MY CHILDREN MY SELF

Before junior high I always felt like a girl inside but to many strangers I looked like a boy. Unless I was in school or church clothes, both of which required a dress, I wore dungarees, sneakers, t- shirts and sweat shirts and I had very short hair. It was the 1960’s and when many girls my age had long hair my mother insisted on keeping mine very short. I was the only one of my sisters who befell this fate on a consistent basis year after year until I entered eighth grade and she backed off and let me decide how to wear my own hair. My high school freshman yearbook photo shows an adolescent working hard to grow out short hair. This class photo from my kindergarten class gives you a pretty good idea how different I looked from other girls. I am second from the right in the back row next to the teacher. It also shows you who the photographer felt should not be in the front row.

When I had children of my own I remember looking at photos of me and my young son at various ages and it was remarkable how similar we appeared. Jackson and I have small close set eyes and big ears that stick out a little at the top. So I usually kept his hair a bit longer. It was a reaction to my own insecurity that developed spending a decade with my ears exposed.

“See how much he resembles me?” I would ask people when I placed our pictures side by side from similar ages. When Jackson was in the fourth grade he started wearing glasses and then puberty started and any obvious similarity ended.

Conversely I have perpetuated the belief that my daughter looks nothing like me. I have always resembled my own mother to a certain extent and I was surprised when she did not. Instead she resembles my husband’s sister except in coloring. She has large, wide eyes and a small nose and ears. She recently measured her face according to the golden section in a math class and discovered that the proportions of her face were “perfect.”

I added this item to the long list of things my daughter and I will never have in common. For example I always hated school and she seemed wired to succeed at it from birth. She was a pretty natural swimmer and I struggled throughout my childhood to learn the skill. She read early and often and I didn’t pick up the habit until I was almost seventeen. These are the things that sit at the forefront of my brain when I think about my daughter being connected to me. It’s as if she could do so much better than be like me.

Quinnie’s enduring hairstyle throughout childhood has been to part it on the side without bangs and cut it blunt across her shoulders. This isn’t terribly interesting except I recently uncovered a colored snapshot of me taken in 1967 when I was in the third grade.(Note the date on border. Film took a long time to get developed in our house.) The photo stopped me in my tracks. It reveals the one small window in my entire childhood when I had somehow managed to grow my hair to my shoulders before my mother shuffled me back to the hairdresser for my routine pixie.

When I look at both of these eight year old girls I see the things the viewer cannot. Our difference in age is exactly the same as my mother’s and mine. We are both the youngest and have a deep fondness for little things like fairies, trolls and gnomes. I see our imaginative selves that wrote poems and drew expressive people dressed up in fancy clothes or the beginnings of countless comic strips where girlfriends said banal things to one another. I see our love of Little House on the Prairie books and the caretaking of numerous dolls that needed more attention than we each had time to offer. I see both our childhoods played out against an exurban backdrop.

I remember longing for the late afternoon to arrive so school could end or the Saturday chores were finally over and my mother would relax and serve a late day snack, free from the pressures of housework. I recently learned Quinn’s least favorite time of day is between 1 and 3 PM. She has always had a longing for a little four o’clock tea and biscuit which helps transition her into the evening. I suppose I encouraged and nurtured this habit.

I can’t say anymore that we are more different than the same or we never resembled one another. The pictures reveal that what we believe and what we remember aren’t always reliable indicators of the truth.

THE PERFECT GIFT

In 1993 my father stepped off the airplane carrying an oversized wrapped birthday present. My husband Rob loaded it into the back of the car and noted how heavy it felt.

“That’s the perfect gift,” my father had said proudly. “The perfect gift.”

I was expecting my second child in a few months and imagined the box contained a massaging pad for my sore back.

The next day after dinner and cake I opened my presents. Rob gave me a pair of Birkenstock sandals. “See, you can adjust the straps as your feet get wider.” Obviously the fact that I had removed the laces from my sneakers had not gone unnoticed.

Our three-year-old son Jackson kept asking when he would get his present. Rob unsuccessfully tried explain that it was his mother’s birthday and there weren’t any presents for him. Jackson thrust his head in my large lap and sobbed.

My father, always eager to keep the fun moving, had the answer. “Hey Jack,” he said, gently tapping his shoulder. “Wait till she opens my present. You can share it with her.”

Realizing this was his best shot at a gift, Jackson stopped crying.

“This is really for everyone,” my father proclaimed as he rested the box at our feet.

Jackson and I unwrapped it together and stared at the contents, which included four heavy red balls and four green balls and one tiny white ball.

“Oh, it’s a bocce ball set,” Rob exclaimed. Rob, who is of Italian descent, is always approving of anything made in Italy.

“That’s right!” Dad said. “Isn’t this the perfect gift?” he said again. He suggested we go play.

“Right this minute?” I asked, feeling weary at the thought of it.

This prompted my father to dive into our exploits of croquet from when I was a child. Our lawn in Illinois had been large and flat and covered in an even bed of perfect grass. The court had been regulation and my father always won.

Our current apartment was in a house that faced the Palisades and the terrain slanted downhill towards the Hudson River. The yard was bumpy and filled with plantains and crabgrass. My father explained that unlike croquet, bocce could be played on any surface. We paired off and played. As the shiny wooden balls bounced along our yard my father rewrote the rules of bocce.

“You see,” he said, pointing as a ball hit a divot and bounced off course. “That’s just part of the game now.” After we had finished he said, “You’ll play this for years to come.”

