Big Red

Emma's back today and she's remembering her Uncle Harlan.

By Liz Zuercher

My poker-faced Uncle Harlan was a tough nut to crack.  Short and wiry with wavy blond hair and fine long fingers, he wasn’t physically imposing, but I remember as a child being a little leery of him anyway.  Maybe it was because he didn’t say much, and I had to strain to hear him when he did speak.  Unless he was talking about his airplanes.

A bachelor approaching fifty, Harlan might have been married to his meticulous work as an optician grinding and polishing lenses every day.  But he was definitely in love with the model airplanes he built at his garage workbench. Uncle Harlan’s eyes sparkled when he talked about his models.

When a new plane was ready – joints smooth, paint glossy, motor installed – he’d take us kids to Flyer’s Hill, a spot overlooking the Pacific where all the modelers flew their planes, and he’d test out his latest creation.

Uncle Harlan was particularly excited about trying out Big Red.  Since he’d never named a plane before, we knew this one must be different.  And it was.  Big Red was his largest plane yet, his masterpiece, he said.  He even bought a special engine by mail order. 

“Paid a fortune for it,” he said.  Another first for Uncle Harlan.

After months of construction, sanding, painting and fine-tuning, Big Red was ready for her maiden flight on Uncle Harlan’s fiftieth birthday.  The whole family gathered at Flyer’s Hill for the occasion.  He started up the engine, held the remote control box in both hands and sent Big Red off into the air to cheers from all of us.  After a stutter from the engine that left us breathless, the plane climbed, circled and swooped in answer to Herman’s commands.

“Isn’t she a thing of beauty?” Harlan said with pride.

We all nodded.  Big Red was indeed glorious.

Then, without warning, Big Red took on a mind of her own.  Instead of completing the loop back to us that Harlan signaled with the remote, Big Red veered off toward the ocean.  Harlan wiggled the toggle back and forth trying to steer Big Red back to land, but she just dipped a wing and headed farther out to sea.  We watched in horror as she flew out of sight.

Uncle Harlan stared at the horizon, heaved a big sigh and packed up his gear.  “Well that’s that,” he said.

As we all trouped to our cars, no one said anything.  What was there to say about such a loss in the family?

Not long after that Uncle Harlan surprised us all by marrying Martha Springer, a large jolly auburn-haired woman who was five years older than Harlan and also had never been married.  He gave up flying model airplanes and took up making plastic model tanks instead, filling three curio cabinets with them.  None had names or engines. 

“At least they won’t get away from me,” he’d say with a far away look in his eye and a catch in his voice.  Maybe he wasn’t so tough after all.

The Lady Business

Another post from my off-again, on-again coming of age novel.

by Susan Matthewson

In our city neighborhood, the blocks were divided by single-lane, gravel-top alleys lined on either side with an eccentric assortment of fences in various states of repair. Every summer morning we gathered in the alley to begin our day and it was there that our imaginations spilled over. We searched for treasure in the trash cans stacked along the fences, fought pretend wars behind trash can barricades, and slew monsters hidden in the fiery incinerators behind each house.

It was also in the alley that we learned about the differences that divide people in more ways than physical boundaries ever can and about the hidden parts of family life that can only be seen from the back alley.

It was from the back alley that we spied on Mrs. Gersten, the lady from somewhere in Europe with the strange accent and dark eyes. The Gerstens had moved in the previous November but an early and harsh winter kept us huddled in our homes and their arrival went almost unnoticed until spring when we’d see her working out in her yard and gradually became aware that she received a steady stream of women visitors at various times during the day.  Soon our mothers began to whisper about Mrs. Gersten and certain repeated phrases wafted over the backyard fences and stuck in our minds without our completely understanding their meaning—phrases like “a camp survivor,” “numbers tattooed on her arm,” “a Jew,” “intellectual,” and “very bohemian.”

We began to spy on Mrs. Gersten because of these whispers and because she was so different from our mothers. Our mothers wore their hair in short permed bobs or stylish chin-length waves. Mrs. Gersten’s hair hung in a heavy, dark, wavy mass down to her waist. She tied it back with colorful scarves, the ends floating free like the wings of a butterfly.

Our mothers wore knee-length Bermuda shorts with crisp cotton sleeveless blouses in the summer or tailored wool pants with silk blouses or button-down oxford shirts in the winter. Mrs. Gersten’s wardrobe knew no season. All year-round she wore black tights and a black leotard covered by wrap-around skirts of a gossamer-like fabric in colorful prints or brilliant solid shades of flamingo, buttercup, sapphire, and emerald. She was a brilliant tropical parrot in a neighborhood of sedate little wrens and sparrows.

Our mothers only wore earrings when they dressed up for church or a special evening out. Their earrings were clip-on designs no bigger than a large button usually set with imitation gems. Mrs. Gersten had pierced ears and wore earrings all the time, even while working in the yard or sweeping her porch. Her earrings did not sit sedately on her ears like our mothers’ earrings did. Mrs. Gersten’s earrings dangled down to her shoulders, they danced, they tinkled, they flashed, they fandangoed like gypsy dancers, and they fascinated us.

Mrs. Gersten was also different from our mothers because she worked and most of our mothers did not work except for Mrs. Clark who taught music at the elementary school and Mrs. DeGrazia who was a nurse in a doctor’s office. But Mrs. Gersten worked at home and it was what she did that we spied on from the alley behind the big concrete incinerator.  For Mrs. Gersten taught modern dance to a collection of similarly clad, leotarded women, many with foreign accents like her own.

