Left on the Sidewalk

The tradition began with a whim, and a whoops.

Snow had begun falling shortly after I arrived home from work and by 5:00, with the lights from street lamps and porches reflecting off the clouds, the neighborhood on the edge of town was eerily quiet. I stepped outside into the crisp air and let the flakes fall gently on my face. “Let’s walk down to Michael’s for dinner,” I suggested. I wanted to hear the crunch of snow with each step and do something that seemed almost quaint.

So we picked up our one-year-old daughter and bundled her in her blue snowsuit. We tucked her hands into the clipped-on mittens, tied the drawstring of her hood snuggly under her chin, and made sure she was good and trussed up so she wouldn’t get cold. All that was showing was her little round face. To make the adventure particularly sweet, we got the Radio Flyer sled out of the garage, placed her upright on it, and headed down the driveway and on to the sidewalk toward town, just a short half-mile away.

The sled glided easily along the snow’s surface. I checked a couple times to make sure our little tot was happy before easing into a conversation about what had happened during work that day. I thought about how cute we must look pulling our baby along behind us—a delightful sight, I was sure. The sled really was so lightweight. It effortlessly trailed along with virtually no resistance.

As we were about to turn left onto Main, I checked on our girl again and horrors, she was not on the sled. Poor little thing had slid off about 50 feet back and was lying face up on the sidewalk. I yelped, dropped the sled’s rope, and ran back up to get her. She looked up at the sky blinking at the falling snowflakes, not the least bit bothered or upset, trusting that all was well. I scooped her up and held her close before walking back down the sidewalk. By the time we reached Michael’s, we were a bit hysterical as we laughed about what had just happened.

We had a delicious Italian meal that evening. Our daughter was the center of attention for the staff who cooed at her and delighted in her attempts to pick up macaroni with her pincered fingers.

And, except for the part where she got left on the sidewalk, a tradition was born. Eventually we were a family of four that went to Michael’s for dinner every year on the evening of the first snow, enjoying the crunch of boots, the snowfall, and the beauty of reflected light.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

The Imaginary Friend

Her name was Who Who. Only I could see her. She was two inches tall.

I don't remember having any friends who were my same size until I started kindergarten. It was just Mom and me at home, and mostly me playing on my own. Just as in “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” Mom did the washing on Monday, the ironing on Tuesday, and the floors on Wednesday. In those days she cooked a meal every single day: meatloaf, chicken, spaghetti, various casseroles, and, without fail, beans, peas, and corn were included in predictable rotation, with white bread or rolls on the side. When Mom wasn’t reading the newspapers or her magazines, or sewing, baking, or hauling me around with her from store to store, I think the phrase I heard most was: "I'm busy, go play." 

My playmate was a very tiny little girl with blond plaits, each tied with a blue ribbon at the end. Who Who and I liked playing in small spaces. Closets were perfect. There was the closet at the bottom of the stairs where Mom placed a few old dresses and shoes for me to use to play dress-up and act like a grown-up. Who Who and I would play make-believe together for hours. The bottom of the closet in my bedroom became a Barbie house that I set up with furniture I made out of scraps of wood or paper. I painstakingly created a three-dimensional refrigerator, stove, and dresser for my dolls from sturdy card stock Dad had brought home from work. Scissors, glue, a little tape, and color pencils were my tools. I made a couch out of a piece of a 2x4 and baseboard. With my toy-size hammer and a few brads, the two pieces went together easily. Who Who was there to help me figure it all out.

Who Who and I listened to 45s on my little Victrola with the RCA dog logo on the front. Our favorite was a recording of the story of Sleeping Beauty. We had to switch over to the second side after the twelfth fairy said, “There she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and fall down dead!” It was scary, but Who Who was there.

Who Who was very smart, I thought. She would often advise me and I would tell Mom the things she would say like: “Who Who doesn’t like liver and onions and thinks I should have a hotdog instead.” Mom thought Who Who was smart, too, except she called her a smart aleck, and I still had to eat liver and onions. 

Who Who was a very loyal friend for many years. Even after I started school and started to meet people my own size, Who Who stuck around and was there when I needed her. She was my first best friend.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

Out the Window

It’s a funny expression used when something is a waste: All that hard work is now out the window. I started thinking about things that had literally been thrown out the window while on a run a few weeks ago. Over the six-mile course I caught glimpses of an apple core, a smashed USB cord, several aluminum beer cans, a sock, a bag from MacDonald’s, and a package of unopened string cheese. The string cheese made me laugh as I imagined a tot in high dudgeon and unamused by his parent’s attempt to calm him with a morsel. He, instead, flung it out the window.

My son liked to throw things, too. But he didn’t have to be in a temper to suddenly take the notion to hurl whatever object he had in his hand. I particularly recall a time while in Florida visiting my parents. Dad was driving his van, Mom was in the passenger seat, and I was with the kids in the center row. Mom was keeping a close watch on the road helping Dad drive when she jerked her head around and excitedly asked, “What was that?”

I looked up and said, “What was what?”

“Len, stop the car,” Mom ordered. In that same moment my son began wailing and pointing his finger at the open window next to him. Dad was thoroughly confused, as was I, about why Mom was insisting we stop.

Mom’s eagle eyes had seen an object fly by her window, bounce off the pavement, and ricochet off to the side of the road. “I think Aaron just threw his ball out the window,” she said. His now loud sobs and pointing finger seemed to confirm that suspicion. And so we stopped. We were quite the curiosity for passersby as we searched along a quarter mile stretch for that ball. We found it, which put an immediate stop to the crying. Dad promptly rolled up the windows and hit the window lock button before we continued on.

