hall in front of his locker wearing all black, unkempt hair hanging in his eyes telling me to chill.

I stood in these halls. I probably had this locker! I know better than to get mad or yell. I know better than to overreact. But my heart feels like it’s been cut in half and laid open for him to spit in.

I don’t want him to get as lost as I got. I want him to embrace school, embrace life, find hobbies, play golf, act in plays, play in bands, pick up his guitar any time, day or night. I want him to realize that even though it’s only 8th grade, it’s the beginning of everything. “Chill,” was not the response to this progress report that I was hoping for.

In middle school I was fairly engaged. I was in pep club, I was a student leader in gym. I had a reputation for being good at art. By high school I’d decided all sports and all school activities were pathetically boring. I wasn’t in art club, the environmental club or any other club. I never went to a high school football game. I didn’t participate in any sports. I was bored and boring. I was apathetic. I was too cool for school. I don’t want that to happen to Jesse.

“Why do you think the nurse is here during conferences?” Jesse asked incredulously as we were leaving school.

“To help mothers having coronaries,” I explained.

aunt betty.

2005-11-26T10:38:00.000-08:00

Maybe everyone has an Aunt Betty. I do. My mother’s younger sister did everything right, everything that my mother did not. Aunt Betty didn’t just marry for love. She married a man who made “good money.” Life didn’t seem to just happen to Aunt Betty. She had a plan, charted her course and sailed her ship. My mother did not. “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man,” my grandmother always said when comparing and contrasting my mother’s life with my aunt’s.

Well, as a matter of fact, no–it isn’t “just as easy” because it’s not just as easy to even meet rich men, even if I did subscribe to that philosophy. We didn’t belong to a country club; my father didn’t play polo. My mother wasn’t a golfer; she didn’t belong to the Junior League. Where in the hell was I going meet rich men, let alone marry one? Not to mention, I still had my baby teeth when I started hearing this advice.

As a car salesman, Kent’s dad seemed to make more money than most dads in our neighborhood. Then we heard he went to jail for fencing diamonds. How’s it go? If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning. I guess Kent’s dad was a horrible warning. I was friends with Dr. Osaba’s kids and Dr. Kaelson’s. They had money. But their dads were never around and when they were, they didn’t bring eligible young doctors home for their kids’ friends to meet.

The men I had to watch and study, the role models available to me were teachers, appliance salesmen, aircraft workers, firemen, ministers and realtors. Coach Levi wielded a certain amount of power among the boys at Hadley Junior High. But I babysat his daughters, I’d snooped in his refrigerator, I’d had to fiddle with his TV. I knew he wasn’t rich. My own father was a radio announcer turned television broadcaster. He worked for the local ABC and then CBS affiliates and honest to God, I thought of him as a television star, but I knew we were not rich. If a TV star can’t be rich, who can?

My grandmother always seemed to imply that the only difference between my mom and Aunt Betty was Uncle Jim and his paycheck. But Aunt Betty was different long before Uncle Jim arrived on the scene. Fresh out of college, Aunt Betty went in halves with my grandparents on the Chatty Cathy I got for Christmas when I was 5 years old. Even at that age I found it extraordinary that Aunt Betty could afford to give gifts on the same level as my grandparents. They were grandparents, she my mom’s little sister just out of college. Chatty Cathy told me, Aunt Betty was going places.

I don’t remember Aunt Betty the sorority girl in college. From my earliest memory of her, Aunt Betty was an airline stewardess. I’m sorry, but in the 1960s, you really couldn’t have hoped for a more glamorous job in this world for your only aunt than for her to be an airline stewardess. It wasn’t just what she did. It was who she was. She flew for United, and was based in Seattle. This was before flight attendants. Back in the day, all the stewardesses were women–pretty, unmarried women, who could meet the height and weight restrictions that kept flying the friendly skies so friendly.

