topTender Care | Garage Sale Treasures | The Tree Next Door
A Wooden Heart Song | The Immigrant
Tender Care
I was raised in a two-career family. My father was a policeman, often working long hours and/or the night shift. My mother was a teacher, so once I started school, our hours were pretty much the same.
Back when I was a kid, pre-schools and latchkey programs were yet to be born. People relied on relatives and trusted friends and nannies. Before I started school, I was watched over, at different times, by Mrs. B. and dear Markie.
Mrs. B lived in a quaint house a couple of streets over from my own. I truly don't even remember what the woman looked like, but I remember her house. It was stucco and painted a deep forest green with white trim. The doorway was a huge A-frame that felt like the entrance to a castle. It was a smallish house, but immaculately kept. I was the only child in Mrs. B's care, and had her undivided attention while I was there. I remember the pale grey of her wall-to-wall carpet. I remember the dining room with china cabinets and a lace runner down the center of the table. And on that lace runner sat a bowl, always full, always tempting - filled with hard candies, butterscotch. At the end of each day, just before being retrieved by my mother, Mrs. B would reach into that bowl and hand me a butterscotch candy. I would unwrap it slowly, enjoying the crinkle-screech of the plastic as it untwisted. That first taste on my tongue as my saliva melted the sugars down was buttery and sweet and oh-so-good. It was the most delicious candy in the whole wide world!
Mrs. B would smile fondly at me and promise me another piece tomorrow. And I always, always knew that Mrs. Butterscotch would keep her promise.
Markie was a family friend. She and her husband had no children. They were both retired teachers.
Markie's house was the antithesis of Mrs. B's house. A huge, labyrinthian monster of a house, surrounded by trees on all sides. You entered it through a side door, a "mud porch". I'm not even sure if the front door was accessible; I know that I never once used it.
Inside was dark, but somehow, remarkably, not frightening. There was much furniture, and books, and magazines, and "things" - items collected over the years by Markie and her husband. It was the most fascinating house on earth for exploration. A trek to the sunporch would deliver you into a huge space, cluttered with paper everywhere. Against one wall stood a piano; but not just any old piano - this was a player piano! A piano that even I could play! I spent hours randomly choosing scrolls from the pigeon-hole shelves on the wall, inserting them into the open doors in front of me, and pumping the pedals until my legs hurt. I could make music!
Sometimes I would sit with Markie in one of the big overstuffed chairs in the living room, curled up on her lap as she read stories to me. Markie was a marvelous story teller, acting out all of the parts - her voice would change and her free hand would spin through the air in elaborate gestures.
We spent a lot of time in the huge farmhouse-style kitchen. Markie would bake cookies and cakes for me and she always let me help. I would crack the eggs, or stir the batter, or spoon out cookie dough. When the cooking was done, the room smelled of cinnamon and butter and warm hugs. We would sit at the big oak table eating cookies and drinking milk and Markie would talk to me, and listen to me talk. She was always interested in everything I had to say, and never rushed me, never dismissed me. It was as if I was the most important person in the world, when we were together.
Mrs. B and Markie always made me feel very special...which shows just how special they were.
When I read articles, or watch TV coverage, indicating that a two-career family is harmful to children, that they need their mother at home with them while they grow up, I inevitably think of Mrs. B and Markie. I think of what I would have lost had they never cared for me: the importance of promises kept, the appreciation of music, self-reliance, the variety between people, the magic of books, the pride in being myself, learning to express myself.......
..................................................the tenderness of caring.
Garage Sale Treasures
I had two friends that were dorm mates in college. I was there at the same time but housed in another building.
The suites in their dorm were designed to house 2 people per room, with a connecting bathroom to another room which also housed 2 people. It was popular to have a loft installed in these rooms, providing a sleeping area above the room itself, freeing up the floor space for desks, living/lounging areas. My friends had one of these lofts. Although the rooms weren't large, with careful planning it was possible to fit in several pieces of furniture. It was common practice to acquire furniture as hand-me-downs from the parents, older siblings and rummage sales.
One of my friends came home one day with the "perfect" garage sale find. It was a rocking chair; painted white and made of wicker with a covered cushion on the seat. The kind of chair that was so popular during the 50's; seen on wide porches where families took their leisure on warm summer nights, nodding and chatting to the neighbors passing by for an evening stroll.
It was a lovely chair. They placed it in the corner of the room and it became one of the primary seating pieces in the room. Of course, there were a few people who soon stopped using it, complaining about the draft in that corner.
One night both friends were sleeping in the loft as usual, when one of them woke up in need of the bathroom. She began to descend the ladder when she heard something and paused. Distinctly, in the room below her, she heard the rocking chair in motion. As she continued down the ladder, she could feel the coldness of the room. She stepped down to the floor and peered into the corner, where she saw the chair moving rhythmically, back and forth. Then, out of the darkness of the corner, from the chair, she heard a deep male voice... "During the day this is your place. At night, it is MINE!".
