23. Thanksgiving

My grandfather and me at Thanksgiving, around 1968

For me, Thanksgiving is my grandfather.

The preparations for the big family dinner always began the
day before, with Aunt Inez’s arrival on Wednesday noon, the table-setting in
the afternoon, and the ritual stuffing of the turkey – in those days before
warnings of salmonella poisoning – on Wednesday evening, after which the turkey
might remain in the cool laundry room, accompanied by pumpkin, mince and apple
pies, until the roasting began early on Thursday morning. My grandfather always
presiding over the stuffing, and it was the job of my cousin Barbara and me to
help him. My father took pictures of this practically every year, and more
pictures were taken the next day, when Aunt Meredith and her family arrived
from the farm, and Aunt Patty and her family from another nearby town.
Sometimes other relatives and friends were there too – “Auntie Vera,” a
childhood friend from South Otselic; Inez’s friend Aunt
Blanche; occasionally Minerva and Frank, or my paternal grandparents; and
later, various boyfriends and girlfriends of the cousins in my generation, or
friends brought home from college or work. Eventually a new generation of
spouses, babies, and children was added. The table eventually became two, borrowed
from the church parish hall and stretched end-to-end through the dining room
and front living room and requiring two sets of china. To my family’s credit, I
think, children were never relegated to a separate table. While the family
milled around throughout the house, talking and drinking scotch and wine,
cracking whole nuts from the nut bowl with its little pewter squirrel on the
rim, and eating popcorn, my grandfather and father carved the turkey, giving
liberal treats to my cousin Paul’s collie. My grandmother made the gravy on the
stove while my mother finished the creamed onions and squash and green beans in
the upstairs kitchen, and the other women brought more pies, cakes, vegetables
dishes and homemade breads and put them on the old round pine kitchen table
that always felt like the centerpiece of our family’s life.

Through all of the chatter and chaos of those memories –
which I can still replay from the level of a child, running between rooms on a
mission of hide-and-seek, or as an awkward teenager, or finally as an adult
returning home from far away – my grandfather is the serene center. I see his
face light up with delight as I come down the stairs, or walk in the back door
after months away; and feel his arms open up to hold me. He was eternally kind,
patient, and generous to everyone who entered that house, but especially to his
family. Thanksgiving seemed symbolic of the warmth of both my grandparents, but
especially of him, and I don’t think he was ever happier than when he looked
across all our faces, from his place at the head of the table to my grandmother
at the other end. The respect and love we all felt for him was absolutely
genuine and deserved because of his selflessness, not from some sort of imposed
idea of authority. 

After dinner – which was always at lunchtime – Uncle Lee
would have to leave to get back to the barn, and the other men would retire to
the back room for football-watching  while the women did the dishes and put things
away, and then sat together in the front room talking and knitting. When we
were children we headed upstairs to play – a favorite game, besides hide and
seek, was “red-light-green-light” in the long upstairs hall, which meant that
each turn took a long time. Sometimes – usually at my instigation – we put on
plays and insisted that the adults come upstairs to watch us, and then somewhere
in late afternoon everyone would crash from their
mince-pie-and-ice-cream-induced high, and we’d hear a call from the foot of the
stairs that meant the holiday was over. It all seems so simple now: especially during
those Eisenhower years when time felt suspended and no one was very upset about
anything at all.

 

22. Men (part 2)

A tintype of Charles Rush Miller, my great-great-grandfather. Another photo is here.

Inez says that the girls were always “a bit scared” of
Charles Giles, but they had a different opinion of their other grandfather, Charles
Rush Miller. My grandmother adored him and always described him as being
confident, happy, and not giving a damn about what anyone else thought of him.
He was a farmer and a skilled carpenter and cabinet-maker; at 70 he built a
beautiful heavy horse-drawn sleigh for his son, Wallace, which Inez said
“carried many parties of people, young and old, after it arrived in South Otselic.”

He was also a skilled woodsman and lover of the fields
and streams, and probably encouraged the little girls in what became a lifelong
interest of their own. When I was little, Inez used to tell me how he had once
found a den of baby foxes whose mother had been trapped and how the girls
begged him to tell and retell the story of reaching in and taking the cubs out
one by one.

