For two years 1979-1981 I worked as a “staffing specialist” at a major hospital in Buffalo. My job was to make sure all of the nursing units had adequate staffing on their unit, and if they didn’t, I had to assign a “float” nurse and/or aide to that unit. Over the two years, I got to know all of the “floats” and most of the nurses, and I loved it. One of the float aides and a couple of the nurses were in the U.S. Army Reserves; I don’t remember whether or not they’d been active soldiers, but their serving as “weekend warriors” added to their income and they had paid leave while doing their annual 2-week active duty training.
The idea became quite attractive to me. Not only was I living on a shoestring, but since my marriage ended I’d worked in a profession in which I met mostly women. I was single, and didn’t have many opportunities to meet men. I also despaired of ever being able to travel, since I had no money. The three things bothering me the most had an answer! The Reserves! I had a soft spot for the Navy, so I called the U.S. Navy Recruiting Center in Buffalo, and they were perplexed at this woman who’d never been in the Armed Forces, but they were willing to talk with me. I had an interview, took a battery of tests, and they gave me numerous forms to fill out. I sent in all the required information and waited…and waited…and waited. Over a year later I called and somehow they’d misplaced everything, but eventually found the file so I didn’t have to do it all over again. I did have to go in and sign papers, and when I did, the Commanding Officer of the Security Group at the Reserve Center saw this young middle-aged woman signing up and became curious. He came over, told the soldier taking my information that I spoke fluent Russian (untrue!) and would be needed in the Security Group. So, once the F.B.I. ran a top secret security check on me, I was sworn in as a Seaman First Class of the U.S. Navy Reserve. I was issued a full set of appropriate uniforms, including combat boots, that arrived in a huge seabag a month or so later. That was in February 1983, and my enlistment was for 6 years.
In summer of 1984, my two-week active duty training sent me to a base in Scotland, where there’s a huge security facility to monitor activity in the North Sea. I was posted, not to the Security Group, but to the Public Affairs Office, where I answered the phone calls of local Scottish dignitaries who had questions about the upcoming Changing of the Guard on the base. And I had a weekend off in Edinburgh, where I attended the famous Edinburgh Tattoo and got most of my Christmas shopping done. So much for “training”.
There was a single man a few years younger than I in my Reserve unit, and we had a very nice relationship for several months, so all but one of my reasons for joining the Navy Reserves was fulfilled. In the early 80’s there were ‘hot spots’ around the world, and my sons at that time were at the right age. Brian had registered as a conscientious objector, but Scott would have been willing to enlist if there had been a need. I figured that if my kids were going to serve their country, I would too.
As it turned out, some time after I began a position with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, I had to work every weekend, and it became difficult to be absent from work even once a month for my weekend drills, so after 2 years of Active Reserve Status, I became part of the Standby Inactive Reserve. No drill, no pay, but if there was ever a general callup of the Armed Forces, I’d become an Active Reservist. I only hoped they wouldn’t expect me to speak Russian! I received my Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1989.
Every year at St. Mark’s on the Sunday before Veteran’s Day, there is a breakfast for all the Veterans. I went two years ago, made creamed chipped beef (S.O.S.), took in a couple of pictures of me in my summer uniform, but felt uneasy and didn’t attend the breakfast last year. Linda, the priest at St. Mark’s, asked me a week or so ago if I planned to bring S.O.S. for the breakfast again. I said no, and I wouldn’t attend. I told her I don’t feel like a veteran, I hardly did anything, I was inactive for 6 years, etc. She said “We need your S.O.S. at the breakfast, so please come.”
I did, and after the breakfast (not only S.O.S., but pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage), Linda’s sermon spoke of a person she’d talked to who didn’t consider himself a veteran because he was never in harm’s way, and she told him what was important. “You showed up.”, she said she told him. That’s all that’s necessary. You showed up, you signed up with the knowledge that you could be required to go where they send you. You showed up.
I am a veteran. I showed up—no matter my selfish reasons at the time. One of them wasn’t so selfish. If there was a problem that my country was involved in, especially if any of my children were involved, I wanted to do my part. So on this day, November 11, I am proud that I did my little bit to serve my country. I showed up.
November 11, 2009
October 29, 2009
Remembering Mom
Sunday, November 1 is All Saints Day, and at St. Mark’s and at all Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and many other Protestant churches, we remember and honor all those who have passed on from this Earthly life. Passed on into what we do not know, but I take comfort in the belief that this life isn’t all there is. I don’t pretend to know what’s coming; I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include St. Peter and pearly gates and angels with harps and halos. But I believe this conscious life is as much a phase as the gestation period we all spent in our mother’s womb.
Today I remember my mother, who died on October 29, 1961, 10 days after my 20th birthday and 24 days before what would have been her 50th birthday.
Beatrice Yardley Spicer Woodward was born November 22, 1911 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the only child of Myrtus Randolph Spicer and Gertrude Brown Dooley Spicer. She attended high school in Brooklyn, the Packer Collegiate Institute, and Mount Holyoke College. My mother was an educated woman in a time when few women attended college. She majored in English Literature and minored in French. One of her college friends had a friend who had a brother, Benjamin Weston Woodward II, and he married my lovely mother and fathered my brother Ben and myself.
I don’t know whether my Mom and Dad had a happy marriage. I assumed so, but then what children experience is their norm until they grow enough to know that each family is different from their own in a variety of ways. My mother was, as many women were in the 50’s, a stay-at-home Mom. She said it was her choice, not my father’s demands or expectations, because she wanted to be there when her children came home from school. And she was. Near the end of first grade, I fell off a seesaw and broke my arm. My seesaw partner was in the down position when the recess bell rang, and she jumped off while I was in the air. The break was not bad, but the nurse called my mother, who didn’t drive. Someone drove me home, and as soon as I saw my mother, I finally cried. The arm didn’t hurt, but I was afraid of what the “sling” was that I was told my arm would be “put in”.
