Family

Porcupine Corpse a Prickly Issue

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

I tried to get them to stop. Really, I did. I pointed out the dead porcupine on the edge of the road—quite fresh, too, as far as one can judge these things driving by at 65 mph. It wasn’t the least bit squashed. Its bristling quills, highlighted by the late-afternoon sun, would have been a great temptation to any creator of traditional beadwork.

I thought my sister—the one who sews and quilts and knits and dyes and comes up with so many creative things—might have appreciated a chance to do something interesting with porcupine quills. We had plenty of room in the car; we could have tossed the critter (carefully) into the back and taken it right to her doorstep, which is where we were headed anyway.

Besides, you would think the two guys with whom I was traveling would have jumped at the chance to examine an intact road-killed porcupine. One is a scientist with an interest in natural history and the other one is a law-enforcement student whose career will probably encompass plenty of road accidents. Not to mention that both of them carry pocket knives and know how to field-dress game.

But no. They refused to stop.

I didn’t understand the full extent of the opportunity we missed until I saw the headline in our newspaper’s online edition a few days later: Man does C-section on dead porcupine, saves baby.

The story was from the Associated Press (and no, it didn’t appear on April Fool’s day). A man in Maine saw a porcupine get hit by a car. He had heard that some sort of mineral deposit valuable to Chinese medicine formed in the stomachs of porcupines, so he cut open the dead porcupine to look for it. What he found instead was—not surprisingly, given the time of year—a baby porcupine. He “cut the umbilical cord and thought the baby porcupine was dead until he started massaging it and it began breathing.”

If my traveling companions had only been willing to stop, that could have been us. We might have saved the life of an innocent unborn baby porcupine. Assuming I had been able to figure out the video function on my cell phone camera—which I’ve only used once and that was by accident—we could have even posted a video of the surgery online and become famous.

And we might have ended up with a cute little pet porcupine like this one. Just imagine having one of these critters in the house: climbing the piano, munching on the house plants, gnawing on the furniture, rubbing up against you, snuggling on your lap . . .

Wait a minute. What was the whole point of stopping to pick up the dead porcupine in the first place? That’s right. The quills. Those sharp, pointy, barbed things.

Never mind.

But I bet having a pet porcupine would teach the toddler grandkids a valuable lesson about not rubbing animals the wrong way.

Categories: Family, Travel, Wild Things | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Family Heirlooms

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

What makes something a family heirloom? Age? Value? Ownership? The fact that two or more family members stop speaking to each other because they have a big fight over it?

I hate to say it, but that last reason might be the most valid.

Merriam-Webster defines “heirloom” as “something of special value handed on from one generation to another.” It doesn’t, however, try to define “special value.”

That’s wise of Merriam-Webster, because the value of an heirloom doesn’t necessarily have much to do with how much cash you could get if you sold it on EBay or Craig’s List or at a local antiques shop. The real “special value” that transforms something into an heirloom is the stories around it.

I remember years ago visiting the Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City. In one room was a collection of beautiful old pianos. One of them had traveled from England, first by sea and then from St. Louis by wagon. Its owner was a widow with six or seven children, the youngest of whom, if I remember correctly, didn’t survive the voyage.

Another instrument, a square grand piano that would need a sizeable parlor to house it, had an even more interesting history. The wagon train it traveled with apparently started somewhat late in the year and needed to speed up the last part of their journey in order to get across the mountains before snow came. They dug a pit, wrapped the piano in hides (beaver, I think), buried it for the winter, and went back to retrieve it the following year. Since it was in immaculate condition more than a century later, it apparently survived its temporary entombment perfectly well.

I enjoyed seeing the pianos and reading their stories, but it was also a little sad to see them sitting in a museum, unplayed and labeled with “do not touch” sign. These were family heirlooms that were no longer in their families.

One of the heirlooms in my family is a parlor organ. Its history isn’t quite so dramatic as that of the continent-crossing pianos, but it did make its own journey across the prairies by wagon. The trip, from the southeastern corner of South Dakota to the family homestead in the south-central part of the state, took three rainy weeks in the spring of 1905 and included crossing the Missouri River by ferry.

