Category Memoir

There’s no phone in the basement and other babysitting woes

JT Twissel 25 Comments

The other day an aunt of mine posted a meme on Facebook that read:

You’re sixteen and it’s a Friday night.

What does it mean to you?

Her answer was: “Date Night!”

Apparently I was an ultra nerdy teenager because my immediate response was: “Babysitting.”

Not counting the many times I watched (for free) my ungrateful and obstinate siblings, I became a “professional” when I was just eleven years old. My first gig was for an older couple across the street who had a baby girl. I never knew if she was a late in life baby or a grandchild whose parents, for whatever reason, couldn’t raise her. I wasn’t permitted to ask about such things. Anyway, both of the parents worked at the casinos – one worked nights and the other days, meaning they didn’t need a babysitter most of the time. However sometimes they would both need to work a swing shift – generally during the busy hours of 8 PM to 1 AM, I would arrive after the baby had been put to sleep. All I needed to do was to be there. If the baby woke up and actually needed attention, I phoned my folks … HELP! If they weren’t home, I knew all the neighbors. Still … eleven years old!!! I can’t imagine anyone leaving an infant in the hands of an eleven year old these days. In fact, it’s illegal in most states.

What happens when you hire an older woman to be your babysitter!

Most of my jobs came from my mother. She had no problem pimping me out to anyone desperate for a cheap sitter. Today there are babysitting agencies. Before you hire a babysitter, you can check out her resume, her profile and even read her reviews. Back then it was Mrs. Brown asking Mrs. White for the number of a “girl.” Then Mr. Brown would be send to retrieve the girl while Mrs. Brown prepared the list of do’s and don’ts (no candy before bed, no television until homework’s complete, etc.) most of which would be ignored. After the children were in bed, the “girl” would get on the phone with her friends and eat every potato chip in the house. Woe to the Mrs. Browns of the world who failed to stock up on junk food before a sitter’s visit. Word spread quickly of no snack houses! As did word of lousy tippers, smelly houses or creepy husbands.

Besides babies waking up and needing real care, I only had a few frightening things happen while sitting. Once a hollow-faced man appeared in the window next to the front door. I screamed and he ran away. When I called the parents, they told me it was just Jim, the neighborhood crazy guy, and he was harmless. And then they laughed. Apparently they thought terrorized fourteen year old babysitters were a real riot!

Another time the telephone rang and I answered thinking it might be the parents. A male voice said “I’m in your basement and I’m going to come up and kill you!” I was about to run out of the house with the kids when the ten-year-old said. “There’s no phone in the basement.” Then he laughed and told me what a “stupidhead” I was.

However, for the most part it was boring and so I’ve never understood why so many movies have been made about babysitters. Take Adventures in Babysitting (1987), the sitter and her charges are chased up the side of a high-rise in Chicago by mafia thugs, save a runaway teen from a rat-infested bus terminal, and crash a fraternity party … to name just a few of their adventures. Then they had to race back to the suburbs before the parents arrived home. Of course, the parents were clueless and didn’t suspect a thing.

I imagine if I was a teenage babysitter today my review would read: Panics easily, eats you out of house and home, and bores the children to death.

A Tale of Motor Vehicle Fatalities

JT Twissel 33 Comments

Today is my birthday and the plan was to be in Ireland. I’m not sure where exactly although the county of Connemara was high on the list.  If not for the pandemic, I’d be on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, the one my ancestors faced hundreds of years ago.  Tomorrow we face that grey abyss, that swallower of ships … battered and seasick to finally land where the mighty river narrows, Quebec.

I was born on a Friday afternoon in a small town in the middle of Massachusetts. If it wasn’t for the recklessness of  motor vehicle drivers I probably would have been born in Springfield which is closer to my grandparent’s house.  To explain, we go back to the year 1913.  In that year people drove “motor vehicles” on roads meant for horse and buggies with little or no instruction and zero regulation.

 

This led to an alarming number of accidents.

