Category Archives: father

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Print or cursive?

My father’s father was a pressman and the head pressman when he was in Knoxville, Tennessee. This is back in the lead type times, when the type had to be set before printing the newspapers. Before they moved to Knoxville, they lived in Connecticut. My father said that my grandfather helped develop the four color process for the comics. My father would get the new comic books, Superman, straight off of my grandfather’s press. Too bad those were thrown out!

I started cursive in school in about fourth grade and I did not like it. I learned, but I thought it was ugly. My father knew how to write in italics. I liked italics much more and asked him to teach me. I adapted the capital letters to make them easier and then I wrote my papers in italics when we were not allowed to print. The teachers objected but I pointed out that we weren’t allowed to print in the papers, but it did not say, “No italics.” I imagine that some teachers found me difficult.

My cursive is still stuck in about fifth grade and I almost never use it.

Meanwhile fast forward. A law is passed in Washington State that prescriptions cannot be written in cursive. However, it does not say that we have to print. The same loophole. I usually printed prescriptions anyhow, so that the pharmacist could read it. I got compliments occasionally for printing in a legible way. I didn’t spell certain medicines correctly, but the pharmacists never seemed to care about that. Now it is all by fax and since Covid started, even the controlled substances go by fax.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: print.

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Shapes and songs

The Ballad of the Shape of Things is one of those songs that I learned very young and from my cousins, so I did not know who recorded it. Another “dead girl song” only this one is a “dead guy song”. I loved the puns: “They say he died of the chickenpox. In part I must agree, one chick too many had he.” I also liked songs with words I didn’t know: transom, in this one. We were fairly bloodthirsty kids and happily learned songs about death, unfaithful lovers, murder, betrayal, noble suicide to save the highwayman, and so forth. My Darling Clementine, another dead girl song. We had a very educational childhood in song.

We needed the triangular “garment thin that fastens on with a safety pin” explained at the end of the song, because the cloth diapers we’d experienced were rectangular. I find memorizing things that rhyme and especially if there is a story and a tune, much easier than memorizing the varied side effects of drugs such as ACE inhibitors. The story behind the side effects escapes me, though maybe there is one! Think of that, a ballad of the ACE inhibitors, with each one having its individual good and bad effects! I am certain that I could make up a story, even if we don’t really understand all the effects.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: triangle.

Here is a side effect song, though not quite what I have in mind.

The photograph is my sister Chris and me, at my father’s 70th birthday, 2008, taken by my friend Malene.

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The cover of a book

“The cover of a book is only skin deep.” -Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway

My father came up with that one. It sounds like it makes sense until you think about it a bit. He and my mother did tons of wordplay and they would conflate adages. That’s “Don’t judge a book by its’ cover.” and “Beauty is only skin deep.” (I don’t agree with the second. The complex interiors of people have their own beauty. We just don’t have pageants for small intestines and hearts and brains.)

Don’t burn all your bridges, look before you leap and we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We morphed those into Don’t burn your bridges before you cross them. Another I’ve heard is this:

The older we get, the more we learn
which bridges to cross, which to burn

Honestly, I am terrible at burning bridges. I think it comes from being passed around as an infant and feeling abandoned or a sense of loss and grief. I am practically incapable of really burning a bridge. At most I can put up a guardhouse with a tollbooth. Not that anyone ever tries, really. People mystify me and apparently that is not going away ever.

I love this old adage, too:

Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: adage.

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Take off

Our family of four is visiting the Hoh Rain Forest. I think my husband is a relatively normal person and that he and my daughter are just being silly.

Suddenly they morph into dinosaurs! Pterodactyls! Ferocious long toothed beaks and weird speckled feathers! My son looks at me and gives me a hug. “Thanks, mom.” He morphs too and they are in flight, off in to the rain forest!

They weren’t being silly. They were practicing and apparently my daughter has now learned to fly.

I still miss them terribly and hope that they are well. Be careful, and do not marry a pterodactyl.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fiction.

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Intimacy

What IS intimacy? And what is love? And are they the same thing? Do you have to be intimate to love someone? Not meaning sex, but what level of intimacy is “normal” and “appropriate”?

