CONTINUED: Customer Service

Convinced that a place with a pretty name and pretty girls couldn't be all bad, I declared my search victorious and reported my choice of “The S.S. Treasure Chest” to Mrs. Dave.  She was not impressed with the science of my method.

 “Are they pirates?” she asked, “Or just bimbos.”

“I’m sure they’re simply working girls,” I said.  ”It’s so nice to do business with young professionals who are so healthy looking.”

My wife found an institution for her accounts that was more to her liking.  She mentioned something about being realistic, but such comments have always gone way over my head.

It turned out my choice was probably not the best.  But having made my decision, I continued to struggle on, dealing with constant screw-ups.  Each was more bizarre than the preceding, but each afforded me the opportunity to work with customer service reps like Layla Sue. 

Layla Sue is just the cutest little thing.  She has the finest long blonde hair and the sweetest southern drawl.  But she lacks the ability to add a column of figures twice and come up with the same total.  And I’ll admit it’s rather disconcerting to hear someone in a bank always saying “Close enough.”

On the plus side, Layla Sue wears dresses that would embarrass Lady Gaga, eye makeup she probably buys by the pound and a perfume so strongly provocative it’s been  known to set off smoke detectors.

Of all her outfits, the most intriguing is a sheer blouse worn over a dainty and girlish bra with a thin strap across her back featuring an  embroidered message. It took me the longest time and many discreet glances to decipher the phrase, which I am too embarrassed to ask about.  I don’t know where anyone would ever find a bra that says, “I’ve Been To Reno.”

I like working with young women to help improve their professional skills, even if it’s only basic arithmetic.  And doing business with someone as interesting as Layla Sue is not a hardship.  But I have no idea if my checking account balance is $3,000 or three cents.  My last monthly statement said I wired in 400,000 Euros from a bank in Bogota and still wound up with a negative balance.   Layla Sue says to not sweat the details.  When I add it all up … twice … there's no way I can be described as anyone but a happy, satisfied customer.  That’s what I told the FBI when they came to visit yesterday.

copyright 2015 by David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Ceil's Front Porch

The    W i n d s w e p t     J o u r n a l

Number 212                          November, 2015

 Ceil’s Front Porch

 I can still see the mountain in my mind’s eye.  And imagine the breeze, a pocket of cool air.  It left the top of the mountain and rushed down the steep slope, crossed the floor of the valley spread out before us, came towards me, jumped over the railroad tracks about a half mile away and climbed the grade up to the porch to dust a coolness across my brow.  As I sat on a wicker rocker and listened to whom I chose to call my elders.  Friends, more or less, who  I would learn from if I kept my sights on what was important in life and not on all that glittered from every corner of my young man’s world.

I learned a lot on Ceil’s front porch, but perhaps not what anyone would have guessed.  I mostly sat and just listened to everyone as I gazed across the valley at Overlook Mountain, the same geological formation that hovered over Woodstock, NY, some 8 miles away.  Sometimes I’d offer an opinion on what I heard.  Most of the folks sitting around any of the conversational circles that formed would nod as if it was OK for me to speak, but not really necessary.  In my thirties I was accomplished in my own sphere, but I was a decade or more younger than most of my porch mates and didn’t know anything they would consider useful.

Oh, I could lecture about memory modules, virtual communication channels and other technical subjects related to the industrial films I produced … “You make films, Dave?  Do you know Marlon Brando?” … but no one would have been interested.  Surprisingly I wasn’t bothered by people not wanting to hear what I had to say.  My ego seemed to shut down on Ceil’s front porch.  I needed applause less when I found myself wrapped up in someone else’s  story.

My life had reached a point where I needed to decide how much to allow a dawning career to impact my family life.  And my social life, too.  That I cared much about the latter was a surprise to me.  I had always thought the actions and lives of those around me to not have much of an effect on me.  I was now coming to see that was untrue.  In fact, those around me would shape my essence more than I imagined.

At that time we lived smack in the middle of what had been a rural valley, until the state built a super highway right down the length of it and high tech workers moved in with their high-powered commuter cars.  Many of the visitors to Ceil’s porch were from families who had lived on the surrounding land for generations, older men and women who farmed most of their lives and now sat on porches on weekend afternoons and spoke of their former existence.  I was more than a little weak on topics like How to Fix a Manure Chain, How to Plow a Headland pattern, how the honey bees would do this year and what was a decent rolling herd average for a dairy farm of only eighty cows.  It was 1974 and I would have never planned to adopt “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” as my favorite song the following year.

But even if I seldom understood the conversation, listening to men and women who could manipulate  rocks, soil and trees to build a homestead had a comforting effect on me.  I came home early one morning from a barn fire and would not have traded giving a successful technology presentation for my night running the pump on the fire truck to help save a family’s home.  It renewed my faith in humanity to know there were still people in the world who could husband animals and produce food for the table, who could take care of themselves and their families without resort to cash and credit cards, corporate intrigue and ass-kissing.  What I loved about Ceil’s front porch was the bare-bones competence I saw in people who were independent.  Their wealth was rooted in the dirt beneath their feet.

