Good morning,
In my ears the radio talks of violence in Mexico and murdered students. As the reporter's voice floods my head, the ghost of complaints which crowded my soul on waking slip away. My aches, my pains, my grief, my loss: they feel slight compared with the concept of a mass grave and burning bodies. I tell myself that life is not a competition, it's an exhibition; but I do not believe that in this moment. And so I pour my coffee, and let the dog out into the yard, and pour some food into the cat's dish, and sit down at the computer to try and make some sense of what I feel. Or what I have experienced.
Someone recently told me that I do my best writing when I speak of persons other than myself. When you write about yourself....he began. Then he shook his head. I stood mute and wondered: When I write about myself the quality of my writing degenerates? The stories bore you? The events disturb you? The joys fill you with envy? I did not speak the questions nor receive any answers and the moment passed.
I'm thinking this morning not of myself but of a man whom I knew thirty-five years ago, when I worked at a drug store in St. Louis's Central West End. I can see him when I close my eyes: Over six feet tall; over seventy years old; thin body hung with an old serge suit: Jacket, vest, pants, tie. The material had been pressed so many times that its surface shone. The man's skin defined black and stretched taut across his bones. He wore a brown Fedora with a tattered feather in its rim.
I worked in the make-up department on one side of the store. Across from me, beyond the ten or so aisles, the pharmacist handed out prescriptions to the stores' customers including the old man. Several times a week, the man would push open the front door and turn left, towards Pharmacist Arthur Perry's domain with its platform full of work tables, from which the pharmacy students counted pills and listened to their client's woes. Art did not own the store. The other pharmacist, Bernie Kuntz, owned it; but no one in the neighborhood timed their stops to be served by Bernie. They all wanted Art and the old man was no exception.
He made his slow journey from door to the pharmacy window, his head straight and motionless, his narrow shoulders level and rigid. From the make-up department I tracked his progress. He would stand without complaint until everyone else had been served and then reach his hand to receive the bottle of pills. Because the pharmacy had been elevated, I could see Art bend down to shake the old man's hand in the cheerful way Art had. I could not hear what the old man said but I could see Art and follow the conversation from experience. How are you today, sir? (I'm okay, Mr. Perry.) What can we do for you today, my friend? (Oh, I'm just fine sir, fine; this here bottle is just what I came for.) All right then, thank you; and please let the ladies know if they can help you. (I will, Mr. Arthur, yes sir, I surely will.)
Then the old man turned, each time, and inched his way to the front register. He handed the bottle to the girl at the counter, who held it while he drew a thin worn wallet from his pocket. He placed the wallet on the counter, unfolded it, and extracted a ten-dollar bill which he handed, with a slightly shaking hand, to the cashier. When she gave him back his change, he slid the silver into his right front pocket and the paper money back into the wallet, and reach beneath his jacket to return the wallet to his back pocket. Then he'd extend his hand for the bottle. He did not want a bag.
I would watch him turn to his left and catch my eye. A lively twinkle rose. Each time: I threw my glance far across the store to the place where Arthur Perry still stood, watching. He would give me a brief, sure nod: each time. Then Art turned back to his duties, to the measuring, and counting, the pouring, the greeting, the hand-shaking; while the old man made his slow way to me.
He'd ask how I was: each time. And I would tell him fine: each time. Then I, in turn, would inquire after his health, and he would allow as how he'd been getting by well enough, he reckoned: each time. Then he would raise his hand just as I lifted my own, and into my hand he would gently place the bottle. And I would open it for him, taking off the cap. I'd shake one pill from the bottle and tender it to him to place in his mouth. I'd hand over a cup of water that I would have already poured for him. While he drank, I would replace the cap, turning only half-way, so that when he went home, alone; when he rose in the night with an attack of the pain which the pills relieved, he could open the bottle himself.
When the old man had drunk his fill -- enough to swallow without difficulty -- his dry hand reached for the bottle and I gently placed it in his palm. He'd curl his fingers around the small brown bottle and I would watch, time after time, as he slid it straight up into the right-hand pocket of his worn suit coat. It would not spill. Then he'd take one of my small white hands in his two black, arthritic hands and he'd say, each time, each time: Thank you, my dear. Thank you.
Then the old man would softly slide his hands off of mine and step back, almost as though he'd gotten one minute too close to me. Invariably I raised my eyes to look into his but could not help seeing Arthur Perry observing me from across the store. We nodded as one. I would pull from my belly a weak acknowledgment and then the old man would gaze at me for a few more minutes, letting his cloudy brown eyes absorb whatever timid emotion crept across my face. As Arthur watched the back of the old man's head from the pharmacy, the old man would turn, raise one hand in a brief salute, and slowly walk to the door through which he had come; through which he would go; and through which we always believed he would return.
I left St. Louis in June of 1980. Sometime between then and the mid-1990s, that drug store succumbed to the unrelenting march of progress. The building is gone. The restaurants in which I ate dinner and scribbled poetry have been closed, and re-opened as other restaurants with more modern themes. Arthur Perry went to work for Eli Lily doing pharmaceutical research. I saw him once in the decade during which my mother died, when I had come home for her funeral and my brother Stephen and I went to the Central West End for dinner. Art sat at a table of elegant people, none of whom I knew. We briefly spoke and I saw that while his eyes still pierced, he did not recall the poignancy of the days when we worked at the same place, a place where an old man came in order to be treated with dignity, at the end of a life that none of us understood nor even attempted to know.
Symphony music plays in my ears now; a piece on the radio about a composer from the 1930s. The bars flow and the violins keen and outside of my house, the sun shines with an intensity that I feel sure it cannot maintain. Winter draws near. The drums roll and I think, whatever became of that old man? And I wonder, for the thousandth time this week, what will become of me.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Death of My Favorite Curmudgeon: Special Edition of the Saturday Musings
Good afternoon,
This is not Saturday. I realize that. It is Thursday. I had intended to write this and send it out on Saturday morning and if you get this on Saturday, know that the writing, editing, and crying consumed me for long enough to have this arrive in your inbox more or less on time. If you get it before Saturday and insist on waiting until Saturday to read it, you will be perfectly within your rights. I am not Douglas Adams; I do not misname my creations with deliberateness.(1)
Most of you who are reading these Musings know that my father-in-law, Jabez Jackson MacLaughlin, died yesterday, 05 November 2014. I would like to share the story of my relationship with Jay by way of my own private but publicized eulogy for him. I plan to attend his service but Jay had an aversion to funeral proceedings which included family members popping up and down to moan over the departed. He found it tacky. However, he liked my blog, and often read it, so I think I am safe in telling this story, here, today, in my way.
I first met Jay in the summer of 2009 when his son, James, and I started dating. Jay shocked me with his irascible nature and the somewhat dated views which he held and freely expressed. But he made a killer flan and always served a special, non-red-meat entree for me when Jim and I came to his house for dinner.
In the early years of my relationship with Jim, I struggled to get my footing with his father. I once had a complete and total meltdown in his kitchen when he scolded me for stirring caramel and causing it to crystallize. His daughter, Virginia, placed her hand on my arm and counseled me to "shake it off". But shaking off the scoldings of the men in the generation above me does not come easily to me. It's no secret that my father, rest his soul, ruled our house with a leather belt, an abusive manner, and a volume level that would scare the paint off an old stairwell. Though I got the least of his wrath, being sickly and something of his favorite, still, I suffered enough of it and heard it all. I came to middle-age with a tendency to shiver and retreat when faced with an angry man.
Over the next three years, Jay and I fenced our way to an ability to tolerate, if not like each other. And then, as fate sometimes dictates, something arose to bind us inexorably to one another. His beloved wife Joanna became ill, and Jay and I, along with his children, became her care-givers. In the seven months between the onset of her last illness and her death, Jay and I became fast friends. I grew to love him, to listen to him, and to respect him. Over that year, I found a new way of understanding Jay. He never raised his voice to me though we did not always agree with one another. He treated me in that "old-fashioned" way that men of his era treat women, and as time passed, I no longer saw his proclivity to pay my way and hold doors for me as a sign that he thought me less significant due to my gender. In fact, it meant quite the opposite, and I learned that from him.
Jay received his diagnosis of cancer in June of this year. I found this development unsurprising. Joanna died on 08 October 2013 and he longed for her presence with an intensity that rendered me breathless. I felt he wanted to go to her, as she was clearly unable to return to him at least in any largely satisfying sense. And so, when he took me to lunch and talked about his cancer, and his inclination not to undergo chemotherapy, I reached the conclusion that he had no objection to death even if he hoped not to suffer in the dying.
Still, speaking strictly for myself, I did not want to lose my favorite curmudgeon. I loved him. I looked to him as a father and felt honored that Jim and Virginia willingly tolerated my doing so. We had lunch and dinner outings, explored the Internet, and had our own personal happy hours. He called me several times a day in the year after his wife died. He would call to check on me, to talk about a future dinner date, to share some idea that he did not want to forget, or just to hear my voice. By the end of his life, he had taken to calling me sometimes six or more times each day and I would stop nearly any pursuit (as long as there was not a judge involved) to take his calls.
As the fall progressed, I found myself increasingly fearful that he would let himself slip away long before the year that he had been given. I found myself bargaining with him to prolong his life. The biggest pay-off would be the running of the 90-day exclusion period for his Long Term Disability policy. Jay liked nothing so much as the thought of sticking it to that company and the mere mention of that potential caused him to salivate. "Oh yes," he would say. "Got to get my money's worth for that policy." I'd cast my nervous eye on him and wonder if he meant what he said. He held his body in a still, silent way which suggested otherwise. But I chose to believe him. I had no recourse: To concede his impeding demise would cause me to lose my composure, and Jay hated to see me cry.