A few years later we moved to an apartment in a small neighboring city and sold off all our lawn items except the bocce ball set which we stored inside an opaque plastic box. A few years after that we bought our first house which was on a lake in Putnam County. The house sits fifty feet above the water and the yard snakes down to the dock along a foot path that runs through a wooded lot. A friend remarked during our housewarming party, “This isn’t the kind of yard you could ever play anything on.”

Once when my father was visiting he pointed out the only level strip of land in the terraced yard and we bandied about putting in a skinny bocce court. In the end we abandoned the idea because of cost and size.

The summer before our daughter left for college she held a yard sale. She was told she could keep all the proceeds from the sale for herself in exchange for doing all the work involved. As she gathered up our junk she discovered the bocce set under the basement steps.

“What about these?” she asked, peering down at the dusty balls.

My father, who had been dead for almost four years, wouldn’t have known the difference and we hadn’t played with them since before my daughter was born. I picked up one of the heavy balls and wiped away a thick layer of dust with the edge of my t-shirt. I tried to picture all the gifts my father had ever given me but could only remember this one. The weight of the ball transported me back to that birthday and how pleased he had been with his gift. I admired the red wood that still contrasted against the patterned white lines circling around the ball and saw for the first time how utterly beautiful the balls were.

“No,” I said, returning the ball with the rest. “I want them.”

“But you never use them,” she argued mildly.

“Well your father and I plan to start playing just as soon as you leave for school.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Really,” I said.

TRAVELING WITH FAIRIES

Living on the lake has always been coupled with a driving desire to leave, partly because we know we will always return. Another reason lies in the fact that a lot of what happens at our house and yard requires constant attention and upkeep. It’s rare that a day at the lake is spent resting on the dock reading a good book between naps and a long swim. One of those things might happen after a day of chores. So I am always thinking about the next trip.

Photo by Robert Forlini

As an Italian, Rob has a difficult time getting in the car and actually driving away. The unspoken fear is, “Who will watch the house?” Growing up in a close-knit compound where three neighboring homes were occupied by blood relatives, there was always someone around to keep an eye on things. The only people around us are an odd collection of neighbors we refer to as “The crazy house,” “The troglodyte,” “Buzz bomb,” “The drug addicts,” and “Scary.” Not exactly a rousing recommendation. But after the trip has been planned and the light timers are set, the wooden pole is slipped into the sliding glass door and the alarm is turned on we barrel away on an adventure accompanied by any number of talismans.

These trinkets hold deep and guarded powers over our lives except they probably only hold the power we have assigned to them. There’s Gobo the little Italian hunchback who hangs from the car’s rearview mirror. If you rub his hump he wards off the evil eye and brings you good luck. I’m not sure what evil spirits await us on our journeys but it’s good to know we have that covered before even pull out of the driveway.

Inside our pockets we have silver Chinese coins that have pictures of the animal of our birth year. I was born in the Year of the Dog and I have two of them. I lost the first one and Rob diligently replaced it. The other day I pulled out a pair of shorts for the arrival of warm weather and the original dog coin fell out of the pocket.

“That’s a good omen,” Rob said.

The next day we discovered a long lost blown glass fruit bowl we had decided a visiting handy man had stolen. For years we pulled up the example of the missing fruit bowl as another indication for why you just can’t trust people and you can never have enough safeguards. When we found the fruit bowl buried under platters in the back of a high cabinet we changed our tune.

Rob declared, “When you found that coin your luck changed. Maybe now you’ll find your lost watch!”

My Chinese zodiac symbol is earth dog. It is associated with the turn of each of the four seasons. It governs the spleen, stomach, mouth and muscles. Its negative emotion is anxiety and its positive emotion is empathy. But I really like the way rabbit coins look so I have one of those too. Rob tells me that the rabbit isn’t doing much for me.

Rob and I have placed guardians all around us. Garden gnomes watch over the lawn, a Lucky Cat statue safeguards the books. We pay homage to our ancestors with their pictures on the mantel.

But the charm I hold most dear is a small silver fairy that I wear around my neck whenever I fly on an airplane. My oldest sister gave me the fairy in 1970 and I partly believe in it’s power because I haven’t ever lost it. It harkens back to an era of hippies and free spirits. My fairy and I lift the plane into the air and safely land the equipment onto the runway. The captain helps but I know that my fairy and I assure our safe return.

Admitting all of this goes against what I have always believed about our adult selves. We travel with plans. We scope out a detailed itinerary that includes roadside attractions, well researched restaurants, side trips and we only stay at hotels with high marks on Trip Advisor. We allow logic and reason to guide us through most of life. We are firm believers in science and evolution and scoff at organized religions and the zealots who hold their faith dear. We do not believe that catastrophic weather is the result of a pissed-off God. We laugh at the television evangelists preaching to thousands of blinking congregants who nod their heads in agreement.

“Sheep!” Rob barks as he changes the channel.

Followers of God accept truth in the unseen. Their faith is something deep inside them and they believe life’s randomness are acts of God. “God works in mysterious ways” or “only God knows” are common responses to unexplained events.

So you might think that our affection for good luck charms is more than a little duplicitous. We could probably become members of the Church of the Good Luck Charm. The difference lies in the fact we know these things are trinkets. At the end of the day I know the fruit bowl was there all along and why the coin fell out of my pocket and the pilot, weather conditions and air traffic control landed the plane safely.

But the fairy makes me feel better.

