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Fudge Roller Coaster

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Mother had been saying for weeks that she and Winzona had made easy and wonderful fudge one year and she wanted some fudge.

“If no one sends us some fudge for Christmas, then I’ll make some.”  She kept saying.source:DeanFamilyPhotos

“Ok.”  She probably shouldn’t push herself that hard and besides, it had dairy in it which meant I shouldn’t eat it, so I’d just as soon she didn’t make it.  I love fudge and having it in the house would be torture.  When she put the extra needed ingredients on the grocery list and I got them, hoping she’d forget.

As I concentrated at the computer, I slowly became aware that through the door behind me Mother was moving around in the kitchen.  And it was more than just putting her dirty breakfast dishes in the sink.  She was getting pans, pulling things out of the cupboards and the refrigerator.

“What’cha doing?”  I asked, without turning around or moving from the computer.

“Making fudge.”  There was no talking her out of it now.  I should have ordered that gluten and dairy free fudge I found online last week but I kept hoping we’d get the box of homemade goodies that Holly, my nephew Andrew’s wife, said she was sending.

It was probably at least thirty-five minutes later that I left the computer to see how Mother was doing with this “easy” recipe.  It was true there weren’t many steps or many ingredients but her sighs of fatigue over expended energy had finally penetrated my concentration.

“It’s the stirring over low heat that takes the longest time.”  She was standing at the stove stirring and looked like she could fold at any moment.  It may have been leaning on the spoon as she stirred that kept her upright.

The fudge looked thick and rich and wonderful.  “Do you want me to stir for you?”

“No.  I think it’s ready.”  She turned off the burner, reached for the greased Pyrex dish and began to pour the hot fudge into the dish.

She was at the sink running water into the mixing bowl and pan when I came back through the kitchen on my way out the back door.  The fudge looked luscious as it cooled in the Pyrex dish.

“I have to go sit down before I fall down.”  She turned off the water and reached for her cane.

“Good idea.”

I got back from the post office and headed to the dining room with the stack of mail.  The house had a wonderful chocolate aroma.  Mother was in her normal spot at the table, wrapped in a gray sweater with her new brown and teal electric heated lap robe over her lap and legs.  She was sound asleep, ink pen in hand, the crossword puzzle she had been working on the table before her, the TV turned to a cooking show with the sound muted, the radio on the sideboard behind her playing classical music.  She looked all of eighty-five, half folded over like that, her hair graying more all the time.

She woke with the sound and movement of the mail being dumped on the table.

“That stirring was hard work.  It wore me out.”  She said as she straightened some in her chair.  “Oh, that kills my neck when I fall asleep like that.”

“Look what Holly sent us.  Fudge!  And some gluten free goodies!”

Mother sorted the mail into piles and started opening Christmas cards.  “I wanted to make fudge.  So I did.”

“Good for you.”  There was no point in telling her now that it was too hard on her.  “I’m sure it will be delicious.”  My resolve had been slipping since the very first aroma of the cooking fudge and with this box of Christmas goodies the last of any resolve faded away.  Christmas goodie binge, here I come.  I would pay for it, I knew, but at the moment, I didn’t care.

Ten days later, we had consumed all of her fudge, and I had consumed most of Holly’s chocolate and peanut butter fudge, the gluten free chocolate covered pretzels and some of the cookies she’d sent.  The last remaining pieces we boxed up and sent along with a Christmas food basket to a needy family.  My body fared better than expected at first on all those goodies but the sugar and chocolate stimulant withdrawal had begun and I was beginning to feel its effects.

Mother, meanwhile, had spent ten days exhausted and house bound, her arm aching from all the stirring.  She missed church and spent some of everyday sleeping in the recliner with her feet elevated until she finally began to feel like herself once again.

“Making that fudge did me in.”  She said

“Me too, Mother, me too.”

Superhero

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My dad: Superhero.  Many little kids think their dad is a superhero.  They want to be like him and they copy what he does and what hesource: DeanFamilyPhotos says.  Then the kid grows up and often the flaws they see in their dad outweigh that early superhero status.