I can’t imagine why, can you?   In the small town of Palmer, which is on the main route from Boston to Springfield, there was no hospital. The nearest was in Springfield, a distance of thirty miles.  Thus most of the accidents were ultimately fatal.  The newspapers highlighted the need for a hospital and a local philanthropist by the name of Mrs. Emeline Wing stepped forward to donate her home to the cause and that is where I was born on this day many years ago.   My grandmother was the head nurse and I was her first grandchild. Shortly after I was born the hospital moved to a more modern building on the outskirts of town.  The house is no more.  Now there’s a bank. 

My parents were of the opinion that children only needed food, clothing and schooling.  They didn’t need big, fancy birthday parties.  However, for my sixteenth birthday they did take me to Trader Dick’s Kon Tiki Bar (across the street from the Sparks Nugget) and I had a virgin Mai Tai with a slice of pineapple and a miniature umbrella. I can’t remember what I ordered but it was probably a lot more exotic than pot roast (my mother’s speciality).

 I’ve had a few “unforgettable for all the wrong reasons” birthdays. One year we attempted to drive from Aspen to Reno in one day which would have been possible if the weather had cooperated.  By the time we got to Wendover Nevada we could go no further.  We had to stop.  Wendover is where your car breaks down after crossing the Bonneville Salt Flats and  Wendover is where the Mormons go to gamble, drink and hang out at strip clubs, particularly on Memorial Day weekend.  We had difficulty finding a room.  We couldn’t get a seat in any of the casino restaurants.  Dinner was buck fifty tacos from a stand and drug store gin and tonic. We sat in our hotel room and watched tumbleweeds blow into the hotel pool as sand storms went about the business of  destroying windshields. 

Wendover Nevada looking east toward the Salt Flats.

On the television we could only get three channels: Fox news, Spanish soap operas, and a marathon of Undercover Boss, a reality show that attempts to prove bosses really care about their employees.  The morning couldn’t come fast enough.

Today is supposed to be the hottest day of the week and so perhaps we’ll just stay home.  Water the green beans and the garlic and read a good book.  Ever have one of those birthdays you’d just assume forget?

 

In the park where we had breakfast one Sunday morning

JT Twissel 24 Comments

It’s dark and rainy here and will be for the foreseeable future.  Jesus and Guillermo are in the basement removing asbestos (our furnace was condemned) and the cost of removing all of those sixty year old ducts and hopefully getting warm again has dulled the excitement of Santa Claus’ arrival. And so instead of filling the airwaves with uplifting stories and holiday cheer I’ve been on a grim mission to track down and label dead ancestors. 

 

On the back of this picture is written: In the park where we had breakfast one Sunday morning.

I’m guessing the woman wearing a head scarf and the man pouring the coffee are my great aunt Millie and her husband Ben.  I met them at least a couple of times when I was quite young and vividly recall thinking Ben was too handsome to be sentenced to life in a wheelchair. Shallow, I know but I was in the Disney princess stage.  As to how Ben came to be in a wheelchair, time has dulled my mother’s memory.  Was it WWI or polio?  Who knows.

This picture, and several others of a similar ilk, have nothing written on the back.  Nothing.  The bespectacled young woman in the front row, with the “you gotta be kidding me” look on her face, is my grandmother.  She was probably only sixteen but that look never changed.  I believe one of the two elderly women is my great-grandmother but mother can’t tell which one. 

Mother:  “I was dead before my grandmother was born.”

Me: “No mother.  I think you meant to say she was dead before you were born.  You’re still alive.”

“One of them could be Mrs. Pease,” she suggests, a neighbor lady who looked after her grandfather after his wife’s death.

“Which lady is Mrs. Pease? You must remember her.”

“I only remember their cow.  We used to bring it down to the barn so that Mr. Pease could milk him.”

“Her, could milk her.”

“I remember the cow.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever played “identify the ancestor” with someone who can’t remember what day it is … but five minutes is my limit.  Of course, to a five year old all old ladies look alike but a cow – who could possibly forget their first crush, even if it was on a cow?

