Back East, Part I

I spent some time in Wisconsin and Illinois last week, and I have some thoughts on that trip. But today is Father’s Day, so this first part is going to involve tattling on my dad.

My dad was born in Wisconsin but his parents moved to Illinois when he was a wee lad, and my dad grew up in the area of Highwood and Highland Park (roughly 25 miles west of Chicago). At one point, they—and by “they,” I mean Grandma and Grandpa Murphy plus their seven children—lived in this house:

I know this because my sweet cousin Donny scooped us up the morning after we arrived in Illinois and drove us on a tour of Highland Park, Highwood and Fort Sheridan—where my dad would have gone when he enlisted in the army. (Yeah, it was a goose-bumpy moment, to realize we were traversing the same ground he would have covered as a gung-ho twenty-two-year-old who was eager to get overseas and serve his beloved country in WWII.)

Donny showed us the house, and we had a conversation about what it must’ve been like for nine people to be living there—with the only bathroom being an outhouse in the back yard. (Side note here: How on earth did mamas potty train babies when they had to run them across the yard to get them pants-down-and-seated in time?)

But what really made me happy was when Donny drove us to this hill:

I had to get out and take a photo, and I hope you can see from the photo how steep the hill is. Now close your eyes and imagine two things: 1. The hill is covered in snow. 2. There is no rock barrier between the bottom of the hill and the lake (aka, "the big lake," Lake Michigan). Hold that thought.

When I was fifty-ish, it occurred to me that, since my father had died when I was only eight years old, and for other reasons which are just sad and don’t bear repeating here, most of my impressions of him had come from my mother, who, as it turns out, wasn’t the most reliable narrator of my dad’s life story. When I had that revelation, I wrote to my dad’s sister, my very sweet Aunt Betty, and I asked her to tell me about what my dad was like before he married my mom. I’m going to skip over the back story of everything that happened to that letter after it arrived in Illinois and was passed from aunt to uncle to cousin and back again, and just say this: Some months later, a CD arrived for me in the mail. On it were the voices of my Aunt Betty and my cousin Mick, the latter interviewing the former about my dad. Since then, I’ve wept my way through that CD numerous times—all the more so because Aunt Betty has now passed. But my favorite story involved that steep hill… and my dad… and a sled… and my Aunt Betty. Here is the story in Betty’s own words:

“There were nine of us stuffed in that little brick house--Mom, Dad and seven kids. One winter Saturday morning Mom had things to do so she told my older brother, 'Pete, you can’t go any place until Betty is dressed. You take her with you today.' Little did she know what a treat I was going to have!

I was four or five at the time and Pete was three years older. He grumbled but he got me dressed and set off with me and a sled. ‘This is going to be the most exciting day of your life,’ my big brother promised me. ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked. All he’d say was, ‘You’ll see when we get down to the lake.’

It wasn’t that far a walk. Soon we came to the bluff overlooking the lake. There was a path that Highwood people used to get down to the lake. Pete stopped there and told me, ‘Listen to every word I say. I’m going to lay down on the sled. You lay on my back and hold on for dear life because it’s going to be a rough ride.’ I grabbed on with two hands. Once he made sure I had a good grip, off we went bumpity bumping down that cliff and out onto the lake. We flew through little whiffs of snow. The cold air was blowing on my face so hard I had to put it down on Pete’s back, but I kept lifting my face up because I wanted to see everything. We went far out onto the lake. ‘How far can we go?’ I asked my brother. ‘Until the ice cracks,’ he said. I wasn’t scared. I just thought, ‘Okay, he knows what he’s doing. He’s my big brother.’ Just as I thought that, the ice cracked. Peter quickly turned the sled sideways. We flew that way for a while because we were going so fast. It was a long walk back, and I was tired by the time we got to the shore.

When we got home, my mother said, ‘Look at your rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes!’ Pete hadn’t told me not to tell, and I didn’t notice his frantic signals. I said, ‘Oh, Mom, I had the best time!’ As I told of our adventures, my mother’s smiling face changed like a witch woman’s! Peter had to go to his room. I felt terrible that he got punished.”

This story is all the more endearing to me because every time I hear it, I think of all the times my big brother—three years older—placed my life and limb in jeopardy by pulling similarly dangerous stunts. Just as Aunt Betty trusted my dad, I trusted my big brother to always keep me safe, and he did. For the most part….

How fun it was, though, after hearing that story for so many years, to stand at the top of that hill, look down to the lake, and imagine the wild ride down and the slide across. At least my brother had the sense to always warn me: “Don’t tell Mom!”

Nostalgia

Yesterday morning I spent two hours talking to a cousin—a cousin whom I've never met. He'd read my memoir, Tainted Legacy, saw the last name "Williams" mentioned as one of my ancestors, did some checking, and yeah, we're cousins; his great-grandfather was the brother of my great-great-grandmother (all of which we happily verified on Ancestry.com). Our conversation, over that two hours, led us from laughter to tears and back again as we shared family stories and secrets, heartaches and triumphs. And in the course of our dialogue, we discussed an individual who may or may not be a blood relative, someone with whom I had contact while researching Tainted Legacy. But I haven't spoken to her in years. And now I'm curious to know who her people were. So is new-cousin-Chris.

