Keep the Coffee Comimg

Yesterday was downright cold, and when the wind whipped through, it made the day feel even colder. It was a fleece day, an acknowledgement to the coming winter. Today is a pretty day. It is in the mid-40’s with a bright, bright sun. The few red leaves and the pervasive brown leaves on the oak trees shine in the light. We still have a wind.

When I was a kid, I loved walking to school in the mornings. We lived on a hill. Across the street from the bottom of the hill was a huge field, a tended field with baseball diamonds. I always thought of the field as a shortcut so I’d cross it to get to the sidewalk on the street which led to school. The sidewalk was long, the whole length of the street, and was interrupted only by the railroad tracks.

When I was growing up, the living room was where we spent the most time. The TV was there in a corner. We’d sit on the rug close to the set and watch it. We never went blind. In the late afternoons, my mother would be in the kitchen making dinner. In my mind’s eye I can see her standing by the sink peeling potatoes. The stove was behind her. The fridge beside her. The kitchen was small. We always had potatoes. My father never had supper with us. He’d get home late from work. He was a salesman. I remember a photo of him coming in the front door. He is wearing a fedora and a top coat, the unofficial men’s winter wardrobe back then. Both were black.

I didn’t question much when I was a kid. I went to school every weekday, played outside if I could in the afternoons, watched TV, did my homework, ate dinner, watched more TV then went to bed. I was never bored. Kids seldom were.

The sun and the blue sky pushed away the earlier morning clouds, but I don’t know how long they’ll be around as cloudy is the forecast. It is windy. All the high branches are being blown. I can see the leaves falling. It is 54° but could get down to the high 30’s tonight. Right now it is a perfect fall day.

When I was little, my mother used to read to me. She told me I loved Golden Books. She said I could name all the animals in the circles on the back covers of the books. I was smart she told me, parental exaggeration I suspect. When I got a bit older, my mother switched to reading to us, to my brother and me, books, chapter books before we went to bed. I always hated it when she’d stop for the night, and we had to turn out the light. When I could read by myself, I’d read in bed until my mother told me to turn off my light, but I didn’t really turn it off. I’d hide the light under the covers so I could keep reading. Sometimes I got caught.

When I was growing up, I was never really girly. I grew out of dolls early except for that dancing doll I got for Christmas one year, the one whose feet you attached to your shoes with elastics so you dance together. I always wanted trains, but they were boy presents. I did like new clothes but nothing too fancy, usually sweaters and a skirt or a pair of ski pants. I always wanted books for my birthday and for Christmas, and my mother never disappointed me.

In Ghana, I wore a dress every day. At first I wore the dresses and skirts I had brought with me. I remember a purple dress, a white blouse and a wrap-around skirt with flowers. I’m sure I had more clothes, but I just remember those because I seem to be wearing them in so many of my pictures from Ghana. I also remember a zippered sort of house dress. It was black with white designs. I wore it every night after my shower. All the clothes were new. We had shopped in Hyannis for clothes and other items from the packing list sent by Peace Corps. We got most everything on the list and managed to reach the 80 pounds of luggage allowed for the flight.

Right now I’m watching the very first episode of The Lone Ranger. He has donned the mask made from the vest of his dead brother, a Texas ranger, killed in an ambush by the Cavendish gang. He and Tonto just rescued Silver from the buffalo ready to gore him.

On my dance card is mostly uke events. I have my usual practice and lesson and also three concerts. It will be a busy rest of the week.

This is my traditional post for Veteran’s Day.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, World War I ended. This day became known as “Armistice Day.” In 1921, an unknown World War I American soldier was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Similarly, unknown soldiers had been buried in England at Westminster Abbey and at France at the Arc de Triomphe. All of these memorials took place on November 11th to commemorate the end of the “war to end all wars.”

In 1926, Congress resolved to officially call November 11th Armistice Day. Then in 1938, the day was named a national holiday. Soon afterwords war broke out in Europe and World War II began.

Soon after the end of World War II, a veteran of that war named Raymond Weeks organized “National Veterans Day” with a parade and festivities to honor all veterans. He chose to hold this on Armistice Day. Thus began annual observances of a day to honor all veterans not just the end of World War I. In 1954, Congress officially passed and President Eisenhower signed a bill proclaiming November 11 as Veteran’s Day. Due to his part in the creation of this national holiday, Raymond Weeks received the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Reagan in November 1982.

In 1968, Congress changed the national commemoration of Veterans Day to the fourth Monday in October. However, the significance of November 11 was such that the changed date never really got established. In 1978, Congress returned the observance of Veterans Day to its traditional date.

National ceremonies commemorating Veterans Day occur each year at the the memorial amphitheater built around the Tomb of the Unknowns. At 11 AM on November 11, a color guard representing all military services executes “Present Arms” at the tomb. Then the presidential wreath is laid upon the tomb. Finally, the bugler plays taps.

