Mixed Milk

There is a period of my family’s shared life that we affectionately refer to as the “mixed-milk” years. If Dad were here to remember it with us, he would laugh along as Mom does, but he might also disclose (now that we’re old enough to understand) that a better name for those years might be the “single income, five children (four of whom would be in or entering college one year apart beginning in four years), two family cars and a truck, building one house while living in the other, and having a wonderful newborn son”… years.

We were not poor—such a thought never entered our heads. We were simply in the middle of middle-class America. We knew this because from our front porch we could see scores of nearly identical small, three-bedroom brick ranches, and beyond them were hundreds more, packed into the streets of our tightly-woven world.* In over half of those houses large, young families like ours were living the same frugal lives—although none of them, as far as we knew, were mixing their milk to stretch the grocery budget.

It’s hard to know for sure, because such money-saving measures were deeply guarded secrets. The idea was not new. Carnation introduced “Magic Milk Crystals” in 1954. By the late sixties, the magic was gone but the product was still on store shelves, and unfortunately Dad found it. In fact, he found a slightly cheaper brand, Sanilac Non-Fat Dry Milk. We didn’t call it dry milk or powdered milk. To us it was mixed milk because it was the mixing that we hated most.

Each week, the four older kids rotated through a cycle of specific evening chores: washing the dishes, drying the dishes, and taking out trash / feeding Duke (these latter two were one chore), but the fourth assignment was the worst of all—mixing the milk. For starters, the smell of the stuff reminded me of our friend Blain Fuller’s dairy farm. In his big barn, at the end of a long row of Holsteins was a small room where their milk was held in stainless steel tanks for shipment. Powdered milk smelled like that room, neither fresh nor sour— just raw and dusty.

Worse than the smell was the taste. Even if the kid on mixing duty did a good job of adding the powder gradually into the jug while stirring the water…the end result was still this odd-tasting white concoction that only Dad could drink without getting a twitch down his spine. We eventually got used to the taste (it helped if the milk was ice cold), but we never got used to the lumps. If the person mixing just plopped in the powder without stirring at the same time—I won’t mention any names—there were dry curds that settled in your glass or stuck to your front teeth. About once a month, we’d have a batch like that, and we’d all have to break up the globs with our forks and stir them in while Dad reviewed the proper milk-mixing technique.

I should mention that the “mixed-milk” years had sub-chapters too numerous to include here, but I’ll tell a short one that comes to mind during this time of year:

One evening while I was mixing milk, Dad was reading the evening paper and saw a mail-order ad for “leather-like vinyl shoes” at $4.99 a pair. The deceptive “buy-one-get-one free” line should have been a clue that this was a rip-off (it meant only that the second shoe of the pair was included in that low-low price). Still, the offer was too good for Dad to pass up, and within six to eight weeks, he and his boys were slappin’ the pavement with stiffly molded ankle-high, strap-over “boots” that looked about as “leather-like” as the shoes that come with Mr. Potato Head. To use my sister Kathy’s term from the time: We looked like “clods.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the smell of these shoes stunk to high heaven. Oh, they pulled on innocently enough with a faint scent of “new vinyl”—but because the plastic did not breathe at all, each night when we pried them off of our sweaty feet, they reeked like some dead thing wrapped in a shower curtain. Even Dad conceded that this was a serious flaw in design. As a courtesy, we began taking them off outside. By early winter, the freezing temperatures made the plastic so inflexible that the uppers and soles began cracking, as if on cue, in late December. It was a modern Christmas miracle if ever there was one.

That year under the tree, we each got new leather shoes. We always mixed necessities in with our wants at Christmas. This was especially true during the mixed-milk years. In fact one of my favorite Christmas snapshots is me sitting beside the tree in an undershirt with a new Bible in my right hand, a new bike tire in my left and those shoes somewhere in the wrapping paper in front of me. My mother says that picture makes her sad because I seem to be holding a bike tire with such satisfaction, but I had asked for the tire—it was on my list, just like the Bible and lots of other things I had unwrapped--and then to top it off... new shoes. The smile on my face is one of genuine contentment.

Some of my favorite memories are from our mixed-milk years. I’m not exactly sure when they ended. It might have been when Kathy went off to college, leaving a gap in the chore rotation; or maybe it was the next year when Paul joined her and we simply needed less milk. Maybe it was the next year when Dave left. Maybe Dad got a raise. I don’t know. We children were blissfully ignorant of family finances (except for what we heard through our parent’s bedroom door). We learned not to ask for some things, and we collectively made do with what we had. Kathy babysat, and each boy had a paper route until we were old enough to have "real jobs." Our needs were met and our wants were few. We took great "tenting" vacations across the state and Canada at Georgian Bay, attended church camp each summer, and eventually went off to college. (With Mom and Dad’s help and some God-send jobs, not one of us graduated with any debt.)

One could calculate, I suppose, how insignificant the savings of mixed vs. real milk was during those years, but mixed milk was more of a mind-set than anything else. It let us know things were close but so were we. We were all drinking from the same cup so to speak. Now that I know how such things work, I don't know how Mom and Dad pulled it off. I’m sure their budget during the mixed-milk years looked like a badly written story problem. The hard kind that makes a student say, “This can’t be done!” and the puzzled teacher reads it aloud, shrugs, and agrees that something must be missing. But somehow Mom and Dad worked through that story problem in such a way that the problem parts seemed small...
and the story parts stayed with us.

Very little was missing.



*If you click link on "tightly woven streets," our house and garage on Buckhannon in Roseville is below the "k" in Buckhannon at the east end of the street. Click "hybrid" to see street names if they do not appear.
© Copyright 2005,TK, Patterns of Ink

Unsettled Chapter 13-A: "Fill My Cup, Lord"

There is a stand-alone chapter-story I wrote three years ago called "Mixed Milk" that really belongs in this "Unsettled" series. Had I been thinking I would have posted it for Christmas. When I print and bind these thoughts about the land and well and house to leave in our house for whomever lives there someday, I will include the "Mixed Milk" chapter. I've reason to mention it now...

Toward the end of that post you'll find this paragraph, which describes a picture you saw back in Chapter 9-b. Here is the paragraph and the picture, which we recently found:

"That year under the tree, we each got new leather shoes. We always mixed necessities in with our wants at Christmas. This was especially true during the mixed-milk years. In fact one of my favorite Christmas snapshots is of me sitting beside the tree in an undershirt with a new Bible in my right hand, a new bike tire in my left and those shoes somewhere in the wrapping paper in front of me. My mother says that picture makes her sad because I seem to be holding a bike tire with such satisfaction, but I had asked for the tire—it was on my list, just like the Bible and lots of other things I had unwrapped--and then to top it off... new shoes. The look on my face is one of genuine contentment." POI 12-05
You'll notice that paragraph speaks of my mother in present tense because it was written when she was an active reader here at Patterns of Ink. But the actual reason I wanted to include these opening thoughts is so obscure that it requires further explanation about the phase of life in which my siblings and I now find ourselves.

