Over the Rainbow

Tweet

Starting Spring

No rainbow today.
or at least not outside.

Outside---
Snow.


Somewhere inside,
the house,
or the inmate's hearts,
is the potential for
rain
&
rainbow.

Sometimes at the same time,
just like outside.

Well,
I'm planting seeds.

Some for Spring,
some for now.

Some for salad,
some for weathering
future storms.

After all, it is a wonderful world,
sprouting green seedlings
and kindness.

I hope.

Mrs. Slattery

Tweet

It is far from the first snow fall, so it surprises me to find myself thinking of Mrs. Slattery. A small women, of indeterminate age, measurably moving along on her canes each morning. I don't think I knew  why she used canes, as it never came up in conversation,  Plus, I was not comfortable bringing up something she chose to leave unacknowledged.

Midge, as her friends called her, but not me, a lowly student, manned the bookstore in my high-school. Need a pencil, notebook, science book or tickets for the latest event? She was the person to see, only, not many people seemed to see her, or me, which is why, one day in the still hallway that faced the courtyard and the snow falling, we had a conversation.

My classmates often complained about how long it took her get the items they had forgotten and needed now. She either did not hear their remarks said under the breath or choose to ignore them. I marveled at her unflappability, which I had not yet mastered, but sorely needed to, if I was to survive.

So, when I did need an item from the bookstore, I would only approach her window when I first arrived at school, 7 :10 am, as I lived far away so had to come earlier then most, or at the end of the day, after the crowd had cleared out, to the various activities I did not participate in, but before the bus would cart me back home

One day, as I waited for her to retrieve the Spanish workbook for me, I saw falling out the window the first snowflakes of the year. I said to myself, more then to Mrs. Slattery, "Oh look, the first snow".

" I love the first snow" she responded with a smile as she placed the workbook on the counter.
"I do too", I replied, returning her smile.

From that time forward, I would always make sure I stopped by the bookstore on the first snow, to say hello. We would exchange knowing smiles, and look out into the courtyard and exchange the various reasons we enjoyed winter.

After I graduated from high school, Mrs. Slattery sent me in the mail a graduation card with twenty dollars in it, and a handwritten note:

"Dear Naomi,
I have enjoyed your company these  four years. You never knew how much your visits to me meant.
My husband and I had been in a terrible accident, which he did not survive, and I was sentenced to these canes.  He and I loved the first snow falls together, when you said  to me you love the first snow, it was the anniversary of our marriage, and I was missing him terribly. I felt you had been sent to help me through.
Good luck and thank you,
Midge Slattery"

Every year, for many years, Mrs. Slattery sent me a card on the day of the first snowfall, to say hello and see how I was getting on. One winter, no card arrived or any there after.

 I've always hoped it meant she was with her husband once again, and they were admiring the first snowfalls together.

Post Christmas

Tweet

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

 Howard Thurman

Making Pie Crust

Tweet

Crumbling butter into flour, sugar salt, I think of  Mrs Gregory, my fist landlady. I was twenty, she was eighty-five or at least that is how old I felt like she was. She may have been younger.  Her apartment was next door to mine, above a sheet metal shop her husband owned.

Hoosier Mama Pie Shop, love pie. 

She was tall, elegant, and perfectly coiffed, and a bit sketchy on grammar. I was young, homesick, and very tight on funds. 

In the evenings, when I could bear the silence no longer, I would sometimes knock on her door. Helen, which was her first name and what I called her privately in my mind, though she never offered such intimacy to me, answered my knocks swiftly. Which always made me wonder, if she heard me coming, and was as eager to see me as I was to see another person.  Mrs. Gregory had never ventured to my door, and often seemed surprised that this new renter would end up at her's. 

On one particular evening, when Helen came to the door, her hands were covered in flour. She invited me in to her carpeted kitchen, "keeps the sound down" she said, when I queried "why carpet?" Carpeting in kitchens seemed counter intuitive to me. 