     Ceil would have not known or cared much about the skills of her guests and their varied knowledge.  Her purpose in the covered dish suppers and afternoon coffees was not to bone up on the best way to keep leaves out of her cistern.  She hosted a continuing soiree that held our dreams, our opinions and our stories.  She wanted a front row seat to all of it.  Intensely interested in people and their lives, one could view Ceil as either a gossip or an astute student of humanity.  Most of us who gave it any thought considered her the latter.  The porch may not have been a complete library of human experience, but Ceil cataloged the lives she saw taking place around her. 

I thought I was there for the content, considering it important to know, for example,  how to balance an iron shoe on a horse I’d probably never own.  But what I was learning about was me … what excited me, what calmed me, what made me feel human.

Ceil was there for the drama she saw squeezed out of human hearts as they wrestled with themselves and each other.  Ceil gazed directly down into the well of human existence while I was only just discovering how to be human and pretending to live in an earlier time.

   In good weather, life as we knew it continued to roll out on Ceil’s front porch.  She and her husband, Roger, kept the 1930’s era house spic and span and inviting.  A crisp coat of vanilla colored paint set off the balusters and railings of the porch, while the grey painted floor was covered by a bone colored sisal carpet on each side of the grand stairway that came up from the lawn in front of the home. Cedar shakes covered the outside walls of the house, weather-worn to a grey and brown patina by the rain and snow blowing down off the mountain during the wetter parts of the year.

Ceil’s natural inclination was always to be in the center of what was happening among the people she loved (and sometimes didn’t.)  I’d watch her putter from the kitchen through the house to the porch, stopping at each little circle of people to listen in.  The topics on a summer afternoon could be anything from “stories of old” about people like Aunt Betty who carried a kitten around in her bosom, sometimes to church in the winter.  Or we might hear “stories unfolding,” in other words the current gossip. 

I had landed in Ceil’s neighborhood when I drove my high-powered commuter car into a driveway about two miles away and bought a house right there in the sticks.   My journey into what I called God’s Country had begun when I decided to leave a stultifying upper middle class neighborhood where I often sat outdoors in the summer listening to lawn mowers and the bedlam of children in swimming pools.  I wanted a more private and primitive existence.  I longed for crisp mornings in the fall and entertained thoughts of running back from the chicken coop with a few eggs to be cooked on an old iron stove.  I imagined warm summer evenings as I pranced around with the kids on a  soft green lawn growing beside our own dirt road down in the woods.

I purchased the remains of a mountain farm. Fourteen acres of pasture and woods and an old farmhouse.  There were assorted other buildings, among them an old hay barn bent over as if in a graceful curtsy, falling in upon itself as it headed towards the ground.  The house was structurally sound, but very much in need of paint, wallpaper and the decorative touches necessary to make it a comfortable home.

Lucky me,  I didn’t have to farm the property in order to eat and pay my bills.  I certainly didn’t have the energy of those who lived in the old house before me.  They handily drew a living from the soil and the animals.  But I would have survived neither the sheer amount of work nor the colossal boredom of living an hour (by buckboard) from the nearest town.  I would have been struck dumb by the prospect of living out on a back road all alone with no other human contact for weeks at a time. How the inhabitants of a remote farm in the 1800s kept themselves sane was always a wonder to me.

After our move to the farm, an elderly neighbor named Harold would stop in the kitchen from time to time and point out where his family had kept their old kitchen table in the center of the room when they owned the house decades before.  His younger sister, Elsie,  had entered the world on the table top three quarters of a century ago.  His sister’s birth was evidently the first bit of biology he had witnessed.  His face would light up with wonder and with his finger he’d point to a spot on my Ethan Allen Harvest Table. 

“She came out right there,” he said.  “I remember it like it was yesterday. Right there next to your sugar bowl.”

He told me this story often and each time he’d wait a beat before continuing his revelation.  “An hour later I was eatin’ my beans and pork butts right there on that very spot.”

Elsie was gone by then.  She never married and spent her entire life within a few hundred feet of that spot on the table where my white bowl sat.  I thought of her every time I sprinkled sugar on my oatmeal. She was one of a growing number of ghosts occupying the house.  There must have been many spirits resident while I lived there,  but most of the time my family was oblivious to them, busy as we were with our lives.  We put our heads down, ignored the immortal beings and lived a normal family life just as they had when they were alive.

I invested the earnings from my high tech job into restoring the old farmhouse and exasperated my family as I coaxed them to live like we’d all been born a hundred years earlier.  There were no electrical outlets in the bedrooms up on the second floor.  We used mechanical Mickey Mouse clocks to get us up in the morning until I wired the rooms after three years.  There was no heat in the upstairs bedrooms or toilets until about the time my daughter got married.  I told her young husband he was getting a girl who was marrying for the simple pleasure of shared body heat.  I wasn’t just trying to save money.  I was keeping the old farm house primitive to justify other areas in my life.  Somehow, my living style helped me to ground other areas of my existence that needed to be kept to their basics.