By September, no one believed Jay should continue to live at home alone, so off to a respite center for evaluation he went. On one of his five nights there, I brought a fancy Happy Hour kit, assembled by a clerk at the Plaza's Better Cheddar. Jay loved Happy Hour. "It's five o'clock," he would say; and any whose attendance had been summoned had better be present or the drinks would be poured in their absence and weak upon arrival.
I brought smoked salmon, and slices of expensive hard salami; fat ripe blackberries; good crackers; and a bottle of wine. His cousin Anne Jones arrived with her service dog, Katie, and a box of chocolates. We laid out the spread on the hospital bedside table and Jay ate the entire package of salmon and most of the salami. He drank the whole bottle of wine himself, save the half-inch that he allocated to me, allowing me to pretend that I drink without actually having to do so. Anne Jones called Katie to hop on the bed and Jay placed one spotted, worn hand on her head and smiled, with absolute tenderness.
Jay moved into assisted living at Brighton Gardens at the end of that week. We talked. He told me that he wanted to die at home and hoped that he could do so. He planned to use the sojourn in BG to "get strong" and move back to the house that he and Joanna had shared for nearly two decades. I indulged that dream. As far as I was concerned, I would fetch him back to his house in my car and stay 24/7 if that would give him an easy death.
But his decline continued. I'd tell him, "You can't die yet, Jay; we've got 60 more days til we can stick it to the insurance company," and he'd reply, "Don't worry about that! I'm getting their money!"
In mid-October, I asked Jay if anyone had arranged for him to vote.
Now, the mere inquiry should cause your eyebrows to shoot skyward. I am by way of being a yellow-dog Democrat, Missouri-born and bred, daughter of a union organizer. I've actually been accused of being a Socialist, and but for the sheer unworkability of the philosophy, I find it appealing. Jabez J. MacLaughlin, on the other hand, was a life-long Republican who crossed party lines once to his deep regret and would never do so again. He broadcast that fact publicly and firmly, even vehemently, though never disrespectfully at least not in conversation with me.
But Jay was my father-in-law and I loved him dearly. I knew that he had taken a strong dislike to the candidate running against Senator Pat Roberts in Kansas; and that he scorned the process by which he believed the race came to be narrowed to two, with the withdrawal of the weak Democrat candidate for pretensive reasons and the resultant strengthening of the chances of the Independent.
So I told him that I would handle his application for an absentee ballot, but on one condition: That he promised not to die before the election. You see, I saw the look of death begin to gather round his eyes a month before he passed, and I longed to stave off the certain surrender as long as possible, because I am both greedy and shameless. I did not want to lose him.
I don't think Jay's zest for life prompted his to promise to live until November 4th. He yearned to be with Joanna, whom he knew waited for him. I often visited her resting place and told him of my visits, showing him pictures of the flowers which I brought. "Tell her that I will see her soon," he'd instruct me. And I did. Every time.
No, Jay strove to endure because he wanted to vote against Senator Roberts' opponent by voting for Roberts.
I filed his application and the election board mailed the ballot. But it didn't come. On October 23rd, at my request, they mailed a second one. It still didn't come.
On the morning of Monday, November 3rd, Jay called me. We had discussed his voting in each of my visits the prior week, and I assured him that he would vote if I had to put him on a stretcher and push him to his polling place. But he grew weaker and I feared that voting in person would be hopeless. Had we thought, we could have changed his address to the facility, but that might have hastened his demise by destroying the charade which he liked to maintain that he would return home one day to die in his own bed. So the absentee ballot looked like the only option, with the potential for its receipt dwindling.
In that Monday morning call, Jay said, in a craggy voice which showed the gathering weakness, "I don't suppose there's much chance of my voting now, is there, honey? I'm getting weaker." My heart clenched and my stomach turned but I kept that out of my voice and said: "I will get you a ballot if I have to walk to Olathe myself and bully someone into giving it to me. So hold on, Jabez J. MacLaughlin. You promised me." And my favorite curmudgeon replied: "I'll try, honey; but hurry."
I placed a call to Olathe and talked to my contact there. She passed me to a supervisor who passed me to someone else. I explained what had happened and Jay's situation and she said that I should come ahead and she would get things started. I got on the highway, weak eyes and all, and drove like the wind, following the directions which the lady had given me. I arrived at the Election Board and discovered a line of early voters which extended the length of the building. I told one of them why I was there and the line parted. Like Moses, I crossed the Red Sea.
At the counter, I told the woman that I needed to speak with Cheryl. She instantly replied, "Are you the lady with the dying father-in-law?" and I burst into tears held back since Westport. I did not need to answer.
Twenty minutes later, I had been certified as Jay's Election Assistant and slid back behind the wheel of my car, sparing only a few moments to fear getting stopped for my long-expired plates. I leaned my head on the steering wheel and remembered my mother's death in 1985 when, with expired plates, I drove from my cousin Theresa's house to my parents' house at 7:00 a.m. to see my mother's dead body, passing a police officer going 50 in a 35 with four months' gone tags. He stopped me but gave me a warning when I told him the nature of my errand. I prayed for such leniency on I-435 and took off.
At my father-in-law's bedside, I completed the forms for his voting process: my pledge, his designation of me, a copy of his driver's license. Then we started the ballot completion, with Jay too weak to fill in the black circles and me, the Democrat from St. Louis, doing it for him. With my help, he voted for Mr. Roberts and a score of other Republicans, and cast a vote against a couple of taxes and a judge with liberal tendencies which he described in a spat-out sentence which I will not here repeat. I take some credit for reminding him of that judge being on the ballot, for he had already said, in a fading voice, that he did not know or care about any of the judges.
Jay took the pen in his hand to sign his name to the ballot, and I steadied both page and pen. And when he had done, he laid back against his pillows and told me: "When Senator Roberts wins by one vote, I want you to call him and tell him that it was my vote, and that I voted for him in spite of himself." And then he closed his eyes, his meager allotment of energy for the day spent.
I took the ballot to Olathe and return to his room. I spent several more hours with him, just he and I. And the next day, Election Day, I abandoned my Democratic Party Certified Poll Challenger duties after only two hours to go and sit by his side until his son could arrive. He held my hand. He told me that he knew I loved him. I laid my head on his arm and wept; and he told me not to cry. He hated it when I cried.
By 1:30 on Tuesday, November 4th, 2014, Jay had slipped into a kind of sleep from which he would not emerge. His son and I sat by his bedside for that day and through the night. I kept my hand on his heart while he slept. And once again, the irony rose thick and full: I watched the election returns with Jim on Fox News, and injected my voice with enthusiasm as I kept my favorite curmudgeon apprised of the results. And when the tables turned, and the senate went red, I took his hand in mine and told him, "You did it, Jay; Senator Roberts won; and your party has taken the Senate." And he smiled at me. I swear on my mother's grave: The news of the election results drew a smile from my favorite curmudgeon, as he lay in a sleep that would carry him to his Joanna's arms.
Forty-eight hours nearly to the moment from when he performed his last act, signing his name to that ballot, Jabez Jackson MacLaughlin slipped from us. His wife's love filled the room. One of his children held each hand. His death came easy. The deaths of good people should always be easy.
This morning, I crafted a letter to Pat Roberts. I told him a sanitized version of Jay's voting for him -- I pulled no punches about how Jay felt about him but left out the bits about my tears. I gave him Jay's message, and one of my own. I charged him with the responsibility of making Jay's endurance worthwhile. I asked him to do his duty, in honor to those who entrusted it to him,including and most especially my favorite curmudgeon..
Jay gave me something that I thought I would never have. He gave me the relationship of a father to a daughter. He loved me. He cherished me. He taught me, by example and by word; by action and by the smallest most meaningful gestures: The slight wave of his hand; the tilt of his eyes; the set of his jaw. That his son married me and gave me the most precious gift of being Jay's daughter-in-law endears him to me far beyond any love that I feel for my husband, far beyond any strain that our marriage has had, far beyond the cracks which might never be repaired. On the night that Jay died, I said that my words about Jay were mixed with the salt of a thousand unshed tears. And so they are: and so they shall stay, when the tears have fallen and dried; when the handkerchiefs have been re-washed; when the calendar's pages have fallen and withered.
When I go to visit them in their resting place --- Jabez and his Joanna -- I will place the roses on their headstones, and I will touch, briefly, their names engraved in the stone. And I will know, as surely as I know the enduring nature of their love, that I will never feel anything but gratitude for my curmudgeon and his beautiful bride. At the same time, though, I will never overcome the hole in my life where Jay once was, beside the hole that was once Joanna. A gossamer sheen might sweep itself over the rending. I can hope for little else.
But I will hold my head at the tilt which he taught me: Chin up; eyes bright; and smiling. For my tears hurt him; and he has suffered enough. His was a noble life though in many senses, a humble one. He raised two children and provided for them in a confident manner. He spent the last twenty years of his life traveling, and cooking, and caring for his Joanna. And me. He cared for me. Any goodness that still blooms in me, abides in part because of his tender nurturing of my spirit. And so, I bid farewell to my favorite curmudgeon. I will miss you. We never got to Lourdes, as we planned; but by God, we voted. We voted. And that's something of which we can both be proud.
Mugwumpishy tendered,
Corinne Corley
(1) For those who do not catch this reference -- Douglas Adams wrote "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the "increasingly misnamed trilogy" which had five books.