Unlike his daughter, my great grandfather seemed only too happy to have his picture taken.  In this gathering he’s the fella sitting on the right with a little girl on his lap.  The couple behind him are my grandparents and thus the little girl must be my mother. So who is the elderly lady sitting next to great gramps?  She can’t be his wife because we’ve already established that she died before my mother was born.  She must be that friendly neighbor lady, Mrs. Pease.

After comparing the two photographs  I believe Mrs. Pease is the lady on the right (below) which means the lady standing behind my grandmother could be my great grandmother. 

What do you think?

This assumption gained new legs when I compared photos of my great aunt Millie (from the Sunday picnic breakfast scene) through the years.

Here she is with my mother and uncle, aged 2 1/2 and 18 months respectively.

 

And years later at my mother’s wedding (on the left).  

Yup, I’m reasonably sure I’m right although I’ll never really know.  All I know for sure is that one Sunday morning long ago three people had breakfast in a park somewhere and apparently that’s how they wanted to be remembered.  

What really happened to Beauregard

JT Twissel 25 Comments

What do you do with pictures of people you’ve never met but who were special to someone you loved? It’s a icky, sticky, wicket to those of us who inherit our grandparent’s photos and memorabilia and guess what folks?  As the eldest grandchild on my mother’s side of the family all those boxes and albums are in my possession and my siblings and cousins couldn’t be happier! 

Hello people I don’t know. You seem fine and dandy and I do love your photos but I can only guess at who you are. Or were. Or are.

So what will I do with all these pictures of folks I don’t know?  Invite them to some ghostly Thanksgiving seance so they can tell me their stories?  What would you do?

And now – the truth about what really happened to Beauregard

I tried to think of a funny Thanksgiving story to tell but the only thing that came to mind was the year my father decided to confess at the dinner table.  I believe his aunt Katherine was in attendance as well as his cousin Jim and recently widowed sister Helen Betty.  And of course, his adult children. The table was set to perfection. The entrees ready to go.  Everything … but the scalloped potatoes. They’d been delayed by Dad’s two inept and half-drunk divorcee daughters and we were in Deep Shit. The air was icy; the perfect dinner ruined and so Dad in some half baked attempt to save his daughters from eternal damnation rose and admitted he’d lied. On a recent hunting trip, Beauregard, his wife’s favorite basset hound, hadn’t been hit by a car and killed.

Dad had mistaken the dog for an elk and shot him dead. We tried not to laugh, we really did. Poor Dad. The things parents go through for their children.

Happy Thanksgiving – and please remember to turn on the oven before you start drinking the wine.

After your underwear drops round your ankles

JT Twissel 38 Comments

There is a story my grandmother liked to tell after a posse of vodkas had loosened her girdle to the point that her underpants dropped round her ankles if she tried to stand.  She told it with a chuckle and she told it again and again. A comedian, Grandmother was not.

It involved a cross-country trip she took with a sister-in-law she inherited after her brother’s early death. A burden it was and frequently noted but the girl had no family of her own and some form of promise had been made and some form of promise would be kept because Grandmother was 100 % Norwegian and they are, as everyone knows, the most noble of the human species. And so “Aunt Mary” became Grandmother’s shadow on holidays and vacations. In fact, I can’t quite form an image of her in my head that doesn’t include my grandmother.  Because she was still working when her husband died, she was allowed to maintain a small apartment near her place of employment.  She did not need to be reminded … although she was … that she must save diligently for the time when she could not live on her own and the family ⏤ via obligation ⏤ would have to step in.

With this as a backdrop, here is Grandmother’s Hilarious Story about Aunt Mary:

“We’d had a smooth flight out to California and even though it was Mary’s first time on an airplane, I’d told her there was nothing to fret about and so she didn’t say a word until we landed and then she let out a whimper as the plane bounced to a stop. ‘Now Mary,’ I told her, ‘no need to make a scene.’ And she didn’t although I did have my eye upon her. 

