MOMMY'S OFFICE

From the collection A Bit of Fantasy

Copyright March 2005

[Part 3]

Mommy tried to be a good sport, but every time she moved a load of things in her car from the apartment to the “fixer-upper,” more things got lost.  In the fall, when it was time for me to go to school in the mornings, my homework papers would be lost in a sea of botany papers Daddy had to grade and medieval literature papers Mommy had to grade.  One morning I wore Mommy’s apple design sweater to school—it almost touched the ground and made a “stylish wrap-coat” on me, Mommy said—to keep me warm in the fall wind, because no one could find the box with my sweaters in it. 

My bed got taller like in the story of the “Princess and the Pea,” because we stacked up the mattresses from the apartment on the floor of my room at the farm.  It was nice to have my own castle of seed-pea crates, too, but I missed my desk which had been stored somewhere.  Lancelot liked climbing the castle walls just beside Laundry Mountain.  I couldn’t find Guinivere.  I had put her in the box with my sweaters.  Sometimes Mommy would serve us a little picnic lunch on crates outside with a view of the farm.  We left a chair for Lancelot and one for Guinivere—for when we find her. 

Almost every night Mommy would cry about something during supper.  She couldn’t find her crêpes recipe, or Grandma had kept her too long arranging chrysanthemums, or it was her turn to wash and press all the church choir robes, or one of her students had wondered how a botany paper got into his medieval homework portfolio.  

        One night at supper I tried crying with her to help her out, but that just made Mommy and Daddy think I was feverish or having an asthma attack, so they forgot dessert and called Aunt Louise to come over and check my temperature and listen to me with her stethoscope.  Aunt Louise said I was fine, but to give Lancelot a bath.  Then Mommy cried because she didn’t have time to give Lancelot a bath.

Yesterday, Daddy had a surprise for us.  We drove to campus to see an art exhibit, then Daddy took us by the apartment.  It was still empty, and he said Mommy’s desk and school files could be moved back there, along with his workout equipment, the extra mattresses, and my desk.  Mommy didn’t cry at supper last night, and this morning we’re going swimming.  Daddy is acting silly and wearing his swim fins at the breakfast table.

Whew! That was a close call.  I know I’ll be able to concentrate on my work so much better, now that I’ll have my office again.

MOMMY'S OFFICE

From the collection A Bit of Fantasy

Copyright March 2005

[Part 2]

It was a great life, and—best of all—I had my own office at the apartment.  It was in a “walk-in closet.”  I had my own little desk and chair, a bookcase with my favorite books, my stuffed cat named Guinivere—because my real cat from the farm, Lancelot, couldn’t visit the apartment—and all sorts of wall space to hang up my artwork.  I also had a small, old, TV from Grandpa’s, but I didn’t watch it very much when I was working at my office. 

I even had a pretend window over my desk.  It was a framed picture of lavenders growing in a field in Provence.  Someday Mommy and Daddy are going to take me there, and Daddy is going to see how they grow flowers there.  Then he can tell his botany students all the reasons why people love French flowers.

Late in the summer, Mommy finished her doctorate and was in a ceremony wearing a long robe and a flat hat. Daddy, Mommy, Grandpa, Grandma, and I all went out to eat after the ceremony, and that was fun—until they got into one of their serious talks about the bills.  Grandpa and Daddy were saying that now the apartment in the city wouldn’t be needed, and the money usually spent on it could be used for the “fixer-upper” and the Provence savings account.  They were very excited, but Mommy and I were worried.  We liked the apartment.  I whispered to her and asked her why Daddy didn’t want to keep the apartment.  She said it was because he was a “country mouse.”  I’ll have to ask Lancelot to explain that to me.

MOMMY’S OFFICE

From the collection A Bit of Fantasy

Copyright March 2005

[Part 1]

        I remember the office Mommy used to have in the city, near the campus where she was getting her doctorate.  It was in a little apartment only two blocks from the library and one block from the swimming pool.   Some days we would walk to the library, and I would read all afternoon in the children’s section at a little table, while Mommy poured over huge books called medieval literature.  When she got very tired and fell asleep with her reading glasses on the pages, we’d take some of the books to the apartment, close down the computer, and drive to the farm to see if we could help Daddy with his new seedlings.  

Other days, like Saturdays, we’d get up early and go to the pool on campus.  It didn’t have a children’s section, but that was okay, since I can swim.  The lifeguards would let me wear my snorkel, sometimes, if only a few swimmers were there. They would tease me about being a “strawberry blonde,” and would help me whenever my pigtails got tangled around the snorkel.  Mommy would do ballerina-type exercises in the water, saying that helped her relax and “stay in shape.”  Daddy would arrive and act silly, turning somersaults in the water and calling the somersaults “flip turns.”

