Life without grandmothers

Moving house

2009-04-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

I have moved here. Posts from this blog will migrate over time.

One year

2009-03-06T09:27:00.000-08:00

How has it been a year (yesterday) already?

Mimi, you are still with me every day.

Christmas

2008-12-24T08:17:00.001-08:00

This is the story I told at Mimi's memorial service:

In 1987 in Vermont, for midnight mass we went to the Unitarian church in the upper village. Mimi frequently attended there because it was so much closer than the nearest Episcopal church. The church is up on a hill next to a farmhouse and barn, and the farmer had a live Nativity scene for after the service.

The closing hymn was "O Come All Ye Faithful"---we started singing and filed out into the night. In the barn there were some local kids in their parents' bathrobes with towels on their heads, grinning. There were some sheep and a surly-looking goat. A cow chewed quietly, and the pony was adorable in its shaggy winter coat.

I was walking with Mimi when we left the barn. It had started to snow in big clumps, and the streetlight shone pink. We were on the final verse of the carol. She took my arm and we sang at the top of our lungs as we marched down the hill in the snow:

Yea, Lord, we greet thee!
Born this happy morning,
Jesus, to Thee be glory given;
Word of the Father,
Now in flesh appearing:
O come let us adore Him
O come let us adore Him
O come let us adore Him
Christ the Lord

One way in which my life diverges from that of a famous dancer

2008-12-17T11:39:00.001-08:00

When I was a teenager, I went through a brief phase of loving Dr. Who. And I wanted that scarf---or, rather, a long long scarf that would trail on the ground when I walked.

(Beth had given me her old 60s-vintage dress coat, black trimmed in black velvet. Wouldn't that have been grand with a giant scarf?)

I showed Grandmom the program. "Long, like that," I said, "but with black and grey stripes."

"YOU CAN'T HAVE THAT LONG SCARF," Mom said.
"Why not?" says I.
"BECAUSE ISADORA DUNCAN DIED FROM A BROKEN NECK WHEN SHE WORE A LONG SCARF IN A CONVERTIBLE."

I did wonder about this, not being a person who ever rode in convertibles.

"Oh, I'll knit her a safe scarf," Grandmom said.

And she did: she used grey and brown variegated yarn, so it had wodges of color instead of stripes.

And she made it very, very safe.

If I stretched real hard, it went twice around my neck, with tails that hung all the way down to my collarbones.

So I'm glad to say that I did not break my neck from wearing that scarf.

So many Christmas memories!

2008-12-16T11:39:00.000-08:00

Grandmom and Granpop went to a tiny country Methodist church up on the hill that had a Christmas party every year with Santa. Each child got a small wrapped present and one of those old-fashioned stockings containing an orange, a candy cane, and a handful of chocolates. It was way better than Santa's helpers at the mall: because there were not many children (it was a Baptist kind of town), we got pretty much all the time we wanted to babble about how very very very very good we'd been and how very very very much we wanted a pony or a chemistry set.*

The year I was 7-ish, my dad excused himself to go to the bathroom right as we were ending the singing part. "Hurry back!" I said, because Santa would be there any minute.

We stopped singing. Santa came out and no Dad! Several kids went up. My sister (3-ish) went up to sit on his lap, and she howled and screamed in fright, which for some strange reason made Santa laugh a lot. This only made Lissa scream some more, until she finally wriggled out of his lap and ran away. My grandmother was giggling as she took Lissa's present. I was worried about my daddy having tummy troubles in the bathroom, and then it was my turn.

I sat on Santa's lap and thought what a very good Santa's helper he was. He had nice eyes, like my dad's eyes. He was very jolly: I could hear him trying not to laugh when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I rattled off whatever I wanted that year, while my wee brain began to form a suspicion that perhaps my daddy was not in fact in the bathroom. I stopped in my list.

"Is that all you want?" the Santa asked. And that was it. This was definitely my father. I squinched up my eyes and nodded.

Back in the pew, I stared longingly at the chocolates in my stocking and worked myself into a high dudgeon. The nerve! Santa's helpers were supposed to be anonymous and from the North Pole, not your own dad.

I was, however, smart enough to keep my yap shut until Lissa had gone to bed. I was familiar with the process of hand meeting fanny and how to avoid such.

"That was you!" I yelled.
"What are you talking about?"
"You were Santa!"
"I was not. I was in the bathroom."
"You were! Grandmom was laughing and that was you."
"That kind of doubt is the kind of thing that makes Santa take presents away."