This is not Saturday. I realize that. It is Thursday. I had intended to write this and send it out on Saturday morning and if you get this on Saturday, know that the writing, editing, and crying consumed me for long enough to have this arrive in your inbox more or less on time. If you get it before Saturday and insist on waiting until Saturday to read it, you will be perfectly within your rights. I am not Douglas Adams; I do not misname my creations with deliberateness.(1)
Most of you who are reading these Musings know that my father-in-law, Jabez Jackson MacLaughlin, died yesterday, 05 November 2014. I would like to share the story of my relationship with Jay by way of my own private but publicized eulogy for him. I plan to attend his service but Jay had an aversion to funeral proceedings which included family members popping up and down to moan over the departed. He found it tacky. However, he liked my blog, and often read it, so I think I am safe in telling this story, here, today, in my way.
I first met Jay in the summer of 2009 when his son, James, and I started dating. Jay shocked me with his irascible nature and the somewhat dated views which he held and freely expressed. But he made a killer flan and always served a special, non-red-meat entree for me when Jim and I came to his house for dinner.
In the early years of my relationship with Jim, I struggled to get my footing with his father. I once had a complete and total meltdown in his kitchen when he scolded me for stirring caramel and causing it to crystallize. His daughter, Virginia, placed her hand on my arm and counseled me to "shake it off". But shaking off the scoldings of the men in the generation above me does not come easily to me. It's no secret that my father, rest his soul, ruled our house with a leather belt, an abusive manner, and a volume level that would scare the paint off an old stairwell. Though I got the least of his wrath, being sickly and something of his favorite, still, I suffered enough of it and heard it all. I came to middle-age with a tendency to shiver and retreat when faced with an angry man.
Over the next three years, Jay and I fenced our way to an ability to tolerate, if not like each other. And then, as fate sometimes dictates, something arose to bind us inexorably to one another. His beloved wife Joanna became ill, and Jay and I, along with his children, became her care-givers. In the seven months between the onset of her last illness and her death, Jay and I became fast friends. I grew to love him, to listen to him, and to respect him. Over that year, I found a new way of understanding Jay. He never raised his voice to me though we did not always agree with one another. He treated me in that "old-fashioned" way that men of his era treat women, and as time passed, I no longer saw his proclivity to pay my way and hold doors for me as a sign that he thought me less significant due to my gender. In fact, it meant quite the opposite, and I learned that from him.
Jay received his diagnosis of cancer in June of this year. I found this development unsurprising. Joanna died on 08 October 2013 and he longed for her presence with an intensity that rendered me breathless. I felt he wanted to go to her, as she was clearly unable to return to him at least in any largely satisfying sense. And so, when he took me to lunch and talked about his cancer, and his inclination not to undergo chemotherapy, I reached the conclusion that he had no objection to death even if he hoped not to suffer in the dying.
Still, speaking strictly for myself, I did not want to lose my favorite curmudgeon. I loved him. I looked to him as a father and felt honored that Jim and Virginia willingly tolerated my doing so. We had lunch and dinner outings, explored the Internet, and had our own personal happy hours. He called me several times a day in the year after his wife died. He would call to check on me, to talk about a future dinner date, to share some idea that he did not want to forget, or just to hear my voice. By the end of his life, he had taken to calling me sometimes six or more times each day and I would stop nearly any pursuit (as long as there was not a judge involved) to take his calls.
As the fall progressed, I found myself increasingly fearful that he would let himself slip away long before the year that he had been given. I found myself bargaining with him to prolong his life. The biggest pay-off would be the running of the 90-day exclusion period for his Long Term Disability policy. Jay liked nothing so much as the thought of sticking it to that company and the mere mention of that potential caused him to salivate. "Oh yes," he would say. "Got to get my money's worth for that policy." I'd cast my nervous eye on him and wonder if he meant what he said. He held his body in a still, silent way which suggested otherwise. But I chose to believe him. I had no recourse: To concede his impeding demise would cause me to lose my composure, and Jay hated to see me cry.
By September, no one believed Jay should continue to live at home alone, so off to a respite center for evaluation he went. On one of his five nights there, I brought a fancy Happy Hour kit, assembled by a clerk at the Plaza's Better Cheddar. Jay loved Happy Hour. "It's five o'clock," he would say; and any whose attendance had been summoned had better be present or the drinks would be poured in their absence and weak upon arrival.
I brought smoked salmon, and slices of expensive hard salami; fat ripe blackberries; good crackers; and a bottle of wine. His cousin Anne Jones arrived with her service dog, Katie, and a box of chocolates. We laid out the spread on the hospital bedside table and Jay ate the entire package of salmon and most of the salami. He drank the whole bottle of wine himself, save the half-inch that he allocated to me, allowing me to pretend that I drink without actually having to do so. Anne Jones called Katie to hop on the bed and Jay placed one spotted, worn hand on her head and smiled, with absolute tenderness.
Jay moved into assisted living at Brighton Gardens at the end of that week. We talked. He told me that he wanted to die at home and hoped that he could do so. He planned to use the sojourn in BG to "get strong" and move back to the house that he and Joanna had shared for nearly two decades. I indulged that dream. As far as I was concerned, I would fetch him back to his house in my car and stay 24/7 if that would give him an easy death.
But his decline continued. I'd tell him, "You can't die yet, Jay; we've got 60 more days til we can stick it to the insurance company," and he'd reply, "Don't worry about that! I'm getting their money!"
In mid-October, I asked Jay if anyone had arranged for him to vote.
Now, the mere inquiry should cause your eyebrows to shoot skyward. I am by way of being a yellow-dog Democrat, Missouri-born and bred, daughter of a union organizer. I've actually been accused of being a Socialist, and but for the sheer unworkability of the philosophy, I find it appealing. Jabez J. MacLaughlin, on the other hand, was a life-long Republican who crossed party lines once to his deep regret and would never do so again. He broadcast that fact publicly and firmly, even vehemently, though never disrespectfully at least not in conversation with me.
But Jay was my father-in-law and I loved him dearly. I knew that he had taken a strong dislike to the candidate running against Senator Pat Roberts in Kansas; and that he scorned the process by which he believed the race came to be narrowed to two, with the withdrawal of the weak Democrat candidate for pretensive reasons and the resultant strengthening of the chances of the Independent.
So I told him that I would handle his application for an absentee ballot, but on one condition: That he promised not to die before the election. You see, I saw the look of death begin to gather round his eyes a month before he passed, and I longed to stave off the certain surrender as long as possible, because I am both greedy and shameless. I did not want to lose him.
I don't think Jay's zest for life prompted his to promise to live until November 4th. He yearned to be with Joanna, whom he knew waited for him. I often visited her resting place and told him of my visits, showing him pictures of the flowers which I brought. "Tell her that I will see her soon," he'd instruct me. And I did. Every time.
No, Jay strove to endure because he wanted to vote against Senator Roberts' opponent by voting for Roberts.
I filed his application and the election board mailed the ballot. But it didn't come. On October 23rd, at my request, they mailed a second one. It still didn't come.
On the morning of Monday, November 3rd, Jay called me. We had discussed his voting in each of my visits the prior week, and I assured him that he would vote if I had to put him on a stretcher and push him to his polling place. But he grew weaker and I feared that voting in person would be hopeless. Had we thought, we could have changed his address to the facility, but that might have hastened his demise by destroying the charade which he liked to maintain that he would return home one day to die in his own bed. So the absentee ballot looked like the only option, with the potential for its receipt dwindling.
In that Monday morning call, Jay said, in a craggy voice which showed the gathering weakness, "I don't suppose there's much chance of my voting now, is there, honey? I'm getting weaker." My heart clenched and my stomach turned but I kept that out of my voice and said: "I will get you a ballot if I have to walk to Olathe myself and bully someone into giving it to me. So hold on, Jabez J. MacLaughlin. You promised me." And my favorite curmudgeon replied: "I'll try, honey; but hurry."
I placed a call to Olathe and talked to my contact there. She passed me to a supervisor who passed me to someone else. I explained what had happened and Jay's situation and she said that I should come ahead and she would get things started. I got on the highway, weak eyes and all, and drove like the wind, following the directions which the lady had given me. I arrived at the Election Board and discovered a line of early voters which extended the length of the building. I told one of them why I was there and the line parted. Like Moses, I crossed the Red Sea.
At the counter, I told the woman that I needed to speak with Cheryl. She instantly replied, "Are you the lady with the dying father-in-law?" and I burst into tears held back since Westport. I did not need to answer.
Twenty minutes later, I had been certified as Jay's Election Assistant and slid back behind the wheel of my car, sparing only a few moments to fear getting stopped for my long-expired plates. I leaned my head on the steering wheel and remembered my mother's death in 1985 when, with expired plates, I drove from my cousin Theresa's house to my parents' house at 7:00 a.m. to see my mother's dead body, passing a police officer going 50 in a 35 with four months' gone tags. He stopped me but gave me a warning when I told him the nature of my errand. I prayed for such leniency on I-435 and took off.
At my father-in-law's bedside, I completed the forms for his voting process: my pledge, his designation of me, a copy of his driver's license. Then we started the ballot completion, with Jay too weak to fill in the black circles and me, the Democrat from St. Louis, doing it for him. With my help, he voted for Mr. Roberts and a score of other Republicans, and cast a vote against a couple of taxes and a judge with liberal tendencies which he described in a spat-out sentence which I will not here repeat. I take some credit for reminding him of that judge being on the ballot, for he had already said, in a fading voice, that he did not know or care about any of the judges.
