C.A. Haddad's Blog, page 6

My Sister Ellen

My sister hated me.  Was it my brilliance that turned her against me?  Or was it that time when I encouraged her to stick raisins up her nose and my mother had to dig them out.

Ours was not a happy family.  We were always at war with one another, and the action was physical.  How the hell did my parents allow that.  Well, they were physical too.  This was not a picture Norman Rockwell could have painted.  Unless he did war zones.

My sister and I perhaps could have gotten along had we not been forced to share a room when my younger brother was born. I was nine at the time and she was three years younger.  My brothers each got their own room.  We were shoved in together, despite our vehement protests because both of us knew we’d never get along; and in our childhood we never did.  (Plus, may I mention that the room we were jammed into didn’t have heat.  This was discovered only after we had both grown up and left.  So the room was frigid and so was our relationship.)

Kindness was in very short supply in our household, not to mention love, but while my sister suffered, she suffered less than Joe or I because she was “fragile,” as my parents liked to think.  She was as healthy as the rest of us; and, since we never saw a doctor for anything except immunizations, that’s pretty damn healthy.

Ellen was much prettier than I was, taller, thinner, blonder.  I was built like a peasant, short, spreading hips, thick thighs meant to work the potato fields.  “Seventeen” magazine was a big part of my life back then, and my one dream was to own a Pendleton skirt with all those pleats.  I couldn’t do it because the pleats opened.  My sister looked perfect in Pendleton.

Not all our time together was horrible.  There were the two weeks of Girl  Scout camp every summer, when we were away from the hot house of home.  When we were picked up from Girl Scout camp, we headed up to Oneida for our summer of freedom, Ellen to play with Gussie and me with the wild bunch of Artie, Joe and Jeanie.  There was also that wonderful time in Paris, just before my freshman year in college.  We stayed in a hotel away from our parents, went out and got drunk on vin ordinaire.  Ah, good times.

I went to college, she went to college.  Despite being accepted elsewhere, I was forced to go to the University of Michigan because my parents went there and insisted it was the right place for me.  It definitely was not.  It was way too large, and the first two years were taken up with large lecture classes, where you never met your professor.  Ellen, much to my parents’ dismay, didn’t get into Michigan.  So they sent her to Marietta.  It occurs to me that all my siblings had the benefits of a private college education, while I was left to sink or swim among the masses.  Mainly, I sank.

Fast forward a few years.  I had married, Ellen was still looking—until she found someone.  My parents never particularly liked her choice, but then they didn’t like mine either.  Despite the fact that my husband was Jewish and from Israel, my mother insisted he was an Arab because he was born in Baghdad.  Fortunately, my husband couldn’t have cared less about my parents’ opinions about anything.  I only wish I had developed his cavalier attitude.  Constant criticism and fault-finding was par for the course for my mother.

Ellen was going to have a church wedding, as she was marrying a Catholic.  I made the assumption that, being her sister, I would be asked to be the matron of honor.  I wasn’t.  That’s when I knew how much she really hated me.

But time travels on and unravels feelings from the past.  At one point we were both living in Maryland within an hour or so of one another.  I had three kids by then, while she had twin girls and then had her tubes tied.  She informed me every time she left my house, she had a headache because my kids were so rowdy.  I thought they were quite normal, perhaps a bit rambunctious, while Ellen must have imposed a vow of silence on her daughters.

As we got older, Ellen and I started traveling together.   We both loved Snow Farm, our art week.  We took several Road Scholar trips together, and had a relatively good time, lots of laughs, especially when Ellen plugged in the hair dryer at this one motel and knocked out the entire power grid.  

Now where are we in life?  Our parents are dead, our brother is dead, Ellen is a widow and my husband has a brain bleed.  We email every day.  She cleans. I don’t.  She shops.  I don’t.  My children have been through way too much with divorces and deaths.  Her twins never married, and they are her life.

So far, because of the pandemic, we haven’t traveled together, but we will.  And then we’ll discuss our favorite theme.  Ellen has said it best:  “Our parents should never have been allowed to have children.”

My Wedding

While my wedding reception was to be held at the Hotel Thayer at West Point, the wedding itself would take place in the rabbi’s study on the campus of Princeton University, where my husband was to receive his Ph.D. the following week.

The day of the wedding I was up in Nanuet, New York, with my mother and my three siblings.  My father was at work.  We were to drive down mid-morning and have lunch at the Woodrow Wilson Center before the early afternoon ceremony.  That morning my mother informed me she had too much to do before the reception, so she wouldn’t be coming to the wedding.  I sweetly replied, “If you don’t come to my wedding, I won’t be coming to your reception.”  She changed her mind.

