Getting Here Part X: God But A Heartbeat Away

Perhaps the direction of my life in the first half of the 1970s was reflected in my changing look. At the beginning of that decade I had a certain fresh-face look. My hair was trimmed from what it was in our Hippie phase

As I slipped further into a life of pleasure-seeking and anger at those who criticized such living my look darkened. I let my hair grow out again and also stopped shaving.

By 1974 I appeared quite the anarchist.  I was also now in even another job and we had made two more changes of address. Since leaving ARCo in May 1969 I had worked for Philadelphia Gum as a bubblegum welder, North American Publishing Company as circulation manager, Lincoln bank as Operations Accounting Supervisor and Olson Brothers as Office Manager and Cost Accountant.  Now I was a year with Welded Tube Company of America as Assistant Controller.

We had given up our apartment in Aldan because Olson Brothers was planning to relocate in New Jersey. We moved to the Cherry Hill Towers to be closer to the new factory, but then Olson's folded operations instead and I found a new job and we moved to Chalet at Ski Mountain, on the edge of Pine Hill and near Clementon, NJ.

We continued our friendship with the couple from Aldan and so there was little change in our lifestyle. However we ended the visits with the other couple because Lois was suspecting they were hinting we do engage in wife-swapping. Also in those years we lost two more babies in the early months of pregnancy. Lois was having more pronounced periods of depression. I was urging her to have her tubes tied before her health suffered.

We traveled a lot, went to concerts a lot, drank a lot and engaged in risky sexual behavior. Then in 1975 on one of our vacation trips I noticed she was getting sick in the mornings. She finally told me she was pregnant again, number seven.

The doctor was dubious, but did his best. I don't think he performed a Shirodkar procedure again, but can't remember for certain. Lois did have this procedure performed previously because it was determined she had an incompetent cervix, but it proved unsuccessful and that baby was lost. Nonetheless, things were looking okay this time. She made it through the fourth month and was well into the fifth, but then it happened. She told me she felt she was going to lose it and I took her to the hospital.

They put her in a labor room and hooked up an IV drip. They hoped to retard the labor and give the baby time to develop further. She was alone in this room for nearly a week. Every day after work I came and sat with her.

On a table near her bed there was a monitor. It recorded the babies heartbeat. Do you know when a heartbeat is first detectable? In the fourth week of the fetus the heart can be heard. At that point the brain is forming its five sections and all the vital organs have formed. The baby is a human from the moment of fertilization, which is the point when it has all the DNA to determine its makeup and from conception the sex of the baby is known. From that point it is dividing and developing and two weeks after that it has a face.

Much of the time spent in that room there was silence, but not completely. There was the sound of the baby's heartbeat all the time. It sounded strong. It sounded like someone who was fighting very hard to live. 

Near the end of that week the doctors had to allow the labor to proceed and a baby girl was born doomed to die. We would have named her Amy. 

I was sent to a waiting room while that delivery and death took place. I sat in the waiting room and somehow I could still hear that beating heart. I know it is hard for some to understand, but every beat I imagined told me there was a God. Hearing that baby struggling to live made me understand that life could not have been just a chance accident. I didn't know exactly what God was, but I could not do anything at that moment but believe in a creator. 

When we went home, once again just the two of us, it was with a feeling of great emptiness. My wife was as low as I ever saw her. She didn't want to get out of bed. She was crying. She talked of suicide.
I did not know what to do. 

I found myself making a suggestion I never thought I'd make. It would change my life.

To be continued...

The last picture is a fetus at 15 weeks.

Getting Here Part V: Desolation Row

The first few years of our life together went rather smoothly. Both of us were doing well on our jobs. There were promotions and raises. Outside of work we were enjoying something of the good life. Besides eating out regularly, going to dances at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown and plays at the Valley Forge Music Fair we traveled. We went to Gettysburg, toured Virginia and spend several days in New York staying at the Waldorf-Astoria (that is Lois pictured there on the left in 1962).

Also in the year we got married I won runner-up in the Writer's Digest Writing Contest. My desire was to become a self-sustaining author. I spent as much time writing as I could. Typically we would get home from work, have dinner and I would disappear into the den to write for the evening. I would come back down around ten and we would talk (or other things) until the wee hours of the morning. We were young, sleep didn't seem high on our list of things to do.

We could always talk. We talked most of the time on our dates. The other thing we could always do was sex. I was a virgin when we got engaged, but I admit I wasn't when we married. There was no way either of us could restrain ourselves for that whole year. We took any opportunity alone to go at each other. This sometimes had funny results. One time we were at my home and my mother and grandmother left for some church function. My dad was on the road somewhere. We waited until mom's car went down the road and then we began undressing. We just reached the state of au natural when we heard the kitchen door open and my mother coming through the house calling my name. We quickly began pulling on clothes. My mom knocked on my bedroom door and I had to let her in. She said they had forgotten something and then they left again.  At the time Lois wore a pair of leopard spotted pedal-pushers. I turned around with a sign of relief and saw her pants were on inside out.

So when Lois became pregnant two years after we married it was sooner than we wished, but hardly surprising. We were concerned about the financial implications, but these were outweighed by the prospect of parenthood.

In August 1963 Lois was home from work. I am not certain why she didn't go in that day. She was in her fifth month of term. I got a call from her later that morning. She said she was losing the baby and asked me to come home.  I asked if she had called the doctor.

"Yes, " she said, " I told him I was going into labor. He said that was impossible. He would send something from the drugstore for my pain and not to bother him again."