As regular readers may recall, my sister and brothers and I have had "work days" in our family home, the house this Unsettled series is about (not the one in the photo). On those days we have met at the house to do the work that all surviving loved-ones eventually face, and I must say I have been encouraged by how the five of us have conducted this systematic sadness, this sorting of life, this closure of what's past and redefining of present. It has actually been a very meaningful time.

Because many of us have or will face this process, I'll share two ideas that helped make it so. First, we always work together or at least in pairs. And second, we try to defer to each other about the little "things" that can sometimes cause strife.

For instance, when it came to the hundreds of "priceless-but-not-costly things" that fill a house, my sister organized each room of the house as if for an estate sale, but rather than "buying" the objects, we each took turns (in a "rotation" of order that kept it fair) at picking things that had meaning to us. Once we got down to items that no longer had meaning to anyone, we left the objects there for a true estate sale (on a date yet to be determined). The process took hours, but it was a time of fellowship and reflection. Spread on the floor all around Mom's piano was her old sheet music. Each of us got to select "favorites" one at a time.

In this photo are two pieces of sheet music I picked that day: a first edition copy of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" and the song that is the subject of this post. If you look closely at this photo of our piano now and the photo above from Christmas 1969, you'll see the same copy of "Fill My Cup Lord" that is on Mom's piano behind me.
I picked that music because I knew this chapter was coming. (I'd already alluded to it last summer in another story [2/3 down in that post].)

I have not heard this song in a church setting for many years. It was written by Richard Blanchard in 1953, but it reached its height of popularity in the late Sixties and Seventies, and like so many meaningful songs of that era, it's been shelved by the present generation.

It's possible that some readers here at POI know little about church music, so I'll just say that in addition to the great old hymns of the church, each generation is compelled to contribute new songs for believers to sing. These new songs ride up and down on waves of popularity over and below the steady line of the great hymns through the years, but unlike the hymns, they tend to be forgotten over time. (I could name dozens of other "church songs" that are even further back on the shelf, unsung for years.) In my case, for whatever reasons, I have not heard "Fill My Cup Lord" in a church setting for nearly two decades.

My children do not know this song, and I'm guessing neither do many of you. So for those unfamiliar with it, let me just say that it is based on the story in John 4 of the woman at the well whom Christ told He was the long-awaited Messiah. She was a woman who had been "looking for love in all the wrong places" so to speak. Christ told her of living water that satisfies eternal thirst. Just as Christ used a metaphor to capture that woman's imagination, Blanchard does so with ours, beginning his song with "Like the woman at the well, I was seeking for things that could not satisfy."

The links in this paragraph are not of the best quality, but I include them to demonstrate that "Fill My Cup Lord" was very popular and sung by vocalists and choirs of that time. It was sung by hundreds every week here in the states, and it's sung to this day in little churches all around the world. As a teen, I sang this song several times a month for many years. But how I remember it most, is hearing my mother singing it at her piano. To give an idea of how simple that sound was, I'll include this link of a piano playing it. (I wish it did not have the "midi" notes for the vocal part. Midi music has a way of making good music sound cheesy.)

Chapter 13 was to be called "The Woman at the Well." It is not about the woman in the Bible but my Mom. I split the chapter into two parts. Part "A" explains the song so that when I mention it in part "B," you'll fully understand its meaning and why my mother sang it so often that summer when we dug the well.

I probably won't be able to post the next chapter until Friday or so. In the meantime, please follow this link to read "Mixed Milk" (or listen to some of the other links above). If you have a few more minutes, watch the video below by CeCe Wynans. It's called "Alabaster Box" and is about a different woman in the Bible, equally in need as the woman at the well, which is perhaps why Wynans begins the medley with "Fill My Cup Lord."

Chapter 13-B coming this weekend.

Dave's Take on "Dream Pony"

Upon reading my brother Tom’s recollection of the day our pastor brought a “prize pony” to our church, I couldn’t help but share my slightly different perspective on that day and that time in our lives. This is an slightly revised version of the draft I sent him.

The first set of hymns had already been sung, and Pastor was talking about some stuff in general, which was usually my cue to stare down at the tile patterns in the floor between the pews. Just then he announced some “fantastic news for every kid in the auditorium.” In my head I was hoping that they had cancelled the youth choir practice for that evening and that we could all stay home and enjoy Bonanza. I liked Bonanza, especially when the entire family was sitting around the old black-and-white TV. Tom would fix popcorn, he was the official popcorn maker. He, and only he, knew just how long to keep the kernals on the stove without the slightest hint of being burned. Sunday evening always seemed like the best evening of the week on those rare occasions when circumstance allowed us to stay home [or more often at Grandma's house] to enjoy it.

(Whenever the slightest hope of not going to Sunday evening church arose, there was always a twinge of guilt hanging over us because Dad was a deacon and we had to get back for the evening activities. Sunday evenings were always ruined by the hustling and bustling of trying [trying to enjoy the "day of rest" to the fullest and then racing off to church. Our three or four hour ordeal started with youth choir practice, then “Young Peoples” meeting, and then a sermon from either the bus minstry guy or one of our young upstart preacher boys.)

Pastor Sedalia was still talking, as everyone’s eyes were drawn to the platform, “This beautiful pony will be going home with one of you next week—to keep. “That’s right. This pony is the grand prize for whoever brings the most people to next weeks revival meetings.Our speaker [Bill Rice III] is coming here from his ranch next Sunday, and he’s eager to see who will be taking this pony home.”

I looked over at Tom who was squirming with delight in his seat. My older brother Paul didn’t seem to hear what the pastor had said. Mom just sat motionless in the choir loft silently thinking about who she needed to talk to after the service. My dad, folded his arms and put one finger over his mouth. He gently tapped his lips and raised one eyebrow. I could see what he was thinking. He knew he would never have to worry about taking that pony home unless one of his children performed a miracle.

The pastor continued, “ Our speaker will also be giving free sign language classes to all who would like to join. So that way we can further the Gospel to our deaf friends.”

Oh, great, I thought just one more thing Mom will have us doing. I just knew it was going to wreck my time schedule. I actually had no schedule for my life and that was the best schedule a kid could have. You just sorta go through every day enjoying the day as it magically unfolds before you.

The pastor continued, “Who would like to be a part of the free sign language classes? They will be held every evening an hour before the revival service starts.”

I stared at my mom who had turned her head to the lady next to her. I knew what was coming. It was as though my eyes zoomed in on her mouth and I could hear her voice whispering in my head, “I have a deaf cousin,” she was saying, “and you know, I can sign the whole deaf alphabet to him, but I’d love to learn more.”

I watched in disbelief, as her hand shot into the air in response to the preacher’s question.

Time seemed to stand still. She waved it for all to see then gave me a smile and mouthed, “You are really going to like this.” My heart sank into my stomach. Mother was always trying to get us involved in something that we actually had no business doing. It really didn’t matter, I suppose, because we tended to miss the first half of the anything Mom attended with us. (Something she did improve upon later on in life—I guess it really is never too late.) Being chronically late was usually frustrating, but whenever we got stuck going to some church thing we didn’t really want to do, there was always that faint ray of hope—if we were lucky, Mom was in charge of getting us there.

