Memories of a Lifetime

In which we make cookies

2009-10-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I found my mother's sugar cookie recipe. I sat down and read it, looking for some hint of my mother in the words she had written on a piece of pink notepaper for me. We had probably been sitting at one kitchen table or another somewhere, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes -- maybe playing yahtzee -- when I asked her for it. She probably jotted it down from memory -- she really did remember a lot of different things.

The memories came flooding back to me as I read it. "Roll out dough, cut and decorate." How many great days do I remember rolling out dough, cutting and decorating? At Christmastime, the windows in the kitchen would fog up with the heat of the oven baking cookies, while outside it was cold. Christmas music would be playing in the background, and the three of us kids would be decorating cookies. We didn't use icing, it was all colored sugar, red hots, little gold and silver balls and those little sprinkly things.

My brother always made green santas and red Christmas trees. My sister always got to help cut out the cookies, and I loved carefully placing those little sprinkly things on the Christmas trees to simulate lights and ornaments.

On Valentine's day there'd be heart- and diamond-shaped cookies, baked for us while we were in school. She had a set of metal cookie cutters for each of the 4 suits of cards that she used then. Sometimes we'd come home and they'd just be there for no reason (she once told me she baked cookies for us every week and maybe she did, I don't remember).

Today I'll be making Halloween cookies for a party tomorrow night. I will roll, cut and decorate and I know that somewhere, Mom will be very happy.

In which we catch an unsafe driver

2009-08-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

This actually happened last Monday, and if you're out there Mr. Air Technologies, you have me to thank.

Monday was Katie's 16th birthday and tradition dictated she go to King's Island with her friends to celebrate. This year only one of the usual crowd was able to go.

The weather Monday was typical Ohio summer day unsettled, so Katie and I had some phone conversations about whether or not they would stay at the park or come home early. Finally the weather cleared and they ended up staying until park closing.

On my way to pick them up (it's about a 45 minute drive) I noticed a sheriff lurking at the Otterbein Home area of Rt 741.

Successfully picked up the girls and headed homeward up the highway. A few miles into the trip a truck came up on us and started tail-gating and flashing his brights at me. As soon as I could safely get over for him to pass I did so, but as the road is a bit of twisty 2-lane blacktop he had to wait. Waiting was obviously not this guy's strong suit as he blazed past me in a great big hurry.

We were able to see that it was a red, business pick up truck and the word "Air" on the side.

A little further down the road we got stopped at a red light. He stopped in front of us but then decided to run the light. He didn't outright run it though, he sneaked it by pretending to go right on red and at the last second doing a U-turn and continuing north on 741.

This really made all three of us girls mad, so we decided that if the sheriff was still lurking about the Otterbein Home we were gonna be tattle-tales.

Sure enough, there sat the cop. I pulled in, he rolled down the window, set aside his laptop and cell phone and asked me what the problem was. (I guess he wasn't running radar or he wouldn't have still been sitting there as Mr. Air blasted by him.) I told him what had happened and, to his credit, he took off after the guy, telling us that maybe he could get him at the next stoplight.

There was nothing at the next stoplight, nor did we see anything for the next 8 miles. But, as soon as we reached the outskirts of Springboro we saw cop lights flashing up ahead. As we slowed down to pass we saw it was Mr. Red Truck, Air Technologies blazoned on the side of it, getting a big, fat ticket from the Warren County Sheriff's Department.

We all pumped our fists in victory and yelled "Yay!!!" as we drove by. Katie declared it the best birthday ever.

In which I remember a friend

2009-07-19T19:02:00.000-07:00

The following was written in May of 1999 when my friend Jim Matuszak died of an unknown disease. He was in his mid-50's when he died. I didn't make any edits to what I wrote then.

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Jim and I became friends about 8 years ago.

I was working at PMCI as a proofreader, and he had recently been hired as a copywriter.

No one who knows me would ever expect me to be "only a proofreader" - I took this responsibility seriously. Sometimes, I'd find myself in the role of editor, too - not major editing, mostly corrections to grammar and punctuation, although occasionally I'd make suggestions for changes to copy where I'd had to re-read a section to understand what the writer was trying to tell me.

As you can well imagine, the suggestions of a lowly proofreader did not sit well with our friend Jim - I will always remember how he'd bristle at the sound of me saying "Jim, I've just reviewed this copy and…"

Finally one day I told him, "Look Jim, this is my job. I'm supposed to question this stuff. I am not criticizing your writing, nor am I trying to change it. I am only making suggestions that I think will help the flow of the copy."

He sat back, did that little shake that he did when a realization came to him and asked me what my suggestion was for the copy in hand.

That was the end of that - after that, he always listened to my comments, responded to them and sometimes even made the changes I recommended.

He considered me his friend.