Each Veterans Day should be a time when Americans stop and remember the brave men and women who have risked their lives for the United States of America. As Dwight Eisenhower said, “…it is well for us to pause, to acknowledge our debt to those who paid so large a share of freedom’s price. As we stand here in grateful remembrance of the veterans’ contributions we renew our conviction of individual responsibility to live in ways that support the eternal truths upon which our Nation is founded, and from which flows all its strength and all its greatness.”

My friends left yesterday afternoon so I’m back. With them, it is always as if we had seen each other the day or week before. We laugh a lot. We eat great foods that Peg always brings. We take rides along the ocean. On this visit, we went out to lunch. We stopped at a new place, the Maritime Museum in Hyannis where even I had never been. We took our time with the great exhibits and watched for a while a boat rocker building class. As for the dogs and my company, Henry stayed away a bit but then warmed to Bill and allowed patting. As for Nala, there are no strangers, just people to jump on and lick.

My house always feels empty after people leave.

Today is colder, in the low 40’s. The sun is so very bright, the sky a straight blue, but cloudy is the forecast. I have no list for today though I could be clearing spiders’ webs. They seem to be everywhere, across door ways, around chair legs and from frond to frond on my plants. I need to walk round carrying my duster.

My dance card for the week is uke heavy again. I have practice, a lesson and three concerts. Our music for the week is bluegrass.

When I was a kid, Saturday was kids’ day. Sunday was for family. With no stores open, there was only home or the grandparents’ house. I preferred home, but I had no vote. Now, I am the only vote. I stay home. The house is warm and cozy. The fridge is filled with great food, leftovers from Peg. I’ve already eaten toasted Irish bread, a wonderful recipe with orange and cranberries. The dogs are sleeping on the couch.

I’m old, but I don’t feel old; however, the signs are there. At stores and even the dump people ask me if I need help. I used to say no. I don’t any more. Everything is heavy. Also, all the tops of jars are difficult to open as are pill bottles. I have to use pliers. I think it is a conspiracy.

Today will be another warm day, 69°. It is partly cloudy, and the clouds will hang around all day. Yesterday I took a ride. All the oak trees are filled with brown leaves just waiting to fall. They add an odd color to the trees along the roadside. My deck and front lawn are covered in leaves. When I walk through them in the front, I shuffle my feet as I go. The sound brings me back to when I was a kid walking in the gutters filled with leaves and kicking them as I walked.

My friends are arriving this morning. With them I have the most amazing memories of Ghana. They lived in the south. I visited them and traveled with them on school holidays. Their house was on a second floor. It didn’t have running water. They had little houses in the backyard. It was a run some times to get there, but Peace Corps volunteers get quite adept at timing the run. Bill hauled water from the town well.

There was an opening for an English teacher at my school as another volunteer had left . She had been unhappy the whole school year. She seldom even spoke to me, just a hello as we passed each other. I asked Bill and Peg if they wanted to come north to Bolga. They did. We still wonder how that was accomplished as all our communication was by mail. I convinced my principal who spoke with Peace Corps. Bill and Peg moved to my school and lived in the other side of my duplex. We ate dinner together every night. We listened to music and we played games. We played Password so many times we had the cards memorized. We played an alphabet word game. We had paddle ball contests. My mother had sent one in a package. We got so good we paddled well into double figures on each turn then catastrophe struck. The elastic broke. We both had motos and took day trips around the town. We had fun. We had each other.

I have a concert today, and Bill and Peg will be there. I am so excited to have someone I know in the audience. I will sign autographs at the end.

Today is a lovely fall day. The air is still. Sun and blue sky are here for the meantime as clouds are predicted for later, but outside is so bright right now that even the brown leaves left on the trees are glistening in the sunlight. It is in the mid-60’s and will stay there most of the day. I was out on the deck earlier. I didn’t even need my sweatshirt.

This morning as I was waiting for my bread to toast I got to wondering. Why do we toast bread for breakfast? Who decided that untoasted bread is not for mornings? I’m sure somewhere on line people have speculated, but I’m not going to look. I like a little mystery.

I remember the first time I voted. I was a senior in college. It was 1968. I had turned twenty-one during the summer, and I had registered to vote right away. I followed the campaigns of both Nixon and Humphrey, but I knew for whom I would cast my vote. My candidate lost. In 1972, my next candidate also lost. I was on a roll, downhill.

During my junior year in college, I used to get up in the early hours on Fridays and go to the wholesale fruit market. I picketed for the grape workers. I remember walking the line one Friday in the rain. I was soaked. A man waiting in his car opened his window and waved at me. I went over. He handed me a rain bonnet, the sort my grandmother wore, and told me to put it on. He said he had a daughter my age.

In the fall of 1968, I went to a George Wallace political rally on Boston Common. I was with 20,000 of my closest friends. To say the crowd was unfriendly is almost polite. He raged against liberals. He said the only four letter words hippies didn’t know were work and soap. “They’re building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia,” was one of his memorable quotes.

