Dusty: Cat, Friend & Mouser Extraordinaire

Best friends - Dusty & I (circa 1970)

Dusty was a very special friend to me. He came into my life when I was 9 years old, born to a stray (who had adopted our family 2 years earlier) named Smoky. His mother had had 2 litters previous to his, but the tomcat got them all. This time, Dusty was the only one that escaped, because my father was able to hide him in the hayloft before it was too late.

Dusty was spoiled rotten by his mother Smoky, since she could devote herself solely to him. She was a great mother, and we watched with fascination as she eventually started to teach him all about the important hunt. She first brought home her catches and would eat it in front of him, allowing him to sniff and examine. Next, he would try nibbling on a mouse or shrew; he found he rather liked them. Once he got a taste of them, Smoky couldn't keep them coming fast enough! He literally stuffed himself, the little piggy! We would laugh, wondering how many today. I think the record was 5 mice she brought in, and all for her son. Eventually, she started bringing her prey home alive, and would present them to him and we'd see how he would play with them, and not know what to make of them, and then his mother would show him how it - the kill - was done. It was humane, really - cats take a mouse by the neck, make a quick bite, severing the spinal cord (or as my father would say when he witnessed it, the cat would do a coup de grâce...) It was an amazing process to watch over a short time as Dusty was growing up. It's another story, but during this critical time, he lost his mother. But she was there long enough to help him grow up. He never forgot his lessons, and was an amazing mouser the rest of his long life.

Dusty and I hung out a lot.  We slept together, we hunted together, we played together, we took walks together.  He wasn't sure what to make of my horses, but he sometimes played chicken with them!  He was pretty brave, sniffing noses with Sunny a few times, considering how much bigger Sunny was compared to him.  He loved to show off his kills, and would often come trotting out of the pasture or woods, proudly carrying a mouse, vole, shrew, gopher, or other feline delicacy, for us to crow over.  I swear, he looked so proud every time!  We'd pause whatever we were doing, Mom would even come out of the house, and we'd watch with fascination as he went through the cat ritual:  play, torture, play some more, let the prey think they were escaping, then viola, execution!  He would usually eat the head first, which he particularly seemed to enjoy (BRAINS!)  He invariably would leave nothing but...the tail.  Sometimes, even when we weren't there as an audience, we would come home later to find a tail or two on the steps.

Dusty in his (doll) bed, getting ready to go to sleep...

I was very fortunate to be at my parents' home when Dusty passed away.  One night he wanted to go to bed, but couldn't get down the stairs on his own.  He was 18 now, and his arthritis was catching up to him.  I took him downstairs in my arms, and tucked him into the doll bed, his bed for so many years.  In the morning, he wasn't up at the top step rattling the door like usual.  I wasn't immediately alarmed since he had had a hard time getting downstairs the night before, so I went down to help him get back upstairs.  When I got to his bed, he was curled up like he was still sleeping.  But he wasn't sleeping anymore.  His beautiful body was already cold and stiff.  Dusty was gone, having crossed over the Rainbow Bridge.  I cried and cried like a baby that day.  It was the middle of the winter, so he had to be put in the shed until spring to be buried.  Wrapping him up and saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.  But I'm so glad despite the pain, that I was there with him to the end.  Eighteen years is a long time to be a friend to a cat, and I felt privileged to have been a friend to one named Dusty...

Home Remedies

Mustard Plaster Recipe: This is made of different strengths, depending upon the length of time it is desired to keep it on and the sensitiveness of the skin.

1. Equal parts of mustard and flour.
2. One of mustard and two of flour.
3. One of mustard and three or four of flour. White of an egg added makes it better and not so blistering.

A paste is made with warm water and spread between the layers of muslin and left on no longer than ten minutes. When the skin is red remove the plaster. This is used when you wish a quick counter-irritation.

The above recipe for a mustard plaster - a very commonly used home remedy in the early to mid 20th century - was taken from the medical volume of The People's Home Library: A Library of Three Practical Books; sold door-to-door by salesmen, published by the R.C. Barnum company, "...a well-known subscription book company at that time."  Many is the time I watched my mother make mustard plasters, sometimes for my father, and sometimes even for me (and this was in the 1960s yet...)  When I was small, I tended towards chestiness, and had more than my share of terrible colds, flu, chicken pox, measles, not to mention ear and tooth aches.  My mother nursed me very well through them all, with help from my grandmother who lived nearby, this book, her own common sense, and experience.  It may have been old-hat by then, but old tech doesn't mean irrelevant or outdated.  Sometimes the old cures are very effective.

My Grandma bought a 1920 edition of the first in the series, called The People's Home Medical Book, by T.J. Ritter, MD. It described Dr. Ritter as a "...Graduate of both the allopathic and homeopathic schools; formerly asst. to the Chair of the Theory and Practice of Medicine, Michigan State University, Ann Arbor, Mich."

My Mother grew up under the care of Grandma using the advice of that book, together with her own common sense. In turn, my own family, including myself, came under it's influence in due time. Where some may have learned about human anatomy from National Geographic or girlie magazines, I learned from the People's Home Library.¹

As I raised my own children, I didn't have the book to refer to, but I remembered my mother's examples, and carried on the tradition of common sense home nursing care, and not running to a doctor every time my children sneezed.  I provided simple but effective remedies like gargling with warm salt water when there was a sore throat, providing a comforting (and chest/nose opening) warm 'steamer' (aka vaporizer) at night when they slept, had oil of cloves on hand for tooth aches and ear aches, etc.