Later, having left my Chatty Cathy behind for Barbie, I realized Aunt Betty’s exciting life was the stuff of which Barbie-clothing storylines were made. Barbie, an airline stewardess, lives in Seattle. Her boyfriend, Ken, is an airline pilot with his co-pilot and best buddy, Alan. Barbie’s best friend, Midge, is a stewardess, too! Barbie and Midge share an apartment. This storyline follows the outfit splayed out under hard plastic that includes a navy blue, United Airline stewardess suit with straight skirt and matching garrison cap; a white button-up shirt (OK, the tiny little white buttons were fake. It really snapped in the back.); black heels, because poor Barbie, her feet demanded that she always, always wore heels; a suitcase and make-up-cube case; and a tray with teeny tiny drink, silverware and plastic dinner on it. Barbie liked to buy discounted airline tickets for her little sister, Skipper. In this scenario I would try to identify with Barbie, but in reality I was Skipper wishing I could go see the Space Needle.

Beyond Skipper, I don’t remember Barbie having much family, just her friend Midge. Aunt Betty had an older sister. My mom, Kiki Bock, was Betty Bock’s older sister by five years and her only sibling. Throughout their life Kiki and Betty looked enough alike with their blonde hair, blue eyes and Mick Jagger mouths to obviously be sisters, but Aunt Betty was taller than my mother, thinner than my mother and of course younger than my mother. Like a beautiful salad arranged on a plate with the croutons set just so, Aunt Betty presented well. She was the first person I’d ever known to wear contact lenses. Among the many things that set her apart from my mom was this terribly chic job flying for United. It afforded her nice clothes and opportunities for travel. Eventually we would see that being an airline stewardess was also the avenue that would lead to Aunt Betty’s well thought-out, well-planned life.

No falling in love with the male lead in a college play and telling the girls back stage that she would marry him someday before she knew much more about him than his name. No quitting college after two years, having the biggest wedding Hastings, Nebraska had ever seen and then moving away to live the terribly luxurious life as the working wife of a radio announcer living in a basement apartment in Colby, Kansas with your Lenox china and sterling silver for Aunt Betty! No four kids in seven years crowded into a three bedroom, one bath single story house was on her horizon! All that was my mother’s–we wouldn’t really call it a plan–all that was my mother’s reality.

Aunt Betty, we were told, had an actual plan. The first step in Betty Bock’s plan was a home economics degree from the University of Nebraska. I cannot tell you how hard my sisters and I laughed when we were older, wondering why anyone on the planet would get a degree in “home-ec.” A degree in sewing pillowcases and preparing Welsh rarebit seemed utterly useless to us. We thought my aunt a fool. Nevertheless, according to my grandmother, home economics laid the foundation for the real beginning of Aunt Betty’s plan. And maybe the family fable is true. Maybe she did check airline, first-class-passenger lists until she found her guy. But Uncle Jim didn’t come without his baggage. (No pun intended, but how lovely it works here.) Sharing my own father’s same exact birth day and year, Uncle Jim was 10 years older than Aunt Betty. Uncle Jim was divorced. Uncle Jim already had three kids.

Nevertheless, Uncle Jim and Aunt Betty were married the day before my 10th birthday, Aug. 19, 1965. My mother went to Seattle for their wedding and my birthday was postponed for a week. She left four kids at home. I was the oldest. Karen, our teenage neighbor who was always in rollers, came over to baby sit during the day and my dad took over at night. It was the only time in our entire childhood, the only time in her entire life that my mother went away on a trip and we stayed home. So while I listened to the “Mary Poppins” soundtrack, endlessly on the family stereo in the living room, Aunt Betty and Uncle Jim were married.

The only picture I ever saw of the wedding was of the two of them, about to get in a limousine–her in a trendy, short, above-the-knee wedding dress and him in his tux, smiling, standing under an umbrella in the pouring rain. Her best friend Judy had dyed their wedding rice different pastel colors, mixed it into little net bags and tied it up with the thinnest of satin ribbons. This was long before it was decided that we were blowing up birds’ stomachs with all the wedding rice we were throwing around. But no one could throw the pale pink, yellow, green and blue rice in the rain or it would have ruined Betty’s dress. My grandmother said everyone kept the pretty little net bags as souvenirs. I had one in my jewelry box for decades. It reminded me that even the best well-thought-out plans could be pre-empted by weather. It also inspired me to pay attention to the tiniest of details.

