Chevy coupe

“Jesus Christ!”  I blurted out---emphasis on the first syllable, “Je-sus.”  I had tumbled off the bench seat of our old Chevy coupe when my mother slammed the brakes. My head grazed the dashboard as I toppled to the floorboard below. The brown and red threads of the tan plaid upholstery prickled my bare legs as I clambered back on the seat. 

It was 1951 and I was six years old.

The car---I’ve confirmed from photos online---was a 1940 Chevy 2-door business coupe, and about this color. The model was a Master 85, and in the brochure artwork it looks professional but sporty.  

The coupe had its own story and I learned it decades later.

That day we were headed into the city---to San Francisco, 40 minutes by car from our small town north of the Golden Gate Bridge.  I watched my mother grip the gearshift with its milky bakelite-tipped handle as she pressed in the clutch in one smooth, deft motion. She was a good driver.  

In the 1950s medical and dental appointments in San Francisco were expeditions that entailed coat, hat and gloves.  Deckled-edged Kodaks show me in a gray and white checked coat with a matching tam that my mother had sewed. I wore white gloves in little kid sizes that now seem unimaginable---clothes for city sidewalks, not the gravel roads in the county where we lived.

Our destination was 450 Sutter Street, a professional building a few blocks uphill from Union Square and one of the tallest buildings in the city at the time.  A 26-storey art deco tower, its front doors were recessed beneath a gold fan-shaped portico.  I thought my family dentist lived in a temple on the 16^th floor.  When we waited for the elevator in the black marble hallway, I craned my neck to look up at the bronze and silver ceiling. Its dimly lit zig zag shapes made me dizzy. Only recently did I learn they were Mayan revival motif designs. 

For several years my mother regaled friends and relatives with the story about my startling expletive.  As the only child of parents who had---and now it puzzles me---mostly childless friends, I often listened to adult conversation.  Grown-ups told stories about other people, but they also seemed willing, even eager, to tell stories on themselves. Adults seemed to have an invisible protective skin, and they could become a character and be made fun of, be the butt of a good joke. It was something we kids never did.

Grown-ups telling stories---when not at my expense---brought relief from well-behaved boredom. I watched as the launch of some tale snagged the scattered conversations in the room, reeling in the attention of highball-clutching adults. I listened to half-understood words and events that seemed to stretch out as if along a tightrope of telling. The tension clutched my stomach.  Back and forth my eyes darted, from teller to listeners, anxious for some weave or wobble in the story, a gasp of surprise, a sigh of let-down, or a hoot of laughter at the end.

The work of what I later learned to call literary devices seeped unnamed into my brain.   

Sixty years after I banged into the Chevy dashboard, my mother came to live with me in  Michigan.  Unable to manage in an apartment on her own, at age 81 she pulled up stakes on the west coast and moved east to share a house with me and my son. 

And of all places, in Flint.

Family recollections surfaced during the six years we lived together in Flint, and one was the back story to the 1940 Chevy coupe.  We both remembered its faded beige finish and the red pin stripe still visible along its sides the year I grazed its dashboard. According to my mother, she and her older brother had bought the car new in their hometown, Portland, Oregon.  In the course of the purchase, the dealer off-handedly mentioned that delivery charges could be saved if the car were picked up at the factory in Michigan.

Brother and kid sister set out east by train. Grand Northern’s Empire Builder ran daily from Portland to Chicago’s Union Station where they could pick up Grand Trunk Western mainline and get off at Flint.  My mother recalled being told to wait on a Saginaw Street corner for a man who would take them out to the factory---which must have been Chevy-in-the Hole. 

To save money on the return road trip to Oregon brother and sister shared a motel room and my mother remembered sleeping on a trundle bed.  At remote stops along U.S. 30 and the way home, my uncle---a jazz lover---searched out obscure recordings.  Heavy 78s in brown paper sleeves, some of them ended up in our house, gifts from my uncle to teach my mother about jazz.

