The Good Catholic Girl

Even though my dad was a Methodist minister, as a kid I had few friends who were Methodists.  Maybe because my parents did not wish to look as though we were playing favorites, none of us developed close friendships from within our various church populations.  They did have friends who were other pastors and their wives, and a few parishioners from previous towns who kept in touch for decades. 

My friends came mostly from the neighborhood.  And especially in Attica, New York, when I was between second grade and fifth grade, most of the kids in my neighborhood were Catholic.  My best friends lived the closest - Ann Marie and her little sister Betty and Peggy and Donna.  They all went to the parochial school and I went to the public school.  We had loads of fun riding our bikes, roller skating on the dangerously bumpy sidewalks, playing with our stuffed animals, and always trying (and failing) to gather enough lumber to build a tree house or a raft.  

Two Catholics and a Methodist (Me with Betty and Ann Marie)

Two Catholics and a Methodist (Me with Peggy and Donna)

A slightly younger girl from the next block also became my friend.  I do not remember her name but she had a white cat named Salty.   One afternoon when  I was in the third grade, this girl decided (for some unknown reason) to take me on a private guided tour of her Catholic church.  She boldly opened the huge front door, dragged me into the hushed sanctuary where she eagerly showed me the stations of the cross, the confessional booth, the altar, the flickering votive candles, the gold decorations, and the beautiful yet startlingly gruesome statues. She was breathless with excitement and I was silenced by awe.    Then, as a grand finale to this afternoon's activity, then she proceeded to show me all around the priest's private dressing room (the sacristy) behind the altar. 

This magical room contained many glowing dark wood cabinets with drawers and drawers full of vestments - pristine white satin robes, miles of lace and golden embroidery.  She opened each and every drawer - showed me every candle, where the communion wine was kept, and the wafers.  And the chalices and candle holders.  I was quite overwhelmed and impressed with all of this beautiful bounty.   

But now, all these many years later, I can only imagine if the priest had caught us in there.  He would have had a coronary.  We were fortunate that we never encountered another soul during our little tour.  And I don't think I ever recounted this adventure to my mom and dad.  I am sure they would have been mortified.

I decided it would be only fair to return the favor and take this girl on a tour of my church.  After all, my dad was the minister - I knew every nook and cranny in that gigantic old building.  When I asked her if she would like to see my church, she recoiled in complete horror.  She told me my church was a "public" church (not a "parochial" church) and she was sure she would be struck by lightning if she ever dared step foot inside such a blasphemous edifice.  She and I pretty much stopped being friends after that - I am sure her parents forbade her from hanging out with me to avoid the risk of eternal damnation.

On another occasion, a group of us kids were given tours of the various churches in town.  This was part of the new Ecumenical efforts by various denominations.  When we entered the Catholic church, a nun yanked me out of line and asked me to cover my head.   The other girls were pulling out lace-trimmed hankies for this, or even little hats - but I had nothing suitable.  So the nun grabbed a facial tissue and slapped it onto my head.  All I remember is being dismayed that these weird Catholics thought a rumpled Kleenex on my head was more suitable in their God's eyes than my own freshly washed hair. 

Cake Two

I posted this story of the birthday cake a while back but now I have found the photo!  So here is the story again.

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 off to one side of it. A large white candle kind of angled out of the cake like a cannon. The chocolate frosting was flecked with  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 couple of spoons 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.

The Summer of '59

Grandma and Grandpa had a beautiful backyard garden with narrow grassy pathways and about enough “lawn” for a couple of chairs and the rotary drier.  Grandma took care most of the flowers – black-eyed susans, peonies, lily of the valley, forget-me-nots, bleeding hearts, day lilies, iris, glads, snapdragons, trumpet vines, hens and chickens, jack-in-the-pulpit, lamb’s ears and ferns.  More flowers than I can remember – the garden bloomed all summer long!  Grandpa tended three things:  his roses, his tomatoes and his compost heap.  There was a wild brambly red raspberry bush which yielded a small handful of treats each season.  Strawberries too, in sweet juicy abundance.

