Sepia Saturday: My Daddy Made All of That!

My dad was a master of many trades. Though a CPA, he was also a farmer, auto-mechanic, carpenter, welder, blacksmith, roofer, plumber,mason, painter, backyard griller, and a list of another dozen trades. He couldn't carry a tune and had two left feet, but that's beside the point.

That's the house I grew up in, and he built every bit of it, including the flagstone chimney and fireplace. He also built the playhouse for my sister out of the remains of an airplane engine box he brought home from Douglas Aircraft when he worked there and he felt it was a waste to discard it. It later served as my tree house where I held court with my secret club and stored my personal childhood library.

That's my sister Nanette in the middle, cousin Glen on the right, me in the sock cap and glasses, and my grandfather's dog Buddy, probably around 1959 or 1960.

Learn more about Sepia Saturday here.

Faultlines and Bloodlines

Some days I am certain I sense my mother's essence, shrouded in the tiny steam cloud dancing above a bowl of miso soup.

Or isn't that the offbeat rhythm of her shuffling house shoes I hear echoed in the strokes of my bamboo tea whisk?

All of the ardent efforts of my generation's attempt to be spiritual not religious can not erase the image of a group of altar guild ladies silently arranging calla lilies and irises, privilege pausing to bow down in awe at the beauty and power of nature -- too transient for them to ever tame and emboss but within their capacity to appreciate yet never fully comprehend.

At every turn there is a new book or other product preaching about the futility of material things and selling a plan that will ensure that you will live in the Now not the past. The past is too brilliant of a dancer to fall for such bunk. Bloodlines of the past hold up a mirror that dares me to look at my own future or at least come to terms with those who have already lived it. Reconcile or forever be locked in this dance.

Silences, especially at night, lead me to ponder the fault lines under my bed. A cracked windshield, spider web smile lines that can overnight become ravines. Silence was the beacon call to sleep when my mother read at my bedside, those commas and dashes that gave her the chance to let her eye glance from the page to my bed to see if I was truly, finally asleep. Even now, hours before I need to rest my head for the night, I can hear the silence and wonder if the next sound will be the page turning or the book closing and the light turned off for the night.

Mug Shot Series No. 9rc381 A, B & C - Parental Panels

Click the photos to "embiggen".

Sepia Saturday: Dowdy or Not

I've posted it here, but quite a while back. This is my mother, Helen Polley at the time, around 1943 when she was 18. My sister and I never saw this picture until a couple of years after she died and her sister sent it to us. She'd mentioned that as a teen she had done a few modeling shots but said that all shots from the shoot were lost. "No great loss," she would say. "They were pretty silly since I looked so dowdy in those shots."

Princess Bow Sez...

...Happy Friday everyone. Enjoy Mom's Day.

January's Circle

A good friend of mine, who I only see every three or four years because she lives in Cairo, is in town to see her mother through the final stages of terminal cancer. The last time I saw her and her mother was Thanksgiving two years ago when I'd recently lost my father. Over the past six weeks, I've had close to casual acquaintances and relatives lose spouses, parents and children. That, of course, becomes a reality at a certain age. It reminds me to take stock of likely losses and blessings in my own life. I know there will be more, but not in the immediate future I hope, seeming to have lost all that could be lost in the past five years. Sometimes it feels like a clean slate, and for the first time in years I feel that I can be of support and instead of the one needing support but retreating from it.

I thought of five years ago, the last time I saw my mother before she was gone a few weeks later. As I heard about others losses, that so typically come at the very end and beginning of the year, I didn't feel contentment in knowing that it was not my own loss but a certain relief in knowing you can lose a parent only once but sustain the loss forever.

On a day like today -- when the weather was gloriously perfect -- it was hard to think that anyone was in pain or experiencing loss, but a quick scan of headlines or e-mail quickly shatter that reality. Having a couple of walks with Bow in the sun, neither of us needing a jacket, it was a pleasure to be removed from that reality, even knowing that a glorious day like today is an omen of drought, heat and water rationing in the months ahead. But it was pleasant for that moment.

Just Get on the Bus!

Not that I'd ever be one to follow the pack, but I thought I'd keep in line with my fellow bloggers and share this photo of my first day at school. It was...uh...a few years ago. Amazing how photos speak volumes. Just look at how that little twerp clutches his hands, waiting with such intent. That expression suggests he plans to try to keep the teacher in line and would prefer to be the one teaching the class (which he did try a few times). So intent, and amazingly I feel the same vibe today. For whatever dreams have been dashed, bumps and disappointments in the road, I really see myself as that kid under the tree waiting for the bus (actually my obsessive mother drove us, made sure I got to the right room, still had my lunch money...) It suggests that I've not learned a single thing all these years later or have retained much of the same optimism and verve or maybe a mix of all of it.

