We’ve been binge watching Game of Thrones in the evening after dinner. That is, when we’re not going out after dark to drive through Arches and places like that. In GOT it’s a phrase that is repeated over and over. That, and the phrase, “The night is dark and full of terrors.” Back here at “home” in our trailer we find that the phrase “winter is coming” means something a little different than what it means in GOT. For one we don’t have White Walkers to deal with, thank God! But we do have winter to contend with and it’s bringing our northerly traveling to an end. Our northerly traveling has been so very interesting, educational and downright enjoyable. I’ve been surprised and flabbergasted by turns. We’ve seen things we didn’t expect and things that were better than we expected. We started this journey on July 15th and, in terms of miles driven, we’ve driven to Australia and half the way back.
My western states map shows our progress highlighted in day glow yellow. It’s a giant loop going north, then east, south and west from the Pacific coast to the Rockies and then to the southern deserts. We have loved (almost) every minute. Yes, there were times – especially early on – where we weren’t sure we made the right decision and were ready to pack it in. It took adjustments to go from a big house to a tiny trailer crammed with 2 dogs and a cat who were adamantly against such a major disruption. But they endured and we endured and we all eventually hit our stride. The trailer is home.
A horseman I know and greatly respect is fond of saying, “Adjust to fit the situation.” He is talking about horse training but, really, isn’t this great life advice? We’ve had to adjust. Sometimes we adjusted well. Sometimes not so well. In the end, and by in large, I’d say we’ve adjusted quite well. We could go on this way for a long time.
As we’ve traveled, we’ve learned a lot about this great country of ours. We’ve learned how incredibly geographically diverse and beautiful it is but we’ve also experienced how politically and psychologically diverse the people are, too. We chose to go out during a very challenging time and it really affected our travel. Most people were kind and thoughtful but some people were downright selfish and rude. Kind of like how we always are but even more so. Before Covid it was easy to ignore or forgive rudeness but now it’s front and center and hard to let go.
Someday soon we will be moving back into a house. We don’t know where exactly yet. But it’s going to feel weird to have so much space. The rooms might echo for a while as we figure out, “Do we really need so much stuff?”
Here are some pictures from various places on our last leg from Arizona to Oregon.
An ingenious person made use of a “toadstool” rock at Cliff Dwellers, AZ and built their house.I defy you to assert that these drawings, based on real Navajo antiquities, are primitive. At Marble Canyon AZThe builder made excellent use of abundant and local natural materials at Lee’s Ferry AZ on the Colorado River.I enjoy the view and cool waters of Lake Powell at Lone Rock Beach near Page AZ.You had to have been there. There’s no way to get a good idea of the scale any other way. It’s BIG. Zion NPAgain, Zion NP. Look very, very closely in the middle and slightly to the right. There are 2 people walking. That’s the scale.Abert Rim in Oregon between Burns and Lakeview. Windless, the lake is a perfect mirror. There are bighorn sheep down there at the water’s edge.Another planet. Not of this world. But it is. Lake Abert ORI had to include this. Maybe it’s why OR has clean roadways. California get a clue.
In our next leg we will be finding permanent winter quarters. I’ll be writing about that process and showing pictures. It ought to be a discovery, too.
A Walk Under the Tall Trees Near the Shores of Lake Michigan…
Years ago, I saw a short film called “Powers of Ten” that made a big impression on me. Here’s a link if you haven’t already seen it.
The zooming out in this short film is pretty amazing but it’s the zooming in that blew me away. In my alternate life I would have loved to be a theoretical physicist.
Here’s the connection: on a recent visit to the suburbs of Chicago I walked the neighborhoods near the shores of Lake Michigan. In the suburb I was in the leaves were coming out on some trees but on others the leaves had not yet appeared or were barely appearing. The trees that impressed me most were the giant Burr oak trees. Leviathan comes to mind. You feel humbled standing underneath them in much the same way that one feels humbled when thinking about the Universe of the micro and macroscopic.
I craned my camera up to get an image of the magnificent canopies. They could have been the veins of a human or other animal, rivers and streams of the Earth, rivulets and gullies in the desert. Isn’t nature wonderful?
In Junior High and High School everything changes for me. I‘ve entered the Twilight Zone of disconcerting physical changes and scholastic expectations that I’m not prepared for. In elementary school I was awkward and shy but in Junior High awkwardness takes a quantum leap into the stratosphere. Looks are important. Popularity is important. Grades are important.
To get to Anson Junior High we ride the bus. Sometimes I walk and I even walk when the weather is really cold but mostly we ride an old bus with a friendly driver. On the bus I wait to see if a certain boy will board the bus but then I am too shy to say hello if he does. I just sneak a peek and hope he doesn’t notice me peeking.
I think the bus looked something like this.
Once we get to school, a crowd gathers outside the front door until the bell rings. To pass the time we tease each other or some hapless individual. Maybe we decide that we don’t like their hair or clothes. My god, we do not have a conscience. (Welcome to Junior High. Now go home.) It’s sort of like the Mark Twain short story (“The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”) about the man who conquers his conscience and then goes on a crime spree. Yeah, that is us. Eventually the victim complains, and we are hauled into the principal’s office where we get a proper finger wagging. After that we behave. Well, I know that I behave but I can’t speak for the other little Heathers. I’m not like that. Instead, I am a natural follower of Heathers.
In class I spend all my time seated in the back row drawing elaborate cartoon stories I’ve made up about the exploits of the Beatles. It looks like I’m taking notes, but I’m not. I’m drawing like a house on fire. This is 1963. The Beatles have just been on the Ed Sullivan Theater show. When I’m done I fold the note into a little bundle and sneak the note to a friend who then draws a response and sneaks it back to me. We are inspired by the Beatle movies we’ve seen, A Hard Days’s Night and Help! We have seen these movies many, many, many times at the Orpheum Theater on Main Street on a Saturday. I’ve gone to see A Hard Day’s Night 10 times. Looking at these cartoons years later I realize how creative they were.
We loved The Beatles so much!
The only class I like is Latin. This is because our teacher, Miss Rose Sadoff, is so nice and such a character! There she is at the head of the class declaring, “Latin is not a dead language!” and then she goes on to explain why. She inspires me to love language. As I get older, I’m still enamored. (Ha! Latin there!) I love studying the etymology of words and one of my favorite books is The Story of English. I still remember Latin verb conjugations set to the tune of One little, two little, three little Indians. How’s this for memory? The verb “to love” – (I can recite it with my eyes closed and my hands tied behind my back.)
“o”, I; es “you”; t “he”; mus “we”; tis “you”; ent “they”; amare!
She instructs us to greet each other, “Salve!” (sal-vay) to which we respond, “Salve et tu quoque!” (sal-vay et too qwo-kway). “Salutations!” “Salutations to you also!”
I enjoy Home Economics, but I’m terrible at it. My A line skirt sewing project is a disaster and the purple cow milk shake I make tastes, well, like purple. Somehow, I manage to acquire skills but I don’t think it’s because of Home Ec class. I think it’s because my dad threw me in the deep end of cooking at home. More about that in another chapter.
Ellen demonstrates how to make a salad in science class, and I use her technique to this day. David pulls the wings off a fly in homeroom to gross out the girls. We are properly grossed out and disgusted. We perfect our swimming technique in the underground swimming pool. One day we swim laps and for some reason I’m super tired. I probably have not eaten breakfast because I’m in the habit of throwing in the gutter the fried egg sandwich that my mother gives me to eat on the way to the bus. I hate fried egg sandwiches. I think they make me look stupid. Anyway, she won’t listen and keeps giving them to me and I keep throwing them away once I’m out of sight of the house. The neighborhood dogs are happy to see me in the morning. Anyway, in swim class I’m in the throes of low blood sugar because all of a sudden, I can’t make to the edge of the pool and I’m going under. The teacher doesn’t notice but Ellen does and she jumps in and pulls me to the edge. Saved by the mayor’s daughter! That is the first time in my life I might have drowned but it will not be the last. And I’m not a bad swimmer. Just a bad decision maker!
We girls have all seen “the movie” in grade school. Ya’ll might know the one called “Very Personally Yours”. It’s a movie all the girls are required to see and most of us just put the whole thing out of our minds afterwards because it’s so embarrassing! We’ve all seen “Carrie” and we know what happens to that girl! Eventually the grossness happens, and we aren’t prepared and it’s 100% embarrassing. We get passes to not participate in swim class and we hide in the locker room when we change our paraphernalia. Marjorie shows me how to use the tampons because the pads are unbelievably annoying and it’s a giant CF. It’s too much and nobody talks about it.