CATAPULTS, BAG PIPES AND HOME BREW OR THE BOY I LOVE

I was rooting around in the kitchen junk drawer yesterday when I came across a small hand held squirrel call. It has a black rubber plunger on the top that is pushed down repeatedly into a small glass cylinder to make squirrel sounds. It is one of the many useless items we had to have since we moved to the lake.

Like many of these items it was purchased on a whim. Jackson and Rob had gone to a hunting shop to buy bushings for the rowboat oar locks and the squirrel call was sitting in a box next to the register. The cost was low enough and Rob, always eager to encourage new interests in his children, said yes. Who could blame him? Jackson has a remarkable ability to persuade people.

Jackson’s scheme was to charm the squirrels out of the trees and follow him around like the Pied Piper of Hamlin. At the very least he wanted to fool the squirrels so they acted confused. You might be surprised to learn that it didn’t work. The trouble with Jackson’s childhood interests was they never had a lot of staying power.

When he wanted to fish we bought poles and lures and dug up bait. Rob and Jack set out in the row boat and caught a medium sized bass on their very first trip. Rob scaled and cleaned the fish and fried it up in butter in a cast iron pan as Jack looked on in horror. By the time the dishes were done he declared he was done with fishing for good. Ten years later, after he was in college, we sold his fishing gear at a tag sale and the very next summer he decided to start fishing again, which I wrote about in the very first post of this blog called Bonding.

Living on a wooded lot produces a lot of dead branches and Jackson’s solution to this bounty was to become a whittler. Using a kitchen knife he chipped away at a variety of branches until they resembled toothpicks the Flintstones might use. So a purchase was made of a forty dollar whittling knife which contained a small pamphlet on the fine art of whittling. Instead of learning to whittle on balsa wood Jack used dead oak making the work was tough going, not to mention the basement work table awash in wood chips. The knife was lost and the interest died away until one summer in college when he picked up a branch seeing the error of his past attempts. After a bit of convincing Rob bought him a second knife and he whittled two wooden cooking spoons in the span of one day. He proudly gave them both to me as a gift which I still use. We both silently acknowledged he could cross whittling off his bucket list.

Photo by Robert M. Forlini

He was always on the lookout for a musical instrument to play. The only requirement was it should not take a lifetime to master. A month was about average. He tried the electronic keyboard, the ocarina, a penny whistle and the ukulele. One Christmas he wanted bagpipes. He found a children’s set in a catalogue and we ordered them. It was after all Christmas. I know he never played out an entire tune but I’m pretty sure he puffed out a few notes before they were relegated to a box in the storage locker. In all fairness he did major in music in college and whose to say the bagpipes didn’t play a small part in that decision.

We recently emptied our storage locker and got rid of any unwanted items. On the top of the list was a metal detector which I believe he purchased with his own savings since he was sure to hit the jackpot once he started finding buried treasure. The first time he ever used the metal detector was at a playground with a sandy floor. After an hour or so of searching the only metal he had detected was a discarded aluminum chewing gum wrapper.

In desperation I buried a pile of change and said pointing, “Hey, try over here.”

He pocketed his winnings and left confident that this was just the beginning. Our yard coughed up a few metal pipes, a one inch thick bolt and an old spoon which I recently gave to him as a long lost souvenir.

One summer he decided to plant a garden in our shaded yard. After careful consideration he decided to grow okra and we purchased the packet of seeds. He surveyed the premises and determined the perfect spot for his crop.

“This area gets the most sun,” he said pointing to an arid parcel of lawn next to the sandbox.

I craned my neck back and looked into the small patch of sun that was peeking through the leaves. “Yup,” I agreed, “this is about as sunny as it gets here.”

He toiled away for several days, turning the soil, adding mulch and making rows before planting the seeds and then forgetting about them. With little sun and sporadic watering the okra yield was nil. Not to be deterred by the okra experiment he stuck with the farmer theme and persuaded us place an online order for a plant called the Living Stone. The advertisement for the plant stated that this was a plant you could not kill. A few weeks later a tiny bulb-shaped succulent plant arrived in the mail peeking out from a small terra cotta pot. It resemble a rock sitting on a small circle of dirt. It sat on the top of his dresser for almost a year before it was determined that even living stones need some water

His sister peered down into the tiny pot before it landed in the kitchen garbage and said, “Only you could kill a Living Stone.” His reason for the Living Stone’s demise rested on the single fact that Living Stones were not terribly interesting plants. What he really needed was a Venus Flytrap. Rob had one as a child and he instigated the acquisition. The problem arose when it came time to feed it. As vegetarians we didn’t have any meat on hand and Jackson spent an inordinate amount of time trying to catch flys. The Fly Trap starved to death.

By the time he was eighteen he set his sights on brewing beer. This was one of the rare occasions where I was the complicit parent. I know I should have probably said no. In fact I’m pretty sure I originally did but after a lot of discourse he won me over. I even drove him two hours north to a family run beer supply business set up in a shed next to their house. We tasted their newest batches and three hundred dollars later arrived home with most of what one needed to home brew. I remember the trip fondly as a private adventure the two of us shared. He insisted on keeping the buckets of fermenting yeast in his room so he could monitor the temperature. One morning I went to wake him up and was bowled over by the stench not to mention the liquid oozing onto his hardwood floor. He reluctantly moved the buckets into the basement for the remaining weeks. In a panic on the night before he left for college, when he should have been packing, he had his parents and sister filling bottles and sealing on caps in an assembly line fashion while he directed our every move. Thanksgiving he proudly offered his beer to my mother and stepfather who thought it was delicious. Every time he left home I tried to check to see that his backpack wasn’t clinking with contraband beer bottles. In total he produced three successful batches and one that never had fizz.

