I Promised My Mother-in-law

June 18, 2012 by scillagrace

I promised to dedicate a post to my mother-in-law for her birthday, which was the 16th. The last time I saw her alive was on her birthday in the year 2001. She died sometime the following week, alone in her apartment, while we were traveling. That fact is consistent with the mystique I associate with remembering her. I’ll never be certain who she really was, although I have many theories. I have been told that she was a concert pianist as a young woman and that she played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16. I have seen the signed program portrait that he gave her. I did hear her play as an accompanist for our community theater. She was definitely capable, even with arthritis. I wish I had known the passion of her younger years. I saw in her such a mixture of joy and anxiety as a mature woman. She had a playfulness and sense of humor that I found completely amusing, so much more casual than my own mother’s. She was a grade school teacher with the ability to relate to people in a very natural way. She was sentimental about cats and dogs and friendship and children. As I learned more about her relationship with her mother, though, a very painful history emerged, steeped in shame and punishment. I’m sure that was the root of the depression that lingered throughout her life. She carried scars and secrets with her to the grave. We only learned about them when her sister-in-law spoke up after the funeral. I imagine, though, that she would have liked to allow the sunniest parts of her personality to shine through unclouded. It was her ability to laugh in the face of fear that I illustrated at her memorial service when I told this story:

In June of 1992, she came out to visit us from California. We had only been living in Illinois since August, and Jim had been through an emergency cardiac procedure that January. She came out eager to see him recovering and to bask in the hugs of her four grandchildren. He had a scheduled check-up during her stay, and learned that his arteries were even more clogged than in January. He was advised to undergo double bypass surgery as soon as possible. He was 31. She decided to extend her stay indefinitely and see what happened next. Her anxiety was tremendous, and so was mine. Her sense of humor, however, surfaced much more readily. It was her coping strategy, and it matched his perfectly. The day of the surgery was stormy and dangerous. A tornado touched down in the vicinity of the hospital and cut out power just as he was coming out of surgery and off the breathing machine. A frantic nurse grabbed a mouth tube and bag to squeeze air into his lungs. Marni and I were shaking all over and clutching hands as we watched. Moments later, the generators kicked in and a calmer air prevailed. Jim was breathing unassisted, and he was motioning me to come closer to tell me something. I leaned in to hear him say in a hoarse whisper, “They found out what was wrong with my heart.” “Yes, dear…” “When they opened me up, they found this!” His hand moved under the bedsheets by his side. I looked down and discovered that he was clutching the broken figure off of one of his bowling trophies. “The Bowler” was a running gag we had started the first year of our marriage. He surfaced in Christmas stockings, random drawers, and even in the bouquet of roses Jim brought onstage after my senior voice recital. How in the world did Jim manage to stage another practical joke on the day of his heart surgery?!! Well, he had an accomplice, of course. His mother, who smiled mildly and innocently at the end of the bed while I looked around in utter amazement. Then we all tried to keep from laughing too hard, only because it was so painful for Jim when he tried to join in.

Recovering from heart surgery, smiles intact.

So, whatever troubles lay at the core of my mother-in-law’s psyche, I appreciate that she had the desire to live happily and tried to do that as much as possible. She truly loved her children and grandchildren and enjoyed so many pleasures with them. She shared what joy she found with a lot of kids during her lifetime as a teacher, and I’m sure many are grateful and remember her to this day.

The Kreativ Blogger Award

June 18, 2012 by scillagrace

I have been nominated for The Kreativ Blogger Award by Naomi Baltuck of Writing Between the Lines. I learned more about her life in her latest post and recognized more places of resonance between us. Receiving this honor from a published writer and professional storyteller gives me a bit of a thrill, to tell the truth. Thank you, Naomi!

The rubric of the award suggests that I publish 7 facts about myself and then nominate 7 other bloggers for this award. I never consider these customs obligatory or binding, so we are all free to do with it what we will. Think of it as a collection of beads on a string, something to fiddle with if you are so inclined. Here goes:

1) My work life as of now includes hours when I am engulfed by a corset, bustle, petticoats, and a prairie bonnet. I sew pin cushions and crochet rag rugs and play the pump organ. It also includes time when I sit in my underwear at my grandmother’s cherry table in the dining room, listening to Big Band music from the 30s, bantering with my partner Steve, and cleaning up used books for shipment to new readers. And at times it includes working one-on-one with an individual who wants to learn more about vocal technique, singing, performing, and discovering the bag of sonic tricks they carry around in their bodies. I am never going back to work in a cubicle again!

2) I find looking at the sky a life-changing event.

3) I don’t have a TV, a dishwasher, a washer or a dryer anymore. I also don’t have a mortgage. Suits me just fine. I do live with approximately 30,000 books.

