A Chicago Kitchen in the 1950s

January 24, 2010 at 5:54 pm (Books, Chicago)
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            It didn’t work out.  I made my children liver sausage sandwiches with mayonnaise, garnished the top with circles of dill pickle, and they squished up their faces and asked that I NEVER serve that again. 

            Well, okay.  I was in a nostalgic mood.  I was just remembering the lunches my mother prepared for us in our old kitchen.  Then kids came home for lunch.  My brothers and I ate grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup (and, Mom, please make it with milk!!).  We nibbled warm chocolate chip cookies while my mother read to us right in the middle of the day—JANE EYRE, THE RED PONY.  We’d close our eyes and picture other worlds, strain for the sound of carriages and horses’ hooves or the smells of hot sand and desert flowers.  And then the stomach churning sound—my mother slapping the covers of the book together.  We’d trudge back to school.   

            I can still vividly see my mother’s kitchen table, a scarred mahogany library table which she had covered with red gingham oilcloth.  It was perfect for rolling out dough, playing with finger paints, doing homework, or just sitting mesmerized by the red, blue, and yellow roosters strutting the wallpaper above the green plaster dado.  There were way too many moments in my life when I escaped the memory of my math teacher’s face or avoided my mother’s admonishment to read the newspaper, and just sat, lost in the festive feathers of those bantams.  Ah, moments in the old kitchen.

            For that’s where we gathered.  It was the kitchen we stumbled into as toddlers clutching a baby bottle; the kitchen we ran into as children eager for Sugar Pops or the face of the hero on the Wheatie’s box.  We ambled there as teenagers bringing our friends and perusing the contents of the refrigerator.  It was the rule to complain about what was found, the rule to combine foods in taboo ways—peanut butter and egg salad—and then shriek with laugher. 

            There were many moments when my mother stood at the enamel kitchen sink, her back to us, struggling for a stern posture, stifling a laugh.  We knew what would come next—a penalty of sorts, a dictum from on high.  She’d point to the blackboard she had nailed up over the sink where chores were marked off for each of us, the penetrating words—wash, dry, put away.   She’d add something punishing for the child of the moment—clean the hated greasy meat grinder used for making hash or the wooden rolling pin sticky with dough.                      

            But truly, the kitchen was my mother’s room.  She filled the small space with her warm gestures and words, conducted those important talks around the dinner table, and was always there to kiss us goodbye or hug us hello.

            But any kitchen worth its salt could also become the center of the storm.

            My older brother had fallen asleep over his Greek or Latin translation and now blamed my mother for sending him to a school that worked him to death. 

            I burned the toast.  Three times. 

            My younger brother appeared crying—the newly assigned patrol boy was the neighborhood bully.    

            On those forever mornings chaos blocked out kind words, if any words at all.  We forgot to help one another as we raced around the kitchen, bumping into things with that “mother threat” hanging over us—things would not go well for us if we dropped the half-gallon glass milk bottle on the floor.  Of course one day we did.  Milk, laced with shards of glass, spread its long, white fingers everywhere while we scrambled for dish towels and cloths.  To our collective surprise, my mother kept us; she did not send us to the dogs that fateful day—instead she frantically looked over our hands for cuts from the glass.

            Often my mother turned on the static-laden radio to let in the real world.  But we children didn’t hear a thing.  To us sitting sleepily at the kitchen table, life was idyllic.  We heard only the rasp of the milkman’s brakes, the jangle of bottles inside his metal basket as he came up the walk, the eggs chirping in the pan, and the bacon snapping and sizzling—breakfast sounds that broke through the constant braiding of bird song.  

            My mother was a widow and earned our keep by typing insurance policies in the dining room.  We took for granted her gift of security, as if in a fairy tale an enchanted rose thicket kept us safe.  Magic wasn’t my mother cracking open an egg and finding a double yolk.  Magic was being there in that sheltering kitchen. 

           I load the dishwasher.  Despite the fact that my family often eats exotic takeout foods with nomenclature that didn’t exist in my childhood, or we prepare meals with blenders and food processors in our gadget heaven—the kitchen is still where we gather.  And it’s there, like in my mother’s time, where I try to make my children’s empty full again, providing encouraging words before a test, comforting advice about a friendship, and those same hugs and kisses—all food for the journey.   

            I think of the wonderful kitchen afternoons my children and I have had, afternoons when there were no lessons or errands to run, no games—absolutely nothing on the calendar.  The kids would sit around the counter on the stools, attempting homework, tapping pencils, moving papers, producing occasional squeals and arguments as the phone rang, the microwave beeped, and a Game Boy hummed intermittently.  Oh, they weren’t playing jacks or pick-up sticks, they weren’t creating a new world out of Lincoln Logs, but it was wonderful, a wisp of the old kitchen.  

            The back door bangs.  The kids are back.  They each choose a stool and rattle around, giggling and smiling at me.  The sky is still full of sunlit clouds and we can all hear a basketball thumping in the distance.  I wipe the stove thinking any minute they’ll shriek and run off.  But instead, they stay, asking me questions, laughing, joshing me about my memories.  Yet as I begin to talk, I know they are eager to take in every word.  I smile at each of them and then turn away suddenly, blinking.  I see the bookshelf in the corner of this kitchen, full of cookbooks.  I focus on it—I’m sure there’s space for a copy of the RED PONY, maybe even JANE EYRE.  They’d go well with foods of great comfort—steaming tomato soup made with milk and runny grilled cheese sandwiches.