Anyway…
I join 4H but it’s “town” 4H so it’s not really that much fun. No farm animals or anything. I learn more cooking, but it’s still on a rudimentary level. I demonstrate how to make egg salad sandwich boats at the county fair. It’s at the old fairgrounds in town which is a throwback to earlier days when fairgrounds were really cool and there’s not a speck of modernity to it. It’s just like the state fair in the musical except on a smaller scale. I get up on a tiny stage in the demonstration building and show the judges what to do. Chop hard cooked eggs, mix with mayo, scoop into a hollowed out hot dog bun and top with a little sail made out of paper and toothpick! How quaint! It seems like the next thing they’ll ask me to demonstrate is Jello salad, or something with Miracle Whip in it. I have absolutely no recollection of what the judges think of my presentation. I’ve blocked it out. I’m just glad to get it over with. Anyway…
At thirteen this would have been a very cool dress for me.
Then there are the school dances, and I get all dressed up and stand at the edges of the gym terrified that some boy might ask to me dance. No one ever does and this is a great relief. Then one of my friends tells me that her older brother who is already in high school thinks I’m cute and this makes me feel good, but I have no idea what to do about it if anything. Boys are an exciting idea, but the reality is overwhelming. No one ever sat me down and told me what was expected of me. My mom is busy doing other things and dad, well, he would never, ever have such a personal talk with me. No. I am 100% on my own. I rely on my own devices all through junior high, high school and on into college. All I can do is watch what my friends do and try to stay out of trouble.
Then President Kennedy is assassinated, and we all sit there stunned not knowing what we should think or how to feel. I remember being in class and the principal comes in and tells us the news and then tells us we can go home. A few days later we watch the funeral on TV when we should be having Thanksgiving dinner. There’s the unforgettable image of the handler barely holding on to the riderless black horse jigging down Pennsylvania Avenue with the cavalry boots turned backwards in the stirrups. It’s so sad to see Jackie with her widow’s veil barely concealing her tear-stained face and the sight of little John-John, their son, fumbling his hand under the flag of his father’s casket and then saluting. I am aware of politics for the first time.
High School
In high school my dad refurbishes a Volkswagen convertible which he paints cherry red and gives it to me to use. Dad shows me how to drive it and I remember stripping the gears before getting good at 4 on the floor. When I am finally good then my friends and I go nuts Scooping the Loop every Friday and Saturday night American Graffiti style. It’s me with Chris, Kathy and Tani and we drive down Main Street and South Third Avenue from the Times Republican building to the A&W root beer stand, then turn around and do it all over again. We heckle our friends as they drive by and sometimes, we throw stuff at them like the canned figs that Chris stole from her candy striping job at the hospital. Not quite juvenile delinquents but close.
Pretty damn cute, isn’t it?
In senior year we experiment with booze and we go out to a lonesome dirt road west of town and someone brings a bottle of Cherry Heering to which we add SevenUp and drink that. Yuck. But isn’t this what country kids do in the summer? Sometimes we drive down to a sand bar on the Iowa River north of LeGrand threatening to convince someone that they need to go on a snipe hunt, but we never do. Sometimes we drive east of town out Main Street and then up on the bluffs above the river to a place we call Twinkle Hill because we get a good view of nighttime Marshalltown up there. It’s twinkly down below and if we have a boy in the back seat we’re twinkling on each other. Workin’ on the Night Moves.
After a night of wasting cheap gas, we make it over to Chris’s mom’s house and watch Gravesend Manor which shows scary movies like Masque of the Red Death and The Tingler.Gravesend Manor is corny as all get out but we love it anyway. I mean, we know of nothing better. We’re just the kids John Mellencamp sings about later on. Gravesend Manor is hosted by Malcom the Butler, and is joined by The Duke of Desmodus, Claude the Great, Clyde, and Esmarelda. Where are they now? Are they sitting in a rocker on a porch somewhere? Think about if your glory days were pulling pranks on WOI Channel 5 and that’s what you have to reminisce about. Could be worse.
The host of Gravesend Manor: Malcom the Butler with the Duke of Desmodus, and Claude the Great
Sometimes we have slumber parties at somebody’s house. To call them slumber parties is beyond absurd because the point is to get as little sleep as possible. One night Maribeth has a slumber party at her house. First, we drive all over town and doing the usual Scooping of the Loop. While scooping we play the radio in the car. We hear Chug-a-Lug by Roger Miller and then stop at the root beer stand for some food. When we turn the car back on Chug-a-Lug is still playing! Whoa! That’s weird! We decide to try an experiment. We turn off the radio and then wait a while and then turn it back on and see what happens. A half hour later… Chug-a-Lug! Now our 16-year-old minds are racing to thoughts of a diabolical plot by aliens from outer space. We drive over to Maribeth’s house, get out of the car, go upstairs to Maribeth’s bedroom and turn on the radio. Chug-a-Lug!
Imagine 5 teenage girls screaming at once.
One of our favorite idiocies is making each other pass out. How you do it is one person breathes hard, in and out, in and out, in and out, for a minute and then someone grabs them around the abdomen and holds hard. If all goes well the breather passes out. We think this is fun! Imagine what genius achievements we could have had had we not killed half our brain cells!
Of course, the “evening”, because by now it’s 1 or 2 in the morning, ends with all of us in our sleeping bags on the floor telling ghost stories. Here’s a favorite: (Delivered slowly and ominously). “I am the viper and I’m on the first step, (pause) I’m the viper and I’m on the second step, (pause) I’m the viper (all the way to the top). (pause) Anybody vant their vindows viped?”
Gli Capriciosi
I am actually a pretty timid person and to be outgoing is a skill I need to learn. I want to be popular and have people like me but there’s seems to be no clear path. So, I think, well, I’ll join clubs. So, I join the drama and art club and somehow it seems that I have innate leadership skills. Eventually I become president of both. But mostly I’m content to work behind the scenes painting backdrops or pull the curtain when I’m stage manager for our theater production of Plain and Fancy. I’m chosen to be a cast member in the improvisational theater group that our drama teacher Stan Doerr directs. He calls it Gli Capriccioso (The Capricious Ones) and it’s in the style of Italian Commedia Dell’arte theater. Pretty sophisticated for a podunk midwestern town.
Stan Doerr was a wonderful drama teacher.
What a character Stan is! He has the most expressive face on the planet, and I can still see him making a surprised look to demonstrate some concept he has. He makes it a blast to be part of the troupe. He yells and fumes and the actors and stage crew cower but eventually it all turns out and he lets us know that we did good. I play Isabella, a female innamorata, and we make masks out of a rubber substance to be authentic. We dress in period costumes that we’ve made ourselves or that the stage moms have made. In Commedia dell’Arte there’s no script. All we have is a loose scenario, so we have to ad lib our lines. The scenarios are from basic Italian stories, and it’s slapstick and a blast. There’s one scene where Ralph, playing the part of Pulcinello is to give me, as Isabella, a big comedic wet one right on the mouth. The comedic part is trying to negotiate the giant noses of our masks. But when Ralph finally makes it to me, he opens his mouth wide, wide open and I, having never been properly kissed have no clue how to kiss back. Allrightey then.
Dan Rovner and me at the Prom. Don’t we look sweet? My mom labored over that dress. It was supposed to be a copy of a dress I saw Mia Farrow wearing in a magazine, but we couldn’t find the exact fabric, so this was a compromise. Otherwise in design it was Mia’s dress.
Our hair style was long and straight. But before long straight hair was fashionable, we had ratted bouffant with the flip ends and a bow placed smack dab in the middle between the bangs and the bouffant for garnish. I’m so glad that fad passes. The long straight hair looks good on me but the bouffant does not. I try to make my hair into a bouffant, but I can never get my flip to come out even. One side always sags lower than the other. Such a disaster. To achieve the look, we wear curlers to bed. The curlers make sleep impossible because the plastic teeth poke into your head. Sometimes we wear the curlers to town covered with a scarf. I remember mom telling me that all this discomfort is necessary. She says, “You have to suffer to be beautiful.” OK, mom, sign me up.
After the bouffant deflates and is replaced by English style, straight hair rules. Marjorie and I decide we need our hair to be straighter than nature has given us. We put an iron on low, drape our hair over the board and irone so it is stick straight. I hear of some girls accidentally burning their hair this way, but we are careful, and it works!
Note: My full-length memoir comes out in the next 6 months – if I’m lucky – and will be available on Amazon. In it I go into much greater detail about my life growing up in Iowa.
