Thoughts on the Passing of Millvina Dean

An era passed into history Sunday morning when Millvina Dean died in a resting home in the U.K.  While she lived a long life – 97 years – she won’t be remembered as much for who she is, but rather what she represented.  Millvina Dean was the last survivor from the sinking of the Titanic.

My mom is a natural storyteller.  When we ran out of Golden Books to read when I was a kid, she’d tell me about the things she remembered before I was born: the big blizzard in 1967, watching the news the day President Kennedy was shot, putting my infant aunt to sleep by playing her Little Richard records.  My dad didn’t volunteer too many stories, but – if asked – he would tell me about what it was like serving in the peacetime army between Korea and Vietnam.  He remembered when radio didn’t mean music, but shows like The Shadow, The Fat Man and Inner Sanctum. 

My Grandpa Ramsey didn’t talk much, but one time – without prompting – he told me about how bars in Chicago when he first came to the city before World War II offered free lunches.  Most of them were nothing good; hard boiled eggs and pickles.  However, he smiled as he remembered one that had a big bowl of cocktail shrimp every day.  My Grandma Francis remembered going to the movies before they had sound.  She loved the actor Francis X. Bushman and she cried when she heard Rudolf Valentino died.  My Grandpa drove a “Tin Lizzie” to school; before that, he rode a horse.

While my grandparents were old, I knew there were people still older that must have seen things even farther back in history.  I remember a man interviewed by Johnny Carson who remembered when President McKinley was assassinated.  That was 1901.  The Guiness Book of World Records had people listed who had been born in 1860.  There were people who remembered the Civil War still alive in my lifetime.   

I’ve always felt like a single thread intertwined in the middle of a patchwork quilt that makes up our history.  As I asked my mom and dad about the past, Daniel asks me now about watching the Bears win a Super Bowl, remembering when President Nixon resigned, seeing Scooby Doo on television when it was brand new. 

Millvina Dean was only a few months old when the Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage.  She had no personal recollections of the trip.  She couldn’t provide any details that weren’t reported in contemporary accounts and the myriad of books written in the past century.  However, she provided us with a personal doorway to those distant events of 1912; that door now forever closed as the Titanic slips down into secondhand history.

Cheap Conversations

I can remember a time when I actually spoke to people I knew every single day.  I lived with my parents as a child.  We spoke to each other during dinner.  I spoke to (well, yelled at) my brother all the time.  I had friends in school and we’d talk at lunch and at recess, sometimes in class and get in trouble.  But the world moved on.  I finished school, got married and moved away.  We all drifted apart into our own separate lives.  When I started paying for my own phone bill, long distance was still something expensive.  I remember making a $90 phone call once… once.  While I have nights and weekends free these days, I still have to fight my instinct to dial someone outside my area code (which is almost everyone I know).

I talk to each of my parents once a week on the phone.  I kept in touch with my roommate from college and we talked on a regular basis.  That made sense as I lived with him longer than anyone with the exception of Meka and my mom.  However, in the past year we speak more like once a month.  Most of my other friends I rely on e-mails on a quarterly or semi-annual basis and my relatives get (gasp!) an actual letter once a year close to Christmas (no later than Groundhog Day).  While the frequency leaves something to be desired, I try to make up for it with length.  I think this year’s letters averaged about seven pages (or twenty in the large print editions I wrote for my great aunts).

I am a pretty prolific writer, but cranking out that kind of output on a regular basis seemed daunting.  I thought back to my days in school.  What on earth did we talk about for so long? I couldn’t remember much of substance and – after wracking my brain about it awhile – it occurred to me there wasn’t much substance to remember.  We just talked.  Suddenly the challenge of writing seemed less so.  I already wrote a lot of nothing (I call it my “blog”), so I decided to try and get reconnected.

I joined Facebook in the summer and met up with people I hadn’t spoke to in decades.  The first e-mails were long as we had years to catch up on, but after that I was glad to find we didn’t run out of things to say.  I’ve been keeping up with many people via their one sentence status blurbs.  In return, I add short pithy comments to their home pages.  This kind of communication seems “cheaper” somehow, but I mean that in a good way.  I don’t feel like I have to save up my e-mails or letters or only call someone on a special occasion like a birth or death or major holiday.  I talked to a friend for an hour or more a few weeks before Christmas.  After the New Year, I called again and we talked for another hour.  While we didn’t share too many profound insights, we had some laughs and both agreed it was an hour well spent and we’ll probably do it again soon.