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Hillary Clinton and Me Part II

January 23, 2010 at 8:49 pm (Chicago, Health, politics)
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I think my mother’s role in my life greatly contributed to my slow learning as far as fairness to women was concerned.  And it should have been the exact opposite.  My mother should have been angry that her salary in downtown Chicago did not compensate her to care for three children like it would have if she had a penis.  But my mother didn’t really want to be in the business world.  Her so-called success there (she held a job in the same insurance agency until she was 80) didn’t really register with her.  She had always wanted to be married and raise six children.  She got three and a dead husband.  She had no degree.  She will tell you to this day, even though she had two single sisters who worked hard for the money they made in the publishing business, that men should make more money than women because they are supporting families.  She condemned feminist thinking and would get up and walk out of the room when the conversation turned to such talk. 

I don’t know why.  She could have gone to school, worked her way up in the business world, but she didn’t really want to be there, so she just held on.  I think a lot of women do.  To digress, I became a nurse in 1993.  I was 46.  I immediately experienced the back-biting and jealousies that often pervaded a hospital unit.   I didn’t like it.  Women need to work together to further themselves.  When after only three years as a floor nurse I got a job being a nurse outside the hospital, a former staff member said, “But you took a cut in pay to do this.”  When I told her that no, I actually would be making more money, she glared at me.  How dare I advance myself.  She had no guts for it, so why should I?

I still believe firmly that nurses need labor unions.  Nurses work 8 or 12 hour shifts.  On many days they do not get a lunch break or bathroom break.  I worked in labor and delivery.  Oh yes, I was birthing babies, how lovely.  But to get to that point there’s a whole lot of work.  And nurses don’t just stand at the bedside holding the hand of one laboring mother in a nice blue and pink room. 

I worked at Mercy Hospital on the south end of the loop in Chicago.  It was the early 90s.  We had a long hallway with labor rooms off one side and a delivery room and a surgical room off the other.  On every shift we had five nurses to the eight labor rooms that were almost always full.  At any given time the patients in those rooms could be in their first or second trimesters, contracting or bleeding or vomiting—terrified and scared.  Or they could be patients at various stages of labor.  But when you have one who is pushing, another whose fetal heart tones are dropping and needs a cesarean section which requires TWO nurses—one to scrub and one to circulate—and another who is screaming in pain and making everyone else jumpy–things start getting wild and crazy.  Get a break?  Go to the bathroom?  Forget it.  You move.  And you keep moving.  You put in an IV or take blood samples; you check the fetal monitor; you take away a bloody pad and give the woman a new fresh one; you page the doctor for her epidural; you give her ice chips; you chart; you deal with her mother who wants to be in the delivery and her significant other is saying no.  You keep moving.  Her light goes on and when you turn to go to her your nurse manager says you have another patient coming in; the ER doctor says she’s dilated to 9 and pushing.  She’s had no prenatal care.  Good luck.  You keep moving. 

But when the hospital boards cut back the extra money the charge nurse is supposed to get, or when they insist they won’t pay for overtime and you better swipe out before you are into overtime—the tendency is to go along.  Nurse leaders cave to the demands and they don’t fight for salary increases and better benefits. 

Being a former teacher and a member of the NEA, I have always seen the value of unions, the muscle of numbers.  I picketed for higher salaries and benefits when I was a young teacher.  And I worked hard at my job and never felt guilty that I was asking for more. 

Hillary saw much earlier than I did that women were not on equal ground and needed to fight for their place.   Out in the work place, it didn’t take me long to understand that.  And each year I see it more clearly.  Yes, I raised two daughters who are now independent and motivated.  They have masters degrees and can support themselves.  I am extremely proud of how they think, what they value.   And I have a son who is kind, smart, motivated and jokes that he is in touch with his feminine side.  I did good with him!

I am proud of my mother too.  Of what she accomplished as a single woman and mother.  She was of a different age and her loss of a husband, ironically, did not galvanize her into a feminist position, but made her long all her life for that FAMILY and husband that she had for a short nine years. 

Hillary only had one child and was able to continue her role as an attorney and then First Lady to the governor and then to the president.  Now she is Secretary of State.  She makes me proud of my womanhood, proud of my roots.  I cheer her on and admire her strength.  And if I were to be fortunate enough to meet her again, I would probably repeat the question: how do you get up every morning and do what you do–with the criticism swirling around you.  She’s a tough woman.  Go Hillary!

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Hanging Out — The Laundry, That Is!

January 21, 2010 at 6:28 pm (Chicago, Current Culture)
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Great-grandma was green.  She hung out her laundry. In the 1990s when drying cabinets appeared, I thought the tornado-like winds of change would make them a household necessity. Then green got really big. Drying cabinets use energy and manufacturers have to convince smart homeowners that they need a dryer and a cabinet. Not an easy task when today’s households are ready to make changes and lead greener lives. Some families are again doing what great-grandma and some grandmothers did—hanging out the laundry. I could run some clotheslines between the trees in my yard, but it’s so shady—I’m haven’t decided just what I’m going to do.

