Auld Lang Syne
A lovely photo of my mother-in-law offering a toast of holiday cheer is proudly displayed on my husband’s iPhone home screen. She was 95 when she passed in the spring of 2019 before all the COVID hullabaloo. But had she lived, I think she may have very well survived the pandemic. She withstood nearly every awful thing that came her way, what’s another disaster?
Sally and her husband Paul lived in a 150 year old house which was sited in the middle of a 220 acre farm. The land was heaven on Earth: natural spring water fed a little creek that meandered around the property’s rolling hills and fields. Giant woods lined the west and south sides bursting forth with all the colors of the seasons. The little weather-worn white and grey house sat in the center of the bowl-shaped land with an enormous oak tree and broad sweeping gravel drive that welcomed visitors to the side porch entrance. Wild turkeys, deer, rabbits, foxes, coyotes, and countless birds were everywhere. During the temperate spring and summer months, Sally’s huge flower garden was a sight to behold: impressive rows of wild rose bushes lined the long drive to the house, and hummingbirds darted among the towering hollyhocks that stood guard over hundreds of perennial delights. At the edge of the side lawn, a gentle south facing slope was the site of the most bountiful garden. Paul built a makeshift fence around it out of scrap wood and wire, and mounted a hand-lettered sign above the entrance “Heaven’s Gate.”
My in-laws were members of what has come to be known as “The Greatest Generation.” Born in the early 1920’s, they endured the Great Depression at tender ages. By the time Sally was 11, she had lost three of her six sisters due to disease; and another sister to a murder-suicide some years later. They both served honorably during WWII. Paul was a fighter pilot in the Pacific, charged with protecting U.S. Navy ships from Kamikazees; Sally was a real life “Rosie the Riveter,” an airplane mechanic for the Marines stationed in North Carolina. After the War, they returned to their modest upstate New York rural life where they married and bought a small farm, but just before starting their family, Paul was called back to serve in the Korean War. Eventually they would have four children, a girl and three boys, my husband being the youngest.
Paul was stoic, contemplative, and quirky as hell which masked the fact that he probably suffered silently most of his adult life from undiagnosed war-related PTSD. His wife had a more cheerful disposition, and embraced the simple farm life raising their kids without complaint and without many of the luxuries that we have all come to take for granted. The family got a television with its rabbit-ear antenna and two-channel reception only a few years before they got a phone in 1971 — a party line which they kept well into the late 90s. The phone itself had an extremely short cord that held the user hostage standing in the small home’s central hallway. Privacy was non-existent.
My husband was 10 when the phone arrived to great fanfare, and his siblings were well into their teens including his oldest sister who was a senior in high school. I imagine dating or any sort of social life was near impossible for them considering the circumstances. Their nearest neighbor was about a mile away and the small famous tourist town where they attended school and bought their groceries was another five miles beyond. In spite of the seeming isolation, they grew up with lots of family and friends close at hand: they had frequent visitors and parties at the farm, or they traveled to nearby relatives’ farms and homes in town.
Their garden, which Sally tended to with an incredibly deft green thumb, provided much of their food. Paul meticulously ran a small dairy farm in the barns across from the main house. And occasionally they had chickens or horses. They raised black lab puppies, and Sallly tried her hand at antique collecting and furniture restoration. Their nearly half-mile long “driveway” road was lined with berry bushes and fruit trees, climbing trees and the small winding stream which the kids would explore on the walk down home from the bus drop off at the top of the hill.
In today’s world of hyper-information, hyper-connectivity, and hyper-processed consumables, their simple farm life was idyllic. They were spoiled with natural beauty and animals, abundance, health, a strong supportive family. Both parents were always home and they set excellent examples of hard work, duty and integrity. The kids thrived. Diane, the oldest was a popular high school beauty queen, and her excellent grades earned her a scholarship to an Ivy League university. She was followed by three equally-accomplished brothers who also earned scholarships, and who each pursued successful careers in law, real estate, healthcare and business sales — earning many times more than their parents would have ever dreamed possible.
You see, in spite of the bounty that surrounded them, they were by today’s material standards, quite poor. They wore hand-me down or thrift store clothes (when in wasn’t trendy); they had few creature comforts: No shower, only one bathroom, very few electric outlets, no dishwasher, or modern laundry appliances, no air conditioning, and not even a furnace! Paul and Sally heated their home by burning buckets of coal in two stoves that were strategically positioned: one in the kitchen where they spent most of the time sitting around the table; and the other between the living room corner and the downstairs bedroom where the kids would crawl into their parents’ bed on the coldest nights instead of sleeping upstairs in the frigid loft room.
Sally and Paul tended to the fires all hours of the night, especially when their house on the aptly-named “Snowdin Hill” would be in a deep, deep freeze for several months each winter. One time I was upstate visiting Paul because Sally had been admitted to rehab after taking a nasty fall and breaking her hip. I slept on a cot near the bedroom stove, only to awake at 4 a.m. because the fire had gone out and Paul was rattling the dead ashes loose to start anew. I said, “Oh my, do you realize it’s 36 degrees in here?” as I squinted in the dim morning light at one of the many thermometers they had hung around their home. Paul didn’t miss a beat, “Yup! And that’s 46 degrees warmer than it is outside!”