Waving her hands towards the table, "sit down", she said, "you can talk to me while I make pies." Obediently, I sat, happy to have an excuse to stay. All the while she talked to me, as she was a talker, she gently worked the butter into the flour,  Helen mostly talked about her sister, Lucille, as she occasionally threw in a little more butter, then a little more flour. 

I asked her what her recipe was. Mrs. Gregory looked up at me incredulously. 

"Recipe? you can't have a recipe for pie crust! You feel the ingredients, some-days you has to add more butter, some-days you has to add more flour. Your hands tells you the recipe, you have to listen to your hands!" 

The next evening, a knock startled me out of my loneliness, opening my door, I found, Mrs. Gregory, and a piece of pie waiting for me. 

Longed-for beauty

Tweet

It is autumn,
with its longed-for beauty
of:

Burning bush outside my office window. 

red,
yellow,
gold.

all of which fuels an even
deeper longing
for:

drawing closer
to each other.

Remembrance of Uncle Walter

Tweet

Uncle Walter in Yugoslavia 

Today's post was written and spoken at Uncle Walter's funeral by my daughter, and is used here with her permission. 

"Thank you all for coming today.

Uncle Walter was a lot of things, but boring wasn't one of them. In photographs, he is nearly always pleased: and no wonder. When Uncle Walter was photographed, he was usually in another country.

The travel industry has changed a great deal since he worked on Michigan Avenue, but the general idea--go and make sure to have a wonderful time while you're at it--comes through loud and clear.

A few months ago, my mother and I sorted through his enormous collection of expired passports. Uncle Walter was a man of the world, or at the very least a man who saw quite a lot of it, and so the visa stamps were like something out of a spy novel.

Japan. India. France. South Africa. Cuba ("Fidel Castro was always very nice to me," Uncle Walter said. Apparently the Cold War really did a number on the honeymoon tourism industry). 

Uncle Walter wasn't exactly James Bond, but he had an air of mystery about him, one that was at times overshadowed by his very dry wit, or his impeccable nature. It was easy, as a child--and it remains easy now that I am an adult--to think of Uncle Walter as a man at the end of a long journey. 

To be sure, his life in Chicago had a lot of routines embedded in it: Aldi for groceries, Selmarie or Brauhaus for lunch, freezing a coffee cake in individual slices so it wouldn't have time to go stale. But his apartment--which he moved into in 1956, the day my father was born, and which he moved out of in 2008--was filled to the brim with souvenirs from the life he led when he was away from home. It seemed very small, or at least it seemed that way until we had to move everything out; then it was just a constant unfolding of stories no one had ever asked about. 

Part of that was money, of course, because Uncle Walter knew the value of a dollar and didn't work with anyone who was sentimental about the fact--but part of it was that, Uncle Walter was the kind of man who planned for every contingency and who knew how to read his audience. Uncle Walter also knew how to be a tourist; he excelled at parties because of this. The trick is: stand in a corner with a glass of scotch, and wait to see what happens next. It's a very good trick. I have written it down.

When pressed for talking points, the war comes up in one way or another. I think it was the first time he had gone to another country. Uncle Walter served as a staff sergeant based in the Philippines and did quite a lot of administrative work; he used to say that a typing course saved his life. He never really said much aside from that, which was generally considered a good reason to change the subject. Still: when we were sorting through Uncle Walter's papers, we came across a letter from Bob Stillwell, who was a close friend to Walter and served with him during the war. Bob wrote, "you have always been the perfect gentleman.... And you taught me that life was supposed to be fun. Never forget those cocktail parties [during the war] with the bombs falling all around us."

Uncle Walter had style, and he wasn't shy about offering his opinion. But that remains a very small part of who he was. 

Uncle Walter was an astonishing person and he lived a very long and full and fascinating life. I have a feeling that we will never know the half of it. I hope he had a marvelous time."

----Katie Rose McEneely

Safe Passage

Tweet

Yesterday, Uncle Walter went on a another trip.

This one will be the adventure of a lifetime, and while he would have preferred to have this voyage on the QE 2,  instead, it is a voyage of another realm.

Uncle Walter has never visited this location previously, and it is the ultimate stamp in his passport.

I miss him.