An excerpt from “Just Walk Away – A remembrance of growing up in the 50s in Central Iowa”
This is the old Glick Elementary School in Marshalltown, Iowa
I started school when I was four years old. Because I was the oldest, I always got to be the first one to test the waters for everything that the kids in our household had to do. I thought this was a rip off and unfair as the dickens. Maybe they were trying to get rid of me sooner but in reality they probably thought I could handle it and I could.
I started kindergarten at age 4 because I would not be five until October and school started in September. Norris Elementary was easy walking distance from our house but at first my mom walked with me and then because there were so many kids in the neighborhood the same age and going to the same place all at one time we walked on our own. I thought kindergarten was pretty cool. It seemed like all we had to do was play. For example, we made puppets out of shoe boxes and paper sacks and one boy had us screaming with laughter when he made his puppet’s head shoot up out of the shoe box body and fly across the room.
First grade was pretty much the same as kindergarten, and certainly we started to learn to read and practice rudimentary arithmetic. You know, one plus one equals two and that sort of thing. I don’t remember any of that although I can now read really well, and have been able to for a long time, plus I can also do arithmetic with the best of them so they did their job. What I do remember is the teacher filled a large jar with milk which we passed around to each other each taking a turn at shaking until the butter separated out from the buttermilk. We then ate the butter on crackers, and it was absolutely delicious! The beginnings of my interest in good fresh homemade food.
My favorite teacher was the 3rd grade teacher Shirley Knoll who taught us the “La Cucaracha” song. La Cucaracha mentioned marijuana and I don’t know if Miss Knoll knew this, but she explained to us it was just a cigarette.
“La cucaracha, la cucaracha
Ya no puede caminar
Porque no tiene, porque le falta
Marijuana que fumar!”
“The cockroach, the cockroach
Can’t walk anymore
because he doesn’t have it, because he lacks it,
marijuana to smoke.”
(Exposed to vice at an early age.)
She also had us make up pen names and write short stories. I chose the pen name Miss Ster because I couldn’t think of anything and like a little criminal, I peeked over to see what John, who sat across the aisle, had chosen. He had chosen Dr. Sterling. I thought in my little pea brain third grade mind, “That sounds good.” So, I took that inspiration and came up with the name “Miss Ster”. Later I was surprised to have Miss Knoll tell me how clever I was. It took me a while to understand what she meant and I didn’t get that I had chosen “mister” (Miss Ster). She set me up for a lifetime of enjoying the process of writing even if it was somewhat based on thievery. I’ll never forget her.
“Ha! Happy Go Lucky Ha!!! Stories” written and illustrated by Miss Ster
Norris was kindergarten through the third grade so when it came time to go higher, we all got on our bikes and went to Woodbury school which was a few blocks from downtown.
See the metal lunch box in the bike basket? It looks like a house. Saddle shoes. Ill-fitting sweater! Wrinkly old skirt.
Most of the time we rode our bikes to Woodbury. It would be a caravan of about 8 girls from the neighborhood meeting up and setting off without parental supervision. It wasn’t like today where kids seem to need parental supervision for just about everything. Jamie, Patty, Marjorie, Sally, my sister, Cindy, Pat, and me. Where were all the boys? We didn’t seem to have many in our neighborhood. Cindy had 2 younger brothers. Maggie had one brother and, of course, Toni and I had our brother. It was a girl dominated neighborhood!
If the weather was bad, one of the moms took us to school in a car. They’d cram all those kids in the front and back seat of a 1955 two door sedan. We’d be sitting staggered, one up and one back, to make us all fit in. Seat belts did not exist or if they did no one used them and would not have worried about it. No one cared that the seating arrangement was not safe in case of an accident. We survived and things have changed.
This wasn’t our car. I don’t remember how ours looked but this is close.
I don’t recollect much about 4th, 5th and 6th grade except that Miss Ward read us thrilling stories after lunch (“The Lion’s Paw” and “Around the World in Eighty Days”) and that my 6th grade teacher Mr. Melvin Peed was so good looking! My mom decided I needed to learn a musical instrument, so she got me a rented violin from Smith Music Company, and I toted that heavy awful thing up to Miller Junior High where Mr. Fowler, the music teacher, tried to teach us something. I was bad. Let’s just say that. I sort of learned the basics of a French song “Au Claire de la Lune”. Screech schreech screech screech, schreech schreech. That was a disaster, so we got a piano. The violin was out. The whole family drove to Des Moines and shopped for a brand new piano at Baldwin Piano company. We got a spinet, and it had a beautiful tone. I took lessons from Miss Jackson in the basement of the one and only music store in town. I’ll never forget how that store smelled. All those amazing instruments and the sheet music! It was glorious. As for the piano, when I wasn’t practicing in the grumpiest way imaginable and lying about how much I had practiced, mom would get on it and play her German kind of oompa music. Dad would sing along sometimes. He had a pretty good voice. You know they both could sing pretty well. I wish I had had foresight because now I would love to be able to play. Isn’t that how it goes sometimes? I can hear myself warning my daughter, “You’re going to regret it someday if you don’t learn to pay that cello!” Typical.
This isn’t me but it could have been. It’s a Baldwin Acrosonic just like we had.
The best thing about the piano was that it came in a great big wooden crate that we kids decided was perfect to make a computer out of. Big main frame computers were just coming in and somehow, we heard about them. Maybe I read about them in one of the, what seemed like, one million LIFE magazines Mom had stored downstairs. We cut a couple holes in the piano crate and labeled them “IN” and “OUT”. Then we decorated the outside to make it look like what we thought a computer looked like. When it was ready my sister got inside the crate with a vacuum cleaner and a typewriter. Then we invited the neighbor kids to ask it a question. To do so you would write the question on a piece of paper and insert the paper in the “IN” slot. The vacuum cleaner we installed inside the box would be switched on to indicate something was happening noisily inside the computer (it was WORKING, ya know!), and sister would type an answer on the old Smith Corona typewriter and put it out the “Out” hole and switch off the vacuum cleaner.
And to think a lot of today’s kids can’t come up with a way to entertain themselves without the aid of a screen.
An excerpt from my story about growing up in Central Iowa in the 50s
The Great Outdoors in Marshall County
We spend all our time outdoors unless it’s really bad weather. The only time we are indoors is when it’s crazy hot and humid, a howling blizzard or a thunderstorm with a tornado in it. In hot, humid weather my refuge is our finished basement where there is a wall of shelves stacked with hundreds of Life magazines that mom has saved ever since the first issue came out. It’s cool like a cave in the basement in the summer and I must have gone cover to cover in every single one of those magazines she had. Later on when I became a graphic designer the innovative Life magazine picture centered layout inspired me and was my main stay. This was in the day before central air conditioning so the coolness of the basement is a god-send. In the winter we play outside in any weather except blizzards. We build snow forts and lob snowballs at each other or dig out snow caves from the drifts and pretend we are eskimos. We even brought food to snack on in our caves. We made snow angels in the snow and rolled the snow into snowmen and snow creatures. Being outside in all seasons was neither here nor there for us. We didn’t think about it. It was just what we did and what was expected of us.
Sometimes after a cloudburst thunderstorm, the storm drain on the street in front of our house would clog with debris and back up into the street and form a little lake. Mom would let us go out and ride our bikes through it. You heard thunder off in the distance from the receding dark rain cloud that was still close enough and the air would be humid and cool. This was great fun.
In the summer we went to the outdoor municipal pool at Riverview Park. It was there that I learned to swim but not to jump off the dive board. I did that once and only once because when I got my nerve up and tried it my stomach leaped into my throat. It wasn’t such a high diving board, maybe 10 feet or so but it seemed high enough to me and that scared me to death, so I never did it that again. We ate salty popcorn from the snack bar and fudgsicles that would melt if you didn’t eat them real fast. I had a gap between my two front teeth and I would take a mouthful of pool water (!!!) and squirt a stream of water at my friends.
In the back yard we played Annie Over which was a game of throwing a ball over the roof of our garage to our friends on the other side. This is how it went: we’d yell Annie Over! and throw the ball as hard as we could. One of two things would then happen, and you never knew what it would be and that’s what made the game exciting. First, the friend on the other side would not know where the ball was coming from. They would either get lucky and it would, by some miracle, come straight to them and they could catch it or it wouldn’t, and they would have to run to get it wherever it came down. If they caught it, they were allowed to run around the end of the garage and try to tag us with the ball. This was a game of honesty. Fair and square. We didn’t ever consider faking it or at least I never did. So, when we threw the ball, we had to then be on the ready to see if our friend would come tearing around the side of the garage and get us. If they didn’t catch it, then they were to yell Annie Over! and throw the ball back to us. There would be a pause where uncertainty prevailed and nothing was happening. It was a nerve-wracking game but fun.