Jim and I met just after college in a neighborhood bar and as we got to know each other we compared our upbringings. I’m from a large midwestern family, The middle of seven children born in quick succession. We were solidly middle class but the sheer size of our family meant that we didn’t have fabulous vacations, restaurant dinners, or fancy new clothes like many of our friends. My father was a traveling salesman and my mom went to work as a bank teller when I was in grade school, so we were sort of latch-key kids. But there were so many of us and we always had a friend, or someone to help with homework, and we took turns being “Mother of the Day” in charge of making dinner and keeping track of everyone’s whereabouts. “We ate a lot of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese,” I exclaimed. “But my mom always made sure we had a nice birthday and Christmas with gifts to open, even if it was just something that we needed like a new pair of shoes.”
Jim’s reply? “We were so poor, if I didn’t wake up with a hard-on on Christmas morning, I had nothing to play with.”
Mic drop. We were engaged 14 months later.
We went up to the farm a few times a year with our young family — Thanksgivings, and the few days after Christmas, Easters and every July for Paul’s birthday. He would greet us by saying, “Oh, you’ve decided to come camping indoors again, heh?” acknowledging the decidedly un-modern amenities they offered to their suburban daughter-in-law. Sometimes there was no hot water. Sometimes there were rabid bats upstairs. Sometimes Jim’s siblings and their families would be home too, so we might find more sleeping space in the back of our minivan parked under the big oak tree.
Paul would crack a smile, and then crack open a beer and pull his knotted bandana scarf hat down a bit over his twinkling crystal blue eyes and settle into an arm chair at the kitchen table that was always loaded with cheese, dips, nuts, chips, pies and fruit. Sally busied herself with the fire or food prep while she hummed along to big band tunes from her youth, and apologized for not having this or that. She would often say, “my house might not be perfect, but I can stand it,” a sentiment that ironically captured her world view, perfectly.
One particularly snowy winter when my kids were quite young, we lugged a minivan-load of winter gear up to the farm: snow jackets, hats, boots, extra mittens, sleds, so the kids could frolic on Snowdin Hill building snow forts, snowmen, and snow angels. I sat on the worn linoleum kitchen floor winterizing one kid at a time: layered, scarfed, booted, gloved, nose-wiped and out the door. Somehow in our packing we made the unforgivable mistake of leaving behind one precious “Woody” snow boot (from Toy Story). I tried my best to improvise with extra socks, bread bags and rubber bands. (Read about my McGyver mom escapades here.) My disappointed six-year-old hrumphed as he slipped out the door with his baggie boots to join his brother and sister in the snow. This is when my mother-in-law declared that my kids seemed a bit spoiled. She recounted that when she was young, and when she was raising her own children, everyone only had one pair of shoes and no one complained. EVER.
Touché. I guess. But that was definitely then, I thought. My internal mother/daughter-in-law dialogue simmered at a low boil. Was I really a bad parent for bringing (most of) our kids’ snow boots on a snow vacation to frigid upstate New York? Are my children ungrateful little snots? Am I being disrespectful for shoving my late 20th century snow boot privilege in her face?
Usually we use the past as a baseline to define how much we’ve improved our lot, I thought to myself. Just consider advancements in dental pain management or the eradication of diseases that killed three of Sally’s sisters only a few decades earlier. Where we’ve come from is not only a useful tool for predicting our future — past is indeed prologue — it’s also a wonderful measure of gratitude for the present.
But a revelation came to me before I blurted out something rude. Sally’s comments revealed a survival defensive mechanism, a trick of sorts, which Sally had honed to shiny perfection: our revisionist memory works as our most powerful protectant helping us cope with bad times by glorifying our endurance of pain and suffering. It’s the flip-side of the romantic “auld lang syne” and it’s crucial to our survival. The Greatest Generation has had to rely on that survival muscle memory more than any other. No generation has experienced such anguish and for so long. They were raised on want, they braved great wars, and not-so-great wars; they lost their siblings to disease, and their children and grandchildren to terrorism, fear and depression. More than 100,000 young people have died from drug overdoses in the last year. And now their grandparents who have endured everything, are making up the lion-share of COVID deaths. Perhaps they should be called the Saddest Generation.
Sadly, there aren’t many of them left to measure up against. For me and my kids, we are spoiled with creature comforts, conveniences, and luxuries inconceivable to Paul and Sally — not just an extra pair of snow boots, or a sparkly new toy under the Christmas tree, but the absence of pain. We have had to pay a stiff, yet not-so obvious, price for our pain-free fortune. Namely, we have precious little patience, and we would be hard-pressed to recognize the honor that comes from sacrifice. We are disconnected from our food, and our earth in profound ways. We’re fat, and endlessly bored, and have too many things. Everything is disposable and replaceable: our relationships, our careers, our stash, our homes. The heavy toll has been served up with such a gigantic spoonful of high fructose corn syrup — like the taxes that get syphoned off our paychecks by our greedy government — we don’t even realize what’s missing.
Only time will tell if our mad, mad, mad world dials down the sugary anesthesia and offers some well-needed perspective by way of truly devastating disease, world wars, or natural disasters like the generations before us. The drip, drip, drip of climate change hysteria, or porous fentanyl borders, or Orwellian despair, is simply not cutting it. Until then, I suppose we will go on living the life with our closets crammed full of weather-appropriate shoes, which we then cram into our carry-on suitcases as we jet set to far off modern day snowy hills. If we feel like we’re slipping on the gratitude front, we can always launch a “mindfulness” app on our too-expensive iPhones with lovely pictures of our dearly-beloved moms.
Happy New Year to all.
