“When we was growin' up Papa had a rule, no laughing at the dinner table. If one of us children laughed, our plate was put up on the mantle and we had to finish eating our dinner standing up.” Aunt Katie chuckled, “I was a growed woman before I finished a dinner sitting down.” Her sense of humor never left.

Aunt Katie was my mother’s aunt, Grandma’s younger sister and she was married to Grandpa’s younger brother. For most of my life the two couples lived next door to each other in Blackwell, Oklahoma, Grandpa being retired from the ministry and Uncle Julius retired from farming. I have few memories of any of them from my childhood. By the time I left college Aunt Katie was the only one still alive, she was 85. And she kept on living. It was in these “elder” years that she became a legend in the family.

Aunt Katie complained she was having trouble reading the newspaper and Mom asked when she last had her eyes tested. That was past remembering. The eye doctor was gone, but his son had the business and, amazingly, he still had Aunt Katie's records. He tested her eyes, found they hadn't changed, and suggested putting a better reading lamp beside her chair. They started to leave. Aunt Katie took a couple of steps, stopped, looked at Mom, held up her walker and said, “Do you suppose this is my imagination, too?”

A woman Aunt Katie knew came out of the bank as Mom and Aunt Katie started to enter. They stopped to talk for awhile. When the conversation ended they continued into the bank. Aunt Katie turned to Mom, “Why don't old people understand that when someone says 'how are you' they really don't want an answer?”

A succession of women were hired to live with Aunt Katie which enabled her to continue living in her home. Aunt Katie laughed heartily when she told me that one woman wouldn't let her watch the television show Dallas because it was sinful, unless she watched a religious program afterward. Aunt Katie preferred Dallas.

The sofa was past worn out. Aunt Katie protested buying another, at her age it was a waste of money. She was in her late 90's. Mom pretty much forced her to buy a new one. After it was delivered, Aunt Katie sat on it, and studied it, then looked up at us with a big grin on her face, “Well, I might not live long enough to get the good out of it, but I'll go out in style.”

My parents lived in northern Kansas. I few to their home and a few days before Aunt Katie’s 100th birthday we drove to her house for the celebration. When we walked in the door she was sitting in her chair. A hand mirror was on the table next to her, which I thought was odd as she wasn’t that vain. After greetings, she picked up the newspaper, which was also on the table, and showed it to Mom. “The paper sent a woman over because of my birthday. After talking to me awhile she took my picture. Here it is.” It was a huge front page story with a large photo “I got to lookin’ at that picture and I thought, 'My nose doesn't look like that' so I got out the looking glass.” She picked up the mirror, looked at herself in it and pointed to her nose. “I believe I'm getting a bump on my nose. Doesn’t it look like it to you?” Sure enough she was, but it was so small none of us would have noticed it if Aunt Katie hadn’t pointed it out.

A few days later illness sent her to the hospital. There, she was walking in the hall when a woman stopped her and asked, “Aren't you the woman whose picture was in the paper because she turned 100?” Aunt Katie said she was. Surprised, the woman exclaimed, “But you don't look 100.” Aunt Katie asked, “How many people over 100 have you seen?” When the woman replied none, Aunt Katie told her, “See, you just don't know what a 100 year old woman is supposed to look like.”

Someone put one of those candles that don’t blow out on her 105th birthday cake. She blew, and blew, and giggled, and blew, and laughed, and tried to blow, but she was laughing so hard she had no breath. And I thought she was going to fallout of her chair laughing.

The family's favorite Aunt Katie story occurred a year or so before she left us. “I couldn't get to sleep the other night because I was a worryin' about who my pallbearers would be. I thought of our neighbors on the farm, but they are gone and I suppose the children are too. And I thought of the people in Deer Creek, no one is left there either. Then I just decided it isn't my problem because I'll be dead. Then I turned over and fell asleep.”

Aunt Katie's mind and sense of humor were sharp until the end. But Mom says Aunt Katie didn't really die, she just fell apart like the One-Hoss-Shay. In 1989. At the age of one hundred and seven.