We also played jacks and pick up sticks. Jacks is where you had a little rubber ball or sometimes a golf ball and a bunch of metal objects that looked liked pronged stars. They were tiny. Maybe the size of a nickle. You’d trow the ball lightly in the air and let it bounce once and then you had a chance to pick up as many jacks as you could before the ball hit again. Pick up sticks was similar. You had a bundle of thin sticks that you would let fall into a heap and then taking one of the sticks peel the other sticks away and not move any of the others. If you moved any you were out and your partner had a chance. If you were very very good you might be able to peel away all of the sticks and this made you King of the World and you won the game. If you couldn’t and you kept trading turns back and forth. Whoever had the last try was the winner. I was very good at both because of my steady hands, and ability to keep my eye on the ball, with quick reflexes. Hopscotch was improved after we figured out that we could use little ball chains that were better at landing and staying on the square than the average rock which invariably skittered off. We lived each summer on the shady side of the porch or on the sidewalk.
We skated up and down the newly paved roads and sidewalks of our modest subdivision in the kind of skates that attach to your shoes with clamps. A little key tightened the clamps on the skates to your shoes. It was a good thing that our roads were pretty new with very few bumps and ruttles. Even so someone would always come home with a bad case of road rash. Skinned knees were common.
We learned bike riding from our dads who ran with us holding on to the seat while we pedaled as if our little lives depended on it. All of a sudden, the dad would yell, “You’re on your own!” and we’d be flying!
In winter the guy who ran the tiny neighborhood grocery store and bakery down on Nevada Street scooped out a large shallow area in the empty lot next to his store and filled it with water after the weather was good and cold. The ice wasn’t smooth, so I never did well at skating. I fell more than anything else. Sometimes mom and dad would take us to the country club where they had acres of rolling hills devoid of trees and bushes and covered with snow and not so deep so a kid could use their toboggan, inner tube or Flexible Flyer and go screaming down the hill careful to miss the tiny creek covered with snow at the bottom.
From left: In the back silhouetted our dog Heidi (a Weimaraner) my sister Toni, my mom, and me.
In spring after a hard rain, I would go with my dad to look for arrowheads in the plowed fields. It had to be after a hard rain so the arrowheads would be washed clean and stand out from the dirt. My dad would say, “Look for something that doesn’t fit.” When he found something, he’d say, “It fascinates me that the last person to hold this was the person who made it.” (an Indian, of course) Because the fields were wet and muddy, we’d be tromping around in heavy boots weighed down by elephant size globs of mud but that was not a problem. Sometimes a hawk would circle overhead, and I figured out how to whistle like a hawk and if the hawk whistled back, I was 100% convinced that we were communicating. The sky would be blue and clear except for the small cumulus clouds that scudded over head in the breeze coming in from the north over the Great Plains. I was in my element.
Entertainment
Saturday mornings were for cartoons. The folks were asleep when we kids got up as soon as the cartoons started which was about 7 or 7:30 am and then we’d marathon watch Heckle and Jeckle, Mighty Mouse, Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, and Rocky and Bullwinkle. Then there was Sky King, Roy Rogers, Fury the Wonder Horse as well as My Friend Flicka. That show didn’t start until I was older. We didn’t have a TV until I was about 10 and then it was black and white. I watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show when I was 13 on a black and white TV. Color came when I was in high school.
I got a small record player for Christmas that played 33/45/78 rpm records. We had that record player a long time and when I got older I had a My Fair Lady album with all the show tunes, and I sang along. Somehow, I learned the words to Wouldn’t it be Loverly? I loved Johnny Horton singing North to Alaska and Gene Pitney singing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. OK, so it was cornball.
Speaking of cornball, I would go over to Jamie’s house to their finished basement where she tried in vain to teach me how to dance while her record played the latest tunes. She tried to teach me to do the Mashed Potato and the Locomotion, which was a line dance. Everybody’s doing a brand-new dance, now, c’mon baby, do the locomotion! Talk about two left feet. I really wanted to dance well. I was like a colt all arms and legs tangled up. I didn’t really learn to dance until years later when I was in college! I finally stopped being self-conscious.
On weekends we would beg for Dad to take us to Polley’s farm north of town so we could ride out through the cornfield stubble to the timber on Al’s barn sour horses. Some young women would saddle the horses for us, cussing at the horses all the while. Maybe they were Al’s daughters, who knows? I never heard such language in our prim and proper household. Swearing was not allowed in our house but swearing was allowed at Al’s. We rode western saddles and I tried to copy how my dad neck reined one hand on the reins and one hand on his hip. We’d ride through the timber looking for deer sign because this was where my dad did most of his hunting. Then we’d go through a break in the trees and the horses got the barn in their sights. The horses always took off while we clung to the saddle horns for dear life laughing our stupid heads off.
In the same timber we’d go for winter cook outs in the snow. Dad and his friends had what they called The Deer Shack. It was an A frame plywood shack that they went in to get warm after sitting in a tree stand waiting for hours for a deer to come along on a well worn path in winter. Their deer hunting days were in November so you know it was cold. Sitting up in the tree on a little board for your perch was the only way to get a deer if you could get one at all. They didn’t have big high-powered rifles with scopes. Just ordinary recurve bows. They fletched their own arrows, too. Anyway, there was so much underbrush that stalking the deer on the ground would have been an exercise in futility. The deer could hear you coming a mile away. At the deer shack the moms brought homemade chili and the dads would build a big fire and when the coals were hot, we’d warm that chili up and eat it with saltine crackers.
Weather
Every summer we would have terrible thunderstorms where wind, thunder and lightning was beyond the beyond. If a storm happened at night, we’d watch the light show from the safety of our house but always be on the ready to dash to the basement. The lightning fascinated me, but the thunder was bad and hurt my ears. There would be the crack of the lightning and simultaneously there would be the tremendous clap of thunder and the house and windows literally shook. Our Weimaraner dog whimpered and cried while she hid under our beds. I didn’t blame her one bit. Sometimes there would be a tornado alert and mom would tell us all to get to the basement. She was of the opinion that if we sheltered in the southwest corner of the basement that the house, if hit, would fall away from us. She also was pretty confident that Marshalltown would never get a direct hit because the Indian lore she heard said that encampments built where two conjoining rivers were safe. We had Linn Creek (pronounced “crick”) that ran through town and flowed into the Iowa River on the town’s northeastern part.
She also said that we were to open windows on the side of the house facing away from the direction where the storm was coming because she claimed that would equalize the pressure inside the house and the house wouldn’t explode apart. It turned out that all the things she said were untrue and unscientific but at the time I really believed her and somehow we managed to stay safe. Nothing ever happened. Years later, though, a tornado tore through the middle of Marshalltown, straight down Main Street, so the truth came out. Marshalltown was indeed vulnerable all along.
The green indicates that there is a lot of hail in the cloud. Hail reflects back green on the light spectrum. So, sorry, corn plants. You are about to be shredded.This is a really intense green so I think the photo was a bit doctored.
Growing up in Iowa gave me a great respect, interest and understanding of weather. On sultry summer days you could expect that by late afternoon there would be some kind of thunderstorm. Large or small, you never knew. Here would come the great shelf cloud from the west. You could see it coming for miles. The main event of the storm, the thunderhead, was many miles high, maybe even 5 miles, and the shelf cloud in front and below the advancing storm would be a creepy shade of green. All was ominously still and silent before the storm, and then the gust front hit! All hell would break loose! The rain came down in great sheets and giant drops. The wind could blow the small trees almost to the ground and branches were blown off the big trees. Once we were looking up into the storm clouds and I saw several tiny little tornados way up high. In Illinois while visiting my grandmother there was the unmistakable funnel cloud miles away silhouetted black against the western sky at the edge of the storm. Since then, I’ve always loved weather and clouds and am bored if it’s the same all the time.
Here it comes. This is exactly how it looks. And the air has a quality that cannot be described in words but I’ll try. Silent. Still. Ominous. You have to experience it to know exactly what it’s like.
My favorite time of year was fall. By fall the Iowa River would be very low and almost but not quite dried up. We would drive north out of town to Timmons Grove Park, walk down to the water and wade for miles up the middle. We might also bring truck tire inner tubes that we got from a tire repair place and float downstream. If we were wading Dad always said avoid the downstream end of the sand bar where the water was deepest because the sand was soft there and could suck your foot down and you’d sink in. The rest of the river was no deeper than your calf and easy walking. We’d keep our eyes peeled for river clams and when we found a bunch, we’d take them home in a bucket of river water and then leave them alone until their foot came out looking for food. They were big and heavy and no one ever ate them. Buttons were made from their shells in the olden days.
