Tag Archives: Nostalgia

Playing Cribbage with Clara on an Old Board

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The cribbage board connecting generations

I taught my twelve-year-old granddaughter, Clara, how to play cribbage. The first two rounds we played were full-disclosure games because we laid our cards face up on the table. It’s the easiest way to teach someone to play. I taught her strategies for tossing cards into the crib, how to maximize her chance for a better hand, and how to peg points while preventing her opponent from doing the same. I taught her how to count the pairs, runs, and combinations of fifteens. Cribbage is a complicated game, but that’s what makes it fun.

I learned to play cribbage when I was nineteen years old. I was a bartender in a small unincorporated town, population 350. One of my customers asked me to play cribbage. I told him I didn’t know how. “Well,” he said, “you’re going to have to learn because when customers come in and it’s slow, they’re going to expect you to play.”

I’d grown up eight hours away in a metropolitan area, and I’d never heard of cribbage.

The customer grabbed the cribbage board and a deck of cards off a ledge from behind the bar. “I’ll teach you,” he said. He placed the pegs in their starting holes and shuffled the cards. I carried over a barstool and sat down in front of him but stayed behind the bar. After all, should another customer have shown up, I might’ve had to pour a beer, mix a whiskey-7, or pop a top on a soda. He taught me well, and I played many games of cribbage with him and other bar patrons, especially on quiet winter days and nights.

Shortly after Clara and I started our third game, I asked, “Do you want to play without us seeing each other’s cards?”

“Sure!” She smiled and her eyes sparkled, excited that Nana felt she was ready to be in charge of her own hand. She did well and quickly caught on to counting her hands, but luck plays a part in cribbage, and I had better cards. Yet none of that mattered. We laughed and celebrated our high-scoring hands. We laughed and mocked our low-scoring hands, saying, “two, four, and there ain’t no more,” or “I got nineteen.” (Nineteen equals nothing because it’s not possible to score nineteen points in a cribbage hand.) I almost skunked her in one of the games, but she managed to avoid the stink of getting beat by 31 points or more. And we laughed about that too. Both of us like to play cards and board games, but neither of us is bothered by losing. There is always another game to be played.

Clara and I played on the same cribbage board I used when I taught my grandma Olive to play cribbage. I have two other boards, but I liked knowing that Clara and I were touching the same pegs and moving them along the same holes on the same board Grandma Olive and I used forty-five years ago.

When I was eighteen, I moved in with my grandparents, George and Olive, and lived with them for almost three years. Grandma Olive and I didn’t always agree about how I should live my life. She believed I should sing in the church choir and attend Sunday sermons. She believed I should be present at the dinner table for breakfast, lunch, and supper. She believed I should be home before midnight. She believed I should have a better class of friends. She believed I should iron my shirts instead of wearing them wrinkled.

I believed Sunday mornings were for sleeping in. I believed if a friend said, “Let’s go swimming” or “Let’s play tennis,” skipping lunch or dinner was no big deal. I believed being home by midnight was for Cinderella. I believed my friends were wonderful. And I believed the heat from my body would smooth out most of the wrinkles in my shirts.

But I loved Grandma Olive, and I knew she loved me and worried about me. And because neither of us liked conflict, our disagreements were soft-spoken, thirty-second exchanges of point and counterpoint, in which neither of us would change our minds. Then I would leave the room. And she would exhale a heavy sigh.

When I wasn’t working or with my friends, I liked spending time with Grandma in her kitchen. She taught me how to make an angel food cake (lots of sifting and gentle folding) and Amish sugar cookies (pressed with the bottom of a cut-glass crystal sugar bowl). She taught me how to play Shanghai rummy, which used two decks of cards and had increasingly complicated hands of sets and runs, which players had to attain to score points.

Grandma often heard me talk about playing cribbage with customers when I bartended. “I wish I knew how to play,” she would say, so I bought a cribbage board. One evening as we finished up the supper dishes, I offered to teach her how to play. I can still picture her standing in her slightly remodeled 1940s kitchen, wearing her patterned apron trimmed in red rickrack, one of its pockets bulging with an ever-present handkerchief. She teared up, smiled, and said, “Oh, yes!”

Grandma Olive loved me even if drove her crazy, and I loved her even if she didn’t understand my generation.

Grandma Olive with me on her lap and Grandpa George with my sister on his lap, 1960. Seventeen years later I would move in and teacher Grandma how to play cribbage.

I lived with my grandparents for nearly three years. I thought I was easy to have around, and in many ways I was. But looking back, I realize that my grandparents, especially Grandma Olive, worried about me. They’d already raised three children, so having their eighteen-year-old granddaughter come to live with them during their golden years wasn’t ideal. Grandpa, who was never a talker and still worked at his gas station six days a week, would remain an enigma to me. But Grandma and I came to know and appreciate one another, most of time.

So sometimes when the baking and cooking and dishes were done, Grandma Olive and I would sit at the old wooden kitchen table covered in oilcloth and play Shanghai rummy or cribbage. We talked and laughed, and forgot about our disagreements, neither of us caring if we won or lost the game.

