8 March 2021
Trigger: Memories are made of this
In our long lives, there have been key moments or events, which have stayed with us. They might have changed the outcome or direction of our lives. Or they may have been especially pleasant or important family events such as a birthday, or a voyage or a gathering. Or perhaps it was a tragedy, a death, a disappointment. Plumb the depths of your life for something significant or memorable that ,on this day, brings a smile, or a tear, or maybe even both.
In Celebration
Upper Left: Uncle “What’s for ‘zert?” Norm with my sister Mary Anne. Upper Right: My mother, Monique Potaire M_______, age 32. Bottom: Doing the bunny hop, hands on Dee Ann H_______’s hips at my 13th Birthday party, Two Harbors, Minnesota January, 1960
IN CELEBRATION
A year of lockdown has turned every day into the same as the next. This has exacerbated a longer term trend in my life of not treating any day or occasion as particularly special. Especially after retirement, there are very few days that stand out from any other. I can treat any day as special or not. I can chose to make a special meal, or have that better bottle of wine whenever the whim strikes me. When I want or see something special to buy, I dont particularly wait until a “special” day or occasion to buy it. And as we have no family in the neighborhood, family events do not occur. It’s ok. I can celebrate any time or any day I want.
It was not always so in my family. My mother, Monique Potaire who left France in 1946 for the US at the age of 18, with a barely known sailor/husband from Indiana to a place I am sure she had hardly heard of before meeting Jim, loved turning any excuse into a reason to give a party. And birthdays were considered among the most special of events.
After being installed in an apartment upon arrival, I came along less than a year later to some small degree of celebrity. I was the first child born on the centennial day of the founding of Evansville. A photo of me as the official Centennial Baby, and my mom was in the papers and she received a gift of a new vacuum cleaner and $25 which for it’s day, was a nice sum. The article in the paper brought my mom connections to other french war brides, who then became her circle of friends. As they all began to have children, we were often together at parties at one or another of the french women’s houses.
After another year, my folks used dad’s GI Bill to buy a small house in a newly built neighborhood along with other war veterans similarly raising a young family. Thus there were always a gang of kids around, all growing up at the same time. One of the few exceptions to the young families in this three block long dead end street was my great Aunt, Maude, and her husband, Norm, who bought the house next to us. Their son, Jack, was already 18 and beyond our legion of children who swarmed up and down the street. I became like a younger brother and tagged along with him when I could.
Thus, there was always a ready made group of kids for my mom to invite for my birthday parties. And in the early 1950s, in the years before my dad’s engineering job took us away to other parts of the US for months at a time, my mother would go all out for birthdays, both for me and my sister. There would of course be cake and ice cream and other snack treats, hats and decorations and orchestrated games by my mom. Presents would have been carefully wrapped and each kid came with something as well, so the gift haul, while not expensive, was at least extensive. There would be the obligatory photo op of blowing out the candles with that years number iced onto the cake surface.
But after my 7th or 8th birthday, we lived in other cities while my father would manage the steel construction portion of various buildings around the eastern part of the US. Each year someplace different: 1955 Springfield, Mass,: 1956 Malden Mass then Cleveland Ohio; 1957 Newburg NY then Alexandria Louisiana; 1958 into 1959 Bangor Maine. And as we were transients living between 3 and 6 months in each of those places, living in apartments, hardly knowing anyone long enough to invite them over, my birthdays became solely family affairs.
None of the trappings were skipped however. Mom would always make my favorite dinner, steak and french fries. There would be banana nut cake with candles and icing and presents of course. We even put on our nicer clothes though it was at home.
And all our holidays were celebrated like that. Any occasion my mom could use became a party day. And when we would happen to be back home in Indiana, between my dad’s construction responsibilities, it would be at our house that all the older family members came for the day long feasting and sitting around for the major holidays. They always included Aunt Maude and Norm, her widowed sister, Aunt Ida, my grandmother, Hallie, while she remained alive. It gave mom the chance to use her silver and the “good” plates. All presents my dad gave her for their anniversary and her own birthdays.
This pattern was to change in the fall of 1959. The company my dad worked for was given a major federal contract to furnish the steel and build a Bomarc Missile base. This was at the end of Eisenhower’s administration with the US locked in the politics of the cold war. The Bomarc was to be a game changer, a defensive missile system to counter the Russkie’s long range bombers and ICBMs. They were armed with a 10 kiloton warhead as the accuracy in those days was not as great as now so it was a “neighborhood” explosion. Of course, then the idea of a high altitude nuclear explosion destroying all the electrical grid was not the problem as it would be to our current silicon based world.
The missiles were stored in hardened underground bunkers with a nuclear hardened roof that would slide open within minutes to allow the missile to be raised and fired. The bases were all placed at sites spread along the US Canada border and the one my father was assigned to build was north of Duluth Minnesota, which is at the farthest western point of Lake Superior.
So north we went, me at 12, my sister at 7 and my mom at 32 knowing that this was likely to be a couple year assignment. The actual site of the base was French River, barely a fork in the road 15 miles north of Duluth. The next real town up the road along the lake was Two Harbors and that is where my folks looked for a place for us to rent.