But it’s amazing to remember: the flapping of the sheets and towels as they wrestle with the wind, and the creaking of the laundry poles as they perform their Atlas-job holding up the line, and the intense scent that clings to our skin as we run under the warming linen. Mom shoos us to the back of the yard. We flop down in the brilliant grass and watch as she stretches the wet fabric of the next sheet, working the clothespins onto it with a squeak, the taut line groaning. This is the way we wash our clothes, wash our clothes—

I have a friend who has been drying her sheets and towels on lines for years. Some towns even have ordinances that restrict this activity. That will probably change. Anyone wanting to save money by cancelling a gym membership could find a new way to work out using elements of this before-machines laundry method.

It was a huge task. Mom had to lug all the sheets, towels, tablecloths, and dirty clothing down to the basement and power up the washing machine. We don’t even want to think about decades before when the sopping wet materials had to be manually pushed through a wringer. Post World War II machines could spin the clothes and get rid of most of the water. Then there was more hauling depending on the weather. During winter or on rainy days, Mom relied on lines strung up along the basement ceiling to hang the clothes. She had to run up and down the stairs checking on drying rates, removing some pieces and adding others from the basket. And think of what she was cleaning! There were few synthetics or blends. Only time and progress would bring permanent press, stain resistant, and nonfading. She was also washing napkins, tablecloths and lots of rags that we have eliminated with our reliance on paper products.

The soap manufacturers of today want to pull us back to the romance of that time—if indeed there was any romance. Check with Mom! A stroll down the laundry aisle calls out to our olfactory senses: after the rain, sun-kissed breeze, emerald stream, mountain spring. They can get to me. I’ll reach for the sun-kissed breeze and be back in the grass watching my mother, back in a time when I didn’t need to fly the blue sky above me; I just wanted to look at it and my sheltering yard.

My ten-year-old dryer still works, and the oak trees in my yard are very messy. So I’ve decided to settle for some dryer sheets to bring me back to that time. I’m cutting back on my use of paper products and there’s definitely no drying cabinet in my future! I’m spoiled enough.

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Hillary Clinton and Me Part 1

January 18, 2010 at 8:33 pm (Catholics, Chicago, Current Culture, politics)
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The inauguration was a year ago this week.  Pundits and the press are saying how far we have come from the positive feelings the country had when Barack Obama became president.  Now we are all hanging our heads and falling into despair.

I hate their commentary.  You keep saying negative things and quoting poll numbers and people begin to feel negative.  Barack Obama has accomplished a lot in his first year in office.  He had a shit-load of tough things to handle.  He had worked hard, passed important legislation and tried to be bipartisan while doing it.  He even offered his biggest opponent to the presidency, Hillary Clinton, an important job, Secretary of State. 

I met Hillary Clinton at the Drake Diner in November of 2007.  It’s a local eatery in Des Moines, Iowa, and we were both there at five in the morning—she to be interviewed by all the major networks, me to sit in a booth in the background and drink hot coffee.  I guess you could say I was window dressing.  But I wanted to be there and I did get to meet her.

When there was a break in the interviews, she came to our booth.  I leaned over, shook her hand (I had met her once before after a town hall meeting that previous January) and told her I was worried about her.  Was she getting enough sleep?  How did she do it every day?  She knocked the so-called wood of the shiny booth table and said so far she was hanging in there, doing just fine.  My husband John told me later he thought he saw a tear in her eye.  John is from a large dramatic Irish Catholic family.  His mother used to light blessed candles during a thunder storm.  Tear in her eye?  Hillary?  I don’t think so.  I was sure he was exaggerating. 

 Then came the iconic moment in New Hampshire.  In Portsmouth, Marianne Pernold Young, a photographer standing behind a table where Hillary was talking with 16 women voters, asked her a similar question.  “How do you do it?  How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?”  And when Hillary replied about having help with her hair and then just went into the major guts of her life, her face pinked up, her armor crumbled, she got emotional.

            “I just don’t want to see us fall backward as a nation.  I mean, this is very personal for me. Not just political. I see what’s happening. We have to reverse it.  Some people think elections are a game: who’s up or who’s down.  It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ future. It’s about all of us together. Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some difficult odds.”

 My God, yes.  Difficult and impossible odds.  Talk about having to have thick skin.  But that’s what you need to be in politics, especially today when the color of your pantsuit can deflect from the important words you are saying or the actions you are implementing.     

 I am Hillary’s age.  We both graduated from high school in 1965.  We graduated from college in 1969.  We heard the news about Martin Luther King being shot under the same circumstances—away at school, struggling with course work and social stuff and bam—the world changes in a second.  And then in June, 1968, I’m doing final exams and Bobby Kennedy is assassinated.  How do you cope?  What makes any sense?   We both had those same questions.  But they took us down different pathways.

I got a job right out of college teaching English in a secondary school.  I needed money and had to turn down two scholarships to get a master’s degree, because I wanted to get my life going, I wanted to get married. 

I come from a family of English majors, readers, poetry lovers and classical music fanatics.  That is the richness that I inherited.  It swirled around me from the moment I could breathe.  But we did not have money.  My father died of a heart attack when I was 3.  I have an older and a younger brother.  My mother typed in our dining room to pay the bills.  She was tough and took good care of us.  By seventh grade she was working in downtown Chicago and I was in charge of laundry and cooking.  I also looked out for my younger brother.  And the widow-factor worked on me big time.  “Make sure you can get a job after college, that you can support yourself and a family.  Be a teacher.  You’ll have the summer off and you’ll be home in time to take care of your kids.” 

