Are Those Your Keys?

Standing in line at a fast food restaurant, 3 year-old Sawyer was eye level with the keys dangling in the hand of the man in front of us. He looked at the keys, craned his neck to scope out the man, and then looked longingly back at the keys. Finally, with a speculative gleam in his darling blue eyes, he said, “Hey mister, are those your keys?” Pete and I both sprang into action, as if the kid had dynamite strapped to his chest and his finger on the detonator. “Don’t give him your keys!” Pete shouted, while I barked at the bewildered man, “Don’t even let him hold them!” Sad experience had taught us that the child had mad Houdini skills when it came to keys. My sister once innocently let him play with her keys while we were visiting in Indiana and three weeks later, back in Ohio, we found the whole set in the garage of his Fisher Price playhouse. (Because that’s where you keep the keys, of course.)

He loved, collected, carried, hid and played with them endlessly. He shaved about 4 years off my lifespan when he stuck one in an electrical outlet just to see what would happen. What happens is the house shorts out, the socket turns black, mom makes an NFL worthy tackle and the child gets the shock of his life.

When Pete bought a John Deere tractor to mow our large yard in Ohio, Sawyer could not keep his hands off the tractor keys. We fastened them to tennis balls and chained them to yard implements, but every time Pete went to mow, the keys were missing. When Pete would ask, Sawyer would say, “I’ll get ‘em, Dad” and then disappear into the Fortress of Lost Keys (his bedroom) and come out dangling a set on his little kleptomaniac fingers. Well, sometimes. Other times Pete would just sheepishly drive back to the John Deere dealer and buy another key. We had to do this so often they kept them in stock for us.

One of the happiest days of our life was when my Aunt Rita gave him an entire box of old keys saved from the Harley Davidson dealership she once owned. Keys, glorious keys! There were golf cart keys, and motorcycle keys and old skeleton keys and they were ALL for him. We thought this would satisfy his urge, but after a short while he seemed to realize those keys didn’t have the same power to make mom and dad run shrieking through the house, turning trash cans upside down and begging a 3-year-old to “please tell mommy where you put the keys…”

That blue-eyed 3-year-old is now 16, 6’ 3” and shaving. A couple of days ago, he got in the car with a driving instructor at the DMV and turned the key. I watched from the curb, stomping on my imaginary brake, as he parallel parked and backed up for the test. They drove away for the road portion and I entertained myself watching two twin sisters taking their test. The first one returned and hit the ground running, exuberantly waving her test paper, shouting, “I passed, I passed!” The second twin drove off for her test and I idly listened as the first twin replayed every acceleration and turn for her happy parents. Then there was silence…and then tears….the second twin had returned and apparently failed her test.

Unable to bear her tearful recital of nervous mistakes, I went inside to wait and selfishly hope the same thing wouldn’t happen to Sawyer. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, for him or the twin, but it could certainly seem like it when you want something so much.

Minutes crawled by until the door finally opened and that crooked grin announced the good news.

I gave him another set of keys today. I don’t think he’ll lose them. In fact, I don’t even think he’s coming back.

All is Forgotten

THINGS ELI HAS FORGOTTEN: How to walk. This is because Eli has a brain injury.

THINGS I HAVE FORGOTTEN: How to sleep. The word for scissors. What being cold feels like. This is because I am “pre-menopausal.”

THINGS MY HUSBAND HAS FORGOTTEN: Where he put his phone. Where he put the keys to Eli’s van. Where he put Eli. (Clue: Eli was in the van with the keys right before Pete locked them both inside.) This is because he is … “pre-elderly." (Except he’s always done stuff like this, so…)

THINGS MY OTHER THREE CHILDREN HAVE FORGOTTEN: How to close the basement refrigerator door…for two days. How to close the basement freezer door…for one week. How to turn the thermostat back up to 76 after they turned it down to 62 “just for a minute because I was hot.” (Only took six hours to notice the frost on the windows.) This is because they have brain damage. Brain damage is different from Eli’s brain injury. According to Bill Cosby, all children are born with brain damage. This is compounded by the fact that we have apparently taught them from an early age that money comes from Grandma and food is free.

