I Remember Papa

I love this photograph of my father because it doesn't resemble the man I knew in any way shape or form.

The man I knew smoked only an occasional cigar and drank an occasional sherry or glass of wine, barbecued weekends, loved Chinese food and take out, and dressed like Don Draper every work day of his life because he was an ad man.  

This photo was probably taken when he was in the USAF during WWII.  The hair cut, the shirt, the hard-ass look.  I thought this was Frankenstein the first time I found it in the drawer of his high boy dresser.  I was probably 7 or 8 and it scared me to death.  He had to reassure me it was just a photo taken when he was young and he was definitely not a monster!

Dad, circa mid-1940s





I remember my father is as a loving but stern, old-fashioned man with a very rigid set of principles.  He was born in 1910, another era light years from the Sixties when I was coming of age.  We did not see eye to eye.  Yet, he instilled his faith in God, his work ethics, his frugality and his loyalty in my brother and me.  We are the better for those things.


Me, Dad, Mother at Butchart Gardens British Columbia   Summer 1969  Mother & I wear nosegays of violets from Dad



Dad loved an occasional cigar, a pancake breakfast with bacon on the side, a good walk, his dog(s), nature, God and country. He was never so proud as when his two grandsons were born.  I think they were the light of his old age.
 

D

Dad & Grandsons 2005 (age 95)

He was nutrition and supplement minded before it was fashionable.  He read the Rodale books and followed a predominantly naturopathic road when I was young.  I remember him ingesting Tiger's Milk, fish oil, B supplements, high fibre food, whole grains, raw honey.  He walked that walk.  He lived into his late 90s and was still mobile.

Dad presenting retirement document to a retiring Colonel Vandenburg AFB, 2004

For those of you old enough to remember, "My Dad" sung by Paul Petersen on The Donna Reed Show 

For those of you about to be new fathers...  

60 Is the New 40

.  

One of my favorite bloggers, injaynesworld, commented on my October 15th Women of A Certain Age post about "turning" sixty.

"60 is the new 40!" she enthused.

I don't know if that is true or not but my bones aren't buying it.  

Last October, six of my oldest friends and I flew to New Orleans to share our mutual 60th birthdays.  Some live on the West Coast, one lives in the Keys, I live in New England and we all grew up together in SoCal.

We took full suites at the luxurious Windsor Court Hotel downtown.  Here's a sample view from our rooms on the 17th flr.

We were a ten minute walk from the Quarter.

And walk we did.

  

The minute you get to NOLA, you want to hit the Quarter.  You want to find a bar or restaurant.  You want to have a local drink and some of that Cajun/Creole food you've heard about all your life.

You want to see the sights:  the grill-faced balconies, the shot gun houses, the brick buildings, flower baskets, parks with lush tropical plants.

It's a hot flower of a place is New Orleans.  If you're having hot flashes, it's even hotter.

We had four days to check it all out.                    

You can have any kind of food you like but the seafood and local cooking is the best.  It just doesn't get any fresher or more delicious than here.

The music is the greatest.  It's everywhere, street corners, cafes, the obvious jazz places like Preservation Hall, open air patio restaurants.  There are so many truly fine musicians in New Orleans.  They say it's in the water and the blood.  

                                                                                   

                                                                                             

The atmosphere on Bourbon St is just what you expect: maniacally happy.  After a couple of cocktails, so are we!  I had Sazeracs, a favorite since my first visit to the city in 1981.  One of my friends tried a Hurricane, the rest drank their usual and missed out on the fun of Mint Juleps and the like.  We were feelin' the love just the same.                                                                  

This is the famous statue of  Andrew Jackson, my mother's cousin, many times removed.  Behind him is St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square.  

Personally,  I like the horse's face. 

                                                                                   

Breakfast at Cafe du Monde is a must. 

Beignets and chicory cafe au lait.  Heaven.   Fresh seafood, local cooking are the best ways to experience the true flavor of the area.  Our finest meal was a seafood place called G.W. Fins.  Other choices that come highly recommended are Acme Oyster House, Arnauds, Antoine's.  We had reservations at Galatoire's but somebody changed the game plan, much to my dismay.  Lucky for me I've dined there before as well as Brennan's, where bananas foster was created.  Lunch at Mr. B's was nice.  It's owned by the Brennan family too and is a gorgeous, wood paneled, elegant place.   