However, on the way back to Fargo the plane hit such turbulence that I felt it my duty, given the hard life she’d led, to assure her that it would be over quick. Like smashing into a brick wall.  No sense spending your last moments getting hysterical.

‘But Myrtle,’ Little Mary said and she was almost whimpering ‘I’m so ashamed. I can’t die with such shame.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said to her, ‘you haven’t done a thing in the world to be ashamed of.’

‘I didn’t clean my kitchen before we left,’ she said in a whisper. ‘What are people going to think of me if I die with my kitchen floors such a fright?’”

I thought of Mary Ness last week as we were under threat of evacuation from wildfires.  We had no electricity and cell service kept going in and out.  The parks were closed; the libraries; the stores and even the gas stations.  We had to keep our windows closed because of the smoke.  We were advised not to use a lot of water because the pumps that move water hither and thither are electrical and if the power outage went on, eventually our taps would go dry.  And so we were basically prisoners in our own homes. Waiting and waiting until our plane finally landed on solid ground. Or slammed into a mountain.

For one brief second I did consider washing the damn kitchen floor. As an activity … to keep my mind off things I couldn’t control.

And then I thought of Aunt Mary and reread a favorite novel.  Damn the kitchen floors.

Chocolates in the Snow

JT Twissel 30 Comments

I just received an email about a writer’s conference to be held in Kauai in November.  Generally I stay clear of writer’s conferences because they include meets and greets with agents more interested the anguished memoirs of bi-racial transgender youths than anything from a boring old white women.  Some of them reject you nicely but most have a look that reads: “what a complete waste of time it is to even look at you.”  I get enough rejection for free; I don’t need to pay for it.

But Kauai beckons.  I’ve only been there once and the purpose of my visit was definitely not fun and games, but I felt at home, at peace there.  And so I told my husband that for my looming and hideously repulsive birthday I wanted go to the conference and I didn’t mind going alone.  He’s not an island person.  He claims island fever drove both his brother and nephew to drink. 

“Oh no. You’ll attract someone.” Poor fellow is on the waiting list for much needed cataracts. 

I had to explain to him that not even Danielle Steele would try use a literary conference as a setting for one of her romances. Imagine this entirely believable synopsis:

Trevor couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the beautiful and sexy Dinah Dimlight of Dimlight Productions sitting in the audience listening to his reading from Forty Years of Hell, My Life Fighting Ebola.  When she said she could sell the concept to Disney with a few slight changes, he fell instantly in love. But she had more than a few slight changes in mind and so, enraged, Trevor turned to Sophie Goosebury, a fellow writer, for solace which she happily provided on the beach that night, under a thousand stars and listening to the barking sands.  But Goosebury had an ulterior motive – she wanted Trevor to promote her manuscript Kitties Armed With Assault Weapons to Dimlight as a possible cartoon series.

After I explained to Joel that two writers could never make a relationship work because the weight of propping up ailing egos would destroy at least one of them,  he said to me: “But you’re so confident.”

Holy Crap.
holy, holy crap
piss into the wind
unholy crapola

My husband is making the same assumption as many people:  I know what I want to do and I’m doing it. But being a writer in the age of a billion blogs, when you can’t go to a party without running into someone who is also a writer or wants to be a writer is like standing in line waiting to be chosen for a basketball team.  If you’re the last chosen, you’ll be sitting on the bench. But you keep on improving your skills.  You support the team and try not to be negative.  You have confidence that you’re doing what you want to do but uncertain you will ever have a chance to play on the court.

I’ve had old friends say  “I don’t have any special gifts or talents like you.”   They act as though I’m writing and blogging because I think I’m special. I am not special. I was the last kid chosen for basketball.  I was the girl whose guidance counselor suggested might make a good housewife.  I was the child whose father threw a birthday box of chocolates into the snow because she was getting chubby.   I am nothing special. 

