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The Palm & The Pine – A California Story Part I

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by Bob Sparrow

      I was recently made aware of a physical and symbolic boundary that screamed, “Road Trip!”.  It is a ‘landmark’ of sorts that I believe most Californians, much less those who live outside our state of ‘fruits and nuts’, don’t even know about .  It is simply two trees in the meridian of a highway that represent the mythical dividing line between Northern California and Southern California – and trust me on this one, there is a division.   As a matter of fact there have  been no less than 220 official initiatives, 27 that have been considered, ‘serious’, to separate California into, sometimes multiple pieces, but mostly in half.  It seems this ‘sometimes-less-than-civil’ war has been going on in California since the very beginning.

      The first secession effort was in 1854, just four years after statehood.  That attempt was a ‘tri-state-ectomy’ where the southern counties were going to be called Colorado, a name not being used at the time, but one that a group from the Rockies had called ‘dibs’ on.  The middle counties would retain the California name, and the northern counties would be called the State of Shasta – the State of Canada Dry had apparently already been taken.  That initiative lost momentum when everyone was more interested in finding gold than defining boundaries.

      The next secession attempt was five years later in 1859, but lost traction when all the paparazzi headed to the South covering another secession attempt, the beginning of the southern state’s attempt to break from the union and that pesky conflict that ensured.  With that, the California state-ectomy soon became back page news and Californians didn’t want to waste time on political posturing when there was a good war going on.

      Ironically, it was another skirmish that got in the way of yet another effort by Californians to subdivide the state in the twentieth century.  In 1941 individual counties from both northern California and southern Oregon were seceding, one each week, to form the State of Jefferson – a name probably inspired by the television show of the same name, but, alas, the Japanese were planning some sub-dividing of their own that year, which gave those in the entire country, and particularly those on the west coast, more important things to worry about.

      There was another major state-ectomy initiative in the 1960s – of course, what wasn’t going on to interrupt the status quo in the sixties?  Sorry, I don’t remember.  But hey, there was another war going on then too, so it must have been time to look at separating the state.

      The nineties offered up another tri-sectomy with a proposal of the states of Northern California, Central California and Southern California, which died in the state senate; I’m thinking it was because no one wanted Bakersfield.  As recently as mid-2011 the latest attempt to create the State of South California was laughed at by most politicians in the state; which was an ironic twist since we’re usually laughing at most politicians in the state.

     The reality is, over the last 150+ years, destiny, providence circumstance and various wars have prevented us from even getting close to bifurcating California.  So the trees have come to symbolize, at least to some, the cultural divide between Northern California and SoCal – see, even these two terms typify the different cultures.  So, you say, “Enough with the history lesson, what’s the story behind the trees?’

 Coming in: The Palm & The Pine – A California Story  Part II

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A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIME – Part Two

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By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

When we left Annie in Part One, she had just witnessed the shooting death of her mother and was, in the norms of that time, a spinster.  But that was about to change.

In the late 1870’s, John Hoever, our paternal great-grandfather, emigrated from Germany to San Francisco.  After a short stay in ‘The City’, he moved to Willows.  This is the first indication that he might not have been of sound mind.

In any event, he made the move and opened a jewelry store, the first of its kind in Willows.  We don’t know how John and Annie met, but since they lived in a small town, it was either in church or through friends.  That  is how things were done before Match.com.

John and Annie married in 1892.  They had a son in 1893 and our grandmother was born in 1895.  Annie got pregnant again in  1899 but John Hoever died months after the baby, a girl,  was born.  My second cousin didn’t have any information on how John Hoever died, but obviously something went horribly wrong.  Another research opportunity!

Unfortunately, this may be a case of “be careful what you ask for”.  After hours of searching on the ancestry data bases I finally found was I was looking for – his census record from1900.  There he was, recorded for official purposes, in the Napa State Hospital for the Insane.  Oh boy…this explains so much about our family.

Annie was no doubt devastated by having to put her husband “away”, especially considering the stigma associated with mental illness in those days.  I imagine that his behavior must have been pretty bad for her to decide it was better to raise three small children alone than live with him in the house.  John died in September of 1900, presumably from his illness.

Faced with this overwhelming loss, Annie might have chosen to do what so many Victorian women did when their husbands died – don a black dress and stay home for the rest of her life.  But Annie was not a typical woman.  She made the decision to keep her husband’s jewelry store open and manage it herself.

In a book published in 1918 about the early history of Willows and its inhabitants, the authors noted that “Annie Billiou Hoever took over the management of her husband’s jewelry store after his death.  She has demonstrated her ability as a business woman and won great success through her own efforts”.   That was quite a high endorsement for a woman to receive in 1918.  Heck, it’s a great compliment today.

Annie not only became a successful business woman, she also excelled in raising her three children.  Two of the three graduated from Stanford University (our grandmother, the rebel, being the lone exception) and they all went on to lead rewarding lives.  She was active in the community and enjoyed a wide circle of friends until her death in 1940.  She is buried in a joint grave with John.

Which brings me back to the ring.  The diamond had been re-set over the years and the latest iteration “smothered” it.  So for our anniversary last year my husband had it put in a new setting so that I could wear it as my engagement ring.  Every day when I look at it I think of Annie and of all that this diamond has “seen” in its lifetime.  I think about her joys and her sorrows and how she persevered through it all.  I wish that I had known more about Annie when I was younger – somehow it gives me strength to know that I come from such an inspiring woman.

So on this Mother’s Day I hope that somewhere Annie knows that she is still remembered and makes her family proud.

Annie with her three children

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A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIME – Part One

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By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

This week, in honor of Mother’s Day, I want to pay special tribute to my paternal great-grandmother, Annie Billiou Hoever.  Last year I received a ring from my mother that I always assumed was my paternal grandmother’s engagement ring.  When I told mom I would enjoy wearing Grandma’s ring she looked at me with alarm – something I’ve become used to – and said, “It wasn’t her engagement ring, it was her mother’s engagement ring.  It belonged to Annie Hoever.”

Sheesh!  Good thing I found this out before mom died or I would never have known the truth.  In all the stories I’d heard about our family, I couldn’t remember one mention of Annie Hoever.  Mom had only met her a few times after she married our dad so she couldn’t tell me much about her.  I wanted to know more about the woman who first wore the ring so I started doing some research.  Luckily, I found a second cousin who had stories, pictures and old newspaper clippings about the whole Billiou clan.  Jilted lovers, murder, insanity…it was all there.  Just your typical American family.

Annie’s father, Joseph Billiou, was born and raised in St. Louis.  Her mother, Julia, had emigrated from Ireland to Willows, California in the 1850’s.  Willows is in rice farming country north of Sacramento.  My father, who was raised in Willows, often spoke of his home town in rapturous terms.  I’m not sure Fodor’s would agree with Pop; Willows is a typical agricultural outpost that could barely be found on a map until Interstate 5 was built and they constructed some off ramps to the town.  Now its claim to fame is that there is a both a Denny’s and a Burger King right off the freeway exit.

In any event, when Julia came to Willows she fell in love with Joseph’s brother, Michael.  Michael (rather foolishly in hindsight) asked Joseph to move from St. Louis to Willows to join him in the rice business.  In a move worthy of a Kardashian, Julia took one look at Joseph, broke off her engagement to Michael,  and married Joseph.   That must have made for some rather awkward Thanksgiving dinners.

Joseph became major rice and grain farmer in his own right.  He and Julia eventually had four children, Annie being their firstborn, and they lived a wonderful life on the ranch.  Annie was educated at a Catholic boarding school near San Jose and then returned to Willows to settle down.  However, no eligible bachelor presented himself and by age 27 she was still unmarried.  Today, that would be the equivalent of someone at age 40 still being single.  In other words, getting hit by lightening was a more likely event.

Unfortunately, in 1887 the family idyll was rather unceremoniously torn apart when their cook, having drunk too much of the cooking sherry, stormed into the dining room one evening and shot Annie’s mother to death.  The cook then chased Annie around the house, shooting at her twice but – the cooking sherry having taken its toll – missed her both times.

The subsequent newspaper accounts of the cook’s trial and the vigilante justice that took place afterward are something right out of the Wild West.  I guess because it was  the Wild West.  A jury convened the week after the murder (makes you long for frontier justice, doesn’t it?) and found the cook guilty, sentencing him to life imprisonment.  Upon hearing the verdict  an angry mob formed and demanded “an eye for an eye”.  The sheriff, knowing a “situation” when he saw one, put guards at the entrance to the jail and hid the cook in the basement. He wasn’t aware that one of the vigilante group members was a former sheriff’s employee who knew all of the jail’s hidden entrances.  That night the group broke into the jail, extricated the cook, and lynched him in a nearby field.  No member of the group was ever arrested for the cook’s murder.

You would think Annie had suffered enough trauma to last her a lifetime, but unfortunately she had more ahead of her.

Stay tuned for Part Two…coming on Thursday!

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Road Trip Through the Continental Divide – Part II

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by Bob Sparrow

     Just outside the city limits of Denver heading east the state of Colorado quickly becomes Nebraska – not geographically, but visually.  Here the world is flat.  There is nothing but miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.  If in the world of ‘new energy’, corn is oil, then Omaha is the new Abu Dhabi.  Would have made better time, but a McCormick Reaper took 35 minutes to pass a John Deere tractor leading a herd of cattle crossing the Interstate – I’m having steak tonight for dinner, just out of spite.

     Weather is heating up and so is the car.  While I don’t know a great deal about cars, I do know that smoke coming out of the front is not a good sign.  I pull over, pop the hood and assume the requisite ‘guy’ stance as I stare vacuously at the engine even though I have no idea what I’m looking at, much less what I’m looking for.  As far as I know, there could be a nativity scene under there.  I continue to stare.  I see a bundle of wires and a lot of . . . parts, and just generally think that things look pretty grimy under there.  A middle-aged woman stops and asks if I need help.  Not wanting to suggest a lack of masculinity, I assume I can discourage her assistance with some manly ‘car speak’.  I give a knowing, Barney Fife sniff, a tug at my pants and nonchalantly say, “Nah, it looks like the rotator gasket came off the muffler bearing.  I got it covered, thanks.”  She stares at me like I’ve said something really stupid, shakes her head, turns and goes back to her car, returns with a container of radiator fluid and says, “When it cools down, pour this in that thing in the front of the car that looks like a washboard, then I think your muffler bearing will be just fine.”  She continues to shake her head as she drives off.  I make it to Omaha for that steak dinner and good night’s rest.

     Finally make it through Nebraska and into Iowa, which is just the same as Nebraska, but with museums, and more corn, if that’s possible.  In Iowa you’ll find a museum for the birthplace of John Wayne, the museum for former Cleveland Indian pitching great, Bob Feller, the museum of The Bridges of Madison County, the Herbert Hoover museum (be sure to watch the up-beat video, ‘The Great Depression’), the Buffalo Bill museum and somewhere I’m sure is a museum containing the world’s biggest ball of twine.  I drive through the iconic town of Newton, Iowa, long-time home to Maytag, whose repair people could never find work.  Now even the people who made Maytags can’t find work – they were purchased by Whirlpool.    Just outside of Newton is the ‘world’s largest truck stop’.  Top selling bumper sticker: “If it has boobs or wheels it’s gonna cause you trouble.”  I didn’t buy it, never been one for espousing my philosophy on the bumper of my car, but it gave me something to think about for the next several hundred miles.

     As I near Chicago it starts to snow and although the trip was book-ended with storms, the weather for the rest of the trip could not have been better.  I considered the light snowfall just as I entered Chicago as a ‘ticker tape parade’ welcoming the end of my journey.

Factoids of the trip

  • It’s exactly 1,000 miles from my driveway to the first Irish pub in downtown Denver
  • One-third of the time was spent listening to great CDs, one-third of the time was spent listening to the soybean and hog futures on ‘local radio’ stations and one-third of the time was spent in silence ‘listening’ to what I saw.
  • There are about three times as many trucks as cars on the Interstate between Denver and Chicago.
  • A Corolla gets 37.4 miles to the gallon cross country – even Al Gore didn’t feel the globe warm on this trip.
  • There is a North Platt, Nebraska, but no Platt.
  • I passed through three time zones on the trip, four if you count going back to the 50s while driving through Nebraska
  • Driving time: 30 hours.  Gas: $177.27.  Coffee: 2.6 gallons.  Delivering my daughter’s car to her in Chicago: Priceless
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ROAD TRIP THROUGH THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE – Part I

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by Bob Sparrow

     When my daughter, Dana moved to Chicago she needed someone to drive her Toyota Corolla there from southern California.  That road trip had my name all over it, so I happily volunteered.  I kept a journal of my thoughts and observations along the way – here it is.

     It’s early, it’s dark, I’m invigorated by my planned road trip across two-thirds of America as I shower and get dressed.  Did I leave the shower on?  No, I look outside, it’s raining.  It will not dampen my enthusiasm.  I set out.  Where’s the windshield wiper lever?  More importantly where’s some coffee?  Gosh, these Corollas are small.  I fumble to find the cruise control in the dark, unsuccessfully.  OK, I’m serious now, what happened to the Starbucks on every corner?  Discover that Corollas don’t have cruise control!  Limited music on the radio at this time of the morning.  Didn’t realize we had so many Spanish-speaking stations – Mariachis at 5:00 a.m.?  My gosh what are they so happy about at this time of day?  Got coffee and finally out on the open road, sun starting to peek over the mountains.  I’m hungry.  Find an ‘Open 24 Hours’ truck stop.

     Wishing I still had that ‘TruckMasters Graduate’ ball cap as I feel like I’m not really fitting in here with my Bermuda shorts and Tommy Bahama shirt.  I sit at the counter and order my coffee black, like the rest of the truckers – I’ll put some cream and sugar in it when I’m back in the car.  I listen to the truckers’ stories and am reminded that I’m happy I have all my teeth.  Back on the road.  Soon the smell of rural American comes wafting through the car.  I see horses and cows and acres of farmland.  I see a little town ahead and slow down to read the sign . . . ‘Norco’.  I’ve traveled nine miles.  I’m thinking this could be a very long trip.

It requires significant will power to drive past Vegas; I didn’t even know there was a ‘past Vegas’ until now.  But on through to St. George, and after 700 miles, pull into Grand Junction, CO, for the night.  While it is a junction of sorts, I didn’t really find it all that grand.

The next morning’s drive was a ‘religious experience’ for me.  There are few, if any, more scenic stretches of road in America than the one from Grand Junction, through the Rockies to Denver.  The Colorado River has carved the most beautiful path through the mountains, and man has tunneled, cantilevered and laid his road next to the river.  It makes one of the most beautiful blends of nature and man’s work that I’ve seen.  I drove this road in the early morning hours, just as the sun reached the rim of the Rockies, providing a soft light to the freshly fallen snow.  It was a quiet, cold (7 degrees at its coldest), breath-taking experience.  I put in a John Denver CD, but decided that no sound was the best sound.  The winter panoramas were purely magnificent.  I pass the town of Rifle, the turn off for Aspen, Vail.    I stopped to take ‘communion’ (a cup of coffee and a doughnut) in the village of Eagle.  I parked the car, got out and just looked at the beautiful winter scape around me and listened to the quiet.  The cold air fills my lungs and while it was unbelievably invigorating it was also damn cold.  Back in the car and back on the road.  I remind myself to tell anyone that has the opportunity to make this drive, particularly on a clear winter’s day, to do it.

As I emerge from the Rockies the city of Denver unfolds below me.

(Next post: Part II – Denver to Chicago)

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LIVING ON THE FACE OF THE SUN

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By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

Eight months of the year I live in Paradise, otherwise known as Scottsdale, Arizona.  Contrary to popular belief, it does get cold here in the winter – we’ve had a freak snowfall most every year – but generally we have sunny days and 70 degree temperatures.  It’s what causes some of my jerkier acquaintances to call home to Minnesota every January and taunt their friends who are digging out from an ice storm.

But all that is about to change.  This past weekend we had our first 100 degree temperature of the year.  That’s right – it’s frigging APRIL and we hit the century mark already.  Although it will cool down a bit this week, the fact that we’ve had a 100 degree day means only one thing:  we are once again facing hell on Earth.  Literally.  The average temperature here in July and August is 105.  That would almost be bearable except that the average low is 75.  So it never cools off.  We are God’s warming drawer for four months of the year.

I know that the conventional wisdom is that it’s a dry heat, but then again, so is my microwave oven and you won’t see me living in that.  In the 14 years we’ve lived here I’ve never become used to this “upside down” schedule.  My whole life I was conditioned to love summer – school was out, we looked forward to time at Tahoe, and we had lots of beer parties.  Now summer is something to be dreaded.  Somehow that still seems unnatural to me.

Our strategy since I retired ten years ago is to escape out of here each summer.  We have tried all sorts of combinations for our summer road trips – renting for a month, staying in hotels for a week or two, mooching off some of our friends who have mountain homes.  Two years ago when our house was being remodeled we rented a condo in Sun Valley, Idaho for three months.  Ironically, that was our worst summer.  I have to admit, as nice as it was to get away for the whole summer, I really missed my “stuff” at home.

So once again this summer we will be in and out of Arizona, traveling to California’s central coast, the Bay Area and up to Sun Valley.  That leaves a lot of time to sit at home in the air conditioning and get stuff done.  I’ve already started to compose my list of “summer projects”; really fun stuff like cleaning and organizing drawers, saving computer files to a hard disk, and alphabetizing the spice rack.

But I also have a potential blockbuster to keep me occupied. When I did our family history last year I traced it back to medieval England, and there is some possibility that one of our lines goes back to the Irish kings.  If true, that would go a long way towards explaining Bob’s propensity to enter every Irish pub he sees.   We also might be related to King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, in which case I think we are 16,346 in line to the British throne.  You’d think that should have warranted an invitation to the Royal Wedding last year.

So, as those of you in other states get ready for BBQ’s, planting a garden or just chilling at the beach, I will be putting the cardamom between the caraway seeds and the cayenne pepper.  And, maybe, getting fitted for my tiara.

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The City of Californicating, Oregon

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by Bob Sparrow

    I love Oregon, but as a Californian I always go there in disguise; not the glasses, big nose and mustache kind, but rather with an affected Canadian accent, which ends up sounding more like a drunk Norwegian with a lisp.  Why the disguise?  I’ve found that it’s never a good idea to tell people in Oregon that you’re from California.  The reason dates back to the real estate boom of the ‘70s when California home prices were very affordable and were attracting people from all over the country . . . the world.  Californians, wanting to get away from this sudden in migration, decided that the ‘promised land’ had moved across the border to Oregon, so they started moving north . . . in droves.

     Oregonians, fearing that these new California immigrants would turn Oregon into another California, were not the least bit pleased with the influx of ‘flakes from the land of fruits and nuts’.  While there was some question as to whether signs ever really existed at the California-Oregon border that read, ‘Welcome to Oregon. Now go home!’, Oregon governor at the time, Tom McCall, did set the tone with this quote to a CBS news reporter, “Come visit us again and again.  This is a State of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live”.  But Californians still came, and to this day most things that smack of progress in Oregon are blamed on those who have ‘Californicated’ the state.

     So it was with mixed emotions that I went to Sunriver, Oregon on a recent business trip – anxious to see this beautiful part of the country for the first time, but concerned that there may still be a bounty on California natives loitering in these pristine environs; especially if I was going to enjoy a cigar while I was there. I thought rules for smoking in California were stringent, if you want to smoke in Oregon, you have to go to the Southeast corner of the state and step into Nevada.  If you’re going to continue to smoke, Oregonians would prefer that you just stay there.  I left the cigars at home.

     Prior to my trip I decided to look up a little history of Sunriver.  The short version is that it was built by the Army as a training camp during WWII and then developed as a resort in 1968; I guess that’s the long version as well.  The developer picked the name, so the brochure says, “to reflect the most characteristic features of the area”.  Perhaps I came at a different time of year than the developers, but it was only on the last day of my visit that the sun came out and I caught a glimpse of the river.  Had it been up to me to name the place, I probably would have called it something like Overcastandcold – of the four days I was there in mid-April, it rained once and snowed twice!

     I discovered that Oregonians have never shown much imagination when it comes to naming their cities, to wit: Drain, Sinks, Cake, Bakeoven, Wagontire, Lookingglass and Noon.  There is also the self-deprecating town of Nimrod and one left over from their hippy days, Zig Zag.  When they ran out of domestic objects as names they started just copying other US city – Cleveland, Denver, Kansas City, Detroit, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Nashville are all cities in Oregon.  To add an international flavor, they have cities named Glasgow, Lebanon, Little Switzerland, Paris, Rome and Damascus to name a few.

     I will say that the one sunny day I did have in Sunriver was spectacular, Mt. Bachelor shown as a snow-capped peak set against a deep blue sky, was awe-inspiring (see picture).  ‘The Three Sisters’ peaks of the Cascades couldn’t have been more beautiful; the closest town: Sisters.  I know that I breathed air in Sunriver that no one has ever breathed before.  Oregonians are excellent stewards of the nature around them and I love that.  It was ultimately a joy to fully understand and appreciate how Sunriver got its name.

Aloha, not a Hawaiian salutation, just another Oregon city.

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THE ICE AGE

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I love history – both generally and specifically as it relates to our family.  Last year when I was studying some of the Sparrow history I was fascinated to learn that our grandparents were married the same week that the RMS Titanic sunk.  In other words, that ill-fated ship and the Sparrows are commemorating a 100th anniversary this week. Of course, our grandparents have been dead for decades.  But our family celebrates everything without much provocation.

All the hoopla around the Titanic anniversary, including the re-release of the movie by the same name, has made me wonder what our grandparents thought about the disaster, or if it in any way affected their honeymoon. I suspect that I’m not alone in wishing that I had asked my parents and grandparents more questions before they died. Typical things mostly – what attracted them to one another, what their first job was, what mom was thinking when she chose that wedding dress, or, in this case, how did a major catastrophe affect their lives.

I suspect that in my grandparent’s case, it affected them very little. Theirs was something of a scandalous marriage at the time so they had their own personal ice floes to navigate (and, yes, I’ll write about that in a future blog). Something that happened thousands of miles away to strangers would have been interesting, but not necessarily all-consuming.  I suspect that they read about the Titanic in the newspaper over breakfast and then said something like, “Please pass the Devonshire cream”.

Contrast that to what might happen if the Titanic sank today. One can only imagine the news coverage: helicopters flying over the site, news anchors broadcasting from both Southampton and New York, and inevitably Geraldo Rivera would be clinging to an ice berg, wind whistling through his hair, looking for lost treasures. We would be inundated with “expert” analysis and live interviews with people who had a third cousin once removed who went to grammar school with the porter on the third deck.  I don’t even want to think about Twitter and Facebook.  The Food Network would be our only place of refuge.

And all this leads me to wonder: are our lives improved by constant, overwhelming news reports?

I realize that in a broad sense we are all part of the “human family” and sometimes news coverage gives us a better understanding of an issue or a situation. And certainly there is a human interest aspect to every major story.  But so much excessive coverage also leads to stress. We can hardly breathe for all of the information that comes our way. The news channels seem less interested in providing us with the salient facts than in out pacing their competitors in the minutia race.  The result is a LOT of “noise” and the inevitable annoying person at the office who has to be the resident expert on every breaking news story.

Sometimes I think the generations before us had it better in this respect.  They got the pertinent news, usually once a day, and unless it affected a friend or relative, they then went on about their business.  Somewhere between 1912 and 2012 we’ve misplaced the happy medium.

Oh, one other coincidence between the Titanic and the Sparrows:  there has been many a “morning after” when someone in our family has suggested that they were hit by bad ice.

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Don’t Call It ‘An Old Folks Home’ (Continued)

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(Continued from April 3rd post)

by Bob Sparrow

    The show begins.  The entertainment was a husband-wife team in their 50s who had a Captain and Tennille sort of vibe, except he played the keyboard more like a deckhand than a captain and she, pardon the mixed metaphor, couldn’t carry Toni Tennille’s jock strap in a wet paper bag.  I have no idea what that means.  Their repertoire included mostly Snoop Dog and Lady Gaga stuff.  Oops, sorry, that was the music I had running through my iPod during their performance.  Just kidding, I don’t have any Snoop Dog.  Actually they weren’t bad, as they succeeded in keeping the audience awake, no small task, and on numerous occasions even had them ‘gumming’ the words to some old familiar songs.