More touching to me is the photo of my dad (second from the left in the back row) and how much of him is still alive today.

Where Death Had Bloomed

It took a while for me to fully grasp why the past weekend felt so weird to me, but then it dawned on me yesterday that it was a year ago that my father died after a fairly brief journey with Alzheimer's. The past year has been an odd journey, and with both parents gone, I still anticipate another call with bad news, of someone who has gone into the ICU, the term "critical condition" being bandied about, relatives I've not talked to in years needing to be called and informed.

One of my co-workers has reminded me repeatedly that joy will return to my life, and I've felt glimpses of it now and again. And after a year of sorting out my parents estate, I keep toying with how many things I want to hold on to, to pass on to extended relations or put into storage.

As I hear about horrific weather in many parts of the country and the globe, I can see glimmers of the supposed joy likely to return to life in a couple of items brought across the country back in June during my famed U-Haul trek. These two flower pots belonged to my maternal grandparents, and I have seen them in photos from the house in Kansas City at least as far back as the 1940s, possibly even the 1930s. I don't know the story behind them, but for the past 20 to 25 years, they were fixtures at my parents' house but always empty. When I emptied them to bring across the country, the dirt was as hard as concrete, having not been worked for decades. Seeing them filled with life again is encouraging on a sometimes disconcerting Tuesday. August, always a month of preparation for some (me) rest and retreat for others (not me), leaves me in that mode of frustrated anticipation for the show about to open. I am trying my best to take a moment now and again to focus on the coleus in the pot, appreciating that they are here now and will likely be gone in a few months. In the meantime I am reminded to seek more life.

World War III

One of the odd comforts of working with my sister to settle the material aspects of our parents’ estate is coming across unexpected treasures. Yesterday she discovered a rubber squeeze toy bulldog that was a present on my first birthday and I have not seen it in 30 years. Last fall we came across a stash of letters written during my parents courtship. We had found similar letters of my father’s parents’ protracted courtship from 1909 to 1910 three decades ago.

It was especially disconcerting to read language I never heard my father use around me when my mother was alive but began using to describe her after she died in 2004 and he was alone for two and a half years, dealing with Alzheimer’s.

Walking along Valencia and seeing Toni Morrison’s Beloved in a book stall, these words he wrote to my mother when she was in New York and he in Dallas came back in a flash as dusk arrived.

December 29, 1947

My dearest Miss H_____________

Well, here it is 6:15 p.m. and there is no one else in this lonely office but me and the porter, sweeping and dusting in the distance. I hope you do not mind that I am working on my typing skills by writing you. This certainly is not something I would ask the girls in the secretarial pool to type out. I must say it feels so lonely down here, cold but not as brittle as I am sure it is up there. I can’t help but think of both of us, my beloved, in these big cities alone and waiting to be together. I count the days.

I do not know what to make of that silly family of mine. I write and call, but it seems they do not have the time for me. Oh, you don’t know what it means to get your letters. They are a light in this winter.

Last night Larry and I went to see the new movie “The Bishop’s Wife.” I thought it was quite good, with very good writing and acting. I know you and that you have probably already seen it and can write me a long treatise on the mistakes that I did not see in it, but I will look forward to hearing what you have to say.

There is something I have wanted to write in my past few letters but have struggled with how to state it. I know that you hear all the talk that there will be another world war, and this one may be even bigger than the one we thought would end them all. It seems that this time I would have no choice but to serve. That is something we cannot ignore, and I want you to know that if that happens I would not expect you to have to wait for me to return. The covenant we have made still means everything to me, and I want you to know that it is only you that I want, but I do not want to think of you ever having to be the widow. We will have to wait and see what happens, and I hope that I never have to serve. I just want you to know that you are my beloved, and that my life has been blessed if it was only what we have shared the past 12 months.

That war never came, they married ten months later. My mother spoke of them doing a lot of ballroom dancing during this period, something that, like the language in this letter, I never witnessed them sharing together in my life time. While this letter came up in my mind as the sun was setting and objects were vague in the distance, I was sure that I could see them waltzing in a world that would never witness another global war. And then the image faded into darkness.