¹ - I also learned some interesting facts of life from my Mom's Bible, which was illustrated in color with reproductions of famous painter's renditions of scenes from the Bible. I must admit that I was, even at a tender age, very appreciative of the curve of the nearly nude derriere of Samson as he pushed the mill stone around...but that's another topic altogether!

Going Home is Never the Same

I have made trips like Chris Ware made. They are indeed, very bittersweet. I find that for myself, I have to make them. I am being pulled right now, to make such a trip. I plan on going alone, with one friend, to the village of my birth this summer. I have to go, I don't have any choice. The pull is like the pull animals feel when they migrate. You just know you have to. I'll be making my pilgrimage to see where I as, who I was, who they were, and reconnect with the past.

Chris Ware says it well...

I am only one of many grandchildren, my grandparents having had two children, my mother and my uncle; my uncle’s children also spent many a night at my grandmother’s house, not to mention my mother, who of course grew up there. Thus, not only are my memories of my grandmother and Omaha not unique, I suspect they are generously gift-wrapped by my special position as a child who could be indulged as one’s own might not be, and through which one’s own regrets might be replayed and ‘fixed,’ perhaps. There were dozens – scores – of times my grandmother would slip and call me by her son’s name, never noticing or even correcting herself. As well, I’m certain I’ve afforded a large measure of rosy joy to swell and spill over into the glass that was, at the time, filled by the dry humdrum of life, running the ribbon of my overly-precious memories against the edge of my mental scissors just one more time to give it that extra, fancy curl. But I can’t help it. And why, when my grandmother decided to move away, did she take me to all the houses she’d lived and grown up in, if not to convince herself of something similar?

I had prepared myself for the visit to Omaha in 2002 with the steely reserve one might save for open-casket funerals; I’d expected it all to hit me like a blast of winter air the second I stepped off the plane, grateful tears filling my eyes and nose, ‘mine homeland,’ etc. – but the actual experience was much more flat than that, almost clinical. The airport had been renovated, expanded; gourmet coffee kiosks, backlit advertisements for cell phones, and travelers with PowerBooks plugged into the wall reminded me that life had indeed continued here since I’d left. Even so, I still couldn’t believe that I was actually here, in the literal city of my dreams; I wanted to stop and grab one of the agreeable Omahans by the turtleneck and say, ‘Don’t you realize how lucky you are? Don’t you know that you’re living in the most magical place on Earth?’

In my shiny red rental I felt like an ill-outfitted time-traveler. The ridiculous plasticity of the vehicle clashed with the felty grey memories passing by and through its windshield at me, one after the other, details missing, others plumped up by my thirsty sentimentality. I drove and redrove routes that I used to take practically every day while living there, from my school to my house to my school to my grandmother’s house, and back again. I took hundreds of pictures. I unrolled the window, trying to smell something I’d forgotten. I stopped the car, got out, and stood. I ate snow. I was looking, listening, for something, my wife patiently weathering my prattling on and on about the amazingly familiar cracks in the sidewalk, the hill down which I used to coast on my bike, the grocery store I’d give every cent I’ve ever been paid to revisit with my mother and grandmother for just one hour.

But the more I drove around, looking to see what was still left of me, I began to realize – intuitively at first, and then more sensibly – that the details I was frantically trying to scrape up, dust off, and pick out of the landscape (and, more often than not, not finding) weren’t affecting me anywhere nearly as deeply – as silly as this sounds – as the curves of the streets and the shapes of the hills and bridges that I was traveling around, over and under. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made, both to my memories of the real place, and the dreams I had about it: houses and buildings and tress looked both strange and oddly unfamiliar, of course, due the time that had passed, but the spatial rivulets that had patiently eaten away at my mind from riding in a car from house to store to house countless times as a child were as real to me as the back of my hand, and as immediately familiar as if I’d just been thinking about them a few seconds before. I could anticipate the crest of a hill or the drop of an alley like the passage in a well-known piece of music; I sensed the turn of a corner like the expected sighting of a loved one in a stadium crown; these routes had eroded unique tunnels in my mind through which everything else in my memory – at least it seemed at that moment – to have been poured, a molten lead of three decades of digested experiences slowly setting into its heavy shape in the intestinal ant farm head of an Omaha Nebraska brain.

When my grandmother was dying in the nursing home in Texas, I was able to witness the steady almost measurable deterioration of both her mind and her personality. All her life she’d been one of the most generous people I’d known, the checks and clipped newspaper strips and frozen boxes of Ho-Hos (unavailable in Texas) arriving at my dorm mailbox just a small part of her largess. She’d given of herself in a way that most people don’t try, radiating a reassuring warmth that preachers and proselytizers talk about but I’ve never felt anywhere they tell me to look for it. But in death, she became alarmingly demanding, petulant, almost spiteful, cruelly alienating herself from my family’s memories of her with an unfamiliarity that was only matched by the bloating of her body and the gradual curling of her limbs. Our phone calls, which had been placed every other day for years since I’d moved away, became infrequent, and eventually were so inchoate that they were more of a torture than a relief.