"Don't let her slip away, Kay," he implored.

No kidding.

So I went looking for her phone number. I began by searching my entire Bertha Gifford file (and let me tell you, it's extensive, including all my notes, newspaper clippings, photos, every email I've ever received about her or the book—printed--rejection slips from agents and publishers—ha ha ha ha ha ha ha—and the True Crime comic book in which her story is featured. (No, I won't mention which one or the issue date. Good lord, it's horrid.)

But I didn't find her phone number.

So today I finally (after quite a few years), went through my nightstand drawer, the place where I keep the cards my kids send me and other precious mementos.

Is it important to mention that I've had the same nightstand since I was born? Yep. For sixty-plus years it has sat sturdily next to my bed in every home I've lived in. The beds have come and gone (I sometimes miss the waterbed), but the nightstand remains stalwart. I promised my mom in 1972 when I moved out of the house and she sent it off with me that I'd sand it down and refinish it. Sorry, Mom!

I didn't find that phone number.

But I did find an abundance of other treasures, including a birthday card The Youngest Granddaughter made for me—yes, that granddaughter, the one who just started college. I have treasured it all these years for the way she depicted us together.

 And a Mother's Day card my son drew for me—in the 1980's—complete with an Ewok sticker to fancy it up.

 And a card my mother sent me... when she was 90.

 And the two-page letter my sweet cousin Danny Fiocchi sent me after he'd finished reading Tainted Legacy, which was not long after it came out because at its publication, I'd sent him a copy, since the book came into being only because that stubborn Irish/Italian man refused to let me give up on it. In the letter, he mentions that he is 51... that he started working at the age of 16... that in all the years he's been working, he's only been late for work "a handful of times, today being one of them." Because he couldn't put the book down. "Thank God I'm my boss," he said. See why I love him?

And all the precious bookmarks my bibliophile friends have sent me over the years, including one from County Cork, Ireland (wherein the Murphy ancestors lie buried), several made for me by my beloved cousin Jean Thompson, and one I procured from the Singing Wind bookstore in Benson, Arizona (Winifred Bundy, proprietor) in 1993.

I have been steeped in nostalgia all day. And you know what? It's a nice place to visit when you've been sad. It has reminded me of how much love has been surrounding me all my life.

Now if I can just find that phone number....

Birthday Gift

Back in the late 1970's when I was a young wife and mother with very little money, someone in our church began selling Avon products as a way to supplement her family's income. I sympathized with her plight, and so I found one thing to buy when she made her obligatory pitch over tea one afternoon. The "Dear Friends" cologne decanter (pictured above) with its lovely girl holding a cat reminded me of my then three-year-old daughter and her tenderness with a tiny orange kitten she named "Sweetheart" (because that was what I called her). The scent, "Roses, Roses," seemed like such an extravagance, but it really did smell just like roses, and I really did want to help out the young woman whose young family was struggling like my own.

So I bought the little decanter, and I kept it on my dresser, and every time I dressed for church or to go to dinner with my husband, I dabbed on a few drops of the sweet scented water. It took years to empty the bottle. Once the cologne was gone, I kept the bottle on my dresser because I loved the figurine, and the scent of the roses lingered in it. Now my granddaughter has it. She's sixteen.

A couple of years ago for my birthday, my daughter bought me some rose water, telling me, "This reminds me of you because you always smelled like this when I was growing up." It swept me back across decades in an instant. Until that moment, I'd had no idea she associated that scent with her childhood.  I used the rose water she gave me, though it didn't smell quite as sweet as the original cologne, and of course it was lacking the nostalgia of that lovely Avon bottle.

Then yesterday, for our birthday—because my daughter was born on my nineteenth birthday, still the best birthday I've ever had—she handed me a small gift bag. In it, wrapped ever so carefully, was a very familiar figure. Somehow, she and my granddaughter had found (online, of course) a woman selling the Avon products her mother had collected for years. As I opened the package, tears in my eyes, my granddaughter reminded me that she still had that old "Dear Friends" bottle because, she said, it reminds her of her childhood. My son, sitting beside me, didn't remember the bottle at all, but when he smelled the cologne inside, his eyes widened. "I remember this!" he said. Of course. When scent is connected to memory it can snap us back to places and experiences from long, long ago.

And what a gift it is when someone can give us something so simple yet so powerful! I love this gift because it will remind me, every time I splash it on, of those long ago but much beloved days... and how far we've come as a family. And now, having seen my granddaughter, as beautiful as her mother, gently cradle a kitten in her arms, this simple glass and plastic container takes on an even deeper value.

So here's a birthday toast to nostalgia, to vintage memories and to making new memories as our family grows in ever widening circles of love.