Out the window in the case of the thrown ball is easy to understand, but why did we ever start saying “out the window” when something was a waste? I did a little research and found all kinds of references to the expression and a fascinating explanation about defenestration, but nothing that could truly explain the usage.

I suppose the closest I can come to understanding the expression is when thinking back to the return trip from a local carnival with my grandparents when I was five years old. In the car, Mom and Dad were upfront, and I was snuggled between Grandma and Grandpa in the back. I tightly held the treasured helium balloon that had been purchased for me. I gazed up at it with fascination. Grandma even said, “You like that balloon, I suppose?” I did like it and was a bit in shock that I had been given such a wondrous thing.

We stopped at an A&W Root Beer drive-in for dinner. I ordered a hotdog with ketchup and a Baby Mug. Grandma rolled down her window just enough so that when the carhop brought the tray, there was a place to hook it on to. Grandma busied herself with handing out the food and everyone began eating. As I undid the wrapping to my hotdog I momentarily forgot about the balloon. In an instant, the string unfurled from my wrist and the balloon zipped out the window and headed toward the sky. Now that truly was a waste.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

The Shoplifter

Evy and I took the bus out to the mall just about every rainy Saturday, so when we woke up to rain the Saturday Sandy was visiting from St. Louis, it was obvious how the three of us would spend the day. We walked the half-mile to Lake Shore Drive and stood under the shelter of the Stop 20 shed until the bus arrived. With tickets and transfers in hand, we went immediately to the back to find seats. 

On this particular day, Evy and I both had babysitting money in our purses and intended to buy friendship rings. As we were about to leave Sandy’s mom grabbed her purse and said to her daughter, “Here sweetheart, let me give you some money to shop with.” I’d never seen such a thing before as someone’s mom just handing over the tremendous amount of twenty dollars. Sandy took the money as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

After the bus dropped us off at Carson Pirie Scott, we headed into the mall to get Orange Julius beverages to start off our shopping day. Marquette Mall was all grayish concrete with a few planters full of low-growing greenery running down the middle. It was just one level with no fountains or water features of any kind, but with twenty stores to choose from, we were happy to be sheltered from the elements.

We girls spent a couple hours milling about looking at clothes, records, cards, and Spencer gifts before heading back to Carson’s to catch the bus back home. Evy and I had looked at friendship rings in the jewelry stores but there had been nothing we could afford. At the jewelry counter in Carson’s, however, we found exactly what we wanted. The rings were a gold color and cost only about seven dollars. The young clerk helped us while we each tried on the same style ring until we found the right sizes. We handed her the cash from our hard-earned babysitting money to complete the transactions. She wrapped each ring in a piece of tissue paper, placed them in individual bags, and handed the bags and receipts to us. We were very excited. 

“Where’s Sandy?” I asked as we turned away from the counter.

“She said she was going over to the junior department to look at slacks and tops,” Evy answered as we both reached our hands into our bags. We unwrapped the friendship rings, ripped the price tags off of them, and promptly placed the rings on our fingers. We smiled with pleasure at the cheap little rings on our adolescent hands. We then crunched up the bags and threw them away along with the receipts into a nearby trash can before heading off to find Sandy.

The junior department was fully stocked with the latest fashions in jeans, hip-huggers, body suits, and all sorts of accessories. I saw Sandy coming out of one of the changing rooms just as we arrived in the department. She was still browsing when Evy said, “Hey, I need to go to the ladies room.” I pointed toward the sign just as a rack of yellow print blouses caught my eye. A few seconds passed before I checked back over my shoulder to make sure Evy had headed in the right direction when I saw a burly-looking man walking right behind her. “That’s weird,” I said out loud.

“What’s weird?” Sandy asked as she came up the aisle next to me.

“I just saw a man following Evy toward the restroom. I wonder what a man is doing in the junior department.” Sandy gave me a concerned, almost fearful, look and I suddenly thought I’d better go to the ladies room myself.

“Evy?” I asked as I entered the restroom, “You OK?”

One of the toilets flushed as she came out of the stall, “Yeah, why?” she asked as she started washing her hands.

“This really creepy guy seemed to follow you over here and now he’s hanging around outside the door.”

She grimaced at me and dried her hands. She looked at her watch and said, “Well, guy or no guy, we’ve got a bus to catch in a few minutes so we’d better get going.”

Sandy still looked a bit terror struck but I tried to reassure her, “It’s OK, Sandy. We’re in a big department store with tons of people around. This guy’s not going to try anything weird with so many people and clerks around. Let’s just go outside and wait for the bus and get home.” She didn’t look quite convinced and I felt a bit sorry for her being so scared. 

“I have to pee,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes. You go ahead.” Evy and I shrugged and headed out the door.

The guy wore a nondescript pair of dark-colored trousers and a gray polo shirt. Dull loafers poked out underneath the cuffs of his pants. His hair was slicked back with some sort of oily substance and his face had a pallor you’d associate with that of a smoker. When we came out of the ladies room, he gave us a surreptitious look as he slid the hangers along a rack of girls jackets. Evy and I skirted around the edge of the racks of clothes holding hands and headed toward the back entrance of the store. The guy caught up to us and grabbed a hold of Evy’s arm. I stepped back as he said to both of us, “Come with me, girls, you’re in a whole lot of trouble. I’m the store detective.” He then grabbed me by the arm and while dozens of people, mostly older women, were looking on, dragged us toward the back of the store. We were stunned into silence by the sheer size of this man, his obvious strength and determination, the embarrassment of being hauled off to who knew where, and scared because we had no idea what we had done. 