A few years after I moved out of my grandparents’ house, Grandpa George died, and Grandma Olive developed dementia. She and I couldn’t play cards anymore.

Comes a time when there isn’t another game to be played.

Machines from the Past

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My grandsons and the silent typewriter

“Hey, boys,” comes a lively greeting from a tall, white-haired man, whose cheery voice emanates from an equally upbeat face that gives the impression it has spent a lifetime brimming with friendliness. The man, who is at least as old as I am, is dressed in a pair of jean shorts and a casual blue shirt that matches the color of his fun-loving, twinkling eyes.

My six- and four-year-old grandsons have just entered the assistant lighthouse keeper’s home in Two Harbors, Minnesota. The jovial man, however, isn’t the assistant keeper. He is a tourist, like us, visiting the lighthouse grounds, which are now a museum.

He points toward the corner of what would’ve been a small sitting room. “What’s that, boys?” he asks my grandsons. I haven’t crossed the threshold yet, so I can’t see what he points at.

Without skipping a beat, my six-year-old grandson answers, “That’s a typewriter.”

“Wow,” the man says, now looking at me. “Most kids don’t know that!” He reminds me of my father who would’ve put this kind of question to anyone, young or old, in a museum, hoping the person wouldn’t know the answer, giving him the opportunity to burst into a history lesson. In the absence of strangers, my father would quiz me, “Do you know what this is?”

I smile at the man, and as an explanation, I say, “Their nana is a writer.” But this isn’t why my grandson knows a typewriter when he sees one. None of my grandchildren have seen me use one. I do my writing on a laptop. Although I wrote plenty of college papers on a typewriter, I can’t say I miss it. I made too many mistakes and smeared thick globs of whiteout on typos, which resembled miniature frescos when they dried, but without any artistic flair.

I’m not sure why I blurt out, “Their nana is a writer,” but something in the tall man’s happy manner makes me happy, so I say it because writing makes me happy. I’m already thinking about our encounter as something to write about.

So, why does my six-year-old grandson know that the machine with rows of letters is a typewriter? Because I like to take my grandkids to small museums. A month ago we visited the Old Firehouse and Police Museum. On the second floor in an old office displayed with artifacts, he pointed to a typewriter sitting on a wooden desk and asked, “What’s that?” I explained what it was and how it worked, and that the fire chief used it to type reports about the fires they fought.

The white-haired man moves on to another room in the assistant keeper’s house turned museum. My grandsons and I look at the typewriter. “Can I touch it?” one of them asks. My first impulse is to say no. Instead, I look at the typewriter. I don’t see a do-not-touch sign. If I had, I would’ve said no. In my family there are two kinds of people: those who can’t ignore signs and those who feel they are merely suggestions. But I’m flirting with a technicality because I know museum curators don’t want visitors touching artifacts.

I think back to the mid-1990s when I took my father and my two sons to the same fire and police museum that I recently visited with my grandkids. Inside the museum was an old fire truck, with a hand crank used to start its engine. I came upon my father turning the crank, which was located right below a sign that said: DO NOT TURN THE HAND CRANK.

“Dad,” I said, “you can’t do that. Look at the sign.” I wondered if he thought the engine might roar to life.

“Well, they left the crank here,” my father said, as if the presence of the crank negated the command: DO NOT TURN THE HAND CRANK. The old hand-crank fire truck was still there when I took my grandkids, but the sign was gone and so was the hand crank. I don’t think my father was the only person who turned that crank. He was a mechanic nearly all of his life, and the urge to tinker with mechanical objects never left him.

My grandsons and I are still staring at the typewriter. I think about my father and his belief that signs weren’t meant for him. He routinely ignored handicapped parking and speed limit signs. When he taught me to drive, he said that I could take curves at twenty miles over the posted limit. I stare at the typewriter, thinking about the fingers from the past that pushed its keys, sending thin metal bars with raised letters clacking to an inked ribbon, leaving black words on white paper. My grandsons stare at the typewriter as if it’s a mystical object, but I have no idea what they are thinking.

“You may touch it,” I say, “but very gently, like this.” And, I brush my fingers like feathers across a few keys. There is no one to tell me, “You can’t do that.” There is no one I can answer back to by saying, “Well, there isn’t a sign.”

I add, “Do not push down on the letters.”

Each grandson takes a turn, stroking a few keys softly, like they are a newborn’s forehead. Sensing they’ve been granted a special privilege, they are silent. Neither of them pushes down on a key. But I imagine they think about what it would feel like and how the typewriter would react if they did.

Suddenly, I understand something about my father and the old fire truck and its hand crank. He wanted to feel that crank turn. Perhaps, because he’d never had the opportunity. By the time he was born in 1937, hand-crank cars were a thing of the past. But his father, who opened a gas station and repair shop in 1920, would’ve worked on cars with hand cranks. Perhaps, my father wanted to touch something that linked him back in time to his father.

After all, I enjoyed touching the typewriter keys and wondering about the lighthouse keepers and the documents they typed. Perhaps, in their off-hours, they wrote novels or stories or poems about the solitary life of lighthouse keepers and the stormy moods of Lake Superior.

