My Grandma

Every person who meets my Grandma for the first time is immediately struck by her elegance. It’s not just the lovely clothes, the perfect touch of perfume or the glittery jewels. Her soul shines right through all that and it’s perfectly obvious from the very first second you meet her that she is a great lady.

She loved literature and history. Shakespeare, poetry, and great orations were her particular favorites. She had memorized many of them, too, and could recite them from memory. When I didn’t recognize a particular great work (which was, sadly, often), she never made me feel dumb; she just delighted in being the first to introduce me the piece she valued. Of course, she was an author herself, too! I remember how excited and proud she was when her first book, Destination River Bend, was accepted. She was beside herself with joy! After that, it was almost as if the next 5 books were easy!

She loved music and her piano. As long as I can remember, she has always had a music room, a space with at least one piano, sometimes more, where she enjoys playing a few minutes, or a few hours, at a time. Her latest piano, a professional piano with more keys and dials than a 747, was a thrill to her. She played it daily and I think her piano bench was the most comfortable seat in the house to her. While she loved the ‘oldies’ like Frank and Etta, she’d be quick to ask you to turn off the country or Mozart. And she loved to dance to Top 40’s!

She missed her beloved home town of Seattle. How she loved the city! Always in a dress and heels, we’d go downtown for lunch or a play. She adored the tall buildings, the sound of the cars, and even the smell of bus fumes. You have never appreciated a city until you’ve seen it through Grandma’s eyes!

She also enjoyed the palm trees in Jacksonville, where her hands and feet finally got warm and in Honolulu, where she and my grandfather would vacation. The swaying palm trees on warm nights were wonderful to her.

When Grandma danced, it was magic. Give her gorgeous diamond-studded high heels and a dress that twirled just right and she was ready for an all-nighter on the town! She and Grandpa, also elegantly attired, would go out to the Elks or Trappers, where everyone welcomed them as old friends. Dance floors would clear and people would just watch them dance, this beautiful couple who were in perfect tune with each other and oblivious to their admirers. I think the dance floor is where Grandma was most herself. I just know she dances every night in Heaven; I just hope they have a dress pretty enough for her there!

While Grandpa worked, Grandma gardened. She respected each plant, caring for it as a precious living thing. She could move a boulder or dig up huge plants, too; it was amazing at how strong she really was when she decided a big bush needed more shade! And her raspberries! Nobody can grow a raspberry like my grandma! Most big raspberries loose their flavor, but not grandma’s! They didn’t dare. Hers were as big as your thumb as sweet as an angel’s song. We’d pick some after lunch and wash ‘em up in her colander. Then she’d dish us up a little vanilla ice cream and we’d put the raspberries on top. We’d sit at her dining room table, chatting and enjoying that little bit of summer in a bowl. When we moved to Florida, she continued to garden in containers on her patio. She was even successful in keeping an orchid alive that Tara had given her way back in Seattle! That plant survived the 3,000 mile trip and continued to bloom every year, right on cue. Grandma had that effect on living things; she just made you want to bloom.

I cannot begin to convey adequately how much I love her. It’s so frustrating that I can’t think of how to express how much she means to me. I just hope I can reflect her spirit just a little bit, as I know the world would be better for it if I did.

-Tracy

The Angels Rejoice

Yesterday, at 4:00 am, Grandpa met Grandma (Mildred) at the gates of Heaven with an armful of flowers and a gorgeous pair of dancing shoes. Grandma’s passing was peaceful. She was pain-free and comfortable, smiling at familiar voices and caring touches but otherwise blissfully unaware of our worries.

It was a blessing that God took her so quickly, without pain or suffering. Though we don’t know what Heaven is like, it is easy to imagine her today, playing pool with her brothers, hugging her Mamma and Daddy, dancing and laughing with her husband, and visiting all of her friends and family who have been waiting so patiently for her to join them in Heaven.

While the Angels rejoice at her Homecoming, we try to get used to living in a world without her. She will be missed beyond measure.

Page 1 News

Deep in the Depression and on into World War II, a familiar figure all across the country was Fiorello LaGuardia, the Mayor of New York City. Even in Seattle, we knew of his accomplishments and the impact of two-fisted getting the job done.

