Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Excelsior!

December 31, 2010 by elainehaley

I sit with a blank page on my laptop watching my reflection in the large black monitor on my son in law’s desk. The picture I see looks like a ghost of either Christmas past or Christmas future, perhaps both. It seems a line has been drawn across my life this year with bittersweet endings on one side and uncertain beginnings on the other…

The long and arduous relationship with my mother in law appears to be coming to an end as she lies in a hospital in Roanoke gravely ill. I have never been able to feign any words of endearment toward her, although I recognize that she has accidently taught me many lessons. It still makes my stomach churn to think of her lying there alone, even though it is doubtful that she is aware of much around her. I cannot count the times I have wished her out of my life, but now I find there is no triumph for me in her passing. I believe that in this I have followed my children’s example of forgiveness and acceptance. My husband’s mother passed before he and I married and my mother lived far away and died when they were young. So with all her faults she has been the only grandmother that has had a relationship with them.

My mother would have been proud of my daughter for taking on the duties of Christmas this year. Although my children do not remember much about my my mother, the ceaseless work and attention to detail Eva showed preparing a wonderful meal for friends and family reminded me so much of her. In contrast, I did not so much as put up a tree this year. I admit that the passing of the reins is not without some trepidation. After so many decades of sitting in the driver’s seat it was strange hearing the words I used to tell everyone else directed at me. “Just sit back and relax”. I have no practice at this indolence and I find it bewildering, like being a child told to stay out from underfoot.

I empathize with my newly mobile grandson who clammers at the baby gate, wishing to be in the thick of things. Looking at him I know I should not waste a second bemoaning times past. Both of us just need to acquire the necessary tools and understanding to function in this new order. It’s nice to have so much in common with him actually, although I doubt he would see it that way. I am bursting with optimism about the future and it is obvious he feels the same. He is unaware of how much I am learning from him about persistence and ignoring barriers.

My favorite inspirational phrase this year is on a card at my work desk, “Life rewards those who let their actions rise above their excuses”. This quote is reportedly by Lee Colan, an organizational guru, and it was passed to me in an email from my director. The same email also quoted Jedi Master Yoda “Do or do not, there is no try”. I am ashamed to admit that although I have read an reread them, I have not taken the words to heart like I should. Instead of doing, I have been trying. As I have watched my grandson Logan progress from being stuck where ever he was placed by an adult to a fearless independent locomotion I recognize his total grasp and application of the attitude I am striving to learn. The fact that he would walk straight off the edge of a cliff with his newfound skills is not lost on me and neither is the inordinately strong and ultimately ineffectual will to live exhibited by my step mother in law. I however have no excuses not to succeed at anything I want. I have the common sense not to walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon and jump, but the health and fortitude to strap on a parachute and leap out of an airplane. I’m not saying skydiving is in my immediate future but perhaps something equivalent, only slightly less terrifying. I’ve never quite overcome my fear of heights you see, but like the young Jedi I am not trying. Let me just say welcome to the fresh new year and give you one more homily, this one from tinybuddah.com.

“Death is more universal than life. Everyone dies but not everyone lives.” ~Alan Sachs

Posted in Death and renewal, Holidays, Mother in Laws | 1 Comment »

Sunrise in Seattle A Memory from 2005

November 20, 2010 by elainehaley

Always the mountain sits and waits, at times only the faintest memory of mountain, sketched in mist and clouds, floating like a magic city above the landscape, but always there, like faith or love, even when unseen.

I wake to the SOS sound of the vertical blinds in the apartment, blown by the fans breeze through the open patio door. Since I am cool, and it is July, I realize I have left Virginia far behind. A half moon shines redundantly in the half moon window above me. I rise and turn off the fan and step onto the balcony and into the early dawn of Seattle. I can’t quite see Rainier yet, but a ghostly outline tells me it is still where we left it at sundown last night. A long line of black mountains extends across the horizon, with a hint of gold promising the return of the sun is imminent. I close the door against the chill and dark and crawl back into my bed. It seems a time for sleeping, but I am unsuccessful in my attempt to doze again. My mind is filled with the impressions of last evening, a beautiful restaurant patio, the cool breeze, fabulous flowers, and the crisp, grapefruit scented wine we enjoyed on my arrival. Even the bus ride had seemed exotic, a quiet, clean, electric trip through a neighborhood of wedding cake houses, interspersed with terra cotta adobe and grey cement apartments, ornamented with plants, sculpture, and flowing wrought iron. I give up on sleep and attempt to make coffee, a Seattle religious ritual, but find myself puzzled by the electric grinder and the location of the brewing device. I dress and step back out to the balcony where I enjoy the promise of the new day, watching as the mountain reappears, splashed with spots of gold and pink across it snowy face. Some lights blink on in the hillside windows of other early risers, and dawn slides down to Lake Washington, bringing its scattered sailboats to life. The seagulls have turned out for breakfast and sing their discordant squawks, complaining about their empty bellies. Jets soar high above, carrying sleepy people to distant, unknown destinies, reminding me that my time here is limited.