We move on from the typewriter, looking at a way of life from the early 1900s. An old stove waits for someone to start a fire in it and cook a meal in cast iron pots. Old dishes sit on a scarred table, waiting for a meal to be served upon them. An ancient washing machine waits for someone to load it with soiled clothes. Oil lamps wait to be lit after the sun sets, and an old stuffed chair waits to be filled by a weary person at the end of the day.

Over and over my grandsons ask, “What’s this?” And I explain. Over and over their hands reach to touch an object, and I say, “Don’t touch.” I point to the signs saying, Please, Do Not Touch, which had been absent by the typewriter, but are now everywhere. And each time they withdraw their hands. I can’t ignore an actual sign asking, Please Do Not Touch.

But I’m glad there wasn’t a sign by the typewriter, and I wonder if my dad would’ve pushed the keys.

Holding On, Letting Go, and Hugging a Tree

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The jacket makes its return to the Goodwill, January 2023

I bought the deep-green Minnesota Wild windbreaker at Goodwill for $3.99. Its 2T size was perfect for my grandson Michael, who was two years old at the time. I kept it at my house as a spare jacket because where I live the weather changes faster than a runway model. Michael wore the jacket on misty days and sunny-but-cool breezy days and gray chilly days when the sun refused to show its face. When needed, he pulled up the hood and slipped his hands into the pockets, hiding his ears and hands from the cold.

When Michael outgrew the jacket, I saved it for Evan who wore it until he outgrew it. Then, I saved it for Charlie who wore it until a year ago when he told me, “I’m too big for this.” I had run out of grandchildren, but I kept the jacket. Throughout the year, I thought about donating it back to Goodwill, but it held memories. My grandsons wore it to the library, to parks, and on walks. When they ran and played, the windbreaker’s waterproof material serenaded them with a crinkly tune.

I’m somewhere between my mother and father on the what-to-purge-and-what-to-keep scale. My mother saves very little. A few years ago, I asked her where the instructions were for her bike lock because I needed to reset the combination. Her answer: “I threw that out.” When I complained, she snapped, “I can’t save everything.” She claims she doesn’t want to make her children clean and sort through piles and piles of possessions. But really? Even small amounts of clutter unsettle her.

Very little exists from my mother’s childhood, but I think that’s because her family had very little. What happened to the other bits and pieces from her youth? I don’t ask. Perhaps her mother threw them away, or perhaps my mother did. Sometimes memories connected to objects are painful, a place one wants to walk away from, not revisit.

In contrast, my father saved a lot of stuff: old newspapers, if an article interested him; letters, including the ones I sent him; his childhood artifacts; his pilot logbooks; trinkets of all sorts; and bits and pieces of mechanical objects because he never knew when he might need that specific part or screw or nut and bolt. He wasn’t a hoarder, and we could walk through his house without fear of being consumed by his possessions, but his garages, closets, and spare rooms were filled with his history, both the small and momentous moments. He would’ve saved the instructions for the bike lock.

My father also kept old issues of Trade-A-Plane, a publication printed on yellow paper, where pilots could buy and sell airplanes and their parts. When the Trade-A-Plane came in the mail, he would dodge his responsibilities and read every classified ad, even if he wasn’t looking to buy or sell because, as he would say, “You never know.” He had lengthy telephone conversations (at a time when long-distance was expensive) with other pilots about planes, even if no buying or selling took place.

Frustrated, my mother once asked him why he needed to save every Trade-A-Plane, and he said, “Well, you never know.” He might want to look up something in one of them. Sounds ridiculous that with decades of old issues, he would be able to find something specific from years ago. Maybe he could have, maybe he couldn’t have, but he was comforted by their presence. They held memories of the planes he bought and sold and dreams of the planes beyond his reach. When he needed to buy a pair of wings for his Cessna 196, he called the airplane junkyards that advertised in the paper. He found a set of wings in New Jersey and had them shipped to Milwaukee.

My father saved the letters his father wrote to his mother in 1937 when she was pregnant with him and in the hospital on bed rest. Her pregnancy had become difficult, and if an emergency developed, the doctor didn’t want her to be an arduous forty-mile drive from the hospital. My father was born on November 24, 1937, and his parents saved a copy of Life magazine from that week, along with the cards family and friends sent on the occasion of his birth. My father treasured all of it. He had a vein of sentimentality that ran deep through his curmudgeonly bedrock. After he died, I inherited these keepsakes, and I cherish them.

The letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while she was in the hospital hold the ordinariness of daily life, recounting the weather, what he ate, how much gas he sold at the station, how deer hunting season was progressing, and when he would be coming to visit her. But with each mundane line, I imagined my grandfather writing around his fears about his young wife and child, praying for them to be well and hoping for them to come home soon. Always he signed his letters, “Lots of love, George.” In one letter he wrote about his day and mentioned he’d gone “to sleep without his bed companion.” It was the only personal line in all of his letters – subtle, but filled with longing to have his wife and child home and to be a family. This would’ve been important to my grandfather who was orphaned when he was eleven years old.

