B & D Carryout helped raise my kids.

Debbie and I were talking today about how parents do not always raise their own kids and it turned to my early years of being a single parent.   I know I was working at the Red Carpet and I was off on Sundays.  Through the week I worked the morning shift, came back and helped through the supper rush and then went down on South Main to sack bread at the bakery.  When you maintain a schedule like that, days off are a definite luxury so it was important that they be savored.  Now I have to say I was not very good at attending church, but I made sure the kids got on the bus every Sunday morning for their religious training.  But Sunday afternoons were special.

The fishing poles were always in the trunk of the old black Ford.  There were no such things back then as car seats so the kids just piled in wherever they fit.  They climbed back and forth across the seats, hung out the windows and generally just made a nuisance of themselves.  Of course they were hungry.  They were always hungry.  They were always hungry, always thirsty and always needed to pee.  It was all just part of the living thing back then.  They were kids and that was all they knew.  But any time we had a little time to kill and a little gas in the car we were good.  Gas was like 20 cents and the Ford could go 20 miles or more on a gallon of gas, so life was golden.  The only thing the old car lacked was an actual floor board on the drivers side.  It had a lot of floor, but it was mostly holes.  Well, no radio and no heater or windshield wipers, but it ran and that was what mattered.  Well, stopping mattered and the brakes worked most of the time.  I guess it was a way to get to the B & D Carryout out on fifth street where dinner awaited us.

Now keep in mind that coffee was 20 cents a cup and a hamburger at McDonalds was 19 cents.  At B & D Carryout I would purchase 8 hamburgers and French fries.  The bottom of the box was covered with French fries and then 8 hamburgers were placed on top of the French fries.  Each hamburger had a pickle slice and a squirt of ketchup.  That was it.  For this I paid $1.00.  Try and feed a family of 6 for a dollar today.  Not happening.  You are probably thinking that those were some damn little hamburgers, but you would be wrong.  When a rag tag carload of people are off for an afternoon of fishing and playing in the sand, there is no better meal to be had and the memory of those afternoons will some times pop into my mind at night and make me so homesick I cry.

How I would love to turn back the hands of time and be given another chance at raising my kids.  There would have only been one husband and father and there would have been college funds.  No home made clothes and no hand me downs.  There would have been a bedroom for each kid with a bed and sheets and blankets.  There would have been a puppy and kittens.  I would have read them stories and taken them for walks in the park.  We would have filled the pew at the Presbyterian church on Fourth Street.  And there would not have been a B & D Carryout.  Of course there would not have been fishing trips either.  So would the trade off have made that much difference?  Do my kids enjoy life because we went fishing  or would they have been better off going to college?  It is all irrelevant now.  There is no going back, so I guess I will just try to remember it as good times.  I am old enough now that I can get my fishing license for $1.00 at Walmarts.  I bought a new rod and reel and a new tackle box, but for some reason, they have not been taken out of the shed.

Mother said it best.

When we were kids on Strong Street, life was so simple.  In the winter we filled the water buckest and set them close to the wood cook stove in the kitchen so they would not freeze.  When it snowed it snowed and if the snow was deep Mother sent Jim Davis to the school to walk home in front of us so he could break a path for us.  Dad couldn't do it because he was busy playing Dominoes at the "Recreation Hall ( which was another word for "Beer Joint") in town.  Back in those days cars only had rear wheel drive which was the precursor to front wheel drive or all wheel drive.  Let's think about that concept a moment.

Rear wheel drive meant that all the power was in the back axle and the steering was in the front axle.  So basically, a car was propelled from the back and steered by the front.  Only time you actually had control of where you went, was when you went backwards.  OMG!  Isn't that how life is lived?  It sure is!  How many time have I looked back and thought " I should have done that differently!"