Against my better judgment, we opted for a three hour bus tour of the city.  It turned out to be educational, enlightening and fun.  We learned much and saw the remains of Katrina's devastation which is still shockingly extensive; visited the Ninth Ward now under some semblance of repair thanks to Harry Connick Jr. and his Musician's Village and Brad Pitts' 

                                                                                   

New Orleans City Park 

is 1300 acres and a cab ride from downtown.  It is worth a half or full day's trip.  Had we known and had the time, we'd have returned to take in everything from the Museum of Art to the Carousel Gardens Amusement Park and Storyland.   Photos are from the Botanical Gardens within the park.

          

The obligatory cemetery tour..  While stopped here, a full-sized bus pulled up and a ton of Super Senior citizens (meaning:  older than us) got out.  My best friend, who is usually not humorous, sarcastic or wry, commented

"That's out next trip."

We weren't sure if she meant the people on the bus tour or a trip to the cemetery.

FUN FACT:   Woldenberg Riverfront Park is a beautiful scenic stretch of land along the banks of the Mississippi.  There is an aquarium, aviary, IMAX theatre, lawns and walkways with comfortable benches.  It was funded by the Great Uncle of one of our group.  She wanted us to see it and I envisioned a little park.  Wrong. It is a long stretch of walking, biking, sitting and playing parkway bordering the river. Her Great Uncle Mal has been dead many years but she remembers him fondly. Seems he scandalized the city when he married a black woman and left his millions to her, after her funded the park.  (snort!)

One of the hundreds of  small parks within the Quarter with statuary, fountains, benches and deep shade in which to "set a spell."

THIS is what I thought my friend's uncle bequeathed.

This is the first night get-together in the bar of our hotel.  They make them some "fine" cocktails and we didn't hesitate.  We partied like it was 1999...well, more like 1969.


Many things change as you age; your jowls, butt and boobs descend, your face begins to crease here and there, your hair greys and your stamina ain't what it used to be.  But a lifetime of friendship remains no matter how grumpy, drunky, barfy, and silly we may be when we're together.

If "sixty is the new forty", this is what it looks like.  Not bad.  Not bad at all.

Of Fathers, Birthdays and Presidents

Dad (in straw hat), his sister (in front) a cousin & their Uncle

 down on the farm in Southern Illinois   ca. 1918

Yesterday would have been my father's 101st birthday. Hard to believe. He was born in 1910,  very much a turn of the century time in this country. William Howard Taft was President. Neither the telephone, the refrigerator or the zipper had been invented.  The Titanic would sink when Dad was two years old.  The U.S. was changing from a predominantly agrarian society to a manufacturing one. People who could no longer subsist on farms were moving to the cities as were immigrants making their way to the "land of opportunity". My father grew up on a farm in southern Illinois on the banks of the Ohio River. He always remembered it with great fondness and longing. They were poor but not starving. His father was an anomaly in those days:  he had a college degree in horticulture. His mother had been a milliner in the city of Chicago but his father moved her to the farm. She was, by all accounts, not happy about it.

Dad moved to Chicago to work for Florsheim Shoes in the advertising dept. He worked as a "paste up artist" which meant he cut and pasted drawings and words to sheets of paper in the form of a print ad. These were given to the newspaper to be typeset. It was 1929; he was 19 years old. He vividly recalled the stock market crash. His workspace in the Florsheim building was below street level, with those tiny grated windows looking onto the sidewalks at people's feet.  He remembered a jumper landing outside.  He watched his money carefully from then on.

Dad put himself through colleg,e taking night courses at Northwestern University. He never finished and it always bothered him. He eventually went to work in a new industry: radio. He was selling national advertising air time to big ad agencies for a company that represented radio stations across the U.S. and Canada.  The business was in its infancy and he was there.

Dad smoking (he'd quit by the 

time I was born) ca. WWII.  When

I was little, I thought he re-

sembled Frankenstein's Monster!