I said, "I'm coming home right away."

I said it, but knew right away was not going to happen. I left work immediately, but I still had to walk to the train station, catch the next train, which might mean up to a half hour wait and ride it for an hour, then drive the last few miles. When I finally walked in she was in our bedroom. I entered and she was shivering on the bed. There was blood.

"I'm sorry," she said and began to cry.

"Where is it?" I asked.

It was in the bathroom in a basin. It was a boy. We would have named him Sean.

I called the doctor and he came. He wasn't happy about coming. He went into the bedroom, was there a few minutes and came out.

"How is she?" I asked.

"She'll be fine," he said.

"What should we do with the baby?" I asked.

He brushed by me. "You can throw in the garbage for all I care," he said and left.

I was stunned. Lois went back to work in a few days, but she came home upset and depressed. Despite her own ordeal no one gave her much sympathy. They were too busy talking about and feeling sorry for Jackie Kennedy, who had just lost a premature baby two days after its birth.

Her depression was understandable, but it was a harboring of something that would increase as the years went by that had no relationship to this loss. It is still not clear if this physical loss was a factor in those that would be loss in the future.

Meanwhile, my life had also changed. A fellow my age had started working in my unit and we became friends. He had been going to Temple University on a football scholarship, but gotten injured and loss his grant. He couldn't afford the tuition, but he was now working during the day and going to college at night. I didn't know such a thing as evening college existed. I thought you had to go to a campus and live in a dorm and spend big bucks to attend university. He suggested I try it.

That summer I enrolled at Temple as a non-matriculating student. I took Introduction to Sociology with plans to major in that field if I though I could handle college. I got straight A's in the course and the professor told me I should definitely enroll that fall. I did, taking as many credit hours as allowed to a part-time student. By September I was working full time, often with overtime, and going to school three nights a week. I still tried to squeeze in writing everyday and keep up my time with Lois.

During this same year Ronald finished his term of service with the Army and moved back to the area. He took an apartment in a nearby town and invited Lois and me to dinner. We had a great evening talking about old times. Toward the end of the evening Ronald told us something which at first we didn't quite understand.  He said he had gone to a club in Philadelphia. The address had been given him by a friend. He didn't think he would go, but he did. There were only men in the club and during the night they danced with each other. He danced, too, and he enjoyed it and thought he would go back. He left it at that. It wasn't until Lo and I discussed this that we grasped what he was telling us.

I refused to believe it at first. When we were double-dating during high school I always thought Ron was the most awkward guy I had seen around girls, but I never thought it more than a deep shyness. Homosexuality was not talked about much in the period I grew up. I knew it existed. Guys at school would call someone they didn't like "queer" as the ultimate insult. The only other information I had was from sleazy magazines were homosexuals were either blackmailed or beaten up. I became concerned for Ronald, fearing these things would happen to him. I wrote him a letter. We had an exchange of letters and I in my naiveté and he in a period of sensitivity mistook what we said to each other and as a result stopped speaking.

At this time I discovered an odd thing. When I would get into a conversation with people at work I would begin to shake. I was all right when discussing business, but if the conversation turned to other things and became serious I felt my body was quivering and that I couldn't control my speech. I decided to do something about it and went to a clinic and met with a psychologist. I didn't tell my parents because they would have had a fit. Psychologists and psychiatrists were people only insane people visited. Anyone who went to one for therapy was stigmatized in their world. But I didn't feel this way. I knew I had to do something before this shaking I felt interfered with my job.

The Psychologist was almost a caricature. He resembled Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H (pictured right), the bushy hair and mustache. He wore jeans with one of those corded sports coats with the leather patches on the elbows. Invariably he would enter, sit down and plop his feet up on his desk. He wore these causal shoes with thick crepe soles. I did most of the talking. He asked if I had any recurring dreams. I said I often dreamt I was being chased by a bull or a gorilla. He said these dreams meant I hated my father. O-o-o-k-a-a-ay? My father and I didn't have the best relationship, but I didn't think I hated him. He really took interest when I mentioned buying several books on homosexuality. I explained about Ronald, my fears of what might happen to him and that I wanted to understand it. He decided my concerns about my long-time best friend indicated I was homosexual. If there was one thing  I knew for sure, I was not a homosexual. I stopped going to the clinic.

Oddly, my feelings of shaking during conversations stopped at that point.

These years, though, continued to be a yo-yo of ups and downs. Lois seemed to revive from her loss of Sean all right, but she was beginning to have some paranoia about the neighbors and an occasional bout of depression or migraine that laid her up. Then one day she came home and said she had been fired.

She said there was office politics going on and some manager were trying to "get her boss" and somehow that resulted in her being terminated. Whatever the reason, we now had a financial problem. Our income was more than cut in half because she was actually making more than I was. We went from having luxuries to not being able to meet our monthly bills. After several months we decided we had to sell the house.

We put the house up. There was a real estate slump at the time. Worse, we came under physical threat. A neighbor saw an African-American couple visit the house and the next thing we had a delagation of our "friendly" neighbors threatening to break all the windows in our house if we dared consider selling to a black person. I told our realtor we would sell to anyone who wanted to buy the place. This did not exactly ease the tension, but maybe it sped up the sale. The realtor suddenly found a white couple who purchased the house almost immediately after this confrontation. We sold at a slight loss.

We moved in with my father-in-law, possibly one of the biggest mistakes of my life, but we were naive and didn't know what else to do at the time. It was to be one more address on our journey down Desolation Row.

