Category Archives: Memoirs

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Spacious Skies

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I spent the day in the 19th century, working at Old World Wisconsin, so naturally, I wasn’t allowed to be wandering around with a camera.  I have to admit, though, I did square off my fingers to imagine a few frames.  The sky today was absolutely breathtaking.  Big cumulus clouds with flat, gray bottoms were floating around as if on parade.   Looking up outside St. Peter’s church, with its 1839 bell tower and cross silhouetted against these clouds was like looking at a catalog of “INSPIRATIONAL”.  I remembered back to the days when I was living in Los Angeles County, CA, feeling as if I would suffocate any minute.  To look across the atmosphere to the horizon was like looking into a thick bean soup.  Even looking straight up would remind you of watery hot cocoa.  I longed to escape the valley and take off for clearer skies.  I thought I could simply ascend the mountains and be in a brighter, cleaner, more natural world, but it wasn’t that easy.  Everything is Owned in California.  There is hardly any open land.  We did get an invitation one weekend to house-sit for a retired couple who lived on Mt. Baldy.  Their home was beautiful, furnished with antiques, quiet, nestled away from the highway in the pine trees.  It was good enough.  I took our nine-month old daughter in the baby backpack, my Canon AE-1, and left the smoggy valley behind.  There is a photograph from that weekend etched in my mind.  I’ve got on my beloved hiking boots, Susan is smiling in the pack on my back, my skinny legs are striding over a boulder.  I was in the throes of postpartum depression; I weighed 98 pounds, and I was nursing.  My husband’s buddies called me “Tits on a Stick” behind my back.  I was struggling for survival. (photo added Jan. 20, 2024, see below) 

Some years after that, I was living in suburban Illinois, and the skies opened up over the prairie.  I would wander out to open land while the kids were in school and get lost in the clouds.  I remember September 11, 2001, as a clear, sunny, perfect sky day.  I spent the afternoon out in the prairie after having saturated myself in the news that morning.  I look to the sky when I am confused.  Back in the heyday of my Christian spiritual journey, I wrote this poem:

The Sky

 

Did I ever thank you for the sky

spread far around like an open field

piled high with moods and structures,

a playground for my soul?

 

This space above bids my thoughts expand

to climb the heights of an anvil-cloud

and teeter on the edge of a dazzling glare

or slide down the shafts of the sun,

 

To swim to the center of its lonely blue

Where I find no mist to hide me,

and lie exposed to the western wind

like a mountain braced for sunrise.

 

Or clad in the shroud of brooding gray,

it coaxes me to musings

far removed from the minutiae

that chains me to my life.

 

I search for light and openness

to shadow the bonds of earth,

exploring the vault of heaven

for its meaning and its truth.

 

Thanks for this cathedral speaking glory through its art.

Thank you for these eyes admitting You into my heart.

 

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Alice Through My Lens

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Blue eyes.  That was one thing that made her unique among 4 sisters.  She had our father’s eyes.   She was the shortest among us; I believe I grew to have at least a half an inch over her.  But that took a while.  Since she was 3 years older, I trailed behind her most of my life.  I definitely didn’t mind following in her footsteps.  I adored her.  She was the sweet sister, the kind one, the one who loved children and animals and had friends.  She somehow spanned the gap between being a nerd and being popular.  Not that she wasn’t picked on early in grade school.  We all were, and she was very sensitive to it.  When she was 10, she ran away from a boy who was chasing her down the sidewalk.  He caught up to her and managed to grab the back of her coat hood. He yanked her down hard, and she fell backwards onto the sidewalk, hitting her head and fracturing her skull.  The boy was sent to military school, and Alice recovered amid cards and gifts and angels surrounding her bed. 

She started dating first among us, though she wasn’t the oldest.  I wanted to learn how this “boyfriend” business worked, so I watched her very closely, sometimes through the living room drapery while she was on the porch kissing her date goodnight.  She modeled how to be affectionate in the midst of a distinctly cerebral family, shy about demonstrating emotion.  She gave me my first pet name: Golden Girl or Goldie, and then the one that stuck in my family, PG or sometimes Peej.  By the time I was 16, we were very close friends as well as sisters.  She invited me to spend Spring Break with her at college, and enjoyed “showing me off”.  She told me that the boys were noticing me and that she’d need to protect me.  I was thrilled!