The detective dragged us past the customer service area and into a small well-lit room that had exactly two plastic chairs. He ordered us to take a seat. Evy and I sat in complete disbelief. She looked at her watch and muttered, “We’re going to miss this bus.” I nodded knowing this to be true. My stomach was churning around and my worst fear was that this guy was going to somehow call my mother. I could hear her admonitions in my head: When you get in trouble at school, you get in worse trouble at home. Do you understand me?

The store detective at Carson Pirie Scott came back into the empty little room where Evy and I sat with hands folded in our laps. He was followed by a short plump woman wearing a security uniform. “Seems you girls have been caught shoplifting according to Mr. Snelling.” We both stared blankly. She ordered us to stand, and systematically patted us both down, searched our purses, and the bag Evy had with a purchase from another store. She even reached up through our pants legs and under our shirts to check to see if other clothing was lurking beneath. She looked over at Mr. Snelling and shook her head. He nodded over at us and said, “Look at their hands.” The woman saw right away that we were both wearing the exact same rings. They were shiny new and she suspiciously asked, “Where did you get those rings, girls?” I blurted out the story of purchasing them at the jewelry counter. I told her that the clerk could tell her that what I was saying was true. “Where are the receipts?” she asked. My stomach lurched as a picture of us crumpling up the bags and receipts and throwing them in the trash popped into my head. “I can find the receipts,” I claimed. The woman and Mr. Snelling looked at each other. He shrugged to indicate he didn’t care whether she let me go look or not and she said, “You go find the receipts, but your friend stays here.” I took off and ran down the main aisle of the store. The jewelry counter was right at the entrance to the mall and so was the trash can. There was no one at the counter so I thrashed around through the trash to find our bags. Inside were both receipts, which I clutched tightly in my fist as I ran back to the security office.

It then didn’t take long to get everything straightened out. The woman dismissed us and we left the security office. “Oh my god!” I exclaimed, “Where’s Sandy?” I’d completely forgotten about her throughout our ordeal and wondered if she was still in the bathroom. Evy and I picked up the pace as we hurried by the customer service desk. As we passed the outer door to the store where we would meet the bus, I looked outside and saw her sitting by herself in the shelter of the eaves of the building. We pushed through the double doors and inhaled our first breaths of fresh air in over three hours. We had about a half hour to wait for the next bus. We plunked down on either side of Sandy and poured out our tale. She was properly aghast and sympathetic to what we’d gone through.

When we arrived back home, we went to Evy’s house to show her mom our rings. We also told her the whole story of the store detective and what had happened. Mrs. Batstone was so outraged by the treatment and injustice she got out the phone book and looked up the number for Carson Pirie Scott. “I do over one hundred dollars worth of business there each month but you can be sure I won’t be doing business with you any longer after the incomprehensible treatment my daughters received today.” (I loved that part—her including me as one of her daughters.) She hung up the phone and continued to rant to us about adults in so-called power positions taking advantage of children. “Getting off on intimidating children—oh yes, what a powerful man,” she said facetiously. We thought it was so wonderful her standing up for us, threatening big bad Carson Pirie Scott & Co., and genuinely being on our side.

The scene was a little different at my house. With fury in her tone, Mom said, “Well, you shouldn’t have thrown out those receipts. Don’t you know that you NEVER throw away receipts before leaving a store? It’s absolutely idiotic what you did and you deserved to be treated like common criminals.” I hung my head in shame thinking about what a screw-up I was. 

Later in the evening, after our parents had gone to the basement to watch some sporting event on TV, Sandy confessed that she had actually shoplifted about fifty dollars worth of items and still had the twenty her mother had given her. She’d apparently gone into the dressing room and put on the clothes and then redressed over the top of a stolen pair of panties, bra, shorts, and two tops. She’d also slipped a couple of bracelets on her arms and a new pair of gold-hoop earrings. She thought herself very clever, and the whole thing quite hilarious. But, I was not amused.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

For the Love of Min

I would never meet her, but Min, my predecessor at Andover Savings Bank, would forever stand on the ultimate pedestal as exalted best employee ever. Nevertheless, I gave it everything I had to push her off her perch.

It was my first job out of college—the one that our professors had told us we would choose after the dust had settled on all the offers we would receive thanks to our newly minted credentials as a holder of a BBA from Stetson University. Except it was 1980, the unemployment rate was over 9 percent, and I was looking for a job not on the national level, but in the quaint little town of Andover, Massachusetts, where my (also) newly minted husband had taken a job at Phillips Academy.

The search for work was rough, and I was stressing over the impending cancellation of my father's health insurance, which would only cover me for 14 days after signing my marriage license. To add to my stress, in those days, wives had to wait an obligatory 9 months before being added to a spouse's health insurance. So not only was it imperative that I find work with full benefits, but as a "fellow" at Andover, my husband's pay was about half the rate of a regular teacher. He was being paid in experience. We needed the money. And I needed to work not only for those benefits, but for my self-esteem, and to put an end to my husband's daily question: "Did you find a job today?"

After a number of failed attempts (some humiliating) I landed a job as a mortgage service clerk at Andover Savings Bank, just a half mile down the hill from Phillips Academy. I saw my first ATM machine as I walked in the door to meet with the president of the bank for my interview. The interview was short as we went over my resume, which was nicely punctuated with several banking jobs I'd held while in college. I took a very easy math test, and was offered the job on a Thursday to begin the following Monday. The president asked me to come in on Friday (I was not paid for that time) to fill out a W-4 as well as the medical and dental benefits paperwork. I was thrilled.

