It was strange that Sunday afternoon that I should get a call from my brother, Paul.  He was not one to get on the phone and chit-chat and there were no problems between us.  We always had fun together when I was home for a visit but years of living many miles apart and busy lives do not make for a lot of family closeness. It didn't take long for me to find out the reason for his call.  Dad had passed away.

My initial reaction was how could this be.  I had just talked to him on Tuesday and he sounded fine. When you have two parents who have been divorced for years and never mention the other one's name you have to plan ahead to avoid uncomfortable situations.  Dad and I talked on the phone about once a week and with Mother coming to visit I called him before she arrived to avoid a sticky situation should he have called when she was there.

Dad had remarried a few years after he and Mother got a divorce.  In his usual style she was about thirty years younger than he was and had couple of almost grown children. My brothers and I tried to be polite but it was obvious from the beginning that she did not care much for us.  The feeling was quite mutual and I even nicknamed her the Wicked Witch of the West as she was an alcoholic and prone to not treat Dad very well when she drank.  My brothers had lots of stories about her that I really didn't care to hear but there is the one where she referred to us as lazy kids.  You could say a lot of things about my brothers and I but lazy did not fit any of us.

After working as a pharmacist for fifty-two years Dad had retired the year before at the age of seventy-four.  Without any hobbies, except for betting on college football games, or many friends I could imagine that being at home with the Witch was difficult. I always kept our conversations cheerful, tried to find some new medical or scientific fact to tell him along with the positive happenings around our house.

Was I surprised when Paul called with the news of him passing?  Yes and no.  I knew from him popping nitroglycerin pills during his visit and his disdain for doctors that talking to him about his health was not the thing to do and I actually guess that it was a call that I expected.  More than surprise it was the shock of realizing that the person who always protected me from Mother, thought I could do anything and was always positive was gone.  He built me a playhouse, taught me to ride a bike and drive a car but by far the best was how he taught me to be kind and to love.

I do have to say that he did die in what some people would think was pretty sad.  I have always thought he went out in style.  On a beautiful Sunday morning he went to the self-service car wash, had a massive heart attack and died instantly.  I could always imagine him in his white  shirt, hat, dress slacks and wing-tip shoes washing his car.  The man who never spent a day in the hospital and the man who wiped his cars off with a chamois every night in the garage died probably the way he would have wanted to.

My bothers made the funeral arrangements which was good since I knew nothing about that sort of thing.  At the age of thirty four I had only attended two or three funerals in my life and those were for people I really did not know all that well. He was not a church goer as the only time he attended church was when we were little so the funeral was more of a small memorial service at the cemetery.  There was some discord between my brothers and I from the fact that I did not want to view him in the casket. I wanted to remember him sitting at the kitchen table when we had our long discussions or painting the house in clothes people would wear to church or his smile when I would go into a long dissertation of why I needed a new dress. I had long gotten over the fact that friends would think he was my grandfather because he was older or that he loved Studebakers.

I was glad the service was short and there were not many people there.
The interesting thing is how many times through the years that I have thought when something good happened or I achieved some goal how much Dad would have liked it.  Or how he would laugh when I pulled some boo-boo.  Of course I miss him but at the same time I always feel like he is there.

When Mother's Happy......

There were good times and bad times for Mother to come for a visit.  This may have been one of the better times for her to come as things were going pretty well.  At least there was enough snow and cold weather that perhaps I was not going to have to go out and run three miles every morning with her. Plus she had seemed pretty cheerful on the phone for the last few weeks.  Dennis not so cheerful but what else was new.

In all honestly it had been a rough five years for Mother since George passed away shortly before Wally was born.  She had married George and moved to Oklahoma City in 1970.  If there was ever a prince on a white horse that rescued someone it was George. He was a geologist and one of the sweetest people you would ever want to meet.  They had a lot of fun together, flew all over the country in his little plane, spent a lot of time with all his friends and she was happier than I had ever seen her.  George's sudden death at age 54 was devastating to all who knew him.

