A Remembrance

Here's an email from my son. He received this note from a high school friend.

Wayne, I wanted to send you a note while I was thinking about it. We had a mini get-together last night, and I was talking with Fabian Pedraza's little brother, David, who I didn't remember from school. Your name came up and he said very thoughtfully that your dad had passed and that he was a great man and instrumental in David's life. David said that being a hispanic boy in this environment, he was really headed in the wrong direction, but through Scouts, your dad turned his life around. He said that your dad believed in him, encouraged him and that had a significant impact on his life and that he would be eternally grateful to him. I thought that was a wonderful tribute and wanted to share it with you.

I remember David, a handsome boy. He was a runner. I know that what he said of my husband is true. And it's wonderful to hear, to know Wayne is remembered.

722 N Georgia

It was only a house. But now it’s much more than that. I have an old digital clock in my kitchen which permanently displays the address, 722. My children notice when other clocks show those numbers, and they'll say something about it. They, the numbers, have acquired a hallowed status.

On those rare occasions when we’re all together, we will likely regale one another with stories about the place. Each child has a special feeling of belonging and ownership about the whole piece of property—the house, the yards, trees, back pasture—and probably about some private space as well, like the hideout under the stairs with its passageway past the furnace and water heater into the food storage room.

They played wiffle baseball in the backyard and crack the whip in the front—hence Andrew’s broken collar bone. And Richard’s half pipe in the pasture was his pride, but word gets around in a small town, and the thing attracted visiting skateboarders I had never seen before, and that made me nervous. They'd just show up at odd times, wander through my yards and make themselves at home. Not my kind of thing. I'm big on private property.

We had a round trampoline for a while, and the kids moved it close to the house so they could jump onto it from the roof. I may have put a stop to that.

But you can’t put a stop to what you don’t know about. Not until they were grown did I learn that more than one son climbed out of the basement windows at night to sneak off somewhere while his parents slept unsuspecting upstairs. Rite of passage maybe.

Some activities were entirely innocent, like sliding down the stairs on all the sleeping bags rolled out or jumping down to the basement landing onto a pile of pillows and quilts. The kids did that while I worked in the kitchen.

We had a dog, too. Cokie. I guess you'd call her our dog. She came with the house. None of us expected that when we moved in, but there she was.

I'm sure they remember the chickens, the goats, the steers. No one wanted to gather the eggs or feed the chickens either. No one really wanted to watch as the men parked their truck in the pasture and shot those three young steers to death. Yet we all did watch. No one much wanted to feed the goats, and milking was never a favorite pastime. No one much wanted to load the dishwasher or put groceries away, either. Big family. Lots of things to do.

No one ever wanted to clean their room.

The boys grumbled about mowing the lawn or chopping wood and hauling it up from the pasture. Everyone grumbled about weeding the garden. But we were trying to be self-sufficient there, and the children understood that. Their grumbling was more obligatory than heart-felt. I think.

The kids would rake the front yard leaves into piles for jumping and for burying one another. They'd dash into the house to slip on their bathing suits and run through the water when we flood irrigated in the summer. They'd hook the hose up and slide down wetted strips of black plastic. Better than the city pool, I thought.

Only a house, but a good house for us, a good home.

Mama

My mother's birthday approaches--and my daughter, her namesake. Born March 2, 1899, she is Lola Samantha Nelson Brimley but was never Samantha to me. Samantha is her mother's name. Is all this clear? Lola fit her, and so did Mama, which is all I ever called her.

I remember some names she called me.

Darling girl
Dear heart
Merry sunshine
September morn (I was born in September)
Impudent little piece
You little asssk your mother
Cross patch
Carol
Martha
Sterling

Those last two might fall out while she was trying to find the real right name. I thought it so funny of her until I grew up and had children and could not always find their names when I needed to.

This is a poem I wrote for my mother soon after her death those 30 years ago. One poem of several about her.

Dear Mama,

I miss you. I always thought

you might come back to tell me

some good news about where

you've gone. Nights and even days

I think about the last time I saw you,

lying in that bed, hair bunched

from sweat and struggle and

strung out long like grandma's.

