:Family Matters

October 19, 2008

There is a soap opera I used to follow many years ago called “Days of Our Lives’ that began each episode with the statement “Like sands through the hour glass. . . so are the days of our lives”. For some reason I have found myself thinking about those words recently, you understand that having reached the age of 68 has absolutely nothing to do with with it, and lest you be wondering I long ago gave up the seductive lure of the ’soaps’ when I realized that with a cast of ten or eleven there were only so many liaisons that could be imagined and when particular characters that I had grown fond of became entangled in these mostly very inappropriate relationships (the one that did me in was where a young woman became involved with a married man who turned out to be her father only neither of them knew it at the time and don’t ask me how they resolved the problem because that was where I stopped watching). I decided to give them up not only for the good of my own soul but I didn’t want my baby to be exposed to these stories which she was no doubt absorbing along with her mother’s milkl lest she were to grow up thinking that what she was seeing was what ‘real’ life was about although I must admit that there have times when I felt like my own life and that of my family was as full of soap opera drama as anything that could be thought up by a writer—just minus the sex.
I became entangled with these programs because my youngest daughter was always hungry which meant I spent a great deal of time nursing her while ensconced in a rocking chair in front of the television. I had lots of time to spend with her as all the other children were in school which meant she had my undivided attention for most of the day. I might add here that I would have loved to have nursed her for at least a year but when she was about 8 months old the pediatrician we were seeing recommended that I start supplementing her with formula because the charts showed that she was underweight for her age and of course once I did that nursing went down the tube and no, she didn’t gain any more on the bottle remaining small and petite for her age for the next several years but as she was rarely ill I wasn’t concerned about her general state of health even if she failed to fit ‘the norm’. Mathematician I am not but I think they still get normal (average), or at least they used to when I went to school, by adding all the given elements divided by the total number of elements which means you could have one baby weigh ten pounds and another baby weigh five pounds when they were born so the average weight would be seven and a half pounds which neither baby was. So much for averages although they can give a great deal of comfort to a person taking a medication that is deemed 99% safe but if you were the 1% that was allergic to it and it killed you nothing else would matter as you would now be nothing but a statistic in some medical textbook. So all I am saying is that it doesn’t hurt to take a grain of salt along with the numbers that declare one normal, or not.
Nursing was never easy for me although I worked at it diligently believing then, and still do for that matter, that mother’s milk is the best nutrition a baby can receive. The scriptures tell us that we mustn’t covet what others have but there are several things I have always wished for one of which is beautiful hair and the other is being able to provide a bountiful supply of milk while nursing my babies. I long ago became reconciled to the fact that neither of those desires was to be mine in this life and stopped wasting time in the pursuit of what was never to be. But still, I wish I could have nursed my babies longer if for no other reason than I lost weight while I was doing so which is nothing to be sneezed at especially if you look at the size I have ballooned to in the twenty-eight years since my last baby was born. Sigh. On the other hand the prospect of caring for endless babies just so I could stay skinny has lost much of its allure as I have aged, so maybe the best thing would be to find some other way to lose weight.
While on the subject of soap operas I couldn’t help but remember a dear sister who was my visiting teaching partner for many years while living in Wisconsin. We always got our visiting teaching done each month but we had to schedule our visits before her favorite soap which came on at noon. She had followed the program faithfully for years and by the time I became acquainted with her the characters seemed more like family than her own—well not really but she did hate to miss a program. Not that she would fall a long way behind if she missed an episode as the story arc moved so slowly a pregnancy could often last a year or more with both mother and child eventually being delivered safely. (DH began to follow this soap when she was bed ridden for months because her husband threw a pan of hot grease out the back door while trying to prevent the house from catching fire and unintentionally hit the back of her legs because he didn’t realize she hadn’t gotten out of the way in time after opening the door for him. Fortunately her obstetrician lived next door so she had medical help right away but even so the burns were so severe that she spent months in bed recovering which is where she got hooked.) Since she also taught piano lessons in the afternoon we were always on a tight schedule when it came to seeing the sisters we were assigned which wasn’t helped by the fact that the closest one lived 25 miles from us and the furthest was 50.
To be honest I miss those long drives, listening to her stories—she had so many to tell. I guess you could say they were my own personal soap opera which I became addicted to as I followed the twists and turns of her life and that of her family, but those times are gone now and so I must be content with life in a Retirement Home which, at times has its moments but is mostly made up of small pleasures as MGH and I make our daily rounds in this very quiet place that has become our world. I might add however, that we have plenty of family who, along with their posterity, keep us enthralled with the happenings in their lives, many of which lead to much fervent praying on our part for and in their behalf. So, as they say, ‘the beat goes on’ even though for us it is much reduced which gives us the luxury of sitting in the ‘cat bird seat’ as we eagerly await news from them as our own personal “One Man’s Family” continues. . . .

