Miniature Gallery - Click to Enlarge

Sketches

We don't begin before
the sketches, but the whole makeup and disposition is there to tell, if words. So we look and see what's finished, but think the person before and after more. Her sketches to the fractional inch of the balustrade of Chalkley House, the dimensions of tables and chairs, designs of wall paper hide an intellectual edge to the core. What original, what real? Sketching from life the eye has its fill, styles a vision of the divine particular. The portraits on the walls of these paintings, the lamps and shadows are gone. The bombed out shell of Chalkley House doesn't exist, but it doesn't change much from the sketch of 1930 to the photograph of 1955. The watercolor of the Hall is fantastical more than monochrome stepped up to color. It is an architecture of the idyllic, not a reality of 1930, 1955, or 2008 when this is that. The real Hall is a series of snapshots where none is permanent. It resembles lives as evasive in the final building as also in each stage. Imagine climbing a step ladder to measure a tree branch for its length and girth to get a picture of the tree. There is a lot of weighing and measuring going on in these interiors which the finished product doesn't make obvious, but it is a deliberate result.

Chalkley Hall, Pennsylvania Museum

Gray Lady of Chalkley Hall

The Gray Lady appeared in any number of haunts from the New York Times to TV castles and halls. Clues of her habit also appear in the notebooks in comment and quotation symbolic of the building itself. Later in the account the artist says the building became a ghost. Grey Lady is reported in Philadelphia: A Guide to the Nation's Birthplace (Federal Writers' Project, 1937): "several interesting legends have clung to the city and the memories of its inhabitants, and in a measure have become sectional traditions. One of these centers about the old Chalkley House, or Chalkley Hall as it is more popularly known, the residence of an old Quaker family in what is now Frankford. The legend described a tempestuous romance, disavowed by the Chalkley family, between one of the Chalkley girls and a suitor who failed to win the family's approval. The affair culminated in the suicide of the girl, who had been dis- traught over her misfortune. For many years, residents of the dis- trict declared, the wraith of the unhappy young woman hovered about the old mansion. Even with the advent of modern skepticism and the apparent disappearance of many ghostly traditions of the past, there are those who believe the girl's ghost still walks in Chalkley Hall. A local historian who had been chatting with the watchman of a factory nearby, was whimsically assured by the latter : That Chalkley ghost comes around once in a while at night."

Chalkley House was a stop on the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia before the Civil War. Construction began in 1727 by Quaker preacher Thomas Chalkley, but it was unfinished until 1776, one of the first three-story houses in the Colonies, completely razed however in 1955 after 228 years, a service of industrial progress. Similar landmarks in the Frankford area survived, Cedar Grove was moved to Fairmount Park, Port Royal mansion was partly reassembled at the Winterthur Museum. Chalkley went unsaved.

Mayors in the '50’s envisioned salvaging it. George R. Staab (Evening Bulletin, 4 Jan 1955) called it a "memory-haunted old mansion." Though not directly involved in Revolutionary events, its Gray Lady "floated about the old staircase whenever someone was about to die." Symbolic echoes of itself and its past reecho. Different parts were recycled, the old stonework filled Frankford creek, the staircase, pictured here, was "hauled off to a museum," but the original two story west wing, demolished in 1941, was a precursor of its end in 1955. Here is the Google photo again.


These furnishings were the motive of its attempted preservation, not its use by Indians who would camp the early ground or its use as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Restoration efforts of the 1940's however began a decade earlier by seven women students of the Moore School of Interior Design, (Moore College of Art & Design). To encourage Chalkley Hall's restoration they took measured drawings of the exterior and interior details in winter and spring of 1930, proposing interior restoration and redecoration. For weeks these seven spent "half a day measuring the dirty woodwork and making notes and sketches." Her choice was “the center hall and stairway,” habitat of the Gray Lady who went missing when "all of the interior woodwork, the splendid old staircase, the very floor beams and joists from nearly all of the buildings" (Staab) disappeared.

In recollection in 1955 the artist wrote:
"In the late winter and early spring of 1930, seven eager young women, students in Interior Decoration at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, arrived at the gate of the American Engineering Company at Wheatsheaf Land and Sepviva Streets. Their project was to make measured drawings of the exterior and interior detail of Chalkley Hall, and to propose ideas for interior restoration and decoration. To the amazement of the employees of the company, each week these girls would arrive and spend half a day measuring the dirty woodwork and making notes and sketches. Of course the men never saw the finished project which was only moderately successful. My choice was the center hall and stairway, and the problem was one of the last to be finished before graduation. While there was a little sentiment for an actual restoration and probable removal of the building, this was the beginning of the Great Depression, and the students ideas were all forgotten. In 1955 a Philadelphia group tried to raise funds for removal of part of the building to the new Independence Mall. No money was forthcoming, so Chalkley Hall became one of the ghosts that haunts Philadelphia."
Her finished watercolor of the architectural ghost remains. Notes reveal that the Hall, not included in the clippings in her desk, was just what one dreamed to find in her four level home, hidden passages:
“Two brick arched chambers with ends and low lateral walls of stone… about alike in size… parallel to one another, being separated only by the dividing wall and communicating with the cellar by wooden doors. The top of the arch is at least nine feet high, the floors are beneath the level of cellar floors, necessitating three steps to descend. Both chambers are about twenty feet long and are to the left of the main house built by Abel James. Extend at right angles from cellar wall beneath the drive, and at the further end of each chamber there is in the arched ceilings a circular opening. The iron gratings, covering these openings can still be seen from below. These were not passageways for means of escape to Frankford Creek but storeroom cellars. They must have been built by digging from above and not by tunneling so could not have been constructed secretly. The difficulty of carrying such a large passageway thru swampy ground and the difficulty of emerging preclude the possibility that they were used for the escape of slaves. Similar chambers at Valley Forge were also storerooms not secret passages.”
Secretly constructed in plain sight so they could needs be denied that they were, the idea completely suits a preparation to view her life with its large helping of clandestine. Chambers not a means of escape, but storehouses, sum up the beauty of her life. Every one of the levels of her home was a Chalkley House which no longer exists, but which we revive. The Hall today in photographs, drawings notwithstanding, is as her home and herself we may say.

Measured Furniture Drawings from the Pennsylvania Museum

She felt it was not “fine art,” her course of study in interior design, though nothing was more suited to the Pennsylvania ethos of the lily and liberality of life. The watercolors of these interiors were coextensive with this symbolism. That is, household furnishings surrounded her, even if also hid in the attic, themselves desirable as art. Grandfather Henry, who lived with Anna and Elizabeth in Philadelphia, left his blanket chest when he retired to son Philip's after their move to Media. It is not a decorated blanket chest, Henry being an Old Mennonite, but the laminate sides, porcelain knobs, square nails, painted top and base are ornament. Thus there is a species of artist as cupboard, who goes to the museum to sketch by day and comes home by night to live in the same, American natives, brown, gold, plain to contrast the Italian Renaissance examples she did for the Institute.

Friendship with the brown grain understates her possession of those heirlooms inherited through her mother. She had inherited through hers, at which time they were already "old," like the hand made walnut case with craquelure of centuries. "Annie had that from before she left home (1901) which had been her grandmother's." This case sat in the middle upstairs room in Media for six decades after it had lived in Philadelphia and Barto. The over-sawed keyholes, asymmetric dovetails, scored lines of scribe marks, square rosehead nails, thick bottom boards, chamfered drawer bottoms were a kind of speech. Lifted out the door with some others before being loaded into a truck, it sat on the lawn that December, had a breath of air. Admirers lined up. hey thought it was a sale. It was covered and put back inside. "Measured Furniture" was personal with her who had grown up with the subtleties of sideboard which in the same breath she would disdain as "peasant furniture." We will know what these things mean.

The domestic Pennsylvania raison d'être of hundreds of years built the barn outside from within. These three women lived at its heart, Anna, her mother, dollmaker, baker, gardener, Elizabeth the artist, celebrant, curator, Florence, her sister, emancipator of classrooms. Their philosophy can be reduced in single terms to the long view taken.

Sheraton Settee

Of settles, settees and couches, this upholstered Sheraton Settee was one of the furniture masterpieces that existed in many variations, but the affection for furniture in these paintings suggests an interior garden of which not all effects are in the scene. The great length-wise cushion of Sheraton Settee seats at least six across. It is made to reflect the sun with long upholstered panels of vertical pale yellow stripes alternating with light, a gold green alchemy. As the sun shines upon the green the wood frame outlines the whole with equidistant spindled legs. The watercolor shades up and down the middle of the stripes, washes from pale to a more constant color at the top and from the middle down to show it worn where backs have rested. The cushion, it is thus implied, is curved, a metaphor of wear, color, time supported by the brown edges. Whatever the real life model, the near luminescent washes suggest a lighting perhaps that did not exist in that room.

Pennsylvania Room - Philadelphia Museum

In Pennslvania Room a trestle table at center with a pitcher and vase holds an old book bound by metal clasps like the Wahren Christenthum of her attic inscribed with the name of her great great grandfather. A woman in a white bonnet and plain purple

dress sits above the table for her portrait, hair with red gold highlights, like her auburn haired grandmother made young. To the right, above and below, an empty spindle-backed wood chair, a country cupboard with another wood chair, and Pennsylvania Dutch folk designs embroider the wall paper. Baskets of flowers, part of a barn, a rooster, the designs continue under the table and chairs, interwoven with shadows. Her sketchbook shows each detail prepared, measured: front stretcher, its dimensions, side stretcher,

its dimensions, the chair, positive and negative space measured. Different versions of the wallpaper exist, the one chosen, designed on hand drawn graph paper, magnifies each detail before finished execution.

The Greater Decoration Is the Less

In much the same process of sketching to restore Chalkley Hall I woke to this art in her mother’s attic at the age of four. The attic was an unfinished A with windows at either end, smelled of sycamore, rock wool, bare beams. It was the exile of her still life oranges and apples piled in green bowls in the shadows at the tops of wardrobes. Reflections of the canvas in the attic light made a hunger for more. Persistent questions, whose art is this, got no reply, but there were four levels to that house, implicit allegories, levels of meaning.

If it is accepted there actually were paintings, hiding a profound intellectual life, another contested reality, was a sign of humility. In a few more years the observer overheard another aunt, Florence M. Reiff, had written a master’s thesis. “What about?" was the inquiry. "Pleasure Boating in Florida!" came the facetious reply, entirely believed, but in the real world that title, five decades removed, appeared with the remains of the art in that same attic (c. 2004), “A Comparison of Outcomes Based on the Use of Certain Teaching Techniques…” (1952). Home making, home economics, interior design are the applied essence of Pennsylvania German philosophy and art, in brief, the effort to find the home within. This thesis was the basis of her later groundbreaking book, Steps In Home Living (Peoria, Illinois: Chas. A. Bennett, Co.) which occurred in three editions with multiple printings (1966, '71, '84). Notes discovered from a speech the author had given said, “because I was convinced that how we teach is just as important as what we teach I decided to do a study based on the use of certain teaching techniques and devices in various units of homemaking." As an effort to break from traditional authoritative to "democratic" methods where "the pupils helped to plan cooperatively with the teacher and participatory devices were used," it was also an early instance in racial diversity of application and illustration, teaching home making, home economics for slow learners. A review in the Journal of Home Economics said, "the author’s broad experience in teaching such students and as home economics education supervisor in a large city is reflected in her warm understanding of the problems of disadvantaged students and their teachers.” Her editor said later in a letter that appropriate materials were not obvious. Another writer for his company "can’t get pictures of Negro children, and no matter how they try they can’t seem to keep from discussing projects that are suitable only for middle-class whites of suburbia." It later became obvious how central this proposition was to the unheralded democratic Pennsylvania Dutch way and to the teachings of their mother Anna (1880-1970) on the rights of women.