Winter was beasty cold and windy and most of the time there was very little snow. It seems like it just blew away. The scene you saw out your window was all monochromatic shades of white, gray and black occasionally punctuated by a dark green evergreen tree. The evergreen would be the only color. The fields were white. The trunks of the trees were black. The snow, if there was any, was dirty and unappealing, The sky was depressingly gray because it was almost always clouded over from horizon to horizon with low clouds of no texture. Just a blanket of gray the same color as the ground. The only time the sky was clear was after a cold front that came in from Canada and then it would be bitterly cold.
Sometimes there would be an ice storm which we kids loved. School would be closed because it was treacherous to drive. Everything would be covered in ice. I mean everything. The tree branches and electric wires would be bending down to the ground looking like they would snap any minute and sometimes they did. We got out our ice skates and would skate all over. There wasn’t anything not to like about it. Beautiful but dangerous.
We got Teddy from the Oakland, California shelter in 2009. I had just left my husband three months before and Ari and I were living in El Cerrito. We wanted a dog for a companion. When we met Teddy he roamed all over the visitor’s yard and then came over to us and laid down in the shade next to us. We thought he would be a good dog for us in spite of the shelter saying that he didn’t like cats and had barrier aggression. He was not too big and not too small. He was super cute. They said he was a spaniel/chow mix. How they knew that I have no idea.
The shelter was all wrong about him. He had no interest in cats and had zero barrier aggression. What he had was a willful disposition. When I went to take him for a walk in the rain the first time I tried to put a raincoat on him and he went 100% cujo. Ok I says. Walk in the rain and get wet. When we took him to dog training he was asked to leave. He didn’t like people getting near his head and would bite. Well, what good is training if they have to be perfect to start out with? What are we here for?
We did find out that he was a model citizen with a prong collar on. He would obediently heel and not pull ahead. He knew the difference between having the collar and not having it. When we went for a weekend we asked a friend to watch him. She took him to the very large dog park and upon exiting the car he took off and no amount of calling him would get him to return. On 1-10 we get a call, “Don’t ever do this to me again. He’s a real dog.” She took him to our house and put him in the enclosed backyard and kept an eye on him that way.
Another time we went out of town again and boarded him at a vet. They said we have to give him a shot and we said oh no that’s a bad idea because he hates shots he’ll bite. They said oh we’re trained we can do it. Upon returning they told us he’s not welcome here anymore. Why we asked. He bit a handler. We said we warned you and we never went back.
At Grindstone Ranch Teddy found his purpose. He became a lean, mean fighting machine chasing ground squirrels up and down the hills and never catching any. I had to start feeding him high energy dog food so he wouldn’t get too skinny. Dr. Burnham, the local vet was savvy and when he gave him rabies shots he sort of squashed him between the wall and a chain link door to give him his shots. Teddy still had that biting instinct. If he didn’t want to do something he would object. He nearly bit me when I tried to get him out of the back of the SUV. He loved being in the back of the SUV. I got him out by attaching a lease to his collar and pulling him out.
Eventually he got bit by a rattlesnake while going down a hole after a squirrel but he recovered nicely from that. At the ranch I also had to watch helplessly as he chased a pack of wild pigs up into the big pasture. Of course he wouldn’t recall when he was on the run. At the top of the rise I saw him way off by the bluffs chasing a pig, getting chased back, running away, and turning around to chase again. He stayed out of reach until he got bored and decided to come back to me.
He was a dog of his own recognizance. Not very friendly like most dogs are. Not a lap dog. But not unfriendly either. He would sit at your side and let himself be petted when he felt like it.
Here’s a poem by Pablo Neruda that fits Teddy and me to a “t”.
My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I’ll join him right there, but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex.
No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he’d keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing.
Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea’s movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean’s spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don’t now and never did lie to each other. So now he’s gone and I buried him, and that’s all there is to it.
Just Walk Away: a recollection of people, places and things
When I look back on my life it seems that I was always leaving something behind.
I was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 13. It was Friday the thirteenth, the day I was born, which is unlucky in the eyes of the superstitious. Later on, when I became aware of the superstition, I decided that Friday the thirteenth was lucky for me. I decided that everything that was unlucky for everybody else was going to be lucky for me. That’s my superstition.
This is 1738 N. Park St. in Chicago, Illinois. My mom and dad brought me here after I was born. .
Sweet Home Chicago
After I was born, we lived in the cheap, bohemian, artsy fartsy part of Chicago. My mom called the place where we lived “Bug House Square.” She said at night, with all the lights on in the kitchen, she would plug up the cracks below the doors and spray bug killer. Then she would turn out the lights and slam the door behind her. In minutes she would hear scuffling at the bottom of the door and in the morning, upon opening the door, would find a giant pile of dead cockroaches that had tried to flee the poison.
At first mom had her teaching job and dad went to art school. In his free time, he would golf. My dad would have loved to be a professional golfer. Maybe it was my arrival that made him give up this dream. But he didn’t give up golf. Oh no, he golfed all his life, chipping practice balls in our back yard and going off to the golf course every chance he got. In Chicago it made mom sad and angry that he would go off to golf because he sometimes would go off and golf with women he met somewhere. Mom had to stay home with me. This made her resent him at the time, and this resentment continued all the time they were married. I believe that my Dad did not think anything was wrong with this behavior, but I know my mom felt betrayed because she told me this when I got older. She wanted to be the center of his world, but he couldn’t because he was essentially a self-centered person even though generous at times, and this was too bad because mom was a pretty sweet catch which he should have appreciated more. On the contrary I think he thought that he himself was the catch and that she was the one who should appreciate. This dynamic eventually led to divorce thirty years later. He wanted to be the center of the world and she wanted to be the center of his world. When two people have that kind of dynamic a good marriage isn’t going to happen. After I married and my own husband started to behave this way it caused the same kind of resentment in me and eventually, we split, too. When two people meet to give, both get 100%. When two people meet to get, no one gets anything. This seems to be the state of affairs with human beings. Hardly anyone meets to give. Most meet to get, or there’s an uneven split. 60/40. 30/70. I wish I had understood this better when I was young. My own relationships with men would have been a lot better and certainly different.
But in the beginning in Chicago and maybe even for a few years in Marshalltown they got along well enough and more often than not things were harmonious. The full blown rancor came later.
Mom
My mom was born in Illinois to German farmers and educated people who were preachers. People who could come up with a unique sermon for the congregation every week. She told me that when she was young, she was a very energetic person, that she ran everywhere. She had a strong personality even then and I’m sure she got this from her mom, my grandmother Frieda who was a house ‘a’ fire and then some. For example when my mom’s younger sister LuVerne was treated unfairly by a teacher in the one room schoolhouse where they attended school my mom stood up for her and bawled out the teacher. Imagine the chutzpah in the mid 1920s.
From left: Gram’s sister, mom with the dark brown Buster Brown haircut, blonde Uncle Kenneth, grandpa Bernhard, grandma Frieda in the kerchief, red-headed Aunt LuVerne, great grandma Tina, great grandpa William.
I only knew mom when she was an adult. Who knows their parents any other way? This is a sad state of affairs to my way of thinking and part of the reason I am writing this. This is so all the people who might have only known me as an adult might know a bit about me in other ways. Like when I was young. It’s the only control I have over time which is really no control at all.
As an adult my mom was an art teacher and book illustrator. She was a very creative and frustrating person to me. Maybe she was frustrating because she was so creative. I don’t know. I do know that she was not like everybody else I knew. Other people might have been boring, but my mom was not boring in any way. She was a combination of fear and courage for one thing. She couldn’t or wouldn’t do some things and I guess it was because she wasn’t confident but on the other hand, she was vivacious and fun, full steam ahead. Yes, she was complicated. She was not easy. Looking back, I can see that her life must have been frustrating for her, too. She could have been so much more, and yet, I can say with certainty that she did the best she could with her lot in life. When she got older and I looked at pictures of her I thought, “That person looks like they have had all the life sucked out of them. That person looks deflated.” Is this what happens to us? Why do some people still have vitality as they age? Why don’t other people? My mother lost her vitality as she aged. It was so strange because when she was young, she was a hot potato, a bottle rocket with zing! Some days I think I know what happened to her. Some days it’s just a theory. But I can relate because I was full of vitality when I was young and, now, I’m just tired out.
