Dad - Now I can stop telling the stories

Our last coherent conversation was our most frequent… whether I went to Mass.  I lied about going for a few years. Bucked up. Found my integrity. Told the truth and discussed, bantered, argued, made peace, argued some more, agreed to disagree, argued some more.

No such thing as Gay. Except, well maybe the guy that drove the cab in their one-taxi town… he was light in the loafers.

Man of unmovable faith in God. Any argument with believer, no shows or atheists ended because all began with God as “first cause”.

Loved my mom since he was six years old. He called her Beautiful. He called her Mary Idabit.

He almost married my college roommate’s boyfriend’s mother. And he dated the mother of the Catholic priest where I went to college, who told me I should follow my heart whether I should go to Mass. He left the priesthood.

Hogan’s Heroes and MASH were their favorites, but he never served in the military.

He asked my mom to marry him. She said no, once. He said, many times that "I can't believe someone like your mother would marry me."

He played the saxophone and football in high school. He played in the same league and maybe against Gerald Ford. He loved music and I often heard him whistling. I think he was an optimistic man, with a pragmatic stripe and a Plan B in God knowing what he was doing.

The one argument between he and my mom ended with, “No wife of mine will work.”

My mother saved quarters from grocery change to buy him an organ for Christmas. Another year, she saved for a bicycle. He played every evening after dinner or after his bike rides in the summers.

He quit a hard-to-come-by job during the depression, because the grocer wanted him to put his finger on the scale.

I liked to make him laugh. I remember when I was about seven having been sent to my room for some action, likely “You may not contradict.” I came out, before my penalty time elapsed and streaked through the living room in a clear plastic cleaners bag.

Mom would have the kitchen clean by four forty five. He arrived home no later than five thirty except the third Thursday of the month when he had a board of directors meeting. Upon arriving home, he hung his suit coat, removed his tie and sat down in the living room to a martini. No cheese and crackers, less gin, more ice after the heart attack. My mother sat next to him divided by an end table with a Manhattan. Her drink remained the same after the heart attack.

He quit Michigan Agricultural College (Michigan State) during the depression after a year, maybe two, when the money ran out.  He reminisced about Sunday nights. None of the boys had money during the depression. Food Service closed. They’d chip in and buy a loaf of day-old bread and a jar of peanut butter to share.  

His name was John Frederick Longe. His father was William Frederick Longe. My brother is James Frederick Longe. My son is Alex Longe Frederick.

William Frederick (Fred) Longe died a saint in 1924 when Dad was ten years old. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the lawn while he lay dying. The furniture factory owner, another Fred, turned off the factory work whistle to lessen the excruciating pain Grandpa experienced when it blew. The Knights of Columbus, dressed in full regalia, marched in his funeral procession, so did the Masons – an unthinkable event at the time, brought about by Grandpa as Grand Knight of the K of C and community organizer, invited them to participate in a successful joint minstrel show. The town band marched silently, without instrument to honor him too. At ten, Dad wouldn’t understand the significance of these occurrences, but the telling and retelling of them by his uncles and family seared a brand that guided him.

One visit in Florida, my husband and I slept on an air mattress under the Christmas tree near the dining room. Sleeping a little later than Dad’s breakfast time, he rattled dishes till we woke and scolded us by starting a sentence with, “In this household, we”. My husband, cranky from a fitful night sleep, exacerbated by his 6’4” frame tangling with frisky Christmas Tree needles, interrupted him and said, “John, could you just give me the rule book?”

The neighbors often commented on our perfect lawn. For years he mowed it, though my brother took it on and later I did. It didn’t receive the same acclaim when we were the landscapers.

