Cranky

Posted on by Elaine Maly

Feeling generally cranky.  Not about anything big.  It’s the miniature annoyances that get me.  The greasy butter knife he left on the counter.  His underwear on the bedroom door knob. His hair in the bathroom sink.  His beer taking up too much room in the frig.  The nonstop pinging sound of cowboys shooting at each other on his favorite old TV shows.

Yet I know, that if he leaves the scene before I do, it will be the absence of these annoyances that will bring me to my knees with grief.  me and Tom 2017

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What Could Go Wrong?

Posted on by Elaine Maly

It was Labor Day weekend, the last weekend in a summer full of outdoor adventures with my grandsons.  Twelve-year-old Noah and I headed up north to go white water rafting.  It was my idea.  I’d gone rafting dozens of times.  Who cares that the last time was almost 30 years ago?  What could go wrong?

We arrive at the meet-up spot near Pembine.  Our guide, Derek, fits us with life jackets and helmets.  Along with the other 6 rafters, two women and four men, we board the bus with our driver Bill who takes us to the launch spot on the Menomonie River.  We rafters chat a bit on the bus and I learn that only two of them had ever been rafting before and it was a long time ago.

The first section of the trip is just flat water and Derek uses the time to review the safety instructions and practice paddling in unison.  We all listen carefully.

The next section is class 2 rapids which I now know means “some rough water and rocks, some maneuvering.”  Only a basic skill level required.  Yahoo!  We got wet.  Everyone was laughing.  We give a high five salute with our paddles.

The next section is class 4 rapids which I now know are waves, rocks, sharp maneuvers, a considerable drop; “exceptional” skill level required.

Off we go.  Derek is calling out paddling instructions.  But the people paddling on the left are paddling way harder than the people on the right and we smash straight into a giant face of rock.  The force bounces us into a ricochet which catapults me into a backward summersault out of the raft.

My helmet pops off and I’m trapped underneath the raft.  “Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle.”  Oh dear, this is bad.  I was really, really scared.  After a death defying amount of time, the raft and I drift  apart.  But now I’m going down the “considerable drop” all by myself.  Whitewater crashes over my face.  It feels like what I imagine waterboarding would feel like.  I thought I was going to drown.

Noah is screaming, “Grandma!  Grandma! Grandma!”  When you are over 60, you think about death now and then and you think, yeah, I’ve had a good life.  I’m okay with death.  But not today!  Not fucking today!  Not like this.  This would really suck for Noah.  I can’t have Noah’s last memory of me be this!

Derek is shouting “nose up, toes up” at me. He’s yelling at the rafters to paddle hard and they finally get close to me.  Derek reaches over and grabs me by the shoulders of my life jacket.  “One, two, three,” and he hauls me into the back of the raft. The bottom of my suit falls down to my knees. I’m face down, bare ass up.  As I wriggle around to pull my suit up and find a more comfortable postion, Derek says, “Sorry ma’am.”

We get through the rest of the rapids and glide to the river bank.  No one is laughing.  “Grandma, are you okay?” says a wide-eyed Noah.  I say, “I’m fine,” even though my heart is pounding out of my chest and my hands are shaking.  Derek is wild-eyed and wants to know if I hit my head anywhere.

We hike a little way to rendezvous with the bus driver.  Bill greets us with. “Wait until you see the video!  Some of you are really going to want a copy.”

Video?  What video?  I forgot about the video.  Bill had been perched above the falls recording.

I rationalize it away.   How close could he possibly have been?  Plus, the mishap was in the back of the boat.  Only Derek saw it.  I tell Noah about it just in case and he thinks it’s funny but he’s not concerned.  “They would probably fuzz it out anyway,” he says.

Back at the meet-up spot, everyone gathers around a small flat screen to view our exciting journey.  Sure enough, there it is.  My big white ass for the whole world to see.  Noah nods his head and says, “Oh Grandma.”