Argument ended, thank you very much. Many years later, we laughed a lot about how my sister screamed.

*Several years later, I did get a chemistry set, and I spent many happy hours turning liquid from white to purple and back again.

Making the ephemeral last

2008-12-12T15:09:00.000-08:00

(When I went home for Thanksgiving, Mom had a bag of Mimi's clothes for us to go through, sent down by my aunts. Because I had written about Mimi's Keds, they sent 2 pair for me: one khaki, one light blue. We have the same shoe size. I shall wear them all next summer, if I can possibly do so without filling them with tears.)

Christmas 1987, when we all met up in Vermont, there was so much snow ... maybe not to a Vermonter's eye, but definitely a winter wonderland for a North Carolina girl.

We made a lumpy snow maiden outside the dining-room window, dressed in things from the dress-up box in the sleeping porch.

I don't know whose idea it was---one of the dads?---to pour a pan of water over the snow maiden, but they did one afternoon, late, just before the sun went down. We inspected her the next day and she was an absolute block of ice.

When we got to Vermont that summer, Mimi had a picture in her album of the snow maiden in April, still standing and just then starting to get mushy, surrounded by green grass.

Strangely, this was never in style

2008-12-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

One weekend we drove up to Norwood without checking the weather forecast. We drove up Friday night, went to bed, and woke up in the morning to see our breath misting in front of our faces, and there were several inches of snow on the ground.

My brother was about 2, which would've made me 14 and my sister 10. And we were desperate to get out into the snow, with nary a glove, a hat, or a snow boot among us.

I could wear Grandmom's boots, coat, and gloves, and I had a scarf wrapped around my head. I remember grousing about not being able to wear my own jacket, but in the end, snow won out over teenage fashion trauma. Lissa grumbled too, because everything she had on was too big: she had on like 3 pairs of socks inside Grandmom's rain boots, and she could hardly walk.

My brother had a coat but no shoes to wear. We stood around for a minute, pondering, while he bounced up and down at the window making one of those toddler sounds that's most audible to dogs. Finally, Grandmom decided that we would rubberband plastic bread bags around his legs.

He did not love this idea.

But when the violent operation was over, I carried him howling outside into the snow and plopped him down in it. In 3.9 seconds he had forgotten that he was wearing food packaging. We built a lopsided snowman. It even had a carrot nose.

Another birthday

2008-11-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

Mimi would have been 93 today. We all still miss her so much.

One year (we were living in Raleigh), Mimi and Gogo came to visit in the fall, for Dad's and Mimi's birthdays.

Angel food cake was always one of Dad's favorites, so that's what he got for his birthday cake.

The next night, for Mimi's special dinner, Mom brought out a big chocolate cake for Mimi.

"It's devil's food---I hope you like it!" she said.
"Oh, lovely," Mimi said.

Mom cut into the cake, and then Gogo erupted in howls of laughter. We stared at him.

"Making a comment about your mother-in-law, Beck?" he asked.
"Baroo?" we all said.
"DEVIL'S FOOD!" he yelled.

Poor Mom was so flustered. And we tease her about the devil's food cake to this very day.

Every time we would tell the story in front of Mimi, she leapt to Mom's defense. "It was a delicious cake! I loved it!" she would say.

Hooray for dads!

2008-11-04T07:27:00.000-08:00

Today is my father's birthday.

When I was about 6 years old, I used my EZ-Bake Oven to bake his birthday cake: yellow cake with peanut-butter icing. (WHY has there not been more peanut-butter icing in my life?)

It did not occur to me until after I proudly placed the tiny plate in front of him that Dad would eat the whole thing. That was a minor tragedy. Still! He pronounced it Good.

When we went on the EYC (Episcopal Youth Community) camping trip and a stick bug got on my sleeping bag, Dad went with me to sleep in the car.

On my ninth birthday, Lissa gave me a skateboard (thanks for the scars), Mom gave me a beautiful dress, and Dad said his gift required going out. I insisted on wearing my beautiful new dress (slightly too big, and so very long, which I loved). He said that if I was going to dress up, so would he, so he put on a suit and we went to see Star Wars. Twenty years later, when the special editions came out, I cried a little in the movie theater when the music started to play, because I wished that I was sitting again with Dad.

He has more than one gold gallon pin from the Red Cross for donating blood.

He is spending his retirement building Habitat for Humanity houses.

I am so proud of my dad.

Happy birthday! I love you.

