Celebrating, With or Without You

My dad, my giant personality in a giant body Dad, should be celebrating his 80th birthday today, but he's not. We will celebrate, we will raise a glass (and if it was warmer Jack would smoke a cigar but it's freezing outside and that stinky thing is an outdoor activity), and I will tell my girls stories about their grandfather, ones they have most certainly heard but ones that give me comfort and make me laugh and allow me to feel, just for a bit, that he is a part of their lives in a way that is not just stories but real day to day grandfather stuff.

Several nights ago my sister and I went back and forth via text, hashing out dates and years and time frames that all led to the demise of Bill and Sharie's once promising life together. Ashley was 8 (I think), I was 16. Maybe, I know I could drive because all I wanted to do when they told us was leave and go to a friends' house, which they did not allow. I actually thought they were kidding, several of their good friends had recently made the same announcement; I thought it was a Keeping Up with the Neighbors kind of joke. It was not. I realized that the specifics, now over thirty years later, didn't really matter at all. Our lives were changed forever, the ripple effect of their decision still in play today.

Dad moved to an apartment just a few minutes walk from our house. In no time he had married his secretary but just stop right there. Dad's secretary was 10 years his senior, not smoking hot, and a bit bossy, in a matronly kind of unpleasant way. She vehemently disliked both my sister and me; her first direction as the new Mrs. Lang was to change the locks on the apartment that was now theirs. Interesting way to cozy up to the stepchildren, she continued on this charming path for most of their 19 year marriage. When Dad died I think she was genuinely surprised at our grief, and it was clear to me, that even after 19 years, she had no capacity to understand just how much Ashley and I loved our Dad. I felt a tiny bit bad for her. Tiny bit.

The stepmother died a few years ago. I had remained in contact with her as she had been very interested in my children and had, uncharacteristically, been very kind to them, always remembering them at birthdays and Christmas. She said once she was doing what Dad would have wanted and I appreciated that effort, even though I knew that there was little anyone could do to represent what my father might have meant to my children.

Mom and Dad worked hard to maintain a very friendly relationship. My sister, still very young, benefited greatly from their willingness to work together. It wasn't perfect and while I went off to college, she took the brunt of the saga of the divorced parents. It's never easy but I appreciate so much that they tried. They had been friends since high school, and they continued, in a new and unique way, to be friends until Dad died.

Yesterday, on the phone with Mom covering the Mother's Day things, she was quiet for a minute and then said, "your father would be 80 years old tomorrow". The quiet was now on my end. Mom just turned 79, she was a year behind him at Hillcrest High.

"I know Mom, I know."
"Your dad would have done 80 so well."

Sitting at the island in our kitchen, the same island that came from Mom's house, on the phone with my mother while one daughter bakes a Mother's Day cake and the other sets the table for the dinner, I imagine what life might look like if there were two more places set at that table, if our downstairs guest room was full of grandparents and love and laughter.

"I always loved your dad Allyson, I always did."

I know that too Mom. 
Happy birthday Dad, we all miss you so very much.

Fashion Statement

Amongst her things when she died was a pair of gold shell earrings, although they were slightly different, unlike a pair of earrings should be. The fronts were almost identical but the backs looked nothing alike. It took me a few days to remember, to solve the mystery of the mismatched earrings.

Mimi was always generous with her things, even when I was a very curious five year old who loved nothing more than combing through the jewelry drawers that pulled out in the middle of her long dresser. In there I found beautiful and shiny things, pearls and cocktail rings, gold cuff bracelets and shell earrings that I could clip, painfully, onto my small ears. Upstairs, in the attic, was a huge box full of old clothes: the simple blue and white floral dress that she wore at her wartime wedding ceremony, the bright pink and orange floral sheath that had seen numerous cocktail parties on the terrace in Mexico and the old fur stole that, for years, she draped over her glamours shoulders. Rainy days meant the box was dragged out into the guest room and my hours were filled with every possible combination of mismatched dress up imaginable, accessorized fully with diamond bracelets and sapphire pendants, all under the patient and watchful eye of my grandmother.

