Whenever I’ve talked about how that at St. Cabrini, where I attended Catholic grade school, our 4th grade class saved up to buy a pagan baby, I’ve gotten one of two responses. People who did not attend Catholic school in the 1960s will look at me in stunned silence as though I were from Mars. People who did attend Catholic school will nod their head knowingly and sigh at the utter absurdity of the notion.

How does a fourth grader go about buying a pagan baby you might wonder? Well, we brought our scavenged pennies and nickels into school and put them in a jar until we finally had enough to send off for a pagan baby, I guess from the pagan baby store which was probably somewhere in California. That’s where everything cool was, or at least that’s what mid-western Catholic school kids thought. If you could get your parents to move to California, then you could automatically be cool. Anyway, $4 and some box tops later, or something like that, and we were the proud owners of a heathen. I have no idea how much a pagan baby cost, no one ever told us, and being good Catholic children, we didn’t ask.

Eventually we would get a certificate of some kind in the mail. The class would vote on a name and afterwards we would have a naming ceremony. For a baby girl, Sister always pushed us to choose Mary something – Mary Beth, Mary Alice, Mary Margaret, Mary Catherine, Mary Jane, whatever. The Mary list is endless. For a boy we were expected to choose a name like Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. But in 1969 the names we fourth graders favored were names like Ringo and Twiggy.

Since it was a class vote with Sister having two votes to our every one, we compromised on Mary Twiggy. We thought it so very funny to exasperate Sister with our zanyness. As a class, we were supposed to pray for the salvation of little Mary Twiggy throughout the school year. So you see, there was a seed of goodness buried deep deep within such a warped idea. And somehow? It made sense at the time.

I wonder what ever became of Mary Twiggy

I like my dad. Oh sure, I love him too. That’s a given. But I really like him. I always have.

My dad and I like to hang out together. My parents have a gazebo in their back yard that is enrobed in purple clematis and hanging baskets of pink petunias in the summer. The gazebo rests in the shade of towering trees that were not much more than seedlings when I lived there. Dad and I like to sit out there in the breeze that swirls through and drink iced tea and talk. Or not. Sometimes we just sit.

Sometimes we venture into the garage and make something. That’s how we got the gazebo. One time we ended up with a grape arbor. And then grapes. Another time we painted a mural of a seascape on the side of the garage. I tell him I want to make something. He tells me why it can’t be done. We go back and forth until he is convinced it is his idea. And then we set to work, the two of us, a team. The only team I’ve ever been on that never kicked me off.

My dad has a lot of qualities I admire, but the one I’d like to have that I didn’t get (especially now that I’m a parent) is patience. The man is unflappable. I remember one time when I was about nine, my brothers and I were in the living room throwing pillows and agitating one another and just generally being the rowdy obnoxious kids that we were.

Dad was in the kitchen quietly working on an oil painting. Somehow, one of the sofa pillows went sailing into the kitchen and landed squarely on dad’s painting. He just stopped what he was doing and took the pillow and the painting and deposited them both into the trash. He didn’t even grimace or make a face or even heave a sigh. There was no yelling or well-deserved discipline or even a lecture. If he had only beaten the pudding out of us, it would have been less painful than the silent expression of disappointment. There are many other times when I deserved a measure of his wrath, but it was never forthcoming.

When my dad comes to my house to visit, we get up early and meet in the kitchen for a cup of coffee and the New York Times crossword puzzle. After I fix him two eggs over easy, two pieces of bacon and a piece of toast, we sit down and work the puzzle together. He doesn’t know who Bon Jovi is. I don’t know what an ogee is. We make a good team, each one making up for the deficiencies of the other.

I’m a lucky girl. I have a daddy that I love. But I really like him too.

Happy Father’s Day Papa Ed.

The other day as I was passing through the living room, I noticed an arrangement of canned olives artfully displayed on the console table by the front door. Ripe. Large. Spanish. On the window sill, was a tower of fruit cocktail. The sight of canned goods in my living room struck terror in my heart. It was already starting to happen. It’s only a matter of time before I find my dresser lodged in the staircase.