When I was young, I sometimes needed to ask her advice like any daughter would. Much to my chagrin she would come up with an impossible and outlandish idea to what I thought was a reasonable question. Her answer, if executed, would have been truly amazing, but was going to be absolutely impossible for a teenage kid like me or for almost anybody else for that matter. Me: “Mom, I need an idea for how to decorate the cafeteria for the prom.” Mom: “How about an ocean cruise theme where the cafeteria is decorated with portholes and set on hydraulics, so it rocks back and forth like ocean waves.” Was she not taking me seriously or just trying to drive me crazy? I’ll never know. More about my mom later. This is just an introduction.
Dad
I have been told that my dad was an art student when my mom met him in Chicago. He was on the GI bill going to the Chicago Art Institute and he had already studied at the Nottingham School of Art in England after World War II. Mom told me that she married him because she didn’t want anyone else to have him. What a funny reason to get married! And I hope and pray that she actually loved and respected him, too! But I’ll never know now. After he got his art degree, he became an art director at a big heating and air conditioning company in Marshalltown, Iowa. He had a disdain for the corporate world. In Chicago at a job where he worked he went in to ask for a raise. “We just had a baby girl so I need a raise.” The next day they let my dad go. This made him very angry and he never forgot it. This was in the day before you could do something about discrimination. In those days you just had to suck it up.
Like my mother he wasn’t ordinary either. Never boring. Ordinary people had landscape reproductions and prints of Jesus on their walls, but my mom and dad had real paintings done by them or by people they admired. My dad could sing and dance and tell jokes like there was no tomorrow. No, neither my mom nor my dad were boring. Maybe that was part of the problem. Some days I wished they were a little more boring. They kept our home in a tumult. All I wanted was a little peace.
My dad was a practical person, too. My mom’s vivaciousness, which was probably exciting to him at first, got to be tiring as the years went on. He also caused her to feel insecure and jealous. He thought she was being hysterical and unreasonable when she wanted to know where he was going or what he had been doing and with whom. He gave her grounds for wanting these questions answered. She wasn’t hallucinating or fabricating stories. This was my dad’s narcissism. I’ll talk more about his background later on but for now suffice it to say she was smart in a way that probably intimidated him. He was blue-collar and he painted what he saw in a realistic way according to the norms of the day. He approached painting like a tradesman or a carpenter. He would say, “I’m going to build a painting.” But he was adept enough that he was never pedestrian. He inserted elements of impressionism and abstraction into his paintings. But in his heart he was a tradesman. He approached life the same way. And he wasn’t as educated as she was. He would say, “Marge, you have a college education and you can’t even cook a hamburger.” What does that say to you? I think it says he felt not as good as her. After all he didn’t have a college education. It seemed that what he really wanted was someone to cook good food, keep house and have kids. He was not ambitious. He did what he had to do and didn’t aspire to anything more.
Scenes from EarlyLife
Even though there was tumult in our house there was an element of average even though it was a very small element. My mom had a domesticity that was efficient and warm. There is a picture of me in my highchair cramming tiny fistfuls of my mom’s homemade noodles into my mouth. My face is covered with noodle debris. Dad called me The Noodle Kid. When you looked at our household from a 20,000 foot level you would say we were a pretty average Midwestern family making ordinary food and doing ordinary things. My dad golfed and gardened. My mom cleaned and cooked and planted flowers.
But we were not average. Mom and Dad chose dark brown to paint our house when everybody else had some pastel shade. Mom planted corn and castor beans around our house while everybody else planted petunias. Mom played the oompah piano and dad sang along. Dad played the “Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart on the stereo system he built. Mom played Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel. Nobody else enjoyed the kind of music they did. We had backyard picnics and ate hamburgers, yes, and boiled corn on the cob with potato salad and cole slaw like everyone else but that was a nod to the Midwestern way of life for them. They aspired to more. Dad hunted like other dads but instead of a rifle he used a bow and arrow. Nobody else I knew did these things, so I felt different and set apart from our neighbors. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out exactly how different we were. You have to get away and see how other people live to get perspective, and I did, and this feeling has stayed with me all my life.
(This is an excerpt from my Memoir “Just Walk Away” which is a recollection of people, places and things.)
When I look back on my life it seems that I was always leaving something behind.
Chapter two: Insects
We had lots of picnics in the back yard and friends of the family came over for hamburgers and corn on the cob. So did black corn beetles. They were first in line to crawl on your food as best they could so you had to pay attention when you were eating because you might chomp down on one. There were mosquitoes that bit you and chiggers that got into the crease of your skin at the waistband of your shorts and itched something fierce. If you were running barefoot in the yard you might step on a bee and then mom would scrape the stinger out and put a bread and milk poultice on your swollen and itchy foot to, according to her, suck the poison out. When it got better, she would soothe the inevitable itch with baking soda mixed into a paste with water that would get all over the place when it dried. We never learned. We went barefoot constantly. Once I got a trip to the emergency room when, chasing lightning bugs, I tripped and fell and gashed my forearm on a broken glass bottle that was sticking out of the dirt. I was quite young, maybe five. I guess in the old days, before the subdivision was built, the Schulz’s had used the back part of our yard as a trash dump. I still have that scar on my right forearm. You could identify my dead body by it if you wanted.
Strife
My mom and dad yelled and screamed at each other in that house. You could hear them all over the neighborhood which was a source of embarrassment to me. I don’t know what they particularly argued about except I would eventually hear my mom say as my dad stomped out the back door, “Where are you going, Art?” My dad was an old-fashioned guy who thought women were there to do men’s bidding and it was none of her business where he was going. Once my dad hit our mom during an argument. I heard him slap her and I heard her crying. That was it. I’ve blocked the details out. What I do remember was that it frightened us kids very, very badly. We never knew what caused him to slap her. We knew that he had a bad temper and could get angry over the smallest things. He had zero patience. When I was quite a bit older my boss at the non-profit gave me a phrase that seemed to fit him perfectly: “Street Angel, Home Devil”. Lisa was from a Long Island, New York Italian American neighborhood, and they had many colorful phrases to describe people. Everybody outside our family loved my dad for his humor and quick wit. In our family we feared and obeyed him. Mom sometimes pushed back but was never able to prevail in getting him to be a kinder person. He was what he was, and he stayed that way. OK I admit that he could be kind. Extremely kind and thoughtful. Every year he gathered armfuls of lilacs for my mom on her May 15th birthday. Yes, he wasn’t all bad!
Mom In More Detail
As a mentioned before my mom was a very clever, smart person though insecure and frustrating. On her best days she came up with all sorts of fun things for us kids to do. On birthdays she might make it a pirate theme and have a treasure hunt complete with a map and some kind of treasure to discover. We’d dress up in pirate clothes and have a whale of a time. In the summer she dug big holes in the back yard, lined them with plastic, then filled them with water for us to splash in. On Halloween she would go all out sewing costumes. She drew us girls paper dolls with clothes to match. Then we’d cut them out of the paper and dress our paper dolls. Once an older girl named May Polley cornered me and demanded that mom make her a paper doll, too. She wanted a Cinderella doll like I had. I ran home terrified and in tears. Mom made the paper doll, which I then gave to May and she never bothered me again. Maybe it was a lesson in giving in to bullies or maybe it was a lesson in picking your battles. In the picture you can see the little tabs on the side of the “dress”. Those tabs are meant to be folded over. They aren’t some weird appendages. The tabs were integral to the dress because when they were folded over, they kept the dress on the doll. It was really good fun dressing the dolls.
My mom had time to do all this stuff because she never worked outside the house. It was a time of prosperity in America after World War II, and we could get along on my dad’s salary, but we weren’t flush with cash or rich by any means. We lived a frugal life without extreme penny pinching. Now and then I would ask mom how come we can’t have this or that, like some neighbor kids had, and mom would always say something like it’s because we spend our money on insurance and those people don’t have any. Yes, she said this and I never knew if it was true, but I accepted it as a reasonable answer. We didn’t live a life of luxury or privilege, but we had what we needed.
Food
This is a Big Section because food is important to people in the Midwest, and we were no different.
I say important because invariably upon finishing breakfast mom and dad would be discussing what they were going to have for lunch. After lunch they would then be discussing what they were going to have for dinner. It was like that.
The majority of our food was home cooked from scratch. Mom never bought sugary items at the grocery store, for example. I envied kids who had Sugar Pops or Frosted Flakes in their cupboards. If Mom did buy boxed cereal, which was rare, it would be Wheaties or Wheat Chex. Mostly we had the hated old-fashioned cardboard flavored oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. To make either of those tolerable we added a pat of butter, heaps of brown sugar and a little milk. We didn’t have desserts in our house except for the occasional grocery store brand Fastco ice cream that came in a square paper carton. It was always vanilla and it was terrible but at the time we didn’t know better and accepted it as tasty. Once in a while she would come home with Neopolitan ice cream, in the Fastco box of course, which was strawberry, chocolate and vanilla in sections. It was good enough and we ate it.
