Yellow Gingham

/ By / In / Leave Comment

This prompt brought back powerful memories of a yellow gingham skirt my mother made in the 70s. She and my father took square-dancing lessons for a while, the outfits were wild. He had western style shirts with ruffles and mother-of-pearl buttons. She made skirts and wore them with ruffled blouses. She also made very puffy multi-tiered net underskirts that made the whole business stick out a mile and rustle, several of which finally died a horrible death in the dress up box when my kids were small.

I don’t have any photos of my parents, sadly, but I did find some like photos that feel right.

When I sat down to write, a strange poem emerged — the closet in the poem existed in time before the skirt, when I was very small, the square-dancing skirt appears much later  — but here they are together somehow, perfectly impossible together.

Yellow Gingham

My mother’s closet is a place of dreams
Dark, cool, larger than my room
Scary with things like stockings with seams,
Fox furs with the heads still on.

Walk-in style, no door or windows,
Coats in bags, hats in boxes,
Suitcases and extra pillows,
Shoes stained by years of feet.

In the heat of the day
I hide behind the long soft dresses.
On my father’s side
Scratchy wool and leather belts.

The brightest thing in the dark with me,
a yellow gingham square dance skirt.
She wore it with a peasant blouse
she made to match his ruffled shirt.

Grandma Brown’s gone now, her furs
gone too. My dear gone dad
wears no more awful plaid.
The only one in Mom’s closet is her.

That dream stood in silence for so long,
mothballs, dust, until you asked.
Now the yellow gingham skirt she made,
becomes my mother’s song.

 

 

 

 

 

Some Memories Are Best Left In Closets

/ By / In / 6 Comments

 

Closets…. Funny topic in that something so mundane as a place where one hangs clothes, stores shoes and accessories, could be worthy of a story let alone a memory.

 

That said, my mother’s closet held many such stories and memories. Like all mothers, knowing early on that in this case, her little boy (that would be me) would search every possible nook and cranny for possible hiding places for Christmas and birthday gifts, required that she find a good hiding place. Likewise, it didn’t take long for me to discover her closet was her favorite hiding spot, that was until she realized the best place to hide something was by putting it in the most unlikely spot which she did by  hiding my Christmas and birthday presents in the top of my very own closet! It became obvious early on that mother was clearly more shrewd than I.

One day while watching my mother searching about in the far depths of the top shelve of her closet, way in the back and beneath neatly folded linens and items, I watched as she pulled out a beautiful Stetson hat box.

 

Having seen that particular box in the top of her closet since I was a little boy, curiously I asked what was in it. Patting her hand on the edge of the bed, mother invited me to sit down as she placed the box between us as she began to share a story from her past. Her memory began by telling me how much her and dad loved to dance. As if it was only this morning, I can recall how she seemed to gaze up into the abyss as she reflected on what was obviously a memory that lite up her own heart. I watched as she slowly removed the lid from the box and removed a shirt, one that was ragged and torn.

She began describing with great detail how many years ago her and dad had dressed up to attend a dinner and dancing several miles away, just across the river from North Bend and how handsome dad was in his new western style shirt. “Oh my, your father was such a handsome man and oh how he could dance!” Across the bay beyond the bridge there was a very popular place  where my father enjoyed taking my mom for an evening of dinner and dancing.

It was on this particular evening as they were nearing the bridge that they could see traffic had slowed to a stop and no cars were moving. As they came to a stop behind the other cars they could see a lot of people standing along the steep bank at one end of the bridge. Mom and dad got out to go see what everyone was looking at. As they got closer to the crowd they could hear people screaming and there they could see a car upside down in the water below slowly beginning to sink. There was a woman standing in the water frantically yelling “My Baby, My Baby, someone please help me find my baby!” Dad could see baby bottles floating near the car and asked why nobody was helping but still nobody offered to do anything. Dad quickly slid down the steep rocky bank tearing his dress clothes along the way on jagged, sharp rocks and jumped in the cold water.

While dad was swimming around the car looking for a way in so he could help find and save the baby, still nobody offered to help. Mom, now with tears in her eyes as she reminisced the memory of that day, explained how she remembered hearing people talking about how my father should be careful helping because he might be sued. Dad continued searching until the authorities came and later found the baby drowned.

My mother sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes filled with tears and explained how angry my father was that no one would help. She said, “Your father hated everyone that day and for the love of God we couldn’t figure out why nobody would help. We returned home, having not spoken a word, I took the brand new western, badly torn shirt that I had picked out for him only the day before and washed it, placed it in this box and saved it all these many years to remind me of what a wonderful, brave and loving man your dad was. Not a word has been spoken about the contents of this box until today.

I sat on the edge of the bed watching as mother carefully folded the torn shirt and placed it back in the hat box and then slid it back to its safe place. Many years later after my mother’s funeral, I found the hat box still holding the shirt which I now hold for safe keeping.

Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress

/ By / In / 10 Comments

Wearing my mother’s mink coat

Mainly I remember my mother’s closet as a great place to play hide and seek. It was a big walk-in closet shaped like an L, so you could go around the corner to hide and a seeker might just look in the doorway and not see you. There was also a little door that led into a crawlspace, and I imagined that if you went through that door you could get to all kinds of secret passageways.

