Judgement down the Centuries

She was, by all accounts, a pretty tough woman, this woman born in 1881 on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin to a 58-year old man and 35-year old woman, both immigrants from Norway.
 

She was my father’s mother; her name was Sarah Gustava Tillotson, though her father was Ole Trondson Tillorson. Had the name been changed in Ellis Island? Or was Ellis Island even operating at that time? Because the family came in the first or second wave of immigrants: her father’s first child, Henry, was born in New York in July of 1846.

I barely knew her, though I distinctly recall having to eat beet greens that had been boiled from about the beginning of time. And I remember that her hair was falling out, probably due to the chemotherapy she was taking at the time; she died of cancer when I was ten.

“She was a fine woman,” said my mother, with real respect in her voice. And the feeling must have been mutual; apparently my grandmother had remarked, when told that my mother couldn’t come to a family gathering, “but how will we have any fun?”

So I don’t know the woman, and I may not even know the stories. Because I seem to recall that she heard that the ladies in church were scoffing that she was too poor to buy a car. So what did she do? Went out, bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, and then drove it back. Then she parked it on cinder blocks in the front yard.

True? Cousin Ruthie says no, and she should know, being slightly older than I, and having known the woman.

OK—so what about the story about my father, who wanted a quarter to go to the movies? “Move the woodpile to the side of the house,” said his mother, “then come back for instructions.” Jack appeared half an hour later.

“Now move it back,” she said.

She was a religious woman, this lady who endowed a wing in a Chicago children’s hospital, and who bestowed an annuity from the Moody Bible Institute on my mother. The annuity was for twenty-five dollars or so; notwithstanding, the institute was in the habit of sending a man out every year to make sure that Franny was still living. Invariably, he arrived in January; just as invariably, he got stuck in a snow bank on the long road to my mother’s house.

“Would you like to join me in prayer,” the man would ask.

“No,” my mother would reply. But pleasantly….

“She was tall, and ramrod straight, and pretty unapproachable,” said John, my brother, who remembers her, apparently, just as vaguely.

What is it about old pictures? Did she believe, when this was taken, that this would be one of the few photos of her that would be taken, photography being—relatively—in its infancy? She looks out at us, as if challenging us. Have we measured up? Are we slackers? Giving in to vice?

I do my best, or so I think. I have my collection of people to whom I give money—one of whom invariably asks for more. I try not to cheat or steal or bear false witness.

Why do I think that’s not enough?

On Sisters and Ticks

OK, Dear Readers, we have a serious problem, since what happens to a blogger without Internet? The same thing that happens to surgeons without scalpels…

Right, the son of a newspaperman am I, so, was I going to be defeated by what never existed until the last years of my father’s life? Shouldn’t I be able to find something, anything, to write about?

He would have been 105, three days before that day (Wednesday,) and he died nearly twenty years ago, but here’s today’s secret, Dear Readers: it gets better, yes, but never to the point of best. Which means that, yes, I no longer weep when I see a wok (Jack was an excellent Chinese cook), and I’m glad that he got out of the world as he did: fast and painless, with not too much deterioration. Life makes you philosophical, and the icon giving the option to go on indefinitely can’t be found on the desktop. So you might as well go when you still have most of your faculties, and life isn’t too onerous. But that said, his absence turns up, once in a while, and then I miss him.

Wednesday, for example, he showed up at The Poet’s Passage, the café / craft shop where I work, and where the Internet had decided to take a prolonged cigarette break. I was delivering rice and beans to Naïa, the daughter of the owner, whom I had seen and who was going off to get her child the rice and beans. Since I myself was going for rice and beans, it was no problem to get an extra order.

Naïa, of course, is completely unfazed by Marc arriving with the food instead of her mother. And also completely in character, she has a joke:

“What do you call a mad flea?”

I know it’s going to be bad.

“OK—tell me.”

“A lunatic!”

I’m about to protest that a tick is hardly a flea, but guess what? The damage is done, and Naïa is a girl who has never once ventured down the doll aisle of a toy store. Instead, she heads straight for insects—in which I believe—or dinosaurs—in which I don’t. So that means that not only is she twelve, but she’ll probably win.