Four years later, in 1944, my mother got engaged and planned to move to San Francisco where she would be married. Her brother let her take the car---he was headed to Washington, D.C., to work in the Office of Strategic Services or OSS that had been established by Roosevelt in 1942. Off to a glamorous career in the capital, my uncle readily signed over the title and threw in some jazz records. The Chevy coupe became my parents’ first car. 

By 1955, my grandparents lived with us and a more practical family vehicle was needed. One summer evening my dad pulled into the driveway in a 1950 4-door Ford custom six “executive sedan.”  A deep forest green, in the center of its grill a “bullet” jutted out that only underscored the car’s roomy boredom. 

My dad bought it used. We never again had a brand-new car like that sporty Chevy coupe.

I’m still in Flint.  My mother died here in 2008. I drive Saginaw Street and imagine her waiting on one of its gusty corners in 1940, twenty-three years old and never dreaming that she would return to this city where her first car was made. 

Growing up, I’d had to suppress a flinch whenever my mother plunged into the anecdote about my “Jesus” outburst. Now the story seems less attached to me than to places and people that I have loved. The protagonists depart, social conventions change, and places are transformed beyond recognizing. The story remains and now I can do the telling---I did learn to be one of those grown-ups who can tell stories on themselves.

"Violet" (1904)

Until last summer three packing boxes filled a hallway cubby hole in my house.  Inside them were family pieces---silver and china---wrapped in recycled newsprint sheets left over from my mother’s last move.  At age eighty-one, my mother had arrived from Oregon to spend, as it turned out, the last decade of her life with me in Flint.  Stevens Movers, a venerable Michigan company and still full service, was lavish with paper.[1] 

Two mature women joining into one household meant duplication, decisions about which silver and china to save for “best”---to re-wrap and put away.  We held protracted parley in the course of which my mother and I recalled family and events connected with this stuff.  In the end, each of us mooted a case for this or that item and the rest was boxed, shoved into the hallway cubby hole for later. 

My mother died six years ago and I am back again to one life in this Michigan house, not two.   There is no need to “save for good” anymore; future state occasions are unlikely or---let’s face it---my participation in them is not assured.   

Time for a different household philosophy.

I pulled out the boxes and opened one; out from their stiff paper nests and into my life tumbled objects I remembered that my mother always identified by their original owner’s name or a past event.  Burgundy colored felt rolls unfurled, their soft pockets releasing silver teaspoons, pearl handled forks, napkin rings that clattered onto the table.  Vestiges of elegant dining in my grandmothers’ time.  

Pearl-handled cutlery still seems a bit over the top for a kitchen drawer.  Those pieces were tucked back into their rolls, their grosgrain ribbons retied, but the silver teaspoons have entered my daily life.  A set of six: their handles are engraved with the letter “V”---the first initial of my maternal grandmother’s new married surname---and probably a wedding gift.  The script grapheme lays gracefully in the oval blank toward the top of the tip.  I decided to use them every day. 

My grandmother, Esther Wilkins, was married in Caldwell, Idaho, on February 15, 1912.  The wedding date is engraved in the bowl of a different teaspoon in the felt role, a commemorative piece.  Esther was thirty-two when she married, a bit beyond youthful prime.  She had been sent out west from Indiana because of poor health.  She lived to eighty-eight.  Her maternal uncle, George Little, was a judge in Caldwell, a respected town figure and a family man with wife Flora and children, Edna and Wesley. [2]  What year my grandmother arrived, I cannot say.  Decades later, she still corresponded with “cousin Edna.”

Esther worked in a bank in Caldwell and earned her own money.  She liked nice things and remembered proudly how she ordered gloves and shoes from Chicago. Old photographs show her with three other young ladies, all in puffy white shirtwaists, their long dark skirts billowing in the wind.  The ladies clutch their broad brimmed hats as they pose in front of a house in glaring sunlight.  No other buildings can be seen.

Idaho territory was admitted to the Union in 1890.  Besides farming or ranching, gold and gem mining lured prospectors there and Esther relished adventure.  She told of suitor who took her on an excursion to the gold mines.  He gave her a gold nugget that she had made into a pin. 