Barely five feet tall, always dapper with a flower in his lapel, he attracted attention as he forcefully waded into the way things were. We heard how he swung onto the back of a moving fire engine to join in a four-alarm fire, and then revamped the fire department; rode with police to crack down on ‘speak easies’, and became famous for fighting crime and corruption.

On a cold night in January, 1933, in the poorest part of the city, he dismissed the judge from a night court, and took the bench to preside over traffic violations and petty crimes. The first case was a ragged woman who had stolen a loaf of bread, for her starving grandchildren, she pleaded. Ten dollars or ten days in jail was the penalty.

Mayor LaGuardia took ten dollars from his pocket and paid the fine. Furthermore, he fined every person in the courtroom fifty cents each for living in a town where a grandmother would be forced to steal a loaf of bread! Including an extra fifty cents from the grocer who was robbed, $47.50 was handed to a tearful woman while police and criminals together rose in rousing burst of applause for the Mayor of New York City. And he turned slums into low cost housing with playgrounds and parks.
After Pearl Harbor was bombed, a Japanese submarine launched a missile that exploded in our woods, and LaGuardia was the expert who was sent to organize our West Coast defenses.

He was endearing in a crisis in 1945. From the South Pacific, Lee was home from the hospital in Australia, but his brother Jack, after their two years together in New Guinea, was sent on to Biak, my brother Bob was still in battle in Europe, and there was no one anywhere who did not constantly devour the war news.

Suddenly, on June 30 that year, how many thousand creatures of habit were left unprepared for the trauma of no newspaper for seventeen days on strike! Radio came to the rescue with hourly reports of war news, but it was upsetting, and there was yet another void.

Then, in front of their radio sets, people young and old were drawn together to fill that need as Fiorello LaGuardia held a microphone at the New York Tribune and read the funny papers.

–Mildred

The Up Car

Gregory Flugal’s brother Fritz is a psychiatrist with his office in a tall building downtown in San Francisco. Fritz will be having dinner with Greg and Greg’s adored wife, Stephanie, but, in a significant interruption of his schedule, Fritz is going to be late for dinner.

It was a bright, sunlit afternoon in San Francisco. In town for a singing engagement of her stylized blues and rhythms, tangle-haired Jessica Dee, mini skirt and loose jacket , pulled off her dark glasses and crushed into a back corner of a crowded elevator. Five foot two or three plus heels, she was hidden back there as the doors, closing on that ‘up’ car, were pulled open to make room for one more passenger. Sherrie Dee, pretty executive, feminine suit, wedged inside and touched the Roof Garden button.

Dr. Fritz Flugal, comfortable gray suit, leaned into his corner until stops on fourth and sixth and then a mass exit on seventh left him alone with Jessica Dee, singer of blues, and Sherrie Dee, bank executive.

In that awkward turn of circumstances, the two women were forced to meet again. If they thought of each other at all it was with rancor they didn’t bother to define, and they would never willingly have taken the same elevator. Too many wounds inflicted, too much time gone by.

As the doors closed on the seventh floor, Sherrie Dee turned, and choked at the sight of her sister Jessica Dee! In reckless haste to escape, she slammed her palm against the rows of elevator buttons, and, somewhere between floors eight and nine, the car jolted to a stop. “Damn!” slipped out under her breath as she frantically scanned the operating panel while Jessica spat out, “Sherrie Diane Dee, how did you get in here?”

With an alarming jiggle, the elevator settled a foot lower in its concrete shaft, and Sherrie jerked back her hand in panic. “What did I do?” she squeaked.

“You did nothing,” Dr. Flugal assured her as he stepped over to push the emergency button. “I work in this building, and we have this touchy elevator. Elmo will fix it again when he sees the light flashing. It might be a few minutes.”

Unbuttoning his suit coat, Fritz returned to his corner and sat down on the carpeted floor of the elevator car. He gestured for the women to relax in their places, but Jessica pouted that she would rather stand.

In words striking with cannon ball impact, she jabbed at Sherrie, “You haven’t changed.”

Sherrie flung back at her, “In all of San Francisco, couldn’t you …?”

“How would I know?” she sputtered, and stopped to listen. There was nothing. In angry explanation to the other captive, she flatly stated, “She stays out of my life. I keep out of hers.”