Next I would have a date for an afternoon and evening with Grandma and Grandpa on the farm, while Mommy and Daddy went to the symphony or to a fancy restaurant.  Sometimes I even spent the night in Daddy’s old room full of baseball bats, pitching trophies, and framed collections of tattered baseball cards, and went with Grandma and Grandpa to church the next morning.  Grandpa sings almost quietly, but I can hear him.  Daddy brings flowers to church.  He grows prize flowers on the farm all around our house, a “fixer-upper” he calls it, near Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

FRENCH FRIED: D-Day's Invitation

From my journal of essays entitled FRENCH FRIED
Copyright October 2003

            Tonight is the Annual French Poetry Reading Competition at the university, and I’ll be reading as a guest for the first time. All of us must choose poems to intone for the audience. My choice was easy, this close to Veteran’s Day. At this time of year, I always picture my Uncle Frazier, climbing up under planes as a mechanic serving in Bedford, England during WWII. He was a Supply Sergeant for the "Army Air Force" but had cross-training, because he was so good with motors. BBC was in its heyday then, and one night on BBC, the night of Jane 5, 1944—or perhaps the night before—a poem by the French poet Baudelaire entitled “L’Invitation au Voyage” was read over the air during one of the cultural programs. It was the usual fare for BBC at night, but this particular poem was the signal that the D-Day Invasion would begin the next day.

            The press corps was an interesting place in which to serve in those days, and the Allied Press was issued khaki-colored uniforms similar to that of soldiers, male and female. An account of them that does them justice is provided in the background of a novel published not so long ago by Thomas Nelson Press. Called Twilight of Courage by Bodie and Brock Thoene (a husband and wife), its characters include members of the press, who in their own way were imbedded into the fabric of the troops’ lives. One female reporter serving in Germany just after the war, Ann Stringer, forever lent her name to the type of story done in the field and sent to a news service, the “stringer” story. Up until I read some of her stories in an old Reader’s Digest, I had always thought the stringer concept came from fishing, just like the word “broadcasting” did.

            Ike, Commander Eisenhower in those days, trusted the press on an occasion that became a legend in the newsrooms of the world. The date for D-Day had been extremely hard to set for more than a year, principally because of having to figure in daylight hours and the currents in the English Channel. The sand around the French castle and stronghold Mont St. Michel, for instance, is quicksand during some springs and summers, and in earlier centuries had often claimed the lives of soldiers on their way to the many crusades in the Holy Land. Ike knew in his heart that someone in the press would figure out any day he chose, so he called them all together and told them the date three weeks in advance. No one leaked the news until the landing was underway.

            During his fifty years with us after the war, Uncle Frazier told me, as well as his son and grandsons, a few things about England then. After my first trip to London, Uncle Frazier wanted to hear all about how the place had seemed to me. What he most remembered, in addition to the kindness of the people, he said, was the quality and quantity of light. It was northern light, not so different from what we saw on television when the Olympic Games were held in Norway, and it often lasted, he said, until 10 p.m., just as bright as day. That was a help during D-Day, too.

            Uncle Frazier often spoke of a flyer’s jacket whose story he treasured from the war. He had not been a flyer himself, but one of his best friends had been.

            “Jonesy,” the fellow had said on the evening after the BBC broadcast, when the flight was certain for the next day. “I want you to hold my new jacket for me. I’m not real sure I’m coming back from this one. If I don’t come back, you wear it for me, but if I do come back, I’m wearing it Saturday night and dating the prettiest girl in town.” That time the friend returned safe and sound, having worn an older regulation jacket in flight.

            As I read Baudelaire’s poem tonight to a new group of French students, it will seem to me as if I’m hearing the droning of airplane motors revving up in the background of its words. There’s also one other picture that will come to mind with that of Uncle Frazier. It’s a picture from 1995, when my husband and I were in Paris, having tea at a little table outside a bistro. That summer was the 50^th anniversary of the Liberation of France by the Allies, and even the sugar packets proclaimed, “Thanks to the Yanks!” Celebration signs were everywhere that summer, but sugar, rationed as it was during WWII, seemed a very appropriate place for the message.

            And, no matter what has happened in the politics lately between France and the U.S., I know that all over France tonight there are people like Uncle Frazier who will never forget. For them, too, Baudelaire’s poem will always seem to come to them on wings.

FRENCH FRIED: Governor Schwarzenegger

From my journal of essays entitled FRENCH FRIED
Copyright October 2003

            “It’s up to God now,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said as he cast his ballot in California’s hotly contested gubernatorial recall. “We’ve worked hard, very hard, and gotten the message out. Now it’s up to God.”

            Those of us fans who’ve watched his career through the years know that he meant every word, and that he’d probably just said the same thing to his kids around the breakfast table. Of course, anyone who could make it through the scrutiny of the whole Kennedy Clan and marry Maria Shriver, herself a renowned journalist and author of Christian children’s books, is A—O.K. to us.

            More than that, though, we know that movie scriptwriters face hundreds of possibilities in how their words are delivered by the live actors who bring the characters to the screen. The soul of the actor invariably come through. In True Lies, for instance, where the spy loves his wife so devotedly, and in Kindergarten Cop where his rapport with children is so evident, the real Schwarzenegger shines through the star at work.

            Schwarzenegger has also been a good sport about playing the Terminator. Whether or not we want to admit it, cinema research shows that American audiences still think the “heavy” is more believable with a German accent. The situation is still worse in France, where French families don’t usually want their kids to learn the German language, in spite of the fact that it would make trade with a neighbor easier.

            My husband and I found this out in ’95 when we visited a Christian school in Mulhouse, a French town in the Franche Comté area near Alsace-Lorraine and close the German border. While delivering a volleyball set from our hometown Christian school, and meeting the teachers while the students were vacationing, we also managed to tour the old mansion housing the school. The maps in each classroom of the three-story building were incredible. They operated on fascinating steel mechanisms that had been left during the WWII Nazi occupation of the mansion and still worked perfectly. The equivalent of the PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) was not pleased with the memories this map system provoked, but the blasted things worked so well, that the teachers just went ahead and used them. They also said they had radio equipment left in their basement that was too massive, and impressive, to move until a museum could take charge of it.