Dovetailing perfectly with the planned parts of her life were the amazing windfalls, like when Uncle Jim was transferred from Seattle to Hawaii by his employer, Westin Hotels. Living on a golf course with a swimming pool in their backyard, I couldn’t believe their luck. As snow drifted across the playground at school and we were forced to go outside, (“Get your coats!”) I thought of my new little cousin, swimming in her very own swimming pool before she was even out of diapers. I imagined Aunt Betty and Uncle Jim with baby Susan, wearing leis around their necks, sitting by their pool sipping tall drinks with umbrellas in them. Lucky ducks.

My grandparents visited Hawaii several times dipping into Aunt Betty and Uncle Jim’s tropical paradise. “The McCulloughs” didn’t even dream of it. I remember a tinge of disappointment mixed in with my excitement when Westin transferred Uncle Jim from Hawaii back to Kansas City of all places, to the Crown Center Hotel, as if I was somehow going to get to Hawaii on my $3-a-week allowance. Or, like my parents, who couldn’t even afford to take us out to dinner, barely missed buying those six round-trip airline tickets to Hawaii.

We saw Aunt Betty and Uncle Jim more once they lived in Kansas City. By now I had two cousins. Even if they were 12 and 13 years younger than I was, visiting Aunt Betty, Uncle Jim and the girls, made me feel good. I felt connected to something bigger than just my family. I needed that. I was beginning to sense that my family had some fatal flaws that being good, doing my homework and eating my vegetables were not going to fix.

Before Day-Timers, before palm pilots, before the internet, Aunt Betty’s ship seemed to run more and more smoothly as our own personal seas became very rough. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The most desperate of diseases put an extra layer of desperation on my mother’s already depressing life–well, depressing in comparison to Aunt Betty’s. By my father’s decision, mom had a surprise mastectomy during “exploratory surgery.” She worked at recovery while my father drank. My mother finally got back to “normal” what ever normal was for us, and my father drank. And my mother quietly grew angry, so angry that she would eventually leave her fairytale I-love-him-so-much marriage, and my father drank.

My father defaulted on the mortgage while my mother didn’t notice and they lost our house. She filed for divorce. He went into treatment, and out of treatment, and into treatment and finally quit drinking. Still my mother wouldn’t take him back. Their divorce was final and she was dating. She’d gotten a fulltime job. She moved into a townhouse and was making a new life for herself. All of this with just one breast. I was embarrassed of her desperation for love and her determination to live, meeting and doing things with people who never knew her when she had two breasts.

A second round of cancer killed my mom eight years later. She died 24 years ago. Next year, she’ll have been dead as much of my life as she was alive. Next year I’ll be her age when she died. I can’t remember much about her and I’m realizing what I do remember is all wrong. I cannot remember her voice. I have no recording of it. She died in 1981, long before home video cameras were common. I remember only what she looked like. I thought my mother was very overweight with very large breasts, especially when there were two of them. This Halloween, as Zsa Zsa Gabor, I put on mom’s hand-beaded, white Christmas shell from 1969. It was tight across the bust line. Do you suppose her stomach wasn’t as big as I remember, too? And her bottom? I used to watch my mom pee and vow never to let my rear end get so big that it completely filled the toilet seat. I still remember what it felt like to have to hold myself up by locking my elbows and bracing my arms on the seat so I wouldn’t drop right into that cold toilet water.

Mostly I don’t remember a single solitary thing my mother ever told me that I believed enough to incorporate into my personal philosophy about living. Her explanation about who to marry was the only one she had for herself, “And then someday, like magic, you’ll just know.” I’ve known three times now. She didn’t tell me about dating or marrying. She didn’t tell me about using my talents or finding a career. She didn’t clue me in on what idiots men could be, or how important girlfriends would be, or how completely I would love my own children. She never told me to follow my passions and hold on to them through all my relationships because in the end that may be all I have. Maybe she didn’t know. My mom was like a child mother, but I desperately wanted her to be more. She was not. Even before she died, I turned to my grandmother for all the information I could get. But having been born in 1899 and trying to advise me on relationships and jobs, then my new marriage, pregnancy, and babies, there was always a bit of a generation gap.

