My Friend Hazel

Hazel Pontius Collmer was the first “elder” in my life, other than my grandparents. I encountered her in the late 1970’s, when she was making the best of her twilight years at Beechwood Retirement Home, having out-lived two husbands. The driver who ran errands for the residents used to bring her paintings in for framing when I worked at a nearby frame shop. She included detailed notes on the type of framing she desired and we all adored her dreamy little watercolors.

One evening I had gone over to Beechwood to see my paternal grandmother, who lived in the wing with the dementia patients. Grandma was a lovable little dear but she really did not remember who I was and this made for unsettling and abbreviated visits, motivated more, I must admit, from familial obligation than anything else. I remembered that Mrs. Collmer lived there as well so one evening I decided to try and find her.

Thankfully this was in the days before all of the “privacy concerns” so I asked for and received her location. I knocked on her door and introduced myself as her framer. She chuckled and responded that she had always assumed her framer was a man but she looked me up and down and must have decided I was OK because she invited me into her small apartment. She was watching MacNeil/Lehrer (quite a refreshing change from the game shows blaring away in the rest of the building) and she shushed me until the segment she had been viewing was finished. It was a story about the first woman to be appointed the head of an Ivy League university.

Mrs. Collmer shut off the television, turned to me and asked, “Now, what would you have worn for an interview like that? How would you have done your hair?” She thought that the woman had not looked businesslike enough for such a distinguished position. Mrs. Collmer always dressed impeccably: she had a wardrobe of beautiful dresses, matching shoes and handbags, her hair was always perfectly coiffed; she always seemed to look like she was heading out the door to attend a concert at the philharmonic or perhaps conduct a board meeting.

By the time I met her, she was ninety-something and I was thirty-something and we soon became fast friends. I would go visit my grandmother for five or ten minutes and then spend several hours with this delightful woman who soon insisted that I call her Hazel. She had moved into the retirement community after the death of Mr. Collmer, her second husband who had been her first love. This was the best story!

When she was in high school she was friends with and eventually the beloved of Mr. Collmer, who was a year ahead of her. He went away to college after he graduated, and they corresponded regularly. He told her stories of his new roommate, a Mr. Pontius, and he told Hazel, “I am bringing him home with me for Thanksgiving, he is a grand fellow - you will just love him!”

Of course, much to Mr. Collmer’s dismay, Hazel did indeed fall in love with Mr. Pontius (and he fell in love with her). They were married for over fifty years until his passing, whereupon Hazel serendipitously reconnected with Mr. Collmer whose wife of many years had also passed on. So the childhood sweethearts were reunited (in their seventies) and married for over a decade.

Hazel’s room was decorated with the best pieces from her art collection and her favorite furnishings. When she had moved into Beechwood in her eighties she knew she needed something other than her musical pastimes to keep her occupied, so she took some watercolor classes from James Kuo at Rosary Hill. Dr. Kuo was delighted with her bright spirit. A medical condition caused her hands to be quite shaky so he convinced her to paint clouds and skies and seascapes and foliage - not try to aim for straight lines - go with the flow, as it were. Soon I had framed so many of her paintings that I convinced her to have a one-woman show at the Rosa Coplon Home that lent its wall space to local artists for month-long shows.

Hazel Pontius Collmer and me.

 The residents and staff at Rosa Coplon could hardly believe that this artist was older than most of their residents! Hazel displayed her works there three years in a row and sold quite a number of pieces each time (I bought quite a few myself). At the last show she made a personal appearance at the opening, gave a brief talk, and ended up by demonstrating her daily exercise routine. My dad was holding a microphone for her and he really had to scramble to keep up with her contortions.  Someone asked her how it felt to be so old. Hazel replied, “I will let you know when I feel old.”

Hazel had been born in 1888; she was one of the first generation of women to pursue education beyond high school. Mr. Pontius worked in the upper echelons of management in the YMCA and they traveled all over the world on for both business and pleasure. She played the violin and sang in choral groups. She was straight-backed and tall (she had much better posture than I did!), and she strode through her kingdom with a slender silver-headed cane (which I now have in my possession). Every night before she went to bed she walked down every hallway of her entire building complex and checked to make sure all of the exterior doors were locked and secure.

I remember she told me she was always so excited each time a new resident moved in to Beechwood. She lived with the everlasting hope that someday she would find a kindred spirit - someone who could discuss great books and music and world affairs, and someone who could hear well enough to carry on the conversation. Someone to talk to, a friend her age, a peer – that is what she sought and I do not think she ever found such a person. That may be why she and I became so close – she was desperate! She did give me the perceptive advice not to marry my second husband (which I of course ignored) and today when I look at a plastic grocery bag or a plastic container of any kind, I think of her comment almost thirty years ago that someday such items would be abandoned as being wasteful of the planet’s resources.

In 1985 she fell, broke her hip and her daughter hastily arranged transportation to Buffalo so she could make preparations to move her mother back with her to North Carolina to be close to the rest of her family. Humor usually pops up in the darkest of circumstances and I remember laughing that even though Hazel was suffering from the sudden alteration to her circumstances in addition to the discomfort from her shattered hip, she still managed to be fashion-conscious enough to chide her 75-year-old daughter for carrying a purse that did not match her shoes. Her daughter responded, “I am sorry, Mother, but I was in a hurry to get here to be with you!”

After she moved out of Beechwood, I saw her one last time. I drove down to Asheville with all of her possessions shoehorned into my rusty old van. Although I had a delightful stay with her daughter in an enchanting old farmstead in the middle of a wild and beautiful woodland, visiting my dear Hazel in the inhospitable hospital setting was just not the same as our vibrant get-togethers from days gone by; she was suddenly small, powerless and forlorn - such a pale imitation of her former effervescent self. It was a heartrending visit.