We did not exactly understand modern dance so at first we snickered at the grown women contorting their bodies in Mrs. Gersten’s empty dining room, but gradually we fell under her spell and loved watching as she led them through their movements with the soft lights of the chandelier glinting off her blue black hair as it swayed back and forth in rhythm with her body. We came to love her deep rich voice with its strangely accented syllables as she caressed her ladies into celebrating the rites of spring amid the faint echoes of flutes and French horns from the record player.

 “Now my lofflies,” she’d say in her heavy accent, “ve must bend to da breeze and blossom vit da sun. Bend now, tendu, degagé, lift, point the toes, round the back, raise the head, and bloom, bloom, bloom.”

Oh, my, how desperately we wanted to bloom, bloom, bloom and to be one of Mrs. Gersten’s “lofflies.” There in the alley, hidden behind the incinerator, we would point our toes, arch our backs, and lift our heads to the sun. We wanted to bloom, bloom, bloom. We wanted black tights and a leotard, we wanted a feathery filmy skirt that wafted around our legs, but even more we wanted pierced ears and a pair of dancing, dangly earrings.

So we let our mothers’ cautionary whispers about Mrs. Gersten waft away and dissolve in the summer sun while we whispered a promise to each other: we’d have pierced ears by the start of school or die trying.   

Ice Cream Sundaes

by Susan Cameron

My rental car gingerly feels its way around the dirt road potholes
as it stutters up the hill toward the exhausted farmhouse.
For a hundred and fifty years, the house had endured
sunbaked days and frozen nights, drought and deluge,
freeze and thaw, and the indifference or poverty of its owners.

Creaky-floored, rattle-piped, drafty-windowed,
it sags under the insubstantial weight of its latest renters --
my old friend, her two kids, her new husband, his two kids:
skinny refugees from urban warfare seeking shelter
in rural Noplace, Michigan.

Her son and daughter slam-bang the screen door open
and joyfully whoop their way into my arms.
Not once do I exclaim, "My God, you're so big, and
I used to change your diapers!" -- too SoCal Cool for that now.
Then comes a smaller boy and a younger girl, trailing behind,
cautious and quiet as field mice; the new step-siblings.
And then, there's my friend!  Her husband, too,
on his way to work, driving truck, local truck, for minimum wage.
My friend sometimes babysits for a few women who work in town
at the Walmart, but not today...

Today, I take everybody to town for ice cream sundaes!  Hooray!
At the ice cream parlor, the kids are a small orchestra playing
Eine Kleine Gigglemusik.  We're all so happy -- it's a party,
a two-hour party, and the waitress is getting a big tip today.
But no party lasts forever.  Night is coming, and it's going to get cold.

My friend and I are back in her kitchen, and she seems to be
struggling with words half-stuck in her throat.
I hear noises -- the children are dragging mattresses to the living room,
around the fireplace, since that's where the heat will be.
If she asks me to dinner, there won't be enough food for everyone.

I kiss everyone goodbye and drive away through the cricket-singing twilight,
glancing through the rear-view mirror at the rosy sunset glow
lighting up the peeling paint of the old farmhouse porch,
amazed at the lovely patina glazing rural America's
picturesque poverty.


Susan Cameron, copyright 2013

The World According to Hattie May

By Liz Zuercher

A year ago we went to Peoria, Illinois to bury Gary’s mother, Hattie May. The funeral director led us to the room where the services would be.  All the pink flowers and the pink satin dress didn’t surprise me.  Hattie loved pink.  What surprised me was the woman in the casket.  This couldn’t be our Hattie.  The Hattie May we knew wore a perpetual look of childlike wonder.  Where was that?  Where was her wide-open face, her ready smile?  Where was the love that poured out of her, that desire always to please?

“Don’t you want a donut?  A strawberry sody?” she should be saying.  “I’ve got Drumsticks in the freezer.”  She always had ice cream Drumsticks in the freezer.  We could count on that, just like we could count on those sayings of hers, the ones she’d heard from her mother, Grandma Sweet.

“You can’t get finished, if you don’t get started,” she’d say when you were dragging your heels about doing chores.

If you were whining about something you really wanted, she’d say, “If I gave you the world and a fence around it, you’d still want a slice off the moon.”

If she asked you to do something and you said, “What?” she’d say, “I don’t stutter and your ears don’t flip back and forth.”

Our Hattie May was not shy about telling you how she felt – good or bad.  You always knew where you stood with her.  Like she said, “When my heart gets so full, it spills out my mouth.”

She didn’t suffer fools, and had some choice sayings to express her point of view:

“Good is good, but too good is a fool.”

“When drink goes in sense goes out.”

“Can’t wipe yourself clean on a dirty towel.”

“You are talking when you should be listening.”

We always listened to Hattie May.  Her wisdom sprang from the lessons of real life.  She worked hard and kept her modest home spotless.  She wasn’t fancy - she had all she needed, she told us. She loved simple things: doing word search puzzles with colored pens, because the page looked so pretty when the puzzle was done, or watching Lawrence Welk and Disney movies with a bowl of popcorn.  And she loved a good joke.

“Many a true word is spoken in a joke,” she’d say.

Hattie loved her church, and Sunday was her favorite day of the week.  “Some day it will be Sunday every day,” she’d say.  That was the day she thanked the good Lord for all her blessings, the day she got to relax and enjoy those blessings with her family.  For her nothing was better than that.

Above all, she loved her family.  She was fiercely loyal and generous to us. Her husband, Charlie, was the love of her life, and she missed him every moment of the decades between his passing and hers.  Reminiscences often prompted another saying, “Oh, happy days gone by.”  This one might bring a tear to her eye.

No, the woman in the casket, dressed all in pink, surrounded by pink flowers, wasn’t our Hattie.  Our Hattie May was with Charlie and the rest of the family who’d gone before her.  They were all relaxing together on an eternal Sunday afternoon.