Back to the pony.

By this time, the pony had been led up the stairs and onto the stage. He was being tugged by a small framed, red-headed fellow who had been hired by the church to fill a “catch all job.” It’s not that he wasn’t a hard worker, it’s just that I sometimes feared he was being taken advantage of by everyone who meandered in and out of the building. When your job description is vague and your list of bosses long, life can be rough. At this moment, however, he seemed proud of the fact that he’d been given the odious task of coaxing the small stallion up onto the stage. This was his “fifteen minutes of fame.”

The pastor made some gesture to quite the crowd and just as he opened his mouth to speak, the silence was broken by a sound—a sound which is familiar to every fifth-grade boy who is able to place the palm of his hand in the pit of his arm. It sounded like a large balloon that was losing air. It was elegant and yet it was some how barely perceptible. The sound was slightly deadened by the clump of gray hair which hung from the pony’s posterior, but I knew everyone heard it. I knew that sound. If this were a locker room full of boys they would have erupted in laughter. But this was no locker room. This was a sanctuary where baptisms and alter calls took place. It was an omen of things to come, but we didn’t know that. I looked across the aisle at my friend and he held his fingers over his nose and wrinkled his face. I really had never heard a horse flatulate before. I would have been embarrassed. The pony, however, seemed so nonchalant about the whole thing. I was impressed by his composure.

My brother Tom seemed to be frozen in time as he watched the pony prancing near the preacher on the stage. He jerked his head back against the halter and gave his shaggy main a tired toss. I studied the animal and realized that there was no way that this pony, in his present physical state, could carry my weight. He was no match for Trigger. Trigger was the beloved horse of one of my television heros. He probobly wouldn’t look as cool as a palimino raring up on his hind legs in all of it’s splendor. It’s huge powerful muscles rippling as it threw it’s hooves into the air. No, this was quite a different picture. This pony which had sleep dripping from both eyes, a belly which hung nearly to the floor, and knees that were as swollen as an old lady’s knuckles was quite tired.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I thought I might like to have the pony. However, the longer I studied the situation the more I realized that I had about as much of a chance of winning that pony as I had of actually getting store bought milk at home. Which is another story in itself. We never had store-bought milk. Dad bought powdered milk and we had to mix it with water. If you were really a “good milk mixer” you could add a little extra water and make it go further. Why mixed milk you ask? “Well, after all it is six cents a gallon cheaper,” was dad’s reply. [Maybe he meant the Sanilac brand of dry milk was about six cents cheaper than the Carnation stuff. Either way, I sometimes found the rationale as hard to swallow as the mixed milk.]
And so, deep in my heart, I knew that that pony would never see the inside of our backyard. This is why, I began to rationalize why I didn’t need the pony. So, while I sat there, watching this story unfold, I came up with a few really good reasons why participating in the contest was probably not a good idea and should, at any cost, be avoided by anyone in our family.

The first good reason was a girl name Debbie Kay. She was very competitive. In all the years that I had attended church she had somehow managed to win every contest that was ever held. There was the yearly “bus route” contest, the “memory verseses” contest, and the “Bible School” contests [and when she got older, the Campbell’s Soup lables contest]. Needless to say, I and my sibblings would always get the same lecture from dad on the way home in the old Plymouth Fury.

“You know,” he would start, “Debbie deserves a lot of credit. She works very hard, and she’s going to make it in this world.” Then he would look in the rear view mirror at me and our eyes would meet. I’m not sure what the look was for. The older I got the more I could tell when he was steering me toward a “nice girl.” For being so good with details, Dad seemed to overlook some things about the girls he hinted at for me—like the time he recommended I ask out a rather stout framed “beauty” with a well defined mustache who had been riding our church bus since age thirteen. I fortet her name but remember getting punched by her a couple of times. She packed a really hard punch.

The second reason I knew my family should never own that pony was Alex. Alex was our pet parakeet. In reality he was less of a pet and more like a prisoner of war. The difference between Alex and a prisoner of war was that a prisoner of war was fed at regular inetervals, at least once a week. We got alex in the early fall of 1958. He had escaped from someones cage and thought he had it good when he landed on my dad’s old Bell Telephone truck. Dad kept the telephone truck parked on the side of our house when he came home for lunch. My dad was a very logical man. He’s the one who came up with naming the found parakeet “Alexander Grahm Bell” in honor of the old green truck and the inventor of the phone.

When I think back on Alex he was not a very friendly bird. In fact, he hated everyone. Every night he planned his escape while we slept. Given the chance he would attack any part of your flesh that accidently or intentionally made it’s way pass the bars of his cage. I always knew that given the chance he would immediately go for the eyes. On several occasions he gouged my hand with his beak while trying to put food in his cage. He always pretended to be asleep. The clue that you were about to be attacked was when he cocked his head at an angle and glared at you with his one good eye. Suddenly, it was as if you heard that strident violin stroke from the shower scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The attack that followed was nothing short of sharks in a feeding frenzy. And when he got out of his cell, he didn’t land on your head or shoulder like most parakeets. Oh, no, he swooped and pecked like his cousins in that other Hitchcock classic.

It got to the point where we didn’t know what to do with this vicious bird because of his surly attitude. Mom decided to put his cage in the basement, which was like a pitch-dark dungeon 95% of the time. And that’s where he served the rest of his life sentence and met his demise. As the saying goes, “out of sight out of mind.” Once in a while we ventured into the basement. Someone would say, “Hey there’s good ol’ Alex. Has anyone fed him latley?” The reply was usually, “I think it was my turn last month. Whose turn is it this month?” Unfortunatley, if it was my turn I never checked the schedule. Sometimes poor alex would go for weeks with out being fed. Tom did not mention Alex in his retelling of that pony dream, but this no doubt influenced that bizaar twist in his dream. “Oh, that’s right we have a parakeet” was not a dream.

[Some time later, when Alex had his first stroke, I thought he had learned a new trick and was literally lying in wait to attack, but he’d actually suffered a stroke—that was dad’s diagnosis. I figured we’d end up feeding him through a straw… but within the first day, he learned to drag himself around by his beak. “Amazing!” I thought, “he will still be able to feed and water himself after all.” It would be the first time we could actually put him on our shoulder with out having him fly off and play hard to get. A week later Alex suffered his second stroke and died. We burried him in a shoe box out near the old tomato plants.]

The third reason we couldn’t have a pony was Duke. Don’t get me wrong. Duke was a great dog. He wormed his way into the hardest of hearts. He was a watchdog “extrordinare” in that he would litterally WATCH strangers come into the yard, pillage our prized posessions form the garage, and not move a muscle. My ten-speed was stolen without so much as a bark. It got to the point where he too, like Alex, had had several strokes. It was sad. He could barely move his back legs. Some said we should “put him down,” but he’d had been with us for about fifteen years. That’s one of the hardest decisions a family faces—my point is… with Alex in the basement and Duke moping around the back yard, it would have been inhumane to take on another “pet.”

