Meet the Parents
Friends, Romans and Countrymen, Lend Me Your Ears:
Well, this has certainly been a week and then some, and that's not even the half of it. I always say that it's just as well that we don't know what's right ahead of us, and this has been a prime example of that, because we would most likely not be happy to see it coming, and in fact, might be tempted to stow away on the next NASA mission to Jupiter or beyond. It seemed for the last two weeks, you couldn't turn on the news without hearing about some other celebrated person who had breathed their last, from the heights of fame and fortune, all the way down to the humble and forgotten, and more's the pity, I'm sure. In fact, it turned into such a wave of demises, that it swept away my Mom right along with it, like it was some sort of express train that she didn't want to miss. She would have been 87 in September, which is remarkable longevity among her family, and she was doing fairly well right up until the end, for which I credit her good strong pioneer stock, which the dinosaurs and I find so lacking in people nowadays. I was planning to take this opportunity to share some of my reminiscences about my mother, but then I realized that when my father died in 1997, I didn't have a computer, so I didn't have a chance to do the same thing for him at the time. So in honor of both of my parents, here are some of my favorite family anecdotes, in no particular order, and with the proviso that some of them may be exaggerated, while others might have been purely hallucinations on my part.
It was always easy to find family snapshots with my two older sisters at interesting places, like amusement parks, or visiting relatives, or at historical sites like the Statue of Liberty. Whenever I would ask why I wasn't in the picture as well, Mom always said: "Oh, we left you with Grandma." Anyone can tell that this has scarred me for life.
It was probably just as well, however, that I wasn't born yet when my parents took my oldest sister Linda and my other sister Diane to the Bronx Zoo when Linda was about 3 and Diane was only one. At one point, Mom and Linda trotted off to see the monkeys, and left Diane in the stroller in the care of dear old Dad. You can imagine their surprise when he met them later outside of the monkey house, and my mother took one look at the stroller and asked very calmly, "Alec, where's Diane?" Upon realizing that the stroller he was pushing was empty, my father promptly turned green and pelted off in the direction he came from, to round up the wayward toddler. She was discovered blissfully crawling in front of the tiger's cage, and was snatched to safety without incident, although it would be safe to say that my father never heard the end of it. Of course, if it had been me, I would have been at Grandma's.
It was no secret that my father was color-blind, which was too much of an obstacle to overcome in the hopes that he might develop some sense of fashion or decor, and he never did. Fortunately, my mother had more than enough for both of them, and she always made sure that things were "just so." It remains a mystery why she ever thought to send my father to the store to buy a table radio, and expect him to pick out one that would match the room it was intended for. When he returned with a bright turquoise radio for her kelly green kitchen, she rolled her eyes and immediately banished it to the basement, where it remains to this day.
My father had a well-deserved reputation as being able to fix anything, and he always carried with him a screwdriver, penknife and pocket flashlight, just in case an emergency arose and he didn't have time to go get his tools. It's not uncommon to see people at a diner or coffee shop straightening out the tines on their forks, with their fingers or other flatware. When you went out to eat with my father, you could expect him to bring out a pair of needle-nose pliers and repair their beat-up tin creamers with the bent and wobbly lids, until they were perfect and snug like the day they were made. He could do every table around us before the food was served.
Speaking of food, one day he and I were having lunch at IHOP, where we had never been before. The waitress who came to take our order looked us over and then announced, "Sir, your wife may be able to get away with saying that she doesn't know this girl, but anyone can tell that she's your daughter." Au contraire, I felt like telling her. (That's French for, "We left you with Grandma.") I noticed early on that whenever I went shopping with my father, he suddenly became a bachelor with no family. It was useless to try getting his attention by calling, "Daddy. Daddy! DADDY!!!" Every other man in the store would look up, but not my father, who was intent on whatever he was there for. I finally had to say, "Alec!" if I really wanted to get through to him. It was like once he entered The Store Zone, he had no idea who I was.