He hunted deer in the “North Woods” and small game nearer
home. He was a trout fisherman of great skill, spending many summer days at his
son’s home, helping in haying and fishing the Middletown and other streams he had known all his life. With a granddaughter to drive him
in a buggy to the source of a stream, he would vanish for most of a day,
returning weary, with sagging shoulders at night, but never with empty creel.
He always fished with worms, carried in a little bait-box, slung by a strap
from his shoulder, his fish-basket, lined with ferns, on the opposite side.

Wallace Miller, my great-grandfather, as a young man

It’s odd, considering how large Libby looms in the family’s
history, but I don’t know much about Wally, my great-grandfather Miller. My
mother and grandmother certainly loved him dearly. He died suddenly, of a
massive stroke or heart attack, quite a long while before I was born, before
the war, I believe.

Wally in his late years

These two men – Charles Rush and Wallace – must have given
my grandmother an affection for men, even if she refused to kowtow to them. She
always told me, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that it was important to make
men feel that you thought they were indispensable, while being perfectly
capable of standing on your own two feet. She was very fortunate to find my
grandfather, who loved her completely and was willing to wait on her and put up
with her independent spirit and strong opinions; she, for her part, was devoted
to him as well, and they were an inseparable team for over sixty years, known
by everyone in our town. My grandmother had a fast mind and a tongue to match,
while he was tremendously patient.

My grandmother often quoted poetry, and also loved doggerel. One of her favorites, trotted out on appropriate occasions, was "Patience is a virtue, learn it if you can — Seldom found in women, and never in a man," but she had married someone who was the exception.

My grandfather and me in the woodworking shop, 1986

If my grandfather did lose his temper on a rare
occasion, you knew he must be very angry. Instead of lashing out when he got
frustrated with his wife, though, he usually retreated to his big woodworking shop in
the stone cellar, where he kept a bottle of gin to calm his nerves and could
saw or sand in peace until he was calm and ready to go back upstairs. He was an
excellent restorer of antique furniture, and taught my father to be a fine
woodworker as well; the two of them spent many hours in the shop as well as
working together in the real estate business during the day. My grandfather was
also just plain lucky – at life, and at cards. Learning to playing bridge with
him was quite an experience. He never got rattled, and like my mother could remember all the cards. He and my mother or grandmother would be partners,
against my father and me, and we would watch in amazement as he’d win the bidding at 3 No
Trump and calmly and confidently proceed to take every trick, then gather up
the cards and, smiling a little bit to himself, say something offhand like, “That worked out pretty well.”

Note

I’ve added some missing photos – one of my father to the post on "The War" and a photo of Henry Miller and his pioneer house in South Dakota on "Emigration." There’s also a new paragraph in that one with the secret of why Henry went west – I knew I had it somewhere and found that I’d written it down in 1985 when my grandmother told it to me.

21. Men (part 1)

Charles Giles Adams’ 90th birthday, 192x. He is seated in the middle of the second row; my grandmother is directly in front of him on the grass. Inez is in the back row, third from right.

Before this, I’ve been writing mostly about the Clark-Miller side
of the family – the ancestors of Libby’s husband, Wallace Miller. On the other side,
Libby’s father and mother were Charles Giles Adams and Sophia Foote. The
Adamses were descended from Darius Adams, born in 1774, who came to Sharon
Springs, New York in 1792, and then to South Plymouth (near Beaver Meadow) in
1803. Darius and his wife Martha Simons (aha! another Martha!) had eleven
children. Most of them eventually drifted west, but the youngest was Charles Giles,
my great-great-grandfather, who stayed.

He married a neighbor, Betsy Lowenza Taylor, and she died
just a year later, leaving their baby son, Lorenzo. Inez writes that he always
kept a few mementos of her locked away, such as bits of jewelry she had worn,
including a pair of gold hoop earrings. He once showed them to Inez’s cousin
Julia, who admired them and asked if she could wear them. He said yes, if she’d
also wear another like them in her nose!

In 1854, shortly after Betsy’s death, Charles married Sophia
Foote. (The Foote family farm is the beloved Beaver Meadow farm where Inez,
Grandma, and Minerva eventually grew up – Libby describes how the family got
there in chapter 8 of this story.) Charles and Sophia had four daughters:
Florence,
Helen, Alice, and Libby, and later,
two sons, Grant and Jessie.