I remember my grandmother playing that organ, which she did by ear because she didn’t read music. My sisters and I—with the benefit of enough piano lessons to make us dangerous—used to play on it, too. We would pull out the various stops to see what differences they made in the sound and pump the pedals until our legs got tired. The collection of old music books and sheet music in the library table was where I discovered a whole new set of verses to “My Darling Clementine.” My favorite, and the only one I still remember, was: “How I missed her, how I missed her, how I missed my Clementine; Till I kissed her little sister, then forgot my Clementine.”

One of my sisters still has the organ. The next time we visit, I might have to introduce my youngest grandchild to it. At age 15 months, he likes music, and I imagine he would have great fun pulling out all the stops. And if we paired him with his slightly older cousin, they could take turns on the pedals.

It would add one more generation of stories to this particular family heirloom. They might even get into a big fight over it. And maybe they would eventually learn to play “My Darling Clementine.”

Categories: Family, Remembering When | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Grandmas With Guns

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

It was the lead story in the Rapid City Journal’s Outdoors section this week. There was a photo of two smiling hunters with a mountain lion, which wasn’t smiling, probably because it was dead. The headline under the picture? “Grandmother bags a mountain lion.”

As if that weren’t enough, the teaser headline at the top of the paper’s front page read: “Grandma, 75, Shoots Mountain Lion.”

Why is it that every time a woman older than, say, 50, does something mildly adventurous, unusual, physically challenging, or illegal, the first and sometimes only word journalists use to describe her is “grandmother”? She might be a business owner, a barrel racer, a cancer survivor, or an artist. She might do all sorts of interesting things.

It doesn’t matter. If she’s over a certain age, and she has kids who have kids, reporters grab that “grandmother” label, slap it across her forehead, and think they’ve summed her up.

Maybe she shot a mountain lion. Or drives a semi. Or runs marathons. Or has a seat in the Senate. Or wrote a sexy book called Sixty Shades of Scarlet. Or makes meth in her basement, for that matter. The tone of the news story is, “Oh look! See what this sweet little grandma did! Isn’t that cute?”

If a man with kids who have kids does something newsworthy, he’s almost always described as a mechanic, a lawyer, a rancher, a professor, or whatever his work happens to be. Once in a while, admittedly, in a spasm of equal-opportunity condescension, he’s labeled a “grandfather.” But by and large, it seems to be assumed that a grandfather has a life beyond the facts of his age and his grandkids.

But once that first grandchild shows up, grandmothers seem to be expected to lose all other parts of their identities and retire into a one-dimensional state of grandma-hood. Presumably they are allowed to knit and bake cookies. But committing acts of adventure, or career achievement, or actually having a life apart from grandkids, is just so not grandmotherly.

I have a herd of grandkids. I love them all, from the ones who are barely walking to the ones with baritone voices who are taller than me. While I have taken some of them hiking, I’ve never knit anything for them. (Well, apart from one half-finished baby blanket. If the kid it was started for is lucky, I might get it done in time for his own first baby.) And if they want cookies, they’ll have to bake their own.

Maybe, if they really love me, they might even bring me some.

Categories: Family | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

“Nobody But a Logger Stirs His Coffee With His Thumb”

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

Rocking a baby to sleep is one of life’s lovely little pleasures. Well, at least that’s true as long as said baby, not particularly interested in going to sleep, isn’t screaming its darling little head off.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the case the other morning with my one-year-old granddaughter. She was just a bit reluctant to settle down for her nap, so I sat down in the rocker and sang to her. For whatever reason, when I sing to little ones they seem to slip right into dreamland. Given my singing voice, my theory is that they do it in sheer self-defense. Never mind; if it works, it works.

In this case, it only took two times through “The Frozen Logger,” before she was sound asleep. I just sat for a little while, soaking in the pleasure of holding her and watching her beautiful little face as she slept.

During this meditative interlude, the song kept going around and around in my mind. “The Frozen Logger,” is a folk song by James Stevens that I learned from a recording by The Weavers. It has several qualities that make it a good lullaby. It’s a fun little story song, set to a waltz, so the words are easy to remember. It doesn’t have any inconvenient low notes or annoying high notes. And, most important, it has a lot of verses and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.