Their antagonism sizzled as Fritz Flugal asked how long it had been that way.

“Years,” Sherrie answered. “Her fault.”

Jessica snapped back, “My fault? You were Daddy’s little girl who liked solving his mathematic brain teasers I could never get.”

Jessica scolded, “You and Mama were always together at the piano.”

The hostilities crackled in accusations that could only prolong the war. Dr. Flugal suggested, “You must have once felt deep fondness to be now so bitter.”

Jessica sulked, “We’re sisters.”

With squinting eyes, Sherrie corrected, “Were.” Silence simmered.

Contemplating the elevator carpet, the doctor quietly asked, “You never had times when you laughed together?”

Sherrie’s swivel inquired what that had to do with anything, while Jessica, leaning back into her corner, suppressed a titter, “Morry Binns.”

Sherrie frowned at Jessica’s silly grin, but gave in to shrug, “That stuffed shirt, showing off to dumber kids his A Plus grades. He wasn’t so smart with our poster paint on his head.”

“Skidding down our muddy slide into the river, he was all flying legs and lunch pail.” They laughed out loud.

“Lunch pails. Do you still like strawberry jam sandwiches? I’ve never forgotten Grandma’s wild strawberries.”

Fritz Flugal was drawing slow ovals on the rug while his mind swept back to picking blackberries on a camping trip with little brother Gregory. He
remembered the bottomless pit of fear when he knew for sure they were lost in the woods. Their mother had told him, ‘Fritzy, you take care of your brother.’ But it was little Greggy who told him not to worry and found the trail back to camp.

Greg, with his supermarket, and Fritz, psychiatrist, still needed each other. The brothers shared the pain when Lillian divorced her busy doctor. They shared the glow when Greg married the lovely dancer, Stephanie Prentiss.

In words frosted with reproach, Sherrie was saying,, “I miss Mama.”

Jessica reminded her sister, “I was in Europe, you know, when Mama died.”

Sherrie stabbed at her, “And you couldn’t leave, could you?”

Jessica argued, “If I had come back for the funeral, it wouldn’t have been any help to Mama.”

Turning to the wall, Sherrie whimpered, “It would have helped me.”

Subdued, Jessica said, “Oh.”

Sinking to the floor, she defended herself to the stranger, “I didn’t think Sherrie ever needed me. She was so everlastingly sure of herself.”

Sherrie spun around. “Sure of myself? I could never do anything right. Even now, getting a divorce!” She looked up as if she could see the Roof Garden high above. “Sir Malcolm is a really nice man, and he’s up there waiting for me while we’re down here, hanging helpless in an elevator shaft.”

“Don’t get me all scared again,” Jessica warned her. Pulling her big purse over her knees, she sat with legs curled back, and gloomily wondered how long they would be trapped, hanging in a cage, while, outside, the sun was still bright, seagulls wheeled, cawing, over ships docked in a blue bay, and the world of people and traffic went by, unaware. A word connected in her brain. “What do you mean, ‘divorce’? I hated you when I heard he had married Kevin, who was mine, I thought.”

Sherrie dropped to the floor beside Jessica. “I didn’t know that, Jessie. You had so many boyfriends.”

“Not anymore. Traveling around, it’s hard to find somebody decent.”

“Well, Kevin wasn’t decent, either,” Sherrie informed her. “Selling luxury boats tempted him into seamy schemes with rich and lonely women. He is in jail now for fraud and grand theft.”

Stricken, Jessica said, “Oh, Sherrie Diane, I am sorry. I didn’t know you had trouble.” Her eyes narrowed as she remembered one other thing. “The money,” she accused. “What happened to my share from Mama?”

Sherrie Diane shoved her little sister, hard. “Jessica,” she scolded, “you don’t think I took your money, do you? I’m the banker, remember? Mama knew how fast you would throw it away. Before she died, she told me to put it in an account at the bank where I work. It’s collecting interest for you down the street.”

Jessica stood up. “Keep it there,” she said, “until I grow up, will you?”

Getting up, Sherrie hugged her sister as she pleaded, “Don’t grow up. I’ve missed you.” Stepping back, she rearranged Jessica’s hair to see how it would look. She remarked, “I saw you last night on stage.”

“You did?” Eagerly, Jessica asked, “How was I?”