The head of mortgage service was a 40-something woman named Linda. Her desk was situated at one end of a large room that had one partition running down the middle. Three desks abutted the partition on either side. The six of us occupying those desks faced Linda so that we were in her sight line. We all packaged mortgages, and in addition we each had a speciality . For instance, Lois did insurance, Mary Elizabeth issued checks to contractors, and I posted mortgage payments using a machine that, for its time, was quite the tech marvel.

On my first day, Linda began by teaching me the filing system. She showed me how to assign numbers to each new mortgage, and how that number was to then be recorded on every document having to do with that mortgage. She showed me how to correctly put each document in its precise order in a folder, two-hole punching, stapling, clipping, and organizing in exactly the same way for each. She explained the significance of the timeline for the dispersal of funds, what documents had to be in the folder, and how to use the checklist to make sure everything was perfect for the closing attorneys. And at the end of each instruction, she added almost like a tic: "Min always did it this way."

“Who was Min,” I asked.

Linda's face took on a glow at the mention of Min's name. Her mouth formed a beatific smile, and her pupils dilated. She looked slightly heavenward, and sighed. "Min," she said, "was perfect." She went on, "Min was the kind of employee every manager dreams of. Her precision, her ethic, her efficiency, her innovation." I looked around at my co-workers as Linda sang on. They all were suddenly in deep concentration, eyes fixed on the fascinating papers on each of their desks.

Being a naturally detail-oriented person, I picked up the sequencing quickly, and soon was packaging 8 mortgages a day. The office average was 7. From Linda's daily reference to Min, I knew that she had been able to package 10 mortgages a day. Ten was a lot. To beat that number would be a challenge because a lot of time was required to check and double check one's work. Linda reviewed every single package, and was a hawk for details. She was very nice about any mistakes she found, and simply brought them to the attention of one of us clerks to correct our work. Linda was generous with her praise, but no one, absolutely no one, could beat the incomparable Min. Min had become, mythologically, a goddess of mortgage packaging. I became even more determined to topple her from her pedestal.

I was about 10 months into the job, and was itching to move into a management position. But after talking to the president again, and witnessing the elevation of a young man, who started about the same time I did, from teller to manager, I realized that it wasn't going to happen for a woman at Andover Savings Bank. When I discussed it with Linda, she took a long drag on her cigarette before confessing that she'd worked for the bank for over 20 years before she became manager of the mortgage service department. Instead of dwelling on that depressing news, I renewed my efforts to beat Min's record.

By the end of my eleventh month, I was packaging 11 mistake-free mortgages a day. But it didn't matter. Min would always be better and more competent in Linda’s eyes. My single-minded desire to replace Min as the exalted best employee ever was a fool’s errand. For, Linda did not love me. Nor did I want her to. What I wanted was her respect and acknowledgment for being the best. But you can’t best love.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

Kicking the Habit

I started smoking to be like Pam. We were co-workers at Cloth World during my first year living in Florida. I was a junior in high school with few friends, and I liked her. A lot. She seemed sophisticated and, though only a year older than I, much more mature and grown up with a knowing air floating around her imagined aura. I never was really addicted, but I became comfortable with the habit of smoking with Pam during our breaks. As I eventually began meeting people, I found myself among other casual smokers, who, like me, mostly lit up at the pizza place after football games, while cruising the streets of Bradenton, or at the homes of those of us whose parents didn’t mind. My parents minded. A lot. And I consequently did everything in my power to hide it from them. Though I’m pretty positive my mother’s sniffer couldn’t have missed it having been a former smoker herself with similar tendencies to try and hide such things from her parents. But for whatever reason, she never confronted me.

I continued to smoke socially throughout college, sometimes burning through an entire pack in one evening, but even so, could go at least hours, if not occasionally days without a smoke. A few days before I was to get married, my husband-to-be, however, issued an ultimatum. Quit or I won’t go through with the ceremony. I was obedient, and simply quit. Cold turkey. And I’ve never looked back. But what strikes me about both my starting and stopping is that I did both to please someone else, or at least to fit into an expected persona.

Fast forward almost 30 years. I was in my early fifties when I developed a chronic skin sensitivity. I had been in the habit of using the exact same products and skin cleansing rituals for decades, but suddenly, it seemed, I woke up one day and I was allergic to all my old standbys. I then tried everything I could think of to try and calm the various irritations. I went to the doctor for medications, purchased over-the-counter remedies from Oil of Olay, Pure Simple, Neutrogena, and came darn close to seeing a very expensive local dermatologist with her own line of skincare products that I knew would cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

But one morning in the midst of my desperation, I looked at my bathroom cupboard and drawers full of bottles, tubes, misters, sprays, and jars, and had an idea. What if I just kicked this habit too? Cold turkey. I had a small panic as I looked at my aging skin and couldn’t imagine how I’d manage without a moisturizer. I rationalized that maybe without using the facial cleanser, which possibly was designed to dry out my skin so that I would then buy the moisturizing product from the same manufacturer, my skin might adjust? I took the plunge.

