Mom, A Life: Part Six

Mom, A Life: Part Five

Life With Father

Mom had apparently been in love with Dad for a while, since before his truncated failed first marriage even, although she would never discuss the gap in time between Dad hitchhiking to visit while she was a nursing student before 1947 and their marriage in 1949. The thing she did know about Dad was that he was artistic, a good dancer and something of a dreamer.

Dad always thought of himself as something of an entrepreneur, an independent small businessman. When the family started to grow and they bought their first house in East Haven, Dad set up a one-man advertising agency in New Haven, using his artistic talents. It struggled at first, and money was tight, but that did not stop the romantic in Dad from buying an upright piano for Mom for an anniversary present one year. She was furious. (I only found out many, many years and many, many piano lessons later.) Mom was always the practical, accountable partner.

Mom and Dad both loved to socialize and throw parties especially if Mom could come up with a theme. They held costume parties, luaus, scavenger hunts and hallowe'en get togethers. One party in the 50s was a hobo gathering where each guest (in appropriate raggedy costume) was given a large can full of stew and a smaller can for drinks. One scavenger hunt, apparently in drag, covered five towns and may have involved the police. (Rumors vary.) There is a photo, which I have seen but can not put my hands on just now, of Dad wearing a German pickelhaube helmet from WWI, three sizes too small, and blowing a bugle of the type used by postal riders back when there were postal riders.

Dad's agency grew and was successful for a while. His largest client was the A.C. Gilbert Co. makers of American Flyer trains and Erector Sets.

With the opening of the Connecticut Turnpike (I95), the shoreline east of New Haven became available for development and the family moved to a small (12-25 houses) development deep in the woods of North Madison at the end of 1961. The house was an ugly modern split level with too small windows. Mom proceeded to paint the main wall in the living room purple and used an enormous sponge to daub large (also purple) splotches on the wall of the master bedroom. She also created a large (3 foot tall) jack of diamonds playing card to hang on the family room wall. The card was lost when we moved to our second house in town, a large post-colonial sea captains house built 1798, but it was found and appeared in the local newspaper chained to the ankle of the reporter's wife.

(The garage on the left is at street level and had a flat roof. The room at right was originally a screened in porch. The house is visible only because the huge and ancient horse chestnut tree is gone.)

Unfortunately, in 1967, A.C. Gilbert went bankrupt and it turned out they were Dad's only sizable client. Both Mom and Dad tried various desperation measures to bring in income. Mom had a successful but short-lived business making pre-baked pie shells out of the house and had them in various stores along the shore line but, even with us kids assembling and labeling the boxes daily, exhaustion set in before enough capital was available for serious expansion and the project collapsed. At one point Dad sold bait to fishing supply shops along the shore. Eventually, they had to declare bankruptcy and we moved to our third house in town.

Mom, A Life: Part Five

Mom A Life: Part Four

Career and Early Suburbia

When Mom was pregnant (with me) she quit the hospital and went to work in the private practice of Dr. Elisabeth Adams, a GP who had just moved her office from New York City to the quiet, classically New England village of Guilford, Connecticut. Mom took the bus from New Haven where she and Dad had an apartment. Both mothers-in-law lived in the same building.

(Dr. Adams' residence and office on the NW corner of the Guilford Green.)

Dr. Adams was a bit of a character in her own right and fit in quite well with the New England tolerance and encouragement of eccentricity. She was a Christian Scientist and did not believe in doctors--for herself--but became a doctor to serve others less enlightened. She also didn't believe in pain. Mom became the office head nurse and desired administrator of all shots.

My delivery was complicated but that didn't stop Mom from having two other children, both boys. The second child, Jon, was also born in the apartment in New Haven but, when they were expecting the third child, Robert, Mom and Dad decided to buy a house of their own in a newly opened suburban development in East Haven, adjacent to New Haven and one town closer to Guilford. The development, High Ridge, was huge by the standards of the day, paving over and landscaping acres upon acres of river bottom farm land and building hundreds of houses, all variations on the theme of single story ranch.

