Michelle's Ghost Story


Halloween was last week and it brought to mind an odd incident my Sister experienced.

Mom, is second from left, with her Aunts on either side
and her Mother to the far Right. 

Our Mother died years ago. She was around just after the birth of my Sister's son but was gone before his first birthday. Mom had immense charm, a great sense of style and no financial management skill. She was petite,  blond, adorable with great legs and a penchant for antique wire framed spectacles. Mom lived to shop. Case in point:  Dad was an economist but had to declare bankruptcy after a decade of salary without taxes overseas. As a result, my Sister inherited Mom's charm, style and great legs but very little of fiduciary value. The exception were Mom's wedding and engagement rings which my Sister always wore along with her own. 

Michelle

My Sister is a costume designer. At this point in her career she was shopping for a living. All day long she would dash through Manhattan buying character appropraite designer clothes, watched as they were tried on and fitted,then dashed off to return the excess. She had effectively turned Mom's shopping defect into a creative career. Taxis were her primary transport mode. Rushing from family to fittings to Bergdorf's to Barney's and ultimately to reclaim the infant son from the babysitter. 


One day shortly after our Mother had passed on, the baby was with relatives on the East Side and Michelle with bundles of garments was on her way, by taxi, to pick him up. Since she was all over the City, she would place her "valuables", the two sets of rings, in her wallet for safekeeping. When she arrived at her in-laws, she paid the taxi, threw her half-eaten bagel lunch in a trash receptacle and went into their apartment building. Rearranging her purchases and personal property upon arrival, she reached for her wallet and realized it was gone.


First she thought of the multitude of receipts which she had to turn in for reimbursement and credits, then she thought of the cards she used to make the purchases, then she remembered the rings. The rings! Bursting into tears, she tore out of the apartment heading back to the Avenue. The only tangible thing remaining from her mother, and her own mementos. She had to find the missing wallet!. 


She first checked the trash receptacle where she had disposed of her uneaten lunch. Her in-laws would not have approved of their Daughter-in-law butt-up in the air head-down digging through trash cans on Fifth Avenue. Her discomposure was to no avail,  the bagel was located but no wallet. Thoughts raced through her mind. Perhaps she had left the wallet in the taxi? The taxi was long gone. How to contact a taxi? Wasn't there a taxi commission? Maybe she could ask a police officer; would they know? How do you find a cop when you actually want one? As she gazed wide-eyed up and down Fifth, she saw two big burley blue backs talking to a doorman on the other side of the Avenue. 


She ran across. She was about to ask how to contact a taxi... but the words which burst out of her mouth were "How did you get my wallet?" One of the policemen was holding her wallet, waving it around gesturing to his crony. The cop looked at her and said "Lady, do you have some ID?" A discussion ensued in which she clarified that she had no ID because she had no wallet because the cop was holding the item. Once she had collected her thoughts and her property, the question returned "How did you get my wallet?" The cop shrugged and hooked a thumb towards the doorman. 


As the police departed the doorman explained that a few minutes before my Sister had made her breathless entry into his building, a cute little old lady wearing a short-skirt and incongruous wire-rimmed glasses had walked in. The old lady had  handed the wallet to him and immediately departed. Michelle was dumbstruck at the coincidence of the description. She turned away and shaking her head, began to walk back to retrieve her son. The doorman shouted to her "Oh, the old lady said something - - that you should take better care of your Mother's things." 

Mother’s Day Pense

Grandson just turned two. Our Maternal event was a Sheep and Wool Festival.  The little urchin is just distinguishing  different animals; discovering and petting the sheep plus alpacas and rabbits made his day. He kept calling the goats "doggies". His  impression was reinforced as the goats climbed on chairs. It is wonderful to observe and help him explore the world and learn.

The last of the Wisteria in my garden faded and fell on Mother's Day. Each year I wait for the week of floral glory. Not only are the flowers a visual treat and the new leaves a subdued bronze but also they exude an  aroma which the soft Spring breezes spread throughout the house. Wisteria combines the best qualities of any flower and the brief display makes their beauty all the more poignant.

The rampant Wisteria vines are lovely in and of themselves but the cascading racemes of blossoms also carry a divine message to me. They present, a moral lesson about the passage of time and the need to pause and appreciate the world in the display. Flowers don't have to be beautiful. Their beauty and our ability to appreciate that beauty is my evidence of  a positive plan to the universe. 

Each year we host a Garden Party to for all our friends to enjoy the Wisteria. This year, the Wisteria peak coincided with the Grandchild's second birthday. We were able to rejoice in two wonders at once! In hindsight, his childhood will seem as fleeting as the blossoms.

Running for the Hills

For three decades I dwelled in a suburban town contentedly working for the town and rearing my Daughter. The suburban setting never appealed to me but it was ideal for a custodial parent and an independent child. She could safely wander the neighborhood, ride her bike "downtown" or take the local bus to the Mall. As she became a teen my concerns of her being out at night were not new urban panic but more in line with mid-century boys with cars.