Not my dad.  Oh, he wasn’t perfect, but he loved me unconditionally, he was smart and funny and happy and caring and committed to his personal values and to telling other people that God was real and Jesus loves us all.  He was competent at so many things: he’d been a master plumber, airplane mechanic and tested rocket fuels.  I’d seen him repair cars, build church buildings, build a brick fence, fix plumbing problems, handle electrical breakdowns, repair the roof, transplant trees, maintain tomato plants and harvest fruit from all the fruit trees in the yard of the Pomona house and help Mother do the canning.  He was the one who got everything stored in the freezer.  In the garage there are four different type ladders and he used them all for various tasks.  There’s an entire network of shelving in the rafters of the garage and he knew what each box held and what was stored up there in the boxes we could and couldn’t see.  His handiwork is all over this old house.

This house ran so smoothly under his care that it seemed a simple thing to me to tell him that I would be here to see that Mother was ok and could stay in her home after he was gone.  In about three months’ time he’d gone from busy and capable, a sharp thinking and productive 88 year old, to thin and weak and desperately tired from the ravages of liver cancer.  He sat in his recliner watching me one day as I struggled to flip the queen size mattress on his and Mother’s bed and then put on fresh sheets.  I probably wouldn’t have even thought of flipping the mattress but Daddy had done that twice a month and kept it marked on the schedule of his Daytimer for at least the last twenty years.  That must explain why that mattress is still uniformly even.  I left the bedroom and walked across the living room to where he sat.

“How are you doing, Daddy?”  I laid my hand on his shoulder.

“I’m tired.”  He said.  “I want to go home to God.”

My eyes full of unshed tears, I said, “Then maybe you should go, Daddy.”

“Your Mother’s not ready.”  He spoke softly, his eyes closed, his head back on the headrest.

“I’ll be here Daddy.”  I said.  “She won’t be alone.”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Easy promises made out of my need to reassure him.  He was the rock of our family and of my life but it was clear he wasn’t going to beat this.  He was going, and soon, to the place without pain, without suffering.  I wouldn’t let him down.  I’d pick up the load he’d carried here and he could go without concern.

In the nearly four years since that day, Mother and I have continued on.  This old house has needed a new breaker in the electrical box, new fuses (with regularity), the dishwasher died, the freezer died, the garage door got so bent out of shape it no longer worked, the garage was burgled and all Daddy’s tools were stolen, the shower stall and the toilet in Daddy’s bathroom both leaked and were starting to destroy the floor, the rain came in through the old roof, the lawn and gardens and trees needed care, much of which I wasn’t strong enough to provide, Daddy’s car had to be sold and mine was so old more money for repairs made no sense, the nearly thirty year old forced heat/air unit kept breaking down, the cooking range took a sabbatical then miraculously worked again, the ceiling heater in the back bathroom died, the kitchen desperately needed painting, the bedroom-cum-storage room where I sleep needed an overhaul and the thirty-plus-year old red carpeting in the main rooms had to go and the underlying hardwoods needed work.

I’ve kept the promise I made to him.  Through all the minutia of maintaining a house, through all the times Mother has driven me crazy and in the times of fun and laughter we’ve had together as I learn to accept that she will never have his optimism or his joy for life.  They say opposites attract and they were truly opposites.  Daddy loved her and I try to do the same.  She dreams of Daddy every night she says.  I look around me and see him in every detail of this old house and in the legacy of God’s love he passed on to his family.  He lived by God’s grace and by God’s grace I’ll be the best I can be, my heart looking forward to the day I’ll see my Daddy again.

Pomona Life

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Daddy’s fingerprints are all over this Pomona life I’m living.  Just the mention of the town of Pomona conjures up years of vignettes of Daddy and Mother’s life after all their kids were grown.  Until they moved to Pomona, it was just a town on the map, about halfway between downtown L.A. and the Riverside/San Bernardino area where I went to college and spent ten or so years living, working and trying to figure out who I was as a young adult out on my own, away from the family nest.  It became a destination of travel once they moved here when Daddy retired from the pastorate and went to work for the California Southern Baptist Convention.  It was a fairly easy destination close to the Ontario airport when I lived in Texas, then a convenient and inexpensive haven to store my things and a place to live for a few weeks while finding a job in L.A. and was a fairly easy drive (forty minutes or so) from to West Side of L.A. for overnight Friday night visits several times a year while I worked in Beverly Hills and later in Downtown L.A.

It was suburbia and I was the urban city dweller.  It was hotter in the summer and colder in the winter than the milder L.A. West Side temperatures.  It was a quieter, slower paced life and I was a busy, single, professional who had no time for unsophisticated suburbia.  A convenient place to visit because it was where Daddy and Mother were, but I wouldn’t want to live there.  And if I ever moved back to Southern California, was my thought as I used it once again as a way-station between leaving my urban L.A. life and heading cross- country to Nashville, I certainly wouldn’t chose Pomona as a place to live.

