Author: Lynda Jones

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An Orphanage Volunteer

I wanted to feel useful. To volunteer my time for a worthy cause. To have something meaningful to do one afternoon a week, while I lived in Mazatlán. A friend was volunteering at the local orphanage and I asked her if I could tag along. She said, “Ok. But it’s harder than you think it’s going to be.” She was right. 

I still remember the names of some of the children at the orphanage. The babies were Diego and Daniella. Two of the older girls were Mariam and Lupita. There was one darling little boy who was angry and hateful. He captured my heart but I don’t remember his name. For this blog, I’ll call him Diablito. 

The woman who ran the orphanage was a beautiful, kind Mexican woman. She operated on a small budget and very little training. The children slept in dormitories, girls in one room and boys in another. Each child had his or her own bed and an orange crate on which to display pictures and shiny objects. Some children had pictures of the parents who had abandoned them, hoping that some day they would return to celebrate their birthday and take them home.

There were other volunteers. Church groups donated clothes and toys at Christmas. A Rotary Club donated money to put a tall swing in the dirt yard “playground.” But no one donated enough love to heal the children’s hearts.

The babies were fat and darling. They would be adopted before the year was out, by American families willing to pay a crooked attorney a lot of money in order to take them home. 

The older children seemed sad. They knew they would not be adopted. They went to school but didn’t have much energy for learning. My friend was a yoga teacher who led the girls in a yoga class every week. The girls loved her. They would have gladly stood on their heads for hours, just to see her smile. 

I participated in the yoga class and other activities that the yoga teacher arranged. Otherwise, I was pretty useless. I often positioned myself in the playroom and helped Diablito build tall block towers. One day, when he left the room to use the bathroom, the girls walked over to our tower and kicked it to pieces. Diablito came back to the room, screamed and burst into tears. I wanted to do the same.

I tried to hug Diablito. He tried to bite me. When I told the director what happened, she shrugged her shoulders and said it happened every time Diablito built towers. She suggested that if Diablito would stop building towers, the girls would stop kicking them over. I walked out the door, caught the bus, and went home. 

I volunteered at the orphanage for six months, from November until May. The next year I volunteered at the library. Other American women volunteered at the orphanage and were more creative and successful than I was.

One day I ran into the Orphanage Director at the bank. She had happy news. Diablito found a home with a family who wanted him. Diego and Daniella had been adopted, too. But the girls, Mariam and Lupita and the tower-kicking girls, were still waiting. 

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Feliz Cumpleaños, Mamacita!

Neto’s Mamacita, Zelmira Flores Aguilar, turned 94 last week. It’s a very long time for a woman to live in Mexico. Last year, when she turned 93, no one expected her to live another year. It’s not that Zelmira is sick or in pain. She is simply very old.

Zelmira lives in her house on Papagayo Street with Neto, his daughter, Vannya, and Vannya’s children, Danya and Emanuel. Neto isn’t sure how old the children are. He thinks that Danya is four and Emanuel is two. But he thought the same thing last year. I’m sure Vannya knows, but age just isn’t something that Neto thinks about unless he has to. 

Zelmira has had a long and interesting life. She raised seven children and provided for them by turning her living room into a neighborhood grocery store and breakfast cafe. Later, she followed Neto to California, worked as a housekeeper for a Cuban family in Echo Park, and ran an illegal business on the side, transporting clothes from California to Mazatlán.

Zelmira is no longer the terror she was when she threw Neto’s surfboard in the trash when he was fourteen. She’s no longer the young woman who made trips to the Vatican to see the Pope and to Portugal, to see the famous shrine to the Virgin of Fatima. Or the woman who went to Mexico City for the blessing of the Basilica. Or the woman who cried when JFK was assassinated. 