Mom was always there when I got home from school, and I'd jabber away at what happened, who did what, what the teacher said and did. My mother was always there.
Once Mom had viral pneumonia and was in bed for several days. I don’t remember anyone being worried; she was simply sick. Mom had surgery for varicose veins. Mom had all of her teeth pulled a few years later, and they waited until the gums healed before they fitted for dentures. I got so used to the way she looked toothless that when she had the dentures put in, she looked like she had way too much in her mouth! But no matter what, Mom continued to smoke her Kools, at least two packs a day. She coughed, she had bad breath, and I hated that she smoked.
Mom was a voracious reader; my parents belonged to the Book-of-the-Month club, and she read periodicals and newspapers from cover to cover. Mom did the Sunday New York Times Crossword puzzles every week while Sunday dinner was cooking—a roast beef, roast leg of lamb, pot roast, fried chicken. [In those days the Sunday Times puzzles were considerably more difficult than those now. I know, because I am still working my way through a book of 100 NY Times crosswords from years past, when Eugene Maleska and others were the editors. Will Shortz is a good editor, but the puzzles are easier. I can finish them now most every week, but if I’ve completed 5 of the 60 or so I’ve done in the book of 100, I’d be surprised.]
My mother and father were both political junkies, Mom even more than Dad, very right wing Republicans with a visceral hatred (it seemed to me) of Democrats in general and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in particular. Harry Truman fared just as badly, especially when he fired General Douglas MacArthur, who my parents thought sat on the right hand of God. Conversations around the dinner table, especially with dessert and coffee, centered on politics, and voices rose as Dad’s fist pounded the table. There was never any swearing in my familial home, save for “hell” and “damn”, and I heard plenty of those when the grownups discussed Democrats. The conservatism that my parents embraced cannot be compared to today’s conservatism. The religious right might have been conservatives then as well, but the issues were not at all religious in the 50’s and early 60’s.
My mother was home all day but we had a cleaning lady for years. Myrtle would hug me, smelling of furniture polish, when I told her I got an A on my spelling test, and she’d give me a nickel. Mom would eat lunch with Myrtle, but the meal was shared in the kitchen, not the dining room, where we always ate breakfast and dinner, and lunch on the weekends. Myrtle was a Negro. I think my Mom cared a lot for this woman who came weekly and cleaned our house and shared lunch.
Mom did laundry every Monday, and hung clothes on the line and put Dad’s trousers on pant stretchers. She ironed everything, and one of my visual memories is Mom standing at the ironing board, my brother sitting on the stove, and myself sitting on the kitchen table—the three of us talking about all manner of things while Dad puttered in his basement electronics retreat. My brother joined my mother and me maybe only once a week, often on a Saturday night, and both of us were so pleased—almost honored that he deigned to be with us.
Mom participated in, and perhaps chaired, the annual March of Dimes, which at that time was fighting polio. A neighbor on the street had a little boy with polio, and my mother, as many mothers in the late 40’s and early 50’s, had a terrible fear one of her children would contract polio. She was indefatigable in whatever effort she pursued. She joined a group called the Minute Women, and here is a Wikipedia introduction to that subject:
“The Minute Women of the U.S.A. was one of the largest of a number of militant anti-communist women's groups that were active during the 1950s and early 1960s. Such groups, which organized American suburban housewives into anti-communist study groups, political activism and letter-writing campaigns, were a bedrock of support for McCarthyism.
The primary concerns of the Minute Women and other similar groups were the exposure of communist subversion, the defense of constitutional limits, opposition to atheism, socialism and social welfare provisions such as the New Deal; and rejection of internationalism, particularly in the form of the United Nations. They campaigned to expose supposedly Communist individuals, focusing particularly on school and university administrators.”
Yes, this was my mother. She all but worshiped radio commentator Paul Harvey, and had her picture taken with him at a Minute Women convention in Cincinnati the year I was 11. That both my parents were proponents of Joseph McCarthy is a source of anguish for me, but hindsight is 20-20 and for my mother especially, the Communist threat was very real. How many times I’ve wished I’d had the opportunity to discuss politics with her as an adult!
My mother gave me mixed messages about being a woman. She told me that it was more important to educate my brother Ben than to educate me because I would get married and be taken care of. Ben had to be the breadwinner for a family. Yet I knew she greatly valued her education, and I remember her telling me how important it was for a woman to be educated for her children’s sake. I sensed that had she lived, she would have embraced Women’s Lib. After my grandparents, who lived with us for several years, passed away, my mother immersed herself in politics. We lived in a township in Western New York, and she was a committeewoman for the township. It was the equivalent of being on a city council, and she reveled in her new life with an energy we hadn’t seen in several years. Unfortunately, the damage to her physical health had been done.
My grandfather died in late 1954, which was a blow to both my mother and my grandmother. He had not been sick, and he and my mother had always been close. They would sit at the dinner table long after Grammie had retired to her crocheting (not very interested in politics was she), Dad had escaped to his basement retreat, and Ben and I had fled to our rooms for homework or relief from politics. My grandmother went downhill quickly, and by March ’55 was put in a nursing home. Since Mom didn’t drive, she took the bus to the nursing home downtown one day a week, and then on Sunday Dad or Ben or I drove her and picked her up. I believe that dealing with Grammie in the nursing home was the beginning of her long depression. When Ben left in ’57 to attend Cornell, Mom missed him terribly, and her depression deepened. Grammie finally gave up the ghost in late ’58. Mom was finally free! She was 47. Mom had hypertension and still she smoked at least two packs a day. She was thin, and she probably had emphysema. She coughed a lot and didn’t have a lot of physical energy.