The two other women in the group realize how awkward this is and yank the men away.  I threaten to stalk anyone who buys the video.  Noah consoles me, “It’s okay Grandma.  It’s not that bad.  Everyone has a butt.”

I give Noah a big hug.  I’m so very grateful that our memory of this trip will be this really funny embarrassing thing that happened and not something horrible.  He tells me that rafting was the most fun he had all summer.

(The live recorded version of this piece aired on WUWM on 1/6/17.  http://wuwm.com/post/ex-fabula-adventures-children)

 

Our Anniversary

Posted on by Elaine Maly

Tom and I were married in 1989.  On the eve of our wedding a friend asked him how he felt about getting an instant family.  My boys were 11 and 15 years old.  He replied that it was going to be great.  “The hard part of raising kids is already over.”  He figured they were practically grown.  And the boys loved him.  They even invited him for a sleep over.  “Mom has a really big bed.”  They told me that they liked the idea of having a man around the house full time.  At least that’s what they said.  A few short weeks after our brief honeymoon, we discovered just how difficult becoming a family was going to be.

They turned on him.  They complained about everything and the “You’re not my dad” line was practically on an hourly rotation.  Ben, the 11 year old, took me aside and said that he didn’t think it was working out.  “Why?” I wondered.  “I don’t like the way he makes eggs,” was the only thing he could come up with.   Sam, the 15 year old, just stayed out of the house as much as possible mostly at the local skate park.

And Tom, who was the only child in his family, was not used to having competition.  He was cranky.  About noise, especially boy noise early in the morning.  The sound of them slurping cereal made him insane.  And he didn’t like sharing special snacks.  Or having to compromise on the TV schedule.  I was constantly negotiating the tsunami of two pubescent boys with the thunder clouds of a spoiled child .  It was ugly.

And it got worse.  Sam would disappear for whole weekends at a time on vague skateboarding missions without adult supervision.  When Ben got to high school he became a chronic truant and found a new hobby spray painting everything in the neighborhood.   Tom suffered through a bought of depression.  I spent countless months on projects I invented in the basement and went to counseling.  We even took separate vacations.  And in the mean time, we managed growing responsibilities at work.  Our marriage was being tested everyday.

Little by little things started to sort themselves out.  Sam turned 18 and cashed in all of the savings bonds his grandparents had given him and went off to travel the world as a professional skateboarder.  Four years later, Ben started his carpentry apprenticeship and moved out of the house.  Excited empty nesters, we booked a romantic budget trip to Europe!

And then in year 10 of our marriage a letter arrived by certified mail.  It was from the Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee.  It said, “We regret to inform you that while you are married in the eyes of god, your paperwork was never properly filed with the State of Wisconsin.”  It went on to explain that we had a year to file a special form called a “delayed certification of marriage.”

Stunned, Tom made us a drink and we reread the letter together a dozen times.  What did it mean?  Was it a “get out of jail free” card?  How strong was our commitment to one another?  How would we feel if the letter had arrived a few years earlier, in the midst of the firestorm that was our family life?  Since there was no urgency and we were busy with work, we decided to just think on it for a few weeks.

And then the Journal Sentinel came out with an article.  It said  that during a period from roughly 1988 to 1990, the church where we were married failed to complete the necessary legal paperwork.  The reporter discovered that the issue was uncovered when a woman who had also been married during that period, applied for a passport in her married name.  When the government informed her there was no person with that name matching that social security number, the shit hit the fan.

I didn’t change my  name so it never came up when I got my passport for our trip to Europe.  But we’d been filing joint tax returns the whole time.  This was difficult to understand.

The article also cautioned people affected by this mishandling of really fucking important paperwork, that it was not a “get out of jail free card.”  Looks like a marriage, smells like a marriage.  The untangling of any union would require time in court.

Tom made us a drink and we discussed our course of action.  Together we decided that the letter was really a gift.  That we could take our time, the whole year allotted to us, to think about the years that we had survived, our lives as they were now, and the kind of relationship we wanted going forward.  We established a weekly date night.  We found new interests in common like visiting art museums.  We rekindled our friendship and passion.  We went on vacation with my adult sons, mended fences, laughed about the years that we had survived together, and truly reconnected.

