Bank Accounts & Shaving Kits

I have been reading Kathryn Forbes’s book of family stories, Mama’s Bank Account — my own mother’s favorite book and one given to me by my eldest sister thirteen years ago.

My mother was a story-teller in her own right, keeping me entertained for hours during my childhood and teenage years. In tribute to her, I asked her to write her stories about her experience during World War II. I published these in a small print run for her 90th birthday to share with my siblings and their families.

After her death, I published her stories in a digital edition, now available to the world.

Watching the funeral of Justice Antonin Scalia reminded me of how much my father influenced my life. My mother used to say “If you don’t want to do something you don’t think is right, tell the other girls that your mother won’t let you.” After my father’s death when I was thirteen, and for many years after, I found myself saying, “If my father was alive, he would not let me do this.” Thankfully, I was spared the most dire consequences of my stupidity.

Reading Forbes’s account of her early family life in San Francisco brought many personal memories to mind. One of the stories was titled “Mama and the Graduation Present” which reminded me of a Christmas present I received from my mom and dad when I was in my preteen years.

I had just started junior high school (now called middle school for some strange, unknown to me, reason) and my female peers had a great influence on my sense of what was expected of teenage girls. Besides the usual hair style and pegged jeans (my generation’s equivalent of skinny jeans), the gym-suit and short socks required smooth legs.

My crime became known to my mother when my father cut his chin while shaving with a dull razor. Since I had expressed a desire for a lady’s razor and that request was denied, the perpetrator was obvious to her. Without revealing her sources, she assured my dad that there were new blades in his shaving kit.

When his new blade was dull before its time, Mom had no choice but to point her finger.

Though I had an allowance based on my own estimation of my weekly expenses and a stipend for completing all my chores, there was not enough in the short time I had, to purchase the implement required. Complain, cajole and beg as I will, my mother was adamant that I did not need to have smooth legs at my age.

One of my sisters and her family invited us to spend Christmas with them. We drove to Arizona for the occasion and my younger sister and I were crammed into the backseat on either side of one three by three foot toy box for my nephew and its companion for my niece tied into the trunk of our two-tone Ford sedan.

Since the arrival of grandchildren, we seemed to have taken a backseat to this new generation although I was only six years older than my Arizona niece. I had little in the way of expectations for a Christmas spent away from home. There were a few presents from my parents for my little sister and me under the tree but the toy boxes were chock-a-block with toys.

My father always went out on Christmas Eve to buy stocking presents. These were his special project, a holdover from his own childhood as the youngest of nine children and the infrequent recipient of toys. On Christmas morning, the youngest members of the family were wildly excited. I—at the age of twelve—as the eldest of the children, approached the present-opening event with decorum and patience.

Decorum and patience flew out the patio doors along with my vast sense of maturity when I opened the little blue and white circular, click-closure box to discover this: 

I doubt my father had the where-with-all to make the choice without some input from his wife. This was the most exciting and best loved gift that year and for many thereafter. In fact, I have never forgotten the feeling. Not because I had wanted it or asked for it, but because my parents had heard me and were not opposed to the changes in young ladies’ grooming requirements.

Like Kathryn Forbes at the end of her story about her Graduation Present when her father offered his “grown-up daughter” her first cup of coffee,  I “felt very proud.” 

A Walk In the Past

By Fran McNabb 

Delving into the past is a great way to make sense of the present, to learn about the past, or to simply enjoy piecing together what people before us did. My husband and I did this recently when we traveled to his hometown to bury a former classmate. In our spare time, we visited some of the local cemeteries to find graves of my husband’s family. Because his hometown is a small city with many rural communities surrounding it, we were not even sure if we could locate the different cemeteries.

We first visited his hometown cemetery where his parents and one brother were buried. We put flowers there, then with only the name of small rural cemetery and directions from one of his friends, we headed out.

It was a gorgeous, crisp autumn day making our drive quite enjoyable. We drove down winding tree-lined lanes and into what seemed to me to be a long forgotten area of the world. Occasionally we came upon neat little homes with large, well-kept yards. It surprised me how people today could live away from towns, but as my husband says, “It would be a boring world if everyone liked the same thing.”