That artist could have said, “Oils! dear boy, I’m a watercolorist,” meaning a soloist of the lyric. The drawings could be called elevations and she could be called architect if these sheets 20x30, unearthed fifty years after with her notebooks in that attic, had so written between the lines of her character. It was a path not taken.

If she is an idea, symbols may translate. Instance the furniture of her home, for the Pennsylvania German turned flowers into bookmarks and bookmarks into fraktur to bring paradise indoors. But decoration greater than tulips, hearts, stars and crowns, Mennonite linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips migrate from paper to linen to wood, and even letters that swirl with stipples of signatures in descending spirals have as much to do with it as the absence of these things, the plain board, cut of lapel, cap, hat or bonnet. Christmas cookies at play and glee thus conjoined a life of belief in inner spiritual form from which the outward surfaces of reality proceeded. The greater decoration was also the less.

This reluctance to call austerity a virtue occurs among the austere, who hardly exist at all after 1890-1990 and the various body politic obesity bubbles, the Savings and Loan bubbles, tech bubbles, mortgage loan bubbles, all with inflation, monetization and biggie size ornaments to cloy the overstimulated response. Around the edges of these bubbles unsavory characters we'd like to ignore remark, “are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life?”

Plainfolk black suits, what are they hiding? Invisible or covered rough brown cabinets, wood handled tools, trunks on metal rollers, wardrobes and pottery in the unsigned, eponymous paradox of china and hand made dress.
Surrounded with custom and biography, generations that join the personal ask where the desire for the beautiful begins, whether with Grandfather Henry coming in from the fields too exhausted to eat or Uncle Andrew who came in at noon and studied for an hour. Her mother fled the barefoot life, the cows, accent, suspicion upon the education of the world to become a tailor of "the high boned collar, the leg mutton sleeve, the tiny waist, the wide lined skirt." Cousin Jesse, dead at 26, his impasto watercolors labeled "valuable" in a folder in her desk, roosters and weather vanes coming apart, symbolized what it would be like in her going to art school as she did at 16. So, as all people desire it, the joy of their desiring is something like what Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel, that there is "a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty" that it would save the world.

Historic Monument

The classes were not all rustic browns. For all the emphasis on plain style she always loved red as vermilion as the inside of the alligatored case she took on buying trips to New York. The Moore College of Art and Design catalog prescribed "...lectures on Period Furniture, museum study under direction, visits to shops and factories." Besides the notebooks two course catalogs, the sketches and watercolors remain. They did charcoals, gouache, pen and ink, oils and blueprints, but she cared the greatest for watercolor. A black and white reproduction of her second year "Study in Historic Ornament," printed in the 1928/1929
catalog leaps out when unrolled from its sheaf. It was the first one I brought down from the attic. She met me below stairs in the second story and said that the teacher had ordered it made darker to show better in the catalog photograph. Then she asked, as though that subject were closed, had I seen the Pennsylvania Room? But looking at Historical Ornament under digital magnification is worlds from the black and white. Enhancement lightens what was made dark, magnifies the shadows under the railing of the altar to show detail unobserved before, as though she were painting with a microscope. Light sweeps from the left. She is in love with the fine grained, sometimes dark textured layers of the altar rail, which has five levels, the rail, the shadow from the metal rungs blending with the shadow from the wings, the plate and the back wall. All this seen under magnification of 15 mega pixels was in the original, layer on layer, palimpsest over all.
The irrelevancies of side panels, triptychs, inserts, set pieces as though from a distance, stand isolated with statues, chairs, faces, angels. A grand scheme is implied, not that we know what it is, but why else the green tint on the bottom of the above gold plate?
The remaining four years of her life she would speculate to fill the time, had done genealogical certificates and frescoes, but asked why she not paint fraktur replied, “too tired from the long days.” Layers of humor occur. She broke her hip at 90 and lived some weeks in a rehab house with activities like happy hour and watercolors. Declining the happy hour, never revealing her background, she did watercolors they hung in the halls.
The image of the sun implicit in the settee’s cushion, the green and gold, bursts in memory of those first oils, as detailed as the paintings on the walls at Van Gogh’s viewing. This Beatrice of humorous denials pretends to be ignorant of her influence. But with all the inheritance she holds in four stories, attic to basement, she is inwardly thrilled somebody else feels the longing.

So two feminine archetypes of wisdom existed in the childhood of that boy, withal his mother's name was Beatrice, if that computes. Different bound versions of the artist's life were executed about 2004, titles more and more provocative: Portrait of a Lady, History of the Last Days,
Red Portfolio: Life of a Pennsylvania Dutch Radical, The Way into the Flowering Heart until finally, Angels and Artists of the Dutch Germanic. The wrestling of imagination with specific images encompassed "the sun in the sky connoting all aspects of light in itself...I used to do watercolors of it, gold on blue, blue on gold, the most beautiful thing on earth" (Portrait of a Lady). As though these were takes of the feminine psyche from the Faerie Queene or Dante they led upward, "A lady...through virtue hidden in her /I felt the potency of pristine love...the same that transfixed me long ago / Before I passed my boyhood. (Purgatorio, xxx, 31-2, 37-41), so as the beginning of desire for the beautiful emerged in front of his eyes: "I became aware of a woman...a vivid color and undiminished vigor...she seemed to touch the sky with the top of her head" (Consolation of Philosophy, 1).
Were beauty such a simple thing like the sun in the sky why wouldn't she climb the stairs and show the watercolors rolled up fresh as a Rilke sonnet? The interior is a special gift of Pennsylvania belied by its demeanor. She took interior design the way her sister taught homemaking. A few of these sheets had stains from the leaking roof, but the best were immaculate when cleaned, even with the obstacles held their integrity. Stretched onto boards, before painting the perimeter was glued, then the whole wet. When executed the paper was cut free.

Earthy opinionated farmers, boorish uneducated ethnics, conflicted in principle, full of contradiction founded schools, charities, respected human rights, opposed slavery, supported orphans and oppressed themselves with suspicions of technology. Even if their folk art was anonymous there was no anonymity living among them. With all reserve there were braggadocios too, Utopian dreamers married to myth. The many Pennsylvanians were like an octopus with too little to do, introvertedly creating its own world while meddling in what all the other arms were doing.

 Watercolor is the most difficult medium, all its mistakes laid bare. When she finished her study and sought contract jobs in the Depression, one of her first employers asked for oils on his wainscot. She said she had not done much oil. His reply was if you do watercolor you can do anything. A conflict of beauty with the
stereotype of perversity is in its way a metaphor of watercolor, for memories slighted along the way cannot be corrected, even if they are overwhelmed by later good will.

Watercolor Miniature

The art in these pieces is like miniature. Not that it was so intended, but the details are capable of much exploration. Measures to the inch in the original hold their integrity in a magnified field. To account for such beauty in life and art is a generalization the artist herself would not allow. Being an antiquarian and curator of two centuries, an intellectual and water colorist, her life was a history of a family's memory of itself. The historian in her nineties enabled this narrative with documentation by chests, embroidery, letters, manuscripts, quilts and books. Conversations pursued over the last four years of her life produced an oral record pieced together like the Times crossword she did at night. There were also collections of speeches and wood cuts, wood carvings and the rolled sheaves of watercolors.

A fierce Independent, she lived alone, successfully negotiated lame feet, a broken hip, cataract surgery, transportation systems and daily chores. This demonstrated a way to live in hope for its own sake. But she did not exactly live alone if the heirlooms have voice. China spoke with linens, called from cabinet to attic. Gravestones and German books called out and gave their names. This revived the innate as much as any email address. Hovering around these examples was a light for viewing the object, names illumined by other names, linens by linens, chests by chests, books by books. Right away it was a method of proceeding, to place them and their creations among contemporaries. This contextualizing and exploring of the miniatures, small because far away, involved art, history and language with some startling surprises. The previous dark was found shot with light. It makes one think even more light can dawn.

She spoke with her mother’s voice and her sister’s, her grandmothers and grandfathers, so who they are is of importance, and we have foundit out, but without the preservative of gravestones who hears? You must be bred to it.
The heirlooms are a means of restoration, a way back to track the antiques heard of but not found, etched wood signs of an attic barn. Pretty often last wills exist. More than a will, sometimes a man’s own words exist impossibly in court filings defending his actions. His conflicts exist in the quotation of his words in the letters of antagonists. These prove his character, a father with an edge, but not a diplomat. It seems like a family trait, at least

from Jacob the Elder and his brother Conrad. When all text and context is counted, false and true, Conrad's celebrated atheisms are resolved in his will in faith. The more you look the more you see.

There is a defensiveness to overcome in the narration of the folk mind, like Alan Keyser’s admission that the verse of fraktur is not fine art (This Teaching, 8), of limited value only for what it reveals about the “untutored” the minds of its makers, as though fine art were something visible and recognized, not taught, as if Blake made fine art, Van Gogh or De Kooning. Fine art must mean a commerce imposed to sell classes of derivatives in markets. No one asks whether the beautiful is great, but is the beautiful produced primarily for utility, beauty? The fine art crowd elevate themselves and their judgment, which denies entrance to whoever breaks protocol with the present empire. Really fine art eventually finds an audience. But everything has a utility. A landscape, a portrait, all words, you can use them. The only thing that doesn’t have use is something you can’t use, but what is that? Money? So the curse that folk art has “utility” is meaningless.Were someone of this life of folk denial to be also of clandestine mind this secretiveness could be debated as paired opposites of some kind, modesty or fear, prudence or intensity, beauty and self loathing. People are always complicated. Rimbaud proves this. To say the artist hid herself might be accurate. She covered her trails in burnings and disposings of compromise so complete that even if they were such, the personal was expunged. While John Singer Sargent was doing his charcoal portraits in Massachusetts, anonymous itinerant portrait makers went farm to farm in Pennsylvania doing charcoals of children with also taufscheim, geburts and frakturs, baptismal certificates. There was an application of art to a family, some purpose that made it folk, a kind of furniture making with decorations.

Interiors were most decorated when used by the family, a habit stemming from the inward source. Embroideries showed this purpose. Show towels meant to do just that, the decorative, with quilts and silver smithed napkin rings, decoration of cups for children, leather tooling of the designs as on the towels, iron work, wood carvings, but the names of the artists scarce, pieces largely unsigned. Even in 2003 they were still apologizing, heard regarding poetry, folk art and folk bodies, as though they would never dare claim beauty for themselves.



In Elizabeth’s family the claim for beauty starts with her great grandfather’s signature celebrating his ownership of a copy of Die Wandelnde Seele in 1835, and with the name “Maria Lapin” stitched in citron on a linen sheet, 1772. It continues with the embroidery of her father’s grandmother, Margaret Gehman, a white tulip blooming from a heart, 1851. We track these but the momentum is always there. By the time her grandfather Henry Mack recorded his love for “my darling Lizzie,” in his Ledger of the 1870’s, the quest had gathered more. Henry partly escaped the peasant destiny, but was remembered by his daughter Anna when he came in from the fields at noon sometimes too exhausted to eat, taking only a glass of warm water for food. Anna, born 1880, prepared to leave the farm
well before her actual departure in 1901 to
become a tailor in Philadelphia. Anna left the Pennsylvania Dutch accents too and the thought that education was worldly. She was not alone, but her brother, Jesse Mack, a six foot redhead, singer and artist, died tragically at 26, leaving the one impasto watercolor, labeled “valuable” in a folder in Elizabeth’s desk. In a metaphor of the whole, the roosters and weathervanes were coming apart, but in the settling of her estate it was lost.


Anna’s Elizabeth, our subject, made the first complete effort of those generations toward an intellectual life. She was the first artist and intellectual but the last surviving family Dutchman. She wanted to be free of earth, but in the same ironic breath told me, “I’m a peasant, you’re a peasant,” as if, in the next contradiction, she might find out she had contracted for a buggy but got an airplane. "I don't know where I got my mind,” she said, affronted by the perception of a first class mind in what prejudice believed was a second class body. We can ask of her and of ourselves where does the mind come from. I cannot believe I am going to say it comes from the environment, physical artifacts, can only follow the trail.