Since we have taken the baby gates down and Sean has had free reign of the house, I am finding all kinds of unusual things in unexpected places. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the whimsy a can of olives can bring to good home design, because I do. Not to mention what they can do for a martini. But at the same time it scares me because I know from experience that it starts out innocently enough accessorizing with a few canned goods here and there, rearranging a few pictures, sorting books large to small, but it won’t be long before he’s moving furniture. Ask my dad.

My parents didn’t go out a lot when I was growing up — partly because they didn’t have a lot of extra money for that kind of thing, but mainly because they were afraid of what they might come home to. Anytime my parents went out for an extended period of time, I would get all Laurie Smith and do a Trading Spaces on my house.

In just a few hours and with no money or a carpenter, I could make over our entire house. I would switch everyone’s bedrooms, taking the largest room for myself of course, and assigning my brothers to my small room. I rearranged and organized everyone’s closets and dresser drawers. I re-hung pictures. I made curtains. Sometimes I even painted.

My parents never seemed to mind or at least they put up with it. Or maybe they were just too tired to move the furniture back. And they never asked how a 60-pound 9-year-old girl could move a bedroom suite by herself. Or maybe they were just afraid to know. I have always been a remarkably resourceful being with a very strong back and an even stronger will. Although, one time I did get a chest of drawers stuck sideways in the staircase. You might expect that when my dad came home to find his dresser stuck betwixt and between the two floors that he might say something like, “What the hell???…” But no. The only question he asked was “Where were you planning to put this anyway?”

And that is why finding olives in my living room is so frightening. Because I know it’s just a matter of time before I come home to find my dresser lodged in the staircase.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have very many toys. If we got anything really special, like a bike, we usually had to save up for it or at least pay something towards it. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, in retrospect it was a good thing.

My brothers and I took care of the few things we had because there was never a question that if we lost or destroyed something, it would just be too bad. No one was going to replace it. One time my brother left his bike unlocked outside a store and someone stole it. It was another summer of mowing yards and delivering papers before he got another one. A very hard lesson, but one that wasn’t lost on me. I saved up for and bought my own car at 17 (1977 Mustang – so cool) and I always took good care of it. I knew if I wrecked it or did something irresponsible, then it would be back to walking.

I bring this up because there is a park across the street from our house. Sean and I have been going there at least once a day, sometimes twice, since before he could even walk. It is always astonishing to me to see the things left behind at the playground – expensive scooters, wagons, bicycles, helmets, basketballs, tennis rackets, shoes and coats. When I see these things I always think how if I were ten or eleven, I would miss my bike or scooter. Especially if I had rode it to the park and then walked home. But it’s not hard to imagine that these things were quickly replaced or perhaps that they were not even missed among the excess that is pervasive in this zip code.

A week or so ago, I sat on a bench looking at an expensive red Radio Flyer wagon that had been sitting in the park for several days. I know it’s expensive because Sean got one for his first birthday — not from his cheapskate parents, but from his indulgent Aunt Terrye and Uncle Jack. If it were up to me, he would have had to have saved up for his own wagon. Kidding! Just half of it. I’d chip in something. As I stood up to leave, I looked in the orphaned wagon to see if there might be something to indicate whose it was. I saw a cell phone and a garage door opener. It made perfect sense. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. And I had to laugh.

Until it hit me like a bucket of cold water and one of the unchanging laws of the universe settled uncomfortably into my bones: If I want Sean to take care of his belongings, then I have to take care of my belongings. If I want Sean to be responsible, kind and considerate, then I have to be responsible, kind and considerate. “Do as I say, not as I do” means nothing to a two-year-old. It’s a daunting to think that I have to be the kind of person I want my child to be.

Damn those laws of the universe.

My mother’s first child, my brother John, turns 50 today!

From the stories my mom tells about John, it’s a wonder that they had any more children after him. I guess I owe my life to the iron hand of the Catholic church and the fact that John was just so darn cute they couldn’t stop at one.

John pretty much ruined it for my middle brother and me in terms of getting any perks. For example, if it weren’t for John, I could have had Beatrix Potter-style Peter Rabbit wallpaper in my bedroom. I know this because the remains of it are still in the closet of what was my bedroom in my parent’s house.