When Esther married in 1912 she chose an easterner, Samuel van Hyning, three years younger than she was. Ladies must have remarked on this.  Samuel had run away from his Ohio farm home when he was seventeen; the story was his father would not let him have a buggy.  He survived in Idaho (among the Basques, he said) working as a shepherd.  “Lonely beyond imagining,” he told my mother. But by the time he married Esther he ran a grocery store in Caldwell.  A metal scoop from the store survives.  “Drink with VanHyning & Co. Groceries Use Hills Bros. Coffee Caldwell" reads the raised print stamped on the inside.

But back to the spoons.  The pattern is Wallace “Violet,” first issued in 1904.[3]  The design has the sentimental sweetness of many flower patterns I’ve viewed online, unlike formal designs available in the Edwardian era.[4]  They give tactile pleasure---their handles fit comfortably in my fingers; the bowl is deep. The spoon has “balance”---its tip and foot rest evenly on the table.

Stories about my grandmother come to my mind each day when I use her teaspoons.  But my strong attachment to objects and their stories also complicated my life.   My Catholic schooling cautioned us impressionable girls that “worldly goods” were inferior things, dead weight that kept you from rising to spiritual heights. 

Equally powerful was my family’s adherence to social propriety.  Acquisitiveness was a double whammy: both ill-mannered and a sign of weak character.  “Greedy Mae,” my mother would chide me---or some unsuspecting child who took the last cookie on a plate.  I imagine that my grandmother Esther must have called her that.  My mother was acquisitive too.  

My attachment to things is inherited. 

As an only child I spent hours observing things---household objects, clothing, accessories, furniture and all their intriguing shapes and textures---while adults talked.   I observed people too, but objects did not move around or stare back at me, interrupt my gaze and question me.  Objects were silent as I was, complicit and, so I thought, waiting for me to inspect them more closely.

All this childhood peering at stuff might serve some higher purpose for a future artist, a painter or sculptor, a craftsman or perhaps a physicist, even a collector.  I can say in my defense, however, that long observation of objects led me to observation of people and sharpened my intuition. 

Decades later in Poland, I met an elderly lady helped me learn Polish while I did small household tasks for her in return.  She lived in one of the cinderblock apartment buildings of the time. The flat was two rooms, a bathroom, and a windowless kitchen; in the first postwar decades people were grateful to get one. A Biedermeier cherry armoire covered half of one wall; its rosy, reddish-brown wood warmed the bleakness of the room.

I was instructed to serve her tea, placing the sole silver teaspoon in the household on her saucer.  Relatives, she said, had been deported to Siberia; a spoon was the most valuable item one could have.  Armoire and teaspoon, relics large and small of a time when objects of daily life were beautiful and useful.  In times of calamity, life sustaining.

Shortly after my grandmother’s teaspoons entered my kitchen, I read Susanna Moore’s “The Life of Objects.” [5]  On the eve of World War II, Beatrice Palmer leaves Ireland for Berlin to work in the aristocratic Metzenberg household.  She enters a German family with Jewish connections where generations of wealth and taste have amassed a significant art collection.  From tapestries, sculptures, and porcelain, to stationery and cigarette holders, all manner of objects bespeak refinement.  Beatrice learns the German term, vorzügliche: exquisite.  Her cultural education occurs as the Metzenbergs flee to their country estate. Disdainful of Hitler, unable to abandon their heritage, they sell or barter their possessions for food and safety.  Eventually the Metzenberg world crumbles under Allied bombing and Russian pillage.  Beatrice survives, more educated and perceptive, and without regret as she says, “having passed through fire and into selfhood.”[6]

No fires of war singed me into selfhood. My young education occurred in a peaceful time---idyllic as I recollect it now.  The objects that entranced my gaze were minor in comparison to those described in Susanna Moore’s novel.  Still, the fate of objects is to break or scatter, to be cut loose from their settings as their owners’ lives dissolve.  I write to evoke the fragments of my grandmother’s life that some silver teaspoons represent to me.

Other stuff remains; two of the three boxes returned to the cubby hole this summer.  Next year, I’ll pull them out again.  Just now I’m still not ready tackle the china, but I think I’ll take another look at those napkin rings. 