It probably shouldn’t surprise us that Schwarzenegger at one time, while being interviewed during his bodybuilding days, had old vinyl exercise records of this father’s that, unfortunately, touted the glories of the Fatherland in the 1940’s. All of who love our dads have momentos—these were just unwieldy to find out about before an election. Imagine, if you will, Schwarzenegger’s father as a kid like Rolf in Sound of Music. Only built like Schwarzenegger and quite a prize to a military recruiter.

Schwarzenegger’s name in German means a piece of farm/forest equipment from the Black Forest (Schwarzenwald) area—the same place that gives its name to the famous five or six layer German chocolate torte, with whipped cream and cherries between thin layers of cake. When the cake made its way to Austria, two restaurants fought over the recipe, leading to a legal tangle still remembered as “the tort over the torte.” When the Schwarzenegger family made it to Austria, however, they must have brought that other commodity for which the Black Forest is famous…the Black Forest Fairy Tale as told by the Brothers Grimm.

It has often been said that because people of the Black Forest area believe in fairy tales, it is possible for them to make their lives into fairy tales coming true. Our hero has managed to do this. The French neighbors are still cackling over the American headlines that say Schwarzenegger “improperly groped” women on the set of his movies when he was a young man. This implies, of course, that there is such a thing as “proper groping,” the eternal mission of the French.

In the past few weeks, though, Schwarzenegger has proven just how American he has become. While “being playful” and “not meaning to offend anyone,” he’s admitted to being as confused as any American male today, and, adding icing to the cake, he’s made it through his first election.

FRENCH FRIED: Chirac Aime-Bushed

From my journal of essays entitled FRENCH FRIED
Copyright October 2003

            Well, there they were, as big as life, Laura Bush with her hand being kissed by Jacques Chirac. And she had never looked lovelier. When have we ever seen Laura Bush with such joie de vivre (the joy of life)? What is it that it does for a woman to visit Paris—whether or not she represents the greatest nation in the civilized world?

            “It’s as if someone turned on a light inside you,” Kevin Kline says to Meg Ryan about the same phenomenon, in the movie classic French Kiss a decade ago. Earlier than that, Humphrey Bogart said longingly and comfortingly to Lauren Bacall in Casa Blanca, one of the crème de la crème (best of the best) movies of all time, “We’ll always have Paris.”

            Do the French really think we’re going to “kiss and make up,” as the headlines have read? Well, maybe. It’s not just that Chirac is kissing Laura’s hand; it’s the way he’s doing it. Look at the picture carefully if you’ve had the foresight to save your newspaper or magazine. His eyes and his humble bent posture say that nothing is on his mind at that moment but kissing her hand well, with all the feeling in his heart. Can American men be trained to do this?

            I’ll have to admit that my husband has French ancestry, so got to skip the training, but is there any better reason for Paris to continue? And what of Bush himself? He didn’t get to go this time, but my guess is that Laura will be so illuminated by her visit to “The City of Lights” that he will reap many rewards, and—perhaps a decade from now—will count her trip to Paris as among the top ten reasons why he is glad that he was president.

            Our feelings have been hurt—deeply—by the French. The fact that they did not stand by us going into Iraq was enough to make the Statue of Liberty, and her little sister in Paris built first by the same artist, weep. Of course, not knowing how many terrorists were hiding among the Beatnik to Punk assemblage around the Left Bank and the Sorbonne, Chirac and his advisors were afraid that the Eiffel Tower would be blown into a million tiny shards of light before French soldiers could even get their boots on after the Parisian idea of a weekend.

            Meanwhile, as if in an unbelievably sad poetic justice, the Death Angel passed over France anyway last summer—a toll of 11,000 people, according to September French TV, having died from the heat called “La Canicule,” (Dog Days, but like they have never been seen before.) The French were brought to their knees—yes, many in a prayerful way—by the fact that so many older people who had lived alone could not be connected to a next-of-kin. They were buried after a memorial ceremony in a Paris park much like that for the Unknown Soldier. France still prides itself on close family ties and could not imagine that this had happened. Still, people from all over the world purposely “drop out of sight” in Paris, so that would explain much of it. Chirac spoke eloquently on that occasion.

            I’ve decided that this year I’m going to do a little research to find out just how our early liaison with the French insured the freedom of both countries. I know it has something to do with the writings of Rousseau, and the fact that Jefferson and Franklin spent so much time in Paris when our country was young. Continuing our parallel existence, prayer, for instance, has not officially started the school day in France’s public schools since the French Revolution, but students in some schools of the various départements (like states) pray or discuss their faith any time they darn well please, according to some of my pen-pals. Agonizing over the same things that we do, the French can’t be all bad.

            At our house we haven‘t exactly quit eating French fries. The truth is, we usually rub the potato slivers in Mazola oil and bake them at 450⁰. My children tell me I should call them “French Bakes.” For the same reason that we can’t pin down, calling them “French,” like eating them before a fire outdoors, makes them taste better.

