Sailing with my father after I’m divorced we take my two children. They and I are small. My father is frail, 55 years of Camel cigarettes in his lungs. “Papa,” I say, “How would we pull you in if you went overboard? We aren’t strong enough.” Nor is he strong enough to pull me in. My father thinks. “You are right,” he says, “We’ll make a Go Bag.” A 3 to 1 pulley, with a clip. We can clip it to the boom and push it out over the water. Attach the pulley to the life jacket and I can winch nearly anyone aboard. Maybe. We have it in a dry bag, with towels and chocolate and a set of sweats, a space blanket because the water is cold here, 45-55. My father knows, I’m sure, that if he falls in, he’d be unlikely to survive even if I did reel him in, an unlikely catch. We wear our life jackets and the kids do too.
One time we hit container ship waves when my son is on the bow. He is thrown up and drops, flat, prone on the bow, holding on. This boat has no railings but my children pay attention.
We never have to use the pulley.
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At first my father said that we could unhook the haul down and use the boom, but I said, if it’s me and two little kids and I have to drop sail and get back to someone, that is too hard. How do we make it easier?
The older we get, the more we learn which bridges to cross, which bridges to burn.
What shall I keep?
And shall I burn that bridge before I cross it
or after?
I did not know that was a bridge
I would burn
And I grieve as a I learn
But the sledgehammers and bombs
loosed by the family
have left a bridge
that is all but falling
Into an abyss.
It is stone and old.
It won’t burn, but it barely holds together.
One heavy rock, thrown in the middle
and it will fall
down down down.
What shall I keep?
What shall I let go?
I wonder what my parents think
and grandparents
and sister.
Do they think at all
or do they let go with death
and let joy overcome them
in reunion with the Beloved.
I hope where they are is joy.
It is ok, loves.
It did not turn out well
but people make their choices.
I can’t rebuild the bridge alone
and on the other side they prepare
new IEDs to blow me up
if I attempt to rebuild
or cross.
I keep my children away
from the web of triangulation
and so they are not attached to the land
nor do they play the family games.
I am so glad.
I am still attached to the land
and my dead.
Not the living but the dead.
My sister, my mother, my father
grandparents, uncles, aunt.
All the dead.
Forgive me, but I can’t keep the bridge
going
and I will let the land go.
My children and I will be dead
to those living.
We have family and friends
who are loving and not hating
and not cruel.
I still love my dead and even though the place reminds me of them, they are not there. They are in my heart. I keep them safe and let the bridge and the land go.
It’s about shacks on a lake in Ontario. My grandparents and family built the shacks and I’ve been going there since I was under a year old.
However, my sister died of cancer in 2012 and there was a horrific family battle over my niece. My mother had already died. My father died 13 months after my sister and left the same will as my mother. Unfortunately it was written when I was a minor. I cried when I read it because I was the only person named in it who was still alive. I knew what my father wanted, or remembered what he told me. A will is a will though. I took it to an attorney and followed her interpretation.
Then I was sued by family regarding the niece.
I knew what my father wanted but he had not done it. So I decided not to fight it and handed over half the estate. Because even though my father wanted me to watch over his granddaughter, he had not left me the tools. And she did not want me.
So back to the shacks. It’s the side of the family that brought in all the lawsuits. I have not felt welcomed there nor loved since my sister died.
Part of me is furious that I am being hunted out, unwelcomed, wants our grandparents to curse them.
The other part points out that I have already been hunted out, effectively. I stopped trying to take my children there because I couldn’t tell who in the family was “neutral” (basically not talking to me) or “gossiping” — the rumors re me trying to harm my niece were incredibly painful. I had to let her go.
After my father died I dream that I am issued a huge SUV, black. I am to go pick up three children. When I arrive, two are teens: my two. The third is a toddler. My niece is really the same age as my daughter, but not in the dream. In the dream, they tell me, “You can’t take the toddler. You don’t have a car seat.”
I say, “Can I go get one and come back?”
“No.” they say.
I say, “Please, can I borrow one? I didn’t know I needed it! I was issued the SUV!”
“No.” they say. “You can only take the two teens.
So I took the two teens and left, crying.
I woke up and thought: my father’s will is not my fault. I did the best I could. I followed an attorney’s advice and I tried to do what my father wished. I did not have the tools I needed.
Now my children and I may get an offer to buy our share of the land. My children are ready to be bought out.
