Time Capsule ....or.....Now We Are Six(ty)

" I don't feel very different, she said, I know it's strange....."

Back When We Were Beautiful

Matraca Berg

I remember the '57 Chevy...and not just the pictures of it, either. We drove it a long time. Laura and I were very young, but it seemed very big, and the only thing keeping two little girls from rattling around the back seat was the bubbly vinyl seat covering my folks put in to protect the upholstery. We stuck to it pretty good; this was long before seat belts in the back. The '63 red Dodge Dart didn't have seat belts, nor did the '64 Volkswagen Beetle.

We had the Volkswagen while my mother was attending night school to get her teacher's certificate. While she was in class, my father took us to the laundromat. I learned my multiplication tables and long division to the swishing and sloshing of washing machines in Naperville, Illinois. When we had completed our lessons, we got to share a bottle of orange Fanta from the vending machine....or maybe a Tab...while we were folding the laundry. Tab was new and it tasted terrible, but I remember feeling quite adventurous trying it.

Afterwards, Laura would curl up behind the back seat and I'd stretch on the back seat. The Bug didn't have a radio, but my father hung his AM-FM transistor from the rear view mirror and listened to one of Chicago's classical music stations while we waited in the dark.

I was hanging my coat up in the hallway outside Mrs. Erdman's second grade class when I heard President Kennedy had been shot.

When I asked my father whether he thought Mr. Goldwater or Mr. Johnson should be President in 1964, he said one would probably be a better president and the other would be probably be better for his job.

In 1968, our class spring field trip to either the Museum of Science and Industry or the Field Museum was canceled because of the rioting after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.

Our family watched the first moon landing while gathered around a tiny black and white television  in the creek side rooms of a lodge in South Dakota when my father's work took him there for several weeks. We didn't watch much television that summer, nor did we stay up late: doing both in one night marked the occasion as momentous.

I remember when Harry Caray was with the Cardinals( til 1969); the first stumbling broadcasts of Mike Shannon(1972); our first air conditioned car, a 1968 pale yellow low slung Plymouth Fury with a cushy suspension but no power steering; and the epic collapse of the Cubs that broke the city's heart and paved the way for the Miracle Mets (1969). I got to see “The Sound of Music” on a theater trip with our Girl Scout group and “Mary Poppins” with our family at the theater in LaGrange." Dumbo" made me sad and "Pinocchio" made me scared.

We played whiffle ball in the driveway. I had a pair of roller skates that adjusted length and width-wise with a key; I loved to coast down the driveway and turn right onto the sidewalk of our long corner lot. After a while, sand and grit got into the bearings, or the metal spread and your wheels would either lock up or spill bearings into the street.

I got a social security number the summer I accompanied my father to practice and play several concerts with the Lemont Town Band under the direction of Mr. Nichols.  I dearly wish I could tell you more about Mr. Nichols.  My impression is that he had been a band director of some note in the hey day of John Philip Sousa and his peers. He was aged by then, a tall spare stooped figure of few words leading a smallish town band in the basement of the city hall.  His wheelchair bound wife always accompanied him to practice.  The sheet music was old, yellowed, black with fast notes and stamped with his name at the top.  When we played virtuoso chestnuts like “Norma”, “Carnival of Venice”, and original arrangements of “The Washington Post”, “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Colonel Bogey”, the band barely hung together through the multiple repeats and the trio, but somehow maintained its force and plunged with a flourish and much relief to the coda. I knew no one could really hear one small clarinet or had time to notice me foundering in my search for the key signature, or the fingering for some accidental an octave above the staff, but the experience that summer left lasting memories of a musical past just out of sight behind me, and what technical quick wittedness was required to make all those notes bubble out effortlessly.

I got three checks in the mail…$6 dollars each for playing with the Lemont Band.  It seemed an immense amount of money at the time for a player no better than I was. Those checks, with their official looking Social Security number, undoubtedly went directly into my savings account.  

Kids my age got chicken pox...and German measles (what we called the three day measles).  My sister and I got one of the very first measles immunizations, which has lasted all these years.  We never did catch the mumps despite being exposed to them many times.