In 1866, the family moved for ten years to Cazenovia, New York – then a very sophisticated and wealthy
town compared to the rural hamlet of Beaver Meadow. Cazenovia was also quite far away. The truth about the family’s unusual move
remains a mystery, but Inez speculated about the reason:

It has always been said that this was done to give the older
girls the advantage of the educational facilities there. However there may have
been other factors inducing the move just at that time. There had been some
gossip about a child of Olive Brown, a neighbor’s girl who worked for
grandmother.

In 1876 the two older girls graduated and the family came
back to Beaver Meadow. Lorenzo, who had been overseeing the farm for the last
two years, had married his stepmother Sophia’s niece, a young woman named Ada
Benjamin. They quarreled and she went back to her family. Charles Giles went to
see her and tried to patch things up, and Lorenzo went to get Ada.
When he arrived, she was sitting on the porch with another young man, a
neighbor, who Lorenzo had suspected as being the reason for Ada’s
discontent all along. According to the story, he drove by the house without
stopping and never came back. Lorenzo then entered college at Northwestern University and soon came down with
typhoid fever. Charles Giles went to get him but he died there in 1878.

There
was more tragedy in store: the little boy, Grantie, contracted dysentery from
polluted drinking water and died. Some of the older girls, brought back to the
wilderness from the sophistication of Cazenovia, had rather inappropriate love
affairs. Ten years after the family returned, Jesse, 14, was shot in the leg when he and
another boy were climbing over a fence and Jesse’s gun went off accidentally. The
local doctor had limited knowledge, and Charles Giles refused at first to
consent to an amputation when the leg became infected. When he did agree, it
was too late, and Jesse, the only surviving son, died.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Inez, my Grandmother,
and Minerva all shared a definite attitude of female superiority. It seems to me that
this may have come from their own mother, Libby, both because of the superior education
she and her sisters had received but also because Charles Giles, and perhaps
Lorenzo too, had been considered stubborn and selfish. Sophia looks sad and
long-suffering in her pictures, though Libby says she had a good sense of
humor. I wonder if she harbored resentment and sorrow at the loss of Grant and Jesse
and blamed her husband – and who knows what she felt about the neighbor girl!

Sophia died in the early 1990s, not long after she and
Charles Giles went to live in the nearest “big” town – the county seat, Norwich.
Libby and Wally took over the farm, and Charles Giles spent his summers there.
In his very old age, he quarreled with Libby’s next older sister, Alice, who
wanted him to dispose of his horse to make room for the automobile she planned
to buy. To spite her, he bought a new house in Norwich and married an elderly woman to keep it. When he died, at age 90, he left a
provision in his will requiring his four daughters to support his widow until
she died.

20. …and Return

Libby (left) and her sister Alice in about 1865. This picture was always in a small frame in my grandmother’s bookcase.

 

We think of people going west and never returning, but some
did. In Libby’s memoir, “Heaven and Hell in the (18)60s," she tells the story of
one family who made the journey in hopes of finding a better life. Most of this memoir is based on recollections of her mother, Sophia Foote Adams.

There came a time when Kansas land was being greatly exploited. Several families from this district migrated thence in response to glowing invitations to acquire cheap new land under very
flattering conditions. We were then surprised with the announcement that the
Elder (the pastor of the small Baptist Church) with his family, two sons and a young daughter, were going to join his
eldest son who had married and gone to settle there before them.

A farewell donation was given them and a large gathering
assembled for the occasion. This was to be held on account of greater space, in
the new hotel, and would be an oyster supper. On these occasions the housewives
seemed to vie with each other in offering up their finest culinary productions.
There were oysters, stewed and raw, scalloped and fried; cold meats of every
description, baked beans, breads of wheat, corn, and rye; jellies, preserves,
cakes, cookies and pies. A farewell offering was presented, amounting to more
than one hundred dollars, which was considered quite magnificent.

I find it amazing that they were able to procure oysters, which must have represented the height of luxury in those days – they must have come in a barrel, by train, from Boston to Norwich or Utica, and then have been fetched by some of the men with a horse and wagon.

Whispers went round that the affair was to last only till
midnight, when the owner of the hotel, who had extended his hospitality, would
arrange a dance. This proved to be true. Farewells were said and departing
friends had reduced the gathering but the Elder was so gratified with his
parting gift that he wish publicly to thank the donors. So with sets formed
on the dancing floor and the music about to begin, the parson appeared, and
after making a short speech of acceptance knelt down on the floor and offered up a prayer for their spiritual
welfare.