Zelmira is no longer the feisty woman I knew when I moved to Mazatlán. Back then, Zelmira would come by city bus, uninvited, to my house nearly every day. She rang the doorbell promptly at 7:45 and announce she had come to sweep my courtyard, even though I told her over and over, that I didn’t want her to sweep my courtyard. In fact, I paid someone else to sweep the courtyard. In fact, I was just waking up. I was happy to have Zelmira come in for a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, but only if she put down the broom. Sometimes that worked. Usually it didn’t. Zelmira was a woman who was always the boss.

Now, Zelmira is no longer in charge. Her husband died in 1993. Two sons and one grandson have died. All of her brothers are gone, except Uncle Mon, and almost all of her friends have died. At this point, Zelmira doesn’t know who is alive and who is not. She often mistakes Neto for her husband and wonders where her friends are. 

Neto’s father was right when he told Zelmira long ago, “Don’t hassle Neto. He’s the one who will take care of you when you are old.” Zelmira is not able to get out of bed and Neto and Vannya provide around the clock nursing care, including changing her diapers, washing her and getting her dressed every day.

As an old woman, Zelmira’s world is closing in around her. Her son, Franco, is not allowed inside the house, because he sold his mother’s cemetery plot to buy cocaine. Her daughter, Rosa, was recently asked to leave town after repeatedly screaming at Neto and Zelmira and then faking a seizure. 

Always a tiny woman, Zelmira is physically shrinking away, according to Neto. She weighs less than seventy pounds and sleeps most of the time. Once in a while Neto puts her in a wheelchair and takes her for a walk around the block. Sometimes he takes her to church, where the neighbors are delighted to see that she is still alive.

Zelmira likes the taste of food but her diet is extremely limited because she has no teeth. She lost her false teeth five years ago, when she visited Rosa. No one knew what happened to the teeth and there was no money available to replace them. Now Zelmira eats tiny amounts of watermelon and feeds herself watery oatmeal with slivers of bananas every morning. Neto makes her chicken broth with fideos (tiny noddles), but he has to be careful she doesn’t pour the broth on herself when she tries to lift the bowl to slurp the last few drops. 

Last week Neto bought his mother a small cake from Panama Bakery. Zelmira forgot it was her birthday.

“Who is this cake for?” she asked. 

Her eyes lit up when Neto said, “It is for you, Mamacita. Feliz Cumpleaños!”

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Jason Turns Forty-Eight

This week is Jason’s 48th birthday. I love remembering the day he was born. He was such a tiny baby, the doctor assumed he was going to be a girl. This was before the days of ultra-sound or amniocentesis. Back in 1973, no one knew what color to paint the nursery or knit the baby blankets until the baby was born. I was happy to have a girl. But when the doctor announced that he was a little boy, I was over the moon. I remember thinking, “another little boy in blue jeans” and laughing out loud at the thought of having two little boys to love.

That was also back in the day when mothers got to stay in the hospital for a long time after the baby was born. Jason and I hung out at St. Joseph’s Hospital for five days before we agreed to go home. In the meantime, Jim took care of Garth and together they painted the nursery blue.

More than anything, Jason has always been outgoing, cheerful, patient and kind. He makes friends quickly and still has many of his friends from high school. He’s a great dad to Devon, Tyler, Connor and Max. And to Kirby, their turtle, and Polaris, their dog.

Jason loves animals. When he was nine years old, he spent the first six weeks of summer vacation trying to grow tadpoles in a jar at home. Unfortunately, they all died (croaked?) before we left for Minnesota to pick up Garth. As soon as we got to my parents’ house, I realized that Jason was still thinking mostly about frogs. Every bait store we went into, he stood longingly over the frogs. When we went to my uncle’s cabin, Jason tried to catch frogs that lived by the dock. One morning I got up and overheard him calling all the pet stores in St. Paul to find out if they had frogs and how much they cost.

In one of those moves that mothers always regret, I agreed we could buy a frog, on the condition that he take good care of it. Jason took excellent care of it. And also of the salamander my cousin’s daughter found for him just before we left for Colorado.. 