The longer I sat, though, the more I started to wonder about the song. Chiefly, whether it was really an appropriate one for a conscientious grandma to use as a lullaby. After all, it’s about a guy so tough he “stirs his coffee with his thumb.” Not only that, “if you’d pour whiskey on it, he would eat a bale of hay.”

Then I remembered how that classic lullaby, “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” ends. “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.” Given the potential trauma to an infant psyche from this happy thought, I decided not to worry about mere bare-digit coffee stirring.

Then I got distracted by another thought. Suppose you have a cup of steaming hot coffee, fresh from the pot. Or you’ve just poured boiling water over a tea bag. There’s no way you would stick your thumb in that cup.

Yet some people have no problem whatsoever in drinking coffee while it’s still steaming. Or in sipping tea that’s been cooled from the boiling point by only a tiny splash of milk.

I’m one of those people. This is why I rarely order coffee in restaurants. It isn’t hot enough. So I gulp it quickly before it cools, and then the waitress comes by and fills it up again, and I have to drink that while it’s hot. And before I’ve finished my omelet I’ve had six cups, and I’m so full of caffeine that my hands shake for the rest of the morning, and if I tried to send a text, LOL would probably come out KIK.

What’s the explanation for that? Are our tongues—sensitive organs so capable of detecting subtle tastes that they can tell the difference between two brands of chocolate—really that tough? More to the point, are they really that much tougher than our thumbs? After all, thumbs, besides being one of the things making us human, are calloused, hard-working digits.

Maybe—to save others the trouble of pointing it out—I should just admit the most likely truth. Apparently, some of us exercise our tongues more than we do our thumbs.

Categories: Family, Food and Drink | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

Fertilizing the Family Tree

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

When my younger stepdaughter and my daughter were both in third grade, they had a class assignment to draw family trees. My stepdaughter’s tree was a small one, including only her mother, her father, her sister, and her brother. My daughter’s tree was more like a fat Christmas spruce with an over-abundance of ornaments. She included her father, me, her brother, her stepdad, her stepsisters and stepbrother, their stepbrothers and stepsister on their mother’s side, our cat, and her stepsister’s stepdad’s dog.

Deciding who is entitled to perch on a branch of your family tree isn’t always a simple thing. In our family, now that those earnest third-graders and their siblings are adults with kids of their own, it hasn’t become any simpler. We just keep adding inlaws, grandkids, cousins, and significant others. (Does anybody have “insignificant others,” do you suppose? I hope not.) Enough of these extended family members are step-whomevers so that most of the time it’s easier to drop the “step” part and just think of them as what they are: family.

And it doesn’t stop there. My partner’s mother, for instance, who died recently at age 96, had only a small family of her own. But in the last years of her life, the definition of “family” in her life changed. A woman who originally helped her with house cleaning and errands, then took on more and more care of her as her health declined, eventually became a close and loving adopted daughter. She didn’t come alone, either. She brought her children and grandchildren, and all of them blessed a rather solitary woman’s house and life with people, activity, and lots of love. If that doesn’t qualify as “family,” I don’t know what does. Branches are branches, even when they have been grafted onto the family tree.

All those branches, of course, have to be supported by roots. To some extent, we define our families by where we came from. In my case, one grandmother immigrated from Germany and the other’s parents were both born in Norway. My grandfathers, whose ancestors came to this country much earlier, aren’t quite as easy to categorize.

But we’re about to find out more. We’re participating in the National Geographic Genographic Project. By testing DNA samples, it can tell us more about where our ancestors came from, where in the world they went across the generations, and what racial mix we are. It can even reveal whether we have Neanderthal ancestry. Who wouldn’t want to know that?

It will take a while to get the results, but there’s one thing I already know. This knowledge is going to expand the roots that support our family trees. A good thing, too. At the rate we keep adding branches, we need the broadest root system we can find. Neanderthals and all.