Libby notes earlier in the memoir that the Elder
was known for his eloquent preaching.

For a few years the little church was without a regular
pastor and meetings were held by any nearby minister who could be engaged, and
the church seemed to lapse into innocuous desuetude. But, suddenly, it became
known that the Elder was returning – in fact, was already on the way. They had
loaded all their possessions into a large covered wagon like those of the
pioneers and this was their home. At night they slept encamped beside the road.
The sons had acquired a band of horses, which, it was said, were to be acquired in Kansas for a song. These followed the wagon and fed on whatever they could find by the way. Certain ones
were exchanged for driving and the whole band were expected to furnish a means
of revenue upon returning in the east. Upon pleasant nights the sons slept
outside where the horses were bunched together. It proved to be a long trek,
consuming most of the summer, but they arrived at last, brown and seedy, at
home again and happy to be once more in a land of plenty. Many were the stories
told of their experiences in a strange environment. Torrential rains had washed
their vegetables out of the ground and winds of hurricane strength came and
blew them away till at last all they had to eat were corn dodgers and salt.

So another donation was given for them and everyone marveled
to see how ravenously they ate. This time there was need for clothes and
supplies of every kind to start them living again. Cashmere for a new dress was given the wife and the donors whispered among themselves with smiles that she “wished it were made.”
 

The Elder soon took up his work again as shepherd of the
little Baptist flock but he seemed to have suffered physically from his
experiences. Old age was creeping upon him and not many more years were given
him.

19. Emigration

Henry Miller in South Dakota

In the 1880s, two of my great-great-grandfather’s brothers,
Lucien and Henry Miller, emigrated to South Dakota, taking their aged father, Lewis Miller, with them. Lucien left behind the
bodies of two infant daughters who are buried in the Stanbro cemetery near
Beaver Meadow along with his mother, Minerva Clark Miller, and his brother Silas,
but his two sons went with him. One, Lewis, only lived a short time, but Walter
became the father of nine children.

Inez didn’t put this story in the genealogy, but my grandmother told me that Henry had "had to get married," and didn’t want to. At the altar he turned to the woman and said, "You can kiss my ass," walked out of the church and immediately packed up and headed West. He came back once to visit the family, and she remembers him as a lovely, sweet man who paid a lot of attention to each of the girls.

My great-great-grandfather, Charles Rush Miller, made at
least one trip west to see his brothers — or perhaps it was when his father
died. Two things he had brought back from that trip always hung in my
grandparents’ “back room”: an Indian
peace pipe carved of red stone, and a terrifying club made of a round,
fist-sized rock fixed with leather bands to a wooden shaft that was decorated
with tiny glass beads; both were authentic articles he had received in some sort of meeting with native Indians in the Dakotas. It was always a big treat when my grandparents took
these things down off the wall and let us handle them.

Aunt Inez, Grandma, and my Aunt Meredith always maintained
connections with this branch of the family, keeping up a correspondence by mail
and going a few times to visit. Some of the South Dakota
relatives also came back here. My cousin Barbara and I corresponded with one of
our South Dakota cousins, Nancy, when we were teenagers, and Barbara eventually went out there in 1971 to school at South Dakota State – amusingly known as SDS U.

18. Driving

The jeep careened around the corner onto Nowers Road, barely staying on all four wheels. “Jesus H.
Mahogany Christ,” said my father. My heart was beating very fast, and I
clutched the steering wheel hard as we went down the straightaway. I slowed
down and pulled over, shakily.

Learning to drive wasn’t too easy. Although Dad and I
usually got along very well, doing things together, we clashed when he was the
teacher and I was the student. I didn’t like being told what to do, and this
was a situation where that was rather necessary. I also didn’t like not being
good at things, or not being able to master them quickly. Using the jeep as a
learning vehicle probably wasn’t such a great idea, though – I don’t think we
did it again. My mother was patient and endlessly kind, so she did the bulk of
the sitting-while-I-drove: down the familiar highway, around the town, around
the lake, offering a few suggestions now and then, never getting too riled up
or jumpy. My father did the jump-off-the-deep end parts, taking me to an
iced-up parking lot to practice controlled skids, teaching me to parallel park,
driving on interstates and in traffic. I had plenty of outbursts; he tried to
be patient but got mad back; we are, and always were, a lot alike. I always swore
I wouldn’t get in the car with him again, but of course I did. It was the same
when he taught me to sail. It was OK to get mad and frustrated, or even to jump
off the boat and swim to shore, but he never let me quit: I’m very grateful.
And I’m grateful that my mother and I were not so alike in temperament: it kept
me from fighting with her – we almost ever had words – and allowed us to do
many things together happily and peacefully. There was nothing my mother
disliked more than conflict.

