We woke at the usual time, before 5am, only today I walked downstairs before Gary had finished making the coffee, and we sat together before the fire. This is not a “normal” morning because it is Christmas. It is not like last year when we soaked in the pool at the Kennedy School and watched our grandchildren unwrap gifts.
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A year ago, a hug was just a hug, but now it is a wonderful, a marvelous thing.
Times change, and our needs change too. The BBC interviewed the author of The Boy, the Mole, and Fox, and the Horse in a video, and I am reminded how this slim book touched me when I first read it.
Some dismissed the book as empty calories, as saccharine and forgettable. I didn’t agree when I first read it a year ago. I disagree even more today. As a former student wrote yesterday: It’s been a year.
It’s been a year of illness and isolation, of struggle for many people working in dangerous conditions and without loved ones nearby, of honest words struggling to be heard.
This is one of those books like Winnie the Pooh and The Arrival and The Wolves in the Walls that I wish everyone read.
“Sometimes,” said the horse.
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
“Sometimes what?” asked the boy.
“Sometimes just getting up and carrying on is brave and magnificent.”
by Charlie Mackesy
We could all use help about now—or those of us willing to ask.
There is no story here, but many gentle words of wisdom. And a mole who eats all the cake and then it happens again. And a fox. And a horse.
When I was young there were inspirational books all over the place with seagulls and kindergarten. This is like that or better. And the illustrations!
Yesterday, a neighbor’s dog went astray during their walk. We could hear Tim calling and calling. Gary said, “I hear his tags—he’s that way.” Oscar had turned up a side street toward the highway. We could not see him, and I could not hear a thing, but Gary has better ears. He found Oscar in a yard fifty feet from the highway, walked around and shooed him past me. A minute and Oscar heard Tim’s call and went running. It was a good day.
Our sons were both musical in school. Choirs have become particularly touching to us. Another sort of faith from mine, but it speaks me:
We Met a Deer We met a deer beside the wooded trail over the cape and east of the highway. I used to walk that way with my boys when they were young and eager. It is a long walk for a five year old. Miles away. Was it even possible to walk home the way we’d come? We never did. We returned north on the highway and through the tunnel, a scary path for any age. By then we were exhilarated, high on adventure and adrenaline, and eager to get home. The deer was afraid in her forest. She stood silent, still, breathing the same air we held in our chests. She willed us not to see. We stood still, silent, on the narrow trail above her. We watched, holding breath. We had been climbing for only a short time, up the north slope among alder trees, a lighter green than the spruce and hemlock we would find higher still. There is no leveling off on that early path, it is all up, then steeply down, always up on the right as we climb. Moss, ferns, mud, the dripping moisture. Then the Dark Fortress. Here at the crest, the land slopes steeply downhill on our right. Dry. The path nearly level. Evergreens grow darkly close together, like a crowd of giants’ legs, like a maze of massive pillars grown black and silent. We are near the ocean, a hundred meters above the highway, but while we stand and listen, we hear nothing. The ground is thirsty here and deep in duff, the dead needles of the spruce and hemlock trees, dropped a thousand million times, over a thousand seasons. Silent. The deer stood silent as if her stillness might make her safe. And then she turned her head, was gone. We moved on ourselves. We climbed and counted mushrooms. We walked up and up and up past creeks and perching birds and then through darkness, quiet, and finally down and down and down and through young alders to pavement again. We had listened for the highway, for the ocean, for the sound of our own footsteps, my little boys and me. Everything so still and far away. Quiet, until we are safe at home, and all our chatter and heat returns. Milk and brownies as reward for our long walk. “And we saw a deer,” they say. It was years ago. Perhaps my boys would not recall that day. They are grown men and too far away for me to ask.
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In the 1980s and 90s, we hosted an Open House on the Sunday before Christmas. For weeks I would make and freeze holiday cakes and appetizers. We cleaned house and invited neighbors, co-workers, and friends. No alcohol was served, which is probably why nothing awful ever happened. Well, there was the incident with the dog . . .
We stopped throwing these parties after the year both my brother and mother failed to attend. It seemed sad to work so hard if my local family couldn’t be bothered.
But I am retired now and I love any excuse to bake. We had talked about reigniting the tradition this year, but then, you know, this pandemic.