All the families on our little cul-de-sac moved in within months of each other. All the parents were roughly the same age (Mom and Dad were the outliers, having started later) as were all the (many) children. The one notable area of diversity was in religion. Our family was Congregational Protestant (the old Puritan church of New England). Our neighbors on one side were Catholic, on the other Jewish. The kids of all three families grew up calling all the other parents aunts and uncles. We envied Larry and Debbie because they received a present every day of Hanukkah. They envied our Christmas tree. 

Parenting was different then. The dog was frequently our babysitter. Fortunately, he was a smart dog. One day he came running home to get Mom and bring her and Aunt Barbara through some back yards and into the woods down to the Farm River that formed the western boundary of the development where Barbara's daughter Debbie was crying because my brother Robert was trapped in the middle of the stream with his snowsuit snagged on a branch. They were around three years old at the time. I would often ride my bike twenty miles or so round trip two towns over, mostly on back roads but occasionally on the state highway, just exploring. I never told anyone. I was eight or nine.

As the '50s came to an end, the state completed a new highway (the Connecticut Turnpike, I-95) east along the shore, opening up formerly isolated beach towns for expansion. We moved further out, leapfrogging Guilford, to Madison.

Redneck Studies

Continuing my studies of my brother's acquired redneck tendencies, I have concluded that another defining characteristic is the inability to bring any project to completion.

This is not to say that required repairs are left undone or that desired outcomes are not achieved. They are. But the redneck mindset sees reaching the goal as the end of the road and does not recognize the necessity/desirability to return the scene to the status quo ante.

Thus, the clothes dryer is repaired after blowing the starter mechanism but the tools used to replace the motor are still in the laundry room.

The piece of loose siding up under the eaves over the garage that revealed the hole by which the various creatures that have shared our house with us have entered has been reattached, but the ladder my brother used to climb onto the overhang remains in place providing a convenient way up for more critters.

A dead inflatable Hallowe'en lawn decoration, after a failed resuscitation attempt, lies scrunched up against the garage door, both guy and electrical wires trailing across the driveway like the tentacles of some decaying orange squid.

The trash cans can not fit into their faux picket fenced enclosure because it is "temporarily" filled with empty cardboard boxes removed from the overstuffed garage in some vain attempt to make it passable. The fact that my brother must climb over the boxes in order to turn on the lawn sprinkler system is not enough to motivate him to remove them. At least, sitting in the driveway, they block the view of the "squid" from passersby on the street.

I attempt to zero out the various projects whenever I can but new ones keep popping up.

Take Your Sweetie to the Blood Center Day

Today was my monthly platelet donation.

As I was lying there attached to the machine a young couple came in for whole blood donations. He had been there before, it seems, but this was her first time. The staff put them on facing couches so they could make faces at each other. She had a slight problem drawing but after some adjustments she seemed to do fine and was not at all put off. They promised to return in eight weeks.

All in all, an interesting afternoon date. I hope he has something a little more romantic planned for this evening.

Mom, A Life: Part Four

Mom, A Life: Part Three

The Later War Years

The School of Nursing, in 1944, was housed in Hartford Hospital, a very large Victorian house, complete with free-flying bat, on Jefferson Street in Hartford. Students and faculty frequently chased the bat without success over the years. Standards of hygiene were . . . different . . . back then.

When patients checked out (men on one floor, women on another and surgery on still another) the beds were stripped down to the springs which the nursing students scrubbed with toothbrushes. When the beds were remade, sheets had to be cornered just so and the open ends of pillow cases were never to face the door. Nursing students poured and counted prescribed meds (with supervision).

Nursing school was not all work. It was here Mom learned to swim underwater and dive in the residence pool, two things she could never do as a child due to the mastoid infections. Because there was a war on, the local movie theaters held morning showings to accommodate shift workers, including student nurses. Mom was also selected to be editor-in-chief of the yearbook sophomore year. Her only really negative experience was coming down, along with twenty or so fellow students, with a serious case of food poisoning. They were all treated to a course of the new wonder drug penicillin, 500,000 units every four hours injected in the buttocks. Fortunately, all the girls had a crush on the male doctor who treated them.