During her steady decline I continued my weekly comic strip for the student newspaper in Austin, but found that I was only able to draw stories of my increasingly littler mouse wandering alone, through a large, unoccupied house – my grandmother’s house. Every week was a torment of my trying to do something that might mean something to a reader waiting to take a Calculus test and balancing the inevitable erasure of one of the most important people in my life. One of her last nights, when we arrived, I looked in on her, and she was laying there, breathing heavily, the blanket clutched tightly in the wads her fists had become, her eyes and tongue lolling back and forth behind half-closed lids and mouth, the machinery was shutting down, the gears were grinding to a halt. Amazingly, however, the attendant nurse said that the had been talking in her sleep, and intelligibly – and that she said she’s ‘gone back’ to the house in Omaha – but that all the rooms were empty, and that, horribly, she didn’t know where anyone, or anything, was.

She died a day or two later, and my mother and stepfather – I don’t know how they did it – took care of all the ugly details; actually seeing her dead, signing the papers, arranging for cremation, the transportation of the body, etc., etc., et cetera. My life went on, amazingly; I moved to Chicago, started drawing a new comic strip, got married, saw my friends have children, get married, slip up, die. Somehow, things happen, and if you spend most of your life sitting at a table starting at blank sheets of paper, they happen fast.

I had driven by my grandmother’s house already on this trip in 2002, but the tongue-scum beige the church had painted it – not to mention the boxy cinder-block addition they’d attached to the former entry, blotting out the window to the kitchen which was, to me, the center of the house – was more than I could stand to see again. My own memories of my grandmother were already so reconstituted by having seen her dwindle from the vital person I’d known all my life into the demanding patient she became that somehow seeing this house, with which I’d so completely associated her, chopped up and redone, was too much of a parallel fro me, and I’d driven on each time. But here I was. What was I going to do, not go?

Though the house was still there, at least in part, it had ‘cooled,’ for lack of a better work, like the remnants of an exploded start. My every-expanding orbit had taken me back; here was possibly where the most ‘me’ used to be – I could still look at the yard and the windows and imagine myself as a kid, playing, and as a teenager, trying everything possible to grow up faster and get away. But whatever solipsistic wonder I had imbued it with was now static, frozen at absolute zero…

Trivial Me

I Grew up in the oldest village in my state - St. Vincent, Minnesota.

But I was born in Emerson, Manitoba.

I am only 4 degrees of separation away from the Hillside Strangler serial killers.

I learned to read at 3 years old (and yes, I am a voracious reader who likes nothing better than to lose myself in a good book, fiction or non-fiction...)

I have moved over 27 times (so far).

It took me 50 years to find the love of my life.

I once met Vincent Price at a baggage carousel in LAX.

I once went at midnight to observe the annual grunion run at Huntington Beach, sponsored by a local marine museum; we waited, and when the guides saw them, we were told to turn on our flashlights; males wrapped themselves around females, which in turn laid their eggs in the sand; as quickly as they came ashore, they were gone.

A friend and I once rode our horses along with a wagon train for 10 miles, during the American Bicentennial.

Speaking of horses, I have been lucky enough to have ridden in the Rocky Mountains, along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, in the deserts of New Mexico, as well as my own home prairies.

After leaving a bad marriage, I became a single parent at age 25, went back to school at 27, sought and obtained a good government job at 29, bought my first house at 31, and bought my first new car at 33.

I left that good job after 23 years to follow a new dream, which brought me full circle, back to a rural life on a small hobby farm like the one I grew up on.

I grew up in the house my grandparents built, that my mother grew up in, and later me and my children lived in for 18 months with my parents while I began getting back on my feet.

I have a deep love for my home village and its surrounding villages, which are really one, big extended family (and many are related to one another...)

I love writing as much as reading - in fact, I daresay I may like it more. It is like breathing to me, necessary to my life, the ability to document and express, to create and to share. 

I have a deep passion for animals, and for several years dedicated my life to the goal of becoming a veterinarian. Life had other plans.

My best friend growing up was a cat named Dusty. He was a great mouser, who worked part-time as my alarm clock during the school year.

I nearly drowned when I was 4 years old. My mother and her friend took me to a swimming pool one hot summer day. They had me go in to the wading pool while they visited nearby. I somehow sneaked away to the big pool which I evidently thought looked much more fun. I slipped in holding the side, not knowing how to swim. A wave pulled me away and before I knew it, I was sinking, looking up at the sun through the water, the world going dark. Next thing I knew, my mother's friend was giving me mouth to mouth, then I was choking up water. She had just saved my life.

I used to play the piano fairly well, as an accompanist at my school, church, and as a soloist, including in competitions. 

I once had a grand mal seizure. 

I survived an 18-month bout of clinical depression by walking, writing, and with the help of two people - a very special friend, and my daughter.

Brick Wall

Carpenter:  A few of my Great
Grandfather's tools...

You could tell my Grandma was a daughter of an Irish carpenter; she knew how to design, build and repair just about anything.

I still have her father's carpenter saw box, and use it to hold books I'm reading. It's dark with age, but still strong. His old saw is with me now, too,  inherited from my parents after they broke up housekeeping. The wood handle has a soft patina from years of use.

William Fitzgerald married a Prince Edward Island wealthy farmer's daughter, took her half-way across a continent to Minnesota, where they did whatever they had to, to make a living. I know very little about him, but what I do know is not good.  He was known as "...a man of intemperate means", and died that way -  run over by a train, 5 years after his wife died shortly after giving birth to their 14th child.

