memories

What I did this summer

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‘A Seasonal Report from Lutheran Liar’

I’ve started seeing those end-of-summer posts on Facebook and Instagram. You know the ones. A fallen red maple leaf with a caption like “Finally!” or “Can’t happen soon enough!” And what’s with the pumpkin spice? They didn’t even wait for September.

Well, it is September. And this morning I woke up to a 60-degree morning so crisp I had to layer on a fleece for my bike ride. So okay, I get it. Fall is (ouch) here. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. Nah, I like summer. Always have. And it always goes too fast for me. This year’s seemed even faster than usual, what with all the action packed into its sweaty little months.

The hammock got some use over Memorial Day, cradling our nephew Matt and wife Sharona. No time to use it since!

Memorial Day seems like a budding-green blur in the rearview; then it was June and our Dartmouth Reunion Adventure. (See “It’s Not Easy Being Big Green” for a madcap recap.)

With former roomie Sex (er, Lex) and wife Susan outside Dude Man’s dorm

Once we were over the excitement of being representatives of the 50th (gasp) Reunion Class, we were back to our usual Amagansett highjinks. Climbing up ladders and clipping things for The Dude. Knitting up garments large and small for me.

Dude scaling some heights to do some rope tying. Or something else equally precarious

On terra firma, doing something involving a rose bush my Dad got us. (Kite-board visible on top of Honda in the background; must not have been any wind at this moment)

People are always asking me, now that I’m retired, if I get bored. Actually, this is usually the question: “Aren’t you bored?” Well, actually, no. I divide my time into two blocks: Stuff I Have to Do, and Stuff I Want to Do. I try to do the “have to” stuff first, and by the time I do, it’s, like 3:00. And I haven’t even dipped into the “Want to” stuff yet (!)

So no. I’m not bored.

I mean, how could a person be bored with fascinating stuff like this to read?

Speaking of reading, my “subject” this summer was Alice Munro. For those of you who don’t already know this, each summer I pick an author I like (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf) or am curious about (Penelope Fitzgerald) or both (Larry McMurtry) and read a good biography while revisiting the writer’s works. This way, questions like “What the heck is with Ethan Frome?” get answered. It’s really fun; you should try it! The Alice project was, however, somewhat disappointing. The biography I read failed to mention that Alice’s second husband molested her daughter (!!!) And, hey, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty important piece of info to glean by accident from a Wikipedia entry instead of reading about at length in a biography.

I also read a lot of other stuff. This summer I dug into 70s fiction like Jaws and Stepford Wives and Diary of a Mad Housewife. The movies too! Delicious!!!

And there were more trips. I went to visit my Mom and Sister; the visit was enhanced by the surprise addition of The Child. Much fun was had by all generations. And dog.

Best place to be on a summer evening: Laura and Dave’s backyard

More backyard fun, with canine

After that, it was a coed baby shower to honor our Future Grandchild, placeholder name Zeus. San Franciscan Adventures ensued, including a brush with danger. (See “The Streets of San Francisco” for almost-gory details.)

How I picture The Child in my head

How The Child really looked at her baby shower. (Yes, that’s ecstatic me smack-dab next to her)

Oh, and somewhere in there this summer was a museum benefit featuring birds of prey, a visit from Dude Man’s sister and plenty of tomatoes and mozzarella. Not sure which of these was the most filling.

Fancy Hamptons party guest. With human

Fancy tomatoes for lunch. With cheese

Decidedly not fancy taco party. With Sister-in-Law. Somewhere in there (Or maybe she took the photo?)

Well. Time to wrap this up before this not-summer-but-feels-pretty-darned-spectacular day is over. I still have quite a bit of Fun Stuff to fit in.

I’ll leave you with this delightful photo of the Soon-to-Be-Parents, taken at their place in Flagstaff this past Labor Day Weekend. *sigh*

Amagansett, New York. September 2024

This Christmas is going to pot (roast)

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‘It’s high time to bring back that classic.’

As I wrote in my sort-of-whiny and somewhat-navel-gazing post last week, I’ve practiced a rather opt-out attitude toward the Holidays in the past few years.

Some years my “decorating” consisted of switching the turkey napkins for the reindeer ones

I remember only too fondly and well the famous Marilyn Christmasses celebrated at my late great Gramma Peterson’s when I was a kid. Nat King Cole on the stereo. Gumdrop tree on the table. A luxurious evergreen so bushy and tall Aunt M would often have to crop it so it’d fit in the living room. (We believed her when she told us the top, complete with angel, was in the bedroom overhead.) 