No gatherings here or in Portland for Thanksgiving. The up side of this is that I do not have to avoid the foods people do not or cannot eat. I can cook with gluten, eggs, dairy, nuts. I could make my spiced carrots. My pumpkin pie can include cream. There was an article in The New York Times this week about traveling and arriving exhausted and still having to cook, about adjusting to individuals’ preferences and dietary needs, and about having to eat multiple Thanksgiving feasts with each partner’s family. (Gary and I did that until we moved to Oregon.) Apparently other women have found the same silver lining. Less work, less stress when it’s just the two of you. Articles have acknowledged that holiday expectations are especially hard on women, and offered all sorts of suggestions about easing into a lockdown Thanksgiving: cook everything but in smaller amounts for two, cook the one thing you like best, cook nothing and order take-out, or reheat something frozen or just drink.
My solution was different. I am cooking a complete meal in easy stages. One dish a day. I made the wild rice and mushroom casserole a few days ago and we’ve eaten half of it. The rest is for tomorrow. I made twice-baked potatoes with cheese, and we’ve sampled that too. Yesterday I made my regular vegetarian herbed dressing using my own sourdough bread cubes (thank you again, Mary Jo and Dale), celery, onion, parsley, herbs from the garden, homemade stock, and cranberries. We had some of that for dinner last night. I might bake two loaves of cranberry bread this afternoon, but at least the pumpkin pie. (The Delicata squash I am using for the filling was roasted and puréed earlier too.) The trick will be keeping Gary out of the pie—pumpkin pie is the holiday dish he’s most fond of.
Stretching out the Thanksgiving feast preparation has been relaxing. I enjoy cooking, but it’s a lot of work for just one meal. We have enjoyed the Startbefores even more than the Leftovers in past years. It means that tomorrow I will make the apple salad with dates and walnuts first thing in the morning and we’ll have some for breakfast, and later roast Brussels sprouts for the big meal. I only have to reheat everything else.
The next holiday is Hanukah beginning 10 December, and we will burn candles. I was afraid I’d given away all the apricot jam, but after my initial panic, I found there is still one jar for the rugelach.
Then Christmas. The cards are more than half-addressed. I will miss not having Prissy’s wreath on the door, but we have lights and the just-for-show fake tree can go up soon after Thanksgiving. We are not buying a cut tree for the first year ever. (Even during the Big Mess when Gary and I, our two preschool children, and six dogs camped in 500 square feet for nine months including Christmas, we put up a tree.) My collection of clippy glass birds will stay in their boxes. The Swanson-Vance flying animals will hang on the pre-lit white paper “birch” tree from Costco. Just this once.
Another of Gary’s favorites is a Dundee cake, traditional for Boxing Day. My dried fruits—three kinds of raisins, pineapple, mango, and cherries—are soaking in rum as I type this. It only needs freshly grated lemon and orange peel. (I fear it will not be as good as last year when I used Scotch and home-candied orange rind.) There will be no one here to share that rich cake, so I plan to make us a six-inch round, which is still too much for two people.
In recent years our sons and their families have come for Twelfth Night in January. That’s not happening this season either, at least not as a physical get-together.
We are planning Jitsi or Zoom group meetings with family. Gary and I might watch Home for the Holidays, and certainly we will watch When Harry Met Sally. We will not stay up till midnight on New Years Eve—we almost never do. We will manage fine because we have remembered to tell people we love them. They might not be in the room, but there is room in our hearts,
Despite nearby forest fires and smoke and helicopters, power outage, impossible travel and seclusion due to covid, and an earthquake for Heaven’s sake—despite these trivial challenges, a former student and friend managed to marry today in a beautiful backyard garden. Her father was the officiant, her mother spoke, a neighbor added heartfelt wishes, the couple said their vows and danced, and two people who love one another are married.
Something wonderful happened.
[I won’t identify the couple as I do not have permission. Gary and I attended virtually.]
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Who was the boss of me? Most often that would have been my mother. Corporal punishment was extremely rare in my childhood. I ran wild in the woods and rode for miles on my bicycle. I came home with frogs and splinters and muddy clothing with the knees worn through. I do not recall being punished for any of that. On the rare occasion I was in deep trouble, I was sent to my room. (“Time Out” had not yet been invented, but “Go to your room until I tell you that you may come out” was pretty much the same thing.) Sending me to my room, I would eventually overhear in adult conversation, was not entirely successful. It seems I liked being in my room and would draw or read books without noticing my punishment.
