20th Century Woman

  John Gray died this week. He was a couple of years younger than Jerry and I.  My daughter told me via email. He and his wife, Reggie, have been my daughter’s next door neighbors for 25 years in a little English village of thatched roofs, walled gardens and climbing roses.

They were a modest, gentle couple who shared a deep love for all animals. Their large garden was a sanctuary for stray and unwanted cats, but in addition they had chickens (he used to bring us eggs when I visited because he knew I loved them) ducks and rabbits. At one time they had a pet fox, and some goats. And probably some species I missed. They supported their cattery by collecting unwanted articles from the villagers and selling them at “boot sales”. We often invited them over when I visited, which I did at least once every year for a few weeks at a time.

The cats patrolled the high wall between the Gray’s garden and my daughter’s. They would stroll nonchalantly along the top , taunting Fluffy, our toy poodle. For the most part Fluffy kept them out of our garden. Fluffy goes in and out of the house at will through a cat flap. One day when he and I were in the kitchen, a large, somewhat grizzled yellow cat slowly pushed half way through the flap. For a long moment the cat and Fluffy regarded each other in seeming disbelief. Then the cat backed out of the flap hole, and Fluffy shot through it like a bullet. Sounds of scrambling, hissing and yapping followed, and we were not visited again by that cat. I told Reggie about it when they came for dinner the next day and she said, “Oh yes, that is an old cat, and he has been a problem to his owners because he would go into people’s houses. So we took him on.”

John and Reggie have lived in the village, in a house that used to be the brewery, for much longer that my daughter’s 25 years, and whenever we saw them I learned something new about the history of the village. A lot of the past will have died with John. He was a man with a sense of humor. One day my daughter came home from work after dark, and the next morning John came to the door. When she opened it he said “Are you a very observant person?” Puzzled, she followed his gesture toward the garden wall. It lay in a heap of stony rubble on her flower garden. It had been weakened by ivy growing on it and had collapsed the day before. That part of the wall was replaced with a wooden fence, with complete harmony between the neighbors.

John and Reggie did not eat their own chickens, although they were not vegetarians. They accumulated roosters (cockerels) and my daughter and I disagreed about how many roosters there were.  Crowing would begin around 1 in the morning and continue all night. Some nights when I couldn’t sleep I entertained myself calculating the approximate number of cockerels, from the relative distance of the sound and overlap of two or more crowings. Eventually I asked John how many there were and he said there had been 7, but they had taken 5 very old ones to the veterinarian to be euthanized, so that at the time I enquired they had only 2. There are a great many vegetarians in the UK, and once John told me, with a twinkle in his eye, “People say to me, you love animals so much, why do you eat them? I tell them, because they taste so good.”

John had been, I think, an engineer before he retired. I don’t know what their education was, but both he and Reggie were thinking, well informed, intelligent people. They were readers. After he retired, besides working on the antique car he loved, to supplement his income he took a job sweeping and cleaning up at the local petrol station. He told me that he enjoyed the job very much because it brought him in contact with so many people.

My daughter’s email said, “John Gray died last night. So sad. I wonder how Reggie will cope.” I can imagine that her grief is deep and terrible. They have a son. I have never met him, but if he is like his father he will be her comfort and protection.

We are diurnal animals, and when we stay active at night we create environments with lights and sounds that mimic daytime. Night, real dark night, is a parallel world, mostly unknown and often feared. The older I get the more I follow the sun. I get sleepy when the world is dark, and wakeful just before dawn. I sleep later and go to bed earlier in winter. When I wake up at night I sometimes stay awake and worry. Nighttime is worry time, and I can think of frightening things at 3 o’clock that seem trivial at 7:30.

As a child I was more scared of the dark inside the house than outside. Closets and under beds were especially spooky, but in a dark room any undefined shapes could be sinister. Outside, as told by Thornton W Burgess, was the world of benign night citizens, — Reddy Fox or Johnny Chuck and the like. Sometimes I would sneak out of bed and go out, believing that if I sat still and kept quiet for a long time these wild animals would show themselves and be my friends.