We drove back to Denver with the frog and the salamander in an ice cream carton in the back seat. Jason took care of his frog then, and he took care of it later when the salamander ate the frog’s foot off. He called my dad to find out what kind of medicine he should put on the wound. He carefully rubbed an antibiotic on the frog’s front foot twice a day for a week until the infection was gone and the frog could again climb out of his terrarium every time the lid was left slightly ajar.

Next to his family, his friends, and his pets, Jason’s the greatest love is sports. When he was nine, he was addicted to watching All-Star Wrestling and the Roller Derby. He knew the life stories of the Road Warriors, the Fabulous Freebirds and Moon Dog Spot. Each week he could hardly wait to see if Gwen Miller would body-check Georgia Hasse over the railing and then stomp on her with her roller skates.

Jason wrestled in middle school and played baseball from the time he was seven until he was out of  high school. Being the youngest and smallest member of the team, Jason didn’t get to play a lot, but he never lost his enthusiasm for center field.

My most telling story about Jason, however, happened when he was in first grade and learning how rough the real world can he. He came home one night with a story about Dearmon, a boy in his class, who cried every morning. Finally, in exasperation, the teacher called a class meeting. Dearmon sobbed through the meeting and finally blurted out that he had no friends. He never had anyone to sit with at lunch or play with on the playground. Dearmon knew that absolutely no one in school liked him. At that point, Kiki, a most sympathetic and tactful girl, put her arm around Dearmon, looked anxiously around the room, and then told him, with much relief, he could stop crying ~ because Jason liked him.

Happy Birthday, Jason. Thank you for forty-eight wonderful years!

 

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An Olympic Adventure

It all started in late February, 1980. I was working in a four-track, year-round elementary school. One of my favorite families, a single father with three boys, didn’t return to school in January and everyone wondered where the children were. The teachers wanted me, the school social worker, to find out if everything was ok. I called their house. There was no answer. I knocked on their door. It looked as if they still lived there, but no one answered. I asked other students from the neighborhood  if they knew anything. No one seemed to know where they were. I decided not to panic. I wanted to wait and see.

At the end of February, the three boys came back to school with their father. They looked fine.

“Where have you been?” We all wanted to know.

“We were in Lake Placid, New York. We went to the Olympics.” The boys were excited. Their father was proud of what he’d done. The teachers were aghast.

“How could he take them out of school for such a long time? Doesn’t he know how important it is for them to be in school?”

I had a completely different reaction. I went home that night and couldn’t wait to talk to Garth and Jason over dinner. They were eleven and seven years old. 

“Guess what we’re going to do!” I announced. “We’re going to the Olympics.” 

I told them we needed to save our money because the 1984 Olympics would be in Los Angeles and we were going to be there. It was one of the best decisions of my life.

We saved our money. We bought tickets in advance. Jim’s sister, Kathy, and her husband graciously agreed that we could stay with them so we could go to ten days worth of Olympic events. 

In 1984, Garth was fifteen and Jason was almost eleven. We were psyched! I bought a new car, a red 1984 Subaru , to drive from Denver to L.A. and back. I mapped our route and we started out. I’d been having a lot of back pain, but there was no stopping us. Or, so I thought. 

By the time we got to Vail, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to drive all the way to L.A. I turned to Garth, who had recently gotten his learner’s permit, and told him he was going to have to drive. He didn’t hesitate. He climbed into the driver’s seat, with me in the passenger seat, and logged 1000 miles of driving in two days. I still think the best part of the Olympics for Garth was not the events. It was driving all the way California and back.

The 1984 Olympics was pure magic. We went to as many of the events as we could afford, which included watching endless field hockey games because the tickets were $5.00. We skipped the opening and closing ceremonies. Much too expensive! We watch one day of track and field. One day of diving. One day of baseball. We saw the end of the marathon. 