4) I haven’t gone to a salon for a haircut for at least 3 years. I trim off the ends myself every once in a while. Steve’s hair is almost as long as mine. A senior visitor to the living history museum where we work asked him brusquely the other day, “When was the last time you got a hair cut?!” “1882,” he replied.

5) I sing along to Broadway musicals while driving 35 miles to work. I sometimes sing along to Dvorak’s New World Symphony, too, not that there are words to it. One of my favorite lines from a musical is this: To love another person is to see the face of God. For 3 pieces of cheese, tell me what musical that’s from! (My father used to dole out precious morsels of expensive Camembert or Bleu if we were able to answer Bible questions after dinner, while he was finishing his wine.)

6) Two of the people I have loved most in my life died right next to me. My sister Alice died in the driver’s seat while I sat strapped into the passenger’s side. We were taken by surprise. That was 3 days before my 17th birthday. My husband of 24 years died beside me in bed while I lay sleeping. His kidney dialysis machine and sleep apnea machine made an uninterrupted white noise that covered any disturbance I might have heard, if there was one. I suppose I have yet to experience a death while fully conscious. I expect to get a closer look some day, and I want to be able to face it squarely.

7) I relish all kinds of hedonistic experiences now with less guilt than I was taught. I believe Shame is a great thief of holy joy. Doing nothing but gazing into the faces of the babies I bore was perhaps the beginning of his undoing in my life.

Whether or not these can be considered facts is debatable. No matter. More beads to share:

Stephen G Hipperson takes excellent photographs. Enjoy!

The Ache to Bloom is a new blog by a young writer of passionate expression. She’s also one of my children, and I hope she’ll write more.

These are the only two blogs I have begun to follow since the last time I nominated favorites for an award. You can see the other 15 here.

Thanks again, Naomi! And now to the post I promised on June 16…..

My Favorite Fathers

June 17, 2012 by scillagrace

The obvious blog subject of the day here in the U.S. of A. is Father’s Day. I have two stellar examples of fathers prominent in my thoughts and conspicuously absent in the flesh. My husband, the father of my four children, died in 2008. My father, who had 5 children, died in 2010. What they have in common is that they both felt woefully disappointed by their own fathers (at one time) and were determined to do better. I’m glad to say that my husband had the chance to improve his relationship with his dad over the years, whereas my father did not. They both had an internal sense of the kind of father they wanted to be, and were clear in their values. They were incredibly dependable, stable providers of basic things, although in slightly different mixtures. My husband was far more of a “warm fuzzy”, emotional Teddy Bear. My father provided more structure and logic. I’ve come to realize that these are not opposite qualities in parenting, they are important components. There are as many ways of concocting a life-giving balance as there are fathers.

My favorite memories of my dad contain literary and educational aspects: his voice reading aloud from story books, the ballet and opera and museum tickets he treated us to regularly, the vacations and nature walks we went on. My favorite memories of my husband as a father are visceral and physical: how he held them, laughed with them, cried with them, sang to them, praised them and worried over them. When a man is giving the best he has to his children, it’s a beautiful thing. Well worth celebrating, whatever flavor it comes in.

You gotta give Dad a tie on Father’s Day…

(Okay, photographers, clearly the slides taken by my father’s Leica in the 1970s came out better than the prints from my Canon AE-1 that I scanned into a dusty screen. My brother-in-law converted the slides to digital images somehow; I love how sharp they are!)

This Space Reserved

June 16, 2012 by scillagrace

Today’s date is reserved for a blog about my mother-in-law, who was born on this day. However, I just don’t have time to do Marni justice, since I didn’t get home from work until 6:30, made dinner, walked to the market and am now eagerly anticipating the arrival of my oldest daughter and her First Mate for a sleepover visit and Sunday breakfast, after which I go back to work until 6pm again. I apologize for the disappointment, but promise to do my best to honor her at a later time. Here’s a teaser about this beloved person: she was a concert pianist. She played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16. Yeah. And as a grandma, she was a computer game geek. You’re gonna love her.

Jim, his mom, and Ach du Wee Bear.

Friday Night Dancing

June 15, 2012 by scillagrace

After the living history museum closes and I’m finished my work for the day as an interpreter in St. Peter’s Church, I’m changing out of my corset and bustle and into modern day country dancing togs! There’s a barn dance tonight in the octagonal barn. Square dancing is something that I’ve enjoyed since grade school when Mr. Maghita, the gym teacher, would call out the squares and teach us to promenade, doe-see-doe, and allemande left with our classmates. I didn’t even mind the boy cooties. Even better, though, was the Girl Scout square dances when I got to dance with my father. Which reminds me of a funny story….