Which calls to mind several things my momma used to say and I could not understand them back then, but as I gain in age and wisdom, I am actually getting pretty damn smart.  There are 2 that spring to mind today for some reason.  The first one is  "As you sow, so shall you reap."  And the second is  "Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."  I was naïve back when she would tell me this.  She explained it to a nine year old girl in simple terms, "If you want to eat a tomato, you have to plant a tomato.  You can not plant a turnip seed and get a tomato."  That was simple enough back then when eating was the most important thing in my young life.  And later when I was married to the "love of my life" I could not make the correlation.  That saying had no meaning in my life through the next 4 husbands either, but now that I am on the down hill slide, I can see it all very clearly.  Whether it has been the roughly 45 years of learning that has been drilled into my head or just the culmination of life that woke me up, I do not know, but here I am dispensing wisdom to anyone who will listen!

So let me explain the "sowing of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind" as I understand it today.  During the Vietnam War years, I waved my flag and demanded they "bring the boys home".  You see how that worked out for me.  When the powers that be decided to end it, it ended.  Gay rights came and I waved my flag.  AIDS hit the scene and I demanded care.  Martin Luther King, Trayvon Martin, Civil Rights; it was always something.  Now it is immigration and ripping babies away from mothers that has me stirred up.  Always demanding.  Always thinking my voice matters.  But does it?  Probably not.  I am on facebook, but I do not appear too often, because when I do I piss somebody off.  Mostly I defend as a "Libitard", but occasionally I get personal.

My last marriage taught me all I need to know about living a peaceful existence.  He respected and trusted me, and I returned the faith and trust.  He was my friend.  Sometimes he would need to remind me that I could not save the world and that Don Quixote tilted at a lot of windmills in vain.  I no longer have Kenneth as my rudder, but I do have my faith.  Social Justice is my thing and I pretty well stay away from people and their personal problems.  I adhere to that "Do not judge me until you have walked a mile in my shoes."

Trouble with the husband?  That is between the 2 of you and as long as it remains only the 2 of you, you have a chance.  I guess you could put it on facebook and let people vote on it, but when it is all said and done, it is between 2 people.  I equate facebook to the whirlwind and the poster as the sower and reaper.  I guess life could be simple if both parties were to post the saga as they perceive it in their mind.

"Geraldine does not fix meals I like.  She is always on the phone.  She is lazy.  I have to clean house.  She loves the dog more than she loves me."

"George   doesn't like the same food I do.  He is always wanting to talk when I am on the phone.  He is lazy and does not clean up after himself."

These are little things in themselves, but they become bigger than the whole.  George and Geraldine have planted little seeds.  Each one is harmless in itself, but as they lay in the ground festering, they become all consuming.  They do not discuss them, just water them with words and watch them grow.  And then comes the day of harvest.  The gentle breeze of yesterday is now the whirlwind of today.

Mother said other things also.

"Clean up your own house before finding fault with the neighbors house."  (Am I blameless in this or did I do something selfish?}

"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."  (Ever watch a cow standing in knee high grass and straining at the fence that separates the 2 fields?)

"Try to get that toothpaste back in the tube."  (When hateful words are hurled there is no getting them unsaid.")

And of course there is the Golden Rule!  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  and let me end this with what my oldest daughter says:  "What doesn't kill you, will make you strong."

Death is final.  There is not compromise after that.  The dead one inevitably wins because they got in the last word.

Just some things I am throwing out there today.  Take it or leave it.

Where are the Kleenex?

I know you will not believe this, but there was a time when there were not Kleenex!  Worse then that, there was a time when there was an ironing board in every home and an iron in every plug in.  Before that there were pieces of iron which were shaped in a rather triangular manner and placed on the wood stove to be heated to use in the chore of getting wrinkles out of clothes and other household items.  The clothes and other household items were first washed in a washing machine (God I love the way we used to name stuff for what it was used for in the home!)  The clothes were then hung on the  (get this!) clothes line to dry.  When they were dry the ones we did not want to have wrinkles in, were sprinkled.  It was called sprinkling because we put water in a "sprinkling bottle"  which had a top on it with tiny holes to let out tiny sprinkles of water.  See, when the clothes dried with wrinkles in them, they had to be dampened and ironed on the special board  (hence the term "ironing board).