When I was a new parent, I had visions of gathering my children around my tanned, flexible knees (It’s MY vision, ok?) and teaching them to be fiscally responsible citizens of the world.

I must have forgot.

Write Me Down in History

When I was eleven years old I received a red leatherette diary, complete with lock and key, for Christmas.

I started writing in it on the first day of 1973 and one of the entries reads:

Today was kind of busy. After school I went to Camp Fire Girls. After that we picked up Jill from music lessons and then went home. I got a big gold star in my English notebook. Mrs. Frey said she was only going to give the big gold stars to the “almost perfect” notebooks and I got one. I’m so happy and proud of myself.”

Other entries chronicle fights with my brother, sleepovers with friends, and the saga of my best friend Debbie’s 6^th grade romance with Eric Lindgren. I had a secret crush on Eric, so I scrutinized the ups and downs of their relationship with keen interest, waiting for my chance to comfort him, should the path of true love not run smoothly. I wasn’t terribly dedicated to my journaling; my last entry was only 5 months later in May, but I started another journal at 17 and managed to write in it for almost two years before stopping three blank pages from the end. The handwriting is better and the entries are a little deeper, but the cringe-worthy content is of little interest to anyone but me.

 Or so I thought, until my 10 year old began reading quizzically over my shoulder. “It says you ‘slept in’ – did you do that back then?” he queried innocently. “Didn’t you have to get up early to work the crops on the farm?” There wasn’t really room for crops (or a farm) in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in, but his question made me realize he knows very little about my childhood, and that’s my fault. I guess I haven’t told him nearly as many “I walked to school barefoot in the snow” stories as my mother told me.

Mom began a tradition years ago of including a story from her childhood in her annual Christmas card to her children. One year she told of frog-gigging in the river bottom before the TVA flooded the Cumberland River to make the Cumberland Reservoir. Another year, she reminisced about her Aunt Pat teaching her to iron handkerchiefs with a flat iron heated on a wood stove. My mother has faithfully kept a journal for several years and the memories she’s recorded have provided the impetus for many of her stories.

When I asked her why she kept a journal, she said it was mostly because she dearly wished her grandmother had kept one; she would have loved reading about her daily life and its struggles and joys. My mother decided she didn’t want her posterity to have the same regrets.

I never knew my great-grandmother, Margaret (Maggie Jane) Humble, but my mother wisely wrote down her memories of this hardy, Kentucky farm woman. Maggie Jane was born 84 years before I entered the world, yet in the space of only three generations my life would bear little resemblance to hers.
  

I married at the modern age of 24 and, except for a few months in an apartment when we were first married, we’ve always lived in a home that had at least 4 bedrooms, central air conditioning, hot and cold running water, and carpeting or hardwood floors. Maggie Jane, one of 11 children, married Pleasant Bolden Bell when she was 19 years old. He built a two-room log cabin for them to start their married life in and they never left it or enlarged it. She never in her life had running water or electricity.

* * * *

At last count, we had 4 computers, 2 iPhones, 3 iPods, and 5 TVs. When my internet was recently out for a few days, I was nearly crippled in my efforts to pay bills, do schoolwork and find the answer to the all-important question, “What is a helgamite and what does it look like?” (It’s an aquatic larvae often used as fish bait; it looks like something that will bite you and make you wet your pants at the same time.)

Maggie Jane had a radio that her husband only allowed her to turn on in the morning for the news and weather, but her favorite program was The Lives and Loves of Helen Trent. She would turn it on when Pleasant left to do the chores and post my mother as a lookout by the window. If Grandpa finished early and was spied coming up the lane, my mother would run tell Maggie so she could turn it off.