The United States entered the First World War, "the war to end all wars" to which it was mistakenly referred, in 1917.  Of course, the war reparations act led to a second world war.  As a result, my father enlisted in the Army Air Corps for WWII. By then, he'd moved to Los Angeles to start his own rep firm.  He walked away from the new business and beginnings of stability at the age of 31 to defend our country. It took him quite a few years to recover what he'd lost.  By then, he'd been married and it had been annulled; a fact I didn't learn til my mother died.  He kept it a secret but it explained much about him and his breaking his engagement to my mother and his melancholy.  But, that's another story.

                                                                                               

Dad and Mom were married in 1950 and together til her death in 1997.  He lived another ten years without her, on his own, in the lovely quiet area of the Central Coast of California, where they retired.

He died during a lunch of take-out Chinese, sitting with his caregiver, a lovely lady named Isabel. He had a heart attack and could not be revived.  I remember all the times we ordered Chinese take out or he'd take me to China Town in L.A..  It was his favorite food and I was happy he was enjoying it at the end.

Mother and Dad at Christmas time  circa 1967

                            

I flew to CA immediately and set to work on funeral arrangements, along with my brother, as well as the celebration I wanted to have at his home.  The turnout to Dad's service was amazing.  My brother and I thought maybe twenty five at the most.  We probably had closer to 60 and a bunch of my friends made the trip up as well.  That meant so much to me.   My brother and I gave eulogies; mine was about how crotchety Dad was but how loving and kind too.  He was a mixed bag as are most of us.  We gave him the military funeral he'd planned for and it was so moving.  He had full honors with an honor guard, the flag folding, taps and a 21 gun salute.  I'll never forget it.    

 My sons pay their last respects to PaPaw

He and my mom left my brother and I, my two sons, his two daughters and, so far, a granddaughter.  My brother and I think of him often.  We can laugh now at things that were not so funny when we were young.  I wish I could tell him that. 

                                                                          My sons, my nieces, me, my brother out on Dad's lawn 2007

Ahhh, Togetherness

Those of you who've been reading my blogs since last year know we recently moved out of the home in which we raised our sons.  A quick escrow and winter weather made it expedient to move in with the mother-in-law, heretofore known as MIL.  She has a large 100+ yr old farm house, she's 83 years old, her husband died last summer, so we decided to give it a try.  For background material, go here and here.

Long story short, it is a never ending challenge.  We moved in December and made it through the holidays but by the end of the first three months, I was ready to move out.  We share her kitchen (a disaster for any two women unless they REALLY like one another) and we do invade her space by virtue of necessary ingress and egress.  We're upstairs, she's down but, you can't avoid one another.  Top it off, our younger, 22 year old, son is living there, saving his money so he can move to Tampa.  He's in and out only to eat and sleep and I think his habits irritate her which I can understand.  I thnk our habits irritate her and I KNOW her habits irritate me.

She's a non-stop talker.  She talks through tv programs, netflix movies, while I try to follow recipes, she talks over you or interrupts.  She's now giving my son advice on his love life.  I don't think she's enamored of the girl he's dating while I, the mother, like the girl just fine.  I spend most of my time at work so I am not home often but, when I am, I like my space; my peace and quiet.  MIL is in the house 24/7.  She has no hobbies, no exercise regimen, no close friends other than the next door neighbors. 

My husband and I are weighing the various solutions to our problem.  On the one hand, she needs us.  On the other hand, neither of us want to do this kind of maintenance work any longer.  We cannot deny our overhead is lower than renting our own place; on the other hand...what price convenience? 

It's all an experiment in the new economy.  More folks are living with their parents and v.v.  This was common one hundred years ago.  Now, thanks to lack of health insurance, retirement savings and all, it's a necessity again. 

I would very much like to find the key to making this a smooth situation.  But perhaps that is setting the bar too high.

 

Happy Father's Day

M

My father, mother and I in front of our home, Van Nuys, California 1952.

Background is the car they called "Snubnose".

My father died three years ago this summer.  He was  98 years old.  He wanted to live to be 100 and we all thought he would.  Perhaps that's why I was so surprised when he keeled over from a heart attack while eating his favorite food, Chinese. 