Thanks to the atom bomb, the war ended before Mom graduated and she never had to tend casualties from an invasion of Japan.

Graduation, Career and Marriage

Mom graduated as a Registered Nurse in 1947. Shortly thereafter, she moved back to New Haven and started in the neo-natology ward at St. Raphael Hospital but left when procedural disputes between the woman running the unit and the sister in charge of the department created stress and dysfunction for all the nurses. Mom became a PRN (where needed) nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital which at least had the advantage of never being routine.

Marshall Rosinus, who Mom had known since childhood from school and church functions, was discharged from the Army Air Force after the war and returned to West Haven. He worked for the New Haven Water Company for a while and, with a friend, would hitchhike to Hartford to visit Mom and the friend's girlfriend (also a nursing student and also a friend of Mom. The world was a smaller place back then).

(At some point, Marshall ran off on a very short lived and ill-advised marriage to someone named Rita. Mom never spoke or wrote one word about it but Dad mentioned it to me once, and I have found a Florida divorce record for them. Who she was, how they met and when (or why) they married I have not been able to determine. The divorce was recorded in Dade County in 1949. The same year Mom and Dad married.)

In 1949 Mom and Dad married in the First Congregational Church, West Haven, Connecticut. Mom was 29 and Dad 31. Mom's dress was home made and everyone was relieved when they caught her two-year-old nephew, Gerald Parsons, before he could take a pair of large shears to it while it hung on the door before the service. Gerald's older brother Douglas (four+) was ring bearer.
Since they were both older, they decided to try for children right away but had no luck. Dad went first for a check-up and then Mom but there were no physical reasons holding them back and finally the doctor just told them to forget about it and relax. That advice worked. That, and Mom managed to change shifts at the hospital.

One of their favorite pastimes was horseback riding, once Mom got used to the beasts, and they rode together on weekends right up until Dad discovered the Connecticut Governor's Horse Guard, Company B, and Mom discovered she was pregnant.

And the Winner Is . . . the Cat

The cat finally got into the house. Was let into the house, specifically. As an act of ineffectual softheartedness.

We had a storm (or possible two loosely connected storms) this weekend. I could see the front approaching for about two hours Friday night, rolling in from the Gulf, all flashes and backlit clouds. Thunder arrived about ninety minutes later as it neared and finally the skies opened. Surprisingly, although the storm came from the west, the rain came from the east and I closed the windows on that side of the house. The cat spent the night under my car.

Saturday night threatened a repeat so I took some food out to her before the weather arrived. The winds hit close to 50mph and I closed the rest of the windows. I saw at least three lightning strikes in the neighborhood and the thunder indicated there may have been a couple more. The rain came in sheeting gusts. The Weather Channel showed our storm, a classic cyclonic swirl of clouds and lightning, stretching all the way up the Gulf coast.

When my brother came home from work, I mentioned I felt sorry for the cat out there under my car. He looked out the door and said, "No, she's right here." She'd followed him up the walk and parked herself just outside the screen.

At first, when he opened the door, she was reluctant to enter. She came into the entryway slowly and then into the foyer, walking daintily, sniffing around with a look of wonder on her face. She walked right past the bag of cat food and stood staring into the living room. My brother called to her, using several different names all of which she ignored. Finally, with some nudging, he got her into his room but apparently thought better of that and moved her onto the lanai, making a temporary cat box from an old plastic basin and some fine wood chips. I was concerned for the resident lizards.

Of course, as soon as she was safely ensconced, the rain ceased, the winds died and the lightning stopped.

She spent the night curled up on one of the cushioned wicker rockers and managed to let herself out through the lanai's unlatched screen door in the morning.

The lizards hid successfully and are fine.

Location, Location, Location

We broke out the binoculars yesterday.

A pair of mockingbirds have decided the amenities we offer, constantly refilled and refreshed birdbath, occasional seed balls, varied shrubbery and a never-ending supply of fresh organic lawn insects, make for a neighborhood in which they would like to raise their family.