* * * *

I would be embarrassed to count how many pieces of furniture are stuffed in the rooms of my house; we have at least eight couches spread over three floors of our home. When my clothes dryer recently broke, my husband came home with TWO dryers because he found such a great deal. The thought of ever moving again makes pyromania seem necessary.

Maggie Jane’s front room held two feather beds, a little table for the radio, some rocking chairs and a ladder made from hickory saplings resting against the wall that went up to the attic. The kitchen held a round oak table covered with an oilcloth. In the middle of the table was a canning jar filled with silverware, a covered butter bowl, and blue salt and pepper shakers.

* * * *

My husband and I recently spent several frustrating hours sorting out his company’s new medical benefits. We filled out papers for a Health Savings Account and debated the merits of Dental and Vision insurance and their deductibles. I run to the local pharmacy for everything from prescriptions to cough drops.

Maggie Jane was considered a doctor/midwife and people came from around the county for her to “doctor” them. She knew all the herbs and plants in the woods and their uses. In the corner cabinet she kept a glass jar that held the “cancer medicine” she made from the sheep sorrel plant. She gathered the leaves of the plant (about a million of them) and boiled them down into a gooey, black, stinky mixture, and it’s said she really did remove skin cancers with it.

* * * *

I once painted my bedroom wall 6 different colors before finding just the right shade called “Moroccan Leather.”

Maggie Jane papered her walls with pictures from magazines that people gave her.

* * * *

I shop at one of three nearby grocery stores that stock items from around the world. My pantry shelves bulge with canned goods, balsamic vinegars and gourmet pastas.

Maggie Jane had a hand-dug cellar under the back porch where she would send my mother some mornings to get a blue mason jar of peaches for breakfast. She canned food from her garden by cold packing, and it was done in a big black kettle over a fire, in the yard. There were never enough canning jars, so when the green beans were picked, my mother helped snap and spread them on a sheet in the yard. Covered with old lace curtains to keep off the bugs, they put them out in the morning and brought them in at night until they were dried by the sun. Once dried, they were strung on a string and hung from rafters in the attic.

* * * *

I had my first child at 26 in a hospital, attended by an obstetric team and a queasy husband. I would have three more over the next 15 years. When my kids got sick, I rushed them to a doctor, and when one was seriously injured, the combined efforts of hundreds of trained people pulled him from the brink of death and saved his life.

Maggie Jane had her first child at home at the age of 20 and over the next 24 years she had 12 more. When she was 33 years old, she buried her 1-year-old baby girl, Zona Elizabeth, who died from the whooping cough. She wrapped her in a little hand-stitched quilt, walked to the woods and buried her in a pine thicket. Eight years later, when she was 41, the flu epidemic of 1918 hit her home in Wayne County, Kentucky, and every member of the family was stricken. Her son, Jim Roe, was 14, healthy and handsome. He died on New Year’s Day. Her beautiful 16-year-old daughter, Lucinda, died 5 days later on January 6th. The ground was frozen too hard to dig a grave, so a neighbor built two wooden boxes and they put the bodies in the barn until the ground thawed enough to bury them.

* * * *

I never met Maggie, but I feel like I know her because she came to life in my mother’s memories. I do remember my Grandmother Dora.

She loved to quilt and garden, and she was partial to brightly patterned blouses and dangly earrings. She thought the Avon catalog held the latest and greatest, and she gave birth to my mother on her mother’s round oak table in Maggie Jane’s two-room log cabin by the light of a kerosene lamp.

But my children won’t know those things about my grandmother Dora, if I don’t follow the example set by my mother and write down my fleeting memories of her: she was an identical twin who never outgrew dressing like her sister, she created art out of tin cans and Styrofoam egg cartons, and she was a genuine country cook who could make cabbage and corn bread taste like gourmet cuisine.