“How can you not believe in dinosaurs,” she said, when I presented my belief.

“Never seen one,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable.

“And have you ever seen a tick, “ I said, hoping to deflect the argument, and she professed that she had—one had been venturing across the inner landscape of Lorca’s ear. (Lorca being the toy Chihuahua…)

So we talked about that, and discussed proper tick-removal schemes: you can’t pull them out if they’re embedded. Then I asked what she had done with the tick.

“Flushed it down the toilet,” she said.

“A singularly uncreative thing to do with a perfectly good tick,” I said.

“Yeah? What would you have done with a tick?”

“In fact, there is a long history of inventive uses of ticks in my family,” I told her, since first it was true, and anyway, there was no Internet.

Eric walks into the café.

“There was my brother Eric, who was engaged to an genteel lady from Pittsburgh: her father was a cardiologist, her mother hung out with the Carnegies and the Mellons. So what happened when Eric found a tick on him, one weekend after having been out in the woods? Well, he went to the jewelry store, got a ring box, deposited the tick on the cotton, and then had them wrap it up. Then he left it on her desk at the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper where they both worked.”

The marriage ended in divorce.

Naïa, of course, doesn’t see that. Eric definitely picked the wrong girl….

“Then there was my father, who had also been out in the woods, and who had to interview the president of the Bank of Madison.”

Historical note—there was a time, Dear Reader, when banks had perfectly sensible names, before they began to call themselves MadBank, or whatever.

Jack walks into the café.

“Well, the president of the bank was young, and very pompous, and treating Mr. Newhouse with great formality, which generally tended to be wasted on Jack. So the prez left the room, which was a good thing, since Jack had begun to feel that really awful feeling: something strolling across his scalp. So there my father was, holding the tick in his hand. And then he heard footsteps.”

“So what did he do?’ asked Naïa.

“He must had had Mercury blossoming all over his astrological chart,” I told her, “since he knew immediately what to do. He leaned forward and dropped the black tick on a white piece of paper on the president’s desk.”

“Then what happened,” asked Naïa.

“Well, he waited for the situation to evolve. And then he saw the president start, and reach out to grab the paper. But Jack wasn’t having any of that!”

“So what did he do?”

“He leaned forward and said, ‘is that a TICK on your desk?’ So then the president got really nervous and said ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know!’ He should just have laughed, of course, but he got rattled. So Jack leaned farther forward and said, “well, any damn fool can see that that’s a TICK!” And now, Jack couldn’t help it, and began saying things like, ‘do you mean to tell me your bank has TICKS!’ and ‘have you ever had an infestation of TICKS before?!’ So of course the president got completely rattled.”

“So then what happened,” Naïa wants to know.

“Well, Jack finished the interview and went across the street to have a cup of coffee behind the front window of the diner. And guess what happened, twenty minutes later?”

“What?”

“Three trucks from Oliver Exterminating roared up in from of the bank. And the guys came out running, like HazMat guys going after a bomb!”

Naïa is completely unimpressed. Right, I realize it wasn’t much of a story.

Unless, of course, you had known Jack….

Family is funny, I thought. People come in and out, die, turn up unexpectedly, and go away again. And then, sometimes, people just turn up.

“Marc, I don’t know how to say this,” said Lady, Naïa’s mother.

This is rarely a good sentence to hear.

“You’re one of my closest friends,” she says simply.

“You’re my sister,” I say, without thinking. That’s when you know it’s true.

We kiss. Then I head off to the café.

Naïa has to have her rice and beans.

I come from good people (reposted)

This is a post from November 21, 2012. Went to the beach today and could not write, so I leave you with it. Hope you enjoy it.

There’s an old saying—a wise man knows his father, but no man knows his mother.

Is it true?

Can’t say. I’ve spent a lot of time on Franny, lately—in fact, I can claim I wrote the book on her. Did I get it right?