TO BE CONTINUED...

A Lost Year; A Year of Losses

When I was a child a Billy Wilder film won the Academy Award. It was "The Lost Weekend". I didn't see it during the first screenings. I was only four years old. I saw it years later, probably on TV and it became a favorite that I viewed several times over. I even read the novel it was based upon. The autobiographical novel was written by Charles R. Jackson.

For those not familiar with the story it concerns a young alcoholic writer's five-day drinking binge. During this period he descends lower and lower into the gutter, hocking his typewriter for booze money and ending up in the DT ward of Bellevue.

My lost year was nothing quite like that and certainly had nothing to do with alcohol. It mostly came about by events beyond my control.

'Twenty-twelve was bad from the get-go. I had become dissatisfied with the direction my church was going and left it a few months earlier and the job I had at the end of 2011 left me. Thus I began the year unemployed and somewhat adrift spiritually. I am a Christian, a true believer in the salvation of Jesus and the truth of the Bible, but when disconnected from a body of brothers and sisters in Christ tends to drift backward into my sins. I began the year already with a sense of lost...and with a feeling of nausea.

I was sick most of January. I hadn't been really ill in years, couldn't remember the last time. It must have been back in the days I worked at Wilmington Trust, back in the last millennium. But I began 2012 sick.  It went away after a week, took a little Carrabean cruise or something, then by late February returned to make me sick again twice over.

Not long into the first month of the year I also lost my ability to take the long walks that generally began my days. These are times of reflection as well as physical exercise. I can get away into the quite of our many parks and clear my mind. But one morning early on I awoke with a grapefruit in my left knee or what appeared to be some sort of bulbous melon.

It really hurt with one of those pains that doesn't go away no matter what you do. Lying down, standing up or sitting, the knee throbbed away. I could barely hobble about the house upon it and driving a car was pure agony. I couldn't ben tie my own shoes.  I certainly wasn't going to be hiking up any rocky trails in the Piedmont.

As we shuffled moaning into the drear days of February the grapefruit began to deflate. Healing came slowly, but came. My knees began to match each other, ugly twins indeed, but neither bloated or painful. But my ankle was.

As if he had been displaced by bursitis, angry man Author Itis returned taking vengeance upon my ankles. I still could not walk. I had to bear a few more weeks of agony, but by the Ides of March I too was marching forth with something of my normal gate. It seemed I was about to resume the life I had become use to living.

Then on the first Wednesday of April the phone rang at about 9:00 AM and my way of life simply disappeared. Caller ID id'd my parents number. They never called me this early in the day. My first thought was, "dad died". It was going to be the call I had anticipated for the last couple of years, but when I answered it was my dad's gravelly voice that answered back.

"Your mother's had a stroke. I want you ta come up here." (Pictured left, my dad and mom on one of the last days of their lives.)

Thus began a seven month period where I disappeared into handling my parent's affairs, seeking a nursing home that could care for them both, dealing with the slow moving government agencies and then with the deaths of first my mother and then my dad with a two week period.

By that point my wife's own health was a concern, our financial situation was deteriorating and two of my favorite cats also died. I also lost my Blog domain names.

I lost the Blog domains because Wilmington Trust had been taken over by another bank, which issued all new cards. My old Wilmington Trust MasterCard became this bank's Visa. My domain names meanwhile came up for renewal in mid-summer and dealing as I was as my parents now, I forgot to revise my automatic payment info. The Domain licenser's payment request was denied against my old now invalid card.

I did not find this out until months later, of course, because I had stopped writing. I am hoping I have reached a point I can write again.

This has become a lost year in a way and a year of many losses. But in the midst of all this pain and turmoil I found prayers answered and assurance that God was always nearby. I found a new church and a new spirit. I learned that what we cling to so tightly in this world can very daily slip away. I saw how material possessions disappear in the wink of an eye as I had to dispose of my parents belonging to meet the requirements of Medicaid. When the died all that was left were a few boxes of clothing, which I donated to Goodwill.

I saw this lesson again this December as I joined the Disaster Relief Team at my new church and spent weekends doing mud-outs in homes flooded during Hurricane Sandy. All the possessions of the owners ruined and stacked haphazardly on the sidewalk for trash pickup. The houses empty shells.

You sometimes suffer in this world and you can easily slip into self-pity, then you step out into the places where others have suffered even more and you understand why we must lend a hand to our neighbor.

This was a lost year and a year of losses for many, but as for me, I know even more that God has my back and God can lift me up.



PSALM 116: VERSES 1-8 (KJV) 

I love the Lord, because He has heard
My voice and my supplications.

Because He has inclined His ear to me,
Therefore I will call upon Him as long as I live.

The pains of death surrounded me,
And the pangs of Sheol laid hold of me;
I found trouble and sorrow.
 Then I called upon the name of the Lord:
“O Lord, I implore You, deliver my soul!”

 Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;
Yes, our God is merciful.
 The Lord preserves the simple;
I was brought low, and He saved me.
 Return to your rest, O my soul,
For the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.

 For You have delivered my soul from death,
My eyes from tears,
And my feet from falling.

                    

Tears

It is a little more than two weeks past six months since my life was no longer mine. On April Fools my mother was struck down by a moment eruption of a tiny vain deep in the brain. 

The call came early. My mother never called me in the morning. But the voice on the other end was not my mother, but my father and my father never called. “Your mother had a stroke,” he said. This was not the script we wrote. The call that had been expected since his heart attack a couple years back would be of his passing, not one of my mother’s failing. He was supposedly the weak one and she the caretaker. And now I was the caretaker of both by some odd reversal of nature. It never should be that the child becomes parent to the parents.