My brother noticed them building their nest in a large bush about forty feet from the back door. He shredded some string and hung the lint on a small succulent just outside the lanai. The male mockingbird took a whole beak full back to line the nest. With the glasses we can see them fluffing and primping the insides.

So, not only will we have mockingbird song right outside all summer long, we'll get to watch them raise their babies, too.

(Also saw a black-and-pale-yellow zebra butterfly outside my window. A couple of sulphurs are already flitting around. Should be a good summer.)

Man in the Middle

I received a text message somewhere around 4:00 in the morning yesterday. It said, "this morning i wish to tell you how much i love you, and how much i appreciate you in my life. Thank you." I was asleep when it arrived.

While this is a beautiful sentiment, and one I could appreciate, it is not something anyone I know would send to me, at least not out of the blue without some context. 'Tis a cynical world in which we live but I suspected spam.

I went online and did a number search and came up with a private cell phone in Escondido, California. So: not spam. That's good. The message was a heartfelt expression of love. But I know no one in Escondido.

So, now I feel bad that this little love note was sent to me by mistake and the intended recipient, who I'm sure would also appreciate the sentiment, does not know how his/her friend feels and can not reciprocate thus injuring the original sender's feelings.

I hope the original sender rechecks the phone number and resends because I don't want to be responsible for ruining a beautiful relationship.

Mom, A Life: Part Three

Mom, A Life: Part Two

The Pre- and Early War Years

In 1938, before the war started, Mom and her sister, Shirley, experienced what they thought was a huge windstorm, what's known in New England as a Nor'easter. They saw huge trees fall and went outside across the street to the bluff overlooking the beach where a twenty-five foot storm surge had brought the ocean to within five feet of their perch. The young man who would later marry Mom was out working, delivering groceries. There being no storm forecasts in those days, it was only after the fact that anyone knew they'd been through the most destructive hurricane in the 20th Century to hit Long Island and parts of Connecticut further west.

In 1939 Mom had the chance to visit her Uncle George Matthieu in Newport News, Virginia. Uncle George had married into the family when he met Mom's Aunt Eula at a medical facility in Louisiana where she was a nurse and he'd been sent to recover after being gassed in World War I. They'd moved to Connecticut but the Depression was on and as the government geared up for war Uncle George found work as a pattern maker for the Navy. Mom's family drove to Virginia in their 1933 Hudson, a three day trip averaging 35 miles per hour and staying overnight in roadside cabins, the precursors to motels, for $3.00 per night for the entire family, including Grandma Davis. Some of the cabins even had indoor plumbing. It was in Virginia that Mom ate her first fresh fig, plucked right from the tree. They stayed for a week and then drove home for three days again.

Mom had always wanted to be a nurse, maybe because of the other nurses in the family or maybe because of her extensive exposure to the medical profession with her repeated operations as a child. The problem was, the tuition was $300, which, during the Depression, as she said, "might as well have been $3 million." So, instead, she went to work as a lab assistant for the Chief of Ophthalmology at Yale, for $20 a week.

As World War II approached, the federal government set up the Nurse Cadet Corps in anticipation of future needs. The Cadet Corps not only paid the tuition but gave the girls a stipend to live on. Her boss encouraged Mom to sign up but she had to take extra classes first in math, trigonometry and chemistry. Fortunately for her, they let her substitute her French for the Latin she never took in school. She took the classes while she continued working.

By then the war had started. Mom's brother, Chester, immediately enlisted in the Marines rather than wait to be drafted. He disappeared into the Marine Corps and no one in the family knew where he was until they received a notice saying he was recovering from being wounded on Iwo Jima. Mom's mother was frantic but apparently the wound was relatively minor.

Marshall Rosinus, the boy Mom would eventually marry, enlisted in the Air Force, or rather tried to. He had to make three attempts, because of some irregularity in his eyes, before they would take him and even then he spent the war stateside as a recruiting sergeant on college campuses.

Mom was accepted to Hartford Hospital School of Nursing in 1944 for the class of '47. All the other girls were 18 year olds fresh out of high school. Mom was 25.