I couldn’t have foreseen that my thirteen years in the Nashville area, a sprawling suburbia with small urban pockets and clusters of suburbia interspersed with rural areas would find my health and me changed.  Nor could I have foreseen that the decision to live in Pomona would be made for me by the march of time across Daddy and Mother’s lives.

I knew I had to fly out to check on them after Daddy was diagnosed with liver cancer.  I told them it was a vacation and it wasn’t unusual for me to fly in for a week or so, but subconsciously I felt the mental and emotional shift from a trip that normally meant some down time from the stress of my own life to this trip as an adult on a mission to see if my aging parents were ok.

They weren’t ok.  Of course, Daddy insisted they were fine.  He would start chemo and life would go on and the chemo would remedy the situation.  He was more concerned for Mother who had been dealing with diarrhea for nearly two years and was struggling with trying to do all the things she had once done easily.

On this trip I didn’t pay much attention to the town of Pomona or all those reasons why I wouldn’t choose it for a home.  What I saw was two valiant people, Daddy, at 87 and Mother at 80, slowed by waning strength and stamina, but like a very slow energizer bunny, they just kept going, trying to cope with the tasks necessary to keep up a house, a yard, gardens, an imperfect car, a garage with a difficult, heavy, wooden door, and Daddy’s responsibilities as pastor of their rapidly fading church.

It was Daddy’s bathroom that clinched it for me.  Daddy had picked me up at the airport and I’d only been at the house a little while.  When I left the bathroom and returned to the dining room Mother was at her normal spot on the back side of the table, the table cluttered by piles of mail, books, crossword puzzles and papers.  She looked up at me through her weariness and said,

“How’s the bathroom?  I just haven’t felt like even thinking about cleaning it.”

“Oh,” Daddy sat tiredly at his end of the table, “it’s ok.”

I was speechless.  I’d never seen layers of dust on the toilet, a dirty sink, a toilet bowl that needed cleaning and mold in the shower.  It told me two things, Mother was beyond keeping the house clean and Daddy’s eyes had deteriorated to the point he couldn’t see how bad it was getting.  In the past, he had always picked up the slack of what Mother couldn’t get done.  It was probably that more than anything else that convinced me as I flew back across the country to Nashville, I was needed in Pomona and in Daddy and Mother’s house.

They were pleased when I came back six weeks later for a Christmas visit.  I wasn’t sure what my long range plans were at that point, I just knew I had to be there.  Five days later, Mother collapsed with congestive heart failure.  That settled it.  Once Mother was stable and recovering,  I returned to Nashville and began the process of closing down my business and deciding what to do about my home and my things.  Pomona, here I come.  All those details like suburbia and less than ideal weather no longer mattered.  How could they?  Daddy needed me.

Robocalls

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I remember when everyone had a phone in their home.  A phone connected by phone lines to telephone poles.  When the phone rang it was because someone you actually knew or did business with wanted to talk with you.  You had to be pretty well off to have a mobile phone and they were rare and big cumbersome things.  It hasn’t been all that long ago, either.  All of my nieces and nephews were born, although only one of them was old enough at that point to have their own child, but now all of my great nieces and nephews have their own cell phone and live in homes without landlines as that old phone system is now called.  I wouldn’t be surprised if my great-great nieces and nephews have cell phones – well, perhaps they’re still a little young.

I’d never even heard of robocalls until I returned to California five years ago.  That could be because the last three or four years that I lived in Nashville, I’d only used my landline for my business fax machine and no longer had an answering machine on it.  I like to think salespeople were calling and got the high pitched squeal of a fax machine. As a salesperson myself, you’d think I’d have some mercy for them, but I didn’t.  Seventeen years ago I’d started selling Real Estate using a pager and the shared computer in the office but it wasn’t long before Realtors had cell phones and their own desk computer and/or laptop.

Back in California, in Daddy and Mother’s house, however, there is still a landline and an answering machine and we get from three to six or seven robocalls a day.  Some of them are recorded messages and some are real people on the other end who want to sell something or collect money for some “good” cause.

“May I speak to Cri-ley Dean?”

