Lost

In every story he ever heard about his mother she was referred to as “Libby”. He clung to her name with the desperation of a hungry puppy latched to a tit. So when I was born a voice rose up inside him and he pleaded with my mother to call me “Libby”. “Libby Lou Smith”. My mother flatly said, “NO!” expressing her willingness to call me Elizabeth instead. “That was her given name, after all”, she explained. He would not give up his small child’s view. His mother had always been called “Libby” and nothing my mother could say would change that in his mind. In the end, my mother won out as usual but compromised by giving me the middle name of the woman who had supposedly taken my father in. Her name was Elaine. So, Paula Elaine Smith was the name I was given before the tw0 week’s stay in the hospital was over and I went home.

History has to do with the past. Facts pull into view aspects of an event outside of ourselves so we can remember. Memory brings the past into the present so we can grapple with the internal experience. Memory can be affected by all kinds of things: age, emotional awareness, perception, life events, and imagination, to name a few. Memories are akin to making up stories. That is why our memories often change from one telling to the next. Sometimes they become filled with magical thinking—and those are the times that the memories can become fantastical stories that have very little or nothing to do with what actually happened.

So, consider the story my father remembers being told about his mother. Libby is heating up water on the woodstove. She is a 32 year old, strikingly attractive farmwife living in Iowa. The sun is high up in the blue cloudless sky. Her husband, Will, is out on the land planting alfalfa. Her 2 older sons, 4 and 6, are playing outside near the house. She looks out the window and smiles as she watches her husband on the tractor making a large circle at the end of the row. Her 6-month-old baby lies in a basket kicking his feet wildly with joy. She is heating water to give him a bath. Suddenly, a flame catches her dress on fire. She cannot put it out, cannot get out of the dress because the flames are moving too quickly. Her blood-curdling screams bring Will running. He rolls her frantically in a worn carpet and the flames finally smolder out. For the next 2 weeks Libby suffers excruciating pain in their tiny farmhouse before she dies.

Libby’s story seems to end here. But, what happened to her family? Was the baby (my father) passed around from one good neighbor to the next family member to the next church lady? What happened to Will and the 2 other boys? To compensate for being too little to remember, as he got older he alleged to have been taken in and given a wonderful home with his mother’s sister, Elaine and her husband, Otis.

When he was 5, his memory kicks in and he is living with his father and brothers in a tent with a dirt floor in Kansas City. The next memory that he occasionally shared is factual. He is attending the University of Kansas on a football scholarship during the Depression, going to school and football practice during the day and working as a janitor in various buildings on campus at night.

Did his higher education and marriage to my mother, a woman from a very different social class, provoke a separation with his father and brothers? I do not remember his ever talking about them, nor did I meet any of them. Their complete absence was such an integral part of my life, it never occurred to me to ask about them.

What was it like for him to lose his mother in such a horrific way at a young age, his father and brothers as a young adult? How did these events influence his sense of Self? Did setting him loose on his life journey, like a baby floating aimlessly in a basket, eclipse entire parts of his psyche? These are questions that come up for me when I try to make meaning of my memories of the man I called “Dad”.

My mother occasionally told a story about Dad. When I would hear this story, it emoted the feelings and the image I had of my dad in most of my memories of him. They had just met at the University of Kansas and my father called her up and asked her out. She was a popular girl on campus and not lacking for boys’ attentions. She declined. He insisted, saying it was necessary that she come downstairs from her dorm room immediately. She reluctantly acquiesced. When she rounded the corner and started out the door—she saw him standing there with 2 ice cream cones.

I cannot for the life of me comprehend why my mother married my father. He was a constant source of irritation and embarrassment to her, his family and our community. She did an excellent job covering up for his inadequacies and kept him isolated from herself, my brother and sister and me. During the short time after my mother died and before he remarried, I spent a little time alone with him. I was shocked with his shortcomings and inadequacies that were painfully obvious and uncomfortable to be around. 

To me, he felt like a little child. Not childlike exactly, but powerless. He did not possess the power adults’ carry. Consequently, he was the one all the other adults in my world blamed for everything. Everyone in the family projected something negative onto him. I could feel these projections when I was young but could not sort them out or separate them from my actual experience. Negativity therefore became the foundation of how I thought about him.

