Category writing

The Anchor

JT Twissel 14 Comments

In honor of my mother’s birthday, a post from a few years back.

Mother and Sally exchanged Christmas Cards for over seventy-five years. For most of those seventy-five years, they lived four hours from each other and could have easily visited, but I didn’t meet Sally until Mother’s ninetieth birthday.

They grew up in the same small town in New England. They were the same age, went to the same schools and the same church. And … both moved far from that small town after high school graduation. But those are the only things they had in common. Teenage Mother liked to party but did well enough in school to earn a scholarship while Teenage Sally apparently never rocked the boat. While my mother was at college, Sally met a soldier returning from the war with only one hand, married him and left for the West Coast.

Sally’s husband worked for the Post Office until his death. They bought a house just south of San Francisco where they raised three children. After his death, the oldest daughter moved in down the street to take care of Sally. According to the daughter, Sally’s children all did well and produced equally successful children.

In December 2019, after baking Christmas cookies for her neighbors, Sally sat down at the kitchen table and died. I can’t imagine a more pleasant way to go.

Mother somehow graduated from college although to hear her reminisce about those days it’s hard to understand how. She started her career in Hartford Connecticut, about thirty miles from where she’d grown up, and soon got married. My father spent about seven years trying to survive in the corporate world … jumping from company to company all over the states. And Mother went along with him having children and attempting to be a housewife. After they settled in Reno Nevada, Mother gave up the charade. She divorced my father and went out and got the career she’d always wanted.

For some reason through all of the turmoil — and it was turmoil — Mother always looked forward to Sally’s Christmas Cards. I imagine they contained a synopsis of Sally’s year. Or perhaps they just contained holiday greetings. None survived the final move she took.

I finally met Sally during the year that Mother lived with us. Her daughter contacted me and we got the two ladies together, coincidentally on Mother’s 90th birthday. They sat together mostly in silence, affectionately touching and gazing into each other’s eyes and when the restaurant closed to prepare for the dinner rush, there were tears. On all our faces.

Christmas 2019 Mother called to tell me she had not received a card from Sally. She said something must have happened because Sally would never forget to send a Christmas card. Since both ladies were now approaching 94, I thought perhaps Sally’s mental state was slipping and so I contacted her daughter and heard about the Christmas cookies.

Telling Mother that Sally had died was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

Mother died in August 2020. I wish she’d exhausted herself making cookies and sat down to die, but it was during the pandemic. Residents of her assisted living facility were basically prisoners in the their rooms with only remote entertainment which I’m sure aided in the decline of many of them. I played her music from the 30s and 40s on my iPhone and read aloud from a book until finally in the morning her spirit escaped. She just didn’t want to go through another Christmas without getting a card from Sally. From what I know, the two ladies probably wouldn’t have enjoyed going on a cruise together but they anchored each other to this world. Some old friends are like that.

Bruce is beyond reproach

JT Twissel 45 Comments

Good Friday always reminds of the Seagrass family under whose wings I spent my high school years. They celebrated every holiday to the max, unlike my family. Easter we might get dressed up and go to church. Or we might not. One year we went to the Lutheran Church because my paternal grandparents were visiting and grandmother insisted that we not only go to church but that we look respectable.

My brother still hates wearing a suit! But my little sister has become quite the fashion plate. Don’t show her this picture. She’ll really pitch a fit!

The cheerful couple in the above picture, Myrtle and RB Senior, met in Fargo North Dakota and spent twenty-five years working on Indian reservations. I never really understood why until I recently discovered that RB Senior was a descendant of White Elk, aka Colonel Alexander McKee and Nonhelema, aka Grenadier Squaw. So living amongst the Native Americans was in his DNA. Unfortunately it was a life that hardened my grandmother to the point that she made RB Senior’s later years miserable. I only remember the quiet, taciturn man who died when I was twenty. But recently, via the miracle of the internet, I discovered he wasn’t always that way.

Oh Bruce, we never knew! Why didn’t you marry Katherine Ladd, whose “winning countenance never fails to influence the judges in forensic contests”? Or her twin sister, Rizpah, the laughing twin, who “plays gentleman friend to all the spinsters on the faculty.” A good laugh is indeed sunshine in a house. Or both sisters! You could have done it Bruce! Although, what was this Ford’s establishment on North Broadway you famously frequented?

Once again I have the ancestors in an uproar! But it is the holiday for forgiveness, right?

Happy Easter all.

They swayed like branches in the wind …

JT Twissel 18 Comments

This one’s for Charlie Dills

There have been many movies made about life in post WWII Germany (The Third Man, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, etc., etc.) that portrayed American GIs who stayed behind as profiteers or spies. The reality is, many were broken men who didn’t want to pretend the world would ever be free from evil. They worked for the Army, mostly in logistics, married European women, adopted European traditions and spent too much time at the Officer’s Club enjoying Happy Hour every night.

