Life Goes On

Presidents Day weekend 2020 I took the opportunity to travel to North Carolina to visit my sister. While I was there, we took the opportunity to look at our grandmother’s college scrapbook together. She went to college during the years of 1916-1920 at Millikin University, in Decatur, Illinois. Near the end of her scrapbook, we found envelopes containing letters friends from college. These had been written to her during a time when she had to temporarily leave school to recover from the Spanish Flu. She was at her family's farm, being cared for by her grandmother and uncle, who had raised her from a small child. All her friends' letters implored her to come back as soon as possible, as college was not nearly much fun without her. 

Ironically, the month following my trip to North Carolina, Covid-19 hit our country, and we started having to go into lockdown. During the spring, I was furloughed from my job (from which is was then more or less involuntarily “retired”); I broke my ankle; and I found out that two of my daughters were pregnant with our first grandchildren. Both babies were born before the end of the year (in October and November), and both are healthy.

As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” My grandmother hadn’t planned to have an interruption in her college education. But she recovered, finished college, went on to have a career, met and married the man she loved, and gave birth to the baby who would become my mother. And a hundred years later, although my life has taken a detour, the birth of my two grandchildren has reminded me that we will recover, and that life will go on.

 

 

I'll Be Home for Christmas

I’ll be home for Christmas,

You can count on me.

Please have snow

And Mistletoe

And presents under the tree.

Christmas Eve will find me

Where the love light gleams.

I’ll be home for Christmas,

If only in my dreams.

I remember singing this song on my way home to Illinois for Christmas soon after I was married and living far away in Maryland. After our family got to a certain age, we opted to not make that trek between Thanksgiving and Springtime, due to the potential of treacherous weather; not to mention the need to establish holiday traditions for our own young family. However, every year my memories still turn to the pleasures of spending Christmas back “home”.

As with many things in the Smith family, our Christmas was humble. This was a necessity, as we didn’t have much money to spend on big ticket items. But our Christmas was still very special, as each year added traditions in the way we did things. Decorating the tree was always exciting. At least once Aunt Katie and Uncle Lloyd came over to help decorate, and someone had the idea of making garlands of popcorn to string on the tree. This necessitated popping lots of popcorn, and then my aunt and uncle took up needle and thread to make the garlands (we used to have a picture of them doing this). The fact that I only remember this happening one year is probably due to the amount of labor involved. The special part was that Katie and Lloyd spent the evening at our house.

Decorating the tree was a ritual of opening boxes of much-loved ornaments, which I remembered from year to year. Some had belonged to my mother as a child; others were newer and fancier.

We always had big tree lights that generated a lot of heat, and probably posed a fire risk. When we started getting artificial trees (due to Yours Truly’s allergies), those hot lights melted into the artificial needles of the tree. The big tree at the Methodist church had bubble lights. It was always a much taller tree than ours at home, and the bubble lights were beautiful, covering the entire tree.

We always put tinsel on the tree. This was a good thing, since the trees we got were scrawny, and the tinsel hid the big gaps. Once the tinsel was on the tree, it looked magical.

Each one of we three kids had our own Christmas stocking, made of felt and decorated by Mom, and they were hung underneath the stair railing where there was just enough room for three stockings. One looked like a black train engine; one was white with holly on it; and the other one was red and looked like Santa.

There wasn’t much financial outlay for Christmas because not much money was available. In other words, we never got a bunch of toys. Generally, each of the kids was assured of getting three Christmas presents (not counting the little things in our stocking). One present would be a toy; one would be something handmade; and the other would be... well, something else that we needed. Although sometimes we got clothing, at least we never got the dreaded gift of underwear.

Special gifts that I remember were:

·         A bike, when I was nine years old.

·         Pepper, our Boston Terrier, given to my sister Jo Ellen that same year. Technically he was her dog, but he essentially belonged to the entire family.

·         One year, my mother knitted a set of mittens and a hat. The hat was “basket stitch,” and the dark blue yarn was iridescent. They were very beautiful, and although I would have preferred toys to clothing, I loved them. 

Grandma Chamness always gave us a new set of pajamas, complete with matching bathrobe, and sometimes slippers as well. This gift was always opened on Christmas Eve so that she could see us wearing them as we went up the stairs on our way to bed; and of course, we would be wearing them on Christmas morning.