Highly sanitized, is Eric’s take, and he’s right of course. There are significant omissions, a couple of slants not explored, and one chapter—I now come clean—entirely made up. I needed something funny, so I imagined a silly conversation between Franny and me about John Cage’s 4’33” (of silence).

Here’s the scary thing—now it feels that it actually happened.

Well, Jack wouldn’t have approved. Like Eric, he would have written the story straight and got the facts right and spelled people’s names right (I flubbed on Franzmann) and made the deadline and done it all over again the next day.

Or would he?

‘Cause he got pretty wrapped up in some causes. The police chief—Weatherly—who got embroiled in some issue, had to resign, moved to Texas and became a drunk. His wife shot him, one day, and was tried and given parole. Came back to town only once, sat in the green sofa, talked.

Hard woman.

“You’re the only person I’m gonna see in this town,” she said to Jack on leaving.

He was a big guy, and big on fairness. He hated the bastards getting away with things. Made him crazy when good people got stepped on.

Which is why he pushed for the equal right housing amendment in the early 60’s. And never saw a contradiction with the State Journal’s strong Republican stance and its support of the amendment.

Couldn’t understand why the Cap Times was silent on the issue.

So by chance, Eric came across a Taliaferro, and I wrote about it. Sent it up to Hesselberg—an old colleague of Jack’s, and fine writer. He came back immediately with this—a letter written by Odell Taliaferro after Jack’s death.

NEWHOUSE FOUGHT FOR RACIAL EQUALITY

   Now is the time when friends are moved to extol the virtues of John Newhouse and to soft-pedal any shortcomings of which they are aware, but we assure you this is not the case with us. We have been singing the praises of John for about 40 years - and we are aware of no shortcomings.

    He wrote profusely of the modern dance abilities of our daughter, Joan Taliaferro Hartshorne and we feel that his news stories and pictures were very influential in enabling her to acquire a position with the Jose Limon Dance Troupe. We offer this fact, not as a virtue, but as an example of effective reporting (though, to us, it was a virtue).

    Once we moved into a segregated neighborhood (it was all white - until we arrived) and the prospective neighbors divided themselves into three groups:

    1. A small number gave a party to welcome us.

    2. A large group paid no attention.

    3. A small group threatened to burn our house down the first night!

    When John heard of this, he came in person to the neighborhood and we visited all the nearby houses. In a calm manner he explained, there was nothing to fear. We have lived there for 30 years - and no one has ever been treated better by their neighbors.

    John was a great man to have on your side.

Well, Jack was a good guy to have on your side. And when he wasn’t?

That same Norwegian-Lutheran backbone that led a black guy into a racist’s home and stared him down could get a little twisted—usually on sexual issues.

“I’m not voting for the Equal Rights Amendment (remember that!?) because it’s for homosexuals and ALL OF MY KIDS ARE NORMAL!”

Words converted to a slap.

In the end, he came around. Many people did. And many people made that change because of a phenomenon occurring in the plague years of the AIDS crisis.

The gay and lesbian choruses.

Virtually every major city had one. San Francisco, of course, had or has a famous one. Toured nationally, recorded. And once, did a heart-breaking rendition of the last act of Poulenc’s opera “Dialogs of the Carmelites.” The opera ends as the nuns, singing their prayers, are taken off to the guillotine, heard offstage. The sight of gay men, many of them HIV positive, reenacting the scene?

And I—not knowing whether the virus was flowing in my own blood?

Catharsis, in a way.

Yes, I will face it. Yes, it may come. Yes, I won’t back down.

Which is why I said to him, today, at the beach, “well, how did I do? Turn out OK? You proud of me?”

We plunged, the water was warm, and surprisingly clear for this time of year. Did the retrot back home. Then he reminded me of this….   

So Where Is Everybody?

So where is everybody?

That’s what a friend, José, wanted to know. He’s up on the news, he reads all the island’s newspapers every day; then he reads The New York Times for national and world news. Like me, he’s a news junkie; also like me, there are writers and journalists in his family.

And journalists, as I heard in exhausting detail—OK, I confess it. When the old man was lecturing on the importance of a free and objective press, I tuned him out, those many years ago. Look, does any 15-year old hang on his father’s lips?