Somewhere around my junior year in high school, I began to separate myself from my mother. I stopped telling her every single thing as I had for years. I also felt betrayed by her when I learned she had read a letter from my boyfriend (I had opened and read it and left it downstairs) and later I was awake when she came into my room one night and read part of my diary. The betrayal hurt me deeply. I confronted her with both of these incidents, and she admitted she was curious because I wasn’t talking with her as much as I used to.
I left home in early 1960, having graduated high school and dropped out of college after 3 months. I moved to Ithaca, where my boyfriend and brother were students at Cornell, and found a job at the University. After boyfriend left Cornell (without graduating) due to illness, we got married and lived in Buffalo, so we saw my parents regularly. The four of us played Bridge on into the night at times, and I saw my mother happy to have one child back in the fold. When my husband enlisted in the Army, I went back to my familial home because we couldn’t afford to keep up an apartment without his income. For three weeks in October, my mother and I began the process of finding one another again.
One of the friends I’d worked with in Ithaca was getting married on Saturday, October 28th that year, 1961, and I wanted to go. I came home from work on Friday, planning to pack and leave that evening. But Dad was cooking, not Mom, and he said she was sick and in bed. I found her in bed, smoking, having trouble finding her mouth with the cigarette. I should have been alarmed, but she said the doctor had been there (imagine—a doctor making house calls!) and I wasn’t to worry. But she said she’d appreciate it if I didn’t leave for Ithaca until Saturday morning. I, being a petulant, barely 20 year old, agreed, but wasn’t happy. Saturday when I got up, she wasn’t any better, but she said I should go, have a good time, Dad was there to watch over her.
I had a good stay with dear friends and enjoyed my friend’s wedding. Sunday, just before I left Ithaca at 6 p.m., I called and spoke to Dad, telling him I was leaving and to expect me around 9 or so. I asked after Mom, and he said she was better; she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom.
The drive was uneventful; I had done it several times. What I didn’t expect was that when I turned the corner into my street, there was a large black vehicle in front of my parents’ house. I recognized a hearse as I pulled into the driveway, and the look on my father’s face as I came in the door is one I will never forget. My mother was dead. I turned 20 on October 19th and on the 29th my mother was dead.
The older I get, the more I miss my mother. I miss her in retrospect—when I had my babies, when I was divorced the first time, when I married again, and when I divorced again. I miss her when I have big decisions to make. I miss her when I have so many questions I can’t ask her. What did she think and why about this or that? How could she believe this or that? What did she regret? What was she proud of? What had been her dreams?
Most of all, I recently realized that what I miss most of all is the knowing and feeling all my adult life that my mother loves me and that home is where my mother is. I have felt incomplete (and somewhat abandoned) for so many years. I don’t know how to be a mother to adult children. I do my best, which often isn’t good enough.
Mother, today I honor you, today I miss you so very much, and I credit you with so much of who I am. Thank you, and Mom, continue your peaceful rest. You deserve it.
Today I remember my mother, who died on October 29, 1961, 10 days after my 20th birthday and 24 days before what would have been her 50th birthday.
Beatrice Yardley Spicer Woodward was born November 22, 1911 and grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., the only child of Myrtus Randolph Spicer and Gertrude Brown Dooley Spicer. She attended high school in Brooklyn, the Packer Collegiate Institute, and Mount Holyoke College. My mother was an educated woman in a time when few women attended college. She majored in English Literature and minored in French. One of her college friends had a friend who had a brother, Benjamin Weston Woodward II, and he married my lovely mother and fathered my brother Ben and myself.
I don’t know whether my Mom and Dad had a happy marriage. I assumed so, but then what children experience is their norm until they grow enough to know that each family is different from their own in a variety of ways. My mother was, as many women were in the 50’s, a stay-at-home Mom. She said it was her choice, not my father’s demands or expectations, because she wanted to be there when her children came home from school. And she was. Near the end of first grade, I fell off a seesaw and broke my arm. My seesaw partner was in the down position when the recess bell rang, and she jumped off while I was in the air. The break was not bad, but the nurse called my mother, who didn’t drive. Someone drove me home, and as soon as I saw my mother, I finally cried. The arm didn’t hurt, but I was afraid of what the “sling” was that I was told my arm would be “put in”.
Mom was always there when I got home from school, and I'd jabber away at what happened, who did what, what the teacher said and did. My mother was always there.
Once Mom had viral pneumonia and was in bed for several days. I don’t remember anyone being worried; she was simply sick. Mom had surgery for varicose veins. Mom had all of her teeth pulled a few years later, and they waited until the gums healed before they fitted for dentures. I got so used to the way she looked toothless that when she had the dentures put in, she looked like she had way too much in her mouth! But no matter what, Mom continued to smoke her Kools, at least two packs a day. She coughed, she had bad breath, and I hated that she smoked.
Mom was a voracious reader; my parents belonged to the Book-of-the-Month club, and she read periodicals and newspapers from cover to cover. Mom did the Sunday New York Times Crossword puzzles every week while Sunday dinner was cooking—a roast beef, roast leg of lamb, pot roast, fried chicken. [In those days the Sunday Times puzzles were considerably more difficult than those now. I know, because I am still working my way through a book of 100 NY Times crosswords from years past, when Eugene Maleska and others were the editors. Will Shortz is a good editor, but the puzzles are easier. I can finish them now most every week, but if I’ve completed 5 of the 60 or so I’ve done in the book of 100, I’d be surprised.]