It was a delightful English garden, Grandpa puttering around and Grandma and I sitting in the sun reading (she read about flowers, I read about horses) and painting (she painted flowers, I painted horses).  My entire childhood revolved around these special weekends and summers in this garden.

Once each summer came a wondrous event.  The fire hall was about four doors away, and the firemen put on a carnival for a day or two, located on the other side of the unkempt hedges and tall old trees ringing the garden.  It was magical – strings of lights, cotton candy, games of chance and skill, small rides, and wall-to-wall people!  People came from miles around – kids, teenagers, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas.  Of course, some people parked on Grandma’s flowers and drove over the bushes and bumped into the trees, which always made Grandpa angry, but, heck – it was only two days a year.

My grandmother and I were strolling through the carnival one evening when I saw him – and I thought for a moment it was James Dean.  Skinny blue jeans, white tee shirt, ducktail haircut.  He was the very image of wild rebellious youth and my heart skipped a beat.   It was love at first sight.  I was 13 years old.

 
I had seen Rebel Without a Cause when I was 9, Elvis was my favorite singer, and Edd “Kookie” Burns was my TV heartthrob on 77 Sunset Strip.  And here he was, practically in my grandma’s back yard!  I followed him through the carnival as best I could with Grandma in tow, and caught tantalizing glimpses.  Later I saw him drive away in his convertible, top down in the sultry summer night.  I wrote down his license plate number.

Thus began my little adventure.  I wrote to the license bureau, told them my girlfriend had a crush on this guy with this license plate on his car but she was too shy to do anything about it so I was doing her a favor and could they please send his name and address?  Astonishingly enough, they did.

After much pondering, I sat down and wrote him a letter.  I told him that my girlfriend, Linda Russell (I made up both the name and the girlfriend), had seen him at the carnival and thought he looked really nice and she wondered if he would be willing to meet her.  I told him the location (the firemen’s road next to my Grandma’s back yard) and picked a date and time when I knew I could be there.

The days passed in alternating paroxysms of sheer terror and wild excitement.  I could hardly wait to get to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.  By the time the weekend arrived I was beside myself.   As the appointed hour approached I was crouched in the high back bathroom window which had the best view of the laneway.  When I saw his car drive up, I nearly jumped out of my skin and I clattered down the narrow crooked stairway and bolted through the kitchen and out the back door into the garden; then I attempted to emerge unruffled and serene on the other side of the tangled shrubbery to meet my dreamboat face to face.

He had left his engine on and his muffler was roaring like a jet engine.  He was leaning up against the car and he looked puzzled when he saw me.  Dirty words had been painted all over his car in crude black lettering, and I was mortified to see him up close in the glaring sunlight.  His hair was too greasy, his face was lined, and some of his teeth were missing, his clothing was soiled.  He was ugly!  He was old!  (Probably at least 25!)

I calmly told him Linda had been unable to meet him that day because she was sick, and she had sent me to tell him.  He apologized to me about the graffiti on his car, told me his friends had pulled a prank on him.  With these apologies exchanged, he got back in his car and rumbled away.

When I reemerged into the now-quiet sanctity of the garden, Grandma was coming down the back steps.  “Who was that, dear?” she asked innocently.  “He just wanted some directions, Grandma.”  “Oh, alright, dear.”

I never told a soul about this incident – if my mother had found out she would have had kittens and I would have been grounded for life. If Grandpa had ever found out he would have had a coronary.   It is only in retrospect that I realize how lucky I had been, coming away unscathed from my first attempted “walk on the wild side.”  The guy was probably just a grease monkey but he could just as easily have been an axe murderer.  I returned to drawing horses for several more years before I again ventured forth into the wild uncharted world of boys.

My Dad

 Elma, 1948

I was done up in this outfit to be the flower girl at my uncle's wedding.  I was less than thrilled, pitched a royal fit,  and the wedding photographer caught us just as dad was calming me down.  I was always referred to as "Miss Thundercloud" by the family because of this behavior and this photograph, but it is also told that I fulfilled my duties as a flower girl quite flawlessly.

I miss my dad.

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!