I can leaf through that Life magazine from 1937 and know I’m reading the same pages my father and his parents once read, learning what was newsworthy the week their first baby was born. When I read it, I found an article about Dy-Dee doll, “the most popular doll in the world” because she wet her diapers. My mother-in-law received a Dy-Dee doll for Christmas in 1937. The doll was all the rage, and she never forgot Santa left one for her under the Christmas tree. That 1937 issue of Life is a keeper because it connects me to my father and my mother-in-law, making it something I save. My children will have to throw it away.

I understand why my father kept the letters and artifacts of his childhood. I still have the teddy bear Santa brought me for my first Christmas in 1959. In my forties, I put Teddy in a plastic garbage bag. He had holes in his neck and crotch, and most of his fur had worn off. I tried to throw him away, but I couldn’t. After I pulled Teddy out of the garbage, I told my son, “I just can’t let him go.” And my son, who embraces minimalism to the point of nothingness, said, “Somethings you just need to keep.” So, Teddy sits in my closet on a stack of quilting material. I have my yearbooks and old report cards. I have photographs and a scrapbook. I have toys and clothes and artwork that belonged to my children. I have a pair of onyx owls from Nana and a colorful laughing porcelain Buddha from Grandma Olive. I have an antique hutch filled with glassware. I save all the instructions for every appliance and bike lock I buy. But I sympathized with my mother about Dad’s Trade-A-Plane obsession.

And so, after hanging in a closet for a year, the size 2T Minnesota Wild windbreaker became like my father’s old issues of Trade-A-Plane, no longer useful. Because I wanted others to make happy memories with the jacket, and because having too much clutter in my house unsettles me, it was time to let go. I placed the jacket in the wooden clothes bin at Goodwill. Having heard the door open, a young woman with a broad smile approached me and asked if I needed a receipt. I told her no, and she went back to sorting donations. I turned to leave but I couldn’t, so I grabbed the jacket and laid it on a bin of donated books and took a picture. That helped. It’s what my father would’ve done. He was the champion of taking pictures of everyone and everything. In his later years, he always tucked a small camera in his shirt pocket.

I lifted the jacket off the books, but I wasn’t done yet. I felt compelled to tell its story, so I stepped into the large sorting room, and the young woman asked, “Can I help you?”

I held up the officially licensed NHL windbreaker with the Iron Range Red, Forest Green, Minnesota Wheat, and Harvest Gold “wild animal” logo that appears to be a bear or a wildcat or a wolf. (When asked, the Wild organization will only refer to it as a “wild animal.”) And I told the young woman the story of the jacket’s full-circle journey from Goodwill, through three grandsons, and back to Goodwill.

I felt like an old person telling a story that a young person isn’t particularly interested in hearing, but she smiled, said it was a good story, and thanked me for sharing. I’m fairly certain she meant it. On my way out of the sorting room, I dropped the jacket back into the clothing bin and hoped that soon some child’s parent or grandparent would buy it.

A few weeks later Evan and Charlie came for a sleepover, and we took my dogs for a walk. None of us thought about the windbreaker because it was a clear, cold winter’s night, and we wore snow pants and heavy jackets, knit hats and insulated mittens. We passed the west side of the park, and Evan pointed to a tree and asked, “Do you remember when we circled around this tree last summer?” I didn’t remember, but I said yes because it was important to him. On that particular day, he might have been with his mother at the park, but that’s the slipshod nature of memory. Perhaps that’s why we keep physical remnants from our past. And on that clear, cold winter’s night with stars sparkling above us and a moon peering down at us, I remembered the Minnesota Wild windbreaker I’d given away.

Evan climbed the snowbank by the road, hugged the tree, and said, “This tree holds all my old memories.” He might grow up to be the kind of person who will save every issue of the Trade-A-Plane, all his Nana’s cards and letters, and the instructions for a bike lock. Or perhaps not. But at the agèd year of six, Evan already treasures his memories. And he understands the ability of an object to hold his heart.

Book Review: Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean

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[I’ve read many good books in the past few months. I’m going to review some of them in a series of blog posts. So, if you’re looking for a summer read, maybe you’ll find a book to enjoy in one of my book review posts.]

Why did I read this book?

I bought Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend in 2011 after listening to an interview of Susan Orlean on Minnesota Public Radio. (Click on the blue font to hear her talk about the book. She gives a good interview.)

I’d never seen a Rin Tin Tin movie or TV show, but I’d heard of the famous Rin Tin Tin because he was often referenced in popular culture. Rin Tin Tin’s story appealed to me for two reasons. One, I like reading about the movie industry, especially the history of its beginnings. And two, I grew up with a German Shepherd named Fritz, who was intelligent and kind, and at times heroic. Our Fritz could’ve been the Rin Tin Tin of the silver screen.

Sad to say it took twelve years before I lifted the book off my to-be-read pile of books. Sad because Susan Orlean’s book is a fascinating combination of three stories.

What is this book about?