Mom had told me that one time he came home and Mom was only 7 years old, and was ironing clothes with the old flat irons, and he got abusive with Mom's mother.  Mom took after him with the hot iron, threatening him to leave her mother alone.   He responded, "And who is going to stop me?" And she said, "I am, and I have two brothers out there looking in the window that will help me." After that, she said he was pretty docile when he'd come home drunk.  Mom didn't like her Dad very much.  In all the conversations we had during the time Mom lived with me never once did I ask what his father's and mother's names were...  - From a letter written to me on May 15, 1990 by my Aunt Pat (Alberta Fitzpatrick)

Article describing my Great
Grandfather's horrific demise,
Hallock Weekly News
Saturday, July 26, 1913
[Click to Enlarge & Read...]

No known photographs exist of either Great Grandpa Fitzgerald or his wife, Elizabeth Clow - it was through following her family line that I came to know what little I do.   If it wasn't for his notorious death, a handful of newspaper references of his life, and the tools he left behind, I would have nothing to go on at all.

My great grandfather's end came in a most gruesome, but not entirely surprising, manner.  The article to the right describes in graphic detail what became of him.  The events leading up to the "accident" are speculative but likely, based on his activity just prior to the event.  The Kittson County Enterprise, July 1913, had the following article about the aftermath:

William Fitzgerald, a pioneer citizen of St. Vincent, was run down and killed by a Canadian Northern train near Emerson last Saturday night.  Coroner R.B. Johnson was summoned but upon reaching the scene found that although the victim was a Kittson County man, the accident had happened over in Canada, and therefore could not exercise any authority in the case.  The body had been so ground up by the cars that the remains had to be gathered in a sack.

This item was used to carry
 items from the larger tool
chest to the work-site.
Approximately 140 yrs old.

When I discovered the newspaper articles about his death several years ago in the microfilms of the Kittson County Museum, I tried to obtain a death certificate for William.  According to both North Dakota and Minnesota, as well as Manitoba, none of them had a death record of any sort on file for him.  After reading the above about the confusion at the time of exactly where he died, it appears he fell through the cracks for that particular record!

I have no proof of the following, it's purely conjecture:  William's oldest record is a census record in 1881 PEI where he is listed as a farm hand in the Samuel Clow household, with a place of origin listed as "N.S.", or Nova Scotia.  Down the list of sons and daughters of Samuel is Elizabeth, who he would marry later that year.  I have wondered if he may have been Catholic while the Clow family he married into were most definitely Protestant.

I have attempted on my own to mine the records of PEI and Nova Scotia to no clear end, and I have attempted to hire professional genealogists, who have looked at the case and told me they can't crack him.  He is my 'holy grail', my brick wall...

Box insert to tool chest, with drawing knife, square/mitre/ruler/level,
and hand awl. All items are approximately 140 years old.

UPDATE: At the end of August 2013, I was contacted by someone who thought they may have information to help me break down my brick wall.  The initial news was very exciting, because it sounded like it was 'my' Great Grandparents.  It turned out not to be the case.  But there is a connection.  I have found that one of her relatives married one of my relatives, and there was an uncanny coincidence of the names - a James William Fitzgerald marrying an Elizabeth Jane Clow. However, it was not my great grandfather, William Fitzgerald or my great grandmother Elizabeth Jane Clow.   But Great Grandma was the Aunt to the other Elizabeth Jane Clow. How? The other Elizabeth's father was Marcus Clow...Great Grandma's brother!  So far, I haven't found anything further, but it's worth looking closer at this other family line, just in case.  Fingers are crossed!

Spring Cleaning

When I was growing up, it was common practice for my mother and grandmother to do what was called spring cleaning.  Windows were opened up, curtains and quilts were washed and hung out, rugs were aired and beaten, walls and floors scrubbed.  And kitchen cupboards were emptied, and thoroughly cleaned out and washed down.

As a young wife 35 years ago, even I used to do this domestic ritual.  I liked how it connected me to my mother and grandmother, and how it made me feel like a successful homemaker.  Everything felt so wonderful, so fresh, renewed!

Over the years, I became a very busy single working mother, and spring cleaning was forgotten and abandoned.  Not because I stopped believing in it, but because there was never enough time.  Deep cleaning gave way to spot cleaning on-the-fly.  It seemed to suffice.

In recent weeks, Bill and I have noticed increasing sightings of a small, dark, and thin beetle on our counter tops.  Along with this tiny beetle we have seen nearly as many small 'worms'.  We cleaned the area and thought no more about it.  Until it kept happening.  Over and over.

As often is the case, we were in denial.  It became obvious that this was not isolated but ongoing, that no amount of wishful thinking was going to make them vanish.

We did some research.  We learned they were a type of grain beetle, of which there are many kinds.  The solution sounded suspiciously like...spring cleaning.  I had lucked out over the years;  sadly, time and statistics (and maybe domestic karma) has caught up with me.

So this week, I shall be slowly but surely unloading the corner cabinets top and bottom, doing an inventory on my supplies, throwing out anything that is old, open, and/or infested, and thoroughly cleaning the cabinets.

Grandma and Mom knew what they were doing...

Where I Came From

"It's a sad country, but it's the most beautiful God ever made. There's a wildness to it, a richness of colour, a sweetness on the wind you couldn't know unless you'd smelled it. It's a very old land where once heroes and saints and scholars lived and now the memory of those days aches in the colour of the earth, the standing stones, the trees against the sky, the sound of a storm." - Ann Perry

My ethnic background is a mixture of many cultures. My father's was Norwegian and German/Scot/English stock, from his mother and father respectively; my mother's was Irish/English (both parents).