My mother and father were both political junkies, Mom even more than Dad, very right wing Republicans with a visceral hatred (it seemed to me) of Democrats in general and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in particular. Harry Truman fared just as badly, especially when he fired General Douglas MacArthur, who my parents thought sat on the right hand of God. Conversations around the dinner table, especially with dessert and coffee, centered on politics, and voices rose as Dad’s fist pounded the table. There was never any swearing in my familial home, save for “hell” and “damn”, and I heard plenty of those when the grownups discussed Democrats. The conservatism that my parents embraced cannot be compared to today’s conservatism. The religious right might have been conservatives then as well, but the issues were not at all religious in the 50’s and early 60’s.
My mother was home all day but we had a cleaning lady for years. Myrtle would hug me, smelling of furniture polish, when I told her I got an A on my spelling test, and she’d give me a nickel. Mom would eat lunch with Myrtle, but the meal was shared in the kitchen, not the dining room, where we always ate breakfast and dinner, and lunch on the weekends. Myrtle was a Negro. I think my Mom cared a lot for this woman who came weekly and cleaned our house and shared lunch.
Mom did laundry every Monday, and hung clothes on the line and put Dad’s trousers on pant stretchers. She ironed everything, and one of my visual memories is Mom standing at the ironing board, my brother sitting on the stove, and myself sitting on the kitchen table—the three of us talking about all manner of things while Dad puttered in his basement electronics retreat. My brother joined my mother and me maybe only once a week, often on a Saturday night, and both of us were so pleased—almost honored that he deigned to be with us.
Mom participated in, and perhaps chaired, the annual March of Dimes, which at that time was fighting polio. A neighbor on the street had a little boy with polio, and my mother, as many mothers in the late 40’s and early 50’s, had a terrible fear one of her children would contract polio. She was indefatigable in whatever effort she pursued. She joined a group called the Minute Women, and here is a Wikipedia introduction to that subject:
“The Minute Women of the U.S.A. was one of the largest of a number of militant anti-communist women's groups that were active during the 1950s and early 1960s. Such groups, which organized American suburban housewives into anti-communist study groups, political activism and letter-writing campaigns, were a bedrock of support for McCarthyism.
The primary concerns of the Minute Women and other similar groups were the exposure of communist subversion, the defense of constitutional limits, opposition to atheism, socialism and social welfare provisions such as the New Deal; and rejection of internationalism, particularly in the form of the United Nations. They campaigned to expose supposedly Communist individuals, focusing particularly on school and university administrators.”
Yes, this was my mother. She all but worshiped radio commentator Paul Harvey, and had her picture taken with him at a Minute Women convention in Cincinnati the year I was 11. That both my parents were proponents of Joseph McCarthy is a source of anguish for me, but hindsight is 20-20 and for my mother especially, the Communist threat was very real. How many times I’ve wished I’d had the opportunity to discuss politics with her as an adult!
My mother gave me mixed messages about being a woman. She told me that it was more important to educate my brother Ben than to educate me because I would get married and be taken care of. Ben had to be the breadwinner for a family. Yet I knew she greatly valued her education, and I remember her telling me how important it was for a woman to be educated for her children’s sake. I sensed that had she lived, she would have embraced Women’s Lib. After my grandparents, who lived with us for several years, passed away, my mother immersed herself in politics. We lived in a township in Western New York, and she was a committeewoman for the township. It was the equivalent of being on a city council, and she reveled in her new life with an energy we hadn’t seen in several years. Unfortunately, the damage to her physical health had been done.
My grandfather died in late 1954, which was a blow to both my mother and my grandmother. He had not been sick, and he and my mother had always been close. They would sit at the dinner table long after Grammie had retired to her crocheting (not very interested in politics was she), Dad had escaped to his basement retreat, and Ben and I had fled to our rooms for homework or relief from politics. My grandmother went downhill quickly, and by March ’55 was put in a nursing home. Since Mom didn’t drive, she took the bus to the nursing home downtown one day a week, and then on Sunday Dad or Ben or I drove her and picked her up. I believe that dealing with Grammie in the nursing home was the beginning of her long depression. When Ben left in ’57 to attend Cornell, Mom missed him terribly, and her depression deepened. Grammie finally gave up the ghost in late ’58. Mom was finally free! She was 47. Mom had hypertension and still she smoked at least two packs a day. She was thin, and she probably had emphysema. She coughed a lot and didn’t have a lot of physical energy.
Somewhere around my junior year in high school, I began to separate myself from my mother. I stopped telling her every single thing as I had for years. I also felt betrayed by her when I learned she had read a letter from my boyfriend (I had opened and read it and left it downstairs) and later I was awake when she came into my room one night and read part of my diary. The betrayal hurt me deeply. I confronted her with both of these incidents, and she admitted she was curious because I wasn’t talking with her as much as I used to.
I left home in early 1960, having graduated high school and dropped out of college after 3 months. I moved to Ithaca, where my boyfriend and brother were students at Cornell, and found a job at the University. After boyfriend left Cornell (without graduating) due to illness, we got married and lived in Buffalo, so we saw my parents regularly. The four of us played Bridge on into the night at times, and I saw my mother happy to have one child back in the fold. When my husband enlisted in the Army, I went back to my familial home because we couldn’t afford to keep up an apartment without his income. For three weeks in October, my mother and I began the process of finding one another again.