FRENCH FRIED: Bella the Cow

From my journal of essays entitled FRENCH FRIED
Copyright  October 2003

            The other morning, waking up just after dawn, I had to blink twice. I saw a scene outside my window that looked like a page from a French picture book. A misty fog hung over the fields, and, through the early light, I counted 20 of Dad’s beef cows and calves—every single one of them, since we automatically count every time we see them—nestled along a swath of the pasture field where Dad had cut hay the day before. This year has been an especially good one for soft, moist hay, what with the rain and easy temperatures of this past summer’s growing season. He had baled most of that field the day before, but had left that long swath between a pond and the creek when night fell before he could finish.

            The soft hay on the ground was as thick as the beds Dad sometimes makes for the cows in the barn, and that seemed to be what they had taken it to be. As if not lying down in it would have been like turning down a present, they posed all along the length of it down through the field, taking up maybe a quarter of an acre. They stayed that way all morning, and then through the afternoon, not grazing as usual but occasionally pulling loose a nibble of the succulent Timothy or Red Clover. As I would check past the window now and then, they would be in different locations and in different postures, the younger ones sometimes lying back playfully like children on a new mattress, but not one of them ventured off the special hay bed until the tractor and baler arrived in late afternoon. 

            The next day had its own surprises, too. Dad has always said that cows are smarter than anyone dreams they are, and he has seen them mourn for stillborn calves. He arrived at the field a couple of hours later than usual because of trouble with the baler and couldn’t help but chuckle appreciatively. Because of moving the baler from place to place the day before, he’d left openings in the fences between the fields. When breakfast was late, a gallant bull had rolled a bale from the upper field through two openings and through two fields down to the side of the creek bank. He was just finishing the rolling as Dad arrived to see the cows gathering around “breakfast in bed.”

            As Dad told me about it, my thoughts drifted back to a day long ago when I was cooking with my grandmother in this same house, and she’d gone to the window to see the cows looking like the picture books of her childhood. “Always keep cows where you can see them out this window,” she had said. At the time I had thought it was financial advice, but now I could see it was more. She had taught me a lot about French cooking, though her family was several generations removed from France, and to this day my favorite French cookbook, La Cuisine de Nicolas, has a chapter right in the beginning where it talks about the beauty of cows.

            The book I have is in French, though it was originally written in Swedish by Christina Björk and illustrated by Lena Anderson as LINUS BAKAR OCH LAGAR. It features an actual picture of a champion Jersey-looking cow named Bella, along with drawing of Nicolas and his friend Alex visiting a grandmotherly lady named Marthe. The recipes are interspersed with stories of learning to cook and with a chart of how much milk, butter, and cheese Bella can produce in a year. The recipes for ice cream and milkshakes fill a page opposite the directions on just how to make cheese and whipped cream.

            In these days in the USA, when kids hear the same horrendous warnings against butter and beef and tea and sugar as they do against hard drugs and, of course, can’t tell the difference in the warnings, it would do us all good to remember the European view which our ancestors brought to this country. We should “remember our roots,” both in heritage and nutrition. Bella, meanwhile, says goodbye to the chapter in a drawing which resembles “Elsie the Cow,” who is still featured on the Borden’s label in the USA. The chapter ends with, “Merci pour tout, madame la vache.” As we would say it, “Thanks for everything, Mrs. Cow.”

Alice, Cat, and the Seven-Day Chest

Or "Why Tall Furniture Should be Attached to a Wall"
From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright May 1992

[Part 6]

Just then the pediatrician returned.

“We were blessed,” he said softly. “The natural suture in the skull stretched and then went back into place. She’ll be fine. Keep her quiet the next ten days, and wake her up every hour tonight to make sure her pupils are equal and reactive.” The nurse told him about the wardrobe incident.

“You know” he confided, “the worst day of my medical career was when a little child was brought in who had run under the legs of piano movers who were lifting a baby grand. Somehow the piano got away from them and fell right on him. The piano legs had been temporarily removed, so it fell flat. There was nothing I could do. Now I tell all parents to leave the kids at Grandmother’s whenever they’re moving. And with someone as inquisitive as Alice,” he smiled down at her and Cat, “I’d leave her at Grandmother’s for weeks if I ever moved.”

As we left the Emergency Room, I saw my mom and dad in the waiting area. The radio station staff had called them. Mom took Alice into her arms and led the way to the cars, suggesting that we take a route by McDonalds. Leave it to Mom to remember that none of us had eaten all day long while we waited. Alice got to skip her bath that night, since she was always a wild banshee, loving the water, while Nicky settled down easily into a nap after his bath and feeding.

“Aunt Louise” (Auntie Claus), my sister, called from Chicago, where she was a surgical P.A. She talked to Alice, then asked me all the medical questions she could think of—friends later telling us she turned as blue as the "scrubs" she was wearing, just thinking that anything might have happened to Alice. She remembered seeing Alice throwing Cat into the air and catching him. Louise thought Cat might have landed on top of the seven-day chest, and that Alice might have been climbing up to get him.

Dad instantly produced the carpenter’s tools which he always seemed to have in his car somewhere, and busied himself upstairs. He and my husband were evaluating the accident scene. Dad marched half-way down the steps.

“It’s off-kilter!” he announced. “Why companies put real wood in the fronts of drawers and don’t consider the lesser weight in back…..” He went on mumbling and marched back upstairs to modify the chest in some way.

