It’s that time again. I’m gonna make you listen to this song:
Yeah, you guessed it. It’s my birthday. I am, not surprisingly since I have been blogging under the stupid blog name FiftyFourAndAHalf for 5 and a half years, well, I’m older today.
Old. Probably older than you; probably shorter than you, too. Life just ain’t fair. I’m older and shorter than people I can’t even see…
Today is my 60th birthday. I’m not a big fan of my birthday, for reasons you can find here: Still, it’s a day. A decade. Something to celebrate with my husband and son and good food and cake. Gotta have cake.
And it’s something that is way better than the alternative. Yup. Way better.
To the handful who have been along with me since I was, actually 54-1/2, thanks for all the times we’ve laughed and cried together. To my new blogging buddies, welcome again. Thank you for stopping by; I hope you stick around.
Blogging has been a wonderfully fun way to spend time over these last 5-1/2 years, and counting, cause I’m not planning to stop. I see no reason to stop.
Because people my age are getting gross. So what else can we do?
She told the story every year with a warm smile on her face. Sometimes her eyes got a little bit misty.
“It was 1943, and the War was on, and your father was in the Navy, on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. We never knew where he was. Like all the other boys I knew, he was in danger every day. We lived for the mail, we were terrified of unfamiliar visitors in uniform. A telegram sent us into a panic. And ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ had just been recorded by Bing Crosby. It was Number One on the Hit Parade.”
That’s how Mom started the story every time.
Of course I’ll Be Home For Christmas was Number One that year. Everyone, or just about, was hoping that someone they loved would, in fact, be home for Christmas. That all the boys would be home for good. But all too many people were disappointed. I doubt there were many dry eyes when that song came on the radio that year or for the next few.
Mom and Dad got engaged right around Pearl Harbor Day, but the War lengthened their courtship significantly because Dad enlisted shortly after the attack. It was to be a long war, and a long engagement. But Mom was in love with her handsome man. But Dad was even more so.
Mom, Circa 1943
My Dad was drop-dead gorgeous, and I have heard that in his single days, he was a bit of a ladies’ man. Every girl in town, it seemed, had a crush on Dad.
Dad, Circa 1943
In fact, my Aunt Sally once told me that she had been manning a booth at a church bizarre one Saturday in about 1995, when an elderly woman came up to talk to her.
“Are you Freddie E’s sister?” the woman asked Aunt Sal.
“Yes I am. Do you know my brother?” Aunt Sal responded.
“I did,” she sighed. “I haven’t seen him since we graduated from high school in 1935. Sixty years ago. He was,” she stopped to think of just the right word, “… He was dream-my.”
“He still is,” Sally quipped.
One day not long after after Mom had passed, Dad and I were looking at some pictures I hadn’t seen before.
“Dad,” I told him with wonder looking at a particularly good shot, “You should have gone to Hollywood. You’d have been a star.”
“Nah,” Dad said. “Mom would never have gone with me. And once the war was over, well, I wasn’t going anywhere else without her.”
Dad circa 1935
Dad never quite got over feeling lucky that he had Mom. And he never stopped loving her.
But back to Mom’s story.
“It was Christmas morning, 1943, and I went over to visit Dad’s mom and dad. Grammy E’d had symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease for seven or eight years at that point. She could still move around (she was later, when I knew her, almost completely paralyzed), but she could barely talk.”
Mom continued. “But your Dad’s mom was singing ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas.’ Well, she was trying to sing it, any how. She kept repeating that one line, over and over again. ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas.’ I thought she was crazy.”
“You see,” Mom would say, “Your father had somehow managed to get Christmas leave – he was coming home! He wanted to surprise me and wouldn’t let anyone tell me he was coming. He was expected any minute, and there I was, trying to leave. But I couldn’t stay. That song made me cry; Freddie was so far away, and in so much danger. I couldn’t bear hearing it.”
So Mom left after a while, she had other people and her own family to see. Later Dad caught up with her and they spent most of Christmas together. Both of them always smiled at the memory. Dad was home for Christmas that year, just like in the song. It was a magical year for them both.
