Private Memorial

I took a stool and sat there quite a while, gazing at the flowers Jan had sent along with me.The stone had not changed except for a new date, but a flood of images flashed on my screen.

Dad still walked the downtown mall at the change of the millennium, too fast for me to stay abreast. He cut no corners and marched along as if still in boot camp. We’d lived not far from there in 1936, on Terrace Street, but with everything changed beyond recognition the Oxford Hotel was gone. It was Grandma Rogers’s place of business, where I learned to tie my shoes, say the ABCs, write my name and answer the phone. Dad at twenty was not yet quite my dad and tended bar just across the street. He got Mom a job there too, waiting tables. I visited often and sat in a booth. A penny always brought me more pistachios in salty white shells than I could get open in an hour. In the evenings they frequently went window-shopping and came home with a grapefruit to share over yesterday’s Chronicle. A nickel date.

Dad’s first hip transplant did not slow him down for long and when the mall was torn out for still another revitalization experiment he walked his neighborhood, a mile of dogs and curbs and gutter surprises. Sometimes he came home with pocket change, but once it was with a discarded (or lost) filleting knife that he gave to me. I made a leather sheath for it. I can slice raw salmon thin enough to see through. For one of my birthdays in the 60s he gave me a rabbit-skinning knife in a factory-made sheath. I keep it sharp for tomatoes. Dad and knives. Dad and knives and me.

I tried to do that power walk with him once, but only once. I couldn’t match his furious pace.

Before his second new hip he joined me in my ‘90 Lebaron convert for a top-down trip up to Newago County. We slowed enough to note the changes in Uncle Ben’s and Uncle Edd’s old places, ate a meal in White Cloud and came home. It was an easy afternoon and the long ride didn’t bother him too much. Images flooded both our heads that day.

Our times alone grew sparser, but one morning we had a nice breakfast on Lakeshore Drive, Muskegon Lake just beyond the window. Only three years ago we went out to the Lake Michigan Ovals and sat for most of the afternoon at Captain Jack’s. Beer and sandwiches and sunshine. And laughing. I went back out there yesterday afternoon, but there was only the beer.

Dad still took good care of his garden in the middle of the decade, but Larry and I helped him more and more with it. Eventually, I put in his tomato plants.

We shared his birthday, Christmas and New Year’s of 2009, but it was at DeBoer’s Nursing Home. He needed me then to position his eating utensils and tip his plate toward him. I rescued some things from home (it was on the verge of becoming someone else’s) including a tie adorned with jazz trumpets that I’d gotten for him in Philadelphia. He chose it from a huge assortment. Last June Lynne rescued it again, this time for me.

I took him one of his best mountings of deer antlers and the maintenance man hung it for us. I also brought in some salmon I’d smoked at home. He liked it though I knew it was nowhere as good as his.

Yesterday evening I hitched up my jeans and went to VFW 446. People there miss him too.

Mom's birthday is the 18th.

Marines' Toys for Tots

Startled the gal at the drop-0ff site with a fleet of trucks for Christmas of 2010

Fourth of July

Dear Jesus, bring my daddy home.
Bad people fire guns at him
and booby-trap the roads.

Bring home my pretty sister too.
She writes to mom about the boys
who lose a leg or finish their
patrol then shake as if they'll fall apart.

I see her tears on every page.
She has a nurse's heart.

Ben and hobby horse

Looks like it might be a while before he'll be able to bust this bronc, but it was fun to see him astride his pony.

Father's Day

With Father’s Day around the bend
I racked my brain for quite a while
on gift ideas. My lifelong friend
is generous with a playful smile—
my mental scrapbook sports them all—
as he unwraps some little treasure,
entirely unaware how tall
I feel to offer simple pleasure.
At ninety-three it’s getting tough
to find a present he can use.
Some basement tools? He has enough
and they’re retired with no excuse.
Neckties are out. His crippled hands
do not cooperate as well
as they once did. The hour glass sands
have stolen more than I can tell.
Some sweet smoked salmon? Buckwheat honey?
Each year is its own precious gift,
and not too tied to food nor money.
Perhaps a chat will be that lift
as he recalls much younger days.
Or just a poorly crafted poem
drafted in a teary haze--
for last night Jesus called him home.

Mother's Day

The Little Red Table: Mother’s Day Tribute

As a young mother during the depths of the depression, Mom never wasted a thing. She scrubbed floors to buy onions for sandwiches, which of course produced breast milk I couldn’t digest (she later told me). She got us through those lean times with grit, determination and creative rejuvenation of ostensibly worthless rejects. Those harsh years and their lessons stuck, and over the length of my childhood I recognized her—though I didn’t know the term—as a congenital recycler. Americans of today, to be as patriotic as consumers are taught to be, use things for a while, even so-called “durable goods,” and then throw them away. It doesn’t matter if it is bought for cash or on credit; when we tire of something it goes out the door, either into a huge trash truck or a yard sale for ten cents or less on the dollar.

At our house, from kindergarten through high school, I saw old sofas and chairs recovered, woodwork, walls and cabinets repainted, rooms repapered and leftovers turned into stew.

In 1972 the old farm I bought in rural Maine came with a leaky barn full of discarded items which had never found their way into the normal stream of castoffs. Every few weeks for the first several years, I loaded the pickup and a converted boat trailer (overloaded would be more accurate) with a huge mound of stuff I couldn’t always identify and hauled it to the cone burner out on the Mapleton Road.

The most recent collection was ready to cart away when my retired parents Buicked into the farmyard one year for the opening of strawberry summer. Mom spotted a scarred brindle table with a leg chewed half off by a transient porcupine and disrespectfully covered with bird stains and grime. The unfortunate thing rested forlornly atop that ugly heap of barn junk--rusty iron, broken jars, oil cans and torn gum rubbers. It had lain there for a very long time before Nature and I finally consigned it to oblivion. With its uneven legs pointing skyward, it looked like a prehistoric beetle which had just lost a serious skirmish with the Orkin Man.

Mom lost no time in speaking up for the homely relic so I was forced to wrestle it from the pile and add an extension to the damaged leg. She hosed down the restored incarnation and gave it two coats of Farmall red.

Mom leaned over that table for a host of sunny seasons in the shade of the woodshed doorway while July strawberry patrons passed her crisp fives and tens. She tucked them with maternal care into the table’s lone drawer and was hardly aware of the vision she made as she bantered with customers pleased with the crop. Her smoky brown eyes and magnificent smile were more than enough to persuade me that the table was her. She had given it fresh life and pressed it into obedient service, just as she had countless things over her long life. When the picking was over for the summer, she and Dad eased their car down my long driveway and onto the Egypt Road. I was never happy to wave goodbye and often during their long absences found myself drawn out to that formerly busy spot in the yard to drink in her lingering spirit. The little red table always seemed to radiate a special northern New England warmth, even many years after the strawberries and Mom were only a wonderful memory.

The woodshed in winter was stark still and cold, but the table suggested as I began to feel old that since she longed for spring I should do so as well. And two welding gas tanks stood as close as they could--solemn, silent sentries who knew her true worth, but wouldn’t tell.