I do not know if I am. I feel like this is the last connection with that side of my family, not only the living, but the dead. I love the land far more than the silent living and the cruel living. Why are families so cruel and why do they need enemies so badly? Gossip is a sin, truly, and hurts. Selling my share is saying goodbye to my sister, my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, my two uncles, my aunt. I don’t mind saying goodbye to the cruel living nearly as much as to my dead.
My son was an Extroverted Feeler when he was little. Let’s call him EF.
We move in the middle of his first grade. From Colorado to the Olympic Peninsula, arriving on December 31, 1999. Y2K. The computers do not stop the next day and the world does not implode. My mother has recurrent cancer.
He starts school. He is in a three year class in public school with two teachers. It is a first, second, third grade mixed class. There are fifty kids and he is starting in January.
His mother is bananas because she is trying to learn a whole new set of patients, phone numbers, specialists and local medical slang. His father hates moving and lies on the couch. His grandmother is not doing well. He doesn’t have any friends yet. He misses his Colorado friends and his teacher. He is gloomy.
His father takes him to get his hair cut.
They return and I nearly swallow my tongue. The EF has a triple mohawk. A central spike of hair, shaved on both sides, and then another spike on each side. He and his dad thought it up. I tell myself: it’s just hair, it’s just hair, it will grow back! Horrors.
Two weeks later the EF is cheering up a bit and has a friend. Why? Apparently the haircut garnered attention. Within a week, not only does every kid in his class know his name, but most of the parents do too. “Who is that kid with the triple mohawk?” The EF is very pleased.
He gets a triple mohawk once more. By now I am ok with it.
After that he gets normal haircuts. His grandmother dies, but he has some friends now. His mother is less bananas over time and his father knows the name of every checker at the grocery store and all the coffee shops and the golf pros.
There was a cartoon where a mother is telling her son not to stare at a person with a mohawk. “But mom, don’t they get mohawks so that people will stare?” Uh, good point!
I wrote this in 2009.I don’t know why this gentleman comes to mind today. Partly because I have a friend in the hospital. She is in her 80s. When the doctors ask how she is, she says, “Fine.” I want to yell “Liar! She is NOT fine!” Luckily she has her daughter-in-law and me and her sons saying “She is NOT fine!”Sometimes people are very stoic and will not tell you that they are not fine.
When I was in residency we rotated through the Veterans Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Most of our patients were either very elderly or they were alcoholics or addicts in their 50s, starting to really go downhill medically.
One elderly patient is particular vivid in my memory. He was in his 80s and black. He was weak and had various problems. I was not doing a very good job of sorting him out.
He wouldn’t answer questions. Or rather, he would give a reply, but it was not yes or no and I couldn’t figure out how the answer related to the question.
On the third day he gave a long reply to a question and I recognized it.
“That’s Longfellow,” I said. He nearly smiled. “We did a bike trip around Nova Scotia and read Evangeline aloud in the tents at night. The mosquitos tried to eat us alive. That’s Longfellow, isn’t it?”
He wouldn’t answer but the twinkle in his eye indicated yes.
So our visits were cryptic but fun. I would try to guess the author. He knew acres of poetry, all stored in his brain, no effort. I tried to relate the poems to my questions to see if he was answering indirectly. I wondered if he had schizophrenia and these were answers, but I didn’t think so. I thought he was just stubborn and refusing to answer.
I challenged him. “Ok, you are the right age. Come up with a song with my first name that is from early in the century. My father used to sing it to me when I was little. Can you?”
The next day he sang to me: “K-k-k-katy, beautiful Katy, you’re the only beautiful girl that I adore. When the m-moon shines, over the cow shed, I’ll be waiting by the k-k-k-kitchen door.”
We sat and grinned at each other. Soon afterward I moved on to the next rotation. I don’t remember his medical problems. But I remember him and remember wondering what he had done in his life to have a memory and a store of poetry in his head. A teacher? A professor? A man who loved poetry? I started matching him with my own store of poems, the Walrus and the Carpenter, songs, bits and pieces. I felt blessed and approved of when his eyes twinkled at me, when I recognized an author or even recognized the poem itself. I looked forward to seeing him daily on rounds. And he seemed to look forward to my visits. I was sad when I had to say goodbye and the next rotation was out of town. And since he had never told us his name, no way to stay in touch. Farewell, poetry man, fare thee well.
____________________
We were not doing nothing. He would not tell us his name, so we were awaiting an opinion from neurology. Waiting.