All she really had to do for the wedding was bring a cake and a bottle of wine for the kiddush.  No time to make a cake, or even drop by the Pearl River bakery, she bought something by Sarah Lee.  I still remember the rabbi’s face when my mother peeled off the lid and all the frosting stuck to it.  Priceless.

But back to my preparations for what would be my first and only wedding.  So far.  No morning of pampering, no make up artist or hair stylist, no decent shower because everyone had taken a shower before me and the water was COLD!.

Down we went to Princeton.  Was I nervous?  A bit.  My mother said, “I wasn’t nervous when I got married.”  To which I replied, “Maybe your mother wasn’t in the car with you.”  (She eloped!). I discovered that my husband-to-be had sold his Ford clunker for $35 to buy a new pair of shoes for the wedding.  He had a barber professionally shave him; the guy obviously had never shaved anyone before.  The nicks, the dark shadow, they were all there on my husband’s face.

Somewhere, after the meal, I found a place to change into my wedding attire, a simple white cocktail dress with a pill box hat.  Then it was off to the rabbi’s study.

Abe had his friend Steve by his side.  Abe’s brother, the one we called Uncle Monster showed up at the last minute with his daughter.  My father arrived with his best friend Fred Bach.  Then we had to sort out who would hold the huppah. Fred was going to do the honors until the rabbi found he wasn’t Jewish.  So it was up to Steve and my brothers and the awful Uncle Monster.

The ceremony was very short.  I didn’t understand a single word.  It was all in Hebrew.  Literally, all in Hebrew.  So I was mystifyingly married, the ring was on my finger and on my husband’s.  After the disastrous cake reveal, exeunt all, with rice being tossed.  Sorry, birds.  We didn’t know any better back then.

How I would have loved to have photos of my wedding.  But instead of hiring a photographer, my mother assigned that task to my brother Joe.  And while he clicked away, he forgot to put film in the camera.

Telling Stories

Some people grow up wanting to be writers.  I never did.  I perhaps have a compulsion to write, but it wasn’t a vocation or an avocation.  I just like stories and sometimes I have to tell them myself.

My parents never read to me when I was a child, but I knew books were important.  This was a time long ago, when all of us had to trudge home for lunch, no matter the weather, as there was no cafeteria at school.  It was expected that our mothers would be home, waiting for their adoring and adorable children.

Our lunches were always tomato soup and either peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or toasted cheese.  My mother would put food on the table for the four of us, the ones she dropped haphazardly into the world, then sit down at the table with us and read her book.  She probably assumed nothing exciting was happening in our lives at school.  But even if there were, she’d never know or care to know.

But all children want to hear stories, whether it’s of times long ago, family moments, or, like my grandfather, stories of Carolyn and Joey Rabbit.  Most nights when we were in Oneida, before we were moved to our own bed to sleep, we’d curl up with Grandpa and he’d weave all these fabulous adventures about what was happening with Carolyn and Joey Rabbit; and, boy, did they get into some fixes.  But he always got them out of those fixes with relish. I wonder now if he was just embellishing on the Peter Rabbit stories and substituting us instead.  I don’t know where my sister was in all of this, but she was always “fragile” and really never roughhoused like the two of us did.

My father, for all his faults, used to take me on his knee and tell me stories of Carolyn Ann McFinty.  Oh my, they were exciting!  I was in the Arctic or I was in the jungle or wandering through the desert.  Somehow I’d always be in a perilous situation and breathlessly waiting for him to get me out of it.  He always did.  Then one day the stories stopped, and I was quite sad about it.

I needed stories to feed my life.  Dinners en famille were awful, mainly because my mother was a terrible cook.  We were forced to eat everything on our plate or we were confined to the bathroom, with our plates of cooling food, until we did.  However, redemption of a sort came as I listened to my father talk about his days at the lab and all the personalities involved.  It was a running serial of interesting and sometimes erratic people; and it always made me unhappy when he had nothing to say.  Where was the plot line!

My mother barely communicated with her children.  Why she had four of us, I could never understand.  If you don’t want to engage with your children, don’t have them.  She did take us weekly to the library in another town so I applaud her for that.

After my father died, and I would visit, I’d catch my mother as she was finishing breakfast with her coffee and her cigarette.  She’d always buy Entenmann’s crumb cake for me and chocolate doughnuts for my sister.  Why Entenmann’s doesn’t sell crumb cake in the Midwest is beyond me!  Usually, we had nothing to say to one another, but if I asked her about a relative, someone I recalled from my youth, like Reuben and his wife growing gladiolas, she’d start talking about all our relatives up in Oneida.  It would bring me back to my childhood and bring her back to hers also.