In my memory he desperately wanted a family. Not his own family with Mom and us kids—but he yearned for parents and siblings. So he looked to my grandparents devotedly and could not wait for the next family gathering to visit for hours with my aunts and uncles. They made fun of him behind his back, in front of me. I started to believe that if he was such a loser as they implied, then perhaps I was, as well. This thought kept me isolated in silence and despair.

Sentimental is how I would describe him. Along with having a sentimental emotional streak running just below the surface he was also sentimental about things he saw. He could tell you in great detail and with deep emotion about a hay bale he had seen decades before. I often wondered if this sentimentality left his unprotected heart vulnerable to other people taking advantage of him?

When I was little I thought he was intelligent and clever. I watched as people at my grandpa’s lumberyard waited in long lines out the front door for him to figure up what materials they needed for their projects. For not having any formal training, he naturally demonstrated tremendous creativity and talent. You’d think this would have brought him some positive recognition. But, like everything my father did, this backfired, too.

Working for his father-in-law brought him in close contact with a parent, which he coveted, while making it necessary for him to turn his back to the abuse that was being heaped upon him. When he did something my grandfather didn’t like, Grandpa would complain about him to my mother. Her anger would build throughout the day and into the evening until after we went to bed. Then, she let Dad have it with both barrels. “How could you be so stupid? Why did you tell Chester Kolterman the least expensive way to fix his window? Why did you order so many tubes of caulk?” The yelling seemed to go on for hours. My memories about this are muddled, as I was certain the verbal abuse was being directed at me.

When I was 4 (and loved my father with all my heart), my mother, after one of her tirades, loaded us up in the car and announced we were leaving and never coming back. When we started out, I looked back at the house and Dad was sitting on the porch steps with my dog. I was hysterical the entire 3 hours drive to Kansas City. I could not stop crying. Eventually mom said, “ Because you won’t stop crying we are going back”. Then I cried all the way home with the weight of this responsibility. When we pulled in the driveway, there he was, still sitting in the same place on the stairs, dog in his lap.

Our trust was broken during the only years I remember actually loving him. I was 5 and desperately wanted to spend time with him. One day he came home for lunch and asked me if I would like to go to the grocery store with him. I was ecstatic! We went to the store and picked up bologna and a can of chicken noodle soup, my personal favorites. On the way home we stopped at the old hospital. He bodily carried me inside and waited in the hall while Dr. Fleckenstein gave me a booster shot. I remember feeling the sizzling anger of betrayal for the first time in my life. I knew I would never trust him again. My feelings of loving him never resurfaced after that incident.

All through my growing up years he let other people think for him and did whatever they said. For instance, he was told to polish our shoes for church on Saturday nights, which he did religiously. His job was also to sort through the lima beans whenever he was told. More humiliating for everyone was when he was told by my mother to say something that was hard for her to say or do something that was difficult. He was oblivious to so much of my day-to-day life that when my mother sent him in to deliver a message, he would surprise me every time with his unhinged rage. At those times he was a loose cannon and even more dangerous because he hadn’t stopped to consider what he was doing.

When I got my first period and told my sister, he burst into my room, threw sanitary pads on the bed, then turned around and left without saying a word. Another time he slapped me in the face in front of my high school girlfriends because I was getting ready to go to the Queen of Courts Dance with them for an hour. By not questioning ‘why’ he was well suited to be able to do my mother’s frenetic dirty work.

He was physically incredibly strong and athletic. Much to everyone’s aversion though, he frightened us by sensationalizing physical wounding. Working at the lumberyard carried with it many possibilities for getting hurt. When this would happen he would describe in gory details exactly what had transpired and insist, with pressuring force, to look at his injuries. This sensationalism was also especially bullying when he cut up fish. He seemed to get a real thrill out of terrorizing us with blood and guts.

I often wonder what it would have been like for me if Libby had lived? Without the horrible wounding would Dad have had confidence to think and make choices for himself? Would he have been able to say to my mother, “Stop it, Alice, you are scaring the children”? Would he have protected and supported his children—been engaged in our lives? Would he have dealt with people differently and directly so that our relationship could have been spared his displaced anger?

Toward the end of his life I realized my father had never had any idea who I was. He had been around when I was growing up but absent from my life. It felt like he had never been interested in me and didn’t even like me. I could sense his anger at the opportunities my mother provided and he completely ignored all my creative and academic endeavors. From my earliest memory of him I could sense his disappointment in me. 