Alice and Mike in Los Gatos, summer 1979

We spent that summer at home together in California.  I introduced her to my new boyfriend, who eventually became my husband.   She begged our parents to allow me to be her passenger on a road trip back to campus at the end of the summer.  She had just bought a car, and although I couldn’t drive, I could keep her company, sing with her along the way, and be her companion.  The road trip was a travel adventure flavored with freedom, sisterly love, and the sense of confidence and brand new responsibility.  We flopped the first night in a fleabag motel in the same bed.  She woke earlier than I and told me as I roused and stretched how sweet I looked cuddling the stuffed bunny my boyfriend had bought me.  Then we stayed with her friends in Colorado.  Our next day’s journey was to go through the heartland of the country and hopefully, if we made good time, get to Chicago for the night.  We never made it.

Nebraska is flat and boring.  We’d been driving for 6 hours.  I was reclined and dozing when we began to drift off the fast lane, going 80 mph.  Alice over-corrected, and we flipped.  She had disconnected her shoulder strap, and flopped around, hitting her head on pavement through the open window.  Her fragile, gentle head, with two blue eyes.  She was dead by the time we came to rest in the ditch.

Life is an experience, a journey of unexpected and unimagined happening, a verb in motion, not a noun.  Alice was in motion, at 20, and may be even now…somewhere, in some form.  I still taste her sweetness floating near me from time to time. 

Three of four sisters, Christmas 1978

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I Promised My Mother-in-law

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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.

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The Kreativ Blogger Award

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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…..

  

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My Favorite Fathers

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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!)

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This Space Reserved

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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.

 

 

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Friday Night Dancing

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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!

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I Love to Sing

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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!

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The Kiss

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A selection from my file marked “Widow’s Story”:

“I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I found out that he was in the same English class as my older sister, so I gave her a note to pass to him. I fastened it with a safety pin because I didn’t want her to read it. It was decorated with doodles and stuff, like a goofy schoolgirl with a crush would send. Basically, I offered to make him a cassette tape of my parents’ PDQ Bach album because I knew he was learning some of the madrigal pieces in choir and found them very funny. He sent me a note back, or spoke to me, and we agreed that I would give him that gift the next day before he got on the bus to go to the beach with the Senior class for Sneak Day. So, early on the morning of June 8, 1978, I waited outside the school near the cul de sac where the buses would board. He came bounding up to me when he saw me, and I greeted him with a big smile, handed him the tape and wished him a good day at the beach. He smiled back with his dazzling grin, thanked me and then leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He smiled again, turned and boarded the bus. I stood dazed on the steps for a few seconds before running off to class with a secret smirk planted on my face that must have lasted days. We talked about that first kiss a lot over the years. We celebrated that kiss forever after. At first, it was the 8th of every month that we gave each other anniversary cards and letters. Then, it was the yearly Kiss Anniversary presents of Hershey’s kisses. For 29 years we did that, sharing our chocolate mementos with children and co-workers and whoever was around on that June day to hear the story.

After the kiss came the letters. In the first one he wrote me, he said, “This is the first in a series that I will affectionately call ‘Letters to Priscilla’. In 20 years, you can toss them onto the fire and say to your husband, ‘Well, they were some good after all.’ But then again, in 20 years, maybe I’ll be your husband. Wink, wink.” He wrote that letter the night of that Senior Sneak Day. The day of our first kiss. Did he know?

The energy of that June day returned to me this morning.  Lying awake beside my open window, feeling the coolness of the morning air and the promise of sunshine and heat to come, the scent of freshly-mowed grass recalled to me the old high school lawn.  A certain excitement, the world about to turn in a new direction, the feeling that my real life might just be even more wonderful than my fantasies, and the realization that finally, I didn’t want to be anyone else except the person I actually am, set that energy flowing in a trickle down my face.  This may be the path to acceptance after all.

Photo credit: my little brother, aged 7. I set the shot up for him on my Canon AE-1 (a gift from Jim) and asked him to do this favor for me so that I’d have a picture to take away to college. What 7 year old kid would take a photo of his big sister kissing her boyfriend? A sweet, generous one. Thanks, David. Always grateful.

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Oh, You Kid!

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I spent a lovely afternoon with my daughter yesterday.  Despite being in grad school and already a real adult, she still has a wonderfully childlike nature.  I was waiting for her in the park on the square, and she managed to park her car and sneak from tree to tree without me noticing her, in order to come up from behind and grab me in an ambush hug.  Needless to say, she makes me smile and feel like a kid myself.  We wandered over to Aztalan State Park, where the wide open spaces were calling to me.  When I was a child, my dad used to take me to the Morton Arboretum.  I’d see fields of dandelions and expanses of grass that made me break out into a run, or a gallop, or a skip.  I just had to propel myself into the middle of that lush landscape, wishing I were a wild bird so that I could skim over the entire scene.  What happened to that energy, that joyous surge?  I still feel it in my brain, although the rest of me is greatly slowed down.  I invite you to step into this place as if you were 7 years old again….how does it feel to you?