The Multiple Days of Christmas

The Twelve Days of Christmas is one of my favorite carols because I can relate to it. There are the actual Christmas Day festivities of course. Daniel woke me up early because he wanted to see what Santa had brought him. Meka spilled the beans about Santa last year, but I still categorically deny any hint of a relationship between myself and Mr. Claus. Our governor would be proud. Daniel got a Hot Wheels raceway that I managed to assemble in my sleep. After a nap, we got ready and drove into Chicagoland to visit my aunt and see my mom’s side of the family.

Besides Christmas Day, we also had Christmas Eve. Traditionally that is “our” Christmas, a day just for immediate family. Over time, it’s evolved into the “Orphans’ Christmas”. Anyone who didn’t have somewhere else to go was invited for food, gifts and general warm spirits. This year I invited my dad and stepmom, my sister and my old college roommate. Meka invited her friend from school so he could visit his parrots. Meka’s parents spend the winter in California. While she got a phone call from them on December 25^th, we celebrated Christmas early while we were there at Thanksgiving. Her brother’s family came over too and we had a very nice time watching the Lions get embarrassed on national television. If that’s not an early Christmas present for a Bears fan, I don’t know what is. My mom and stepdad came down a few days before Christmas and have until New Years Day to make the rounds to see everyone. We got our turn for a few hours on the day after Christmas. It was Boxing Day; we celebrated by breaking down a bunch of boxes and putting them out to be recycled.

The actual celebrating of Christmas cannot be contained in a single twenty-four hour period. Including the preparations for Christmas, there are many more days that get included. There was the day we went to Target to get our Christmas picture taken. I count Black Friday as one of the days of Christmas. I had to wait in long lines; maybe I should count it as two. We went to church last Sunday and I spend another couple of days working on Christmas cards. Meka would probably add a few days to make cookies and clean the house. That probably takes me up to twelve days with more to come: I have a couple of presents to return, I have several pounds I need to lose and of course I have to work many days in order to pay everything off.

Well Water at Grandma’s House

A lot of people swear their Grandma was the best cook in the world.  I’ve heard about grandmas who baked the best pies.  I’ve heard about grandmas that whipped up the best cookies you ever tasted.  I’ve heard tell of recipes for pot roast, turkey, chili, even spaghetti sauce that would make you laugh, cry, whatever was appropriate.  However, my grandma had them all beat.  My grandma made the best water.

She kept the water in a pitcher in the refrigerator (she kept the 7-Up in the dishwasher… long story).  It didn’t look all that difficult to make.  She just placed the pitcher under the kitchen tap, filled it halfway with water.  She made ice cubes in metal trays.  They had blades frozen in the ice that you could shift with a lever.  That was a bit tricky; I couldn’t even move the lever until I was in elementary school and then the ice shards (they definitely were not cubes) would erupt out of the tray and slide onto the floor.

For something so simple, I could never understand why I couldn’t copy it.  I tried drinking water out of our taps at home.  It tasted terrible!  I poured water in a pitcher.  I put ice cubes in it (we had plastic trays at home).  Later on, I actually bought an aluminum ice cube tray at a garage sale and found a pitcher just like my grandma’s at K-mart.  It still wasn’t the same.

My grandparents moved when I was in high school.  By then, of course, I had long given up water for the more sinful pleasures of regular Coke.  However, I remember stopping by and being offered a glass of water.  To my surprise, it didn’t taste nearly as good as I remembered.  It dawned on me the problem was the water itself.  When I was a kid, Schaumburg had well water.  It was full of minerals (we called it “hard water”).  My parents had a water softener that we filled with large salt blocks every so often.  However, my grandparents didn’t have a softener in their old house.  Their taps would drip long after the pitcher of water had been placed in the fridge because the pipes were seriously messed up.  However, you couldn’t beat the taste.

Unfortunately, by the time I made this discovery, Schaumburg had switched from well water to water from Lake Michigan.

Pass the Turkey Time

By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to Michigan with my family.  We’re going over rivers and through woods, to visit my in-laws for Thanksgiving.  It will be a good time.  We’ll see Meka’s brother and his family.  Between Meka’s family and me, we have the entire NFC North fan base covered, so the pre-game “discussions” can be spirited… not this year, of course.  The Lions have already committed seasonal hari-kari while the rest of the division looks – at best – vulnerable.  I have the normal things to be thankful for this year: health, family, job security, etc.  Additionally, I am thankful to be able to eat birds once again.