My mother had a mink coat, with her name embroidered in the lining. When I was little, I loved it when she put on that coat, which she only wore if she and my father were going somewhere special. I would run my hands up and down her sleeves because it felt so good. Many years later, after she became a snowbird and started spending all her winters in Florida, she realized that she would never again be in weather cold enough to wear it, so she offered it to my sisters and me. Neither of my sisters wanted it, so I took it happily, even though Sacramento winters aren’t all that cold. I wore it a couple of times, but then wearing any kind of fur became so politically incorrect that I couldn’t any more. I still have it hanging in my closet though, and I can still run my hands up and down the length of it and think of my mother. The featured image is of me modeling it in a photo shoot for my daughter’s photography class.

We sold my mother’s New Jersey house when she decided at age 93 that she couldn’t make the twice-yearly snowbird trek any more. This was not the same house I had grown up in, with the L-shaped closet. That one had been sold when my father retired, back in about 1978. But all the furniture and art and other accoutrements of my childhood house had been moved to this smaller house, so my sisters and I went through it to see what we wanted to take, with my mother’s blessing.

I ended up with a long black evening gown of hers. I didn’t really think I would have any occasion to wear it, but she insisted that I should have it. This is a picture of me in the gown that I took to send to her, so she could see how it looked on me. That might end up being the only time I ever wear it. I wish now that I had asked her why she bought it, was it for some special occasion, and did she have a good time when she wore it. I’m sure there’s a great story there, and now I’ll never know.

I also took quite a few of her tops and pants and jackets, because they fit me perfectly and I was in need of some new clothes. She had one pair of pants with a note attached to them that said “too tight.” They seemed to fit me when I tried them on, so I took them home, but when I wear them for any length of time, I have to agree with her assessment, they are too tight. I still wear them though, because they look great! I love wearing all of these clothes of hers, especially now that she is gone. I feel her spirit enveloping me, like a wonderful hug from beyond.

 

###

 

You’ve Got A Friend

/ By / In / 7 Comments

When I was little — practically from birth — I had a best friend named Bette. Her parents were good friends with my parents, and she had two older sisters whose ages roughly corresponded to the ages of my older sisters. Our two families rented houses next door to each other at Lake Hopatcong every summer. There are more pictures of her in my baby book than there are of anyone else besides me. The perfect story would be that we are still best friends, six decades later. But alas, no. We didn’t go to the same school, and didn’t even live in the same town, so it became less and less convenient, especially when both families stopped summering at the lake. We did go to camp together at Interlochen the summer we were eleven, and then after that we drifted apart. Now we are facebook friends but nothing more.

Remembering the various “best friends” I had after Bette made me wonder about what friendship means. So much of my life is written in song lyrics that naturally I started thinking about the many “friend” songs that I know. (And there are a lot of them!) Carole King probably said it best:

When you’re down and troubled
And you need some lovin’ care
And nothing, nothing is going right
. . .
You just call out my name
And you know wherever I am
I’ll come running.

Who do I know that I have always been able to depend on like that? Who would literally come running, or hop on a plane, if I needed them? My two sisters are the only people I can think of who fit this description. And they actually have done it for me, and I for them. If that’s what friendship means, they are my best friends.

I don’t tell them everything though. They grew up at a different time, and have views that are different from mine in a lot of ways. For that I need someone else, and luckily I do have one friend whom I can talk to about absolutely anything, and I know she will never disapprove or judge. We lived together after college in a house on Cambridge Street, at a time when we were both pretty wild. We know a lot of stories about each other, but of course we would never tell. Even now, forty-plus years later, we still confide in each other about all kinds of things. We each know that the other will be okay with anything we say. We live in different parts of the country, but we still manage to see each other every couple of years. And of course there are lots of phone calls, emails, texts, and facebook messages to keep us connected in between.

Most of my closest friends are women, but I have one really dear male friend who I met my freshman year of college. I dated a roommate of his, and he dated a future roommate of mine, and we became close complaining to each other about the problems in our relationships, then and later. Over the years we have seen each other through many joys and sorrows. He even crashed one of my college reunions, driving from New York up to Cambridge on the spur of the moment. There is a song in the show I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it On the Road (which ran off-Broadway from 1978-81, and had my cousin, a semi-famous actress, in the cast) called “Old Friend,” which always made me think of this particular friend, especially this stanza at the end of the song, after the main character sings to her old friend about how she leans on him every time another relationship of hers falls apart.

We’ll meet the year we’re sixty-two
And travel the world as old friends do
And tell each other what we’ve been through.

In the 1980s I was sure that this part of the song would actually come true. Now we are both past sixty-two (how shocking!) and it hasn’t happened yet, but we are still good friends and still talk about things we’ve been through. So maybe the song didn’t quite get it right, and we’ll travel the world the year we’re seventy-two. Or eighty-two.

In addition, I am lucky enough to have several other friends who are important in my life in one way or another. Mostly from college, a couple from law school. None of them lives nearby, so we don’t see each other very often, but no matter how much time passes between visits — years, or even decades — we pick up right where we left off and it feels as if it has been no time at all. Maybe, in the final analysis, that is the real definition of friendship.

Postscript:  Two days after I posted this story, Retrospect Media made it the Readers’ Choice story and wrote about it on facebook, with the picture of Bette and me, and a link to the story. I shared that post on my page, and tagged Bette in it. A week later she read it and commented,

“Oh Suzy, I am honored to have been your friend at any era in our lives! Loved your thoughtful story – touching and so true.”

The next month she flew to Sacramento in her private plane and we had a three-hour lunch. It was the first time we had seen each other in twenty years, but we reconnected as if it had been no time. Here’s the picture from our lunch.

I don’t think we’ve changed that much from the picture at the top of the story taken when we were three.

*