Good In The Natural


Direct access to this good occurs in folk art, but not much spoken, even if sung, a reticence that in a hyperbolic age seems welcome. The boast of Stoudt holds good that the Pennsylvania Dutch “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land” (3). The lily “dominates the poetry and the literature; tulips appear rarely in verbal form.” That Pennsylvania Dutch nurture surrounded her in its host of domestic particulars in her mother’s gardens full of tiger lilies, tulips and herbs and dozens of pots of African violets on every window sill. She got her mind from those extraordinary pies, cakes, coffees and roasts, doughnuts made whole by the kitchen artist. She got that mind from the Gaudy Dutch plates and cups, old when her mother’s grandmother had them, from hymns she sang at multiple church services, from the handmade Berks county country chest with its chamfered drawers, walnut wood and heavy boards. She got that mind from her grandfather’s blanket chest and its porcelain knobs in the attic with old trunks with her father’s initials and his father’s, filled with the show towels and double-stitched woolen car blankets, bedspreads and linens alongside shipping boxes of chocolate from her father’s warehouse: Walter Baker & Co. Ltd., Premium No. 1 Chocolate, large metal containers of sugar from the Franklin Sugar Refining Co., Philadelphia, artifacts, vases, Stangl ceramics.

The household artifacts and gardens compound with the hymns in mutual quotations about flowers, roses, lilies, and morning-stars expressed in jewelry, pottery, and linens. A “use of natural events and objects,” says the disdained Stoudt, “to describe spiritual conditions” (100). It was an easy thing for one who had good taste anyway to translate this into being. She was a New York buyer of gifts for her department store for 35 years.The bygone Pennsylvania German imagination retrospective for the “lily age,” symbolic of images in hymns, gardens, and art mutually exposed a state of mind with Christ as the lily, but that lily was also the believer in a compounding paradise of “uncontaminated good with natural reality” (Stoudt, 101).

Mennonites were prone to contemplate the eternal in such temporal and floral images, “the first indigenous folk art in America” (Stoudt, xviii). She got her mind from this milieu, but we are not so eager to learn from whence her prejudice against the body came, largely a result of the longstanding war between Pennsylvania German and English culture. Body and mind were in conflict in her life always with the proviso that one should not reveal to the other. That would be pride. Flesh must be disdained. “There was no “self-expression” in the religious folk art of Eastern Pennsylvania for he who insists upon having his own way, either in art or in life, is an egotist” (Stoudt, 9-10). Mennonite theology is a refrain she doubted or believed, but its psychology was suspicious of the motives of another and herself. It was against egoism. Of course bathing in submerged tradition is endemic to art. The great freedom is freedom from oneself.

Collective biblical images buoyed her health, courage and faith in the same way that Pennsylvania German folk art took meaning from the literary tradition which accompanied it, the Bible, medieval and Pietistic hymnody and hymnals portrayed in artifacts and in the tradition of the literary. But do not say that art was not favored in Mennonite families, that is disproved by the “tulips” embroidered in in the soul.






















Pennsylvania Rimbaud

A search of artistic denial leads to the celebrated life of the early 20th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who renounced his greatness at 19 to never write again. The work she never did, accepting that it was never done, makes her a kind of Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud. He accomplished his by dissolution. She consummated by retailing. “Tired from long days” as a motive for avoiding fraktur might be believed were it not yoked with the distrust and distaste for glory she dares to call “realism,” a fearsome display of the tiger stripes of beauty and austerity.“Not good enough for fine art,” she says when I ask the right question, “not a genius,” she says with self-effacement, but the causes are counter causes.

George Herbert didn’t think his poems measured up, commanded his brother to burn them. Donne circulated only hand written copies. Dickinson hid in her room. The incandescent Hopkins burned all his early work. Blake, taking his gouge, dug every suggestion of affection for and approbation from the reader from Plate 3 of Jerusalem. Who survives their immolation by doing the work and burning it or burning it by not doing it? Realism or genius! We go to such lengths to restore beauty in our memories, dig up manuscripts from Rossetti’s grave, thankfully save one surviving colored copy of Jerusalem. Of the work of her maturity there is none, which suggests a dichotomy of art and life beyond comprehension.

 In the midst of all this discovery and self revelation she asked whether I had seen a red portfolio in the attic, the red portfolio that is, that contained all the free work she had done since, as watercolors should be done, she said, freehand, for the joy of living. This comment takes her out of the world of the mundane, and the action it describes puts her in the rare company of the poet's assassination, the artist's compulsion, the driven, mad follies that all the best of those we love the most seem to practice: Hopkins, Blake, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rimbaud! The nerve and the pain of it she casts with aplomb. She had shredded them in a fit at her husband, in a fury of rejection tore them up in a fury right in front of his eyes.
After this, not really in an attempt to get even, I sent some prose to Marvin, who liked to write, with the advice that it should be drunk with a bucket of sea water. Vulcan revered part (Pancake Syntazz (66-71) and Eyeshot thought another wayward with symbolic acts. I gave her an acrylic, now returned after her death, where earth and sky wrote cursive yellow swirls of blue, white and brown, a language not reduced to formula, to remind her, the brushstrokes like the swirls of her great grandfather’s signature, that the outdoors come in again, that even though the road is not taken, the road is taken. What drives the beautiful out of twilight into full sun? She says she studied art because she hadn't the patience to be a teacher.

So the Red Portfolio was gone, but left behind a conundrum that didn't fit the world of art school and watercolor to  the social but go nicely annihilation. It went with the sardonic, critical view of the foibles and follies of life. It went so well it fueled four years of riposte by phone, hours by the week and thorns for the crucified when she had no fame and hardly any visitors, but survived anyway on the slender pickings
of teasing calls, with packages of oranges and apples appearing mysteriously on the porch. She never got it that these were sent to her in homage of the still life oils, that is, returned in fruit. She only became famous when she was able to declare herself terminal and was admitted into the niceties of permanent care. Then governed wit made nice. Her walls held photographs and paintings of which she might consider herself part muse. Her nightstand held copies of many bound versions celebrating herself. If I will assume what she assumed, there is a long while yet to drive back shadow, indeed  they burn, torched by light.

Blame fortune, the death of her father, personality, ambition, that she was able to give it up. Blame duty, sacrifice, she gave it up for her mother. Blame the Mennonites. Somebody’s got to pay. She sacrificed to work, provide a home, protect her mother, did not continue as an artist in any manner but life. It’s like she lived on the farm, spurned her passion of life and invented ways to doubt even her own beauty, upbringing, religion, gender, poverty. Beauty might not have been known by its own name if they thought it vanity, being consumed by beauty’s sister, truth. Anabaptists sought truth and God for their own sake, not some use, as opposed to their reputation in art, for beauty might be associated with pleasure. But where was beauty hid? In the city they ruled by utility, formality and duty, in the country more so. Like the English they were their own worst enemy.
Of the contradictions and vagaries of the lives of people, Beethoven running down stairs to finish a chord, high passion and dudgeon, we may have things reversed. Borges was the god of the fabulists but called a priest at the end of his life. The celebrated atheist was buried near Calvin. It will be said an aberration; it was Maria; he didn’t mean it; old age turns men weak, but the true weakness is youth, Rimbaud’s madness, drugs, guns and preachings about prophets when he was not one, for to be a prophet means more than erratic speech. At the end of his life Rimbaud calls on God, has a priest and comes to equipoise. They must exhaust themselves before they see. This is a new take on the literature of exhaustion.

The Red Portfolio
Given the nature of things it should be no surprise to learn that the work was done, just that it did not survive. Death notices of family members, behests and bequests survived. Wastebaskets covered with flowers embroidered out of burlap survived. “Wilkom” painted with love birds in a big circular poster in the basement survived. The compensation for me has to be all those notes taken in the last years of her life by phone, hundreds of pages of reflection and anecdote survive, done with the same intention I had to get the best I could of literature of the 20th century in the last decade of its millennium.This was the harvest she reaped, sent in that first draft by mail after she announced her impending death in September 2004.

She was not surprised at the metaphor-laden subtexts to her thinking revealed there, like her house, her literal home, her whole sense of family, the culture of which she was a part and her own mortal being.So yes, it turns out that there was some work of her maturity, despite austerity and self denial, duty and perfectionism, for when the rolled sheaf of watercolors was recovered from the attic she said there had been another collection, painted much later to her own taste in watercolors, in what she called the plain style, “as watercolors should be done,” without extras. Suggested stems with whitecaps detached? Were these seen, she asked, in a large red portfolio in the attic?


No sign.

"I guess I threw them away."

Whatever can be said of this absurdity fits in with her humor. She is not guessing and knows well what happened. She did not throw them away. The story comes out. She tore them up in her husband’s face. How many times must we be warned not to share our work with those we know? And if we do be prepared to explode. In the midst of some discussion or other, she uncharacteristically wanted to reveal herself further, retrieved The Red Portfolio and showed the contents to her fanatic Dutchman husband of his own seventh generation. Marvin had such ferocious ideas of art that he then and there declared they weren't art! She destroyed them in front of his eyes. Tore them in a fury. It’s nice to compare this with the time the rejected Blake, being criticized, gouged every word with a chisel from the copper plates of Jerusalem suggesting his “love,” or “friendship” for the reader (Blake,10-11).

Auto de Fe

Artistic suicide refuses to paint. Auto de fe, destroying the red portfolio isn’t solely a Dutch rage, but there is a tradition of it in the collection and burning of German devotional books by Peter Miller and Conrad Weiser in 1732. They immolated the Heidelberg Catechism to prove they weren’t Lutherans! Good true Sabbatarians, they were and not the last immolation of that century according to critic Julius Friedrich Sachse (I, 245). But it wasn’t even the first such immolation of her family either.

Before she ever graduated art school her brother, my predecessor in the roster, had profoundly misplaced their errant grandfather’s estate papers. The post hoc justification for this act never changed, but the story itself varied. Late in life he said he just didn’t pick them up, but the early gleeful passionate account was that he burned them. Of course a child is not supposed to remember such things, but allow that they will twist unchallenged.

With art or without, she admits a temper. A Dutch species? Her mother destroyed every letter she got after she had read it (but not the post cards!), not from temper but from the belief that once read the letter was worthless. Why then save all the post cards? Because of the utility, the pictures! Flurries of cold reconciliation swirl about. Mennonites do not save the errant past. That is why antiquarian Jacob Mensch’s saving of the 48 letters of Bishop Andrew Mack is such a rarity and exception. There are ever greater rarities revealed. She pulls the aplomb of centuries around her, "you'll get over it," she says, as if she did.

I don’t. I piece the shards, array the clues of attic, basement, history, court records, china cabinet, chests.

If this rejection of the body is a Pennsylvania Dutch paradigm, book, papers, or whatever oeuvre, it’s not art, letters, estate papers or devotional books that offend. That’s just how she expressed herself. When she retired to the hospital towers at $300 a day, a desk drawer with diaries of the 70’s and 80’s was found, meticulous dailies, but which yielded no personal comments or observations whatever. Asked what she wanted to do with them, she replied, “I’ll get my lawyer to burn them.” She declared that she had old records of her trip to Greece. Should she send them to me or “tear them up?”

Just a manner of speaking? Estate traders live their lives off rejected detritus, but they are treasures of the past. My wife’s grandmother burned all the letters she got from her sisters in Sweden after moving to Texas in 1920. Her recipe book was handed down though; her daughter glued recipes cut from magazines over the original ones handwritten in Swedish. I at auction got a rosemaled Norwegian dower chest with the hand painted name Magdeli Jahns dr [dotter] Laupsa 1889.