My husband was a great storyteller.  His life was a lot more interesting than my middle class existence.  (See my novel “Flowers of the Desert”)  Born in Baghdad, he traveled with his family to Tehran, to Israel; and then he went on to Princeton, where I met him.  Here was another person with a large extended family, like mine in Oneida, with adventures and scandals galore.

And where was I in all this?  I never read at the table, but did I ever tell my children stories of my life?  Were there stories I could tell without pain?  I read to them definitely, both my husband I did.  With my grandchild I would repeat all the fairy tales I remembered and was quite annoyed that he didn’t particularly appreciate “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”  He preferred Jack and his beanstalk.

For my children, their father’s life has come alive, but I think mine remains hidden.  Perhaps until now.

Don’t Kill the Dream

I can’t say I was ever particularly fond of school.  Give me a good window to look out of and I can almost survive.  As far as I can remember, the highlights of my elementary school career were being on the safety patrol and given the assignment of beating the chalk off the erasers.  Yes, those were two prized positions to have.  Who didn’t love the safety patrol badge and belt?  And our lungs?  Hey what’s a little chalk dust when it gets you out onto the playground.

There was always recess to look forward to, where we played dodge ball, hung upside down from the jungle gym, or jumped rope.  I spent way too much time turning the rope, due to my inability to jump. Our academic classes were interspersed with gym, music, and art.  Gym was awful.  We had to meet certain USA requirements.  I never did.  Climbing ropes?  Was I a monkey?  Also, our gym teacher was a sadist—and later fired for it!  I think we can conclude that most gym teachers are sadists, at least to those of us put on the D teams.

Art.  I still remember our art teacher’s name.  Mr. Shubert.   He was a very nice, mild-mannered man, but he never recognized my talent.  I had the distinct impression he thought I didn’t have any.

Do they still have parents’ night at schools?  Where the kids have their work displayed?  Somehow my art never made it up there, hanging with tacks from the wooden board that ran along the classroom walls.  My writing never made it either because I’ve always had terrible handwriting, never got above a C and a “needs improvement.”  They must have put something of mine up.  I was always a diligent student.  It couldn’t have been math.  Even in my old age, I’ve never seen the point.  I can remember being at a dinner party with engineers and one of them said, “Can anyone imagine living without math?”  I replied, “I’ve done it all my life.”  True, it makes comparative shopping and playing canasta difficult, but I persevere.

But back to Mr. Shubert and his, I won’t call it disdain but, confusion about my “art.”  Because of his discouraging reaction to my efforts, I left school with the impression that art and I had nothing to say to one another.

Flash forward way too many years and I discovered Snow Farm.  I had seen a floor cloth at the beautiful Milwaukee Museum of Art and decided I wanted to make one.  Where in the world could I learn how?  Up popped Snow Farm in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, on my search engine.  I think it was the only time they offered that course.

I told my sister about it, a whole week away doing art. We could kill two birds with one stone, see my mother in Nanuet and then drive up to Massachusetts together.  And so we did.

It was a wonderful week, one we repeated for many years until there was no reason to return to Nanuet, especially for me.  It’s a long haul from Chicago to Massachusetts, through “scenic” Indiana with a toll road that could never read my I-Pass. 

While at Snow Farm, my sister and I mostly chose different courses.  She liked pottery, weaving and stained glass.  I preferred  monoprints, fabric arts, fused glass, where for some reason I became known as the “kiln hog.”  We took enameling, paper arts and watercolor together.  Mr. Shubert would have  approved of my sister’s work.  Mine?  Too outre?

Like writing, art releases the mind to go its own way.  There are no boundaries, no lines within which to color.  It’s joyful and life-giving, which makes it so sad that too many schools no longer have a period devoted to art.  From finger-painting to play doh to the creative world beyond, the hands work their own magic on the mind, telling it to relax, to mediate, to create.  Everyone has her or his own vision.  Art teachers everywhere, don’t kill the dream.

The Great Escape

My father’s parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe.  Despite the fact that my father topped six feet, his father was five feet two and his mother barely five feet.  In fact, all seven children were taller than the parents.

My grandfather, whom I never recall meeting, came from a fishing village near Kiev or Kyiv, as they’re calling it now.  I once heard a rumor that he fled the village for America when he got someone pregnant, but the truth remains unknown.  As far as anyone knows, no other member of his family ever reached the States.