I don’t think about my father much anymore. Some of my memories have worn away like sandpaper rubbed smooth, others with colors faded from overexposure. But when I do occasionally bring them out I begrudge the fact that they are not tender and loving. Some part of me wants to remember him as a gentle person with a big heart. I want to see him in my mind’s eye with his love of people and his vast curiosity about life. I want to celebrate his creativity, his strength, his love of the land and animals. I want to savor his enjoyment of his tomatoes and vegetables. I want to experience again the special bond he had with my son. I want to feel compassion for him and form a picture with all these things in it. But, I cannot.

-->

If the role of fathers is to show you about the world, then I was shown how to give myself up for others, to have no boundaries, have no respect for myself and to allow others to abuse me. My deepest memories of my father are all about being repeatedly disappointed. Continually embarrassed. This was my experience. It is part of my story.

Lost

In every story he ever heard about his mother she was referred to as “Libby”. He clung to her name with the desperation of a hungry puppy latched to a tit. So when I was born a voice rose up inside him and he pleaded with my mother to call me “Libby”. “Libby Lou Smith”. My mother flatly said, “NO!” expressing her willingness to call me Elizabeth instead. “That was her given name, after all”, she explained. He would not give up his small child’s view. His mother had always been called “Libby” and nothing my mother could say would change that in his mind. In the end, my mother won out as usual but compromised by giving me the middle name of the woman who had supposedly taken my father in. Her name was Elaine. So, Paula Elaine Smith was the name I was given before the tw0 week’s stay in the hospital was over and I went home.

History has to do with the past. Facts pull into view aspects of an event outside of ourselves so we can remember. Memory brings the past into the present so we can grapple with the internal experience. Memory can be affected by all kinds of things: age, emotional awareness, perception, life events, and imagination, to name a few. Memories are akin to making up stories. That is why our memories often change from one telling to the next. Sometimes they become filled with magical thinking—and those are the times that the memories can become fantastical stories that have very little or nothing to do with what actually happened.

So, consider the story my father remembers being told about his mother. Libby is heating up water on the woodstove. She is a 32 year old, strikingly attractive farmwife living in Iowa. The sun is high up in the blue cloudless sky. Her husband, Will, is out on the land planting alfalfa. Her 2 older sons, 4 and 6, are playing outside near the house. She looks out the window and smiles as she watches her husband on the tractor making a large circle at the end of the row. Her 6-month-old baby lies in a basket kicking his feet wildly with joy. She is heating water to give him a bath. Suddenly, a flame catches her dress on fire. She cannot put it out, cannot get out of the dress because the flames are moving too quickly. Her blood-curdling screams bring Will running. He rolls her frantically in a worn carpet and the flames finally smolder out. For the next 2 weeks Libby suffers excruciating pain in their tiny farmhouse before she dies.

Libby’s story seems to end here. But, what happened to her family? Was the baby (my father) passed around from one good neighbor to the next family member to the next church lady? What happened to Will and the 2 other boys? To compensate for being too little to remember, as he got older he alleged to have been taken in and given a wonderful home with his mother’s sister, Elaine and her husband, Otis.

When he was 5, his memory kicks in and he is living with his father and brothers in a tent with a dirt floor in Kansas City. The next memory that he occasionally shared is factual. He is attending the University of Kansas on a football scholarship during the Depression, going to school and football practice during the day and working as a janitor in various buildings on campus at night.

Did his higher education and marriage to my mother, a woman from a very different social class, provoke a separation with his father and brothers? I do not remember his ever talking about them, nor did I meet any of them. Their complete absence was such an integral part of my life, it never occurred to me to ask about them.

What was it like for him to lose his mother in such a horrific way at a young age, his father and brothers as a young adult? How did these events influence his sense of Self? Did setting him loose on his life journey, like a baby floating aimlessly in a basket, eclipse entire parts of his psyche? These are questions that come up for me when I try to make meaning of my memories of the man I called “Dad”.

My mother occasionally told a story about Dad. When I would hear this story, it emoted the feelings and the image I had of my dad in most of my memories of him. They had just met at the University of Kansas and my father called her up and asked her out. She was a popular girl on campus and not lacking for boys’ attentions. She declined. He insisted, saying it was necessary that she come downstairs from her dorm room immediately. She reluctantly acquiesced. When she rounded the corner and started out the door—she saw him standing there with 2 ice cream cones.