Why Did You Go To Art School

In the end the errant Peter Becker retired to live out his years on a farm in Skippack. Did he get over the destiny generations find so hard to attain? Many forces oppose the inevitable. Considering all this she is asked, “why did you go to art school?

“I didn’t want to be a teacher.”

“Why did you go to art school?

“Well I wanted to be a doctor but that didn’t go over at home.” Now the evasion begins to ring true.

She didn’t apply to Women’s Medical College, but surely she belonged. Not good enough for fine art either she thought. One cannot totally blame the environment, every earthen vessel has to believe against all odds. Maybe that’s why she loved the Russian émigré who boarded with her mother for a time, who did a bust of her. The soul of hope against all hope.

She despised entitlement, but didn’t have any, yet it was not forever denied her. It came in the end in the wise hands and mind of her interlocutor’s wife, a sole doc, a lone doc in the old sense, but with as fine a research brain as she herself had, which means, as any.

Much unrealized, deferred, remains to be made right, fulfilled. When she finished art school she painted murals for cash, floral scenes above wainscots on restaurants and the walls of rich ladies such as Mrs. Sheldeker of Oak Lane, who insisted on having her driven home by chauffeur, for which patronizing attitude the artist terminated the position.

She didn’t lack talent, but hubris, the reverse genius who believes the opposite so strongly, the opposite of what is real, what is seen so much that it doesn’t matter what others do or what happens. I feel the weight of it, not just herself but her mother too, to make plain their beauty, for surely they all gave me their gifts.

What if all the high flown questions of the Pennsylvania Dutch aardvarks about celestial chastity, Dunkards, Schwenkfelders and rebaptizers came down to just fulfilling a need to belong, be accepted, but which everything they did caused them to be excluded from?

Before the Mennonite: The Fragrant Husband

There are ironies in these ironies. She disdained farmers and ignorance, favored the maternal families, though farmers and Mennonites, but cast a cold eye on the paternal because of that errant grandfather, a huge irony in a life of them because this man’s family beginning in Pennsylvania was not Mennonite nor poor farmer either, but blacksmiths, professionals and elected officials who founded amid much controversy, the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania and one who attended as a delegate the Pennsylvania Assembly for the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

Such activities require a separate monograph, but they figure largely, with an edge, in a number of 18th century sources, the Journals of Henry Muhlenberg of 1753, the Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm 1728-1748, Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey To Pennsylvania of 1756. As political and social leaders they were everything her mother Anna, eight generations later, wanted to be. Before Anna ever sought to escape the accent, the farm and country ignorance these paternal forebearers spoke multiple languages, including English and held public office. Anna sensed a fragrance of the life she wanted in her husband’s past.

Briefly, that first new world progenitor, Hans George, settled his family in Salford at least by 1717 (Strassburger, 414). Although no Mennonite, he signed his name “with a firm hand” (Heckler) as witness to the Mennonite Trust agreement of 1725 that allocated land for that burial ground and school. Maybe he put this agreement into English. The terms of his will show him to wise and implicitly educated. Some think he married the daughter of a Dutch Reformed Church minister. His son "was entrusted by the Colonial government as agent… to collect partial payments from settlers on their lands in 1723, he must have been here some time before, well acquainted, and in the confidence of the leading men". (Dotterer quoted in Heckler, 31) This Jacob, was Philadelphia County assessor in 1741, deputy for the probate of wills for Philadelphia County, 1743 to 1748. Heckler in his Historical Sketches (1886) said he was "the most prominent man in the early history of Salford" and among the four most "reasonably well educated” men of the area who were classically trained, “a man of great force of character.”

The next generation’s oldest son, another Jacob, was the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89) who voted for the Convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, was also one of several founders of the Wentz Reformed Church which continued the Skippack Reformed the begun by his father and grandfather.

The second son, George (1740-1808), from whom she descended, married Elizabeth Hendricks, the daughter of Leonard Hendricks, son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks, part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled Germantown in 1683 whose progenitor signed the anti-slavery tract in 1688. That’s how her father’s family became Mennonite.

George and Jacob’s cousins, Daniel and Phillip, were officers in the Berks Co. Militia during the Revolution. Their wives were educated, wrote and spoke English, were mentioned honorably in contemporary affairs. These activities however would fall under Mennonite prohibition, but how many generations does it take to get assurance for the immigrant mind?

Compelled to answer the questions raised here just because the puzzle exists, I sent her such genealogical papers as I had found at the time, but she was by then disinterested. I continue because from the earliest age she was the image of beauty to my mind.

When she first declared herself terminal with cancer and an early draft of this piece was rushed out for her to read with its thousand disorganized details, I asked, “People are going to ask me whether you read this, but it’s very chaotic, the Mennonites, for instance crop up everywhere. What do I tell them?”

“That’s the way it is with me, the Mennonites are always following me around mentally. I’m still a Mennonite in some way or other.”

Works Cited

William Blake. Jerusalem. Edited by Morton D. Paley. Princeton: William Blake Trust. 1998.

James Y. Heckler. The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township. 1886. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.

Sachse, Julius Friedrich. The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1899. NY: AMS Press, 1971,

Strassburger, Ralph Beaver. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Privately Printed: Gwynedd Valley, Pa. 1922, 414.

John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Allentown, PA: Schlechter’s, 1966.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference.

Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.

The Glory of Her Wit

"You know the trouble with Mennonites? They've always wanted to be Jews."

(Rudy Wiebe, The Blue Mountains of China)

The Humor of Defect

Wit more deeply etches with age. The whole plate dissolving, she was mobile when her peers had fallen. Cicero thinks an irascible nature will out at any time, so the best way to endure old age is to practice the cardinal virtues. But the practice of virtue is dangerous as is staying alive among the ancients. Aristotle’s celebration of defect says that moral turpitude makes us laugh, that it briefly makes us whole at the defect’s expense. Wit then is no cosmetic beauty if it so heals. Her witticisms are serious, farcical and everywhere between, depending on the moment. There is only an appearance of dialogue, everything plays to her trump. What else does she have to do than exchange lighthearted confidences by phone? I often called when she was in the basement doing the wash or folding the clothes. It seemed to amuse her.

Writing on both sides fast to get the cadence, I began to scrawl details and store them in a folder. They were often illegible as if encrypted. Scraps of paper became full sheets. The talk was wide ranging. Sometimes I typed them immediately and the notes cued the whole conversation. Sometimes months went by and the thread was lost except for the quotes. I had no intent to produce a memoir. As atrocity demands further atrocity, she would poor mouth her situation to bait me. My response, “Do you want me to come out there and take care of you?” I had actually tried to send my daughter in this behalf after her hip broke, but that plan was rejected. She would not live with anybody.

Her riposte is ready. “Everybody,” she said, “wants to take care of me.”

Her brother left her a legacy in his life insurance when he died. My older, now deceased brother, said he would take care of her. Her sister, also deceased, said she would take care of her! Nobody seemed to think her competent. Once I asked whether if she needed money she would feel free to ask me for it. She said yes, the hugest joke of all, the best part of talking to her, the pure sarcastic puns. I bought her a vacuum cleaner. She had 12,000 shares of Sara Lee.

Abraham Again: A Day In The Life

One time from her basement she debated the Hebrew idea of a day, symbol of the predicament of age. The chiliast PA Dutch believe in a thousand year period variously applied. She took up the day/age theory with a vengeance because Abraham defied her realism. What she could see was what she believed. A realist declines that the good is invisible, that’s for romantics. Her mother was this species of romantic who naturally gave birth to this empirical Elizabethan. Women however were given a pass in debate which was reserved for putting males in order.

Old beshriveled Abraham was promised a progeny as the sands of the sea. That’s not realistic. We would say “contemplate yourself surrounded by what you need in order to succeed,” but the realist wanted no reconciliation with the invisible. She argued days were different in Abraham’s day, that a year then was measured differently, presumably a lot shorter. To the counter that she seemed to believe Abraham a myth, not real, she stamped her foot. “I’m too tired to think.”

Of Abraham’s age and realism one urged: “Did not the Gardener say that if a grain of mustard said to the mountain move, it would be carried into the sea?” “Yes,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean faith in yourself.” Meaning again, “you male egotists mistake your ego for God.”

The glory of her wit wasn’t only that it got into phenomenology, it also made her adept at categorical denials and affirmations. Referring to this very manuscript, she told nephew Robert, “He is keeping me alive,” meaning these circulating drafts were making her the center of attention so much that maybe she would put off dying a while to enjoy it. Many people reach their 90’s with failing memory and incapacity of thought just when they have something to say. Puissant at 94, her humor is ironic and dry. It is a beautiful defect. She calls it, "making a remark.”

Acme

On a shop, trying to get some kosher grape out of Acme, like she is preparing a Seder, it being near Passover, but not finding any, she says to the kosher foods clerk, “I guess I won’t write a letter of protest about anti-Semitism here.”

The lady is affronted, “are you accusing me of anti-Semitism?”
“No,” she says, deadpan, “Acme.”
She does it for fun. What can anybody do to an old lady?

I offer, “humor is a sign of intelligence.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Dry.

Still, for all that, not much a drinker. Has to remind herself to drink. Likes the grape though, as long as it’s pure.

This satiric bent is nurtured by history, travel, literature and a thirst for experience denied in the next breath. Satire questioned takes umbrage. She can’t write anymore, never showed her true colors on paper anyway. It is a habit of the clandestine mind; don’t leave a record. Protect yourself in print. But she could make a remark like a bee sting.

Bee

She has reminded me twice on the phone recently of an occasion when I had the cartilage out of my knee in 1964, the old way with the six inch cut. She remarks that when she and her sister visited in the hospital they had a good laugh after over their nephew’s “pain.” Is that in the medium range?

Ophelia

“I’m up to surviving” she says, as if in the middle of some book. Specifically Jerry and Dayle, that is, her older stepson, with his fiancee, are in town to announce their engagement and are to be married off at Media Presbyterian in May, the third time.

“Will they marry anybody!”

When the chief administrator gave them a booklet he was asked, as a favor to the First Female Elder, herself, which minister, Don Norquist or Bob Keissel (who married Lib and Marvin) would marry them. She considered the whole, “cheeky.” So May 15 at 11 AM to townhouse for lunch with the bride she goes. The bride has a girlfriend from VA, got the wedding package, already had the dress, went up to Allentown, Marvin’s boyhood home, to a farmer’s market and bought dry corn. “You soak it, bake it, boil it like stew. They also got the farmer’s cheese,” but “not original,” wrapped in cellophane. Commercial cheese.

It was a big social of that Sunday, including also a birthday party for Bud, then Jerry’s wedding, unless my notes are garbled. How could you do both in a day? The bride in her 60’s wore short white hair, a long pale pink chiffon gown with ruffles at the bottom and plastic ribbons trailing down the back with a wreath on her head.

“I keep calling her Ophelia,” she says.

I offer that my wife has rescued a half dead kitten from the alley by the canal in the hot May heat, but I don’t want a cat. I raise chows. She remembers how my brother had been so proud of Bingo, a cat of the family’s youth, exclaimed to her, “isn’t she beautiful.” Being then good, she only smiled. Now she says, “Ophelia’s a good name for your kitten.”

We had gotten out the Shakespeare by then and hotly pursued the Ophelia menace. She tortured me with Polonius’ advice to Laertes, Ophelia and her flowers, rosemary and pansies.
I think, “mummery,” but suppress it for, “wall!” which led to Morley’s “Travels in Philadelphia,” and his preface to Shakespeare. Her Mennonite vision of the world as a foible and a vanity compel these quips.