A little aside here, back in the days that this went on a woman was judged by how white her whites were and the uniformity of how her clothes were hung on the line to dry.  There were 2 kinds of clothes pins which held the clothes on the line.  They were both wooden.  One type had a spring and it pinched open, was placed over the item on the line, and then released to hold the item in place.  The other was also wooden but just slid down over the item.  It was best if you had only one kind, because that is just how it was.  A drop of "bluing" was put in the second rinse water to make the whites appear a brighter white.  We even had sets of tea towels which were used for drying of the dishes back then.  (These also required being ironed.)  That was way before automatic dish washers.  The tea towels were embroidered in one corner to denote what should be done that day.  As I recall, the litany was:
 "Monday, wash day,"
 "Tuesday Iron day",
"Wednesday Mending Day",
 "Thursday Shopping Day",
"Friday Cleaning Day",
"Saturday Baking Day,"
 "Sunday Worship Day".
And the world pretty well turned on that unless there was a death or something else equally catastrophic.  Iron day was always special.

Mother would sprinkle the clothes the night before, usually.  Then when she got home in the evening the ironing would commence.  First was baby clothes, then little girl clothes, then boy clothes, men clothes and household things that needed ironed.  But what was really special was the little ball in the corner of the sprinkled clothes.  That was for which ever one of us that had been the best and begged the hardest.  It was the handkerchiefs!  Since there was no such thing as Kleenex, when we needed our nose "blown" mother would whip the handkerchief out of her pocket and pinch it over our nose and tell us to "blow."  ( A little aside here.  I was always hoping I was the first to use that particular handkerchief  as I did not want to have my nose any where near where someone else had undergone the ritual of nose blowing".

But there seemed to be magic in the ironing of the handkerchief.  They had to be square and have no wrinkles.  Most of them were women's  "hankies" because men mostly blew their nose into the air and pinched it off.  Gross, grosser, grossest comes to mind.  Women's hankies usually had a hand crocheted edge.  They were also of thinner fabric.  Each one of us girls took pride in the handkerchief ironing, because we were preparing for the day when we would be the lady of our own home and have our very own iron and ironing board.  Back in those days everything was preparatory to the day we would marry a wonderful man and spend our day making him happy and keeping his home.  So it was always  with great pride that I presented my freshly ironed handkerchiefs to mother and waited until she inspected each one and told me to put them in the "handkerchief drawer."  My life at that point had meaning!  Ah, but time marches on now doesn't it?

Today we have a washer and special liquid soap designed to remove stains, followed by fabric softener to remove wrinkles in the dryer along with removing static cling.  The iron is downstairs, or in a cupboard some where and it really is not needed if you get the clothes out of the dryer in a timely manner.  This did not happen overnight.  As I recall, I tried to get my girls interested in the fine art of ironing and they thought I was nuts.  As for handkerchiefs, those are replaced by Kleenex that are disposable.  And why on earth would we want to reuse a hanky when Kleenex goes in the trash and is added to one of the 697,000,000,000 + piles of trash floating around in our sweet earth today?

I long for the good old days when we actually used stuff that made sense and called it by the name it was used for at the time of use.  So many things in my kitchen are now obsolete, ironing board just being one.  My mangle is a collectors item.  Where are all the rolling pins?  Potato peelers? Lemon juicer?  Sausage stuffer?

Maybe I am the one that has outlived my usefulness?  Ya' thnk?

I may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but...

I am not big on government and how all this works, but it has come to my attention the ours is not working at all.  I know we have checks and balances and I also know we pay a bunch of people in Washington, D. C. to pass laws and generally keep my world spinning on its axis.  Seems like there should be about 102 Senators and 435 Representatives ( I could be wrong on the actual numbers because my memory is not what it used to be back when I actually paid attention.) Along with all these people who are elected to represent us in our great capitol  are many helpers, secretary's, and various assistants of all kinds.  All these are there to make sure my life runs along on an even keel and I can go about my business of living and making money to pay taxes for these people to run my life.  Not happening, is it?

I pay my taxes and the powers that be use my money to pay these great men and women to keep me safe and happy.  Well, it sure as hell is not working out that way now, is it?  We have a nut in the white house, placed there through the help of Communist Russia and the people I depend on to make my life run smoothly are running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off trying to make me think that they are doing their job!  How friggin' stupid do you think I am?