During the next week Dad and my husband put heavy screw-eyes behind every tall piece of furniture we owned, and lashed the pieces with leather strips to screw-eyes in the studding of the walls, especially on the pieces that looked “too heavy to tip over.” If we had been living on the high seas, with the townhouse as a boat, no other pieces of furniture could have fallen.

Alice recovered completely, and we still have Cat. Now he lives in the trunk with the Christmas decorations and only comes out to play once a year. Several months after this adventure Erin Elizabeth arrived, and a couple of years later we moved out of town to Jones Farm—two fields and a creek from Mom and Dad. The kids explored the farm that summer by reenacting the Lewis and Clark Expedition: Alice making detailed drawings and maps, Nicky collecting field diamonds, and Erin leading their German Shepherd/Norwegian Elkhound, Branwyn, while wearing a stretchy gold headband in her hair to hold her teal feather as Sacajawea.


I still write fairy tales Märchen (MARE-KYEN) for and about the kids, and I’ve quit worrying about whether all people can appreciate fairy tales.  After all, I know the real Author of happy endings.

Alice, Cat, and the Seven-Day Chest

Or "Why Tall Furniture Should be Attached to a Wall"
From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright May 1992

[part 5]

Just then I saw my husband at the door. I felt like Lucy and Susan suddenly seeing Aslan in Narnia after starting their adventures in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  He was holding Cat.

“You’ll never guess where Cat was,” he said. “He was under the seven-day chest.”

“That’s what Alice was trying to tell me then. She thought he was hurt.”

“Yeah,” said my husband, “and still lying there at the scene of the accident.” We smiled at how Cat always seemed alive to Alice, then suddenly held each other tightly, feeling how scared we both were.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“They’re just about to do a CAT-scan,” I said.

My husband bounded over to the CAT-scan area to see Alice and give Cat to her. By then her screams were coming from the area, and it comforted us a bit that she could still scream like that. At the sight of Cat she nestled down, whispered something into Cat’s ear, bit his ear affectionately for good measure, and became very quiet and still, holding Cat across her tummy. She seemed to have the impression that Cat was about to be scanned. At the end the nurse gave Alice a shot to reduce swelling, then stuck the hypodermic into Cat, so Alice would think he had been treated, too.

While we were waiting for the results, the nurse who was our neighbor got into telling us about when she was a little girl and had pulled a wardrobe over on herself. Luckily, she had been standing at the door spot, so that the door just opened, and she was inside the wardrobe on the floor when her parents found her. I told her the stories handed down in our family about two uncles of mine—one of Mom’s brothers in Virginia, and Dad’s brother in Tennessee—who during the Depression had each managed to climb up their mothers’ China cupboards and bring down all thr dishes without getting hurt as the cupboards fell. There must have been pieces of Depression glass everywhere in those days.

Alice, Cat, and the Seven-Day Chest

Or "Why Tall Furniture Should be Attached to a Wall"
From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright May 1992

[part 4]

Another nurse was carrying Alice, and the pediatrician looked at the nurse who was our neighbor.

“Will you go with us if we have to go to Johnson City?” he asked her.

“Yes, Doctor,” she replied, and we looked at each other. Johnson City was the site of the University Medical Center where patients with serious head injuries were taken. I began to feel woozy.

On top of everything else, I had one other consideration—my husband and I were pretty sure our third child was on the way. Now I had to tell the nurse because, if I passed out, who knows what medication would be indicated, and it might be something that would hurt a baby on the way.

“By the way, if I should pass out,” I tried to sound cheerful. The nurse took me by the shoulders and settled me down into a chair. As I told her about the possibility of our third child she said, “Bless your heart.” It’s a common phrase in this part of the country, but she meant it. This was a Seventh-Day Adventist hospital, and they could mention God anytime they wanted to, along with many blessed hearts.

My Alice had left in the arms of a nurse—my Alice Anna with her Bible name and her fairy tale name. “Anna” was for the prophetess who had been promised she would live to see the Christ Child. “Alice” was, of course, from the stories by Lewis Carroll. During our college years and our early career years, we had always felt our children were a promise God would fulfill, and we’d told friends their names would come from our favorite stories, since our life together was so much like a fairy tale—romantic, with occasional ogres and cliff-hangers, like any good story. Now Alice had been one of God’s best promises to us and had, besides, turned our whole world into a wonderland of discovery. We just couldn’t lose her.

“Don’t take her, Lord, unless it’s your will.” I had known the Lord since I was eight years old. I knew him too well not to trust him with this. I would have to trust him with the end of the story. It was God himself who had invented happy endings, giving us the first “happy ending” in Christ’s resurrection. He was the one who had made it possible for us to “live happily ever after.”

Alice, Cat, and the Seven-Day Chest

Or "Why Tall Furniture Should be Attached to a Wall"
From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright May 1992

[Part 3]

Naturally, during an emergency, the children’s car seats were in the house when they should have been in the car. It always took at least fifteen minutes to install them, and I wasn’t sure Alice had that long. Alice could lean against me as I drove, and she was holding the Raggedy Andy pillow, which was almost as big as she was. I put Nicky into the floorboard across from me, so he couldn’t fall there, and had to concentrate not to drive like Mario Andretti through the quiet streets of our little town to the hospital.

“No sudden stops at red lights, no jarring, and, above all, no collisions,” I kept saying to myself.