Balaam

These conversations occurred years ago now, remarks and details scrawled on scraps of paper by phone. In one case we were debating how to differentiate the apparent "L" from the "C" in Pennsylvania Dutch script, the handwriting of her great grandfather. Abraham C. (Clemens) Bechtel (1776-1861), who signed his name as a subscriber in the frontis of John Arndt's Wahren Christenthum, dating it it 26 Jan 1833. It's a little hard to do this by phone, but with the aid of her brother's German grammar it was determined that the middle initial, resembling a capital "L" in English, was in fact a "C" in cursive German.Then the debate turned facetious. The question reminded me of a fiction where I put speech into the mouths of animals. Not those proper beasts of Narnia, my mules spit sibilant German hauling tourists to the bottom of Grand Canyon.

"Who knows why mules should speak German," I baited her, "but their pidgin would be too offensive for your eye."

"Not at all," she said, pitching right in, "I don't care, mules aren't Arabian Horses. obviously they speak poorly."

I volunteered, "maybe they spoke Pennsylvania Dutch."
She countered, "maybe that's what Balaam's Ass spoke."
Misdirecting, I tried, "but that was English!"

One or the other wondered what Balaam's Ass actually said in Hebrew. This led to consideration of the diversity of the text. Maimonides was cited for the tangents and opposites of Hebrew homonyms. The angel speaking in the ass, "the Lord opened the ass's mouth," is good, but the adversarial angel, "I have come here to oppose you," is bad. (Guide of the Perplexed, III, 99) This more than compensated the diction of my poor plebes in whom no angel spoke, saying:

Mine vurst vessel,
mine strubal vagen,
be smirchen sie hovel,
bestrudal mine bier kanne.

There is a lot more, but it has yet to appear ( Balaam’s Ass in The Defense of Ben-Gurion)
“Well,” she says, “I don’t know mules spoke vurst.”
“Yes, it is a living wurst.”
Which won't be the first time we tamper with the composite English, German, Hebrew, Pennsylvania Dutch ass.

Mashed Poetato

This one doesn't die down so easy. Start with the German, but in English.
"Mashed potatoes," she says, "mashed potatoes were a supplement to mother's milk for Pennsylvania Germans."

You have to get the layers of mockery.

"My legs were slightly uneven making me a little clumsy.
I wasn't muscular.
I was a mashed potato baby.
They called me chubby baby.
I have peasant hands, short stubby fingers.
I have a peasant body."

It's an operetta. She boasts it of all her family. Grandfather Henry Mack gets it, but her facts disprove the argument.

"Henry had suits made to order. He was long from the waist to the knee, had heavy thighs."

If he was long from the waist to the knee how could he have heavy thighs? The stereotype is self fulfilling. She says,

"It's an ethnic thing,"

"Short legs and powerful thighs are better for digging with shovels."

But Henry was a lousy farmer. Maybe she means her other grandfather, Jake and his son Howard, her father.

"Stocky, thick."

High blood pressure boys.

"My family never had any growth spurts."

Such things are uttered gleefully, assertively, the facetious essence of all that agrees with Ben Franklin.

"They weren't athletes."
"Mennonites don't jump."

I tell her, "neither did Ben Franklin. He looked just like a bibulous moon."

Oh Ben, what can the matter be?

"I'm too gibbous!"

"Well, they're not English. They have no sense of humor, "German boors and oxen." The best are like Goethe and the worst grow pigs in Oley. Imagine, they still speak German after all these years!"

I observe that her family had always insisted I physically resembled her father.
She puts me in check, "you've got a peasant body."

Do not say there was no return fire. Al Creamer, her boyfriend at the time her father died prematurely in 1927, sent her 17 yellow roses for her birthday (how, she wonders, did he remember yellow?). She, grieving her father, didn't respond for three days, but now, 75 years later, feels bad.
“How could he afford it.” she says, “his parents weren't rich.”
I think to myself, “maybe he loved you!”

On this terminable voyage she has confided to Robert and Cynthia that she may have loved a Russian emigre artist who boarded with the family after her father died. This Russian did a bust of her, which she has never bothered to mention. She lost interest when he talked to other girls. Realist opaque.

Then the repartee went something like this:
I asked,“What did you have for dinner last night?”

"Hot dogs."

Beef?

“No.”

Turkey?

"No. Pork dogs. Meat wieners."

She relishes the Anglo-Saxon like food.

I tell her my wife won't cook pork, recall the sauerkraut browned around a roast that my mother cooked, recipe via her mother Anna. She remembers smoked tongue around Memorial Day. Now, she says, “you probably can't buy it. It goes into dog food.”
She's living high off the hog.

Then rapid fire: “so you never found a boy who loved you!
She: "I like matzo crackers." Then, "what. . .?"
“You're a matzo Mennonite!”
She ends the call with, "I think we talk too much." I see what this in retrospect.

Pennsylvania Dutch rejection of the body is all tied up with anabaptist worldlessness, but English prejudice is the crackle in its fire, a massive inferiority complex projected over hundreds of years of suspicion furthered by suspect fifth column movements of WWI and the virtually unstoppable dark faces, thighs and incomprehensible tongues. Ben started it, looking in the mirror at his own self, which pyknic profile more than precisely German speech and ways bothered him. It's more the be-hind indelicate until you feel a predator spring from ambush with complete extension, lean as a glider. When other people see it and name it, these thighs euphemise booty, which booty is also beauty so they mock it. So shake it, Europe's worst fear and complex, the whole body, big ears, nose, teeth, thighs, behind, belly, feet. "A hardy gregarious mammal" is the best symbol of the body we're going to get, but if short thighs stand in for it it becomes "stupid, obstinate, perverse," the much maligned Dutch ass.

This prejudice is compounded by the anabaptist so busy shedding his blood you'd wonder when he had time to make love. Against the flesh you see, the uncircumcised in heart and mind, to borrow a phrase, and that did pretty well for a hundred years until they emigrated and stopped being tortured. The psychology for martyrs is here.

She doesn't say, "I want to distance myself from the farm but don't," doesn't want to raise herself too far above above being the farm girl she never was and going to Women's Medical College. All beautiful women share the one defect of doubt, can't look in the mirror and see themselves. She is Beauty from the symmetry of her features,but she is beauty in the body of her walk, skin, fingers, eyes, but wants a defect to be unlike, but beauty is still beauty, the body desirable itself. Even if embarassingly polarized from mind, peasantry is serious business.

In early drafts I explained the image emerging in a life of contemplation as blue on gold, gold on blue, "a lady...virtue hidden in her...the same transfixed me before I passed my youth" (Purgatorio, xxx, 31-41). This became "full of years...possessed a vivid color...seemed to pierce the sky with her head" (Consolatio I). I told the memory of sleeping in her bed, age five, images that remained of a blue gown, the contraries of spirit and flesh, Joy of man's desiring vexed as an Anabaptist, a danger to hear. Song: "let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth." Proverb response: "may her breasts satisfy you always." She doesn't know I remember her at 35 as Boethius said and before as Dante.

McHusband and McWife

She just finished the questionnaire from Friends Life Care. It is the age of feedback, yea or nay don’t fit the form, like the answer she gives the do-good who asks how she’s doing.

She wants to query them, “well how do you think I’m doing?”

Cooped up, bunged up stirs the nasty. Satire fires off port bow:

“I’m rolling down the hill trying to keep my head above water.”
“What do the sycophants say to that?”

But now she’s rolling.

“They live a vulgarity, got a McJob, a McHusband, a McWife.” There’s punch in the bowl. Old women rock and roll. Let’s talk about weather. She says, “society is vulgar.” Critiques the dance of Brittany and her girls at Super Bowl halftime as “marionettes, factory girls doing a space dance in a clone suit.” They probably won’t survive the alternative future.

I offer the male code to restore polite society.
Vigilantism gets her back up, malefactors corrected and punished by other men outside the law.

“Well, will women do it?”
“It sounds just horrible.”
She asks, “What is the code?"
"The unwritten code? I’m not going to write it down if you don’t know it.”
He’s a nice boy too.

She wants to be free of earth, patrician, noble, epicene in getting away. I want to fly too, do leg lifts over 300 lbs to leave, the ground my springboard, launch into air for a backhand poach off return of serve. The boys crow, "Flying Wallenda." Having heard the thick thigh, heavy calf routine it depends on your point of view. I love the power and the time. They never noticed the peasant body until I blocked their jump shots. At the gym the weightlifters want to know where did you get those thighs. "How'd you get the wheels?" She doesn't ask, "where did I get my peasant mind?" Body came from the thick peasant parent and mind didn't? Like she had contracted for a car but got an airplane instead? Higher and lower, mercy, gratitude, unselfish, forgive, you can have a mind and in a body too. It is a taught organ.

Henry Mack wanted to escape the farm.

Anna Reiff escaped the farm.

She wanted to be a professor.

"What kind," I ask, "art?"
No.
Teasing, "home ec.?"
Snort.
"History?"
"No," she says, "English!"
"I was an English professor!"
Very droll.
"Yes, I know."

But I want to be a farmer. She doesn't think she could be a teacher.
"My friends went to Normal School to be teachers."
"Did you go to Abnormal School?" No, she passed out of it. Advanced placement.
"I knew I wouldn't be patient with the slow."
Nice old dear.

Here's the thing and my infinite amusement with her talk. People of higher intelligence who boast they are peasants born of peasants as far back as Charlemagne, but all the while look down the nose to see if you are facile enough to believe it. Artists ape the peasant, it pleases them to go native as they say, even in poverty, believing themselves the only true aristocrats because they see and hear the immense world of delight compassed by the senses five

Many Subjects

There are many subjects in her mind and conversation.
You want spiritual authenticity, a sense of community?
Hey, you want to hear about Mennonites?
Man, who doesn’t?

The Mennonites are all wrapped up with her art, farm and peasantry. She is that generation caught between farm and city, between peasantry and the new primitive earthiness and its own aesthetic, whose only recourse is to conciliate the mind of the peasant with the artist's higher memory, intuitive speed and concrete absorption. Her father left the proletariat, went to business school. Her mother left the farm, took him as her husband. Her brother graduated Penn State and climbed the executive. She studied art. They all escaped, but whatever it was they were doing I had to learn for myself, starting with the English Renaissance.

She says Henry Mack didn't have a peasant mind. Nobody knows the mind of Kate Rosenberger, her father's mother who died of TB three years after his birth. Her own father lost his life at 47. Her mother hungered for mind and produced the noodling watercolorist. It was not lost on me. I always thanked my father's foresight in marrying outside the gene pool for the first time in nine generations. Were we to go beyond the anatomical definition of mind, this business might find the adversarial voice of the angel, that is, in the world of opposites, we look for the good.

There is a series of black and white photos of her after dinner, age 92, November 2002. In only two is she serious. Her head is elevated in laughter. Eyes roll at the ceiling.

How does this lead to "that white head to milk cows and Anna’s father remarried when she was 8?" Or to her mother, “she spoiled me rotten.” Before those thoughts Anna fled the Dutch accents and suspicion on education as worldly. She left the barefoot existence and the tyranny of cows, became a tailor, not plain style, made the high collar, the leg mutton sleeve, tiny waist of the wide lined skirt. Remote hero of the common, courage of spirit against all odds, Born To Destiny, as the Navajo say, Born For Emancipation.

I interpret the swift changes of direction as a bit of spirit, meaning she is recouping from her sadness at husband Marvin's passing, the year before, April 20, 2001.

She quarrels with my reference to the Henry Mack/Lizzie Bechtel love story as an appeal to the feminine! "That's out of date." But not the quest for beauty that began with her Uncle Jesse, dead at 26, his impasto watercolors labeled "valuable" in a folder on her desk, the roosters and weathervanes coming apart, a symbol of what might have been, what might be.

Matzo!

The last time we talked she ended with "well, I guess we could talk forever."

Dogged

Remark-making can dog anyone who has been taken more seriously than they deserve. Once, after announcing to the dissolute Tom Whitbread at a party, "I'm a republican!" he crowed: "you have a fine mind!"

The clerk at the library said, "God knows we need the rain."
"Well, God would know that wouldn't He."