Mostly we soaked up the California sun and the Olympic culture. We ate our lunch in the park outside the Colosseum, surrounded by people from every country in the world. People were exchanging pins and a few were just giving them away. We said “thank you” in English to people who smiled and answered us in their language. Smiles are universal!

I drove while we were in LA, but Garth took the wheel again for the trip back. Jason slept in the back seat. We stopped at the Grand Canyon on the way home and spent our last night in Durango, CO. We talked about all we had seen and done on our two week vacation to California. Before eating our last restaurant meal, we drank a toast:

“To us!! Because we said we were going to go to the Olympics. And we did!”

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How I Learned To Read

I was six years old when I walked into Sister Doyle’s first grade classroom. It was my first year at St. Peter’s School. The school, a big brick building with lots of windows, was on the corner of a busy street, two houses down from where my family lived.

Kindergarten was a long six blocks away. I walked with my best friend, Betty Ann Lennon, holding hands all the way. I was short and extremely shy. Betty Ann was tall and brave. Walking to school made me feel a little braver, too. 

While kindergarten was mostly devoted to listening to the teacher read stories to us, taking a nap, and going outside to play, first grade was serious business.

Sister Doyle had sixty-four students in her classroom, sitting eight students to a table. Sister was small and pretty. She smiled all the time but, to us,  she seemed very old. Looking back, I think she had recently graduated from the Franciscan convent. She had probably just turned twenty-one.

The first day of class, Sister Doyle asked us to stand up by our desk and say our name. “My name is Mary Lynda Jones,” I whispered. 

The boy sitting next to me, jumped up with a swagger and announced, “My name is Dennis, zip up your barn door, Kelly.” The class laughed. Sister Doyle did not. We weren’t in kindergarten any more.

None of us learned to read in kindergarten. Nobody did. None of us learned to read at home. Nobody did. We didn’t have books at home and we didn’t go to a library. We were little kids. We played outside. My Dad read comic books to us, but it never occurred to me that I could learn to read, too, until I got to first grade.

The second day of school, Sister Doyle told us we were going to learn to read. She promised that all sixty-four of us would be reading by the end of the year. I still remember the magic of it.

Every day Sister Doyle read us a story about another letter and the sound it made. It was the Sesame Street approach before Sesame Street. I still remember the letter M. A monkey told us that the letter M said, “Mmmmm. The sound you make when something taste really good. Mmmmm, milk.  Mmmm, macaroni.”

At the end of the story, we sat at our table for thirty minutes with a plain piece of paper in front of us and a big bucket of crayons to share. We practiced drawing the letter M. We drew pictures of all the words we could think of that started with Mmm.

It worked. All sixty-four of us learned to read, except maybe Charles Gott. For months I thought his name was Child of God. Charles often came to school with no lunch. When I told my mother, she started packing an extra sandwich in my lunch bag to give to Charles. Because Charles couldn’t remember all the letters of the alphabet, he got to stay in first grade another year and listen to Sister Doyle’s stories all over again. 

My only other memory of first grade is that when a child broke a rule, Sister Doyle would take her paper punch and punch a hole in the paper he or she was working on. Parents and Sister Evangelista, the Principal, could look at the child’s paper and know they did something bad.

I got in trouble only once the entire time I was in school and it was in Sister Doyle’s class. We were coloring pictures of snow. I was using a crayon to color each dot of snow. Sister Doyle thought she heard someone knock on the door. When she went to answer the door, no one was there. She turned to us and asked who had been knocking on their desk so loud that it sounded like someone knocking on our door. 

Mark Robertson, a boy at my table, raised his hand and said, “Sister, it was Mary Lynda. She’s coloring her snow so loud it sounds like someone is knocking on the door.”

I was mortified. I’m sure I started to cry. Sister Doyle came to me and explained to the class that this time she wouldn’t punch a hole in my paper. Instead, she took out a straight pin, and pricked a tiny hole in the upper corner of my paper. I learned my lesson. 

But most of all, I learned to read.

