Throw the bum out!

On Memorial Day I wrote that my dad was away at war from the time I was 8 months old until I turned two. The family photo album contains black-and-white photos showing my mom, grandma, aunts, and cousins. Society as I knew it was run by women.

Then a man came home, this stranger with a deep voice who walked into our house and acted like he belonged. What’s more, my mom and grandma acted like he belonged. (Let me quickly add that my dad was a respectful, even-tempered guy. But to my two-year-old self, he barged in and disrupted our lives, and of course he took away my sense that everything revolved around me.)

I’ve had issues with male authority figures ever since. As in, Who does this guy think he is? Why doesn’t he respect that I know what I’m doing? As I write this I can feel the creeping resentment I have felt toward so many male bosses. Women, fine, I can work with them. Men seem like they’re…barging in.

I was dealing with an especially large dose of this resentment in the mid-1990s. I reported to a boss who was in way over his head. I tried to give him helpful information and advice, but he didn’t know enough to take it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to keep me around. One of my benefits was free tuition for my stepdaughter at a great college. It would be a year until she started, and I was determined to hang on until she graduated. With my hubby’s coaching, I handled the situation. But I always had to be careful and act respectful, and sometimes I wanted to explode.

One night at a baseball game, I found release. The umpire made what I thought was a good call. The rival manager strode onto the field to complain. The crowd was yelling at the manager to get off the field, and yelling at the umpire to throw him out. I joined in. I climbed up on the seat and screamed as loud as I could. I kept it up as long as the two men kept arguing, as long as anyone in the stands kept heckling. A friend said he thought it had been a bad call and the manager was justified in complaining. I said I didn’t care, I was having a breakthrough.

I was very publicly voicing my disagreement with a male authority figure, and I reveled in the feeling. It didn’t matter that he had no authority over me. It only mattered that I chose to let go, to be loud and disapproving and unrepressed and, yes, undignified. I wasn’t trying to persuade him, I was just feeling free.

I don’t need to yell at the umpire any more. Whether I have a good boss or a bad one, I can cope. But it's only in the last couple of days that connected all this with that unsuspecting man who came home when I was two and shifted my reality in a way I couldn't understand. 

Memorial Day thanks, and a charity clambake

I'm thinking today about three veterans of World War II: My dad, a good friend, and my husband's father, whom I never met.

Peter's dad was part of a railroad corps stationed in Belgium, where he maintained train cars sent over from the U.S. to move troop supplies and equipment. He survived the war and raised a family. At age 50, on his way to bowling one evening, he was killed by a drunk driver.

My dad was assigned to the Army Signal Center in London, where he endured the bombing and transcribed classified strategic conversations between Pentagon officials and military and diplomatic leaders in London and Paris. Dad was interviewed last summer for an oral history project, and he shared copies with me and my siblings...a wonderful gift. He has lived in Hibbing, Minnesota, since 1948, and this week will move with my stepmother to an assisted living facility in St. Cloud, which is closer to us and where we should be able to visit them more regularly. I was just eight months old when my 28-year-old dad went off to war; My early childhood photos show an extended family of women and children waiting for the men to return, and I have some very sweet letters from a proud young daddy to his little girl, along with a Scottish tam that he sent from afar.

Wayne Terwilliger, front left, with fellow Marines on Saipan

Our friend Wayne Terwilliger joined the Marines at 18 and spent his tour of duty in combat in the South Pacific. He was part of the landing at Iwo Jima and saw the flag go up on Mount Suribachi. He was also in the assault wave at the horrendous battle of Saipan. A photograph showing him in the midst of a sniper attack has appeared in various magazines and newspapers, and the US Postal Service featured it ten years ago when they commemorated the 1940s. His book includes an entire chapter on his wartime experiences, and helping write it made that war much more vivid for Peter and me.

To our dads and our friend Wayne, and to their young selves who went off and fought for their country, thank you.

And now for something entirely different....

Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub.. It's the last day of the month and time for the next image from the Men of York calendar produced by the Chamber of Commerce to raise funds for charities of York, Maine These gents represent Foster's Downeast Clambakes, and the tagline on their photo is "Hot Hot Hot...and steamy!" I won this calendar from Eva in a giveaway and have shared the photos each month; this is one of my favorites.

See you in June!

All the best...um, wishes for an, um...

I am a writer. I churn out brochures, newsletters, magazine stories, books, speeches, news releases, citations, web content, and blog posts.

What I can't write is a simple message on a greeting card.

At the office, they pass around cards for birthdays, babies, retirements, illnesses. All I need to do is jot a quick greeting and sign my name. You know, "Have a great one!" or "We'll miss you!" or "Feel better soon." But by the time it gets to me, all the good ones are taken. Or I'm first and I just know everyone else will judge what I've written.

Oh no, I can't do this. I'll just set it down for a minute and come back to it. An hour later somebody wants to know where the card for Suzie is because we need to keep it moving.

For the past three weeks, I've had this card sitting on my desk at home. I chose the photo and printed it on a large matte greeting card. Then I said to my hubby, "We need to write a wedding message to Nick and Molly."

In fairness, I've already written three...one for a printed coupon from the Honeyfund site, where I choose a small portion of their trip to China to support as our gift. A second message in a card that went around the office. A third in a notebook where we each wrote "advice" for a happy marriage, as if we know more about it than they do. But none of those messages said what I really want to say.

These two are smart and funny and conscientious and kind. They are great together and good for each other. We are nearly as excited about their wedding as we were about our daughter's. There, I've typed it. It's not that I don't know what I want to say...maybe it's that I can no longer think with a pen in my hand.

Which is funny, if true, because when I first tried to compose at the typewriter, I could. not. do. it. I wrote college compositions by hand on notebook paper and then typed them. Tonight I'll do the reverse. I'll copy my typed sentiments into the card by hand, and we'll sign our names. Crisis averted.

May 25, 1985: the Dinner Date

We’d met at a business meeting April 15 and had several meetings and a lunch date. He went out of town for a conference, and then we made a date for dinner.

He showed up with a box of Frango mints from Marshall Field in Chicago, happy to show he’d noticed when I said I liked them.

He also brought a bouquet of mixed stems…a large allium, a blue delphinium, a handful of pinks and purples and whites and greens. I popped them into a vase, thinking I shouldn’t dawdle. But he arranged them, saying we should take a moment to appreciate them at their best. It was a point he would make often.

Allium

The day had been sunny and warm, and the restaurant seated us at an outdoor booth, with an open arbor above our heads. Before long, it began to drizzle. He went off to ask that we move indoors, and when he came back he sat next to me, protecting my head with his jacket while we waited for an inside table.

Pointing out that he had revealed more about his life than I had about mine, he asked many questions. When I told him at some length about my mother, who had died five years earlier, I found myself crying a little. Damn. What is this? I hardly know this man, and yet I’m so unguarded I’ve slipped right into tears. On our lunch date, he’d had a catch in his voice while talking about his father. At the time, I’d been a little skeptical about his sincerity, but here I was, and I knew I was not playing a game.

Delphinium

He called a couple of days later. It was Memorial Day, and he was taking his nine-year-old daughter to roller-skate around one Lake Harriet. Abby skated while Peter and I walked, and we stopped periodically to chat. She was bright, energetic, mature, polite, and charming. I couldn’t tell what she thought of me, but she was being nice and I hoped we were hitting it off.

Apparently she hadn’t thought much of some of the other women he had dated. And there were lots of them. He told me he’d spent the last couple of years looking pretty seriously for someone to settle down with. I wasn’t looking; I had learned to enjoy my own company, something I thought everyone should be able to do. I had settled comfortably into single life with two cats in a house I’d just purchased, and which I loved.

We made a date for the following Friday night, and then the Thursday after that. On one of those evenings, we went to a Mexican restaurant and emerged into one of those long Minnesota evenings when the setting sun turns half the sky rosy red. As we reached the car, he said, “I’m going to throw a monkey wrench into your well ordered life.”

I felt my face blush as red as the setting sun.