These six months have been ones of suffering for them, who lived so long, perhaps beyond a reasonable age. But the will to keep on keeping on is strong within us, even when our bodies have begun to desert our souls and hope is only that the suffering might end.

The world that surrounds us can be sympathetic, but is inefficient and slow moving. The gears of bureaucracy move slower than the fingers of beckoning death. And while you wait for these instruments of government and care to turn and click on you see all the trappings of their lives dissolve away, until finally and mercifully they too slip off in the night

BRIDE

She comes all winter warmth
Swathed in clinging frost
And diaphanous gloom.
Her smile of frozen teeth
And her eyes of icy ponds
Send shivers through the room.

We think of death as skeletal,
Cowled with cloak of black
Hunched like some old farmer
Over his scythe and sack
To cut and carry us to our doom,
But no, death is not the groom.

Death comes dressed in marriage veil,
In a snow white bridal gown
With a long icicle train.
Our final vows are sealed by one
Who doesn’t steal, but stills our heart
With a lover’s kiss that ends all pain.

On September 23 my mother felt that kiss and her soul went to The Father, shedding the ravaged body and leaving dad alone.

He wanted to be there to the end, holding her hand as he had for those days before, telling her he loved her so she knew as if she didn’t all ready. But fate and failing lungs carried him from her in the end and he could not be there then. I held her hand that afternoon and told her everything on earth was done and in place and she should not worry anymore and said goodnight. And on that good night she died within the quarter hour before the clock struck eleven.

And he came back to the room they shared during the week after he found her gone and he was too frail to attend at her final resting, to see her body off, to gather up like flowers the regrets and love of long time friends and relatives.

This past Monday dad seemed strong as if he would continue on for many more days and months. Then yesterday all that changed into a gurgle in his throat and a weakness in his body. I could hardly believe it was the same man I had sat next to in the day room the other day as I stood with my wife beside his bed today. He seemed to have shrunk, his breath a gasp and rattle, his eyes wandering up as if seeking escape. He tried to talk, but I could not understand what he was trying to say. He was grasping at the cover over him and I did not know what he was reaching for.

Then at one point as I leaned over trying to hear I did hear what may have been his last distinct words. He said, “Thank you,” which were words my father never seemed to find in his vocabulary before. 

And last evening, October 11, 2012 my father died within the quarter hour before 11:00, within the same time as his wife, the love of his life, the woman they told me he was reaching out for yesterday, had passed. She called for him and he went.

It has been just over six months and in all that time I didn’t cry. There was too much to do for tears. It is 3:38 AM on the 12th of October and now the tears have been coming, in bursts and fits and waterfalls all the last few hours. Now the six months of tears have burst through the dam and flood me.

All is gone now. Willy and Milly have passed beyond the scope of this world. Their house is sold, now the possession of another. All their worldly goods are gone as well. There is nothing left of them except the memories and the feelings they left with others. That is enough, is it not? 

This ordeal has drawn me closer to The Lord and it has taught me many things. Three weeks ago I prayed intently about these things and these passings were God’s mercy both to my parents and to me. 

Take from my parents whatever they left within your hearts, but also see the truth of where our treasure must be for as Job said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”

WHERE THE RAINBOWS END

We begin this journey of life

Down a road we do not yet know.

We see the blossoms of the moment,

Costumed in dancing colors

That entice us like the bees,

To their perfumed petal traps

And we lust to gain their beauty,

 To glisten like the rose after a rain.

We watch the sun rise upon the distance city,

Turning the towers of glass to gold,

Shimmering like a river of riches

And our eyes serve us our breakfast of “wants”

Sprinkled with the sweet sugar of excess.

We glutton for the fat of the land.

Our stressed hearts beat faster

As the grasp of our hands

Fills our veins with the empty

Calories of success.

We ignore the storms of warning

That dare darken our skies and the path

To our ever bigger car and grander house.

We fill our rooms with knick-knacks

To gorge our obese egos

And we ignore the dust specks of reality

That swirls about the air to settle

Lightly upon our treasures

As if in echo of some ancient tome.

Not Home Sweet Home,

But ashes to ashes and

Dust to dust.

We do not see the light for the shimmer.

Our eyes are always to the rainbow,

An illusion of sun and water,

A trick of diffusion

And a lure to delusion.

We cannot own the colors,

But can we the Pot of Gold at its end?

But where the rainbow ends

Lies the mire of despair and truth.

When we reach the distance touchdown point

The rainbow fades away

With all we ever gathered

And we are left naked before the eyes of God.

A Wanderer At Journey's End

Death is all around me. It is like a heavy fog that will not lift. It covers me like a blanket at night and a cloak during the day.

Last Friday we buried the body of my mother and yesterday, October 2 on his 94th birthday, my dad entered Hospice Care for his last journey.

And last night at 11:54 PM another journey came to an end. Hobo Joe died.

I do not know what his original name was nor how old he was. He had belonged to someone at sometime. He was neutered and housebroken and for a large cat genteel with people. A Snowshoe Cat we believe, my daughter said he had Siamese in him because of the shape of his head, and he had those large white feet. If so, it was an apt breed for we first saw him in the storms of 2010, those blizzards that hit that year and buried us in feet of snow.