Assignment #7

Wishful Thinking by Diane Marcus

The Santa Monica pier was alive with parents and children. People, young and old, speaking in all languages; Korean and Chinese; Hebrew, Spanish, German and English were taking advantage of this bright and balmy day in June. The air was clear, the sky was blue and the sun reflected on the ocean like white crystal stars dancing on top of the surface. I breathed in the salty air and let the breeze play around my face, my neck and arms reaching beneath the sleeves of my blue cotton blouse cooling my skin. I was so mesmerized that I felt as though I had blended with the sea, wind and surf. The seagull’s wings flitted in the wind while in the background the sounds of music coming from the merry-go-round and children’s laughter spread and seemed to rise above the people and then settled itself on the waves as they licked the shore oblivious to the sand castles being built by future artists.

And then I saw him, a very sad and frightened boy perhaps twenty one or two. He walked toe to heel his arms crossed tightly in front of him as he spoke to no one. Occasionally one arm would flail out in front of his face chasing whatever demon was after him. His clothes looked fresh and fairly new and it seemed clear to me that he had someone to care for him. When I saw his face his eyes squinted and his head fell forward resting his chin on his neck. I recognized in his profile the high cheek bones and straight nose. He even has the same birthmark just above his nostril. He had shoulder length brown hair with auburn streaks running through the thick waves. He even had a cowlick on the top of his head.

Is it possible that when you want something to be true you can create that reality? Could it be that all these years he hadn’t died but lost his memory? I felt myself spiraling inward as the outside world began to blur and all I could feel was my need to touch him. I began to follow behind keeping my pace with him, not wanting to startle him. He sped up and so did I. When he stopped and paused I followed. Nothing seemed to matter except for me to reach out to him to take his hand and tell him to come home. I felt that I was about to cross over a very fine line that separated me from insanity when suddenly he twirled about and with an expression of terror he shouted “Stop it! Stop it! Why are you following me?”

“I’m so sorry.” I whispered. “I thought you were someone else.”