Also on the food front, my mother had her own recipe for Toll House Chocolate Chip cookies, and she would bake them by the dozens and dozens at Christmas and throughout the year. They were a special treat and prized by relatives, friends, coworkers and neighbors who might get a tin of them at the holidays. At home, we would eat them until we made ourselves sick, and raved about them anew whenever the latest batch came along. Mom churned them out tirelessly and gave them to her devoted fans with true generosity of spirit, regardless of how much work it was. As for herself, she wasn't much of a cookie eater, and probably wondered what all the fuss was about, when people would go into rhapsodies over these admittedly common treats. This proved our undoing many years later, when she was home alone and looking for a snack, so she pulled one of her own cookies out of the cookie jar, gave it a nibble, and pronounced it inedible. "It's hard!" she wailed. In spite of all our assurances that everybody loved them just the way they were, she refused to ever make them again, sending everyone else into paroxysms of despair, and she remained the only person who didn't like her own chocolate chip cookies.
Cooking was not my mother's only area of expertise, she was artistically creative in many ways, and we all had some of the most inventive Halloween costumes to prove it. We've been bats, little Dutch girls, cowboys, soldiers, geisha girls, ballerinas, brides, angels, squaws and race car drivers. One year, my sister and a neighbor were mashed potatoes and gravy. I once won a contest as a gigantic Halloween candy bag, and I probably still have the transistor radio that was the prize. Nothing stumped her, and everything she worked on was perfect down to the last detail. In the 1960's when "troll" dolls were all the rage, she made tiny Biblical costumes for mine, and I had a Troll Nativity that had to be seen to be believed, and even after they saw it, many people still couldn't believe it. Every year, each high school class put on a program of music and dance, and my mother was up to the challenge, whether it was leopards, scarecrows, ragdolls, horses, or my personal favorite, trees. There was no stopping her.
For as long as I can remember, every year in the spring we put up a big pool in the backyard, and took it down again in the fall. These were no kiddie pools, but 24-feet in diameter with four-foot walls and sloping to 5-feet in the middle. Lesser people than our parents would never consider tackling an operation of this magnitude with 3 small girls, who were not only no help in carrying anything heavy (in fact, we were often more of a hindrance than any sort of help) but also prone to giggling and easily distracted, even at the most critical points of assembly. Inexplicably, after the pool was finally in place, a few weeks later we would go on vacation in the woods for two or three weeks, when you would think we would have stayed home, after all the trouble of putting the darned thing up in the first place. Here again, you have the same three small giggly girls not being much help erecting a 12x12-foot old canvas Army tent, which weighed a ton, plus a 20x20-foot kitchen fly, as well as a caravan of supplies that would have made the Normandy invasion look paltry by comparison. How this massive undertaking was a vacation for my parents, I'll never know.
My father was patient to a fault and was also the resident super hero in our lives. In fact, I wouldn't be here now if he hadn't yanked me out of the undertow at Jones Beach when I was too small to save myself, and my sister Linda can tell the same story about him pulling her out from under a dock when she got caught under there by accident. But what sealed his place in family lore was the year that we went camping as usual, but for the first time with my sister's new contact lenses, which were just coming into vogue in the mid-60's. One day she dropped one in the tent, and it managed to fall between the planks of the platform, and into all the leaves and debris underneath, where it would presumably be lost for all time. Not on my father's watch! He was able to catch a reflection of it by shining a flashlight through the platform, and somehow miraculously, he sifted through all of the rubble under the platform and pulled it out, which is on the order of not only finding a needle in a haystack, but several haystacks. I think a person could legitimately rest on their laurels after that.
On the other hand, the one thing he never could seem to get a handle on was that his daughters would have boyfriends. My sister Linda met a boy named Donald and brought him to the house, and from that day forward, no matter who we met, or what they looked like, every boy that we introduced to our father, he would call him Donald. In retrospect, I realize now that it would have saved a lot of confusion and aggravation if we had just dated boys named Donald, and ignored everyone else while we were growing up.