Make sure.  Make sure.  So there went the idea of going into advertising or just being a writer.  The widow-factor blunted the master’s degree goal.  And so did the Catholic-factor.  My mother not only raised us to love music and literature, she also raised us in the Catholic Church.  Hillary was a Methodist so she didn’t have nuns telling growing bodies that French kissing was evil.  She didn’t have an acne-faced priest tell a roomful of girls not to masturbate, that the temptation was always there.  How could he be sure about that temptation, someone asked?  Because he knew, he said with a soft smile.  Yikes.  

Senior year we all had to assemble for a sex talk given by a married couple.  Four girls asked what 69 meant and the couple kept evading and evading.  Hell, maybe they didn’t even know!!  Those were different times.  While Hillary was attending the Maine East and Maine South co-ed high schools, earning her National Merit scholarship and experiencing the highs and lows of the debate team, I was buried in the library at the Academy of Our Lady, again Catholic, all girls.  There I worked to get A’s to earn four scholarships and deal with the widow-factor.  I did sing in the Chorus and worked on the small yearbook.  Hillary was already becoming politically conscious.  I was already dating my future husband and writing in my diary about that.  But who could blame me?  My mother sang the praises of marriage and family, pined for my father, had no interest in meeting someone else.  She worked hard and worked for little pay because she did not have a college degree.  My pathway was really chosen for me: and I was a good Catholic girl on top of it.   When it was 1969 and the boomer world was exploding, I was not doing drugs or burning my bra.  I was planning a wedding as soon as I could afford it.      

 While I lived on the south side of Chicago, Hillary came from a northwest suburb, Park Ridge.  She had a hard-working father who did well in his own business.  Her mother was a stay-at-home mom.  She has two brothers as I do.  Neither one of us was born with a silver spoon in her mouth.  I married my high-school sweetheart, worked hard as a teacher, had children, went back to school to become a nurse, worked again.  I’m living a good life. 

Hillary is living an amazing life.  She was more than just moved by the death of Martin Luther King.  It shook her to the core.  In time it changed her political affiliation from Republican to Democrat and made her certain that she wanted to go on to law school—Yale Law School.     

I’m smart.  That’s always been my big thing—I am smart.  It gives me self-esteem.  It’s something to get up for in the morning.   I know who I am and what I do well—writing, medical research, parenting—so backing Hillary in her run for president of the United States was logical and true for me.  I believe so much in my own abilities, why wouldn’t I believe in another woman’s abilities to run this country. 

And if I am smart, Hillary is smarter.  That’s one of the reasons I showed up at the Drake Diner.  Out of all the candidates, Hillary was the most electable in my mind because of her smarts.  She is on it.  She gets the entire picture of things that go down.  People use their votes for different reasons: he’s from my state, he’s a lawyer, she went to high school with me, he is a born-again Christian.  After GWB, the only thing I thought we should be focusing on was to get someone in the oval office with brains.  We did that.  Barack Obama is extremely bright.  I love the guy.   

Hillary reminds me of my friend Carole Doris, who is also a lawyer.  Carole and I went to  Mundelein College, a school that no longer exists.  Many all-girls schools collapsed because of economics and because girls wanted a coed situation.  Mundelein was subsumed under Loyola University, the next door neighbor on the shore of Lake Michigan, the big school just waiting to take over the small one.     

Carole and I both majored in English and minored in education.  I would study six hours for our Victorian Lit test.  Carole would study two.  She’d get an A and I’d get a B.  Always.  I’m smart.  But Carole Doris is Hillary-smart.  She is now Chairman of the Metra Board in Chicago—that means she’s a big wig in transportation.  But Carole can tear up like Hillary and she cooks like a gourmet.  I saw a different side of her when she planned wedding showers the summer we both got married—1970.  She was all about making favors and playing party games.  I’m sure Hillary has spent time in the kitchen preparing food for a birthday party or a family dinner.  She says she’s familiar with the heat of the kitchen.  Hillary is a wife and a mother who doesn’t always have a chef with a big white hat working the stove.        

Hillary’s school, Wellesley, in Massachusetts, is still going strong, an all-girls school with a population of 2,318 students.  The school motto is: “Non Ministrari sed Ministrare” – “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.”  How fortuitous.  In New Hampshire, was Hillary thinking of those words when she became emotional and talked about wanting to reverse what has happened in this country?   

Or was she worrying about her hair?  I can answer that—no. 

Hillary Rodham was all about course work and career and using her smarts.  Hillary Clinton is still that person.  If we had gone to school together, I might have spent some time with her talking about the spiral helix or the true meaning of Faulker’s THE BEAR, but I don’t think we would have been tight close friends.  My insecurities dictated some of the friend-moves I made.  In college I fought the battle of beauty versus brains.  The Mundelein was preparing materials to send out to high schools to lure young women to our programs.  Five girls were selected from my dorm for photographs.  Coming and going to class in my tattered raincoat or my one special Garland sweater, I saw them posing: on the college steps, sitting on the porch of the old library, reading in the lounge.  It made me sick.  These were the rich, well coiffed, well heeled girls who wore too much makeup.  They didn’t represent Mundelein as far as I was concerned.  The ones with the smarts did.  Like Carole.  Or maybe me.  But I was learning what pushes people’s buttons. 