So for those three reasons, I knew my family should stay out of this contest, but I remember looking down the pew at my little brother. He had a goofy grin on his face, and I knew that behind his glazed eyes he was thinking of a trillion and one things that he would train the pony to do. Me? I was content with not having the darned ol’ thing. I was confident that Debbie Kay would once again win the contest and all would be well with the world: Dad would give me that look in the rear view mirror; Kathy and Paul would be in control of the TV set at home; Mom would never be on time for sign language classes; and as long as I left my homework at school… in my mind, it never existed.

Yes, life was good.



Tom’s brother Dave, guest writer to Patterns of Ink.

A Pause for a Happy Cause
in the Series of Posts

I mentioned yesterday that Part III-C is on its way and it is, but Part III-B was pretty serious so I wanted to interrupt the series with short light-hearted post to wish my mother a Happy Birthday.

A few hours ago, a dozen people were gathered around a birthday cake in our dining room singing Happy Birthday to two people. (My mom and I weren’t singing.) You know how cautious I am about giving out personal information on the web so I’ll just say that two days after I was born, my mom celebrated her 26th birthday in the hospital. Her birthday is Tuesday.

That’s my mom there in the light green listening to a friend talk in the kitchen. Her husband Bob took the picture a few weeks ago. Most of you are somewhat new to POI, and you may only know my mother as the sweet little girl in “The Gray Hair in the House.”

Let me say that this beautiful lady, so composed and serene in her golden years is the very same mother who brought delightful balance to our lives in the “Mixed Milk” years. She is the cook who brought the lunches to the boys (and fed the dog) described in “Property.” She put the charm in “Past Tents” and “Pitching the Tent” (scroll down to June 24 at this link) She accidentally walked me past the drunk Santa in Part 1 of “When Doubt Came Slowly” (and explained the saddest bundle of letters I ever found in Part 3 of those posts).

If you have time to read only one of these links, she is the nervous bride in the story she told me a year ago as I had a chance to spend the night on her side of the state. It’s about how Bob (who took the picture) made "The Wedding Cake" for my mom and dad’s wedding. [The full 4-part version of the wedding cake story begins at this link, scroll down to April 1, "Visiting Home" and the 3 posts below it.]

My mom is not only amusing, she is the “muse” of many of my stories. I’ve been writing them here at Patterns because she reads regularly. She is an amazing woman who has been on her back more than once over the past ten years with the on-going reality represented in her pink bracelet. She arrived here Friday, four hours from her home, after that day’s radiation treatment, and yet she had a wonderful visit with my daughters, my in-laws, and the nearly 50 guests at my daughter’s bridal shower yesterday. She and Bob just headed back to the other side of the state a few hours ago.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Happy Birthday, Mom! We love you!

The Old Popcorn Bowl

Something funny happened Saturday night. I was hungry for popcorn, but we could find no microwave popcorn in the house.

Throughout our children’s lifetime, this convenient snack (which takes less then three minutes to make) has been a food staple in our home. In recent years we have grown particularly fond of Pop Secret’s “HomeStyle” because its touch of real butter and salt makes taste most like the kind I used to make on the stove as a kid.

Before I tell you what struck me as funny, I need to back up a bit and give a brief timeline of memories and experiences related to this post:

Thousands of Years ago: Western Hemisphere "Indian" nations discovered popcorn, which led Native Americans to introduce it to explorers hundreds of years ago. I was not there to witness this, but I have no reason to doubt that the story we were all told in elementary school is true.

1966-1980: I was the in-house expert pop corn popper in my childhood family. We typically only made popcorn when the whole family was home and there was a good movie or “special” on TV. The older I got, the more often this culinary honor fell to me, and I became very good at it if I do say myself. I put the burner on "high" until the three "test kernels" popped in the oil; then added the perfect amount of popcorn to the oil; turned the heat down two notches; and when the kettle was half full, I removed the lid to release the steam so the kernels would not become tough in the final seconds of popping. And voilà!. I poured the perfect batch into the popcorn bowl.
.

Never in my childhood did my mother ever buy Jiffy-Pop, which came in its own aluminum frying pan. It was about ten times more expensive per serving than regular popcorn. (These were the "mixed milk" years, and Dad would never allow such a novelty on Mom's grocery list.)

There was one time, however, when my brothers and I were spending the night at Grandma Spencer’s house, and she bought some Jiffy-Pop as a special treat. I was about twelve, and I remember reciting the jingle as I put it on the red hot burner. "Jiffy-pop, Jiffy-pop, the magic treat; as much fun to make as it is to eat!"
But it did not pop as shown in these pictures. Grandma's stove was too hot and the popcorn began to burn when the aluminum “dome” was only about half full. It was one of the great disappointments of my childhood.

(I have never met an eye-witness who has seen Jiffy-Pop perform as shown on TV.) [Update: as you can see in the comment section, I actually have met at least two people who have successfully made Jiffy Pop as shown on TV. Thanks, Stephen and Marcia! That's one of the great things about blogging...it helps expand our knowledge of human accomplishment.]

1971: My brother Dave and I were at an “afterglow” (youth group get-together after Sunday night church) at Nancy W’s house, and everyone was fascinated with her mother’s new microwave oven. None of us had ever seen one before, and everyone wondered how they worked. I asked her if we could put a kernel of popcorn in the oven to see if it would it pop. We tried it and it DID NOT pop. It got very hot, and Mrs. W. stopped the experiment,afraid it might ruin her new appliance. (What we didn’t know is that if we had put the popcorn in a paper bowl with some vegetable oil, it would have worked (would have made a mess, but it would’ve worked), and had we continued the experiment and developed an expandable paper packet we might have become rich. But alas, that was 40 years ago.)

During the early 1980’s: Julie and I used a “hot air” popper. The popcorn made in these contraptions was very dry—so dry salt would not stick to it. Eating popcorn form an "air popper" was basically like eating packing peanuts. So the manufacturers added a little place to put slabs of butter which was supposed to drip on the kernels as it ricocheted into the bowl. The only problem was the yellow plastic part of the machine eventually melted, and the thing looked like they’d been in a fight with a blow-torch.

1989: Microwave popcorn was invented and by the mid-1990s, it became the most common use of household microwave ovens.

Which brings me back to the purpose of this post.

This past Saturday night, Keith and Emily and Nora were visiting because Kim was home from Chicago. Among other “wedding things,” the girls were sorting through family pictures for the photomontage.

I wanted to make some popcorn but could find not a single “packet” in the house…that was when a dormant idea struck me for the first time in two decades: We do have popcorn. I slipped out of the room and went downstairs. On the shelf of antique toys that encircles the basement, there was a decorative container of popcorn—real popcorn—it was something my mom gave us as a joke about fifteen years ago. As I brought it upstairs, Emily gasped, “Gross! You can’t use that old stuff.” I took out Julie’s largest kettle, poured in some vegetable oil, and added the hard kernels.

Here is the strange part, the “funny” part. Not only were my adult-age children concerned about the age of the popcorn, they also gathered around the stove with amazement. Emily is twenty-six and she had never seen popcorn made in a kettle on the stove. They weren’t sure that it would work, and as the lid began rattling like a tin-roof in a hailstorm, and the steam puffed out the rim, and the wonderful aroma filled the air, they stood there in shock and awe. Just at the peak of popping, I poured the yellow fluffy treat into the perfect destination for this nostalgic trip back in time.