Now, of course, it’s different. I see him, in my mind’s eye, listening on Tuesday nights to the City Council meetings, which were broadcast over the radio. Jack, my father, was probably the only guy who ever listened, but that was OK. If only one guy listens, but then goes and writes a blistering editorial in the newspaper the next day—well, the system works.    

There’s a real question, however, if the system works down here. The island is mesmerized by the capture of la viuda—the widow—who is in fact quite a merry widow. Here’s a pic….

Well, I confess it, I spent several hours of my life yesterday poking about and hanging with the widow as well. But today, la viuda is still splashing around on the front page of the New Day; I, however, am moving on.

“No, José, no. It can’t be….”

He swore it was. And then he told me the story.

In 1993, our governor, who was by the way a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, instituted a health plan. Essentially, he did away with the socialized health system and spent the money giving it to private insurers. The system continues to this day, said José, with 1.6 million patients.

“What,” I squawked at José, “are you telling me that half of the island is on the government’s health plan?”

Yes.

The island, for the purpose of the health plan, is divided into 8 regions, and various health providers are asked regularly to submit bids. Thus, it was no surprise when the new providers were announced last Thursday. What was the surprise?

For the first time, the entire island is going to be insured by one company—Triple-S.

Is that a big deal? Well, the doctors aren’t too happy. Here’s one:

“Tanto pacientes como médicos estamos a merced de esta organización, llámese como se llame. Le da un poder de casi $2,000 millones a una sola empresa, le da más que eso, le da una arrogancia sin límites. Va a disponer de pacientes, de clase médica, como le da la gana”, afirmó el doctor Eduardo Ibarra, presidente del Colegio de Médicos Cirujanos.

 (“Patients as well as doctors are at the mercy of this organization, call it what you will. It gives the power of almost 2 billion dollars to one enterprise, more than that, it gives unlimited arrogance. They can do whatever they want to patients and doctors,” stated Dr. Eduardo Ibarra, president of the College of Medical Surgeons.)

The politicians aren’t happy, either:

 “Preocupa grandemente que se conceda casi un monopolio de los servicios de Salud a Triple S. Sobre todo, se ha señalado constantemente que el secretario de Salud, Francisco Joglar Pesquera, ha tenido serios conflictos de intereses con dicha compañía y que esta contratación no abona a la confianza pública sobre dichos procesos de contratación”, afirmó el expresidente de la Comisión de Salud.

(“I worry greatly that this concedes almost a monopoly on the services of Health to Triple S. Above all, it’s been shown constantly that the secretary of health, Francisco Joglar Pesquera, has had serious conflicts of interest with this company and that this contract does not meet the public’s trust about the process of awarding contracts,” the former president of the Health Commission stated.)

Conflict of interest?

“What’s that all about?” I asked José.

Francisco Joglar Pesquera’s previous job?

Senior Vice President and Medical Director for Triple S.

“What?” I’ve gone beyond squawking, now I’m just squeaking.

“Yes,” said José.

I’m dumbfounded.

“This is blatant.”

“Don’t worry,” said José so seriously that I knew he was joking. “Joglar took himself out of the whole process. He recused himself, and gave it all to his sub-secretary. Then he went into his office, shut the door, closed his eyes and covered his ears. And when the sub-secretary knocked on the secretary’s door five minutes later, Joglar was just as surprised as the rest of us. So it was fair. See?”

Oddly enough, the essential health of the political system of the United States is that people are pissed off. We’re angry, frustrated, and—some of us—almost explosive. But that’s good—all that energy and foment can lead to change.

“Los pillos,” people say, with a shrug of the shoulders, a glance skyward.

The thieves.

Speaking of our elected officials as thieves is dangerous. It implies a cynicism, a consent to be stolen from, an apathy that nothing can change. And that means, of course, that nothing will change.

José was right….

Where is everybody?

Una Dama, Though Cynical

“Quizzical,” I thought, when I first saw Antonio Quiñones Calderón. There was something—perhaps an ever-so-slightly raised eyebrow—that suggested puzzlement. Or perhaps it was a newspaperman’s curiosity mixed with slight anxiety?