Even as a junior in college with my 2.5 out of 3.00 and other activities I was trying to be the best on all fronts.  I was kind of obsessed.  I tried out for the college board.  In the sixties that didn’t mean I was going to be on a quiz show or that I would be honored at my college—it meant that I had a friend take my picture and I filled out a form that I picked up at the department store Caron Pirie Scott in downtown Chicago.  Carsons hired 100 female college students to work in the junior clothing departments at the downtown and suburban stores.  College board girls wore the same outfit and had their pictures up on the walls at the store. We were featured in an article in the newspaper.  What were we really?  Salesgirls.  But at that time of my life, being on the college board was huge.  When I was accepted I not only had a good summer job, but I had glamour and praise for my looks.  I hate admitting that.    

Hillary certainly did not work on the college board.  I imagine that her summer jobs dealt with social justice.  I know that after we graduated, in the summer of 1969, I worked for an agency that handled workman’s compensation.  I pulled cords on an old switchboard and typed up the information that members of the various unions had written done on their claim forms.  Where did the accident occur?  Answer: in the bedroom.  How did the accident occur?  The usual way.  These labor people needed to create a different form for women who were applying for aid because they were pregnant!!

While I was slowly learning that women were still on the sidelines in so many ways, Hillary was doing odd jobs as she traversed Alaska.  There wasn’t much social justice in washing dishes in the Mount McKinley Nation Park, but there was in the work she did at the processing cannery in Valdez.  When she blew the whistle on the awful working conditions, they fired her.  But they were shut down overnight also.  I don’t think Hillary was thinking about glamour.  Her consciousness was definitely raised.

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FIRES a story about Anna, THE HELP, in my life.

January 2, 2010 at 9:41 pm (Chicago, Current Culture)
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THE HELP   is an amazing new novel by KATHRYN STOCKETT, that draws on her experience growing up in the south.  It’s a must-read, that reveals the complicated relationships whites and blacks developed as black women worked in the homes of whites, often literally raising white children.  My story is about Anna, a black woman who cleaned for us for many years.  She did not raise me, but she taught me a very important lesson–each one of us has to come out of the security of our own separate life in order to understand what it means to experience real living in this world.

FIRES

Last night I was in the house at 10055 South Wood Street.  I was sitting on the old green couch in the living room and talking to Anna, our cleaning woman, as she carefully wiped the small panes in the leaded glass windows.  But I was married and living in that house with my children, bathing them in the claw-footed tub in the upstairs bathroom.  I was dreaming.

I had once again entered into a world my conscious mind knows little about—a dark, mysterious world where I dwell when I’m sleeping, living at 10055 South Wood Street, the home my father was raised in and moved back to with my mother, the home I was born in and lived in for twenty-three years until I was married.

Grey frame, large front porch, scraggly lawn, bridal wreath bushes out of control, western windows catching the sunlight—a place full of moments of living: cut knees and birthday parties, fights with my brothers and my first kiss; Chopin sonatas and the Beatles; and my father’s death—a heart attack which killed him as he rested in a red, fabric-covered chair that was worn but still in our living room as I grew up.  All these moments, buried in the wood and plaster, mingling with the slope of the ceilings, the creak of floors, the very air of that space.

Though I’ve had my own homes which I could dream about, nothing replaces the home of my childhood.  Nothing burns away the memories.  Not even fire.  Years ago faulty wiring sparked flames that swept through the entire first floor changing it forever.  The current owners had to remodel the kitchen and replace the leaded paned windows that melted away from the heat.  But after that when I dreamed, I was not walking through charred hallways.  Instead the house was the same, peaceful and full of the details of our living.  The fire didn’t destroy anything for my family and me—it sparked creation.  We began to talk of deeply buried moments that were now, strangely, unearthed and set free.    

My memory was about Anna and another fire.  I was eight years old, but even then I somehow knew that things in Anna’s world were different from mine, that I was safer, for some reason, than she was.

Anna cleaned for us every Friday.  She came early in the morning, walking six blocks from the bus, clumping up the back steps in shoes that never fit her.  I didn’t wonder about this, it was just Anna—her clothes hung on her, and she had three black plastic bracelets that clicked together along her thin brown arm. She changed out of her coat down in our basement.  She always wore an old stocking over her hair, and her face was wrinkled and warm, her brown eyes always full of something, like a secret she couldn’t tell us.  She moved furniture and swept stairs and burned the trash out in the backyard in a wire basket.  Her body always bowed to her work so that year after year she seemed to shrink from my gaze as I grew.

Mother worked in the dining room typing insurance policies.  We came in from school and she’d stop to ask us what we wanted for a snack or to see our school papers.  Eating a banana or cookies, we watched Anna come into the kitchen.  There were newspapers spread around the grey tile floor that she had washed.  She dumped a bucket of dirty water into the sink and shuffled around us.  She talked to us, told us what good children we were.  On rare occasions we heard stories about her own children, her face opening to us as she spoke.  She often brought us Chuckles, five pieces of sugar coated gummy candy in flavors we called red, green, yellow, black and orange.  We didn’t always remember to thank her for this gift she surely could not afford.  And as we grew, the borders and boundaries of the real world, the sorrow of living, became know to us.  My father was dead and my mother typed in the dining room.  But Anna was black.  Anna was poor.  We began to see that.