The Christmas parties for the Detroit brewing industry were legendary. Decorations included an aluminum tree with rotating color and boxes of glass balls on varying lengths of red, green or gold ribbon hung by jamming the hook into an acoustical tile in the basement ceiling. The Harmonie Club on Belle Isle, which my dad was a board member, would cater with the best chef, in uniform cutting from a two-foot high prime rib. He stocked the refrigerator with the Strohs, Gobel, Altes..., any which would be represented by their brew masters, chemists and presidents. No one was allowed to request a brand. Jesse, if not given a cocktail order, just opened the door and pulled the next beer on the shelf to hand to them… with a glass of course. Just before one party, maybe I was nine, I was told to anticipate the needs of a guest. Bring a napkin if they didn’t have one. If their plate was empty ask first what I should get them or offer to take the plate.

We had a cottage on Lake Chemung until the summer before I turned ten. I remember my dad taking me out in the middle of the lake very late one night to see the Aurora borealis. I also remember a cold winter day, sledding down the hill onto the frozen lake, and a cold spring day raking the muck from the shallow waters and spreading a dump truck of sand to create our beach.

He promised once to take me to a store to buy a guitar with my babysitting money. Wearing a tie, he wouldn’t let me get in the car until I dressed up. “We don’t want them to think we are rubes,” he explained. It means an awkward, unsophisticated person.

Dad left MAC and an uncle or cousin, not sure which, took him on as an apprentice brewer in Toledo, OH. He attended brew school at Siebel Institute and lived blocks from where I lived when I first moved to Chicago. At some point, I don’t know this chronology either; he became brew master in his hometown of Ionia, MI and ran a second brewery in Port Huron. He moved my mom, sister and brother to Port Huron until he took a job with a supplier, a malting company in Detroit.

“Let’s not be goops,” a phrase he brought out at neighbors, relatives and the vestibule at church that related to standing with coats buttoned to leave, saying good-bye and one more thing.

Overall pants were not allowed at the dinner table. He served each plate of food individually, taking orders for more or less, but never none… unless one was company. A question or joke for each person served. My friends who stayed for dinner were scared and at the same time awed by him. No one else had a dad who served dinner every night, not just Thanksgiving.

He wouldn’t eat tomatoes, ketchup, onions or horseradish but loved shrimp sauce.

Zucchini was consumed only for the sake of eating.

Serve from the right, clear form the left. Forks, spoons, knives, salad forks and shoes all had their proper places.

The weekend my brother graduated from Notre Dame, while my mom and sister stayed in South Bend he brought me home for my eighth grade graduation and party. As an adult, I can only imagine the discussion my parents must have had about how it would work. I am grateful that he thought it important.

Truth, integrity, fairness expected, required, practiced.

Worst handwriting on the planet.

At one point, I visited Dad with Alex. Mom may have been in the hospital that trip. Alex talked back to me. I, wanting to prove what I learned, washed his mouth out with soap. He got sick. I learned a lesson in reenvisioning parental expectations.

Made a pact with God to go to church every day if he survived his heart attack at age 48. Renegotiated after a stroke ten years later.

When I was eleven, my parents traveled to Florida for a Master Brewers Association convention. While they were away, Wilda, our housekeeper stayed with me until Friday, when a man wearing glasses, in a tie driving a huge Cadillac picked me up wearing a wool red plaid two piece dress and took me to the airport to fly to Florida to meet them. Standing near the pool at the Fountainbleau Hotel in Miami, still in my wool outfit, Dad introduced me to Augie Busch. He told me to remember meeting him. I do. And I remember flying by myself for the first time.

I don’t remember my parents helping me with my ACTs or SATs, nor taking me to see schools or helping me write essays. I do remember the summer after graduation saying that I thought I might not go away and stay and become a secretary. That announcement may as well have been a war decree. Nothing would stop me from going to college. I would not become a secretary.

On the other hand, he could not understand why I would leave a perfectly good job to start a company.

In retirement he created octo-lunch. He cut fruit in eight pieces, eight slices each of apple and pear, eight grapes, eight orange or tangerine sections with eight Ritz-bits. It took him several years in Florida to go to dinner without a tie, though I am pretty sure he never went to church without one.

Couldn’t get drunk on beer.