I’d arrive home at night from the offices of a large corporation a few miles away.  I jumped out of my suit and into bib overalls, then got busy with the chores.  Some jobs couldn’t wait for a change of clothing..  I’d find hay in my suit coat pocket when I gave an  executive presentation the next day.  Putting my feet up on a colleague’s desk one morning,  I saw the horror on his face as a gob of manure plopped off my wing tips on to his calendar.  After that, he called me Mr. Douglas in honor of the lead character in the television series “Green Acres.”

On Ceil’s front porch I seldom related what I thought were funny stories about our living without modern amenities in an old farmhouse.  Many of my listeners would have wondered what was amusing.  Growing up without electricity or automatic heat was simply part of their early lives.  Country living often contained some degree of privation, then and now.  John William, who was my age, remembered water freezing in a glass on his bedside table when he was a boy.  Edgar, slightly younger than I, attended a one room school house through the sixth grade and remembered taking the coal ash from the single heating stove out to the ash dump each morning.  So did I.

Ceil’s porch didn’t simply blossom out of nowhere for no reason.  What probably brought most of us together was our shared attendance at the little white church farther down the King’s Highway.  Brought up strictly Catholic, I found being Protestant a terrific emotional release.  The music was delightful and the message wasn’t that much different than what I’d been brought up to hear, except that it was like a local weather report compared to the great Catholic battlefront communiques I was used to hearing in Sister Mary Jean’s class in fourth grade. Every thing in Catholocism had been so heavy.  Solutions had been militaristic, world-wide Jesuit campaigns to eradicate the enemy.  In the little white church, neighbors of differing opinions sat down at a covered dish supper and somehow got along as they made agreements to work together.

On Christmas Eve everyone in the little hamlet jammed into the church, no matter what their religion, bank balances or politics.  We didn’t stay apart because of anything we’d been taught,  we came together because we were neighbors.  With everyone in church on that frozen night, we lit up the church with just our little candles.  The only light in the hamlet that cold and snowy night came weakly through the stained glass and curled around the snowy pine boughs hanging below the windows. 

And there were Easters with warm breezes drifting through the windows, as we stood in prayer with heads bowed among believers who actually prayed about the coming week.  The pastor, even twenty years into his career, was still nervous on Sunday mornings before his sermon.  At least every other month he discovered something new about himself, life or the spirit that he would carefully try to craft into a message, hoping those of us sitting out in the 150 year old pews would hear his heart and join his spirit.  Many of our minds were elsewhere, however, having arrived at church in a rush, children trailing behind us, after a week of pure greed or a weekend of the wrong kind of spirits. 

Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon or an evening the Pastor would join us on the porch.  Everyone loved him, but he always saw himself as apart from us.  I could never decide if it was a good or bad thing for him, but I left the man to a life that to me at times seemed more chosen than lived.

It was too cold on winter nights to meet on Ceil’s front porch, but the fireside was often available in the living room.  Waiting for the storm to end, waiting for the coffee to perk, waiting as many of us did one night to hear if Kenny had rescued the fire truck by backing it over the train trestle in a snow storm.  The night early one spring we waited to hear if the ambulance had gotten through the flooded valley to deliver old Granny to the hospital.

It’s probably true most people who came to the porch believed they were simply visiting, while for Ceil it was a means of keeping track of all of us, those she loved or at least found amusing.  For me it was more.  The visits were a healing, an affirmation of what was just then becoming important in my life, the witness of simple human exchanges taking place among ordinary people. I was a young man becoming a young father with a wife and children.  I was beginning to build a dimension of my life that had come as somewhat of a surprise to me.  Boyfriend, bridegroom and career worker were becoming husband, father and neighbor.

I have no idea why I spent my thirties and forties emulating an old farmer lifestyle that had never been part of my own family’s “city Irish” background.  But I had a lot of fun.  I don’t know why listening to Ceil’s friend Rett speak of  the best way to build septic system drain fields or old Dan remembering his cows one by one, pet name by name,  gave me a feeling of  the world being in capable hands despite what they were saying on the Nightly News.  Or that at least a few young adults could take care of the business of the world as I listened to Dougie figure pump pressures out loud in his head as he spoke with Albert about the fire company’s new pumper truck.  But all of the conversations on Ceil’s front porch, all of the sometime arguments, all the love and the tears and sometimes ill feelings among neighbors … all of them ran a lot closer to the ground we really lived on than the fakery that came to us from our television sets or movie theaters.