There were few dangers for us in those days.  Mother even let us burn the leaves in the driveway turnaround under a spreading apple tree.  There were fire engines parked somewhere in Morgan Park, not very close to our house.  There were fire hydrants down the block.  Once we made fire helmets out of newspaper and ran around the yard with the hose.  And there was a little door on the furnace, and I could go down into the damp basement and watch the gas flame leap around and hear the motor humming heat slowly up through the registers into my safe, warm home.    

The phone rang one Friday by my mother’s typing table.  I heard her say “fire.”  I always listened to my mother talk on the phone, getting the conversation from hearing her responses.   And I was wondering if I would see this fire.  My mother was saying: “Are the fire trucks there, is everyone out?” And then she was telling me to go and find Anna. 

I don’t remember where I found her—arranging my mother’s perfume bottles on a mirrored tray, leaning into the tub to cleanse it, wandering back from the trash burner, not seeing the hunks of my mother’s carbon paper sailing around the yard like curling black birds.

I didn’t tell Anna her apartment was on fire.  I said she had a phone call and then ran ahead of her.  I could only hover at the edge of her life, watch her take the phone from my mother there in the dining room where dusk had pulled away all the light.  Her small head shook as she talked awkwardly into the phone.  She had to sit down right away when she hung up.  My mother brought her a glass of water, touched her shoulder.  Everything in the room was transformed.  Anna’s head sunk lower and lower.  I could see her things burning up, things she had told us were in her house—the picture of Abraham Lincoln, a quilt my mother had given her, dresses and linens and dishes—things we didn’t use any more.  Anna always accepted what we no longer needed.   

A man was coming to pick Anna up.  She thought she knew this man.  He lived in the neighborhood and he would come and get her.  We stood around the dining room table while Anna trembled and we waited.  It got dark against the dining room windows.  My brothers ran to the front door when the bell sounded.  Anna had to push her hand on the table top to get out of that chair.

Two white men stood on the front porch.  I could see behind them a long white Cadillac gleaming in the grey twilight.  I watched them take Anna down the front walk and open that car door for her, swinging it into the street.  The car swallowed her and they drove away.  

Then I was glad they were gone.  I was the one to slam the front door against the cold air.  I was worried about my mother.  She had argued with the men about Anna, raised her voice while Anna stood frail and alone on our porch. The men had said something like “everything is under control.”  But nothing felt right.  Anna was so small between those two white men in their heavy winter coats.  While mother talked I cowered behind her, thinking those two might come into our house and stay.  But they were gone.  I didn’t have to watch Anna sitting at the table, not moving about like she always did.  I must have thought Anna liked to be always shuffling around our house.  I didn’t yet know the strong desire to sit after working all day.  I didn’t understand about long walks to a bus carrying other people’s things and yearning for your own four walls. 

We were in the kitchen fifteen minutes later making dinner, pulling the shades and holding the light inside for just the four of us.  And then the doorbell rang.  Again.  There was a man on our porch, a black man, saying that he had come for Anna.  He had a little blue truck parked in our driveway.

I don’t think any of us ate much that night.  Anna signed some paper in that white car and lost even more money than she lost in the fire.  At least that’s what my mother told me, and I think she knew what really happened.

Anna came back to work a week or two later.  She looked the same.  She probably brought us Chuckles.  We asked her about the fire but she just shook her head, smiled that secret smile and said nothing.  It was like her.  We always asked her how old she was and she didn’t answer, except once when she told us old enough to have parents who had been slaves.  We asked her why she always carried a knife in her purse and she said we didn’t need to know the reason.  And then we just forgot, forgot it all.  We moved back into our child-world, unable to see what Anna could show us—what it really meant to survive, to live—even beyond endurance.

Anna worked for us because she had worked for my grandmother.  She cared for us and we for her in a pattern that was structured by the times we lived in.  Now I see that we should have driven Anna home that night.  We should have done so much more to help her.  We were frozen, held behind those stupid cultural boundaries and borders.  Then I didn’t understand about other neighborhoods, but I did know I was safe in my own home and instinctively I wanted to keep it that way.  I had no father, but a mother whose strength and love allowed me and my brothers to live a childhood that no danger ever penetrated.  Because my mother was with us we feared nothing in that time of innocence and freedom.  And when harsh reality stepped into our vision, I know I did everything I could to blot it out.  I didn’t want anything to touch me, because I had lost one parent and would not lose again.  In the end I was wrong.

Anna came to us for many years, even when she really could not do a proper job.  My mother continued to give her work and thus dignity.  And then Anna faded from our lives. 

We grew up and learned to take risks, no longer needing to hold on so tightly to a certain way of life.  We saw that there was room in living for sorrow as well as for joy.  Anna could have taught us such an important lesson if we had been able to see it so long ago.   

Gradually we let go of those hot summer nights when my brothers and I ran through the dry grass and argued about whose peanut butter jar held the most fireflies.  And the winters, when dressed against the cold, we warmed our faces in the heat of the fire and watched a six-foot evergreen, now dry and brittle, signal the brilliant end of our full and joyous Christmas.