Last time I saw Aunt Betty was 10 years ago at my grandmother’s funeral. Since then my toddlers have grown into bona fide boys. One of her daughters, my cousin Ann, got married and had two kids. I got divorced. Uncle Jim had his leg amputated; I cannot remember why. I remarried, some days I cannot remember why. Uncle Jim died. I did not attend his funeral. But last weekend my sisters and I went to see Aunt Betty–our cousin Susan, her oldest daughter, was getting married.

Surreal is the word to describe the experience. Last time I saw Aunt Betty, she was 10 years older than I am now. Now she’s 70. Aunt Betty doesn’t arrive on the scene with big, tall, handsome Uncle Jim any more. Now Aunt Betty is almost frail and a widow. Aunt Betty walks with a cane. On bad days she uses a walker. Some things are still in place. She still has light, light blonde hair, like my mother’s but it’s cut so much better than my mother’s ever was. She still has my mother’s same blue eyes, my grandfather’s eyes. She still has a wide, always-lipsticked smile and very straight teeth. She still has a great sense of style and great clothes. But, Aunt Betty can’t wear heels any more. I don’t think Aunt Betty plays golf any more. Aunt Betty’s commanding presence at this point seems to be out of others’ respect for her well-established momentum.

And for the first time in the 50 years I’ve known this woman, I finally let Aunt Betty touch my heart. In her, I had to see that I too will become old and fragile. My kids will grow up and leave, my husband will die and I won’t be able to do, or even want to do all the things I love doing now. For 10 years, time had stood still for Aunt Betty; she was still 60 years old in my mind. Just as time has stood still for my mother, she’s been 51 years old for 24 years now. I have often wondered what kind of through-the-looking-glass world I’ll tumble into when I turn 51 and then am older than my own mother.

After plenty of champagne, I sat down by Aunt Betty at Susan’s wedding reception and cried like a baby. Although she was always so different, although I worked hard at distancing myself from her and her perfect life, although I judged her harshly, although making fun of her was my most effective way of not envying her, here was Aunt Betty touching my heart. And for all the ways I wanted to believe my mother had something on Aunt Betty–my mother had a bigger heart, an older soul, a deeper spirit–Aunt Betty has lived a long, well-planned life and at this point is, in her own words, “pretty mellow" and seems enviably wise.

Sitting next to her, I cried because it was so much like being with my mom. And I cried because it was so different. I cried because of all the people on the planet, with as different as she is from my mother, Aunt Betty after all is the closest I will ever come to being with my mom again in this lifetime. After 50 years of seeing how undeniably different Aunt Betty was from my mother, I sat next to her and cried because she is also so undeniably like my mother. I cried because I missed my mom terribly. And I cried because I missed out on being Aunt Betty’s niece and gathering her wisdom by envying her success. And finally, I cried because I think of myself, ironically like Aunt Betty, as taller, thinner, younger and richer than my mother. And now I have found that I am not.

show-and-tell dads.

2005-11-17T12:53:00.000-08:00

My blog entry this week is dedicated with lots of love and admiration to Linda Vrana. In the story that follows I say, “Linda has done her share of working things out.” That does not begin to touch on what Linda has really done. Linda is a world-class champion of hanging in there. Linda has buried a daughter, had her house gutted by fire, buried her sister and on Monday Linda lost her Dad. Always Linda Vrana has come back swinging and eventually emerged triumphantly over life’s cruelest tests and toughest situations. Whether she knows it yet or not, she will this time, too.

It was Linda Vrana’s Dad, Pat Clawson, and his wife, Janet, who were killed in the gas explosion that leveled their home, Nov. 14, in Clearwater, Kan. Although I never met her father, I wrote this story last April after hearing about him. I know for certain he was a total character, a cowboy, a team roper til the day he died and, the paper says, he was the inspiration behind cowboy singer Fred Hargrove’s song, “Patches.”

In my mind, the irrefutable testimony to this man’s character can be found in his daughter, Linda. I see it in the sparkle in her eyes. I see it in the deep laugh lines that crease her temples every time she smiles. I see it in the family that always surrounds her. When Linda’s daughter, Lori Chandler, decides to do something, by God, that woman sets her jaw and gets it done. She is a social worker for the State of Kansas, Social and Rehabilitation Services and so must have the resolve and resiliency of a superhero.