Mostly I was well behaved. I said please and thank you as I’d been taught. I asked permission. I do not recall ever being deliberately rude to anyone except maybe my brother. Even sibling harassment (which flowed both ways) rarely occurred within earshot of my parents. That definitely led to banishment to my room. I was given rules about how to treat other people. Talking back, disrespect, refusal to do my chores—none of that was tolerated. “Think how the other person must feel,” my mother would say. Think how the other person must feel. I heard it a hundred thousand times. I believed her when she said it was important. She was almost always right, and I wanted to be good.
One painful example of my failure to be good involved thank-you notes. The very idea of writing a thank-you note made my stomach twist. I remember the feeling clearly all these years later, and also that I did not know what to write or how to do it. I suggested that Mom write the note and I would sign it. She actually did that once before she gave up entirely. My resistance was a mystery to me even as a child. Why couldn’t I write the thing? Sixty years later, I think I know. I really really did not know how to do it. There were no lines on the inside of the card, the card was very small, and I was used to lines and big pages and a fat pencil. I needed a model, or for my mother to help me create a model of a thank you note. All I had as an example of writing to my grandparents was watching my mother write letters. A hundred lines of neat writing on thin stationary was not something I could imagine doing.
It sounds ridiculous now to say that I did not know how and needed a model with the words “Thank you Gaga and Papa for the toy rabbit. I played with it all day. Love, Janice,” but I think it’s true. I needed my mother to write out the words for me on a sample piece of paper so that I could understand where to start and where to end. I dearly loved my grandparents. I just did not know how to fit my words on the card.
When I was teaching English to 16 and 17 year olds, I often found myself taking students step-by-step through tasks and ideas that seem obvious to most adults. We memorized The Preamble, wrote essays, took notes in several styles, and we studied the difference between fiction and nonfiction, considered how a person may be wrong without lying, and that it is important to thank the person when completing a personal interview.
When I insisted my Honors students address and mail me a one-page letter proposing their research topic, writing the letter was only half their battle. For a few years, when college applications were still on paper, I insisted they mail the letter to me. They were horrified. (Seriously.) I gave them a printed template for the letter—an outline for four brief paragraphs in full block business letter form with directions—and handed out #10 envelopes. (It was not safe to assume they had access to envelopes at home.) I drew an envelope large on the whiteboard, and demonstrated where to write their return address and the address they must send it to. Yes, they would have to buy a stamp. I told them what it would cost.
No one complained that they already knew this stuff. Almost none of them had ever mailed a letter before. Several told me after the fact that they had never before entered the Post Office, even though many of them did not even have home delivery of mail. They knew how to do many difficult things, but there were massive gaps in their experience even on simple tasks. This was not anyone’s fault. They were smart students, capable and generally willing, but like the definition of “pejorative” and typing an m-dash, they had no experience of how to do it. I needed to explain step by step.
That was me writing a thank you card when I was six. It is like taking a bus, filing taxes, changing a tire. Basic, maybe even essential skills, but someone has to show us the first time. [Full disclosure: I cannot use a smart phone. Yes, I can text—though I don’t—and search the internet, and I am confident I could manage more if it were necessary, but no one has offered to show me how to do anything, and so long as I can avoid figuring it out on my own, I will.]
When I finally sent a colored pencil drawing of a dragon as my thank-you, my grandmother unfolded and pressed it flat, framed it, and Papa put it up on the wall. I was astonished. I had not thought how they would feel. But my mother would continue to remind me.
Simple courtesy is not automatic. If there is crude language or anger or name-calling in the home, a child does not learn that these are unacceptable in the world at large. [I was sent home from school with a note when I was six or seven because I had used a swear word I’d heard at home. That was a mistake I struggled not to repeat with my own children.]
Students deserve respect. And that sometimes meant a detailed explanation of the difference between vulgar language and actual swearing and why the latter is particularly offensive to some people. I assured my students that I was not personally offended by most language, but that it was likely hurtful to some of their peers. In addition, I absolutely did not tolerate racist, sexist, ablest, homophobic, or other bigoted language. I told them such bigoted remarks were personally painful, that I hoped they would show respect toward me as I did toward them. Am I ranting? I do not think so, not quite.