When I last visited the west coast, real life had seemed so far away, but now, with family sleeping cozy downstairs, I understand how this comfortable place can be home for them. I am content as I anticipate their awakening, knowing that love abides, solid as the mountain, seen or unseen

Posted in My Children | Leave a Comment »

Phobia

November 6, 2010 by elainehaley

The bridge grew like a leviathan as we approached from the south, it’s exposed metal girders suspended impossibly high off the ground. In the back seat I become silent as my brother and sister chatter about our trip north. My skin feels clammy, my stomach twisted as if the bridge has reached its awful steel-gray hands into my gut. My brother, suddenly realizing I am too quiet, seizes the opportunity.

“You know the road ends up there.” He points forward and I look with rising terror at the arch of the highway ahead. My five year old eyes cannot fill in the space outside the lines. I believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy because they give me gifts. I wonder why I go to God’s house every Sunday, but he never seems to be there. I imagine him as a man in pith helmet, machete in hand, cutting through the African jungle in search of lost sheep.  I believe in the picture I see ahead, where clearly, the road is simply not there.

My thirteen year old brother, encouraged by my fear, continues, “When we get to the top the car is gonna just sail off the end.” My fists clutch the edge of the fold down arm rest that divides the space in the back seat. I am allowed to sit there because I am the smallest. My siblings both fume at my privileged position. I look for help from the front seat, but my parents seem engaged in serious conversation. I waver slightly on our imminent death by drowning, but I know for a certainty the consequences of interrupting them. I look back at the road way. I review the few years of my life I can remember, the sandbox in my back yard under the willow tree I love, the church, the grocery store, my grandmother. It blurs into a impressionist montage as the mouth of the monster approaches. Seconds now until our death, but my brother continues to badger.

“Just a little further and it stops,” he taunts as we draw ever closer to the crest. I hold my breath for the plunge, eyes riveted to the asphalt. Very soon in real time I become aware that the ribbon of highway in front of me stretches flat and straight as an arrow across the Indiana bottom land, as far as I can see. I know I have been duped, and I tell him so with my eyes. My confused and angry glare elicits a quick, “Wrong bridge,” and a belly laugh from he and my sister. “It’s the next one, honest” he swears, hand in the air. The scene fades to a gray humiliation.

Ten years later, Sunday afternoon on a back country road, my mother sits beside me in the family station wagon. I am the apprentice driver, my hands positioned on the steering wheel like they showed me in the driver’s manual at 10 and 2, as if the wheel were a clock. Her fists are digging into the seat in a manner reminiscent of my five year old fingers long ago. A pale shadow of the giant bridge of my childhood looms ahead of us. Both of us look at the pancake flat road as if the ground were going to open and swallow us whole. “Move over to the center line,” she intones, trying to keep the rising panic out of her voice. Responding to the fear I turn the wheel slightly left, slow to a snail’s pace and straddle the double yellow lines. We roll down the center of the three car length structure like a parade float, our four eyes fixed directly and unblinking forward. Finally on the other side, we both remember to breath.

At age twenty I drove across the Verranzano Narrows connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island with a steady hand and a joyful heart. At twenty two I crossed the Golden Gate to visit friends at Stanford, delighted at the beauty of the perfect bay around me. Large or small, from coast to coast I cruised over them with a trust in technology stronger than any fear I could conjure in my head. One night, not long before my second marriage, I woke from a fitful sleep in a cold terror. A nightmare of a bridge loomed ahead of me and my car was moving too fast for me to control, especially from the back seat where I found myself sitting. Reaching desperately for the wheel, knowing it was too late to stop, I sailed off the end, just like my brother predicted. It was the bridge he told me about, the one my mother tried to prepare me to cross. Since that night the dream has come back to me many times in many forms, all my fears tucked neatly in one basket.

Perhaps in my rush out the door of childhood I was moving faster than the speed of fear. Now here in my dotage I have time to reflect on how high those bridges were and how deep the water lay below them. I do not pretend to understand the psychology of irrational anxiety. I only know I miss the audacious, reckless, sometimes outright foolhardy girl who lived on faith and velocity. I think I might still have enough courage left to conjure her again, slightly shopworn perhaps, but stronger for the journey.

