Dances and Rhythms - 9

Borrowing memories from my sisters, Helen, and Bertie, when I graduated from Stetson U. in 1996, I was able to blend what I know about my dad to their experience of family.  They were grown when my mother died. My parents had joined Alpha Lutheran Evangelical Church in Turtle Creek, PA in 1925.  How my dad got on the roles is a mystery.  He'd inherited a long-standing hatred of the church.  My father could barely tolerate the religious radio broadcasts that my mother took to heart."Do you have to have that thing on?" I imagine his crisp remark from similar ones I'd heard growing up.  He more preferred the jokes of comedians like Groucho Marx or George Burns and was crude with his own one-liners.  "I've found that women are the chief cause of mens problems," he would quip. "Why?" someone would ask.  "They insist on asking too many d--- questions." Many of his jokes involved sex.  "Do you know why I cut holes in my pants pockets?" "No, and I don't care!" I replied.  "When the ladies try to pickpocket, I give 'em a surprise!"  Dad was good at making you visualize what you didn't want to think about.  My own experience growing up was a continual conflict over needing him and being repulsed by his obnoxious behavior. I wondered what it was like for my real mother to live with his sharp-witted criticism and off-colored remarks. Helen and Bertie told me that our mother seldom mentioned how she felt about our dad, other than he embarrassed her in front of church friends. They said she focused her energies on being kind to everyone, including my father.  But I wonder if she ever agonized beneath the surface.  Whatever secrets she may have held, everyone - including my father, agreed that Iva was a woman of faith.  Iva believed that life held a larger purpose beyond her life in the home.  I'm told she lived in such a way that others considered themselves richer for having known her.  Iva had an entrepreneurial spirit in her blood that she refused to give up, which was kind of amazing given that she had been born in the early 1900's..  My father was jealous of the time she spent outside the home, but that didn't deter her.  Determined to have a public life with or without him, she attended church regularly, took on a leadership role, and sold candy to the wives of the men my father worked with.  Iva was following in the footsteps of my maternal grandmother, Bertha Elizabeth who had sold girdles two decades before. It was my good fortune to be nurtured by my mother's Christian worldview and to become a member of Alpha Evangelical Lutheran Church at my birth.  Alpha was a rainbow-capped vessel of stained glass, dark wood, and polished brass that sailed weekly.  When the weather was bleak, her pastoral scenes lost their brilliance.  But when the sun exploded into rainbow colors, I'd imagine God himself pouring into our sacred space.  The sensibility of that place left a lasting impression on the white space of my mother's absence.  It was there I learned to wean myself from things other children took for granted.  It was there that I learned I was part of something much larger than myself. Higher than the congregation, even higher than the alter was the esteemed Rev. Logan.  I imagine we looked like fish in the belly of a ship as he tossed out the parables, Psalms and Proverbs I'd grow to love. During sleepy sermons, I'd rest against the thick of a neighbor's arm, while our white-haired parson fixed our minds on heavenly things.  The rhythm of my early social and religious education was modeled by my mother at just the right time. It is thought that the first six years of a child's life determines the rest.  Helen and Bertie told me that even when the weather was bad, my mother would go to church on my brother's sled, to get off the steep hill in Wilkins Township.  My brother Carl Jr. would lay down with both hands on the steering mechanism.  Like a heavy piece of furniture, my mother sat behind, and off they went on a wild downhill slide into the Turtle Creek Valley.