WHEN GRANDMOTHERS ATTACK

2008-10-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, I have a ridiculous hatred of raincoats. I don't know what it stems from: it's not like I have a memory of Childhood Raincoat Trauma.

I read a book once about a girl whose mother hated yellow slickers, so she always had to have fancy rain outfits: I remember a description of one that was pink with black trim, including a pink riding helmet with a plastic-covered black velvet button on top. But the girl in the book wanted a yellow slicker patched with duct tape and a pair of rubber boots.

I wanted both---geez oh man, I wanted the elegant fancy pink raincoat with a hat AND the goofy Paddington slicker that would make me Part of the Crowd. Of course, this was a book about a girl in high school, and I was in elementary school, so it wasn't really applicable. As a child, I was always aching for whatever I read in a book. I mean, for real---if I had read a book about fois gras on toasted challah, I probably would've laid on the floor and longed for duck liver. (As I am now.)

In sixth grade, in Slidell, I had a red raincoat with metal latches that had a tan canvas lining printed with red and green ducks. I hated those ducks. It wasn't so much the rest of the jacket (I liked the latches), but those ducks! That tan canvas! I hated it so much. And, you know, I was At An Age. It was raining, and time to go to school, and I wanted an umbrella, but Mom wanted me to wear my raincoat, and I launched into one of those emotion storms that children have. I threw myself to the floor, wailing, and Mom's response has become a standard family joke: "Get! Up! Off! The! Floor! You! Are! Not! A! Slave!"

At the time, I thought something along the lines of "But I am! I am a slave to the raincoat!" but how funny is that?

When Mimi would come to stay with us, she'd let us use umbrellas. Well, and eat grilled cheese sandwiches on TV trays for dinner, so it was like Child Vacation in Heaven.

But Grandmom: now she had a fetish for rain bonnets. Heaven forbid it should look like 82% humidity, because she would bring a handful of little plastic containers from her purse and we'd have to put those wicked things on. I liked the containers---the lids would make a nice popping sound when you opened them, and the best ones had ball-chain loops so you could put them on your keychain. I liked unfolding the bonnets, which were always cleverly mashed up like little plastic maps, and they never ever ever folded up the same way or fit very well inside the containers.

I did not get the point of the plastic rain bonnets: they kept the top part of my hair dry but not the bottom, didn't keep the rain out of my eyes, didn't keep my clothes dry. The main result was a dry scalp and sweaty ears. But Grandmom always made us wear one at the first sight of rain.

As much as I hated them, I'd give a lot to have another one now, for Grandmom to make me wear one of those dumb, useless hats.

Amazing culinary prowess: age 8!

2008-10-09T20:09:00.001-07:00

The summer I was 8, I decided that I wanted to learn to cook.

Mom and I trooped off to Coburns (just over 2 miles straight downhill), where I picked out a box of Duncan Hines spice cake mix and matching frosting. (1) I liked the color and (2) "spice" sounded super fancy, like something out of Narnia.

Back at Innisfree, Mimi set out a footstool for me. I cracked an egg! Then Mom fished the pieces of shell out. I stirred that cake mix with all the strength in my little twig arm. Later, when the cake was cool, Mom inverted the two layers and I used every molecule of frosting. Geez oh man did it smell good: clove and cinnamon and just like I had hoped. It was all I could do not to quiver into another dimension, waiting for dinner to be over.

After dinner, we repaired to the terrace. "Does anyone want cake?" I asked. *I* wanted cake, let me tell you.

"I get the first piece." Gogo said. "A big one!"

I brought him a piece of cake as big as his head. He ate the whole thing. "Delicious!" he said.

I thought, "Great! I am a really good cook!" And of all the things I have felt insecure about in my life, I never once doubted my ability to cook yummy food.

All the things that save my life

2008-09-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

Here is something very few people know:

Since the moment of my birth, I have regularly required Lifesaving Measures. I'm sure this is annoying and alarming for everyone. Certainly I've gotten pretty tired of it.

When I was 16ish, Mom and Dad sat me down at the kitchen table one night after dinner: white table with yellow trim. Lissa and I sat on a bench on one side; Mom and Dad had yellow chairs. J3's high chair was at the end. I'm pretty sure Dad built the bench. Under the chair rail, the kitchen and breakfast nook were painted yellow; above it there was white wallpaper with little springs in blue, red, and yellow, each of which had 2 green leaves.

"We are worried that you are thinking of hurting yourself," they said.
"OMG NO!" I said.