I threw everything out so I wouldn’t be tempted. And I am saving hundreds of dollars a year as a result. The more I think about it, the more I realize I allowed myself to be marketed to. You need this. You should do this. I was using these products because someone was telling me to do it in order to fit a certain persona. My skin has adjusted, and gone are my laments. I’m now feeling very sophisticated, mature, and grown up, and I am the one telling me what to do.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

Sins of the Mother

A predisposition to believe the worst about the intentions of her offspring was at the core of the principals Patsy Ann Steen Taylor Perry Roche used to guide her actions as a parent. The principals, on the whole, were generally regarded as sound, being firmly based on her upbringing in the Lutheran church. What Patsy Ann lacked was a basic understanding for the human inclination to adapt to any circumstance in order to achieve what was desired, regardless of the obstacles placed in, or naturally occurring along, its path. Patsy Ann herself was not immune to her own desire, and consequently navigated the dark waters of her own childhood to suit her inner most needs. It was these desires, for instance, that made Patsy Ann the subject of gossip and speculation among her fellow residents at The Sons of Norway Assisted Living Facility in Bradenton, Florida, during the last three years of her life.

“Tell me again, dear, you have three children?” asked the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Anderson whose false teeth clicked when she talked.

Patsy Ann nodded, “Yes, that’s right.”

“From three separate marriages?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Patsy Ann held the statistically improbable distinction of having had three children, one by each of three different husbands, each child born ten years after the next, each on the same day of the year—June 30, exactly halfway through the years of 1958, 1968, and 1978—each a girl.

“And what are their names again, dear?” Mrs. Anderson, click click, inquired. Patsy Ann tried to remember how many times Mrs. Anderson had asked this same series of questions over the past three years but as she could only recall that the questions had been asked and not the number of times, she let her momentary annoyance pass and answered them without malice.

“The oldest is Elizabeth because, at the time of her birth, I adored Elizabeth Taylor. My middle daughter is Katherine Carrie. After Katherine Hepburn. I thought about naming her Barbra, after Streisand, because ‘Funny Girl’ was my favorite movie in 1968, but Streisand is Jewish, and my mother and father would never have approved of that.” Mrs. Anderson nodded her head in understanding. “And there’s my youngest, Shirley Faye, because I couldn’t decide between Shirley MacLaine and Faye Dunaway. But, we ended up just calling her Faye after Shirley started talking about all those strange previous lives she thought she’d lived.” Patsy Ann pressed her lips disapprovingly together before concluding, “Ridiculous.”

“And the husbands?” prompted Mrs. Olson whose voice could only be heard when she placed a pneumatic larynx up to her throat. The arthritis in her right hand made depressing the “on” button difficult.

Patsy Ann narrowed her eyes at Mrs. Olson whose electronically produced voice grated on her nerves and said, “That’s a topic I do not discuss.”

The topic she referred to was the bad luck of having been widowed three times. Bad luck, or what her own mother referred to as “unpleasant matters,” was strictly forbidden for discussion during the course of her lifetime.

The lesson had been learned early upon the death of Patsy Ann’s grandfather, on her father’s side. Bumpa Steen died when the cirrhosis in his liver made its further functioning impossible. They laid his body out on the dining room table in the small alcove area off the parlor where the light from the bay windows shone in “like the very angels in heaven were having a peak inside,” said Patsy Ann’s grandmother.

“Why did he die?” little Patsy Ann asked. There were a dozen answers that could have been given to a child but the one she got was, “Hush up now. He died and that’s all there is to it. This is an unpleasant matter,” said her mother, “and no one is to discuss it. Ever.”

As to having the unpleasant matter of three dead husbands, Patsy Ann Steen Taylor Perry Roche had no intentions of letting anyone, least of all the residents of The Sons of Norway Assisted Living Facility, know the finer details of their unfortunate passings.

“I feel just terrible about it,” began Mrs. Olson who fumbled with the switch on her pneumatic larynx and had to pause in her train of thought to find the button, “but of my three boys and daughter,” she paused again for an intake of breath, “I have a favorite.” She eyed Mrs. Anderson who seemed to grip the arms of her wheelchair a little tighter at the thought of Mrs. Olson’s impending confession. Patsy Ann waited patiently while Mrs. Olson enjoyed what she imagined was a suspenseful moment. “It’s my daughter,” she rasped. The heads of her small audience nodded their acknowledgment. “Do you have a favorite among your girls?” she asked Patsy Ann.

Patsy Ann did have a favorite, but not in the way she thought Mrs. Olson meant. Katherine Carrie, her middle daughter, was singled out in her mind, receiving much closer scrutiny over the years, because from the moment of her birth, Patsy Ann thought her sneaky. At just six hours old, Katherine Carrie’s beady little dark blue eyes peered back at her in a way Patsy Ann felt was a challenge. “Just see if you can catch me,” they said to her. And, from that moment on, Patsy Ann was determined to catch Katherine Carrie misbehaving in order to “break her of any bad habits that might lead her to experiment, if not fully engage, in undesirable activities of any kind.” To Patsy Ann, even those dark little baby eyes betrayed Katherine Carrie’s inborn tendency to “take the wrong road” as she often defined it to herself.

Patsy Ann knew what she was talking about, too, because she herself had flirted with dangerous thoughts and downright sinful doings. When Katherine Carrie was four years old, Patsy Ann warned her, “There’s nothing you can do, nothing you can think of to do, that I haven’t already done or thought of doing. So don’t try anything with me. I’ll catch you at it and you’ll pay the price.” The gauntlet had been thrown down and although Katherine Carrie never deliberately went out of her way to see what kind of trouble she could get away with, she had a keen grasp of those things her mother would not approve of and honed her skills in the art of lying and deception in order to do precisely what she wished without getting caught. And thus, a predisposition to believe the worst about the intentions of her own offspring was at the core of the principals Katherine Carrie Perry Thomas Stevenson Lombardi used to guide her actions as a parent as she raised her four children from three different fathers.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

I Was Just Teasing

My fury boils as he turns the gas up on our already heated discussion. He flings verbal grenades at my emotional responses, and further denigrates me with the ultimate sarcastic-dripping insult: “OK, Jan.” Really just bravado to ward off the tears that are sure to soon come unbidden, I raise my voice in anger and say, “I am not my mother.”