The Best Christmas Ever

1952 was the year I turned six. I could steal a line from Dickens and say it was the best of times and the worst of times. My mom and I were taking turns being sick; she with what I now believe to have been severe and frequent migraines and me with the usual array of childhood maladies such as chicken pox, mumps, measles, croup, etc. I remember one event which resulted in my dad carrying me across the park in front of our parsonage to the town doctor who painted my mouth with some ghastly purple stuff. I found out many years later this purple stuff was gentian violet used as a cure for thrush.

I also remember having to be dosed with a daily spoonful of cod liver oil because I “needed iron.” I could never figure out what the iron had to do with the medicine, but my mom and I arrived at an unusual ritual for my dosing: I used to crouch under the kitchen table for this hated spoonful and she would thrust the spoon under the table. I was very happy to be pronounced well enough to be rid of it - although I can still recall that hideous oily taste. *Shudder*

In spite of all of these ailments, my folks and I shared a wondrous life together. Dad was the quintessential poor country preacher (who one summer painted the parsonage to supplement his meager salary) and mom, in training to be agoraphobic in addition to her other illnesses, was very lucky that the church was right next door to the parsonage (she hated having to ride in the car, always got motion sickness). She occupied her time trying to decorate the old farmhouse/parsonage and sewed clothing and curtains when she could get out of bed.  I guess we did not realize how awful our lives were so we simply enjoyed life and each other.

The school was just up the road and I could walk the half block or so and come home for lunch from kindergarten and then first grade. Part of our family lore, told to me many times, was that when I first started school I kept leaving and coming home because I wanted to “help my mommy” since she was so sick. My folks and the school officials had to convince me that it was OK for me to be gone a bit each day and that mom would be all right without my ministrations.

It was in this town also that my parents were forced to buy their first television, to keep me home at night. The neighbors two houses away used to invite me over after supper to watch Hopalong Cassidy and not unlike millions of other boomers, I was immediately sucked in to the Cowboy Way. The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and of course, all of these famous TV cowboys had famous TV cowboy horses: Topper, Silver, Trigger and Champion.

It was love at first sight! I wanted a six-gun, a cowboy hat, cowboy boots…and I wanted a horse!

Little by little I acquired the six-gun (but no holster, alas), and some sort of straw hat that masqueraded as a cowboy hat. But no horse seemed forthcoming. We could not afford a horse, of course, and my dad tried ever so gently to persuade me that the parsonage committee would not take to having to clean up after a real horse.

In the fall of 1952 I was suddenly banished from the basement. This did not bother me a great deal, as I recall, because it was one of those creaky old scary basements with the low-hanging furnace pipes and the finished part just kind of trailing off into dirt. The church basement was the same and I still have nightmares about it. I remember waking in the night hearing strange noises coming from the cellar but these also did not seem to bother me and any alarums of the night were forgotten in the light of day.

Well, as it turned out, my dad had decided to build me a rocking horse. He took pieces of wood from a sturdy old rocking chair and one of the men from the church cut out the head from a piece of plywood. My dad did all of the rest of the work himself, including the glossy black paint. My mother then made the thick black yarn mane and tail. Dad even managed to find some scraps of leather and rivet together a bridle.

My dad was not known for his skills with tools. Oh, he could handle a paintbrush all right, but he had never been one with any skill, knowledge or love of saws, planes, drills, screwdrivers, hammers and the like. (My paternal grandfather had been the tool guy who worked on the railroad; I have his toolbox today, with his initials in Morse code painted on the outside.)

So the fact that dad was able to create such a magnificent rocking horse for me was all the more amazing. My Black Beauty was so well built and sturdy that even though I weigh many times more today than I did back then, he still holds my weight. I marvel at the skill that came so unexpectedly from my dad’s love for me and from his desire to make me happy that year at Christmas.

"No wonder you never had any kids!"

Part One – THE BLUE DRESS

My mother did not drive.  Nor would she ride in a car during daylight hours so shopping was pretty much out of the question for her (with the notable exception of the Sears Roebuck Catalog, from which she regularly made sure my father remained forever buried under a small mountain of debt).  Whenever any shopping expedition was required, especially in late summer when a new school wardrobe was needed, my mother made my father drive me to Batavia or sometimes even Buffalo to go to a big department store like Woolworth’s, Adam, Meldrum and Anderson’s or that brightly lit new upstart – K-Mart.

On one such foray, during the early sixties, we returned home from the K-Mart in Batavia with a light blue tailored linen dress with navy trim and buttons.  It was an A-line dress – I loved this dress but when I modeled it for mom she acted both horrified and embarrassed.   She was so flabbergasted  dad and I had a really difficult time trying to get her to reveal why she was so flustered,  but she finally blurted out what she thought must have happened:  my poor addled father and I had wandered by mistake into the maternity section of the store.  Gasp!   Nothing we could say would dissuade her.  Her mind was set - it was a maternity dress and if I wore it out in public - to church or to school, “People will think you’re pregnant!”

I tried to counter her argument by saying that all anyone would have to do is wait a few months and when no blessed event came forth then people would just have to stop thinking I was wearing maternity clothes.  But no – there was no arguing with my mother.  Even my dad knew it was a losing battle and retired to the solitude of his study to work on one of his sermons.

My mom then proceeded to spend the next several days remaking the dress – she ripped out the seams, she shaped it and reshaped it.  She was never quite able to make it into one of her beloved shirtwaists, but she came as close as she could until she was finally satisfied that I would be OK to appear in public in this garment and not a soul would harbor the dreaded thought that I might be pregnant.

Part Two – RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

In 1965, when Paul and I announced that we were to be wed, my mother was overcome with joy –that is, until I informed her that I did not want any kind of engagement ring, only a simple gold band as a wedding ring.  No diamonds for me, no siree!  I thought they were ugly and stupid and I am sure Paul was greatly relieved at dodging this very expensive pre-nuptial bullet.

My mother, however, contributed to the occasion with a familiar yet unexpected refrain, “You can’t just get married, you have to become engaged, otherwise everyone will think you had to get married – people will think you are pregnant!”

Once again I retorted that if anyone at all were to be paying attention to this little event of ours, all they would have to do is keep an eye on me to see if any babies were forthcoming and if none showed up then they could rest assured no shotguns were involved in the proceedings and all was above board and on the up and up.  And once again, in the eyes of the greater community, my virginity could be assumed to have been a proven fact and my mother could hold her head high in public.

My mother, again proving quite intractable, simply would not stop her argument until Paul and I went out one day, found a little junky antique store on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, and purchased a cheap old gold band set with three stones, a chipped opal in the center and two garnets, I believe, on either side of the opal.  Paul tied this onto the pale blue neck-ribbon of a plush toy Siamese cat and gave it to me for Christmas that year and my mom was beyond delighted.

I discovered many years later, after my mom had died, that a ring of that type - set with a row of stones, is often called a Mother’s Ring – each stone represents the birthstone of a child.  If my mom had known that she probably would have had kittens.

Part Three -THE WEDDING GOWN WAR

I have already described one of the skirmishes in the Wedding War – the battle of the engagement ring.  My mother won that one.

Herein follows the tale of the Battle of the Wedding Gown.   I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide the winner.

I am of the belief that my mother began planning the wedding the moment I told her I had met this nice guy named Paul.  She went into overdrive when I declared our love, and she went into orbit when I announced the wedding. 

I bought a bride’s magazine and found a pretty yet plain gown.  My mother was crushed that I was not planning to have her sew my gown.  She was, after all, a wonderful seamstress and I must admit she had probably been planning my gown since the day I was born.  She had made most of my baby clothes and most of the clothing I wore until I managed to convince her that T shirts and dungarees were my preferred mode of dress and I was able to finally escape her frilly, girlie ideas of apparel.

I grudgingly agreed to let her do a gown for me, but then one day Paul and I were wandering down Elmwood again and I found a lovely white satin floor-length gown with multi-colored embroidered ribbons on the sleeves – this dress was from Mexico and I was ready to buy it on the spot but I decided to tell my mom about it first.  She was crestfallen at the news and made my father drive her from Mayville to Buffalo so she could see this garment in person.  This was the first time I remember her being in a store since I was a very little kid.  She was appalled at the sloppy stitching and even more appalled at the colorful trim on the sleeves.

Obviously this could in no way be designated a wedding gown because of course if I were to wear any color other than a white as pure as the driven snow – it would be screaming out to any and all that I was pregnant (sound familiar?).  My mother put her tiny foot down and that was that.  The Mexican wedding dress was out.

My grandparents became involved in the Battle of the Wedding Dress.  Grandma tried her best to be the peacemaker between mom and me, and Grandpa got “het-up” and one of his rants that I recall began, “Why don’t you just wear blue jeans and ride a horse down the aisle!?!”  (Of course I thought that was a wonderful idea!)

Mom and I wrangled back and forth – would I buy a gown, would she make one.  She sent away for patterns and yards of satin while I bought magazines.  She convinced me that she could make a gown and we finally settled on the plainest empire waist A-Line gown, with elbow length bell-sleeves and a very simple unadorned neckline.  And I began to campaign for embroidered ribbon trim on the sleeves.  No, not in color, simply in metallic gold and white – different widths and designs of ribbons – row upon row.

We sent away for samples of trims and in the mean time I was busy convincing her that gold wasn’t really a color and no, people wouldn’t think I was pregnant.

Mom swung into action – sewing seams and ripping them out and doing fittings and re-sewing and re-ripping.  But she was obviously having fun so how could I get angry with her?  By the end of the whole ordeal, however, she had sneakily added a lace mantilla with gold edging and a huge gold-edged lace overskirt.  Luckily she ran out of time before the wedding or I would have been clad in lace from head to toe.

So that is why I never had any children.  I blame my mother.  I also thank my friend Babe St. Joan for the title of this post.  That is what she said to me when I told her these stories.

Camp Wesleyan for Girls

One of the most traumatic experiences of my young life was the week in July of 1960 when my parents sent me to Camp Wesleyan.  I had just turned 14, I had never spent any time away from my family, and by the time it was finished I swore I would never attend camp again.   Camp Wesleyan for Girls was run by the middle-aged wives of ministers,  elderly missionaries and one particularly memorable overzealous wanna-be drill sergeant in Bermuda shorts.

My dad drove away in his old Chevy, leaving me adrift in front of the massive and crumbling Epworth Inn at Silver Lake, New York.  It was there that the first horror story embedded itself into my brain.  A group of us newcomers were standing around with our hard shelled suitcases and matching make-up cases, trying to figure out what we were supposed to be doing.  A baby bird fell out of its nest in one of the ancient oaks and landed at our feet on the gravel .  Some girls were squealing and some of us were working on a plan to rescue this pathetic little creature when an older camper appeared and with the stacked heel of her cowboy boot swiftly smashed the unfortunate bird into the ground .

This is how we met “Tiger,” a girl whose apparel made my usual tomboy outfit look positively frilly. Tiger was wearing skinny dungarees, a Western shirt with pearl snaps, a black cowboy hat and cowboy boots.  She looked and acted like a boy (except we knew she was a girl because this was a camp for girls only).  Had the baby bird incident never happened I surely would have worshiped her (from afar) all week.  Tiger was best buddies with the entire staff and we newcomers were in awe of her and also scared to death of her – mostly however I think we all simply hated her out of pure instinct, for her aura of coolness and her seemingly casual cruelty.

Another incident I remember from that first hour involved a really shy girl whose parents had given her two cases of Hershey bars to hand out to her “new friends” at camp.  Campers swarmed her like a Biblical plague of locusts, the candy bars were devoured, and even at our young age (14 was a lot younger in 1960 than it is today!) we all unconsciously dismissed her as needy and pathetic.  I still think of her every so often and wonder how she managed to survive in the big mean world.

The camp stretched on into endless hours and days of unaccustomed dormitory living, communal bathrooms, being forced to go to bed too early, the wanna-be sergeant in Bermudas who used her bugle to wake us up at the crack of dawn, awful food, tedious and uninspired Bible classes – all supposedly aimed at turning us into missionaries – no thanks!  We new campers were terrified of the uppity clique of older girls who flaunted their familiarity with the camp routine.  Once in a while we were allowed to go down to the lake to swim or sunbathe – but there were no crafts, no music, no fun – it was like five horrible days of church with really bad meals and prison guards.

Before supper on the last evening, a grim-faced staff member came to the front of the dining room and informed us that there had been a terrible accident and their darling little Tiger had drowned.  We were shocked at this information – our young brains barely comprehending the dreadful news – someone we had all hated and now she was dead!  It was simply too awful for words. 

We were informed that later in the evening there would be a memorial service in the dining room for the dear departed.  (Why not the chapel? This was, after all, a church camp!  We were too stunned to think to ask questions.)  The lights had been dimmed when we arrived, a few candles were burning, and over on a low riser a shape(which we assumed to represent the deceased) was lying draped with a white sheet.  Soft music was playing and we were all completely cowed. 

The staff began a solemn service – which swiftly turned from flowery King James phraseology into complex doggerel and ended with a rousing chorus of “Hold that Tiger” whereupon the deceased threw off the sheet, sat bolt upright (cowboy hat and boots and all) and jumped to her feet and proceeded to stomp around in the midst of our astonishment.  The staff members were holding their sides and howling with glee.

I did not think this stunt was very funny back then and fifty years later I still think it was a rotten trick because it was such an utterly frivolous departure from the humorless tone of the overly staid camp.  Probably scarred our little Hershey bar camper for life – but, then again, who knows, maybe she grew up to became a missionary! 

It is only now as I write this that I stop to wonder about Tiger’s life – I suspect she was able to conquer any and all people and obstacles in her path.  Although I doubt if she ever became involved in wild bird rehabilitation.

The Parsonage

I have been working on a series of stories about my life as a Preacher's Kid - way back at the dawn of the Age of the Baby Boomer.  Here are three tales about the houses that our churches so generously allowed us to occupy.

The Kitchen Window

In every church community where we lived the Parsonage Committee was a group of parishioner volunteers who saw to it that the parsonage was repaired and decorated for each pastor and family.  Plumbing, heating, painting, and roof repair – the Parsonage Committee either did this work themselves or allotted funding for professional help.  Or not.  I remember when the attic of the Pavilion parsonage was invaded with bees and my dad ended up on a long wobbly ladder trying to get rid of them.  And I have a photograph of dad on that same ladder, painting the Pavilion parsonage!

When my parents moved into the parsonage at Pavilion, my mother began her decorating routine as usual.  This was in 1950 – the parsonage was probably over a hundred years old even then.  The kitchen had only a hand pump at the sink when we arrived but after my mother’s continued consternation this old dinosaur was soon upgraded to a set of real faucets (and hot water!).

The one feature of the kitchen that even the best parsonage committee could not repair was the lack of a window over the sink.  The plumbing was on an inside wall – the kitchen window was off to the left but just not the same to mom.  So she figured out an ingenious fix to this imagined flaw:  she made dad buy a set of Venetian blinds and some shelf brackets and a board.    She hung up the blinds over the new shelf, sewed a set of curtains and - voila!  A houseplant was even installed on this new “window sill.” It sure looked like a window – just enough to ease her worried soul when she was standing at the sink washing dishes.

Members of the Parsonage Committee were flummoxed at first by the arrival of this anomaly and more than one could be seen pulling up the blinds to find a blank wall underneath.  Mom was inordinately pleased with herself over this trick.

The Big Surprise

An incident connected with the Parsonage Committee in Attica sent my mother nearly around the bend, but as the Minister’s Wife she knew discretion was the better part of valor and when she was called upon, she gave a performance worthy of an Academy Award.

We had gone to the lake for our usual week of summer vacation at the cottage and when we walked into the parsonage we were nearly blinded by a newly redecorated downstairs: living room, dining room and foyer.  Some walls were covered in patterned wallpaper and on the other walls really wide stripes.  The color scheme of this delight was deep maroon, white and silver.  The pattern consisted of enormous white flowers.  The stripes even marched up the stairs to the second floor.  Mom almost keeled over on the spot but when the Parsonage Committee burst in upon us to see how we liked our “Big Surprise” mom had regained her composure and somehow managed to convince the committee of her absolute delight.