Shortly after that, we discovered we had two very important things in common - we were both Polish and we both had the same birthday - February 5th. (Pardon me for saying this one last time, Jim, but it was in different years.)

He used to tell me that his sister's birthday was June 5th, and he must have been conceived on her birthday. No matter how many times I told him he had the math wrong, he persisted in believing it.

As we got to know each other, we took delight in the things we had in common and had many conversations as to whether there could actually be something to all that astrological "crap" - sometimes it was even as if we were thinking the same things at the same time.

We shared a love of music … movies … baseball … words and wordplay. We had a shared sense of irony and recognition of absurdity and injustice… our politics were the same … we had the same "quirky" sense of humor … and most of all we shared a love of Star Trek and its vision of a better, brighter future.

When the little day-to-day happenings in his life got him down, he knew he could come to me to rant. I don't think I ever helped him much, but at least he could get things off his chest and know I'd never hold anything he said against him.

Around PMCI he gained a reputation of being the "abominable no-man" because he was always the one to find the negative in any plan or creative anyone would come up with. But he always stood his ground and fought for what he believed in, and in so doing gained the respect of his co-workers. And when he became ill with Hodgkin's disease, we all stood by him while he fought it -- amazed at his grace and dignity, his perseverance and faith that he would get through it. His positive attitude in the face of what must have been the scariest thing he'd ever had to face was truly inspirational to us all. We gained a new respect for him during this time, realizing that if he could maintain his sense of humor and be so upbeat through the chemo and radiation therapy there really must be more to him than what we had thought.

Make no mistake, he was scared. He didn't want to die. He was prepared for it then, but he wasn't ready for it. I remember he made me a music tape then, entitled "I'm No Angel - Not Yet", featuring "angel songs". I still have it. I think I'll keep it for a long time to come.

When another co-worker of ours, Dick Niswander - who Jim had known for years - was dying of cancer, Jim honored him by suggesting we name our annual Hospice fund-raising efforts for him. In a more Matuszak-like fashion, he grew a beard in Dick's honor. Dick had had a beard for as long as anyone could remember. Jim grew a beard to prove that he still could (the radiation treatments had killed hair follicles), and also to honor Dick in the only way he could think of.

A couple of years ago, Jim, Tom Johnston and I started going to lunch nearly every day. We soon realized that each day our lunches were becoming more and more Seinfeld-esque. I dubbed us "Jerry, George and Elaine", and we'd make our receptionist laugh each day when we left by saying, "Jerry, George and Elaine are going to lunch." (I'll leave it up to you to figure out which one was George.) When we'd get back, we'd have to fill her in on whatever the adventure of the day was.

We'd laugh, we'd discuss office and national politics, we'd listen to music and sing along, and we'd nearly always have a problem at whatever restaurant had been chosen. Jim never hesitated to complain either, about the things that were wrong - be it the food, the service or whatever it was. I guess he figured life was too short to eat an underdone steak. I won't hesitate to speak for Tom here when I say we'll never be able to complain at a restaurant again without invoking Jim's memory.

When my ex-husband and I split up almost 2 years ago, Jim quietly "set his cap" for me. When I had to tell him I didn't think of him "that way", he accepted it, without rancor or bitterness. Our friendship continued, unchanged, unmarked by events.

I actually found out through Tom how Jim felt about me. Jim had told Tom, who came to talk to me about it. I worried about what to do, I didn't want to lose my friendship with Jim, but I couldn't allow him to believe something was there that wasn't. Tom said to me, "Claudia, I think Jim needs to just move back to Cleveland, find himself a nice, middle-aged, divorced Polish woman with a couple of kids and marry her."

I remember looking at Tom in surprise and saying, "Tom. Don't you see? That's what he thinks he's got here, with me!"

Thank you, Tom, for not thinking of me as middle-aged.

I mentioned earlier that we shared a love of movies and of Star Trek. When Jim and Tom and I were out and about together, one of the things we'd often do was quote movie dialogue.

There's a line we used to make fun of from Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, which seems particularly fitting to me now. We'd exaggerate it, and laugh about Shatner's delivery - his "chewing up the scenery" - but I can't help but think Jim would like it said about him. It comes from a scene where Kirk is delivering the eulogy for his friend, Mr. Spock. He says, "Of my friend I can only say this. Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most … human."

I know that he must have accepted this recent illness with the same grace and dignity that he did the Hodgkins. I know that he wasn't really ready to go, and I'm grateful to him for fighting as hard as he did. We will all miss him. Our world, our universe if you will, will not be the same without him.

Good bye, Jim. I have been, and always shall be, your friend.