Jay took the pen in his hand to sign his name to the ballot, and I steadied both page and pen. And when he had done, he laid back against his pillows and told me: "When Senator Roberts wins by one vote, I want you to call him and tell him that it was my vote, and that I voted for him in spite of himself." And then he closed his eyes, his meager allotment of energy for the day spent.
I took the ballot to Olathe and return to his room. I spent several more hours with him, just he and I. And the next day, Election Day, I abandoned my Democratic Party Certified Poll Challenger duties after only two hours to go and sit by his side until his son could arrive. He held my hand. He told me that he knew I loved him. I laid my head on his arm and wept; and he told me not to cry. He hated it when I cried.
By 1:30 on Tuesday, November 4th, 2014, Jay had slipped into a kind of sleep from which he would not emerge. His son and I sat by his bedside for that day and through the night. I kept my hand on his heart while he slept. And once again, the irony rose thick and full: I watched the election returns with Jim on Fox News, and injected my voice with enthusiasm as I kept my favorite curmudgeon apprised of the results. And when the tables turned, and the senate went red, I took his hand in mine and told him, "You did it, Jay; Senator Roberts won; and your party has taken the Senate." And he smiled at me. I swear on my mother's grave: The news of the election results drew a smile from my favorite curmudgeon, as he lay in a sleep that would carry him to his Joanna's arms.
Forty-eight hours nearly to the moment from when he performed his last act, signing his name to that ballot, Jabez Jackson MacLaughlin slipped from us. His wife's love filled the room. One of his children held each hand. His death came easy. The deaths of good people should always be easy.
This morning, I crafted a letter to Pat Roberts. I told him a sanitized version of Jay's voting for him -- I pulled no punches about how Jay felt about him but left out the bits about my tears. I gave him Jay's message, and one of my own. I charged him with the responsibility of making Jay's endurance worthwhile. I asked him to do his duty, in honor to those who entrusted it to him,including and most especially my favorite curmudgeon..
Jay gave me something that I thought I would never have. He gave me the relationship of a father to a daughter. He loved me. He cherished me. He taught me, by example and by word; by action and by the smallest most meaningful gestures: The slight wave of his hand; the tilt of his eyes; the set of his jaw. That his son married me and gave me the most precious gift of being Jay's daughter-in-law endears him to me far beyond any love that I feel for my husband, far beyond any strain that our marriage has had, far beyond the cracks which might never be repaired. On the night that Jay died, I said that my words about Jay were mixed with the salt of a thousand unshed tears. And so they are: and so they shall stay, when the tears have fallen and dried; when the handkerchiefs have been re-washed; when the calendar's pages have fallen and withered.
When I go to visit them in their resting place --- Jabez and his Joanna -- I will place the roses on their headstones, and I will touch, briefly, their names engraved in the stone. And I will know, as surely as I know the enduring nature of their love, that I will never feel anything but gratitude for my curmudgeon and his beautiful bride. At the same time, though, I will never overcome the hole in my life where Jay once was, beside the hole that was once Joanna. A gossamer sheen might sweep itself over the rending. I can hope for little else.
But I will hold my head at the tilt which he taught me: Chin up; eyes bright; and smiling. For my tears hurt him; and he has suffered enough. His was a noble life though in many senses, a humble one. He raised two children and provided for them in a confident manner. He spent the last twenty years of his life traveling, and cooking, and caring for his Joanna. And me. He cared for me. Any goodness that still blooms in me, abides in part because of his tender nurturing of my spirit. And so, I bid farewell to my favorite curmudgeon. I will miss you. We never got to Lourdes, as we planned; but by God, we voted. We voted. And that's something of which we can both be proud.
Mugwumpishy tendered,
Corinne Corley
Joanna Mitchell MacLaughlin
and
Jabez Jackson MacLaughlin
(1) For those who do not catch this reference -- Douglas Adams wrote "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", the "increasingly misnamed trilogy" which had five books.
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Saturday Musings, 01 November 2014
Good morning,
A light frost kisses the mound of leaves in the yard outside my window. I sit on the couch, the green couch that I never thought about wanting. It's flanked by my rocking chair, and at its right arm, there's a child's chest. It's a toy dresser that a grandfather from a family not my own made for a daughter not my own. On it sits a giraffe puzzle from the Renaissance Festival which I purchased for my son over twenty years ago. I feel as though I'm in a cubby, coffee at hand, newspaper abandoned on the oak coffee table, and the half-raised blind letting in the feeble sunlight struggling to overcome the barrier formed by the remaining leaves on the neighbor's trees.
A squirrel scampers down the trunk of the maple on the west side of the street and runs under the a parked Dodge. Two birds light on the sidewalk, wings fluttering. I have ear-buds playing the local public radio station snug in my ears and Scott Simon is interviewing someone who has been attempting to determine that he is related to everyone on the planet. I'm feeling a yearning to hear a twang from what my nieces call the Lou; I don't feel related to anyone here, don't feel the warm course of anyone's blood racing through my veins. I feel alone. And in my moments of feeling most alone, some tender memories flow around me.
The same year that we bought the wooden puzzle, I took my son trick-or-treating with the family of the woman who provided his daycare that year. I had just moved into the Holmes house, unwittingly purchasing a home that had belonged to another family from God's Children Daycare, the place where Patrick received care while I tried to start my law practice. 1993; Patrick had turned two in July. All of our boxes had been unpacked and our mourning doves, Larry and Lady Bird, had nested in their cage on the front screen porch.
I dressed Patrick in his Batman pajamas which he insisted could serve as a costume. He slid his little feet into his black cowboy boots and clutched the handle of the plastic pumpkin in which he would collect candy. We drove to Diane's house, not too far south, and parked at her curb. She opened the door and gestured for Patrick and me to come into the house, where she had mugs of hot chocolate and thick slices of bread with peanut butter and jam. Her own children crowded around the table. Patrick hung back, with his stuffed Goodnight Moon bunny in one hand and the pumpkin's handle in the other. Though he played every day with these children, he seemed suddenly shy of them. I did not push him.
Diane's husband came into the kitchen from a back room in their house and handed Diane and me flashlights. I shoved mine into my jacket pocket. I wore a light blue windbreaker that had been the only coat besides a friend's inherited mink that I had been able to wear during my pregnancy. The jacket now hung down to my knees and provided cavernous pockets, a wide collar to warm my neck, and, with its color, visibility. It seemed the perfect jacket for walking the streets of south Brookside in the chill of Halloween.
Diane carried a large silver bowl to the front stoop and set it on the step. She filled it with candy bars and taped a sign to the front which said, TAKE ONE. As we walked away from the house, with a soft wind rustling the fallen leaves, I looked back at the bowl and thought, what are the odds that each ghost or goblin will only take one? Diane noticed my glance but did not speak. Diane had more faith in the honesty of trick-or-treaters than I. But then, Diane did not live very close to the streets of the East Side with its teenagers who had started knocking at my door before I got Patrick ready; who kicked my screen when I told them I did not have candy to give because I had not planned to be home. We walked away and rang the bell of the first house just as a little ballerina and her hobo brother reached down to extract one candy bar each from Diane's silver bowl.
The children lasted two or three blocks but got enough in their pumpkins to thrill their little souls. We strolled back to Diane's house in time to see a five-foot tall witch with a couple of midget Ninja Turtles take the last two candy bars and replace the bowl on the porch. Diane looked at me and raised her eyebrows as I buckled Patrick into his car seat for the trip home. I smiled. Her husband guided their children towards the house and bed while Diane hugged me and told me to try to have a good rest of my night. She stood on the sidewalk in front of their house watching me drive away. I could not understand the set of her shoulders and would not, until I heard, a month or so later, that she and her husband had separated.
But on that night, that Halloween night, Diane and her husband, their two children, my son, and I, formed a movable tableau of Americana. Patrick fell asleep with his bunny tucked in the crook of one arm and a black spider from the dollar store clutched in his hand. I adjusted his cover. I retrieved a few toys from his floor: the giraffe puzzle we had gotten a few weeks before at the RenFest; the cloth ball with a rattle inside leftover from his baby days; the stuffed polar bear that our first neighbors in this house had given him along with a copy of Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear. I lit his nightlight and left the room. I pulled down the shades, turned out the living room lights and went to bed, in the quiet of the Holmes house, the house in which I presently write, a house too quiet by more than just half.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
A light frost kisses the mound of leaves in the yard outside my window. I sit on the couch, the green couch that I never thought about wanting. It's flanked by my rocking chair, and at its right arm, there's a child's chest. It's a toy dresser that a grandfather from a family not my own made for a daughter not my own. On it sits a giraffe puzzle from the Renaissance Festival which I purchased for my son over twenty years ago. I feel as though I'm in a cubby, coffee at hand, newspaper abandoned on the oak coffee table, and the half-raised blind letting in the feeble sunlight struggling to overcome the barrier formed by the remaining leaves on the neighbor's trees.
A squirrel scampers down the trunk of the maple on the west side of the street and runs under the a parked Dodge. Two birds light on the sidewalk, wings fluttering. I have ear-buds playing the local public radio station snug in my ears and Scott Simon is interviewing someone who has been attempting to determine that he is related to everyone on the planet. I'm feeling a yearning to hear a twang from what my nieces call the Lou; I don't feel related to anyone here, don't feel the warm course of anyone's blood racing through my veins. I feel alone. And in my moments of feeling most alone, some tender memories flow around me.