Posted in Angst, anger, anarchy | 3 Comments »

MY GRANDMOTHER”S IRON BED

November 7, 2006 by elainehaley

The man’s name was Hardin Porter and he was suppose to be a cousin to my Dad’s mother, but I have searched the family tree and have yet to shake out a Porter from its branches. I know he existed, because I have an article about him rafting logs down the Rough River in Grayson County, a dangerous and highly skilled job. The article mentions his sons, Harvey and Mike, who remembered their Dad careening downstream at the rear of a 200-foot log raft, yelling orders to the oarsmen: A lick to the left! Two licks to the right! Half a lick to the left. It was a tough and rowdy bunch, and I think I might hesitate in suggesting any kinship to them if they were alive today, but times were different in Kentucky at the turn of the century. The newspaper article I have came from the Courier-Journal about 24 years ago, and Hardin’s son Mike was 78, his father long dead. It was a great story that told about a way of life wilder and more grueling than I can imagine.

In between times of rolling logs down the river, Hardin was a farmer and raised cattle. I do not know if it was a common occurrence, but the facts passed down to me were that on at least one occasion he took a trip to Louisville on the train to sell a load of livestock. He returned without mentioned anything of his adventures to his family, but when a train car full of furniture arrived for him the next month, his sons questioned their Dad about the extraordinary event. He had to admit that he had gotten drunk in the big city and did vaguely recall buying the things. Having no storage for the items, he was forced to sell them off at a discount to family and friends. My Grandmother bought a beautiful iron bed for the princely sum of two dollars cash, or perhaps $1.50, depending on whether my sister or I have the better memory.

I don’t know what color it was in the beginning, but I recall it in my grandmother’s house painted a ghastly shade of dark brown. Perhaps because of the cheap price, they did not value the massive thing, and were trying to make it look like wood. As all members of the family can attest, it is a solid piece of furniture, possibly indestructible, so I imagine all of its friends from the freight car are still around the country somewhere, unless they were melted down during the war to make tanks. My sister was in possession of it after my grandmother died, but she graciously passed it on to me when Eva was born. It came over the Appalachian Mountains to Virginia in a u-haul trailer with other assorted pieces, to furnish her then empty room in our first suburban home. The trip was memorable because it’s when my husband and I confirmed some fundamental things about our children and Pontiac products. Two facts were crystal clear as we pulled into a mountain gas station at 3 in the morning, with steam pouring out from under the hood, and hysterically tired children in the back seat. Since it was our fifth, or perhaps sixth stop to fill up the radiator, we were quite sure that our babies really, really, did not sleep in cars, and the cooling systems of Pontiac station wagons are really, really, not designed for hauling trailers.

There was a lot of cursing and grumbling as we hauled the heavy frame up the stairs late the next day, but I have a feeling the bed has heard it all over the years. It looked innocent enough, decked out with a coat of white paint and adorned with an antique quilt made by a great, great, aunt. You would never know by looking that it had lived such an exciting life. In many ghost stories, pieces of furniture hold memories from long ago, and I like to think that some part of my grandparent’s energy is somehow tied to the bed. I remember sleeping in it when I stayed overnight at Mamaws house when I was a child, bundled under homemade quilts on a feather mattress. Eva was never really fond of the bed, because it provided no soft, cozy, resting spot for her back. I also fussed with her often about the two tiny brass balls that were screwed onto the ironwork as finials. Evidently the desire to unscrew them was unbearable, and I would have to crawl around under the bed to search for them frequently. Because it is one of the few physical links I have to fond memories of my grandmother, plus the fact that the grandfather I never met slept in this very bed, it will continue to be a part of my family as long as I live.

So I am grateful to Hardin Porter, a man I never met, but have tried to imagine from the first time I learned about the bed as a child. His story was a bit risque when I was young, what with the drinking and all, but as I have grown older, I view it in a different light. I doubt that Hardin traveled as far in his lifetime as the bed has, and I picture him in the unaccustomed bright lights of Louisville, tempted to check out one of the establishments where you could actually go in and order a drink from the bar. I like to think he stayed in a hotel, had a bath in a big claw foot tub, and dressed in his cleanest duds to go out and do the town with his cattle money. If he had been a hard drinking man, he would have been more cautious, but unaccustomed to spirits, he quickly became drunk and was vulnerable to whatever shyster took him in. I have no idea if that’s how it happened, but I enjoy the false memory of him waking bleary eyed and puzzled the next day, checking out of his hotel, wondering where his money went, then catching the train home. My children, who are exhausted from my constant probing curiosity, will be amazed that I never asked more about Hardin years ago when his sons were living.