As I walked through the emergency room automatic double doors with both kids and the Raggedy Andy pillow in my arms, a nurse who was a neighbor of ours saw us and guided us into one of the examining rooms. I briefly told her what had happened. Then Alice yelled to go to the bathroom. Another good sign. Her bathroom training was just recently learned but still holding. Still, she couldn’t relax enough to use the bathroom, so I brought her back to the examining table. The nurse was holding Nicky. Up until now he had remained pretty quiet, surely sensing that something was wrong. Now he started to whimper into the nurse’s shoulder.

Suddenly, Alice lifted herself up onto one elbow.

“Get Cat,” she said again.

“Cat’s in the wash, Alice,” I said. “Just hold Raggedy Andy.”

Alice looked at me square in the eye, then looked as if she were giving up. She didn’t know the words to tell me where Cat was. She started throwing up.

“Nausea is common after a head injury,” the nurse reassured me, as she handed Nicky to me and moved to help Alice. Just then the pediatrician on call stepped in, having just fished a needle out of someone’s foot. He looked into Alice’s eyes with a little light, then explained that he was taking her to x-ray.

“We’d better call your husband,” the nurse said. She helped me over to the phone, and I tried to remember the number of the radio station where my husband worked and where I had worked for years before the kids were born. It took two tries to remember the number, and my hands trembled as I pushed the buttons.

“Bring diapers, and juice, and Cat,” I said to my husband after telling him what had happened. He would be on his way as soon as an announcer who was a realtor on weekdays could get to the station to “take the control board.”

The doctor poked his head in the doorway.

“The x-rays didn’t tell us enough,” he said. “Do you want a CAT-scan?”

I nodded agreement.

Alice, Cat, and the Seven-Day Chest

Or "Why Tall Furniture Should be Attached to a Wall"
From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright May 1992

[Part 2]

Alice was busy folding washcloths upstairs, so I picked up Nicky out of his playpen in the living room and had just buckled him into his highchair in the kitchen and sprinkled a few Cheerios into his tray when I heard the most terrible THUD I had ever heard in my life. I must have been up the stairs in two seconds flat.

As I got to the top of the stairs, I could see the seven-day chest lying on top of Alice as she sank into the covers of the comforter. A tiny writing desk that folded out above the seven drawers had saved her life by keeping the piece from falling flat on the floor. Now the writing desk, just above her head, was holding the piece off the floor at an angle that protected Alice. The thick comforter, too, was protecting her to some extent, but the writing desk hinge had burst upon impact and wouldn’t holding indefinitely.

My mind flashed to the INCREDIBLE HULK series where David Banner had tried to lift a car off his wife pinned underneath. I knew I could lift it. This was the piece of furniture that Alice’s Godfather, Jerry, in Iowa had once teased us about and called “the coffin” as he’d helped us load it into a U-Haul. It was an awkward piece made of solid pecan with smooth sides. I wished Alice’s Godmother, LouAnn, a nurse, could be beside me at this moment. I grasped the middle, and as I gave it a mighty lift, it flipped easily away from Alice. I guess that was the problem, with the right tug even Alice could flip it over, and her toy jump rope was tangled in one of the drawer handles.

At the first sight of her little face, relief and thanksgiving washed over me. She was not bleeding and was conscious. The first danger was past, but the second danger—going into shock—was still a possibility. Having been reared in a medical family, I immediately went to medical calm and spoke quietly, trying not to let Alice know how scared I was.

“Are you okay, Alice?” I asked gently.

“Get Cat,” she said.

“Oh, thank you, Lord,” I said silently. “she can still talk.”
      

“Do you think you can stand up, Alice?” I asked.

She let me help her to her feet. At her age her bones were mostly cartilage, and she could survive more than an adult could; but I remembered seeing a QUINCY rerun the night before. In it a boxer had suffered a break to the septum of his nose in one fight, so that a slight jarring to his nose in a second fight had killed him. I knew something could be broken and bleeding inside Alice where I couldn’t see. I gently picked her up and moved as quickly as I could down the steps and out to the car, jarring her as little as possible and placing her in the middle of the front seat. I was afraid to leave her side but had to get Nicky.

“Sit very still, Alice,” I said, “and I’ll get Nicky.”

“Get Cat,” Alice said

Cat was Alice’s favorite stuffed animal. He was flat, quilted, and made of calico fabric in a cat shape about nine inches high and five inches wide. She liked to carry him around with her and to “feed” him baby food at the table. That meant that half the time he was in the wash. I unbuckled Nicky from his high chair, and in a quick scan didn’t see Cat, so I picked up another favorite, a Raggedy Andy stuffed pillow. I had heard of children in the hospital holding onto a stuffed animal until they died, but I couldn’t let myself think of that. I had to drive.

Alice, Cat, and the Seven-Day Chest

Or "Why Tall Furniture Should be Attached to a Wall"
From Stories from Jones Farm
Copyright May 1992

[Part 1]

            The whole day started out off-kilter. “Off-kilter” was a phrase I thought, as a child, that my Dad had made up, but later I’d seen it in a list of terms the Norsemen had used for describing their ships in the water. A ship “off-kilter” was listing to one side with the rigging probably a bit tangled. That described us that morning. My work was off-kilter, I was behind with the wash, and for the first time ever I’d dressed Alice for the day in an outfit that didn’t match—plaid shorts and a striped, long-sleeved t-shirt. It would do until the wash dried. Alice had finished her breakfast and scampered upstairs to “file checks.”