Throughout my childhood whenever we made popcorn, the whole family ate out of one large spun-aluminum tub we dubbed “the popcorn bowl,” which was rarely used for anything else. About six years ago, I was visiting Mom who still lived in the house we built back in the 70’s. We were watching a movie called Mother starring Debbie Reynolds, and we made some microwave popcorn and divided the portions into baskets lined with open napkins. “Whatever happened to the popcorn bowl?” I asked without meaning to begin a treasure hunt, but she scrounged around in the dark corners of her lowest cabinets until she found it. “Your dad and I got this as a wedding present,” she said, handing it to me.

I looked at the bowl in an entirely new light. “This is fifty-five years old,” I mumbled respectfully.

“Isn’t that something! I can’t believe it. Where does time go,” Mom sighed, “Do you want it? You’re the one who always made the popcorn.”

It was a bit dented and out-of-round. Even though it says "Mirro The Finest Aluminum" on the bottom, it would be worth only a couple bucks at Goodwill. But its value to me had nothing to do with it's worth (as is often true of treasured things). This container had been my family’s popcorn bowl for decades. It had passed from lap to lap back in the days when our whole family could nestle on the couch between Mom and Dad. It remained the popcorn bowl in the later years when the couch could no longer hold us all. If our family had a holy grail, this was it... so I gladly brought it home and began using it solely for the purpose it had served so many years ago.

And there it sat on the kitchen counter as one by one our doubtful family tasted the oldest popcorn I had ever popped sitting in a now sixty-year-old bowl. To be honest, the popcorn itself was not as good as a fresh-popped microwave bag, it was also twice the work, but sitting there with the old popcorn bowl on my lap as I watched the girls sorting pictures gave me a very unique sense of home.

This post made possible by a "snow day."
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Bringing Home the Duncan Phyfe: Epilogue

How Things Turned Out

"Romance is hope in story form...the thread that darns the gap between what is and what we dreamt would be." T.K.

When Duncan Phyfe was making his furniture in the early 19th Century, embroidery was a craft enjoyed by women who lived in homes suited for his style of furniture. This etching suggests a life of leisurely homemaking and the fact that somewhere beyond this room, there were servants doing the harder work.
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There was another type of needle craft practiced (but perhaps not enjoyed) by women of that day: darning socks. Very few people darn socks anymore. Even back in 1951 my mom had never darned a sock in her life... until she married Dad. "Why throw out a whole sock when only the heel has a hole," he'd say. So Mom, of course, learned to darn socks in her "spare time" as one, two, three, four, and eventually five children were added to her life of leisurely homemaking.
[Dad would have considered sock darning more practical than embroidery, but there's a place for both in life. By the way, if my mom had taken up embroidery, like the lady in the picture above, Dad would not have sat and watched (and he most surely would not have crossed his legs like that).]

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When I was a kid, Mom still darned our socks, and though I now appreciate that labor of love, back then I hated wearing those darned socks. I could always feel the mend down there in my shoe. But Mom did another kind of darning--a kind done so skillfully I didn't know it at the time--she filled all sorts of gaps in our lives through the years.

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Eventually, Mom quit darning socks, but the other sort of darning never stopped. She kept our home happy whenever life "wore through." Call it hope; call it romance; but Mom made us feel blessed to be exactly where we were in time and space even when times were hard and space was cramped. She knew enough about darning to know that the secret is not pulling the gap shut--it's filling it in with newly woven threads. Romance is hope in story form... the thread that darns the gap between what is and what we dreamt would be.

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Like any good story, family life is rich in character, setting, theme, and, yes, conflict—both seen and unseen.
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My Mom is a romantic—I got a double portion from her. My Dad was more of a realist (and a bit of a pragmatist when it came to problem solving)—I have plenty of that in me, too. Being a blend of both has made life interesting, and for that I am forever indebted to them both. I think it has been easier to be a blend of Mom and Dad’s traits than it was for them to manage the purer traits alone. Until recently, I never thought of my parents' marriage as an endearing and enduring clash of romance and realism. Take the Duncan Phyfe for example.

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Mom wanted the table in hopes of bringing a hint of the romantic past to her home. If not the long past of the 19th Century… then the near past (and security) of her childhood home. She knew the feeling she wanted the table to bring to their apartment but did not give much thought to the actual task of getting it there. Dad, on the other hand, wanted to make Mom happy, but was immediately faced with reality. To him, the table did not represent a feeling. It was an object. It had weight and dimensions that were in conflict with both their small apartment and the trunk of his car. From the start, the table presented a problem to be solved, and solving such problems was very satisfying to Dad. Problems are challenges—dragons if you will—and slaying dragons is what husbands do (even those so romantically challenged that they would never phrase it in such terms).
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This Duncan Phyfe tale was the story of my parents’ life before my siblings and I became a part of it. Having said that, I’ll briefly tell about the days and years that followed with us and the Duncan Phyfe, because to whatever extent this felt like a story, those reading it may wish to know how things turned out.

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Before I proceed with this epilogue, however, we must look closely at the above print of the embroidering. If we could look at the bottom of the lady's tapestry, we’d see the shapes and colors roughly in place. We’d probably “get the picture,” but we’d also see the awkward knots and frustrated tangles and a hundred loose ends.

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When it comes time to frame and display the finished work, we tend to put the good side out. Is that hypocritical? No more than combing your hair in the morning. Need I say that this story of my parents’ first year has been something like that? I’ve spun the yarn and chosen which side of the fabric to show, but I know—we all know—life is far from perfect, my parents’ marriage was far from perfect, our home was far from perfect—and the same is true for all their descendents. It hasn't always been a pretty picture. Sometimes it was more darned than decorative, but the fabric held together. There's something to be said for that.

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It’s good sometimes to look at the back of the embroidery, to remember all the work and imperfections and knots and loose ends that are just below the surface of our better days. But it’s also good to cherish those better days and to smile upon the picture as it was meant to be seen from above.

And now on to those loose ends...


Part I: Flipping Houses to get a Home

Virg Palmer and my Dad were more than friends. They became business partners. They were both hard-working, hands-on, can-do home builders in disguise as telephone repairmen. One day over lunch came up this idea:
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“I’ll help you build your house. You help me build mine. Agreed? Deal.” Handshake.
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Virg owned a vacant neighborhood lot. Dad had been “saving up” for a dream and had a few thousand dollars at the credit union. Pooling their cash and collateral, the two men built a spec-house together and sold it—each more than doubled their investment in a year’s time. They worked well together, and purchased two “fixer-upper” houses to “flip. That’s how Dad got enough money to buy the house on Lapeer Avenue, which had an upstairs apartment that they rented out. In no time at all Mom and Dad went from being tenants to being landlords. But Lapeer was just a house to live in while Dad built their “dream house.”