The Polar Ice Cap is melting because of a thing called Global Warming and the EPA is non existent.

 People seeking asylum because they are being raped and murdered by the drug cartels in their  countries are being locked up at our borders and their children shipped to "holding facilities" without even a wrist band to identify infant children so they can be returned to their parents.

 Blacks and other minorities are being harassed by rebel carrying rednecks who are still fighting the Civil War.

Pipelines are being shoved across land that was "given" to the Indigenous People who habituated the land by our magnanimous government years ago when we stole the only home they knew.  Bet they wish they could take back the welcome they gave us!

The streets are full of drug addicts that became addicted because big Pharma pushed opioids for every ache and pain through prescriptions  pushed by doctors who received payoffs for selling the product that they knew were addictive.

Teachers are not given the tools they need to teach our children and the cost of getting a higher education gets higher and more impossible to achieve.

People die in our streets for lack of healthcare.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say, no one is listening in the hallowed halls.  The only time these people know we are here is election time.  And that, my friends is the key!  They are in Washington D.C. because we sent them there.  You can send an honest person to Congress, but you can not get them back.

Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the whole damn bunch have been there and padded their pockets with money and favors from the NRA, Big Pharma,  Monsanto and the Koch Brothers,  just  to mention a few.  They are not interested in our welfare.  What they are interested in are laws that let them operate at our expense.  We are not even allowed the luxury of having our food labeled and the contents that end up in our bodies are irrelevant to the bank accounts of the powers that control our lives.

Do you think that the man that ordered the babies taken away from their only security on this earth bothered to ask why so may people were running from one country.  Hell no!  That man is a loose cannon and the very people we sent to protect us are in bed with the enemy.  The countries around the whole world laugh at us.  We are backward and we should be the leaders.  Other countries educate their children and furnish healthcare , but we set here like morons wondering how in the hell that joke of a man got into such a position of power.   Let me tell you, if we do not pull our head out of our ass and wake up the Congress we are going to be marching off to our own Auschwitz.  And it has to start with a whole new bunch in Washington who are not controlled by money.

Think your vote does not count?  Think again.  Not voting or casting your "protest vote" is what got us here today.  For God sake, educate yourselves!  Register.  Study your candidates and do not just go with what Facebook puts out there as fodder for the masses!  The race for even your precinct in your local city is important.  The mayor race is important.  The Governor, Senator, Representative, and on and on.  The school board.  Do not go like a lamb to the slaughter because the man you sent to the Senate all those years ago, is a familiar name.

I watch as groups march against the yoke being tightened around our throats and I watch the nightly news and see the leaders in Washington doing nothing.  NOTHING!!  Their job is to lead us.  Yeah, like lambs to the slaughter.  Use some of your precious minutes to call their offices and tell the answering machine (because very few of them even bother with a live person in their office) to stop the madness and return us to the civility that we deserve.  We work hard and pay a congress to protect our interests.  And do it today.  Not tomorrow or some future time when a man with a tattoo gun is putting your identification on your forearm as he leads you to a bus.

A country that does not learn from it's mistakes is doomed to repeat them.

PEACE THROUG POWER!

No man is an island!

Believe it or not, there was a time when I could have recited most of that poem and told you who wrote it, but those days are gone.  My foggy little mind no longer spits out long thoughts including poems, and other litany.  It mostly just gives me snippets of information that may or may not be actual, but I will accept that and be grateful that the damn thing still works at all!  That having been said, I shall forge ahead with some worthless piece of something for me to write and you to read.  Hopefully one of us will get something from it!

I woke up yesterday and my Grandfather Haas was on my mind.  118 years ago he came to the shores of this great country through Ellis Island.  The Haas family came in shifts.  Great Grandpa Haas had been married twice and the oldest children were responsible for the younger children.  My heart swells with pride when I think how the whole family left Dettingen, Germany and came to this country with everything they owned in the equivalent of a back pack.