That was totally a lie, because I was. I had been collecting razor blades out of Dad's toolbox, and I would lay them out on my white nightstand under the lamp so they shone. I would drag them across my arms to feel them catch and skip.

The problem was, I couldn't figure any way to demise myself when my sister wouldn't be the one to find me. I got up first in the morning to get ready, and she was second. So if I filled the tub with the contents of my veins, she would see it, sleepy and in her nightgown at 12 years old. And I just couldn't do that.

When I told her this, several years ago, she punched me in the arm. Really hard. And she called me a bad word.

So for Easter we went to Jekyll Island to visit Mimi and Gogo---for many years they escaped Mud Season in Vermont by taking the auto train down to the Georgia coastal islands. (And seriously, how cool is the phrase "auto train"?)

A couple of nights I took a walk by myself on the beach after dinner. I have always loved, still love, the silver road that the moon makes on dark water. Where does that road go? I have always wanted to know. I wandered up and down the beach, chanting (bad) poetry to myself.

The second night, I walked out up to my neck in the water before I realized I had done it.

I trooped back out of the water and wandered up and down the beach, waiting for my clothes to dry. "At last," I thought. I could just wander out, and maybe it would be a stranger to find me, someone who would not be traumatized, and my family was all together, so they would be okay.

I went out the next night, and Gogo was at the bottom the steps, smoking.

"Going for a walk!" I chirped.

He clamped his arm around my neck.

"I'm going with you," he said. "This walking around all hours of the night: it's weird."

At the time I was so annoyed. But now I'm grateful. I'm also pretty sure he knew dang well what he was doing.

It's not a novel, but at least it changed the family slang

2008-09-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

When I was in Vermont in the summer of 2005(? sometimes it's very inconvenient to be away from the Innisfree guest book), I was driving around in the car with, I think, Mom, Lissa, Mimi, and Ellen.

We went around a curve and there was a vast field of junk: cars, washing machines, satellite dishes, garden chairs, and and and.

"WHAAAAT is THAT?" says I.
"Those are the Coutermarshes," Mimi said.

And my brain made a sound like a pachinko machine. Of course, in my head it's spelled "Cootermarsh," because "cooter" is funnier. I howled with laughter the whole way home and spent the rest of the trip talking about the Cootermarshes. I gave them tremendously dirty names (I think one was Peen Tallywhacker "Tally" Cootermarsh) and declared them "Cononisseurs of the Disused and Dishabille." I gave them a mangy girl dog just so I could use the phrase "that bitch Franklin Delano Roosevelt." I gave them French cousins named Coutremarché. And the longer my mother and sister kept laughing, the more I talked about their adventures in which they saved the world without even knowing it.

Mom thinks my path to literary fame lies with the Cootermarshes, but I've never been able to catch a decent plot: that's a problem with jokes. It's very hard to spin them out for very long.

So instead, somehow we've all gotten into the habit of using "cootermarsh" to refer to all the assorted stuff and junk of life. That pile of stuff I fling into my bag in the morning? Those are me cootermarshes. When I'm moving detritus from one spot to another, I'm cootermarshing. That sounds so much more glamorous than "straightening up."

Even if there's no "glo" left in the Indiglo

2008-09-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

I wear Mimi's watch every day, and it sits tight around my wrist. I imagine that it is her hand.

(Last week, in Austin, I was waiting in Walgreen's to pick up a prescription for a friend, and I saw a lady wearing this same watch. She had beautiful white hair. It was much like Mimi's. I still miss her every day.)

Some adventures are not that great

2008-09-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

One year there was a big raspberry bramble by the big old pine tree in between Innisfree and Mimi & Gogo's house, and, astoundingly, there were actually berries on it that the birds hadn't eaten.

Until recently (I have gone through a weird transformation), I was not an eater of fruit. Raspberries with cream and sugar for breakfast on the deck was an exception to this. And what would be better than ultra-fresh raspberries picked from right there? Mimi gave me a small metal bowl, and I went down to pick berries. It was a hot day, with insects buzzing all around me. And then buzzing ALL around me, and rather a lot of them.

Mom said that she and Mimi stood on the deck, leaning on the railing, watching as I ran through the field, "jumping and hollering for joy."

Except that I was jumping and hollering for bees in my pants.

Yes, my darlings, the raspberry bramble was home to a nest of yellow jackets, and they were unhappy to be disturbed.

I didn't really get stung that much, all told, but it is 100% un-fun to have angry insects in your pants. I suggest trying to avoid it.