In which I say good-bye to my mom

2009-07-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Or as Tom put it, The Book of Claudia, Chapter 1. (And thanks again, Tom, for reading this at the memorial).
Donna Joan Johnston Konicki. As Shakespeare said… a Rose by any other name…

And in her case, certainly the story worth the telling and remembering.

The story of a small girl of 7 or 8 who came home from school and announced to her family she would no longer answer to the name Donna. There was a girl in her class named Donna who Picked. Her. Nose. And she didn't want to be mistaken for HER! From then on, she declared, her name would be JoAn. And don't think a small child's will won't be followed. From then on, she simply refused to answer to Donna. Ignored anyone who called her Donna, even her parents. Unless and until they called her JoAn, they did not exist. (One can only imagine the closed-eye stare she must have given everyone.)

JoAn grew up in the East End of Dayton during the Great Depression – an experience that no doubt explains her habit of saving twist ties, rubber bands and magazines. She came of age in the Downtown Dayton of the War Years. Later she would tell stories of going downtown to the movies or shopping and working in the bargain basement of a now non-existent department store. Other stories of the hardships her parents endured to raise her and the rest of their children – Grandpa walking to work every day to save the nickel carfare so that on Sundays he could take his children out for ice cream, Grandma boiling chicken feet for soup. On the fourth of July they'd have feasts of fresh corn on the cob and fresh watermelon in the backyard. That was the entire meal. She always said they didn't know they were poor, because everyone was poor.

As the Depression eased and the War started, Grandma opened her home to GI's in need of a meal or just in need of the comforts of home. Uncle Gene would bring home his buddies and through that connection she met a young man from North Dayton whom she later married.

JoAn was born 18 months before the start of the Great Depression. She lived to see the start and finish of many Wars…WWII, The Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam. Television was still in its infancy, a transatlantic flight was a novelty and computers, space flight and moon walks were the stuff of science fiction.

She turned 80 last year. We had a big celebration of her life. Everyone was asked to record their memories of Aunt Joan. In re-reading the stories from her nieces and nephews there is one central theme…laughter. Everyone remembers the laughter when she was around. Laughing for joy at being with her family – her siblings, her nieces and nephews and her children. Playing games. Reading. But mostly, the laughter.

People remember her creativity – the sewing and crafting, the knitting and crocheting. Nieces remember proudly wearing clothes she made for them. Nephews remember playing board games and Uno. But everyone remembers the laughter. She might have sometimes sounded like that silly dog in the cartoons when she laughed, but that didn't stop her. She just laughed harder when we pointed it out to her.

She loved to spend time with her sister, Virginia. She once told someone that visiting Virginia was like going to her own little cabin in the woods.

She never stopped missing her mother, her father and Tom, the brother who died in young adulthood. And she loved her baby brother Ned most of all.

The second half of her life was hard for her. After her husband died she had to make her way in a world she was unprepared to take on. That didn't stop her. When her own business failed, she went to work at Saint E's and ran their gift shop for many years. And as her children grew up and left the nest the laughter didn't come as easily to her, but still she managed to hang on to her sense of humor and her ability to see the absurdity in everyday situations. As she aged and life kept throwing her curveballs she began to lose that capacity. But still, when among family that old spark would light up her eyes and she'd enthusiastically join in whatever joking and story telling was going on around her.

We'll miss her. Our lives are all richer for having known her. She was our sister, our grandmother, our mother, our aunt and our friend. Rest in peace, little Joan, and know that someday we will see you again. And when we do, we'll be sure to call you Joan so you recognize us.

In which I lose my Daddy

2009-04-13T17:47:00.000-07:00

I will never forget the night it happened. It was January. I was sitting in semi-darkness at the kitchen table talking to my boyfriend on the phone. I watched from the table as my father left the house at about 9:00 pm. He said goodbye to my mother and me. I remember the house was warm and it was cold outside and I wondered why he was going out. Lately, that hadn't been too unusual for him, but still, this time there'd been no provocation that I had noticed, it was just a normal Monday night. I was 13 and in the 8th grade.

In the middle of the night, I heard the phone ring. We only had one phone at the time, and it was downstairs. I didn't get up, but I heard Leah get up and figured if there was anything I needed to know someone would come and tell me. No one did so I went back to sleep. I remember having a fleeting thought that it might have been something with my Aunt Jean, who had just had surgery and was still in the hospital.

When I woke up next morning, I got ready for school, almost as normal. Maybe it was the middle of the night phone call, maybe it was the atmosphere in the house, but one thing I did that was atypical was to not listen to the radio as I got ready.

When I went downstairs, Leah was there (Eric was away at college) but Mom wasn't. She told me that Mom had had to go to the hospital and that we were to go to school as normal, that everything was fine. Again, the fleeting thought that something was up with Aunt Jean, but didn't think too much about it. It was weird for Mom not to be home, not so weird for Daddy not to be home as he always left before we were even up. But the secrecy, not so weird. In our family we learned at an early age to keep the secrets and just go with it.