The Beck family in Nickerson, Kansas was already established so that became the headquarters of the clan.  Abbyville, Plevna,  and the Huntsville area became Haas territory.  From there they spread out to Oklahoma and beyond.  Some where along the line Gagnebeins got in the mix.  Helen Gagnebein was my great grandmother and my great grandfather was somebody and if I could find my geneology book I could tell you his name, but I can't.  I do know Helen Gagnebein was married to him and had 3 kids.  Mable, Josie, and Lewis.  Mable and Josie married brothers so those are my double cousins.  Lewis married someone and I never knew them very well.  Then Great Grandma married a guy named Hatfield and he had a son named Stephen.  I did not know them well.  Great Grandma lived on one  corner in Plevna and Grandma of the other.  Great Grandma was going to get married a third time since she had been widowed twice by this time and the intended groom died before that could happen.  She then said to hell with it all, closed up her house and moved in with grandma.  And that is when I came on the scene.

Grandma Haas was crippled by a stroke and needed care.  I was 15 years old so I went to stay with them.  I have no idea how much help I actually was, but there I was.  I could help lift and wash dishes and water the plants.  That was pretty much all I was good for, but they seemed to be easy to please.  I mentioned before in another post that the only reading material was the family  Bible, so I got pretty familiar with the King James Version!  Now that is one thing that has stuck with me my whole life.  I can spout scripture till the cows come home, but I can not tell you where it is in the Bible, just that it is there.  I always envied people with memories that worked that way.  But back to the subject at hand.

A couple days ago I was on the phone with a friend and I have got to say, maybe the word I am looking for is not really "friend".  Now anyone who knows me, knows I am a bleeding heart Liberal.  I align with the Democratic party, because their thoughts seem to fall in line with my way of thinking.  In my mind the Republican party represents money.  Democrat represents rights.  That is just how it is.  So anyway, the subject of the kids and the border came up.  His immediate response was to ship the whole bunch of them back to where ever they came from because we have enough people on the dole here and do not need any more.  My idea is to wrap my arms around them and make them welcome.  Course I came from immigrant roots, and he does not?  Is he an Indian or Indigenous as we now refer to them?  Nope.  Anyone else walking these lands of the United States of America has immigrant roots.  My friend and I did decide that we would not discuss politics.  Lot of that going on in this country today.

I do know that different crops are being planted out here on the Mesa.  One thing I am very sure of is that the city boys and girls are not going to come out here and pick peppers so more crops are planted that can be harvested by one man and a machine.  Immigrant labor has been a way of life in this and any agricultural area forever.  They blend into the landscape and into the night.  When the crops are in and the fields barren, they return to Mexico.  They work and put money into our economy and send money home to Mexico to feed their family there.  Is that wrong?  Do they not bleed the same red blood that I bleed?  Do they not love their children as we love ours?

This is a bad way to start the day.  I would much rather face the sun and thank my Lord for getting me through the night then to go out on the street and wave a sign and try to convince a non caring public that children belong with their parents rather than warehoused some where sleeping under a mylar blanket to keep warm.  I wish I could wrap my arms around all the little babies that the man we must call leader has doomed to separation.  Our country is as divided as those children and their parents.



God help us all.

A Brownie pin and a Brownie dress does not a Brownie make.

Aunt Helen Lang was married to a man named Skinny and they had money.  Now this only affected me in a round about way, but 70 years later, I still think about her.  The clearest memory of her is, of course in later life, but still my childhood memories are the fondest.  She and Uncle Skinny would pop into our life on very rare occasions and there was never a heads up, just look up and there was their big shiny car and the trunk was always loaded with wonderful things for us.  I remember when I was in 7th grade and mother had her hysterectomy, Aunt Helen brought me a store bought dress.  I can close my eyes and see it now.  It was ever glaze cotton and the color was exactly the same hazel as my eyes, whatever that color is called.  It had a white collar and strings of the hazel fabric held white daisies.  Two.  One on each string.  It buttoned up the back.  I wore it until it hung in shreds.  Even then it had a use after it was worn out.  Mother cut the good parts off and tore them into strips that were put with other strips, rolled into a ball, and when enough balls were ready, she took them to the rug weaver.  Nothing went to waste at our house.