I cannot for the life of me comprehend why my mother married my father. He was a constant source of irritation and embarrassment to her, his family and our community. She did an excellent job covering up for his inadequacies and kept him isolated from herself, my brother and sister and me. During the short time after my mother died and before he remarried, I spent a little time alone with him. I was shocked with his shortcomings and inadequacies that were painfully obvious and uncomfortable to be around. 

To me, he felt like a little child. Not childlike exactly, but powerless. He did not possess the power adults’ carry. Consequently, he was the one all the other adults in my world blamed for everything. Everyone in the family projected something negative onto him. I could feel these projections when I was young but could not sort them out or separate them from my actual experience. Negativity therefore became the foundation of how I thought about him.

In my memory he desperately wanted a family. Not his own family with Mom and us kids—but he yearned for parents and siblings. So he looked to my grandparents devotedly and could not wait for the next family gathering to visit for hours with my aunts and uncles. They made fun of him behind his back, in front of me. I started to believe that if he was such a loser as they implied, then perhaps I was, as well. This thought kept me isolated in silence and despair.

Sentimental is how I would describe him. Along with having a sentimental emotional streak running just below the surface he was also sentimental about things he saw. He could tell you in great detail and with deep emotion about a hay bale he had seen decades before. I often wondered if this sentimentality left his unprotected heart vulnerable to other people taking advantage of him?

When I was little I thought he was intelligent and clever. I watched as people at my grandpa’s lumberyard waited in long lines out the front door for him to figure up what materials they needed for their projects. For not having any formal training, he naturally demonstrated tremendous creativity and talent. You’d think this would have brought him some positive recognition. But, like everything my father did, this backfired, too.

Working for his father-in-law brought him in close contact with a parent, which he coveted, while making it necessary for him to turn his back to the abuse that was being heaped upon him. When he did something my grandfather didn’t like, Grandpa would complain about him to my mother. Her anger would build throughout the day and into the evening until after we went to bed. Then, she let Dad have it with both barrels. “How could you be so stupid? Why did you tell Chester Kolterman the least expensive way to fix his window? Why did you order so many tubes of caulk?” The yelling seemed to go on for hours. My memories about this are muddled, as I was certain the verbal abuse was being directed at me.

When I was 4 (and loved my father with all my heart), my mother, after one of her tirades, loaded us up in the car and announced we were leaving and never coming back. When we started out, I looked back at the house and Dad was sitting on the porch steps with my dog. I was hysterical the entire 3 hours drive to Kansas City. I could not stop crying. Eventually mom said, “ Because you won’t stop crying we are going back”. Then I cried all the way home with the weight of this responsibility. When we pulled in the driveway, there he was, still sitting in the same place on the stairs, dog in his lap.

Our trust was broken during the only years I remember actually loving him. I was 5 and desperately wanted to spend time with him. One day he came home for lunch and asked me if I would like to go to the grocery store with him. I was ecstatic! We went to the store and picked up bologna and a can of chicken noodle soup, my personal favorites. On the way home we stopped at the old hospital. He bodily carried me inside and waited in the hall while Dr. Fleckenstein gave me a booster shot. I remember feeling the sizzling anger of betrayal for the first time in my life. I knew I would never trust him again. My feelings of loving him never resurfaced after that incident.

All through my growing up years he let other people think for him and did whatever they said. For instance, he was told to polish our shoes for church on Saturday nights, which he did religiously. His job was also to sort through the lima beans whenever he was told. More humiliating for everyone was when he was told by my mother to say something that was hard for her to say or do something that was difficult. He was oblivious to so much of my day-to-day life that when my mother sent him in to deliver a message, he would surprise me every time with his unhinged rage. At those times he was a loose cannon and even more dangerous because he hadn’t stopped to consider what he was doing.

When I got my first period and told my sister, he burst into my room, threw sanitary pads on the bed, then turned around and left without saying a word. Another time he slapped me in the face in front of my high school girlfriends because I was getting ready to go to the Queen of Courts Dance with them for an hour. By not questioning ‘why’ he was well suited to be able to do my mother’s frenetic dirty work.