My father and grandfather both loved to drive and drove constantly, from one end of
the county to another, as part of their business. Mom was a good driver, having
learned from her own father who was just as patient, kind, and generous as she
was, and she and I went places together, but when my father was in the car, she
deferred to him. Neither my grandmother nor my aunt ever learned to drive at
all: my grandmother was basically lazy and enjoyed being waited on and driven
around, and my aunt blamed her inability on her left-handedness. Neither of
them really needed to drive – my grandfather was more than happy to drive anywhere, and
my grandparents often drove to the farm to take my aunt uptown to the store. It
was recreation.

On Sundays my grandparents often took a drive over the
hills, just to look around at the beautiful scenery of the Chenango and Otselic
valleys, or to visit relatives and friends. My father told me recently that
before I was born, and when I was very small, they all used to go to Beaver
Meadow nearly every weekend for a drive or a picnic. The last time I went there
with my grandparents was at my request – I had wanted to see the family
gravestones and try to remember what was where. My grandfather, in his eighties
then, drove right off the road at one point. My grandmother never blinked, but
sat, quietly queenlike in the front seat, until he got the car back under
control. Not long after that, another elderly man in town had a serious accident
in which someone got badly hurt. My grandfather heard about it and put the car
into the garage and said, “That’s it.” He was like that: graceful, aware of his
own limitations, and not inclined to rage against inevitabilities. My mother
was too.

Hardly anyone in my high school class drove to school; in fact one of my own recurrent dreams is that I’m back there, but have my own car. Strange. But I think it has to do with how trapped I felt then, in that small town, without really knowing it, and how a car became a means of independence. Still, I didn’t get my license until I was out of college and working,
and for the first time in my life very much needed my own car. My parents saved and paid for every cent of my education, at considerable sacrifice to themselves, but unlike nearly all parents today, they felt I should earn the money for the other things I wanted. I had a job as a naturalist with the State of New York, and I saved and bought a car, with some help from them. And that was it: I moved out of their house at the lake into the upstairs of my grandparents’ house, and that winter spent a lot of days commuting between Cooperstown, where my boyfriend lived, and our town, where I was working. It was a very snowy winter and I learned how to drive in terrible conditions — which was good, because the next summer I moved to New England. The road, drawn like a curving line between us, became the path between my old life and the new, and the car, the mail, and the telephone the vehicles that carried my love and life back and forth between the two. My ancestors had come from there; now I went back, further away than anyone in the family had gone in generations, except my great-great-uncles who had gone to the west. But I went east, and north.

18. Driving

The jeep careened around the corner onto Nowers Road, barely staying on all four wheels. “Jesus H.
Mahogany Christ,” said my father. My heart was beating very fast, and I
clutched the steering wheel hard as we went down the straightaway. I slowed
down and pulled over, shakily.

Learning to drive wasn’t too easy. Although Dad and I
usually got along very well, doing things together, we clashed when he was the
teacher and I was the student. I didn’t like being told what to do, and this
was a situation where that was rather necessary. I also didn’t like not being
good at things, or not being able to master them quickly. Using the jeep as a
learning vehicle probably wasn’t such a great idea, though – I don’t think we
did it again. My mother was patient and endlessly kind, so she did the bulk of
the sitting-while-I-drove: down the familiar highway, around the town, around
the lake, offering a few suggestions now and then, never getting too riled up
or jumpy. My father did the jump-off-the-deep end parts, taking me to an
iced-up parking lot to practice controlled skids, teaching me to parallel park,
driving on interstates and in traffic. I had plenty of outbursts; he tried to
be patient but got mad back; we are, and always were, a lot alike. I always swore
I wouldn’t get in the car with him again, but of course I did. It was the same
when he taught me to sail. It was OK to get mad and frustrated, or even to jump
off the boat and swim to shore, but he never let me quit: I’m very grateful.
And I’m grateful that my mother and I were not so alike in temperament: it kept
me from fighting with her – we almost ever had words – and allowed us to do
many things together happily and peacefully. There was nothing my mother
disliked more than conflict.