In my earlier years, when I still believed in Santa Claus, I would go upstairs in my new jammies and try my hardest to fall asleep; for I understood that Santa wouldn’t come if we children were awake. I would look out my bedroom window, scanning the sky for the red light of Rudolph’s nose. But the only glow I could see was from the blue lights of the Christmas cross, which stood in front of the Methodist church.

In later years, my parents acquired a new stereo, enclosed in a fine maple case which matched the rest of the living room furniture. A local chain of gas stations had a promotion where, if you filled up your tank, you could buy that year’s Goodyear Christmas anthology LP for a pittance. Or maybe it was free. (Back in the day merchants did give things away for free.) We collected a few of those albums and would listen to them as we opened our presents on Christmas morning, and as we ate a special breakfast.

Mom had a talent for making a meal classy. She dipped the rims of our crystal water glasses in egg white, and then dipped them in sugar, so they appeared frosted with snow. She put a maraschino cherry in the bottom of each glass, and then poured in the orange juice, to make it seem like a fancy drink – or as fancy as a drink could be for a family that never indulged in an alcoholic beverage. She had the knack of making a good hollandaise sauce, and I remember her making eggs hollandaise (which probably accounts for my love of that dish). We would enjoy our classy breakfast on Grandma Chamness’s good china, which had yellow roses and gold rims. In the afternoon we would migrate across town to Grandma Smith’s house, where the festivities continued.

One notable Christmas stands out in my memories, from my early adult years – the Christmas of 1981. By this time my parents were divorced, and my mother had remarried and moved to Champaign, Illinois. In the days immediately preceding our trip, I started feeling a little sick to my stomach. By the time we started our drive, I had a strong suspicion that I might be pregnant. But it was too early to tell, and the first day that a home pregnancy test would be possible was Christmas Day. Eric and I devised a plot – involving waking up at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning and doing a pregnancy test. I can’t remember how long you had to let those old tests sit before you could see a result, but that morning it seemed like an eternity. It wasn’t merely a matter of peeing on a stick and watching for a plus or minus sign to appear in a few seconds, as it is today. A chemical reaction to a pregnancy-related hormone would create a circle on the bottom of the test tube, and you had to wait for a while – maybe as long as an hour or two. So, I did my business and put the test tube in its holder on the dresser and climbed back into bed with Eric. We were too nervous to fall back asleep as the minutes crawled past. But lo and behold when the time had elapsed there was that circle, and we knew we were giving my parents the best Christmas present ever – their first grandchild.

By that time, it was a tradition in my family that everyone had Christmas stockings – even the adults – so I made labels for each of them: Daddy and Mommy for Eric and myself; Grandma Weezy, Uncle Charlie, and Aunt Jo for my mother, brother, and sister. Then we waited for the stockings to be passed around, and great fun ensued. The rejoicing was such that we almost forgot to open the rest of the presents. When the local excitement calmed down, I called Dad in southern Illinois to share the news. Before I could tell him what it was, he guessed: “You’re pregnant!”

Prior to having a baby, Eric and I never had a Christmas tree of our own. The apartments we lived in were very small; and in those days we would be spending Christmas Day in the home of one of our parents. But with a new baby, we needed to start our own traditions. Jeannie was four months old on her first Christmas, and neither Eric nor I were employed full-time. (We were the resident managers of our apartment building, and Eric was working freelance jobs.) So, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I went to Hechinger’s, a local hardware chain, looking for the cheapest and smallest artificial Christmas tree they had. I hit the jackpot with a $35 tree that was just the right size to put on top of our small dining room table. It was the last one they had in stock – the floor model – and since it was used, I obtained it for less than its stated price. And because the clerk said he didn’t feel like taking the lights off, we got a free string of lights to boot. I bought a dozen shiny red Styrofoam apples covered with red shellac, and those were our only decorations. It was simple, but when it was the only light in our small apartment, it looked very festive. And little Jeannie loved the lights. Eric’s sister, Beth, was living near us in Gaithersburg at the time, and she made us a set of cookie-dough ornaments, which lasted for years.