As I recalled it then, and as I still recall it, all was normal at school also. Until gym class. This part requires a little back story. As usual for high school gym teachers ours were a little -- ahem -- masculine. One of them also taught Math and had had my brother as a student. She loved him. Hated me and Leah, but loved Eric. And another important thing, Eric's given name is Paul the same as my father.

After our showers, I'm in the locker bay with my friends getting dressed. I remember I only had on my underwear when I heard Miss White walking down the locker room aisle, swinging the lanyard with her whistle on it and bellowing, "Where's Konicki?". (Keep in mind the bitch hated me.) Thinking I had once again done something to piss her off, I timidly stuck my head out of the locker row, wearing nothing but my bra and panties and holding my shirt in front of me like a shield. In a small voice I said "I'm right here." but in my mind I was thinking "I'm right here where I should be you bitch."

She's not even to where I am standing yet and she hollers, "What happened to Paul?" Confused, I answer "What do you mean, what happened to Paul, he's in Minnesota at college." She says, "No he's not, he was shot this morning over on the East End."

I remember there were faces popping out of the locker bays during this exchange and suddenly all the pieces fell together in my head. I collapsed, sobbing, saying "no, it's not my brother, it's my daddy!"

I don't really remember what happened after that. Somehow, I got dressed. One of my friends must have helped me, because the next thing I really remember is being in my next class and the guidance counselor coming for me. She explained to me that it had been on the news all day (Remember how I said I didn't listen to the radio that morning?) and that most people had thought that I knew and had just come to school. She told me I could go home and I said no, I couldn't, that my mom had wanted me to be in school and in school I would stay. I did find out later from a friend that it was true, most people did know what had happened and assumed that I did too and was just toughing it out at school until there was news. And kids being kids, no one really knew what to say, so they said nothing. Except for Miss White, who had the subtlety of a Mack truck.

When I got home that afternoon, I was a little weirded out to see Mom standing at the stove browning ground beef and onions, as though life were totally normal. She told me to come in and sit down, that she had something to tell me. Wanting to spare her having to tell me, I told her I already knew. She asked me how I knew and I told her the truth about what had happened that day.

(Needless to say, this little tidbit really upset her. She didn't like Miss White much anyway because of the way she had treated Leah, and the way she treated me. The next day she went up to the school and read the principal the riot act for what Miss White had done. Miss White ignored me for the rest of the school year, gave me B's in gym and the next year I was in the other masculine gym teacher's class.)

The next few days were a blur of Mom taking trips to the hospital and trying to run the house. We went to school as normal. I only went to see Daddy once in the hospital, and never told him goodbye because we all thought he was doing better. (I also think there were some silly age restrictions and they had to sneak me in, but I'm not 100% sure of that). The bullet had gone in his side and even though there had been some internal damage we all thought he was going to get better. What happened in the wee hours of January 31 was therefore even worse, because it wasn't supposed to happen that way. It should never happen that way.

In which I invent a game whose name never dies

2009-04-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

Another important part of my extended family when I was growing up was my Uncle Ned and his family, my Aunt Jean and my cousins Rachel, who is 4 years younger than I am, and Tom who is about 7 years younger than I am.

I am told I attended Ned and Jean's wedding, but I don't really remember much about it except that Mother made Leah and I matching off-white or yellow dresses with jackets, I think, (think Michelle Obama's inaugural gear) and we had to wear little white gloves. I do remember using Aunt Jean as a "lovey", she had the softest skin. I would sit next to her and just feel her arm for hours it seemed and she would always let me. My mom would say "Jeannie, if she's bothering you just make her get up," and Jean would say "She's fine." And I would be until I got bored and wandered off to find something else to do.

Rachel was the cutest little baby and toddler. The family has many stories of precocious things she did when she barely walking and talking. We have super-8 film of her shaking her diapered booty at Daddy's camera. She has an ornery streak that runs through our family like a golden thread. It turns those of us who have it into charming and funny leader-types. Those of us who have it don't turn against those who don't (well, usually), we just work with them to bring out their latent charm. When we are all together, watch out! The jokes and puns fly freely, along with flights of fancy having to do with absent family members, mutual friends and mutual enemies.