BUDD LAKE

CECILE BETTS

Several times during April and May of 1925, my sister Anna loaded her three stepchildren, her two year old son, her young brother and sister into the Hudson Super Six, pulled on her leather driving gauntlets, eased her pregnant abdomen under the steering wheel and drove to various fresh water lakes in New Jersey, looking for a place to rent for the summer months. She found a bungalow at Budd Lake. The bungalow, on an unpaved street, occupied a corner lot about a quarter mile from the highway with the lake itself just on the other side of the road. A narrow strip of sandy beach, some tables and benches on the shore and the lake itself had a gently sloping sandy bottom
Anna gave birth to her second son on June 6th, the largest baby born in St. Elizabeth Hospital. At that time, mother and child stayed in the hospital for ten days. During that time, another sister, Belle came from New York in order to look after and cook for Papa, Phil, sister Goldy, who at 17, worked as a sales clerk in Levy Brothers Department store, and to take care of the six younger children. After the bris, the ceremonial circumcision, after the ceremony of naming the baby, after the last school day in June, we moved to Budd Lake. Anna breast fed her son and did not have to bother with preparing formula. I did not appreciate it at the time, but now I realize how hard she worked at the lake, looking after seven children ranging in age from infant to a twelve-year-old.
The spacious bungalow’s furniture and wicker rockers on the porch were comfortably shabby. We washed our bare feet at a cold water shower outside the door before going inside. The first week, we found going barefoot slightly painful but we soon ran up and down that hill to the lake without wincing.
. An ice box with the drip pan underneath and a large round oilcloth covered table with eight wooden chairs furnished the kitchen. I shared a bed in one of the bedrooms with Gert and Lil, her stepdaughters, four and two years older than I. My brother, Matty, then 10 shared a bed with Herman, Anna’s stepson, and 3 year old Nathanie. Anna and the new baby had the third bedroom.
Although we children lived in our bathing suits most of the time, Anna had to scrub sheets, towels, pajamas and boil the birds eye cloth diapers and belly bands and little shirts and flannel kimonas worn by the baby. Instead of trying to wash dishes in the small kitchen sink, which also doubled as the only basin for hand and face washing, she heated kettles of water and used two dishpans.
Without formal instruction, I learned to do the crawl stroke to get out to the raft, anchored out in the deep water. I also watched other older people dive from the float into the water and copied what they did. I floated on my back like a cork, could swim underwater with my eyes open and could tread water, and do a back stroke.
We each had one Jantzen wool bathing suit. That first year you could tell the front of the suit from the back because the front was cut a little lower than the back and it had a red appliqué of a figure in a red bathing suit on the lower front portion.. This marked a great improvement over the bathing suits four of my older sisters wore during their teen years to swim at Coney Island. They wore black sateen, high necked, long sleeved, calf length tunics over ankle length pantaloons, black cotton stockings and white ankle height sneakers. They did a ladylike and decorous breast stroke never getting their long hair wet.
Since we had to walk uphill a quarter of a mile to get back to the house with its flush toilet partitioned off at one end of the screened porch, sometimes we waited too long and had to pee in the lake. We tried to pull the crotch of the bathing suit to one side because the ammonia in urine ate holes in the crotch. We learned this several years earlier when we wemt to the Rahway Swimming Hole.
Anna kept Nathaniel at the bungalow with her and Martin most of the time, she rarely came down to the lake. But, the rest of us spent most of every day down at the lake, always being careful when crossing the highway because the cars sped by at thirty miles an hour.
Sometimes, as a special treat, Anna would give us a dollar to rent a rowboat for the whole day from the boat yard, another half mile from our street.
Her husband would come to Budd Lake for the weekend and often sisters Belle and Lil amd Jessie and their husbands and children came to spend time with us. At such times, we children slept four or five to a bed turning crossways on it, people even slept on the floor. Wild flowers, red, pink and yellow, perfumed the air, and we could hear the bees buzzing while they gathered nectar for honey. We caught fireflies and kept them in jars to enjoy their twinkling bursts of light. At the top of the hill a thicket of wild blackberries grew in a tangle of vines with sharp thorns. We gathered them, ignoring the scratches on our bare arms and legs while we savored the sweetness of the sun-warmed, juicy berries. During thunder and lightning storms when we could not go to the lake, we played card games such as Old Maid and Casino and board games such as checkers,Parchesi
Sometimes, Anna took us to an amusement park at Lake Hopatcong. We rode the merry-go-round and the bumper cars, bought cotton candy and ate at clam chowder at a famous restaurant Not the bland white chowder but a robust tomato based soup thick with little clams, diced carrots, potatoes and onions, flavored with aromatic herbs and spices.
Once when we rented the rowboat , I decided to swim across the Lake. It seemed quite far to the other sidet. I talked Herman into accompanying me in the rowboat. I started out doing the crawl stroke. When I tired, I floated on my back for a while. As I approached the far shore, my legs got tangled in long fronds of weeds growing there. I found it best to take shallow strokes and kicks. Meanwhile, the other children went up to the bungalow for lunch. Anna asked, “Where are Sis and Herman?” Matty told her, “Sis is swimming across the lake and Herman is rowing the boat along side her.”
This frightened Anna so much that as soon as Herman and I got back, instead of the praise I expected for my long swim, she scolded us, spanked us both and loaded us all into the car to return to Elizabeth She calmed down in a few days.] We returned to Budd Lake until Labor Day. School began the day after Labor Day.
Before we left, Anna arranged to rent the bungalow again for the next summer.
Below is a picture of the six children when I was almost 8 years old.. The picture of my brother and me, taken the next year, shows me in my new bathing suit. You will notice the crotch is down to my knees, llke most of my clothes, it was bought big so I could grow into it.