Useless Beast

How hopeless is the cat?

Neighbor Dan's daughters came over because they were worried the cat had died because all it does all day long is lie there under the oak tree, unmoving, surrounded by a family of life-size gray ceramic bunny rabbits (one buck, one doe, three kits) made by Mom.

The blue jays are stealing food from the cat's dish while the cat lies there within ten feet, watching. Yet, when her dish is empty, she'll come to the front door and attempt to climb the screen to let us know she needs a refill.

The good news is, because the cat is useless, none of the other wildlife is afraid to come onto our property. There are now two dozen ibis under the mango tree obliterating the local insect population, half a dozen crows and an equal number of doves of at least two different species hanging around the bird bath, where they have reached a modus vivendi allowing both doves and crows access at the same time although the doves are not happy about it. The blue jays, being busy stealing from the cat, show up only for the occasional drink and the mockingbirds ignore everyone preferring to sing all day and most of the night.

The lizards claim the front walkway and the lanai except when this one crow, who has figured out a way to get into the lanai and is pretty pleased with himself about it, wanders in and inspects the various plants at which time they hide in the couch cushions. Every now and then we'll find a frog attached to a window or screen.

None of this would happen if our cat behaved like a cat and was not what it is, for which I am glad, which is:

Useless beast.

Coincidences

Since Mom's death the two amaryllis and one desert rose, some of Mom's favorite plants, which have not bloomed in years, have suddenly all blossomed forth with multiple flowers.

Amaryllis (above), Desert Rose (right)

Mom, A Life: Part Two

Mom, A Life: Part One

The Great Depression (continued)

Mom is unclear on when the May Day celebrations, including dancing around the Maypole, stopped. It was a school thing, most likely elementary school. She mentions a teacher running the thing and the embarrassment of the boys who ad to participate. The girls, if she is to be believed, loved it.

Much more acceptable to boys and girls alike were the Saturday matinees at the two movie theaters in town where 10c bought a double feature (maybe Hoot Gibson or Charlie Chaplin) and a free comic book on the way out. The Mohican Market, the local grocery, had penny sales: buy one pound of ground beef for 29c and get the second for a penny, one apple pie for 15c, the second for a penny. And if your timing was good the butcher would give away soup bones and spare ribs (often with meat on them) that were otherwise going to be trashed.

Every week the family, Mom, her sister, brother and parents, would drive out to Mom's maternal grandparent's farm for Sunday dinner which was invariably one of grandpa's chickens. He'd kill it and drain it just before they arrived and the girls would help dip the bird in hot water to loosen the feathers for plucking. They'd pick vegetables from the garden and, voila!, Sunday dinner. They also helped pick dandelions and elderberries for grandpa's homemade wine.

Grandpa had a cellar workshop where he created an entire working Christmas village with lighted houses, skiing skiers, skating skaters, sledding sledders and sawing sawyers all operated by a complicated serious of gears and pulleys and a motor hidden beneath the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree turned, too. Unfortunately, Grandpa hanged himself down in that workshop one day in 1933. Mom made no reference to whether some aspect of The Depression economy had brought him down or if it was something psychological but unrelated.

The family would make homemade root beer which the girls would sell at a sidewalk stand and Mom's mom would bake German cinnamon rolls which the girls would put in their wagon and sell around the neighborhood for 25c per dozen. They made their first acquaintance with margarine around 1937 and Mom's mom used it in her baking although she would never admit to it.

In high school, Mom was on the girls' gymnastic team and lettered on the varsity basketball team where she played guard. Eventually she was certified by the state to referee. She learned to drive stick on the family's 1933 Hudson.

The Living Room Carpet, Red In Tooth and Claw

So, I was watching Rachel Maddow last night when a bug scurried out from next to the lanai door panel and into the middle of the room. Bugs, especially the ones that scurry by night, generally come in two varieties: spiders, which I let live despite being, sometimes, almost two inches in diameter because they tend to set up shop in out-of-the way places and eat flies and mosquitoes and other things I would otherwise have to kill myself; and what the natives, in a remarkable piece of rebranding implemented, successfully, to keep from squicking out the tourists, call a Palmetto bug but which is, in fact, nothing more than a giant, not-afraid-of-the-light (probably because of that very size) cockroach.

