Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Sphere of Influence
Morning porch coffee
Skirt or pants boots black or red
Meeting across town
Starting the Year with Two Funerals
We have two funerals this week.
One is for a longtime community activist and the other for a former alderman, people we’ve known for forty years. I won’t eulogize them here. They were just really solid people who showed up consistently over decades, listened to people, spoke up, and wrestled with the endless job of making things better. Are we better off because these two were on the earth? I suppose we are but we don’t have metrics. We just have what we want to believe.
I wonder who will be at their funerals. There will be family, for sure, and their oldest friends, even though both of the deceased were plenty old themselves. I remember my 89-year-old dad telling me his friends were dying and it was harder to find someone to play golf with. So there may not be many of their contemporaries there, but my husband and I would be close. Still junior to both of them as they would surely point out, especially as they retrieved various bits of advice to give us. They saw that as their job – nudging us to do better, warning us about this or that. Now we don’t have anybody doing that. We’re on our own out here.
Who will come to the funerals becomes a question of who will remember? I remember my brother waving away the need to have a funeral for my 84-year-old mother because, as he kind of heartlessly put it, “Who would come?” One of the people who passed away was still very present in local goings-on, a fixture at fundraisers and government meetings. The other had been in assisted living for a long time, retired from public life. So we don’t know who will show up, whether we need to arrive early to get a good seat or can wander in at the last minute. And then there’s the matter of what to wear.
There are people who refer to their blogs as musings. That might be what this is, a directionless riff on two funerals this week. Not everything has a beginning, middle, and an end. Sometimes there is just the end and figuring out what to make of it.
Typing My Way to Victory
Central Michigan University, Michigan State University (2x), University of Michigan-Flint, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2x). My college education started in 1966 and ended in 1986. I just this minute realized that my trudge through higher education consumed twenty years.
But the real question is what colleges I attended, it’s why I went to college at all.
My dad said I was going. I didn’t quarrel, having already spent several years working the candy counter and feeding the parakeets in our dime store. The summer before leaving for college I worked as a secretary for a little company selling Carbo-Lastic! a roofing sealant. It was fascinating.
My dad said I could be a teacher, nurse, or secretary. I didn’t quarrel, those did seem to be the options for women then, this wasn’t him just voicing low expectations. I could already type ‘like a bat out of hell’ but he did insist that I take a shorthand class in college.
My dad paid for three semesters of college and then told me he was driving to Mt. Pleasant (where Central Michigan University is located) to bring me home because my continued presence there was corrupting me. He was right about that, but it still seemed an overreaction.
After that sad episode, I got a job where I typed and took shorthand. “Jan, can you take a letter?” Yes, someone said that to me almost every day for a year, until I screwed up my little courage, applied to Michigan State, quit my fulltime job, and went back to school. I got a job doing the weekly bulletin at a local Lutheran Church. I typed it on a stencil that was then mimeographed. This was the single most aggravating task ever, next only to matching a plaid on a handsewn blouse.
The rest is history, many semesters, several schools. Much typing, so much typing. College then was something people could actually work their way through, pay as you go. My heart goes out to young people who have to mortgage their lives to get an education. I was lucky, but also very determined. And I ended up not being a teacher, nurse, or secretary. So there’s that.
Kick the Can Friday Round-Up
Writing a story where I know the main character pretty well but have no idea what she’s going to do is a weird sort of playing but I like it. Yesterday, I pulled a character from a murder mystery my husband and I wrote in 2021 (Murder in Wilson Park) and put her in a new story. Her essential feature is that she cuts her own hair but that becomes a metaphor for her entire presence on the earth. Sally is salty, brave, self-doubting, and loveable so it’s fun to hang out with her.
Another version of playing is our early morning sits in our pajamas and big parkas on the back porch. These have been temporarily suspended due to extremely cold weather. We seemed to have evolved a rule that temperatures below ten degrees means we retreat with our coffee to bed. The fun of the back porch is manifest in talking in sign language (because I am without my implant processors), remarking on one or more dog’s peculiar behavior, and watching the birds including the single woodpecker and cardinal that show up amidst the 10,000 sparrows.
Joyful people are so attractive. The photos of New York Mayor Mamdani riding the subway the day after his swearing-in are delicious. Google him, see for yourself. I love people who just smile unrelentingly. Mamdani is like that. Nothing about Mamdani seems calculated or manufactured. He seems so happy and so full of the greatest energy for change. Inspirational, even for this Midwest gal 43 years his senior.