He was physically incredibly strong and athletic. Much to everyone’s aversion though, he frightened us by sensationalizing physical wounding. Working at the lumberyard carried with it many possibilities for getting hurt. When this would happen he would describe in gory details exactly what had transpired and insist, with pressuring force, to look at his injuries. This sensationalism was also especially bullying when he cut up fish. He seemed to get a real thrill out of terrorizing us with blood and guts.

I often wonder what it would have been like for me if Libby had lived? Without the horrible wounding would Dad have had confidence to think and make choices for himself? Would he have been able to say to my mother, “Stop it, Alice, you are scaring the children”? Would he have protected and supported his children—been engaged in our lives? Would he have dealt with people differently and directly so that our relationship could have been spared his displaced anger?

Toward the end of his life I realized my father had never had any idea who I was. He had been around when I was growing up but absent from my life. It felt like he had never been interested in me and didn’t even like me. I could sense his anger at the opportunities my mother provided and he completely ignored all my creative and academic endeavors. From my earliest memory of him I could sense his disappointment in me.  

I don’t think about my father much anymore. Some of my memories have worn away like sandpaper rubbed smooth, others with colors faded from overexposure. But when I do occasionally bring them out I begrudge the fact that they are not tender and loving. Some part of me wants to remember him as a gentle person with a big heart. I want to see him in my mind’s eye with his love of people and his vast curiosity about life. I want to celebrate his creativity, his strength, his love of the land and animals. I want to savor his enjoyment of his tomatoes and vegetables. I want to experience again the special bond he had with my son. I want to feel compassion for him and form a picture with all these things in it. But, I cannot.

If the role of fathers is to show you about the world, then I was shown how to give myself up for others, to have no boundaries, have no respect for myself and to allow others to abuse me. My deepest memories of my father are all about being repeatedly disappointed. Continually embarrassed. This was my experience. It is part of my story.

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Angels

Mary Jean Handley was the Pre-K Sunday school teacher at my church when I was 4. Mary Jean was tall and dazzlingly divine.  She carried her 30-year-old ethereal body with grace and her enchanting white blond hair accentuated her enormous, breathtaking turquoise blue eyes. She sang soprano solos at church, as well as for most of the funerals and weddings in town. Her voice was so clear and pure that when she sang it sounded like something astonishing from the beyond. I knew she was an angel.

I didn’t tell anyone about my revelation until one Sunday night at my grandparents as we sat around their large dining room table eating chili. I took a chance and mentioned my discovery that Mrs. Handley was an angel. Everyone laughed and laughed and laughed. In fact, they couldn’t stop laughing. Finally one of them, I can’t remember who, informed me that there was no such thing as an angel.

Besides feeling humiliated, I was crushed at the news and not completely convinced. So I vowed to myself to carefully observe Mrs. Handley for clues. I also promised myself I would NEVER share anything important with my family ever again!

The first time I actually encountered angels was when when I was 17. I had long given up trying to figure out if Mrs. Handley was a real angel. Certainly, the people around me had been clear about their beliefs, which had probably covertly influenced my indifference. I hadn’t given much thought about the plausibility of angels for years. But, when I experienced it first-hand, I could not deny the Truth.

The year before, when I was 16, my sister and I had flown to San Francisco to drive back with our brother, who had completed his studies at Stanford. It was the first time we had ever flown. In 1966 commercial airlines were just beginning to become available.

Our excitement about flying was overshadowed by trepidation. Our terror was not of flying, but the paralyzing anxiety that comes from doing something for the first time. Our comfort zone was being extremely challenged. It gave us a bit of consolation that we had each other even though we both knew that, in a pinch, if something really happened the other would be of no help at all.

We sat right behind the smoking section and I watched as a blue haze rose up around us and swirled in the sunlight coming in through tiny windows along the sides of the plane. Dust in the air floated upward toward the ceiling and seemed suspended in mid-air.

We made it to California and were met at the gate by our brother. We were never so glad to see a familiar face in our lives!

The following year—the year I met angels, I was flying solo to Rochester, New York to visit my brother and his new wife. The information I was given about the trip was sketchy, at best. All I knew was that I would have to change planes in Chicago. That information was enough to keep my stomach in knots for days. But I didn’t know anyone to ask who had flown before and might know how to change planes.