In retrospect, we were quite lucky at this relatively low-key decorating approach.  In later years my dad and step-mom lived in one parsonage (in a town which shall remain nameless) (OK – it was Honeoye Falls!) where the kitchen looked like it had been done by the set decorators on Laugh-In.  Hot pink, neon orange and enormous butterflies:    “Sock it to me!”

Polka Dots

In addition to my “suite” of two rooms upstairs in the old barn of a parsonage in Albion, down the hall was my very own bathroom (or half-bath as they are called nowadays).  I was thrilled with this little room and set about decorating it.  The plumbing fixtures were old – even the toilet seat was very beat up looking with scuffs and dings and missing paint.  It would never have occurred to anyone in those days to try to find a store and buy a new toilet seat – this one was perfectly serviceable – just ugly!

So I decided to decorate the toilet seat.  I got out my pearlized pale blue nail polish and painted polka dots over the scuffs and dings.  Mom thought I was very clever and Dad rolled his eyes and after we all got a kick out of making something old new again, we pretty much forgot all about it.  Until a member of the Parsonage Committee happened to be visiting one day and beheld this wonder for the first time.

Word spread like wildfire and I never lived that down. When I returned for the church’s anniversary celebration over 30 years later– several long-time parishioners came up to me and mentioned the polka dotted toilet seat.

The Sun Also Rises?

I am assuming this is still the case, otherwise it would be dark all the time and there would not be beautiful sunsets for me to photograph, but I must admit I haven’t seen a sunrise since I stopped frequenting the Continental back in the late eighties or so.

My maternal grandparents were both early birds – Grandpa worked at the “Bank with the Gold Dome” in downtown Buffalo and commuted by bus from Elma so he arose before the birds to make it to work on time.  Grandma loved to paint quick studies of the sunrise over her beloved garden from the cozy vantage point of the bathroom window on the second floor of their house on Bowen Road.  To live this lifestyle they naturally had to be in bed by nine or so.

My parents, on the other hand, were night owls – well, at least my mother was a night owl.  As a preacher’s wife she was obliged to attend church every Sunday, but that was the only day of the week she arose much before noon.  She hated daylight so much she would have made a perfect vampire.  Nighttime brought out the best in her – with every light blazing in our usually massive parsonages, she would sew, dust, read, dust some more, do laundry, and dust again.  I often wonder what our electric bills must have been like back then.

My dad was on call around the clock so he slept when he could – catnaps during the day on the couch in the living room, a quick snooze at his desk in his study, catching a few z’s while he waited in the car when he was chauffeuring me someplace – but he was always there to make the valiant attempt every school morning to pry me out of bed.  I do not know how he managed this because I was the kid who stayed up reading with my flashlight under the covers until all hours of the night; or I whiled away the night time hours listening to those far off stations on my brick sized turquoise colored transistor radio.  Cousin Brucie on WABC, Dick Biondi on WLS, Dick Summer and Irving the Second (aka Superplant) on WBZ - rock ‘n’ roll and silliness! 

Every school morning dad would call me from their room, “Time to get up.”  I would mumble, “I am up,” and of course, fall back asleep.  This was repeated several times, until my human snooze alarm appeared in my doorway and made sure I stumbled into the bathroom.  He was always nice enough to turn on the wall heater so the bathroom was toasty but as soon as he went back to bed I would curl up on the bathmat and go back to sleep.  This resulted in a series of knocks at the door.  “Are you awake?”  “Yes.”  “What are you doing in there?”  “I am brushing my teeth.”  “I don’t hear any brushing.”

I do not know how he managed this but I made it to school nearly every day (unless I decided to skip gym class and then I became quite talented at feigning illness).

When it came to my abbreviated college career, my nightmares were the morning classes – I rarely made it to any of them.  I failed Psychology 101 when it was an 8 o’clock class – passed it easily the next semester when it was in the blessed afternoon.