The same year that we bought the wooden puzzle, I took my son trick-or-treating with the family of the woman who provided his daycare that year. I had just moved into the Holmes house, unwittingly purchasing a home that had belonged to another family from God's Children Daycare, the place where Patrick received care while I tried to start my law practice. 1993; Patrick had turned two in July. All of our boxes had been unpacked and our mourning doves, Larry and Lady Bird, had nested in their cage on the front screen porch.
I dressed Patrick in his Batman pajamas which he insisted could serve as a costume. He slid his little feet into his black cowboy boots and clutched the handle of the plastic pumpkin in which he would collect candy. We drove to Diane's house, not too far south, and parked at her curb. She opened the door and gestured for Patrick and me to come into the house, where she had mugs of hot chocolate and thick slices of bread with peanut butter and jam. Her own children crowded around the table. Patrick hung back, with his stuffed Goodnight Moon bunny in one hand and the pumpkin's handle in the other. Though he played every day with these children, he seemed suddenly shy of them. I did not push him.
Diane's husband came into the kitchen from a back room in their house and handed Diane and me flashlights. I shoved mine into my jacket pocket. I wore a light blue windbreaker that had been the only coat besides a friend's inherited mink that I had been able to wear during my pregnancy. The jacket now hung down to my knees and provided cavernous pockets, a wide collar to warm my neck, and, with its color, visibility. It seemed the perfect jacket for walking the streets of south Brookside in the chill of Halloween.
Diane carried a large silver bowl to the front stoop and set it on the step. She filled it with candy bars and taped a sign to the front which said, TAKE ONE. As we walked away from the house, with a soft wind rustling the fallen leaves, I looked back at the bowl and thought, what are the odds that each ghost or goblin will only take one? Diane noticed my glance but did not speak. Diane had more faith in the honesty of trick-or-treaters than I. But then, Diane did not live very close to the streets of the East Side with its teenagers who had started knocking at my door before I got Patrick ready; who kicked my screen when I told them I did not have candy to give because I had not planned to be home. We walked away and rang the bell of the first house just as a little ballerina and her hobo brother reached down to extract one candy bar each from Diane's silver bowl.
The children lasted two or three blocks but got enough in their pumpkins to thrill their little souls. We strolled back to Diane's house in time to see a five-foot tall witch with a couple of midget Ninja Turtles take the last two candy bars and replace the bowl on the porch. Diane looked at me and raised her eyebrows as I buckled Patrick into his car seat for the trip home. I smiled. Her husband guided their children towards the house and bed while Diane hugged me and told me to try to have a good rest of my night. She stood on the sidewalk in front of their house watching me drive away. I could not understand the set of her shoulders and would not, until I heard, a month or so later, that she and her husband had separated.
But on that night, that Halloween night, Diane and her husband, their two children, my son, and I, formed a movable tableau of Americana. Patrick fell asleep with his bunny tucked in the crook of one arm and a black spider from the dollar store clutched in his hand. I adjusted his cover. I retrieved a few toys from his floor: the giraffe puzzle we had gotten a few weeks before at the RenFest; the cloth ball with a rattle inside leftover from his baby days; the stuffed polar bear that our first neighbors in this house had given him along with a copy of Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear. I lit his nightlight and left the room. I pulled down the shades, turned out the living room lights and went to bed, in the quiet of the Holmes house, the house in which I presently write, a house too quiet by more than just half.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Saturday, 25 October 2014
Good morning,
At about three o'clock this morning, I heard thumping, banging and shuffling from the first floor. This could have been Jessica, who's living in the basement room. Jessica's father has been in ICU and though she could have come back to the house during the night, when I awakened, I checked and she had not returned. But in the center of the kitchen floor, I spied a curious piece of Styrofoam, packing debris that wasn't on the floor when I locked the backdoor before retiring.
I assume our ghost had a party to which I was not invited. I stood holding the piece of foam, thinking: Did they unwrap those margarita glasses in the basement? Early rising on Saturday befuddles my brain.
Thinking of our ghost reminds me of my grandmother's passing. As I make the coffee, padding around in my bare feet, I am transported back in time to 1974, St. Louis University. A quiet dorm room.
I have come back to the residence halls early, something I have the luxury of doing since I live in town and work for the financial aids office. Rank has its privilege. I'm sad; my grandmother has recently died and we've buried her. Nana showed me everything good about womanhood: The power to work; the power to nurture; the power to choose. She's less than a month in her grave and I am lost without the anchor that I didn't know she provided.
It's Saturday night. Being the only one in the dorm isolates me not just from the palpable sorrow in my mother's home, but from the world. The air carries no sound except what I generate, and I move slowly, touch little, skim my fingers on every surface in a whisper. I do not want to ripple time.
I'm going out to Jennings, home, in the morning. I've taken my mother's car into the city, using the desire to get unpacked before my roommate's Monday arrival as an excuse for escaping. My grandfather will be there; he's coming from their home in Chatham, Illinois to show my family the new Cadillac he has purchased. I feel ambivalent about this visit. It will be his first since Nana died; and I cannot summon the energy to endure seeing his solitude.
I curl under the quilt on my bed, the quilt that my mother gave me. Its top was constructed by my great-grandmother from tailor scraps. I find this bedcovering to be romantic. I've always been told that my grandfather's father traveled around Lebanon selling pots, pans and other oddments from the back of a cart. My mother's relatives came from Austria, but this quilt of tailor's samples somehow connects the two families in my mind. It comforts me; it brings my lineage into focus.
I fall asleep amidst the soothing sound of silence.
At midnight, I awaken from an odd dream in a cold sweat. I've seen my grandmother. She's in the backseat of my grandfather's new car, except in my dream it is not a Cadillac but a Lincoln Continental. She's whole and undamaged, free of the ravages of several years of debilitating strokes. In my dream, I stand on the sidewalk outside my mother's home watching through the window as she smiles. Only I can see her. She rolls down the window as my grandfather opens the driver's door to get out, and says to me and me alone: "Tell Cillekin I'm all right. Tell her not to cry."
"Cillekin" is her pet name for my mother, Lucille. I try to speak but words will not come and suddenly, I am awake and panting, with a cold sweat gripping my body.
I decide to take a shower. For the life of me, forty years later, I cannot say why but I did and when I return from the communal shower room my grandmother is sitting in the rocking chair in my room with that same sweet smile on her face.
I drop my towel on the floor, struggle into a flannel nightgown, crawl back under my great-grandmother's quilt and fall into a deep sleep. When I awaken, sunlight streams through the uncurtained window and my towel has been neatly folded and draped across the back of my rocking chair.
Later that morning, I find myself standing in the spot that I occupied in my dream. My mother stands beside me; we are watching for her father. And then he is there -- not in the Cadillac we've been told to expect, but in a Lincoln Continental. It seems something happened to the Cadillac that he had just purchased, and he found that fact so offensive that just the day before, just the day of my dream, he took it back and walked across the street to the Lincoln dealership to buy a different vehicle.
I could not draw my eyes from the empty backseat.
Later that day, after we had eaten, after my grandfather had left for the hour's drive home, I told my mother about my dream. I told her what her own mother had said: that she was all right, and not to cry. Mother did not question my sanity. She knew, as I had known, that whatever I saw, whatever I heard, whatever I felt, perfectly comported with what Nana would have wanted.
Here in Kansas City my morning advances. Jessica has come home. She tells me of her father's current state: The ventilator tube became clogged and without it, her father should have died. The family gathered at his bedside and the chaplain came. But her father lived. And lives. At least, at present; at least for now. It is left for Jessica and her family just to accept, this matter of life and death, this question of when and how. No one knows the answer except whatever angel guards him, and that angel will not speak.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
At about three o'clock this morning, I heard thumping, banging and shuffling from the first floor. This could have been Jessica, who's living in the basement room. Jessica's father has been in ICU and though she could have come back to the house during the night, when I awakened, I checked and she had not returned. But in the center of the kitchen floor, I spied a curious piece of Styrofoam, packing debris that wasn't on the floor when I locked the backdoor before retiring.
I assume our ghost had a party to which I was not invited. I stood holding the piece of foam, thinking: Did they unwrap those margarita glasses in the basement? Early rising on Saturday befuddles my brain.
Thinking of our ghost reminds me of my grandmother's passing. As I make the coffee, padding around in my bare feet, I am transported back in time to 1974, St. Louis University. A quiet dorm room.
I have come back to the residence halls early, something I have the luxury of doing since I live in town and work for the financial aids office. Rank has its privilege. I'm sad; my grandmother has recently died and we've buried her. Nana showed me everything good about womanhood: The power to work; the power to nurture; the power to choose. She's less than a month in her grave and I am lost without the anchor that I didn't know she provided.
It's Saturday night. Being the only one in the dorm isolates me not just from the palpable sorrow in my mother's home, but from the world. The air carries no sound except what I generate, and I move slowly, touch little, skim my fingers on every surface in a whisper. I do not want to ripple time.
I'm going out to Jennings, home, in the morning. I've taken my mother's car into the city, using the desire to get unpacked before my roommate's Monday arrival as an excuse for escaping. My grandfather will be there; he's coming from their home in Chatham, Illinois to show my family the new Cadillac he has purchased. I feel ambivalent about this visit. It will be his first since Nana died; and I cannot summon the energy to endure seeing his solitude.
I curl under the quilt on my bed, the quilt that my mother gave me. Its top was constructed by my great-grandmother from tailor scraps. I find this bedcovering to be romantic. I've always been told that my grandfather's father traveled around Lebanon selling pots, pans and other oddments from the back of a cart. My mother's relatives came from Austria, but this quilt of tailor's samples somehow connects the two families in my mind. It comforts me; it brings my lineage into focus.