While I did hear about the Norwegian side of things in passing conversation while growing up, my general sense of who I was, was of being Irish. My mother’s family was overwhelmingly Irish, with a wee bit of English thrown in just to keep it interesting.  I grew up with brown bread, strong Canadian tea, roast beef dinners, making do, passionate ‘discussions’, and knowing the value of hard work and faith. Family was important, and that included laying your cards on the table even if feelings got hurt; honesty was prized, and unkind words quickly forgotten. While you might feel like killing someone for a split second, you hugged them the next. Life went on.

While I eventually grew to appreciate my father’s family, learning there was more to my father's family history than I at first had realized, I’ll always think of myself as an Irish girl.

'Uncle Mark Miller' brought me from the station with his ancient buggy and what he calls his 'generous purpose' horse. He is a nice old man and gave me a handful of pink peppermints. Peppermints always seem to me such a religious sort of candy -- I suppose because when I was a little girl Grandmother Gordon always gave them to me in church. Once I asked, referring to the smell of peppermints, 'Is that the odor of sanctity?' I didn't like to eat Uncle Mark's peppermints because he just fished them loose out of his pocket, and had to pick some rusty nails and other things from among them before he gave them to me. But I wouldn't hurt his dear old feelings for anything, so I carefully sowed them along the road at intervals. When the last one was gone, Uncle Mark said, a little rebukingly, 'Ye shouldn't a'et all them candies to onct, Miss Phil. You'll likely have the stummick-ache.'

- from Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of the Island

The 'pink peppermint', or the English mint as it's sometimes called, is actually flavored with wintergreen. It was a favorite of mine and it seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth now.

I will forever associate them with my Grandpa Fitzpatrick, and how he fed them to me...along with whisker rubs and sloppy kisses, calling me his 'little girl'...

"I'm so tired of gray worsted and sensible things. Of course I can't have a tree, an' I don't suppose I really want it; but I'd like somethin' all
pretty an' sparkly an'--an' silly, you know. An' there's another thing I want--ice cream. An' I want to make myself sick eatin' it, too,--if I want to; an' I want little pink-an'-white sugar pep'mints hung in bags. Samuel, can't you see how pretty a bag o' pink pep'mints 'd be on that green tree? An'--dearie me!" broke off the little old woman breathlessly, falling back in her chair.

Ella was the first to speak. "It's too bad, of course, but never mind. Mother'll see the joke of it just as we do. You know she never seems to care what we give her. Old people don't have many wants, I fancy."

Frank stirred suddenly and walked the length of the room. Then he wheeled about.

"Do you know," he said, a little unsteadily, "I believe that's a mistake?"

"A mistake? What's a mistake?"

"The notion that old people don't have any--wants. See here. They're having a party down there--a party, and they must have got it up themselves. Such being the case, of course they had what they wanted for entertainment--and they aren't drinking tea or knitting socks. They're dancing jigs and eating pink peppermints and ice cream! Their eyes are like stars, and Mother's cheeks are like a girl's; and if you think I'm going to offer those spry young things a brown neckerchief and a pair of bed-slippers you're much mistaken--because I'm not!"

- From Eleanor H. Porter's When Father & Mother Rebelled

I found this link today on a Canadian site I will try. I am abound and determined to track them down...

On my Dad's side of the family, his mother being Norwegian, he attended Lutheran churches as a child, what little he did attend. His mother was the one who saw to it, when she could. His father was a very profane, abusive, and unreligious man, right to the end. He could be somewhat pleasant, but even I, who knew him not that well, was never very comfortable around him. Everyone else who did know him better, including his own son my father, painted a very negative picture of him. At one point, when my Dad was still at home but was a young man, he had to lethally threaten his own father to prevent him from beating his mother to death. My Dad is a sweet guy - he could have been a wife beater himself, but turned out just the opposite - a kind, thoughtful, inquisitive, funny, inspiring man.

However, I learned later in life that my Dad may have had a dark side.

My daughter and his granddaughter, Eva came to me in 1989 when she was around 10 years old after kids club at church one night. She slowly told me with great difficulty that my Dad had been molesting her.*

I supported Eva and gave her the benefit of the doubt from the very beginning. I felt to do otherwise would not only break trust with her, but put her at a very possible further risk. In my heart, I couldn't be sure, but that said, I couldn't be sure either way; with my Dad's family history, it's quite possible something like this behavior could come out for any number of reasons.

I reported it to the authorities, and my father was notified by his local county sheriff that my county was aware of the allegations. However, since I was not pursuing a private action, it was not up to me to file charges, but up to the local county attorney where my father lived. They chose not to.

I did use my church and they used their church, setting up a meeting in Grand Forks midway between us with both our pastors present. We talked many things out, and aired concerns, but I never did get a definitive denial OR admission of guilt from my father.

Dad cried a lot, wanting to know if I would ever forgive him. He was very broken up about it, and concerned about my love for him. He asked specifically if I had lost my love for him.

I wrapped my arms around him, and said that even if I never knew the answer, I can live with it. That was my way of allowing him not to have to admit it, right or wrong, I just let him off the hook. "God knows, and you and Eva know. I forgive and yes, I love you."

I put parameters on Eva's being alone with them. For a year or so, she was never allowed near him. Then we visited together. The next two years she spent a week or two alone with my folks during the summer, and she felt OK about that.

It was very hard for Eva to tell me because we had lived full-time with my folks for 18 months in 1985 to 1986, and had lived near them when she was a toddle, so she feels very close to them.