My grandmother, whom I did know slightly from her rare visits to us, which drove my mother crazy, came from Lithuania.  She entered the country as Minnie London.  I’m assuming that was an acquired name, but acquired from whom?  The poor woman never learned to read because her husband forbad it.  As you might surmise, this was not going to be a happy family.  The two of them moved from place to place in upstate New York, dropping children as they went, until they finally settled for good in Utica.

My father never had a good word to say about his childhood.  There were no golden glow memories as I had of Oneida.  The parents remained poverty stricken; and for their seven children it was a struggle for existence, never enough money, never enough food, never enough love.  Not the warm-hearted stories of immigrants about which one usually reads.  My father did have a sweet spot for his older sister Rosalyn.  Decades later, when he had left poverty behind, he even sent her to Israel, a lifelong dream of hers.

Later in life, when my father was in the hospital dying of cancer, women from Hadassah tried to come in to his room to give him a gift basket.  He brusquely turned them away.  He said they never did anything for his family when they needed them, he didn’t need them now.

Some immigrants, in fact the majority, come to America and make a success of themselves, working hard to move away from an impoverished state.  It seems my grandfather wasn’t interested.  Instead he peddled bananas from a cart, but most of the time he was in the synagogue praying. I assume that’s where my father got his distaste for religion.  My grandmother did the best for the family with her limited abilities.  I do know she made the best latkes I’ve ever eaten.

So there were the Kushners, mired in poverty, with the Depression descending on them, never had anything so never had anything to lose.  Except hope.  Along came FDR and the New Deal and the CCCs.  That’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Civilian Conservation Corps, for those unfamiliar with history.  The CCCs was a way out with a stipend and three meals a day.  My father applied.  Heartbroken, he discovered he didn’t make it.  He was first on the wait list though, so there was still a chance.

The day before those chosen were to report, one of the lucky ones got sick.  My father stepped into his place.  The rest is history.

He never really talked about what he did in the CCCs, except once mentioning being a stone mason in the south, where they weren’t too friendly to Jews.  At that time in the Thirties, no one was friendly toward Jews.  Like, things have changed?  In the South they still use expressions like, “Are you trying to jew me?” when bargaining.

The CCCs saved my father.  He had a way out, of which he took advantage.  Receiving a scholarship from the University of Michigan, where he met my mother, he went straight through from freshman to Ph.D. in organic chemistry, thus enabling us, his children to make our way into the middle class.

Of course there were bumps along the way.  He still remembers how, when he was at Michigan, someone stole his winter coat.  He froze the rest of the winter.  But this was a minor setback to what turned out to be a sterling career at Lederle’s, later American Cyanamid, later Pfizer.  Thanks for the stock, Dad, it came in handy.

As far as the rest of his siblings:  One became a house painter, one sold funeral clothing, one became a policeman in Washington DC, one became a butcher, one became a secretary, and one followed my father into organic chemistry.

Of Me I Sing

A theme of my musings would seem to be self-pitying if one were given to whining. I am not given to whining, so there’s no selfpity involved, just the plain simple fact that I am often overlooked, being a cipher in other people’s eyes.  I’m an observer but never observed.

Annoying, yes.  But at some point one must accept the fact that no one notices me or appreciates my many talents, among them my ability to sing.

Why do they no longer have music classes in schools?  All of us in kindergarten had to purchase a flutophone and learn to play the scales and a few simple tunes.  Onward from that was practicing staying on the beat, with the teacher handing out all sorts of rhythm instruments, the tambourine, the triangle, the marimba. See note above on being overlooked because I was always given those damn wooden blocks.  Not even a drum to beat.  What gives!

In upper elementary school we sang.  How I loved to sing.  My mother used to sing in the kitchen while she was doing the dishes.  That’s how I learned the songs from World War II, especially “We’ll Meet Again.”  A sad one, that.  And I can’t forget about that red red robin, bob-bob-bobbin’ along.  One of the neighboring kids, Richie Fry, asked my mother if she were a professional singer.  Was she pleased?  I would have been.

Unfortunately, no one’s ever asked me that question.  In fact, when members of our class were being chosen for the county chorus, I was one of the few left out.  I couldn’t understand why because I had a beautiful voice.  How humiliating the year-end school assembly, when all the county chorus members moved down the risers to sing their pieces.  I was left standing conspicuously alone, mortified by the disgrace of not being chosen.  (Another girl, also rejected, moved down with the chorus, which, if I had been clever enough, I would have done also.  But—-)

In high school I joined the chorus.  I had to “audition.”  I was so nervous, but I knew it was something I would enjoy if I could get past Mr. Bremer.  He probably let anyone in, but I was overjoyed to be sitting in the auditorium with sheets of music on my lap, discussing the hickey on Joyce’s neck or how someone five feet tall would have sex with a basketball player.