I am thinking of my mother. When I was just starting college, she started talking to me about my father and about his drinking. I became more and more uncomfortable and finally asked her to find a counselor or someone other than me. The thing is, she refused to DO anything about his drinking and in fact, covered it up. The two of them would scream at each other at 2 am and fight when I was in high school. It would wake me up and I would think, I wish they wouldn’t, because I have school tomorrow. But I certainly didn’t go say anything because then they would have screamed at me. And as I got older, I wondered if my mother was drinking heavily too. Because why would she argue with someone drunk at 2 am, that makes no sense. Unless she either was drunk or loved to argue or both.

It is clear that she was drinking heavily at that time from her journals. Over and over she writes, I drank too much last night. Hard to blame her for not intervening with my father if she is drunk too. But she was using him as her cover up. Her family blamed him. My grandmother, her mother, didn’t blame him. She loved them both.

When we had guests, my mother would turn on the charm. She could mesmerize a room and entertain people with stories. My sister and I and others would be the butt of the stories. My father too. After the guest left, she would often talk about them. Analyze them. Talk about their faults and weaknesses. I was fascinated but a bit horrified too. She seemed to like these people so much and to charm them and invite them back, but was talking about them behind their backs. Ick.

So intimacy interests me. I wonder how to do it “right”. Maybe right is not the best word. How to do it “functionally”. I really don’t know what normal is, my maternal family certainly did not model healthy intimacy. My generation still gossips about each other. I quit that at age 19 and refused to be part of it. I don’t think anyone saw my rebellion except my maternal grandmother. She did not say a word but I knew that I had her respect. She did not play the family game with me.

I don’t think that gossip and triangulation are a good form of intimacy or love. Person A talks to person C about person B. Word gets around and sometimes it is person D that says something to person B and person B gets upset when they realize where this came from. And how twisted and one sided the story is. And aren’t we seeing this play out on a national level? All these people saying that THEY KNOW the status of the President’s memory. I don’t. I can’t judge it from a debate. And frankly, if we are going to do a psychiatric evaluation of one, I think we have to do BOTH. Stop following stupid rumors. Why not require a neuropsychiatric evaluation on every candidate for President and Senate and House of Representatives and the Supreme Court. And make them public. That would cause some chaos, wouldn’t it? And how do you decide who is “sane” enough to govern?

I think that gossip and triangulation is a dysfunctional form of intimacy. People feel closer when someone is whispering a secret to them. I don’t think it’s healthy. It might be normal for our culture, though. Normal does not mean healthy, after all. What do you think?

This election is like a bad hallucination. Why do we accept candidates that behave badly? Are we so addicted to television and movie drama that we want it to happen in our government? I don’t. How about you?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: hallucination.

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Coping or manipulation?

I see someone in clinic with a difficult boss.

This brought up work stories. Now, are these coping skills or manipulation or a bit of both? You decide.

Long ago I work in a lab at the National Institutes of Health. We are super busy and doing a lot of overtime and have some media pressure as well. Our boss gets us together and gives us hell, about making mistakes. I am annoyed, because I’ve been really careful. I stew. I write a letter, what I think he should have said, which is telling us all great job, you’ve worked super hard, we are under pressure and also we need to not make mistakes. I circulate it to the four other lab techs, who enjoy it. The lab cheers up a bit. Eventually I get brave and give it to the boss. He likes it and reads it to everyone, who try not to laugh. A year after I leave the lab, I visit, and he has that letter up on his bulletin board.

Long ago I am made chief of staff at a hospital. My goal is to finish the monthly meeting in an hour. I have two senior doctors who always blow up about something in the meeting. I decide to be proactive and go to each one before the meeting and prime them. I pick a topic, say I am worrying about it, and what do they think? They each then blow up in the meeting, but now they have no opposition so there is no brawl. I prime them about something that is not really controversial. I do get the meetings done in an hour.

One year I go to the lake with my family. My children are small. My father has been drinking heavily. I call ahead and say, “Will you treat our tent site like my house and not come there if you are drinking?” “You don’t own the lake land,” says my father. “We don’t have to come.” I reply. He agrees not to drink at our tent site.

He is angry, though, and pretty much won’t speak to me. I ask if he would come to a family sing at my site. He says no. I think about it for a while and ask my cousin to hold a sing at her cabin. My father agrees to that, not knowing that I am the instigator. He is happy at it because he’s said no to me and yes to her, and I am happy too, because I love to sing and sing with him.

My father was one of eight people to start Rainshadow Chorale in 1997. I sang with him in the chorale from 2000 until the year he died.

Where is the line between manipulation and coping with a difficult person?