“Good enough, I guess,” Sherrie teased. “You held that room in the palm of your hand, and you know it.”

From the elevator’s control panel, a voice startled them, and the doctor went over to answer, “This is Fritz Flugal, Elmo. Is it fixed?”

“In a minute or two,” the voice promised, apologizing for the jamming of gears.

Jessica gasped, “You are Dr. Flugal? I am your appointment who can’t sleep. Your sister-in-law, Stephanie, is my leading dancer, and she promised me that you could solve my problem. Well, Doctor, I think you succeeded. I’ll sleep now. I don’t hate my sister, anymore.”

Hanging onto her, Sherrie informed Dr. Flugal, “This is Jessica Dee. Have you heard her stunning music?”

“Not yet,” he answered, “but her dancer, Stephanie, and my brother Greg are meeting me in the restaurant on the roof.” Taking the hand that Jessica held out to him, he asked, “Will you be my dinner date before we go to your theater?”

“I’d love it,” Jessica said. “But I can’t eat before I sing.”

“All the better,” Fritz laughed.

At the Roof Garden, they stepped again into the world where things were going on, tinkling silverware in a hushed room lit by shaded sunlight. Life seemed to be leaping out to greet them.

Stephanie and Greg were waiting for Fritz. Sherrie Dee found her banking client, Sir Malcolm, absorbed in the dramatic panorama of the busy harbor. Tables were pulled together for the group.

From her seat across the table, Jessica said, “Stephanie, when I saw you dancing in a TV commercial, I didn’t know you would send me to this doctor who has given me back my hateful sister!”

Sir Malcolm grinned at Sherrie., “You are the hateful sister?”

Sherrie made a face. “I didn’t like her, either.”

Stephanie told Sir Malcolm, “I crashed my car into Greg’s Market, and he keeps me dancing. Holding Greg’s hand, she proposed a toast, “To the Flugal brothers who make troubles disappear.”

A little misty, Jessica and Sherrie raised their glasses as Jessica said, “Anyone who hates her sister, should call Dr. Flugal.”

Taking her hand in his, he kissed it and said, “Please call me Fritz.”

* * *

There will soon be smiles of celebration with trailing ribbons when Jessica Dee marries Fritz Flugal. Family is maybe the most enduring richness of our lives.

–Mildred

Accidentally

(Traveling through California, we stoppped at a neighborhood grocery where wedding bells decorated the checkout counter. A clerk told us what happened, and I had to write this story from the words of Gregory Flugal.)

It was an ordinary day until she ran into my store up to her windshield! Climbing out of her car, she flung at me, “I’m sorry I bent your stupid supermarket!”

Red neon letters dangled from my Gregory’s Market sign. Walls of glass lay in chunks and tiny pieces, inside the broken store, outside, and across the hood of her car. Broken glass had showered her from her open sun roof. I grabbed at her hands as she pulled sharp splinters of glass like icicles out of her long black hair. “Don’t do that,” I said. “You’re cutting yourself.”

“Who cares?” she pouted. “I have nothing scheduled except suicide.”

I yelped at her, “Oh, no, you don’t! And leave me with this mess? Not until the insurance is settled. Then we’ll talk suicide.”

She laughed a little, but did she have serious thoughts of suicide? She was scaring me. She started to shake, and I put my arm around her to help her into the back of the police car that had pulled in out of range of broken glass. The patrolman asked, “Name?”

I answered, “Gregory Mozart Flugal.”

My careless driver giggled, and, ducking her forehead to her fingertips, threw a spray of glass onto my good brown suit. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but Flugle is my manager at Flugle’s Follies. Can Pasedena have two rotten Flugles?”

The cop snapped, “Your name?”

She distinctly replied, “I’m Stephanie Prentiss, ballerina.”

“Ballet stripper,” he noted.

She whispered to me, “I do not!”

“How much have you had to drink?” he questioned.

I don’t drink. I came to the store just to buy a candy bar.” She sank back in disbelief of what was happening to her.

I howled. “You destroyed my store for a candy bar? Lucky you didn’t kill somebody.”

“I know,” she whimpered. “I was driving under the influence of bad news.”

The patrolman went with his clipboard to examine the wreckage. I held her hands, trembling and cold. She said, “I’ll bet you have a piano.”