Talked to Ken, his best friend from high school every New Years. He’d also played football but went on to a scholarship at Marquette. He broke his neck one of his first plays in his first game. “Poor fellow.” Years later, Ken broke his back falling from a ladder as a maintenance man at a sanitarium in Traverse City, an accident that nearly killed him. In his cups one night awhile after, he smashed all the trophies from his athletic days. “Poor sap,” my dad commented when recounting the story. Another night, in his cups, Ken called my dad to tell him he just left his baby at college. My dad said he was in the same boat. Turned out, the two of us girls were at the same school and the men were there at the same time. The old friends planned a weekend with a football game as the highlight. Ken on crutches needed assistance. When the four of us drove into the parking lot at the stadium, a man with a flag  waved dad off. He rolled down the window, “I gotta come through, I gotta cripple in the car.” 

Hmmph. He said it as a first response to many comments and questions. More as he got older.

When I was fifteen, he and my mom returned from a convention. When I asked about going to retrieve Debbie the dog from the doggie hotel, I was told she wasn’t coming home. Her body riddled with tumors, I knew it was time, but I was distraught. Dad came into my room, lay next to me and put his cheek next to mine to console me. I cried and hiccupped and sighed and heaved. He talked and whispered and talked some more. I could feel his breath on my face. When I stopped carrying on, he patted my back. I sat up, stared at him, angry as I’d ever been and said, just so you know, I didn’t hear one thing you said. Your cheek covered my ear.

I don’t know anyone who knew him who didn’t respect him. My friends called him Mr. Longe, even as grown adults.  

He had a devotion to Mother Cabrini and at least once came to the retreat house in Niles for a retreat. I pass it frequently and think of the long drive he made by himself.

Each of his uncles, his father’s brothers and mother’s brother played a significant role in his life. They were the village that raised him. They helped him get jobs, encouraged and discouraged him. He respected them and never crossed them. When a dog that followed Debbie, bit Uncle Doc, the dog was euthanized the next day.

I have the same deep crinkle lines that run the side of my face as him and my nose favors his. There are photos of him as a young man that double for my son. There is a picture of me that looks like his father. Yet, sometimes I unexpectedly catch myself in the mirror and see my mom.

He loved to tell stories. As he got older, he cried at family gatherings, always grateful

for his family. He always told us that he loved us. Though he’d been uncommunicative the last few months of his life, he said, “goodbye boy” to my brother earlier in the day that he died. We loved him. 

Mom... The Other Mary Elizabeth

In honor of Mothers Day, this is a reposting of a previous blog from 2014.

Waking in my crib in a shade-pulled room to the fragrance of perfume, that I now know as Aphrodesia, she lifted me and I noticed her cherry-red fingernails.

Hot dog, no bun, ketchup. 

Picnics on Belle Isle, milk from a Roy Rogers thermos. I got the lid, she drank from a Dixie cup.

Born the year Girl Scouts were founded.

A tan shirtwaist dress worn with a halo-large black flat brimmed hat.

Up to her thighs wearing long pants and tied leather shoes, yanking me from beneath a docked boat in Lake Chemung. 

Once, when I was in sixth grade, staying to watch me play softball.

Smoking in the front seat, the window cracked an inch in a torrential rain, my knees getting soaked.

A sandwich cut in half kitty-corner, the side with the top of the bread cut in half again, with five or six chips and three or four carrot sticks, next to a fruit juice-size glass of milk.

A bag of Oreos - wrapped in foil for my birthday, sent in a construction paper Easter basket, a construction paper Christmas stocking, as an exams care package and a new-mom care package.

Smoking with my high school friends once we were in college.

Smoking by the back door.

Bringing home a drunken woman the night she burned her house, who slurred and stirred her words with tears and whose big bleached-blond hair smelled of smoke and liquor.

My grandfather’s cousin Minnie, who gave up a life of her own, to live with him and his two year old daughter when his wife died in childbirth, became “Aunt” Minnie and ruled with stultifying rules and no affection. Mom often heard, “No doctor’s daughter will…” And, she didn’t.