On my 15th birthday, my older sister Sarah and I were staying with my father at the historic Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. We had just delivered my sister Alice to the University of Colorado, Fort Collins and were heading back to California. As we checked in, I noticed a sign in the lobby advertising that there would be square dancing on the patio that evening. It sounded like a perfect way to celebrate my birthday, so after dinner, we made our way out to the terrace. I noticed that there were a lot of people dressed in square dancing outfits – ladies in ruffled skirts that stuck straight out, gents with string ties and cowboy boots. I lamented the fact that I hadn’t really packed for this occasion. I also wondered why all these people had pinned on name tags with the same logo. As the music started, people started squaring up, and my father promised me the first dance and asked my sister to wait her turn (since it was MY birthday). When all the squares were completed, I spotted a rather disgruntled couple in costume sitting on the sidelines. The caller and the dance started up, and the other couples in our square, in professional regalia, started ushering and dragging my father and I around to the dance steps being announced. Finally, I started putting all these clues together and realized, to my complete teenaged humiliation and embarrassment, that my father and I had just crashed a Square Dancing Performance!! I had always thought of square dancing as a teach-as-you-go, anyone-can-play kind of thing. It never occurred to me that the hotel guests were supposed to be simply spectators! My sister was so happy that it wasn’t her birthday, allowing her to be spared this special treatment. Ah well, Daddy. It makes up for there not being enough room for us to dance together at my wedding reception in the parish hall of the church 6 years later.

So tonight, Steve & I are dancing. I’m pre-posting this because I intend to get home from Old World Wisconsin all hot and tired and in need of a shower and sleep. Enjoy your Friday night, friends! I hope you DANCE!!!

P.S. Becca – you know this reminds me of you!

Little House in Old World Wisconsin

June 14, 2012 by scillagrace

Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Wisconsin in 1867, in a Little House in the Big Woods (near Pepin, WI, close to the border of Minnesota). Mary Hafford, the Irish immigrant who lived in the house where I work as an interpreter for the living history museum, Old World Wisconsin, was widowed in the year 1868 with 3 small children and lived as a renter in a small village near Watertown, WI. The Ingalls family continued to move west and eventually set up a homestead in South Dakota, but Mary Hafford worked away at her home laundry business and eventually achieved social and economic prominence in her little village. In 1885, she had a new house constructed on the property that she had bought. She never learned to read or write, but her children did. Her youngest daughter, Ellen, studied dressmaking, a skilled trade, and became a live-in dressmaker. Ellen was married in 1891 (six years after Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder), and her mother hosted a reception and dinner for 75 guests. Three months later, Mary Hafford died of dropsy. I imagine Ellen Hafford Thompson and wonder what stories she might have written about her life in the Little House where she lived. I have a burning question: what happened to her older sister, Ann, who is conspicuously absent from all records from the mid-1880s on? Did she die? If so, why isn’t she buried next to her father & mother? Did she go into a convent? Did she elope with a Lutheran? The mystery remains unsolved!

The neighbors’ backyard

Trusty “Rapid Washer”

A shadow box memorial to a young woman who had taken religious vows. The braid that was cut off is all the family would ever see of this loved one after she went into the convent.

New Digs (well, actually, really old digs)

June 13, 2012 by scillagrace

I am now working the summer schedule for Old World Wisconsin. I am still at St. Peter’s Church playing the pump organ and singing to the rafters on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. I am also working at the Hafford house on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Mary Hafford was an Irish immigrant who came to the U.S. with her husband and son, living first in New Jersey and then settling in Wisconsin where she had family members who had also moved there. She had two more children here, and then, at the age of 36, she was widowed. Her husband had worked on the railroad and owned no land or property. She could neither read nor write. Somehow, she had assets (possibly from a railroad company’s pension plan?) amounting to $500, twice the average for the village where she lived. She spent $150 to buy two lots in a rural village where she had been renting lodgings. Presumably, there was a dwelling on that lot, a worker’s cottage. She took in laundry and did the washing, ironing, and mending from her home so that she could look after her children. By the time she was 53, in the year 1885, she was able to hire carpenters to upgrade her house to a more respectable cottage. This home is the one that is now on Old World Wisconsin property, right next to St. Peter’s Church. It has one large room (combination kitchen, dining room, living room) with a small bedroom and a pantry on the ground floor and two bedrooms upstairs. It has a kitchen garden in which is growing lavender, sage, rosemary, alpine strawberries, thyme, and other fragrant herbs. The wash tubs and clothesline are set up outside so that visitors (kids, mostly) can try their hand at washing without electricity or plumbing. The laundering process in the 19th century could take up 3 days of the week. For Mrs. Hafford, it would probably be 6 days a week. Soaking, boiling, spot treating with lye soap, scrubbing on the washboard and rinsing would require multiple trips to the pump with two large buckets. One article estimated that women carried 400 lbs. of water in a week for laundry. After the clothes were dry, she would heat the irons on her wood stove and press them. One of the irons we have weighs 6 lbs, though it’s only about 5 inches long. I get the feeling this woman had no need for a gym membership. She pumped iron, literally, at home often enough! So this is the story I interpret for visitors. When there are no guests to chat with, I sit in the rocker and crochet rag rugs. I just learned this skill last week. I pass the time wondering what it would be like to be unable to read and write. Yesterday was my first day in this position. Sorry I didn’t post a blog entry, friends, I was just too tired and hungry and out of time by the end of my day! Here are some photos to whet your appetite. More to come!