Speaking of names, I have to mention when I first got my very own car, the purple Gremlin of lore and legend, I had an early fender-bender when I slid through a curve and hit a guard rail. I was fine and the car was fine, although both the front and rear bumpers fell off, since they were the first year they had invented impact-absorbing bumpers, and apparently hadn't worked all the bugs out of that idea yet. My father said that I should bring the car over to the shop and he could put the bumpers back on when he had time, so I did. When I walked into the service area, my father introduced me to one of the mechanics by asking, "Have you met my daughter, 'Crash'?" Thanks a heap. My father liked my Gremlin so much that he bought one for my mother, and although it was newer than mine, and had some other features, it didn't have power steering like mine. One day I borrowed it to run an errand, and while I was driving down a busy street, someone parked at the curb opened their door right in front of me. I turned the steering wheel completely over, and the car went straight as an arrow, narrowly missing the open car door by mere microns. (I always said that driving her car was like wrestling with an elephant.) I pulled over and jumped out of the car, grabbed the offending party by his shirt front, standing on my tip-toes to the extent of my five-foot height, and in the full fury of righteous indignation, I shouted at him: "YOU MORON, DO YOU REALIZE THIS IS MY MOTHER'S CAR???!!!" He must have thought I was a lunatic.
I can't wrap up this send-off for my parents without a send-off story that is truly worthy of the name. My mother belonged to a group of joggers (back in the old days when that was unheard of) and they would run in the park in the morning, but also socialize at other times. Dorothy Lands was one of the joggers, and her birthday was in the summer, so my mother organized a pool party for her at our house and invited all the joggers to attend. The party went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time, except for Dorothy, who had to beg off at the last minute. Not to be daunted, my mother organized a make-up party for another week that Dorothy could make it, and once again, the party was a big hit, and once again, it turned out that Dorothy was unexpectedly unable to attend. After that, it turned into a running joke, where they would have a pool party every week, and take pictures with everyone in the pool holding a big banner that said "Happy Birthday, Dorothy" and Dorothy would be the only one who wasn't there. If she had shown up for that first party, no one would have remembered a thing about it, but instead, it turned into one of our favorite family stories of all time, and remains a cherished memory to this day. There comes a time to all of us when our memories are all that we have to be comforted with, and it's these memories that keep our loved ones alive in our hearts, so let's all be sure to make the most of them.
The Baby Sister
Well, this has certainly been a week and then some, and that's not even the half of it. I always say that it's just as well that we don't know what's right ahead of us, and this has been a prime example of that, because we would most likely not be happy to see it coming, and in fact, might be tempted to stow away on the next NASA mission to Jupiter or beyond. It seemed for the last two weeks, you couldn't turn on the news without hearing about some other celebrated person who had breathed their last, from the heights of fame and fortune, all the way down to the humble and forgotten, and more's the pity, I'm sure. In fact, it turned into such a wave of demises, that it swept away my Mom right along with it, like it was some sort of express train that she didn't want to miss. She would have been 87 in September, which is remarkable longevity among her family, and she was doing fairly well right up until the end, for which I credit her good strong pioneer stock, which the dinosaurs and I find so lacking in people nowadays. I was planning to take this opportunity to share some of my reminiscences about my mother, but then I realized that when my father died in 1997, I didn't have a computer, so I didn't have a chance to do the same thing for him at the time. So in honor of both of my parents, here are some of my favorite family anecdotes, in no particular order, and with the proviso that some of them may be exaggerated, while others might have been purely hallucinations on my part.
It was always easy to find family snapshots with my two older sisters at interesting places, like amusement parks, or visiting relatives, or at historical sites like the Statue of Liberty. Whenever I would ask why I wasn't in the picture as well, Mom always said: "Oh, we left you with Grandma." Anyone can tell that this has scarred me for life.
It was probably just as well, however, that I wasn't born yet when my parents took my oldest sister Linda and my other sister Diane to the Bronx Zoo when Linda was about 3 and Diane was only one. At one point, Mom and Linda trotted off to see the monkeys, and left Diane in the stroller in the care of dear old Dad. You can imagine their surprise when he met them later outside of the monkey house, and my mother took one look at the stroller and asked very calmly, "Alec, where's Diane?" Upon realizing that the stroller he was pushing was empty, my father promptly turned green and pelted off in the direction he came from, to round up the wayward toddler. She was discovered blissfully crawling in front of the tiger's cage, and was snatched to safety without incident, although it would be safe to say that my father never heard the end of it. Of course, if it had been me, I would have been at Grandma's.