In college at 16, sneaking up to the attic floor in Cadillac Hall at Marygrove, where the nuns lived, to smoke with her friends.

Calling the local police about a blinking light cautioning a dead end at our back yard that interfered with her kitchen radio and ending up as a headline in the town paper, something to the effect of, Woman Complains Blinking Light Protecting Her Children is a Nuisance.

Skipped two grades because she was brilliant.

An argument between Mom and Dad and him finishing it with, “No wife of mine will work.” And, she didn’t.

Her arm wrapped in bandages to reduce the lymphedema.

Replacing white cabinets because they were yellowed from cigarette smoke.

A discussion about whether she should color her hair, she didn't.

At five years old, letting me choose green puppy wallpaper for my own room in our new house.

Every picture of her youth shows a child dressed formally with fancy, expensive clothing and accessories.

The two of us in my “toy” closet, her yelling at me, and then laughing at my retort.

Asking her to explain the term Facts of Life, and the disappointment when I already knew them.

Early in my summer break after my sophomore year in college, she climbed the stairs to my bedroom to bring me a small pile of folded laundry, an act I don’t remember happening before or after, and opening the dresser drawer to put the laundry away and “discovering” my birth control pills. Having lived those same years as a parent, I am highly skeptical at her surprise, but in awe of her acting skills.

Gardenias

Pansies

Dandelions

Laughing at Jim Piper who purposely spilled water down the front of his shirt to illustrate a thyroid condition, then letting him bum a cigarette

Walking on a broken ankle without complaining from our house onto a bus, up and down the steps of Tiger Stadium and off the bus when it arrived back home from the event. Then letting my dad take her to the hospital.

Allowing Jim Piper call her Mic.

Making me wear a dress my first day of college. I saw the same dress last night at the symphony 40 years later. (Seriously.)

Making me wait until April Fools day to get my ears pierced and years later getting her own done.

Wrapping Debbie the dog in a blanket and putting her in the car during a horrific snow storm, taking her to the vet, Doctor Nurse, (seriously) for a proper whelping and coming out an hour later to find a puppy in the snow, that slid from the blanket. It lived but was the runt and favorite.

Wrapping gifts – like the Christmas I hoped for a watch and opening a cardboard watch that said Timex filled with socks, then finding a plastic Timex box, the one with the velvet display that holds a watch and finding a Santa whistle, and opening a wrapped toilet paper tube and finding a Mickey Mouse watch…. Exactly what I wanted.

Infuriated that a nun would tell her that my brother would be nothing more than a sales man, when that was my father’s job.

Crying when Kennedy was shot.

Crying when Debbie the dog died.

Crying when (pussy) Willow dropped a bird at her feet.

Crying when my brother graduated from Notre Dame.

A mad dash just before my dad got home from work to clear the kitchen counter of mail, schoolbooks, match covers and other debris, just after she’d changed her clothes and put on perfume.

"I'm dressed underneath"... the explanation for not looking ready for an occasion. 

Putting on a dress and make up, getting my dad to put on his suit to take a picture of themselves as if they were with us the day I got married, instead of being sidetracked by an illness that prevented them from participating.

Preparing for visits from cousin Edith by buying stinky cheese and rye whiskey.

Being gracious to a relative who pinched breasts and brought gaudy marble lamps he expected relatives to hang immediately upon bestowing them.

Drawing a face with Mercurochrome on my knee and blowing on it to diminish the sting after a skinning.

Never wearing a bra again, nor having reconstructive surgery.

Standing over me to write a book report. Helping me rewrite a sentence to make it coherent, but not rewriting it for me.

Eating Lorna Doones at a table outside on the train station platform in Kalamazoo while waiting for the train to Detroit.

Taking the bus to downtown Detroit with her to go to the dentist and shopping at Hudson’s.