I’m sure some of the people on any given summer Sunday evening stood looking across the pasture at Overlook Mountain and wished they could stay on the porch forever.  For me these were the years of keeping my eyes close to home and concentrated on my family, a growing son and daughter, a young wife becoming a beautiful woman, a home to rebuild and carry us into old age.  Feeling safe in my cocoon, for a while I tried to avoid looking out into the world any farther than Ceil’s porch.  But the world’s pull is inevitable for anyone with a pulse and eventually we were pulled away to our  separate destinies. 

My wife and I kept going in life.  We grew older.  At some point we joined in the dramas of our adult children as they launched their own families.   But eventually we faded away and allowed the kids to have their own lives.

Ceil’s husband Roger died and she sold the house.  Later she moved south to be closer to her daughter.  My wife and I sold our farmhouse and moved to the coast of South Carolina.  We email Ceil from time to time.  She still loves us and cares about our family.

Humans come and go.  We all arrived on Ceil’s porch from somewhere else and eventually we left for another somewhere else.  Staying in any one spot forever is seldom a good option.  Not if we want a worthwhile life.  If Harold’s sister, Elsie, ever worried about her soul she probably wasted her time.  When she died after an entire life spent within walking distance of the kitchen table she was born on she would not have had a soul to worry about.  It would have been worn down to nothing by the sameness in her existence.

I used to think that life held the possibility of special things happening more than once.  I no longer believe that.  I’m close enough to the end to see no time left for repeats.  There will never be another little white church on Christmas Eve.  There will never be quite the set of people in my life who taught me so much about plain old living and there will never be another place to have learned it that was quite like Ceil’s front porch.  

Copyright David Griffin,  2015

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Fire Call

As the firemen set up the truck and microphone and speaker, the entire student body somehow became  arranged on the grass strip between the school building and the parking lot.  Nuns moved among us like Chain Gang deputies, but without the whips and shotguns.   Soon we were ready for the two smartest kids in eighth grade to deliver their “Fire Safety” talks.  The thirteen year olds

were cousins, a girl and boy from a family that had been saddled with high IQ’s ever since their great grandparents began a dynasty of wizards in the last century.  Each of the family’s  generations played a role in the great affairs of our fair city.  Ronald and Margaret would in the coming  years continue their family tradition by running for office and becoming our rulers,  judging our legal transgressions and  prosecuting the worst of us.  These kids were so eloquent, they’d  been on the speaking circuit since third grade.  Neither had many friends.  Ronald had begun to read  Kafka and was a rather cold young man.  Margaret evinced warmth and compassion, but she was rather needy and could be quite adamant.  When her mother didn’t produce the requested baby sister, the girl asked for a dog and named it Cindy.

Ronald’s speech, “Fire Safety in the Home, School, Church and Beyond,” treated the specter of  accidental fires breaking out in your kitchen, in the school’s lunch room,  and on our church’s candle-lit altar.  This last possibility jarred me, frankly.  I had never considered the inherent danger of  attending Mass, especially a high mass, when candle lighting shifted into high gear.  I made a mental note to spend some time thinking about balancing the need for

liturgy and the sin of  putting myself in the way of mortal jeopardy.  I reasoned it was an apt topic for consideration.  Too bad it wasn’t spring, when I always began a list of interesting topics to ponder while imprisoned at The Stations Of The Cross after school each Friday afternoon during Lent.  The year before, I spent Friday afternoons between stanzas of  Stabat Mater trying to recall every line in the film,  “The Glenn Miller Story.”  By Good Friday,  I was two thirds of the way through the script.  I saw the movie four times.   I was in love with June Allyson.

Margaret’s talk began on a light note, with babies and young children playing and laughing, tumbling down the hills in the back yards of  cute little white  houses on tree-lined streets, populated with the homes of attorneys and senior level bank officials.  In one such house dwelled Billy and Mary Magdelen and Mom and Dad.  The little family lived an exemplary life and prayed the rosary each evening, before watching the News with John Cameron Swayze.  But Dad forgot to have the furnace maintained one year and the house blew up.

“Ka-BOOM!!” shouted Margaret  into the microphone, as she stood on  a makeshift pulpit just aft of the fire truck’s cab.  The Lieutenant, leaning against the fire engine’s intake valve, jumped when the girl bellowed.  She was a hefty young lady  and had a prodigious voice that would have eventually served her well as a fifth grade teacher, had she not become the District Attorney.    The girl followed her exploding sound  effects  with the whooshing  noises of   debris flying through the air. Some of the younger children in the crowd began to look frightened..

Margaret continued her parable.   The young  boy and girl arrived home from school on that cold and snowy winter afternoon to find pieces of their life all over the neighborhood.   As brother and sister made their way along the familiar streets,  they first spied Mary Magdelen’s doll up in a tree on Bonnie Brae Place, and then the  twisted remains of Billy’s bicycle over on Ferris Avenue.  Dad was still at work.  Mom had been in the basement doing the laundry, but now pieces of  her were arriving steadily in heaven.  The children sat down in a snow bank (this was Utica, after all) and cried their little eyes out, knowing Dad would be angry when he finally arrived to find a 30 foot crater where his home once stood.  All this grief was the consequence of not keeping a list of home maintenance reminders.  “And by the way,” Margaret  said as she slapped her forehead a little too forcefully,  “where would they eat supper tonight?  How terribly, terribly sad,” she said.