He came wandering into our yard every day a-sudden during that chill time. He would look at you and vocalize, but then hurry off into the brush. Our own cat, Brad, a Houdini of a cat, escaped the house for a while and the two of them were often somewhat distant companions hunched against the winter background. We finally corralled Brad and now this large black cat was alone again.

All that winter and that spring he haunted our yard at times. We put food out for him, but he was caution to any approach. Until one May evening, just when my daughter arrived home from work. It was a pleasant warm late afternoon and my wife, Lois, was working on the bushes before the house when the cat appeared in the drive. Lois sat down upon the stoop and called to him and he looked over. Eventually he ambled close and let her stroke his head and he didn't flee when my daughter pulled in and came up the walk. Laurel, who is a VetTech used to working with cats scruffed him and carried him into our home. We placed him in the bathroom with a cat bed and he settle upon it and slept.

This lost wanderer had a new home and a new name, Hobo Joe.

He quickly adapted to the family. He was the biggest cat and not mean, but assertive. None of the others were about to give this stranger any trouble.

One summer night not long after, my son came home carrying a scruffy, scared, starving kitten he had rescued from the parking lot where he worked. He named the kitten, barely weaned, Kerouac. For what ever reason, Hobo Joe took this kitten under his wing. It was if they were father and son and they forever bonded.

I have been stoic through these harsh few months and days, but I almost lost it this morning when Hobo  managed to walk feebly down our hallway toward the kitchen, as he always did when I got up. He lay down halfway to rest. He suddenly flopped over and I had thought he was gone, but when I touched him, he got back onto his haunches in that positions cats often take. It was then that Kerouac came over and began to groom him.

Somewhat later I placed him on a little carrier bed and took him into the living room to be with me. Kerouac came over and lay down a few feet away as if in vigil for his adopted father. That is when I took the photo at the top of this post, Hobo Joe laying halfway between Kerouac and the light at the end of the tunnel of his life.

I had to go and tend to my own father in the afternoon and expected Hobo would be gone when I returned, but he was still alive. I was with them last night until the end.

Hobo Joe was one of my favorites. He was one of the three that always greeted me when I awoke in the morning, the same three who would be waiting at the door every time Lois and/or I would come home from somewhere, our little welcoming committee of Mark, Kerouac and Hobo Joe. Now it is diminished by one.

I will miss him, he was with us such a short time.  Rest in piece, your hobo days are done.

To My Mom 1920 - 2012

My mother suffered a stroke on April 1, 2012. Before that day she had been independent, albeit sometimes using a cane. She was caretaker to my dad. The stroke was in the Pons area of her brain stem. It took away the use of her left hand and left leg and led to a feeding tube inserted in her side. So she loss her ability to walk and eat, and to do much handling of things. The speech was unaffected.

Her mind was clear and focused until the end. During the last few days when she was actively dying this brought even the experiences Hospice nurses to tears. One told me this was the darkest thing because my mother was aware and responsive to everything going on and most people by that stage were not.

My father sat beside her bed holding her hand those last few days. On Sunday morning he had a build up of fluid in his lungs and they took him to the hospital.

I sat with her Sunday afternoon and held her hand. I told her not to worry about anything. All was taken care of and under control. I told her I loved her and bid her goodnight.

She died at approximately 10:45 Sunday evening September 23, 2012.

Dad holding mom's hand the day before the end.

I want to tell a story and a last lesson my mother taught me about what we should value.

My mother was born in 1920 and her growing up was not in a home her parents owned. There was a prominent family named Thomas, one of the founding families of the Quaker Track in Chester County, Pennsylvania called Whiteland. My mother’s family was tenants on George Thomas III’s estate “Whitford”, in an old white house back of a pond. The “big house” she called it. There was a Blacksmith Shop down the lane from them. That smithy was still working when I was a boy.

She was nine when the Great Depression began and it lasted until she was a grown woman. The family had some hard times. My mother said one of her fondest memories of childhood was every Christmas Mr. Thomas would come to the house and give her a new pair of gloves.

Her dad pulled weeds for a dollar a day. The average America salary was $26 a week, he was making five or six. Her mother became a maid for the wealthier in West Chester and at some point teenage mom labored in the dark of a Mushroom plant, while dreaming of being a motion picture star.

She even entered a talent search for an unknown to play Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind”, but she didn’t win. Somebody named Vivian Leigh got the part. The movie premiered in 1938 and in that year a friend asked mom to go on a moonlight cruise with her, her boyfriend and a friend of his. That’s where she met her Rhett Butler back 74 years ago. He was this tall, wavy haired fellow known as Wild Bill.

He must have thought this little 5 foot one, 98-pound redhead was something, because he’d walk the 15 miles from Modena to Whitford to see her, sometimes sleeping on her porch before walking home again.

Just before they married in 1940 he lost his job and after the wedding they were so poor she went to her home to live and he to his. And so they lived separated the first month of their marriage and except for World War II that was the last time Milly and Willie weren’t together until she left him last Sunday night.

On Monday, when a nice lady from the Hospice went with my daughter and I to the hospital and told dad mom was gone, he quoted Scripture to us. There was once a day when no one would have believed that Wild Bill would ever quote Scripture. It was right after he said, “She was the love of my life and I will miss her.” It was part of a verse from Hebrews. He said, “Well, it says don't it, it’s appointed to every man to die? And now she’s better.”

My daughter, Laurel, and I brought her things home from Pembrooke (the nursing home) that same day, five cartons. Five Cartons was all that was left of what she gathered in her 92 years, mostly clothes, which we donated to Goodwill. All her worldly goods are gone. And it made me think of Matthew 6: 19-20, and made vivid the truth of that Scripture. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth… store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”

But she did have some valuable treasures here as well. She had a group of friends, who loved enough to care for her and dad these last years and see them thought when they couldn’t always do for themselves. Thank you and bless you all for loving my mother.