While others study the great tides of history, I find myself drawn to these trivial rivulets that are rarely recorded. The human equation tells us why, not just what and when, and even though we know mortal weakness all too well, it is somehow comforting to know we didn’t invent folly. The bed sits solid and substantial, and for me, a tangible symbol of both abiding love and reckless behavior, the kind of conduct we all say is idiotic, but that we secretly find intriguing. I hope the bed, along with the story, will pass down in the family, and that unscrewing the brass finials will fascinate some future grandchild, or great grandchild.

p.s. Lulu Estelle Renfrow Crume, my grandmother, was born April 1, 1882 and died September 1, 1970

Posted in My father's mom, Spirit | Leave a Comment »

Miss Annie’s House

May 7, 2005 by elainehaley

She was barely 17 when this wedding picture was taken on July 4, 1907. The childhood she remembered was a golden dream, and her father, a magical figure. She loved to talk about his farm in Hickory NC, a mini factory that turned out every item used in daily life; woolen and cotton cloth, shoes, cured meats, cheeses, canned and dried vegetables and even the coffins for the community. She never said who built the coffin her father was laid in 1909, but she grieved always for the years the typhoid had stolen from them. She kept true to her rural roots as much as was possible, while living on a small city lot in Durham. The backyard was an explosion of beautiful flowers in all seasons, kept with such care that no random weed or leaf was allowed to lie peaceful in it for a day.

Her stiff-necked German husband built her an exquisite house, but he did not agree with her ideas on appropriate interiors. To furnish the house in the style she wanted Grandmother took to her sewing machine and made quality clothing for the finest families in North Carolina. When Mr. Gantt refused to waste money on a college education for their girls, she sewed up enough money to put them both through Duke. When I met her in 1972 she was as tiny and fragile in appearance as a sprite, but I soon discovered she had an almost magical strength of body and spirit. She told me stories that her granny had related to her about the civil war, and held tightly, against all reason, to a hatred for the Yankees. She talked about barn raisings and corn huskings and grand parties that went on for days. With a twinkle in her eye she told me that when a boy pulled back the husk on an ear that contained colored corn, he got to kiss the girl of his choice. Even in her last days she had a style that made me certain that she was the girl most often chosen. I treasure those talks, because she gave me a window into daily life of a bygone era, and introduced me to my children’s relatives.

They were all gone when we met, taken like characters in Greek tragedy. Eva, her daughter, and the namesake of my own child, died after a valiant struggle with cancer in 1961. Her husband went in the summer of 67, spared from the awful blow of their grandson’s suicide that fall. Early the next year, her only son fell from the top of the winding stairs he helped build, and died after striking his head on the needlepoint loveseat at the bottom. She was left alone in a 20-room mansion where ghosts lived like invisible cobwebs in every corner. When we came to visit we slept comfortably in the beautiful old rooms filled with their whispers. No one was allowed to sleep in sons room which was kept as if he had just stepped out for the night. Left alone for so many years, she was in the habit of talking out loud to them, keeping them tied tightly to her side as she had in life. It was a house where one could imagine pathways into other worlds, perhaps through the doors of a massive wardrobe, or taking an extra turn on the stair. My children were fearful on the winding staircase, because I cautioned them so often. I did not mention the tragedy that occurred there, but I’m sure they could sense it in my tone. I always felt safe with the ghosts of the house, and imagined them brushing past me, smelling of magnolia and the slightly acid-musty odor of mahogany wood and heating oil. Even today when I open the china cabinet grandmother left me, a tiny whiff of that smell still lingers, but the ghosts seem to have departed with her.

In February of 1984 my daughter Eva awakened one morning and startled us all by saying, Grandmother will die in the spring, after my birthday. It did not take a seer to know that a 94 year old had little time left, but we never spoke of the possibility and could not imagine a toddler having a concept of death. We celebrated Eva’s 3rd birthday on March 31. The call came from Durham in mid April that grandmother had a stroke but was doing well. I called her in the hospital and assured her we would come down and stay with her when she was able to come home. I told her about my garden full of new peas and asparagus, so she asked me to save a few for her. She related an odd dream to me that was recuring every night. She was in a garden with a tiny picket fence, only a foot high. All her dead family members were standing on the other side of the fence, hands outstretched, asking her to take the one step over and join them. We got the call that she had taken that step on May 7, the eve of her beloved grandson’s birthday. Even with every warning, death always surprises.

When my ex husband remembers his dreams they are often of that house, cool in the evening breeze, the kitchen warm with the smells of cooking. As the son of a minister who moved every four years, Durham was the home of his heart. I have had a recurring dream that I go to her attic and find amazing treasures and mementoes that were forgotten when the house was emptied and sold. It is a dream of nostalgia for all things we have romanticized about the past and a longing for those ghosts to have been flesh for just a bit longer. My children barely remember her now, but her mark is on them, clear for every eye to see, passed as an organic memory from generation to generation. Someday they will inherit the furniture she defied her husband to purchase, but they will not understand the price she paid and they will not turn to search for her when they smell magnolias in the summer.

Posted in Great grandmother | Leave a Comment »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »