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Ghosts of Christmas Past #9
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A. Tabor
Ray Benson [1924-2006]
As the 2014 campaign runs its course, I recall our neighbor Ray Benson. Some of you do, too.
Rowan Oakes’ mother Rosalie lived next door to Ray Benson until she died in 1999, which is how we got to know him. We’d have dinner with her every Sunday afternoon at 3:00, then play Monte Carlo until “Sixty Minutes” came on and she’d announce that it was “Time for you two to head home.” Rosalie didn’t mince words any less than her neighbor Ray, however, and most of our Sunday afternoon conversations were seasoned with stories of their verbal sparing during the week. “Benson shook his fist at me Tuesday. Said I shouldn’t use pesticides on the tomatoes. What the #%$* does that man know of gardening!” That last sentence wasn’t a question. Then she’d chastise him about recycling and he’d wonder aloud why she hadn’t gone to “The Home” years ago.
But then Rosie would find that he’d cut her lawn while mowing his own (“Well it just saves gas to not start the mower twice”) or that her walk was shoveled or her leaves raked (“There weren’t enough to fill just one bag”). She never had him over for a meal (“He’d think it’s too salty and then ask for the salt.”) but I know that one-in-four of her canned goods appeared on his back steps on a regular basis. And that her magazines found their way into his mailbox with the mailing labels carefully removed.
Ray’s parents farmed north of Fahnstock, so he went to Fennimore high and graduated in ’42 or ’43, then joined the merchant marine. Going round the world a dozen times or more, he came back to Agincourt twenty-five years ago. Never inclined to pull his window shades, Ray’s accumulation of tchotchkes from Borneo or Shanghai or Tenerife or Trieste were shelved for all to see. I think Rosie’s carved teak elephant might have come from him—”anonymously,” of course, and with the greatest discretion. Wouldn’t want to leave a paper trail.
Ray’s politics were anywhere but Right. The rear window of his Chevy was an evolving mini-billboard of in-your-face observations, hand-printed on poster board: “Drive a Japanese car? Thanks for shipping American jobs overseas.” Or supporting a flat tax. Or simply “Buy American.”
Ray moved into the nursing home about the time Rosalie died, though it never occurred to me until today that those two events might be linked. Though love often manifests itself in strange ways, our acknowledgment and involuntary reaction to loss is far too predictable.
The Ghost of Christmases Yet to Be
The family were coming for Christmas Day: Catherine’s brood from Vermont, Rowan’s nieces and nephews from Wisconsin, and a few stray folks we’d call “honorary” family, though they might disagree. With the turkey stuffed, pies latticed, cranberries boiled and laced with Grand Marnier, all was staged and ready for the Feast. Then the unthinkable: the whipping cream had expired! Howard volunteered an emergency run to whatever store hinted at life 6:00 o’clock on Christmas Eve.
The Loaf & Jug on Highway #7 was probably still open, but their heavy cream had to be older than Louis Pasteur. So Howard prayed Cermak’s on South Broad — the wrong direction — might have compassion for the slow-witted, clumsy, forgetful and yet still be open. No such luck, so it was about face and northbound to the Strip.
It was indeed a silent night, except for the lone car stuck in a drift, rocking back and forth, gripped by an icy and ever-deepening rut. Howard paused to help.
“Give you a hand?” He knocked on the driver’s-side window. “I’ve got sandbags in the trunk.” A muffled “Sure!” came as the frosted window dropped a sliver.
Everyone north of the forty-second parallel knows what to do in these situations: straighten the wheels; rock gently forward and back; don’t gun the engine. Howard popped the trunk and poured sand into the well, both fore and aft, until the car got traction and was freed from the drift. “The name is Dean. I appreciate your help, Howard.”
“Hi. How is it you know me?”
“It’s your writing; your column. I’m a regular reader.” Dean confessed he’d enjoyed the sesquicentennial series in 2007 but had been out of touch for several months. It was work that brought him to Agincourt, this of all weeks, and tonight, in the eye of a winter storm.
“What could possibly bring you out on Christmas Eve?” Howard wondered, aloud and quietly, deeply within himself.
“Counseling. I’m a life coach of sorts, and the job respects no bounds, temporal or otherwise: when the need is there, so am I.”
To Howard, who just turned sixty-nine, Dean seemed an indeterminate age. Not that you couldn’t place his age; it seemed to fluctuate—now about the same as yours, then younger, then a score of years would wash across his face. The voice varied, as well, though Dean’s patterns of speech were of Howard’s own generation and earlier. He, too, is a man of words, so the subjunctive, for example, was a welcome sound to ears numbed by today’s twitter and tweet. “Did you go to school here?”
“Oh, no, not here. But I did know Miss Kavana. You wrote about her once, I recollect, and were spot on, if memory serves.” He went on, encouragingly. “Though there is so much more than six or seven hundred words can explore. Have you thought of fleshing out those sketches and adding a few more?” Dean suggested a handful of familiar names—Sheriff Pyne during the Great Depression; the unlikely trinity of Circe Beddowes, Maud Adams and Belle Miller; even Howard’s great-grandmother Martha Tennant.
“Say, have you been snooping in my notes?” Howard asked, half laughing, feeling suddenly transparent.
Dean smiled. “They just seem so logical, representative; typical in the sense of types.” Dean knew a lot—as much as Hal Holt, even—for someone not from these parts. “If not you, who?”
Indeed, Howard wondered, who?
“There’s a lot of Hal Holt in what you do. How you go about it, I mean.”
“You knew Hal?”
“Didn’t everyone?” meaning, of course, didn’t those of us with the sense to come in from the storm and be happily harbored in Hal’s tendentious friendship. Soon, they were lobbing Hal stories back and forth—”I’ll see yours and raise you one”—until Howard realized the time. “Jeez! I’m going to be in dutch. Rowan thinks I ran to the store for heavy cream.” The battery (which had been charging) was done, so they disconnected the cables, and Howard bade farewell to this strangely familiar stranger.
“Are you staying in town?” Would Dean like to stay for dinner?
“No, my work’s done here, I think. Got to be in Council Bluffs before midnight. But I couldn’t have done it without you.” Hands shaken, Howard watched the tail lights fade up Broad Street toward Highway 7.
Back in his warm car, he thought, Screw the whipped cream. We’ll make meringue or something, when he noticed a Cermak’s bag on the passenger seat beside him. Inside, a pint of heavy cream (unexpired) and a stylish business card:
Future Perfect
life skills for the hesitant and harried / house calls / fees negotiable
and an email with a domain he didn’t recognize and a phone number that wasn’t local. He put it in his wallet, just in case, and hurried home.
“That was fast!” Rowan looked genuinely surprised. “I didn’t think you’d left yet.” Howard glanced at the clock: it was just 6:15.
Howard’s Dead End
The enclosure that Aunt Phyllis mentioned in her letter to Howard was more than a little surprise; but more about that in a moment. In the meantime, you should know that Phyllis Tabor lived at home until the week before she died.
Phyllis Tabor—one of Fennimore county’s “Daughters of Flight”, a title she shared with her twin Ella Rose—might have attained “greater glory” in the bigger world, if she’d wanted it. But the Dirty Thirties brought her home to tend the family business with her younger brother Warren. Ella Rose was engaged in missionary work in China (from which she never returned) and brother Dwight had died in childhood; Mary Grace was too young. So Phyllis and Warren shepherded Tabor Industries through the late Depression and war years. By 1950 their diversification and employee profit-sharing had saved the company.
Phyllis continued to live at home with her widowed mother Lucy until Lucy died and maintenance of the old house tipped the balance between nostalgia and nuisance. She moved into a small apartment above Van Kannel’s Drug and sold her interest in the business. But the Tabors aren’t the sort to slip discreetly from the scene. So Phyllis continued to fly into her sixties and was easily recognized round and about town in her red Indian “Chief” motorcycle with sidecar, one of the last produced by the company in 1953.
During the second half of her life—though she couldn’t have known there would be a second half—Phyllis accomplished many things. She learned Chinese and made a trip there to investigate the 1937 disappearance of her sister. She taught engine maintenance at the high school. She taught her nephew Howard how to pickle and preserve. She taught Sunday School at Saint Joseph-the-Carpenter with her good friend Rev. Chilton Fanning Dowd and disagreed on certain theological points with pleasant persistence. But more important for our story, in 1957 at the age of forty-five Aunt Phyllis bought a decrepit farmhouse near Fahnstock and undertook a fifty-year renovation that gradually whittled the old place away until it had been transformed as “Howard’s Dead End”.
With apologies to both Carl Larsson and E.M. Forster, that house has been brewing in my head for twenty years or more, and it’s time to give it birth.
Oh, and the surprise in her letter to Howard was a deed to the property with a curious proviso: the house would be made available as a writer’s retreat to any who applied. If you’re looking for an out-of-the-way spot to conceive the Great American Novel, I can put in a word for you. The landlord’s a friend of mine.
Ghosts of Christmas Past #8: “Dear Nephew”
June 16th, 2012
Dear Nephew—
Our lunch last Saturday was enjoyable, more than you can imagine. Not only because we had each other’s undivided attention, but your cooking has improved considerably. (Is Rowan teaching you?) The wine was also a treat, considering I rarely open a bottle here at home. One glass at a time—it goes to vinegar before I can finish it. One day at a time, too—and I’m going to vinegar, as well.
Thanks also for the draught of our family history. Technically, I’m not a Tennant, so trimming the in-laws and cadet branches will simplify your task. And we both know a few who would best be forgotten; the less said, the better. So, thank you for the opportunity to add a few words about myself. Now, in my hundredth year, friends treat me with deference and relatives with tongs. Most are concerned that I’ll break — and a few that I won’t.
You ask about twinship. Being one qualifies me as an “expert” I suppose, but only in the way that you can testify credibly about being a male. Eller and I—I forget that you never knew her; your personalities are so much alike—were identical; Dwight and your dad weren’t. She and I spoke little to one another; we just seemed to know. Then Barnett Fentress entered the picture. Barney, Eller and I became a “couple” of sorts—a friendship that was very modern for the ’30s. People wondered when he’d choose between us, but that was never a possibility. The three of us, after all, were looking for a good man.
One summer in ’35 or ’36 we entered a dance marathon in Kansas City; Barney loved to dance. They didn’t know, of course, that Eller and I would alternate. Wearing identical dresses, she and I switched places in a dark corner by a cluster of potted palms. Barney carried the show, and it was he and Eller who eventually won. We gave the prize money—$50 if recollection serves—to the soup kitchen at St Mary’s church and laughed ’til we cried. Eller left for China the next Spring; I never saw her again.
Uncle Malcolm (Father’s brother-in-law; married to Kate) was a missionary in China, teaching at Saint John’s College, Shanghai, but he also operated a clinic for women in rural parts of Jiangsu province. Eller had trained as a nurse but flying was her real contribution toward increasing the missionary outreach. I treasure her letters from 1937—until they stopped suddenly just before Christmas. We never learned what happened, but it had something to do with the Japanese invasion. The State Department offered no explanation. Ironically, it happened just about the time your great uncle Anson was restored to us. There seems something karmic in the exchange.
I’ve made a few more notes for your writing project (a rough outline) and will include them with this note. There is also a surprise for you and Rowan, a gift I hope you two will enjoy long after I’m gone.
Your loving aunt,
Phyllis
PS: You’ll know where to scatter my ashes.
Ghosts of Christmas Past #7: The English People, Part 1
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A. Tabor
The English People, Part 1
Agincourt has had its share of foreign visitors.
My own family counts for some of them: Aunt Grace’s husband is French and Great Uncle Anson’s wife and their three children hail from the Euskadi, the Basque homeland of northern Spain. But in this neck of the woods, someone from Alabama might be considered “foreign”, so let’s set our sights a little higher.
Two of our most interesting foreign visitors with no local connection may have been Alec and Margaret Parks, who came for a two-week visit in the Spring of 1990.
It all begins with our late great local historian Hal Holt in the 1980s. Hal had been investigating some of the British wheeling-dealing in Iowa agricultural land a century earlier, most of it in Larchwood up in Lyon County. Some of you will know that the Close Brothers organized the “Iowa Land Company” for investment by British capitalists, acquiring nearly 50,000 acres toward that end. Much of it was intended to be sold as small holdings—the sort of homestead farming seen in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois in the relentless march of Manifest Destiny— but the sale of large acreage involved others in the speculative game. Richard Sykes was one (owner of the Larchwood townsite) and Francis Logie-Pirie was another. Hal became interested in Logie-Pirie and opened a correspondence with the local historical society in East Sussex, Logie-Pirie’s county of residence.
Volunteers, many of them retired, handle inquiries in Britain’s local history network, and Hal’s letter (this was long before email expedited this sort of thing) came to the attention of one Alec Parks, retired headmaster of a school in Durham far to the north. Parks replied to Holt’s questions, providing insight to the wealth that had enabled the displaced Scotsman Logie-Pirie to engage in American speculation. And that might have been the end of it, if we were dealing with folks other than Holt and Parks, cut from similar cloth and curious about each other as much as their historical interests. Hal shared their evolving correspondence with me; Alec was someone he had clearly begun to like.
Then, one evening, Hal got a phone call: a cheery British accent at the other end introduced itself as belonging to Alec Parks and wondered if a visit to the Colonies might be in order. Alec and his wife Margaret proposed a visit in the Spring, a prospect eagerly accepted by Hal and his wife Muriel. The insertion of the Parks into the rhythm of local life will not likely be forgotten by many of us for years to come. But the details of that visit will have to wait for another installment.
In the meantime, enjoy the image of a memorial bench placed in Alec’s memory along the Cuckoo Trail in 1995. It seems entirely in keeping with the man we met nearly twenty-five years ago.
I hope to rest on that bench some time soon and savor a few of memory’s happier moments.
Ghosts of Christmas Past (#6)
“I apologize for writing such a long letter. There wasn’t time to write a short one.” —Albert Einstein
The majority of housing in Agincourt is single-family. The styles vary—Eastlake, Italianate, Stick and Shingle Style, Craftsman and Prairie, Period Revivals, Moderne and a lot of “Cornbelt Boxes”; you know the drill—and I enjoy wrapping my head around each of them, as I would learning a new language; a new dance step. The diversity of size, on the other hand, is more challenging, for it’s far easier to design a big house than a small one. Trust me. [BTW, I don’t dance.]
But even in a town the size of Agincourt, there would have been a slight but gradual shift from single-family detached housing to multi-family units. A duplex here and there; eventually a full-blown unapologetic apartment building. Families at the entry level of home ownership were candidates, and so were empty-nesters; apartment living can be attractive when the kids leave home and the dog dies. Especially when you weary of painting all that ornate wood trim.
Our first real apartment building was a modest affair built about 1920: “The Franklin” (named for someone who should have been our president, but wasn’t) at the southeast corner First and Fennimore NW. A Presbyterian church stood to the south; across the alley were the backsides of shops like Vandervort’s Bakery and Wasserman Hardware. Howard had an apartment there when he came back from Chicago and his first gig in journalism.
“A few figs from thistles…”
by Howard A Tabor
Slick and Frannie
My mother recommends moving every five years. “If you haven’t unpacked those boxes since the last move,” she advises “give them to Goodwill.”
Returning to Agincourt in 1970—after two years in Chicago and my first job in journalism—my old room was empty, but it was time to get a place of my own. An apartment at 123 First Street NW was available—two blocks from mom and dad—so I became a tenant, as well as a Tennant.
“The Franklin” was fifty years old that year. Its first occupants were that age and older—seniors moving into town when the kids took over the farm; empty-nesters and such like. Oddly, things hadn’t changed all that much when I moved in on the Sunday afternoon of the weekend between my two jobs. Across the hall was Minerva Sternberg, retired English teacher from the college. Near the entry vestibule were Mr and Mrs Fahnstock; she served as our unofficial concierge and cruise director, keeping her door open a crack to watch our coming and going. Uncharacteristically, I went to the Bon-Ton one Saturday for breakfast where my friend Rowan found me: Cora Fahnstock had told him where to look. The building “super” was also retired from the college, Mack (MacKinley) Heath, but we all knew him as “Steam Heath”, especially when the pipes were cranky in January, as they always were. Mack was also caretaker at First Presbyterian, and the two jobs seemed to keep him happy and financially afloat.
Without doubt, my greatest friends at The Franklin were Slick and Frannie Fielding, who lived just beneath me. In an old wood-framed building like ours, it was the neighbors above and below who you knew best, every footstep on those creaky floorboards revealing who’d just got back from shopping; who’d had an argument and then who couldn’t sleep until there was an apology. I met the Fieldings late that Sunday afternoon, shortly after the last box had been lugged up those two-and-one-half flights of stairs. A slight knock at my half-open door announced Frannie’s arrival from downstairs and a thin voice wondered “I’ll bet you’re hungry, young man. Why not join Slick and me for some meatloaf and mashed potatoes?” I didn’t know which box the kitchen pans were in, and there was no food in the fridge anyway, so, yes, I was grateful for the invitation.
We chatted through dinner and found our common connections. Slick had been a traveling salesman for a company that did business with dad. Frannie had worked as a sales clerk in Grace Arbogast’s upscale clothing store. Now they were comfortably set up at The Franklin on Social Security and a modest pension. I wonder today how the Fieldings would have got through the market collapse, the sequester and government shutdown; probably not well. In addition to sales, Slick (real name, Grover, after Grover Cleveland, I learned) had also been on the pro-bowling tour and earned quite a reputation in the sport, though little in prize money. Frannie regaled me with stories of the dress trade, the sort of gossip that was safe now that so many of her former snooty customers had lain down for “the dirt nap” as she called it. I promised her that I’d keep them to myself, but I did confirm some of the more colorful episodes with my mom and filed them away for future audiences.
On cold winter nights, I’d hear Slick moving about the apartment. I knew that his emphysema made sleeping difficult and that he was most likely moving onto the screened front porch of their apartment: sleeping was easier outdoors when the temperature was near zero. Then, after a late night at office, I came home to find the ambulance on First Street and the EMTs carrying Slick on a stretcher. He’d had the breathing episode that finally took him from us. I held Frannie for a long time (they had no children and informally adopted me) and helped with “the arrangements”. After that, I and some of the other neighbors watched out for her, did some shopping and shared a meal on Sunday afternoons, like out first encounter. Frannie went to a nursing home in 1978 and died a few months later. Life without Slick hadn’t been enough.
Under any other circumstances—living at home with my parents; sharing an apartment with people my own age; even living next door to, rather than above the Fieldings—I would never have made their acquaintance or been let in to their lives. Funny what a difference two-and-one-half flights of stairs can make.
If Winston Churchill was right, there’s a reciprocal relationship between us and our buildings; a mutual shaping of one by the other and back again. A chicken-and-egg thing so old that we’ve lost track of which is which and which came first. Churchill hoped for this effect in Parliament, rebuilt to his specifications after the war; too small during full attendance and therefore become energized, a crucible for debate on the most important topics of the moment. No space in Agincourt is quite that important.
Because his uncle Anson had been an architect, Howard thought about that as a career. I think he and I are cut from similar cloth, however; we both realized that architects have a gland that drips subsistence levels of tolerance for things I can’t mention here, but any licensed practicing architect will share them with you for price of a cocktail. In an earlier draft, I’d itemized a few of those “things” but opted to be less offensive than usual and keep them in my heart (a rare feat for me). So my friend Howard became a journalist—likewise, yet another career choice I could not have sustained.
Ghosts of Christmas Past (#5)
On the eve of what has become the annual rising of the Red River of the North, we’re preparing for what is likely to be remembered as the Flood of the Millennium. Since I moved to Fargo there have been at least five that qualified as “Flood of the Century”, so it may be time to redefine the term. I mention this only because there are fifty—yes, fifty—bankers boxes in the basement, filled with books, and all fifty of these have to be brought up to the main floor for safety. Am I being optimistic that even the first floor will be high enough?
Several friends and I share an illness for which, like malaria, there can be no cure: an unquenchable quest for paper. I began collecting books in high school and the rate of acquisition has seen a geometric increase ever since. Indeed, the cause of my death is likely to read “Crushed by paper.” And, yes, Agincourt seems to be populated with many more than its fair share of such eccentricities—sorry about that—but there’s one of them Howard is anxious to recall.