Mary dreams of such a glamorous life. Her ability to sniff out, from every conceivable hiding place, the awful white shoes I wore at our wedding is commendable. Clomp clomp she marches down the long hallway in an assortment of clothing never before assembled: striped tights, bright pink tutu, diamond encrusted tiara (broken and salvaged from a party goody bag), floral tank top, and a plastic flower lei accessorized with the apron received last Christmas from the uncles. Fashionably she ties it around her neck, the ruffle flapping behind her like a six year old superhero cape. I cringe. In the years between five and thirty I grew into a sensible shoe wearing cardigan loving grown up. Mimi's earrings remind me that once I too loved frump and feathers.

The painful clips proved to be too much and I took off the earrings, or one of the earrings, because one day, only one remained. After a thorough search, and a good amount time spent in my room, the earring was considered officially lost and the remaining gold shell put away. As they were purchased many years before in a Dallas jewelry shop they were declared irreplaceable and some thought was given to making the remaining earring a pendant. Thankfully that never happened. My loving grandfather, in Dallas on business, found a replacement pair, and then there were three gold shell earrings.

My stylish self promptly lost one more, one of the new ones, leaving two similar but slightly mismatched earrings, a perfect pair.

The earrings are now with my aunt who, quite likely, allows her grandchildren to wear them all over her house. My jewelry arsenal is much smaller than Mimi's, as is my stash of old dress up clothing. In my ongoing quest to teach the girls about every color in the rainbow I occasionally forget the sheer joy found in wrapping yourself in clothes that don't fit, sloshing around in shoes that are much too big with over sized gold earrings painfully clamped onto your tiny ears.

The benefits of having learned to be a mom from your grandmother are sometimes disguised. Mary, glorious in her huge cranberry ball gown and coordinating tiara, reminds me how lucky I am to have had such a wonderful teacher.

May Day Birthday

Bopaw was born on May 1, 1901 and so, on Saturday, I reminded Mary and Kate that May Day was also their great grandfather's birthday.

Mary thought for a moment and then suggested we bake a cake. Creative, interesting way to get a cake, working the never actually met, 18 years deceased great grandfather angle.

"But mom, if I eat some cake then Bopaw can have some too, because he is in my heart".


Sweeter than cake, every day.

Suit No Tie

Minutes before I had been sound asleep, snuggled next to my grandmother while Bopaw snored loudly in the next bed. The piercing sound woke us all, startled us into sitting positions, and my grandfather, his few remaining hairs disheveled, looked around, mumbled something to my grandmother and went right back to sleep. Calmly she reached over, picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. That she understood him was a clear benefit of almost fifty years of marriage, not a full set of teeth between them, garbled noise was the chosen form of communication when awakened by a screeching horn in the middle of the night.

Patiently she waited while the phone rang, although to be clear, not a chance anyone could have understood a word she had to say had someone stayed behind to answer the phone in the middle of what I was certain was a raging fire. In my yellow and brown Pebbles Flintstone pajamas I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway finding a full floor of guests as without teeth and hair as we were, all in various stages of pajama clad confusion. "It's a fire! Get up! Bopaw get up NOW!", my eight year old self near hysteria, jumping like mad at the foot of his bed. He rolled over, raised his eyebrows and thought about throwing me out the window, to facilitate my escape from the burning building.

Preparing me for this dramatic event in my young life, third grade Anxiety Training. In Mrs. Coit's room, where we were subjected to 30 minutes of intimidation and manipulative terror masquerading as education, it was fire safety week. Fire fighters visited our school, pamphlets were distributed and the responsibility to get the family out of the burning building now assigned solely to the eight year old family member. We were to map our exit routes, draw up a plan and run family fire drills weekly. My father had no interest in this, not once did we practice our escape, no emergency fire ladders were purchased. The Fire Film Scare Series culminated in a horror film staring the family who had no plan, the final shot of the dog, the only survivor, on the front lawn, an errant tear in his eye, as his entire family perished in the blazing inferno behind him. I had trouble sleeping.

"Get up now, please!", and shocking, still no answer at the front desk. Bopaw got up, put on his robe and slippers, and stepped into the bathroom to run a comb through his hairs. He then checked the hallway, muttered something and went in to put in his teeth, "well Mother, she's right, everyone does appear to be leaving. Maybe we should head downstairs". At this point I had gathered Theodore and Baby Kelly, my two always travel companions, and was standing, jumping, at the front door, waving my goodbyes to all the survivors en route to a lower floor. Mimi was up, and working furiously to ready herself, while doing her best to calm the now panicked eight year old, still in the Pebbles pajamas.