I’m shopping early, it is almost April, ’04. “What do you want for your birthday?”
“Nothing. Wait till I’m 95, and have something to celebrate.”

Visited by the parish nurse, the Saints Alive leader, official maiden ladies say, "I love your mind." She threatens to start a diary, a record of “old age.” She doesn’t know this record of her thoughts and moods exists. I haven’t told her on purpose. Imagine how it would be if somebody were to write down every word you said in jest, take it seriously? I tell her after she is hospitalized and send her an early draft.

How did Dr. Johnson feel?

They tell her, “I love your mind.” In the context of everyday ministries among the old that’s about like saying she can read a candy wrapper, not admit in the middle of inquisitions she never understood Kierkegaard. What’s the mental capacity of an elder in the homes but a mass of prejudice and selfishness uttered in choruses of moans in front of the TV, “help me, help me?” Yes, I have seen it. I love her mind too though, but it’s not as though this means let’s you and me talk about grandchildren.

“I’m a loner” she confesses.
“I’m so glad.”

Everybody is alone all the time. To prove it I mailed her a 75 cent copy of The Fixer. Bellow contrives to die the same week she does, so does the Pope.
I’m playing mixed doubles that day, parenthesize to her, “you know mixed doubles is with women.” "Well I didn't think they mixed it up with horses!”

The wit in overplus, her grandfather, her uncle, for all I know she is named for the Queen, beauty heading inland from sea, toward the oeuvre of destiny. All desired, those women who made show towels and embroidered tulips growing out of hearts, stars and weathervanes, roosters, barns and baskets of flowers blooming.

Starlings

There are 300 blackbirds in my birdbath screeching like grackles.
She says, “maybe they are starlings,” which I now realize they are.
Wonderful name, Star-lings.
What constellation are you from?

The City of Philadelphia wanted to control the unsanitary ways of the downtown starlings, but the uptown bird people were in uproar over poisoning them.
She says, "there were a lot of pigeons down at the RR station in Media but they’re gone now. "
I ask, “are you suggesting foul play?”
She says, “I like that Andy.”
Maybe it’s vigilantes.

Men

There is a flood warning. Fog and snow are bending trees in the rain. She gets out Andrew’s leaf that he gave her for comfort. It hangs in the kitchen. She is scheduled to receive a visit from a 96 year old admirer who is driving over. She says maybe she should call and tell him not to come.
I say, “he’ll be there.”
He is the brother of Betty Wentz whose wife, of equal age, lives in Oregon where she is native.
I say, “men are capable of much devotion.”
She replies, “men are capable of exceeding their capabilities."

Hair With Wings

Not a part of this world, this leaf, my mistress. I would say sister but she had all the brother she would want. She is combing her hair now because there is no appointment this week. No bald spot, but one bright spot, she got another box of fruit. These boxes just appear from nowhere, left at the door, the delivery didn’t even knock, which is a faux pas.

“It has a bell!”
“My hair has wings.”

Einsteinian hair, she says; the TV shows would mistake her for an angel.
"It’s all relative," double punning.

“If you’re not persecuted you fall into apathy.”
She actually says that, stealing the line from an unborn future Mennonite chapter. Where could that have sprung from but the very apotheosis of Anabaptist psychology? Wait and see. Art not favored by Mennonite families? That's how they were plain? No, the prejudice is disproved by the tulip-flowering heart.

The light-dark of these conversations one moment pierces like levity, another plops like a hat.

She is catholic about Lent, monks, penitentes, Ash Wednesday. Ambivalent friends at art school had to give up things like candy, but on St. Patrick’s Day ate back the candy they had given up. Rationally she says that St. Pat is not a saint anymore, a liberator from Lent and fish on Friday. The Pope wants Italians to buy fish.

“This season when you consider Christ’s sacrifice make a sacrifice too,” she says.
They plowed long furrows on my back.

Latin-taught grammar, crossword puzzles, French and Italian cognates. Speaking of cognates, she says my brother Robert and I have opposite aims, but our children are the same. Maybe our aims are not so different. Anything but blame the real cause, the infamous Y chromosome.

When I woke this morning early as always, took my wife in my arms as always, I began to see the eyes of my father's father who died when he was 19. His eyes were alive, metaphoric coals, stars, glints, a warrior's eyes when challenged, like my own. He was a Mennonite, a quiet man, except for the eyes and the muscular build. They said I had his build and worried I would die young. He was a pacifist obviously. Contradictions. They said he would not stand up to his father. as if that were something worth doing, implied he internalized stress, that it killed him and not the nitrite diet, the red meats, high blood pressure, etc. inherited. I had seen his eyes in pictures, never close up as my own. This leads to continued speculations about the Y chromosome, that there is continuity, inherited traits passed to sons from some repeated pattern, not that one wishes to name it, simply that there is a Y inheritance.

But "in quantitative genetics models that included a maternal effect made more accurate predictions." If only the genome is passed to the offspring this must be false. But in the case where the genome is changed by...and that's the point, what changes the genome?

"If you were to compare the genomes of two randomly selected individuals you would find that they are not identical, but on average contain differences every 1,000 base pairs or so. The most common form of these differences is "single nucleotide polymorphisms," or SNPs (pronounced 'snips'). Occasionally, new SNPs arise that allow certain individuals in a population to be healthier and produce more offspring, and these variants become more frequent through the process of natural selection. Although there is considerable interest in finding regions of the human genome that have been targets of natural selection, the tools and resources needed to do so are only now becoming widely available." Adaptive Changes In The Genome May Provide Insight Into The Genetics Of Complex Disease. ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2004) Online.

It has been believed only negatives, diseases, pollutions change so. This causes a lot of problems for the eco-freud-ems, for the masculine is not in favor. Recently it is theorized that viruses pass on inherited traits, but also that learned traits, breakages are passed on, things environmentaly caused from pollution that cause immune deficiency are passed on. That is, that's a Lamarckian view of biology, learned, acclimated traits inherited, which runs counter to I science. which has everything in the now, or is that I aesthetics, I modernism?

I refer to Torah, the statement that blessings flow to a thousand generations, curses to three or four, but of course the curses are modified by the chromosome healer, of which another place. Other than selective breeding how do you explain that the ten generations of these ancestors lived so long, 18th century types into their 90's, consistently. How explain that Mennonites, a belief system, have such longevity if you look for instance at the age breakdowns in the Hereford graveyard tombstone inventory in PA. You can say it is their gene pool. But you know there are too many exceptions in their neighbors. This is an anecdotal study, who is going to compare longevity into different populations? Get a life. Belief anyway isn't a proof system. People have all kinds of odd beliefs they can't prove. Like modernism, autonomy, freedom, divorce from tradition. They might as well believe the word of God.

I am reminded now that on my last birthday I woke up seeing the face of my 18th century ancestor Jacob, with the perception that his face was my own. If I am Jacob then talk to my brother. He has the same genes. Look in his eyes. Look in the eyes, the spirits of his sons, at their characters.

Reliving Anna’s farm days again, fleeing the farm to get away from the German and the opinions, this liberation a release from the past. Getting up to communion in Bally wasn’t easy. Uncle Andrew S. Mack, the bishop, was older than Anna by two generations, but they shared mutual respect and affection, 34 to 80. But not a part of this world.

Boundary

The Greek orthodox don’t worship icons, the representations of dead saints.
Her contention is, “I’m not an icon cause I’m not dead!”
I want to tease, “but you will be!”
Which of course would generate, “which, an icon or dead?”

I can have these conversations with her in my mind.
She doesn’t have to be here. But she is. Or she was. Or she still is. It depends on whether at any particular time someone is living or dead. And getting the last laugh too. Let’s see, is that an icon?
No.
A myth?
No.
She is a boundary I patrol to confirm the fences, to see that all is sound, safe in the camp.

Her take on diagnosing Alzheimer’s: there’s no test in the brain of a live person for which there is an incremental diagnosis, 500x5000x500000. Also that there’s some chemically directed treatment put into the brain that takes the disease out. The long progression of the disease and the upset at its denial in society and families makes this so.

Somehow we get to my recommendation that they put her picture in the window of her bank, which has a teller in her 80’s, because “banks are people too.”
But she reminds me, “so are computers."

In all this the physical therapy for her hip is recommended to the infirm: step up, 1,2,3. Turn failure into success, weakness into strength, 1,2,3. All wanting “to exceed their capabilities.”

Stepson Bruce finished radiation for brain cancer. His older son, 23, is in jail on murder charges. The State police questioned him so he reached for a gun in his waistband. They wanted the gun because it had been matched for an unsolved murder. His bail is 100K. Five police took him down. Bruce blames Judy. Judy blames Bruce. Brian got the calaboose.

I hear ringing. She’s on a three month recall for eye cataract surgery but when she gets tired from reading she uses liquid tears. There is an eclipse of the moon tonight. The trees are late, the leaves not down.
I ask her, “you think I’m a good Mennonite for not voting?”
She responds, “Henry voted, but he was concerned about Helen going out with a Democrat.”

She has mailed great nephew Aaron a form to fill out. Check the blanks:
The check I sent is:
1) never received it
2) lost it
3) won’t cash it
4) can’t go to the bank.
Followed by the query “whether you still use cash?”

She went to buy new orthopedic shoes and pulled out a check to pay but was told, “we don’t accept checks any more.”

To her friend Bud on his birthday, “I’m here today to know how to act when I get to be 97.”

CEO

Realists are grieved by expressionists, but it’s so terrible to grow old when the realists come to get cha. Considering her dislike of the bourgeois, the drinks, the gossip and the social act, I thought I could have been her son. Before she got terminal, as she now boasts, she prattled of any silly thing in her life (not so easily the serious, left alone mostly), from George Eliot on TV to translations of Virgil. Now, CEO of her own death, she has ponsibilities, too busy to talk, there are details to arrange. Dictate the dénouement. Sell the house. Sign the paper. Get lists going. Are those letters of appreciation coming in? Entertain the guests at bedside.

Under the influence of such “realism” I am blinded by a common philosophy, but then the image of her from childhood revives my memory. She is Lady Philosophy. Now I’m her father. Sacrifice will for duty. She would hate to call it love. She hated he was so “dominated,” assumes that I think he was weak.

Looking at his image I think he was tough, but appearances are deceiving. In all the years I made inquiries of her family, from the 1970’s on, all the 30 years after Anna died,she never mentioned the hoard of watercolors, the books, the documents, the files of evidence, barely spoke of linens, the gaudy Dutch china. Her letters about Mennonites in the late 80’s were an exception, partial because a lot of it is public record.

Now she is gone I divine who Grandmother Mack’s grandmother was.
But the effervescence lasts.

She asks the church bus driver, Charlie, if he’s going to wear his Santa Claus suit this year. Biddies on the left and right think Charlie's going to drive as Saint Nick.

But she buttons her realism at church, prudent at Circle, Sunday School and study group when the ladies talk Rapture. Mennonites are not utterly enraptured. She can wear the protective coloring of the flock. They see her strait-laced and serious, one who needs protecting even while they are afraid of her. My siblings are. Who isn’t?

It’s no wonder she says that “they can't tell when I'm kidding and when I'm serious!”
I’m always kidding, so we get along.

But it’s not all satire, there is a longer rhythm to her thought, a wisdom,
greater part reflection and concentration applied before she surrendered to the end game.

Make-Believe Life

There are other daily tests too, Tiggy, her nursing student driver, quit or was fired today,
"I yelled at her and she yelled at me.”
Tiggy wanted "a life of her own," but needed a whole new life just to improve her skills with fussy old ladies.
Remember, this is the pre-nicens period.