This one was not a spider.

Before I could get up from my chair and stomp the "Palmetto Bug," however, something very cool happened. Although we do not generally encourage the lizards in the lanai room or outside the front door to come in, and go to great lengths to remove them unharmed when they do, I may want to rethink that policy since this small lizard suddenly appeared from under the curtain by the lanai door and started stalking the roach. The lizard's reflexes were so fast it looked as if the two critters stopped, started and moved as one, but each little lightning movement brought the them ever so slightly closer together until the lizard pounced, grabbed the bug and lifted it off the floor.

Unfortunately, the roach was significantly larger than the lizard's head and it paused to reassess its options. Also unfortunately, this was when I decided to get a closer look at the circle of life dance being played out on the carpet and spooked the lizard. It dropped the bug, which didn't seem to have any inkling of the danger it had been in and wandered off under a side table. The lizard also scurried away from me and in roughly the same direction. The last I saw them, the lizard was once again in stalking mode. They both disappeared under an arm chair.

Coincidentally, I found a small lizard on the arm of the couch just before turning in for the night. I couldn't tell if it was the same one, but I opened the lanai door and helped it out.

Meanwhile the cat was at the front door begging for food.

Useless beast.

Miscellanea

The local dead tree happy news "newspaper" drops free copies twice a week in our driveway. I always thought it was a marketing ploy to get people to subscribe for the other days but the last one they left on Thursday was the same one they dropped last Saturday so maybe it's just their way of disposing of their leftovers.

It seems we are no longer the fastest growing county in the entire country. (Honestly, I didn't know we ever were. I always thought whatever county Las Vegas is in held that dubious honor.) Anyway, we are now 33rd thanks to fracking North Dakota.

Which is just as well because when the big storm finally comes along, we're all boned. It could take 70 hours to evacuate our low-lying peninsula and the surrounding county. (We're pretty much in the middle of the peninsula and we're not 10 feet above mean sea level. In fifty years it won't make a difference.)

On the bright side, we caught the rat that's been eating the cat's food. My brother had been putting peanut butter topped with cat kibble on the trap but the rat was very good at cleaning it all off without triggering the spring. A piece of hot dog proved both irresistible and immovable. The cat, who prefers to sprawl under the oak tree all day pretending to be a lion lazing under an acacia on the Serengeti and couldn't be bothered to protect her own food supply, was curious enough to come over as I was disposing of the carcass. I told her if she wanted a rat of her own she'd have to catch it herself, so she went back under the oak for a nap.

Useless beast.

The 4.5th Estate

The (extremely) local news rag in town, which started as a happy news newspaper years ago and has evolved into an echo of the "big" daily across the river has a very particular and peculiar style when it comes to crime reporting. I suspect it comes from trying to cover their asses when reporting charges. If they can be sued for any errors when reporting charges, or if those errors might affect the court case, then the easiest solution is simply to copy, verbatim, from the arrest report without editing the police shorthand.

Which gives us the second paragraph of the article below exactly as it appeared in the paper:

Third person accused in meth lab operation

March 28, 2012

By TIFFANY REPECKI (trepecki@breezenewspapers.com) , Cape Coral Daily Breeze

      A third person has been arrested in connection to a meth lab operation that local authorities busted last week at a home in northwest Cape Coral.

      Russell Wayne Baxter Jr., 28, was charged Sunday with drugs produce possess structure vehicle know drugs manufactured minor present, drugs produce methamphetamine, traffic methamphetamine or amphetamine 14 grams or over and neglect child without great harm.

Unfortunately, murdering the language is not an indictable offense.

(This was actually a pretty big deal since we're more of an Oxycontin type community and not so much with the meth.)

One Hand and the Other

April, it seems, is Travel Month at the town library.

April is also RMS Titanic, 100th anniversary of the sinking of, month.

The many and various posters put up around the library seem to be working at cross-purposes.