      Several times during the course of their performance, mom would turn to ‘New Jack’ and start talking about various subjects, not in hush tones, but as if she had learned to whisper in a saw mill.  A woman sitting directly behind us, wanted of all things, to listen to the entertainment and not mom’s ‘whisperings’ of sweet nothings into New Jack’s hearing aid. After several room-filling, head-turning ‘shhhhes’, the woman realized that mom was either ignoring her or hard of hearing, or both, so tapped me on the shoulder and nodded over to mom, using the now-familiar, non-verbal, face-contorting, silent language of seniors, that screamed, “Can’t you shut that old stove up?”  I shrugged and tried to give a non-verbal look that said, ‘Welcome to my world.’

      The entertainment was really just the opening act for the main event – the crowning of the Merrill Gardens Valentines King and Queen.  The room quieted as the hostess from ‘god’s waiting room’ came before the group to announce this year’s king and queen.   In a very officious way she explained that the king and queen were voted on by the residents and that the results had been sealed since yesterday noon, probably in a prunes jar.  She paused dramatically and explained that this year’s voting had a little twist – she would explain later.  She announced the names of the king and queen.  The new queen hurried to the front to be crowned and explained that the king was in the restroom at the moment and would be out when he was good and ready.  The hostess then explained that the voting was so close this year that they decided to crown a runner-up king and queen, which was unprecedented.  She then called out, “Jack and Barbara” – New Jack and mom!  I leaned over and congratulated mom and whispered to her that as runner-up queen, should the 1st queen, for whatever reason, be unable to perform her queenly duties, that she would become queen!

      I must admit that soon after I heard my mom’s named announced I had to restrain myself from jumping up and running around the room shrieking, “I’m a Prince, I’m a Prince”. Or would I be a duke?  Whatever, I was inwardly thrilled with this brush with royalty.  My enthusiasm dimmed however as I realized that while my sister would become a royal princess, my older brother would be the first in line of succession and as the middle child, I’d be squeezed out again.  After this realization, to be completely honest, I became secretly happy that my mom was only runner-up and muttered under my breath, “Long live the queen.”

      After the show, mom, New Jack and I retired to mom’s room.  I knew my brother and sister were going to be asking a lot of questions about New Jack, so I needed to get some information out of this guy.  With the help of some light water-boarding and a flood light, the grilling began.  I learned that he was originally from West Virginia, but he seemed to have all his teeth and as far as I could tell did not play the banjo.  He was a dentist for 30 years before moving to San Diego and getting into real estate where he apparently found that he could make more money with his hands in people’s pocket than he could with his hands in their mouths.  He came to Sonoma because his only child, a daughter, lives there.  The daughter has three grown children, the most interesting of which is a son who lives in Taiwan and works for the US government.  New Jack thinks he’s a CIA spy of some kind; I think he’s a ping-pong table salesman.  All and all, at the end of the interrogation, he seemed worthy of my mom’s attention.

      This budding romance is the talk of Merrill Gardens, but will it last?  We don’t know whether to expect a call from ‘New Jack’ asking for our mother’s arthritic hand in marriage or a call from mom saying that the ‘Chicken Lady’ is now saving his seat.  Time will tell.

 Post Script: I have poked some fun at the elderly here, but I poke fun at everyone and I just didn’t want to discriminate.  Merrill Gardens does an excellent job of caring for their residents.

 

 

 

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Don’t Call It An Old Folks Home

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by Bob Sparrow

    Recently our mother moved into what was previously called an ‘old folks home’, but we have come to understand that that term is derogatory, insensitive and . . . well yes, politically incorrect.   So we have created an ever-growing number of euphemisms to cover this concept, but for simplicity reasons we’ll just call it a ‘senior facility’ – sometimes the word ‘living’ is put between ‘senior’ and ‘facility’ I suppose to differentiate it from those ‘non-living senior facilities’.  Our mom’s new facility is called Merrill Gardens and it’s located in the bucolic city of Sonoma – wine country, which often times comes in handy for those visiting our mother.