I was 12 or 13 when this happened, so it was actually worst of all when I was standing in the turkey roaster in the kitchen with no pants on while Mom and Mimi rubbed ice and baking-soda paste on my legs and Dad and Gogo walked in. I could have died of embarrassment.

Now, of course, the fact that I was standing in the turkey roaster is just too, too funny.

A mother's wisdom

2008-09-19T17:20:00.001-07:00

I had to go to mandatory anti-discrimination training today at work. The speaker kept saying "mature" (="mah-toor").

This reminded me of Mom and how she'd say, "Mature! It rhymes with manure, because without it you're in deep shit!"

(Clearly this gem only appeared once I hit a certain age.)

Another hurricane

2008-09-14T18:37:00.000-07:00

My freshman year in college, I hung out mostly with the people on the same floor in my dorm, one of whom was from St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Just after school started, hurricane Hugo hit the Virgin Islands and caused a huge amount of damage. He was beside himself with fear: out of touch for days, his first time away from home. He sat in the student lounge, glued to the television, and several of us from the dorm would go sit with him.

I was sitting with him when the news reported that Hugo was grinding over Charlotte.

Charlotte is 400 miles inland---it never would have occurred to me to worry about my family getting hit by a hurricane. I remember clearly the lurch of nausea, the contracting feeling of fear.

I abandoned my friend and ran to the phone but couldn't get through, of course (this was so long before cell phones). For 12 hours I fretted, positive that my family was dead. I was walking across the Student Union building, on my way from not eating lunch, when my roommate bellowed across the atrium that my dad had gotten through and they were okay. I just barely avoided sitting down on the floor right there.

They had a hole in their roof, but they got power back within 24 hours. Neighbors across the street had to wait 3 weeks, so they banded together to spell one another for dinners and showers. They had a lot of neighborhood cookouts. A family friend was using a cancer treatment that required eating huge amounts of citrus: Dad took him a cooler full every few days until their power was restored.

----------

Hobie and I are in Austin with the cat, staying with friends. We had a scary night through Ike. Damage is relatively minimal but needs to be fixed soon: we have loose siding in the back that leaked into the bedroom wall and a bunch of siding off the chimney that leaked into the living room, so the longer the carpet sits soaked, the more of it we'll need replaced. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the rapidity and deep pockets of State Farm. Plenty of fence is down too, but that's not critical. Power is still out. We have people on the lookout for its return. Both our offices are closed until Wednesday, and Hobie has been approved to work from home as long as needed. It all seems like a worrisome mess at the moment, but I'm sure it'll be fine. We are very grateful to have come through so lightly.

More on hurricanes

2008-09-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

I remember only two hurricanes from when we lived in Slidell (just across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans): Bob and Frederic.

Hurricane Bob was just a big, wet blow. Dad, Lissa, and I went outside and threw a football around: I remember laughing because the football would go in an arc from the wind. The strength of the wind was enough to make me feel breathless outside, so I remember a feeling of giddiness and hilarity.

Hurricane Frederic (which if you'd asked me 5 minutes ago I would have sworn was Philip) was one of the Doom and Gloom storms: everything was canceled, Mom made a special shopping trip, and we had a family plan of what to do if things got scary. We may even have slept in the hallway.

But it turned at the last minute, and we woke up the next morning to sticks and pine needles in the road, blue skies, and cool, gorgeous weather. It was a free day off of school, and I spent the day on my bike.

Ever since I moved to Houston, every time a hurricane has threatened, Mom has said, "Maybe it'll be like [Philip]." Eduardo was---we spent a very pleasant day off.

Ike looks to be rather less than fun.

A post for hurricanes

2008-09-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

When we lived in Slidell, LA, we watched hurricane preparation movies akin to the blood-and-gore movies of driver's ed. This was in the late 1970s, so the movies focused on hurricane Camille. There was a bit about a house full of people at a beach somewhere who were having a hurricane party: a bunch of the party-goers were interviewed, already drunk, about how much fun they were going to have. Then the movie cut to afterward, when all that was left of the house was a concrete slab on pillars with bits of twisted metal sticking out the top.*

What I remember most strongly is an image from the part about all the flooding: a pair of small white feet sticking out of a red rolled-up blanket. The feet looked about my size at the time, and for days I shivered to think of it.