It’s the story of a man and his love for an extraordinary dog. Orlean’s book follows the life of Lee Duncan who rescues Rin Tin Tin, a German Shepherd puppy, from a bombed out kennel in France during WWI. In a way Rin Tin Tin rescues Duncan, too, because Duncan, who had a tough childhood, is a wounded soul. Duncan brings Rinty, as the dog was sometimes called, home to America. With Duncan’s care and training, Rin Tin Tin becomes a Hollywood superstar during the silent film era. After Rin Tin Tin dies, Duncan continues to work with other German Shepherds who acted in movies and the television show The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

It’s the story of canine and human actors; animal trainers; and Hollywood executives and producers; many of whom become famous and rich (and sometimes bankrupt then rich again then broke again) during the early days of Hollywood and television. Orlean delves into the behind-the-scenes pitches, ideas, deals, and strategies that created and promoted the Rin Tin Tin movies, TV shows, and actors.

It’s the story of Orlean’s fascination, research, and commitment to the story of Rin Tin Tin. She is old enough to remember watching the TV show The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin with her older siblings and loving Rin Tin Tin. But she was only four years old during the last season of the show and remembers nothing about the show itself. She writes about the fascination she and her siblings had with a small Rin Tin Tin toy her grandfather kept on his desk, out of their reach. She remembers the day when, while researching another story, she came across the name Rin Tin Tin, which brought back a flood of memories and emotions about the famous German Shepherd from her childhood. In her book Orlean writes about why she wrote this book, how she did the research, and how the book changed her.

What makes this book memorable?

Orlean is an outstanding journalist, which shows in her dedication to research and her passion for accuracy. Hollywood moguls, however, are in the business of creating legends, and they often spin legendary stories, which light up our imaginations but may have little or no truth to them. Orlean worked to track down the veracity of the many stories that had been handed down about the people and animals in her book. When she can’t find facts to either corroborate or refute a story, she lets readers know. As a reader, I appreciate Orlean’s extra effort to get at the truth, rather than repeating information that may not be true.

It took Orlean ten years to research and write Rin Tin Tin. She was granted access to the vast collection of documents saved by Lee Duncan and other people featured in the story. She interviewed as many people as she could who were connected to the story of Duncan and Rinty. Some of her research included traveling to the places she wrote about, like movie and TV locations where Rin Tin Tin films were shot, and Paris where Rin Tin Tin is supposedly buried in an elegant, verdant pet cemetery.

When Orlean writes about people in her books, she does so in a fair and balanced way, making them neither heroes nor villains. This is something about Orlean’s writing I came to appreciate when I read The Library Book (2018). [I read this nonfiction book a couple of years ago. It would make another excellent summer read.]

I grew up with a German Shepherd. Fritz was born in 1958, and I was born in 1959. After reading Orlean’s book about Rin Tin Tin, I asked my mother why she and my father decided to get a German Shepherd. I wondered because my mother was born in 1940, so too young to have seen the Rin Tin Tin movies. And when The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin ran on TV, she was a teenager, so too old to care about a kid’s show. Without a moment’s hesitation, she answered, “Because they were very smart dogs.” That made sense because Rin Tin Tin’s TV escapades made German Shepherds very popular in the 1950s. So my mother, who didn’t watch Rin Tin Tin as an actor, would’ve heard about the breed’s intelligence and loyalty. And while some German Shepherds have aggressive natures, many like Fritz, are loving and kind.

Orlean’s artful weaving of the stories of Duncan and Rinty, the early days of Hollywood, and her journey to uncover the mystique of Rin Tin Tin makes for an engaging narrative.

[Link to the silent film Clash of the Wolves starring Rin Tin Tin. Link to full-length movie The Return of Rin Tin Tin (1947) with Robert Blake. Episodes of The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin can be found on YouTube, also.]

Riding the Range on a Snapper Comet

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This was only part of our yard. We had land on the other side of the white house, the other side of the curved driveway, and behind the barn and white garage. The hill on which the Snapper became my bucking bronco was just to the left of the barn.

My husband and I live on a small hill. Because of this, we’ve always figured our yard had to be cut with a push mower, but recently we needed to hire a lawn service. Three guys showed up. One maneuvered the weed whacker. One swung a leaf blower. And one drove the riding lawn mower — a zero-turn, wide-cut machine that hugged the hills like a sure-footed mountain goat. I watched with glee, nearly jumping up and down, almost clapping my hands together, wanting to ask if I could take the mower for a spin. I thought, “If we buy one of those zero-turn, wide-cut, mountain-goat mowers, I can cut the grass too.” I used to ride my father’s mower like it was a newly-tamed mustang, and I was a free-wheeling cowgirl.

I was eight years old when I started mowing the 2.2 acres that was our yard, a ponderosa compared to the narrow city lot we moved from when I was five. My dad pIopped me on his 1960s Snapper Comet and taught me how to start, shift, and stop it.

I wasn’t to cut the large rocks that grew behind the barn and garage because they ground lawn mower blades like cowpokes chomping chewing tobacco. I got careless once, and Dad needed to replace the blade. I got careless a second time, and I bent something more serious on the lawn mower. But dad was an excellent mechanic, so he ordered parts and fixed the Snapper.