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Playa Bruja on a Sunday Afternoon

 

Playa Bruja, or Witch Beach, is at the north end of the bus line out of Mazatlán. It takes forty-five minutes to get there from downtown on the bus and it is worth every hair-raising, bumpy minute. Playa Bruja is in the area known as Cerritos, a neighborhood known for drug wars and shoot-outs with the police. I don’t know when those things happen, but it’s certainly not on lazy Sunday afternoons.

Playa Bruja is a Sunday destination for lots of people, but mostly for large Mexican families who go for the great food at Mr. Leones’ restaurant. At least once a month, Neto and I went there to relax, enjoy the food, listen to the music, and watch the surfers. We were never disappointed.

Mr. Leones’ food is excellent Mexican food: Fresh fish, homemade tortillas, burritos and enchiladas, smothered in salsa. Occasionally I would go there with ex-pats from the US, who ordered a hamburger and fries to go with their beer and margaritas. I just rolled my eyes. 

There is always music in the restaurant. Small groups of musicians, or sometimes a single guitar player, go from table to table, taking requests and playing for a couple of dollars per song. I always requested my favorite, Cuando Calienta el Sol, one of the most beautiful songs ever sung in Spanish. It was re-written in English as Love Me With All of Your Heart. Trust me, the melody is the same, but it loses a lot in translation.

At three o’clock, the big band starts playing and that’s when the party gets started. Mexican couples get up and dance. Old men dance with their wives. Children dance with their parents. Young lovers dance with each other. It’s wonderful to watch.

The restaurant overlooks the beach, where surfers perform when the waves are high enough. Neto either brings his board, or borrows one from a friend. After we’ve eaten, he goes to the beach and paddles out to catch the waves. Unlike Olas Altas beach, where Neto first learned to surf, Playa Bruja is a beach for experts. That’s where I first realized how good Neto truly is. The waves are fast and strong “five footers” ~ five feet in the back, (the shoulder) and eight feet tall in front (on the face.) Often the waves are higher.

Neto catches wave after wave. He doesn’t hesitate. Somehow he knows, without turning around, when the perfect wave is behind him. He is on his feet and glides his board from side to side until he reaches the shore. I can tell it is Neto by his style. Younger surfers jerk their boards as they travel back and forth into the waves. Neto’s style is smooth. He is a natural.

Often, as Neto comes out of the water, younger surfers want to shake his hand.  They know that he is one of the surfing pioneers in Mazatlan. He discovered the sport when he was fourteen years old and has surfed all his life. He loves the water. This is where he is meant to be.

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A Minnesota Fourth of July

I checked with my brother to make sure that my memories of the Fourth of July, growing up in Minnesota, were true ~ not some made-up Norman Rockwell picture in my mind. While I had some of the basic facts straight, Bob’s memory for details was razor sharp, as usual.

The Fourth of July was an all-town celebration in North St. Paul, a town of 2000 people that covered one square mile when I lived there. Early in the morning, while my parents were drinking multiple cups of coffee and smoking cigarettes, we kids washed our bikes and decorated them with crepe paper. We wove crepe paper through the spokes and tied streamers onto the handle bars. The boys put playing cards on clothespins and pinned them to their wheels. Riding up and down the block, the noise from the playing cards sounded like motorcycles. Or at least the boys thought they did. We didn’t organize an actual parade. We just rode up and down the street, until our parents were moving and something more exciting happened.

One year there was an actual parade down main street, that included the North St. Paul High School marching band, a group of men from the VFW and the American Legion, and a float made by the Silver Lake Store. Because Leo Fortier’s uncle owned the store, Leo got to ride on the back of the float. He wore a straw hat and dangled a paper fish from the end of stick. My brother and other neighborhood boys walked beside the float, along the two-block parade route that stretched from the VFW club to Sandberg’s Mortuary. Bob remembers being exhausted by the time the parade was finished.