Since those early times, our family grew to include three daughters and two beloved sons-in-law, and our own Christmas traditions have evolved. But there was something special and irreplaceable in those long-ago times when our family didn’t have much in material possessions; yet every Christmas was special in its own way. Those dear parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles are no longer physically present with us, but their spirits will always be near us, in the holiness of Christmas Eve and the warm and cheerful celebration of each Christmas morning.

Weezy’s House

I am still doing a lot of thinking about Mom, in the run-up to the year anniversary of her death. At times I think I shouldn’t be obsessing about it (like picking at a scab), and at others I believe it is my necessary way of reckoning with having lost my sense of “home” when I lost her. Just yesterday, I was reliving the feeling I would have whenever I would stay at her house. Whatever stressful circumstance was going on in my life in Maryland would recede into the background, and would (all too temporarily) be unable to touch me. It was as if my mother had a magical power to weave a spell of safety around me as long as I was with her, and in her little house.

When I was the only one staying with her, I would move into her office and sleep on her fold-out twin bed. Although it was not an especially comfy bed, the addition of a mattress pad and a wedge, plus a couple of pillows made it into a little nest where I would sleep soundly. I would fall asleep and wake with the unique sounds of southern Illinois (cicadas, frogs, and suchlike) in my ears, and the faint scent of Mom’s house in my nostrils.

When a house has only one bathroom, you have to be especially considerate, and we had our morning ritual. After I had woken up and initially relieved myself, it was understood that before my shower I would awaken her so she could likewise avail herself before I further tied up the room. I would either call her quietly or tap her on the shoulder. Usually, being a light sleeper, she would get right up when she heard my voice.

At other times, I would wake up to realize she had already slipped into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee.

I still have a picture of the strip of wallpaper border she had in her bathroom. Even though it was “only” a bathroom, it was important to her to make every room in her house her own space, and surround herself with beauty - even if you only saw it while sitting on her potty! It was a row of cute birds sitting on a picket fence, and I’m pretty sure it made her think of the fence in our back yard in Zeigler, and the way the birds used to like to sit on it (and it brought back memories of my Grandma Chamness’s joy in watching them through our picture window).

Emerging from my cocoon in her office, I would come into the living room. Although now much of the furniture has been removed from the house, that room will always remain in my mind’s eye as it was. The TV cabinet; the two couches and easy chair with its accompanying footstool; the pictures on the wall arranged just so; the small secretary in the corner of the dining room with the portrait of Esther and Grover; the antique books arranged on top of the secretary - all of which had been in our living room in Zeigler.

Best of all, then there was Mom - either sitting at her dining room table or the small white table in the kitchen, with her cup of coffee in the blueberry mug. Perhaps she would be reading the “Southern Illinoisan” or her Bible.

The kitchen window was surrounded by various glass pieces, or had stained glass hanging in it, catching the sunlight. Some of the bric-a-brac was old, some new - but all were attached to a beloved memory or person in my mother’s heart and mind.

Often, there would be the apparition of Hobo’s face, framed in the window as he rubbed against the wooden frame, asking for breakfast.

Conversation would be small and pleasant, as befits two people waking up to face the day. What was the plan?; news of friends and loved ones; or an interesting book or article one had recently read.

Thus we would start the day in sweet companionship, looking forward to the coming hours. Now, I can only relive one of these precious mornings, as a treasured memory.

We Are One Loaf

My experience of communion, owing to my varied church membership over the years, has been almost as diverse as Christendom itself. I was raised a Methodist, and the rules of that denomination regarding communion state that each congregation can schedule communion as it wishes but must observe the sacrament at least once a quarter. My church had it once a month. We would go to the altar rail and kneel, and the minister would give us first the bread (in our case a literal cube of bread), and then a small cup of “wine” (i.e., grape juice), murmuring “the body of Christ, given for you,” then “the blood of Christ, shed for you.” Once we had received the elements, we were welcome to stay at the altar for as long as we wished; the experience had a meditative quality. When a person arose, the next person in line would take their place.