Somewhere around my twelfth birthday, birds and I started having a gastric disagreement.  Ever see The Exorcist?  You get the idea.  I was allergic to something common to most birds and just couldn’t eat them without getting sick.  Chicken wasn’t much of a problem to me; I stopped eating it around 1982 and didn’t really miss it all that much.  Turkey was more problematic.  I really looked forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas and the turkey with all the trimmings.  For a few years, I would sit at the table and enjoy the meal, knowing – in a few hours – I would be lying on the bathroom floor wishing I was dead.  However, by the time I was in high school, the time between table and toilet was down to a few minutes.  My last Thanksgiving with turkey was 1986.

I took allergy shots for the better part of a decade.  My allergies seemed to shift as I got older.  My hay fever isn’t as bad as it used to be.  For better or worse, I can’t use it as an excuse not to mow the lawn anymore.  I seem to be less allergic to cats, but slightly more allergic to dogs than I used to be.  My food allergies were probably shifting too, but I didn’t exactly go out of my way to test my theory.  A few years ago, I did discover I could take a double-dose of my allergy medication and eat up to half a turkey sandwich without getting ill.  And last year, I made myself a half sandwich and started eating before I realized I hadn’t taken my medication.  I sat and waited for the inevitable clenching of the stomach and throat and was quite surprised not to feel lousy. 

Over the past year, I’ve done some experiments.  I’ve eaten at Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president.  I’ve made chicken based soups and turkey sandwiches a key part of my diet since starting Weight Watchers.  And this will be the first Thanksgiving in many years I will be able to partake of the bird with everyone else.

I’ll just have to skip the beans… for some reason they don’t seem to agree with me any longer.

The Last Family Party

I got the call from my mom last May.  My Great Aunt Inez was turning 90 and they were throwing a party.  She lived in Anderson, Indiana, about 20 miles northeast of Indianapolis.  It’s a five hour drive for us, but I was glad to make the trip.  I always liked my Aunt Inez.  And I’m always up for a family party.  There aren’t too many places that haven’t changed from my childhood.  However, my Aunt Inez’s house is one of them.  I found a picture from – I don’t know when; my grandma and grandpa had dark hair.  There they were, standing together in a kitchen.  I showed it to Meka and she immediately recognized where it was taken.  As far as I can tell, time stopped there somewhere around 1960.

It isn’t very large, just a little ranch house on the corner.  Her son Jack had tables and tents set up in the yard.  Daniel doesn’t have too many close relatives, so it’s always nice to find a way to introduce him to more family.  He ended up playing cars with some kids around his age.  They were related in some fashion; I just told him they were “cousins”.  We saw relatives from across the United States.  We drove about 300 miles, but my mom drove almost twice that.  Her cousin David came in from the Carolinas and others drove in from Florida.

Throughout it all, my Great Aunt Inez held court in her living room.  Someone had given her a tiara and plastic scepter which she wielded with good humor.  Opening all of her gifts took the better part of the afternoon.  As the sun was going down in the west, I gathered everyone together to take a picture of us all.  My aunt’s yard was too small, but the driveway next door was long and flat and perfect.

“What if they don’t want us to take a picture?” someone asked.

“Who cares?” I replied.  “We outnumber them.”

Everyone walked across 8^th Street and stood in a long row while I set up the camera.  Aunt Inez took a seat in the center of the crowd.  I set the timer and ran to a place along the side.

“Everyone say ‘Take the frigging picture!'”  I actually said “frigging” because Aunt Inez didn’t approve of coarse language.

“TAKE THE FRIGGING PICTURE!”

The camera flashed once, twice, three times.  Everyone started to move, but I motioned them to hold their positions, just in case, while I check to see if everything had worked.  It did.  The picture turned out fine; a nice souvenir from a classic family party.

I got the call from my mom Monday night.  My Great Aunt Inez passed away in the evening.  She had been ill for about a week.  She was 91 years old.  I’m driving down to Anderson again.  It’s sad, of course; no one likes to say goodbye.  But there’s bound to be a crowd.  I’ll see plenty of cousins, I’m sure, from around the country.  And with the tears, there will be smiles and some laughter as we reminisce at her final farewell: one last family party.

Happy 90th Birthday, Aunt Inez!