My dear grandfather went to the closet and selected a suit, a full on gray wool suit to slip into for his descent into the blazing inferno that I knew would find us on the way down. This he wore over his blue, with navy piping, pajamas, monogrammed on the pocket. Once assembled he realized that slippers would never do and so, while Mimi and I stood waiting, he put on socks and shoes before announcing that yes, now he was ready. We stepped into the hallway, the only ones left, and Bopaw walked to the elevator. "Oh no, no no no, we have to walk down, we have to take the stairs in a fire!", their combined 115 year old bodies not at all pleased with this announcement, they followed me to the exit door. In what was surely the longest time ever spent in a stairwell, we descended 10 stories to the street outside the Kahler Hotel, pausing at every landing for air. At these breaks I would run ahead, and then back, utilizing all my fire preparedness training: checking doors for heat, staying low and breathing into the damp washcloth I had somehow found time to prepare. They begged me to go on, to save myself and I cried out, "NO! Never, I'll never leave without you", or maybe they were discussing last week's golf game, Mimi having left her teeth to broil in our upstairs room.

A short hour or so later we reached the ground floor. Throwing open the door, having saved my grandparents, Theodore and Baby Kelly from certain death, I stepped confidently into the lobby, knowing that my well developed fire safety skills were the real heroes. There was not a firefighter to be seen, only far in the distance could we see the front desk clerk, shouting "hello" impatiently into the phone. "Mother, did you leave the phone off the hook?".

We took the elevator back up to the tenth floor, false alarm.

It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, or it was last week. There were toys in every store, trees in the grand hotels, and everywhere I turned, grandparents visiting grandchildren. The average age in our neighborhood jumps at least 20 years the week of Christmas; at lunch Wednesday I was the only mom alone with children, every other table at Frances was populated with happy grandchildren and adoring grandparents.

It’s a very short road to bitter, self pity even closer. There are no grandparents at our house and at no time does it smack like it does at the holidays. The girls notice and I feel guilty, grandparents being such a vital part of my childhood I ache that I can’t offer them the same. And try as I may, Jack and I are the here and now, grandparents offer children a sense of permanence and a place in the world. Grandparents are fun and silly, and they give us tradition and order, or they did me. Of course I must remind myself that those very traditions which guide me were once nothing more than my great grandmother soaking a fruit cake in brandy, everything has some delicious beginning.

And so this year we created our own Christmas, and it was a wonderful holiday. Thank God for my aunt who comes to visit her daughter, my cousin, who welcomes us all to her perfect Christmas home. But for Lynda, I'd be the oldest at the table, and I'm not ready for that. Lynda teaches the girls that because of her, we are all related, a real life example of what I try to convey to them, that we are bound together going up the tree. At five, I needed grandparents. Maybe the girls don't, but they certainly would enjoy the option.

To A Good Home

The drawer on the top left was for her checkbooks, the large three to a page variety with black binders. Below that was a drawer fitted for paper, typing paper and carbon paper and letterhead, both her personal and business. The bottom drawer held envelopes, letter and personal size and the blue ones that she took with her to church every Sunday morning. To her right was the drop down front with the slide that popped up and out, which held her blue typewriter, and which scared me when it snapped into place. On top was the faux antique phone, a desk pad, a calculator and a small pyramid she bought somewhere in Asia which, in theory, was to give the time when tapped on top. But the time, although spoken in English, was so heavily accented that you couldn't understand a word said. She loved to set it off, lean in, and then roll back laughing, "the things I spend money on!". The middle drawer was for pens, my favorite being the clicky green ballpoint from her bank, a roll of US flag stamps, lick required, in the clear plastic stamp roll, liquid paper and piles and piles of address labels, most received in the mail from various organizations, all of whom she reimbursed for their kindness with a check, yellow safety paper, from the big black binder.

In the evening, after dinner, while my grandfather cleaned the kitchen and vacuumed the floor (which he did every night) Mimi would frequently retreat to her office, the red room, where she would spend hours, or what seemed like hours to me, balancing the company checkbooks. When she was off by a penny, which was not often, she'd wander the house, muttering constantly, deeply frustrated at the imbalance. While she worked I would sit on the day bed and look at the albums of family photographs she had created, black pages in maroon binders, her writing in white script. Occasionally she would move to the table, the same one we used for card playing on Sunday nights, allowing me to spend my time working away on the typewriter, writing story after story, none of which remain today.