Back to Aunt Helen.  One afternoon while I was off doing something somewhere else, Aunt Helen and Uncle Skinny came to visit.  I must have been in the third grade at the time.  I missed them completely, but Aunt Helen did not forget me just because I was not there.  She brought me a Brownie dress with a Brownie beanie.  If you do not know, the Brownie group was for the younger kids that preceded going into girl scouts, which was my fondest dream.  She also provided the brown shoes and the money for registration where I received my golden Brownie pin!  I could see vista's opening onto a wonderful life as a Brownie and later as a girl scout.  The world was my oyster!  But alas, a nine year old girls dreams die very easily in the dust of Strong Street in 1950.

Oh, I went to the first meeting and paid my nickle dues.  I got my gold brownie pin, which was worn upside down until I fulfilled a list of things to do.  That list was never finished.  As a matter of fact, it was never started.  Everything on that list required an adult to help and guide me through the process.  Mother was off cleaning houses to put food on the table and Dad was very busy shuffling dominoes at the local pub.  My oldest sister who was 12 or 13 at the time was busy being a slut and "getting herself pregnant" by a 27 year old man.  (In this day and age he would have been thrown so far into prison he would never have seen the light of day, but that was then and what was acceptable then was that he worked and would take care of her.)  And there my resources ended.  So that went by the wayside.  The brown dress stayed in a drawer with the beanie and the gold pin.  I assume at some point it ended up in one of the rugs.

My oldest sister married the man and in due time,  a baby girl arrived.  After a few years she became pregnant again and I was called upon to stay with her while her husband worked since she was in a lot of pain and had a 4 year old daughter that needed care.  So, as the day progressed and she was in more pain I really began to get nervous.  When she came out of the bathroom clutching the door jam to announce, "The baby is coming!"  I learned where babies came from and it was not the stork, like I had been told.  I was ripped into the birds and the bees business very rudely.  I grabbed Mary and ran next door to the preachers house.  His wife (luckily) was a nurse, but (unluckily ) she was not home.  He called somebody to come and I ran home to my little house on Strong Street with Mary in my arms.  Sadly, the baby was born dead and I would carry the guilt of not knowing what to do all my life.  Common sense tells me this is wrong, but we are all humans and we all fail and learn to live with those failures.

I was in an antique store in the Junction a couple years ago and found a Brownie pin.  I looked at the little dancing elf, or whatever it is and bought the pin.  It is up in the cupboard along with other worthless treasures that some how seem to form my life.  They all seem to connect together to pull me back into myself.  I know my life is made up of the good times and the bad times and it sometimes makes me very sad.  The things I have done and the places I have gone are all in my mind some where and last night I lay in my bed and thinking about things I came to the realization, that one day, I will just die. When that happens, all my memories will have been for naught.  When that happens and people learn of my demise, they will say "Oh, I knew her!"  

Which brings me to the point I want to make.  No, you do not know me.  You know OF me.  You know who I let you see.  We are all that way.  I look at you and I see the face you present, but I do not know what you are thinking.  I do not know what you are feeling.  People say I am blunt.  Frank.  I tell it like it is.   Am I?  But do I?  Mother always said, as we get older we begin to face our own mortality and I am sure Mother was right.

But I want to put Aunt Helen to rest here before I leave.  Mother and Aunt Helen remained friends all of their lives.  When I went home to visit, Aunt Helen always came to see me or I went to see her, but mostly she came to mom's house.  When mother lived in the apartment on 15th Circle, Aunt Helen would get confused as to which one to go to and she had a big problem with curbs, in that she had a hard time staying between them!  She would see me standing in the parking lot she was supposed to be in and here she would come in that big Lincoln!  She would park taking up several spots and leap out of the car with her wig askew waving a bag of Werther's Originals that she had brought for mother.  She was 90+ the last time I saw her.

Aunt Helen has been gone for many years, but I still pick up a bag of Werther's every now and then just to take that walk down memory lane.  It works every time.  I can see her in my mind right now as clear as day.  I do not remember Uncle Skinny, but I do remember my precious Aunt Helen and her heart of gold and her hopes for a skinny little girl on Strong Street.  I just want to say, "Hang on Aunt Helen!  I will make it up there yet!"