Read more essays like this in East Village Magazine athttp://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

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[1] http://www.stevensworldwide.com/About-Us.aspx

[2] http://www.accessgenealogy.com/idaho/biography-of-george-little.htm

[3] According to Wikipedia, Wallace “grew to be the largest manufacturer of flat tableware in the world. At the start of the 20th century, about 3 tons of steel and 1.5 tons of nickel silver were used daily. The company opened selling houses in New York and Chicago.”

[4] The teaspoons are not the full 6-inch size that would be part of a full place setting.  They are the “5 o’clock” size:  5 and 3/8 inches, designed for tea---extra teaspoons usable for any occasion.

[5] Susanna Moore, The Life of Objects, 2013.

[6] Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books, Feb. 7, 2013. 

Last one at the dinner table

Two years ago I retired from teaching.  My original Social Security card lays in the left side drawer of my writing desk.  The ballpoint ink of my signature as a fifteen-year-old is still blue.  My signature has matured, but I can remember signing the card.

Officially, I’d been a college professor for 26 years.  Before that I worked as a grad school teaching assistant and an English instructor in Poland. I worked in libraries, bookstores, and nursery schools.  Along the way odd part-time gigs kept me going---serving as a Shabbos goy in a private home, an office assistant for an auctioneer, typing bills of lading in a shipping office out on a pier in San Francisco.  

More than forty years of work life passed in the blink of an eye, as the cliché goes. I was stunned when I reached “my full benefit age”---that foundational concept of the Social Security Administration.  

What hit me hard was how little life was left to do anything else.  Twenty-five years remained if I matched my mother’s life span.  She lived to 91.  Fewer years if I lived as long as her mother, my grandmother, who lived to 88.  I call them my hardy matrilineals. Less time left than the “blink of an eye” I’d just lived through.  

Time to go.  Now. 

Unfinished goals that still nagged me---a second promotion, a monograph in my field---what did they matter now?  More money, more points plotted along an academic career graph. Did I want to spend my only years of life left on them? 

I re-focused fast.

Since then I’ve settled into what we call retirement. I’ve pondered the language. In Jane Austen novels it meant to withdraw from social life, to live in seclusion.  Or to be diffident and quiet.  As in, “she’s a very retiring person,” or she lives in the country “in retirement.”  

When Germany pioneered modern social insurance for workers in 1889, we got the notion of retirement from paid work.  Historian Richard Gabryszewski narrates a video about the development of social insurance behind our Social Security system.  You can find it on the SSA website. It’s a noble story and I love it.  I’m proud to be a part of a history that (if we skip the workhouse era) includes Aristotle, olive oil, Frances Perkins, and FDR.

 

Thanks to them all, my monthly social security benefit slips silently into my checking account.  I have time to write, to cook and to garden, to read.  Few dates recur in my calendar---yoga classes, the dentist, the financial planner, and the doctor.  There’s time to understand point and figure charts, to practice long form tai chi.

All in all, my transition has been successful.  My daily life habits are comfortable. As I say, I have settled in.  Or so I thought.

One day last year, making the bed and gazing absently out the unwashed windows of my now mortgage-free house, a surprising thought surfaced from my subconscious. It flickered, illumined, and then slipped below again. 

The thought is hard to re-capture, but the gist is this.  So much of the advice elders dinned into my once youthful and compliant head seems irrelevant now. Family expectations and exhortations (and the views and values they rested on) aimed at girding me for the precarious path to a future successful adult life. 

My elders worried, I suppose, that I might not make it to this point.  Their worry has long since been laid to rest. What remains of their counsel has transformed completely, or just fallen to the side, shards of another era. I made it. Here I am.  Except that I’m someone else.  

Why would this thought emerge now?  

I think it has to do with the irony of retirement, maybe its paradox, or even its subtext, as the literary say.  

This is pretty heavy. I’m writing an essay to try to figure it out.