The desk was organized and predictable, as were my evenings at their house. Lawrence Welk on television in the family room, Mimi in the kitchen making dinner, cocktails at 5:00, dinner usually at 7:00, as my grandfather frequently appeared just before, to catch the final round of Wheel of Fortune, and my grandmother always got the puzzle, in record time. Each time she beat Patricia from Cleveland, or Ralph from Orlando, my grandfather would rub his chin, look at me and say, "she's amazing, isn't she? We've got to get her on there, don't we?", and she would wave her hand horizontally, shrug him off, and return to the final plating of the fried fish and peppery potatoes with lima beans, as I was frequently a dinner guest on Fridays.

In that desk I knew I could find paper and stamps and pens that had ink. There was never a scramble for a sharpened pencil to finish my homework, never a letter left unmailed for lack of a stamp. For years it's been with me, moving at least 10 times, but we now have no room for Mimi's old desk. Our small space is no longer able to accommodate two adults, two children, a beagle and a huge old office desk. It needs a good home, one that will appreciate the old tape marks on the pull out to the left where she taped phone numbers, including the Hall's bridal registry direct line. One that will know the secret of the drawers, which one must be extended to free the others. It's well worn and loved and on it's way to Philadelphia, to my cousin, who happily offered it a new home.

And it's old home is now a bright blue playroom, full of crayons and paper and sharpened pencils. The perfect place for Mimi's great granddaughters to find comfort and order and silliness, just what I needed so long ago, just what she would want now.

Goodnight Gracie

Fresh off a wonderful and busy weekend with their grandparents, Mary and Kate are exhausted. Cranky, droopy, sloppy exhausted, limp limb exhausted, my girls are tired. But it's not just the grandparents, first we had four days of the uncles, and there is no sleep to be had when they are in town. A three day break and then four days of grandparents, and certainly you might be thinking, grandparents, really? Rocking chairs and cookie baking, not these people. We went to the zoo, we went to the beach, there were tricycles and hula hoops, festivals and celebrations, and yet again, very little sleep.


The girls tell me when they are hungry, they manage the bathroom procedure now rather self sufficiently and they certainly know when and how to have fun, but it is my job to see that they get an adequate amount of sleep. Like any four year old they hate to surrender to that place where they will quite certainly miss out out on all that goes on in the rest of the world, understandably. And now that we have phased out naps, save very special late night occasion preparedness, as in the Independence Day fireworks, exhaustion is standard fare around here. There are things I can be somewhat casual about but for reasons unknown, I am a complete lunatic when it comes to their sleeping. It's not that bedtime is cast in stone, 8:00 generally, a smidge later now that summer is here, and they generally sleep until 8:00 the next morning, banking a good 12 hour sleep almost every night. But when I see the signs, the loopy eyes and the wandering stare, my crazy mother sense goes into overdrive.

Much like in high school when I would find myself at a party or event that I sensed was soon to be out of control, my feathers begin to spin when I realize we are away from home with soon to be very tired children. Clearly it's my fear of illness that plays a role as they both tend to fall prey to whatever the kid funk of the day is when they are tired. But there are some very real fears about being out of control and not taking charge of a situation when they look to me to make the right decisions. Several years ago we figured this out, children have no idea how much sleep they need, it's our job to be responsible and make the right choices for them. They can run wild in Target and I am able to chock it up to four year old madness but when they are tired and I let it happen, the weight of bad parenting lands firmly on the top of my head.

Goodnight Mary, goodnight Kate.

Reasonable Offers Accepted

Yesterday the most amazing thing happened, I read the paper, a good three or four sections, before it was dark outside. Jack tore threw a few also, Sports and Business, while I reached for Sunday Style and Books. We sat on the front porch on a glorious summer day, sipping tea, reading the paper and acting like people without a care in the world.

The children were at the park.

Yesterday the grandparents suggested that they might take the little ones to the park, hesitantly, as if we might say no. In almost five years no one has ever approached us to say "may we take the children to the park?". It's our fault, we chose to live away from family, away from doting grandparents and uncles who might swoop in on any given weekend and grab a child or two for a walk down the street. So while we accept full responsibility for never being able to read the paper in the morning, we happily accept offers from loved ones who might think that a morning spent chasing Mary and Kate around in a park sounds heavenly.

Mary and Kate couldn't agree more.