I fall asleep amidst the soothing sound of silence.
At midnight, I awaken from an odd dream in a cold sweat. I've seen my grandmother. She's in the backseat of my grandfather's new car, except in my dream it is not a Cadillac but a Lincoln Continental. She's whole and undamaged, free of the ravages of several years of debilitating strokes. In my dream, I stand on the sidewalk outside my mother's home watching through the window as she smiles. Only I can see her. She rolls down the window as my grandfather opens the driver's door to get out, and says to me and me alone: "Tell Cillekin I'm all right. Tell her not to cry."
"Cillekin" is her pet name for my mother, Lucille. I try to speak but words will not come and suddenly, I am awake and panting, with a cold sweat gripping my body.
I decide to take a shower. For the life of me, forty years later, I cannot say why but I did and when I return from the communal shower room my grandmother is sitting in the rocking chair in my room with that same sweet smile on her face.
I drop my towel on the floor, struggle into a flannel nightgown, crawl back under my great-grandmother's quilt and fall into a deep sleep. When I awaken, sunlight streams through the uncurtained window and my towel has been neatly folded and draped across the back of my rocking chair.
Later that morning, I find myself standing in the spot that I occupied in my dream. My mother stands beside me; we are watching for her father. And then he is there -- not in the Cadillac we've been told to expect, but in a Lincoln Continental. It seems something happened to the Cadillac that he had just purchased, and he found that fact so offensive that just the day before, just the day of my dream, he took it back and walked across the street to the Lincoln dealership to buy a different vehicle.
I could not draw my eyes from the empty backseat.
Later that day, after we had eaten, after my grandfather had left for the hour's drive home, I told my mother about my dream. I told her what her own mother had said: that she was all right, and not to cry. Mother did not question my sanity. She knew, as I had known, that whatever I saw, whatever I heard, whatever I felt, perfectly comported with what Nana would have wanted.
Here in Kansas City my morning advances. Jessica has come home. She tells me of her father's current state: The ventilator tube became clogged and without it, her father should have died. The family gathered at his bedside and the chaplain came. But her father lived. And lives. At least, at present; at least for now. It is left for Jessica and her family just to accept, this matter of life and death, this question of when and how. No one knows the answer except whatever angel guards him, and that angel will not speak.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
My grandmother, Johanna Ulz Lyons; my sister Joyce Corley; and in the background,
my great-grandmother, Bibiana Ulz.
I've shown the edge of the picture so my family can see the date: June 1968.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Saturday Musings, 18 October 2014
Good evening,
Other than a couple of planned hiatuses, today marks my first failure to write my musings on Saturday morning.
I can almost recapture the mood which inhibited me. Unsettled; reluctant; agitated. I slept long but not well, tortured by dreams drawn from the fears which lurk in the murky recesses of my mind. The interplay between self-pity and the "suck it up, Buttercup" attitude that my friend Ellen urges me to adopt stymied me.
Ellen and her children and grandchildren, churchfolk and relatives, bade farewell to her husband Charlie today. I barely made the visitation, under-estimating the drive-time to Plattsburg. I slipped into the funeral home, past the smokers on the lawn, and found myself enfolded in Ellen's arms as though I were the mourner and she the comforter. That's Ellen.
I eased my small body into a chair between two older couples, and watched the people fill the aisles. Finally Ellen and the rest of her family, both sides, took their seats and the preacher stood to open the service as the sounds of Amazing Grace surrounded us. Later, between the prayers, we heard James Taylor and Pink Floyd:
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
I never meet Ellen's husband. He stayed mostly at their place at the Lake these last two or three years, and Ellen lived primarily on their farm in the northland. I'd seen photos of him; heard stories; and listened to Ellen describe his tenderness, his bull-headedness, and his gentleness. I know he had his troubles. He reminded me of my father in many ways: A man you love; a man who plagues and fascinates you; a man who lives life without restraint, who loves without hesitation, who lights a room.
His son and two of his grandchildren, as well as several friends and his first mate, Bubba, stood to speak of the man whom they had lost. When his granddaughter Elizabeth, small and solemn, said, "I am sorry my grandpa died," I suspect every strangled tear burst forth around the room. The catch in his grandson's voice, as the boy leaned forward to the podium microphone, stabbed my heart. And the tall, strong, and shaking sight of his son, so much like the father, telling us that Charlie taught him to be a man, took my breath away.
Afterward, at the Stony Point Presbyterian Church in Trimble, the counter in the basement kitchen fairly sank beneath the weight of all the food laid for the dinner. I knew only two or three people besides Ellen and her family. I'd been to church there once, with Ellen, on an August Sunday. I'd met some of the ladies, and their husbands, and the minister. I found myself surprised to be remembered. A half hour later, Ellen drew me to the family table, and I had a lovely conversation with a fifteen-year-old, the daughter of a Carnie cousin.
Eventually, I made my way back to the city. As I traveled south on 169, I thought about my failure to write Saturday Musings. I realized, suddenly, that the musings waited to be written until I had had a chance to spend several hours with Ellen and her family: Her family by blood, her family by marriage, and the family with whom she surrounds herself each Sunday. I felt their love. As I descended further, on 71, and then west to my home off 63rd Street, I thought about Charlie Carnie. I never met Charlie Carnie, but today I met his legacy.
As I parked the car in the gathering gloom and walked to the house through the chill of autumn, I felt that Charlie would have been pleased at how he was honored today; and I felt grateful that I got to be a part of those gathered in his memory.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The best online version of the song that I found can be heard here:
Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
Other than a couple of planned hiatuses, today marks my first failure to write my musings on Saturday morning.
I can almost recapture the mood which inhibited me. Unsettled; reluctant; agitated. I slept long but not well, tortured by dreams drawn from the fears which lurk in the murky recesses of my mind. The interplay between self-pity and the "suck it up, Buttercup" attitude that my friend Ellen urges me to adopt stymied me.
Ellen and her children and grandchildren, churchfolk and relatives, bade farewell to her husband Charlie today. I barely made the visitation, under-estimating the drive-time to Plattsburg. I slipped into the funeral home, past the smokers on the lawn, and found myself enfolded in Ellen's arms as though I were the mourner and she the comforter. That's Ellen.
I eased my small body into a chair between two older couples, and watched the people fill the aisles. Finally Ellen and the rest of her family, both sides, took their seats and the preacher stood to open the service as the sounds of Amazing Grace surrounded us. Later, between the prayers, we heard James Taylor and Pink Floyd:
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
I never meet Ellen's husband. He stayed mostly at their place at the Lake these last two or three years, and Ellen lived primarily on their farm in the northland. I'd seen photos of him; heard stories; and listened to Ellen describe his tenderness, his bull-headedness, and his gentleness. I know he had his troubles. He reminded me of my father in many ways: A man you love; a man who plagues and fascinates you; a man who lives life without restraint, who loves without hesitation, who lights a room.
His son and two of his grandchildren, as well as several friends and his first mate, Bubba, stood to speak of the man whom they had lost. When his granddaughter Elizabeth, small and solemn, said, "I am sorry my grandpa died," I suspect every strangled tear burst forth around the room. The catch in his grandson's voice, as the boy leaned forward to the podium microphone, stabbed my heart. And the tall, strong, and shaking sight of his son, so much like the father, telling us that Charlie taught him to be a man, took my breath away.
Afterward, at the Stony Point Presbyterian Church in Trimble, the counter in the basement kitchen fairly sank beneath the weight of all the food laid for the dinner. I knew only two or three people besides Ellen and her family. I'd been to church there once, with Ellen, on an August Sunday. I'd met some of the ladies, and their husbands, and the minister. I found myself surprised to be remembered. A half hour later, Ellen drew me to the family table, and I had a lovely conversation with a fifteen-year-old, the daughter of a Carnie cousin.
Eventually, I made my way back to the city. As I traveled south on 169, I thought about my failure to write Saturday Musings. I realized, suddenly, that the musings waited to be written until I had had a chance to spend several hours with Ellen and her family: Her family by blood, her family by marriage, and the family with whom she surrounds herself each Sunday. I felt their love. As I descended further, on 71, and then west to my home off 63rd Street, I thought about Charlie Carnie. I never met Charlie Carnie, but today I met his legacy.
As I parked the car in the gathering gloom and walked to the house through the chill of autumn, I felt that Charlie would have been pleased at how he was honored today; and I felt grateful that I got to be a part of those gathered in his memory.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The best online version of the song that I found can be heard here:
Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
Saturday, October 11, 2014
11 October 2014
Good morning,
I visited my favorite curmudgeon yesterday afternoon, clad in my new glasses, bearing Penuche fudge from Laura Little's candy shop. He likes that fudge. His preference always led me to buy two pounds, back in the day when I brought the little white boxes to his wife, at the Sweet Life, during her final months. Now I come with a pound of Penuche which the girls at Laura Little's cut in thirds, nestling each piece in a little paper cup like a delicate flower. I brought a bag of freshly-roasted cashews, too. We talked about his cancer and I rearranged his room to be more comfortable. Before I left, I held him in my embrace. I love that man.
As I passed through the lobby of the facility where Jay lives, I stopped to speak to a man with whom I have exchanged pleasantries on prior occasions. A nurse stood by him, holding a small water cup. I bade him good evening. He protested, mildly, a bit mockingly. Not a good day with her making me take these pills, he told me. I smiled at him encouragingly, then made my way to the car. As I did, I suddenly remembered my last visit to my aunt Della, who lives in a similar facility in Illinois. I haven't seen her for six years, and my neglect of her has weighed heavily on my mind in recent months, as I make my way to visit my father-in-law two or three times a week, and visit my mother-in-law's grave with her favorite roses.