Sparky, the Dalmatian, was apparently quite touched by Margaret’s tale.  He began wailing and whimpering and snuffling until the Lieutenant lovingly took hold of the dog’s collar.  It could have been my imagination, but the man seemed to twist  the choker rather tightly.  Sparky’s crying stopped abruptly, but he soon got  loose and jumped off the truck into the crowd of children.  Our cries of surprise and delight quickly turned to disgust and laughter when Sparky lifted his leg against the black skirts of Sister Bunny.  You really couldn’t blame the dog.  The nun indeed resembled a street lamp, with her jet black attire and the bursting white “flying nun” hat on top.

Billy and Mary Magdelen were taken off to an orphanage that definitely did not serve desserts.  At that point in her talk,  Margaret smiled broadly, looked around the crowd and said, “Thank you all very much for coming to see me.  I am extremely grateful to have been chosen from among hundreds of children (true, if you counted everyone all the way down to kindergarten) to deliver  The Distinguished Annual Fire Safety Lecture at this prestigious institution.”  (That would be our elementary school.)  With that, she jumped from the truck, alarming the Lieutenant, who was now holding on to Sparky for dear life. 

The students  began to grow restless as their minds turned to warm baloney sandwiches and government subsidized milk in tiny bottles … 2 cents for white, 3 cents for chocolate.  Even the nuns looked  tired.  The firemen reminded us once more not to play with matches.  They  revved up the siren one last time as we all held our hands over our ears.  Another successful visit from the Utica Fire Department came to a close. 

My mind turned from the fire trucks to other topics.  Question No. 372 had begun to bother me a little and I wondered why Mom seemed so pleasant to that man in Woolworth’s last week.  She told me he was a friend of Dad’s.  Ah well, it was my favorite time of year and I tried not to ruminate so much in good  weather.   Later that morning,  I wrote a note about  the Woolworth’s incident on a candy wrapper and stuck it in between the pages toward the back of my catechism.  We wouldn’t get there until March, and that was an eternity of time,  far awa

y into the future.  Who could guess?  By then, anything might happen.  The church could go up in smoke, Mom could run off with the milkman and Sparky could get accidentally strangled.

copyright 2008 by David Griffin

Another memory from O.L.O.Lourdes, this time in the depths of winter.  February 11 was the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes and it was a very cold day in 1955.  There I was in my brown gabardine pants, cowboy shirt, plastic western string tie, buckle-up snow boots, imitation Navy Pea Coat and sheepskin lined bombardier hat from Bernie Phillipsons Army-Navy Store (don't ask whose army,) forced out of Our Lady of Lourdes School on a February afternoon, ejected from our over-heated, over-populated fifth grade classroom by Sister Mary Wenceslas, to stand like a group of miniature prisoners in snow up past our knees, as the wind howled and boogers slid down my nasal canal and were snap-frozen right at the edge of the nostril by a temperature hovering near ten below, trying to hold my body against the 40 mile an hour wind as I grasped the little paperboard song book containing a selection of 973 songs of praise to Mary, an entity we were forbidden to worship ... but I guess under a thousand songs is OK .... trying to hold the little book in my German Alps Ski Commando leather mittens, gathered around the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and led by Sister Majestyria in songs of esteem, including Sister's favorite, Queen of the May, bizarrely set to the clank of tire chains out on Genesee Street. 

Having spent the daytime hours of my formative years with religious women, I’ve always been careful to not get on the wrong side of Mary, and have always hoped she has a sense of humor.  It just now occurs to me she must, since her Lourdes apparition means she landed in France.  You can’t possibly survive in that country without a sense of humor.

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Make Hay While The Sun Shines

Albert left in a huff in 1914 after a fight involving money, ran away to Blackduck, Minnesota where he worked in the woods.  Inebriated, his shack burned in winter, left to find help, froze his feet and lost some toes. Died and the powers that be shipped his body back to Manawa  by train to be buried next to his parents on the Klingbeil family cemetery in 1950.

 Gustav Jule Klingbeil married Emma Braun, sired eight children, Edward, Melvin, Oscar, George, Walter, Frieda Johnson, Dorothy Worm, Eleanora Buth,  farmed in Little Wolf.  Bertha, my grandmother married Fred Lembke in 1897, lived thither and yon, spending the last years in Big Falls after a hiatus at the Klingbeil farm. Six children: Emma Beyersdorf, Louie, Elsie Schmidt, Alma Zillmer, Leona Ostermann and Clarence Lembke.   Ella married Ernest Johnson, farmed at Elderon where he died of blood poisoning.  Twins Richard and Annah.    Ella died in December 1965, the last leaf on the Klingbeil tree.    Minnie married Bill Becker, farmed in Dupont. near Lake Michael School. Three daughters Irene Steinbach, Viola Schorweide, and Ruby Worm.  In 1940 after Bill's death Minnie sold the farm to Lester Bork, who built a new house for his bride.  Marie the baby married Frank Becker, resided in Sheboygan, two children Harold and Lucile Reinbacher who just passed away at the age of 99.  