One of the friends I’d worked with in Ithaca was getting married on Saturday, October 28th that year, 1961, and I wanted to go. I came home from work on Friday, planning to pack and leave that evening. But Dad was cooking, not Mom, and he said she was sick and in bed. I found her in bed, smoking, having trouble finding her mouth with the cigarette. I should have been alarmed, but she said the doctor had been there (imagine—a doctor making house calls!) and I wasn’t to worry. But she said she’d appreciate it if I didn’t leave for Ithaca until Saturday morning. I, being a petulant, barely 20 year old, agreed, but wasn’t happy. Saturday when I got up, she wasn’t any better, but she said I should go, have a good time, Dad was there to watch over her.
I had a good stay with dear friends and enjoyed my friend’s wedding. Sunday, just before I left Ithaca at 6 p.m., I called and spoke to Dad, telling him I was leaving and to expect me around 9 or so. I asked after Mom, and he said she was better; she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom.
The drive was uneventful; I had done it several times. What I didn’t expect was that when I turned the corner into my street, there was a large black vehicle in front of my parents’ house. I recognized a hearse as I pulled into the driveway, and the look on my father’s face as I came in the door is one I will never forget. My mother was dead. I turned 20 on October 19th and on the 29th my mother was dead.
The older I get, the more I miss my mother. I miss her in retrospect—when I had my babies, when I was divorced the first time, when I married again, and when I divorced again. I miss her when I have big decisions to make. I miss her when I have so many questions I can’t ask her. What did she think and why about this or that? How could she believe this or that? What did she regret? What was she proud of? What had been her dreams?
Most of all, I recently realized that what I miss most of all is the knowing and feeling all my adult life that my mother loves me and that home is where my mother is. I have felt incomplete (and somewhat abandoned) for so many years. I don’t know how to be a mother to adult children. I do my best, which often isn’t good enough.
Mother, today I honor you, today I miss you so very much, and I credit you with so much of who I am. Thank you, and Mom, continue your peaceful rest. You deserve it.
October 20, 2009
This Year I Will Spend Less for Christmas
Every year I make a promise to myself. I will spend less for Christmas. I bet you can guess what I’ll say next. You’re right! I always spend too much for Christmas. I start early, finding something just right for, let’s say, my sister-in-law. Then I find something even better for sister-in-law, so I buy that too. So add to sis-in-law: son 1 and wife, son 2 and wife, grandson, brother, niece and husband, nephew and wife, best friend, five additional and different best friends, and unknown recipient at work. The years I go to one of the son’s home for Christmas I spend less for decorations, but then there’s the airfare! But it doesn’t seem fair to count the airfare as a gift to that son and his wife.
So this year I will spend less for Christmas. Period. Full stop. And here’s how, so if any of the aforementioned (you know who you are) are reading this, listen up. [Wait a minute—reading? listen? Isn’t that sort of like a mixed metaphor?] Anyway, I mustn’t get distracted. Pay attention. One gift for each person (and we’re not talking a Tiffany bracelet here, a new flat-screen TV [I think they all have one...I don't] or a new set of golf clubs. We’re talking simple, hopefully unusual, thoughtful little (in size as well as…well, it’s tacky, but you know…cost) gifts they’ll treasure. Then perhaps a small (same previous adjectives) for the house, or that they’ll both love/appreciate/use as well as treasure.
I really have been saying this mantra for years, especially to my children, who are now 46 and 44. They stopped believing me years ago; they usually laugh, snicker, or snort whenever I say “I will spend less for Christmas” this year. But guys, this time I MEAN IT!
You may wonder why I’m even thinking about this toward the end of October. The Christmas decorations are up in only some places. After Halloween they’ll sprout like dandelions after a good rain. Well, this weekend I’m going to visit my friend in Reno, and there are lots of wonderful little places around, like Truckee, with its really special glass store, and there’s other places Cabby will take me. Temptation will run rampant, and I must be strong! Then at Thanksgiving, Cabby and I will spend the time in Angels Camp, which is really close to Murphys, Sonora, and not too far from Jackson and Sutter’s Creek. Oh, the places in those little tourist-trap towns! It’s major temptation, major danger. I will spend less for Christmas.
I’ll make another promise too. After Christmas, I will come back to this blog with an honest report. I will have spent less and given fewer gifts. Knowing that I have to account to whomever bothers to read my blogs will keep me on the straight and narrow.
Boys! Stop laughing, snickering and snorting!
So this year I will spend less for Christmas. Period. Full stop. And here’s how, so if any of the aforementioned (you know who you are) are reading this, listen up. [Wait a minute—reading? listen? Isn’t that sort of like a mixed metaphor?] Anyway, I mustn’t get distracted. Pay attention. One gift for each person (and we’re not talking a Tiffany bracelet here, a new flat-screen TV [I think they all have one...I don't] or a new set of golf clubs. We’re talking simple, hopefully unusual, thoughtful little (in size as well as…well, it’s tacky, but you know…cost) gifts they’ll treasure. Then perhaps a small (same previous adjectives) for the house, or that they’ll both love/appreciate/use as well as treasure.
I really have been saying this mantra for years, especially to my children, who are now 46 and 44. They stopped believing me years ago; they usually laugh, snicker, or snort whenever I say “I will spend less for Christmas” this year. But guys, this time I MEAN IT!
You may wonder why I’m even thinking about this toward the end of October. The Christmas decorations are up in only some places. After Halloween they’ll sprout like dandelions after a good rain. Well, this weekend I’m going to visit my friend in Reno, and there are lots of wonderful little places around, like Truckee, with its really special glass store, and there’s other places Cabby will take me. Temptation will run rampant, and I must be strong! Then at Thanksgiving, Cabby and I will spend the time in Angels Camp, which is really close to Murphys, Sonora, and not too far from Jackson and Sutter’s Creek. Oh, the places in those little tourist-trap towns! It’s major temptation, major danger. I will spend less for Christmas.