Sometimes my dreams bring you

here and you look young and good

in your sparkly black dress. Wouldn't

I love that.

Your daughter,

Carol

Officially

Edmund Andrew Darrington.

Update(s)

1. His hair is not dark.
2. He has a name.

I suppose I'd better wait until I see it in public. But I can say this. I like it.

It's Later

I thought I'd wait for the name, but that is proving to be a wait.
For now. He looks wonderful. Cute and plump and pink.
His brothers--and his parents--love him already, of course.
Weight at birth 7 lbs 4 oz and 21 inches long.
I'm the grandmother. Should I be telling these things?
A little bit of smooth dark hair.
Dimples. That means he's perfect.
Mellow temperament. So far.

It's A Boy

Born today at 2:14 p.m. to Ann and Jeremy.
Happy are we.
More later.

Goat Musings, Part 5

The rest of the story

I can’t doubt that the other children grumbled about the milking and feeding chores—they grumbled about most things they were asked to do. But my memory hangs on this incident, of course, because it’s impossible for a mother to forget something like this, your son saying, "Okay, you're telling me to leave. I'll leave." I mean, he doesn't say it, he just does it.

I think the other children did not know about his attempted escape. At least I never spoke of it to them. It remained between him and me. We never mentioned it after that night, and if I know him, he said nothing of it to anyone. I think it’s safe to tell in public after thirty years.

I found out a few things the night he left: I adored that boy and was so so happy to see him; I did not want him to leave again, and I didn’t want to squeeze him in a vise like that again. That’s clear to me now, but apparently I am too stubborn for anybody’s good. I say that last part as I recall that I probably made him pull himself out of bed next morning, drag the goats up to the milking stand, and place his hands on the teats of that big grumpy Cookie. It would not have made any difference to the goat if someone else had milked her, but I guess it mattered to me. I was in the middle of something and wouldn’t back down. More’s the pity.

The word “regret” comes to mind as I write, but it is much too late for that.

This boy of mine was not the kind to step over the lines, those boundaries families establish, though he might occasionally push against them, as he tried to do that night. He was a good boy with a mother who—I see clearly now, these many years later—held the lines a little too firmly sometimes. Like when our family fasted two meals once a month on Sunday, and I expected my children to do so after they reached a certain age. It was harder on this boy than anyone else. More than once he got sick and threw up right before dinner time. My memory is cloudy here. It seems reasonable to suppose that after seeing how hard this fasting was on his small system, I would relent. I hope that’s the case, but obviously I’m not sure.

And I’m not sure what he learned that night he left home over the goat milking. I would like to think he learned that I loved him. I hope to goodness I told him so.

But perhaps he learned that goat’s milk was very important, and he may have felt that it was more important to me than he was. Perhaps he learned that leaving home—an extreme and desperate move and, I’m sure, a difficult one for him to make—was not enough to move his mother. Maybe all he learned that night was that I could be hard as nails. That’s the way I see myself as I look back on the moment and wish I had been wiser, more flexible. The truth is I didn’t know the best thing to do. I did what I thought a parent ought to do: hold the line and teach the child. I wanted him to be responsible, to do his part, be a member of the family, and I thought I was teaching him all that. I may have been wrong. I may have pushed him away. It’s hard to know.

And that, in my mind, is the hallmark of being a parent, goats or no goats: it’s hard to know what to do, how to teach, when to give in and when to hold firm. I used to say being a parent was like driving in the fog. I’ll stand by that.

Goat Musings, Part 4

About the milk.

But I've written this before. If you care to, go here:

http://widowschronicle.blogspot.com/2008/10/milque.html

Goat Musings, Part 3

Drama queen? maybe

One day I threw my boots against the bedroom wall. I had boots. That part surprises me. But I did, and I threw them. My husband witnessed this; it was for his benefit that I threw the boots. The act punctuated my anger. I didn’t usually yell or throw things, but the moment seemed right for such behavior, although now it doesn’t, and when I tell why I did it, you will likely think it silly.