The family picnic began at lunch time. Before Highway 36 cut the town in half, the picnic was held in a large, beautiful park next to the railroad tracks. Later, the picnic moved to Silver Lake where, if you went early in the day, you could snag a picnic table. My mother packed a lunch of potato salad, coleslaw, jello, potato chips and brownies. Men from the American Legion grilled hamburgers for sale in the parking lot. Our cooler was filled with bottles of soda “pop” for the kids and lots of beer for the adults. 

Sometimes my grandmother joined us at the picnic table. Adults visited with one another while we swam, chased each other in the sand, and fought over trivial matters. So much for Norman Rockwell. 

VFW members sold raffle tickets as they walked through the crowd of families. Hal Norgard stood in the back of a truck and, in his booming basketball-coach voice, announced the winners of the hourly drawings.

At 3:00 the Bald Eagle Water Ski Club put on a spectacular show of beautiful girls in modest bathing suits, performing all sorts of amazing tricks on water skis. Since we didn’t know anyone with a boat, I never learned to water ski. Given my athletic ability, it’s probably just as well.

As the sun went down, we pulled out a bucket of worms and tried fishing off one of the docks until it was time for fireworks. Huge, loud, booming, once-a-year fireworks! Maybe they pale by comparison to today’s pyrotechnics, but to us they were absolutely magical.

Later, sometime in the 1960s, the Fourth of July picnic became an Ice Cream Social in August. My Dad’s Dixieland band, the Polar Bearcats, played for the crowd from a platform on the side of a truck, as the Ladies Auxiliary sold ice cream cones. By August the lake had turned green from algae and “dog days” had arrived. Gone was the smell of hamburgers on the grill. . Like most things, the Fourth of July would never be as much fun again.

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Welcome to Stone Island

No trip to Mazatlan is complete without a trip to Stone Island. A Gilligan’s Island sort of place with predictable characters, happy catchy music playing in the background, and an underlying premise that people with different personalities and backgrounds need to get along with each other in order to survive.

The first time I met Ernesto, he was selling tours to Stone Island for somewhere between $30 and $80. The price seemed ridiculously negotiable, but I wasn’t interested in going somewhere I’d never heard of, at any price. I told him that I didn’t need a tour. I needed a fountain. And the rest is history.

Shortly after I hired Ernesto to be my handyman, he asked me if I wanted to go to Stone Island with him and Publio the following Sunday.

“Oh, no,” I told him. “That will cost too much money.”

“It won’t cost much at all. We’ll take a panga across to the island. It only costs $1.50 for each of us.”

“What’s a panga?”

“A fishing boat that ferries people across the channel. We can walk to Playa Sur, where they sell the tickets. You’ll like it. It will be fun.”

“What about the cruises you were selling on the beach?”

“Oh, those are only for tourists. You aren’t a tourist any more. You live here. We’ll take a panga across.”

Pangas leave the mainland every five minutes, or so. The boats speed across the channel and arrive in less than ten minutes. People pile in and out of the boats with everything they need to spend a day at the beach. Neto and Publio brought their surfboards. Other people brought beach chairs and coolers of food and drinks. One family even brought a large plastic children’s swimming pool, even though we would be right next to the water. I  just brought my fanny pack with sunscreen and pesos.

Sundays at Stone Island are truly a magical experience, with restaurants serving fresh fish and traditional drinks. (Think lemonade, beer and margaritas.) Neto’s friend, Rudy, worked in a restaurant owned by his sister-in-law, so we always went there. Other ex-pats were loyal followers of other nearby restaurants. Rudy had comfortable chairs and hammocks. His English was perfect and his manner was unfailingly charming. His Mexican lunch of fish with rice and beans was delicious.

One of my favorite parts of a day at Stone Island was talking to the beach vendors, who travel up and down the beach, selling jewelry, clothes, rosaries, and wooden sculptures of palm trees and turtles.