“Because my mother named me Mozart? I play, but I’m not as good as my mother.”

“Would you play for me?”

I could be wading into suicidal mentality, but if she killed herself, I didn’t want to have to feel guilty for not trying to change her schedule. That night at Flugle’s Follies, I opened the passenger door when she came hurrying out.

Along the way. I asked, “How’s your hair?”

She laughed. “I used the blow dryer over the garbage can.”

In my driveway, she asked, “A house? I have an apartment.”

I brought our coffee with pastries. “No, thanks,” she said with control as she studied the assortment. “Your home is beautiful.”

“My mother left me the grand piano.”

She sat back, relaxing with her coffee while I took a doughnut. Leaning forward, she asked, “Do you have a grandfather? Mine’s going to kill me.” Her slender shoulder pressing mine, she took my doughnut from my fingers, broke it into two pieces, and gave me the smaller half while she took a measured bite to make hers the same size as mine. “..I don’t know whether to shoot myself or leap from my ninth floor window. Which would you do? Greg? Everybody calls me Stephie.”

“Stephie,” I said, tempted to smooth her soft brow, “don’t do it.”

“My grandfather is a math professor, and I am his treasure. How could I tell him I’m a Flugle Floozie? Not that any of us are,” she laughed.

“Conga Hips shares her apartment with me. She’s nice. But Grampa’s coming out here, expecting to see me perform in a dance theater.” She went to the piano where she touched a key. “Come and play something?”

She moved to the music, changing with every rhythm as I went on, not wanting to break the spell she was casting over me. Sinking to the floor, she was crying. As I pulled her up, she said, “That’s how I want to dance.” Curving her body into mine, she wrapped warm arms around my neck, and whispered, “Thank you for the music.”

Bewitched, I held her, smelling her perfume. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and pulled her by the hand to sit and tell me why wasn’t she in the dance theater.

“Max Flugle,” she said, pushing with folded arms into corner cushions.

“He loaned me money for the down payment on my car, but the interest is galloping. I took that job, trying to hang on out here awhile longer. Now I can never get out of it! I wrote to my grampa that I was going to be in a musical I had auditioned for, and it was exciting. But when I told Max I was going to leave the Follies, he threatened to prosecute me for embezzlement.”

Easy solution. I would loan her pay-off money. “No,” she protested, rising to go. “You’ve been kind enough, Greg.” At the door, she said,, “Maybe I have to tell Grampa Prentiss the truth.”

At her apartment door, I kissed her forehead, and she whispered goodnight, carrying her shoes to keep her steps from disturbing Conga Hips. I went home in confusion. When in doubt, I should mind my own business; but I almost never did.

* * *
Grampa was going to pay off her loan and take her home to Ohio. She must go.

We had lunch in the park, and, running around the pond, I said, “Wait a minute!” Pulling her down to the grass, I puffed, “Do you know anything about cameras and video equipment?”

“Well, yes, everything,” she exaggerated. It was settled then; she would work for me in the store.

Grampa Prentiss went with Stephie to Flugle’s Follies where he told Max to reduce the balance due. ‘I teach college mathematics,” he said, “and your calculations are illegal usury.” Before he left, Grampa knocked Max Flugle into his swivel chair.

* * * *

Now, in my television commercials, Stephanie is dancing in a series of episodes as boy meets girl in the supermarket. People come to tell her, in her camera corner, that they watch her mini romances. Who knows how far she will go from dancing in the aisles?

Yesterday, as I came around a corner, she and I collided in the cereal aisle. Clinging to her, I asked, “Are we making a mini romance?”

Her eyes inviting, her lips so close to mine, she whispered, “Yes.”

A kiss was halfway to Heaven.

The Welcome Mat

Do we need to be fearful? We need to watch out. People could be misled to believe that terrorists could represent millions of Muslims, those millions who have no connection with any desire for destruction.

Beyond question, Muslims have a right to build a mosque anywhere they choose, and they need assurance of the tranquility they seek.

Our country is structured (don’t we know that?) on the concept of lending individual diversity to the exciting fabric of who we are!

Could we please regard, for all of us, our freedom of choice? We welcome all who gather to worship in their own form of religious faith.