We had those goats in the pen Wayne had built for them. He and our friend TD built milking stands. At first we had the milking stands up on our patio, but later Wayne built a shelter down near the pen and put the milking stands there, so we no longer had to drag the goats across the lawn and up the hill to the patio for milking, and so that TD’s goats would no longer eat the new peach tree I had planted near the patio, but it was too late for the tree already, and that’s not the part that made me mad.

We had our two goats, but the D family kept their two goats at our place, too, because we had a pasture to build the pen in. They had no land and there may have been a city ordinance prohibiting them from keeping goats in their back yard.

The reason I threw my boots: four goats eating hay make a lot of goat poop and it accumulates faster than you might think. Mucking out is a chore on any farm. You go into the barn or wherever the animals are kept and muck out their waste. But nobody mucked out the goat pen. I kept asking Wayne to do it. He kept not getting to it. You know how that is, and he didn’t or wouldn’t (don’t know the right word) call TD and ask him to come and help muck out the pen.

The not getting to it went on for a long time until, eventually, the level of the ground in the goat pen rose to the point where the goats would soon be able to step over the fence and walk away. And I’m not kidding. I had already experienced trying to catch an animal that had walked over a fence—that big steer of ours just walked right over on the snow—and I wanted no more of that. So one day, I got mad, put on my boots, laced them up, and went out and started shoveling goat poop while the four goats looked on. I may have spoken to them, maybe not, but they knew to stay out of my way.

My poor husband didn’t.

When he finally learned what I was doing, he came out and began shoveling, telling me to go on in the house, but I was too mad even to speak to him. Before very long, TD showed up in boots with a shovel and began working, too. Wayne had called him when he saw me out there. Soon I was persuaded I should quit, and I went in the house.

What do you suppose they said when I left?

It was afterward, when I took off my boots, that I threw them and yelled at my husband. I am sorry to say it. In a few minutes I had calmed down. I don't know if my children knew what had occurred.

It’s unfair of me to write this, I know, because Wayne is not here to tell about things I did that would have made him throw his boots, if he had been the kind of guy to do such a thing. But I've written it anyway.

By the way, when all our goats had babies, that was one crowded pen. We sold most of the babies to the Hispanic folks who somehow heard about them and just showed up. They told us baby goats make for good eating. You probably didn’t want to know that. But even so, for a while, we had six goats in the pen. No need to make further mention of mucking out.

Eventually the D family built a house with a little land and moved their goats down there, and some time later we sold our goats. That was a sad sorry day, actually.

Goat Musings, Part 2

About the goats and other uses we put our pasture to

We had two goats. Cookie, the big white Alpine with black and brown markings, was the mean and willful one. Carni, a Togenburg, was chocolate brown, small, patient, and good natured, or maybe just cowed by Cookie.

Cookie had to be milked first—her rule, not ours. If we tried to get Carni out of the pen first, Cookie would butt her out of the way. She might even butt one of us. We tried to trick her, offering a nectarine or a handful of oats while slipping Carni out the gate. We tried to hold her, turn her back to the gate, or cover her eyes. No way. She was strong, insistent, and quite impossible to move when she didn’t want to. We always gave in, and so did Carni.

Cookie was also loud. If the hay feeder was empty or if the kind of hay we “served” did not please her, she would yell us out of the house and down to the pen to make things right. Difficult she was, but her milk was plentiful, sweet and rich. Besides, I liked her. I think we all liked her. Of course, we liked Carni, too, because she was easy and pretty.

This was in the early 1980s. We lived in Caldwell, Idaho. It’s a farm town, but our Canyon Hill neighborhood wasn’t exactly rural. Pughs still farmed across the road from us, but on our side of the street it was houses with two-car garages and lawns and people who had either given up farming or had never done it, like us. Two houses on the block had a pasture in back, ours and one other. We found out we had grandfather rights attached to the land, so we decided to use the pasture.

It’s why we moved to Idaho, so we could do some farm work—on a very small scale. We built a chicken coop and had our own eggs for a while. Wayne cultivated a garden spot, and we loved what that provided for us. We planted fruit trees and raspberries, and we raised a few steers.