Then there’s Lori’s daughter, Linda’s granddaughter, Brittany. Recently I got to see Pat Clawson’s spunk manifest in his great-granddaughter, Brittany, as she stole the show at the Wichita Eagle Holiday Highlights Fashion Show to benefit CASA and Roots and Wings. While other models trembled down the runway thinking too hard about their high-heeled shoes, Brittany Vrana strode with confidence. Her beaming face showed how much she loved what she was doing.

Pat Clawson surely lives on in many ways, but I see it demonstrated profoundly in Linda Vrana, her daughter Lori and her granddaughter Brittany.

Now, there is only one little hitch in the following story. I wrote it as a true story, and it is a totally true story, except for one thing. After I’d written it and gave it to my husband to read, he told me he never said that Linda brought her Dad for show-and-tell. Well, that put quite a hitch in my get-along because my stories are almost always true and I wasn’t sure what to do with this true-except-for-the-whole-premise story. Finally last week I emailed it to Linda along with a disclaimer. Linda told me she loved the story. I’m not sure why, but I hope it’s because it touches not on something her father actually did, but it speaks to how he impacted people throughout her life.

show-and-tell dads.

“Hang in there girlfriend. You know I'm here if you ever need an ear, or a drink!” I’ve come to Linda for support. The kind you need when you realize your husband is a total jerk.

Linda Vrana was the first girl my husband ever kissed. She had red hair and freckles and in 1956 at Peterson Elementary School on the west side of town, where lickety-split construction met old farm houses, fate threw them into the same kindergarten class.

With her gravelly smoker’s voice and deep laugh lines, Linda has her appeal now. She is comfortable. She is reassuring. She is the salt of the earth sipping a white Russian. I’m sure she was something special at five, but Barney doesn’t give her all the credit alone.

Linda brought her Dad for show-and-tell one week. He was an honest-to-God cowboy and I guess that just about sent Barney to the moon. Her Dad dressed like a cowboy, he talked like a cowboy, he probably even smelled like a cowboy–the musky smell of horses and hay, coffee and cigarettes, and laundry starch reactivated by grown-up man sweat.

“How in the hell could I resist?” Barney answers when I ask him how Linda caught his 5-year-old eye. “Her Dad was a real live cowboy!” These days Barney won’t even listen to country-western music, so it’s a real marvel that a cowboy impressed him, even at 5 years old. It’s easy to forget how powerful a real cowboy’s presence would have been back before cop shows replaced westerns on TV.

I can’t be sure that it was her idea, but I am envious that Linda thought to bring her Dad for show-and-tell. A cowboy Dad was certainly worthy of one week’s show-and-tell turn. Everybody had a Chatty Cathy or a rock from another state. I didn’t know anybody with a cowboy for a Dad.

My Dad was a movie star practically, but I didn’t think to bring him for show-and-tell. I was proud of him, too. I was proud to tell people he did the weather and the sign-off on KAKE TV. I knew it was cool that he knew Henry Harvey, the Santa of “Santa’s Workshop.” I knew it was something special that my Dad went to college with Johnny Carson, but I didn’t think to bring my Dad as a show-and-tell item! Instead I waited for ways to casually bring it up in conversation that my Dad was on TV. It didn’t come up often.

About the coolest thing I ever took for show-and-tell was dead-pheasant parts, and that was my Dad’s idea. It was especially the boys who thought it great when I brought tail feathers and a couple amputated feet from my Dad’s fall hunting trip. All the kindergartners gathered around my table and I showed them how my Dad had taught me to pull a tendon in the clammy limp foot. It made the claw tighten up as if it were going to grab something. The girls hated it and turned away. It was there in Mrs. Torkelson’s kindergarten room that I had my first experience of being the only girl at a boy event. Still, the boys were only half the class. Looking back I wish I would have just brought in my Dad, the movie star, as my show-and-tell like Linda had brought her Dad, the cowboy.

I can see five-year-old Linda in a dress with a petticoat, a lariat around her Dad, dragging him into a kindergarten classroom with black linoleum floors and chairs too little for him to sit on. I see him big and uncomfortable in this citified world of hers, not sure what to do at first. But Linda’s Dad wasn’t a range-riding, cattle-driving cowboy. He was a rodeo cowboy, and he would have warmed up to the crowd and known what to do pretty dang quick. He must have been wonderful, because Barney fell in love with Linda right then and there and he loves her to this day.