Before I settled in the burbs I had lived and worked in Manhattan. Working with multiply-disabled in a residential /training facility taught me more than I taught the clients. After a classic Ivory Tower education and a degree in Philosophy, I needed to learn about the real essence of  humanity. My clients had none of the intellectual graces or social refinements which I'd been told were the hallmarks of character. Oh, they were characters! They were interesting unique people, full of individuality, often possessing great personal charm and in some cases really good company. One fellow would take the subway uptown to watch ballgames and play cards with my Husband. He won most of his hands, too.

My specializations in working with clients became designing behavior modification and language acquisition programs and assisting with recreational and occupation therapy. My clients were admittedly difficult personalities and forget rational discussions about moderate behavior. The behavior modification techniques I learned to work with my clients also worked very well with your more standard issue children. Normal bouncy children need to be on-task and goal-oriented too. Relatives would comment that my Daughter had no chance, no chance at all of breaking bad. [She did, I can assure you, but she was never really BAD.]  Furthermore, dealing with the more adversarial and unbalanced clients prepared me for government work. After many years of small-town politics I can only state that politicians have better social skills but are no more rational than the residents of Manhattan Development Centers.
 
Lastly, I learned patience. When you spend days training someone how to hold a button or restraining them from bashing themselves into a cinder block wall, live is put into perspective and you begin to experience each moment on it's own. A tenet of Judaic philosophy is that each day should be like a pearl, your life like a string of pearls. Acceptance of the passage of time is embodied here. The patience I learned from the intellectually stunted helped me pass 30 years in the suburbs. To pass my time I practiced occupational and recreational therapy on myself, teaching myself one handcraft after another. While my nerves were fraying, my hands were becoming adept. Recognizing that the bustle of the city was no longer the best place for me, I found a cottage in the mountains, just a train ride from my home town. Here I shall stay patiently refining my artisan skills, designing and making crafts.  

The Eidos of Table, part one

A century ago when I was in school studying the great books and pondering the nature of Western civilization, there were long Socratic seminars about the perfect forms or eidos. While Plato intended the concept to indicate the perfect good or virtue, we always ended up talking about the perfect form and virtue of a table, making grand gestures over the conference tables around which we sat. When I first saw the life-edge tables made by George Nakashima, my thought was these are truly the eidos of table. The matched slabs of tree with the voids retained are a perfect combination of woodworking technique and practical function while maintaining a clear lineage to the original tree. Throughout my adult life I have yearned to have and use a Nakashima table. His furniture is highly sought and highly valued, not within my reach or in my price range.

When I became involved with and ultimately married a skilled woodworker, I would respond to Holiday and birthday wish lists with "a Nakashima table". This was a running joke for decades. Eventually we found a cabin in the mountains and he built a nice workshop. If we could find a good old-fashioned lumber yard, perhaps we could find the kind of interesting book-matched lumber similar to that which Nakashima used. At the local town hall we ran across a booklet promoting local wood products, in the booklet one name, Aldenville Log and Lumber, occurred in every category. We set our GPS to the rural location and set off for a day trip to nowhere. After an hour of driving as we passed the center of a large reservoir, the GPS instructed us to turn here! Not quite, we decided to try past the reservoir and in doing so found our destination. If you appreciate the natural beauty of  wood, the skill of turning logs into lumber or the methods of ecological manufacturing you will appreciate Aldenville Log and Lumber. [http://www.avlumber.com/] The owner, Dan Droppa, was in and proudly gave us a tour of his facilities. Three drying barns were in service and they were in the process of building an experimental drying facility. Raw lumber came from his own and local forests. When he had bought the Mill, lumber was cured using oil heat. He had switched the kilns to using sawdust by-products rather than imported fuel. This was a facility with which you wanted to do business.

As we toured the kilns, marveling at stacked Walnut slabs 4 inches thick and three feet wide, we explained that we were more or less looking for live-edge boards, book matched in Cherry. He said he thought there could be a few such boards in another kiln. As we walked into the last kiln, I saw a stack of sliced tree with an interesting branch void at one end. Hmm, "What's this? - - Oh, forgot about that one."  It was a 10 foot long, foot and a half wide Cherry log, sawn into eight 2" thick sequential slices. The two center book-matched slices featured a void where a branch joint had been. The contour of the log would make a perfect table with a classic Nakashima gap along the join. We obtained four slices of that tree, the two center cuts for the table top and two more for future matching accessory pieces. For the butterflies to stabilize the top, Bird's Eye Maple and for the stringers to stabilize the bottom, more Cherry.  Dan's staff dropped everything they were doing to trim, finish and load our lumber. Aldenville Log and Lumber treated like important clients not a couple of craftsmen on a weekend junket.