Mother had a couple of male suitors in the five and a half years since George's death.  One we liked but she didn't and one she liked that we couldn't stand.  But I was always careful to just let things ride as it was her life, not mine plus one did not argue with Mother.  It was strange how giddy she had become lately and when she arrived on a Tuesday afternoon she was noticeably different.  She actually talked to the boys and seemed happy to see Dennis when he came home. I had not even had to revert to my usual stage of becoming twelve years all and taking directives from her.  Something was up for sure.

Before she arrived I found out that most of the mini blinds for Jim and Lisa's house were done so when she asked what I needed to do for the rest of the week I told her that there was a luncheon on Thursday that might be fun.  Also told her there were some blinds I really needed to install at a house I thought she would like to see if we could fit it in. She was agreeable to both so I called Lisa and set a time for us to install the blinds on Thursday after the luncheon.  That way Karen could pick up Wally from Mother's Day Out and take care of Wes when he got home from school.

In phone conversations with Mother I had told her about Jim and Lisa and their house.  The luncheon was fun and she enjoyed meeting everyone and promised Karen she would send recipes for the cookbook the New Neighbor's League, actually Karen, was putting together for a fundraiser. Then it was off to put up some blinds. Mother had been rather dubious about my little decorating business almost to the point of not believing I could really do something like that. Pulling up at Jim and Lisa's house was really a surprise.

Lisa was preparing for a dinner party the next night so the timing was perfect.  Remember me saying that when I first went to the house the only furniture was a dining room table that sat sixteen people?  She was busy setting the table for sixteen guests and I learned a neat trick in that she set the table ahead of time and turned all the plates and crystal upside down so that was all done in advance. I took off my heels and put on my tennis shoes to install the blinds while Lisa took Mother on a tour of the house. Just when I finished Jim arrived home, turned on the jukebox and told me it was time to dance. He tried to get Mother to dance with him but she begged off.  Needless to say she could not stop talking about the house or how nice the people were for the rest of the visit.  

She decided she needed to go home on Saturday morning and thought maybe we should all go out for pizza and then go bowling on Friday night.  Okay...I knew something was different as she had banned me from the bowling alley as a teenager because according to hear bad people with tattoos hung out at the bowling alley. To my knowledge she had never been bowling in her life and also was not fond about going out to dinner with little boys. Sounded like fun to me but what brought this on?

Finally got up the courage and the right words to ask her what was new since she had acted different ever since she arrived.  Her first comment was nothing but I pressed on and she finally told me she had started running at the Baptist Pacer Fitness Center in Oklahoma City every morning. All sorts of reasons why running indoors was better that out on the street. Finally she got around to the fact that she had met a man who was very nice and also ran everyday as part of his therapy after open heart surgery. So she was now in her flirty happy mode.  I told her I was happy for her while I was really thinking thank heavens.  This had been the first time since George passed away that she didn't get in a fight with Dennis, actually talked to her grandchildren and didn't make me feel like I was an idiot twelve year old.  This I can deal with with.

That evening of pizza and bowling may have been the nicest time we ever had together as a family. No one bowled very well but there was lots of laughter.  I was actually sad to see her leave the next morning and amazed that she didn't need help in finding her way out of town and onto the highway. It was going to be interesting to meet this man.
Guess the old saying when Mother's happy everyone is happy is true.

Life got back to it's busy normal but busy was good.  Wes had joined Cub Scouts and Wally was good enough at roller skating to go with me to Wes's school's skating parties.  I was busy working on both Lisa and Jim's house and Barney's upstairs plus I had a wallpaper job coming up 
which consisted hanging  hundred rolls of wallpaper in a house under construction pretty far out in the country.  Found a neat lady in the New Neighbors who thought it might be fun to be a helper.

Then I got a call from my brother that I had sort of been expecting but one you are never really prepared for.  Dad had passed away.