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Dad and Virg each bought an acre lot on Atkins Road outside the city limits. Together, they built the Palmer’s house first, and then began ours in 1959. This was the dream house Dad was “saving up” for, and with the help of his friend it was within reach. We lived for one year in that unfinished house. [It was this house on Atkins where the boy woke in "Kept."]

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Part II: The Duncan Phyfe in Roseville, Michigan
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Our family's journey took a dramatic turn in 1961 when Dad took a promotion at Bell that relocated us to the suburbs of Detroit. Roseville to be exact (just a few blocks from Gratiot Avenue). This was to be a temporary address until Dad could find some land on which to build “Dream House II,” but in fact we lived there 14 years.

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(I wrote about some of these years in a story called "Mixed Milk.") Mom loved the burbs. There were lots of neighbors to talk to over the back yard-fence or on the porch. A borrowed cup of sugar or loaf of bread was just a few steps away. It was very much like Forest and Riverview. Dad, however, felt fenced in and never took his eye from their once-shared dream of raising the five of us in the country. In 1968 he bought 14 acres on 23 Mile Road [a few miles east of Gratiot Avenue]. We called it “the property,” it took several years to develop before we could build the home of our final move.)
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During those fourteen years in Roseville, we ate at the Formica table in the kitchen. The Duncan Phyfe was down in the rec-room basement just outside the laundry room. It stayed in that spot for over ten years. When we had Thanksgiving at our house, the cousins ate there, but the rest of the time it was used to sort laundry, or cleared off to play board games or make large puzzles. We built science and art projects on it through the years.

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But the most fun thing we did with the Duncan Phyfe was making "tents." Sometimes my brothers and I (Kathy may have joined in, too) along with some of the neighborhood boys would get that crazy urge to build a huge tent in the basement. None of the other moms would allow it to happen in their house, but our mom was always cool about spontaneous creative "bubBENtures." [She always called our childhood adventures "bubBENtures" because that's the way my brother Paul used to say the word when he was little.]
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We'd open both of the drop-leafs of the Duncan Phyfe, drape blankets all around it, and then add all the other card tables and blankets we could find until it was a sprawling Bedouin labyrinth. It was while spending hours under the Duncan Phyfe, that I became familiar with the unique design of the pedestal and characteristic wooden "banana peel" legs. They were not ideal for the "tent" because they took up the center of the biggest "room," but we worked around them as best we could. Then we'd drag in our sleeping bags to spend the night in our home within our home. Mom would come downstairs and crawl in one end until she found us. Then she'd embarrass us by chirping, "Isn't this cozy!"

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Cozy is exactly what it was of course, but no boy would be caught dead using the word cozy-- at least not in front of his friends. Cozy is a Mom word. In fact, I believe that the feeling of coziness stems from our pre-natal state. It is a remnant of fetal feng shui. Mom was the Queen of Cozy. She could make anything cozy--a blanket on the beach, an umbrella on a rainy day, a camping tent in the woods, the whole family on the couch during a scary movie. Things became officially cozy by proclamation of Mom. When she said it, it was true, and with her help it was true of every place we ever called home.

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Part III: How Things Turned Out for the Duncan Phyfe

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Eventually the Duncan Phyfe was marred and scratched and scrolled on by us kids, but the most interesting scar was a large water stain that we did not make. Mom heard that if she kept her Christmas poinsettia in a dark basement until the following winter, it would bloom again. All she had to do was keep it watered. So for a few months Mom kept watering the thing down in the basement.

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The quietest demands of life are sometimes forgotten, and it’s easy to forget a poinsettia in June. One summer day, Mom saw the leafless dried poinsettia wrapped in bright red foil behind a pile of dirty clothes. She felt bad to have abandoned it and worse when she lifted the lifeless pot and saw the white blotch tattooed into the mahogany. Twenty years before, she may have cried, but now forty-something she sighed and shrugged it off, having learned long ago that elegance is over-rated, and life is far more life-like than our dreams.

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No matter really. By then the Duncan Phyfe was little more than a horizontal surface. One day soon after, in fact, the weight of all the piled up board games and puzzles and laundry was just too much. No one remembers exactly how it happened… but the table was found toppled with one of the wooden banana peel legs broken right off.

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Dad put the broken table in the back of the old utility van we used as a truck and hauled it to the barn out at “the property.” You may recall from other pages that we built the barn from logs we cleared from that land. It was a cabin of sorts with room for the tractor and tools inside. We sometimes over-nighted there just for fun as we spent weekends improving the land, bridging the creek, digging the well, and building the house.
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Just as it had done in 1951, the Duncan Phyfe presented Dad with a problem to be solved. He knew the pedestal table, as designed, would never bear much weight, so he did what any inventive, realistic, pragmatic back-woodsman-carpenter would do: he amputated the entire pedestal and bolted 2-by-6 boards to each corner. It looked awful, but is was very sturdy. The barn needed a functional table that didn’t take up much space, one that could be opened up to eat a quick lunch or to sharpen the chain saw blades. This was perfect.
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The funny thing is… our family ate more meals at that Duncan Phyfe in the barn than in all our other homes put together. We’d be working hard on some project with Dad, and then about an hour after noon, Mom would show up with a hot meal in a picnic basket. Dad would take a rag and wipe off the saw dust, or the chain saw oil, or metal shavings or whatever debris was left behind from the last odd job on the table. Mom would spread a table cloth—she liked to make things homey…as much as Dad liked to make them sturdy—and we’d sit down, say grace, and dig in.
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There we were among the ladders and axes and wheelbarrows, sitting around the very same table that Dad carted home behind the ’39 Ford back in 1951. In all those eat-and-get-back-to-work meals, I don’t remember the story of the table ever coming up, and I never brought it up. I’d heard the story by then, but the significance of such things had not settled in. There’s a huge difference between knowing something happened and fully understanding the story, the human part, the part that reminds us how it feels to live as life plays out, the part that foreshadows how circumstances come full circle.

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Some may find it sad that after all the table went through it ended up in a barn looking so hard-used, but it makes me smile. The table had served its original purpose—it gave Mom hope when she wondered if she could ever make a house a home. Then after twenty years it was finally in a setting that didn’t require matching chairs.

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The table is a living testament to the romance and reality we call marriage. With or without a table, we're all of us "bringing home the Duncan Phyfe." We're bringing it home each time we see a longing in our loved one's eyes and do our best to meet it; each time we strive to keep the windows of communication open; each time we learn to smile at what frustrates us; each time we make room for things kept beyond their need; each time we salvage what we can from what's been broken. We're bringing home the Duncan Phyfe each time we look back and see that life, perhaps, has not turned out the way we thought it would... but we can embrace the good and bad, the pain and pleasure, the regret and hope... and find joy in living with the way things stand in the end. .

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Post Script: How Things Turned Out For Us

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Still against the idea of a mortgage, and with three kids in college at the same time, Dad had his hands full finishing that last dream house, but we built it ourselves from the foundation to the chimney, learning all the trades from Dad as we went: masonry, electrical, plumbing, roofing—everything. Finally the house was done enough to live in. During the first semester of my sophomore year in college, my family moved in. When I came home for Christmas in 1975, it was to that new house, where Mom still lives today. It was not yet finished. It would not be truly finished for years, but Mom had added her touches, and stepping through the door that cold December night with my suitcase in hand… it already felt like home.