The Boulder and The Coyote
.
. Our tent was pitched in a clutch of giant boulders. It still lay in their black coldness but the slowly lightening horizon lured me out. The morning world was pale—an expanse of bluish sky melding seamlessly with the desert plane. Here and there Joshua trees still slept in silhouette and desert plants hunkered low. My stocking feet only slightly disturbed the gritty sand as I walked to a boulder that promised a perch and wider view. Atop, I hugged knees to chest and matched the boulder shape with mine. The quietness, the cool purity of light was strange and exciting and my ears, eyes, nose all strained to become familiar. I gazed unfocused into the desert and abandoned time. I felt myself melting into the rocks, the changing shapes of shadows, the imperceptible change of colors. I wanted to stay in this altered state forever but knew immobility is not my nature.

A light, rhythmic sound intrudes the primal silence from the left. Being a boulder now, I do not turn. I hear motion and listen with focused concentration to the steady rhythmic tff, tff, tff of rubbing sand. I let only my eyes turn as the sound becomes more distinct. A desert-colored animal that must be a coyote calmly ambles along on its own trajectory, past my boulder. I am filled with happiness that by ignoring me, this prince of nature accepts me into this Garden of Eden just as he accepts the Joshua tree, the lizards, the boulders. I hear the tff, tff,tff, of paws on sand for a long time as it fades slowly back into barely audible and then silence.

I sat there forever, so it seemed, but of course it wasn’t very long before the sun turned up the heat and the stage set changed again. The children woke and were hungry, then wanted to go rock-climbing. As for me, my DNA was permanently changed that morning; I am now part coyote and part boulder.

KCwriter

My brother, Ringo, drank a bit and many of my favorite stories came out of incidents where he was a little less than sober.

He was home on leave, from Germany,in 1957,and I had gone in to wake him up and noticed the scrape along his jaw. I knew he’d been in a fight, but before I could say anything, Mom came in and, seeing that he was awake, asked him if he’d like some breakfast.

He thought for a minute and said, “That sounds good.”

I got up and left the room to give him a chance to get dressed.

When he joined us at the table, it only took a moment for Mom to see the signs of conflict. There wasn’t a lot of evidence; the scrape on his jaw and a raw place on one knuckle.

Ringo knew by the look on her face that he’d been busted, so he began explaining how it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

“Mom, I didn’t start this one.”
Mom shook her head, “I’m sure you didn’t, son. Did you finish it?”
“Well, nobody really got hurt. Really!”
Her eyes strayed to his knuckles, “Really?”

“Well, not hardly. Look, here’s what happened.”
“I’d been drinking in the Green Lantern (a true hole-in-the-wall type of bar) and when I walked out the door, these three Mexican guys jumped me.”

“Three?”

“Yeah, but they weren’t all that big, and I think they were drunker than I was, ‘cause they wasn’t doin’ much of a job hittin’ me and one of ‘em punched one of his buddies, so I just kind of got them under control.”

Mom’s inquiring look prompted a more detailed explanation.

”Well, I kind of knocked them down, and since I wasn’t in any
shape to fight and they sure weren’t either, I kind of put them out of commission.”

At my mother’s horrified expression, he hastened to explain.
“Well, they were laying there by the edge of the sidewalk and they
were all wearing those tight leather jackets”, here he stopped to grin and take a drink of the cup of coffee my brother, Bill, had placed before him, “so, I picked them up and threaded the backs of the jackets over three of the parking meters and then zipped them up…”

He grinned and opened his arms out until they reached as far behind him as they would go, demonstrating the problem the men were now facing, “then I sat them down and pulled their legs out straight in front of them. They weren’t going to be movin’ until someone came out to help them.

“Oh, son…” Mom was trying to look duly horrified.
“Well, I put money in the meters.”
My mother tried to look stern, but the picture he painted was too funny and all of us fell apart with laughter.

It was on this leave that he told us about his “tailor-made” suit.
It seems that when he got to Germany, one of the soldiers who had been there a while told him that he could get a really great suit made out of fantastic cloth for practically nothing.