But the denial falls flat. Because, weren’t there times when I not only acted like my mother, but I actually felt like I was my mother? One particularly vivid moment happened while in line at the grocery store. I pulled out my stash of coupons, and systematically went through them to match them up to the items in my cart, making sure they were all valid, and that I had read them each carefully. Some were for a percentage off, others for a dollar amount, still others were two for the price of one. My gestures and even my facial expressions, as I scrutinized each one, were the perfect mimic of Mom. Sometimes, the tone of my voice or the way I turned a phrase sounded to my ears as if she was acting as my invisible ventriloquist. Was I just like my mother as he stood there accusing me to be?

No. I am different. 

My mother had a terrible temper, but her’s was unprovoked by those she lashed out at. Her’s was unpredictable and inconsistent. Every day was a clean slate upon which she wrote a different set of rules. Except the rules were a secret—a minefield to be tiptoed upon in the hope of not triggering an explosion. 

As my tears brim to nearly overflowing, he accuses, “You’re so sensitive! I was just teasing.”

My parents didn’t tease. Especially not Mom. No, she was self-righteously serious. All the time. And that was interesting in itself. Because she came from a family whose dry wit I came to greatly appreciate and enjoy, once I was old enough to understand it. If you’re in a room with the Hellers, there are no elephants.

Was I too sensitive? Was I not capable of getting the joke? Was it a joke? Or was it a further dismissal of my feelings?

“There’s someone who gets them, and someone who gives them,” Mom stated after I was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer at 23 years of age. As part of the cure, I spent ten therapy sessions with Catherine, who asked, “What’s wrong with being sensitive?” What was wrong with being sensitive? I began to think that saying, “I was just teasing,” was a way of not accepting responsibility for cutting too close to the quick—an excuse for further victimizing the victim of an insult.

“Did she always have a terrible temper?” he asks one of my closest friends.

“I always thought of her as very even tempered,” is the response. I am even tempered. Only, his relentless refusal to be sorry triggers the anger in the moments before I break.

I reject “I was just teasing” as a justification. An excuse. A dismissal. The only acceptable response is, “I am sorry. I am truly sorry.” And then make and keep a vow not to do it again. 

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

Speeding On I-40

My daughter, Ariel, was 10 years old. Car sick and holding a brown paper bag in front of her face, she looked at me greenly and asked, “Are we almost there?”

Foot pressed firmly on the gas edging the speedometer up close to 90, I gamely tried to keep the white van driven by my husband, carrying 14 of his students, in sight. I had no idea where we were going, and there was no GPS, much less a cell phone in my rented Ford Escort. All I knew was that I was to follow that van to our destination somewhere on Arizona’s Navajo Reservation. “I think we’re almost there, Sweetheart,” I assured her.

I-40 stretched out in front of us, a study in one-point perspective, a desert landscape on both sides.

I saw the swirling blue lights before I heard the siren. The state patrol car easily caught up to us, and as I slowed to pull over, I kept a watchful eye on the white van hoping my husband (still two full miles ahead of me) had noticed that I was stopping. He had, and he, too, pulled to the side.

I rolled down my window and waited for the police officer to approach.

“License and registration,” he said blandly.

I gave him an embarrassed smile and said, “This is a rented car, Sir.” He stooped down a bit to look in the window. Ariel still had her face in the paper bag, but she managed a weak smile.

Officer Cisneros was an Erik Estrada look-alike, and my heart fluttered just a bit when he returned our smiles and gently replied, “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

Meekly, I answered, “Almost 90?”

Cisneros chuckled a bit as he nodded his head. “I think you’re the first person I’ve ever pulled over who has answered that question honestly.” An over-achiever my entire life, this compliment pleased me.

“Well,” he continued, “I’m still going to need to take a look at your license. And how about your rental car document? Maybe you could just let me see that.” 

I obliged by first rummaging through the glove compartment for the folder the dealer had placed there, and then pulled out my wallet and extracted my Connecticut driver’s license for him. He stood there for a moment looking at my license and then at me, I supposed making sure nothing else seemed suspicious, and then asked, “Why were you going so fast?”

I pointed at the white van and said, “Trying to keep up with that van. I otherwise don’t know where I’m supposed to be going.” He turned a scrutinizing eye on the van, nodded, and headed back to his patrol car.

“Mommy, I’m still feeling sick,” Ariel moaned.

I rubbed her head and said, “I know. This won’t take long, and then we’ll be at the campsite soon. I promise.”

It was a good ten minutes later before Officer Cisneros returned to my window with the rental document and my license. He sighed heavily and said, “Well, I’m going to let you off with a warning. But, you just must slow down. I know these roads are straight, and you can see for miles and miles, but we also have wild animals that wander onto them. Hitting anything at that speed can be dangerous, and with a child in the car . . .” His eyebrow raised in a ‘don’t-make-me-say-it’ attitude, “. . .you can’t be too careful.”

“Thank you, Officer,” I said taking back my license. “We’ll be careful.”