Categories: Family | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments

A Little Too Close and Personal

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Kathleen Fox

When I was a kid, going to the circus was a big deal. In Winner, South Dakota, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the circus wasn’t held in a “big top.” It was in the open air at the baseball field. Since the field was lighted, it was a perfect venue for an outdoor circus, especially at night.

I remember being awed by the elephants striding across the ground with ponderous dignity, carrying beautiful women in splendid clothes. I remember watching the aerialists out over the field, high above our heads. Their costumes glittered in the lights as they swung from trapezes, twisting and twirling and flinging themselves through the air. It was breathtaking. It was beautiful. It was magical.

Then one year, when I was probably ten or eleven, for some reason the circus was held indoors. I remember walking into the Winner city auditorium with my sisters, scurrying through the crowd, almost overwhelmed by the people and the noise, and finally finding room to squeeze into one of the upper rows of the packed bleachers.

In this makeshift space, even our upper bleacher seats were like being in the front row. The elephants were only a few feet away. The aerial acts were almost at eye level. Instead of seeing the performers as remote creatures, way up in the air in the spotlights, we were up close and personal.

And I was shocked.

The elephants were still dignified. But their skin looked worn and rough, their headdresses were a little dingy, and, to put it bluntly, they smelled really awful.

The aerialists were no longer the beautiful, fairy-like flying creatures I expected. They were dreadfully ordinary, even plain. The flowing golden hair on some of the women was clearly dyed. Some of them even looked old—maybe as ancient as 40 or so. Their glamorous costumes, seen that close, didn’t look much different from swim suits. Some of them had obviously been mended. The sequins lost much of their sparkle in the everyday indoor lighting.

Even worse, I started to recognize performers from one act to the next. It was disconcerting to realize that “Madame Yvette” with her dancing poodles was the very same woman I had just seen swinging from a trapeze as part of the “Flying Santorinis.”

Without the lights and the distance, the illusion that helped make the acts so marvelous was destroyed. The reality was such a disappointment that I lost much of my childhood enthusiasm for the circus. I had seen too much of it, too close. The magic was gone.

I’ve been to a few circuses since then. I’ve enjoyed them. But I’ve never recaptured my early awe and wonder. I know too much about the reality behind the illusion.

I clearly remember the last time I went to a circus. Unbelievably, it was 25 years ago. It was the first time I met my soon-to-be stepchildren. Believe me, there were plenty of illusions involved on that occasion.

Thank goodness that, over the years, we’ve grown to know each other well enough to get past most of those illusions. It hasn’t always been an easy process. But the closer we have become, the more we have learned to value reality.

Just think about the distance it takes to maintain our illusions about other people. A couple you know slightly might seem to have a perfect marriage. Unless you get close, you have know way to know what really goes on between them. I used to see other stepfamilies who seemed to be doing everything right. As I got to know them better, I realized most of them had the same struggles and challenges that we did.

This week we enjoyed a performance of “Hairspray” by a local theatre group. The singers and dancers were graceful, energetic, and polished. Whether they were veterans or this was their first time on stage, they all looked confident and comfortable. It wasn’t until after the show, when dozens of cast members surged into the theatre lobby on a wave of adrenaline, that we could feel the nervous energy they must have been feeling. From the audience, we weren’t aware of the sweaty palms and the shaking knees.

There’s a time and place for illusion, and I greatly appreciate the many performers who put so much discipline and practice into creating illusions that we can enjoy. But I have come to appreciate even more the reality behind those illusions. Whether it’s a show, a job, or a family, the most incredible performances are the ones given by people who show up, day after day, and do what they do.

Who have the courage, the grace, and the heart to do what needs to be done—and even to make it look easy. To get up close and personal. To live with reality—even when some of its sequins are missing.

Because reality, I now know, is where the real magic happens.

Categories: Family, Living Consciously, Remembering When | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

Little People at the Holiday Table

Posted on December 27, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

Sitting around the breakfast table on Christmas morning over our traditional homemade cinnamon rolls, scrambled eggs, and bacon, I had an epiphany. (Is it permissible to have an epiphany on Christmas Day, or does it have to wait until January 6? Maybe it’s okay as long as it’s an epiphany with a small “e.”)