            At nearly two years old, Alice was very much “into” imitative behavior. Her favorite game was to get Daddy’s cancelled checks out of the bottom drawer of our seven-day chest and to “file them” in her sand bucket. I followed her upstairs, carrying a basket of towels freshly warm from the dryer. The thick comforter which usually went on our bed was finishing drying across a lawn chair which completed the room we called our den. It was a writing room to us, an office of sorts, and along with the seven-day chest, only had a big antique copyeditor’s semicircular desk and its chair.

I folded the comforter, deciding the few wet spots the dryer had missed had surely dried during the night. I laid it down in front of the seven-day chest, which was tall and narrow with seven drawers, meaning to take the comforter to our bedroom as soon as I folded the towels. Just then I heard Nicky, now nearly a year old, wake up in his playpen in the living room downstairs. He was hungry again.

I glanced at the clock. At least, Nicky was right on schedule. He always slept through the night but invariably got hungry four hours after his seven o’clock breakfast. It was nearly eleven. Where had the time gone? Alice and I must have talked and played more than I realized during her breakfast. I’d missed my morning writing session once again.

I tried each morning to get an hour’s writing session worked in sometime between breakfast and lunch. I was taking time off from being a journalist, but didn’t want to forget how to type. Many mornings I had typed with Alice standing between my knees, hoping she might like the journalist’s world someday, as she reached up to add a typed letter now and then. Lately my writing had been off-kilter, too. For a balance to journalistic stories, I liked writing fairy tales. It was a legacy from my maternal grandmother who had been of Swiss/German descent. When I got to college and started translating some of the Grimm’s fairy tales usually unknown to Americans, there they had been again—Grandmother’s stories.

The stories were part of my childhood, and they held little secret messages inside them for how to handle the grown-up problems that come along in life. They had, in many ways, determined my view of the world [okay, the German for “world view” is weltanschauung (VELT-ON-SHH-AHNG)]. Now I had old friends from my college days who were ready to rip every Grimm’s fairy tale off library shelves in the name of liberation of some sort. We also had friends from various churches who chafed at our yearly home portrayals of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

To me, besides the Christian legends of the early bishop called St. Nicholas, Santa evoked the aura of the castles strewn across Germany and the Alps. I always loved the stories of misunderstood, kind-hearted King Ludwig of Bavaria who had designed Neuschwanstein Castle (NOY-SHH-VAHN –SHH-TINE). He was known to have often set out on his sleigh with white horses to take, amid drifts of snow, gifts to the lowliest of subjects in his kingdom. During the Christmas season we always celebrated St. Nicholas Day, being Southern Baptists always interested in the holidays of the countries. The children often heard us saying little German love messages to each other that my husband and I had learned in college and left in each other’s mailboxes. Nicky was learning the sounds of English but seemed to like the gruff sounds of German and would repeat them after us when we counted to twelve. [My favorite numbers in German are elf (11, appropriate at Christmas) and zwölfe (ZVULF, 12, like “the big. bad zwölfe”)].

The Easter Bunny celebrations were my husband’s idea, a British legacy in his family, and I loved the yearly glimpse of my clean-shaven husband in long rabbit whiskers. From a costume party years before, we still had a fake-fur gray hood with ears, which I had made at the sewing machine, and fake fur paws that fit nicely over my husband’s large hands an feet. Our Easter bunny wore a long navy velour bathrobe over his t-shirt and jeans, and visited the children to talk to them over a cup of tea. Maybe my friends were right. I didn’t live in the brutal, reality-packed world they lived in.

Nicky changed to his second vocal range, so I scurried downstairs.

Poulos of Corfu

From THE OFFICIAL TRAVELOGUE OF SIR THOMAS CAT. ESQUIRE
Translated from the Meowish
Copyright October 1978

          Long ago, on the island of Corfu in Greece, there lived a black cat named Poulos who made his home among the fishermen. It was said that on the darkest nights when the stars were hidden, a fisherman who was down on his luck could be lamenting and fingering worry beads when suddenly someone would knock the worry beads out of his hand and replace them with an impetuous head needing a pat. It would be Poulos, rubbing his head against the fisherman‘s palm and purring to him songs of confidence. The fisherman could then take Poulos out on the fishing excursion, and the catch that night would be large.      

                                 

          Around his neck, Poulos wore a leather strap which had been encircled by a jeweler’s silver chain with a golden coin attached. The collar was a gift from someone Poulos had helped, and when, occasionally, he got the collar stuck around one ear, the coin over one eye made him look like a pirate. So great was his legend that no one ever dreamed of taking the golden coin or the silver chain for themselves; his presence alone seemed to assure their survival and change of luck from the poorest of circumstances.

          Sometimes Poulos, rubbing his head against a boat’s tiller, would pretend to get his collar stuck in the tiller until a small boat was set on course for the “fishiest” waters. Who could smell better than a cat where the fishiest waters were? Encountering tourists and charming them when not on the sea, Poulos would also, essentially, give the tourists a tour of his favorite restaurants, churches, and marinas.