I recently asked him, “What happened to your home brewing?

He shrugged. “That took a lot of time.”

During his junior year of high school we traveled to Victoria where he pleaded with us to buy him a kit containing all the parts to build a table-top trebuchet. Since we were in Canada I questioned the logistics of getting it home in one piece.

“Remember the sombrero?” I asked to anyone who was still listening.

Rob and Jack fleetingly recalled the trip home from Arizona with an enormous green and gold sombrero that had to be carried on and off two planes along with a long walking stick because neither would fit into a suitcase.

“But it’s a trebuchet,” Rob said.

“So.” I responded.

“That’s really cool,” Rob added and then paid for the contraption.

Back in New York Jackson assembled the device and flung a few items around the house until it was relegated to the top shelf of his closet.

The week after he graduated from college he rented a truck, gathered up most of his worldly possessions and moved into his own apartment. He left a few of his past hobbies behind.

Photo by Robert M Forlini

During the aforementioned storage locker cleanout we packed up the trebuchet into a three foot cubed cardboard box surrounded by packing peanuts. The large box which was supposed to be a big joke by his parents arrived as a surprise at his apartment door. He seemed happy enough to once again be in possession of it and thanked us for it.

That’s the way it is with whims and hobbies. We often like things for reasons other people can’t understand. Interests wax and wane as we age and you never know when something from the past will come in handy in the future, squirrel call included.

EASTER AT THE LAKE

Easter at the lake is marked like everywhere with the arrival of Spring. As a child my first brush with the excitement of Spring came with the arrival of crocus peeking up in our yard in Illinois. I would run outside each day and count how many of tiny colored plants had arrived overnight. The blooming crocus overlapped the burgeoning forsythia bushes that framed our yard in yellow which was followed by the daffodils. Once the tulips arrived we were deep into springtime.

We have the same flowers here at the lake but the event we look forward to each year is the blooming of the cherry tree. The tree sits in front of Quinn’s bedroom window and at some point I declared it “her tree” and nominally dedicated it to her. This did not sit well with her brother who felt this arrangement was preferential because of the arbitrary location at her windows. Later in the season when the enormous rhododendron bloomed giant deep pink flowers outside his window I made a similar declaration for him. He was having none of it and continued to claim the cherry tree which drove his sister crazy.

When we moved into our home we realized that the landscape down to the water held a lot of pitfalls for the lay gardener but it didn’t take a great deal of imagination to see the potential for a grand Easter egg hunt. So when the first Easter rolled around I stealthily snuck outside at daybreak and peppered the yard with colored plastic eggs. The tradition endured over the years as nieces and nephews showed up to help find the one hundred eggs. Each year we came up short because the yard was too good at hiding treasure. In the middle of July while digging up dandelions or turning over a rock a small pink or green egg would materialize and be added back into the bag filled with Easter eggs in the attic waiting for another year, another hunt.

When Anne, Rob’s mother, moved into assisted living she spent all of her holidays at our house. We began each Easter with the ceremonial egg dying. It was always Anne’s favorite part of the day. She would start with solid colors and then branch out and joins us as we tried to individualize our creations.

“This is my Italian flag egg,” Rob said resting a striped red, white and green egg back into the egg carton.

“This is my Quinnie egg,” I’d say to my daughter’s delight setting down one with a yellow top and pink face. “And this is my Jackson egg,” I’d add pointing to the one with a red top. I’d enhance the colors with pencil drawn caricatures over the subtle colors. Anne soon took up the pencil and started drawing bunny faces on the front of her eggs.

As the years went by we had to make more and more hard boiled eggs because Anne could not get enough. She suffered from short term memory loss that manifested in various forms. One Easter after sitting around the table dying over three dozen eggs with her I selected a pretty assortment of our craft and arranged them on the table in a bowl as a centerpiece. The rest of the family arrived and we all went into the dining room to eat dinner.

My mother-in-law came in to take her seat and noticed the bowl of eggs and gasped, “Where did all these beautiful eggs come from?”

We all paused and silently noted that her memory had shifted down a notch. Holidays have always served as benchmarks in time. Cultures and families celebrate events and holidays to help mark that time in memory as a reference point to remembering the rest of the year.

“You just made them,” Rob said to his mother very slowly. “In the kitchen a few minutes ago.”

“No kidding!” she said smiling and then clapped her hands at the thought of it.

Then we all laughed and ate our meal knowing that in addition to celebrating Easter we were little by little observing the steady march of time that in the end changes everything.

MY FATHER ON TV

The Waltons

In the early 1970’s my father, sister and I used to huddle around a portable, black and white television set on Thursday nights to watch The Waltons over dinner. My teenage sister eventually fell out of the habit but my father and I stayed loyal fans every week until I left for college in 1976. The Waltons had eleven family members under one roof which included seven children, the parents and grandparents. The great stories and acting felt believable to me, and none so much as Ralph Waite who died last month, as the loving and pragmatic father who refused to go to church. His obituary in the New York Times wrote…

…Always he was John Walton, the paternal voice of wisdom. He remembered a woman approaching him in a crowd and saying she had been poor as a child and had thought of him as her father. “I went to school and college because of you,” he recalled her saying. “She said, ‘Now I’m a lawyer, and I don’t think I would be if I hadn’t seen that show,’ ” Mr. Waite said. “I’m still amazed by that. It happens all the time.”