As a young adult just post college, I attended a congregation of “Jesus People” which had spontaneously arisen from a coffee-house and street ministry in my college town. This body of believers, none of whom were over 30 years of age, had a very hippie-like flavor. Each Sunday that we had communion (which was not every Sunday), one of the “sisters” (for we called each other “brother” and “sister”) would make a loaf of bread, and it would be torn or cut into pieces, which would be passed among the group in a basket. One of the members, who was an art student, had made a large, ceramic chalice with a cross on the side, out of which we would all drink. We assumed that if there were germs, the Holy Spirit would kill them.

 Eventually our numbers increased, and we moved out of the old coffee house. A visiting minister who was a mentor of one of our young pastors gave a sermon on communion. He made the point that just as we were one body (the body of Christ), we were also one loaf. This was a very vivid metaphor for me, and every time after that, as I took the elements, I would envision myself as being one with every other Christian on earth. It is a powerful image that stays with me to this day.

That young church is where Eric and I met. When we were planning our wedding, we decided to incorporate communion into the service. In those days, it was common for weddings to include a candle-lighting ceremony, but for us there was no stronger symbol of oneness than communion. Our wedding’s communion ceremony would include just the two of us. We chose a bottle of our favorite wine and stashed it behind the pulpit of the church where we would be married.

But imagine our surprise when instead of wine, grape juice flowed across our taste buds! We thereafter referred to the incident as “The Reverse Wedding of Cana Miracle.”

And we have had 40 years of taking communion together. The sacrament of communion is such a special thing for us, that we decided we preferred attending a church that celebrates it every week.

Eric and I have a little ritual at the end of every communion service at Aspen Hill Christian Church. After we have drunk from the cup, we stack our little plastic cups, one inside the other before putting them in the holder in the back of the pew. This is something we had never discussed with each other until the other night; but we both felt that the action was an abbreviated version of the feeling of being one; as if with that small motion of placing our communion cups one inside the other, the sacrament of communion echoed the sacrament of our own marriage.

The Departure of the Cowboy

Many people find it hard to believe when I tell them, but there is quite a western culture in southern Illinois, where I came from. The culture in the southern tip of the state is quite different from the northern part. It is imbued with the twang of the Ozarks on the west and the proximity of the Appalachian Mountains on the east. And it is only a nine-hour drive from Carbondale, Illinois to Dallas, Texas (and only a little over three hours to Nashville, Tennessee).

So, it should not be too surprising that my father, Chuck Smith, from the time he was a young boy, was at heart a cowboy. Somewhere I have a picture of him as a tow-headed three-year-old astride a pony, wearing a cowboy hat.

When I was in junior high, we acquired an honest-to-goodness stereo system. Dad had his own favorite records. He loved Big Band music, and songs by Irish tenors; but the one genre that he - and only he - loved was western music. I’m not talking about twangy country-western music, but what I would term cowboy music. Johnny Cash, The Sons of the Pioneers, and so forth. When he would put one of these albums on the turntable, it was a very limited engagement, because not much time would pass before Mom would ask him to please play something else. But I still have memories of “The Ring of Fire,” “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” and “When It’s Twilight on the Trail.” Dad would always get a little misty when he played this last one.

Let me insert a parenthetical narrative here about myself. I was always one of those girls who loved horses. And it wasn’t from any exposure to them, since we never owned one. I always read books about horses, anything I could get my hands on from the school or public library. For someone who never had much exposure to real, live horses, I knew a lot about them. And when at my Grandma Smith’s house on the edge of town, I would often wander over to the Sniders’ horse barn and feed their horses grass through the fence and pet their velvet noses. Sometimes I would have very vivid dreams about riding a horse, even though I had never been on one alone.

For many years, when my birthday was approaching and my parents (usually my mom) would ask me what I wanted, my answer would be “a horse.” It was explained patiently, year after year, that we had no place to keep a horse. To be honest, I had to agree that a horse didn’t seem like anything I could ever have. Still they haunted my dreams, until a time when, during music camp in DuQuoin I had the opportunity to go on an afternoon trail ride and ended my day with a debilitating asthma attack. I think it was a reaction to the hay; nevertheless, that experience made it obvious that my severe allergies made horse ownership an impossibility.

But back to Dad...