It is uncountable the number of descendants that Wilhelmine and Gottfried Klingbeil have now in 2015, all because they pulled up roots and traveled to America in 1873 on the Good Ship Leipzig.  They traveled with Gottfried's sister Henrietta whose first husband was Kienitz.  He died and she married Carl Knopp and had many children.  Members of St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Manawa.  All walked the ten miles for the rite of Confirmation in German.  

Robert and William Klingbeil never married, bachelors,  farmed the home place and because it was the 'home' place, many relatives came to stay or live for a few days or months or years.  Rob and Bill welcomed everyone, as shown by the photographs surviving.

Gradually winter fades, spring and summer come,

The ground will warm up, the hay will grow,

Time to prepare the hay mower,

Check the tires on the wagons

Roll the hay with a side deliver rake,

Let dry for a few days, sunshine is needed.

Harness the horses to the wagon and hay loader

Hours and hours hauling in the hay.

Among those spending  summers on the farm was Harold Becker of Sheboygan , a lad of about 14 years old, in 1929.  As a Christmas gift from Santa Claus, Harold received a Box Camera.  Took many many pictures, had multiple copies made for all the relatives and for some reason, Delores inherited all of them.   At some time Harold contacted Infantile Paralysis or Polio.  He survived with the good nursing of his Mother Marie.  Went on to college and politics and was voted Register of Deeds of Sheboygan County.

It looked like a happy time on the farm from the smiles on the pictures.  Harold reminisced that they brought the train from Sheboygan to Sugar Bush were Uncle Rob met them with a horse and buggy, even in 1929.  To spend the summer on the farm.  Making hay.  Harold helped with harnessing the two teams of horses, hooked up to the hay mower, side deliver rake and finally to the wagon and hay loader.  No pictures showing how the hay was hoisted into the barn.

Harold even took pictures of Uncle Bill hauling out manure with the team of horses.  No doubt Harold had to shovel manure on to the spreader.  Another picture shows hauling the milk cans to the Little Creek Cheese Factory.  

Each weekend relatives descended on the home farm, 20-30 people, pictures show women in silk dresses, cotton stockings, fancy hats,  high heels.  Men with fedoras, white shirts, ties, vests with a watch fob and suits.  No making hay on Sunday, it was a day for visiting and resting and eating. A niece remarked Uncle Rob had chickens and for Sunday dinner would wring its neck and roast with caraway seed and  heavy cream taken from the top of milk cans.  All baked in a wood cookstove with no refrigeration or microwave.

Great Uncle Bill helped with the horses and a corn binder and threw the bundles on a flat rack wagon.  Brought to the silo, and while throwing the bundles on the chopper, his arm was entangled and he died two weeks later on August 29, 1949.  Uncle Rob continued farming  until 1954 when he sold the farm, after being in the Klingbeil name for 80 years.  He lived for a time with his niece and nephew Walter and Irene Steinbach before passing away at the Waupaca County Poor Farm Asylum in 1961.   The end of an era.  Good times.

copyright Delores and Russell Miller, 2015

CONTINUED: Murphy's First Birthday

“A check list, yes,” I said, “so I can check off the things I’ve done right.”

“OK, that’s fair.  We’ll make a check list for a One Year Old Dog.”

“You handle the pencil and paper,” I said.  “I don’t write very well.”

“Here,” he said, “let me label this across the top of the sheet of paper: ‘Expected Behavior of  An Alive And Currently Breathing One Year Old Dog.' Now,  what shall we put down first on our list?"  

“OK, first,” I said. “He doesn’t poop on the floor. Ever.”

“You did last week,” said the old guy.

“Yeah, but that didn’t count.  I got messed up on my schedule.”

“Actually,” he said, “you lost track of what you were doing during your time outside and then had to go when you got back in the house.”

“OK, OK,” I said, but I want half credit for that one.  Here’s another.  And this one is important: ‘Dog Defends His Servants From all Perils.’

“You do?” he said, his eyes rolling.  “All you do is run around the house heedlessly barking out the windows at nothing.”

“I’m trying to cover all the perils,” I said.

“How about waiting till you see one before you start barking?”

“Never give a peril a chance to get ahead of you,” I said. “But I’ve got another.  Write this down. “Contributes to Household Economy By Eating Outdated Dog Food Without Complaint.”

“Wait a minute, there’s nothing wrong with that food,” he said.

“Here’s another,” I said.  “Write this down: ‘Establishes Home’s Reputation By Welcoming Anyone Who Walks Through The Door.”

“You jump all over them,” he said, “and won’t leave them alone the entire time they’re visiting.”