Memories fade so easily if they aren’t recorded. Details that seem perfectly normal and commonplace at the time might be fascinating to our posterity. Do they even have Campfire Girls anymore? Maybe Eric Lindgren is now famous for something besides eating twelve dog biscuits at Eddie’s party (March 19, 1973’s entry – he did it on a dare.) One day, your journal could be a very interesting historical document. But if all it ever does is make your life more real to family who didn’t have a chance to know you, then a big gold star to you.

Back Home Again...

I was born a poor black child. No, wait, … that was Steve Martin in The Jerk.

I was born a middle class, suburban white child, but lately I’ve been pretending my roots are more Little House on the Prairie.

As a child of the suburbs, one of the few times I saw anything remotely rural was when we visited my cousins in the “country.” We played in the hayloft, chased the pigs in the barn and pelted each other with unripe peaches and persimmons yanked from the tree. I would then return home and say condescending things like, “I’m so glad I don’t live out in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.” I was blithely unaware of the irony since the dead-end street we lived on wasn't exactly a hotbed of metropolitan culture.

My other rural experience as a child was our annual visit to my mother's relatives in Kentucky. It was painful. It was hot. It was boring. We spent a lot of time outside, sitting on scratchy, aluminum lawn chairs, when there was a perfectly good air-conditioned house we could have occupied. There were mass quantities of old people and all they did was sit around and talk about other old people I had never heard of, and hoped to never meet. Their television received only two channels, but it didn't matter because my elderly aunt and uncle acted as if they paid for reception by the minute, so they never turned it on. There was nothing to do, nothing to see and I vowed nightly to NEVER torture my children in such a manner.

Last week I took my 10 year old on a road trip to Indiana to visit my parents. They live on a farm waaayyy out past the city limits.

There is a chicken coop. With chickens.

There is a log cabin.

There is a hayfield and a garden and a barn and some old people. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.)

I'm as happy there as a pig in slop. (Even my metaphors become bucolic.)

I called my mom the day before we left to see if the garden had any ripe tomatoes. I dragged my son out into the hayfield so he could see the deer running into the woods. I made my mother drive me around so I could take pictures of cornfields and barns and Indiana summer skies. Honestly, I don't know what has happened to me, but I'm worried it has something to do with getting older.

Could it be that my parents really enjoyed visiting their ancient relatives on those long-ago death marches to Kentucky? Did they LIKE sitting around in 98% humidity, swatting mosquitoes and saying things like, "Well, I always knew he'd come to no good end..."?

My parents' house is beautifully decorated and icily air-conditioned, yet every evening we wound up outside on the patio by the barn. (Yeah...It's a high-class barn with its own patio.) Papaw would settle in the hammock, Grandma would sit in front of an old box fan plugged into the barn outlet, and I happily sat in a scratchy, aluminum lawn chair while we talked about who died, why the zucchini plants weren't thriving, and the crazy dove who built her nest in the artificial tree on the front porch.

(It's a real dove. In a fake tree. Seriously.)

I tore through the weekend, snapping pictures like crazy, as if I needed to embrace as much healthy, heartland Americana as possible.

I took pictures of cows.

How can you resist a leaning cow matching a leaning birdhouse?! I couldn't!

I took pictures of cornfields and hay fields.

Then I found the barns. I admit I got a little out of control at the barns, but the one lady was very nice and agreed not to press charges.

I gorged myself on homespun images as if I had been forcibly removed from Tara in my youth and was just now returning, even though when I’m at home in Georgia, I only venture outside on my way to the pool or my air-conditioned car.

I’m not quite sure why I suddenly seem to be channeling Green Acres. Maybe as I get older I’m just realizing that a simpler way of life has its attractions; tomatoes that aren’t square, afternoon naps in a hammock, and conversation about real people instead of celebrities.

Then I noticed my 10-year old casting longing glances at the house with its satellite TV and Popsicle laden freezer, and it all came clear.

I’m just trying to give him what I had as a child: an annual visit to his mother's relatives where it's painful, hot and boring, and mass quantities of old people talk about people he doesn't know and hopes to never meet.

He’s really going to thank me for it later.