It was no secret that my father was color-blind, which was too much of an obstacle to overcome in the hopes that he might develop some sense of fashion or decor, and he never did. Fortunately, my mother had more than enough for both of them, and she always made sure that things were "just so." It remains a mystery why she ever thought to send my father to the store to buy a table radio, and expect him to pick out one that would match the room it was intended for. When he returned with a bright turquoise radio for her kelly green kitchen, she rolled her eyes and immediately banished it to the basement, where it remains to this day.
My father had a well-deserved reputation as being able to fix anything, and he always carried with him a screwdriver, penknife and pocket flashlight, just in case an emergency arose and he didn't have time to go get his tools. It's not uncommon to see people at a diner or coffee shop straightening out the tines on their forks, with their fingers or other flatware. When you went out to eat with my father, you could expect him to bring out a pair of needle-nose pliers and repair their beat-up tin creamers with the bent and wobbly lids, until they were perfect and snug like the day they were made. He could do every table around us before the food was served.
Speaking of food, one day he and I were having lunch at IHOP, where we had never been before. The waitress who came to take our order looked us over and then announced, "Sir, your wife may be able to get away with saying that she doesn't know this girl, but anyone can tell that she's your daughter." Au contraire, I felt like telling her. (That's French for, "We left you with Grandma.") I noticed early on that whenever I went shopping with my father, he suddenly became a bachelor with no family. It was useless to try getting his attention by calling, "Daddy. Daddy! DADDY!!!" Every other man in the store would look up, but not my father, who was intent on whatever he was there for. I finally had to say, "Alec!" if I really wanted to get through to him. It was like once he entered The Store Zone, he had no idea who I was.
Also on the food front, my mother had her own recipe for Toll House Chocolate Chip cookies, and she would bake them by the dozens and dozens at Christmas and throughout the year. They were a special treat and prized by relatives, friends, coworkers and neighbors who might get a tin of them at the holidays. At home, we would eat them until we made ourselves sick, and raved about them anew whenever the latest batch came along. Mom churned them out tirelessly and gave them to her devoted fans with true generosity of spirit, regardless of how much work it was. As for herself, she wasn't much of a cookie eater, and probably wondered what all the fuss was about, when people would go into rhapsodies over these admittedly common treats. This proved our undoing many years later, when she was home alone and looking for a snack, so she pulled one of her own cookies out of the cookie jar, gave it a nibble, and pronounced it inedible. "It's hard!" she wailed. In spite of all our assurances that everybody loved them just the way they were, she refused to ever make them again, sending everyone else into paroxysms of despair, and she remained the only person who didn't like her own chocolate chip cookies.
Cooking was not my mother's only area of expertise, she was artistically creative in many ways, and we all had some of the most inventive Halloween costumes to prove it. We've been bats, little Dutch girls, cowboys, soldiers, geisha girls, ballerinas, brides, angels, squaws and race car drivers. One year, my sister and a neighbor were mashed potatoes and gravy. I once won a contest as a gigantic Halloween candy bag, and I probably still have the transistor radio that was the prize. Nothing stumped her, and everything she worked on was perfect down to the last detail. In the 1960's when "troll" dolls were all the rage, she made tiny Biblical costumes for mine, and I had a Troll Nativity that had to be seen to be believed, and even after they saw it, many people still couldn't believe it. Every year, each high school class put on a program of music and dance, and my mother was up to the challenge, whether it was leopards, scarecrows, ragdolls, horses, or my personal favorite, trees. There was no stopping her.