My father, who could be impatient in many things, was surprisingly calm about my attempt to mow rocks. But after he had to fix the lawn mower a second time, I scoured the back field for rocks, like a ranch hand on the lookout for a stray calf. We lived in southeastern Wisconsin, and thousands of years ago some geological force seeded the earth with large rocks, and every spring several of them would manage to bloom. When the rocks grew too tall, my father would dig them out, place them in a small trailer, and haul them to an overgrown field with a miniature tractor not much bigger than the Snapper.

When I cut the hill by the barn I pretended I was riding a bucking bronco in a rodeo. Because I was so light, I would stand and lean toward the hill to keep the mower’s four wheels on the ground, defying its urge to throw me. I conquered that hill — the only thrill in our otherwise flat yard.

Today, placing an eight-year-old child on a riding lawn mower to cut the grass by herself might be considered child endangerment, but I loved riding the red-and-white Comet, turning in tighter and tighter squares until the whole yard was clipped. No one seemed to think it was unusual — not my mother, not the neighbors, and not me. Besides our Snapper Comet, manufactured in the late sixties, was a pony compared to the muscular draft-horse riding lawn mowers of today.

When my father and mother moved to Tucson in 1977, they didn’t take the Snapper Comet with them. No need to cut the desert sands. My parents divorced in 1983, but my father remained in Tucson. After I married and had children, my father returned to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks every summer. He visited me, other relatives, and friends.

Years later on one of my father’s visits to Wisconsin, he found the same model as our 1960s Snapper Comet at a garage sale and bought it. I didn’t ask him why he bought a riding lawn mower to take home to Tucson, where he lived at an airpark without a blade of grass. But he did have a big garage, so he had plenty of space to store it.

But I looked at the Comet and remembered my bronco riding on the hill by the barn — a hill that seems so small now. I wondered if my father looked at that Comet and thought about teaching his daughters to mow the lawn. I wondered if he thought about the 2.2 acres and the farmhouse where his children mostly grew up, a time when we were all together, before several moves and a divorce separated all the things he held dear.

So now, my husband and I have a riding lawn mower savings account. Next spring we’re buying a zero-turn, wide-cut machine that hugs the hills like a mountain goat. I’m going to learn how to operate it. I’m going to cut the hills — at least once. There will be some who say I should stay off the draft horse. But my father, if he were still alive, wouldn’t be one of them. He’d tell me to hop on up. He’d teach me how to start, shift, and stop it. He’d help me shout, “Yippie-i-oh, Yippie-i-ay! Rawhide!”

Tina Turner Died Today

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Sunset Beach, Fish Creek, Door County, 2023

I loved her voice and the way she danced and strutted across the stage, giving every song her all. She was power and elegance and talent.

As kids my sisters and I loved Ike and Tina Turner’s version of “Rolling on a River.” We loved how they started the song out “nice and easy” because as Tina said, “we never, ever do nothing nice and easy” then halfway through they rocked the song like a river bursting over its banks.

We called Milwaukee’s Fun-Loving WOKY at 920 on your AM dial. They took requests. So we asked, “Can you play ‘Rolling on a River’ the way Ike and Tina Turner sing it?”

“Sure,” someone at WOKY said. After all, they were Fun-Loving.

Instead they played “Rolling on a River” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Disappointed, we called again and again, asking for the “nice and easy” version. But we were kids, and we pissed them off with our insistence they get our request right. They told us they wouldn’t play Ike and Tina Turner’s version because they’d just played the CCR version.

We gave it a rest. But we called every couple of days, asking to hear “Rolling on a River” by Ike and Tina Turner. Fun-Loving WOKY at 920 on your AM dial never honored our request. After a couple of weeks we gave up.

Today I didn’t need to call a request line to hear Tina Turner sing “Rolling on River.” I’ve got YouTube. I watched three different versions of Tina sing and dance to the best version ever of “Rolling on River.” And I was twelve years old again.

Ike and Tina Turner live in 1971 singing “Proud Mary.”

Tina Turner live in the Netherlands in 1996 singing “Proud Mary.”

Tina Turner live in 1999 singing “Proud Mary” with Elton John on piano and a duet with Cher.

A Vacancy in the Neighborhood

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Flowers in Mrs. H’s garden

I look out my kitchen window. I can see Mrs. H’s house. She died last November at the age of ninety-one. Yellow caution tape runs from the road, past the side of her house, and toward the back of her yard where her magnificent gardens, filled with daffodils and tulips and other flowers I can’t name, bloom every spring. The caution tape evokes the feeling of a crime scene, but it’s simply there to keep the people at the estate sale from trampling through the gardens. Cars park up and down her block and the next block and on my block. People line up outside her front door, waiting to enter her home, hoping for bargains at the estate sale. I think about Scrooge’s visit with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and the scene with gleeful characters scavenging through the belongings of the recently dead Scrooge.

I’m not saying Mrs. H was like Scrooge, she wasn’t, or the people in line are gleeful, they’re not, but this is what I think about. I waver about whether or not I will go to the estate sale. Going into Mrs. H’s home — looking at her possessions, which under normal circumstances would have been in cupboards and closets and drawers — feels like an invasion of her privacy.

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for twenty-seven years. Mrs. H was here when I moved in, but I’ve never been inside her house. We were of different generations. But I liked her well enough and enjoyed our brief chats when she walked by my house, first with one Miniature Schnauzer then later on after that dog died, with another one.