Having to work for a living also behooved me to abide by the timetables of others.  I do not even remember what time I had to show up for work in those dreadful days – I guess I have pushed that horror from my mind.

The best part of having my own business is the ability to set my own hours.  I open the shop at 11am from Tuesday through Friday and 1pm on Saturday.  This allows me to sleep in to at least 9:30 on weekdays, 11:30 on Saturdays.  I think about those poor folks who have to get up at or before the crack of dawn – and it makes my stomach clench – I am simply no good at anything until the sun is high in the sky.  I cannot think or create or even eat in the morning.

Thus I find myself to be the perfect combination of my mother and my father.  I catnap when I can and I stay up as late as I can – writing, reading, and listening to the radio.  Sometimes my cats give up on me and go to bed before I do – and they are nocturnal souls!

So perhaps this explains why you receive an email from me that I sent out at 3am or a Facebook post at 4am.  I get enough sleep, do not worry – I just sleep different hours than most of you.

And if you phone me at 8am, don’t ask, “Did I wake you?” because you did.

Just Some Manger Looking for a Joseph

For the last couple of years I have been setting up and taking down the Christmas decorations at my step mom’s place (first at the house she shared for many years with my dad and for the last two Christmases at her much smaller assisted living apartment). 

The decorations have gotten pared down quite a bit over these years - from a 3 foot fake tree and decorations all over the house to no room for a tree at all.  But there are still little dabs of Christmas:  Santas and sleds, angels and snowmen and figurines and wall-hangings here and there that spell out “NOEL.”  And of course I still set up the Nativity Scene in a prominent location.

The stable itself is made of crumbling printed cardboard and it dates back to my childhood.  The Baby Jesus in his manger of straw, one resting camel and one standing donkey, all made of solid plaster, also date back to the fifties.  There are three Wise Men, 3 shepherds, and five bug-eyed sheep carved from olive wood and brought back from the Holy Land by some earnest pilgrim.  The wooden figurines are on a slightly smaller scale than the plaster ones (I position them in the shadows, no one notices.).

Somewhere along the line we lost our matching Mary and Joseph.  Since my years in charge I have alternated between using a creepy looking shepherd lad and an old Confucius-looking guy (with Dan Blocker’s “Hoss” ten gallon cowboy hat at his knees), made from hollow rubber, to fill in for Joseph, but these are not really Josephs at all.  The young one looks like he could be a serial killer and the old one is probably supposed to be one of the Three Kings.  The Bonanza hat remains a mystery.

The Mary in the scene was at least the same scale as the faux Josephs, but she was hollow plastic and had her hands folded across her breast in such a fashion as to make her look more worried than delighted by the radiance of the Babe in the Manger.  I repainted her cloak a couple of years ago but she still had that terrible body language and her face also bothers me – she looks too old and jowly - so this year I went hunting at one of my favorite thrift shops and found a lovely new Mary (“Made in Italy” on the base) that probably dates from the sixties.  This much younger Mary is graced with a tender pose and a beautifully-painted smile.  She is the same scale as the plaster figures – so in other words, Mary no longer looks alike a Little Person who has given birth to a gigantic baby.

Last year I stored the cardboard stable and all of the contents in my garage and due to high levels of humidity everything mildewed except the plaster.  I carefully cleaned, repaired, restored, and reinforced the cardboard, scrubbed the mold off of the carved figures, treated everything with anti-mildew spray, let them dry in the sun and then coated them with varnish.

So now I am on the lookout for a suitable Joseph to keep my new Mary from having to remain a single mother – I have banished both of the rubber figures – I figure for now no man is better than a hollow one (Anyways they are both too short for the new Mary!).

If anyone has a Joseph to spare I would gladly give him an audition (but I guess that is not the correct word since I do not expect him to have any kind of a voice).  The new Mary is almost 4” tall in a kneeling position.  Joseph is usually depicted kneeling as well, so he would have to be slightly over 4” tall (because men are supposed to be taller than women).

(I also have to apologize for this post - once the title popped into my head I simply could not resist!)