Mom was always touched by Dad’s surprise and by his mother’s loving gesture in fighting back the paralysis that was taking over her body to try to get her son’s girl to stay. To sing when she could barely speak.
“I’ve always wished I’d stayed.”
We lost Mom on Easter of 1997, and Dad really never got over her passing.
The song and Mom’s story took on an even more poignant meaning in 2000. Because on Christmas of that year, Dad joined Mom again for the holiday. He went “home” to Mom for Christmas again, joining her in the afterlife.
Even through the sadness of losing Dad on Christmas, I always have to smile when I hear that song. Because I can just see the warmth in Mom’s eyes now as she welcomed Dad home. This time, I’m sure she was waiting for him with open arms.
***
I re-post this story every year, because it makes my heart feel a little bit merrier.
You may have seen this before, but I tried to write something new about my sister Judy. And, well, this piece really just sums up who she was better than anything I’ve come up with since.
She’s been gone now for 16 years. Not a day has gone by since that I haven’t wanted to talk with her, laugh with her, or, alternatively because she was my sister, smack her. There really isn’t a relationship like you have with a sister. Even long after they are gone.
*****
Today, April 22, is Earth Day! It’s the Anniversary of the very first Earth Day. Here is Walter Cronkite’s report on the first Earth Day, 1970:
It would also be my late sister Judy’s 64th birthday.
Whoever made the decision to turn Judy’s birthday into Earth Day chose wisely. Judy was a born environmentalist and recycler.
On the first Earth Day, Judy was a new, very young mother who believed in saving the planet. She was the first “environmentalist” I ever knew personally, and well, I thought she was nuts. There was a recycling bin in her kitchen for as long as I can remember. And this was back when recycling took effort. She believed in gardens, not garbage, and she made life bloom wherever she was.
“I’ve got kids,” she’d say. “It’s their planet too!”
But years later, Judy took recycling to a whole different level when she helped people recycle themselves. In the 1990s, Jude, who was then living in Florida, began working with the Homeless, assisting at shelters. Then she actively began trying to help homeless vets food, shelter and work — to enable them to jumpstart their lives.
When she died in early 2000, the American Legion awarded her honorary membership for her services to homeless vets. A homeless shelter was named in her honor. So she’s still doing good works, my sister is. That would make her wildly happy.
Jude also gave me the Beatles. So it is very appropriate that they wrote a song for her.
You see, the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, it was MY turn to choose what we were going to watch. And we were going to watch the second part of The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh starring Patrick McGoohan on the Wonderful Wide World of Disney. My four (all older and MUCH cooler) siblings were furious with me. But I was quite insistent. You might even say that I threw a Class I temper tantrum over it, but I wouldn’t admit to that. But hey, I was seven. And it was my turn to choose. Fair is fair, especially in a big family with only one TV.
Somehow, Judy talked me out of my turn. She was always very persuasive. Thanks Jude.
There was no reason to panic, just because Dad had disappeared shortly before he was supposed to “walk me down the aisle.”
“Find Beth,” I said to Mom, who was there in the church’s multifunction room that was functioning as the bride’s dressing room.
Beth had been my problem solver for nearly three decades by the time I was getting married. And she’d never let me down. Beth could calm the crazies in me better than anybody I’ve ever known. Just knowing she was around, made everything OK.
And if you had a splinter or a cut or any injury at all? Go to Beth. That was true long before she became a nurse who treated premature babies. If ever there was someone with nursing in their DNA, it was Beth.
Surely Beth could find Dad, who’d gone for a walk, and get the keys to the car from him. Because, while I’d gotten my wedding dress out of the car, everything else I expected to wear, beginning with my underwear, was locked in the trunk. And the keys were in absent Dad’s pocket.
Fast forward to 2009. July 4th was just days away, John, Jacob and I were in Maine, and I was in a panic. My eldest brother, Bob, had just been taken to the hospital.
For a decade approaching holidays had terrified me. I suffered from “heortophobia” — the fear of holidays. Well, myheortophobia had a twist: It wasn’t simply a fear of holidays. Nope. For me, it was a perfectly logical terror of illness at holidays. Someone else’s illness. Because If anybody I cared about had so much as a sniffle, well, they were gonna die.