Hazel passed away in 1986 at the age of 98.

 Seascape, Hazel Pontius Collmer

Kitchen Nightmares or Why I am not a Cook

The Bishop’s Wife

My mother was never a good cook on her best days but when company came for a meal she pulled out all of the stops and tried her best to deliver edible hot food to the table in a timely fashion.

This was of course complicated by the fact that more often than not these company meals were served right after church on Sunday and folks expected to walk in the door of the parsonage and take a seat at the dining room table. Mom was expected to be present at the church service, of course, and yet there was this meal she was supposed to be preparing from scratch.

The meals were usually based around roast chicken or roast beef. Mom had those two down pretty good – she could throw in potatoes with the meat and over boil up some green beans or carrots pretty fast when she made the mad dash to arrive home before our guests. Her best dessert consisted of store-bought angel food cake, layered in chunks with great dollops of vanilla ice cream and blobs of chocolate syrup and then re-frozen in an angel food cake pan and served with Ready Whip. No baking, no cooking – only assembly required – mom loved recipes like this!

Methodists don’t have a lot in the way of a church hierarchy – the men my mom lived in fear of having to feed were the District Superintendent (DS) or horror of horrors, the Bishop. The DS was more of a regular fellow and had a closer relationship with the ministers – saw them more frequently, perhaps because he oversaw smaller territories than the Bishops.

One day the Bishop and his wife were scheduled to visit our church – the Bishop would preach the sermon that morning and then they would eat Sunday dinner with us, and they would be off to their next function.

Mom had foolishly decided to venture outside of her established repertoire of roast beef and roast chicken – she told dad to buy steak. Dad was not very pleased with the cut of the steak that was available but mom became determined to serve this. It was not a really expensive cut of meat and after her usual routine of a lengthy and low temperature cooking procedure, the steaks ended up very much akin to shoe-leather.

During the meal there was little conversation as everyone was occupied with the cutting and the attempts at chewing and then swallowing this very dry steak. My mother was mortified by all of this and tried gamely to move on to dessert by clearing away the dinner plates. The Bishop’s wife was still sawing away at her steak and my mom gently told her, “That’s OK, you don’t have to eat that.” The woman stubbornly hung onto her plate and said, “I’m going to finish this if it kills me.”

I remember that the Bishop and his wife beat a most hasty retreat right after dessert that day.

Breaking the Mold

My grandmother (mom’s mother) was a fabulous cook – her specialties were just about everything – roasts, pies, cakes, cookies, and casseroles. She had her written recipes but she was a “pinch of this” and a “dash of that” kind of cook – running on sheer instinct.

This instinct skipped my mom’s generation (as well as mine!). Mom suffered mightily for this imagined flaw in her character: after all, she was a Minister’s Wife and she felt she was expected to possess many talents to serve each parish as the preacher’s helpmeet. Other preachers had wives who played piano or organ, sang in or led choirs, taught Sunday School – but mom’s health and her shyness precluded any of these.

Mom struggled with cooking – she had the decorating and clothing aspects of entertaining down cold but the food part eluded her. Church food committees soon learned that it was best to just ask her for a nice Jello salad. Of course in her unceasing endeavor to make a good impression (for the sake of my father), she usually made the attempt to create a Jello mold.

Lime Jello, green grapes, banana slices, canned pineapple chunks – these were the main ingredients of the Jello mold. That part was doable. The tricky bit was the unmolding of the ring. Manys the time when mom resorted to slipping the pan into a sink full of warm water – to encourage the Jello ring to depart the mold. Of course the pan would sink into the sink and water would dissolve the Jello and green grapes and banana slices and the pineapple chunks would be found floating lazily in the sink full of green-tinged water. And mom would be found flung across her bed, weeping.

The Birthday Cake

Dad and I arrived back home in Albion very late one evening – we had been out visiting hospitalized church members all the way over in Rochester. It was Dad’s birthday, October 13, and we had been gone all day – we had pretty much forgotten about celebrating.

We entered through the back door into an almost completely dark house (most unusual since my mother usually kept every light on in the place when she was alone). Mom was nowhere to be found but there, in the corner of the kitchen, on top of the chest freezer and illuminated by one gooseneck desk lamp, was a cake.

This was not just any cake: this cake had a rusty orange zinnia with a broken stem drooping in the middle of it. A large white candle kind of angled out of the cake like a cannon. The white frosting was flecked with chocolate cake crumbs; the frosting was all over the cake plate. There were little birthday candles stuck here and there into the cake’s frosting and we also found several egg shells and a spoon wedged into this amazing creation. A few pieces of the cardboard cake mix box were also sticking out of the frosting.

Mom soon emerged from the darkened dining room and related the story of this cake. As usual, it was a layer cake that she had tried to bake. And as usual she had encountered problems removing the layers from the pans. When she had finally succeeded in prying the chunks of cake out of the pans, they really weren’t in “layers” anymore so she tried to “glue” everything back together with frosting. A few toothpicks inside to hold everything in place – voila!

Mom always had trouble with layer cakes because the layers never came out of the oven flat or even – they always dipped in one direction or the other – that is why she had to use toothpicks to hold the layers together. It was many, many years later that I discovered that ovens came with leveling feet – and that my poor mother’s years of problems over unlevel cake layers was not her fault but the fault of unleveled parsonage ovens!

But on this day in October this particular birthday cake was not cooperating with her and soon crumbs were in the frosting and frosting was everywhere. First she got mad - then she got creative. And because enough time had elapsed between when she made the cake and when dad and I came home, we all had a good laugh over the cake and cut it up and ate it. We just had to be really careful and watch out for those toothpicks!