I’ll make another promise too. After Christmas, I will come back to this blog with an honest report. I will have spent less and given fewer gifts. Knowing that I have to account to whomever bothers to read my blogs will keep me on the straight and narrow.
Boys! Stop laughing, snickering and snorting!
September 17, 2009
R.I.P., Mary Travers
For me, this is the day the music died. News of Mary Travers’ death yesterday moved me to tears. I never met her, but I felt about her as I have about some friends. I’d met Peter Yarrow during his Cornell years, when he came to sing at the fraternity house where my brother and boyfriend lived. I was in a sort of trance that night, listening to Peter sing, and when he sang “O Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn”, I felt he was singing to me. Peter always stomped (not tapped) one foot, and that night he broke a floorboard at the frat house.
Anyway, this isn’t about Peter, it’s about Mary Travers. The first time I saw PPM perform, she appeared as a goddess—her statuesque body, her silky long blond hair that she continually tossed. Her voice was magic for me, because she was one of the few singers in whose key I could manage to sing. Her harmonies transformed the three people into one entity. I saw her as a real person—a woman not much older than I, who enjoyed singing, had a family, and had a cause. I admired her, not simply because she was doing what I loved to do myself—sing folk music—but she did it with grace and style. She didn’t have to wear sexy clothes, dance seductively, or scream into the microphone. She didn’t even have to play the guitar. She stood there, flipping her hair, clearly having fun, enjoying every moment. And Mary felt every song she sang; ergo, I felt every song she sang.
There was a mighty triumvirate of female folk singers (in alpha order): Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Mary Travers. They inspired me, each of them in their own way. Joan and Mary were the ones I tried most to emulate, since their songs were more accessible to my limited vocal range. Joan wrote incredibly stirring lyrics, and sang them with great intensity. I can’t compare the three one against the other—they were different in many ways. But there was something about Mary.
Mary Travers, you were a light, an inspiration, and a goddess. Thank you, and rest in peace.
Anyway, this isn’t about Peter, it’s about Mary Travers. The first time I saw PPM perform, she appeared as a goddess—her statuesque body, her silky long blond hair that she continually tossed. Her voice was magic for me, because she was one of the few singers in whose key I could manage to sing. Her harmonies transformed the three people into one entity. I saw her as a real person—a woman not much older than I, who enjoyed singing, had a family, and had a cause. I admired her, not simply because she was doing what I loved to do myself—sing folk music—but she did it with grace and style. She didn’t have to wear sexy clothes, dance seductively, or scream into the microphone. She didn’t even have to play the guitar. She stood there, flipping her hair, clearly having fun, enjoying every moment. And Mary felt every song she sang; ergo, I felt every song she sang.
There was a mighty triumvirate of female folk singers (in alpha order): Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Mary Travers. They inspired me, each of them in their own way. Joan and Mary were the ones I tried most to emulate, since their songs were more accessible to my limited vocal range. Joan wrote incredibly stirring lyrics, and sang them with great intensity. I can’t compare the three one against the other—they were different in many ways. But there was something about Mary.
Mary Travers, you were a light, an inspiration, and a goddess. Thank you, and rest in peace.
September 11, 2009
9/11
September 11, 2009.
Eight years ago today, our world changed forever. We all changed forever as well, perhaps each one of us differently, but we changed. For me, despair quietly walked in and sat down next to horror and disbelief. Fear lurked continually in the background, but I was somewhat successful at keeping fear at bay. The following year, a friend and I drove over to the coast and sat on the Bean Hollow rock headland and watched waterworks pretending to be fireworks, one exuberant burst-splash after another in military precision along the rocks. We believed.
I can't watch the endless showings of the planes into the towers. It becomes another movie, something almost unreal. It can't happen here.
We are now into a new administration, one that won on hope and change. One that I championed and voted for. And just 9 months into that administration, I am once again watching despair creep into my sanctuary. No, not because of our president, not because of the economy, nor the wars in Afghanistan. I am a patient person. OK, sometimes I'm not a patient person, but for these big things I am. These problems didn't happen all at once, and that won't be solved all at once. I'm amazed to hear people say the recession is over!
My despair is at the extremes that have so polarized our nation in the years since 9/11/2001. That didn't happen overnight either. I stood with my two grown sons in Buffalo, N.Y. watching the first bombs dropping on Afghanistan--we had all come together to share our national tragedy--and we all were sad and devastated, but we believed it was the right thing to do. Find that bastard bin Laden and make him dead! We believed.
It was over the next 7 years that the polarization started to grow and fester. And I neither need to nor want to cite chapter and verse. Suffice it to say that the divide between Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats became deeper and wider, and in our confused grief, we began to vilify those on the other side of what became the Great Divide.
I believe that the "normal" divide became the Great Divide due, to a large extent, to the rise of Conservative Talk Radio--the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannitys, the Bill O'Rileys--who are masters of manipulation and deceit. They prey upon those who do not tend to read newspapers, listen to NPR, communicate with their Congressional representatives, or use the Internet to check something on Snopes or FactCheck. These are not bad people, and they are not necessarily religious fundamentalists. They are people who go to work, kiss their children, vote, maybe go to church, and share BBQs with friends and neighbors. But they tend to let others do the thinking for them, and when it's said loud enough and often enough they begin to believe it.
Remember Sarah Palin saying that Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists."? Well, as my mother once told me--once something is said, you can't unsay it. There's a lot of that going around--the saying of things that can't be unsaid, and the purveyors of that misinformation know exactly what they're doing. Exactly. What. They're. Doing.