 We went to the dentist every six months like we were supposed to...but instead of a new toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, we left the dentist office with one of those fruity suckers on a looped string!

When our family lived in Orland Park, it was a town of 4500 people with an IGA, a lumberyard, a laundromat, a Dog 'n Suds, a library, the Orland Bank, a new Methodist church, our church, Christ Lutheran, and St. Michael's Catholic Church and parochial school. A harbinger of the growth to come, I attended both of the elementary schools, Orland Park,in town with its 1950s addition to the brick school and 1930s rock gymnasium, and Orland Center, with its one room schoolhouse and 1950s building addition, set between the sod fields and hog farms. I could walk to both from our subdivision...over the railroad tracks and through the older neighborhoods...

......or past the vacant lots flooded during the winter for ice skating and hockey, past the little league baseball fields, under the Osage orange trees and across 151st Street.

We can't stay Six...or Clever as Clever either for that matter.  But Winnie the Pooh is full of wisdom...for a bear "of very little brain"....and has a solution for all of us six to sixty.....

So be it....

Flowers for Mom

I was always nervous when Grandma Hurst made her annual visit to the greenhouse; she loved flowers and I never wanted to steer her wrong with the flowers we had available. We grew miniature roses back then...and Grandma loved roses. They didn't really flourish in the corner under the evergreens, but she picked them out anyway and never seemed to care if they turned out to be annuals, not perennials. Grandma and Grandpa loved taking their family out, but the Mother's Day she decided the thirteen of us should celebrate up at the Tall Corn in Shenandoah turned out to be a one time only event. First the little kids ate all the bread; then they ate all the crackers; Grandma huffed as her great grandchildren went from restless to worse.

After Mothers Day church, all the mothers attending church at Christ Lutheran in Orland Park received a little fuzzy blue ageratum as they departed. Even today, the fresh but pungent scent of the plant speaks to my memory as the flower of Mother's Day, just as the scent of marigolds is connected to summer and Vacation Bible School. Some years we bring geraniums, some years wave petunias, or maybe begonias, but ladies at First Baptist of Tarkio leave with flowers Mother's Day Sunday too.

Even though we were working on Mother's Day while Ben was young, he still honored his mom with a pretty corsage Sunday morning. While other moms and grandmas pinned their flowers on their frocks, this mom wore her incongruous posy on her t-shirt until it wilted on Mother's Day afternoon. I still have a dried corsage of little pale mauve roses on the windowsill of my kitchen.

It will not come as a shock that Mother’s Day gifts were inclined to follow a gardening theme. Trees, shrubs, pots or whatever the garden center was long on that spring came home in the back of the trailer and was ceremoniously unloaded to appropriate oohs and aaahs.

Except for the year Blake made an evening delivery to one of our country customers and backed the trailer over some statuary they had for sale. That year what I got for Mother’s Day was a concrete cherub. He was designed to hold a bird bath over his head, but the birdbath shattered on impact. Without the birdbath, he looked like an underage waiter at a bar, jauntily weaving his way through the crowd with a tray of beers.

Monday begins another frantic week of flower deliveries as the days before Mother's Day intersect with the planting season for city parks and fundraisers for school groups from Kansas City to Norfolk. For this mother, it is a time to count blessings as my Fitbit counts steps. Loading the trucks this past weekend was a family affair in the chill and damp and mud that has marked the end of April. Josh showed off his ability to count; Lizzie and Abbie showed off balancing flowers high overhead and the boys were promised that carrying flats would increase arm strength for baseball. We slipped and slid, laughed, and teased, and promised pop to those who stuck it out all afternoon. And everyone did! With energy a plenty to jump on their bikes and ride to check on their pigs.

The moms and dads this day were the kids of yesterday, who pitched in to help with varying degrees of enthusiasm or stoicism, but stayed to work until the work was done. Mother's Day is a time to reflect on those who made the mold, who set the example, who steered us in the right direction while we were young and oblivious, who we appreciate more as we look back.

P.S. It is an especially memorable week for this family because Lizzie and Gabe and Abbie all turn nine. Mother's Day may be for flowers, but these kids will need ice cream!