A Marilyn Christmas Classic: The Cousin Lineup

After that, during Dude Man and my Early Married Years, there were the amazing Aunt Eleanor Christmasses: lobster, shrimp and, if you saved room, an incredible roast beef dinner complete with popovers. Gramma Whitmore, who made it till a week before her hundredth birthday, would hold court while Eleanor cooked, champagne glass in hand.

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“Hey, Aunt Marilyn! Everybody’s up!”

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‘Missing the Most Marvelous Aunt the World Has Ever Known’

The quote serving as title of this story came from the wee toddler lips of my Oldest Younger Brother Scott. When he was very small he would march into our Aunt Marilyn’s room very early in the morning and announce that “everybody” was up — “everybody” meaning him.

That’s my Aunt Marilyn standing in front of my Mom. She wasn’t much more than a toddler herself in this photo. But I bet she was a lot of fun, even then

See, when Aunt Marilyn was in the house you wanted her up and around and with you at all times. She was that much fun. So much fun to be around that we kids would actually fight over who got to sit next to her at family dinners. (I only realized years later that we were unintentionally hurting our other perfectly-good aunts’ feelings — not to mention our very fun mother’s — by doing this.)

Two sisters and their mom, my Gramma P

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“Swim, Sandy, swim!”

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‘Equal time for dogs’

My Porn Star Name is ‘Sandy Peterson’. In honor of Sandy the Dog, the beloved Pet of My Youth, pictured above in a moment of not-unusual adorableness.

But before we get to Sandy, a quick word about that word game. Maybe you played it too. It’s the one where you take the name of your beloved pet, add your mother’s maiden name, and, voila!, you’ve got your Porn Star Name. (The Child’s is ‘Tuna Henry’.)

I must admit ours are pretty tame. Over wine at my dining room table I’ve heard some easy-to-imagine-clad-in-fishnets doozies: ‘Pinky Parker’, ‘Missy Goodbody’. Though the Dude’s is ‘Duffy Miltner Flockmaster Cromartie’, which is pretty darned racy.

But back to pets, which is the point of this piece. A couple of weeks ago I waxed nostalgic about felines of yore in ‘The Cat Who Ran Away from Home and Broke My Heart’.

I finally found a picture of me with Aunt Marilyn’s Herkimer, the first cat I adored. And tortured with two-year-old abandon

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The Days of Wineberries and Roses

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‘Listening to the Warm: sensational summery sounds’

Forget Rod McKuen. It was Henry James who nailed summer. He once famously said that the two most beautiful words in the English language were ‘summer afternoon’. Go on; say them out loud. Better yet, murmur them.

‘Summer af-ter-noon‘. Mmmmmmmmm. You can practically feel that hammock swaying.

Now you’ve already heard me go on about the tastes of summer — I’ve waxed ravenously poetic about such seasonal delights as watermelon and corn and berries-somebody-else-picks and glorified rice and even (yum!) Jello Cake.

But I haven’t talked much about summer sounds. You know the ones I mean; sounds that really say summer. Fireworks. The ice-cream truck. And, for me anyway, that fwap fwap fwap sound that happens when you clip playing cards onto your bike spokes with clothespins and ride home from the Carlyle Municipal Pool gnawing on a frozen Milky Way.

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That’s my Bob

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‘Your family is who you think your family is’

My Middle Younger Brother Roger is many things: filmmaker, banjo player, wind miller, and maker of the best chili on the planet. Who knew he was also a trailblazer? Yes, Roger was a member of a ‘blended family’ way before ‘blended’ was a term stuck on the front of ‘family’.

That’s Middle Younger Brother Roger standing behind the couch and behind Mom

See, back when Roger was just a tyke, my dad was transferred to Memphis for his job and our young family landed (somehow, I’m not sure how or why, I was only seven at the time) in a very large house near a university. To help pay the rent, my parents took in boarders — a couple of college guys, one named Bill Something-or-Other and another named Bob Sipowich. They lived upstairs, kept to themselves. Everything worked out fine. Except for the time we kids (there were three of us at this point) all came down with the measles over Christmas at my Gramma Peterson’s so we had to stay there till we got well and the boarders didn’t feed or water our parakeet Petey while we were away and he (gasp) died.

Anyway. That was traumatic. Just had to get it out.

That’s Roger, practicing Dad’s “Whoa-Back” move, at about the age of this story

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