And she had a man who even after 72 years of marriage insisted on sitting by her side all her final days holding her hand.

I spent a few minutes alone with mom on the Wednesday afternoon after she passed. It was a sneak preview just for her son of the girl who once dreamed of being a movie star before her final last staring role on Friday. I told her not to worry; dad would be by her side soon.

And they can enjoy their Heavenly treasures together.

R.I.P. Mom.

Seven: The Number of Completeness

And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature. Romans 13:11-14

(Left: my wife and I in 1975)

THE 1960s

Our Years of Protest and Anger

My wife on the left, was to be the vocalist in our band, "Ethereal", music by Jim (with bongos), lyrics by me (holding guitar).

Those weren't costumes, we actually dressed that way.

THE EARLY 1970s

Parties, Sex and Booze

B. and W. in rare photo - fully clothed

This is not the case with the Polaroid photos on the sheet W. holds in his hand. 

J. (far left) and L. (far right), friends through both periods, part of the Hippie group, a writer and later Vietnam war hero. They named their first child after me.

My wife and I are in the center. The little chest on the table next to my wife held a canister of Scotch and a canister of Wild Turkey Bourbon.

There was a well-stocked bar somewhere in the room, our idea of high sophistication. 

New Years in the Poconos. We and nine other couples use to rent a lodge each Christmas week. This was actually a good time. Despite the toasting, there was little drinking. Mostly we went sledding, ice boating and popped popcorn in the fireplace. Note there were children present. Several of the other couples were social workers and longtime friends of my wife's back to high school. 

One of several parties with V. and M. V. is playing my guitar. Another gathering where mostly sanity prevailed. Note again the presences of children. V. was from the Caribbean and of African-Indian decent. The couple with the child on the right were Jewish. M.'s foot is on the left, she was a "good" Catholic Jersey Girl. 

New Year's Eve 1974 with G. and B. No children here. There was a lot of booze.

This seemed to be our fate at this point, just drift along in life having parties and not much caring about anything else. 

We did not know with the dawn next day came a year which would change our whole perception of life.

By 1975 I would say we were in a state of resignation. The old associations and activities were left behind. I had been through three different jobs and as many addresses within three years. In 1972 we had moved to New Jersey because the company I worked for was going to build there. Instead it folded.  In 1973 I began work with a steel fabricator in South Philadelphia as an assistant bookkeeper. By the end of that year I was the assistant controller and by 1976 I would also become the systems manager. In 1974 I quit going to night college and stopped sending out manuscripts, seeing my last piece published that year in "Animal Lovers Magazine". We were also now living in a nice modern luxury apartment at Ski Mountain. 

I was also resigned to the fact we would never have children. This didn't seem so bad. We were unencumbered. Outside of work it was all play with friends or going to concerts and taking trips. Life had become something of a continuous party and a little bit of risk taking. As far as the Ten Commandments, if I thought of them at all, it wasn't that we were breaking them.

The first four didn't count anyway, since I didn't believe in God. I certainly didn't have any gods before or behind him. I was my own god, although I didn't think of it that way. I didn't have some complex, it was just that I was the only thing I really believed in and relied on. As far as taking his name in vain, well, I never had been a curser. I just didn't vocally blaspheme, so I figured I was pretty good on that one. And I rested on Sundays. I wasn't any too certain what keeping the Sabbath meant. If it meant going to church, then I didn't keep it. I didn't worry about it either.

Honor our mother and father, certainly, we kept on good terms with our parents, if at arm's length. They certainly felt more comfortable about us now that we had shed that Hippie persona. They didn't know anything about the sex and drinking.

We hadn't murdered anyone. We might have wished a few people drop dead, but hey, everybody does that!

Although we had a sex-oriented relationship with another couple, we weren't having physical sex with either of them. I had never had sex with anyone other than the woman I married. Oh, I had opportunities, but never took advantage. My wife said this was because I was too naive to know when a woman was coming on to me. I like to think I was just too honorable to commit adultery.

I hadn't stole anything since those "girlie magazines" when I was 13. I was honest. If someone gave me the wrong change in my favor, I pointed it out and gave back the difference.

I didn't tell lies about other people and I didn't envy anyone.

In my humble opinion I was a good guy. I certainly wasn't a sinner. Sin was doing things that hurt people, like stealing. The things we did weren't hurting anyone. They weren't any one's business. 

But why was my wife depressed so often and why did I have a constant feeling of dissatisfaction?

What we needed were a few more adventures. (I'd prefer not to go into some things. Let's just say we did things not made for the family channel.)

Then coming out of a coal mine tour in Central Pennsylvania during a vacation trip, my wife said; "Honey, I think I'm pregnant again."

Yes, she was. And baby number seven wasn't going to be anymore lucky than the six brothers and sisters that preceded her. Amy was going to be born in month five and die just like Sean and Michael. The other four miscarried before getting that far.

[Do you know what babies look like when born too soon?

Babies.

Back when we lost our babies, five months was too soon. Today a lot of those lost children would have lived. Human life begins at conception and it ain't above my pay grade to tell you that!]