When I was a little girl, I asked my mom why the pretty bunny wallpaper was in the closet and not in my room and she told me the story of how as a young mother, she scrimped and saved to buy the Peter Rabbit wallpaper for John’s nursery. And when she could finally afford it, she worked an entire day to hang it. Then she lovingly put her precious first-born child to sleep in his beautiful room with the Peter Rabbit wallpaper. But he later awoke from his slumber in a creative mood and decided to do little baby caveman poo poo drawings, defacing the very image of Peter Rabbbit. That was before the days of scrubbable wallpaper. And that was the end of the wallpaper. Thanks a lot John! Sometimes when I look at my own little boy, I see a lot of my brother John. And that terrifies me. And then I have to go lay down. With a martini.

I figure there were probably lots of cool things other than wallpaper I could have had if John hadn’t been born first, like seconds at the dinner table. But that is all water under the bridge. Today, on the occasion of your 50th birthday John, I forgive you for the Peter Rabbit wallpaper.

Happy Birthday Old Man!

Love,
Your Antique Sister

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was first introduced to figure skating while watching Janet Lynn compete in the 1968 Olympics on television. It was love at first sight. Something about the way the skaters moved across the ice resonated deep within me.

I readily identified with Lynn. Like me, she was a small blonde girl from Illinois with a bad pixie haircut. I immediately began imitating the spirals and spins in front of the TV on the hardwood floors in my socks. I knew it was just something that I had to do. I intuitively knew it was something I could do. But what was an 8-year-old girl to do? I had no skates and I had no money. Ask Mom.

My mom was the master at making impossible things happen. I might have just as well asked for the moon as a pair of skates — there just wasn’t money for that kind of thing. With the powerful combination of prayer, resourcefulness and $2, Mom found a pair of skates for me at the local thrift store that fit me exactly. For some reason unknown, they had been spray painted silver, but I loved them. Then she drove me to the neighborhood park that had a makeshift ice rink (an asphalt rimmed basketball court that they flooded in the winter) to try out my “new” skates.

As I sat in the car lacing up the silver beauties for the first time, Mom gave some basic instructions: Hold your hands out for balance and try to fall on your butt and not your front teeth. And so I hobbled out of the car wearing my snowball hat and my silver skates and made my world debut as the next Janet Lynn to an audience of one. Skating was as natural to me as walking. By the end of the session I was confidently skating backwards and fearlessly trying the jumps and spins I had seen on television.

Figure skating is not a sport for the economically challenged. Over the years, Mom managed to cobble together enough money for some lessons and competitions and eventually some good skates, but it was always tough. Most of the girls I skated with had a wardrobe of expensive costumes and the finest gear. I didn’t know at the time the serious sacrifices my parents made so I could do this thing that I loved. I even got to compete once at Wagon Wheel in Rockton, Illinois, Janet Lynn’s home rink. I skated as much as money would allow until the middle of my high school years when other things, like boys, began to seem more important. But being a figure skater remains central to the core of who I am.

I still love the cold stale smell of an ice rink. I still love to skate, although I’m not as fearless or as flexible as I used to be. And while I did not become the next Janet Lynn, I did get to live out a dream to the best of my ability and resources – thanks to my resourceful mom and the silver skates.

Here in the northern reaches of the great state of Texas, it was 85 degrees on Thursday – a wonderfully warm winter day perfect for doing nothing in particular. Sean and I took the opportunity to get out and about in the neighborhood where I hoped to instruct him in the fine art of goofing off.

Goofing off is best done in pairs. My dad and I, who are similarly wired, have always liked to goof off together. Whenever I’m home, Dad and I still head out to the garage and make something with whatever we find out there. And then we paint it. We won’t know what it is when we’re done. We won’t even know when we’re done, unless someone hollers “Dinner’s ready!” Then we’re done.

The memories I have of just hanging out with my dad and doing nothing mean nothing and everything at the same time. Nothing in that nothing extraordinarily memorable happened, everything in that we spent a lot of time together over the years (doing nothing) and that means everything. Today they call that quality time, a term I cannot bring myself to use, in the same way I cannot substitute the term dialogue for talk. You may dialogue. I talk. You may have quality time. I goof off.