I think this is a time travelogue, so let it be my Ragtag Daily Prompt for today.

The photograph is of my father in 2012. He died in 2013.

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Mother and father

This is a photograph from 1963ish, both of my parents and me in the front of the canoe. This is at my maternal family’s “shacks on a lake”. Cabins, but no electricity. We filter the lake water now but we did not while I was growing up. My parents look way too young to me in this photograph. I still miss them!

I do not know who took the photograph. My grandparents?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: mother.

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You can have some of the things some of the time

My father’s name is Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway. He went by Mac. He died in 2013. I miss him and I still follow Mac’s Rule.

Mac’s Rule is simple: You can get one third of the things that you think you can get done in a day.

I played with this on my days off for quite a while. I would write a list of all the things I wanted or needed to get done. Once I write the full list, it looks silly. Soon it is clear that he is correct.

When I am working full time in Family Medicine and have a five year old and a new baby, I think about getting something done on the weekend. Clear my desk, organize photographs, that sort of thing. After a while I realize that the weekend was more like this: Meals. Get kids clean and dressed. Laundry for the next week. Clean the house a bit. Do some fun family things! Read to kids and put them to bed! My list changed and instead of the ambitious “organize photographs”, I would think of something very small. Perhaps take one roll of developed photographs, pick some of the duplicates, send them to the grandparents. That was it for the entire weekend.

If I apply Mac’s Rule to my life and list all the things I want to do, which third will I pick? For years I write lists for a day off and then pick the top third that I want to get done. If something is added to the list, a friend calls to go to coffee, I take something else off. I make sure that the list always has something that I need to do on it (and often don’t want to: start taxes, pay bills, clean a bathroom, whatever). And something fun.

I don’t try to do it all. It’s very satisfying to get that 1/3 done on the list. And I feel like superwoman if I get an extra thing done! I get to choose which third to do and think about it. And the stuff that I don’t want to do slowly gets done over time. It isn’t that awful to do one of those duty jobs, thank you letters, tax information, dental appointment, mammogram, every day and then it gets DONE.

I am working with someone who puts RUSH at the start of every single email subject line. I have to say that it makes me want to dig my feet in and not even read the email. What kind of rash haste are they working under and why would I pay any attention to the RUSH by the ninth email? It is annoying and ludicrous. I move those emails to the next day list and don’t read them on the day of arrival. No pressure, so there.

Blessings on my father, for Mac’s Rule.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: rash.

The photograph had to be taken before May 2000, because my mother died on May 15 and she is on the boat. I don’t know who took it, another group sailing. Both my kids are there, my father with the tiller, and I am tucked behind the friend facing the camera. Why haven’t we pulled the motor up? This is Sun Tui, the boat currently in my driveway on a trailer.

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Clementine

If I lose my memory, at least, if it’s Alzheimer’s, it’s like a trip back through time. People seem to lose recent memory and then they are in past memories, which burn out like small fires. Like matches, taking the neuron with it.

I have joked that if I was in memory care, I would be singing. I know 9 verses of Clementine and I would sing and sing and sing, because my earliest happy memories are singing.

I know the silly add on verses.

“Now all ye boy scouts, learn a lesson
from this dreadful tale of mine
Artificial respiration
would have saved my Clementine.”

“How I missed her, how I missed her,
how I missed my Clementine
‘Til I kissed her little sister
And forgot my Clementine.”

“In my dreams she still doth haunt me
dressed in garments soaked in brine
In my life I would have kissed her
Now she’s dead, I draw the line.”

Here is Pete Seeger, banjo and all.

The words change. Second verse for me is “Light she was and like a feather”. His version is “like a fairy”. It’s lovely to see how the versions change over time. I did not learn the churchyard verse, and he does not sing the three verses that I add above.

Meanwhile, Steeleye Span did not do Clementine, at least not on Youtube. But this is my favorite moral song from their albums. Would you run as, well, you’ll have to listen to the ending to hear the three seven year penance punishments.

Anyhow, I learned to sing at the same time that I learned to talk. Singing was the happy and safe part. That is where I will go if my memory fails me.

The photograph is from my father’s 70th birthday, in 2008. He is the one with the guitar. Andy Makie is on harmonica and CF is in the back. I don’t know what song this was, not Clementine. My friend Maline took this photograph. She died in 2023. My father died in 2013 at age 75. He was not confused when he wore his oxygen. Without it, he sounded drunk.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: dementia.