The time I had to chase a full-grown steer down an icy street while I was eight and a half months pregnant was the last time I ever wanted the convenience of raising our own beef. We turned to goats, not for eating, but for the milk and for our children, for their character and their souls.

I wonder what they might say about that.

Goat Musings

Part 1

My son left home one night because I insisted he had to milk the goats the next day, just a chore he had to accept with the rest of us, I told him, or he would have to live somewhere else. I actually said that.

He chose the second option, deciding to live with his friend who lived down the street and around the corner, which is where I thought he might go but didn’t know for sure.

That was a long night for me. I didn’t sleep, just sat up in the living room and worried about him and our relationship and about what the parents of his friend would think (yes, I'm ashamed to say I worried about that) and about the possibility that he could just head south to Salt Lake, although I didn’t know how he would get there. He finally came home at midnight, having changed his mind about living somewhere else.

It was probably a long night for him and a hard one. I can't know for sure, though, because he was never the one to talk about things much, especially when the things involved his feelings.

It wasn’t the first time—for the milking. The goats weren’t new. But it was the first time my brown-haired boy got up his guts and called his mother’s bluff. This happened in 1980 when he was 15, had not yet achieved his full stature, and was still a "little brother," sort of living under the shadow of his older brother, who milked the goats, too. We all milked the goats, except our youngest, and she wasn’t a year old yet. Why he picked that night, that moment to rebel I don’t know, but clearly he thought he’d had enough.

I have said we all milked the goats, and I would like to say that all the older children took their turns and the milking chore was spread evenly among them, but I don’t think it’s true. They took turns, but sometimes the older brother didn’t get home from school in time for the evening milking, and he was harder to roust out of bed in the early morning.

It’s possible that this 15-year-old of mine milked more than anyone except his dad and me, and I had fallen and broken my wrist and pelvis a couple of months before this incident, so my milking activities had stopped. I guess he picked up the slack.

Maybe he thought if he quit, we’d get his big brother to do more. Resentment can build up in a person, you know. Or maybe he thought we’d get rid of the goats. He had recently begun saying he didn’t like the milk.

Don't Fall Into the Pierre Salinger Hole

I typed my brother's name into the google address line, and it took me immediately to a biographical article at Wikipedia. Interesting. First line is wrong. They say he is Allen Wilford Brimley. Allen he was never. I wonder if someone guessed at what the A stands for.

I have tried to contact them, once last night, once today. You know, it says down at the bottom Contact Us. Last night I sent an email with a correction. Silly me.

Blah, blah and many minutes later, I have decided to give it up. But in this process I learned what I already suspected. No editing. I didn't just figure this; they say it.

I think you know what that means.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/07/12/twa.conspiracy/index.html

Another

funeral.
Today I go to Chad Anderson's. He was our friend for a long time, too. Since we came to Boise. We loved him.

He and Wayne were part of a quartet for a few years. They would come to our house to practice, and that's how I got to know Chad. He loved to sing. He also loved to follow BYU sports. For years he'd come over to bring a copy of a little weekly sports newsletter, Cougar Tales, to Wayne.

Chad had an affliction whose name I don't remember, but it grew ever more debilitating for him. He could not stand. It ended his singing. Once I convinced him that he could sing in the choir. We'd put a stool up there for him so that when the choir stood to sing, he could sit on the stool and would be almost as tall as everyone else. He did that once that I remember.

Chad would ride his bike over here with the Cougar Tales, lean the bike against the house, and then he would lean against the house for support while we chatted and he gave me the newsletter. After a few years he couldn't ride the bike anymore, so he came in an electric cart, like a golf cart. The problem was not balance; it was in his legs. Eventually, he had to be in a wheel chair and could not go anywhere on his own.

After Betty Lou died, he was lost for a while. Then he began to fail and had to give up his home. He spent some time at Wynwood in assisted living, then moved up to Lewiston to live with his daughter. We missed him then. He died there last Friday. We'll really miss him now.