Dances and Rhythms - 8

"What did you study at school?" I asked, noticing a large crumb clinging to the bottom of my Dad's left elbow.  He laced his shoe - heel resting on the edge of his seat.  He was wiry, weighing around 119 pounds.  His legs were strong from repeated walks through the woods behind his trailer.  Dad continued.
"We learned to read, write, and figure on slates and when we got older - quill tip pens and paper. A buddy and I dipped a girl's pigtails in his inkwell." "What happened?" "We got the switch - both of us!" Dad had a stylized laugh.  I'd memorized it - the turned up corners of his mouth, his widened eyes, and the way he arched his eyebrows as though surprised.  I learned that day that his schoolhouse chalkboard was made of black-painted wood and that his lunch often consisted of leftover breakfast.  I had remembered singing patriotic songs in grade school.  "Do you remember any songs from when you were young?" I asked.  "We sang one at the end of every school day," he replied.  "Really...would you sing it...do you remember it?" "Wait till I get my mouth harp." I couldn't believe my good fortune. Dad had seldom talked to me in any significant way and rarely shared family history.  As he walked to the couch and sat down by his German-made Hohner, I remembered that years that passed since I'd heard him play.  Dad blew a note, hummed in high tenor, and began to sing, It was wondrous to me - a happy accident! "Tis four o'clock by the cuckoo clock - cuckoo, cuckoo. And down the street come the children's feet - cuckoo, cuckoo.  The school is over for the day. The books and slates are put away. The time has come for fun and play - cuckoo, cuckoo." I was about to respond when Dad interrupted. "Well, enough of that - here Peanuts.  I better let this mutt out before we leave."  That day had me taking my "quiet-nature" father to John's drugstore, with one "sweet" exception in an otherwise ordinary day.

Dances and Rhythms - 7

"Grammar school?" I repeated the question - another pause as Dad traveled back in time. "I went to the sixth grade in a one-room building," he said proudly.  "Back in those days we walked a mile to school and in the winter time when we got there, we took off our shoes and warmed our feet by the pot-bellied stove in the center of the room.  "Were there cloakrooms?" I asked. "There were two of them - one for girls and one for boys." I imagined my own elementary school cloakroom in the early 50's in Pennsylvania.  The memory was rich with smells of bologna, waxed paper, and apples in brown paper bags. Dad had brought his lunch in a lard can.  In the winter, he'd carry a hot potato to warm his hands during the mile-long walk to school.  When the bell rang, he'd place the potato on the stove to keep it warm and set his can in the cloakroom.  "Kids of all ages went to school together back then.  The older ones helped the younger," he said. "How many grades did they have?" I asked.  "Eight, but I quit after six to go work in the coal mines. We had to help Mother and Dad out. You know there were fifteen of us." Dad continued.  "My youngest sister Martha died at birth." "What a shame," I said, keeping emotions in check.  I'd learned the hard way that emotional display caused my father to withdraw and often made him angry.  Dad got up to retrieve his shoes from a back room.  His slippers were worn with the backs flattened like a pair of old moccasins.  A chill absorbed me as he pattered across the linoleum floor to his bedroom - a haunting sound from years before.  Brushing past with shoes in hand, Dad took a chair at the kitchen table.  His left elbow rested on a ring of grease from his breakfast plate.  A circle of crumbs clung to his elbow.  I looked away not wanting to call attention... 

Dances and Rhythms - 6

Dances and Rhythms - 6

     Both of my parents were born in the early 1900's.  Hungry for stories related to my parent's early life, I asked my father how he got into Westinghouse Electric, as we waited for his doctor to call in his prescription.  "Your mother's brother, Henry and I left West Virginia for Pittsburgh to find work.  If they took you on as an office boy and you stuck around without getting into too much trouble, they made you an apprentice and taught you a trade."  My father scratched the top of his head, his long fingernails slicing through the fine crown hairs I used to refer to as, "six hairs on top." "So that's how you became a tool designer," I asked? "Yeah."  Dad went on. "George Westinghouse patented many inventions, which included the railroad air brake and alternating current.  To manufacture them, he opened dozens of plants which demanded thousands of workers.  I was one of them." Dad picked some fuzz off his olive-green work pants as he spoke, unconscious of the sizable holes in the elbows of his gray wool sweater.  I loved the look of him.  He paused as though thinking deeply.  "Anyway, Henry and I stood outside the plant waiting to be called, when a foremen walked up."  "We'll hire you right away - he says.  Next I tell him I have to ask my mother.  He goes - we're not hiring your mother boy, we're hiring you."  Laughter. "What did you say," I asked?  "I took the job," Dad replied laughing out loud.  It was uncharacteristic of him to be so animated.  We had seldom conversed over the years.  This made it difficult to really know my father.  Dad played with the gold signet ring on the large knuckled middle finger of his right hand.  He'd worn it for as long as I could remember. "Was Uncle Henry hired too?" "Yeah," he responded.  I determined to ask him about grammar school....