Oh well, I'd been down this road before. We'd get over it. Except Amy was a fighter. They put my wife in a labor room of the hospital and did what they could to stall off birth. They had a monitor that registered the baby's heart beat. It was a strong beat. It stayed strong the whole week my wife was in that labor room and I was by her side every day after work. My wife was drugged up and often drifted in and out of sleep. I sat sometimes for hours in a silent room except for that beat...beat...beat...beat. 

Once upon a time, a decade before, a strange cross had appeared on the wall of my bedroom when I thought I was dying. I had forgotten that cross. I couldn't forget the beat...beat...beat. It was so determined. And when I was alone at home after the visits, I could not get that heartbeat out of my mind and I realized that God had to exist. I sure wasn't god. There wasn't a thing I could do for that baby or for my wife. I could only listen to the beat of life. And in that beating I knew there was something greater than me, greater than us all.

When the day came they could not stall any longer, labor was induced and Amy died. When the beat stopped it was to be the beginning of the deepest valley I ever saw my wife enter. And although I felt as helpless in rescuing her as I had felt about saving that baby I knew something had survived and was alive in me, a belief in God.

To be continued: An Oasis in the Valley of Death

And The Attacks Scale Upward

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade—kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.1 Peter 1: 3-7

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. Romans 5:1-5

When last we saw our intrepid hero, he was dangling over the cliff of unemployment by his fingertips with a baby in one arm. I had been sending out what seemed like hundreds of resumes and being sent on wild goose chases by an employment agency with whom I had signed. It reached July 1980 and I had received no positive feedback. I felt the medical center might be regretting telling me I could stay until I found something. Perhaps I felt that way because they were now hinting...well, telling...me I must be gone by September. 

Near month end, I got a call from a large bank in Delaware. 

Delaware? They had banks in Delaware? I had been in Delaware off and on during my life, but always on the way elsewhere. I didn't see Delaware as a place where people actually lived. It was a little state you went through to Maryland, Virginia or other points south. But indeed, in the flutter of resumes I had mailed, I had answered a newspaper ad for this bank in Delaware. It was for a job as Financial Analyst. I had never been a Financial Analyst, but I had once worked in a bank and I knew how to add up figures on a ledger sheet. I mean, how much more did I need to know?

I drove the forty-five minute trip from our PA. home to Delaware. This was my first time in Wilmington and it seemed to be all one way streets all going the opposite way than I needed to go. Good thing I left extra time. I found a lot to park in and walked back and found the building on Tenth Street.

My meeting was on the sixth floor, which was really the seventh floor, unless you counted the mezzanine, then it was the eight floor. (I don't know what distinguished it as a mezzanine -- lower ceilings, perhaps.) It is this way in the buildings down here. All the first floors are on the second floor. All the actual first floors are called Street Floor. (We don't count the one, two or three below ground floors as floors, just as basements.) 

My meeting with Mister K., who was Vice-president of Finance at the time, seemed to go well until his last sentence.

"I'm not sure Financial Analyst is the right position for you..." Well, that wasn't too encouraging. "But we have this new position in another department that might be right."

So he took me to talk to Double W. Double W was 11 years my senior and Vice-president over what was called Deposit Services and Data Preparation. There was a chemistry between us. We liked each other at once and he took me to meet the Assistant-vice-presidents of his three sections, who preceded to fire questions at me. At the end of this, he thanked me and said he'd be in touch.

A few days later, he called and said his staff liked me and things looked good. I just needed to meet his boss. He set up a luncheon appointment.

I traveled down again and we ate in the Brandywine Room of the Hotel DuPont, a restaurant full of dark wood. His boss was Mister C., Senior Vice-president of Operations. Once again I fielded a bunch of questions and felt it had went well. They would get back to me.

Once again, Double-W called me and told me he wanted me for the job. A few details had to be worked out and then he'd let me know when I would start. Great, I went into the medical Center and informed them I was going to a new job. They said, great and good bye, nice to have known you and my medical career ended like that.  

Then the waiting began. I was sweating it out in the dog days of August and the telephone wasn't ringing. Had something went wrong? After two weeks of growing anxiety, I called the bank. Oh, it was just procedures. Then I was told for my level the Senior Managers had to make the final decision at their meeting, which didn't take place until the 25th of August.

Though it cost me some toss and tumble nights, a positive call did come and I began my new job on September 3, 1980. Had an private office, too.  It didn't have any windows, but it came with a paycheck. I even began going back to evening college, now at a third university taking a major in accounting.

We were getting back on our feet. The house we were renting was nice, but maybe now we could start saving for a place of our own. Looked as if it was smooth sailing ahead, and for the next two months it was, right up until we were walking to that Christmas Party and my wife said, "Honey, I think I'm pregnant again." 

OK, she lied about tied tubes again and we weren't in Jersey near that Christian doctor and one can't expect too many miracles, can one? It wasn't a bit surprising a week or so later, before ever even seeing any doctor about it, she came and told me she was miscarrying. 

I got the minister's wife to stay with Laurel and we rushed off to the county hospital emergency room. They took my wife off somewhere and I sat on a hard bench in a massive waiting room. After a while a doctor came up to me, put out a hand and said, "Congratulations, you have a daughter."

What? How? My wife thought she was no more than two months along. She wasn't showing, not even a bump. She had a baby with no medical attention prior to birth and the baby lived? That's great.

Until they said the baby probably wouldn't live the night, she was too premature, too light. Today newborns under four pounds are probably at less risk, back in 1980 it wasn't promising. 

Then they told us they were sending her to another hospital, one which had a neonatal intensive care unit, one of the hospitals I use to budget, my last employer. We were then told even if our daughter survived, she would be blind and severely mentally retarded. "It would be better if she didn't survive," was their opinion. 