She sprinted to the bathroom, terrified, and cowered in there for thirty minutes. She listened at the door for further sounds, but heard nothing. Eventually, she dared to open the door and peer into the room. Nothing; no noise, no movement. She headed towards the ladder that led to the loft and was startled by the sudden rocking of the chair, and the coalescing chill in the room. She climbed the ladder at double speed, burrowed into the blankets and quivered for what seemed forever, before falling into an exhausted sleep.
Within a week, the rocking chair sat at somebody else's rummage sale, waiting patiently for its next owner.
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The Tree Next Door
We lived in the suburbs, on a three block street lined with boxy little houses built in the early 1950's. Houses meant to shelter all those fresh-faced baby boom families. Interspersed in the neighborhood were a few old homes. These were houses that had stood on this land for a much longer time, having once been the anchors of farms that claimed the land here in the past. They were old houses, large brooding structures shaded by tall leafy oak trees. They were nothing like the bright little square structures in their empty fenced in yards.
There were lots of children in the neighborhood and we all played together after school and on weekends, moving freely from yard to yard, rec room to rec room. On school days, kids would start out of their homes on the far end of the street first, and be joined by others as they made their way towards the school, a few blocks over.
Across the street from our house stood one of those old farmhouses, completely surrounded by trees. In one of those trees hung a shrunken head.
I was around five years old when I first became aware of the tree and its grisly trophy. That's when my world expanded and I started walking to school. My best friend lived at the far end of the street, on the opposite side, in the direction of the school. On our way to pick her up, my big sister and I would first cross the street in front of our house.
It was the end of summer when school opened, and the neighborhood was still green, the trees carried their leaves proudly and lawns glowed emerald in the sun. Then autumn came and the leaves began to fall. One day we crossed the street and my sister paused on the sidewalk, releasing my hand. She pointed up at the tree and said "Look." I looked, up into the nearly bare branches of that old oak, and saw the sky. "What?" She pointed into the branches of the tree, directing my gaze. "There!" I saw something hanging off of one of the branches. I squinted, unsure of what I was seeing. "It's a shrunken head, you know. The people that live here catch people, kill them and shrink their heads, like in the jungle!" I looked hard at the object, at its red skin and long stringy black hair, the blackened, puckered areas around its eyes, nostrils and mouth... and ran.
Later, at school, when I told my friend about the shrunken head I was surprised to learn that she already knew about it. Her older sister had told her, just as mine had told me. The older kids in the neighborhood all possessed this secret knowledge and, when the time was right, passed it on to their younger siblings. It was also known that as long as you did not walk under the tree, you were safe from the morbid talisman and the mysterious occupants of the house.
We lived on the street for two more years after this revelation. During that time it became an unconscious habit to avoid that section of sidewalk, the tree and the shrunken head. Then, when I was seven, we packed up and moved to another city, and a house very similar to that brooding farmhouse across the street.
When I was in my early teens, on a visit back to the old neighborhood, I remembered the shrunken head and took a walk down the block to see if it was still there. It was autumn and the branches of the oak had only a few brown leaves clinging to them. I looked up and scanned those branches, my eyes finally finding what I sought. It swayed slightly about eight feet above me, its nylon thread looped around a small twig. The red of its plastic face was more pink now, faded from years of exposure to the elements, and much of the nylon hair had fallen out from the scalp it had been looped into. I smiled, wondering who had first placed it there, imagining some neighbor child tossing it into the air at random on Halloween and feeling their disappointment at its catching accidently on a branch instead of returning to them. I realized that I really didn't remember ever seeing the occupants of this house, that I was not even sure there had been any during that time. I thought briefly about trying to retrieve the plastic toy myself, but then thought, "Every neighborhood needs a shrunken head."
I laughed and walked away.
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A Wooden Heart Song
My mother's father was an irascible old man. He rarely smiled, didn't join in casual conversation or socialize. In later years, long after he had died, I would find out that he had suffered with a physical condition which caused him constant pain in his jaw and face.
He was grandfather to four girls and one boy. I was the youngest. The four oldest grandchildren were frightened by him, and didn't try to engage him in any way. When we visited my grandparents' home, they could be found outside or in any room but the one my grandfather was in. Like a dog that is drawn first to the person that dislikes it most, or smoke which insists on blowing into the non-smokers face, I was always at his side.
If he was sitting in his recliner watching television, I would climb up into his lap, snuggling into his shoulder to watch with him. If he was out in his workshed puttering, I would be out there with him, chattering away and asking countless questions about the tools I found there. If he was out in the garden, I would be kneeling beside him, pulling the weeds he pointed to. On hot summer afternoons, we could be found napping in the hammock that he kept in the backyard.