Oh, we sang too.  There was always the Christmas concert where we would walk down the aisle with “candles” singing, “Come all ye Faithful,” and then have to watch the entire pageant of Jesus’s birth, except for the labor, be pantomimed on stage.  We always knew who was the most popular girl in high school that year, as the speech teacher chose her to portray Mary.

College came, and I knew that my singing was at an end.  I was at the mammoth University of Michigan, where I was sure auditions would be more rigorous that my perhaps seven-note range would take me.

Flash forward so many years I refuse to count them and place yourself with me at the Augusta Heritage Center, Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia.  This wonderful program is dedicated to keeping Appalachian arts alive, with fiddling and clogging and dancing and so much more. Like singing.  At first my husband and I went there with Road Scholar, as it was not called at the time, so we were confined to their programming.  Fortunately, I was able to slip their constraints by simply not attending and discovered music, singing in the chapel—not of love, a real round chapel.

Thereupon I fell into one of the happiest weeks of my life, not that first year, or the second, but the third year when I signed up for singing alone and spent the entire day from eight-thirty in the morning until after nine at night singing my heart out.

Did I make sure I stood next to someone who held steady to the alto part so I wouldn’t stray to tenor or soprano? Yes.  But the variety of music choices thrilled my soul, with baroque, country, Irish, gospel—African.  And here is where I pushed myself forward because I was tired of standing on the risers alone.

At the end of Augusta Festival week, there’s a party in the park with many performances.  Our African music contingent was scheduled to show off our many talents.  The instructor had picked only two women to sing forefront while the rest of us were doing backup.  Well, screw that, I thought.  Why am I always in the background?  So when the time came, the women stepped forward and so did I.  Was the instructor horror struck?  I wasn’t paying attention.  I was just adding my authentic version of an African chant and what was she going to do, drag me off the stage.

For some reason, she didn’t acknowledge me afterwards.  But members of my husband’s group—he was still with the old people—came up and told me what a wonderful job I had done.  How very true.

Unfortunately, life intervened; and I never got a chance to go back to Elkins, but I highly recommend the program to those who are still able to attend.  Some day maybe, I shall return, unless they remember me.

The Lawn

What is the perfect symbol of the American dream.  You got it in one.  It’s a bountifully green lawn.

When I was four years old, we moved from an apartment in Montvale, New Jersey, into a newly built home in Nanuet, New York.  My mother, I’m sure with the help of some architectural plans one would hope, designed the house to her liking.  Needless to say, it was godawful, from a child’s perspective.  It had a basement that flooded with heavy rains. Downstairs was a claustrophobic half bath, where I would be imprisoned until I finished eating the inedible.  The kitchen, was it ever up-to-date?  Except for a paint job, it saw no renovations over the long years it was in use.  Well, almost in use. My mother never used the stove’s broiler because she didn’t want to clean it.  And there was this one kitchen drawer where she kept the family’s hairbrush and an old oatmeal box where she put slips she didn’t know what to do with.  Once when I was an adult, I came home and told her to make sure she cleaned it out before she died.  She did.

The rest of the downstairs included a formal dining room, facing both the road and the driveway, and a living room that extended the length of the house.  There was never a comfortable place to sit in that living room; and I couldn’t understand why until later, when I had my own living room to worry about.  It was because certain members of my childhood family were so heavy that furniture collapsed under their heft.  My poor mother once had my father’s favorite chair reupholstered as a surprise for him. He was so upset because it never felt comfortable again, until it once more broke down.

Upstairs there were four bedrooms.  The one I unfortunately had to share with my sister was in the front of the house, far away from the one bathroom that was down a long, dark hallway.  No nightlights, it was  totally dark at night.  I saw monsters everywhere in the shadows and was always terrified when I had to scurry down that hall in the wee hours, let’s call them.

No air conditioning but the attic had a wonderful window fan that used to cool the whole upstairs for sleeping, until the squirrels made a permanent home there and no one could figure out how to remove them.  Fortunately, I was gone by then.

The outside?  No lawn. And the lot was plenty big.

I don’t think landscapers existed in those days.  If they did, my father never hired one.  He was going to put in a lawn on his own with our help.  That was Joe and I.  Joe was five at the time, I was four.

Each year—yes, this went on for many years—he would hire a lawn roller and the work would begin.  Joe and I would be assigned to rake the soil, getting out any clumps.  Then we would disperse the seeds, after which my father would use the lawn roller to press the seeds into the earth so they could sprout.  Too bad the seeds had other ideas.