–Mildred

All Together

On the West Coast, we know our country’s history. In Florida, we can even feel it! Just down the road from where I sit at my computer, a cemetery has the grave of a man who was there on July 4, 1776 when he dared to add his signature with the others on the Declaration of Independence! History here is at the touch of our fingertips.

Looking for pleasure in the days of hoop skirts and lacy parasols, New Orleans was the place to be. It was the French in New Orleans who first brought opera to America, and there was, any time, an excuse for a festival in the city of graceful balconies and walls covered with flowers in bloom.
In the war, the amusements went on, hiding the anxiety in brittle frivolity as brave as it was artificial. We know now what cataclysmic dynamo happened at the Varieties Theater. The entertainment that night was a play written by Martha Washington’s grandson and starring Mrs. John Wood. She was a popular actress, but a restless audience soon lost interest in Pocahontas. It was intermission music that lit up the night when it changed from dull to electrifying.

“Play something more lively, dammit,” the theater manager demanded, and the orchestra switched to some music left behind from an old minstrel show.

Conversations went trailing off as people turned back in their seats to listen. They stopped in the aisles as a banjo player started singing, ‘I wish I was in the land of cotton’.

Shouts at the end and wild applause went on until the orchestra played ‘Dixie’ all over again. From there, the music swept the country as an anthem that added to their courage. What it gave them was heart.

But, to the man who wrote the music, it brought ruin. Dan Emmet was a Yankee, suddenly out of work in the New York theater. He had been a fifer in the Union Army and had worked with the underground railway helping runaway slaves. “But, please,” he begged. “Before there was any talk of war, I wrote it only as a minstrel song.” People were afraid, anyway, to be seen talking to him. Cast out as a traitor, he plodded home to farming in Ohio.

Thirty years later, an old friend found him and, arguing that things had changed, he dragged Dan Emmet back for one glorious tour of the theaters. Up North, people thronged to see the minstrel singer. Down yonder, they went wild. In New Orleans, the same old theater rocked with an audience that would not let him go. The whooping crowd joined him in singing his music until a humble Yankee melted in tears of thank you, thank you as he took deep bows for ‘Dixie’.

*****

That’s not all. At the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln stood on the balcony as a crowd gathered at the White House. There were cheers as an orchestra played in spirited celebration.

Then, pursuing his dream for a more perfect union, Lincoln began the task of putting a broken country back together again.

He asked the musicians, “Could you play the best song I ever heard?”
And a vibrating beat of the band broke down all barriers as voices filled the air with the irresistible ‘Dixie’.

–Mildred

Spoken In the Wind

What would we do in Florida if we were nudged from above by one of our torrential rains? In the North Carolina coastal town of Swan Quarter, Sam Sadler was in no way inclined to argue with Heaven.

1876, Swan Quarter, North Carolina. A church is located on land chosen in a raging storm, and the spot was donated by a man who changed his mind.
He had been asked if the church could be built on his corner lot, but he donated, instead, a less valuable property, and he helped in the building of a church on that side street. September l7. It was finished and a dedication service was blessing its rafters when a fierce wind began to blow, increasing to tree-breaking intensity.

Waves of ocean water were sweeping through the streets as the congregation headed for higher ground. They saw their church lifted from its foundation and gently floated down Oyster Creek Road. It took a right turn down a different road. Two more blocks. There It took another turn, crossed the Calwan Canal, and then, undamaged, ready for church, settled on that desired corner lot.

What could he do? Touched by Providence, Sam Sadler eagerly donated his land for the Providence Methodist Church.

–Mildred

A Hint of Smiles

NO SMILES?

No such thing as ‘say cheese’ and snap a picture. Last week I wrote a blog about the variety of sounds in the voices on crowded Seattle streets, but Kay objected to my observation that American Indians were pictured with never a smile. “Well, Mama,” she pointed out, “old cameras required that the subject had to remain completely still for the time it took to photograph.” She is right. In old photos, nobody is ever smiling.

In the days when Indians were distinctive in their native attire, I remember one girlishly young woman with a papoose on her back. She was all smiles in response to our obvious delight in the charm of her darling children. My mother and I watched as she bent over her other little one, dark eyes big as he peeped out at us from the folds of his mama’s dress. She wore pale leather down to the top of her moccasins but decorated it with bright beads as colorful as the feathered headband on the man striding ahead of her.

