The Way It Was Then - Part #17

 

July 29, 1983

When you care a lot or not

 I’m a greeting card freak.

So far, my record is eight hours of searching through every card shop in a twenty-mile radius to find just the one that says just the words I want.

That time, I ended up with one of those pretty-cover, blank-on-the-inside ones so I could really say just what I wanted the receiver to hear.

Now, thank goodness, the two major greeting card companies, and some minor specialty ones, have given me just about everything I could ever wish for. Some unpaid, unsolicited commercials for greeting cards:

Hallmark is far and ahead in my book for its relatively new line called “Hallmark Lite” cards (named because they are supposedly one-third less serious than other cards).

When they first appeared, they sort of seeped into the stores … a few at a time … new ones replacing or being added to inventories of older ones.

They are zesty, sarcastic and very heavily pun-oriented. Example: A very large pickle on the cover of one card. No words. Inside it simply says, “Another birthday? Big dill.”

That kind of thing tickles my funny bone and appeals to my friends with the same puckish sense of humor I enjoy.

At present, I must have ten “Lite” cards stowed away in my desk at home … waiting for just the right time to send one to an appreciative audience. If just the right time doesn’t come along, I’ll send the card anyway, just because someone on the receiving end will laugh and laugh and laugh when it arrives.

Tucked in the corner of a card shop in the Deptford Mall is another new line of cards that could have made my fortune.

Many years ago, I remarked to one of my kids that I really should go into business designing cards for people I dislike, but to whom I’m required to send an obligatory greeting. It’s hard to muster the hypocrisy to sign my name to a sugary-sweet message that will be read by someone I’d just as soon poison.

Now the card companies have stripped the whitewash from the sepulchres and provided truth in greetings … a card line called “Hey, Creep!”

These are truly inspirations, if for no other reason than they lull the receiver into a feeling of warmth and security by the beautiful covers (usually floral) before they deliver their zing. They’re somewhat more expensive than the other, more conventional kinds of cards, but some people are worth more to insult than others.

Another line of cards in the same store carries adult messages behind angelic facades. Not perfect for everyone, but on occasion just what you were looking for.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve hated Edgar Guest rhyming. Corny greeting cards. To each his own, of course, because many people find them perfect for expressing sentiments often difficult to put into words. Now, thanks to the creativity of some card authors, there’s something for everyone.

On a more serious note, another of my frustrations with card designers has been corrected and not too long ago either.

When my mother was ill and everyone knew she wouldn’t live much longer (including her) she kept getting those cards that said the sender couldn’t wait till she was on her feet and her old self again. She was caring enough to appreciate the fact that the card was sent at all, and she loved her friends for remembering her so constantly, but it seemed cruel to me that there wasn’t a card somewhere that offered cheer, happy thoughts, concern and caring without the mush and false hope of the usual get-well message.

Now, there is a whole slew of cards that are specially designed, simple and pretty, without the false bravado the terminally ill person can do without.

There’s really no area that hasn’t been taken care of by the profit-hungry card industry. They’ve created holidays (Grandparents’ Day, for example) to coax us into spending fortunes on greeting cards and they’ve hiked the prices so high that we can’t pare our lists down fast enough to keep pace with the cost of being thoughtful.

Sure, I could take a piece of blank paper and jot down a few, well-chosen words to express my feelings to someone near or far away … but anyone who depends on my doing that may wait longer than he or she should to hear from me. Correspondence via letter isn’t my strong suit.

Cards, though, that’s another story.

After all, who could resist a card that shows dozens of bunnies on the cover and inside says, “Thoughts of you are rabbit forming.”

Thanks, Hallmark, American Greetings and a host of other creative people who spend hours thinking of these gems … you’ve saved me a lot of trouble and brought a lot of smiles to me and the people who’ve received your creations.

Now let’s see … who’s got a birthday coming up? I saw this fantastic card …

The Way It Was Then - Part #16

 

Houses are like real people

When is a house not a house?

When it’s a home.

The four-walled, roofed structure ceases to be just a piece of construction with human inhabitants when it begins to reflect the personalities of its owners.

Perhaps because of some psychological need or other, many of us have what is called a strong nesting instinct. We are happiest when we are making our homes comfortable to us and our families and we strive to make every place we live in fit our mental picture of “home.” Time doesn’t necessarily diminish our affection for, or memory of, homes we’ve known.