How many years did this process go on?  At this stage in my life, I have no idea.  All I know is when the grass showed no signs of growing, my father would become hysterical. Whose fault was it?  Joe’s and mine.  Screaming fits would ensure, as if we had deliberately caused the lawn to fail. 

I don’t remember when the lawn actually sprang to life.  Probably Mother Nature had heard enough emotional outburst and decided to take pity on us kids.  A full-growth lawn meant we had to stop keeping chickens, although my father did save a patch for himself where he would grow his vegetables; and of course there were the grapes that my mother would harvest and make into the most deliciously tart grape jelly each year.

Having a lawn means someone has to mow it.  That was left to my brother Joe, as it wasn’t a job for women.  We had the damn dishes.  After Joe left, my father mowed until Mike was old enough.  Mike still remembers how our father bought him a push mower because he didn’t want Mike injuring himself.  Needless to say, this gracious concern was not appreciated.

Finally, after Mike left my father bought himself a riding mower. A riding mower that broke down, much like my father’s Porsche and then his MG.  It seems everything my father bought had a habit of breaking down.  Let’s not even mention the Jeep that left my parents stranded in a Western town for over a week while a part was found and delivered.  But back to the lawn mower.  My father, temper never in check, spent hours trying to fix the damn thing until he went into the house and said, “Ruth, I think I’m having a heart attack.”

Indeed he was.  But he never gave up mowing the lawn even after Mother Nature told him to stop.

After he died, my mother finally hired a landscaping service.  When I would visit, I would look at the “lawn” and discover really there was no grass anymore, it was all weeds.  But as my mother said, “So what, it’s green.”  And I think that’s the perfect attitude to have.

The Block

Passing through Oneida, New York, I stop the car where I always stop, in front of the apartment house on Sconondoa Street that bears the name “Paul” on its keystone.  Even now I can see my grandfather, with his watery blue eyes, his body bent double due to polio, standing on the stoop, tilting himself backward, waving at me.  Would that he were still with us, the man whom I loved with all my heart.

Traveling with me is my daughter and grandson.  I tell them to cross the street, bereft of traffic like so much of Oneida, and stand on the stoop where my grandfather stood.  They do and they both wave.  I take their picture.  Then it’s time to move on.

The block, as that’s what it was called, was it the only apartment building in Oneida? I have no idea now.  But it was four brick stories, the bottom floor serving as a gas station with one Texaco pump, and a tool shop with all sorts of fascinating levers and wheels.  In the far back where I rarely went was a stack of cowhides, never used.  Who needed Disney World when you had such an adventurous place to play?

The upper floors were filled with relatives, every one of us connected in some arcane way to one another, aunts, uncles, great aunts, second cousins, we kids were in and out of their apartments at all times of day.  Did we annoy them, racing up and down the stairs and into one another’s living space? I have no idea.  It never occurred to us to wonder.

On the first floor, across from my great-grandmother, called Old Granny,  lived my grandparents, Carrie and Augustus.  If anyone called him “Gus,” I never heard it.  I thought they had the grandest apartment ever with wood colonnades separating the kitchen/dining room from—well, from what?  I see some of the apartment clearly but the rest fades away with time.  I remember a bookcase because after my grandfather died, I found a book that talked about the Great War.  It was written before the second Great War, no need for World War I when World War II hadn’t occurred yet.

The kitchen had a big wooden table with clawed feet, always covered in cloth.  Fly paper hung from the ceiling.  After my grandmother died and we’d visit, it looked as if that paper had never been changed—until my mother got at it.

The stove was fueled by coal. You’d need one of those hook-like things to open the burner and place the coal inside.  Ruby’s coal yard was right up the street from the Block; and for some reason, Mr. Ruby objected to anyone taking a lump—or two.  Being caught was out of the question.

My grandfather’s business didn’t only involve the gas station.  He had trucks, Paul trucks that would take propane gas out to the farmers in the area.  So many times they couldn’t pay him in hard cash but we always had crocks of butter, fresh eggs, and sometimes little gewgaws that no one knew what to do with.

Outside my grandparents bedroom was the front roof beneath which was the business office on the bottom floor. This roof had a short wall around it. That’s where we cousins would put on our summer’s end circus and my Aunt Lou would make popcorn balls.  Out the back of the apartment was another roof that had no wall and no protection. Sometimes the boys would jump off it, but my Cousin Jeanie told me there was quicksand underneath where they landed, so I never tried to make that jump.

I slept in the bedroom facing the train tracks, and all night long I could hear the trains passing by with their whistles blowing.  I loved the sound, finding it such a comfort and wishing I could be on one of the trains and go, well, just about anywhere.