  

 Posted with Blogsy

Domestic goddesses

My Grandma Froerer was a tiny little lady as was, for that matter my Granny Renken. At least that's how I remember it; I think I passed both ladies in height when I was about ten. But whenever I make frosting, I think of her with admiration. In deference to her memory, and because it tastes really good, I make a mean caramel frosting, using brown sugar and oleo, cooking and boiling by the clock, then beating in the powdered sugar. Its really a wonderful thing over applesauce cake, or oatmeal cake, or spice cake.

 My grandma frosted yellow cakes and oatmeal cookies. And, she made that caramel frosting by hand with no aid or abetting by mechanical means. Grandma cooked her frosting in a quart or a half or two quart pan, then wrapped a dish towel around the pan and beat and counted and beat and counted til the frosting was golden and smooth. I can only swear that we were duly appreciative...we would carefully peel the frosting layer off our cake and lay it on the side of our plate, eat our cake, then eke out the luscious treat in little tiny forkfuls as slowly as we could. We never left our cake unattended, knowing that one slip would mean someone else at the table scraping our frosting onto their plate.

Grandma was a domestic goddess in other respects. Each year she sewed us flannel nighties for Christmas with ruffles, buttons, and little bows. Each year we looked forward to our new Easter dresses, made for little girls who lived 400 miles away. For the school year, there were jumpers, for play, corduroy pants and cotton shorts, all sent in boxes wrapped in brown paper.

My mother also sewed for her daughters; after Grandma's eyes and hands failed her, my mother carried on, sewing my prom dresses and finally, as her mother had done for her, a wedding dress. The ritual of going to a fabric store and fingering the cotton blends and florals, rifling through the pattern files, or pawing through the remnant counter still feels like home.

 I don't sew, I'm afraid, but my daughter does, so I occasionally come along to ooh and aah over the potentially lovely outfits and fabrics. My sole efforts with needles are pedestrian attempts at mending. While pregnant with Lee, I did embroider a number of felt Christmas ornaments and even made Lee's first Christmas stocking. That was later recycled into Ben's stocking; two years ago, Lee, Ann, and I went into embroidery warp speed and made stockings for Gabe, Abbie, Lizzie, and Kenzie at my house, and then Kenzie and Ben again as wedding gifts. I understood the camaraderie of sewing that our ancestors enjoyed at quilting bees as we shared progress and strove toward our deadline. How pleasant it is to pull the socks from the cedar chest and know they are home grown.

 I look forward to seeing Lizzie and Abbie is some of the pretty Easter dresses their mamas wore and their great grandma sewed for them. Each spring we'd take a picture of the new dresses and send down record of her handiwork. This Christmas, Lizzie and Abbie will be resplendent in dresses and pinafores made by their great Grandma Millie for two other little girls, their cousins Alissa and Bella. Lizzie and Abbie were so excited, preening and posing when presented with their new dresses.

Grandma Millie carries on the home made tradition in her kitchen too. Her mother's angel food cake recipe, complete with notations, is hand written in her copy of the of the "old" St. John's cookbook. With Grandma gone, Millie now bakes angel food cakes from scratch for everyone's birthday. Whatever time of year, no matter how busy she is, a lovely glazed tender angel food cake will appear in the birthday person's home, presented on the pink flowered cake plate. Almost compensates for having a birthday.

Grandma crocheted afghans; I loved the progression of the rainbow colored yarn. She tried to teach me, but I proved proficient at nothing more than making long chains. Granny crocheted rag rugs which captivated me. I collected lots of rags and even completed a rug. But it was as wavy as the Pacific ocean and would have tripped all comers if I had put it on the floor. When I was in college, Granny took my sad project and unraveled it, recrocheting it for me, adding the stitches in their proper places so it laid flat.

We modern ladies have no problem keeping busy; we have lots of calls on our time, both in and out of the home. My children would have suffered if I'd been in charge of all their apparel. Home cooking was sometimes sporadic. But I am happy to have tangible evidence of the talents and skills of the ladies who preceded me as wives and moms. Whenever I stir up a cream cheese coffeecake, or a Mrs. Peter's coffeecake, or work up some gooey rolls by hand, I pay homage to that tradition.