“Barney. Barney. Barney. Nobody loves Barney as much as I do,” Linda told me. Feeling my own hardened heart, I believed her. I knew she loved him more than I did. “But he is the most stubborn man I know,” she said. Barney and I were in a fight. I’d gone to Linda as a voice of reason, a voice for him, a voice for working things out.

Linda has done her share of working things out. She and John got married in high school when she got pregnant. Doesn’t every high school class have a couple that gets married because they get pregnant, but somehow they stay together happier than all the people who married later, when it was more sensible, after college, after they were old enough to know what they were doing? Linda and John were Barney’s couple like that at West High.

The Vranas had their girls, Lori and Angie, almost grown when Linda got pregnant with Tyler. People call it a second crop when one of these surprise babies comes along later. But when their daughter, Angie, died in a car accident and John and Linda adopted her baby, Jake, their second crop was complete. First they had two girls. Now they have two boys. With daughters or sons, Linda has always adored her husband John, warts and all. And John and Linda have done a world-class job of “working it out.”

My son has his own Linda Vrana. If the world has ever known love, Kirsten fell in love with Jesse in Stella’s Holtzclaw’s kindergarten class. Kirsten was darling with her shiny, dark brown hair and eyes to match. She watched Jesse’s every move and you could see she just about worshipped him. One day in kindergarten she asked me if she could “come over.” I said yes for her sake mostly, not for him. He didn’t seem to care one way or another.

Kirsten was absolutely silent at our house. She sat on Jesse’s bed and admired him at home, just as she did all day at school. He went about his business of Legos and Pokemon as if she weren’t there. When Kirsten’s Mom came to pick her up she still hadn’t uttered a word, but she was grinning ear to ear. I felt bad that my six-year-old son hadn’t known how to be more engaging and drawn pretty little Kirsten out of her shyness. But she seemed happy enough.

In eighth grade Kirsten still watches Jesse joyously. And Jesse is still oblivious. I don’t know what keeps couples together, but the love I see in Kirsten’s eyes makes me think she could keep a relationship together with Jesse for the rest of her life. I know better. I know he would need to reciprocate and come to love her the way she loves him. Even then, that might not be enough.

“You can love each other lots,” Linda said, talking to me about this most current fight with Barney, “but these darn kids can wreak havoc on even the best marriage. It's hard enough raising your own teenagers, let alone someone else’s.” Linda’s former teenager, Tyler, is 20 and currently living with two women, a ménage a trios. He does not have a plan beyond that. She says, “I’m not sure I did so good on that one!” with a wink and a laugh. At least she has a sense of humor. Linda’s last teenager, Jake, enters East High next year. She doesn’t think of him as someone else’s, a grandson. He is hers.

“When things are crazy at our house, which is most of the time,” she says, “John and I just say to each other, ‘please don't run away and leave me in this mess alone!’ You know we've joked for years that the only reason we're still married after all this time is because long ago we made a pact that whoever left first had to take the kids with them!”

I’m not sure what to threaten Barney with or bribe him with to keep him from running away. My Dad wasn’t a cowboy. And even as a TV personality he’s been gone for 18 years. I don’t know anyone who even goes pheasant hunting anymore, so I cannot pull tendons and hold on to this relationship with an amputated pheasant claw. Barney and I fight and I know there are days he’d gladly leave and take his daughter. Thinking about the Vranas’ pact, I’d never want him to take my boys, so that, whoever-leaves-first plan doesn’t work for us.

Our “working things out,” is a subtle balance, a dance of small, careful steps. Mostly we have to love each other without saying a word, even if the other person is ignoring us and playing with Legos. We’ve been seeing a marriage counselor, but I don’t think there is room in our delicate balance for marriage counseling. Like Linda says, Barney is one of the most stubborn men she knows. What’s the point of going to a counselor with a stubborn man? Even humble men barely prosper from marriage counseling.