I have a minor talent—I put people at ease. He sat down and told me his story.

And what a remarkable story. Tony grew up in a small town on the west side of the island seven decades ago; his father died either before he was born or just afterwards (can’t recall). At any rate, he grew up early assuming responsibility.

As well as writing. So he wrote his way through high school, and then headed off to work—he had to help his mother and sister back home. And where does a writer who needs a job get one?

At El Mundo, now defunct but then a very serious, respected newspaper. And Tony—fresh out of high school, no money or time for college—started at the bottom. And he worked his way up, in traditional newspaper fashion, from writing obits to the police beat to covering municipal meetings, to finally get the big stuff.

“I remember the funeral of Muñoz Marín—I was covering it for El Mundo,” he said, “and yes, it was big….”

I’m picking his brains, first because the pickings are very good indeed, and second to get him to talk. What is he writing about now?

“A history of the corruption in Puerto Rico,” said Tony.

“Tony, that’s gonna be one long book,” I said.

We joke a bit—he has a wry, self-deprecating humor.

“And how is your health,” I asked—Tony is in his mid-seventies.

Well, I shouldn’t have worried: Tony has one impressive track record. He wakes up and writes, seven days a week. And he’s put together an impressive body of work: 50 Décadas de historia puertoriqueña, published in 1992; La perversión de la política; En los pasillos de poder: Testimonio íntimo de un Secretario de Prensa, 1998; Reflexiones de periodista; El Libro de Puerto Rico; the list goes on and on up until his most recent book, Carlos Romero Barceló: Una vida por la Igualidad. He has about as many books as you and I have fingers and toes.

Well, if anyone can write a book about ex-governor Romero Barceló, it would be Tony. Why? Because he was press secretary for two terms for him, and served in the same capacity for former Governor Luis A. Ferré.

He is unabashedly a statehooder, feeling—as Ferré did—that he preferred to be a state, but if the US said “no,” he’d be quite content to be independent. But colony is anathema to him.

And though a statehooder, he’s tough and fair-minded: he cuts the politicians who favor statehood no slack.

“You’re a cynical old newspaperman,” I told him, after he had pronounced our legislators “gangsters.”

“Old? Old? The rest I accept, but old?”

Relatively speaking, Tony may have a point: his mother is 92 and going strong.

Well, I know newspaper people, having grown up around them. And Tony reminds me very much of my own father: hardworking, critical but just, dig-until-you-hit-the-pay-dirt.

There’s something more about Tony. Beyond knowing more than almost anyone about the political history of Puerto Rico, he’s an expression of something wonderful about Puerto Rico. A self-made man, he sent his kids off to the States; two of them went to Yale. They’re now judges, lawyers, doctors.

We agreed about it a couple weeks ago. What keeps us on this island, with our horrendous crime, our gangster legislature, our continuing economic crisis? Why don’t we bail out and move to Florida; why not join the majority of Puerto Ricans who live off, not on, the island?

The people.

The people like Tony: gentle, kind, scrupulously honest, and gently self-ironic. He is egalitarian in a noble way, extending the same courtesy to all. My mother would have called him a “sweet man.”

But we have an expression, down here, probably very old, probably directly from Spain.

Él es una dama.

The Dead Finger Strikes Again

I have just spent three minutes and forty-nine seconds sobbing as hard as I did three years ago, when my mother had asked for—and I had given her—death.

How do I know the precise time? Because I looked down at the YouTube clip that I chose, or that had been chosen, as the vessel for my grief. The oboe had just finished its solo in the second movement of the New World Symphony.

Is it hokey, this music? I’m never sure, but it hits me, every time. And I needed to be hit, because I had just gotten the news: the Acres might be sold.

If you know the story, feel free to skip the next paragraphs. My father and mother, whom I called Jack and Franny, bought twenty acres of forest in Southwest Wisconsin, and decided in the 1960’s to erect—with their own hands—a small wooden house.

“I needed a place to live and die, so Jack built me a house,” was my mother’s matter-of-fact comment on that decision.