Occupied Germany, circa 1970

As a nineteen year old hippy dippy (love will save the world!) I loved hearing their stories and I think they were amused by my naivete. To a point and then I’m sure I was very annoying. It’s one thing to read about the millions of people – Jews, Catholics, Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviets POWs, gays, priests, members of the resistance – targeted for elimination by the Nazis. It’s quite another to talk to someone who helped liberate one of those camps.

“I saw thousands of people whom the Red Army has saved – people so thin that they swayed like branches in the wind, people whose ages one could not possibly guess.”

Boris Polevoy, correspondent for Pravda

So, on this eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I’m remembering you Charlie Dills.

From my WIP which at this point is resting:

The train had passed through Switzerland on a cloudy night, thus, there had been little to see out the window, only the blur of lights as they’d passed through town after town without slowing down. Charlie’d watched her curiously for a while and then his eyes closed and his head slipped against the window. For the rest of the night he lay like a broken doll in that position. At one time, he’d probably been a handsome young man, she thought, like Gregory Peck, tall and dark with prominent features and soft eyes before the alcohol and cigarettes had taken their toll. Now he looked beyond repair.

Outside their cabin, the Italians partied all night long, laughing and sometimes arguing. Loudly and without a care for first class passengers who might want some shut eye. They were going home for the winter where presumably they’d have plenty of time to sleep. Riley didn’t know what awaited her except a long drive home through Switzerland with the saddest man on the planet.

Thanks for the lift Uncle Bob

JT Twissel 27 Comments

Legend has it that my mother’s water broke while she was shooting the bull with her two younger brothers in my grandmother’s kitchen. Charley, the elder of the two boys, frantically called The Enforcer (aka Grandma), who was the head nurse at the hospital in the next town over and she ordered him to drive Mother to the hospital PDQ. But Charley couldn’t do it. Perhaps it was the sight of all that embryonic fluid on his mother’s kitchen floor or perhaps Charley had begun to celebrate the weekend a little early. And so fourteen year old Bobby took charge and drove my mother to the hospital.

Uncle Bob age fifteen. That’s Charley’s wife next to him – my Crazy Auntie Dottie.

I guess you could say, without my Uncle Bob’s calm in the time of crisis, I would have been born on the kitchen floor. And how did I thank him? I wrote a book about the time I spent with him in Germany in 1970.

Click here for a synopsis of the book.

My mother had a predilection for stretching the truth. Thus I landed in Europe believing my long lost uncle was some sort of a spy.

Uncle Bob in his late thirties discussing top secret spy stuff over a beer with his friend Bruce, also a top secret spy.

He quickly disabused me of that notion. Below is an excerpt from The Graduation Present.

“Gilberto, did you get a look at the knockers on Lou’s new secretary?” Uncle Bob asked the driver as we drove along.

“Molly, you mean Molly, right?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s her name. You know, the big ones are fun to cuddle but there is something to be said for frisky little titties. The French have a saying that the perfect size tit fits into a champagne glass. What do you think of that Gilberto? You like the little bitty titties?”

“Ah, Uncle Bob. I’m in the backseat,” I reminded him.

“So? You got a thing against tits?”

“I can’t believe I actually thought you were a spy.”

“Spies don’t like tits?”

By the time the book came out (it only took me four decades), my uncle had retired to Florida with his church-going, Texas-loving second wife. She took great umbrage at my portrayal of her husband and threw the book away before anyone in her family could read such rubbish. I doubt she read much beyond the frisky little titties scene which is a shame because the book is really about a silly, clueless girl in a complicated world.

Robert Ross Jameson, April 1, 1936 – December 4, 2024.

Hope there’s lots of peanut butter up there in heaven! And, thanks for the lift.

Words of Wisdom from Bruce Lee

JT Twissel 19 Comments

I’ve been experimenting with a book I wrote years ago but was never really happy with. It was loosely based on experiences I had in Europe back when I was a naive know-it-all. Or, at least, that’s the image I had of my younger self. Here’s the thing, I wrote the book from the viewpoint of a nineteen year old when in actuality I was a forty year old, recently divorced woman with two children, deeply doubting many of the choices I ‘d made when young. I think you can probably guess which of the choices I was doubting.

The temp
Look at that computer! Yes, forty was a while back!

So, I rewrote the book from a third party point of view. I’m not sure if it improved the novel but I felt better about it. Thanks to Bruce Lee. I don’t think I’ll ever have his level of self-confidence, but writing a book from a first person perspective when you don’t particularly like that person, is not such a good idea.

This is not to say that all stories written from a first person perspective do their narrators a great disservice. I think the lesson learned for me, is to treat your narrator like all your other characters. No better; no worse. Has any random bit of wisdom ever changed your perspective. Bruce Lee – who knew!