No trains now.  Not much of anything in Oneida.  That wonderful apartment building that held so many of my sweet memories stands now only as a burnt-out hulk where firemen practice search and rescue operations.

I was born there; and when I think of a place where I would call home, where I was always happy, it is perhaps strangely enough Oneida, New York, a place my mother couldn’t wait to leave.

I’ve by now probably given the wrong impression.  I never lived in Oneida.  It was our summer escape, a time when we could be away from our father and his volcanic temper, his beatings.  My heart always froze when he would drive up from downstate to fetch us “home.”  I knew I would never be happy again until we returned to the place I loved best. With a grandfather who loved me when my own parents couldn’t.

My House is Falling Apart and so am I

Does anyone else have nightmares about their house?  Last night—and may I say I never sleep through the night anymore—I had several fleeting dreams, mostly about the house.  I cannot remember most of them. They leave me anxious and forlorn.  But the one I do remember is about my garage door.  It wasn’t working.

Has my garage door ever not worked?  Of course it hasn’t.  Many a time.  My house, built in 1955, at first had a heavy wooden garage door that sometimes wouldn’t open or wouldn’t close or wouldn’t close all the way.  When I had some remodeling done, a lightweight door was put in, one I was supposed to be able to open in case of emergencies, like no power.  But even this one has decided that sometimes it just doesn’t want to respond when buttons are pushed.  Allegedly the sensor.  Isn’t it always the sensor?

In the winter my house never stays warm.  I have cathedral ceilings on the main floor and wither goes the heat?  Not where I can feel it, that’s for sure.  I leave my house at 70 during the day and 65 at night.  It might be seventy at the ceiling level but on the ground it’s 67.  Turn up the heat?  I’m sorry, but I’m too cheap for that, especially when I see the power bills.  So I’m wrapped in three layers at all times.

My basement.  What a luxury to have some place to throw junk.  Or to turn into a swimming pool.  When we moved in, we occasionally had water in the basement.  Of course we fixed the cracks.  In fact, the person who fixed them in the beginning was called Mr. Crack.  But he retired.  Probably we were too much for him.

Cracks on the wall were one thing, but water seeping up from the cement floor?  Thousands of dollars later, the basement is waterproofed, allegedly.  On the plus side of spending all that money, I needed to sort through all the crap in the basement and call the junk man.  Will it surprise anyone that I had to pay one thousand dollars to get rid of the junk and he had to come back twice?  Don’t blame it on me. Blame it on three kids and a packrat of a husband.

In a continuing process about three years ago, I began a remodeling job on the house, that hadn’t been undertaken since we moved in.  First the roof.  I had arranged for the roof to be done while I was conveniently absent.  I came back, the roof was not done.  Roofers claimed too much rain.  My girlfriends told me there was no rain.  The roofers simply had to wait until I returned so I could be subjected to days of pounding and dust.  Thank you.  Writing you a check made my heart leap.  I won’t tell you where.

Thanks to a concept by my daughter and her favorite construction company, my main floor has been completely redone, first the extension on the back and then the entire what used to be kitchen, living room/dining room.  Now it is all one big room and I have to admit I love it.  But those of you who have remodeled know you have to be up and ready for the day at eight in the morning and then you have no privacy whatsoever.  This woman needs her solitude and her nap.  Didn’t get either.

On to the last house remodel, the final glory, the hall toilet.  Is it beautiful now? Yes.  Does it make my heart sing when I soak in the new tub?  Yes.  Did it take three fucking months to do one small bathroom?  YES!  Something about plumbing in an old house.  Hmm.  I’m not buying it.

Outside I’ve had the deck replaced. Composite material with chicken wire to keep out the animals that used to live underneath my wooden deck.  Too bad the skunks and raccoons didn’t realize why the chicken wire was there, the one they easily tore away so they could live under the deck again.

The yard, my garden, I am simply too old to manage it. Yes, I have a lawn service.  He is so lazy, but he is also so cheap.  I should change, but I don’t. However, this year I hired a friend’s landscaper to come and do the heavy work, like cutting back all the junk trees and cleaning the gutters.

I did manage to plant more bulbs this fall. Will any come up?  Only spring will tell.

Last project desperately needed: the driveway.  It has to be ripped up and replaced, as there is no hope for it the way it is now.  It is already turning into a moss garden.

I’m exhausted just writing about my house so you can imagine how exhausting it is to live within—and without.

I am truly at the stage in life where I’m considering moving someplace where every little thing is done for you.  No more nightmares, maybe, except for the cost.

Did I Do Right By Them?