My son and I navigated the streets of the suburbs south of Chicago, in October of 2008, when we were on our college tour. We had been told to look for an angular street at the end of which we would find the nursing home. We didn't have a GPS, we hadn't been there, we weren't familiar with the town. We came upon the place almost by accident. We parked and went inside where an attendant showed us how to get to Della Mae's floor.
She recognized Patrick. We had been frequent visitors to her home for most of his life, and in fact had been present the weekend of her first strokes. Patrick had been ten that year; or maybe eleven. He'd spent many days in Della's driveway, playing with his cousin Jacob, with the little boys, Tyler, and Colin, and Kyle. They'd hauled out the army guys which had belonged to Della's sons Adam and Richard and played fort in her living room. Now he stood five-ten at 17; but Aunt Della, even in her foggy state, knew him. He bent down and she put her arms around him and said, Oh Patrick, you came to see me.
But she did not know who I was. More to the point: She saw me as my mother. She called me "Lucy" and talked about our Daddy, gushing out a long garbled story that I did not understand. I smiled, and nodded, and all the while fretted over getting her downstairs and out onto the visitors' patio, where I thought she might enjoy sitting in the autumn air.
But a cloud covered the sun and Aunt Della lasted only ten or fifteen minutes before she began to squirm under the jacket that Patrick shed to drape over her shoulders. My hopes of an afternoon of outdoor visiting vanished, swept away by an unanticipated wind. We took her back inside and sat in the lounge instead, with other residents wheeling themselves into the area to engage us with varying levels of coherence during our visit.
My aunt had been a vibrant, eccentric woman for all the time I'd known her. She raised three children in the southern suburb of Tinley Park, in a split-level house with its mortgage and one-car garage. She was a good wife, I think; but the marriage had its troubles. She held her tongue until the children all left home and then divorced her husband in a noisy, determined manner which scandalized my mother's family. She went back to school at 45, got a degree, and opened a therapy practice, working with victims of domestic violence and also with abusers. She saw clients in her home and taught a communications class at a local college. I adored her.
In the nursing home, that day, she talked about her husband Richard as though they had never parted. She assured me that he would be coming for her any moment; that he shared her room; that he ate dinner with her every night. She teased the men passing in the hallways, telling me that one was her boyfriend. She cackled, and blushed, and hid behind her hand. My son spoke to her in gentle tones and I stood helplessly by, trying to see my vibrant aunt inside the aging, disoriented woman before me.
I remembered one visit that Patrick, my second husband Dennis, and I had made to Della. We took her to a restaurant that she particularly liked. The waiter took a long time coming to our table. Dennis fretted, wanting attention, wanting to place his order, wanting to be noticed. Della took a paper napkin, speared it on a straw, and waived it above her head saying, Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo! Waiter Person! Dennis really needs some coffee! Even Dennis laughed.
The fullness of time pulls us forward. My father-in-law's cancer will claim him; and my sorrow will seem unreasonable to some but will clutch my heart and pull me into a slump from which only the knowledge of his personal tenacity will pull me. I watch the seasons change. I clean out my closets and my cupboards. I turn the pages of the calendar and think about my aunt Della Mae, wondering if she would know me after more than half a decade, even know me as her sister. I would not mind that now. I would answer as a sister, as my mother. I have grown accustomed to the changes which take me down the path that the women of my family trod before me. I see them in the mirror every morning, in my eyebrows, in the slant of my cheek and the curve of my smile. They watch from the blue of my eyes with the brown of theirs. They guide my step, at four o'clock each day, to the room where my favorite curmudgeon lives. They do not mind my visiting his Joanna's grave instead of theirs. They gave me the love that I now give to others, and they rest easy, both the living and the dead, with the comfortable knowledge of their legacy.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
I visited my favorite curmudgeon yesterday afternoon, clad in my new glasses, bearing Penuche fudge from Laura Little's candy shop. He likes that fudge. His preference always led me to buy two pounds, back in the day when I brought the little white boxes to his wife, at the Sweet Life, during her final months. Now I come with a pound of Penuche which the girls at Laura Little's cut in thirds, nestling each piece in a little paper cup like a delicate flower. I brought a bag of freshly-roasted cashews, too. We talked about his cancer and I rearranged his room to be more comfortable. Before I left, I held him in my embrace. I love that man.
As I passed through the lobby of the facility where Jay lives, I stopped to speak to a man with whom I have exchanged pleasantries on prior occasions. A nurse stood by him, holding a small water cup. I bade him good evening. He protested, mildly, a bit mockingly. Not a good day with her making me take these pills, he told me. I smiled at him encouragingly, then made my way to the car. As I did, I suddenly remembered my last visit to my aunt Della, who lives in a similar facility in Illinois. I haven't seen her for six years, and my neglect of her has weighed heavily on my mind in recent months, as I make my way to visit my father-in-law two or three times a week, and visit my mother-in-law's grave with her favorite roses.
My son and I navigated the streets of the suburbs south of Chicago, in October of 2008, when we were on our college tour. We had been told to look for an angular street at the end of which we would find the nursing home. We didn't have a GPS, we hadn't been there, we weren't familiar with the town. We came upon the place almost by accident. We parked and went inside where an attendant showed us how to get to Della Mae's floor.
She recognized Patrick. We had been frequent visitors to her home for most of his life, and in fact had been present the weekend of her first strokes. Patrick had been ten that year; or maybe eleven. He'd spent many days in Della's driveway, playing with his cousin Jacob, with the little boys, Tyler, and Colin, and Kyle. They'd hauled out the army guys which had belonged to Della's sons Adam and Richard and played fort in her living room. Now he stood five-ten at 17; but Aunt Della, even in her foggy state, knew him. He bent down and she put her arms around him and said, Oh Patrick, you came to see me.
But she did not know who I was. More to the point: She saw me as my mother. She called me "Lucy" and talked about our Daddy, gushing out a long garbled story that I did not understand. I smiled, and nodded, and all the while fretted over getting her downstairs and out onto the visitors' patio, where I thought she might enjoy sitting in the autumn air.
But a cloud covered the sun and Aunt Della lasted only ten or fifteen minutes before she began to squirm under the jacket that Patrick shed to drape over her shoulders. My hopes of an afternoon of outdoor visiting vanished, swept away by an unanticipated wind. We took her back inside and sat in the lounge instead, with other residents wheeling themselves into the area to engage us with varying levels of coherence during our visit.
My aunt had been a vibrant, eccentric woman for all the time I'd known her. She raised three children in the southern suburb of Tinley Park, in a split-level house with its mortgage and one-car garage. She was a good wife, I think; but the marriage had its troubles. She held her tongue until the children all left home and then divorced her husband in a noisy, determined manner which scandalized my mother's family. She went back to school at 45, got a degree, and opened a therapy practice, working with victims of domestic violence and also with abusers. She saw clients in her home and taught a communications class at a local college. I adored her.
In the nursing home, that day, she talked about her husband Richard as though they had never parted. She assured me that he would be coming for her any moment; that he shared her room; that he ate dinner with her every night. She teased the men passing in the hallways, telling me that one was her boyfriend. She cackled, and blushed, and hid behind her hand. My son spoke to her in gentle tones and I stood helplessly by, trying to see my vibrant aunt inside the aging, disoriented woman before me.
I remembered one visit that Patrick, my second husband Dennis, and I had made to Della. We took her to a restaurant that she particularly liked. The waiter took a long time coming to our table. Dennis fretted, wanting attention, wanting to place his order, wanting to be noticed. Della took a paper napkin, speared it on a straw, and waived it above her head saying, Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo! Waiter Person! Dennis really needs some coffee! Even Dennis laughed.
The fullness of time pulls us forward. My father-in-law's cancer will claim him; and my sorrow will seem unreasonable to some but will clutch my heart and pull me into a slump from which only the knowledge of his personal tenacity will pull me. I watch the seasons change. I clean out my closets and my cupboards. I turn the pages of the calendar and think about my aunt Della Mae, wondering if she would know me after more than half a decade, even know me as her sister. I would not mind that now. I would answer as a sister, as my mother. I have grown accustomed to the changes which take me down the path that the women of my family trod before me. I see them in the mirror every morning, in my eyebrows, in the slant of my cheek and the curve of my smile. They watch from the blue of my eyes with the brown of theirs. They guide my step, at four o'clock each day, to the room where my favorite curmudgeon lives. They do not mind my visiting his Joanna's grave instead of theirs. They gave me the love that I now give to others, and they rest easy, both the living and the dead, with the comfortable knowledge of their legacy.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
Della Mae Rush, circa 2000
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Saturday Musings, 04 October 2014
Good morning,
The fragrance of French Market coffee fills the first floor of the Holmes house. My morning has started with ten minutes of Music from the Heart of Space, my radio dial set to KU public radio where it has been all week. I've fed the cat, let the dog out and in again, and settled at the dining room table. Now the news drifts to me from a few feet away; I've positioned myself so my one good ear can tilt towards the radio.
As I passed through the breakfast nook to the dining room, I noticed that the workers had regrouped some of the precious items on the keeping shelf. I touch one of them, a little pottery cup, thinking about finding it in Arkansas. Standing next to it is my mother's dinner bell, and suddenly I find myself transported back in time to September of 1991, Jennings, Missouri, a few days after my father had died.