I am about to listen to Episode 6 of Rachel Maddow’s Burn Order. This is a deeply researched, carefully and engagingly written, gripping history lesson about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. It is a podcast that is free wherever you find your podcasts. And let me tell you this. The facts, the documentation, the storytelling, the voices of real people – you will be blown away, first by how hideous and wrong the decision process to round up Japanese Americans was and second by how pitifully little most of us know about this terrible time in American history.
Time to kick the can into a new year. For me that means shedding a couple of roles that were really important to me and taking on some new responsibilities. I’m happy to say that I’ve been appointed to the Executive Council of AARP-Wisconsin. It’s an advisory body without a huge amount of authority but it’s an opportunity for advocacy and engagement that is really appealing to me. 800,000 AARP members in Wisconsin – how do we engage all those folks in advocating for the best possible future for older adults? Anyway, that’s my new gig. I’m pretty happy about it. New year, new can.
Meeting: A New Year’s Day Story (Fiction)
Sally was fed up with the mockery about how she cut her own hair. Her friends thought she was cheap or crazy or both, but she shrugged them off. Why give all that money to somebody to do what you could do yourself with a sharp pair of scissors and a good mirror. Layering was hard, she’d admit that, and a mistake could mean weeks of wearing a hat, but the savings were amazing.
It was mostly Sally’s pals at the senior center who gave her a hard time. Her two best friends, Debbie and Esmeralda, tried to take her to an actual salon once, but Sally got right up out of the chair when the cute young ‘stylist’ looked at her slyly in the mirror and said, “And what are we thinking today?”
“Who’s we?” Sally answered and then undid the velcro on her smock, muttering about how using the royal ‘we’ really didn’t sit well with her. It was the excuse to scram that she’d been hoping for.
Still, there was that one guy at the meal program. He always wore a red flannel shirt with Levis, suspenders even though he was pretty skinny – she always though suspenders were for big round guys who could thread a belt through the loops. Anyway, Sally thought to herself, if I had better hair would he maybe talk to me?
Her mother had told her if you want a boy to talk to you, don’t sit in the middle of a bunch of girls. So Sally had taken to working the lunchroom, volunteering to pour coffee and bring people milk if they asked. She figured if she was on the move, maybe he’d see an opportunity. But he just sat by himself by the door reading a paperback book, the kind you used to get at the drugstore, small but very thick.
He had great hair. Thick wavy gray hair, a mass of it, he had to have been a knockout when he was younger. Sally hypothesized about all this. Why he had such great hair and what was he reading? And was she even cute enough for a guy to put down his book? After all, everybody in the place was really old including her and the bookworm. She wondered who cut his hair.
She decided to take affirmative action. Grabbing the coffee pot, she headed for Mr. Great Hair. She nudged him gently on the shoulder. “More coffee?”
“You don’t remember me, do you?” He folded down the page of his book and put it on the table. Sally froze, holding the coffee pot like a bouquet of flowers in her hand. She shook her head no. No, she didn’t remember him.
He rubbed his forehead like he was just coming out of a bad migraine. “Well, I wish you knew who I was but it’s okay that you don’t. I’m your brother. Glen. My name is Glen.
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Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash
Little Lucks in the Winter
A thousand missteps
Locks locked lost, turned around west
No falling on ice
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Photo by Anya Chernykh on Unsplash
Durant Diary: Entry #9
For a while last week, Durant would refuse to come in the house.
One of us thought the cat had spooked him. The other one thought maybe he was homesick for Alaska, that he felt better curling up on the straw in his doghouse than he did on the carpet in the living room.
Either way for a while we had to cajole him to come in the house, work at it for a good while. He seemed distant that whole time, all in himself. My husband said he was being ’emotional.’ It felt like he was withdrawing. Choosing a kennel life instead of a family one. In the morning when we did our sit on the porch, he’d head for his doghouse, no interest in being petted or fussed over.
It was disconcerting and depressing.
But then he turned around. Tail wagging. Wanting to be where I was. Standing still while I brushed him. Burrowing his head under my arm while I pet him. Here he is lying on the floor in my office, something he’s not done before.
He’s a dog that has had a very big life before coming here. Thousands of miles running, nights camped out in the snow, mountains and rivers and hairpin turns with a dozen other dogs. Other people who buried their heads in his wild forest fur and smelled his massive doggedness. Maybe he misses all that. Maybe he doesn’t. There is no way of knowing.
I know this, though. He carries around his history. You can see it in his face.
Keepsakes Gonna Keep
I dumped about forty years of work in the garbage bin yesterday. Research reports, community plans, funding proposals, evaluations, some of them with some pretty great graphics and spiffy spiral binding. Writing that just now I had a twinge. I’d run out and retrieve it all but it’s raining hard. Plus, there’re likely five bags of passers-by dogs’ poop on the top of the heap. Appropriate.