Even though going to the estate sale feels like an invasion of her privacy, I’m curious about what her house looks like inside. It’s adorable from the outside — one of my favorites on the street. I might buy something as a keepsake.

I keep watch out my kitchen window, and when the line of people is gone, I grab my purse and walk to Mrs. H’s house. I don’t have to knock to enter, but I do have to take off my shoes.

The front door empties into the living room filled with used furniture. There is a three-person couch for $800, a small outdated stuffed chair and ottoman for $700, and a four-person couch for $900. So much for bargains.

I notice the picture hanging on Mrs. H’s wall has been straightened and marked with a $40 price tag. It’s from the 1980s, like something that hung in a middle-class hotel. For almost a year before Mrs. H died, the picture hung crooked on her wall. Every evening when I walked my dogs past her house, I wondered why she didn’t straighten it. Eventually, I came to believe the crooked picture meant something was wrong with her.

One afternoon, as I walked my dogs by Mrs. H’s house, I ran into her daughter. I asked how her mother was doing. She answered, “Not good.” Her mother was suffering from dementia. I told the daughter about the crooked picture on the wall, that it had convinced me something wasn’t right with her mother. After our conversation, I thought the daughter might straighten it, but she didn’t. The picture remained crooked for months, a signal flag of Mrs. H’s difficulties.

I wander through the house. Its rooms are small, but neat. Simply decorated but bland. Everything is clean. There isn’t much for sale in the house. I get the impression that Mrs. H didn’t like to clutter up her small home with lots of stuff. Objects are $10, $15, $20, $30, $50, $60, $90, and more. If this were a rummage sale, the same objects would be a fraction of the cost. I don’t buy anything, and I don’t stay long. I feel like an interloper. But once outside, I take pictures of some beautiful flowers in one of Mrs. H’s gardens.

Everything changes. Mrs. H is gone. Mr. H died eight years ago. The dishes and tools and clothes and knickknacks that made up their lives are being sold. Mrs. H’s gardens didn’t winter well, and the daffodils and tulips, usually plentiful and jovial, are sparse and lonely. Someone new will live in the house. Mrs. H’s daughter-in-law isn’t sure if the family will sell the home. Perhaps one of the family will live in the home. If they sell it, I hope someone with children will move into the house. When I first moved to this neighborhood, it was filled with children, including my own, and I miss the shouts and the laughter of children playing outside.

Walk in Another Person’s Shoes, A Lesson Learned from Mom

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[This personal essay was published in the April/May 2023 issue of Our Wisconsin. Last year and this year, the editors asked for submissions on the theme “Lessons Learned from Mom” in honor of Mother’s Day. Our Wisconsin is a print-only magazine. Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who mothers someone.]

Me (l) and my sister (r), circa 1963, about a year before our candy caper.

Mom taught us to think about how our actions affected other people. My sister and I were about 5 and 6 the first time I remember Mom delivering this lesson.

We lived in rural Franklin, Wisconsin, a mile north of the Racine County border. Sometimes Mom shopped at a small, independent grocery store. It was nearby, and she liked the store’s butcher shop.

On an autumn day around 1965, Mom loaded us into the car for a trip to the local store, which my sister and I relished. The vibrant-colored penny candy located by the checkout counter made our mouths water. Our pockets normally jingled with coins from our piggy banks, but Halloween was creeping up, so Mom had nixed buying sweets. “You’ll soon have plenty of candy,” she said. “Leave your money home.” We grumbled but left the house with empty pockets.

The store was old-fashioned compared to the supermarket where Mom usually shopped. At the supermarket, we had to stay with Mom, so we didn’t get lost. At the local store, we could roam. Mom could either see or hear us from anywhere in the store.

Mom walked to the back of the store to talk to the butcher. My sister and I remained near the candy. We yearned for Life Savers.

While Mom talked to the butcher, our chance arrived. The cashier left the counter while other shoppers browsed the aisles. I grabbed a roll of Life Savers and stuffed it into my pocket. “We’ll share them,” I whispered to my sister.

Mom finished shopping and paid the cashier. The pilfered goods rested in my pocket. My sister and I didn’t attempt to eat them in the backseat on the way home. Mom had something akin to eyes in the back of her head.

After returning home, Mom put groceries away in the kitchen, and my sister and I sat in the family room, opening the Life Savers. A debate about favorite flavors, eclipsed caution. Mom heard us arguing and appeared in the doorway connecting the kitchen to the family room.

“Where did you get those?” Her voice squashed our argument and dread rendered us speechless. We knew that she knew.

“Did you pay for those?” she asked.

We shook our heads. Lying to Mom wouldn’t work. She’d call the store to check.

“Get a nickel from your bank.” She glared at us. “You’re returning the candy, paying for it, and apologizing to the owner.”

The words, apologize to the owner, were the harshest part of the punishment. The butcher, a muscular man, owned the store. He wore a white apron splattered with blood. He chopped meat into chunks with sharp knives. Would he be holding a big knife when my sister and I had to stand before him and admit we robbed him? Would he yell at us?