“Like I said …”

“You terrorized the young widow Mrs. Zolushka, our Russian Avon lady.”

“Who, me?”

“You wouldn’t stop licking her.  I had to stop you at her elbows.”

“You’re just jealous,” I told him.

“Regardless …”

“I can’t get enough of that Volgograd Sleeper Cell body lotion,” I said. "Or her other favorite." 

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I buy it from the young lady just to help her out.”

“You shouldn’t be wearing that stuff,” I said.

“I don’t,” he said, “I use it to clean the drains.”

“Why do I feel like I’m losing this game,” I asked.  “How many accomplishments can I have on your list?”

“As many as you want,” he said.

“I mean how many checkmarks do I need to have a party?”

“Let’s say … five.”

“How many do I have so far?”

“None that I can see.”

“We’re wasting time and you’re pulling one of my four legs,“ I said. “I saw my birthday cake on the kitchen table.”

“There’s the doorbell,” he said.  “It’s Mrs. Zolushka.”

You can’t go wrong when your servants bake you a cake and your birthday present shows up at the door wearing Pushkin Nights body lotion.

Copyright by David Griffin, 2015

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

.www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED: Gentleman

"This is a good place for the two of you," said Mr. Czupryna, the lunch room monitor and Business Studies teacher.  "All we need are bars to put around you to complete the picture."

"Picture of what?" asked Joey.

"Imbecility," answered Mr. Czupryna.  "Late stage."

Joey laughed his silly laugh, but frankly I was embarrassed to be insulted by a teacher, of all people.  I took it to mean he assumed we were too stupid to know his behavior was wrong.

The boiler shaking away behind the wall helped muffle the comments we made concerning  the sophomore girls in our class and the other high school maidens up through the  more buxom senior girls.  The lunch room monitor couldn't hear us over the noise, even when he came down to our end of the room.  In the 1950s, discussing female anatomical measurements in public would have landed us in detention.  Joey and I  normally used superlatives and seldom noted our observations in inches, preferring instead to describe a young woman's attributes with reference to one garden vegetable or another.  I suppose that would be two garden vegetables.  The produce stand of our imagination provided an adequate vocabulary to carry on our conversation, and a rich set of gestures allowed us to communicate our adolescent impressions over the noise of the furnace.

An older kid, a senior named Ronnie, soon began to show  up at our table, but he sat 12 feet away at the other end.  We tolerated his presence because he good naturedly ignored us.  He was therefore a much more acceptable table mate than someone who would have considered us moronic and said so.  I recognized Ronnie from the ball field, had spoken to him a few times and knew him to be what my mother called a gentleman.  He never said a bad word about anyone.  Ronnie was the kind of kid who would acknowledge you  ... he wasn't stuck up ... but he seldom engaged in conversation unless you spoke to him.  And if he didn't like what you were saying, he would politely make sure it ended.

 Coming from the upper classman end of the school, Ronnie always arrived five minutes after Joey and I sat down.  Each day he brought his unusual lunch and set it up at his end of the table.

He had chosen our all but deserted spot because he needed room to spread out his lunch of multiple dishes and serving paraphernalia.  A wide place simply wasn't available at the other tables, crowded as they were with the next generation of criminal nitwits.

He gave us a nod while he hefted his shopping bag up on to the table and emptied out the contents.  Joey and I interrupted our girl watching to enjoy the show at the other end of the table. Compared to my consistent fare of either warm baloney or peanut butter and something sugary, Ronnie's repast usually came in a square cake pan which held meat or a pasta dish.  There was always a saucer of coleslaw or vegetable wrapped in tin foil, a bottle of A&P soda and usually two cupcakes.  There were other bits and pieces, such as celery stalks and scallions and maybe a good sized chunk of garlic bread, probably from last night's Italian dinner.  The reverent way he handled the dishes and arranged them in a precise pattern held our attention.  I am quite sure that if allowed, he would have brought a candle and lit it with a long taper.

Equally interesting was the ritual he used to serve himself the food.  He did not eat out of the cake pan or the other dishes, but neatly laid out three or four five-inch  paper plates designed to hold a piece of party cake.  Then he stood and served food out of the containers onto the little plates.  Ready at this point to eat, Ronnie sat down, blessed himself and said a quiet prayer of grace.  Only then did he begin his meal.

Joey and I returned to our discussion of onions, oranges, grapefruits and cantaloupes while we privately longed for that great day in the future when each of us might frolic in our own garden.  Something funny caught our fancy ... something funny probably happened 2 or 3 times each minute in the school lunchroom ... and we roared with laughter.  Mr. Czupyrna gave us a threatening look.  We laughed even harder, but not out loud, with our arms held up hiding our faces.  Ronnie was unmoved by any of this.  He seemed not to care whether his future garden held cumquats or zucchini and I doubted he ever discussed the topic.  He was always aloof and sometimes I sensed he felt superior to us.  I was sensitive to what I imagined was his judgment, because Joey was beginning to wear on me with his juvenile antics.  He had made suggestive comments to a few girls and then laughed like a hyena when they walked away.  I was more and more embarrassed by him, but  I was not yet ready to search out new friends. 