Lee remembered his childhood exposure to a terrifying annual celebration. His dad took him every year to Walla Walla for the parade that dramatically halted for a chilling hillside event when a dozen or more spear-waving Indians suddenly appeared at the top of the hill. With savage shouts, they spurred their horses to swoop down, loud enough to scare little kids. Then they dismounted and joined to parade as they laughed and threw candy to the applauding crowds.

Years later when we went to see it again, the parade had lost its luster. There was no vacant hillside for any assembly of ferocious Indians, and we had to settle for smiling Indians in ordinary modern clothes.

–Mildred

A Babble of Voices

When I was a kid in Seattle, I loved getting dressed up with Mama as she decided which of her pretty hats to wear for downtown propriety of hats and gloves, as standard as men in suits and ties. In the sounds of the city, Seattle department stores were events for Bobbie and me. Mama paid monthly bills even in the plush Northern Life Tower with the sensation of its silent elevator, softly lit, that arrived in an instant at its highest floors. Every trip to town ended with a dime’s worth of our favorite candy in Woolworth’s five-and-ten cent store. As if we needed a reward for having a day of nothing but fun.

Part of the intrigue to me was conversation that our ears could catch as we waited in throngs for a light to change, or crossing a street when the light turned green. We didn’t need to understand the words. It was enough to hear the accents in languages that were maybe Dutch, Italian, German, or all flavors of Europe and Asia.

I never heard the voice of any American Indian, but I was fascinated by their distinctive attire as women trailed behind the men in their quiet moccasins. One, in his Indian blanket, was sitting on the sidewalk in a doorway as he passively watched the passing parade. He didn’t return my smile. Do we ever see a picture of an Indian smiling? I don’t think so.
My Aunt Quanah was the pretty librarian that my Uncle Ira married, and she was a quarter Cherokee Indian, named, I suppose, after the famous Quanah, Chief of the fierce Comanches. She was in no way fierce, but touchy, forever in need of our words of praise for her meat loaf or pies.

In a house with twenty-two rooms and five wives, Chief Quanah became a wealthy Oklahoma rancher, prospering in shares of railroads and oil. His children laughed when he began dressing in suits and ties, but their clothes changed, too, when he sent the kids to schools that he built. From teepees to houses, he helped Indians to gain full rights of American citizenship. How could there be any doubt? Weren’t they here first?

We know that Teddy Roosevelt was a weakling little kid who forced himself to grow up physically strong. When he was the President, touring through Oklahoma, he drove out to see the famous Comanche Indian, because Chief Quanah was Theodore Roosevelt’s ideal of strength and admirable bravery.
Extremely brave, Quanah had dynamically changed his Indian lifestyle to conform in all obvious ways. Except one. This is funny. The President met the five wives, and after they left, he felt compelled to suggest, “Chief Quanah, you should not have more than one wife. You should tell four of your women to go back to their own tribes.” Quanah laughed out loud as he claimed, “I’m not that brave. You tell ‘em.”

I still feel the allure of Seattle streets. No longer the custom of hats and gloves, but dress-up continues to be nice. Traffic sounds and animated voices. I always wanted to grow up to be one of those smartly-attired beautiful Seattle girls on lunch breaks, high heels clicking to their favorite eating spots. I was happy when I got to be one, though I often clicked my way from my Seattle General Hospital office only to the nearby YMCA where a delicious lunch with the guys at the counter was thirty-five cents. On Fifth Avenue, I shopped in the elegance of I.Magnin for the extravagance of my Charles of the Ritz lipsticks, and a stunning hat could still blend in with a scattered few.

Any downtown street is still a mingling of people sharing the sidewalks. We can hear accents from Texas, North Carolina, or New York City, but some of us are as ordinary as today’s Indians who smile and have no accent but American. From Canada, Mexico, or any foreign shore, we are just a land of country cousins.

Here is a thought. Make only English the official language in the state of Oklahoma? The Comanche population does not want its language to be forgotten. The idea would have to begin with changing the name of the state! Red man is Oklahoma in translation from Comanche homma (man) and okla (red). How many cities are Indian names? Or Spanish? Or French? Let us not mess it all up.

–Mildred