But wait, there’s more. I insisted on some courtesies as necessary to life, just like changing a tire or using a phone. Know how to ask a favor, how to express gratitude, how to respond to someone who has lost their temper. Think about how the other person must feel.
The danger, as I saw it, was that without considering how others felt, my students were likely to be far from home some day and unknowingly offend a person they had absolutely no intention of hurting. That would be sad, I told them, wouldn’t it?
[For years, I also suggested in conversation the very real danger that when they were far from home they would use bigoted language that would get them “stabbed through the heart.” And then that happened to a student I knew. The boy lived, but being rude to some smaller, harmless-looking individual, he discovered they had a bigger cousin.]
Think how the other person must feel. Teasing, loudness, cruel words—think how the other person must feel.
It’s easier, lazier I would argue, not to hold standards, to give in or fail to follow through and strive to be consistent, fair, and clear. Isn’t that the perennial complaint: Kids these days! I hear that even from people younger than myself. But I think they are wrong that kids these days are different. Kids have not changed. Parenting is not harder or easier. I don’t think it was any different for me or my mother or her mother before that. Maybe we can do better.
My mother did not always exercise perfect judgement. She was not perfect. She made her mistakes. But she was the boss of me—as was my dad, grandparents, teachers, and other trusted adults. Mom set standards for my speech and other behavior that continue to guide me in the right direction. She did not necessarily reason with me as a child; she told me that certain words, attitudes, and behaviors were unkind or dangerous. You are not to do that again. It was not a negotiation. It was a rule.
One of the most helpful parenting tips I ever received had to do with the presentation of important rules. Some rules you can work on (guidelines, aspirations?), some are absolute and should not be followed by “okay?” I hear it all the time, that near-automatic request as if for agreement from the child. Do not hit the cat, okay? is not the message you want to deliver. Try: Do you understand? Do you promise? Don’t ask them to agree or disagree unless you are prepared to have them respond to your okay? with no!
I hear that “okay?” at the end of all sorts of parental directions, as if the child has a choice. But sometimes they do not. No toys at the table because banging metal cars dents the wood. You will brush your teeth in the bathroom because it’s easier to clean spit off the mirror than this couch. You will not say mean things to your grandfather because he is trying to help you and you will hurt his feelings.
It’s fair for a child to ask for reasons, and it is fair that a parent does not budge if the reasons seem unreasonable to the child. It is not okay to hit the cat. Not ever. You will not hit the cat, full stop. I want you home for dinner. Call me when you get there. Do not use that word when you are at school. There is no discussion or negotiation about such rules. The child does not have to like these rules or agree to them. They are about proper behavior.
“You will write a letter proposing your research topic, put it in an envelope, and ensure it will arrive in my P.O. Box by next Tuesday.” A discussion follows of how that may be accomplished, of how the mail is delivered, what happens if the letter is late or incomplete. I can explain and defend the need to do it. They have a choice of topic and thesis, Helvetica or Times New Roman font. Not writing the letter is failure of the assignment. Write the letter and mail it. , okay?
The other parenting tip I learned was about threats. Never threaten to do anything you will not actually do. If you threaten to send a child to her room for the entire morning if she hits the cat again, you better be willing to follow through. Mean what you say, make rules only about what is necessary, and if you give directions, do not ask for permission that they be followed but whenever possible offer choices or options you can live with.
As parents, our job is to provide guidance and rules. Maybe we can reason with the child, but if they do not care to listen about the danger of turning the oven on without permission, we insist anyway. Maybe we bargain about playtime and chores and bedtime. We negotiate: do this and you can have that. We do not always give them options. Sometimes we must be the parent: we insist this is what must happen. Behaviors with the potential for injury, pain, offense, unkindness are not subject to negotiation. We do not ask them if it’s okay. We can and certainly should explain the how’s and wherefores of accomplishing what is necessary, but certain behaviors are not acceptable. You will not hit your brother. You will eat your dinner if you want dessert. I am proud of you for holding your temper. I am glad to see you being so careful not to hurt the cat. I know you are disappointed, but I love you anyway.