Anyway, it happened about the time I was eating my fourth (or fifth or thirteenth—but who’s counting?) piece of bacon and watching the three newest participants in this particular tradition. The two-and-a-half-year-old, having rejected the unabridged dictionary as a booster seat, was on his knees in a chair of his own. The two littler ones, just past one and not quite one, were on their mother’s laps. They intercepted bites of egg with surprising tidiness and did their best to get a full share of the bacon. They seemed enthusiastic about the cinnamon rolls, too—though I did have some suspicions about my daughter’s request for a third one “because the baby ate all of the last one.”

And that’s when I had the small-e epiphany. “Oh my gosh. We’re going to need a kids’ table.”

One of the biggest blessings in my life right now is having two of my kids and their growing families living right here in Rapid City. And that means, one of these years, at family gatherings we will need an extra table for short people. A place where they can skip their green beans without anyone noticing, decorate their fingertips with black olives, and giggle a lot over conversations not meant for adult ears.

Just to be clear, in my experience the point of having a kids’ table isn’t to segregate squirmy small people with rudimentary table manners away from the good china and crystal. It’s more about squeezing people into the available space. At family gatherings when I was growing up, the kids were put at the kitchen table and card table because the dining room table, even expanded with all its leaves, would only hold 12 or 14.

It was usually fun at the kids’ table, of course. And sometimes educational. I remember one discussion about whether some red stuff in a little bowl was jelly or Jell-O. No one wanted to be the first to taste it. When someone finally got brave and tried half a spoonful, we still weren’t sure. (All these years later, I assume it must have been cranberry sauce.)

Still, I always felt I was missing out by not being at the adult table, because so many family members were and are such great storytellers. I loved hearing their stories, and every time I heard a burst of laughter from the dining room I assumed I had just missed one.

So at our house, when we do need a kids’ table, I hope we have room to put it at just the right distance from the adults’ table. It’s a delicate balance. They need to be far enough away so we can pretend we don’t hear or see what they’re doing. Yet I’d like them close enough so, if they want to, they can easily eavesdrop on our conversations. It’s just one more way of passing along the family stories. Especially, perhaps, the ones we don’t necessarily intend them to hear.

Categories: Family, Food and Drink, Living Consciously, Remembering When | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

“Smile!”

Posted on November 8, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

We went to a big, wild party this week. The food was wonderful. The music, I’m afraid, was only mediocre. After overindulging in a certain white substance, a few of the guests got rowdy. There were some brief arguments, but no actual fights broke out. At least the neighbors didn’t call the cops about the noise, which did get a little high at times both inside and outside the house. And one guest missed the whole thing because he was passed out in the bedroom.

Maybe the reason the party didn’t get completely out of hand is that most of the guests were heading home by 8:00—bedtime for some of them. But really, it was a most enjoyable evening. The music was a family rendition of “Happy Birthday.” The substance that encouraged the guests to get silly was sugar in the form of frosted cupcakes. The short-lived arguments were over toys. The inside noise was mostly little kids shouting, laughing, and shrieking. The outside noise came from one of the resident dogs out on the deck who was unhappy about missing the fun. Or maybe she was just unhappy about missing all those cake crumbs on the floor. And the passed-out guest was a toddler who had missed his nap and went soundly to sleep in his car seat on the way to the party.

The guest of honor at this shindig was celebrating her first birthday. She opened her gifts with enthusiasm, much of it focused on the wrapping paper. She dug into her birthday cupcake with both hands and managed to get more of it into her mouth than on her clothes. And she was even gracious enough to interrupt her eating long enough to bestow lovely smiles, enhanced with pink frosting, on her adoring family members armed with cameras (the grandpaparazzi, you might say).

What is it with babies and cameras? At the ripe old age of one, the birthday girl at this party is a seasoned veteran at posing and smiling. But even at a few months old, most babies have learned to stop and smile (if they happen to feel like it, anyway) whenever a parent or grandparent aims a lens in their direction.

I discovered this years ago with my first child. Once, when he was perhaps six months old, I said something to an acquaintance about the way he responded to a camera. “Oh, yes,” she said, “My little poodles do the same thing. Just point a camera at them and they sit right up and pay attention.”