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October 12, 2008

Last night I watched the last half of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. At this distance in time I can’t remember if I saw it when it was first released or not but I do remember reading about it as it was being filmed. I was always a big fan of Elizabeth Taylor having become so after she starred in “National Velvet” along with Mickey Rooney. As horse crazy as I was it was only natural that I would see that movie and delight in the story it told of a “girl, a boy and a horse set to the thunder of the Grand National Steeplechase”. (It was filmed in 1944 so I probably didn’t see it until I was much older but I do remember reading about the movie in connection with Ms Taylor and the critical acclaim it received.) At any rate I found the story gripping enough that I stayed awake until it ended at midnight. Towards the end there is a scene where one of the characters, Brick, who has been drinking heavily, becomes disgusted with his family and decides to return home in the middle of a heavy rainstorm. When he backs his car out of the garage he ends up getting stuck in the mud and is thwarted in his efforts to leave. But this is the part that really caught my attention—I recognized the car he was driving as a style popular in 1958 which was the year I graduated from high school and at the time was somewhat interested in that kind of thing perhaps because it was such an important part of the lives of the young men who were my classmates. Once I married, my interest, such as it was, vanished and I probably couldn’t identify styles by year if my life depended upon it other than a Model-T and the closest I have ever gotten to one of those is the one Uncle Lynn drove when he lived with us for awhile in Mesa when Dad took him in in an attempt to help him dry out. (Uncle Lynn was a full blown alcoholic—a condition he struggled with for many years. His marriage to Addie helped him get his life straightened around in this regard. They had a son named John who they adored. He was the light of their lives and they doted on him. From what I remember, and here would be a good time for my sisters to step in and help me piece together this story, he was extremely precocious but sadly committed suicide when he was 10 or 11. I wish I had more details but the little bit I know about Dad’s brother was mostly picked up from overhearing conversations between the adults. My parents were very closed when it came to giving us details about the grown up world they also inhabited believing, I suppose, that children should be allowed to have time to grow up before they began dealing with the trials of this life. All I remember of Uncle Lynn is that he seemed very tall to me at around six feet 4 inches with dark black somewhat wavy hair. He didn’t have a lot of patience with his little nieces but I suspect that that was because of the problems he was struggling with in his own life. About this time we had a little white dog we called Daisy. She was a Spitz which is a breed that is distinguished by the way its tail curls up over its back. We loved that little dog and when she was hit by a car on the road in front of our house we were broken hearted. I can remember sitting on the front steps crying and crying over her death and Uncle Lynn coming out and telling me in no uncertain terms that it was time to get over it as I had cried enough and that if I didn’t he would give me something to really cry about which I suppose meant he had grown tired of listening to me sobbing and wanted it to stop now, which I did because I knew he meant it.

Thinking about that car I flashed back to a memory I had completely forgotten of sitting in Deeni’s, a local hairdresser who had a shop in her home in Keosauqua who mother set great store by, waiting for mother to get her hair fixed not minding that I was to be there for awhile as I had a stack of magazines to flip through of the kind that mother never allowed us to read at home. She must not have been paying attention to my choice of reading matter or I never would have gotten away with it but one of the articles was about the death of Elizabeth Taylor’s husband Mike Todd in a plane crash which absolutely devastated her as he was the love of her life, at least according to the article I was reading and who knows, if he had lived perhaps she wouldn’t have found the need to go through so many husbands trying to find what she had lost but then again, who knows. . . .

Mother was very protective of her daughters and managed their lives to a very strict code with Dad in complete agreement with her. I heard her say once that she liked being on a farm because she was able to control who we had as friends and where we went. This also extended to movies/radio/television/magazines, you name it, anything we did, saw or heard had to pass through her strict filter, which wasn’t all bad, but meant we led an extremely sheltered life. Perhaps as a result of all this there was a time in my life when I was absolutely fascinated by comic books and greatly enjoyed the often lurid, to my eyes, adventures of “Tarzan” or “Wonder Woman” and would read them eagerly whenever I got a chance, which granted, wasn’t often but that just kept my desire for the ‘forbidden fruit’ whetted and eager for those stolen moments. So it was no wonder that I would sit there reading about the lives of the ’stars’ of the day when I got a chance. Of course the best scenario would have been for me to have been so well taught and obedient that I wouldn’t have touched anything that Mother had forbidden but weak soul that I am I found that I had a very low threshold when it came to resisting all the attractions of the world that she was trying to keep us from exploring. I have absolutely no idea about her own exposure to all the kinds of things she tried to keep away from her daughters. I do know that she grew up in a time when the ‘thou shalt nots’ were lived much more strictly by the God fearing people of her era. Having lived long enough to see the results of removing these same restrictions from the lives of so many I have a much greater appreciation for just what it was my parents were trying to do for their daughters. And lest you wonder—I haven’t read a comic book in years, rarely go to movies, find most television shows appalling with the sleaze they promote and rarely read magazines that feature the lives of the ’stars’ of this day as I find them extremely boring which is probably what I am doing to you gentle reader but I must end by saying that Mother succeeded in inculcating her values.

