Sunday, July 30, 2017

Blackberry Summer

Three young girls, ages totaling twenty-four

Take down the basket and run out the door

Carefully they pluck only the ripe ones 

From between thorns and honey bee flight runs

Sweet Blackberries stain fingers bright red

Pretending blood, “Look, I’m hurt”, they said

Finally, basket and tummies are full

They’re bringing them in to wash and to cull

Blackest and sweetest from reddish sours

Blend and pour. Ice-pops in a few hours

It’ll be a sweet treat when we return 

From swimming I’m hoping with no sunburn

Person made lake has sandy bottom

Shade and life guards, so glad we got ‘em

Three young girls laughing and playing

Don’t want to leave, they’d rather be staying

Remembering the blackberry pops

The resistance to going soon stops

Singing sweet school songs on the way back

Teaching words, humming birds, each one on track

To being full humans with multi-dimensions

Hearing their joy, keeping tears in suspension

Sweet reveries of my own friends at eight

So many years ago; lucky my fate

To have played fully, running in the hills wild

Lucky and lovely to witness this grandchild


Monday, July 24, 2017

Resetting Through Contact... and lack of connectivity


Flame-Skimmer Dragonfly


Re-set through Nature.

Camping at Pismo early last week, I felt the mantle of worry, drudgery, and world horror lift off of my shoulders. I stood taller when I got home. Just a couple of nights close to nature, sleeping on the ground, and I'm rejuvenated. Imagine what would happen if I had a steady diet of the natural world.

Working in the garden is pretty tame, but it does give me a lift to be in it, and to have a radio break.

Hiking once a month with a gaggle of gals is pleasant enough, but solitude in nature is most rejuvenating, most efficient for re-setting my nervous system to neutral. 

Is it technology that gets me hyped up? Is it the pace of connectivity? Speaking for myself, I don't think my innards jive with cell phones and computers all that well. I think my squishy parts are more in tune with trees, grass, sand, water, mud and dirt. 

Nobody but a rosebush knows
How good mud feels between the toes.

I do too. 

Looking forward to another camping trip!

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Origins

My great grandmother stands taller in the photograph taken in England in 1887. The one taken in 1890 in Tarrytown, New York, where she, her husband, and nine children settled that year shows a certain set to her jaw that contrasts with the fluid and elegant carriage of the earlier photo. It looks as if much has happened between the pictures.

Indeed, the epidemic of Spanish Flu, that cut across America in 1888, cost the family dearly. Diminished by two, the Banham family returned to England, where my grandmother was born, only to return to the new country a few years later. My great grandfather found work in upstate New York as a stone mason building Croton Dam near the Hudson River, and many houses in and around Sleepy Hollow. The home he built for his family is now part of the Rockefeller Estate.

To see the outside of it in 1975, on a trip to New York with my husband, even from behind a fence, gave me comfort and a gestalt of wonder mixed with bone marrow tingling perspective. My great grandfather built a home that is still standing, still being loved and lived in. Solid stone bones linking me to them across the decades and generations. I only wish I could have touched it with my hands, breathed the air near it, maybe listened for ghostly laughter, sobs, and family conversations of old.

I never met my great grandparents Mary Banham, nor Charles, but their youngest child and I became fast companions.  I was blessed to spend many hours, days, weeks, and years with my Grammy and Gramps. 

Florence and Lawrence met on a train in New Rochelle, NY. He had seen her standing on the platform along side her sister Mary Polly and Polly’s eight year old son. Lawrence turned to his traveling companion and quietly said, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.” He was 21 at the time. She was sixteen and had miles of auburn hair piled high on her head. She was slender waisted, and had a dignified bearing. His friend raised his eyebrows, nodded, and smiled.

On the train, each sought out his or her assigned berth. When Mary Polly saw hers, she burst into tears. It was an upper. She didn’t think she could manage it, weighing over 300 pounds at the time. And she was meant to share the space with her son. 

My grandfather saw his chance. “Excuse me, please, I much prefer the upper, and unfortunately, I’ve been assigned this lower. Is either of you charming ladies willing to trade with me?” My Grammy Florence told me shyly once that she fell in love with him right there on the spot where his gallant gesture turned the situation merry.

Over the course of several days, on their trip across the country, Lawrence and Florence, or Ross and Floss as they would come to be known to close friends and family, got to know one another. When they finally disembarked the train, Florence went with her sister and nephew to West Los Angeles, while Lawrence and his friend went eastward to Pasadena. I don’t know how they stayed in contact. Certainly no cell phones in 1910 and very few telephones of any kind. Somehow, they did manage it, and were married in 1914. My mother was born in 1919 in Cleveland, Ohio. My ancestors got around all right!

Lawrence Gustave Stern was born in Marine City, Michigan, the youngest of eleven children. His father had lied about his age and enlisted in the Union Army in 1862, when he was fifteen. After the Civil War…or was it uncivil? Alexander returned to Michigan where he and his wife Zueleh opened a general store near the banks of the Saint Clair River. Gramps spoke fondly of being able to build things from scraps of wood when he wasn’t working in the family shop. And of skating in winter down a creek.