The eight Corleys stand or sit in the living room, on the old couch, my father's recliner, the straight-back chair by the front door. My brother Stephen lounges against the wall. A dumpster has been delivered and consumes the usable space at the end of the driveway. My father's body lies on a table at the funeral home waiting to be prepared for burial. I hold my infant son. We have gathered to talk about the stuff accumulated in our parents' home, now that the second of them has died.
We've settled on a method. Each of the eight Corleys will get to "reserve" three items that will be safe -- theirs no matter what anyone else wants or claims. Then, we will travel as a pack through each room of the house, picking by "up rounds and down rounds". Youngest to oldest; oldest to youngest -- in rotation, until everything has been divided.
We make our protected choices youngest to oldest. Stephen, Frank, me, Mark, Kevin, Joyce, Adrienne and last, though certainly not least, Ann. I know what I want: The china and the sterling silverware. I don't expect that I'll get either through any traditional means. I married in 1987 at a hippie church in Arkansas and our most elegant wedding present was the down pillows that one of the Corley aunts had had delivered from a department store in St. Louis. Everything else trended to the hand-made and the consumable. I divorced in 1989 and had my son without benefit of a second marriage, in 1991. I expected to live alone for the rest of my life but did intend to set a nostalgic holiday table.
But Frank claimed the sterling before me. So I went for the china, the silver-plate, and the dinner bell.
"Oh....." Frank sighed but not so softly as to be missed. I looked his way, quizzically. He had not laid claim to the brass bell brought home by my father from Burma, with which our mother had summoned us to dinner. A small silence descended.
"Teresa and I already have the dinner bell," he admitted. "We took it when Mom died." Six years before; and I, living in Arkansas for the last four years, hadn't been home enough to notice.
"Well then...." I began. "I'll think of something else." But Frank shook his head. "No, no," he told me. "I'll bring it back." I couldn't decide what to say next; he seemed earnest. I let it go with a simple thanks, and watched Adrienne, our secretary, note my choices on her pad. We moved to Mark and on up the chain. Within an hour, we had done two rooms in up round and down round, laughing when someone picked something that the person ahead of or behind them in birth order had been waching. Nobody bickered during those rounds, though in the cleaning-and-throwing-out phase of the week, later, enough alcohol got consumed to prompt some tense exchanges. On that first day, though, we showed nothing but love and kindness.
Later in the week, Frank approached me with a little wrapped parcel. "Here's the bell," he told me. I saw him eyeing it; I felt guilty. I imagined that it had been used to call his own children to the table for the half-dozen years it had dwelt in his home. I tried -- perhaps feebly -- to decline. But Frank had already moved away and I stood, in my parents' living room, holding the brass dinner bell, feeling a bit shabby.
The china that I got from my mother sat in boxes in my brother Stephen's apartment storage unit with her china cabinet -- which I had claimed in the breakfast room down round -- and a couple of pieces of furniture that I had claimed. I packed to take with me the silver plate, the "stove lot" -- a bunch of mismatched grease-coated items from the shelf above the stove in my mother's kitchen -- and the dinner bell, which flew home to Fayetteville in the diaper bag beside my sleeping son. A year later, I called my brother Stephen to arrange to get my inherited items, and learned that his storage unit had been burgled. The thief took everything but a box containing half of Mom's china. The plates, the bowls, and the gravy boat.
I tried, once, to give Frank back the dinner bell but he wouldn't take it. As my son grew, I made a half-hearted effort to deploy the bell at dinner time each night, but only managed to use it if his friends had come to visit. With just one child, standing at the doorway to his bedroom does the trick. But on the occasions when I summoned Patrick, Chris and Maher to the table with a shake of the brass bell from my mother's home, the ghost of the infinity Corleys followed them into the room, and jostled for their traditional places -- boys on one side, girls on the other -- at the table.
A singer croons on the radio. I haven't heard her name but her song floods the room, sweet and soulful. My muscles ache from the cold. Last evening, I brought my porch plants into the house. I will soon have to use the furnace. Winter draws near. I sigh, echoing my brother's voice. Then I go to the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The fragrance of French Market coffee fills the first floor of the Holmes house. My morning has started with ten minutes of Music from the Heart of Space, my radio dial set to KU public radio where it has been all week. I've fed the cat, let the dog out and in again, and settled at the dining room table. Now the news drifts to me from a few feet away; I've positioned myself so my one good ear can tilt towards the radio.
As I passed through the breakfast nook to the dining room, I noticed that the workers had regrouped some of the precious items on the keeping shelf. I touch one of them, a little pottery cup, thinking about finding it in Arkansas. Standing next to it is my mother's dinner bell, and suddenly I find myself transported back in time to September of 1991, Jennings, Missouri, a few days after my father had died.
The eight Corleys stand or sit in the living room, on the old couch, my father's recliner, the straight-back chair by the front door. My brother Stephen lounges against the wall. A dumpster has been delivered and consumes the usable space at the end of the driveway. My father's body lies on a table at the funeral home waiting to be prepared for burial. I hold my infant son. We have gathered to talk about the stuff accumulated in our parents' home, now that the second of them has died.
We've settled on a method. Each of the eight Corleys will get to "reserve" three items that will be safe -- theirs no matter what anyone else wants or claims. Then, we will travel as a pack through each room of the house, picking by "up rounds and down rounds". Youngest to oldest; oldest to youngest -- in rotation, until everything has been divided.
We make our protected choices youngest to oldest. Stephen, Frank, me, Mark, Kevin, Joyce, Adrienne and last, though certainly not least, Ann. I know what I want: The china and the sterling silverware. I don't expect that I'll get either through any traditional means. I married in 1987 at a hippie church in Arkansas and our most elegant wedding present was the down pillows that one of the Corley aunts had had delivered from a department store in St. Louis. Everything else trended to the hand-made and the consumable. I divorced in 1989 and had my son without benefit of a second marriage, in 1991. I expected to live alone for the rest of my life but did intend to set a nostalgic holiday table.
But Frank claimed the sterling before me. So I went for the china, the silver-plate, and the dinner bell.
"Oh....." Frank sighed but not so softly as to be missed. I looked his way, quizzically. He had not laid claim to the brass bell brought home by my father from Burma, with which our mother had summoned us to dinner. A small silence descended.
"Teresa and I already have the dinner bell," he admitted. "We took it when Mom died." Six years before; and I, living in Arkansas for the last four years, hadn't been home enough to notice.
"Well then...." I began. "I'll think of something else." But Frank shook his head. "No, no," he told me. "I'll bring it back." I couldn't decide what to say next; he seemed earnest. I let it go with a simple thanks, and watched Adrienne, our secretary, note my choices on her pad. We moved to Mark and on up the chain. Within an hour, we had done two rooms in up round and down round, laughing when someone picked something that the person ahead of or behind them in birth order had been waching. Nobody bickered during those rounds, though in the cleaning-and-throwing-out phase of the week, later, enough alcohol got consumed to prompt some tense exchanges. On that first day, though, we showed nothing but love and kindness.
Later in the week, Frank approached me with a little wrapped parcel. "Here's the bell," he told me. I saw him eyeing it; I felt guilty. I imagined that it had been used to call his own children to the table for the half-dozen years it had dwelt in his home. I tried -- perhaps feebly -- to decline. But Frank had already moved away and I stood, in my parents' living room, holding the brass dinner bell, feeling a bit shabby.
The china that I got from my mother sat in boxes in my brother Stephen's apartment storage unit with her china cabinet -- which I had claimed in the breakfast room down round -- and a couple of pieces of furniture that I had claimed. I packed to take with me the silver plate, the "stove lot" -- a bunch of mismatched grease-coated items from the shelf above the stove in my mother's kitchen -- and the dinner bell, which flew home to Fayetteville in the diaper bag beside my sleeping son. A year later, I called my brother Stephen to arrange to get my inherited items, and learned that his storage unit had been burgled. The thief took everything but a box containing half of Mom's china. The plates, the bowls, and the gravy boat.
I tried, once, to give Frank back the dinner bell but he wouldn't take it. As my son grew, I made a half-hearted effort to deploy the bell at dinner time each night, but only managed to use it if his friends had come to visit. With just one child, standing at the doorway to his bedroom does the trick. But on the occasions when I summoned Patrick, Chris and Maher to the table with a shake of the brass bell from my mother's home, the ghost of the infinity Corleys followed them into the room, and jostled for their traditional places -- boys on one side, girls on the other -- at the table.
A singer croons on the radio. I haven't heard her name but her song floods the room, sweet and soulful. My muscles ache from the cold. Last evening, I brought my porch plants into the house. I will soon have to use the furnace. Winter draws near. I sigh, echoing my brother's voice. Then I go to the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
Pictured: On the keeping shelf at the Holmes House:
(hanging) A little angel from Penny Thieme; a bell ornament from my father's childhood; an antique glass ornament purchased at Waldo flea market.
The bells: A silver Christmas bell; a traditional church bell; my mother's dinner bell, which my father brought home from WWII; a bell from Colorado which Katrina Taggart brought me;
and a Christmas angel bell.
The two-tiered keeping shelf in my home holds many mementos of a life well-lived.
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The Missouri Mugwump®
- M. Corinne Corley
- I've been many things in my life: A child, a daughter, a friend; a wife, a mother, a lawyer and a pet-owner. I've given my best to many things and my worst to a few. I live in Brookside, in an airplane bungalow. I'm an eternal optimist and a sometime-poet. If I ever got a poem published in The New Yorker, I would die a happy woman. I'm a proud supporter of the Arts in the California Delta. I vote Democrat, fly a Peace flag, live in a tiny house on wheels, cry at Hallmark commercials, and recycle. I am The Missouri Mugwump. ®