Camille was very much a legend of my childhood. My maternal grandparents lived on the banks of the James River in Virginia, on a hobby farm carved into a hillside. The hill went up and up, away from the river, with the road cut into it, the house carved lower than that (3 steps up to the front of the house, 18 to the back), 5 brick steps down to the dirt road leading to the barn, a jumpable descent to the first level of fields, and two more lower than that. Grandpop grew Silver Queen corn in the lowest field, just on the banks of the river (the best corn ever in the world). When the river was low, Pat Price's cows would wander across and eat up the crops.

During Camille, the James River rose all the way to the back steps of the house. It flooded out the barn almost completely. There was a house just on the riverbank: a big, gorgeous thing, that was destroyed by that flood and was a ghost house for over 20 years, until some guy moved his family in there to "hide from the gubmint."

*Funny that the Wikipedia article says that never happened. I guess the movie was perpetuating a myth.

(cross-post)

Luck and tiny pieces of paper

2008-09-06T10:31:00.000-07:00

Two things I dearly love: 3x5 cards and writing things by hand. I have always loved writing things by hand, all the way back to the days of fat pencils and newsprint with blue and pink lines. You draw letters and they make words! What is better than words? Words are excellent. Words are better than pate, better than shiraz. Words are even better than cats.

But I digress.

I trace my love of 3x5 cards to Grandmom. She subscribed to this thing called Contest Newsletter: it had lists of hundreds of contests: prizes, due dates, and how to enter. Almost invariably, the entry was either a 3x5 card or a 3x5 piece of paper with one's name and address.

So when we went to visit, she would put us to work, writing her name and address on cards and slips of paper: piles of Bic ballpoint pens, the scent of paste ink (I hate to write with ballpoints, but I love the scent of paste ink), faint scratching, the crinkle of paper or the the shuffle of card stock. We would use the little sponges in glass dishes from the post office to wet envelopes and stamps, swiping them carefully. My fingers would get sticky. Remember having to lick envelopes and stamps? The minty, library-paste flavor of the glue?

(Of course I tasted library paste. They told us that many kids eat library paste and that we should not, no matter how good it tastes. I had to try it to make sure that I would not be tempted in the future. I just had a very small lick.)

She won so much stuff that it was even worth it to spend that small fortune on stamps: a diamond ring, a fair pile of money, mountains of cookware (I eventually inherited an electric wok that I wore out), a fake rose made out of---wood chips?---that fascinated me, and $200 worth of Dukes of Hazzard stuff that ended up with my sister, including the puffiest sleeping bag imaginable, with Bo and Luke's faces on it.

I still happily spending my afternoon scribbling on small cards. Even addresses would be enough.

And I would give teeth to have one with Grandmom's address on it, in her handwriting.

A tale of unions for Labor Day

2008-09-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

When Gogo left the Army, he went to work for Pittsburgh Plate & Glass. Some years later, when my dad was in college, there was a lot of trouble with the labor negotiations. Gogo was management and was resented by the Teamsters: his safety was threatened.

Mimi would go out in the evening with her flour sifter and make a ring of flour around the car. Really, I've always been impressed with this. And in my mind I can see her bent over, muttering prayers, spinning the sifter handle and walking backwards around the car.

My dad and his cousin arrived late at night for a visit. They had not been sitting in the living room for long when there was a knock at the door: the police had put my grandparents' house on their patrol, and he was there to check out the strange car in the driveway. My dad showed his license. "Okay," said the policeman, pointing at my cousin. "But who's that guy?"

Gogo's comment about this whole period was usually "bah!" I think he had some sympathy for the Teamsters, if none for the belligerence.

The summer of Gogo's memorial service, I had just started a library job, but it was a unionized library---so I, with my stick arms and my days spent with dusty books, was a Teamster. I was sitting at the dining-room table one night after dinner and mentioned this.

Dad said, "A Teamster! Your grandfather is rolling in his grave!"

I crumbled.

"Don't you dare say that!" Mimi said, "He would be very proud of his beloved granddaughter!"

Poor Dad felt so awful.

(Yes, my Foot-in-Mouth Syndrome is congenital.)

While the stormy winds do blow

2008-08-31T18:36:00.000-07:00

Mom and Dad say that I have a lot of the details wrong about this one, but this is how I remember it:

We were living in Lynchburg, VA, and we went to Virginia Beach for a week. I was 5 or 6, I think. We stayed in a cottage that had no curtains. I remember it being so bright and sand-colored on the inside. We went to a beach shop and Mom and Dad bought me a bunch of really cool sand toys. The cottage was in a little "neighborhood" that had a pool. There were ant traps in the house. When we first got there, I shook one, and ants came out---a couple bit me, and Mom fussed at me for playing with them.