There was another problem. I had left the medical center at the end of July. I had started in the bank in September. My medical insurance had ended with the medical center. I had new medical insurance with the bank, but coverage for pregnancy did not kick in until I was employed there for six month.  It was now only December.

Our new daughter lived through the night. She was behind wired glass, inside a small glass rectangle called an incubator with a thousand tubes running into her. Every couple of hours they stuck a needle in her heel. She had jaundice and had to be under special lighting. my wife and I had opposing RH Blood factors, so the baby had to have a blood transfusion. She had a fever, she had something else, she had that. We could only hold her outside her little box for a brief time each day. The kid looked like a yellow plucked chicken with a tongue too large for her mouth. I said she looked like Alfred Hitchcock. She weighed 3 pounds 6 ounces.

Three weeks later, Noelle came home on New Year's Day 1981 inside a big red Christmas stocking (Picture on the right).

God had blessed us with another miracle. The hospital blessed us with a number of bills. Well, we'd just have to put off owning a house for awhile.

My wife's father had been acting erratically for awhile. (Her mother had died when she was 17.) He was convinced there were people hiding in his bushes at night, that someone might break in to rob him. He had demanded my wife return the house key and he kept a loaded gun under his pillow. He said if anyone tried to break in he would shot first and ask questions later. Needlessly to say when he wasn't answering the phone in May, my wife was concerned. We drove to his house, but no one answered the knock.  My wife went up the street to her uncle, who was her father's best friend, and he called the police. No one wanted to try and break in remembering that gun with which he slept.

He was unconscious. An ambulance took him to the hospital and they took him to surgery. the man had suffered from emphysema for years. He had lesions in his brain, apparently the effect of working with asbestosis in his youth. During surgery he had a heart attack and died, but the doctors brought him back to life.

If you call it life. He was on machines. The doctors told my wife any decision to turn off the machines were hers. They couldn't advise one way or another. I looked into her father's eyes and there was nothing there. Why they brought him back when he died made no sense. I talked with my wife. We prayed. She told them to turn off the machines and when the electricity died, so did he.  

She was an only child. All his estate went to her. We had a house of our own, but like the first car I got at 16 when my grandfather died, it came with a mortgage of guilt. 

The house was free and clear, but something of a mess. He had kept the outside up nicely, but ignored the inside. It was dingy and dark. junk was piled everywhere, old TV parts, a lifetime of old papers, the power mower and other yard tools stashed in the dining room. We found over $3,000 dollars in envelopes taped to the bottom of bureau drawers. The house was not really fit to move into with a baby and a three year old.

I spent all my free time in this house fixing up, cleaning, hauling away junk and painting. We wanted it ready to move into by the end of July because our lease was up August 1. I was working hard to make it and finally, sometime in July, I brushed on the last dab of paint and it was ready.

I didn't go there the next day, because I had classes that night, but on the day after I took my wife and two kids to see how nice a job I did. 

When I put the key in the lock, I thought I heard a strange noise. I threw the door open and I saw the source. Water was running down all the walls. The living room ceiling lay in a heap upon the floor, all the wallpaper had peeled off and all the hardwood floors were buckled.

I dashed down to the basement where the water shut off valve was located. I jumped into water up to my waist, fortunately I wasn't electrocuted. Firemen had to come to pump out the water. 

A inflow pipe had burst in the upstairs bathroom. How long it had been flooding the house, I don't know, but our interior ceilings were ruined as were the floors, all the kitchen cabinets and appliances and the furnace.All the wiring and plumbing would have to be replaced. Basically, the house had to be gutted and rebuilt to be livable. 

My daughter Laurel huddled shivering on the stairs. For years after she would have nightmares when it rained. The photo at the beginning of this post is my wife feeding Noelle in the ruined living room. You can see the despair on her face.

My father-in-law had insurance, but it would do only limited and basic repairs. We had to decide whether we wanted to stay there or sell the place. We were tired of moving. We decided we were going to stay in this house for a long time and would spend the extra money to built it with higher quality than the insurance would cover. Now I had to get a mortgage to cover the costs of this rebuilding and the remaining bills from Noelle's birth. 

But it seemed my wife's three wishes had been granted: I had a job I liked, we had babies of our own and now we had our own home. Maybe we really could settle down for a while.

And then in early 1982 my wife said: "Honey, I think I'm pregnant again." 

There was no thinking about it. She was. This time she got to a doctor and he determined so much scar tissue had built up she wouldn't be able to deliver naturally. Once again it was back to bed for the term and in August she had a Cesarean delivery of our last child, a son. he was also born prematurely.

He was the giant of our litter. He came into the world weighing 6 pounds 10 ounces. The hospital placed him next to a baby weighting over 10 pounds. We named him Darryl, not realizing that in the future this would subject us to a never-ending series of "Larry-Darryl-and-Darryl" jokes thanks to Bob Newhart.

Having a third child brought up another decision. The house we had was somewhat small for a family of five. Combining this with my long drive to Delaware everyday, we decided to sell the house after all and move once again, this time to Delaware. We have lived in this Delaware home for over 26 years now. I was employed by that bank for 21 years. Our kids grew up healthy into nice people and Noelle was not blind. Both she and Laurel were Honor Students. My wife and I have been married 47 plus years and I've been a Christian almost 34 of them.  

Through it all we have persevered.

And the first thing I did when we moved to Delaware was look for a Bible-Believing church.