As I read this, I immediately related to the sentiment. I never thought of John Walton as my father but that didn’t mean I didn’t see my father on TV, and often.

In September of 1965, when I was seven, my father’s likeness appeared in two television

Eddie Arnold

series: Green Acres and Gidget. My friends told me that my father looked just like Eddie Arnold, and although I wouldn’t say he was a spitting image, there was a strong resemblance and I thought so too. But the character of Oliver Douglas was a cranky and frustrated lawyer trying to become a farmer while living with his exotic wife in a shack down South. Not what I wanted in a father so I pretended the actor was my Dad, but not the character.

Don Porter

My dad

The character of Russell Lawrence, on Gidget, lived in a suburban home as a college professor who presided over his two daughters with sage, even-tempered advice. Gidget lasted only one season but it endured in reruns and each time I settled in to watch it I imagined Don Porter was my father. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my own father, it was just that I thought life would be terrific if I looked like Sally Field and my Dad always acted like this TV dad. It helped that my father greatly resembled Don Porter. Once the credits rolled the introjections ended. During this same period, best friend Mary Kay confided that she thought that her father, who was a dentist, was the same dentist who lived next door to the Petries’ in the Dick Van Dyke Show. Who was I to dispute this?

In 1982 I went to graduate school in New York and left television behind for the next decade. My new roommate, Wendy, announced that Contadina Tomato Paste was changing their label and went out and bought a can with the old label before it disappeared for good.

“When I was little I thought this was my mother was on this can,” she said pointing to the dark haired woman holding a basket of tomatoes in a field.

The new label

“Does she look like your mother?” I had asked.

“A lot,” Wendy nodded. “But I also I thought my mother was Judy Garland.”

We were living in a depressed area of Brooklyn and Wendy, who hailed from Wichita (her favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz) brought new meaning to the phrase, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” each time we ventured down a somewhat sketchy street.

Wendy took a Polaroid SX-70 photograph of Judy Garland from a television screen and when her actual mother came to visit us Wendy asked her Mom to show me her impersonation of Judy. Her mother put on a pair of sun glasses, tipped her head back shook it slightly and smiled. I had to admit they not only looked alike but her Mom shared some of the same iconic mannerisms of the late singer.

That same year Wendy introduced me to my future husband, Rob. One thing people who grew up with television often connect over is a shared TV experience from childhood. Each of us were raised in different states but the television programs were much more limited than they are today so we basically watched the same things. I mentioned that All in the Family, which ran throughout the seventies, had been one of my family’s favorite shows. Rob shook his head in utter disagreement.

“I hated that show,” he exclaimed.

“What? But it was so funny!”

“Not to me,” he said. “I never considered it comedy.”

He went on to explain that the main character, Archie Bunker, reminded him too much of his own father. Archie was a working-class World War II veteran living in Queens. Rob’s father, also a veteran, was an uneducated house painter from the Bronx who was dismissive of anyone not in agreement with his view of the world. Both men could be irascible and fly off the handle without knowing all the facts. They both had wives who placated them but were actually much smarter than they let on.People like Archie Bunker were so foreign a concept to me that I never thought about the actual people the character might have been based upon. The same way that fathers who wore ties were an alien concept to Rob. Fathers on television in the fifties, sixties and seventies gave us a glimpse into what fathers were all about. Our own fathers lead mysterious daytime lives away from us and finding a surrogate on TV helped fill in the blanks of what fathers really did.

Edith and Archie

TV Guide created a list of the Top Fifty TV Dads of all time based upon input from fans. I’m attaching the link to the list so you can go and compare these choices with your own conclusions. Maybe one of the names will remind you of a time when your younger self thought your Dad was on television. (TV Guide never made a top fifty moms list.) I’ve determined that making connections between fictitious characters and real people in our lives is fairly common. I asked my daughter if she ever had this experience and she told me she used to pretend she was a member of the Little House on The Prairie family when she watched it on TV.

In my convalescence on the lake this winter I spent a few days binging on season two of House of Cards. Although the show entertained me I had an empty feeling at the season’s end. There is not one character in the series I could identify with or relate to. Almost everyone is self-serving and unlikable except the President who came across as unbelievably stupid. There are some great television dramas on today but I haven’t discovered a current character who might motivate me to make a life change. In my favorite current show Mad Men, there isn’t a redeeming father in the bunch. Or in another favorite, Downton Abby, a father refused to attend his daughter’s wedding to an Irishman. Also none of the parents spend any time with their young children. Today, most TV is a glut of fake reality. Keeping Up with the Kardashians, The Real Housewives of…(insert city here), Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Jersey Shore and Duck Dynasty to name a few of the shows that have supplanted deep meaningful characters as role models with baseless reality TV people.

Sally Field and Don Porter on Gidget

me and my dad in 1965

The beauty of shows like The Waltons was it came on once a week and you had time to process the difference between the TV lives and your own. When faced with a dilemma you might stop and ask, “How would John Walton make this decision?” Ralph Waite brought poetry and beauty to the character of John Walton which is why he inadvertently inspired someone to go to college.

DETAILS TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES

The snow is melting in erratic stages on the terraced land that leads down to the lake. A plastic purple egg is poking out beneath the overgrown Bonsai tree. It’s a colorful reminder of the past year, one of the three missing Easter eggs from last year’s hunt.