On the day of my big trip my mother was late getting started, as usual. We drove the 2 hours to the airport in Kansas City, Missouri in an hour and a half at an alarming 100 miles an hour on narrow, rollercoaster-hill roads. That alone would have pushed me over the edge if I hadn’t been so worried about the trip.

My mother drove up in front of the American Airlines departure gates and parked in a no parking zone. We literally ran inside and the stewardesses kept the door open for me as my mother checked me in without saying goodbye. I made my way to my seat at the back of the plane as blank stares from other passengers followed me. My seat, 42 F, was in the middle between an aloof young businessman in a navy blue pinstriped suit and a little old white-haired woman with a sweet, friendly smile.

Once I was buckled in, the woman engaged me immediately in conversation. I felt myself relaxing as she calmly shared, with tremendous pride, about her 2 sons and their families. One lived in Chicago and the other in New York City. She couldn’t wait to hug her grandchildren, who she hadn’t seen in a year. She was staying 2 weeks. She had lived in Kansas City her entire life. Her husband had died 5 years ago. “Oh, by the way, my name is Mildred McCrumb.”

I was SO grateful for her uncomplicated chatter, her soothing voice and her fairy godmother’s absolute love. I relaxed and sank into my seat. I even dozed a bit and when I woke up we continued talking as if we’d always known each other. Then, as pressure uncomfortably bore down on my ears, we landed with an abrupt bump and the rough pull of centrifugal force. I was in Chicago and had to change planes! My anxiety spiked! I tried to act as though everything was fine, but inside I was petrified.

Mildred McCrumb didn’t walk with me down the corridor but I kept my eyes on her like a hawk. With every step I stayed at her pace. Then I noticed other passengers were stopping at a board on a wall that showed plane arrivals and departures as well as gate information. I took out my ticket and searched for my flight number, which I couldn’t find on the board. Then I looked for flights going to Rochester, NY, but there were none going there. When I looked around, Mrs. McCrumb was gone.

The panic inside me was steadily building. I had always been excruciatingly shy and felt a gazillion times more shy in Chicago that day than ever before. How would I ever get up enough nerve to talk with someone? Would I be able to ask for help? For a while I wandered aimlessly, trying to find my confidence. I was overwhelmed by the fact that there were more people in the hallway than in the entire town of Onaga, Kansas. I felt tongue-tied, terror-stricken.

Just then, I caught sight of Mrs. McCrumb again. She had her arms around her grandchildren and they were talking a mile a minute. It felt comforting to see her.

This gave me determination to ask for help. I didn’t want to miss my next flight. I found an American Airlines counter with some women talking and laughing behind it. I waited until they noticed me and then I asked them, tentatively, if they could help me. They said they would try. I asked them how to find out which gate was mine. They asked me where I was going. I told them. They looked it up on large sheets of paper and said there were no flights leaving for Rochester, NY. Then I asked the very difficult and embarrassing question. Hesitantly, I got the words out...”Where am I?”  They looked at each other puzzled and then one said, “Why, you are in New York City.”

My heart sank. Right next to the desk was a row of chairs that were hooked together. I sat down quickly and heavily. I felt faint and my mind seemed suspended while speeding too quickly to follow. No matter how hard I tried to hold them back, large tears rolled down my face. Even if I’d had enough money to buy a ticket, I had no idea how to go about getting one.

Suddenly, I looked up and there stood Mrs. McCrumb. She wanted to introduce me to her son and grandchildren. Her son, who noticed I’d been crying, asked me what was wrong. I told him my dilemma and he said he would help.

I watched him walk over to the American Airlines counter. After waiting in a line and then having a long conversation with a young woman in a tight blue uniform, he bought a ticket for me to fly to Rochester. That particular flight left from Kennedy Airport and we were at La Guardia. He went off to locate my luggage and when he joined us again he ushered us toward his car. He was going to drive me to the other airport! This was the moment it dawned on me that I just might be in the presence of angels.

When we got to the other airport he parked his car in the short-term parking lot. Then, he got my bag from the trunk and we all went into the airport. He found out which gate was for American Airlines flight 2674 to Rochester, NY. Then they walked me down to the gate and sat with me until it boarded and I was securely on the plane. As I taxied into takeoff position I peered through the window next to my seat and saw they were all standing at the observation window watching, waiting for my plane to take off. Angels.