Isolation has never been a problem for me.  How fortunate I am in these years of pandemic.  I suppose if I were put in solitary confinement with no view to the outside, I might suffer mightily.  But sitting at my computer, I can look out onto the deck and study my backyard, still not totally frozen over by this year’s lack of winter’s chill.  I know January is coming, then February and we’re in for it.  But for the moment I can enjoy my container plants that are hanging on.

I think, now that I’ve finished the third or fourth revision—who’s counting—of “Grandmother’s Money,” I can consider, did I do right by them?  By “them” I mean the characters I viciously cut out and left to wither by the wayside, when I was informed I had too many people swirling around.

This is what I mean about isolation.  I’m never alone.  I always have my characters, who are alive within me.

Here’s the situation with “Grandmother’s Money:”  Dear old Grandma dies and leaves two million to each of her daughters and five hundred thousand to her two grandchildren.  Originally, there were four grandchildren.  I made two of them disappear.

One of the readers said she liked the granddaughters better than the grandsons.  But since the grandmother in question had two daughters, wouldn’t it be better to have two grandsons to counter-balance them?  Especially as the grandsons had significant others who were women?

Still, the granddaughters linger in my mind, and perhaps I should have given them more of a chance.

Strange.  I can’t even remember their names.  So I’ll give them new ones, and let you in on their plot lines.  One I shall call Greta because I would never name a real character Greta, so why not entertain myself with that name now.  She was single, approaching forty and didn’t see any male of the species on the horizon with whom she wanted a life.  But she did want a child.  So, when she left her boring job as an assistant city manager of a small midwestern town for her annual vacation, she decided on Hawaii, hoping to find someone to impregnate her.

Did she?  Of course.  What would be the point of sending someone to Hawaii if it didn’t advance the plot line?  He was a birder—we’ll call him Matt—who was attending a convention of other bird watchers.  She sized him up and thought—sperm potential.  They had a fling.  She returned home, he returned to wherever.

Unlucky in love, lucky in conception, Greta had a daughter. When the daughter turned five, Greta decided she had enough of her boring job and got another one in another state, more responsibility, less cost of living.  There she was on her lunch hour, eating falafel, when whom should she spot and who spotted her but her birder.

Except he wasn’t really a birder, but a dentist.  Birdwatching was his hobby.  Did they reconnect?  Of course.  What else?  She never told him that her daughter was his.  But then, wonder of wonders, horror of horrors, she got pregnant again.  Unlike most men, he noticed.  And he confessed to her that he knew her daughter was also his, so why not make a family of it.  Happily ever after, and I won’t go into details of how this connects to the other characters in “Grandmother’s Money.”

Onward to the second cut granddaughter.  Was her name Shelia?  Hmm.  I know her husband’s name was Shane, for some reason.  Believe me, naming people can be very hard.

Shelia was a regionally successful cookbook author, who held cooking classes in her home.  Her husband Shane was the problem. Aren’t they always?  His father and brothers were selling their local grocery chain out from under him.  Managing one of the stores was his life.

Depression set in, which annoyed the hell out of Shelia.  Salvation came in the form of Shane’s mother, long divorced from his father, after his father found someone younger and dumber.  But at the time of the divorce, the mother sued for her share of the grocery chain they started together, so she had money to invest in a project she thought would help her younger son.  She was going to open a deli on main street, part grocery, part lunch spot.  Shane could bring in some of his old workers from the grocery store, and Shelia could prepare batches of food to go, along with holding cooking classes in the new establishment.  Lucky Shelia?  After all, she also had a child to contend with and a moody husband; and we all know the prospects for a new business.  But I left it hopeful.  Perhaps they prospered.  After all, downtown, everyone needs somewhere to lunch.

But they’re gone, both Greta and Shelia, and I doubt whether they’ll make a reappearance in any other form.  But who knows?  I think I was stretching it with Shelia because quite frankly I hardly ever use my oven, I find nothing enlightening or relaxing about cooking.  When I was younger and four o’clock rolled around, I always sank into a depression.  What was I going to feed the kids?  Poor kids.  I bet they never had a tuna noodle casserole after they left my house.  And may I say all three became gourmet cooks, so I think my poor kitchen skills did them a favor.  However, Greta?  I could see loving a birder, as long as he wasn’t too obsessive.  A gentle walk in the woods down an unknown, unknowable path, why not?

Right now I’m cleansing my mind from “Grandmother’s Money” and wondering where to go next.  Characters flit in and out of my mind, but what are they trying to tell me?  Mystery?  History?  Romance?  I await their direction.  As I bring life to them, they bring life to me.