Eva has told me long ago that she forgave her grandfather, and she feels similar about her own Dad (another long story, for another time...); I was concerned for her that she may have been negatively affected in a way that would affect the rest of her life. However, so far she has risen above it with her love of learning, excelling academically, and finding a wonderful life partner in her husband Meran.

She deserves it, God bless her...

* While it never went to full penetration of any sort, it did involve heavy fondling of the lower body and digital penetration, which was plenty traumatic enough...

Bedwetter

One of my oldest memories is of being in a cold metallic crib, crying my eyes out.

I was in a room in the Emerson Hospital, and my Mom had to leave me for awhile.  Dr. Ferry was going to be performing a tonsillectomy on me in the morning.  I was just three years old.

The next day, I recall large people looming over me in a strange room.  I was lying down, and they were coming at me with something round, and telling me don’t be scared.  That just made me more alarmed.  I began breathing faster, through the thing, and it smelled strange.  It was the smell of rubber and ether.  I suddenly felt a huge lurch in my stomach, someone brings a metal pan to my mouth, and I vomit.  Evidently ether often had that effect on patients.  After that, I didn’t remember anything until I woke up later with a sore throat.  The good news was that I could have all the ice cream,  pudding, and popsicles I wanted.  

That was my first time, post-birth, that I was in the hospital as a child, but it wouldn’t be my last.

So many times, more times than I can remember, I had problems that required a doctor or hospitalization when I was growing up.  I had the normal things that many children did at the time - chicken pox, mumps - but I also had an unusual amount of upper and lower respiratory infections, sinus and ear infections, as well as kidney and bladder infections.  

The kidney and bladder infections were frequent and often severe.  My mother was told to cut me back on salt, to not allow me to sit on cold surfaces, to dress me warmly in winter, and to keep my head covered from cold and wind.  I was sometimes on several medicines, including antibiotics.  As my urinary tract problems increased, I had more and more catheterizations to obtain the most sterile urine samples possible to determine the cause and course of treatment.  I once had a dye injected into my bladder and told to not urinate for as long as possible as they observed my bladder when full, with the dye helping them to see it better.  To a child, those  procedures were extremely frightening as well as painful¹.

There were times I had long hospitalizations that caused me to be out of school for awhile².  I received cards wishing me well from my classmates, which cheered me up.  I don’t recall being particularly concerned, my Mom said the doctors kept saying that they didn’t think this was serious, that my organs were functioning well, but just that I was getting infections that caused significant pain.  I remember well the pain, the burning, the urgency, the fevers, and the bed rest.  And then, there was the bedwetting.

I don’t know if my bedwetting was connected in any way to my other problems.  My mother made allowances for it and may have thought so, at least at first.  I was not allowed to drink after supper, in hopes it would curtail the problem, but it didn’t.  As I grew older, however, there were many times, especially in the middle of the night when she was changing sheets, that she would mutter about me being lazy about getting up to use the pot³.  I would tell her that I wasn’t.  In my own mind, there was nothing more that I’d rather do than get up.  I hated it far worse than she believed I did.  

When I was growing up, all the way through high school, I slept very sound and very deep.  Nothing would wake me up.  I dreamt profusely, dreams-worthy-of-the-Twilight-Zone dreams.  The only thing that (sometimes) woke me was a cold, wet bed.  The routine went like this:  I’d wake up in a swamped bed, everything wet.  I’d call for Mom.  She would come and I couldn’t look at her, ashamed and wishing more than anything that I didn’t have to call her.  When I got old enough, I changed the sheets myself⁴, but I knew she was often woke up by me opening the old dresser drawers which squeaked at every pull.  The old house’s floors creaked, and every sound seemed magnified in the night.  

The doctors' predictions turned out to be right.  Some time when I was around 11 years old,  I stopped wetting the bed.  All my fears of never being able to go to camp, or stay over at a friend's house, went away, and I was excited to expand my universe, which I inevitably did.  But I never forgot the sicknesses of my childhood.  In a way, although there was a brief respite, they have followed me into adulthood.  But as I often say, that, that is another story.

__________________________

1 - No test or procedure, at any hospital, during all the years I was afflicted, ever could give my Mother a definitive reason for my multiple kidney and bladder infections.

² - At one point, when I was about 10 years old, my physician referred me to specialists at the Victoria Hospital in Winnipeg.   They had a whole floor just for children, a pediatric section.  There, I met the first black person I had seen - a girl my own age.  I felt strange meeting a person so different from myself, but at the same time excited.  This was the late 1960s, and I had been watching the news on TV, and knew that the civil rights movement was happening.  I believed in it, as young as I was, and wanted to learn more.  Thus, she and I became friends in the time I was there, and I was sad to part when the time came.  It was also during this time that my Mom tried to soften the separation by giving me a very special gift, a doll I named Sally. She and I became very good friends.

³ - “The Pot” was what our family called a chamber pot. We used took one upstairs every night to use, and it was my responsibility as a child to prepare it with a little water and bleach, and take it up when we went to bed, and dump it and rinse it every morning.

⁴ - My Mom used old rubber draw sheets from my Grandma Fitzpatrick’s old maternity home days.  On top of that she doubled up a white top sheet and covered that around the middle of the bed.  That way we didn’t have to change the bottom sheet itself.

Old Friends

The author, with her teddy bear, circa 1961 - trees behind her...

Many of the trees of my childhood home are gone now. They were very large and old oak and elm, surrounding our home like giant sentinels. They guarded us, a canopy providing cooling shade in summer, and with endless entertainment - from racing squirrels who sometimes had ferocious, chattering quarrels - to choruses of bird song from morning to night.  There wasn't an upstairs' window you could look out, without seeing a branches of trees nearby, curling around towards the house like hugs.