Finally, we came upon a little white church with a high steeple sitting next to a fence-in graveyard. 

We got out and started walking down the small rows of graves and were amazed to find a half row of tombstones with his family name on them. Some of these markers had been there for well over a hundred years. We found his grandfather’s headstone. As the story goes, his grandfather was killed by a family member while his grandfather was robbing the other man’s trot lines. He had been buried at the young age of 28 in 1922. The man, who supposedly killed him, lived to be 67 and was buried just a feet away. If the story is true, I guess in the early 1900’s, it was okay to shoot someone stealing from your trot lines.

We found graves of Civil War soldiers and of many, many babies. One man had four infant graves next to his with only the identifying words of Infant and the last name. The lack of medical advancement during those years was a harsh reality.  Even my mother-in-law had lost a baby at birth, and on the second day of our search, we visited a third cemetery and found a tiny little marker with his brother’s name on it.

Visiting cemeteries isn’t something my husband and I normally do, but the time we spent on that day was quite meaningful. As we drove away from all the cemeteries, my mind and my heart went out to the families of those people buried there. Sometimes we forgot our ancestors and the people we read about in history books were actual people who lived and breathed, suffered and rejoiced, loved and mourned just as we do today.

 If you have a little time sometimes, take a moment and walk through a cemetery near you. It’s amazing what you might learn.

Fran McNabb writes light romances and is waiting for her eighth book, KEEPING HOPE ALIVE, to be published by The Wild Rose Press. Visit her at www.FranMcNabb.com or at mcnabbf@bellsouth.net.

 

Inspiration

by Sandy Cody

Writers (at least this writer) are always looking for inspiration. I don’t mean ideas. Most of us have more ideas than we know what to do with. Maybe I should stop saying “we” and say “I” because that’s who I’m really talking about. What I look for most is a way to tell the story that will make the vision in my head come alive in a reader’s mind and (I type this hopefully) in their heart. Sometimes I look so hard that I forget that the best ideas usually come from close to home. They’re all around me in my daily life - in the things I do and see and hear - and, most importantly, in the things I remember.

I'd like to introduce you to the source of my best memories - and definitely my best source of inspiration. Meet the McGee girls, five sisters who grew up on a farm in Missouri during the Dust Bowl years. The one on the left is my mother, the other four my aunts (obviously).

When I was a little girl, I loved to sit so still that I felt invisible and listen to my mother and my aunts talk about their lives, the people they’d known and the things they’d seen. You know the book that claims “everything I really need to know I learned in kindergarten”? I think everything I really need to know about writing, I learned from those family stories.

I wasn’t very old when I noticed that, even though they were all talking about the same event or the same person, certain details changed and, with different details, it was a different story. Without realizing it, I had just learned a valuable lesson about writing: the devil is in the details. A cliché? Yes, but true. Isn’t that why cliches become cliches?

There was a mysterious neighbor whose land touched my grandparents’ back pasture. He lived alone in a big house that my cousins and I were convinced was haunted (a conviction the sisters did nothing to discourage). Every sister had a different story to tell about him. Depending on the narrator, he was:

bad to the bone,

painfully shy,

proud and arrogant,

misunderstood and lonely

or (in the language of an era before political correctness)

a nutcase.

I wondered how the sisters could have such diverse perceptions of this man. Five girls had grown up in the same house, with the same parents, had been taught the same values, had known the same person and, yet, each seemed to describe someone totally unique. Another lesson for a writer-to-be: the power of point of view.

It even occurred to me that there might be five brothers with identical faces and different personalities. How else could five sisters have such varied accounts of the same person? I longed to know this man, to see which sister had it right. 

Eventually, I understood that they were all right. Each had seen a different side of the same complex person and each had filtered what they had seen through their own set of complexities. So I learned the most important lesson of all – that every human being is a puzzle and the writer’s challenge is to keep adding pieces until all the baffling inconsistencies merge into a recognizable whole. Do that, and you’ll have a character who lives beyond your pages and a story worth listening to.

How about you? What’s your best source of inspiration?