Just before I began to roll up the window, Officer Cisneros said, “Oh, and one more thing.” I looked at him intently waiting for another cautionary aphorism. “There seems to be a mistake on your driver’s license.” I looked down at my license confused about how there could possibly be a mistake. Address was correct. Social security number accurate. I looked back at him with a puzzled expression. His eyes twinkled at me and his Hollywood good looks flirted as he said, “Says you were born in 1958. Now that can’t be right.” He then winked, and I blushed to my blonde hairline.

“Have a good day, Ma’am,” he said with a parting grin.

I rolled up the window, returned my license to my wallet, and finally dared look at Ariel. She was no longer green, but pink with shock as she exclaimed, “Mama!”

The Bully

They mysteriously disappeared one night never to be heard of again. It was an incomprehensible ending to three years of sheer torture.

It all started in first grade when Alan Delaney stepped forward to self-identify himself as my one true enemy. My teacher, Miss Hill, dismissed it all with a wave of her hand, “That’s just his way of showing he likes you.” My mother dismissed it all with a wave of her hand, “What are you doing to attract such attention?” No one was sympathetic to the target of a bully in those days. It was always the victim’s fault, or the result of acceptable boys will boys behavior.

But Alan Delaney virtually wrecked havoc on every child within two blocks of where I lived, and as far as I know was never held accountable for his actions. He routinely pushed me down on the playground at school so that everyone in my first grade class saw my underwear. He would get behind me in line for the slide so that when I was halfway down, he’d start his descent so he’d have a chance to kick me in the back at the bottom.

I have to scoff now at this notion, but in 1965 before the school began using the gym as a makeshift cafeteria, teachers at Long Beach Elementary would leave their little charges in the classroom to fend for themselves during the one-hour break. One of us was appointed room monitor. As we each finished lunch, we were responsible for disposing of our garbage, or stowing away our lunchbox, but then would be allowed to leave to go out on the playground. If memory serves, there was no such thing as an adult supervisor or even a playground monitor during lunch time. We were seven years old.

The day it was Alan’s turn as monitor, he wrote my name on the board three times, which I knew meant having to stay after school. And having to stay after school meant getting a spanking at home. My first transgression was the creaking of my desk when I raised the lid to retrieve my lunchbox. “Too much noise,” he announced to the room. “Your name’s going up on the board, Anderson.” My ensuing protest only achieved getting my name written a second time. “That’s two, Anderson,” he shouted as he wrote my name again. I looked around at my classmates who were avoiding making eye contact lest they, too, join me as the target of his abuse. Alan deemed it my third transgression when I dared to raise my hand to report that the glass lining of my thermos had broken and my milk was full of the shards. “That’s three, Anderson,” he stated as he stood to write my name a third time. In spite of my fear that it would mean a fourth mark against me, tears rolled unbidden down my cheeks. I feared I was about to wet my pants.

After the bell rang to signal that it was time to return to class from the playground, I saw that he, or someone, had erased my name from the board. But, the psychological damage was done. Miss Hill stood by her desk watching us file in without the slightest notion of what had happened in her absence.

I hated Alan Delaney. I hated him with all the passion of a seven-year-old. I wanted to retaliate, but I was not that kind of kid. I didn’t have the imagination for such things. His relentless bullying continued on for another two years－taunting, teasing, chasing, pulling at my panties, telling lies about me－one horror after another.

Alan’s last tortuous deed occurred on the way home from school one winter day during third grade. As I stepped off the road into several inches of snow to avoid a car as it crested a hill, my foot disappeared into an open pipe just large enough for my little boot. My foot caught at such an angle I couldn’t dislodge it no matter what I tried. Peter, Evy, and her brother, Marcus, tried to help, but it was really stuck. Peter was in the middle of encouraging me to pull harder to get my foot out, when Alan came along. “What’s wrong,” he asked with a sinister smile. “Baby got her foot stuck?” Marcus attempted to defend me and said, “Leave her alone.” But Alan only smirked. He then squatted down next to me and stuffed as much snow down the hole and into my boot as he could. He laughed like the little demon he was before turning his back on us all to head home. I began to cry inconsolably. Evy and Marcus stayed with me while Peter ran up to the house on the corner. His family knew the people who lived there and the mom came and dug me out.

A few months later, the entire Delaney family disappeared in the middle of the night. For the briefest of moments I believed that something magical had happened. Their rented house was empty; the car was gone. I knew it wasn’t that they were on vacation because when I curiously peaked in the windows, the house was empty of every possession. No one ever found out why. And no one cared. Not one of us was sorry to see Alan gone. It was a relief.

It's been 50 years and I still haven't forgiven Alan Delaney. Thanks to social media, however, I know he's out there in the world, recently married, and has almost 5,000 Facebook friends. I am not one of them.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

House For Sale

An ice storm in Nashville closed the airport while I was back in Long Beach for a long weekend. My flight was canceled and rebooked twice, giving me a couple bonus days in my home town on the shores of Lake Michigan in Indiana. With temperatures dipping into the single digits, my friends and I were forced to stick to inside activities. I mostly spent time reading, but we also spent some time reminiscing. Tina remembers one spring break when we still lived here, my family’s planned trip to Florida was postponed for a day due to snow in Chicago. “I felt so sorry for you all,” she said. I realized as she described the storm, and the reasons why we couldn’t fly out, that the trip she referred to, would have been the year we would move over 1,000 miles away. It would have been the week my parents planned to find and purchase the home to which we would move. It would have been a trip I would have gladly traded in for a whole week of being snowed in rather than face the reality of that move. It would have been a time when I thought life was definitely not cool.