How Lucky In So Many Ways

I started writing this blog, as they call them, a couple of years ago when a friend suggested I write one about a road trip my husband, Marshell, and I took to the east coast in our Tesla.  It was challenging to write and I look back at them now and cringe at how bad they were and how much trouble I had each night writing them.  After the trip I realized that writing was fun for me so I did some on our building renovations and I have done a few political ones which now I try to stay away from as each of us has their right to their own opinions. But.....some things aren't really political.

Originally I titled the blog I Should Have Known.  That came from the thought that if I had been a little smarter, a little wiser I might not have made the boo-boos through the years that I did.  As I wrote about being born in 1946, the first year of the baby boomer generation, the thoughts and the title sometime changed to How Lucky I Was To Be Born A Baby Boomer.  I still feel that growing up when I did was a blessing.

Even though I happen to think that growing up in Muskogee, Oklahoma was the best place to live others will think their hometown was. I have written in previous blogs about my slightly dysfunctional family that I thought was completely normal.  Having two brothers, Paul, two years older and Kenny, two years younger gave me a wide circle of friends to the point where I knew pretty well everyone a few years older and younger than myself.  

Perhaps the memories of how much fun I had growing up come from the amount of innocence that surrounded us. In a town of about 35,000
kids rode their bikes or walked quite a distance to school, it was not important to always lock your doors and we played outside until it got dark with all the other kids in the neighborhood.  Most families sat down to a home cooked dinner together even if the Mother worked outside the home.  As we reached our teenage years there was a lot of things in town to do like movie and drive-in theaters, a skating rink, Friday night stock car races or high school football games. I can remember dances at the high school with the school jazz band playing after basketball games and of course, there was the cavernous building
at Meadowbrook Country Club where the local rock and roll band played on a pretty regular basis.

Growing up with two brothers both of whom were into cars/hot rods our house always seemed to be a gathering place for the local boys. I had quite a few girl friends who liked to come to my house perhaps not for my company but for the chance to see some of the boys hanging out in the garage.  My older brother, Paul, only thought of me and most of them as little pests.  It was quite devastating to me to have to hide in the backseat of the car if he had to take me to school or if in the hallway some good looking friend of his would say "Hey, Hansen, isn't that your sister?" as they passed me.  Paul's answer was always "No, I don't have a sister".  Here I thought I was a blossoming Gidget from the movie and he treated me like a silly kid who had braces on her teeth.

When I was fifteen, a sophomore in high school, I had never been on a date with a boy except if some parent drove us to a dance or to the movies. It must have been in the fall since that is the normal time of the year for hayrides that the speech classes had a hayride out to the sandbar on the Arkansas River. For some reason a very good looking boy in Paul's class asked me to go on the hayride with him. He was not really one of Paul's friends but I was more than a little excited.  A real date.

Paul was less than excited and gave me a long lecture against going out with him. He told me how stupid I was and that I had no business going out with this boy but I just thought Paul was being mean because someone in his class liked me. Naturally I was going to show Paul how grown up I was or maybe just defy him.  It turned into one of those I should have known times and also one of those I should have listened.

Mother was only agreeable with my going on a date to the hayride as it was a school function.  It did seem to surprise the speech coach when I showed up with this boy but I took it as he was just surprised that anyone would ask me for a date. But the moment the hayride started and all the way to the sandbar it became a fight to keep him off of me.
I was totally confused as to what was happening or what to do.  There were no movies with scenes in them like this.  No one treated Gidget like this. The speech coach pulled him aside once we got to the sandbar for the wiener roast and talked to him. I don't know what was said but the boy left me alone from then on.

He barely talked to me the rest of the evening and when we got back to where the hayride started I got in the car with him so he could take me home trying to make polite conversation. When he drove past the street where we should have turned to get to my house I mumbled something but he kept driving until he pulled the car off into a field and stopped.
I was trying to think of what was going on and what to do next while sitting as close to the passenger door as I could get. He lunged across the seat at me and at the same time the passenger door opened and I almost fell out.