Mother's Day

The slightest hint of arrogance and vanity were always brewing underneath the sense of duty and praise she poured onto us. The fact that I was the favorite was never fully acknowledged by my sister until the week we lost her. This being my third Mother's Day without a living person to mark the day is the one thing that fully separates me from my sister as she is showered with flowers and treats halfway towards the Atlantic. The cat has been especially loving today. It's always been a mystery as to whether he sees me as a parent, another cat or a source to get outside on this perfect Pacific-Mediterranean Day.

My mother shared with me a sense that our inadequate appearances were the root of much of our mutual dissatisfaction. I had heard of, but had not discovered her stash of modeling photos until after she was gone. Her ever insecure, jealous sister who years ago had torn them up in a rage, revealed that she had her own set of them and mailed them to me the week she took her own life this past December.

Was that the source of the rift of so many years?

Pinturas de las muertos gain more meaning through the years, especially looking back at a parent and longing to possess the youth of the subject of the portrait. Did she really think her looks were so inadequate back then? Or did she think she'd been given fare to New York out of pity, not out of something else within her.

We both mistook the other's silences as loneliness.

She never travelled to quite as many obscure pockets of the world as I, but her knowledge of the religions and separatist movements of the world ran far deeper than any of my visceral encounters have ever brought me.

More than one of my partners announced her phone calls with "The Queen of England is on the the horn, dear." She would be deeply offended by that crack only because she didn't have even a thimble of musty British blood in her veins and could trace the family lineage back to far before the ancestors boarded that boat from La Trance. Her great-great-great-grandmother was from a long line of scullery maids and pick pockets that stormed Versailles like their descendants racing to be first in line during the President's Sale at Filene's Basement, transfixed as they saw their reflection holding silk gowns next to their ash smudged faces.

Acquired prestige carefully laundries a pedigree or redefines what refinement really is.

Having no need to cut the flowers and carefully transport them to her doorstep this year, I can watch them go through their full natural cycle and feel more connected to her this year. In the final sort, my praise for her far outweighs the critique. I look at the portrait above and know the sense of duty may have always been there but was one of many tools in a mysterious fan dance whose secrets I never want fully revealed.

Diving Further into the Blue, the Lure of the Lost

Two exes called this week. Exes ask questions they would never ask when we played house or held each other on groggy Sunday afternoons. Sunday afternoons with the cat still have some of that feel, of our breathing joining, harmonizing, each trying to guess when the distance will begin. Or was it always there? But when the cat walks away there is no second guessing. His departure has nothing to do with me. His return and that of the exes can be taken as the same. The exes offer to tend to the cat during my travels with an enthusiasm that was never there when they performed the same dutiful task during out time as a pair.

One ex wants to be together on Mother’s Day since we both are without parents in the living world. At what age is one not allowed to use the word orphan?

The other ex sighs with pity when I gleefully recount recent dinners and movies I’ve experienced alone, filled with the glory of being so fully in the moment bereft of explaining or apologizing to an ungrateful companion. Then the usual questions come up about when I had my last coupling, when will I have my next. “Aren’t you aware that time is finite?” I am asked, as if I must hunker down before the storm hits. I look out at the gray skies, knowing that it is fog not showers lingering in those clouds.

Although I sometimes miss the dramatic thunder and lightning of past venues and partners, I relate that I have one, possibly two suitors beyond the calm but murky horizon. Each holds promise, but there is no need to hide from tornadoes or hurricanes in this climate. Both are in the distance, but very real, I try to clarify. Both are a few hundred miles away which garners more guileless pity from the ex as I explain what a charge this anticipation brings.

“It’s always about the invitation, not the dance,” I say, seeing the familiar distance across the table that we shared for more than five years. That distance would still be there no matter how passionately I might hold him, something I am surprised to find myself wanting to do at this moment, then taking comfort in the safety of pulling back. As we part, we hold each other a bit longer than we should and promise to get together more often. He never kissed me with such need when we shared the same rooms. Walking home, I wonder how many messages are waiting for me.

I return home to the cat adrift in his own dreams, keeping his eyes closed and curling even closer into himself as I rub his shoulders, his purrs growing ever louder in acknowledgment without ever opening his eyes. I close my own, think of a remote landscape and release my hand to feel further connected.

As I think of the conversations with both exes, I wonder if I revealed too much, or if they only wanted to stick a toe in the shallow pool, unaware that the deepest shade of blue is never the water itself but what lies beneath and seduces the viewer to dive in, never able to reach the true source of that cobalt hue. Then I remember that just this week an ancient ship wreck was discovered off Ocean Beach. It was there all the time but nobody looked deep enough.