I can still see those chocolates in the snow.

Magic Red Panties

JT Twissel 26 Comments

The only logical place to be today is in the sun.  The skies have stopped dumping ice crystals and only a lump of cumulous sits anchored above, but it is cold. 

I’m very superstitious.  If a black cat crosses the road in front of me, I will make a U turn, knock on wood and throw salt over my shoulder. I don’t walk under ladders or open umbrellas in the house.  And I painted my front door beet red. But nothing is sillier than habitually reading a daily horoscope that has never been even remotely accurate.  I’d be better off with the Ouija Board, Tarot Cards or even tea leaves.

A few years back I found out that, according the Chinese,  my mother and I were both born in a Year of the Tiger.  No wonder we were always at each other’s throats, I thought.  We couldn’t help it.  We’re impetuous, untamable beasts.   So I decided maybe there was something to Chinese astrology that warranted looking into.

Didn’t last long. In 2017 tigers, whether born in 1926 or 2010, were guaranteed bodice-ripping, once in a lifetime, grand and passionate love affairs.  Great news to my mother who was raring to go.  But I greeted the news as one would an infestation of wasps. Actually, the wasps would be more welcome. 

But today is the Chinese New Year and so predictions are everywhere. Here’s one of the predictions for tigers in this Year of the Pig.

The Tiger needs to be cautious in dangerous situations such as walking in narrow dark alleyways in the evening, high places such as cliff tops, busy building sites or participating in dangerous activities.  It is advisable for the fire Tiger to wear a red string around his/her waist for the year, or to wear red socks or underwear for support.

I guess this means I can dawdle down dark alleyways at night, do cartwheels on cliffs and pirouette through dangerous work sites as long as I’ve got on my magic red panties.

The Old Warrior’s Birthday

JT Twissel 35 Comments

Today would have been my father’s 100th birthday. While many people would have been happy to have reached that milestone, my father would have been miserable. He was a very active man.

Dad with his good buddy, Captain Wug, daredevil pilot and war hero

My early memories of him were brutal. He could not tolerate weakness.  Illness was a weakness. Bad vision was a weakness. Even breaking a bone was some kind of a weakness. And you never admitted you were in pain, or sick, or depressed. To do so was weakness.

The house he built and never finished in rural Michigan

He was a hunter who expected his family to eat the animals he’d shot and hung to bleed out in the garage. 

I went to bed hungry many nights.

When we went backpacking in the wilderness we always pitched camp near a stream where we were expected to fish for our dinner.

To this day, I hate fish.

But, because of his refusal to buy a boob tube when I was a child, I know a decent amount about classical music and, if given the title of a show tune, I can tell you which Broadway musical it’s from. And I adore books. I probably own over a thousand.

I wouldn’t want to relive my childhood but he raised us the way he was raised.  In fact, I suspect his life was far tougher.  Anyway, I’ll miss calling him today.

Except for the Dead Guy and Minus a Few Cousins

JT Twissel 23 Comments

I’ve been re-editing a book I wrote and published via Booktrope a few years before they went out of business, The Graduation Present. Of the plot, Colm Herron wrote:

A hapless hopeless romantic American girl called Riley O’Tannen heads for Europe to get a taste of the old world and instead encounters her drunken uncle who keeps a mistress, her randy aunt who keeps a gigolo and a dead CIA man whose boss is a raving homosexual.

Which is what happened decades ago except for the dead guy and minus a few cousins.  Such is the dilemma when your write a “semi-autobiographical” piece.

I did travel to Germany unprepared for the realities of life in an occupied country.  I did have to pry my uncle from the bar every night and listen to my aunt sing the praises of her lover’s magical tongue “oh what it could do …”  My uncle’s boss was rumored to be a CIA operative, and he was a dead ringer in looks and manner for Truman Capote.  But, as to the rest, well, I could say time has warped my memory but the truth is, a bit of imagination was applied.  Perhaps too much.