I have been walking on crutches for six weeks and find myself only noticing small things that are close but always out of reach. Past the Bonsai on the other side of the lake a pup tent sits embedded into the ice. I’ve noticed the ice fishing in past years as an aside to life on the lake in the winter but this year, from my window seat, I watch the comings and goings of the pup tent owner like I’m watching a child play with a dollhouse. The tiny figurines of other distant fishermen dotted across my visible landscape conjure up ideas about everything in life I feel I must urgently attend to but cannot.

The torn square on a comforter that needs a few stitches, pine needles from Christmas still trapped beneath a radiator, a small strip of missing grout inside the shower and a thin layer of dust on the venetian blind. Suddenly all these seemingly little things need my immediate attention. I tell myself that when I can walk again I will take care of these items and more. No stone will be left unturned.

As I imagine the arrival of spring I picture the garden blooming as never before under my thumb. The house and decks are freshly painted. The dock that has been leaning on a broken piling since we moved in will be hoisted upright and repaired under the sheer strength of my arms built up from weeks of using crutches. New oars and bushings will be set into the rowboat that will cease to rest upside down, killing the same patch of grass over and over again. The kitchen cabinets and closets will all be sorted out and the basement that I have not stepped a foot into since the middle of January will have a place for everything and everything in its place.

It’s easy to imagine the care and maintenance of your life when you no longer have the mobility to move through it the way you have become accustomed to. I am not so naïve to believe that inventories that pile up while I am recovering will still be important when my attention shifts back to work, commuting, grocery shopping and laundry. What strikes me most now is the little things that go unnoticed in the average day but become magnified when you can’t even make dinner easily. I have cooked a few times these past two months but the effort always left me drained, like getting up the steps into the car has exhausted me before we even pull away from the curb. I stare up the steps leading down to my house and remember the effortless stride I had used each morning to get the newspaper in the driveway. Now I lie in bed and think about the paper and how nice it might be to read it if someone was kind enough to bring it to me. Rob always does, along with a cup of hot tea.

The second year of our marriage we had moved into a railroad flat on the Hudson River that sat opposite from the Palisades. We had a neighbor named Mary who lived across the hall from us who was retired and didn’t drive. Each time the weather threatened snow she wailed, “Ohhh, I hope it don’t snow!”

Her lament of the weather always surprised us because she had nowhere to go or drive to. It didn’t seem to impact her life to any degree. But now, housebound for the better part of this winter, I understand what Mary must have felt like each time it snowed. The snow prevents even the possibility of going somewhere, anywhere.

In my time home, often alone, I have read eight novels. I also re-watched Anne of Green Gables. When Anne says “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” I laugh about how silly she sounds. Even if you haven’t seen it or read it before, you know everything will turn out fine. In my moments of despair, and I’m embarrassed to say I’ve had a few this winter, I have felt like Anne. My family smiles and reminds me of how silly I sound. They remind me that this is not a permanent condition, the weather is awful anyway and for heaven’s sake, take this time to relax and restore my health. Just as the snow and ice will eventually melt and my foot will eventually heal, all details take care of themselves.

FIRE STARTERS OR FLUE SEASON

Rob’s main criteria in a home has always been security. We recently hired a cleaning woman after I had foot surgery and he ran around the house locking all his valuables up in his darkroom.

“She’s not going to take anything,” I protested.

“If she does, it won’t be my things.”

“You’re being silly.”

“Safe,” he corrected me.

So you can well imagine how happy he was to see that our lake home was wired with an alarm system before we purchased it. The fact that our security company is called Bobs doesn’t seem to bother him. Besides the view, my main selling point has always been a working brick fireplace. Our living room is tiny but the large stone-faced hearth makes up for it. I’ve always found burning logs inside a fireplace on a cold winter day utterly romantic.

As an early riser I used to like to slip downstairs on a Sunday before the rest of the family awoke and whip up a batch of biscuits or scones from scratch. This was followed by a pot of Irish Breakfast tea topped off with the morning paper in front of a roaring fire. It was difficult to get through all the tasks before one of the children discovered me but on one particular morning I almost succeeded. Everything was prepared and in order for the fire to catch and without a lot of bother I overloaded an extra bit of fire starter sticks under the main logs. I stuffed newspaper beneath that and struck the match.

The fire ignited in an instant and by the time I turned around to sit down to my tea and unread paper the room had begun to fill with smoke. Suddenly a loud piercing siren rang through the house and all the inhabitants were awake and shouting. Rob raced downstairs, rightfully screaming with the fire extinguisher in hand. He vigorously doused the blaze, pulled the flue chain, closed off doors, opened windows and within a matter of seconds managed to dig a fan out from a closet to begin blowing the smoke outside. The alarm rang on. Fire engines started to sound in the distance and increased in volume as they collected outside our front door.

Now anyone who ever forgot to open the flue knows that it does not require the assistance of an entire local volunteer firefighting team replete with four full size engines. To make matters even worse, my daughter Quinn stared out at the commotion gathering in front of our house and gasped. Mr. Johnson, the local fire chief, was heading down the front steps.

“It’s my teacher, Mr. Johnson.”

To have your teacher enter your smoke filled chaotic home with everyone still in pajamas was a fate worse than death for a sixth grader. She started to cry. Jackson who also had Mr. Johnson two years prior ran away and spied the commotion from an upstairs window.