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October 8, 2008

It’s not that we in Southern Utah lack for modern forms of entertainment, we have cable television here just like the rest of the nation as well as several movie theaters and a Tony award winning Shakespearean theater that plays in the summer and fall along with the Utah Summer Games that draws in participants from all over the state in June and if all else fails we can always, as a young college student speaking in Sacrament Meeting stated, she was explaining why she liked attending SUU–”St George is only 45 miles away”. (Lest you think our meetings consist of nothing but travelogues you need to know that because our ward membership is so transient the only ones, as a rule, who are asked to speak, if you don’t count high council members, are those new to the ward and along with their assigned topic on a Gospel subject they are usually asked to briefly introduce themselves. Most wards that I have lived in will also ask those who are moving to speak just before they depart and if we ever ran out of comers and goers then anyone else was considered fair game—but not in the Cobble Creek Ward which means that we old timers live pretty much ‘fear’ free.) What we do lack, is rain. Our average rainfall of 10 inches makes us pretty dry under the best of circumstances and during times of drought, which we have been in for the past eight or so years, and MGH informs me, is the ‘natural’ condition here, lends meaning to the proverbial expression ‘high and dry’. Just as an aside this is one of the reasons why I admire the lowly ‘cedar’ tree which is actually the Rocky Mountain Juniper which thrives on fresh air and mountain sunshine when all other growth, of any value has long given up and left for wetter climes. Myth has it that when one of the women in the original pioneer company entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake July 24, 1847 realizing that ‘this was the place’ said, “I walked a thousand miles to get here and I’d walk two thousand to get away”. Which, being interpreted, means she had just realized what “making the desert blossom as a rose” was going to entail. Please note also that the average precipitation for the Salt Lake area is almost 18 inches a year which just about doubles the amount we get here in dry old Southern Utah.

When it rains, then, and by this I mean a rain that actually puts down some liquid and not as MGH’s likes to quote his older brothers as saying that a typical Utah storm was, “just a cow peeing on the other side of the river”. While somewhat crude it is a rather apt description of a typical moisture event here as the clouds, when there are any, scud across the sky with every so often one turning gray and letting go a few drops. Take it from a former mid-westerner if you can see the sun shining you are not looking at a major downpour. A real rain then, as # 4 daughter’s GHT (good husband Tom) observed when loading their car for their return home after attending MGH’s 80th birthday bash in July was interrupted–by a ‘gully washer’. You know the kind I mean where the gutters run full and the storm drains get plugged with the debris washed down from the mountain bench our homes are built on which in turn causes the water to run into basements creating real havoc for the families living there. Their anguished cries for justice and retribution leads to much pointing of fingers between the city fathers and the developers who neglected to factor in drainage when they laid out the area for development in the first place because it was ‘dry’ when they made their plans. It seems to me that they have the same philosophy expressed in a little ditty that was popular when I was a girl that went something like this: “Oh the window she is broken and the rain is coming in and if I do not fix it I’ll be soaking to my skin. But if we wait a day or two the rain will go away and we don’t need a window on such a sunny day. Manana, manana, manana is good enough for me! “ This attitude has led to sheer terror for those in our fair city whose homes are built in natural drainage areas as they have ‘been there-done that’ with the flooding thing too many times to have any patience with this laid back lack of concern for their vulnerable condition and have therefore resorted to that great American recourse known as the ‘law suit’ which is how we handle difficulties in the modern world as opposed to the more direct method employed when the West was young of stringing up wrong doers on the spot as an object lesson to those similarly inclined.

At any rate, having digressed in a thoroughly shameful manner I will attempt to return to my original point which is, as Tom so succinctly observed, “When it rains in Utah everyone stands around their front door and watches”. He was shaking his head in amusement because as a native Wisconsinite rain, and lots of it falls from the sky on a regular basis and the idea that it could provide entertainment for one and sundry tickled his funny bone. Well, all I can say is that if he wanted to be really entertained he should have been here the time we had so much water flowing after one storm that one of our neighbors up the road from us launched a plastic sled and was navigating his way in the water as it rushed down the street. Granted he tipped over a couple of times but that did not deter him as he immediately bobbed back up and set sail once more on his quest to see just how far he could go before the stream ran out. I last saw him headed South towards Fiddlers Canyon Road which if he made it that far would have taken him to a larger tributary than the one he was currently on which would have taken him all the way to Main Street! I saw this with my very own eyes as I stood in my door way and if I had a video camera, note to self—buy one—I could have made my fortune selling it to America’s Funniest Home Videos. Note to self—on second thought don’t, as I would probably not have had it handy when needed and not be able to find where I last placed it and while hunting for said camera would miss out on the entertainment I had so freely been presented.

After all life is for living with remembered stories growing better with each telling, don’t you agree? So, LET IT RAIN which it did Saturday all day long with a gentle drizzle, mostly, although Robyn who was attending the SUU football game tells me that the wind managed to turn her umbrella inside out. So maybe it was stormier than I thought. I mean, who’s got time to stand around watching it rain?

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