The rustling of their leaves could be soft and comforting with a breeze, or loud and threatening during a windstorm.  Strong winds would cause them to creak and snap; once during a storm of my early childhood, one of the mightiest and oldest oaks snapped in two about 12 feet up, thankfully falling away from the house. It lay there for many years, only its outstretched branches taken away.  I used it to play on, climbing on it higher and higher as I gained confidence.  Finally one day I got to the top and looked down on my mother hanging out clothes, calling down to her in victory.  It has been thrilling and at the same time terrifying, climbing up so high, but something inside me pushed me on to do it.

In winter, their branches were so bare in stark contrast to their heavy summer foliage.  Like giant shado puppets, they seemed to be in constant silhouette against the white, white snow.  They stood guard around the house, while their brethren in the woods to the north stood at the ready.  When it would get very, very cold, the trees would crack and boom.  The first time I heard them do that, it scared me and I asked my mother what that was and she explained.

Trees are more expressive than many people realize if they don't live among them all the time.  Especially the older, larger trees. There were many days and nights I heard the wind and trees make the most forlorn moaning and creaking sounds together. With the shorter days, it made for much melancholy even for a child. Spring became that much more sweet and meaningful after months of cold and short days.

Mom's Sewing Machine

I learned to sew on this machine... 
[Photo:  Betty Jean Short Thorsvig]

Earlier today, my sister Betty posted about our mother's old Singer sewing machine.  Mom passed it on to Betty, and over the years it has served (and still does) her well.  They don't make 'em like that anymore. It's the one I learned on.

Workhorses, that's what the old Singers are.  Solid metal throughout, working parts made with clockwork precision.  My Mom always said, keep it clean and well-oiled, and it'll serve you all your life.  But they're more than workhorses - they are things of beauty.

I remember when I joined the Humboldt Stick-to-It 4-H club.  I was 9 years old, and I did two projects - food and sewing.  For sewing, I had to demonstrate I had learned the goals of the project by sewing a simple garment;  I chose an apron.  I was entering the strange world where you had to measure once then measure again, and precision was preached.  Exactness was the gospel, and nothing less than aspiring to (and hopefully achieving) excellence would do.  There were right and wrong sides to fabric, you did not 'go against the grain'.  If you were daring enough to choose a complex pattern, you soon learned the art of matching  so a pocket would blend in like camouflage.  Inset sleeves and zippers were years away.

I completed that apron - a purple, green and white floral calico print - on my mother's old Singer.

A Depth of Grieving

I read this, and I think of my Mother. No person ever grieved more for the person they loved, than my Mother did for my Father. For six years, it was as raw each morning for her, as it was the day he died...

Mom's Plum Pudding

My Mom did a spectacular plum pudding* (which is somewhat similar to fruitcake...but not really...!) She was carrying on a tradition that her mother, my Grandma Fitzpatrick, had done before her.

She always shopped for the best suet fresh from the butcher's, candied fruits, and whole nuts to grind, over in Emerson. She canned some every year, and it was like wine, getting better the older you let it sit. At Thanksgiving or Christmas, we'd pop open a jar, steam the pudding until it was warm and plump, and then pour one of the two homemade sauces she made - lemon and caramel/butterscotch over the top of each serving - it was amazing. Sometimes, she even hid a coin in one of the servings to make it more fun!

* AKA Christmas Pudding; while my mother's pudding was heavenly, not all puddings are created equal...

Grandma was not amused...

The Volstead Act of 1919, named for its author, Minnesota senator Andrew Volstead, made provisions for Prohibition's enforcement, but it contained loopholes that invited abuses.

Somehow, I don't think that writer meant my grandfather, but in his own little way, Grandpa Fitzpatrick was flouting the law of the time when he was making beer during this time period, using honey from his bees in the process. They lived in the north part of town, a bit off the beaten track and somewhat private. Maybe Grandpa thought it would be OK if he kept it low-key.

Grandma wasn't thrilled about the idea, since it was illegal at the time, but she put up with it...He was even known to sell a bottle now and then to someone. Grandma herself, after a hard day's work, would drink a bottle against the heat. However, one day Grandpa crossed the line...On that day, my mother, who was around 9 years old, was uptown with my grandma visiting friends. Upon their return a few hours later, they came upon this scene...

Walking up the road to the house, we came upon an unbelievable scene: Men, women, sitting around, having a good time...drinking Grandpa's beer! It was a regular outdoor honkytonk. *

Well, if you only knew my Grandma, you could imagine what happened next: She was not amused. People knew my Grandma well enough that just her arrival meant they had better clear off. As they did, she proceeded to grab the remaining bottles of beer within her reach and smash them against the side of the shed.

* - Harriet Short (my mother)

Mom has been gone nearly a month now, visiting Sharon in Chicago. While it's wonderful having a break, it's a two-edged sword. I also miss her very much.

I wish I could find more ways to stimulate conversation with Mom when she's here. I've felt at times as though I'm missing precious opportunities to connect with her, either not knowing what to say, or being distracted during our times together. It's frustrating, not knowing how to talk to someone you love so much.

Mom's very quiet compared to the way she used to be. There are moments when she comes alive, but overall, definitely more quiet. It's like she's drawing within more, and we are being left behind. I imagine a whole world of memories inside her that she floats along day and night, whether in sleep or lost in thought. Train whistles immediately cause her pain, reminding her of Dad. Like Job, she continues to have a struggle with God about his wisdom in taking Dad but not her.