How do you get a life of your own?
"The idea is ridiculous, especially if you have children, " as Tiggy did.
“What life of your own?"
"Your own comfort, space, belongings, home, thoughts?”
Who has their own thoughts? Aren't what pass for “thoughts” the residue of milky media, boiled down to the denominator?
“How are you to have your own life without your own thoughts?"
“How are you going to get your own thoughts unless you think?”
How can you think if you don't know what was thought?
“But that would require study! So does having your own life.”
Life is make-believe for poor Tiggy.
"You don't ever get to have a life of your own unless you earn it."

She worked at Strawbridge's in 1930 at $18 a week, (Tiggy is at $12 an hour), first in fabrics, then in the toy department where the nasty Scotsman gave you a pasty reproof if he found you lounging at end of day. You got a lunch hour, no breaks, but you could go to the bathroom.

“That was the only place you could sit down.”

Well, “that wasn't a life either but nobody said a word 'cause they needed a job.” Forty years and more than million bucks later!

Along the way her new vision makes a mess. She says of the radio in the kitchen: "isn't that awful it's so dirty."
Anybody can visit old ladies, but don’t look up at the ceiling. It’s hanging down in places

Are You Only a Physical Being?

I meditated her life for decades. She says she tried hard to leave it in God’s hands. Of the indelible memories, effects of the feminine upon innocence in countless walks and conversations from earliest age, the last occurred when I was 21, an insider’s walking tour of New York City from one who had gone there as a buyer every three months for thirty years, but the hour long conversations I had with her by phone those last years were a walking tour through her mind and through the near and far Pennsylvania Dutch past.

I call her today, my 62nd birthday. Her courage inspires me. She immediately takes the offense, queries, “are you only a physical being?"

I hate to be cornered. It’s a struggle to be a physical being. What kind of a question is that on your birthday?
If it weren’t for my wife I probably wouldn’t be a physical being.

I never told her that after I had shouldered the burden of her estate, which was more than physical, dismantled, packed it and drove it cross country, that I had continual lightning flashes in my eyes and one night extreme dizziness that lasted two months (till the brain rewired itself from the stroke). She was well upon the threshold then herself. Being physical has impediments measured in blood scans, pulse rates and torn ACL’s. My resting pulse was a paltry 40. I had to wear a Holter heart monitor for 24 hours to see about it. A little low, asymptomatic, I had consciously wanted it low all those years. Now that they tell me they could install a pacemaker I want it higher.

Only a physical being? Do I desire, as at seventeen, to wrap the universe with my mind and bring it to earth? The only difference, I work at it ten hours a day. I don’t tell her that. There are reminders of physical being where I train. How do people get so misshapen? The outer worlds practice the inner.

These stops are always connected in her itinerary though. “Are you only a physical being” is her way of saying that this week, at 94, she has taken public transit three times for examinations of eye, teeth and foot.

On the first drive she was picked up by a very old black man who declared to her with great authority, "I hope you're grateful to God for being the way you are," meaning navigating the transit system by herself, as though she were some apparition. She is impressed. Maybe he was the apparition. She felt he spoke with the authority of a priest. I have met this man.

On the second trip, to the dentist, another slightly less old black driver had her age on the pickup form. He said, as if scripted, "I hope you're grateful for being able to do what you do at your age." You don’t need to see  angels to benefit or even believe in them.

She savors the moment. Like any last survivor, why am I alive? "My father died at 47, my mother at ninety, my sister at 49 and my brother at 85. God must have a reason for me to still be here." She believes in the reason but doesn't know what it is, survivors' guilt at surviving. With gratitude that she is taken care of I am silent. Love is the most important word in this language. She would not believe the reason of her being is my consolation, that she is a gift to me.

I argue the platitude that as she has lived with ideas and aesthetics so austere that she must accept the resulting  health and long life as obvious connotations of her thinking, not to speak the independent nature which makes her do everything herself. She was 72 when she first felt tired. That was the year she married. The only time she married.

She's promising to reread Paul Tournier's The Seasons of Life because of the four seasons, winter is the one where you don't do, you just be. She’s approaching Abraham’s second childhood. Maimonides says being green and supple in old age means bearing children. I tell her I wish her the generic but not the specific in the joy of transit.

What time is it in the long day? Her standing joke, a rule she maintains, she will receive guests only after 10 AM. It takes a while no matter where you live to dress, get into support stockings alone. Her ankles have largely failed from walking everywhere. There is a circulation problem too.

Husband Marvin’s pills used to take an hour by themselves, but she jokes that when the old body shuts down you can save time on baths, just the thing any twelve year old boy is after. Sweat glands don't work much so you have less laundry.

On the flip side you will always be laughing at the absurdities of life, teeth, glasses and lists, but only when you live alone do you talk to yourself, which she confesses. When you go terminal, into hospice and life care, there are too many people watching to laugh or talk. Even breaking a hip at ninety didn’t tie her down, so after, when she got the cataract out, she hoped, but the gall bladder broke and the pancreas failed.

"I make lists, plenty of them, because I have lots of old paper, even if it is yellowing around the edges. Then I tear them up. But I have a hard time throwing away old paper so I make new lists."

The yellowing edges of image, old paper stored in drawers, disposable lists, the bygone year, have plenty still to write on to pass time in her continuing day.

For me the question is where I can find a hat hard enough to keep from banging against materialisms of inattention not exclusive to alcohol alone. The only hard hat I know is somebody not willing to temporize to get along, with memory intact. I miss the folk authorities most in times of crisis, this latest, the sinking of New Orleans leaves no one left to appeal to in confidence. I could always in their later years so confide in my father and in her.

She doesn’t understand why her left leg betrayed her when she fell. I had that feeling when I backed out of my driveway into the path of an oncoming car. Was it the eyes, the brain, the attention failed? Questions go on. We try to answer.

The Amish Mennonites have a take on it. This guy on his way to Nebraska at Christmas ran out of gas twice, once going and once coming on the same trip. Invoking divine purpose, he said it must have been because he was supposed to talk to truck drivers and tow cops. Does it help you to understand such speech if you know his father is a Mennonite Elk hunter? A three shell man.

Anyway, she concludes, her left leg had the heavier burden since the right leg had worn out its tendons. This made her limp. She turned round too quick, lost her balance. The word arthritis occurs in this. I tell her I don’t believe in it.

I have the same problem with arthritis she does with Abraham’s old age, thinks it myth. She can’t feel anything in two toes. Our pain hold us mutual hostage, but we don’t think that it has meaning for anyone else do we? My pain is for me. And what do I learn? To activate the sense, but not like my dog putting up her nose in the air and howling at the crane cleaning out the canal. We have to own our pain, not pretend it’s for someone else’s good. Either that or we can take the road old pietist John Arndt set out, purgation is our perfection and we should only be concerned if things are going well.

When pain deniers talk about Job all kinds of e-mail rescues get loosed, but not personally. Nobody ever got themselves rescued just like in a previous era none got stoned either. They heard about it. She lived it.

I tell her how the Mennonite Sunday School came up with a story about pain from Guideposts as exemplary piety. A father was watching his son and another boy drown. The father believed he could only save one, so because the other boy was “unsaved” and his son would “go to heaven,” he saved the other boy. What happened to the saved boy? The man pointed to the pulpit. “He’s the pastor.”

He made his son into Kierkegaard’s Isaac; the last person to save is the Christian, since they’re going to heaven. I get sarcastic at this nonsense, say things I shouldn’t, like, “you’ll never meet a pastor like that.” The false dilemma glorifies pastors at any cost. “Whose PR department wrote that?”
“What a good man he was to condemn his own son. Why it sounds just like the Bible.”
“Did the guy think he was Abraham? “
“Do you ever stop to question your assumptions?”

They probably think Isaac mythological, but do not pose as Michael Sattler, the Mennonite father torn apart and crucified in 1527: some “accuse God…of not being willing to keep them under His protection,’ he says, but “if you love God you will …endure all that comes from God.” A momentous glassenheit resignation.

While dude was not rescuing his son, boy was thinking, my own father won’t save me! Kierkegaard didn’t write Guideposts. He wrote Fear and Trembling. When his father raised the knife over his head what was Isaac thinking? Kierkegaard’s solution was that Abraham acted as if he were mad in order to save his son’s faith. How could Isaac trust in a God who ordered his death? Admittedly she is sensitive about her Abraham etc. but she says, “I never understood Kierkegaard.”

I blast her out the Hebrew text with the background narrative from Auerbach, that such detail was left out just on purpose, so you would participate, the opposite of the Greek where all that foreground description occurs. In the Greek, Isaac would be pictured in agony like Michael Sattler. Abraham and Sarah would have been arguing, “where did you say you were going?”

But her stepson Bruce is in for it too. He came home from brain surgery at Temple Hospital after only 4 days. His old tumor of the esophagus had metastasized. They got it all….

Yes, I got nailed by a pregnant illegal immigrant lady in a red car who drove off. I chased her dragging my bumper. What is that a symbol of? Seizing any pretext I tease my wife about it, “how are you going to maintain the illusion that I’m invincible?“

But my aunt has learned this from breaking her hip. “One minute you take a step, the next you are down. How did I get here?”
“The Lord was telling me that my plans were not his plans.”
“Did you find our what His plans were?”
“Not yet.”
Ask Abraham. To affront the reigning realism., “nada problema can separate you from my love.”

I clip the hedge around the drive, but slip that Mennonites for all that seem genuine. She will not be coddled, mumbles, “being genuine is not limited to the lower middle class.”

Marriage

Her realism is not impeccable. Years before, she recalls, her sister had come home from holiday once at the last leaf cleanup of the year. Heavy rain and wind had made the huge sycamore leaves disappear from the tree, blanket the yard. While raking these leaves years later, at age 72, she says God told her to marry Marvin.

It’s hard to know what this means because now she cannot rake at all. Until 50 she had wanted a dog, a dachshund maybe, she says. She lived with her mother though, who, being raised on the farm had had too many dogs. Those years from 30 to 60 she worked 7 AM till 9 PM on weekends, almost as long during the week. When she was 60 and her mother died she again thought about a dog, but decided it would be too much trouble, would tie her down from her travels. So she got married. Perched on the couch, knees together, a brilliantly superior smile on her face, she looked way down the nose and fired out the announcement ferociously: “guess what I’m going to do?”

Marvin was a pacifist, which came up soon after they married when he heard a noise in the upstairs hall of their home, just outside the bedroom door. He was near eighty but much a scout. As the intruder entered Marvin reflexively slammed the door really hard into his head, which marked the end of the intrusion and may have saved their lives. Like the trick questions they’re supposed to ask conscientious objectors at draft boards, what would you do if, etc, knowing his quietist roots, I ask, “what about pacifism?”

He said he was sorry he done it. Would he do it again if somebody were attacking his home? Yes. The best answer is human like his. If I hurt the intruder I'll regret it. But I, check one, a. will, b. will not, hang his head on the post? Is it the same way with marriage? Would you do it all over again? Maybe it depends on what you remember.

Marvin wore two watches, but came into the kitchen to look at the clock on the wall. She assumed he was checking his watch against the time, told him to get it fixed. Now she realizes he wasn’t processing time as an abstraction. What the eyes saw the mind didn't. Seeing he did not see, so in spite of his watches he never knew the time.

Exposition of this fastens on a vet who treated a blind lizard. Diagnostic blood work found lizard on the brink of diabetes, fat deposits behind the eyes made it blind. The vet prescribed a daily walk and a new diet. The treatment worked. “Lizard receives sight,” I want to holler, but it’s not a miracle. She has gotten her sight back after suffering a cataract and a blind right eye for a decade. She always said if she survived Marvin she would have it done, but couldn't risk it if she had him to care for. These days she goes to hospitals as patient not visitor. Spunky men, lean posts comment about how she has kept her figure. Punning on her name, Young?