When we would go to visit Ned and Jean on a weekend night so the parents could play cards, Leah would stay downstairs and watch TV or read while I would go upstairs to Rachel's room where she, Tom and I would play. Tom was an introverted child. I fell in love with him one morning when I spent the night with Rachel. Tom loved music. He would take anything handy (throw pillows, record albums, the record itself, etc.) in his hands and sing the words to the tunes he'd learned from his father's records as he spun the object round and round in his hands. He was the record player. He would not only sing, but do the drum parts, the brass or whatever other instrumental parts there were. He was a genius. Anyway, on this particular occasion, I woke up early and heard him singing. I sneaked out of bed and into his room, where he was sitting in his crib. He had a stuffed toy in his hands that he was turning round and round as he softly sang a song that he had made up for their cat. I sat and listened and watched for a while, and then we started playing together...I think we played the baby gravity game, where the baby throws something out of his crib and the other person picks it up and throws it back. We did that for a while, quietly, until the rest of the family got up and his mom took over. We've been friends ever since.

Anyway, on these weekend nights we'd go upstairs to play. I was probably 9, so Rachel was 5 and Tom 3 or 4. Rachel and I played pretty well, Barbies and whatnot, but with the smaller child, we had to come up with something we could all play together. One night, and I don't know how, I hit on the idea of playing a game named "Windstorm in the Closet". Pretty simple game, really. We hauled everything out of the floor of the closet, climbed in and I proceeded to spin out a tale of a terrible windstorm on the way and the only place we had to hide was this closet.

They LOVED it. We played that whole night. Next time we went over they were clamoring for me at the door "let's go play windstorm in the closet!" I remember Ned looking kinda quizzically at me and I kind of shrugged in a grown up way and we went upstairs to play. I think the adults were grateful we had come up with something that kept the kids out of their way so they could play cards in peace without constant interruptions.

Only problem is, the game, instead of being left behind with the other detritus of childhood, has never died! Every time there's a bad storm, with wind, one of us will contact the other and say "hey, that was some windstorm last night, wasn't it?", or "wow, did you hear about that terrible windstorm in Arkansas yesterday?". Then we all laugh as though we just made the funniest joke in the history of humor. Back in the 70's when a tornado wiped out most of Xenia Oh, it wasn't a tornado, it was a windstorm. Last fall, when the hurricane came inland and still had high winds when it got to Dayton, it wasn't the wind from the hurricane, it was a windstorm - a terrible windstorm at that.

Nice in a way, that a spur of the moment game invented to keep the grown ups from yelling at us to stay quiet turned into a shared bit of history that only the 3 of us really understand.

In which I bond with my sister over candy - and see the hand of God

2009-04-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

As mentioned before, our summer vacations consisted of going to Aunt Virginia's (that's what we always called it, probably because that's what Mom called it. Never, "going to [their town], or "going to [their state], just going to Aunt Virginia's. Because for Mom, that's where she was going, she was visiting her sister and the rest just didn't matter.)

Anyway, these trips always came spur of the moment. I had friends who in High School would take planned spring break trips to Florida or the Caribbean (pronounced ca-RIB-ee-an, not CAR-ib-ee-an, as we who were the great unwashed would pronounce it). We always just went to Aunt Virginia's and we always knew we were going to have a great time, eat great meals and maybe come home with new clothes. What more could you ask for?

One summer morning my sister, Leah, said to me: "We need to walk to San Rae this morning and get candy and stuff. I heard Daddy tell Mom last night we're going to see Aunt Virginia and we're going to need stuff for the car ride."

Immediately, I was excited. I asked when we were going and she said she didn't know, but we needed to be ready and have stuff to do in the car so we DIDN'T BOTHER DADDY. (Anyone who took a road trip with their parents in the 60's knows why I capitalized that. The jokes about Dads saying 'Don't you make me come back there!' and 'Don't you make me pull over!' were especially true in our family. Children were seen and not heard.)

Leah informed me that I was to take coloring books and crayons, books to read and we were going to go to San Rae and get candy and other stuff to fill old cigar boxes. She had already worked it out with Mom and gotten us some money to spend. We were going to fill our cigar boxes with whatever we could get to keep us quiet. I realize now that my big sister was looking out for me, because I was the impetuous child who couldn't keep her mouth shut when it was best for her (still have the same problem, in fact, part of the reason why I am now unemployed!).

A word about San Rae. San Rae was the name of the street. And at the end of the street was a little strip of businesses. San Rae Bakery and Market was one of the businesses. It was in a neighborhood of WWII era housing, the Dayton Victory Apartments and other apartment houses of the same vintage. These were 4 unit buildings, I think you know the type. Row after row of square Lego-esque blocks with 2 apartments up and 2 down.

San Rae was also adjacent to a little business called Dayton Reliable Tool. Dayton Reliable Tool was lucky enough to have invented the pop top for beer and pop cans. They now take up the real estate where San Rae Market used to be. More's the pity, in my opinion.