My mother was the boss of me. During a shopping trip she told me that the four-poster bed I admired was a stupid choice. I was forty years old that day. Mom was still trying to tell me what to do and I was a mother of two teenagers. It made me shrug and change the subject. Well, Mom was not perfect, but she was a good mother and taught me a lot. She irritated me, but I didn’t argue. We moved on to look at chairs because she needed a chair. I bought that bed twenty years later after she died. I laugh when I tell the story because I love her and she loved me. Right or wrong, she was still trying to do her job.
And I was thinking about how the other person must feel.
I have bread rising just now. After I’d put the dough into an oiled bowl—the perfect size with a silicon lid that exactly fits—I washed the measuring cups and the scrapers, the measuring spoon and the mixer bowl and paddle, and finally, since I was at it, the coffee cups from breakfast. Then I dried and put everything away, wiped down the counters, and remembered my mother.
It was my job to do the dishes by the time I was eight—never my brother’s job as he was given the lawn and paid more to do it in his adolescence and teens, facts I resented even then. But for at least the past twenty years or so, washing the dishes has been my husband’s job. We both had full-time jobs outside the home by then. I had more homework. (“You are never off the clock,” he observed more than once. He came home and left the work at work.) I cook. He cleans. I paint walls. He gardens. (I do feel I got the better end of the deal.) We are meticulous about sharing how money is spent. (Except for gifts to one another—we are even allowed to lie about that.)
Anyway. Dishes. The hot tap water scalded my hands and I hated rubber gloves. The entire task was nasty and I resented it.
A couple of years ago we were staying at friends’ beautiful cabin. After a lovely dinner, our host was washing the dishes and I did not help. I knew I should lend a hand but I felt rather helpless. Perhaps it had been too long since I did dishes or I was lazy? Perhaps I had lost some measure of self-sufficiency?
So my friend washed the dishes, dried and put them away, perhaps. I was not paying full attention. Then, in a final step, she wiped out the sink, and it all came back to me. My mother always wiped out the sink and wiped down the counters after doing the dishes. She used a mop to scrub the kitchen floor.
I had done that myself, once upon a time. It struck me, oddly, as a powerful wave of memory, of habits discarded, or skills set aside by necessity because of the long hours I worked while teaching and advising yearbook, caring for children, writing, and completing a fourth degree.
I used to wipe out the sink.
I used to get down on my knees and scrub the floors each week, tip furniture back and vacuum every other day, brush my teeth twice a day, floss, and carry out the trash. I took my young sons out for a walk and often carried at least one of them home again. I canned tomatoes and peaches too.
The mystery novels I am reading just now obsess over protecting private schools and colleges where all “the best people” and “the best women” attend school. Since I am reading this author’s books in chronological order, I note the author becomes increasingly willing to acknowledge politics, her own feminism, and her fear of aging, but she never lets up on class snobbery, which she fervently denies, of course. Those best people. Or as Woolf’s character Mrs Ramsey in To the Lighthouse declares to herself: “the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.”
I paused for a long time over “the poor.”
There is a grammatical structure called parallelism in a list, something I used to teach. “I went to the store to get apples, milk, pepper, and toilet paper.” A list of nouns separated by commas. (That last comma before the “and” is referred to as a “serial” or “Oxford comma,” and some of us have strong feelings about whether it should be used. Yes, it should.) Parallel structures exist in any list, such as verbs—”He ran, jumped, and fell down”—and can be more than single words—Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house…” To be parallel, a list of nouns must be all nouns, all verbs of the same tense, all prepositional phrases, or whatever.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. [I double-checked the caps—Jefferson capped his essential human rights.]
Pause and look again at Woolf’s three words, “suffering, death, the poor.” Suffering and death are situations, but “the poor” are people. Suffering and death afflict everyone, may be avoided or delayed but not escaped. According to the structure of this sentence, so are the poor. An inevitable affliction? She could have said “suffering, death, and poverty” to herself. Poverty is another affliction, though not one this particular character ever experienced. Neither did Woolf herself experience poverty. (She and her husband owned properties when she complained of poverty.) It is poor people who are the affliction in this grammar.
Before we begin talking, as some people like to do, about class warriors, consider the inequality of the battle. Consider who is winning in a battle against poverty and who loses. Consider who fights from gilded mansions while whining about class warfare.