A few figs from thistles…
by Howard A. Tabor
Ghosts of Christmas Past
Garage and estate sales will be my undoing. Likewise, the on-line auction site that shall remain nameless. So, it was against my better judgment that Rowan Oakes and I attended a sale over the weekend and came away with a couple boxes of books. Sorting through them at home, I noted several with a small tasteful sticker inside the back cover: “Shelf Life / 114 North Broad Street / Agincourt, Iowa / Telephone 727”. In the 50s, I had been among its denizens.
One Saturday afternoon my mother sent me to Vandervort’s Bakery for bread; I was eleven or twelve and in no particular hurry. So Frank (the family dog) and I took the great circle route, stopping at the old library and dropping in at Aunt Phyllis’s before heading back to Vandervort’s and home.
Vandervort’s window was always a distraction, crammed with baskets of fresh bread and rolls and platters of cookies, cakes and pies. For some reason, my eye was drawn to another door, the one just to the right of the bakery, and the stairs that led up to a book dealer on the second floor—to Shelf Life. Frank and I were regulars at the library and my parents often gave books for birthdays and Christmas. But I can’t recall buying a book of my own before that afternoon. Frank and I climbed one long flight and knocked softly on the half-open dutch door at the top of the stairs. “Come in, young man, and bring your friend,” came the invitation. If I said Lauritz Melchior, would it conjure a rich tenor voice from your mind’s ear? Out from a tsunami of paper reached the hand of Hamish Brookes, proprietor. “Welcome, Master Tabor.”
How did he know my name?
For what seemed like five minutes my eyes leapt from table to shelf, from wainscot to window, philadendron, goose-neck lamp and back again, around a room more wondrous than any in my short experience. In truth, few since have been its match. Mr Brookes stepped from behind his desk and cleared a ladderback chair for me, one of a mismatched set each of which seemed more shelf than seat. Every horizontal surface—even the floor itself—was fair game for piling paper, bound and otherwise. How all this had not fallen through to Vandervort’s below is a mystery. So I settled in, Frank by my side, to meet our newest friend.
I’ll save for another day my recollections of Hamish Brookes. It’s enough today to have been reminded of his service to the community and region. And to recall the appreciation I gleaned from him for the culture of paper, the composition of words on a page, the gathering of pages in signatures, and their binding into books—a liberal education free for the asking.
Some of his volumes were priceless. Suffice to say I left that afternoon with one I could afford: The Gold Bug by Edgar Allen Poe.
Ghosts of Christmas Past (#4)
My friend Howard Tabor is reluctant to talk about his family, the Tennants.
But the extended Tennant clan fascinates me: their family is large and influential; comfortable, if not actually rich. Anson reflected on his high school years once: “Poor students thought I was rich; rich kids thought I was cheap,” he told me. My family, on the other hand is non-existant and inconsequential to all but me: anyone claiming to be related is mistaken; as the only child of an only child, the very idea of cousins is alien. I’m keenly aware of it at holidays.
So it surprised me to see his column in The Plantagenet the Saturday after Christmas.
A few figs from thistles…
by Howard A. Tabor
Ghosts of Christmas Past
Holidays with friends and family end the year with a mixture of emotion. Aside from family who are present, there are others we miss, who can’t be here—and others we’d like to miss, but dare not admit that we don’t.
My mother is still in her own home, living each Christmas as though it were her first. And my sister and her children are here from Vermont. But dad’s chair is empty and so is the place vacated this year by our formidable Aunt Phyllis, the family centennarian. Tonight, dangling between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I crave great-uncle Anson’s company, the man who died twice.
It’s only proper that Uncle A had two deaths, since he enjoyed two full and remarkable lives. The first involved his education and brief practice as an architect—not Agincourt’s first but perhaps its best. Knowing him made me think I should follow that example. His works from that period—1907 to 1915—are few but still largely intact. I walk past the old library at least twice a day. I live in the Wasserman Block he remodelled in 1912. And I sometimes meditate in Saint Crispin’s Chapel, his last executed design.