In a second marriage, I realize, everything is intensified. We don’t have the luxury of learning about each other, learning about being married and how to be a couple in the world slowly. We’re already waist deep in teenagers, careers and an extended circle of family and friends. I wonder now what it would have been like to marry my high school boyfriend. I wonder if, like the Vranas, I would have learned to “work it out.” I wonder who would have fallen in love with me if I had taken my Dad, the movie star, to kindergarten as my show-and-tell.

front porches.

2005-11-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

I did not experience the peaceful magic of sitting on an old covered porch with wooden rails where the sunshine bounces off the tongue-and-groove floor onto the beaded-wood ceiling, where whether I looked to the left or the right, each house, all the way to the end of the block in both directions, had a porch that lined up with the next porch, until I was grown. As a kid I knew nothing of porch swings, gliders, sitting a spell or catching a breeze.

I am a child of rec’rooms in the basement. I am a child of TV rooms with linoleum floors, fake-leather cowboy furniture, spoke-wheel coffee tables and plastic plants. By high school, everyone I knew had a family room with shag carpet and hanging light fixtures.

When my parents spent time outside they relaxed out back, on the patio, with the fountain gurgling and the martinis slipping down their throats. I didn’t even grow up with a front porch. It was more of a “stoop” as my grandmother called it, a glorified step wide enough to accommodate the storm door as it opened. I am not savvy to the ways of front porches.

Looking down the perfectly lined-up row of 1920s porches on my sister’s block makes me feel connected, part of something, not dissimilar to line dancing or being in a marching band. Lined up like telegraph poles, I realize porches were once a place to gather and dispense information. A bastion of porches standing in rank creates an order and speaks of a time when neighbors faced the world together. I was not of that world.

Now I live in an old house in an old neighborhood across the street from the river. I have an ample front porch. I struggle to enjoy it. I love the idea of a wicker porch swing and a comfortable old rocking chair like my sister’s, but my uncovered front porch is more of a wrought iron affair. The comfort index on wrought iron is just one obstacle to enjoying my porch. Truth be told, I get a little bored–go a little stir crazy out there. So I, along with a zillion other people, bought a chiminea a few years back. Keeping a fire going in my chiminea gave me a purpose for being on my front porch. But my second husband took over as our fire maker and stoked it like he was heating an airplane hanger. Now my chiminea has a fatal crack and I wonder how much longer it will last. I wonder if Mr. I’ll-build-this-fire-so-big-it’ll-catch-the-trees-on-fire will replace it when it completely breaks in two.

I look for other things to do on my porch. After a night of cleaning I tried cooling off on the porch in a long shirt and underwear. It was dark. It was late. It seemed safe enough. To my horror, neighbors out enjoying a moonlight walk, stopped to chat. I was trapped on my wrought iron glider for an eternity, a diamond pattern being embedded into the backs of my thighs. I hid my bare legs under my shirttail and I learned–Always wear clothes on your front porch.

One Sunday I was sitting on my porch when a car pulled up and parked. Living on the river, across the bridge from a city park, I’m used to all kinds of people parking in front of my house. They come for the river. Old black men show up to fish. Teenagers park to drink or smoke or make out. Sometimes a family will even launch a canoe right across from my house. Most people have enough sense to park on the other side of the street, the river side. But one Sunday a car slowed down, pulled up on my side of the street and parked.

An attractive woman with long blonde hair, straight-across bangs and big sunglasses was driving. She got out and walked around the car toward my porch. I worried about what she might want. Hip-hugger bellbottoms covered her long skinny legs and she was wearing one of those gossamer second-generation-hippie shirts and big hoop earrings. She had a Marianne-Faithful-meets-Twiggy-in-2005 look.

“Hi! Hi! Oh hi!” she said nervously walking up my sidewalk. Dear God, she had a voice like Carol Channing! “Hi! I don’t mean to scare you. I bet you think I’m a nut. Hi! I’m Elsa!” She extended her hand. “I’m in from New York visiting my parents and I hope you don’t mind my stopping.”

When Elsa took her sunglasses off she revealed eyelashes that quite possibly held more mascara than any eyelashes I’d ever seen. Great, so she sounded like Carol Channing and had eyelashes to match! She seemed a little older than I first thought. “I just love to drive by this house when I’m in town. And today, well, today I saw you sitting out here and I thought I’d stop. My aunt and uncle built this house. It’s such a pretty little house. My folks live over on Amidon and we used to come over here all the time when we were kids. Are there still lights behind the fireplace?” OK, now she’d proven she really did know the house. Most people don’t know that with a flip of the hidden switch on the mantle, colored lights turn on behind the glass block of the fireplace.