“Crile.” I correct them.  Like Lyle but with a C and an R.  “Mr. Dean died recently.”  They express some sympathy and then start in on their reason for their call.

Other times the caller asks for Zelda or Mrs. Dean and I answer in the affirmative.  This is just so much easier than taking the phone to Mother, watching her fumble with the remote to mute the sound of the TV and then listening to her try to hear what they’re saying, get a word in edgewise and attempt to get off the phone without caving in and promising to send money.  Then after she finally hangs up she’s irritated at all the nonsense calls and fusses about how no one she knows ever calls her anymore.

It’s just easier to take the call myself and get rid of them but how long can I use the excuse that Mr. Dean died recently and our income has been drastically reduced?  It will be four years this April since Daddy died.  The reduced income bit is still true but the bizarreness of the half-truths swirls around me like the fog of a make-believe land where you can say anything and have it be true.

The easiest thing is to not answer so we’ve taken to looking at the caller ID and if it’s an 800 number or a number we don’t recognize, we let them talk to the answering machine.  And Mother fusses again about all the nonsense calls and how no one she knows ever calls her anymore.

If it were up to me, I’d just cancel the landline and handle everything by cell phone but it’s too soon to do that.  For one, thing, whenever I’m away from the house for several hours, I call to check on Mother and she needs to be able to call for help if need be.  She isn’t interested in a cell phone and would have difficulty working one, but most of all, the landline is a tether for her that ties her into the familiar past, when she and Daddy made calls to their children and friends called and Daddy handled the business of the house and life in general on the phone.  This summer it will be thirty years that they’ve had the same number.

Time continues and that make-believe land where anything can be said and be true isn’t all that different from the dreams of yesterday that have become our reality for the world is a different place than it was when Mother and Daddy, about my age now, moved into this house with excitement and hopes for the future.  A future that they could never have foreseen would be littered with robocalls.

As for me, while Mother is tethered to the past so am I.  My days move in a half-life of hope for a future of experiences beyond these walls and a half-life of caring for Mother and her house.  One day that tether will sever, Mother will be gone and what will be left will be just my life.  Will it be in time to be out in the wide world or just in time for my own waning years, pestered by robocalls?  Only God knows and there I must leave the unknown.  In His hands.  Because He who loves me best will be here with me.  With or without robocalls.

What’s in a name?

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What’s in a name?  We all have one or several and they can change through the years.  There’s the full name announced at your birth and so sweetly whispered in your ear as you’re cuddled by your mother or father or a doting aunt.  Then there are the things you’re called by kids as you’re growing up, each kid trying to find out who he is by teasing you about your name and hoping to feel better about their own.

I was still in grade school when I stopped telling anyone my middle name was Jo.  Kids didn’t understand it and I was always teased about having a boy’s name.  I just gave my name as Vicky Dean.

“Do you know what my initials mean, Mother?”  I sat at the piano playing.  I was about thirteen and had come to grips with what my parents had done to me by giving me my name.

“Of course.  VD is Vicky Dean.  VJD is Victoria Jo Dean.”

“No.  VD.  Venereal disease.”

“Don’t you ever say that!”  Her face looked shocked and had gone very pale.  “You have a beautiful name.”

She walked away and I kept on playing.  She can think what she wants but everyone called me Vicky Dean which meant my initials were VD.  Whether she liked it or not.

It wasn’t until I had a job during college and needed to use my initials on a regular basis that I added the J back into my name.  VJD.   That led to signing everything as Vicky J. Dean which became the name on business cards and legal documents for over thirty-five years.

I’d grown up in the Western United States so I didn’t think twice about calling myself Vicky when I moved to the south.  Little did I know that Southerners tongues work best with names of several syllables so Vicky was just too short and Vic was impossible.  Another thing they do in the South is use “Miss” as a term of respect that they teach their children to use and use themselves quite often, hence, I became Miss Vicky.  After years of being called Miss Vicky, I wished I had said my name was Victoria when I started a new life in a new part of the country.  I hated Miss Vicky because I was old enough to remember when Tiny Tim married Miss Vicki on the Johnny Carson show.  If you’re not old enough, google it.  You probably wouldn’t want to be linked to that either!

So here I am, decades after I was given my name, in a new venture of a life of writing.  Why not go back to my beginning and use the full name I’ve never used?  Victoria Jo Dean.  A new start deserves a new name.  Tease me all you might, I’ve come full circle and I’m proud of my name.  I’ve earned it.