I Love to Sing

June 11, 2012 by scillagrace

As I was washing the dishes in the kitchen sink, a song came back to me from years ago when my children were toddlers. I had just finished giving a voice lesson to a Baptist pastor at his storefront church. He’s coming along nicely, despite a rather constant battle with sinusitis (with which I sympathize, having finally had surgery for chronic sinusitis about 10 years ago). He’s got an entire electronic sound system set up in the sanctuary, which is also in the process of being remodeled. They raised the roof a few feet, improving the acoustics tremendously. Today, I asked my student to try practicing The National Anthem while using a microphone. I want him to really begin to like the sound of his voice. That will give him more confidence and more motivation to practice and play around with what he’s got in his “bag of tricks”. I told him that I get a similar opportunity when I’m at the 1839 St. Peter’s church at Old World Wisconsin. At the end of the day, before I sweep up and close the windows, I allow myself some singing time. By that hour, visitors are heading to the parking lot and rarely step inside. I do the figure 8 processional up and down the aisles singing “Jubilate Deo” or “Dona Nobis Pacem” or “Amazing Grace”.

The acoustics in this Gothic Revival building are fabulous! I really like the way my voice sounds echoing up in those wide, white spaces. Yesterday, I stopped in a corner and tried out Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. I haven’t sung that since I performed it at a wedding four years ago. It was a paid gig, just four months after Jim’s death, on our Kiss Anniversary. I was nervous, I was emotional, but I got through it. Then I cried all the way home in the car from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to Illinois. It’s a perfect song for St. Peter’s, the first Catholic cathedral in Milwaukee. It sounds really lovely, but I need to find the music and remember the words!

I am preparing to give another lesson this evening to my newest student. She also has an amazing electronic set up…in her basement. She’s a drummer; her husband plays and teaches guitar and writes songs for his rock ‘n’ roll band. My student is going to try some Sarah McLachlan tunes. She’ll do very well with that style. So, I’m going to do a bit of listening now, but I’ll leave you with the song that started me off. Enjoy!

A Wisconsin Tradition

June 10, 2012 by scillagrace

Steve and I have long talked about partaking of a certain Wisconsin tradition…the Friday Night Fish Fry…and two days ago, we finally had our first experience. It was a gorgeously golden afternoon, and I got a hankering for dining by the water somewhere. There’s lots of water in Wisconsin. It’s not the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but I’ll wager is got a good couple hundred. So, we went to the Post Office to mail off 4 boxes of parcels for the book biz, and we asked our good buddies behind the counter if they had a recommendation for Fish served Lakeside. “The Golden Mast in Okauchee” was the unanimous reply. With just our old road map as a guide, we were able to find it quite easily. No Google or nothin’. And Steve didn’t even find a dead end first. There was a wedding reception going on, and all was a-bustle with the ‘walk-ins only’ Friday crowd. Our P.O. friends must think we are a bit fancy. Truth is, we took a hike in the state park before dinner and arrived a bit sweaty, but no matter. Friday Fish Frys are casual, even at a nice place. The meal is served family style, even for two. We chose the cod over the perch. All the sides arrive first: applesauce, ketchup, tartar sauce, coleslaw, potato salad, rye bread and lemon. Then comes the french fries and potato pancakes and all-you-can-eat fried cod. Steve had a stein of dark beer, but I went with Southern Comfort on the rocks (I guess I was thinking of my Dad and the Ideal Fish Company restaurant in Santa Cruz). After dinner, we walked around a bit. Here are some of the shots I took:

The lake is surrounded by summer homes of all descriptions, settled in cheek by jowl. Typical Midwestern range of economies, some new construction, some barely standing. Not nearly as picturesque as my grandmother’s cottage neighborhood on Lake Michigan, but this lake is much smaller, and apparently, not really suitable for swimming, judging from the number of swimming pools in the area. My favorite one was this one:

Pondering Ponds

June 9, 2012 by scillagrace

Gazing into the pond, pondering its many levels. What lurks in the depths? What ripples the surface? What is reflected from far above? Can you catch the sun dancing across it on a breeze? Does any creature understand all the dimensions of his environment at once?

Wishing you cool, green, dappled quiet pondering!