Under all the professional detritus were the cleverly crammed envelopes of dozens of unrelated photos of kids, newspaper clippings about the reports that were already in the dumper, and letters. Letters from my older daughter from her time away at college and then in the U.K., Spain, and New York. I kept them all, even one that is a thin grey fading fax, especially that one. Letters from my sister telling me how generous and helpful I was, yes, the same one who hasn’t spoken to me in decades. Ah. History.
And then there was this letter from my dad.
He wrote to me a few days after he and my mother had come to Milwaukee for my graduation from UWM forty years ago. Here is the letter.
There are three reasons why I love this letter. First, I was 38 when I received it and this was the first time he’d ever said anything about being proud of me. Second, he forgot his beige golf jacket which he needed me to send back because he couldn’t wear his blue golf jacket with green pants. And third, it has a bunch of typos in it which was weird for him since he could type, as he would say like a bat out of hell, but he sent it anyway, I think because he was so eager to wear his green pants golfing. There was also the part about buying bushes that appeared to be nearly dead but were cheap, so what the hey. The whole letter is so him.
What luck to find it.
Whoever is here after I’m gone will have to deal with this letter. Right now, I’m putting it back in the stack. Keepsakes gonna keep.
Always is the Time of Wanting Plenty
I eschew bare cupboards.
I want the cupboards to be full, not to overflowing, but well-stocked so I know that if all else fails, there will be pasta with butter and Parmesan cheese. My mother kept powdered milk in the cupboard in case we ran out of real milk and it would be a while until she could go grocery shopping. Powdered milk mixed with water is thin and bluish, almost like mother’s milk, and drinkable only if it is very, very cold. I remember the box on the high up shelf. Carnation.
It’s the same with towels and socks and underwear. I want to always have a stack of clean towels, a pile of good socks, socks that wear well if the wearer lives in Wisconsin where it is currently snowing in the middle of April, and underwear that fits me and sits folded in little stacks in my dresser drawer. Having these things and some decent jeans is to avoid want.
My grandmother kept jars of preserves and vegetables on shelves lining the basement stairs. She had long since quit canning, but the jars remained. She didn’t want to eat what was in them but wasn’t ready to throw them out either. I’m betting the jars conjured the sense of well-being that came from having a full larder. A Depression-era mom, she had kept apples and potatoes in the fruit cellar; the fruit was gone but the bushel baskets were still there. I’d see them when I’d go with her into the basement to watch her shovel coal into her furnace. Then she switched to oil, I think. I don’t remember.
At the grocery today, I bought pie crusts, the kind that are rolled up in a tube and all you have to do is unroll them into a pie tin. I long ago gave up making my own pie crust though many would say my reputation as a baker of great pies is sullied by this omission. I don’t tell anyone upfront and if they compliment my pie I let the compliment stand, not wanting to embarrass them for not having noticed the pie crust’s obvious inadequacy. Anyway, I’m not baking a pie today or anytime soon. We have cake. But having the pie crusts means that I could bake a pie if I wanted to. That’s a great comfort to me, knowing that.
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Originally published in 2018 but still holds true today. I love a full larder stocked with canned beans and corned beef hash. And tomato soup. Plenty of tomato soup.
The Daily Post: Deplete
Photo by Nonki Azariah on Unsplash
The Sound of Things Falling
There was a crash. And then the discovery of a large picture fallen to the foyer floor and glass everywhere.
That’s the second picture to fall off the wall in as many days.
This one was a big, framed poster from a museum in Washington, D.C. Before it was hung on the hook from which it fell, a hundred-year-old wood framed mirror had hung from the very same hook for forty-two years.
We didn’t put the mirror back up after the replastering and repainting because its hanging wire had come undone, so we went for a bit of color to liven things up.
Now, the wall is barren, without a mirror or a striking poster or even the hook from which both of them hung. It’s as if they were never there.
The first picture to fall was a beloved photo of three of our kids in a hammock in the Upper Peninsula. When we attempted to rescue the photo from the frame, we saw it had become one with the glass so the only option to save the image was to take a picture of the picture in all its brokenness.
Oh well.
In between the breakages, I saw the obituary for a beloved community leader. But there was also a walk with the dogs and plans made for tomorrow.
Stuff just happens. It’s not a sign of anything except the hooks in the walls had just worn themselves out. Which is some kind of little allegory if you want to twist yourself into a knot about it. Which I might on a different day but not today.
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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