          Paulos appeared in uncountable tourists’ sketches, paintings, and—later—photographs of Corfu.  His name also came to mean good luck or “the cat riding with you,” so that even today Greek names usually end with the “poulos” suffix. It comes from those days when nearly everyone fished for a living, and people vied over whom Poulos might ride with next. And even today it is said in Greece that people who insist upon fingering worry beads have simply never ridden the deep waters on a dark night with a good cat.

Epilogue:  By the way, should you get to visit Corfu someday, don’t forget to visit nearby Mouse Island, which was named for the staircase leading up to the Pantokrator Monastery. At a distance from the sea the staircase resembles a mouse’s tail. Cats who are descendants of some of the best friends Poulos often visited by sea still live there and delight in passing on his legend.

Readers: Here are some key words from the story as they would appear in Greek. If they seem to resemble words in Russian in the former story, there’s a good reason. The Russian alphabet is called the Cyrillic alphabet after Saint Cyril, who lived in the ninth century and is said to have devised it, along with the help of Saint Methodius who had earlier developed the Glagolitic alphabet. These two Byzantine brothers, in order to capture the 31 sounds of spoken Russian, used both Greek and Roman characters.

1.        Cat………. Γάτα (GOT-UH)     Gáta                 

2.        Fish ……….ψάρι (PUH-SOD-EE)     psári

3.        Fisherman……….ψαράς ((PUH-SOD-UZ)     psarás

4.        Boat……….βάρκα (VAR-KUH)     várka

5.        Collar……….περιλαίμιο (PEAR-UH-LAME-EE-O)     perilaímio

6.        Beads……….χάντρες (CON-DRAYS)     chántres

7.        Restaurant……….εστιατόριο (ES-TEE-AH-TORE-EE-O)     

                                                                       estiatório

8.        Church……….εκκλησία (AY-KLEE-SEE-UH)     ekklisía

9.        Marina……….μαρίνα (MUH-REE-NUH)     marina

10.     Photograph………. Φωτογραφία (FOE-TOE-GRAPH-EE-UH)     

                                                                              fotografía

11.     Mouse……….ποντίκι (PONE-TEE-KEY)     pontíki

12.     Island………. Νησί (NEE-SEE)     nisi

THE OLD SOLDIERS--A RUSSIAN TALE

From THE OFFICIAL TRAVELOGUE OF SIR THOMAS CAT, ESQUIRE

Translated from the Meowish.
Copyright May 1979

                Once upon a time, in the middle of Old Russia, there was an old and greying soldier who owned an old and greying cat. They were veterans of the wars, and the old soldier liked to still wear his black wool uniform and medals, while he liked for the cat (and the cat liked it, too) to wear one medal on a red and gold grosgrain ribbon around his neck. The medal was shown off well against the cat’s black fur and white fur-patch under his throat, so that it made him look ready for formal dining.

                In fact, in later years that had become their main pursuit. It was said in that part of Russia that, if you gave an especially nice dinner party, you would hear a scratch at the door and open it to find a black cat in evening wear on the doorstep. If you were kind and admitted the cat, then a few minutes later you would hear a military “rap-rap” at the door and find on the doorstep a stately old general, bowing and inquiring, with the most intriguing and sad grey eyes, about his cat. If you admitted him to look for his cat, your party was sure to be a success. For, you see, the general’s stories would fill the night and tantalize the guests with thoughts of adventure and courage.

                And, as Russian hosts are given to hospitality (they often wrap up presents of food for the guests—particularly bachelors—to take home), for the general the host or hostess would often wrap up a flask of vodka, a jar of yogurt, some mushroom bread or dried fruit. For the cat they often wrapped up a tiny packet of caviar and hung it around the cat’s neck to carry home, knowing he would the caviar best of all.

                When the cat and the general got back to their black tent in a meadow on the edge of the woods, and stretched out along their campaign chairs, they were effervescent with talk of people they’d met that evening, as they had once been effervescent with the talk of battle. They knew it was only a game that kept them from starving. They felt badly about not having returned the favor to the hosts and hostesses.

                One day a traveler in the woods saw the tent blown down and found the general there, dead, alongside his dead cat. Hypothermia, or exposure to the cold and rain, had finally claimed them. Word got out, and so many mourners gathered to see them off that their funeral nearly became a social event of the season in itself. The mourners were a select lot, the beautiful people to whom the general and his cat had given a taste of the heroism of life.

    Post Script: Here are some words in Russian that appear in the story.

                 1.     General (as a title) ..........  Генерал   (JEN-UH-RUHL)

2              2.     Cat ……….  Кот   (KAHT)

                  3..    Black ……….  Черный   (CHORE-NAY)

                  4.     Wool ……….  Шерсть   (TFERST)

                  5'.    Uniform ……….  Униформа   (WIN-KNEE-FORM-UH)

                  6..    Medal ……….   Медаль   (MEE-DULL) гриб

                  7 .    Ribbon ……….   Лента   (LEAN-TUH)

                   8.    Host ……….   Хозяин   (HAHZ-YEN)

                   9.     Hostess ……….   Хозяйка   (HAHZ-YEN-KAH)

1              10.    Party ……….   Сторона   (STRAH-NAH)

1               11.   Bread ……….   Хлеб   (CLIP)

1               12.    Mushroom ……….   Гриб   (GREEP)

1              13.     Fruit ……….   Фрукты   (FROOK-TAY)

1              14.     Vodka ……….   Водка   (VOYD-KAH)

1              15.     Caviar ……….   Икра   (EEK-RUH)