Self-sufficiency is a major reason I do not have my hair cut, have not visited a “beauty salon” since I was a child. I cut my own hair and when I colored it with henna or purple dye, I did it myself. I have never had a manicure, though I have considered one. I have changed tires and headlights myself, painted walls and laid tile, and built fencing and wainscoting. I have never sheered a sheep, but I have carded, spun, and dyed yarn. Over the years I have experimented with most every traditional woman’s craft and a good number of those given to men. Gary and I have never hired anyone to clean for us or to run errands or to do the gardening. Sometimes cleanliness suffered, the errands were not done, and the garden was a wreck. We were okay with that for a variety of reasons. It didn’t matter compared to the rest. Usually, we could not afford to have things done for us. We always believed we should do for ourselves as much as possible.
As we age, this will change. Two lamps are waiting to be installed in the ceiling outside the laundry. We will not be the ones to install them. Gary is forbidden to go on the roof. I refuse to crawl under the house ever again. There will be tasks we ignore or hire others to complete.
Poverty is not something I can personally cure. “The poor” are sometimes “the best people.” I know this from my lived experience.
And while I would be a fool to think anyone is ever entirely self-sufficient, I can still bake bread. I can wipe out the sink when I am done.
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The Reading Under the Gun (or RUG” was a timed writing assignment. I gave students a limited period of time, a short text, some provoking questions, and required them to write until I said stop. The assignment was worth five points. Even if you answered the questions wrong or went off topic, so long as you wrote, you got the points. Sound simple? It was harder for some than you would think. Some didn’t want to do more than the minimum, they filled a page and then wanted to stare into space. I could be sticky about it.
It was a grade-builder, rewarded for effort. If I did my part well enough, they learned how to read quickly and think deeply about texts. They observed and recorded the obvious. They took risks and made personal connections. They didn’t always appreciate it. Regardless, they almost always liked the particular reading below. It was often their favorite of the year.
Some of my students were lucky people and had been protected and blessed all of their lives. But that good fortune doesn’t last for anyone. We do not get to live pretty lives all of the time. All of us suffer and change happens and we grieve for what is lost or never arrived. But every one of us has moments worth treasuring. The snapshots we hope are true.
From Life magazine, September 1991, “Picturing Happiness” by Lynda Barry:
“Happiness is happiness, no matter how things turn out. It still counts. And when you see it caught perfectly in a picture taken nearly 40 years ago, look closely. You’re holding a fragile, sweet, gorgeous bird in your hands.”
We saw the black oystercatcher baby yesterday morning and it’s doing fine, my center panel is joined together and the 3″ frame is cut and pieced, the next quilt is already in planning, and I made blueberry crisp.
This quilt is a version of the one I made for our oldest granddaughter’s bed here at the beach. I am still rearranging as I work through piecing these center squares. (They have shifted from what is here—see top photo.) I hope to have all 81 squares joined by next week. Then I will add a pieced frame and a pieced border, washing the backing that came today in the mail, and folded quilt top and backing into a bag for Linda. Seven rows of nine pieced squares, just lying in place the way they were made. The last row was pieced yesterday, and after a last review in predawn to check the arrangement of values, today I will begin joining the squares to make the center panel.
My husband and I have a lot in common, things you can’t see, and a couple you can. We once lived a half mile apart, and we graduated from the same large suburban public high school, though we did not meet until before my senior year. Our DNA is largely Northern European. Gary has more African; I have more Native American. We both look White. At one time our hair was the same color. It’s the same color now.
We met through mutual friends, the Edmonds Unitarian Church, and rock music. Gary was born in Seattle but spent seven years of his childhood in Arizona. I was born in Corvallis, but lived briefly in Portland then Seattle. We would graduate, first Gary and then me, from the University of Washington with Honors and Phi Beta Kappa. We were overqualified for most of our jobs. We worked hard. We shared a commitment to doing the best we could. We shared values. We shared a commitment to our marriage.
But our backgrounds are different.
Gary’s parents met during the war in Arizona, both of them in the military, and they married in Roswell, New Mexico. Gary doesn’t know if it was in a registry office, a roadside chapel, or a church. My parents met in college at the UC Berkeley after the war and were married in a Unitarian Church in Berkeley, California.