Dad picked us up at the Sarasota/Bradenton airport a day later than expected. I didn’t have much airline experience but I knew that deplaning a jet via its stairs onto the tarmac meant the airport was a small one. I looked around at the strange landscape of palmetto bushes, cypress, white pine, and sand (lots of sand) with a sullen expression as Dad drove us north on U.S. 41 to his rented half of a duplex in East Bradenton’s Oneco section. Far from the boomtown atmosphere of both the Manatee Avenue and Cortez Road access points to Anna Maria Island, Oneco was sparsely dotted with new construction that was well hidden. Old trailer parks, migrant fruit picker’s dwellings, as well as what can only be described as ramshackle white-washed cabins, gave the area a general overlay that bespoke of the abject poverty that dominated it. “Welcome to your new home,” I sarcastically thought aloud. This was definitely not cool.

“What was that?” Dad asked cheerfully.

“Oh don’t pay any attention to her,” my mother said as she suppressed the urge to turn around and snarl at me.

My sister and I dragged our small suitcases into Dad’s temporary living space where we would share a pull out couch for the next several days. I craned my neck to see that there was a small pool in the backyard, and allowed that maybe the next few days wouldn’t be so bad with that as a distraction. I also started to imagine that since this Bradenton, Florida, thing was going to happen whether I liked it or not, I might be able to like it if the house Mom and Dad bought came with a pool. That, I thought, might make things more tolerable, maybe even cool.

Susan and I were not invited to join our parents for their house hunting. We, instead, stayed at the duplex and played in the pool. With Dad’s landlord as the grown-up in charge, we were mostly on our own. He fixed us bologna sandwiches for lunch that he served with Cheetos, but otherwise he puttered about doing repairs, and general maintenance to the three properties he owned and rented out in the neighborhood. As the sun began its late afternoon descent, our caregiver came to check on us to let us know that Mom and Dad were on their way back and that it was time to get out of the pool and get ready for going out for dinner. After giving us our directive, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, and with a look of genuine concern on his face said, “Oh girls. Oh girls. Oh dear me, dear me.” Susan and I looked back at him with confused expressions as he continued to shake his head and say, “Oh girls.” We soon found out that what he could see was that we were very sunburned. Not cool.

Mom was furious. She and Dad had an argument about it. She then yelled at us for a bit for being so stupid. How in the heck were we supposed to know? We’d never been in Florida in March before. We didn’t know that the sun was stronger here. We never had to wear sunscreen in Indiana. Hell, sunscreen hadn’t even been invented yet. There was a general yelling session that then took place as I defended Susan and myself. In the end, Mom always seemed to know what to do, and this situation was no exception. Taking matters in hand, she grabbed her purse and walked to a little general store across from the duplex and bought a bottle of vinegar. Man, did it sting, but Mom knew her home remedies because it soothed the burning. We got blisters on the edges of our ears, but were otherwise fine. Cool.

With our sunburns under her watchful eye, and seemingly in control, we drove out to the island that evening for dinner on the beach. Never mind a pool in the backyard! I now set my sights on the notion of living out at the island with the whole Gulf of Mexico to play in. Now that would be really cool. But, alas, it was not to be. Mom and Dad were golfers, not beach goers. The house they bought, consequently, was situated about a half mile from the Bradenton Country Club. “The perfect lay out,” Mom enthused. “I can drive my golf cart to the clubhouse,” Dad added. “Is there a pool?” I asked. “The country club has a pool,” I was told. And so, 3801 17th Avenue West, a brand new home, was purchased. Dad moved in on the day they closed, and we followed at the end of the school year.

The house had some very unusual embellishments compared to those built during that time. And it was these embellishments—thick stucco exterior, real plaster walls and Italianate inscribed ceilings, hurricane enforced tile roof, security system, real wood door casings and doors, and the aforementioned perfect floor plan—for a comparable price that set it more than just a cut above the rest. For this was no ordinary contractor’s house, this house was built according to special instructions by Tony Rossi, the founder of Tropicana, as in orange juice. Cool.

Tony, so the story goes, built the house for his mother-in-law, an Italian citizen who would soon be issued her U.S. immigration papers. The Rossis had been systematically arranging for their relatives to emigrate from Italy to the U.S. over the past ten years, and his wife’s mother, and Tony’s youngest sister and her husband, would be the last in a long list of earlier arrivals. With a friend in the state department in Washington, D.C., it had been easy for Mr. Rossi to get the names of his family members moved to the top of the list each year, bypassing the normal waiting period, as well as receiving exemptions for any imposed caps to the number of allowable Italian immigrants in any given year. But there had been a snafu. It was called: Watergate. No one in Washington was doing any more favors for anyone, and there was no way of knowing how long the heat would be on, whether Mr. Rossi’s state department friend would get swept up in the massive investigations that were taking place, or whether business as usual would ever be the same again. There would be no names moved to the top of any list this year. Mr. Rossi had no choice but to put the specially designed and built home for his mother-in-law up for sale. The timing just happened to work out that the house went on the market and my parents were the first to see it. They made the offer, and there was no counter offer. It was a done deal in less than 48 hours. To my sixteen-year-old self who was being uprooted from a beloved home on Lake Michigan in Indiana, not cool at all.

But time has a way of soothing more than just sunburns. Forty years later, with both my parents deceased, my sister and I now own the house that Tony Rossi build. And it is on the market for the first time since Mom and Dad bought it with all its beautiful embellishments (and its little know history) still intact. Cool.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2015

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3801-17th-Ave-W-Bradenton-FL-34205/45748787_zpid/