Keep in mind that Ringo had never had a suit of any kind, until he put on his Paratrooper’s dress uniform, and the thought of having something that nice, that no one else had ever worn, was a great temptation; so, he went to the tailor, picked out a beautiful dark blue wool, and had a suit made.

“Now, Mom, what good is it to have a new suit, if you can’t wear it somewhere?”

Mom was putting a patch on a pair of Bill’s Levis and just looked up with an understanding smile.

“Well, I got a weekend pass and went to town.” There was a pregnant pause, “Well, I went to Firth-Nuremberg, which was strictly off limits for us Americans, but it was the closest place with any action.”

“I hadn’t even got to finish my first beer, when a fight broke out. I wasn’t even close to it, but in a couple of minutes I heard the sirens and I figured the MPs might show up, so I went out a back door. Just as I got to the end of the alley, a military jeep came tearing around the corner, so I went over a fence, and, Lord, Mom, there was the biggest damned dog you’ve ever seen in your life that came tearing around the building and right at me. I went airborne about four feet from the fence and managed to get over it, but that dog took a piece out of the cuff of my pants.”

“I didn’t even have time to take a breath, when I heard that damned jeep coming closer, so I just kept running.
“It turns out that the civilian police and the MPs had gotten together and planned to hit all of the bars that were serving soldiers. There were cops and MPs everywhere I turned. There was nowhere I could hide and I just kept running.

“After the first couple of miles, I figured, “What the hell, I may as well run back to the base, but, let me tell you, dress shoes are not designed for running, and that damned wool suit was hotter than the hubs of hell, so when I got close to the base and remembered there was a bridge the MPs might be checking, I just decided to swim the river. It wasn’t all that wide.

Ringo paused, as though in remembrance, then he grinned and said, “I’d forgotten how much wool shrinks. By the time I’d run that last mile and a half to the base, that goddamned suit had shrunk like you wouldn’t believe. “The pants were half way up my calves and the crotch was binding something fierce. The coat had shrunk so much that I had to hunch my shoulders to keep from tearing it, and the sleeves were real tight and came way above my wrists.

Again, he paused and then he laughed. “I looked like the biggest goddamn organ grinder’s monkey that you’ve ever seen in your life. When I got to the gate and showed my soggy papers to the guards, they laughed so hard, they couldn’t have shot at me if I was carrying a bomb. That took a while to live down.”

When Ringo came back from Korea, in 1960, he was drinking harder than ever. In August of that year, our local red light district began to have trouble with someone, armed with a gun, holding up the late night patrons of the bars. The drunker they were, the better.

I had been married in 1958, but my marriage was over and my daughter and I were staying with my parents, so I got in on the first telling of this story.

It was after breakfast and Ringo, Bill, Mom and the baby and I were all still at the table, when Ringo said, “Maybe I’m gonna cut back on the drinkin’.

We all looked at him in surprise. This had come out of nowhere. No one said anything to Ringo about his drinking habits.

“After I closed down the bars last night, I went to my car and when I got in, someone stuck a gun in my back.”

Before any of us could comment, he continued, “I was drunk, not stupid, so I put my hands in the air and I told him he could just take the money and go, but the son-of-a-bitch didn’t say a word. I thought maybe he was some kind of nut that just got off on scaring people, so I didn’t say anything else for a while, but the silence began to get on my nerves, so I said, “What the hell are you waiting for, just take my wallet.”

“Not a word.”

“I must have sat there for half an hour with my hands in the air, sweating bullets, and not a word being said. Finally, my shoulders were killing me and I just didn’t give a damn anymore, so I said, “Go ahead and shoot me, ‘cause I’m sick of this shit, and I turned around.” He paused and shook his head.

“I was so damned drunk that I’d gotten in on the wrong side of the car and all that was poking me in the back was the goddamn gearshift. I’d sat there all that time talking to no one and waiting to be shot.”

“Maybe it’s time I cut back on the drinkin.”