“Get out there,” Rob shouted steering me towards the front door. “You made this mess!”

The happy thought of biscuits, tea and the Sunday Times in front of the fire were gone and I stuffed my bare feet into boots, threw a car coat over my pajamas and went outside to take my medicine.

“Ha, ha,” I laughed nervously and clutched my coat tighter. “I forgot to open the flue. All fixed.” I shot off a shamefaced grimace and shrugged my shoulders.

The firemen were clustered at the top of the steps like it was old home week and Mr. Johnson peered inside the smoky house relieved that it wasn’t ablaze.

“My husband put it out with the extinguisher.”

He nodded. “Just what I would have done.”

The infernal alarm finally stopped, but not before every neighbor within a half mile had come outside to see which culprit had roused them so early on a Sunday morning.

Mr. Johnson smiled. “It happens.” He wrote something down on his clipboard and radioed back to the drivers to start pulling out. “Piece of advice,” he said as he turned to leave.

“Yes,” I answered a bit too eagerly.

“Febreeze.”

“Febreeze?”

“And plenty of it.”

The next day Quinn skulked into class hoping to go unnoticed when kind old Mr. Johnson called her out and reprimanded her absent mother in front of the entire class.

“Remind your mother to open the flue next time!” he laughed.

When she relayed the story after school it was hard to feel too sorry for her. After the firemen left Rob had taken Jack and Quinn out to breakfast and then to a museum for the day. I had stayed home and washed the curtains twice, vacuumed the couch with baking soda, polished the floors and cleaned the windows. I also sprayed copious amounts of Febreeze. It was my choice to stay and clean, hoping it would imbed in my brain to never make that mistake again.

As a precaution we didn’t use the fireplace again for remainder of that winter but the following fall with a careful nod to safety I always had Rob check the flue before I lit the first match.

I SPEAK ICE

Photo by Alice Hagan

The fourth winter at the lake the water froze solid before a single flake fell and we nervously looked out onto a shining, black glass canvas. The ice appeared to be about half a foot thick but you could still see moving water in some places below the ice floor. The ice cracked and cried out as we stamped our boots down on the shoreline and listened to a chorus of vibrations that scared us back onto the dock. It was difficult to tell if the sounds were warning or welcoming us.

All night long the lake moaned a sad and melancholy song. I got up and crept down to the kitchen so I could watch it in the moonlight as I listened to it groan. The sounds were guttural and eerie as the ice, I later learned, was expanding and thickening. The sounds are accentuated in the early morning and late afternoon when the outside temperature is fluctuating.

Photo by Robert Forlini

The next day I saw a child skating on the lake in great looping circles. I had my answer, it was safe to skate. We made hot chocolate and lugged our thermoses, skates and extra socks down to the dock. Initially we stayed close to shore before we brazenly skimmed over a sheet of black ice that was so beautiful I felt guilty about laying tracks of skate blades across the top. You could see frozen bubbles just underneath the surface and my son often chose to lie down on the ice and stare into the abyss.

Rob ditched the skates, preferring to walk across the ice taking pictures. My daughter and I skated restlessly to the other side and as we turned around we had to remind ourselves that we hadn’t just skated through water and it was safe to return. There is a feeling of endless freedom accompanied with open lake skating.

: Photo by Robert Forlini

I had grown up skating on a similar sized pond called Butler Lake in Libertyville, Illinois. I remember the thrill of the opening day of skating. The town managed the safety of the ice and hung up warning signs if the ice ever grew too thin. Libertyville maintained a small warming house that sold cheap snacks and pumped WLS radio through a set of loudspeakers attached to the outside of the house and facing the lake. My mother used to drop us off for the day during winter vacation from school and no matter how low the temperature plunged we couldn’t leave until she was good and ready to pick us up.

One bitter cold day the warming house was packed with kids like us, each hesitant to give up their seat on the bench. My older sister bargained for me to go buy the hot cocoas.

“You go get them,” she prodded. “I’ll save your seat.”

I stared at the endless line of shivering children in wobbly skate blades waiting for a surly high school boy to serve them while he flirted with a cluster of overly zealous girls. I sighed and took my place in line.

I returned quite a bit later with two partially filled Styrofoam cups that had sloshed down around the cuffs of my snow jacket. My seat was filled by an oversized middle school boy in hockey skates and knee pads. My sister looked at me with one of those “what do you expect me to do?” looks. So I teetered in my skates on the thick rubber mats that ran through the aisles and sipped at the chocolate flavored hot water and wished the day would end.

Out of boredom and the increasing din in the warming house we dressed back up in our hats and scarves and ventured out onto the ice for short bursts. Just long enough to not freeze to death. The ramp down to the ice had a metal railing that you clung to for dear life hoping one of the hockey boys didn’t plow you down before you cleared the path.

After about five minutes of limb numbing exercise we pulled ourselves back up the ramp, our frozen fingers barely clinging to the metal rail.

By the time our mother arrived it was almost dark and most of the other children had left. We stuffed ourselves into the back of the station wagon and our silence confirmed to her that we’d had a great day. She obviously had.

“Well you must be exhausted from all that exercise,” she’d say. “I bet you can’t wait to go back tomorrow.”

In actuality we did have fun at Butler Lake over the years but the area you were allowed to skate on was cordoned off and if you ventured too far out someone skated after you with a bull horn and made an example of you.