We were only there a couple of days, and there was a hurricane.

I remember a shockingly pale man, very skinny, in dark swimming trunks, standing on the diving board of the swimming pool, saying that we needed to leave. I remember that the sky behind him was dark and that there was lightning, and that I hadn't been allowed to go in the ocean or the pool because of the lightning.

We packed up the car. I cried because I had to leave my brand-new sand toys behind, but Dad said we would be back (my sister was so small: I bet she doesn't remember this). We drove to Norfolk, to Aunt Betty and Uncle Bev's house.

The lived in an apartment high up in what I remember as a black, shiny building. Aunt Betty was in a wheelchair even then---she had a pair of giant wooden scissors with magnets on the "blades" that she used to reach things. I remember Uncle Bev as very tall and very taciturn, but he let me play with a Bingo set that had a cardboard shaker box filled with tiny orange pieces that had the bingo numbers on them.

It rained and rained: dark skies, dark building, shiny streets. Reaching things with those big wooden scissors and shaking small plastic bits from a box. I remember being there---the balcony (standing there with Dad), dimly lit rooms, Uncle Bev silhouetted against the sliding door---but nothing about where we slept, what we ate, how long we were there.

I don't even remember whether we went back to the beach or whether I retrieved my sand toys.

Flower girl

2008-08-27T10:56:00.001-07:00

One of the best things about Vermont has always been gathering flowers. Gigi and then Mimi would get fresh bouquets every day, and each one would be ceremoniously placed in a vase or a glass and set out for general enjoyment.

My favorites were Deptford pinks, which are not the most common of the wildflowers in the field (Queen Anne's Lace is probably the most common), but I loved how tiny and vivid the flowers are. I didn't know their name back then. As a small child, "daisy" was generic flower in my mind, and the fanciest thing I could think of was France, so I called them French daisies.

Here is a picture of me from long ago, wondering over one of my French daisies:

Swimmin' holes

2008-08-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

There was a brief scare in town: several children who had swimming lessons in the town pond got a weird bacterial infection that doctors at first thought might be leptospirosis---caused by moose pee. Or perhaps bear pee.

Gross.

But tests came back negative. Have they asked whether the children sucked each other's thumbs? Because that's how my sister and I both got trench mouth when we were little ...

... don't pass that around.

We never went swimming in the James River in Virginia: the river was solely for throwing rocks into, except for the one time I went fishing with Kathy. The river is very broad, deep and swift in the middle.

For many years we'd go swim in Pat Price's pool. The Prices were the rich folks in the neighborhood, classic Virginia horse-country sorts of people, though I don't think they were horsey. They were wealthy and friendly, with a perpetually untidy house, giant dogs, and muddy boots, but they were very selective about the company they kept. Pat really liked Grandmom (what's not to like?), which is why we got to use their pool. It was loaded with chlorine and COLD.

Then my aunt and uncle, Patsy and Bill, moved into Bill's family home up the road, and they put in a pool. Good lord, we would pack that thing with cousins. And it was always freezing. They put in a slide: bliss!

The thing I liked about these pools was that I was related to all the people in them at any given time, so I did not have to pretend to have dignity. This meant that I could participate in my favorite childhood sport: silly diving.

It's really very funny until someone loses a bathing suit top. Then it's only funny to everyone else.

Before Mimi and Gogo moved to Vermont, we could use their neighbor's pool in Syracuse. There are a lot of pictures of me in a red Winnie the Pooh bikini and a pink bathing cap (I had tubes in my ears). I remember loving that pool: I remember innertubes, laughing a lot, and that the man who owned it was always laughing.

Our cousins up the hill have a pool in Vermont, which I haven't yet been in (what is WRONG with me?). I think I'm over mud and salamanders now, as well (getting wimpy in my middle years?), which dampens the allure of the ponds:

Thorpe's pond: just up the hill. Has the best dock for diving, made of creaky old wood. Gently sloping on the "beach" side, grassy on the far side. Always well stocked with giant inner tubes (the real kind, from tractor tires). Cold but with little warm spots. Now it's full of fish, so NO THANK YOU.

Camp pond: the pond at Camp Ken-jock-etee, which is the whole reason why my family ended up in that town in the first place (except for the Tyson cousins, who opened the mine). Way up a steep hill, with a broad, gravelly beach, charcoal-grey water, and a bunch of big rocks on one side. Freezing. Even when I was a little kid willing to scream and wail about wanting to stay although my lips were blue, I had a limit at the camp pond.