      It was her 93rd birthday and it was up to either one of my siblings or me to make the trip from Central California, Southern California or Scottsdale, Arizona to Sonoma to celebrate the occasion with her.  My brother had just had a hip replaced, I’m assuming with another hip, so he couldn’t make the trip; my sister’s pancreas was not doing whatever pancreases are supposed to do, so she was out, and thus the familial obligation fell upon me.  Road trip!  The visit would not only provide me an opportunity to see how mom got nearly 55 years of crap from the last house she lived in, into a one-bedroom apartment, but more importantly it would be an chance to meet the new male ‘friend’ in her life that she had been telling us all about for the last several months.  It was my job to ‘grill’ this guy and report back to my siblings regarding his intentions with our mother.  Yes, apparently love has no age limit; love does however have a good sense of irony – mom’s ‘boyfriend’, as she calls him, is named Jack, which, coincidently, was what our father and her husband for 63+ years was named.

      ‘New Jack’, as we have affectionately dubbed him, is 87, which I suppose makes my mother a ‘cougar’ of sorts, but to her credit I’ve not heard her refer to him once as ‘boy toy’.  We’re happy that mom has found someone; our father has been gone for over ten years now and mom was long-overdue as a hen in need of someone to peck.  Those who have a parent in a ‘senior facility’ know that men are at a premium there, so she feels very lucky – I’m not saying she’s getting lucky, I’m just saying she’s feeling lucky – to have latched on to one.

      I met ‘New Jack’ in the lobby of Merrill Gardens as preparations were being made for their big, annual Valentine’s Day concert which included the ceremonial coronation of the ‘Merrill Garden’s Valentines King and Queen’.  We arrived at the showroom (actually just some folding chairs set up in the lobby) early; as mom said it would get fairly crowded rather quickly.  It did indeed become ‘walker room only’ thirty minutes before show time.  Mom and I found three seats in the second to last row; we sat down and mom put her purse on the seat next to her, thus ‘saving’ the seat for ‘New Jack’ who had to go to the restroom . . . again. I suppose in some circumstances we still ‘save seats’, but I thought we stopped that practice after junior high, with the possible exception of calling ‘shotgun’ in high school, thus saving for oneself the most dangerous seat in the car.  After that we just seemed to accept whatever seat we had and whoever sat next to us.  But I’m here to tell you that we return to ‘seat saving’ in our golden years.  The seat next to ‘New Jack’s’ saved seat was also vacant and being saved by the person in the adjacent seat.  As the place was filling up, an elderly woman with a rather grumpy face, that we were to subsequently learn would match her personality, ambled down our row and tried to sit in ‘New Jack’s’ seat.  My mother looked at her purse on the seat and then back to the elderly woman as if to say, “Are you blind, can’t you see my purse on the seat means it’s saved?”  The fact that the elderly woman was indeed vision-impaired seemed not to matter, but watching this interaction, I learned something about getting older, and that is as we tend to rely more on communicating with a look rather than verbally, I assume this has something to do with the loss of hearing that typically accompanies old age.  I digress; the elderly woman looked at mom as if she was a leper and started to sit down in the next seat over, when the woman next to that seat told her it was also being saved.  The elderly ‘seat seeker’ then yelled for all to hear, “That’s ridiculous, they should outlaw seat saving!” and shuffled off in disgust.  Seat savers, don’t be alarmed; while our representatives in Congress have passed sillier legislation, I don’t think the seat saving initiative is getting much traction.

      As we sat waiting for the show to begin, my mother gave me a running commentary on several of the passers-by.  There was ‘Dog Lady’, thus labeled by my mother, not so much because she owned a dog, but because she looked like her dog, probably just in my mother’s eyes, as ‘Dog Lady’ had her eye on New Jack before “the new floozy (that’s mom) moved in’.  Then there’s the ‘Chicken Lady’; no, not because she has or looks like a chicken, but because the wing in which she lives overlooks a chicken farm.  Nothing too unusual there, except ‘Chicken Lady’ also had her eye on Jack (remember, I said men were a hot commodity in these facilities) and had a geographical advantage in that Jack lived in the same ‘chicken wing’.  And trust me on this, proximity to target becomes more and more critical the less ambulatory one gets.

     Finally the show begins . . .

Continued next post