Some lucky kids had fudgsicles in their freezers and, boy, did I envy those kids! Mom considered these specialty or exotic items, and we never had any. The most daring thing mom got were the almond windmill cookies from Archway which were also known as Dutch Speckulaas. They were ginger flavored mostly and there were little bits of almonds in them. They were in the shape of, you guessed it, windmills. While we’re on the subject of cookies, once I came home from school and my mom was not home. I must have been 8 or 9. When I looked in the cupboard for a snack, I saw some boxed coconut cookies covered with chocolate and caramel. What is this? Why are these here? This is very strange and completely out of the ordinary! I was terrified to eat one, this is how rare this was. I thought, “Maybe they were put there by bad guys and they’re poisoned, and they want me to eat one, so I’ll die.” I closed the cupboard and walked away even though they looked incredibly good. Then I obsessed and obsessed about them but kept my composure. I kept going to the cupboard to check if they were still there. Eventually mom came home, and they turned out to be legit. They were Keebler Coconut Dreams cookies and a friend had given them to her.
When I got older, I was glad that we never had many sweets. I think that having very little sugar helped me have good teeth and not get overweight. As a matter of fact, unlike everyone I knew I absolutely loved going to the dentist. Dr. Warrington would come in the exam room, take one look in my mouth and exclaim, “You have such beautiful teeth!” I was a vain young child easily overcome by flattery, but it was true. My teeth were straight, and I didn’t have any cavities. I never had to endure the agony of braces like many of my friends. I even had the added advantage of having a little gap in my front teeth that I could squirt water out of to annoy my friends at the swimming pool. Later on, the gap closed and this was perfect because it helped my teeth to stay straight. Room to move, you see. Sigh. Such a perfect child!
It’s not that we didn’t have our indulgences. Near 15th Avenue there was a small grocery store with a bakery in the back. It was around the corner of Fifteenth Avenue and down the street on Nevada (Nuh-Vay-Duh not Nuh-Vah-Duh. Remember this is Iowa!) where we would buy frozen Snickers bars and Slo-Pokes in the summer. They also had the best white bread baked in their own ovens. One of my favorite snacks was two huge slices of that bread with as much Miracle Whip as possible slathered on it so it skooshed out of the sides when you pressed down. Only Miracle Whip. Nothing else. Not mayonnaise. Nothing. I would lick off the skooshed out Miracle Whip that I loved so much. I’ve found that people who are not from Iowa or the Midwest don’t understand the attraction of Miracle Whip. Everybody in the Midwest uses Miracle Whip. It is an ingredient in just about every recipe you can think of. Deviled eggs don’t taste right without it. Turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving don’t taste right without it. Potato salad doesn’t taste right without it. Coleslaw doesn’t taste right without it. Waldorf salad doesn’t taste right without it. Macaroni salad doesn’t taste right without it. I like mayonnaise now but when I was young it had to be Miracle Whip.
We also fried bologna to put in a sandwich and ate hot dogs raw and uncooked. My brother lived on Franco American spaghetti out of a can or Campbell’s tomato soup with half a package of saltines crushed in it. On Sunday mornings we had pancake eating contests while my dad flipped pancakes as fast as we could eat them. “Who wants another pancake?” he would yell out. “Me!” we would yell back. These were silver dollar sized pancakes mind you. Not the ginormous restaurant size. You could eat a lot of silver dollar sized pancakes.
On Sunday night mom made Swiss Steak cooked in the pressure cooker and served with mashed potatoes. She’d get a cheap cut of steak and pound the heck out of it with a meat mallet, so a lot of flour was mashed into it. Then she would chop carrots and onions and pour a can of chopped tomatoes in on top of the meat in the pressure cooker. Then we watch in fascination and fear as the little bobble thing on top of the pressure cooker would let off steam. Would it explode, or wouldn’t it? We never knew but it never did.
When it was all done, we would pile a mountain of mashed potatoes on our plates and then put a big piece of tenderized meat on top with the gravy over. You could eat the meat with a fork it was so tender. My lifelong enjoyment of liver and onions also began here. I don’t know how my mom made it, but it was never dry and chalky. Of course, we drowned it in ketchup. And, oh, the onions! You had to have a mound of pan-fried onions, slightly caramelized on the whole she-bang. Sometimes she made what she called Neopolitan spaghetti which other people call American Goulash. This was cooked macaroni noodles in a sauce of hamburger and canned tomatoes all mixed up. This, too, was high eatin’!
When we went out to eat, which was not often, we had some choices and one of the choices was a café near the Third Avenue bridge that had a bar in the front and a restaurant in the back. It was kind of seedy but we didn’t care. Their signature dish was a dinner plate size pork fritter with French fries. The bun was this ridiculous looking tiny thing in the middle of the giant pork fritter which had a couple of dill pickle slices and a dollop of yellow mustard. The fritter itself was pounded wafer thin, breaded and deep fried. You would eat your way to the bun and, boy, did we love it!
The other treat was the Maid Rite sandwich. When I was older Hilary Clinton came to Marshalltown on a campaign tour and the first thing out of her mouth was the announcement that she had been to Taylor’s Maid Rite, and she could tell us with certainty that “They are Made Right!” Of course. Tell us something we don’t know. The Maid Rite was a white hamburger bun piled high with ground sirloin cooked until it fell apart. My sister Toni once made a very good imitation of Taylor’s secret recipe. Roseanne Barr, the comedian, called it “loose meats” and had a café in her TV series that sold them. Loose meat is a terrible name for this delicious sandwich. That makes it sound perfectly revolting. It was perfection on a bun with pickle and chopped onion and yellow mustard. NO ketchup. Ketchup had been pulled from the menu in the Great Depression because bums would come in, sit themselves down at the counter, order a cup of hot water then proceed to add a bunch of ketchup for a strange kind of soup.
To go with your Maid Rite, you had to have one of their amazing, malted milk shakes. A spoon would stand straight up if you stuck one in. It was kind of a magic taste, the Maid Rite along with a slurp of malted milk. They did not serve French fries. It was perfect just those two things. In this picture there’s ketchup so this was not a picture taken in Marshallburg unless they gave in for the Clinton. I also see French fries. We did not have these when we were kids. Verboten.
Photo by David Howells/Shutterstock. I do not think that this is Taylor’s in Marshalltown because I see ketchup and french fries. Has Taylor’s succumbed? I don’t know because it’s been years since I’ve been there.
Sometimes on a hot and humid night in summer dad would say let’s go get ice cream and then we’d pile in the car to drive to a creamery in Tama (Tay-ma). We’d be driving in the dusk along highway 30 and I’d look out the window at the miles of corn fields with billions of lightning bugs flashing and wonder how there could be so much corn. I didn’t eat that much corn. Why was there so much corn? Sometimes we’d go to the Tastee Freeze south of town on highway 14 and get soft serve that was dipped upside down into chocolate and the chocolate would then harden. You’d eat a hole in the chocolate and then suck the soft serve out while your tongue was trying to keep up with all the ice cream drips down the side of the cone. John Cougar Mellancamp immortalized the Tastee Freeze in one of this songs.
On the north side of town on highway 14 was the A&W root beer stand. The car hops would come out to your car and take your order and then come back with your food and drink on a tray that attached to the side of the car. That root beer came straight from heaven. The mug had been in the freezer and the sides of the mug were frosted over. Maybe there would be a hot dog along with it, but you didn’t really need it. The root beer was outstanding all by itself. Now any other kind of root beer is pale by comparison. I even tried to make root beer once, but it didn’t taste anything like A&W. I’m spoiled for the taste of true old fashioned root beer now because Mr. Allen and Mr. Wright got the right ingredients and threw away the key in 1919.
Another summer excursion would be a trip to the outdoor drive-in to watch some cowboy movie and have terrible salty popcorn from the concession stand which, of course, I loved. We’d park next to the speaker attached by a long wire cord to a pole. Mom would take it off the holder and hook it over the door. The sound was awful but that didn’t matter. It was all part of the drive-in experience. We’d watch until we fell asleep in the back of the car and then somehow get home arrive home and wake up in our own beds the next morning.
There was only one pizza place in town at the time. Luckily it was and still is the best pizza on the planet. It rivals any pizza you can think of. Chicago pizza, New York pizza, wood fired pizza. None of them hold a candle to Zeno’s pizza. I think they used provolone instead of mozzarella and it was the cheesiest greasiest saltiest pizza on a thin crust pizza you ever had. The atmosphere was great. Everybody had their little booth, and the decor was kitchy Italian with fake grapes and flowers garlanded on the walls.