Now that Sean is two, it’s time he claimed his heritage and learned how to properly goof off. And Thursday was an excellent day for that. Since Sean is still too little for power tools and paint, we set off together out the front door, hand in hand, with no plan and no purpose, just to see what we could see.

It wasn’t long before we found a very nice big stick. People skilled in the fine art of goofing off recognize the treasure in such an item. It was perfect for poking into gofer holes, perfect for swatting against the trunk of a tree and perfect for carrying like the staff of Moses. Sean was thrilled with the find. “I gotta cane! I gotta cane!” he exclaimed. “Papa George have a cane!” he reminded me, brandishing it like a saber as he kangaroo-jumped over the sidewalk cracks.

As we continued towards the pond on our unplanned adventure, we saw a man and his son fishing. Sean held up his stick and a light bulb lit up over his head. “I do go fishin! I do go fishin!” So off we went to the pond to see what we could catch with this fabulous stick. He cast his imaginary line over and over, long and deep, imitating the man and his son. He reeled in a bounty of invisible fish that we pretended to eat. We both agreed that they were the most delicious fish either of us had ever eaten.

As the sun began to set and the wind turned from the north, I hoisted him onto my back like a mother Koala and we headed back down the path towards home. He wrapped his arms around my neck and as he pressed his face into mine and I felt his eyelashes flutter against my cheek. It reminded me of the first time I felt him move in my womb. It had been a good day.

When we reached the end of the driveway, I set him down and stole a hug. Instead of pulling away and running off like he usually does, he leaned into me and looked into my face, in a manner beyond his two years, as though he was searching for something. I wondered what he was thinking. Could it be that someday he will remember how his mother looked on this warm winter day? Probably not. Perhaps like me, he will remember nothing in particular, only that we never missed an opportunity to do nothing together. And that will mean everything.

My friend EB is an over-indulgent grandmother and an over-indulgent friend and I adore her. Her grandson is a year or two older than Sean. About once a month she shows up at my front door with bags (yes plural – bags) of clothes and toys that her grandson Preston has outgrown. Preston must have a closet the size of Old Navy. We have started calling her EB Claus because when she comes over it’s like Christmas. I remember the day EB gingerly asked me if I would be offended if she brought over some “gently worn” things for Sean. My response was “Would I? How fast can you get here?”

I love hand-me-downs because they come with a history. And they remind me of a simpler time. When I was growing up, I thought the only store in the whole world was K-Mart and that was where the rich people shopped. To get a brand-new store “boughten” (I thought this was a word until I moved out of the mid-west) dress was a very rare thing. I grew up wearing hand-me-downs that came with the history of an entire neighborhood. It was always exciting to see Mom come home from down the street with a brown grocery bag packed with “new” things. With no sisters, it always made me feel cool to wear a dress that I had seen one of the older girls in the neighborhood wear.

A bag of clothes would travel from house to house, season after season as kids grew. A dress that originated down the street would next year go across the street. The following year I would get it and the year after that it would go back across the street. If all the kids in the neighborhood put all their class pictures in a box you would probably see the same dress on a different girl a number of times.

There were many things besides the hand-me-downs that glued this neighborhood together. Like my parents, most of the couples moved into the neighborhood in the 1950s when they were first married. All of them were blue collar. Most of them were Catholic and second generation Italian immigrants. My family is not Italian, although I didn’t know this until I was about seven. I often thought we should buy a few vowels for our last name to keep up. Most of them had at least three kids but some had more. And all of those baby boomin’ kids grew up going from kindergarten through high school together. It was like having 25 brothers and sisters. There was no such thing as a “play group.” If you wanted to “play” then you went outside where there was a “group” of kids playing Freeze Tag or some made up game. Everyone was united in a common struggle to raise decent kids and to get by. Fifty years later, most of those post-WWII couples, including my parents, are still married and still live there on the same street in the same houses.

While my parents could not afford to give me “store-boughten” clothes, they did provide me an environment of stability and steadiness that can only be bought with time. Now as I struggle to figure out how to create a sense of community for Sean, I realize what a rare and tremendous blessing that was and how hard it is to do these days.