Weeks and months went by and soon we were coming close to the deadline.  With five days to spare and the signatures of two witnesses who attended our wedding, we filed that delayed certification of marriage form.  We finally became the family we wanted.  The rest will be easy.

This month Tom and I celebrate our 28th anniversary.  Or maybe it’s technically only 18.

Talking to Kids about Race

Posted on by Elaine Maly

This is my story about talking to kids about race over the generations.  It’s the story about a lot of small conversations.  It’s about the journey to unlearn racism that  never ends. I’m white and I grew up on the northwest side of Milwaukee.  I moved to Bay View as a young adult.  I have two sons and three grandsons, two of whom live nearby.

When I was very young I was at a shoe store at Capitol Court with my mom.  An African American man waited on us.  I had never seen anyone like him before and couldn’t stop staring.  I asked my mother out loud, “What is the matter with his face?”  My embarrassed mother whispered, “He’s just like us.  God just left some people in the oven a little longer.”  Hmm, I thought.  So he’s kind of like a burnt cookie.  Like me but somehow imperfect.

I wanted my conversations with my sons to be different.  I took them to Juneteenth day, Mitchell Street Sun Fair, Indian Summer and got them involved in the Boys & Girls Club where I worked.

When my oldest son Sam was in the 2nd grade, he had a homework assignment to do a presentation about his nationality.  We’re a bunch of things—Croation, Bohemian, and German—I was annoyed by having to pick just one and I didn’t like the idea of having the kids separate themselves by nationality and race.  So, I told Sam that we’re American.  Simple, I thought.  We discussed what we thought of as being American culture—hot dogs and hamburgers, baseball games and the 4th of July.  When he got home from school that day, Sam was really annoyed with me and said his teacher wanted to know if we’re native American and what tribe we belong to.  Not so simple.

When my younger son Ben was in the 2nd grade, his best buddies were two Mexican cousins.  We spent a lot of time with their families—school, soccer, church festivals.  One day, after spending time with their families, Ben asked me if he could “please, please, please be Mexican.”  Of course I had to say “no.”  It was hard to explain that we can’t choose what we are.  “We can’t be Mexican.  We can’t change our identity.”

When teenage Ben was riding in a car with an African American friend Jason, they got pulled over in Shorewood and were brought to the police station.  Ben swore they had done nothing and the police offered no explanation.  I talked to Ben about what happened.  He could drive a car through Shorewood  and no one would give him a second glance.  But it was different for Jason.  And I thought about what people mean in Milwaukee when they say “those neighborhoods,” the neighborhoods where “you’re not supposed to go.”  It depends on who you are.

Now I have conversations with my grandkids.

When Ezra was in 2nd grade, he told me that he didn’t like brown people  When I asked him why he said, “Kenny is mean.”

“Oh, so you don’t like Kenny,” I said.  “Are there any brown people in your school that you do like?”

“Oh, yes,” he said.  “I like to play with Trevor.”  “So that means you like some brown people.  What about Nathan?  He’s not brown and you don’t like him.”

“Yeah, I guess I like some brown people and I don’t like some white people.”  What I hoped he was learning was not to judge people by the color of their skin.

Just a few weeks ago I had a conversation with my grandson Noah who is a 6th grader.  He asked me why anyone would discriminate against people of color.  I explain that some people think that they’re different or not as good as white people.  “That’s crazy,” he said.

I still talk to my grown up sons about race.

After an incident at a soccer game that accelerated nearly to physical violence between adult spectators, Ben shared that he was sure that it was motivated by racism.  A Latina girl had accidentally knocked off a white girls glasses during the game.  We talked about how Latinos get stereotyped as aggressive.