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Christmas Post

December 16, 2009 at 3:01 pm (Chicago, Current Culture, Health)

Health.  It’s a big gift in our family right now.  For many of us.  Grandchildren are growing and learning–my granddaughter sent us a CD of her singing, and she’s only 3.  Her pronunciation and strong sense of melody are part of her healthy body, mind and spirit.  So is my husband’s smile and his bear hug each morning.  These are the things that you don’t find in the newspaper ads or flashed on the TV screen.  (somehow we have been spared those awful perfume ads this year–low budgets or something).

Christmas is about health in mind and body.  Health in soul.  For some it’s easy to pray and believe and hold the Christ child close.  For others who are struggling with depression, physical pain or the loss of home, security or a spouse or child–it will be a lot harder this year.  

When I awoke in the dark this morning, I hesitated  about the next breath in my life and its purpose.  I could hear my husband preparing for his day in the next room–always stalwart and full of purpose he is.  But I held back, thinking that the busyness of life keeps us away from thoughts of our death.   So I got up.  Got into that busyness.  But I was still clinging to images of things as I made the bed and stretched.  I was remembering the red sweater that my grandmother knitted for me years ago and gave me for Christmas.  I wore it for years until it began to unravel at the waist.  I was remembering the dough ornaments that my daughters made in preschool.  I was remembering my son’s first Christmas and the joy in my heart when we posed for that Christmas card picture–all five of us. 

My grandmother has been gone for years.  How is her life still linked in mine?  I have her DNA, but the sweater is also gone.  Life is unraveling day to day.  The ornaments are broken in the box and my children are scattered.

So onto the busyness of each day and the bear hug in the morning that is now the best Christmas gift there could ever be.  I will bow to the Christ child on Christmas and to the greater God of all religions and be thankful for the gift of life and health.  In the face of death I don’t know how I will be.  But I’ll think about that some other day.

Merry Christmas.  Grace and blessing be with everyone.

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How Beautiful with Shoes, or Without

November 13, 2009 at 6:51 pm (Chicago, Current Culture, Health, Uncategorized)

I spent an hour in the shoe store yesterday.  I shop Famous Footwear.  Not because it’s my absolute favorite shoe store, but because I must wear bulky orthotics in my shoes 80% of the time, and at Famous Footwear you have access to all the boxes.  My ritual is to pile up styles that might work and then try to stuff my orthotics in the shoes, checking to make sure that I still have room for my feet.  It’s a daunting task and always makes me jealous of ladies who can wear tiny ballet slippers that give one’s foot absolutely no support, or torturous heels that attempt to reshape the foot during the hours that one wears them.  I guess I squandered my chances to be like those ladies.

In the seventh grade, the cusp of life when girls want to shed bulky clothing and shy ways and morph into the first stage of womanhood, I was having feet problems.  The lost-in-the-old-ways doc that my mother took me to not only removed a growth on the bottom of my foot using a very painful process, he also ordered my mother to put me in oxfords.  For the younger crowd, these are shoes that men might wear, or women who care nothing about fashion.  They are leather with stiff soles and ties.  They are usually black or brown.  I must have still been under the influence of the painkillers my mother gave me after the doc shot the bottom of my foot with some form of acid, because I agreed to a pair of cherry red oxfords.  And I subsequently wore these shoes to school.  In the seventh grade!  In 1960.

That’s why Jack D. came up to me at our one and only 8th grade reunion (I was in my early thirties) and told me that he’d had a crush on me in junior high, but he could not get beyond the red shoes.  Even he remembered them.  I don’t know what shoes I was wearing the night he revealed this, but I can assure you they weren’t oxfords.  I moved from those red shoes to saddle shoes and then quietly relied on my mother’s busy life to blot out the doctor’s warning that I had weak arches or something.  I can still remember the elegantly thin loafers I wore in high school, my white crew socks folded way down to reveal my ankles. 

I had years of wonderful carefree shoes—woven flats in various colors, dyed pois de seau for every prom dress or dance ensemble, sandals that revealed lots of skin, heels that were chunky or spindly depending on the style of the season.  But most of all years and years of walking around barefoot.  I always cleaned my house in my bare feet.  Even in winter.  I don’t really know why—I guess I thought I moved faster. 

But the years did catch up with me.  Chronic foot pain led to the discovery of a stretched tendon.  Surgery was mentioned but the orthotics now protect that tendon.  Foot surgery is always an ify choice.  But now I am condemned to BIG SHOES.  I still cheat and wear little shoes for holidays and evenings out with friends.  But trips to the shoe store will never be the same.  Bottom line, I can still throw on a pair of athletic shoes and walk for miles.  No complaints.  I just wonder if I would have stuck with more-supportive shoes my entire life—if those oxfords hadn’t been RED!

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A Silly Mantra That Worked Wonders

November 11, 2009 at 5:05 pm (Current Culture, Decorating, Gardening)

laundry, linens, mending, grocery shopping, cleaning, yard work & plants, correspondence, projects—

words that ran through my brain daily as I was raising three children and running a household, words that run through my brain now only occasionally as I continue to do the same.  But my three children are out of the house and on their way and my focus on that home has been altered by writing and a part time position at our county health department.  What were those words to me? A way to organize my day, to know what I had done and what I still had to do to keep things running smoothly.  The first two were easy to handle, I being blessed with a washer and dryer right inside my four walls.  I haven’t mended anything in years, though when the word hits my brain I know there’s a button off my husband’s tuxedo.  How times have changed. 