Women pay to get their hair braided, and henna tattoos on their arms and legs Children scream and chase each other across the sand. Some tourists haggle with the beach sellers. I never did. I liked talking to them and usually bought something that caught my eye.

One time, I actually paid to take the cruise to Stone Island. We were in a catamaran, a Mazatlán party boat, filled with tourists from the cruise ships. We circled the rocks where a colony of seals barked at us. The crew was jovial and started pouring beer before we even put on our life jackets. When we disembarked, trucks drove us to the far end of island, where we were served fish with rice and beans that wasn’t nearly as good as Rudy’s.

Victor Hugo (his real name!) traveled between tables, trying to entice people to sign up for time-share presentations. By the time we got back in the truck, and then back on the catamaran, a lot of people were suffering from too much beer and tequila, too much sun, and too little good judgement. Once was enough. From then on, I happily took a panga with Neto, and spent the day with Rudy.

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Identical Uncles ~ Double Trouble

I loved all of my uncles, my mother’s brothers, and especially my twin uncles, Ray and Len Hunt. They were devious tricksters. Always full of mischief and seldom thinking of the consequenses. Everyone said they were “full of the devil.” It was an apt description. They teased my mother and her brother, Bob, unmercifully and my mother adored them. 

Ray and Len were identical, “mirror twins.” It was impossible to tell them apart, without looking to see which hand they used. Uncle Ray was right-handed and Uncle Len was left-handed. They got their names before their hand-dominance was established, but it certainly worked out well for those of us who knew them.

Beginning in first grade, Ray and Len often switched seats in school and the nuns couldn’t tell them apart. They walked the mile and a half to school each day, dreaming up tricks to play on their teacher and their only classmate, a boy they named, “Rabbit Tracks.”

One morning they came to school, excited to  tell their classmate they had captured rabbit tracks in their hands.. Their classmate, naturally, was eager to see such an unusual sight and only after they opened their empty hands did he realize he’d been tricked again.  The poor boy was known as Rabbit Tracks for the rest of his life.

The twins were thirteen years older than my mother. They called her “Dolly,” but treated her more like a rag doll that the china variety.  My grandmother told me she didn’t think my mother would live to be six years old, with those two brothers around. They liked to hold her upside down by the ankles and listen to her scream as the blood ran to her head. They taught Bob to steer a car when he was five years old and my mother, the passenger, was three. 

When they were older, Ray and Len took my mother and Uncle Bob all over the farm with them ~ milking cows, inspecting their traps, delivering eggs and working in the field. They named the cows after their girlfriends. They taught Uncle Bob to drive the hay wagon, pulled by two big draft horses, Duke and Nellie, while they rode alongside in the Model T.

On one terrifying occasion, Bob was driving the team of horses, when he lost his grip on the reins and fell between the two horses. My mother hung onto the side of the wagon, screaming, while Bob wrapped his arms and legs around the single tree between the two horses. The twins saw what happened and turned the Model T around in time to stop the horses. Of course, my grandparents never knew about any of those antics. My mother and her brother were threatened and bribed, and never said a word.

By the time I was old enough to recognize my uncles, Uncle Len had a son, Dick Hunt, who was as mischievous as Ray and Len. For a long time I thought they were triplets. Dick died young, but before he died, he helped the twins carry out one last mad caper. 

Uncle Ray had knee surgery and was recovering in the hospital. Len and Dick went to visit him. They wheeled Ray into the bathroom and undressed him down to his underwear. Len put on Ray’s hospital gown, and climbed into the bed, leaving Ray sitting in the bathroom. Dick went to fetch the head nurse and insisted she come to see the surgery, 

“I’ve always heard that the surgeon was a miracle-worker, but you have to see this. That doctor didn’t even leave a scar,” Dick told her.

When the nurse pulled back the sheet to inspect Ray’s surgery, she saw Len’s knee with no stitches or any sign of surgery whatsoever. Only after she went back to the nurse’s station, did the two brothers and my cousin, Dick, find her and explain how they had tricked her. 