At another kids soccer game, while the kids battled it out on the field, the adults of a Latino family were being targeted by the adults of an all white team with taunts like —“speak English.” The Latina mom understandably blew a fuse and unleashed a firestorm of cuss words which made everything worse.  Everyone stood around and gawked at the melt down spectacle, including me.  Finally, it was Ben who came up with a solution to the stalemate.  He simply invited the Latino family to move their lawn chairs and come and sit with us.

I was proud of him.  He may not have changed anyone’s mind that day, but he did something to intervene.  To demonstrate that not all white people feel the same.

People say that talk is cheap.  But so many of the big barriers in our society are built on conversations—the things people tell kids, or fail to tell kids.  People learn about race through conversations.  We learn who we are and who we aren’t.  We learn where to go and where not to go.

But conversation can help to tear down those barriers too.  I’m going to keep on talking with my kids and grandkids and I want them to keep talking to me.  We all need to keep talking.

 

Here’s a link to the live version told at an Ex Fabula Fellowship event in 2017.  http://wuwm.com/post/ex-fabula-difficult-conversations

 

Renae

Posted on by Elaine Maly

My idiot ex husband leaves a voice mail that says my old friend Renae died.  He thought I’d like to know.  It has been over 20 years since I’d last seen her.

I desperately call him back while scouring obituaries online and digging the last months-worth of newspapers out of the recycling bin.  I call a dozen times.  He doesn’t answer.  I remember that she was the one who brought me and my new born second son home from the hospital.  I was alone and afraid in the middle of a divorce.

Renae and I met because our husbands were friends.  We both married when we were 18 years old and pregnant.  Our babies were due on the same day.  We were in touch every day.  Counseling each other through our pregnancies—“I can’t believe what’s happening to my boobs!”—and motherhood—“How long do they have to wear diapers anyway?”—and coping with husbands who were more interested in hanging out in bars than being fathers—“Want to have a sleep over and play Scrabble?” It was like walking a tightrope but finding comfort in the fact that you could look out and see someone else out there along with you, far from the edge.

I take a chance and call the last phone number I had for her.  A number that I kept even when I updated my address book and discarded others.  Disconnected.  I search for her on FaceBook and LinkedIn.  I remember the time that we  took our little boys to State Fair.  She bent over to feed the baby animals and a little goat chewed the buttons off of her blouse.

Finally, the idiot calls back and says that he was mistaken.  She isn’t dead yet but has cancer and will be dead any day now.  “Do you have a phone number?  Does she still live in the same house?”  He doesn’t know.  I remember the night Renae and I called the police because we couldn’t find her son anywhere.  He’d been hiding in the clothes hamper the whole time.

I do the only thing I can do.  I write a letter to the old address.  I tell her that I miss sitting at her kitchen table with a blue mug of black coffee, with her two-year-old daughter perched on top of the table like a little eaves dropper.  I send it out into the universe and hope that it will find her before it’s too late.  I think about Renae’s potato salad recipe, the one with the chicken bouillon cube.  I’m sure I still have it crammed in that dusty old yellow recipe card box.

A week later I get a text.  “It’s good to hear from you.  I have stage four lung cancer.  Probably have less than a year to live.  I would love a visit.”  I remember how proud she was that I went to college after my divorce and that she insisted on giving me a manicure on graduation day.

I don’t know what I expected.  Maybe her lying in bed, gasping for air, weeping in anticipation of our grand reunion.  But the scene I arrive at teleports me back over two decades.  It’s exactly the same.  Her husband and her son pacing around the yard engaged in some vague chore.  Renae meets me at the back door with a cup of coffee.  Everything is the same except now she’s bald.  I remember that when Sam was a toddler with a penchant for wadding up paper and jamming it up his nose, she advised me to shake pepper into my hand and give him a whiff so that he’d sneeze it out.

We fall right back into step.  She shows me pictures of her seven grandchildren and complains about her husband.  We have several more visits.  I take her to lunch at a restaurant on her bucket list.  At a beer garden with our handsome sons who are both now fathers themselves, I have an IPA and she has a coffee.  She never liked beer.  I volunteer for a few trips to the hospital for chemo pushing her wheel chair through the vast hallways, always making a stop at the gift shop.