Dickinson's pond: on a hill behind the main street: black water and bright green grass. Unbelievably, even colder than the camp pond. An excellent pond for ascetics and masochists. Much better for painting than swimming in.

Cousin Rosa's pond: just up the hill, Cousin Rosa had this rattletrap cottage that some of us would stay in now and again. The last time I was in it, you had to walk like a pirate with an inadequate peg leg, because the floors were so uneven. It fell over one day, and there's nothing left. The pond is filling in.

This was the warmest of the ponds: shallow and very muddy. The field around it was not much mowed, so this pond was not a favorite of the moms. Because the water was so warm, this pond was full of salamanders, and they were so blissed out that they were easy to catch. Often they'd be full of eggs. One summer I tortured my sister by throwing salamanders at her every time we went to the pond. That girl has a good shriek on her.

Kingdom pond: One of Mimi's best friends (and the most elegant woman I have ever met) owns the top of a mountain. Her husband bought it for her not long before he died, so that she could have a retreat. She is a shy person but full of resolve, so for many years she was a selectman in town, and she loved to have this far-away place, up a steep, switchbacked, dirt road, as her sacred place. The cabin had one wall made of glass, and the tub was half of a giant redwood barrel.

I always felt so privileged that she invited us up there, knowing that it was her private haven. We would have cookouts by the pond. I had cucumber-dill soup for the first time at the Kingdom, and it was so strange and shocking to me that it was years before I realized that I liked it.

The pond is small and chilly, but you can float in it and see across to New Hampshire, so it's perfect. It's kind of muddy, but that's no matter, in a place surrounded by mountain and green, with a huge sky arching overhead, just above the dark tops of the pines.

One year my brother had a toy---Max something---an Army guy in a neon green suit, which he dropped in the water. My dad and I dove and dove for what seemed like 7 months until Dad found it. The water was so dark that I felt like I would never see the doll, and after a while I was really frightened to keep diving down into that dark water, reaching toward a bottom that I couldn't see, didn't know how far away it was, and so didn't know what I might touch. I kept going, but that fear stayed with me for a long time, and I haven't liked dark water since then.

Town pond: when they first opened this, it was the "community pond," which of course we always called the connudity pond. How could you not? It had a nice sandy beach, quite large, and a rope with floaters across the middle to keep little kids in the shallow area. Mimi (and sometimes Mom) would go to the other side of the rope, wearing her skirted bathing suit, to swim sedately back and forth. Mom and Mimi are/were both side-stroke swimmers, with the tops of their heads dry and the conversation never stopping.

It's a pretty nice pond, I guess, but it's always full of people. Better to go to the invitation-only ponds, where it's just family.

You know, for the silly diving.

In which my mother is right

2008-08-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

Sunday dinners with Gigi were often a little intimidating for a tiny child: several forks were involved, and sometimes shellfish that stared from one's plate (after having menaced one in the kitchen earlier).

Oh, but roast lamb. It wasn't so much the lamb itself as the novelty of putting jelly on meat. Jelly! Which goes on toast, silly! And mint jelly! Who would've thought?

(Between the mint jelly and creme de menthe on ice cream, my memories of Vermont have a minty tang. And oh, MY: if you're in Vermont and you get a chance to have Strafford Creamery's fresh mint ice cream? Do not pass it up. Blissful.)

And so lamb tasted normal to me, even as a child, because I had placed it on my mental list of Acceptable Foods---not many of my friends would have agreed.

My freshman year in college, I fell in with a group of hippies, who eventually convinced me to go vegetarian. Ah, to be 17 and ignorant. I was basically living off of cereal and cheese.

We went to Vermont for Christmas. My family arrived first, on my 18th birthday, and when dinner was ready, Mimi said that she had made my "favorite, lamb!"

"GAH!" I said on the inside.

Mom hung back to catch me as I dawdled in the living room, trying to compose what I would say.

She pinched my arm. Hard.

"If you make your grandmother cry, you will not survive your birthday," she said.

I ate the lamb.

It was gorgeous.

(This was the first of my 3 unsuccessful attempts at vegetarianism. The third time, I went to the doctor and was diagnosed with a raging case of anemia and gastritis. "Hamburger or hospital," the doctor said, "your choice." Hie-diddle-dee-dee, a carnivore's life for me!)