“Would you like to come in?” I heard myself asking. And so Elsa and I walked around my house. I asked her about inexplicable architectural details, like the stairs that go no where and the glass-block fireplace. She told me stories of what she and her little sister and brother used to do, where their hiding places were, how things were different and what was the same.

“Oh! I love how you’ve remodeled the kitchen! Of course it’s small, but it was always such a cute kitchen.” Fourteen years living with peeling-up linoleum squares with thick, yellow wax chipping off the curled-up corners, I’d never considered how the kitchen looked when it was new. Living with the pink Formica® countertops and faux brick wallpaper, I thought I knew better than Elsa about that kitchen’s aptitude for cuteness. I’d always referred to it as the armpit of my home.

“Oh, you redid the bathroom, too? It’s lovely. It’s really all just so, so lovely.” Elsa was an appreciator of detail, a noticer of change and gifted at giving compliments. I was flattered by her appreciation of all the work that had gone into my fixer-upper. I loved showing her around. She arrived a “nut” and left a friend with hugs on the porch, “Thank you, thank you.”

“Oh no! Thank you!” She vowed to keep in touch. Somehow, I knew she would. We emailed, but then we stopped.

Years later I had a photo shoot–the 50th wedding anniversary of a couple at church. James and Annabelle were darling together, so sweet and kind. Their mutual respect and admiration seemed to have grown rather than diminished over the years. Annabelle was politically active and drew quite a crowd of peace-rally marchers, dissenters and protesters of all ages to her anniversary party. I could imagine her carrying an anti-war poster. Music and literature seemed to be James’ passion. The New Orleans-style jazz band he played in attended the anniversary gathering in full force. Old black men sat with their instruments on their laps and their pretty wives in fancy hats sat next to them in folding chairs. They swapped stories about James’ obsessions with Studebaker cars, his slide trombone and Annabelle.

Working the crowd for photos I began to piece together who was connected to the honored couple and how. I met their daughter, Charlotte, who had contracted me for the two-hour job by phone. Charlotte was pleasant, a childhood-friend of a friend’s older sister. She wanted to introduce me to her brother, Jim, his wife, and all their grown children. It’s important to know the key players in a gathering like this. It’s important to get them all in the photographs.

“Let’s go over here and meet my older sister,” Charlotte said. There was a thin blonde with her back to me, standing in a soft pink suit with a short, short skirt. She had great legs and her shoes were runway cool. “Elsa, I want you to meet the photographer, Madeline.” Charlotte could not have been more surprised when Elsa and I hugged and greeted each other like old friends. Suddenly I was doing math wildly in my head, knowing Charlotte was 10 years older than me, and Elsa was older than Charlotte and Charlotte was younger than Jim: 50 + 10 + maybe another 5 or 6, shit, Elsa was like retirement age! With her long hair and great legs, with her skinny little self and her trendy clothes she had totally tricked me. It was a trick I enjoyed and I knew others would not believe her age in the photos I was taking.

Now when Elsa comes to town she always stops for a visit. She’s met my family and knows our routine. She likes coming in the evening and eating ice cream with Tanner. Tanner is firmly entrenched in a nightly ice-cream-eating habit. Elsa caught on to this. The first time she sat down for ice cream with Tanner I served them their little bowls of ice cream and gave them each a spoon.

“Coronation!” Elsa exclaimed gleefully. “Your silver is coronation! What a lovely pattern. I am known as the silver lady of Long Beach. Everyone comes to me for silver, or to find out about their silver. I know it all. Coronation is a lovely, lovely pattern. Coronation is a classic!”

It is Elsa herself who is the classic. She visits and tells me about her life in Long Beach, New York, and the parties she has and the silver she uses. “I have a lovely old home with a large front porch. I just had a fundraiser, a tea on my porch, and invited all my girlfriends. It is so much fun to set a beautiful table out there with all my lovely silver. There is really nothing lovelier than a good front porch.”

I know what she means.