Tag Archives: daughter

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Seven

This is Helen Burling Ottaway, my mother, in 1945.

The vest was red wool with embroidery. We had it still, when we were kids. We probably wore it out.

I am not pensive today, I am festive! And home! Three days of driving, with Sol Duc the cat objecting quite a bit, and we are home in Washington.

There are a LOT of mountains between Grand Junction, Colorado and Port Townsend Washington. Many passes as we drove northwest, over to Salt Lake City and then up through Idaho, part of Oregon and then Washington. There was snow on the first pass, but not on the road. We stayed in Burley, Idaho and then in Pendleton, Oregon. When I drove over Snoqualmie Pass, we drove into a cloud and rain and suddenly I could smell the sound! Salt and sea! It was raining in Pendleton yesterday morning but there was no ocean smell. Sol Duc continued to complain intermittently and got tired and slept a lot. Just wait, cat, we are going back!

It is fabulous to be home and see friends already! A friend came and made me banh xeo, Vietnamese pancakes, with spinach and salmon filling, and then I crashed to sleep.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: pensive.

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There must be

There must be a bell here somewhere. I am sure of it! This is Cinque Terre, taken when my daughter and I were hiking last September. It was a beautiful and fabulous day! We hiked the trail for three towns and that was enough. I thought my legs might fall off.

And the water! Gorgeous.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bell.

Keb’ Mo’, sing it and ring it!

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Tongue twisters and counting rhymes

My mother taught us the tongue twisters that she learned growing up. My favorite is “the mistle thrush whistles in the thistle bush”. There are mistle thrushes in Europe but not in the United States. It is also found in temperate Asia and North Africa, here.

A counting rhyme that we learned is this:
“Intry mintry cutetry corn
Apple seed and apple thorn
Wire briar limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew east, one flew west
one flew over the cuckoo’s nest
Sit and sing, by the spring
One, two, three
Out goes he.”

Here is another version, from 1920: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/74/nursery-rhymes-and-traditional-poems/5204/intery-mintery-cutery-corn/.

We also learned some of my grandfather’s songs. A piece of this one:

Only we learned it as “chop, chop” not clap, clap. It’s like a 1960s line dance, isn’t it? Shirley Ellis, 1965.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: whistle.

And here is a version with the clapping:

I would bet that there are way more elaborate versions of the clapping.

Before that, a song called Little Rubber Dolly was recorded in 1930.

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hiking soundtrack

Saturday my daughter was still here and we hiked the smaller loop at Palisade. It is about 3.5 miles. Coming down, the soundtrack in my brain was “She’ll be Coming Around the Mountain”. I did not sing it to my daughter. One person with an earworm is enough!

My brain definitely plays music. I’ve had 24 years in Rainshadow Chorale and hope for quite a few more. Sometimes in clinic, quite inappropriate music plays. Everything from children’s songs to Bach to Blues, Rock and Punk and various oddities.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: soundtrack.

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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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Red and yellow

My mother would say, “Red and yellow, catch a fellow!” if we wore red and yellow together. So my sister and I didn’t, to avoid being teased.

I look it up to see if it is from a poem or song, and get lots of rhymes about differentiating poisonous coral snakes from non-venemous King snakes. Also the following:

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

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child

some people say
they just want their children to be happy

not me
I don’t understand that
to want a child to be happy
fixed in amber
with one emotion

I want my children
to feel what they feel
to feel happy, unhappy, sad, angry
gloomy, ecstatic, joyous, jealous
snarky, sarcastic, silly, relaxed
to feel the full gamut
the full rainbow
of emotions

In my mother’s family
they pack their sorrows in their saddlebags
and ride forth singing

the trouble is
the saddlebags get heavier over time
weighted with grief and fear and anger
or whatever is unacceptable
to the family
until the horse staggers under the weight
falls over
dead

then they must try to drag the saddlebags
too heavy for the horse
through their lives

I am gifted my mother’s letters
when my mother is in the hospital
the tuberculosis sanatorium
the first letter a month
after I am born

My mother is cheerful in the letters
a little snarky about her roommate
a little lonely

But what stands out is what’s missing
She barely mentions me
in some letters not at all
her first baby
who misses her
and who she can only see outside
through a window

And what was in her saddlebags?
When she coughed blood 22 years old
and eight months pregnant
she thinks she has lung cancer
and will die

She says this without emotion
lightly
almost as a joke
a relief when it was tuberculosis
even though that meant six months
in the sanatorium
separate from her young husband
and baby
at least she was not dying

She doesn’t get to hold me again
until I am nine months
and I have no idea who she is.

The worst thing anyone can tell me
is that I should not feel the way I feel.

I shut down.
I don’t stop feeling how I feel
but that person is locked out.
I will not trust them with my feelings
for a long time
I am an expert at hiding my feelings
raised in an emotionally dangerous
household
and physician training as well.

Once on the boat
my daughter says, “Mom, I’m scared.”
My father says, “Don’t be scared or go below.”
“No.” I say, “Come here. What are you scared about?”
We have run aground.
Too impatient to wait for the tide
we are trying to winch ourselves off.
“I am scared we are trapped.” says my daughter.
“How far is shore?” I say.
We are in the marina.
“Not far.” she says.
“Could we get to shore?”
“Yes.”
“Are you still scared?”
“No.”
Soon a rowboat comes and takes the kids
to shore to play.

“Don’t be scared or go below.”
That was my childhood.
Emotions as monsters.
I went below.
I chose to make friends with the monsters.
I feel what I feel.
One friend says, “Of anyone I know,
you process your feelings in real time.”
and I laugh, but am honored,
because it took years
to reach this.

Don’t share your feelings with fools.
Don’t share your feelings with people
who want you a certain way,
or who try to control you.
You have a right to your feelings
as they are.

And this is what I want for my children.

The photograph is my mother and me in March 1963. I do not know who took it, perhaps my father. I would have been right around 2 years old and my mother was 24. I did not see these photographs from when I was first back with my parents until after they both died.