There's a side to Mom I've seen more of, though...it's her ability to have fun, to laugh...I saw some of it growing up, but I was a kid then, and she was busy being a mother and wife. Now, while still being mother and daughter, we are also women, hanging out together. The dynamics have changed. Time pushes us sometimes very reluctantly forward, into the mystery of the future. We laugh together at it...

My grandfather, Sheldon Albert Fitzpatrick, was an extraordinary man. He kept bees and made his own honey. He ran a farm, and did the family's cobbling. Much to my grandmother's chagrin, he made homemade beer. A man of letters, he loved literature, passing that love down to my mother and thus to me. He cared about his community, and was Treasurer, Mayor, and keeper of the cemetery books and grounds at various times for our little village. Most of all, he was remembered as a warm man with a wonderful sense of humour, well-loved by all who knew him. I was only 5 years old when he died, so my memories of him are limited. I remember an old tall man who wore a hat, took naps on the porch, let me sit on his lap where I would give him sloppy kisses and in retaliation he would give me whisker rubs (I would squeal with laughter and love every minute of it)...and oh yes, the pink peppermints, the peppermints he would share with me that he loved so much...

I sat with my grandfather sometimes during his last days on this earth, when he was laying in his bed at home. When I would come to him and talk to him, he would call me his little girl, and my mother would weep saying I was the only one now that he seemed to recognize. I didn't fully understand that then, but cherish that memory now. It reminds me of when my own father said his last words to Mom and I, Mom saying "No more Hawkeye and Chingascook"...an allusion to other memories of a time when I shared special moments with my father as a little girl...

Garrison Keillor: I Understand Completely

"Rhubarb is the secret to the good life."

I read every word of his essay, and understood it to the core of my being. I feel exactly that way when I am researching and writing about St. Vincent. I love St. Vincent and all the people from it and all the people around it that made up our communities, our lives, our sorrow, our joys.

When my mother was nearing the end of her 97 years, what was most vivid to her was her youth. She said, “There is so much I’d still like to know, and there’s nobody left to ask.” So she ventured into the shadows to commune with her dead, which was a comfort to her. Nobody was alive who knew her in girlhood, so memory became reality. Some call it dementia, I call it imagination. At 71 I sometimes forget last week, but I clearly remember the big house on Dupont Avenue North where Corinne lived one summer when we were 19, and I blew smoke on her African violets to kill aphids. She and I had this idea to form a commune of writers all working away in their rooms, doors open, and when we wrote something good, we could walk into someone’s room and tell them about it. A sort of long-term sleepover. It was a perfect idea, and we didn’t bother with details such as Who and Where and How much, and because it never became a reality, it never came crashing down. It still exists in my mind. If I reach 97, I may finally go live there.

- From Keillor Geography

St. Vincent is my Lake Wobegon...

FBI's Most Wanted

My mother's older sister Irene had eight children, seven of them girls.  One of those girls was named Lois.

Some time in the late 1950s, Lois crossed paths with a man named Everett Leroy Biggs.

Biggs was from another Illinois family, like my cousin.  He had served in the U.S. Marines in post-war Korea.

At any rate, they met, married, and had several children together.  And during their marriage, Everett became a wanted man.  A very wanted man.

He was so 'wanted', that he made it onto the FBI's most wanted list on November 21, 1966, as #240.  The FBI described him as a "serial armed bank robber".

He wasn't on the list long, only two weeks.  On December 1, 1966, Everett was arrested,  taken by surprise outside his Colorado home.  It is said that they tracked him down through his children, who were enrolled in a nearby school.  He served his time, was released, and to my knowledge, walked the straight and narrow thereafter.

I'm not sure when my cousin divorced him, but in 1979, he married again, and he and his second wife were together until his death in 1997.

Before Dick and Jane

"Fun with Dick and Jane"

Dick and Jane.

I remember using this series of books in elementary school. I breezed through them, finding them fun but a bit boring and silly. I had already learned to read before attending school, thanks to my Mom, who felt it was important to provide good books for me to look at and learn from, from a very early age.  She subscribed to the Dr. Seuss books for me, and each month we'd received a 'large' thin box in the mail, and I would know another book had come for me!

I cannot remember which one I got first.  It might have been CAT IN THE HAT, or GREEN EGGS AND HAM.  At any rate, I remember my favorite - HORTON HATCHES AN EGG.  I always loved Horton, and felt he did a very honorable thing.  I did not like the jealous mother bird at all, feeling she wanted to take all the credit for doing none of the work!  Even then, I really got caught up in my stories.  I literally learned to read from being read to, and looking at the words as much as the pictures.  I knew that words have power, that stories transport, and I wanted to know the secret.  I wanted to know how to read! I cannot remember the details, but I remember being told what a word meant, the sounds of words, and between those hints, my own deductions based on observation and context, I began to understand the mystery of the written word.

Before any of that, however, there was my father.  He told great stories to me at bedtime, stories that he would make up as he went along.  I never knew what the stories were going to be about, and that made it all the better.  I was very young at the time, so I can't remember any of them.  But that's not the important thing anyways.  They made a lasting impression of me of how powerful words are, and when they are used skillfully and tell incredible stories, the stories take you with them.  I was hooked!

Thus, when I started school, I had a head start.  I absorbed it all as fast as I could because I couldn't wait to read more.  And more.  And MORE!