When a red headed girl walked by our table, my comment to Joey was louder than I intended.  She stopped and turned to me and demanded my name. I ignored her.

"Stand up," she said.

I immediately had a bad feeling.

"I said, 'Stand up.'" she said again, this time louder. 

I smiled my best  John Wayne I-don't-give-a-damn-Ma'am smirk and got out of my chair.  Her timing was perfect. As I came up from my seat, she stepped in toward me and her elbows shot out from her side.  Her cupped fists shot up under my chin and would have connected with a terrific force had I not caught her wrists just in time.  Still, she connected and my tongue was caught between my teeth.  I could taste blood in my mouth.  Incensed, I began to push her downward by the wrists.  She broke free and began to wildly slap me about the head.  Stepping back, I stumbled over the chair and went down backwards on the floor.

Grabbing on to the chair, I worked my way up to my feet, my head spinning. I didn't want to hit a girl.  But this redhead was ready to swing on me again.

She stood  with her fists up, ready for me to come at her.  I didn’t know what to do or say.  So I swore at her and left the lunch room.  On my way out, I found Mr. Czuprna and, blood dribbling off my tongue into the corners of my mouth,  I announced  there was a girl student out of control who had just tried to injure me.

“Grow up,” he said.

When I saw her in the hallway the next week, I turned and walked away, twice making myself late for class.  I stopped going to the lunch room.  Joey just laughed it off and he continued to sit at the Furnace Table alone, except for Ronnie. 

Ronnie came up to me at the bus stop the next week and peered inquiringly at me.  He smirked and rubbed his jaw.  

"Man," he said, "that was certainly impressive.  She floored you."

"I tripped," I said.

"I notice you haven't been back to the lunch room, though," he said, trying to needle me.

"Got other things to do," I said.

"You're running from her, aren't you?"  he said.

"Ronnie," I said, raising my fist, "I'm warning you.  Shut up and move along or you'll get some of this."

"No." he said. "I don't think so.  You're a coward.  You've been running from her.”

"Oh," I said, "you think I should beat her up?  That doesn't sound like Mister Ronnie Manners"

"Or apologize to her,”  he said.  "Look, it’s none of my business, but you were wrong.  A gentleman would admit it.”

“And you’re the expert, huh?”  I said.  “With the four square lunch your Mommy makes you?  You know all about being a man. I’ll just bet you do.”

The smirk left his face and he looked down at the sidewalk.

“I make it myself at night,” he said.

I sneered.  “Well, cooking is really manly.”

“I live with my older brother,” he said.

“Very helpful, cooking for him, just like a mother,” I said, with emphasis on the last word.

“My mother died last year in a car accident,” he said.

I looked at him.  He wasn’t kidding.  His eyes carefully checked out the concrete surface below as if an army of ants was staging a war dance. He seemed to have lost all interest in me.

“My Dad never came back from the war.” he said.  “There’s just the two of us at  home now.”

“Oh,”  I said.  “Well, I’m  … a … well …”

"It’s my main meal of the day, " he said, "and I ... pretend they’re with me.  My brother won't allow it at home.”

I didn't say anything.  He sighed, then looked up at me.

“You should make more of an effort to become a gentleman,” he said.  “Especially since your mouth gets you into more trouble than you can talk yourself out of and you don’t like to fight.”

He walked off before I could punch him.  But of course I wouldn’t have hit him. I was indeed a physical coward.  He had that right.  I didn’t feel bad about it.  I’d learned my lessons in grade school and didn’t want to get my nose busted any more.

I walked around for a few days and wondered if I was a gentleman.  I reluctantly decided I was not, but I aspired to be one.  After all, my father was certainly a gentleman in the way he acted with everyone.  He came from a family with a rough style, but he developed his manners by what he learned from others.  I had his example and I could have my own experience work for me if I hung out with the right people.

The next afternoon I found the red headed girl sitting on the pipe railing by the sidewalk outside of school.  She stood up when I  approached her, but didn’t raise her fists.  There was a mixture of fear and determination in her eyes, eyes that were really quite pretty.  I wondered if she might date me.  It couldn't hurt to ask.  One never knows, I've heard, when the love of your life will come along.

“I just wanted to apologize,” I said.  “For anything you may have heard me say.”

“OK,” she said.  No smile, no comment about what a great gentleman I was to apologize.  Not a good sign, coming from the woman I might marry some day ... if she promised not to hit me again.

     “Well,” I said, “I’m just trying to do the

right …

     “Get lost,” she said.  She sat back down on the railing and opened her book.  An unkind comment came to mind, but I resisted the urge to say it.  Instead, I got lost.

     Nobody said being a gentleman would be easy.

copyright 2012, David Griffin

Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com