By the time they died, Ray had lost his wife, Betty, and a daughter, Joan. Len lost his wife, Mary, and his son, Dick. But my uncles, Ray and Len, never lost their sense of humor or their playful spirit. 

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My Grandmother, Julia Schmitz Hunt

My family lived with Grandma and Grandpa Hunt from the time I was one year old until I was eight. After Dad returned home from the Navy, we lived on the farm with my grandparents. When Grandpa sold the farm, we moved to a duplex on Sixteenth Avenue, across the street from St. Peter’s Catholic Church. Grandma and Grandpa lived in a one bedroom apartment upstairs and we lived in a two bedroom apartment on the lower floor. There was an indoor toilet, but no bathtub and no hot water. The stove was an “old fashioned wood stove” in the kitchen which, of course, wasn’t considered old fashioned back then. It was considered normal. 

Grandpa Hunt was a big, imposing man who seldom smiled. I avoided him whenever I could. But I loved living downstairs from Grandma. She was a small woman with a soft, billowy chest and huge arms, the result of baking bread every day on the farm, where she raised eight children ~ six big boys, my Aunt Fran (second oldest child) and my mother (the youngest child.) Snuggling with Grandma was the most comforting moment of the day.

Our neighbors on Sixteenth Avenue were Old Man Grunke and the Courneyour family. Grandma was a friend of Mrs. Grunke, but Old Man Grunke was a skinny snake of a man, who hated kids. He especially hated my brother Bob and I because we used to swing on the chain he stretched across his yard, dividing our property from his. He told us to stop swinging on his chain but, naturally, we didn’t. One day he coated the chain with motor oil. Bob and I went home covered in slimy oil. My mother was furious at Old Man Grunke, but he really didn’t care. The war between our families went on for years.

On the other side of us lived the Cournoyer family. They had a garage in their backyard, built over an open pit. They threw all their garbage in the pit, including tin cans and broken bottles, which attracted rats. Huge rats. Some of them as big as small cats. One day, Grandma Hunt was hanging wash on the line when one of the rats ran across her foot. She swore in German, grabbed the pole she used to prop up the clothesline and beat the rat into a bloody mass, swearing at the rat the whole time. Grandma was small, but she was fearless. As I stood there, staring at the dead, bloody pulp that used to be a rat, Grandma turned to me and told me to get the shovel out of our shed and throw the dead rat into the alley. She quietly went back to hanging her freshly washed clothes on the line.

Eventually my family moved to a different house, two blocks away. My grandfather had a stroke and went to live with my Uncle Bill, who was big  and strong enough to take care of him. My grandmother continued to live in the house on Sixteenth Avenue and my Aunt Fran moved in with her. I often walked to Grandma’s house, especially in the quiet hours after dinner. I loved sitting at the table as Grandma finished her coffee, slathering a piece of bread with butter and jelly for dessert. She would tell me stories of her life on the farm. I still have two of Grandma’s coffee cups. I warm my hands around them, as she did so many years ago, and I smile.

My last memory of Grandma Hunt was at the nursing home, where she spent her final days. I had moved to Denver to go to school, and went to see her when I came home on vacation. By that time, Grandma had wasted away.  She weighed less than eighty pounds. Most of her marbles were gone, but she recognized me as I walked into the room. She grabbed my hand, with tears in her eyes, and pleaded with me to go to the kitchen and take her name “off the list.” 

Grandma was convinced that even as she lay dying, there was work to do. She believed that she was “on the list” of people who had to report for duty to prepare the next meal and then wash the dishes.

“Of course, Grandma. I’ll take care of it.”

I didn’t try to tell Grandma that there was no such list. Instead, I walked out of the room and came back a few minutes later. I told her that I scratched her name off the list and told the cook to never put Grandma’s name on the list again. I told Grandma she never had to prepare another meal or wash another dish again. Grandma was happy. It was the least I could do.