My house here on the island is surrounded by woods and wildlife. A few years ago, when I had left the back door open for my cats, I was awakened in the middle of the night by noise in the house. I was alone at the time, sleeping in the open loft, and I turned on some lights and crept carefully part way down the stair. I saw a parade of raccoons hurrying out of the laundry room where I keep cat food, through the living room and dining room towards the open door. There were a couple of large ones and some smaller youngsters. I felt they were not my friends, and I yelled, “get out of here!” They left, and I no longer leave my door open at night.

Sometimes the aid call whistle sounds form the fire department. It sounds automatically if someone on the island calls 911. In the night it’s always more ominous than in the day. One night at about 3 AM I heard the aid call and a few minutes later heard the helicopter. Later I learned that a woman on the mountain had had a fight with her boyfriend and shot herself. She died later in the hospital.

Often sounds get magnified at night, and distant police and ambulance sirens from the mainland reservation can be clearly heard. Jerry told me that the Alaska homestead he built in his youth was about a mile from a railroad track, but in winter on a clear night at 20 or 30 below, trains sounded as if they were coming through the living room.

Nights have their own sounds. In Alaska the 100 or so sled dogs that live on the properties across the road from ours sometimes sing. Starting with a few barks, they begin a long mournful wail, rising in pitch, ending as quickly as it started. I love the sound. When Linda, the owner of about 15 dogs, came back from fish camp her dogs took a few days to acclimatize to being at home and were especially vocal. They, in turn, kept up a chorus with the 55 dogs next door at Joee’s.

Here on the island I hear hoot owls in the woods and occasionally packs of coyotes yip. They seem to move, starting at a distance then coming closer, with high pitched barks and yaps and little soprano howls. Jerry and I wake up and listen. I think it sounds like hundreds of them, but I suppose it is really just a few.

I missed the dark in Alaska this summer. For almost 3 months it was never completely dark. I missed seeing the stars. Now we are back in the world of day and night. Jerry and I have been seeing Venus, the evening star every night when we walk the poodles. I don’t know many stars and constellations, but the big dipper and the north star are evident. I can identify Orion’s belt, and the Pleiades.

I have seen the Southern Cross. Three years ago, when I was only 73, my long time friend, Penny, and I went hiking in New Zealand. We back packed around the tip of the North Island, from part way up the Ninety Mile Beach to Cape Reinga. The second day of our tramp (NZ name for hiking) we camped on a grassy ledge a few feet up from the beach. We each had a one person tent. We were studying the map together in Penny’s tent when there was a sudden clap of thunder, and I reached my tent just as the deluge came.

As evening turned into night I lay on my sleeping bag and watched the rivulets of rain streaming down the translucent sides of the tent. When I awoke in the middle of the night, the rain had stopped, and I crawled out of the tent to have a pee. The sky was black and the stars were bright. In the southern Hemisphere there are fewer stars to be seen, but I saw the Southern Cross.

Night is half of life.

Ninety Mile BeachCamped on the beach

My father was born in 1904 in Greenfield, Massachusetts and taken to Europe at the age of 3. He lived in Germany and Italy and was educated in England. He didn’t return to the United States until he was a married man in the late 1920’s. My mother was born 1905 in Weymouth, England and was taken to New Zealand at the age of 2. She met my father when they were both graduate students at the London School of Economics. I was born in 1932 in Washington, D.C. where my parents worked for the U.S. Government as economists. I want to include in some of my posts excerpts from memoirs that my mother wrote for my daughter, and bits of a long verbal interview that my daughter did with my father.

Here is what my mother wrote about the first years of her life and her origins:

“My mother was a Londoner and my father a Dorset man. Just how they got together I do not know. Somewhere I heard, perhaps from my grandmother, that Mother was very mych in love with him and ‘chased him to London.’ My mother’s mother, Grandma Machell, had nine children and was widowed. She then married a Mr. Lilly. This marriage was a failure, Mr. Lilly probably being a drunk. She got rid of him and proceeded to bring up the eight children unaided and with a no-nonsense iron will. She had enough money to invest in property in London and lived comfortably on the collected rents. My father’s father was a farmer but he also owned several food stores. My father owned 2 shops in Weymouth, produce and meat.