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All through those growing-up years, these places remained an integral part of our lives... my grandma's house, Palmer Park, the beach we walked to under the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse, Blue Water Bridge, and Pine Grove Park. Grandma moved out of the house on Forest and Riverview (just a block from Gratiot) after Grandpa Spencer died in 1975. (My Great Grandfather had died a couple years before.) But Grandma Spencer, my mom's mom, celebrated her 97th birthday last July. We had a big party at Pine Grove Park. It was like old times.

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I can never go there without staring out at the cold blue water of the St. Clair and remembering all the times we swam there and how my father used to swim across and back, and how Mom would meet him downstream. The huge oaks under which they shared summer lunches in ’51 are still there with their spangled shade. They're bigger I suppose by more than 50 rings, Trees are always bigger than before, but with oaks… it’s hard to tell.

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I said at the beginning that on February 10, 1951, my folks began "...the longest journey of their lives. This is the case every time a bride and groom drive away from the place where whispered vows and steeple bells ring true." Marriage itself is not a journey--life is the journey--marriage is the commitment to travel it together 'til death do us part.

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That's Mom and Dad at Pine Grove Park in the summer of 1994, four years after their 40th Wedding Anniversary. He wore that crew cut all his life. That's the Blue Water Bridge spanning the St. Clair River to Canada in the background. (A second bridge was added in 1996.)

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Mom and Dad enjoyed skating and dancing together through the years. On April 1, 1995, they went out for dinner and a dance at the VFW. They both looked as fit as they do in this picture. After an enjoyable evening and one last dance, Dad experienced a heart attack and was gone. A few days later we laid him to rest at Lakeside Cemetery in Port Huron a block from Gratiot Avenue. [Now do you see why I called that avenue they drove their wedding night "the byway of their life"?] From that quiet spot, it's just a short walk to the cold blue water of Lake Huron at the mouth of the St. Clair.

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In 1998, my mom went to the Class of '48's 50th reunion. She had no date so my Uncle Bob, dad's married brother, escorted her for the evening. (He's a year younger but went to the same school and new many of the people there.) That night, Mom met an old friend from the days before this Duncan Phyfe story began. A few years later they married. If you want to read a story about the funny providential twists life sometimes takes, read their story here. Bob is a retired photographer. He helped me with some of the pictures for this story. [For more go here and scroll down to "Visiting Home" April 1, 2006.]
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.......... “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
.......... Is just to love and be loved in return…”

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Unsettled Chapter 33: "Redemption"

It is faster and easier to tear something down than to build it up. Read that sentence again. It rings true far beyond the subject of this chapter.

Building something involves very deliberate thought. It requires a plan, some know-how, and countless measurements to make sure things are square and plumb and firmly in place. That’s true about building a business, a church, a school, a reputation, a life. Building something worthwhile is never easy. Most mistakes can be undone, but carelessness can be costly.

“Measure twice. Cut once,” Dad used to say.

Tearing something down, however, requires little thought, minimal planning (beyond one’s own safety). A few sledge hammer blows on the right props and down comes the whole shebang! Wrecking balls, dynamite, and bulldozers may be needed for bigger jobs, but you get my point: It is faster and easier to tear something down than to build it up.

Salvaging, on the other hand, falls somewhere in between construction and demolition. If building is about perfection, and tearing down is about destruction, salvaging is about redemption. It’s finding worth in something worthless. It's saying, "Not so fast" at the dumpster of life. It's the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. [See the Youtube clip here.] Redemption looks beyond the surface, ignores the scorn of passers-by, and cares enough to discover usefulness in imperfect things (or people).

Allow me to jump beyond the back cover of this book to the time I first understood redemption. Fast forward four years to when we lived in the unfinished house and the job of salvaging the school was long past: I was twenty. It was the summer of 1976.

I had landed a job in the Mt. Clemens Ford Vinyl Plant (which no longer exists). It was my first of four summers there during my college years. Nearly every post in that plant required wearing safety glasses and a pair of white canvas “work gloves.” Typically, an eight or twelve-hour shift would do little damage to the gloves, but the workers felt entitled to a new pair every few days, which meant the “old” pair was theirs to throw away or, as most of the workers did, take home in their back pocket in plain view of the security staff at the revolving exit gate. (These were those one-size-fits all canvas gloves that cost about a buck.) By the end of that first summer, I had dozens of pairs of used gloves that I kept out in the barn.

One day I was wearing a pair of those gloves while helping Dad burn brush. I had scythed a patch of burr marigolds and my gloves were completely covered in stick tights, those small brown bidens burrs [bi-dens means "two-teeth"] that cling to your clothes like cockleburs but they're smaller and harder to pull off.

Anyway, when I was done with my work, I carefully pulled off the prickly gloves, shook my head at all the burrs, and tossed the wadded pair on the top of the pile to be burned. We'd forgotten matches so I ran to the house, got a box, and came back to see Dad with my burr-covered gloves in his hands. One by one, he was pinching off stick-tights and throwing them in the pile.

“Dad, we’ve got enough gloves in the barn to last for years. That’s why I threw those in the pile to burn.”

“I know, and I was going to leave them right there for the same reason, but I remembered a day when I was a kid playing out in the snow with no gloves. I'd lost 'em but didn't want to tell the folks. When I thought of how glad I would have been to have these then, burrs and all, it didn't seem right to burn them. It’ll only take me a few more minutes to pick ‘em clean.”

I stood there watching him pick the burrs from those cotton gloves and drop them into the fire, and I understood Dad in a way I’d missed before. I knew he was thrifty; I knew his dress shoes had been re-soled again and again; I knew he hated that it was cheaper to buy a new toaster than to fix the shiny Toastmaster he and Mom got as a wedding present (so he bought Mom the new one she wanted but kept the old one in the barn to fix on a rainy day.) I knew he sometimes made strange meals out of all the left-overs in the fridge. I knew we mixed powdered-milk to stretch the grocery money. I knew we had torn down a school to build our house, but it wasn’t until I watched him picking burrs form those gloves, that I understood what made him the way he was. Maybe it's a gift; maybe it's a curse, but some people spend much of their time and energy redeeming things others have given up on.

Redemption is a wonderful thing.

In the late winter and early spring of 1972, Dad redeemed that old school house for fifty dollars. Mr. Solomon could have hired a bulldozer and razed it in an afternoon, but that would have cost him money; it would have splintered every board in the place and piled tons of debris in the landfill. What a waste.

Today we’d call this project of salvaging of the school a “green” idea. Good for the environment! Save the Rain Forest! and all that. But Dad simply needed wood—just like that little boy who needed a pair of gloves—he needed wood and didn’t have the money to buy it...so piece by piece we picked away at the job, undoing what was done all those decades before.
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With Dad's old cast iron nail puller, we pinched each nail from the floor boards, sub-floor, siding planks, joists, rafters and studs. Thousands of nails filled dozens of coffee cans, and even the nails were sorted. Most were bent beyond hope, but the ones that came out straight enough to use again were put in a separate can.