My father and grandfather both loved to drive and drove constantly, from one end of
the county to another, as part of their business. Mom was a good driver, having
learned from her own father who was just as patient, kind, and generous as she
was, and she and I went places together, but when my father was in the car, she
deferred to him. Neither my grandmother nor my aunt ever learned to drive at
all: my grandmother was basically lazy and enjoyed being waited on and driven
around, and my aunt blamed her inability on her left-handedness. Neither of
them really needed to drive – my grandfather was more than happy to drive anywhere, and
my grandparents often drove to the farm to take my aunt uptown to the store. It
was recreation.

On Sundays my grandparents often took a drive over the
hills, just to look around at the beautiful scenery of the Chenango and Otselic
valleys, or to visit relatives and friends. My father told me recently that
before I was born, and when I was very small, they all used to go to Beaver
Meadow nearly every weekend for a drive or a picnic. The last time I went there
with my grandparents was at my request – I had wanted to see the family
gravestones and try to remember what was where. My grandfather, in his eighties
then, drove right off the road at one point. My grandmother never blinked, but
sat, quietly queenlike in the front seat, until he got the car back under
control. Not long after that, another elderly man in town had a serious accident
in which someone got badly hurt. My grandfather heard about it and put the car
into the garage and said, “That’s it.” He was like that: graceful, aware of his
own limitations, and not inclined to rage against inevitabilities. My mother
was too.

Hardly anyone in my high school class drove to school; in fact one of my own recurrent dreams is that I’m back there, but have my own car. Strange. But I think it has to do with how trapped I felt then, in that small town, without really knowing it, and how a car became a means of independence. Still, I didn’t get my license until I was out of college and working,
and for the first time in my life very much needed my own car. My parents saved and paid for every cent of my education, at considerable sacrifice to themselves, but unlike nearly all parents today, they felt I should earn the money for the other things I wanted. I had a job as a naturalist with the State of New York, and I saved and bought a car, with some help from them. And that was it: I moved out of their house at the lake into the upstairs of my grandparents’ house, and that winter spent a lot of days commuting between Cooperstown, where my boyfriend lived, and our town, where I was working. It was a very snowy winter and I learned how to drive in terrible conditions — which was good, because the next summer I moved to New England. The road, drawn like a curving line between us, became the path between my old life and the new, and the car, the mail, and the telephone the vehicles that carried my love and life back and forth between the two. My ancestors had come from there; now I went back, further away than anyone in the family had gone in generations, except my great-great-uncles who had gone to the west. But I went east, and north.

17. The War

My father, soon after he enlisted.

Every generation has its war.

For my parents it was World War II. In the early fifties, as
I came into consciousness of the world around me, and the fact that history
hadn’t started with my own birth, I realized there had been this thing in the
past called “the war”. It felt like a living but distant person, or a place,
perhaps, that had been known and visited by everyone in the house except me. My
father and Uncle Dick had both served, in the army and navy respectively, and
both had been involved in serious action. But this was fairly common, in our
small town: many young men had gone. Some had come back, and some had not.

In the front parlor was a photograph of Corky, a young man
in my mother’s class who had been a particular friend of the family and, I
gathered, had had a romantic interest in my mother. He had gone down with his
ship in the Pacific. In addition to the photograph, displayed along with the
family photos, were a few items on my grandmother’s desk that he had brought or
sent from Asia; they felt like icons, or relics which
had significance to the adults that I couldn’t quite fathom. Later my
grandmother told me that he had left some of his clothes in our house, and that
when my mother heard he was dead, she took them all out into the back yard and
burned them.

In the early years, my father sometimes had nightmares that
would wake me in the next room. He had been a tank driver in the infantry in Europe;
he had landed at Normandy the day
after D-Day and gone on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. He said very little about his war experiences, which had been
graphic, exhausting, and sustained, and had included long periods of hospitalization.
When he came home, like so many other GIs, he just wanted to try to have a
normal life. He was the son of the Methodist minister who had recently been
posted to that small upstate New York town, and yet he was the opposite of pious and straight-laced: a bright light
who rode into my mother’s life, smiling, on a Harley Davidson. I bet he was the
most exciting thing she’d seen for a long time, and very handsome too.