“Hey kid, you in the stocking cap,” he announced to every turned head on the rink. “Whatya want to die out there?” You’d nonchalantly pull off your stocking cap and skate back looking at your toe grips hoping you could blend back in.

My memory of the color of the ice on Butler Lake was always a dull grey, never the jet black color that spread out in front of us that winter or the expanse of a rink that was as big as the lake was long. Butler Lake may have called out long heart wrenching cries of expanding ice but any sounds it produced were drowned out by Larry Lujak playing songs like “Harper Valley P.T.A.” or “Little Green Apples.” You expect to hear these things at an indoor rink even today but out on a lake you should just be listening to the ice speaking.

Last winter, my children grown, I skated alone on my lake through a thin crust of snow and watched the late day shadows grow long. A lost seagull was circling above me, both of us inadvertently moving to the song of the ice beneath us.

Skating through thin snow. February 2013

I am ending this blog post with a link to silentlistening that has posted a recording of ice sounds. Enjoy.

ALL IN THE TIMING or I LEFT MY LIST AT HOME

Winter

I have always felt slightly out of step with the rest of America in terms of timing. I graduated from college in 1980 and those of you who are old enough to remember would be hard pressed to find a worse period to enter the modern job market until 2008. After college I worked weekends for a wedding caterer, and I finally received two full time job offers after an extensive search. One was organizing greeting cards in a local pharmacy, which I didn’t take, and the second was working for B. Dalton Bookseller. The greeting card job paid a dollar more an hour but I thought a job in a book shop offered me more prestige. After all, I was a college graduate and I had my standards. I earned $2.90 an hour and after taxes I cleared a little under four hundred dollars a month. My rent was $105.00 a month and I didn’t own a car, so I got by. By 1984, Reaganomics hadn’t trickled down to me yet so I headed back to school to get an art degree- something that would really secure my future. I mention all this because some of it was timing and some of it was choice, like most things in life. The trick is to make astute choices when the timing is all off.

Early Spring

Last week I was working out on the elliptical at the gym and listening to music on my phone. HGTV was on the television above me and the dialogue was in closed caption so I inadvertently followed along. The couple on the screen were searching for a first house. The agent brought them to six different houses and inside each one they looked for their list of “must haves.” For example, they wanted four bedrooms even though they were childless.

“We need room to grow,” the wife cooed with a smile.

“I need a two car garage,” the husband stated emphatically, as if he couldn’t even consider a house with a single garage.

They wanted a great room, space to entertain, modern kitchen and baths, a master bedroom and a big yard for a dog that they did not yet own. At one point they saw a house with a fenced in yard and the woman said, “We can get the dog right away if we choose this house.”

“Two dogs,” the man said.

The words “laughter” flashed on the screen and the couple and agent all looked happy.

They considered the street, the schools, the walking environment, the potential neighbors and above all the resell potential. I was blown away. When did this culture of home shoppers emerge, or were they always around but this show brought them into focus? According to Wikipedia, as of August 2013 approximately 98,229,000 American households (86.01% of households with television) receive HGTV. To the remaining 14% of television households, that stands for Home and Garden Television. I am one of the 14%. This is important for no other reason than that I always get the feeling there’s something I don’t know about.

Summer

In 2000, when we started to search for our first home, once again the timing couldn’t be worse. It was the top of the market and the inventory was slim to none. We waited in a line to see a beat-up colonial in White Plains that needed to be gutted. We contemplated a small house in West Harrison with a cracked foundation and dead rodents in the sink. Some friends in a similar situation moved in with parents and started to stash cash for a better day. Bidding wars and a total lack of know-how sent us to the back of the pack. I saw a small ad in the Penny Saver with the heading: “The Loon Calls. Pull your canoe up to your very own dock.” I dialed the number. I still remember the first time we drove into the Putnam County lake community following the agent in her car

“This is nuts,” I said. “I’m never going to move here. This is a waste of time.”

I saw a man who resembled a member of ZZ Top work on his monster truck next to a yard filled with rusty junk. When we pulled into the garage-less driveway I begged Rob to keep driving.

He sighed. “She’s waiting for us and this was your big idea. We’ll look and leave. Because in the end it’s all information.” Rob often gets the big picture when I don’t or can’t.

We stepped through the front door. There was little to no entryway and we stared at a living room you practically fell into. The next stop was a child’s bedroom. The walls were covered in fake vinyl wood paneling that had been painted poison green and caulked together with silicon gel. The bath next to that had border wall paper that was peeling off and revealing mold. We walked through to the back of the house and found two picture windows looking out on a wooded lot and a lake beyond the yard. The kitchen had a large island built up against one of the picture windows and the dining room off of it was narrow and small. We didn’t see all the work involved we only saw the lake.

Besides a kitchen and bathroom and at least three bedrooms for our family of four we never had a list. I feel like if we had we wouldn’t have bought this place.

The couple on the show had found their dream home without any compromises and paid the same amount we paid back in 2000. All because they had a “must have” list or because the timing was right or both. True, they lived in South Carolina but you can’t have everything.

I often think back to that day in late May when we walked through the house that is now our home and out onto the lower deck. A warm breeze was blowing through the trees and warming our skin. The lake was glistening below. Our daughter was swinging on a tire swing and our son was lying face down on the dock trying to fish a snail shell out of the water. Rob and I caught each other’s eye and in that instant I now know having a list wouldn’t have mattered.

Fall

Lessons on a Small Lake

Navigating the world from a small lake near NYC

Author: Phoebe J