Trying to bring the conversation back to the human species, particularly the especially bright and precocious representative of it that just happened to be my son, I said, “But babies really seem to know when they’re going to get their pictures taken.”

“Oh, they do,” she answered. “You’d almost think they were human.”

Categories: Family | Tags: | 3 Comments

Black and White and Plaid All Over

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

ReunionMatchDresses-smThe photograph is black and white, but the dresses were green and white plaid. My mother had sewed them for us, all alike, their short sleeves and full skirts decorated with rickrack. All five of us wore them to the annual family reunion picnic.

The little girls in the photo aren’t quite as identical as the dresses. My sister and my two cousins, all aged four going on five, are smiling prettily, sitting in graceful poses with their skirts spread around them in neat circles. My younger cousin, not yet a year old, is willing to sit still and have her picture taken but looks a little confused.

Then there’s me, aged just two. I’m sitting in the back row with my skirt spread out over my chubby legs that stick straight out in front of me. I’m smiling, sort of, because I’m sure someone told me to smile, but I’m not looking at the camera.

I’m looking at one of the two older girls in the picture, who are second cousins to the rest of us, and I’m not happy.

Not because I didn’t like them; at that stage in my young life, I didn’t even know them. But I knew one thing for sure—they did not belong in this picture. They didn’t have green and white plaid dresses. They were wearing shorts and blouses. They didn’t match.

The whole point of the photograph, as I understood it then (and still do, now that I think about it), was to preserve an image of the five of us in our matching dresses. Our mothers had sat us down on the grass and arranged our skirts just so in order to show them to best advantage. Then, after all the fussing and preparation, before the picture was actually taken, somebody invited the other two girls to join us.

I clearly remember my feeling of indignation. Including them when they didn’t match simply was not right. It missed the whole point of taking the picture. I didn’t object or cry or make a fuss about it. Even if I had, I don’t suppose anyone would have realized just what I was objecting to. I just sat there, smiling dutifully through my scowl, knowing full well that the grownups weren’t doing this the way it should have been done.

It would seem that an option would have been to take one picture of the five of us and another of the seven of us. But this was in 1953, when developing a roll of pictures was expensive for struggling young families. So we all sat in our identical dresses; the interlopers sat in their nonconformity; the mother with the camera pointed and shot; and that was that.

But this isn’t the whole story when it comes to those matching dresses. At some time during this same reunion, apparently I eluded my parents, wandered off, and ended up in the middle of somebody else’s family picnic. Maybe I was still mad about the picture. But it’s far more likely that I just followed some older kids or was merely meandering. In any case, someone from the other group brought me back safe and sound, knowing exactly where I belonged because of the dress I was wearing.

You would think, to a two-year-old, an experience like this would have been memorable, even frightening. It certainly was for my parents. But I don’t remember it at all. Maybe getting lost wasn’t all that scary. Or else one group of grownup legs around some picnic tables looks a lot like another, and I had no idea I was lost. Whatever the reason, the only big deal for me that day was having our picture taken with the matching dresses.

All these years later, it’s useful to remember this story as I hang out with some of my youngest grandkids. Most of the time I have no idea what they might remember or what they are thinking. It is clear, though, that they have some very decided opinions. It’s probably wise to have a little respect for those opinions.

After all, someday they just might put stories about their early memories all over the Internet. I just hope they aren’t the type to hold grudges.

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“Where Have You Been All My Life?”

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

There’s just something about younger men.

When I was visiting my stepdaughter recently, a friend of hers stopped by with her little boy. To protect his identity—and also because I can’t remember his name—I’ll just call him Tyler. He was about three, with dark curls and big brown eyes. And cute. Had he been a puppy at the pound, he would have been the first one to be adopted.

Tyler was sitting with his mother on the couch when I came into the room. I asked him, “Is it okay if I sit by you?”

He looked up at me with a big smile and said, “Oh, yes!”

It was the delighted response you’d expect from the nerdiest guy in the singles’ bar if the most beautiful woman in the place asked if she could join him. It made my day.

And I didn’t even have to offer to buy him a drink.

Categories: Family | 1 Comment

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