Standing at the ironing board sprinkling water from a beer bottle with a stopper that looked like a wine-stop but with holes.

Teachers, nearly every teacher, commenting on her unique and beautiful handwriting.

Supervising the Girl Scout Hostess Badge and having us scouts plan and execute a tea that included cucumber sandwiches and ginger ale.

Hosting a Coketail party before prom with four card tables of guests and serving chicken salad and ginger ale.

Giving me books, encouraging me to read, going to the library.

Dressing up and make up before leaving the house for anything.

A seething anger at the idea that another family inherited her father’s estate when he remarried at 72 years old and was hit by a bus in Miami on his honeymoon.

Laughing with a woman who kept dropping bananas for me to pick up at a church event when I was three or four

Holding my bike the afternoon I definitively decided to ride it without training wheels after scraped knees and arms from previous attempts. 

Making a Snickers Bar last a week by cutting off a bit for dessert after each lunch.

Bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayo and peanut butter sandwiches.

The water glass by the kitchen faucet filled with whiskey.

Bouts of creativity always mixed with humor. A turquoise painted shell, cotton-ball cloud and an angel ornament.

Sending a big satin pig to my friend Ellen, when she was sad.

Always, always gracious and a little judgmental.

Dad discovering that the whiskey in the bottle was watered down.

Finding the prayer to St. Francis on a plaque in the kitchen, Lord grant me….

Christmas 1978, the first year after they retired to Florida, she put the turkey on the porch to thaw like we always did in Michigan… then threw it out a few hours later because it spoiled.

Awaking in critical care hooked to all kinds of machines, after a surgery had to be stopped mid way leaving her leg unattached to her hip and a broken rib from reviving her, to find us kids bedside her bed and writing us a perfectly coherent, legible note where to find her glasses so she could see us. She was told that she would be in a wheel chair the rest of her life. 

Telling me a month later, still in the hospital, the night before doctors were going to go back in to complete the surgery, that she remembered watching the chaotic scene in the surgical suite from atop a cabinet and she wasn’t scared of dying because she realized she wasn’t done in this life. 

Years after she was gone, I dreamed of her holding my hand and lifting me up through a house and about to leave the earth when we stopped ascending to chat. I knew I wasn’t done on earth yet either. I’m fairly certain some one would have found me dead in my bed that next morning if we hadn’t had that chat.

Pffft, she was in a wheel chair for a few weeks... tops. She used a cane for distance.

Her joy in Monica her first grand child.

Her smile holding Alex.

She wrote letters to my siblings and me. Every once in awhile I think of writing to my son, but instead he gets texts, emails, and postcards. Maybe I will write one today.

Near the end of her life when I visited Mom and Dad in Florida, I remember her sitting in her chair, a Queen Anne’s type, that they’d had someone cut down the legs so her feet touched the floor, that an articulated floor lamp accompanied which she moved about to read or examine various items, and a table with shelves that held letters, an address book bound by a rubber band, catalogs, pens and stationery. She told me that she thought I was a good mother to my son who was four at the time, then asked me whether I thought she was a good mother.  A few days ago, I asked essentially the same question to my now twenty-seven year old son and saw his expression change from animated to blank. I think I know what happened in that moment to me and then to him. I'll call it system overload.

There is no easy answer. It’s, as the cliché goes, all relative. Decisions I’ve made in my life aligned with or juxtaposed with the structure and foundation my mom and dad provided. I can safely say that as a young adult, all decisions opposed to my parents fell to the side where I concluded she wasn’t a good mother. All those that align, either because I agreed or because the lesson I learned helped me, fell into good mother territory. As a matured adult, I adjusted the place my parents held from guiding to voices that I consult. They are the people who came before. They were neither good nor bad parents. They are my parents for whom I hold the highest esteem and feel all gratitude for my life.  I love them and the stories that made them who they are to me. I appreciate the dots that connect us… those that came before, those in the present and those yet to come. And, so I imagine it goes for my child... system overload, indeed.