Paul told me to get out of the car and into his. Paul said something to the boy before he came back to his car.  When Paul got into his car he asked if I was proud of myself and didn't he tell me not to go out with him. Actually he was yelling at me but I did ask how he found us in that field.  He told me he had been waiting for over an hour for us to get back and knew if I got in the car with that boy I was going to be in trouble so he followed us. Did I now understand why he was so mad when I accepted the date?  Did I know what was about to happen to me?  I said yes but I was not really sure just what all the consequences would be.

When we got home he told me to get out of the car and go in and tell Mother how much fun I had.  I asked if he was going to tell her what happened and his reply was that if he told her she would never let me out of the house again. He also said I better get a little smarter as he was never going to follow me around again. I don't remember if I thanked him and we never spoke about that night again. I was too embarrassed to ever tell anyone about that night until I told Marshell a few years ago.

The interesting thing is that when the current sexual harassment things started popping up I did stop blaming myself for what happened that night. Actually it was a good lesson for me in that I did learn to be a bit more discerning in who I accepted a date with.  I did learn how to get myself out of a bad situation like bailing out of a bathroom window when a party got out of hand or leaving a date in the woods when I did not realize what a Fraternity blanket beer party was.

This is where my How Lucky To Be A Baby Boomer part comes into play. I never drank until I was in college, clothing was never provocative, and there was that little unspoken rule that nice girls "didn't". If asked do I know the date of when this happened or the field he parked the car in? No, I don't. Did it traumatize me for the rest of my life?  Yes in that it took away some innocence and established a lack of trust.  Would I believe anyone else who shared a similar or a worse story? Yes, by all means. Would I want this to haunt the boy for the rest of his life? Another profound yes because if he did it to me he did it to many other girls who did not get rescued.  Could I prove this happened if asked? Not if Paul wasn't around as almost all things like this happen with only two people involved. Most important is that this jerk ruined my very first date and it was very difficult for years to go on a date without a great amount of fear as to what would happen.

How Lucky I Was To Be A Baby Boomer because I was taught as a teenager that you didn't drink, go out and do things against the moral values you were taught at home and that just because your friends do something it doesn't mean you can or should.  Echoing in my head is my Mother telling me that just because everyone else did things or went places I was not allowed to was because I was not "everyone else".

Thank you, Paul.  Hope you never felt bad because I never needed you to rescue me again but you did a great job of teaching me a lesson that was never forgotten.  Thank you Mother for setting strict rules for me as a teenager even though we hardly ever agreed on anything. Thank you to all the nice boys and men I have known through the years who were decent and respectful of women.  Finally, thank heavens I learned a lesson at fifteen that stayed with me all these years.

The statics are that 1 in 3 women have been sexually assaulted in some form or the other.  Most go unreported because of embarrassment or from no one believing their story or being ridiculed.  It would be nice if the time has come to where it is okay to speak out.

A Very Interesting Day

Kansas City did not get as much snow that year like the year before when it was piled up eight feet high on either side of the drive.  My philosophy was that there not such a thing as too much snow sort of tempered that year.  I had a lot more places to go and things to do than the previous year so less snow was a good thing.

It is an understatement to say Dennis was not very happy with my making an appointment with a decorating client on a Saturday morning.  All the years he had traveled five days a week for Ford Motor Company had set us in a pattern of never leaving the house on the weekend.  Since he was gone all week he did not want to go anywhere after he arrived home on Friday.  Races and Company parties were the exception so there was not much of a social life. He also avoided being the sole person in charge of the boys from the day they were born. He was also concerned that we were supposed to go out that night with friends from Ford like I would not be home in time.  Gads!