On the surface, I aim to be helpful but clearly being with her is feeding my own soul in a way that feels selfish.  She doesn’t really need me.  She has plenty of support from legions of friends and family members.  Yet, I get to be the long lost friend that resurfaces just in time to provide comfort.  And I’m paying my penance, assuaging my guilt for leaving her behind, for not taking her with me on the journey of life.

We talk about death.  She tells me that she believes in an after life.  She says that she has to.  She would like me to help her write letters to her children.  But she’s not ready.  I promise to do my best to stay in touch with them.

I wonder why we ever lost touch in the first place.  Would we ever have reconnected if she wasn’t dying?  Will I be able to stay in touch with her daughter Katie any better?  I decide that it doesn’t matter.  What counts for both of us is being together in this moment.  I guess my ex isn’t such an idiot after all.  He called because he knew Renae was important to me and I’m grateful.

Right before Christmas, when Renae can no longer get out of bed, I’m summoned.  She wants to see me.  It will be our last visit.  She has a gift for me.  It’s a bracelet with a “friends forever” charm.  I rub her legs to help ease her pain.  My last gift to her.

 

Spies

Posted on by Elaine Maly

The big bay window of the kitchen gave my grandparents the perfect perch from which to spy on the neighborhood.  As the sun went down and they finished the last of their pork shanks and sauerkraut, they would sit with the lights out and watch.  “Mr. Durr’s home from work late again.”  “Those Gitter kids don’t do a very good job at mowing the lawn.”  “The Westphal’s need new shingles on their garage roof.”

Grandma and Grandpa’s house was on the corner at the top of a hill.  We lived next door.  There were always eyes on us.  One Sunday morning, grandma invited us over for breakfast.  My sister shrieked with joy when she spotted her missing doll sitting in a blue and green flowered vinyl kitchen chair.  Mary Jo made a bee line for the doll but Grandma stopped her in her tracks.  “Oh no.  That’s my doll.  Some irresponsible little girl left her out in the cold and rain and now she’s my doll.”  And Grandma meant it.

My brother Joe, who always played that he was working, would move piles of bricks in a wagon from a spot in our back yard to a spot in my grandparents front yard and back again.  Grandpa supervised from the kitchen window.

As a hormone fueled teenager, I snuck my boyfriend into the garage for a french kissing lesson.  We’d just settled into a cozy spot in the corner on top of a paint tarp when the door flew open and the light clicked on.  “Boy you better go home now,” was all she said.  She was also clearly the “anonymous source” who reported me for rolling my skirt up way above my knees on my way to school and for smoking cigarets in the alley.

Eventually, I learned to watch for signs.  The glow of the ash from Grandpa’s cigar.  The rhythmic thumping of finger nails on the formica kitchen table.  The squeak of the swivel chairs.  I learned to be a spy too.

And when my own grandsons walked home from school by themselves for the very first time, my husband and I were there.  With our car camouflaged by a thicket of bushes a half block away, our eyes were on them.

This Started Out as a Love Story

Posted on by Elaine Maly

Hard nutty cheese.  Musky red wine.  Candles drip on the lapis blue cloth on a table by the sea.  A black cat sits on my lap and I let it.

It is just you and me and the cat.  It’s dark.  The candles flicker in the warm breeze.  Our music is the roar of the waves as they wall-by-the-seacrash against the wall by the sea.  I am perhaps most in love with you in this moment.  Our hearts suspended together.  Breathing in peace, an ocean away from home.

Home.  Where bills need to be paid and alarms are set.  Where the light over the kitchen table dims our dreams.  Where expectations and household maintenance avert our gaze away from each other and the content of our hearts.

What I didn’t know then was how hard it would be to be with you again like that—with hard cheese and a bottle of wine.  We tried.  Romantic restaurants in other towns.  But a black cat never sat on my lap again.  And you never want any wine.  And the cheese just stinks.