I had a favorite doll, her name was Laura. Grandma had given her to me for Christmas and she was beautiful. She had long dark brown hair plaited into pigtails, and a blue velvet pinafore dress. Laura went everywhere with me until the day when I was playing in the front yard of my grandparents' house, and Laura's plastic leg cracked and fell off. Grandma inspected her and announced that she would take Laura to the Doll Hospital, since they might have an extra leg for her. A week later, Grandma told me how sorry she was, but Laura couldn't be fixed and she had been left at the Doll Hospital. I was heartbroken.
A few weeks later, I was playing in the shade of a tree at my grandparents, the same tree that I had been playing under when Laura's leg fell off. I heard the screen door open and close and looked up to see Grandpa approaching me. He stood over me as I sat on the ground, then brought a hand out from behind his back and held it out to me, his expression solemn as always. In his hand he held Laura. She was more beautiful than ever, her dress wrinkle free, her hair shining, her blue eyes sparkling... and she had two complete legs! One of them was the flesh-covered molded plastic I remembered, but the other one...the other leg was carved wood, the tone matching almost perfectly to the original. It curved at the calf, and dimpled at the knee and ended in five exquisitely carved toes!
I squealed with delight, hugged Laura to me and then hugged Grandpa. He patted me on the head, nodded once and went back into the house.
My grandfather died twenty-eight years ago but I still have Laura.
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The
Immigrant
I was 20 years old, and attending University, when a friend from school invited me for a weekend at her parents' house. Her parents were going to be gone but her grandfather would be home. We were planning on having a relaxing weekend; catch up on sleep, enjoy some quiet after all those dorm parties.
My friend's parents' home was a typical one-story tract house crammed into an expanse of other tract houses. There were three small bedrooms, a tiny kitchen and a cramped living room. The grandfather stayed in the bedroom right off the kitchen. He needed easier access because he was confined to a wheelchair, having had both legs amputated at the knee due to the effects of diabetes.
We arrived on a Friday evening, and I didn't meet the old man until we had been there for several hours. My friend told me that he spent most of the time in his room; he slept a lot and watched television or read. We made popcorn late in the evening, to munch on while watching tv, and my friend poked her head into her grandfather's room and invited him to join us. After a short while, he emerged, laboriously maneuvering his chair through the kitchen into the living room. I introduced myself politely and we settled in to watch a movie.
My friend went to bed around 11pm that night. The grandfather had gone back to his room. Being the night-owl that I am, I decided to stay up and watch television. After about an hour, Grandpa S. came out into the kitchen and called out to ask me if I would like to join him for some ice cream. I went out into the kitchen, scooped out two dishes of ice cream and sat down at the kitchen table while Grandpa S. pulled up his chair across from me.
He was in his 70's, and had an accent, having immigrated from Poland when he was in his 20's. He'd been a laborer all of his life, a bricklayer, and had lived with his daughter and her family for the last five years, since the death of his wife. I asked him questions about his life, and he asked me questions about what I was going to do with mine.
I really don't recall how the conversation turned to the soul. Perhaps he mentioned death, his wife's or his own. Maybe I said something about things I had studied. More likely, the subject came up because the conversation was meant to happen, at that time, in that place, between these two people.
So I sat in that cramped kitchen, in the wee hours of the morning, talking to an old man, a Polish immigrant, about the souls of people, our meaning in life, lessons to be learned, reincarnation; matters of being. And this old man reached into me and touched things I had always known but never spoken of. He shined a blinding light into dark corners of my mind that I had never known how to look at. He opened up a universe of seeking that I had only had faint glimmers of before.
We talked for hours about these things and I was never once bored. I was entranced by the dance of his mind, by the depth of his heart, by the expanse of his knowledge.
Finally, he said that he needed sleep, but asked me to wait for a moment. He went into his room and returned with a book which he handed to me, telling me that he had had a number of copies of this book over the years, replacing each as he wore out the old. He said that he didn't think he would need it much longer, that he had it memorized anyway. He thought, though, that I might like it, that it might answer some of those questions I was asking and would ask in the future.
I saw Grandpa S. one more time, at the end of the weekend when I went into his room to say goodbye. I kissed him on the cheek and thanked him as he grinned up at me with twinkling blue eyes. Such a sweet man! He died three months later of complications from the diabetes.
I still have the book he gave me, "Cosmic Consciousness", and I still read it sometimes. I have never seen it in a bookstore or anywhere else, and I do not know where he got his copies. I do know that our meeting, at that time, in that place, was one of life's synchronicities. I know that this sweet old man, this bricklayer from Poland, was a wise and loving soul. I know that I was blessed in being able to share those hours with him and honored that he chose to share them, and so much of himself, with me.
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