At Shady Oaks restaurant east of town on Old Highway 30 (also known as The Lincoln Highway by the way), I would always have a giant wedge of iceberg lettuce with Roquefort cheese dressing poured all over. I thought it was quite special and unique that they brought to the table those triple dispensers of salad dressing with a choice of thousand island, blue cheese and Italian dressing so you could ladle out the dressing out to your heart’s content. It wasn’t sanitary but we didn’t think anything of it. At home we didn’t have salads. We had vegetables.
Then there was Milt’s on S. 12th Avenue. This was a hamburger joint, but the attraction was Milt himself. We kids watched in amazement as he poured our milk into our glass going higher and higher until he was pouring it from 3 feet above the glass. When Milt retired it became a Chinese restaurant and dad would say, “Let’s go get flied lice.” He thought this was funny and didn’t realize how derogatory it was to say it that way. The food was actually pretty good. Your standard Americanized Chinese food. They had Egg Fu Yung which was smothered in some kind of beefy gravy and pork fried rice as well as Chow Mein. Not your gourmet fare but we had never had anything gourmet so we had nothing to compare it to.
My dad and his dog. He never told me anything about what it was really like. I didn’t think to ask.
Myth: Old people are stick-in-the-muds and don’t go anywhere because they are crotchety homebodies.
Truth: Old people would love to go everywhere all the time, but old people are probably living on a fixed income and don’t go anywhere because they can’t afford to.
Myth: Old people are hypochondriacs and go to the doctor for every little thing because they love the attention.
Truth: Old people go to the doctor a lot because there’s always something going wrong. Everything hurts on an old person and is giving out. Old people were the picture of health when they were young, and they never saw this coming.
Myth: Old people are lazy and don’t like to exercise.
Truth: Old people would love to exercise if exercise didn’t hurt for days afterwards. Aches and pains that might have taken a couple days to dissipate when they were young now take days and days to get back to “normal”. Whatever “normal” is. Normal is different now.
Myth: Old people are more cautious than young people because they’ve lost their joie de vivre and are now conservative party poopers.
Truth: Old people may have lost their joie de vivre but it isn’t because of what you might think. Old people are more cautious than young people because they’ve realized that it isn’t worth the risk whatever “it” may be. Remember the song by Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is”? Old people have realized this was a true song. It’s going to be a disappointment.
Myth: The Golden Years are a wonderful time of life
Truth: The Golden Years is an idea made up by a young person. There’s nothing golden about it. If anything, it’s the Gray Years. “No matter how bad things get, remember these sage words: You’re old, you sag, get over it.” — Sophia from The Golden Girls TV show
Myth: Sex is better when you’re old.
Truth: This is also something made up by a young person, probably a young doctor or a young journalist. The truth is in old age something is always not working so unless you’re into drugs and surgical procedures you need to come up with other ways of intimate pleasure.
Myth:There’s no or very little age discrimination in hiring practices concerning old people.
Truth: Age discrimination is alive and well in hiring practices of old people. Old people can apply all they want to American jobs but the certainty of getting them is all but certain even if the old person is eminently qualified. Usually they say, “We found a more qualified person.” This is code for “You’re too old.”
Myth:People have respect for the wisdom that is acquired by age.
Truth: Nobody cares what old people know or what their wisdom can provide. Young people think they know it all and the last thing they want is for some old person to tell them anything. Old people know this is true because when they were young, they didn’t want some old person telling them anything even if it made sense. Especially if it made sense.
Miscellaneous Truths: Getting up to pee many times in the night is common. Leg pains from taking medicine is common. No amount of Botox can get rid of all the wrinkles. Eating anything and everything in any amount is a thing of the past because now there’s acid reflux. Fallen arches are common but there’s the Good Feet Store if you can afford it. Forgetfulness is common and they’d like you to think this means you’re on the verge of getting Alzheimer’s.
Youth was a time of gaining things. Old age is a time of letting things go.
The boys had been hang gliding that day. This was years ago but it seems like only yesterday. I was their chase driver and I liked it. I liked being behind the wheel of the SUV alone with my thoughts and looking out at the landscape as it went by. There was that feeling of freedom somewhat anchored by a purpose. This is my ideal life. I like freedom coupled with a sense of purpose. When purpose becomes uncoupled, I’m like a boat on the water with nothing but freedom, no anchor and drifting.
Everyone had a good day. The boys had flown far and landed unscathed. I had been able to pick up the two I was assigned to without difficulty or getting lost. We were back at the camp site that was called Tuttle Creek which I said was famous for all the tuttles. You know, box tuttles, painted tuttles, desert tuttles. Tuttle Creek was right there adjacent to the famous Alabama Hills. In the old westerns the Alabama Hills were the on-location scene with Whitney Portal as the backdrop and I can see why. They were a very interesting rock formation.
It was the fourth of July and we wanted to see some fireworks. So, after dinner we piled in the SUV to see if Independence was doing anything. They were. We joined the citizens of Independence on the shoulder of Highway 395 and waited. Highway 395 follows the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada and you can get a good look at Whitney Portal as you drive 395 through Lone Pine. Independence is a little farther south on 395 and usually has a fair amount of traffic but tonight there was none or very little and we waited in the gathering dusk for the show to begin.
And soon it did. A flat bed wagon pulled in and was set up with chairs for the dignitaries of Independence and the master of ceremonies. The flat bed was off to one side of a large empty sagebrush field north of town. Some one over there was in charge of the fireworks but we couldn’t see who. Eventually we heard the PA system crackle to life. It was dark now, around 9 pm.
“Welcome to the 30th annual Independence California Fourth of July Celebration!”, he said. “Let’s begin by singing our National Anthem.” We all rose to our feet as the PA played a rousing band version and we sang. When we finished singing…
The announcer announced: “For our first display we have something from Ace Hardware on Main street.”
A minute goes by…
Ka-boom!
We all ooo-ed and ahh-ed.
Each fireworks was announced in succession. Apparently, the city had no budget of their own. Every fireworks was paid for by a local business.
“This display comes to you from the law offices of Harvey Smith.”
A minute goes by…
Ka-boom!
“Our next display is courtesy of Eastern Sierra Ice Cream Company.”
A minute goes by…
Ka-boom!
But now we have a sage brush fire that is started by embers falling into the field! Ah-rooooooooo! Here comes the Independence Fire and Water truck roaring down the highway. It two wheels it into the field, slams on the brakes, the driver jumps out, grabs the hose and begins to pour water on the fire.
We get a bird’s eye view of this from our SUV, and it is all quite entertaining.
Fire out. We go back to the MC.
“Our next display comes to you courtesy of Inyo County Water Department.”
A minute goes by…
Kaboom!
We only had 3 more fires (what a successful night!) and three more fire truck sorties to the rescue. Such is life in a small town on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada.
Pico De Gallo is a Mexican salsa that’s loaded with all the things that are growing well in my garden. Pico de Gallo, by the way, (translates to “beak of the rooster”. Don’t ask me why they call it that. They also call a food item wrapped with a tortilla “burritos” (little burros), and deep-fried pastries “churros” (sheep). It’s a colorful language and culture.
The things that don’t grow well in my garden aren’t ingredients in Pico de Gallo. (eggplant, green beans, okra, potatoes). Last year I grew a lot of native crops, but I wound up not using them so I’m not growing them this year even though they grew very well. (black eyed beans, buckwheat, sorghum, amaranth). Now I’m branching out to things that I like to eat. And I’m having trouble with the birds. They eat everything that isn’t a Pico de Gallo ingredient. And guess what? The birds are winning! Things that the birds don’t seem to like are the things that go into Pico de Gallo. (tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, cilantro). They are growing well and I’m sure it’s a southwestern thing. If I had a lime tree, I would have all the ingredients. Pico De Gallo is excellent over tacos, burritos, nachos, or served with chips. You can make up a batch in about 5 minutes.
Pico de Gallo salsa
Ingredients
1 lb Roma tomatoes, (3-4 medium), diced
1/2 medium onion, (1 cup chopped)
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely minced
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
2 Tbsp lime juice, from 1 lime
1/2 tsp salt, or to taste
1/8 tsp black pepper
Instructions
In a medium bowl, add diced tomatoes, onion, jalapeno pepper and chopped cilantro. Stir in 2 Tbsp lime juice and lightly season with salt and pepper, or season to taste. Enjoy right away or cover and refrigerate overnight.
R L Benoit - Writer/Artist 