In a quiet moment, or when something jars my memory just right, I can still visualize the interior of my grandparents’ home in northwestern Pennsylvania where I lived from age two to age 6. Every piece of furniture, even the telephone number, is as vivid in my mind as if it were yesterday.

My older daughter is the same way about her grandparents’ home. Many of her happiest childhood memories are situated there, so much so that she often remarked to my stepfather that she wanted to buy his house someday and live in it forever.

Someone else owns the house now, and has made substantial changes in the exterior. When last my daughter drove by her dream home, she came away disappointed and saddened. Her mental picture of the place she loved is still intact. Only the reality has changed.

Just yesterday, I was told that my aunt will soon be selling her home. It sounds like an ordinary event … happens every day, as a matter of fact.

But in this case, only close family members will understand what this particular sale will mean.

My aunt Mary is a nester personified. She has spent her entire adult life in her home. Her curtains, chairs, wall coverings, furniture arrangement, decoration … all of it reflects the taste of her and her husband Matt. Uncle Matt died a couple of years ago and the home, emptied of its life, what with the kids grown and gone, stayed just the way it had always been, just very quiet and very lonely.

Then Aunt Mary took sick, moved to central Jersey to stay with her daughter for a while and closed the house.

The house had an occasional visit from one of the children … just long enough to collect some necessary papers or adjust a thermostat … but it stayed closed up and forbidding for over a year.

Last week, Aunt Mary felt well enough to go come. Home to what she had nurtured and cared for sine her daughter was a baby. Home to the familiar sights and smells of her kitchen and her living room. She was confident she could handle it.

It lasted only a few days. Whether because the house had been closed for so long and lacked fresh, healthful air, or for some other reason, her illness returned and she ended up back  up north … but this time with a difference.

She’s decided to sell the house.

Now, it’s just a house. It didn’t have a welcoming feeling when she walked back in. There was no excitement about living in it again. It was like a stranger after all those days and months and she wasn’t physically strong enough to renew the acquaintance and rekindle the old flame.

No doubt the little ranch house will become “home” to its new owners. It will have a different décor inside and probably some cosmetic changes on the outside.

It will not be the same in reality as it was during all those years she, her children and her husband lived in it, but it will always be her home in her mind.

Houses … homes… have ghosts of their own.

The Way It Was Then - Part #15

July 15, 1983

Easing Death’s Sting

Dying is a lonely business. Someone famous said that once, I don’t recall exactly who it was.

But, unlike any other great event in the life cycle, death is the one that is carried out strictly by the doer … no one can really help, or go along for comfort.

I’m on this topic this week because of my uncle in northwestern Pennsylvania.

He’s really my great-uncle, I guess, since he’s my late grandfather’s brother. There were six of them … my grandfather Louis, his brothers Bill, Millie, Charles, Henry and Frank. Not necessarily in that order. I don’t remember how they ranked in age, because they always seemed very old to me. I think, though, that Charlie was the youngest.

My grandfather was 89 when he died in the early 1970s. The genes are strong on that side of the family too, I suppose. My father and his brothers are all in the upper quarter of the century in age and going strong, so I have some serious longevity on both sides to hope to emulate.

Uncle Charlie is 81. He is very ill and under treatment for a slow-advancing type of cancer that will eventually take his life. Maybe.

It’s the same thing my grandfather had, but he recently died of other types of functional failures before the cancer got to him.

A few months ago, I had a long talk on the phone with my cousin, Charlie’s daughter. She’s also an only child and she’s really into the discovery of how heavy the burden of a parent’s death … the last parent’s death … can be. Her mother’s passing was tough, but she had her dad and together they handled the grieving.

This time, she’s alone.

But this time, it’s a lot different than it was the first time around in another way. My cousin and her father are totally honest with each other about what the future holds.

They have faced the seriousness of his illness; they have cried with each other; they have talked and talked and planned and planned. They know their chances of beating Mr. Death are nonexistent, but they’re willing to try to hold him at bay as long as comfortably possible. They aren’t kidding themselves or each other. And there’s a lot to be said for that.