So--last week, hearing and reading the unbelievable protests against Obama speaking truth to power (our next generation of adults), I mentioned in a Facebook posting that I'm feeling despair again. How silly of me to believe that a new president, whose ideals I embrace, in whom I had (have, dammit!!) such great hopes, could escape verbal evisceration by such small-minded people.
I went to the freezer half an hour ago to empty the ice cubes into the ice container and saw this on my refrigerator:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
Today is September 11th. It's my boss John Fleischer's birthday. And I am going to find some wild things to be among today. I'll pack up my despair, stow it way deep in the closet, and feel free, along with wood drake.
Eight years ago today, our world changed forever. We all changed forever as well, perhaps each one of us differently, but we changed. For me, despair quietly walked in and sat down next to horror and disbelief. Fear lurked continually in the background, but I was somewhat successful at keeping fear at bay. The following year, a friend and I drove over to the coast and sat on the Bean Hollow rock headland and watched waterworks pretending to be fireworks, one exuberant burst-splash after another in military precision along the rocks. We believed.
I can't watch the endless showings of the planes into the towers. It becomes another movie, something almost unreal. It can't happen here.
We are now into a new administration, one that won on hope and change. One that I championed and voted for. And just 9 months into that administration, I am once again watching despair creep into my sanctuary. No, not because of our president, not because of the economy, nor the wars in Afghanistan. I am a patient person. OK, sometimes I'm not a patient person, but for these big things I am. These problems didn't happen all at once, and that won't be solved all at once. I'm amazed to hear people say the recession is over!
My despair is at the extremes that have so polarized our nation in the years since 9/11/2001. That didn't happen overnight either. I stood with my two grown sons in Buffalo, N.Y. watching the first bombs dropping on Afghanistan--we had all come together to share our national tragedy--and we all were sad and devastated, but we believed it was the right thing to do. Find that bastard bin Laden and make him dead! We believed.
It was over the next 7 years that the polarization started to grow and fester. And I neither need to nor want to cite chapter and verse. Suffice it to say that the divide between Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats became deeper and wider, and in our confused grief, we began to vilify those on the other side of what became the Great Divide.
I believe that the "normal" divide became the Great Divide due, to a large extent, to the rise of Conservative Talk Radio--the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannitys, the Bill O'Rileys--who are masters of manipulation and deceit. They prey upon those who do not tend to read newspapers, listen to NPR, communicate with their Congressional representatives, or use the Internet to check something on Snopes or FactCheck. These are not bad people, and they are not necessarily religious fundamentalists. They are people who go to work, kiss their children, vote, maybe go to church, and share BBQs with friends and neighbors. But they tend to let others do the thinking for them, and when it's said loud enough and often enough they begin to believe it.
Remember Sarah Palin saying that Barack Obama "pals around with terrorists."? Well, as my mother once told me--once something is said, you can't unsay it. There's a lot of that going around--the saying of things that can't be unsaid, and the purveyors of that misinformation know exactly what they're doing. Exactly. What. They're. Doing.
So--last week, hearing and reading the unbelievable protests against Obama speaking truth to power (our next generation of adults), I mentioned in a Facebook posting that I'm feeling despair again. How silly of me to believe that a new president, whose ideals I embrace, in whom I had (have, dammit!!) such great hopes, could escape verbal evisceration by such small-minded people.
I went to the freezer half an hour ago to empty the ice cubes into the ice container and saw this on my refrigerator:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
Today is September 11th. It's my boss John Fleischer's birthday. And I am going to find some wild things to be among today. I'll pack up my despair, stow it way deep in the closet, and feel free, along with wood drake.
September 3, 2009
My Guitar
In two weeks, my friend Cabby and I are having a pretty large yard sale. She has to schlep her stuff from Reno, and has already brought a bunch of items during her last two visits. I realize that what I'm doing is beginning to winnow out my encumbrances ahead of the need to leave this house, the place I've lived the longest since my childhood home. It is a major task, and this yard sale will be only the first winnowing, ridding my house of no-longer-fitting clothes, no-longer-used electronics, and no-longer-wanted accoutrements that have accumulated over many years.
I'm thinking of selling my guitar, which bears considerable thought. I've not been without a guitar since I was 19, with my first one, purchased from a Buffalo pawn shop, a Harmony with steel strings that Brian's father Bob restrung with nylon strings. I didn't learn until much later that it's not a good idea to put nylon strings on a guitar built for steel, and probably vice versa. In a few years, the strings had wandered further and further afield from the neck, making it difficult to play. But I played it anyway. That guitar went with me to Lawton, Oklahoma, when my Bob was stationed at Ft. Sill, and on evenings when thunderstorms killed the power in the service club, I'd sit on the stage and play the guitar and sing folk songs. I wasn't great, but it was better than sitting in the dark without music from the juke box. The soldiers whistled and hooted and I loved it. Sometimes my fingers bled from playing Sinner Man, even with nylon strings, but I played on. One Christmas, just a couple of weeks before Scott was born, both my father and my brother and his wife came to Lawton for the holiday. I used to hang the guitar by its strap in the coat closet, and one day as I was preparing dinner, my husband, father, brother and wife decided to play Bridge. The card table was also kept in the coat closet. My father, in his often hurried careless way, lifted up the card table, knocking the guitar to the floor. I cried with anger and disappointment, but it was only cracked, not broken, and could most likely be fixed. After the holidays, my husband and I took the guitar to a luthier in Lawton, who said he would fix it and not charge us much. He showed us a classical guitar he'd made, and we both strummed it a bit; it sounded like heaven. It had a full, mellow, clear, lovely sound that I'd not heard before, and we coveted it. He was asking $75 for it. I'd paid $25 at the pawn shop for the Harmony, and this wonderful guitar was only 3 times as much. But for us, then, $75 was what $750 is now--at least. That was our monthly rent. We couldn't buy it.