The photograph is not as old as the song. The young man holding the ball is my father, in the 1950s. My Aunt and I think this was at Williston in around 1956.
This child is not afraid of the saxophone because she is growing up with it. The saxophone player is her father. She’s ready to help and be up on stage as well! She’ll have a fabulous jazz foundation and her father didn’t miss a note!
This is Tuesday night at the Bishop Hotel in Port Townsend, Washington. Chris Miller and Peter Leopold Freeman.
Just you wait: new stories. We visited my Aunt Pat, Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Joan, all in their 80s. I want more stories!
My Aunt Pat and Uncle Jim were married for two weeks and then took a newborn home: me. My mother was in a tuberculosis hospital for active tuberculosis and could not be around me. I would be infected and die. So I went with my father, my aunt and uncle, my paternal grandparents and my great grandfather Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway and Florence Henderson Ottaway, who were visiting from Lincoln, England for two weeks. My father, aunt and uncle were all in college at the University of Tennessee. My aunt says it was rather chaos.
My great grandfather Mal would walk up and down singing this lullaby: “With her head tucked underneath her arm.” It’s about Anne Boleyn as a ghost after being beheaded, haunting the Tower of London. So this was one of my lullabies. Some of the songs to raise me were fairly peculiar choices. This might explain some things about me. My Aunt Pat says that Great Grandfather Mal said “‘ead tucked underneath ‘er arm”.
The photograph is Aunt Pat and Aunt Joan playing four hands Christmas songs. YouTube sometimes does not approve of my music choices. After finding these four versions of “With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm”, it plays this to try to mellow me out. Just stop that, YouTube.
Sorrow weights my chest like lead: breathing is hard. Today I can cry for a minute or so and then that is over. Sorrow teething tearing at me from inside like a crow’s beak sharp pointed poking grabbing tearing winter break approaching everyone goes insane buying drinking drugging bearing the cost into the New Year deepening woes I miss the dead: father sister mother Read my mother’s journals when I am ten She writes about art and us and other friends dead. Her voice clear again. My mother is my age when she dies. Her younger voice: memory smiles and cries.
The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is memorize, and oh, what I have memorized! I saw a t-shirt at the Nowhereelse Festival in Ohio that said, “My memory is 80% lyrics.” Yes, me too, a mix of songs, poetry and books that I have read. My sister Chris and I were busily memorizing songs as soon as we could. Here are three very educational songs for young girls. The last one we learned from our cousin, who was a girl scout and a girl scout leader. She was in the calendar one year, making cookies. I was very very impressed and a little jealous.
I bought a four hour recording session at a silent auction and the recordings are me and my sister and my father. We did them in two sessions. We made a list of songs and lost it immediately so we all took turns suggesting songs. My mother had already died of cancer. My sister died in 2012 and my father in 2013. I am so glad to have these recordings. We called it Mocoko for Malcolm Ottaway, Chris Ottaway and Katherine Ottaway. We sang most of them just once and so they are not polished, but I still am happy to have them.
Bridget O’Flynn
I sang Bridget O’Flynn to my daughter when she called me about dancing. “Mom! I love to twirl!” Um, well, yes, your parents met at a contra dance at Glenn Echo Park in Maryland. We love to twirl too.
Late in the evening
A cautionary song, an old barbershop quartet song, that we sang.
Fascinating Lady
I wonder if the girl scouts still sing this.
The photograph is my son scaring me. Ok, that boulder is sitting there balanced BUT! GET OUT OF THERE! Taken in Palm Springs in 2011 up on the mesa. Beautiful.
My son and daughter-in-law got married April 30th in Black Diamond, Washington. The young man in the photograph was the youngest in the house I rented. We had my two aunts: 81 and 86 years old, and my uncle, 85 years old. Me, my daughter, my two friends and their son. This young man and I took photographs. He taught me new things about my camera and on the last day ran a slide show from my laptop to the television. He helped all of us folks with technology and we really enjoyed having him there.
And I am delighted to hear that he told his parent that he wished we had one more day, all of us. Eight people in a household from Thursday to Monday and it went very well. Weddings always have some interesting glitches, but after putting off the wedding for two years due to covid, the bride and groom did not seem rattled by anything! My daughter-in-law is truly a delight.
Here is to the next generation, surviving this pandemic, sweeping up the pieces and growing, and thriving anyhow.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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