Driving back to the store, Mom painted various scenarios, hoping we’d absorb what she said. She wanted us to understand the far-reaching effects our seemingly insignificant 5-cent theft might cause.

“You didn’t just steal from a store—you stole from the owner, a person.”

I hadn’t thought about that.

“He has a wife and children. If people steal from him, he can’t pay his bills. His family will go hungry.”

I pictured his starving children.

“He won’t be able to pay his employees, and their families will go hungry.”

I pictured more starving children. Guilt joined my apprehension.

“You stole from him, his family, his employees.”

I pictured a line of angry people.

“If he doesn’t make money, his store will close. His customers will be unhappy.”

Mom’s talk continued all the way to the store. I don’t remember what the butcher said to us, but he wasn’t holding a knife and he didn’t yell.

I never shoplifted again. When my 7th grade friends wanted to steal gum from a drugstore, I refused to go with them. I remembered Mom’s lesson—I wouldn’t just be stealing a pack of gum.

Mom applied this lesson to other situations, compelling us to be mindful of people’s feelings, explaining thoughtless behavior hurts people. But the hidden gem in her moral? We learned humanity.

[Essay appears here as it was submitted.]

A Birthday Anniversary

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Sandi and me, July 2017

Today my dear friend Sandi would’ve been eighty years old. She isn’t here to celebrate because she died almost five years ago. But if she were here, she would tell everyone she didn’t like having birthdays, she didn’t want to celebrate her birthday, and if anyone mentioned her birthday, she would be angry. One year her family took her at her word, and she was deeply hurt. (I hadn’t been so foolish.) I knew her birthday needed quiet acknowledgement: a card in the mail, a text, an invitation to lunch for “a chance to chat,” and a small inexpensive, but just-what-she-wanted gift.

The first time I met Sandi was in a law office. She was a paralegal, and I was a newly hired paralegal. When our mutual boss introduced us, he added, “Vickie has an English degree.” (I rarely tell people I’m an English major because I’ve learned they think I’m secretly judging their grammar. I also don’t want them secretly judging my grammar.) Sandi remarked, “Oh, good. That’ll be useful because I can never keep the possessive-apostrophe-s rules straight.” I told her I struggled with affect/effect and to lie vs. to lay. I thought about Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains in Casablanca. I suspected the sharing of our grammatical weaknesses was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Later we would laugh about this. She had been intimidated by my being an English major. But it turned out, having attended a private, rigorous Baptist school, she had some good grammar chops herself.

I was forty-five when I met Sandi, who was sixteen years older than me. And the first time I met her oldest son, he said, “I’m surprised that given the age difference you and my mom are such good friends.” I answered, “Your mom’s a little young for me, but I try to be tolerant.” He burst out laughing with the same raucous from-the-bottom-of-his-belly laugh that often erupted from Sandi. “Point taken,” he said. He knew exactly what I meant about his mother.

One year, just after Sandi had become sick, I cleaned her garage for her as a birthday present. Her son owned the house where she lived and he was coming to visit. Through no fault of her own, the garage was a mess and she knew he would be upset. She couldn’t get the responsible party to clean it, and she didn’t have the strength to clean it herself. However, she was embarrassed about me cleaning up the mess, until I pointed out to her that it was a free birthday present, and weren’t we always about free or very inexpensive presents? It took me hours over the course of a couple of days to sort, stack, and sweep the mess into submission. But Sandi and I had some good times going to the Goodwill and to the hazardous waste disposal site together. If you can have fun going to the dump with someone, that’s friendship. A week later when her son arrived, the garage was shipshape, and he complimented his mother on how good it looked. She told him it looked good because she had been given the best birthday present ever.

I think of Sandi every day, and on some days, I cry because she isn’t here. But I did my heavy sobbing when she was still alive. I’d come home from visiting her and sit on my wooden deck stairs and sob.

A picture of two white ducks paddling on water that her niece painted hangs on my family room wall. Because she knew I loved the painting, she gave it to me before she died. A quilt graced with cheerful red cardinals perched in pine trees that she made for me rests on my bed. And when I turn out the lights before going to bed, two LED nightlights glow from outlets in my house, ready to light my way should I need to move about in the dark. When she gave the motion sensor nightlights to me, I looked at her rather dubiously. I’m not a gadget person, but she was. She had a light-up-in-the-dark toilet seat that could be set to glow in different colors. She assured me I would grow to appreciate their usefulness. But what I’ve really come to appreciate is that I think of those nightlights as her watching out for me.

Sandi and I agreed on important stuff. Like Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich were the funniest, but the casting for the movie One for the Money was awful. That Antiques Road Show was binge-worthy, but we should always begin watching it with Dairy Queen treats in hand. That potato salad should always be made from scratch and only with real mayo. That sometimes husbands and children had to be humored.

We loved British sitcoms, The Full Monty, and inside jokes. We shared an irreverent, nonlinear, cheeky sense of humor. We could poke fun of each other, ourselves, and situations, making one another laugh out loud, sometimes hysterically, which always made her snort.

But we always knew when to batten down the hatches and look out for one another. That is, after all, why she gave me the motion sensor nightlights.