Sean really enjoys his hand-me-downs from EB Claus. Next year when he has outgrown them, we will pass them along, but probably not to anyone who lives across the street or down the block. I love my neighborhood and care deeply for our many friends here, but there is not the glue of common ethnicity or faith or circumstance. There is no real common struggle. And part of me holds something back because I know that there will be no history to be built over the course of Sean’s childhood, because by this time next year, many of my neighbors will live some place else.

The summer I was about eight or nine, my girlfriend and I would walk to Vespa’s, the local family-owned grocery store about once a day. As we walked the quarter mile to the store, we would look in the shallow ditches for soda bottles. We’d usually find one or two or sometimes even three. Vespa’s would give us five cents for each bottle we brought in. We would then take our earnings directly across the street to B&B, a family-owned candy store, and spend 45 minutes to an hour studying the glass case trying to figure out how to best spend our earnings. That was the day of penny candy and you could get a generous bag of candy for 10 or 15 cents. So much to choose from — wax lips, candy cigarettes, Jolly Ranchers, Pixie Stix, Jaw Breakers, things that would fizz and pop in your mouth. And then without a care in the world, we would slowly walk home eating our way through the little waxy white bag of goodies and arguing over who was cuter, David Cassidy or Donny Osmond.

My son will never have to scavenge soda bottles for candy. And that is unfortunate. I am in a position to give him anything and everything except for the one thing I would really like to give him, something that has been lost to the ages — a lazy carefree, unscheduled, unsupervised summer afternoon of enterprising scavenging with a friend.

There are no sidewalks with ditches around here. There is no family-owned corner store. There are no more penny candies. There is no candy store. And even if there were I would never let him get a quarter mile out of my sight.

The new millennium has brought us so many good things — so many things that will make his life better and longer. But as I look at a little boy who will never know what it’s like to be the boss of his summer day or feel the wind blowing through his hair as he independently explores and discovers the world on his bike, I think I would like to give back some technology in exchange for some innocence.

Haven’t we all, at one time or another said, “When I have a child, I’m going to do things differently than my parents.” And then of course, when you are actually entrusted with the responsibility of a pint-sized, uncivilized, miniature human being — you do all the things your parents did, and even make up some new stuff along the way. That way, when your kid grows up he can list all the things he would never do as a parent. It’s the glorious cycle of life.

Really and truly, there are not too many things my mom did growing up that I plan to avoid. What I am discovering — the longer I’m at this parenting-thing — is that I hope to be more like her and not less.

My mom was pretty laid back about most matters. It took quite a bit to push her buttons and even when you did reach that elastic limit, she would freely extend grace most of the time. This came to mind the other day when my son had dumped an entire economy-sized box of Cheerios into the sofa. I guess he thought if he stomped on them like grapes, I wouldn’t notice. As I was shoveling Cheerios out of the depths and bowels of the sofa, I really had to focus to keep my humor. My own mother would have laughed about it and then served a mixing bowl of Cheerios for lunch. I mean it wasn’t like he was free-form mixing concrete in the garage or anything like that…

When I was about 9-years-old, I decided the garage needed cleaned out. The Neat-Freak Gene exhibited itself early on. So I hauled everything out of the garage, including a 25-lb of concrete mix, but since it was 25-lbs and I was 9-years-old and weighed not much more than that, I dropped it and it broke open. That’s when I had the great idea that I would hose it out… And the funny thing is that when you combine concrete mix and water – you get concrete!! I kept working quickly and quietly with the hose and broom hoping to get the mess cleaned up before anyone noticed, but I just kept making more and more concrete until finally my spaghetti-sized arms could do no more. So I ran inside and tried to tell mom that there was a growing mass of concrete in the garage. I now recognize that expression she had on her face. It’s the one where you hear a heavy thud somewhere in the house and then silence. Never a good thing.

Anyway, I expected when Mom saw my handiwork that she would blow a gasket and blister my behind, but she just grabbed a shovel and made a nice little sidewalk beside the garage.

Calm and creative. That’s the kind of mom I want to be.