During my early working years, when I was living on my own, yet close to my parents’ house, another trend emerged. My dad developed a fondness for western wear. Perhaps he had always had this penchant, and it was merely waiting for the opportune moment to emerge. He stopped wearing regular shoes and started wearing cowboy boots. He stopped wearing regular suits and wore western suits. And cowboy shirts, the kind that snap up the front. Since I wasn’t living with my parents anymore, it seemed like a sudden transformation. One visit, he was dressed like a normal guy. The next time, he was all tricked out like a cowboy. It was as if like Superman, he had stepped into a special cowboy phone booth. My mom and sister jokingly referred to him as “Cowboy Bob.”

Somewhere during this time, I got married and moved to Maryland.

Fast forward a couple of years. This era is filled with a roller-coaster ride of my parents’ painful divorces and remarriages. My dad had a series of short marriages to a couple of ladies and then a remarriage to my mom, and a divorce shortly after that. At the end of the saga he bought a horse, because as he put it, a horse would probably be easier to deal with than a woman and would treat him better.

I remember the phone conversation where he described Tex, a 15-year-old chestnut quarter horse gelding. Tex at one time had been a working horse, and Dad liked the idea that he was a real cowboy’s horse. He ended his announcement with “So what do you think?” I responded, “I only wish you had done this 20 years ago.”

Given that the ostensible reason I could never have a horse when I was a kid was that we had no place to keep one, I was curious how Dad, who lived in a two-bedroom apartment, was able to pull it off. The answer was boarding. Tex was kept by people who lived halfway between Dad’s office and his apartment and owned several horses themselves. This location was convenient because Dad could stop off and visit on his way home every day, at least long enough to pet Tex and give him an apple.

Dad had big plans to go on trail rides. He took Tex on at least a couple of them; but he told me that he thought it was too hard on Tex. I think it was too hard on Chuck. The two old guys were well matched, and Tex seemed a lot like a big dog - certainly a beloved pet and friend.

I only had a chance to meet Tex twice (both times I was full to the gills with allergy medications) and got to ride him the second time around (being pregnant the first time). Eric was amazed that I could just get on a horse and ride. It was no fancy feat of equestrian finesse, but knowing how to make a horse stop, go, and turn are very basic skills where I come from; especially if you had been obsessed with horses at a young age.

Only a few years passed, and Dad became very ill with a brain tumor. During his illness and subsequent surgeries, we continued boarding Tex at the same location, knowing all the while that Daddy, living six hours north in Chicago with my brother, would never be well enough to ride again. We didn’t even know if he would ever be able to visit his old friend again.

In the meantime, my brother got word from the stables that Tex had passed on. He was not a young horse at this point - probably about 20 years old. They found him in the pasture, where he had been turned out to graze with the other horses. Sometimes we wondered if Tex had pined away for Dad.

My brother called Me “Do you think we should tell Dad?”

“No, it might just kill him.”

Six months after my Dad’s brain surgery, he was doing well enough that he expressed an interest in going south for his class reunion, and my brother brought him home for a visit. Of course, Dad wanted to see Tex.

Fortunately, the folks that had boarded Tex had several horses, one of whom was a chestnut gelding with similar markings. And Dad’s eyes weren’t so good. Charlie drove Dad out to the field where the horses were - at the opposite end of the field. Dad kind of squinted into the distance and looked for a long time. Then he said, with a little catch in his voice, “Well, he looks like he’s happy.”

If Dad was happy, we were happy. And relieved.

Dad passed away less than a year later, from a recurrence of the same brain tumor. We had known from the beginning that we were fighting a losing battle but had hoped for a few more years of quality of life for him. We buried Chuck Smith with a western suit on, wearing his John Wayne bolo tie.

I’m sure he was pleasantly surprised when Tex met him just inside the Pearly Gates.

When It’s Twilight on the Trail

When it’s twilight on the trail,

And I jog along,

The world is like a dream

And the ripple of the stream is my song

When it’s twilight on the trail,

And I rest once more,

My ceiling is the sky

And the grass on which I lie is my floor

Never ever have a nickel in my jeans,

Never ever have a debt to pay,

Still I understand what real contentment means,

Guess I was born that way.

When it’s twilight on the trail,

And my voice is still,

Please plant this heart of mine

Underneath the lonesome pine on the hill.