Lawrence began working in aircraft in 1910. Starting out with Glen L. Martin in Seattle, he helped build the Hanley Paige, a war plane, which had to be disassembled to be moved into Madison Square Gardens in NY, and reassembled once inside to show it off. The year was 1912, just two months before the Titanic set out on her maiden and only voyage. Gramps retired from McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica in 1962. My mother designed and built a patio cover with her dad for the house I grew up in. Three to five feet across, each geometric shape was made of left over nose-cone sheeting - somewhat the texture of fiberglass - which Gramps had on hand. They strung them together with wire and turn buckles. It made a wonderful shade cover. Very modern.

I think of the changes my grandfather saw in the world of aircraft. From seven years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, to supporting the cause of people walking on the moon. Both my grandparents saw and experienced so much during the seventy-seven years of their marriage. Including the great depression which took their chicken ranch in San Bernardino and forced my granddad to re-enter the world of flying machines. 

Among the artifacts of their life, which my uncle has somewhere in a meticulously assembled album, is a typewritten letter from Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, of New York dated third of January, 1915.

“Dear Mr. Stern, Regarding your inquiry to purchase a policy, we must decline. We understand that your job has to do with airplanes. We cannot insure your life knowing you may go up in one of those machines.” 


I’m forever grateful to my maternal grandparents for teaching me thrift, proper use of tools, and for showering me with unconditional love. I hope I may be able to impart to my granddaughter some of the unconditional love and regard that I received from Ross and Floss.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Animal

Pale pastel of a butterfly clam stood out against dark wet sand. Both mirrored the crimson colored sunset. The girl picked up the shell. Her nine-year-old fingers struggled to open it.

That’s the point she wished she'd noted: The struggle. But no, her fingers persisted. Her curiosity, ignorance, and determination killed the creature.

She gasped, realizing the consequence of her choice. Cleaved in two, the clam became her teacher that summer twilight, a moment she would return to often, later in her life, when contemplating hubris, ignorance, guilt, and innocence.

She, her mother and brother were staying in a beach house at Venice, California with the mom’s best friend and her two kids. It was a first attempt at finding space from the girl's father.

Like the clam, the marriage she was conceived perhaps to save, was being ripped apart by determined fingers of addiction. The father was held as tightly by alcohol as his strong hands clung to his glass bottles every evening - wringing out every last drop at the dining room table. His absence from Venice Beach was easier to bear than his overbearing presence at home. He was so big, too loud, crazy-strong, and dangerous.

As if to signal her mother that something was terribly wrong with leaving her alone with him, she developed a raging case of staphylococcus boils on her butt - like a neon arrow. Trouble here.


So, while they should have been free of his influence for two weeks at the beach, the shadow of the father reached across town. Mom had to bathe her daughter with cotton balls and Phisohex soap three times a day and, because the girl couldn't swallow pills, she had to take penicillin dissolved in Dad's Old Fashion Root Beer which tasted pretty good. And if her family dissolved, what would happen next? It was a bitter pill. And she still loved her daddy. Confusing.

The night of killing the clam, even the root beer was hard to swallow. The lump in her throat was too big to get around.

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Gra'Moosey!

Of all the names I've ever answered to, "Gra'Moosey" makes me smile the biggest.

When my granddaughter launches her whole eight-year-old self at me from the mini-trampoline, screeching this moniker as I walk by, I cannot help but beam. How could I not catch her on my back and play horse to her jockey? How fast can I gallop down the hall? PDQ!

This summer, she and I have been hangin' together five days a week. While I'd love to take her on field trips and have pals come to play, that's only worked out very few times. Mostly, she wants to  hang around at my house, which has plenty of space to play, and fresh blackberries out back that need to be tested every few hours. I just have to promise not to weed when we go outside. Any deviation from total attention is looked at askance. 

Recently, her imaginative play scenarios have included setting many traps for "Harry the Robber." Not sure what Dr. Phil would say, but I surmise that since her father remarried a few days ago, she's worried about love being stolen away. She is SO creative with her trap-setting schemes, using Lego pieces under a blanket spread on the floor to foil Harry and hurt his feet, an old-fashioned iron hanging from a rope for him to bump his head on, pipe cleaner hand traps, and magical rays that stop him in his tracks. All of this to prevent him from robbing DevCo, her enterprising business concern in the back room, where she makes great looking mini food items out of play dough. If you're ever in the market for pizza, spaghetti and meat balls (or vegetarian pasta), tostadas, tacos, and desserts of every kind, you know where to come. Just don't show up looking like a robber. You'll be foiled for SURE!

The exuberance is catchy. I totally suspend expectations that I'll get any work done in the hours we're together. It's ALL about PLAY. Accepting that makes all the difference. I can surrender to the flow of imaginative choreography for the day, including making meals into picnics, and finding just the right record to put on the stereo as accompaniment for our tasks. She's fond of the musicals Oliver, The Secret Garden, and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

My husband, also known as Gran'Pun, has been home for this July 4th Holiday, and got to experience the joy of play and her vivid, writerly imagination. This will give him a reference point for when he returns to camp and asks me at the end of our long days, "How was your day?" Exhaustion never felt so good.

My Grammy Florence Stern must've played with me to some extent. I know she loved me unconditionally. I felt it and grew up with that infusion as a buffer to the worrisome times of my childhood.

My hope is that my beloved granddaughter will feel the love pouring out of my heart toward her and that it can be a similar elixir or infusion of absolute love. May the love that this Gra'Moosey has for her be a buffer against all of life's curve balls... including slime ball robbers.