Needless to say driving to Jim and Lisa's it was good that they lived some distance away and I had time to reboot into a smiling normal person.  I had to get over being yelled at plus try to get rid of the apprehension of meeting Jim and acting like I knew what I was doing. All the negative and scared feelings disappeared when Jim answered the door with a big smile and told me how happy he was that I was there since they needed a lot of help.

The house looked a lot different from the one I had toured with Lisa two weeks before.  Instead of being completely empty except for the dining room table there were boxes, new furniture and things everywhere. The "things" were the fascinating part.  Jim, a plastic surgeon in his forties, was a collector of many different things. When Lisa had taken me through the house on my first visit it was hard to understand that one bedroom was to be the camera room, one the music room and the basement was to be the theater. Looking at all the stuff suddenly made sense.

Jim had over two hundred vintage cameras from all over the world.  They were to be displayed in legal shelving, the oak boxes with glass fronts that stacked on top of each other.  There was a room with every musical instrument you could imagine and in the basement were hundreds of reel to reel movies, a projector and a screen that would cover a whole wall.  There was the library/office that needed wall to wall bookshelves so did I know anyone who could build them?  There were about a hundred framed photographs taken around the turn of 
the century of the old west and Indians leaning up against many walls. 

As if my mind was not completely boggled by all this the two story foyer as big as a basketball court now had an eight foot in diameter custom made copper planter with two huge Ficus trees growing in it.  The coolest thing about the foyer was the Wurlitzer Bubble Jukebox filled with 45 rpm records in the corner. Of course it worked and to prove it Jim turned it on, grabbed my hand and we danced to some 50's rock and roll song. There were in addition two quest rooms, the master bedroom and the huge den/living room thay were Lisa's job to decorate in a more traditional manner.

I left there that day with some measurements for a few mini blinds and lots of suggestions for draperies and bedding. The thought crossed my mind that a "real" Interior Designer would kill for a job like this one but I don't think anyone would have as much fun decorating this house or enjoy being in the company of these two people as I was going to have.

Dennis did not ask anything about the people or the house I had spent most of the day at.  He probably would not have been speaking to me except that we had plans to go out for the evening.  By the time we got ready to go it had begun snowing some which made him a little more disagreeable. We took my station wagon since we were picking up two other couples for the forty mile trip to North Kansas City.

For some reason they thought it would be fun to go to a rather dilapidated bowling alley that had a bar with a stage to see, of all people, Johnny Paycheck. Now I was never in my life a country music fan except for Willie Nelson but I did know who Johnny Paycheck was and the thought of going to one of his concerts was less than exciting - especially on what turned out to be a very snowy night.

What can I say about the concert?  I did drink a few beers just to endure the thing while everyone else was having a great time.  I do have to admit to being slightly mesmerized by the way he could hold a cigarette in between his last two fingers and still play the guitar. He was the only guitar player I ever saw who could smoke, play and sing at the same time.  Sometimes he would sing with the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.  Maybe he had learned that during his stint in prison. Needless to say the music was very forgettable.

The fun started on the way home.  A lot of snow had fallen while we were in the bowling alley.  Dennis not being a winter person did not do a very good job of cleaning off all the windows before backing the car out of the parking space.  He had to roll down the electric window in order to see.  Naturally snow fell into the window opening and of course the window would not then go up. Have you ever had the opportunity to ride forty miles in the backseat of a car with a blizzard blowing in the window?  It is quite an interesting experience and one you don't soon forget.  The most interesting aspect was that all three guys, all three guys who were technical service advisers for Ford Motor Company, were riding in the front seat.  It was a good thing I was too covered in snow, too frozen to speak or to choke the driver.

Oh well, at least the day was only 50% bad.  Going to Jim and Lisa's that morning was really very special.  They had no idea that I had never done a house like theirs before and gave me the idea that they had full confidence in me. It was going to be a challenge but a lot of fun.

Mother called the next day to say she would be there for a visit on Tuesday.  Oh Boy!