When you write a book with at least one character recognizable to family and friends, be prepared.  

“You made me out to be quite the putz,” my uncle complained shortly after the book was published. Ironically if he’d read through to the end and not just the first couple of chapters he would have realized that Riley O’Tannen was the putz and not him. Still it gave me pause.  I know writers who will not base a character on someone they know until that person was dead and gone. Even then, it’s difficult.  

“And how about that evil burgermeister. I don’t remember him,” my uncle continued.

“I made him up.”

“Then that other story about me pimping you out for dinner…”

“The truth.  You said ‘look at all those lonely officers. They’d love to take a pretty girl to dinner. Why should I have to feed you all the time?'”

Number one travel book when I first went to Europe.

“I don’t remember.” Sadly he didn’t mention the people who were missing from the story, my young cousins neither of whom survived unscathed from that time. When you tell a semi-autobiographical story those are the choices you face.  Who to spare and who to expose.  Uncle Bob, who now preaches the gospel of Trump in a Walmart parking lot down in Tampa, has repented and been saved. He’s never without an eight ounce glass of gin and makes gross jokes about women’s body parts, but in the church of the almighty Trump all you need to do is speak in tongues and all is forgiven.  Plus, he was born with a teflon hide.

Happy Hour at the Officer’s Club, Worms Germany 1970

And the dead man?  He’s here with me now. He sits with eyes tunneling into the night sky as we ride through Switzerland time and time again and see no stars, just a cold and apathetic landscape. Toward the end, he’d been relegated to a seat at the table reserved for those with frozen boots who couldn’t move on. They are the best people for a writer to know.

I relieved him of his misery.  I killed him.  I let him die in a place where he’d known happy times and not in a Veteran’s hospital. And that’s what writers do. But should we?

The Spoon Apocalypse

JT Twissel 29 Comments

My paternal grandmother believed that at some point in the near future the world would be bereft of spoons.  To prepare her grandchildren for the coming apocalypse, we all received spoons for Christmas, that is until Cousin George, then over six foot eight, pooped on her prophesy. I believe his exact words were “Get your head out of the vodka bottle Grandmother.”

“Oh what a wonderful spoon, Grandmother! Now I’m prepared for the Spoon Apocalypse.

Through all my travels and relocations, my spoon collection has not fared well but I still have the first one she ever sent me. It’s a sterling silver teaspoon with an etching of the Moorhead Minnesota Public Library.  I always assumed it was just something she picked up at some antique store, but through the miracle of the internet, I believe it had some other meaning to her besides the spoon prophesy.

Moorhead was my Grandmother’s home until her father died and her mother married The Judge. Probably a wise thing for a young widow with two small children to do but The Judge was a controlling nasty pants who didn’t allow his stepchildren to talk of their father or paternal aunts, uncles and cousins still living in Moorhead. That town always remained a life that could have been if not for the Spanish flu.  As a freshman in college when the library opened, she probably also spent a lot of time there.  At that time, the University of North Dakota at Fargo catered to the study of animal husbandry and improvement of soy bean crops and not to the study of something so useless as English literature.  So the spoon wasn’t just something she wrapped in foil and sent to her granddaughter (or maybe it was and I’m just a fruitcake)

After Grandmother’s death my aunt sent me this odd assortment of her utensils. Note anything odd?

 

There’s only one fork and who needs that many butter knives? Or pickle forks.

I don’t know what to do with all those spoons. Perhaps play Spoons.  Have you ever heard of that game?  Apparently it’s also known as Pig and Tongue and it is some kind of variation of Musical Chairs.  The winners of Spoons take a spoon from the middle of the table and the winners of Pig, fart.  (Not really they just touch the end of their noses. Don’t ask.) The winners of Tongue stick their tongues out.  I imagine it’s a game old Judge Nasty Pants would have loved.

Maybe I’ll give the spoons to the Spoon Lady!  Any odd things you’ve gotten as Christmas presents that made sense many years later?