Dad's family is long-lived. His mother lived to be 100 years and 3 months.  His Aunt Dema, youngest of his mother's eight siblings, was still driving the coast of California into Oregon when she was in her early nineties.  Her husband, a younger man in his seventies, did not know her real age until she passed.    I hear he was quite surprised.

I remember sitting and talking to Dad when he was elderly, trying to glean information about his life.  He was born in 1910.  I'd heard much about his youth because he spoke of it often when we were growing up:  his days on the Ohio River, the old steamships and paddle wheels, the one room schoolhouse, life on the farm. But his single years, while learning the ad biz in Chicago before the war, were not well known to me.   There was so much more I wanted to know.  Did he have fun?  What were radio and ad agencies like back in the 30's?  What was baseball like?  What entertainments and entertainers did he see?

Dad originally worked as a copywriter and print ad designer for Florsheim Shoes.  They had a large building in downtown Chicago.  He worked in the basement probably starting around 1928 or '29.  I know he was there in '29 because he spoke of the Stock Market Crash, seeing a jumper's body on the sidewalk of his building outside his basement window.  He expected another major crash for the rest of his life.

My family circa 1957 in our second home,Woodland Hills, CA.

My little brother is on a hobby horse.

Dad participated in the beginnings of radio broadcasting. He pioneered in an exciting new business,  national radio representatives, representing  stations around the country to the big ad agencies like Leo Burnett and Foote, Cone & Belding.  Chicago was the center of advertising in those days thanks to pioneers like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Wards.  Dad went to work for one of the early national radio representatives, Howard Wilson & Co.  They sold broadcast air time on radio stations around the country to Chicago ad agencies.  In those days, radio programs ran in fifteen minute segments, also known as quarter hours, and were sponsored by one major advertiser.  He said it was exciting times back then; the business was young, they were young, they lived in a great city, it was all new.

Dad had access to some pretty exciting sporting events too.  He was a lifelong fan of baseball going to both Comiskey Park to see the White Sox and Wrigley Field to see the Cubs.  When I was a kid, he occasionally took my brother and I to Chavez Ravine to see the Dodgers.  I think the Cubs were his favorite team, however. In those days, he said you could meet the players and he was lucky enough to shake hands with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the like.  He saw Red Grange play for the Chicago Bears.  He watched Seabiscuit and Man O' War race.  It wasn't the race.  It was after that.  But he said it was "memorable".

Around 1939, he moved to Los Angeles to start his own rep business.  He later gave it up to enlist with the  Army Air Corp at the beginning of WWII.  He worked in several areas including:  transportation manager for supply trains across the U.S., as an intelligence photographer in Europe.  He was a skinny guy, weighing in at 125lbs during the war, making it easy to hand him partway out of the plane to take photos while flying over Germany.

As kids, we would ask him, "Did you bomb anything?" 

"Oh sure," he'd say.  "But I don't know if we killed anyone."  I don't think that was something he ever wanted to dwell on.  Dad remained in the USAF Reserve after WWII, retiring as a Lt. Colonel.

After my mother died, in 1997, Dad told me he'd been married before, during WWII.  It was an absolute shock; not because he had but because he never told us.  He'd fallen in love with a young woman from New York.  I don't know how they met but they married just before he shipped out.  They wrote back and forth throughout the war.  I have her letters.  They are quite poignant.  Sometime, prior to his coming home, she had the marriage annulled.  She said her father was an alcoholic and she felt obligated to care for him and ddn't want my father to share the burden.  My father was crushed and he carried the pain of it with him all those years.  He erected a monument to her after he learned she, too, died of alcoholism-related illness.

Dad was 40 years old when he married my mother.  He said she never knew about his first wife.  I asked him why and he said he thought she'd be "jealous".  I don't think she'd have been jealous; Mother had two previous husbands.  But I'm sure she didn't know as we were close and shared a great deal.  My brother and I are their only children.

To say we do not know our parents is an understatement.  Their lives are a mystery, for the most part, just as ours may be a mystery to our children.  We may never really know our parents but we should try to learn as much as possible.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy.

D

Dad and his grandsons, 2005.  

He was very proud of them and thrilled they were boys!