San Rae was one of the places we could go pretty much without permission. If we had money. If we didn't we had to ask for money and permission, both were usually granted. We'd get a quarter. Doesn't sound like much, but I could buy 2 comic books and 2 pieces of two-for-a-penny candy with that. Or a nickel Hershey bar, a comic and one of those candy necklaces that left your neck all sticky. You could also, if you were so inclined, get baked goods. The cupcakes were divine and the glazed donuts were the best. The candy buttons on paper were on a big roll behind the counter and when you asked for a penny's worth the clerk would roll off a strip that seemed like it was about 6 feet long and hand it to you. No plastic wrap, no latex gloves.

You could stand behind the glass case where the candy was and ask the clerk, "how much is this?" "What can I get with a nickel?" and they never seemed to mind. Maybe they did, but they sure didn't act like it.

The floors were wooden. The clerks were nice. They knew us. Matter of fact, we could walk in with money and a note from our mother that she needed a pack of cigarettes and they would sell them to us and put them down in the bag with our candy. Sometimes, Mom would realize she was out of something she needed for supper and she'd send us up there to get a can of green beans or corn. We could spend the change on whatever we wanted.

When I was a teenager and needed to make urgent calls to boys that I didn't want my mother to know about I would walk up there and squeeze into the old-fashioned wooden phone booth and drop a dime. Sit in there and talk for an hour. Then come out and buy some candy or gum because I felt guilty for using their phone for so long.

This particular day, we walked up to San Rae and filled our cigar boxes. The only thing I remember buying was pixy stix (LOVED 'EM) and one of those candy necklaces. I'm sure I had other stuff, but I don't really remember.

Then we went home and packed what we needed for the 12 hour car ride. And we waited. Mom was in a flurry of doing laundry and cleaning the house. My older brother wasn't going with us because he had a summer job and she had to keep giving him orders (no parties, no loud music, cut the grass, etc) (all of which I'm quite sure he dutifully ignored).

Finally the big day came. (It was probably the next day or the day after, these things never had a long lead time.) We sat in the back seat all set to go with our stuff. I colored and ate candy. I read for a while and ate candy. Pretty soon we had to go to the bathroom, so we stopped to stretch our legs. (Daddy was good about stopping when we needed to, I'll give him that. I once worked with a man who made his young daughters straddle an old coffee can in the back of his Suburban when on road trips. Child abuse, in my opinion, but I digress.)

Back on the road, I read some more and ate more candy. By now we were in Springfield, Ohio, (I'm kidding, we were probably closer to Cleveland, still not very far into the trip). But it seemed like it was time to start asking if we were there yet. Of course, we couldn't ask, but it sure seemed like it was time to! Leah, Mom and I played the license plate game, and there was the inevitable mooing at cows and neighing at horses out in the fields as we drove past.

In the afternoon, the sun was warm and all were sleepy. Mom had found some music on the radio and we were just riding along in silence. I was leaning my head against the rear passenger side car window, watching the scenery go by and looking at the fields and the clouds. The sun was out and the sky was full of those big fluffy cumulus clouds that change shape as you watch them. One cloud looked like an elephant and then morphed into a whale. You know.

All of a sudden as we went around a bend in the road, I saw a giant cloud that was in the shape of an immense hand with the index finger pointing down to the earth. I shit you not. I was about 10, and going through my religious phase (read: Before I discovered boys) and I was absolutely positive we were going to die. I think I said something out loud, and was probably told not to be silly ("That child has an overactive imagination" - heard that a lot when I was growing up.) This cloud scared me to death. I spent the rest of the road trip in mortal fear. I spent the first couple of days of vacation in mortal fear. Then I got over it. But I never forgot it.

I am still convinced it was the hand of God. But I don't think He was pointing at me.

In which Gabriella, Susan and I do NOT end up in a ditch somewhere

2009-03-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

My Aunt, my mother's sister, lived in a small town in upper New York State with her husband and 5 children.

My cousins are Gabriella, Susan, Daniel, Pam and Geoff. My Aunt is Virginia and my uncle is Dan. Every summer our vacation was to go to visit them and we loved it. We ended up so close - in some ways closer than siblings - and I know my sister Leah and I always cried when it was time to leave because we loved them and would miss them. My mom and dad were both different people when we were there. Daddy had a couple beers with Uncle Dan at night and let it go at that. Mom and Aunt Virginia (Pam, who is 4 years younger than I am, once asked me "Why do you always call her Aunt Virginia?" To which I replied, "Because she is my Aunt and that is her first name". Pam said, "Why don't you call her 'Auntie Ginger-Pie instead?' and so for the rest of that summer visit I did. And Auntie Ginger-Pie would dutifully chuckle each time) would play games, cook, reminisce, and take us shopping and other fun things. We would go on organized family outings, to lakes and parks and have cook-outs. Or, we would just go outside and play.