I can't remember exactly when I bought my present guitar, but I was back in the Buffalo area, and I played mostly in the summer when the family was at Kirk Kove, our Canadian retreat. It was a family fishing resort, with our house the first place on the right as you drove in, built in 1924, most likely before the resort was built. In the summer, when lots of kids were around, there were events in the rec hall, and Thursdays were "talent night". Skits were performed, mostly by kids, and then my 2nd husband John and I would sing folk songs--Four Strong Winds, This Land is Your Land, Whisky in the Jar, and too many others to list. One of my favorite memories of Kirk Kove is sitting on our porch at the top of the hill (a small hill, but a hill nonetheless) in the evening, watching the swallows swoop for mosquitoes, and rehearsing whatever we were going to sing that week.
But I neither sing nor play anymore, and the ol' fingers are quite rusty on the few occasions I've picked up a guitar. Both sons have at least one guitar that I could play when I visit them if the need arose. That thought makes me laugh. If the need arose. Right.
Several years ago I took classical lessons for a couple of months, and it was incredibly hard for me to make the stretches my fingers had to make. And aside from whatever pleasure I might eventually have for being able to play a tiny bit, what would I do with it? Impose on my friends and say, "Oh, look at what I learned over the last 6 months!"? No, that's not me.
Four years ago I attended my son Scott's first Gypsy Jam, held at the wonderful Pollywogg Holler in New York State's Southern Tier. I borrowed a friends hard case so I could check my guitar during the flights. I played a couple of things--badly, as I remember--but people were kind, and I knew it would be the only time I'd play at Gypsy Jam, no matter how many more times I might attend the event.
So I look at the once beloved guitar, in its case inside two plastic garbage bags, and wonder why on earth I should keep it around. There is no reason. Why, then, are these tears in my eyes? Eventually I will move from this house, and far more will have to be sold or given away. Perhaps I'll wait until I can let go of my guitar without tears.
I'm thinking of selling my guitar, which bears considerable thought. I've not been without a guitar since I was 19, with my first one, purchased from a Buffalo pawn shop, a Harmony with steel strings that Brian's father Bob restrung with nylon strings. I didn't learn until much later that it's not a good idea to put nylon strings on a guitar built for steel, and probably vice versa. In a few years, the strings had wandered further and further afield from the neck, making it difficult to play. But I played it anyway. That guitar went with me to Lawton, Oklahoma, when my Bob was stationed at Ft. Sill, and on evenings when thunderstorms killed the power in the service club, I'd sit on the stage and play the guitar and sing folk songs. I wasn't great, but it was better than sitting in the dark without music from the juke box. The soldiers whistled and hooted and I loved it. Sometimes my fingers bled from playing Sinner Man, even with nylon strings, but I played on. One Christmas, just a couple of weeks before Scott was born, both my father and my brother and his wife came to Lawton for the holiday. I used to hang the guitar by its strap in the coat closet, and one day as I was preparing dinner, my husband, father, brother and wife decided to play Bridge. The card table was also kept in the coat closet. My father, in his often hurried careless way, lifted up the card table, knocking the guitar to the floor. I cried with anger and disappointment, but it was only cracked, not broken, and could most likely be fixed. After the holidays, my husband and I took the guitar to a luthier in Lawton, who said he would fix it and not charge us much. He showed us a classical guitar he'd made, and we both strummed it a bit; it sounded like heaven. It had a full, mellow, clear, lovely sound that I'd not heard before, and we coveted it. He was asking $75 for it. I'd paid $25 at the pawn shop for the Harmony, and this wonderful guitar was only 3 times as much. But for us, then, $75 was what $750 is now--at least. That was our monthly rent. We couldn't buy it.
I can't remember exactly when I bought my present guitar, but I was back in the Buffalo area, and I played mostly in the summer when the family was at Kirk Kove, our Canadian retreat. It was a family fishing resort, with our house the first place on the right as you drove in, built in 1924, most likely before the resort was built. In the summer, when lots of kids were around, there were events in the rec hall, and Thursdays were "talent night". Skits were performed, mostly by kids, and then my 2nd husband John and I would sing folk songs--Four Strong Winds, This Land is Your Land, Whisky in the Jar, and too many others to list. One of my favorite memories of Kirk Kove is sitting on our porch at the top of the hill (a small hill, but a hill nonetheless) in the evening, watching the swallows swoop for mosquitoes, and rehearsing whatever we were going to sing that week.
But I neither sing nor play anymore, and the ol' fingers are quite rusty on the few occasions I've picked up a guitar. Both sons have at least one guitar that I could play when I visit them if the need arose. That thought makes me laugh. If the need arose. Right.
Several years ago I took classical lessons for a couple of months, and it was incredibly hard for me to make the stretches my fingers had to make. And aside from whatever pleasure I might eventually have for being able to play a tiny bit, what would I do with it? Impose on my friends and say, "Oh, look at what I learned over the last 6 months!"? No, that's not me.
Four years ago I attended my son Scott's first Gypsy Jam, held at the wonderful Pollywogg Holler in New York State's Southern Tier. I borrowed a friends hard case so I could check my guitar during the flights. I played a couple of things--badly, as I remember--but people were kind, and I knew it would be the only time I'd play at Gypsy Jam, no matter how many more times I might attend the event.
So I look at the once beloved guitar, in its case inside two plastic garbage bags, and wonder why on earth I should keep it around. There is no reason. Why, then, are these tears in my eyes? Eventually I will move from this house, and far more will have to be sold or given away. Perhaps I'll wait until I can let go of my guitar without tears.
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