                                                              

Theme Thursday Wrinkles

Wrinkles...everybody's got 'em; it depends to what degree.  How you feel about them is a different matter.

As a child of the Fifties and Sixties, I never thought I'd grow old.  Boomers have a Peter Pan complex.  It's an ongoing challenge to advertisers as they experiment with  marketing methods appealing to our vanity and sense of entitlement.  We should look young, feel young, act young.  And that's okay...up to a point.

Our parents raised us to believe we'd have a better life than they did during their Depression-era childhoods.  For the most part, we did;  as children, anyway.  I think we had, predominantly, decent upbringings in our respective suburbs, cities and rural areas.  Schools delivered better academic results in those decades;  expectations of manners, customs, rules and religious observances were more rigid.  I won't apologize for mythologizing my youth because it was so care free.  It is, perhaps, the reason we were surprised, angry and rebellious when our ideals proved to be so much fantasy, like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.

Viet Nam is the key turning point for the Boomer generation.  It's the first deep wrinkle in our heretofore benign lives.  The involuntary draft; friends going to Viet Nam; some not returning.  Vets returning with shattered lives, shattered limbs, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and nobody to welcome them home.  Our country recognized the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State in April this year.  It is not a pleasant memory.  It's still raw.  It still resonates.

I ask myself why I feel entitlement with respect to my body and face?  After all, I did nothing to deserve them but I did spend many years working to maintain what I had by playing racquetball, tennis, jogging, etc.  It was fairly easy and I thought it would last.  But it didn't.   I hit my late forties and my body began to suffer as I, in a characteristically Boomer way said, "My body began to betray me".  I had one hip replacement, then the other.  One knee needed replacing and I stopped playing tennis.  I became depressed and angry.  I drank too much.  I bloated.  My face began to sag and get some wrinkles.  I became even more angry.  You see, I had taken it all for granted.

I see this in my peers.  We have this silly sense of entitlement to things we enjoyed so effortlessly as kids, teenagers, young adults.   We think it's supposed to last but nothing lasts, as Frost said so eloquently in his poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

My mother and grandmother believed in growing old gracefully.  I wasn't sure what that meant when I was younger but I have a sense of it now.  We need to like ourselves more, criticize less.  We need to feel good about getting up each day, rather like the little girl I posted on my other blog.  She has the answers and she's only four!  If you haven't see it, you should.  I have nothing against plastic surgery and, if I had a lot of money I might very well have my chin lifted.  But, that isn't going to happen so I'd better get comfortable with this face.

Will Rogers had some pithy comments on aging:

• Some  people try to turn back their odometers. Not me;  I want people to know 'why' I look this way.  I've traveled a long way, and some of the roads  weren't paved.

• You  know you are getting old when everything either  dries up or  leaks. 

• One  must wait until evening to see how splendid the  day has been.

• Being  young is beautiful, but being old is  comfortable.

Theme Thursday Mirror

Disclaimer:  I totally lifted this from my 12/30/09 post on my other blog Women of a Certain Age.  No sense reinventing the wheel. 

Every Christmas, Santa fills my stocking with delightful small items; but this year he blew it.  This year, he  included something I viewed with intuitive alarm:  a small, round extreme magnification make up mirror.  Now, I don't know about you, but when you are a women of a certain age, you do not want to view yourself in the extreme.  You may need an average magnifying mirror in order to better see your face without squinting while you apply makeup.  Extreme is another matter. The number of times this thing enlarged my eye was so unexpected and abrupt, I dropped it in dismay.

I look in the mirror every morning before and after makeup.  I am an optimist.  I generally feel I have very few lines or wrinkles or even age spots.  My skin is still on the oily side so I haven't the crepe paper texture so often associated with aging.  However, this mirror shows all my blemishes, crow's feet, enlarged pores and more.  It's like putting myself under a microscope and recoiling from what I now see.  Aarrggh! 

Don't get me wrong, I am trying very hard to age gracefully, sans face lifts, botox and whatever else people use to slow the process.  But, I still have my illusions and that mirror will shatter them if I keep it.  Can't break it as I'll have seven years of bad luck.

I think I'll wrap it and give it to one of my friends.

Photo from freeimages.com