Our cousins had a lot more freedom than we did because hideous crime hadn't really come to their little corner of the world yet. When I was 12 a man had kidnapped, raped and killed a 12 year old girl who lived not too far from me. Later, a dead girl was found in a Volkswagen in a nearby supercenter parking lot, a pair of crimes immortalized in a book called 'The Girl on The Volkswagen Floor.'

Although not as famous as the Manson case or the MacDonald murders, the tragic and unsolved murder of a young schoolteacher sent shock waves through the town in which it is set. Having grown up in Kettering, Ohio, only a block from where the "girl" of the title is found, I can testify that Clark gives an accurate assessment of the white-bread community, its values and its prejudices. On this background, he paints a compelling mystery that centers not only on the murder itself, but also on Clark's relationship with a psychic who reveals to him insights about himself and the killing. Clark, a skeptic, is eventually persuaded that the psychic is more than a lucky guesser--but how?

Anyway, in the early 70's their town was still quiet with neighborhood grocery stores (something unheard of in the "white bread" suburbs where I grew up) and quiet streets. Some streets were nicer than others as far as upkeep goes, but all in all it was a nice little town.

The summer I was 15 Aunt Virginia had to have her gall bladder taken out. In those days that was major surgery with a 5-day hospital stay. Aunt V asked that Mom and I come up so Mom could take care of us kids and Uncle Dan, keeping house and cooking meals. Of course my mother said yes, because taking care of people was one of the things she liked best.

After supper Gabriella, Susan and I would leave the house and go for walks. We'd walk the streets of town, buy Popsicles and comic books at the newstand downtown, stop and visit their friends, but mostly we would just sing "I'm the Happiest Girl in the Whole USA" which was a GIANT hit that summer (matter of fact, it was the year that song came out which helped me pinpoint this post in time.) Of the 3 of us, Gabe was the only one who could carry a tune, so she sang the loudest to drown Susan and I out.

This was our favorite time of day. It wasn't so hot out, there was always a breeze and we felt perfectly safe within the boundaries of the walks we took. There are beautiful old Victorian houses on the main street of the town and we'd look at them and make up stories about who must have lived in the and why there had been so much money in their town in times past. (We finally found out from Uncle Dan that in some vague fashion it was due to the Railroad.) And we were free of the "little kids". We knew when we got home the little kids would be in bed and the 3 of us along with my mom could play Yahtzee or some other dumb game long into the night.

One night, I don't remember why, we were out particularly late. It might have been, ahem, because we were stalking a boy I thought was cute. Anyway, we didn't get home until long past dark, probably about 10:30, maybe even 11:00. My mother was FRANTIC. Uncle Dan, not so much, of course it took a lot for him to get frantic (still does, in fact). In the midst of her rant about how worried she was and didn't we understand how dangerous it could've been she said "You could've ended up in ditch somewhere!"

I had mostly tuned her out because this is the kind of behavior I got from her every day, so it was nothing new to me. But when she pulled out the "ditch" line, Gabriella actually started laughing! I was dumbfounded! One didn't laugh at my mother when she was in a rage.

Gabe, and bless her heart I will never, ever forget this, said, "This isn't Dayton, Aunt Joan. People don't end up in ditches here."

My mother stood there like a fish out of water with her mouth hanging open. She was completely disarmed! That was when I knew that Gabriella would be one of my favorite people in the whole wide world for the rest of my life!

Uncle Dan chimed in at some point and backed Gabe up. The upshot was that we had a curfew, I think it was 10:00. I guess if we were going to successfully stalk any boys, 3-4 hours would be enough time to get it done.

I loved my time with my cousins. All 5 of them. They don't know it, or maybe they do, but they saved my life.

In which I bond with my big brother - about cars

2009-03-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a post-war (WWII) suburb of Dayton OH called Kettering. Everyone knows the type, cookie cutter houses, uniform sized lots and good fences to keep us all behaving like good neighbors.

We attended Sunday school and Vacation Bible School at a small United Brethren Church that was nearby but across a busy street. (Nearby in the sense that kids of the early 60's didn't mind walking it, but these kids today.) If Mom didn't take us in the car, we had to walk and my older brother was in charge of the three of us.

Vacation Bible school always started the week after school was out so you had no time to get lazy. We had to be up there standing in line at what seemed like 6:30 in the morning, but was probably more like 9:00 or 10:00. Aside from the getting up early part, I didn't really mind Bible School…it was like glorified Sunday school. We did crafts (usually involving Popsicle sticks, Elmer's Glue and yarn.) We learned new songs that we sang on the last Sunday of that week to the grownups in the "Big Church". We learned new Bible stories and verses and played "lightning rounds" where the teacher would say the chapter number and verse number and someone had to yell out the verse. I always kicked ass at this part due to my photographic memory. I only had to call up the correct page of the Bible in my head and "read" it out loud. People hated me for that. At break we got cherry Kool-Aid and round cookies with holes in the middle that tasted like ambrosia (or manna from heaven if you will) but only when consumed with the Cherry Kool-Aid. When eaten alone, these cookies are like cardboard. I know. I've tried. I wonder if Jim Jones served these particular cookies with his Kool-Aid because he knew that then all of his people would be sure to drink up?