As you may have heard 4,327 times, my family members have a nasty habit of dying on holidays. They’ve hit the all big ones — In order of occurrence: Thanksgiving. Easter. My birthday. Christmas. Ho ho ho!
So when Bob ended up in the hospital with Independence Day approaching, well, I knew Bob was toast. The odds, and likely the Gods, were against him.
“He’s not that sick, Lease.” Beth said. “You’ve been sicker and survived.” She’d contacted his doctors, figured out what was wrong, and called to reassure me. Beth, a nurse, knew this sort of thing. But as a fake medical expert with then six years’ experience, I was learning more and more –enough to make me fear everything, actually . So naturally, I wasn’t so sure.
“Beth,” I said, through slightly clenched teeth. “It doesn’t matter how serious his illness is. It’s the date. A HOLIDAY IS COMING. He’s going to die!”
As the eldest in the family, Beth had been able to calm me down my whole life long. She didn’t fail this time, either.
“Nobody is going to be able to trump Dad dying on Christmas,” she said, matter-of-factly. “The Holiday Death Sweepstakes is over, Lease. Fourth of July? Pffttt. Independence Day isn’t even a contender!”
“I HATE holidays,” I moaned, panic starting up again.
“Lease, I’m gonna make you two promises.” Beth had always kept her promises. “First, Bob will be fine.”
“Mmmm,” I replied, not believing it for a minute. Still, I started to calm down.
“Second: When I go, it’ll be on an ordinary Tuesday,” Beth laughed. “I cross my heart and hope to die,Lease, I will not die on a holiday. I mean it. I couldn’t do that to you,” she laughed still harder. At me, not with me. Had she been nearby, I might have smacked her for ridiculing me. Hard.
Bob, whose illness wasn’t all that serious, was released before the holiday; his sentence commuted. I breathed a sigh of relief, let me tell you.
Google Image, Natch
But not for long.
On a Sunday, just over a month later, I called Beth. We talked nearly every day. Beth had had a pretty severe stroke two years previously. It affected her kidneys; she had been on dialysis for about two years. Things hadn’t been going well, and she was more and more discouraged, depressed and disheartened. More importantly, he hadn’t been feeling well in the last couple of days.
Still, I was surprised when her phone was answered by one of her sons.
“Mom’s in the hospital,” Chris told me.
It was a Sunday, though. In August. No holidays in sight. So while I worried, there was no need to panic right? Chris promised that he and his brother would keep me informed.
Late Monday morning, Dave, Beth’s eldest son, called me in tears.
“They don’t know if Mom’s gonna make it.”
I rushed home, packed a few things, and got into the car, and headed to Cleveland.
The weather was horrible. Storms raged — the rain so heavy that I could barely see. Traffic rushed by or crept along. Trucks on the Pennsylvania Turnpike flew by at terrifying speeds when traffic moved. But mostly, the highway was at a standstill, the rain not letting up. I couldn’t get to Beth, and I couldn’t see to drive.
How much of my impaired visibility was due to my constant tears, and how much to the pouring rain, well, I didn’t know.
Dave called me again in the early evening to let me know that Beth was in a coma; they thought she would make it for another day or so.
So, exhausted I pulled onto an exit just above Pittsburgh, and into the first motel I found, where I collapsed into bed.
Beth’s doctor called me a few hours later. Beth had taken a turn for the worse. If I wanted to see her, to be with her, I’d better get back on the road.
I made it in time for Beth to personally deliver that second promise. She died on an ordinary Tuesday, August 11, six years ago.
With her passing, Beth brought me an unexpected cure of my heortophobia, and even let me laugh at the bizarre trend she ended.
And on the way back? The weather was clear. The Pennsylvania Turnpike twists and turns through the mountains. With each curve I rounded as I drove home, there was a rainbow. Rainbow after rainbow. I knew, seeing those colors in the sky, behind every turn, that Beth was comforting me still.
I miss you, Beth. Oh, and I was the one who spilled nail polish remover on your new dresser in 1967. Sorry about that.
FiftyFourandAHalf 