She attracts opposites. When Marvin had begun to stir, her main concern was not to hurt his feelings, for she intended to let him down, but for raking her Sycamore. But people are fickle. When she broke her hip she was “mad at God because I couldn’t take care of myself” which really means that she couldn’t take care of Marvin. She began an antic act as though it “wasn’t so bad.” This defense gave Marvin the wrong cues. Because she didn’t share her pain he thought she didn’t have any. She surmises now that he was jealous, thought she was malingering, which, with his disease, Alzheimer’s, made it difficult for him. He knew he had Alzheimer’s but denied it too.

Still withal, considering the ways over to the exit sign it could have been worse. She has aspirin and Advil. He escaped with his gall bladder, no hepatitis from blood transfusion, no cirrhosis, no liver transplant, no 5 way heart.

On rainy days in winter, nobody to talk to, she will spend an hour sometimes.
We dispute the semantics of “hot water heater.” Marvin worked for a company that insisted that they be called “water heaters.” Isn’t it obvious that this is so? Marvin was cynical about commerce, looked for investments that had a social good. He felt the rhetorical smirks of commerce wage war against philosophy. Truth hard to find, he would speculate it by the hour.

Take any affirmation you like or why not just admit that “dust storms may exist” and Abraham too old? I invoke the life of the mind in these matters to players at the tennis clinic. They eye me like bovines.

But the marriage has affected her more deeply that she will let on. Going to get new glasses this Friday, she felt "divorced" from the old . Glasses are like husbands, she says. Husbands are protectors. She wears the old boys habitually in the kitchen to protect her eyes from the heat of the stove, the cold of the fridge. "My blind eye is jealous. I 'm used to doing everything on the left side (the repaired eye) but now the right eye (the blind one) wants me to use both eyes. It wants to see too!" She had had the habit of turning her head to make contact with images; now the right eye tries to straighten the head.

As though it were a paper read to some convention she concludes, "it's not only what you see, it's what your brain interprets about what it sees." Were it a poem this would read:

“If vision is so mental dear,

what shall we say of ears?”

But after the husbands, the gadgets and the glasses, the cataracts, there's still no end of fears of tests a doctor gives and of none of these disasters can you read a week later because you have no good eye to see with while the surgery heals, does that mean you are afraid?

No. Angry is more like it.

“My eye tells me how long I can read,” she says, “even large print. “The brain gets upset because it thinks since I have sight in one eye I can see better, but I can’t, I have to be careful. I get this push once in a while to do something I can’t do [hopscotch?], neither impulse nor irrational, a sympathetic nervous system thing between the right eye and left, as if the right eye could affect the left eye.” I don't have to listen to Charlie Rose when this is available. Echoes of a husband, “the two eyes were designed to work together.” “I practice by shooting used tissues at the wastebasket from close range and I miss,” all very poignant to the hearer, speaking as it does in symbols of other things. She excels in such speech.

Her town, Media, is battening down for the coming hurricane and those terrorist preparations are useful too. She has laid up batteries with long life, and water. Marvin was always prepared. He had a collection of rare Philmont Scout Ranch shirts, ready for rain or sun, wore pitch black heavy sunglasses, a tam o’shanter, and sweaters all the time. He drove right up to the end, was 94 himself. You did well to see him coming, but he did well too as long as the mind was firm.

This week she was driven up to Coopersburg in a hearse with Marvin’s ashes to put them in the grave next to Stella, his first. Can you actually believe such a sentence could be written? They dug up the grave and put in the box. At such times I am desperate for irrelevancies. Was the weather good? When she committed herself to that terminal care and abandoned her house in one fell swoop, when I called the ER on a guess, etc. and was told I couldn't talk because I wasn't HIPPA enou, but the staff revealed she had been admitted, operated and was recovering in ICU, then I sang a long tune out of the Grizzley Bear Rocketta, that goes:

When the tongue comes out a grumbling

and the soul is out to eat,

do you get the message

or do I have to repeat?"

There are hundreds of verses. Don't start! Anything but confront the real issue. You did what? But she took that drive as a free outing.

Women do all the life sustaining and death work, as at the tomb of the Lord. As Anna was scraping old Jacob off the floor, Aunt Sue was putting in his teeth. She is digging up Stella’s grave so Marvin can wake there at the resurrection.

But this picture of her with Marvin is at the North Cemetery where she will reside with Anna, Florence and her father.
Does it bother me? It doesn't bother her. Marvin was a naturalist and a nonviolent Quaker while he rambled. But I have this passion against death still unresolved, nurtured by receiving a note that hinted of my brother's death while I was on a bus to the remote coast of eastern Costa Rica. I want to compose absurd sentences. I don’t think love a duty and I don’t think she does either. Love is a pain. So she says to me, “it was a nice diversion.”

A painless drive, a comfortable car and thou.

She will be buried across town.There are so many people ahead of me in this queue that dying should be no chore, except the retarding love for life. Unfinished business. Who can finish? She didn’t want to die. Before the medical event she was planning the next year. I didn’t go to the burial. I had continually asked her about what she was going to say when she sees me the time after death. We fenced the issue to a draw. She says, “I try very hard to leave it in God’s hands.”
Whose doctrine of fairness is fair? Justice gets me in trouble. Love makes no record of wrongs, but justice does. Love is a pain we bear, those lucky to get it.

Silk Dress

She has a handmade silk dress in the attic wardrobe now retrieved to the second story. Frame it, I say. No, she says, “I leave it in the closet, sometimes try it on.”

It deepens my reverence for this museum piece. Going to church for her is like trying on this dress, a preparation ready begun, a signature of the week, starts it off right. On the downhill side she finds that different ministers have different goals. Faith leads to action which leads to attitude. But attitude bogs. “The religious are always behind the curve,” she says, “can’t realize that the past is the past. Call it what you will, everyone is so desperate to fit in, fit into the knowledge of the past, fit into the identity their schoolmates gave them, fit into the identity of their job, the host of other-centered conventions, conformity, the myth of their being.”

You invoke the outlier. Exogenous!

Her flip side is that when you fit in you can realize your destiny. This sense of tradition is also like trying on the handmade silk dress, becoming what you have become and finding it like what your mother became. Which brings back the past and saves from reductionism, from the pathetic lament of Robert Lowell, misquoted here on purpose to set it right: “stalled by the climacteric of his want.” There is no stalling here, the car drives straight through to the after life.

Anna, cared for by this daughter in later years, insisted about 1965, “I'm not going to be a sweet old lady.” Forty years later the daughter chimes in. “He's a bore. His brother’s a bore.” “I'm glad I'm named after you,” I report, but when the sparks fly in my direction I keep a watchful eye. She goes back and forth on being sweet.

Institutionalized she makes a steady effort to be nice to the help and to the visitor friends just because she doesn’t feel so good. Of negative capability, holding simultaneously two contradictory truths, that’s more fun, it’s easier to do the opposite of what you feel to her way of thinking. She turns pain and pleasure. The worse it is the more she doesn’t show it. She has pain pills, a regimen, but because it’s harder to be nice it appeals to her to do so. Also, it’s a nice survival technique. Living alone on Orange St. she could get real tired of being nice and would flay the edges with wit because that was more fun. Yes the dress fits.

"I'm getting more like my mother every day."

Letting Go

She was still attached to that four story house she lived in 60 years, survived its sale by three weeks, but it kept her busy.

She wanted notes of appreciation from those who received the belongings. “What happened to the tile tables, the silver? Where’s the strawberry bowl? What happened to the Thirty Thousand Immigrants book I told you Jerry faxed John that he wanted. Well I guess I can’t expect you to remember everything (anything!). Where’s the genealogy?”

She made lists of questions on her bed at night and grilled them in the morning. I brought a flipper, but didn’t tell her I wasn’t going to the funeral, couldn’t stand the thought of her rising up with more questions. John took the workbench. Joey got the kitchen table, the Sydenham chair. But half hadn’t gotten anything. It sat in boxes on my porch awaiting post. “Where’s the Ming dog from the closet? Who has the crystal from the buffet, it’s worth $150.” Things were up from $100. Nothing had any greater value the lawyer said. I added a zero to the oak dropleaf desk/bookcase, felt his mental cringe. The present age of everything was the 30’s. That too would change.

She was still attached to that body too. Hospice wanted to increase the pain meds, but the real pain was emotional and mental. Memory fading at last, old scores needed feminine sympats and care, pats on the hand and heart hugs when she lamented she had no daughter. She admitted when her niece left that she shed a tear, but said it was inside. Nephews! Adam had'em! By that time I was afraid to telephone her at all except I needed identities of some photos. I did call, three times, got a busy signal, a no answer, and an “I can’t talk.” The hard hat, hard edge unsentimental eye beat Rimbaud in one thing, showed him how to sacrifice art for life, art for love and art for duty, not for the drug of self infatuation.

Attic and Basement

In those perennial four levels, basement, first floor, second floor, attic, each closet hid a world. I entered them consciously determined to see and find, but likely there was more. There's still room under the surface. It won’t surprise me if she had trapdoors in the floor. On wash days she would descend that basement and go through the boxes of her past on top of the dryer while waiting for the clothes. She wouldn’t go to the attic. The steps were steep and twice as many. There was no necessity in the allegory, she would get there.Anyway “it’s dirty up there.” In old age, the allegory reads, we can go down, but not up, and when old age ends?

In the attic where we come from, the chests, wardrobes and trunks reside, cookware from the woodstove, old German books, show towels of ancestors inside trunks, bookcases stocked with poetry, pottery, blankets, files, her childhood rocker, quilts, pre-life and childhood experiences. Old men would queue to spend an hour there. The smells, the dim light, the red wood, the open frame roof would cure them of old age. I knew this eternal delight my whole life, stayed there continually as a child. The boxes and the chests, the wardrobes piled high, the attic was where I slept as a boy, under the A-frame red ceiling with the still lifes.

The attic was up two flights for old men, but the basement just one down. They would settle for it, trade gables for stone and casement windows. The basement held Marvin’s father’s fine wood handled tools, planes, levels, rasps, wooden screw clamps my oldest son brought away on visits that Bruce gave him, the wood aged a dark patina.

In this solitude Marvin kept the luminous rocks collected from all over southeast Pennsylvania and the world, raw materials for the gates of his Jerusalem, jasper, red like the petrified woods of north Arizona, amber, obsidian, garnets in quartzite, tan and white feldspar with quartz, green chrysogalla, milky quartz, fluorescent Deweylite, six sided tourmaline with mica, tan calcite with fluorescing pink franklinite crystals (!), white calcite with bornite and chalcopyrite, grey limestone with calcite, talc, speckled granite, shell fossils, jasper fossils, crustacean fossils, talc, lava, chalcopyrite with copper ore, (Fool’s gold), round balls of fire garnets. They were stored there like memories of fine art.

When I visited with my sons, 8 and 14, Marvin would disappear with them into the basement after dinner and go through the boxes for hours. He gave them stones for their gates. Then he gave about 40 boxes to the geological society. Years and years after his departure we were still finding them, plates of fern fossils stuck in padded mailing envelopes, cereal bowls full of buffalo nickels, jars of Indian head pennies under the old dining room table from Syndenham St., the claw feet coming apart near the old wood stove from 1900, the cabinet antagonist of grandfather Jake, who she said had made it just to prove he could be contrary, and the chest Harvey Mack made for her when she lived in Ephrata in the 30’s, with copious notes from all her trips abroad. Mundane things were there, the storm windows and doors I flew out to put up each fall and then flew out again in the spring to take down, stuck up against the old coal bin, detailed images of the old house domestic Dutch.

She had had a railing installed by a female carpenter down these basement steps, for her steps were frail. In the years of broken hip, lost husband, repaired cataract, this realist could have used loaves and fishes, water turned into wine. I longed to do this for her.

The best I ever did was when I sent my wife and son to visit and wrangled tickets to the Barnes Museum, where she, the artist, had never been. Of course she told them she wouldn’t go, but my wife rented a wheelchair and my son pushed her to the rented car, and up the Barnes elevator she went round the tiny rooms with their masterpieces as numerous as stars.

[to be continued...]