Anyway, it was kind of a long walk to the church. Probably the better part of a mile and all uphill one way. This was approximately 1962 or 1963, so most of the houses were occupied by people who knew us, either by sight or because we went to school with their kids. We were always going to be safe on this walk, but by the time we got to where we had to cross the busy road, we were tired. We always stopped to rest in front of the one house on our daily journey that never ceased to fascinate me. In my mind it was a haunted house, it had to be. Because it had burned. Not to the ground. Only enough to make it really, really spooky.

The house really didn't look like it belonged in our neighborhood, for one thing. Besides being burned, of course. It had a 3-car garage. No other houses in our neighborhood had 3 car garages, attached as this ones’ were.

We'd stand at the edge of the property staring at the house as we caught our breath. It was hard to see much due to overgrown shrubbery, but you could definitely see that it had burned and burned badly enough that no one could live in it. "I wonder what happened," I would always ask, and my big brother (7 years older than I and therefore by definition infinitely more knowledgeable) would say with 6th grade superiority, "It burned." "I know that," I would reply,with first grade disdain "I can see that but I wonder what happened. Did anyone die?"

My sister would stand with us and stare as well, but I always got the feeling it didn't captivate her like it did me. Maybe I'm wrong about that. In my limited worldview, houses didn't just sit as burnt out hulks. They were fixed up or they were torn down, there was no other option.

One day he pointed out to me that there were cars in the garage. Old cars. Like from the 40's. You could see them through the garage doors. They were big rusted hulks of what had formerly been Classic American Land Cruisers. License plates were still on the backs of them. They looked like this 1941 Dodge Luxury Liner Coupe:

Or this 1942 Hudson Commodore Custom Eight Sedan:

Or this 1946 Ford Fordor:

And they were burned, too! Still sitting there in the garages where they'd last been parked and resting there as burnt out husks.

This captivated me even more for some reason. Why wouldn't somebody even try to rescue the cars? Now, of course, I understand about wills and probate and the kinds of things that could have delayed this property being sold or demolished. But at the time it was like frozen there, a place out of my time but yielding no answers about its own time.

My brother would tell me stories about it that I would believe. Everyone inside had died. They tried to get to the cars and the garage doors were locked so there were bodies in the cars still. When he and his older friends (One of them was named "Fuzzy") came up here on summer evenings they could still hear the hiss of the flames. That sort of thing. By now my sister was almost to the intersection and waiting on us to get there so we could go across together. I always wanted to wait and hear more stories and be deliciously scared, but by the time we ran across the street and got into our lines at the Bible School I would have forgotten all about the ghosts. Except for the glances I would steal across the street as I waited in the line for my Bible verses and Kool-Aid.

In later years when I was in 6th or 7th grade, my friends and I would roam the neighborhood and the house still sat there, empty, charred, with the burned out cars in the garage. We would stand in front of it and I would repeat the stories my brother told me. One brave soul jumped the fence and ran up to the garage and peered in one of the dusty windows. He swore he saw a skull in one of the cars. With skeletal hands on either side of it like he had been trying to get out of the car.

About 7 or 8 years later when I was working at a convenience store farther down the road on the same busy street I finally got the end to the story of my favorite haunted house.

We had an old guy would come in every afternoon to drink a cup of coffee and chat. (I think he mostly came in to chat.) One day he said: "Saw they're finally fixing up that old house at Dorothy and Colonial." I had to get my bearings for a second and then realized he was talking about my burned out house. "Really?" I said. "When we were kids, that was our neighborhood haunted house." Oddly, this man didn't care! He just went on talking about how they were adding siding and roofing and landscaping to it. Had it gone on the market when all of the rebuilding was done I would have toured it just to see the inside and maybe get some more scoop on the cars in the garage and the reason it had stayed empty for so long. No for sale sign ever went up in the yard, so either it was a private sale or the family finally settled everything. I lean to the family theory because when I go by it now (about once a month because it's across the street from my doctor's office) there are always cars on the concrete apron in front of the 3 car garage. Not just newer cars, but an older one or two in some state of restoration. As if it's part of the house's legacy to have car people living in it.

Now that I know that my brother and I both independently and with no knowledge of the other one doing it, bought purple PT Cruisers when they first came out, I have to wonder - was it the influence of those haunted cars in the garages of the house at East Dorothy Lane and Colonial?

2009-03-22T08:15:00.001-07:00

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