Mother and Dad were married at St. Margarets Church adjoining Westminster Abbey. I have only scraps of ideas about how or why (see note) we went to New Zealand. Two sisters of my mother with families had already emigrated. My father and mother and I went out together when I was about 2 years old. My sister, Freda, 4 years older than I, was not with us. My father must have already been an ordained deacon and I think had a parish to go to. My mother was afraid she might not like New Zealand so Freda was to follow later if they decided to stay.

I am supposed to have said my first words on the ship going out, which legend has it were, ‘Goodnight, Mr. Smith.’ I was told that I hung on to Mother’s skirts every inch of the way. Thus I started bravely for the New World.

Our Journey was, of course, by steamship and our route was through the Suez and around Capetown, South Africa, a long journey, no doubt. Mother was always a very poor sailor, and I can only wonder how soon she got her sea legs and felt well.”

Note by Old Woman: It is rumored in the family that my grandfather was quite a ladies’ man, and that he may have been suspected of an indiscretion with a lady of the parish where he was a deacon. Because of that he was shipped out to New Zealand. This may have accounted for some of my grandmother’s uncertainties about staying in New Zealand.

Here are some excerpts from my father’s memories taken down on tape:

“There was money in my mother’s family, I don’t know how much. Her father, Colonel Fincke — he was a colonel in the militia — was making money and doing pretty well in Wall Street, and then he got tubercular lungs, so he had to give up his work. In those days they had no way of treating tubercular lungs except rest and healthy environment.” (note by Old Woman: the family lived in a brownstone house in Brooklyn, and when the Colonel got TB they moved for a while to Ashville, N.C. because the mountain air was supposed to be good for the lungs.) “One of the things he did was to go around the Horn on a sailing vessel. And there was one time when he went to the French Riviera. That was my grandfather.”

“My father was rector of St. James Episcopal Church in Greenfield, MA. He had apparently given some serious thought to an offer he had received to go and preach to the ignorant and poor inhabitants of Newfoundland, but he had just been married, and he thought that Greenfield would be a better place to raise a family than the wilds of Newfoundland. He stayed only a few years in Greenfield because Mother was — unkind to say, but it is a fact — she was an awful snob. She had tremendous admiration for titled nobility in England and Europe. I remember she used to daydream about my younger sister, Clare, getting married to a duke when Clare was no more than an infant. Anyway, Greenfield was not a place to meet Dukes, and Mother was very unhappy there and kept pressing my father to become rector of one of the American chruches in Europe.

Eventually Mother prevailed on him to go to Europe, even though he felt that there was no chance there to get a following as a spiritual leader. Just a bunch of mostly elderly people who had gone to Europe because it was a nice place to live with cultural opportunities and art.”

Note by Old Woman: I knew my father’s mother well as a child. She was a widow by that time, and I was her only grandchild until I was 8 years old. I spent several summers with her, before World War II in Italy, and later in Maine. During the war she worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, which, I think, was the forerunner of the CIA) translating Italian documents and making propaganda broadcasts to Italy. It is true that she was always a snob. It got to be a family joke, and when she was old we referred to her as “The Duchess” behind her back. She taught me a lot of things, especially manners. She said one must always be polite to servants because they were in an inferior position. Now that I am an old woman myself, I don’t have much use for that good advice, since I have no servants.

Daisy, our toy poodle, became part of the family 2 years ago, shortly after Jerry and I were married. I bought her, a pocket sized puppy, at the groomers, where I had taken my 15 pound long haired black cat to have fur mats removed. I had planned for some time to get a female toy poodle because I love my daughter’s male toy poodle, Fluffy, and I wanted him to have a wife. My daughter has been house sitting for me this summer with Fluffy. It is our dearest wish that we have puppies from Fluffy.

In Yukon Territory, about half way home from Alaska, with Jerry driving the big GMC pickup, and Daisy on my lap, I noticed that she was in heat. I hoped we would get home before the magic moment had passed. Fluffy, at 7, isn’t getting any younger, and to our knowledge has had no experience in the art of canine love. (Actually, to be honest, Fluffy had once tried, without success because of height differential, to mount a large golden retriever puppy called Butter).