Pulling nails. Pulling nails. Pulling nails. For weeks we were pulling nails, sorting lumber by size, and piling high the 20-foot flatbed trailer we borrowed from Uncle Bob. If all went well, we made two trips fully loaded from the school to our barn at the property each day we worked.

Every Saturday, Mr. Solomon stopped by to watch us work. He would simply nod in Dave and my direction if we saw him and didn't say much to Dad. He seemed mostly interested in making sure we would finish the job on time.
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Coming next: Chapter 34: "Just Below the Surface"

"The Oldest Voice in the Parlor" Part II

Last Thursday morning, we went to Chicago to pick Kim up from her summer TESL trip to Croatia. It’s great to have her home and to learn more about her experience each day. To top this off, we had a family reunion with all five of my siblings here at our house over the weekend. That was fun, too. Sorry this was not posted before all the excitement started around here.

This writing project has not gone as planned. It has taken much longer to compile than I imagined. When I write about my own family, I generally write from memory and reconstruct from stories I've heard many times through the years. But this storyline is from Julie's side of the family. Much of it is new to me, and I'm finding it both fascinating but challenging to make readable prose from my research. I'm determined, however, to keep plugging away in the wee small hours of the morning.

Part I in the previous post summarized the Civil War experiences of John Wesley Neal, my wife's great-great grandfather. Part II tells how he providentially stepped into that role. And Part III introduces the heirloom that triggered this whole project.

Part II: “From Near-Miss to Just-Hitched”

Because it happened while John Wesley Neal was walking home to Missouri after all his “scratchless” battles, the following story is all the more ironic: [This first paragraph comes from page 2 of an extensive genealogy written in 1968 by Jesse Harold Neal (b.1898), a great-grandson of John’s who was himself now a grandfather 70.]

“[At the end of the Civil War,] after his discharge from the army [in July of 1865, John Wesley Neal] returned to Linn County, Missouri. As he came walking up the road, he approached two men sitting on a fence stile. One of the men…raised his musket to take aim and remarked, “Well, there is one damn Yankee that won’t get home.” The other man hit the arm of the man with the gun and ruined his aim."

The man who deflected that reckless shot had been a Captain in the Confederate Army, but the war was over and he wanted no part of further killing. His name was Tennessee Carter McNabb (so named because he was born in Carter County, Tennessee, a descendent of Scottish settlers who first came to that region in 1776 and later migrated to Missouri.). At the time of that near-miss from the fence, Carter had a nine-year-old son named Elbert Newton McNabb. (This fact becomes important in a few paragraphs.)

Two years after that deflected musket shot, John Wesley Neal married Nancy Howell (b. Dec. 10, 1851) on November 27, 1867. Three years later their first child was born. They named her Iva. John and Nancy would eventually have 13 children, but they were not reared in Missouri. John thought there was entirely too much drinking in that “wet state.” So on Election Day, November 1884, he loaded most of their worldly possessions in a covered wagon, drove to the ballot box, voted against the Democrat Grover Cleveland [who had paid a Polish imigrant $150 to take his place in the Civil War], and moved to Kansas, a "dry state."* [This picture was taken in 1893, nine years after that trip. Iva is on the far right.]

Only part of John's family was with him at first: He, his daughter Iva and his three oldest sons (along with two milk cows) made the 200 mile trip in two week's time, traveling southwest from Linn County to Kansas City and then on to Melvern (Linn County, MO, is 6 counties east and 3 counties south on this 1895 map link. The town of Waverly near Melvern is shown southwest of Kansas City. The trip may have looked something like this Mapquest link.). Oh, how I wish there was a written journal of those two weeks in that covered wagon, but parts of the story survived by being retold through the years. Iva was 14 at the time and cooked all the meals for the men along the way and in Kansas until her mother and with the rest of the family arrived by train.

Once the Neal family settled on their farm, John and Nancy never moved again. To this day, five generations later, many members of the J.W. Neal bloodline still reside within ten miles of the original family farm in Melvern. [And, in fact, my wife and I were married in 1980 at a little church in Melvern a mile or so from that farm.]

Now here’s the most amazing part of the story. You remember that Tennessee Carter McNabb fellow who spared John from a musket ball? Remember his nine-year-old son Elbert? Well, he was now a grown man, a farmer and plaster worker, and still single. He began a courtship with Iva Neal, and one year after Iva made that trip with her father in a covered wagon, full twenty years after the musket-miss, Elbert and Iva were married on October 25, 1885. Elbert was nearly twice her age, but in that day such marriages were not uncommon.

Thus, the shot Carter deflected that day in 1866 not only spared “one damn Yankee”—it spared the man who would later give his daughter's hand in marriage to his own son. There you have it: a marriage made possible by one man’s willingness to say “it’s over” of the bitter war he and his Rebel companions had lost. In all the family documents and letters I have seen, there is not one mention of any lingering tensions caused by the fact that the fathers of the bride and groom fought on opposite sides of the war. That speaks well of these two families.

Two years after Iva and Elbert McNabb were married, their daughter Mary Lorena McNabb was born, and three years after that (November 8, 1890) Carter Tennessee McNabb was born. (His name was borrowed from his grandfather with the first and second names reversed.) Four other children were born to Elbert and Iva, but it is from the line of Carter Tennessee McNabb that came seven children, among them a daughter, Iva Kathryn, and a son Daryl McNabb who is the father of Julie Ann McNabb, my wife.

(In summary, Julie's father is Daryl McNabb, whose father was Carter Tennessee McNabb, whose father was Elbert McNabb, whose father was Tennessee Carter McNabb, who is the man who saved John Wesley Neal from that musket shot after the Civil War, and the man whose eldest son Elbert married the eldest daughter of the man whose life he had saved.)

Elbert and Iva made a good life there in Melvern. Elbert continued farming but suplemented their income as a plaster craftsman. This work involved making lime plaster (not gypsum) from scratch using the limestone common to that area of Kansas. Fabrication was a dangerous chemical process, but application was not unlike applying joint compound to drywall—except perhaps that the base-coat of lime plaster on wood-lathe walls was mixed with animal hair.

By the turn of the century, there house was not quite full with four children (and two more yet to be born). In 1903, just two years after the assassination of President McKinley that put Vice President Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, Elbert and Iva purchased the heirloom that is the subject of the remaining parts of this long post.
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* In case you are like my daughters and never heard of a "dry state" or "wet state," the term reflects a time when "states rights" were very real. It was states rights and not slavery in particular that began the debates leading up to the Civil War. Back then, states valued their sovereignty and wanted the federal government kept to its constitutional role. States had far more say in local laws and self-government. Wet states allowed the sale of alcohol and had bars and saloons and such, while dry states imposed their own prohibition of alcohol (long before the failed federal prohibition of the 1920's). Kansas held its "dry" status longer than any other state, and to this day, there are "dry counties" there and in many parts of the U.S..

Because my wife Julie is a "preachers daughter," I like singing along to her whenever I hear the song "Dry County Girl" by Rascal Flatts. [Julie is from Kansas not Arkansas.]