Dances and Rhythms - 5

Dances and Rhythms - 5

     Before WWII, prior to the advent of television, my parents relied on radio for entertainment and inspiration. Throughout their married life, my mother Iva tended to the needs of home and family while my father, Carl scraped a living from the coal-smoked town of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  I remember one day in the mid-eighties in October, when I was in my late 30's.  I'd planned to drive my father to the pharmacy and arrived early at his unusually stuffy trailer.  Droplets from his steamy shower hung in the air as I entered.  The smell of Mennen aftershave lingered. My father seemed to manage well on his own in spite of the fact that he had been twice widowed.  "Hi Daddy," I said.  "Mornin'" he mumbled, looking up.  Dad buttoned his grey work shirt then grabbed his glasses and sweater from the bedroom.  His eye sockets were pasty white where his smoke-rimmed glasses blocked the sun.  The rest of his upper body was darkly tanned as though he were full-blooded American Indian rather than one-eighth Seneca. I approached the kitchen sink for a glass of water.  Heat pumped furiously from the vent just below my feet.  A small greasy pan, a spatula and a few ham bits rested in the porcelain sink below.  I moved them before turning on the water and reaching for a glass. With autumn on its way, Dad had the heater set to 80 degrees.  I was burning up.  At least the water was cold.  I slurped down a full glass and went for more.  Dad, well into his eighties and depended on family to take him for groceries and medicine.  This day he was out of heart medicine.  While we waited for the doctor to phone in a prescription, he told me the story of how Westinghouse Electric had hired him as a teen...

Dances and Rhythms - 4

Dances and Rhythms - 4

     "This is the first time I ever remember sharing closeness with a female member of my own family, and well, it's also my first really good look at myself.  I must be beautiful too!"  Bertie's acceptance of my innocent appreciation and hunger for feminine solidarity brought a rush of tears.

     At the sound of my crying, Helen peered out from behind her slacks.  Then, in a direct voice as if commanding an army, Bertie said, "Helen, take off your bra!"  Helen's eyes widened, her Lutheran modesty quickened.  She looked at me, then Bertie, and with one quick move of her hands, rose up bare-breasted.  "There, it's off.  Now which one of us is bigger?" Helen shook her breasts with a forced boldness. I was ecstatic, prancing about the room like a giddy child.  After forty-four years of wandering without a sense of family or identity, it was suddenly before me.  I stared wide-eyed at my blood sisters' gracious show of flesh, deeply satisfied with the glimpse they had given me of myself.  That day we shared a remarkable trinity - three sisters caught up in a rare and private bond.  The next time I take an African Dance Aerobics class, I hope to sink even lower into the drum's beat and enjoy my own rhythm as it tickles me from the tip of my spine to the bottom of my soul. The rhythm of our parents' lives, however, was quite different from my own...

Dances and Rhythms - 3

Dances and Rhythms - 3

     Six years earlier, my sisters, Helen, then age 67, Bertie, then age 61, visited me in Florida for my college graduation. When the ceremony was over, the girls and I went into my bedroom to change.  I plundered their suitcases while chattering - savoring the moments we had missed as sisters growing up together.  Glancing up from Helen's suitcase, I noticed my sister Bertie was naked from the waist up.  Her large breasts flopped back and forth with each movement. Fascinated by our striking similarity, I crawled across the bed, "Oh my gosh - we look exactly alike!"  Bertie raised her head.  Though speechless, I could not take my eyes off her cream-like skin.  It was a perfect replica of the velvety-smooth interplay of light, color, and sensuality of Renoir's female figures.  It was the same kind of skin I had so often bathed on my own body, yet never realized how stunning it was.  "I've never seen you like this before...you, you look just like me," I stammered.  "I look like you!"  In the opposite corner, Helen panicked.  "Sherry, you're embarrassing me!"  Helen covered her half-clothed body.  I looked back at Bertie for understanding.  Did she get where I was coming from?  "It's okay, Sissy," she said.  "You haven't been with us your whole life so it's natural for you to be amazed that we look so much alike."  Bertie drew herself up into a reverent posture to allow me a full view, while Helen teetered on the edge of needed life support.  We ignored her, rising above embarrassment.  "It's more than that for me..."