My parents and grandparents were well-meaning and I don’t fault them.  They wanted happiness and security for me. They survived the Depression and World War II.  We lived together, three generations. They told their stories around our dinner table:  a job lost in New York City and pushing a Good Humor ice cream cart, dismissal from college because of debt, surviving in the Pacific during the war, a paralyzing stroke and no medical insurance, having to sell the family store and move in with relatives.

I was the only child and much beloved, listening at that table.  I absorbed these family tales.  Accounts of disaster seemed normal to me.  My elders’ history was so real to me that growing up I thought everyone had these same stories.  

My parents had scrambled on to the widening ledge of 1950s prosperity.  Their expectations for me centered on college, the education that history could snatch away at any time.  By 1959 I was on the march in my blue blazer, plaid skirt, and the Spaulding shoes of my Catholic high school uniform.  College meant the liberal arts---English and history, Latin and the classics, modern languages. Fields like sociology so popular among my girlfriends were beneath consideration.  (If I’d had any aptitude for math or sciences things might have been different.) 

Other family expectations remained hazy: a good marriage, dignified work (no real professional career), travel, maybe some artistic or creative pursuit.  By my senior year in college, I suspected that---unlike belief in education---these expectations were shaped by social convention. With no immediate prospects of attaining any of them, and graduation imminent, I began to question my life. 

I embarked on my belated rebellion.

It wasn’t hard. The upheavals of the 1960s spurred me on.  I’d missed civil rights---a bit too young. One day my English lit professor stopped his lecture to explain Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement.  I went to anti-war rallies and sat in at sit ins. Women’s issues burbled below the politics. 

I sleepwalked through some of the counterculture’s colorful enthusiasms---pot and music. Concerts at the Fillmore auditorium conveniently combined both.  The movement years waned.  Institutions I’d been raised with papered over their gaps and fissures, and hobbled on. I graduated from college but was never the same.  

I wrestled with mistakes of judgment (a difficult marriage). But the education thing perdured---a word that age and time teaches you to love.  In midlife I plunged into grad school and completed a PhD. Through dogged determination and fortuitous circumstances, I got a faculty post, and then tenure. I supported myself, raised my son, cared for my aging mother, and paid off a house. 

Academe became my home, the source of meaning and a livelihood. I hung onto it tightly, clutched it as sure and worthy.  

When I retired, friends asked about my plans. They chirped excitedly about travel and  volunteering---eager to offer ways to fill time once hogged by gainful employment. Bring satisfaction and value to retirement, people said. Give back, do more, keep active.  

That’s where the irony came in.  Other people’s enthusiasm was unnerving.  After decades of marching through education, work and profession, this pressing you to do something else disconcerted me.    

I panicked.  Untethered from a job would I drift into dissatisfaction and depression? Had I misjudged the whole 25-year rest of life thing? 

It took a year to accept this irony of retirement---that no one wants you to withdraw into quietness at all.  I’ve pretty much let that go.  My time obsession has shifted into its sister dimension.  It’s become more like space left to me---open and uncluttered, airy and agnostic.  I am learning to feel free, perhaps for the first time since adolescence.  I can explore again, without the anxious anticipation of adulthood. 

And there’s some work only I can do---understand how people and experiences changed me. I ruminate about my elders’ ideas of a successful life, chiseled in hardship and the demands of inherited social convention.  Maybe this is why the notion of their expectations surfaced in my mind.  It illumined something---that I’ve long been someone else.  It’s a paradox of retirement that now I can love my elders again, though their advice seems antique and their wisdom has transformed or just fallen away.

If there’s any subtext to retirement (a risky proposition), maybe it’s something structural.  If another phase of retired life follows this one, I won’t be surprised. But for now it’s time to get on with this inward journey.  

In dreams and in my mind’s eye I see those elders who drilled their exhortations and expectations into my young self.  Now I have the ridged nails, the crinkly skin, and the sinking chest of my hardy matrilineals. I wish they had told me more about their lives then, lives of middle age and old age, though I wouldn’t have understood.  But it’s alright.  I talk to them again.  

I’m the last of those around my family dinner table.
  

Read more essays like this one in East Village Magazine at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/en/