Two Harbors was actually a bustling port town. The main harbor was where the large Great Lakes ore boats were loaded with the raw iron ore from the open pits of the Mesabi Range in north Minnesota and floated to the steel mills spread along the south shore of Lake Michigan from Detroit to Chicago serving the industrialized mid west. The trains, a mile long, would arrive from the Range, and in a process amazing to my young eyes, the railroad cars were driven over the open holds of the ships and in a large device, turned 180 degrees dumping the contents seemingly instantaneously. It was a process that did not stop day and night. It required a steady, and well unionized workforce. Thus Two Harbors in those days had a strong, stable and happy middle class. And it was into that town that we were transplanted and enjoyed despite the fact that we were living in a small one bedroom furnished apartment. My parents had the bedroom and I slept on the foldout sofa, Mary Anne on a roll-away bed.
The town had a combined junior and senior high school, which meant that grade 7 to 12 were housed in the same building. While my peripatetic schooling to date had included public as well as catholic schools, this was my first where the students attended hour long sessions then transferred to the room and next subject and teacher. So much on offer. Such wonderful, dedicated and professional teachers. A rich extra curricular program added to the education experience, and I thrived. And as with my earlier life in the neighborhood in Evansville, the kids I went to school with, lived all around our apartment. And mom got to meet and make friends with the mothers and for the first time in a while, developed a more stable life. It was an idyllic time in an idyllic town. Everyone knew everyone and so you felt safe at all hours.
What I was not prepared for was the winter. A month where the temps did not get above zero Fahrenheit. The locals loved it. There was a log sided community center near the main part of town. As soon as the fall weather turned, the field next to the center was flooded to make a skating rink and that is where those Scandinavian heritage kids, and adults, hung out. You would go inside the center to warm up and get a cup of hot chocolate before heading back out into the cold. It was quite frustrating in a way for me. All those kids had grown up ice skating and here is this Hoosier kid dropped in and put on skates to be made fun of by every 5 year old who delighted in skating past me and pushing me off balance. Oh well, always the new kid as I had been much of my life. But this was a warm and friendly place over all and I had formed some strong bonds.
And so my 13th birthday came and my mom began to plan a party for her “to be” teenager. As usual, she did not want it to be halfway done. She hired the community center, planned food, planned time for us to ice skate, then the usual games inside to warm up, and invited all my classmates, about 50 or so. This was 1960, so swing dancing was still de rigeur. But as my age group was not quite at that level, simple dances were still what was available and my mother planned music for us to do the bunny hop in long snaking lines. Thus I found myself connected to the hips of Dee Ann H_______. But as we were winding our way around bouncing to the bunny, I turned and saw my mother, attached to the end of the line, hopping along with the kids. She could not resist joining in. I was appalled. But then my mom was younger than most of the other parents so the kids thought she was cool. Nonetheless, my memory of that night is of my mom, laughing and jumping along.
I survived that night and we became a part of the community. My mom organized a knitting club of mothers and engaged in a long round of dinner parties with the other parents. My thirteenth year was spent in a nurturing environment. I played football with the boys, began to play golf and skated and fished in the nearby Knife River. I explored Agate Bay, the other of the two harbors looking for multi hued stones which washed up on the shore. I carried my first transistor radio, the one that was my present at my party, with me everywhere. It was the size and weight of a brick, but it was my ipod of the day. I had an excellent english teacher, Mr. Harold Swenson, who encouraged my writing and was my first teacher as mentor. I grew 8 inches in that year to my almost current height. And I grew in confidence that I could make it in the world.
By the time my dad’s portion of the missile base construction was completed, Kennedy had become president and the US was engaged in diplomatic talks with Russia and the base was treatied out of existence within a year of completion. In the spring of 1961, after some tearful good byes we moved back home again. My mother stayed in contact with her friends in Two Harbors the rest of her life. She and my father drove up to Minnesota several times on vacations to visit with those lovely people. And Dee Ann H________ came down to visit with my mother when I was away at university. I did not come home to put my hands on her hips or anywhere else.
The last celebration of my birthday of importance to my mom, came in December 1969. I had graduated university and was teaching elementary school in Indianapolis. It was a way of keeping a draft deferment from the Vietnam war. My mom, having lived through occupation by the Bosch and the devastation created by the Normandy invasion with the collateral damage of the death of her brother from allied fire, was violently anti-war. She had made plans to ship me to France should I be drafted.
I received a call from her and heard the excitement in her voice. “Did you get my present?”
“What present?”
“You’re birthday present.”
“Mom, my birthday isn’t until the end of next month?”
“I mean your birth day. I know when it is. I was there, ”
“Mom, I don’t understand.”
“Haven’t you been watching the Draft Lottery?”
“No, I figured I’d hear about it at some point.”
‘Well, I have been watching it all afternoon. And I have given you a gift. You’re birth day was drawn as number 360 out of 365. You’ll not be drafted. I’m so relieved. I’m so happy.”
And that was the highlight of all my birthday celebrations with her. I lived away and was never home again for the banana nut cake or special dinner. And three years later the cancer that increasingly debilitated her, took her life. But I’ll never forget that phone call and the pure joy in her voice. To her, it was the best gift she had ever given me. And that memory is one I’ll always celebrate.