My family had me and my brother, and debating was dinner table entertainment. Money was often tight, but Mom took art classes, and my dad worked for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries as a research librarian.
Gary’s family had six children, they argued out loud. His mother never learned to drive, and his father scrambled to provide for his large family as a carpenter.
My dad had been married before he met my mother, but he and his parents as well as my mother’s parents were divorced. Most of that generation remarried in my family. My paternal grandmother, who raised my dad, never did remarry. My dad was raised in a household of women: grandmother, mother, and aunt. His aunt taught business courses in the LA school system.
Gary’s maternal grandfather had many children (fourteen? seventeen? I always forget), two wives or maybe three in Oklahoma, and worked his whole life as a sharecropper and day laborer. When his first wife died, he gave his children away on a street corner. His paternal grandfather was a contractor who immigrated from Finland, married a widow, and died coming home from a tavern.
My dad was Army in France and Germany, Gary’s dad was Air Force stateside. They both began smoking Camels in the military. Both died of lung cancer. My dad the week before Christmas, Gary’s dad on Mother’s Day. Our mothers did not remarry.
One of our struggles as a young couple was about “discussion” because his family yelled, mine debated. Each of us found the other’s yelling/debating distressing and argumentative. We shared concern with ethics, liberal politics, appreciation of art and music and theater and cultures around the world. We shared a determination to stay together. Both of us worried, but about different things. We “took turns” being sad. [“You can’t be depressed, it’s my turn to be depressed.”] Like any couple, we had our disagreements and misunderstandings. I think, together, we made a good couple. We balance and support and love one another.
My mother actively disliked her in-laws. And that was too bad. We spent all our holidays with Mom’s family in Portland, which was wonderful. Gary’s father’s family never thought his mother was good enough—truly unfair. Once he died, most of the family cut off all contact. Still, his is an enormous family and Gary feels close to siblings, nephews, nieces, and a cousin.
Gary’s family was kind to me. I was a little out there, but they were good to me and I love them.
We thought for a time that we would not have children at all. It was not part of our plan when we married. But then, like a decision to marry, one day it felt right. We talked and made a series of decision about moving back to Oregon and having children. Two children. We love them both and their families. We are proud of our sons.
My parents didn’t like Gary much early on. Fifty or so years ago, my father said he didn’t think Gary was “tough enough.” [I can picture him saying that, a cigarette in his bruised arthritic fingers, and how I thought wtf? at the time.] But it was Gary who stuck it out with me, who was the stable member of his family, who took care of the home front when my dad was dying. It was Gary who made my mother coffee and cleaned her kitchen and stopped by the house three times a day for years, caring for her like a son while her own son was away. In the end, Mom appreciated him. After she died I went through her papers and found written notes to change her will, favoring Gary in the months before she died.
I favor him myself. He is a good man, a good father, and has made me a better person. We will have been married for 46 years a couple of weeks from now. We were together as a couple for five years before that. I just heard from a former student who seems to married her high school sweetheart this spring. It’s rare that such relationships last. Sometimes they do. Our first date was in August too, in 1969. Lucky. Lucky. Lucky.
Once I had the eighty-one squares pieced, I opened the package with the quilt I picked up from Linda Pinkstaff last week. It is hand block-printed vintage Indian cottons from Cargo. This is the top, with the center diamond a true batik. I still have to bind it.
The back is black and white a red, a completely different set of block-printed cottons. There was only red on one selvage, so I cut and pieced the back to take advantage of that. It is a special piece and Linda was right about the quilting pattern. [84″ square]
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My black plum upside-down cake. I made this yesterday morning and we ate the last of it this morning for our breakfast. The plate is from Rainbow Gate, a Santa Fe studio.
Bread is on the first rise downstairs and I meant to come upstairs and work on the new quilt. That was what I meant to do. I bake most days, and I do that because I enjoy baking.
I took up cooking and baking while I was a teenager partially in contrast to my mother. I saw it as an opportunity for creativity. My mother saw it as drudgery. My mother was skilled but unimaginative in the kitchen. Resistant. She was of the generation that produced syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) who wrote a series of satirical books about Midcentury Modern Life with titles such as The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank and If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? Continue reading