Well, Jack was certainly the Master Builder, with a reverential nod to another Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. That applied in the States; when Jack and Franny sailed their 27-foot Norwegian fishing boat through Europe, the captain then became Jack the Skipper.

But every story, especially in this family, has many sides. I was conscripted during the winter to sand floorboards from lumber scavenged from a decommissioned Air Force base. That summer we poured the foundation and put in the floor. During the following winter, I sanded the boards for the ceiling.

What emerged was a lovely house that absolutely everybody loved to come visit but no one in their right mind would want to buy. People, it seems, like house with bedrooms, if you can imagine such a thing. They define pulling out a bed from an uncomfortable sofa—which is what Jack did—or sleeping in a bunk in front of the picture window—which is what Franny did—as camping.

It was completely idiosyncratic, as unconventional as they were. The spice rack lived up at the ceiling, unless pulled down by a rope and a pulley. There were only two closets; the bathroom was small and became miniscule when Franny added the apartment.

My parents had a genius for friendships—the house saw many wonderful dinners, parties. Jack would be standing in the kitchen, aquavit in hand, beaming out at whomever it was who had come. He was about to start the Chinese cooking; all the ingredients were at hand, neatly chopped or sliced or measured out in little containers. It was an hour of preparation, five minutes of cooking, and a leisurely 40 minutes of the best Chinese food I expect to have in my life.

For forty years my mother lived in the house, and she chose to die there as well. Right—so we did that, emptied out the house after she died, closed the door and went away.

I have, in fact, made a small profession of saying good-bye to the place. I did it first three days after she died, that gorgeous May of 2010. I did it a year later, when we were going to put the house on the market, and needed to “showcase” it for the realtor.

Well, we either did a lousy job of it, or the above peculiarities of the house were off-putting—nobody wanted to buy it. So when the Morning Glories—those wonderful women who had cared for my mother in her last year—decided, with the Zanas, to hold a party at the house, I decided to go up to Wisconsin, and say goodbye, yet again.

It was not an easy trip; the weather was cold and rainy, the house seemed sad and unkempt, there were many ghosts.

Perhaps literally.

Bess and Tibor came out, bringing us food, wine, and excellent company. The talk turned metaphysical, and Bess related how she always associated her mother with deer. She was talking with her sister at the time, and then she rose, went to the window, peered and saw…

…not a single deer.

No, she saw fourteen.

“Yes, but have you tried that in Manhatt…”

That’s when the smoke detector went off.

Nobody was smoking; nobody was cooking. I took the damn thing—still shrieking—outside, where there was a strong wind.

Wouldn’t stop….

I was almost fearful, taking the battery out, that it would still keep going.

It didn’t, of course. Two days later, we had the party; I played the saddest and yet most regenerative music I knew. We bid our hosts good night, and began doing the wrap-up.

“Interesting night,” said Eric. “Wonder what Franny would have thought of it?”

The porch light went out.

“You ever put that battery in the smoke detector?” I asked Eric.

“Nah, and we’re not gonna.”

Seemed sensible.

And so the house has sat empty, or rather full of the memories, the love, the occasional spats, the tears and the kisses and mostly—how I miss it—the laughter of those forty years of life and death and grief and joy. And now someone—perhaps—has been chosen to live in it, and fill it up with their own life.

I know grief, as Franny did. You let it out, you wail, you feel better until you need to do it again. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

“But where will they live when they come back,” I sobbed.

Felt real as I sobbed it.

Right, get to work. Sat down in my chair, put on my earphones, clicked the arrow to start the Dvorak, howled for 3:49 minutes. Then I started the post:

I have just spent three minutes and forty-nine seconds sobbing as hard as I did three years ago, when my mother had asked for—and I had given her— death.

Then the computer went dead. No cursor. I could see everything, but there was no cursor, and the computer wouldn’t respond to keyboard commands or typing.

I did the only thing I could do—a forced shut down. As I did that, my iPad, which was charging through the computer, flicked on. I noted the time.

11:23

My mother was born on 11 /23 /1920.