Grocery shopping has never been a favorite past time, though the world of food has opened up before my eyes and variety of things one can purchase to create a meal has dramatically changed since I baked chicken or potatoes in the eighties and now it’s salmon, shrimp and creative pastas on a regular basis. 

Cleaning I have always done day to day, struggling to keep the clutter down.  And though reading is a great pursuit in my life, there is still too much paper coming into the house.  It’s everywhere! 

Yardwork could now be called gardening, though I still have leaves and sticks to deal with in my 17-tree yard–and then there are the deer and moles that could transform a gardener into an executioner quite easily. 

The vast amount of my time has always been dedicated to correspondence–whether that means making phone calls or paying bills, and now emailing or blogging.  Communication is the core of my being and I love it when it can consume the better part of my day. 

Projects are often part of transformations–you paint a room, a piece of furniture, rearrange  furniture or reconfigure a cabinet.  You make a Halloween costume or prepare for a birthday party or holiday.  Projects allow creative juices to flow and are a welcome part of life–whether you have children at home or not.  

In the end, I offer this reading as a key to how I stayed sane and kept things moving when life was exceedingly busy.  My mantra got me through the early years of work and then child-rearing years and the decision to go back to school and become a nurse and the busiest summer of my life when I started my nursing career and remodeled an older home.   

Maybe one of the best things about my mantra is that it was in my head–though lists emanated from it, the mantra in many ways kept down the paper clutter and made me remember what was expected of me.

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Facing that Question

October 22, 2009 at 9:34 pm (Chicago, Medical Writing, Uncategorized)
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I’ve written about my mother before–she has dementia.  Whereas before she was my lifeline, now she can barely retain the names of my children, her grandchildren, and forgets the names of her great-grandchildren.  The core of her personality is still there, loving and supportive.  But when your memory is fading, the context fades too.  We can talk about small increments of life–like what happened in the last hour of her day or maybe a bit of what happened in mine, but if I get too detailed, she pulls away and asks that we talk about this at another time.  That means we will never talk about it because her poor brain cannot hold lots of facts at once.  She cannot support the tension of my day because she cannot take it in and understand what it is.  But we can sometimes talk about the biggest things in our life together, like my father’s death and that she raised the three children by herself, because that is the mainstay of who she is and that is still clear in her mind.  All of this weighs on me as I move closer to losing her and wondering what life really is.  When she’s gone, she’s gone.  My memories of her will be there, but I don’t know if we will ever connect again.    My religious faith says we will–but there is again no context for that, no tool to use to understand it.  You hang out there in the ether hoping for some shred of belief.  Mortality is part of who we are and none of us, except maybe those we call saints, deal very well with it.  Ironically, I have talked to my dead father all my life and he is the reason I lean toward belief in something beyond this life.  He’s gotten me out of lots of tangles–or someone has.  It’s intimate, the talk I have with him.  And baffling at the same time.  Does he hear any of it or am I just creating some healing-type personna that I can talk to instead of paying a licensed psychologist. 

So I’m facing the question about the timing of my mother’s death. And the other one–what’s beyond her last breath, and my own?

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Part of Why I Want a Public Option for Healthcare

October 15, 2009 at 1:12 am (Chicago, Health)
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You are changed when at 22 your student in your junior English class comes up to you and says, “You don’t know I’m Jewish do you.”  You feel like a fool because no, you didn’t know this young man was Jewish.  You don’t know any Jews and you are 22 years old—the product of parochial education.  You need to bust out into the world.

You are changed when another student comes up to you in homeroom first hour and tells you to be careful after the basketball assembly.  It’s 1969 and things are on fire in some neighborhoods.  This very tall African American male doesn’t want any harm to come to you because he knows the plan: during your study hall in the cafeteria all the chairs are going to be to thrown through the windows.  You are starting to make connections.

You are changed during what is called a Human Relations meeting when the leader accuses your father of raping black women.  You burst into tears crying out that your father died when you were a child.  You just don’t get it.  This guy is trying to break you down, you blonde, white sheltered human being.

You are changed when your students, again, surprise you during 2 different class periods with parties when you depart on maternity leave.  They bake cakes and chip in to buy a bicycle for your baby.  Now that’s love.

You are changed as a mother by three amazing children, and as a wife by a tender, funny, bright and achieving husband.  You embrace your life.  But after a while you go looking for something outside your front door and you find another nurturing and giving profession—nursing.  More change. 

You are changed when you hold the hand and rub the back of 13 and 14 year old teens at Mercy Hospital giving birth for the first and sometimes second time. 

You are changed when a pale blonde teen with a loud talking mother tries to let you know that the father of her baby is really her mother’s boyfriend.

You are changed when a newly delivered mom talks about how her check will now go up—this was before Bill Clinton.

And now working at the health department you are changed even more when you walk through the clinic doors each day to see people of all shapes, sizes and colors needing medical care.  Thank God for the county and the amazing and giving people that work there day after day doing everything they can to help lives, to save lives. 

You are forever changed.  It’s a good thing.  Very good.

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