The family thought Uncle A had gone down with the Lusitania and mourned the loss of one so young, so promising. We didn’t know that he’d survived, however, clinging to flotsam in the North Atlantic and rescued by a Basque fishing trawler. As an Iowan landlubber, it came as a surprise that Basques of northern Spain venture as far as Greenland and the Grand Banks to catch the wily cod. What did they make of an amnesiac in striped pajamas among their catch-of-the-day?
Happily, I got to know Anson Tennant before his second death in 1968. The middle name on my birth certificate reads “Alan” but in ’68 I changed it to honor him (without having to replace all those monogrammed towels!). He had that kind of presence. Twenty-one years of his mental fog lifted in the summer of 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Two telegrams preserved in the family albums cancel each other out: the first confirming his disappearance at sea; the second from our State Department announcing his return from the land beyond the Styx.
Charon rows both ways, I guess. And on this return trip the boatman also brought us Anson’s new family, wife Graxi, and my cousins Alize, Mikel and Aitor, who taught me their language with gusto—a Spanish word because I can’t recall the Basque term for infectious enthusiasm.
When the war was over in 1945—the year of my birth—he and his family became bi-continental, living six months in exotic Gipuzkoa and the other six here. I’ve written about his fractured life elsewhere. So today, I simply acknowledge the tangence of our lives; the time we shared, the linkage forged, the torches passed, the presence missed. The void unfilled.
Who’s missing from your life?
Ghosts of Christmas Past (#3)
“A few figs from thistles…”
Howard A Tabor
Christmas Postponed
I know. It’s the Fourth of July.
It’s sultry and the air reeks of gunpowder. But that didn’t stop one of the Ghosts of Christmas Past from visiting me last night.
1968
Chicago’s near north side was a neighborhood in transition during the 1960s. Urban renewal in full bloom, Carl Sandberg Village was under construction and the used bookstore where I worked part time was about to be bulldozed into oblivion.
I had lived in the neighborhood for only three months and was looking forward to the train ride home for Christmas. My sister Catherine was bringing her fiance Jim LaFarge for family introductions and a gaggle of cousins were coordinating a mass migration. It was a great disappointment, then, when a crisis at the newspaper (my day job) forced me to cancel. I’d made a few friends, but most of them seemed on their way somewhere else. So I celebrated with a last-minute rush ticket to “Messiah,” Handel’s oratorio performed annually by the Apollo Musical Club.
That winter was particularly cold and wet; the rhythms of spring and new life couldn’t come soon enough. Work at the paper and my part-time bookstore position filled the days, but evenings and weekends were an invitation to explore a city of ethnic neighborhoods, especially for someone who’d grown up in the relative homogeneity of small-town Iowa.
One late Saturday afternoon found me in “Little Italy,” an enclave holding out against the new University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. There, amid battling pasta sauces, colorful costume—more enthusiastic than authentic—and a degree of Catholicity I hardly imagined, I admired a display of wood carving and fell into conversation of heated agreement with a woman probably in her early 40s. She was Marilla Thurston Missbach, there with her daughter Leah. We shared a gelato, exchanged numbers and parted in opposite directions.
Some weeks later Marilla phoned to say that there was a Ukrainian festival next weekend. Would I like to join her? Absolutely! And we became friends until her death in 1996.
Marilla
Marilla lived in a suburb west of Midway Airport, a short walk from her secretarial position at the Corn Products Co., the folks who bring us Mazola. Soon my preferred route for getting to her home—sans car—was CTA #22 downtown and #67 (the Archer Express, apropos of someone from Agincourt!) to the end of the line, followed by a mile-and-a-half walk through modest working-class neighborhoods. I picked a different path each time and came to know the Village of Summit very well.
Her home was just that: a home. The house itself had been her mother’s but Marilla “camped” there, her base of far-flung engagement with the World. From her I had already learned that Chicago could be enjoyed on a budget—a secretary’s modest salary—if one focused on the freebies: ethnic and folk festivals, discount and standby tickets; connections. It was an education to ride on her petticoat tails.