Walter Laurence Butt Jr.
September 12, 1920 - September 22, 2014

Tomatoes

Tweet

Tomatoes from our garden! YUM!

Slicing
chopping
each;
green pepper
red pepper
onion
tomato &
ginger root.




I am
bombarded
by;
smells
texture &
tastes.






I am
thinking of:
tomatoes &
the poison they
were supose
to have provided.

I am delighted
one bite
proved worth
the risk.

Sands of Time

Tweet

Lost in thought as well as my garden...

Each morning,
stumbling to remember;

appointments,
shopping lists,
and what
to do next.

Nothing seems;
Earth shattering,
time sensitive,
or life changing.

Oddly though:
each moment adds up to;
hours, days, months, and years.


Which in turn add up to:
wonderment at the time
that has pasted by.

Acts that have become;
walls, windows,
worries and wasted.

Or

Cemented families,
friends, fears and faith.

As the good book says--
We have entertained angels unawares.
So easy to miss, so easy to misinterpret.

The Imprecise Mixology

Tweet

These have nothing to do with anything other then this very kind and thoughtful daughter (who, writes the blog I am enticing you to read) gave them to me for my birthday. Now we can eat salads without our hands. How nice.

One of my daughters has started a new blog. Of course, I think it is wonderful.
I hope you will too.

This daughter of mine (or should I say ours? with a nod to my spouse) writes with both wit and charm. Please take a look, in her words, think of it as "going off-road, not off the rails"

SO, I am sharing it with you today:
The Imprecise Mixologist

Italian Ladies

Tweet

While I live in a solidly Midwestern town, just about a mile from my house, is an small international village, so to speak. It was a town settled by Italians around the turn of the 1900's, versus my town which was settled by Presbyterians, in the early 1800's. (A much more staid bunch.)

The houses are built out of stucco, stone and sweat. The yards are small, but every inch counts. It has a Southern Italy sense about it. While there is no ocean edge, we do have Lake Michigan, which I would think, might feel like the sea.

These fine Italians, came and showed us how to garden, make pasta, and enjoy wine. They have done a stellar job, and we are better for their efforts.

The evidence of these facts are clearly shown by the names of the restaurants; Scornavacos, Maria's Bakery, Papagallos, and Two Guys from Italy. Or landscaping companies: Mariani, Fiore, Puccio, to name a few.

The streets are lines with flower beds which also house; zucchini, tomato, pole beans,and cucumber plants. It charms me when I see then sprawling over the fences and climbing up trellises.

Not so much these days, but when I was much younger, I would see small women, hair covered by black
scarves, sweeping the sidewalks in front of their houses.  There were holly hocks dwarfing the front porches, sunflowers dwarfing the hollyhocks, and all of the flowers dwarfing these industrious women. A colorful view.

Now, this town is home to a new wave of immigrants, Hispanic. These two cultures have melded well. Now one finds next door to Italian establishments: taquerias, Super Mercados, and, Panaderias.

It is the age old American story, we almost all came from some where else, hoping to find a safe place to raise our children, a community to call out own, and a hope for a more prosperous future.

Travels with Uncle Walter

Tweet

One of the many passports he has...

Uncle Walter is;

ninety-four,

a bachelor,

fastidious,

a paradox,

and alone.

Except..

not entirely. 

He has traveled lightly

through life. 

Never keeping

what did not matter,

nor packing what

he did not need. 

When he speaks of

his time in the army,

World War Two,

he says;

Typing, saved his life.

Some of his many passports...

(His mother made him take it in summer school, while at the Christian Brothers Academy.)

When he speaks of his travels, 

which was his career, 

he says;

Plan, plan, plan.

Should they inquire the price, 

I did not work with them, 

they were not my kind of clients. 

When the Telex came, I was thrilled, 

when the fax machine came, I was enchanted, 

when email came...

I went home.

I know he carries many wounds, inside and out. 

I know this because, for thirty-eight years, as the niece that married in, I have pursued his company, much to his surprise.

Much to my surprise, 

while we have never left the area,

we have traveled many miles together.