The war made him give up any interest he had had in hunting
and guns, even though he had been an expert marksman; one day, while he was
renovating an attic space into a den, he took his rifle and walled it up in the
closet. He did, however, watch war movies when they started to be shown on
television. As the nation began to enter into the years of the Cold War and
nuclear arms race, I can remember begging him to turn the sound down because
the planes and bombing disturbed me so much when I was trying to go to sleep. (Broadcast
media and antennas were an ongoing interest of my father’s, so we had early
televisions, and experimental antennas in the attic. At night, walking me up
and down the hall to try to get me to sleep, he used to show me the parts of
the radios and amplifiers he was working on – apparently one of my first words
was “tubes.” Later, I used to help sort the parts for his Heathkit projects and
hold things in place while he soldered them.)

Everyone we knew had lost someone in World War II, but the
war had also defined and changed them. Dad never joined the VFW or participated
in veteran’s parades or communities; his uniform was folded and put away in a
trunk, and only taken out once or twice that I remember, probably when I asked
to see it. I grew up with the sense that he had seen things none of the rest of
us had seen, and that part of his sense of self meant protecting his wife and
child from that. He had done it, and never spoke of his service as heroic; he
said flatly that war was hell, and became less and less interested and
supportive of the military as the years went by. His kneecaps had been
shattered in an accident and replaced by steel, and glass from the same
accident was still working its way out of his face when I was a little girl. I
remember when the movie M*A*S*H, about the Korean War, came out, we went to see
it in the theater. I was sitting next to my father, and there was a running gag
where someone was always saying, “Goddam Army,” and at the end of the movie,
when an officer can’t get a jeep to run, he says, “Goddam Army. Goddam Army
jeep!” My father muttered, “’Goddam Army’ is right.”

But the funny thing was that the most tangible relic of
World War II that we had was, in fact, our jeep – a 1952 Willys army surplus
jeep. My father loved to drive it – hotrod it – and when there were kids
around, a favorite thing was for him to take us on “wingdings” – hair-raising
rides around and around the edges of a nearby gravel pit, and then down the
back road where there were some big bumps that would lift us right off the
seats. Of course none of us had seat belts or any safety equipment at all, and
the exhaust fumes came circling up in the back, making us cough and sometimes
get sick, but everyone screamed and begged for more, and he was happy to
oblige. My mother often went along, good sport that she was, and she would try
also try to keep him under control, but their banter was part of the whole
experience – Dad pushing the envelope, Mom trying to reign him in. 

We still have the jeep, and Dad uses it for snow-plowing and
hauling brush all the time. I love it, but find it very hard to drive – it’s
his vehicle. When Dad and I go off on an errand in it together, it feels like
old times – we’re both grinning. It’s very low-mileage – a little more than
30,000 miles – and the body was restored, maybe a dozen years ago. He’s
planning to do a valve job on it right away – as soon as Charlie, at the
garage, gets the new gaskets in.

16. The Dream

Her dream started in the early seventies, when I began
going to cities on my own. I’d take the bus to New York and meet my boyfriend and stay a few days, and later another boyfriend and I went to Chicago and Boston and Washington, D.C., and then I married someone and the day after the wedding we flew across the ocean.

No one in my family had been to Europe since my father had been in the war. I told my mother she could write to me. After we’d been traveling three weeks, we went to an office in Paris, near the Opera, where foreigners could receive mail, and there was an envelope with my mother’s handwriting on it. I opened it and read, “I feel like I am putting a note in a bottle.”

That trip was hard for her, I think. We were gone
six weeks and the weekly letters and phone calls we’d always had were impossible; it was long before e-mail. I called a couple of times. In spite of mom’s allergies, my parents had agreed to keep our dog, a big golden retriever, and they told us on the phone that he was fine. They sounded distant: a little
awkward, a little amazed, but mostly just stoic. Be careful, they said. Come home safe.

The war had done it, I suppose: made Europe into a thing of distance and fear: fear that the people you loved would never come back. But there was also something she feared about cities. My mother
would sometimes tell me about the dream: I’m in a strange city, she said, in a
large hotel with long corridors and many doors. I can hear you calling me, but
I can’t find you, even though I go up and down the corridors, opening all the
doors.