We held many things in common: food, art, an appreciation of architecture. In fact she was a member of Unity Temple, the congregation in Oak Park burdened with an early Frank Lloyd Wright building. We laughed when I discovered she was a contralto in the Apollo Musical Club: I had been less than a hundred feet from her at that “Messiah” concert in December, my substitute for the holiday with home and family.
The Fourth of July in 1969 was more than I could have imagined. We met—Marilla, me and a few other friends—at Grant Park for the free music, food vendors, etc. that led up to a massive fireworks display over Lake Michigan. I had expected to go home but Marilla asked us out to her place for an extended celebration. When we arrived, I found the house fully decked out for Christmas: lights, wreaths, a tree (living and later transplanted into her survival-of-the-fittest garden), and a buffet of eggnog and other very out-of-season treats. There was only one gift—for me: a bus stop sign for the CTA #67 Archer Express, the bus that I took home later that night or early Saturday morning.
Marilla’s gifts were modest but always heartfelt and carefully considered. Yet the greatest thing she gave me was her time, a commodity we have in limited supply and diminishing with every moment.
Happy Fourth of July. Oh, and Merry Christmas, too.
Ghosts of Christmas Past (#2)
A few figs from thistles…
by Howard A. Tabor
Ghosts of Christmas Past: 1960
Looking back on the 60s, it’s hard to recall the optimism I felt as a young man looking into his own future. The U.S. was deep in the Cold War; we had spent much of the 50s deluding ourselves that it was possible to survive a Soviet nuclear attack; but the economy was robust as unemployment headed toward a decade low of four percent. I had a job at Cliff’s Garage, and high school was only a pain in the ass most of the time. For Christmas 1960, I had added two people to my short heartfelt gift list: Willie Simmons and his wife Lillian.
It’s not easy to wrap an umbrella and maintain an air of mystery about it; the antique teacup and saucer were less problematic. My sister Catherine solved the matter of delivery by driving in to Des Moines with friends the weekend before Christmas. So I hitched a ride and found my way to the Simmons’s small apartment near downtown, arriving unannounced on Saturday afternoon. A pleasant hour of tea and conversation ensued before I had to find Catherine for the drive home. It was a gentle day at the opening of a tumultuous decade.
Willie and Lill
William A. Simmons, Jr. was about seventy-five when I met him at Cliff’s Garage, an odd addition to the usual suspects who occupied a bench on the building’s sunny south side. Late spring through mid-September, a constantly changing cast of characters populated that homemade bench. From 11-ish into the late afternoon, customers, friends and the local constabulary dropped in and out for gossip and access to the community coffee pot. Unless someone was on their way to a wedding, funeral or to church, the dress code was decidedly casual, which made Mr Simmons stand out all the more: he was a thin, delicate, meticulous man always in a conservative three-piece tweed business suit and fedora, regardless of the weather. Mr Simmons accorded me the honor of calling him Willie. But as someone sixty years his junior, that familiarity took a while to sink in.
Working for a brokerage firm in Des Moines, Willie’s clients were scattered across Iowa’s northwest quadrant, from Ames and Fort Dodge to Sioux City. Cliff Pherson was one of his small investors in the new market of mutual funds, which gave me the opportunity to eavesdrop on market strategies. One Saturday afternoon, Willie explained the rudiments of a free-market economy and managed, somehow, to make capitalism sound less like money-grubbing greed than I’d begun to suspect. Cliff let me read his copies of the Wall Street Journal. Then, in November of that year–1960–Mr Simmons helped me make my one and only investment in the stock market: one hundred common shares of the Boston & Maine Railroad. I turned a profit and doubled my college fund.
On hot afternoons, Willie would remove his suit coat, revealing suspenders typical of someone born in 1879. From Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, he came to the Midwest in the heady 1920s and somehow evaded the worst of the Market Crash and Great Depression; if he offered details for those years, I don’t recall them. Hedid provide an intimate glimpse just once, near-tearfully revealing the death of his first wife from cancer, which made my afternoon of tea and pleasantries with Mr and the second Mrs Simmons even more poignant.
Shortly after that impromptu Christmas visit, Willie retired from the business. I hope he had made at least a few shrewd investments along the way.
He’d certainly made one in me.