For as long as I can remember, every year in the spring we put up a big pool in the backyard, and took it down again in the fall. These were no kiddie pools, but 24-feet in diameter with four-foot walls and sloping to 5-feet in the middle. Lesser people than our parents would never consider tackling an operation of this magnitude with 3 small girls, who were not only no help in carrying anything heavy (in fact, we were often more of a hindrance than any sort of help) but also prone to giggling and easily distracted, even at the most critical points of assembly. Inexplicably, after the pool was finally in place, a few weeks later we would go on vacation in the woods for two or three weeks, when you would think we would have stayed home, after all the trouble of putting the darned thing up in the first place. Here again, you have the same three small giggly girls not being much help erecting a 12x12-foot old canvas Army tent, which weighed a ton, plus a 20x20-foot kitchen fly, as well as a caravan of supplies that would have made the Normandy invasion look paltry by comparison. How this massive undertaking was a vacation for my parents, I'll never know.
My father was patient to a fault and was also the resident super hero in our lives. In fact, I wouldn't be here now if he hadn't yanked me out of the undertow at Jones Beach when I was too small to save myself, and my sister Linda can tell the same story about him pulling her out from under a dock when she got caught under there by accident. But what sealed his place in family lore was the year that we went camping as usual, but for the first time with my sister's new contact lenses, which were just coming into vogue in the mid-60's. One day she dropped one in the tent, and it managed to fall between the planks of the platform, and into all the leaves and debris underneath, where it would presumably be lost for all time. Not on my father's watch! He was able to catch a reflection of it by shining a flashlight through the platform, and somehow miraculously, he sifted through all of the rubble under the platform and pulled it out, which is on the order of not only finding a needle in a haystack, but several haystacks. I think a person could legitimately rest on their laurels after that.
On the other hand, the one thing he never could seem to get a handle on was that his daughters would have boyfriends. My sister Linda met a boy named Donald and brought him to the house, and from that day forward, no matter who we met, or what they looked like, every boy that we introduced to our father, he would call him Donald. In retrospect, I realize now that it would have saved a lot of confusion and aggravation if we had just dated boys named Donald, and ignored everyone else while we were growing up.
Speaking of names, I have to mention when I first got my very own car, the purple Gremlin of lore and legend, I had an early fender-bender when I slid through a curve and hit a guard rail. I was fine and the car was fine, although both the front and rear bumpers fell off, since they were the first year they had invented impact-absorbing bumpers, and apparently hadn't worked all the bugs out of that idea yet. My father said that I should bring the car over to the shop and he could put the bumpers back on when he had time, so I did. When I walked into the service area, my father introduced me to one of the mechanics by asking, "Have you met my daughter, 'Crash'?" Thanks a heap. My father liked my Gremlin so much that he bought one for my mother, and although it was newer than mine, and had some other features, it didn't have power steering like mine. One day I borrowed it to run an errand, and while I was driving down a busy street, someone parked at the curb opened their door right in front of me. I turned the steering wheel completely over, and the car went straight as an arrow, narrowly missing the open car door by mere microns. (I always said that driving her car was like wrestling with an elephant.) I pulled over and jumped out of the car, grabbed the offending party by his shirt front, standing on my tip-toes to the extent of my five-foot height, and in the full fury of righteous indignation, I shouted at him: "YOU MORON, DO YOU REALIZE THIS IS MY MOTHER'S CAR???!!!" He must have thought I was a lunatic.
I can't wrap up this send-off for my parents without a send-off story that is truly worthy of the name. My mother belonged to a group of joggers (back in the old days when that was unheard of) and they would run in the park in the morning, but also socialize at other times. Dorothy Lands was one of the joggers, and her birthday was in the summer, so my mother organized a pool party for her at our house and invited all the joggers to attend. The party went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time, except for Dorothy, who had to beg off at the last minute. Not to be daunted, my mother organized a make-up party for another week that Dorothy could make it, and once again, the party was a big hit, and once again, it turned out that Dorothy was unexpectedly unable to attend. After that, it turned into a running joke, where they would have a pool party every week, and take pictures with everyone in the pool holding a big banner that said "Happy Birthday, Dorothy" and Dorothy would be the only one who wasn't there. If she had shown up for that first party, no one would have remembered a thing about it, but instead, it turned into one of our favorite family stories of all time, and remains a cherished memory to this day. There comes a time to all of us when our memories are all that we have to be comforted with, and it's these memories that keep our loved ones alive in our hearts, so let's all be sure to make the most of them.
The Baby Sister
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:36 PM
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