Fluffy and Daisy had met at the end of April, before we went to Alaska, and had shown some slight hostility which we put down to jealousy. When they met anew in early September it was a different story. Love at first sight. Daisy danced around him, presenting her backside, wiggling enticingly and considerately moving her little tufted tail aside. With pheromones floating in the breeze, ancient dog behavior genes clicked on. Since Daisy is slightly more petite than Fluffy, it was a good match and they went at it hot and heavy.

We are still unsure of the success of this project. Jerry, who was never enthusiastic, came in from the back yard one day and said with disgust, “They’re stuck.” That was 5 or 6 days after we got back. Now my daughter and I check frequently for signs of pregnancy. There’s nothing conclusive so far.

Fluffy and Daisy have settled back into a routine life of intense excitement over feeding and the possession of toys, and reluctant obedience when told, “Bedtime!” They trot quietly to their large cage fitted with 2 soft cat beds. My daughter is leaving for England for a few months, sadly saying goodbye to her dear friend Fluffy. We hope for a couple (or more) puppies by the time she returns.

When I was very young I sometimes wondered whether I would live to the end of the century.  I was born in 1932, about a third of the way into the 20th century.  As a kid the idea of being 68 (turn of the century) seemed too old to imagine.  Here I am, 76, and the clock is still ticking.

But I often think about death while I brush my teeth.  The 2 minutes of the electric toothbrush, punctuated every 30 seconds, makes me conscious of time.

In Alaska,  where I spent this summer one is conscious of time because life passes kaleidoscopically fast.  When my husband and I arrived in Manley Hot Springs AK the landscape was dark and dead.  Sometimes a moose with a calf would suddenly dash across the road into the swampy gloom. Then rabbits appeared.  There were dozens in our yard, with a lot of winter white fur on their feet and ears at first, then gradually changing to all brown.  They drove Daisy, our toy poodle, to a frenzy of excitement.  In a few weeks they  all but disappeared. Next you see a robin; then robins were everywhere.  Swallows, beautiful iridescent purple and green and white, arrive and set up house keeping under eaves and in bird houses. 

The forests turned green almost over night.  Pink wild roses appeared where ever you looked, lasted for a week or two, overlaping with the millions of blue bells, then masses of purple wild irises along the roads and all over the airstrip, and  at the end of June, fireweed, with its hot pink spikes, began.  Unlike most of the other flowering plants, the fireweed stays longer, and in the fall transforms to orange red foliage carpeting the hills where fires have been. 

As soon as the spring frosts are over hungry mosquitoes are legion.  They waited in swarms at doors, thickly covered window screens, and bit through clothes.  One day yellow and black monarch butterflies appeared.  They were everywhere, fluttering around the wild flowers.  Little brown butterflies too.  And big black dragonflies zig-zaged at all altitudes from the tops of the tallest spruces to a few inches off the ground.  They looked like tiny space ships.  Daisy chased the ones cruising a foot off the road.  When I steped out on the porch 20 or 30 big black spiders scuttled into the cracks between the boards.  An owl, a great gray owl,  nested behind the Redingtons, and came over to hunt in our yard.  It sat on a bird house and watched for small animals, probably shrews of which there are a lot.

Great grey owl

There were a lot of bears this year.  When bear hunting was in full swing  I heard that 32 had been killed in this region.  Joee Redington shot 2 at Cy’s cabin where they were trying to get in his front door.

Everything in Alaska does what it must do to survive fast, because there time is short.  In mid summer, when it is never dark, the forests looked lush, especially since it rained a lot, with stabs of lightening and crashes of thunder.  Now that we are back on our island in Puget Sound, the leaves will have fallen, everything will sleep or die, then it will snow, there will be white twilight and finally darkness will prevail.

But still, it is the brushing of teeth that makes me think of death.   I heard Patrick, son of Earnest, Hemmingway interviewed on the radio on the occasion of his 80th birthday.  When asked how he felt about being 80, he said, “Well, I might live to be 120, but the chances are that I will die sometime between 80 and 90.” 

In 3 ½ years I will be 80.  Although my mother lived to be 100, my chances are about like Patrick’s.  How did this happen to me?  Two minutes at a time.