Years ago, before the marvelous work of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and other researchers into the psychology of dying, many of us played a kind of macabre game with our terminally-ill relatives. It was like a big “Let’s Pretend,” filled with “when you’re better, we’ll...” and “the doctor’s going to give you this terrific drug and you’ll be right as rain in no time.” Heaven knows who we thought we were fooling, least of all the patient, but we skirted around the dreaded subject of death and acted as though it would never really happen to us.

How unfortunate.

Bu playing this “horrible game” as my cousin termed it, we really cheated ourselves and our dying relative out of the last chance to be real people.

 We blew our chances to say the things that never got put into words because “there’ll always be tomorrow.” We had one last tomorrow and we didn’t use it honestly.

What a waste!

I probably am in good company when I say how much I’d give to be able to roll back the clock and spend my mother’s last days reliving old good times and telling her about how great it had been having her as a mother.

Instead, like so many others in that situation, I lied and lied and lied about how much better she’d feel after one more chemotherapy treatment .. on more injection … one more new pill.

Those days she spent in such pain and fear could have been spent in any kind of tranquility she chose preparing for her death. She would probably have wanted that, but she didn’t know she could insist on it.

And none of us was honest enough to offer it to her.

Things are changing some now. There are doctors, like my uncle Charlie’s, who won’t be dishonest with their patients, nor will they allow members of the family to play no-death games.

There are people who firmly insist on the right of choice … on being able to say how much heroic effort they will allow to spare their lives for another day, week or month of suffering.

There are children and loved ones who have the courage to be open and frank about their feelings and their fears.

So we are perhaps coming closer and closer to the time when, although only the dying person can slip away from this world, he or she has had plenty of company on the journey and can leave in peace, knowing that those left behind were prepared and shared in the last days … honestly.

 

TheWay it was Then - Part #14

July 8, 1983

A few not-favorite things

Maybe it’s the heat… maybe not.

It just seems that a lot of things bother me lately.

Maybe it’s just creeping old age.

Like standing in a long 10-item-or-less express line, waiting to check out one carton of milk, counting the items in the woman’s basket in front of me and coming up with 29.

Like trying to find a seat in a crowded theater that isn’t in front of or behind a person who’s talking … incessantly and loudly.

Like settling down on a quiet stretch of beach only to be joined, blanket to blanket, by a young couple blasting hard rock from a portable stereo.

Like finding that purple blotch of bird dropping right on dead center of my freshly-washed burgundy-colored car.

Like finding dried mud kitty paws all over the seats of the car after leaving it, windows open, for a few hours.

Like being kept awake during the wee small hours by the unrelenting barking of a neighbor’s dog.

Like buying a pink skirt in one store and finding, under the lights of another, that it’s pale lavender.

Like settling down in front of the TV for a rare night of viewing a favorite old movie only to find it chopped to bits and interspersed with inane commercials.

Like repeating an order over the fast-food intercom to be sure it’s right and then finding a crucial item missing … after I get home.

Like being beaten into a front-row parking space at the mall by a little car that zips in front of me after I’ve waited, signal on, for the leaving auto to clear out.

Like people at a bank drive-up window who ties up traffic by transacting lengthy and complicated business.

Like customers who are rude or nasty to checkout clerks for any reason whatever.

Like parents who think malicious mischief on the parts of their darlings is “cute.”

Like the guy in front of me at the toll booth on the Parkway who needs directions to Timbuktu … and argues with the toll-taker about how to get there.

Like the casino buses on the expressway that zoom up on a law-abiding motorist, follow too closely for a short while and then pass doing about 85.

Like the state troopers who don’t see buses speeding—only auto drivers.

Like digital alarm clocks that go blink, blink, blink when the power goes out in the middle of the night, making me late for work when I oversleep in the morning.

Like finding that my name has been sold to a million junk mailers, all of whom send official-looking letters asking for money.

I’m sure you all could supply me with reams more of this fun kind of complaining.

Life is more interesting because of the situations we run into day after day, but sometimes it all gets to be just too much.

Just once, I’d like the line I move into at the supermarket or the bank to keep moving instead of stopping while the person in front ties us all up.

Just once, I’d like that short-cut I took to get somewhere faster to really be short.

Just once, I’d like a speaker who says he’ll be brief to be brief.

And just once, I’d like the driver of the car that comes to a stop at an intersection ahead of me to let me know, before the light turns green, that he intends to turn left instead of making me wait until he gets a break.

Dream on.