I will be watching the results though I know some states will take a few days to tabulate ballots; regardless, I’m doing my best. I’ll have my fingers crossed, I’ll knock on wood and throw salt over my shoulder.

The morning is cloudy and chilly. The backyard has bare trees and a deep carpet of dead leaves. The lawn and deck are covered in brown leaves with curled edges. Gone are the glorious colors of fall. Drab winter is making a headway.

Yesterday I waxed the kitchen floor and hall. I dusted the living room. I am exhausted. Housework does not become me. My flamingo is now a turkey. He is wearing a pilgrim hat, a coat with a turkey tail and has a wattle.

My dance card is full this week with 4 uke events and company coming. I have already planned dinner, and I have a dessert to make or even two if I get really ambitious.

Language changes. Words and phrases are added as others disappear and are lost in time. When I was a kid, other kids had cooties. It was one of the worst insults. We even made cootie catchers out of pieces of paper. Cars were parked by Spot Pond for the submarine races. I really believed there were races. I never noticed all the steamed windows, and I doubt I would have known why if I had. We had party poopers and wet rags. We used to cluck at other kids and call them chicken. My father went to the can. My mother used to say everything is copacetic. I knew what a beatnik was because we watched Doobie Gillis. I remember yelling dibs when I wanted to ride shotgun. Don’t have a cow. Don’t be a fink. I wore pedal pushers and guys wore pegged pants. You gave someone the bird.

Lately I have noticed a few new phrases. People don’t die anymore. They are unalive. I’m hearing the phrase I’m not going to lie peppered in conversations. It always seems to come before an opinion. “Do you want to come with?” Dude is now ubiquitous.

I know I’ve told you before about Ghanaian English. It is both colorful and wonderfully descriptive. “ I went to your house and met your absence,” is my all time favorite. I wasn’t home sounds drab in comparison. “I’m going to come,” my students would say as they were leaving my house. They would return. Obroni waaru was loosely translated as dead white man clothes which were sold in the markets and thought to be castoffs or charity contributions.

I will always be a lover of words.

My calendar is still on October. I’m just not ready for November. The year is far too quickly speeding away. Winter is intruding. 39° will be the low today.

Yesterday my membership in the Organization of Sloths was in jeopardy. I did errands, grocery shopped and washed the kitchen floor. That last chore took a long time. Poor spiders were sent scurrying. They had thought they were safe. I hand scrubbed under bottles and bins and chair legs. Today I’ll wax the floor and fill the bird feeders. I may also nap just to maintain my revered status as a sloth.

When I was a kid, storing my bicycle in the cellar was a sad ritual at the beginning of winter. I rode as long as I could, but the cold got to be too much. The freezing air whipped at my face as I rode down the hills. I needed mittens to hold on to the handlebars. My coat would puff from the wind riding up the sleeves. I had to walk everywhere.

We counted down to Halloween, and we counted down to Christmas. Thanksgiving just sort of happened. We did color turkeys in school and used the outlines of our fingers for their tails, and my mother put up a few cardboard turkeys and Pilgrims on the insides of the windows, but there were no real festivities. There was just turkey and a few days off from school.

When the weather got cold, Saturday matinees started at the movie theater uptown. We went almost every week. My mother gave us ticket money and money for popcorn or candy. She got rid of my brother and me for an entire afternoon for less than a dollar. We walked to the square and stood in line at the ticket window which was on a side wall inside the door. The candy counter was at the top of a small incline. Al owned the theater, and his wife ran the candy counter. The popcorn machine was on one side of the counter. Nothing was better than the aroma of corn popping, but I seldom bought popcorn; instead, I usually bought a long lasting candy like a Sugar Daddy. Coming attractions were usually first followed by a cartoon or two and the movie. The theater was never really quiet. In the back rows were the teenagers. They never watched the movie. I remember walking home in the late afternoon in the early darkness.

As usually my dance card for the week includes uke and not much else. This is the start of the busy season with two concerts this week and three next week. We’ll be playing transportation this week and bluegrass starting next week until December and Christmas music. I do love Christmas music.

It might rain today. I should have expected it as washing the kitchen floor tops my chore list. As for that chore list, my sloth days are over for a bit. I have to clean the house, friends are coming. Those clumps of Henry hair will soon be a memory, at least for a day or two.

When I was a kid, I loved rainy afternoons. I’d get soaked walking home from school. My shoes would bubble at the tops. That always amused me. I’d get home, hang up my wet clothes, put my shoes by the radiator and change into my pajamas. I’d get cozy in bed and read the afternoon away. Sometimes I’d even fall asleep with my open book in hand.

Life is quiet right now. My uke gets me out of the house. Without it, I would be the poster child for slothhood. I like the slower pace, but it did take me a while to get rid of the guilt of choosing to do little.

I met my friends who are coming this week on the first day of what is called staging in Peace Corps lingo, the day you check in to begin your journey. You meet the people with whom you’ll serve and learn more about where you’re going and what the training will be. I remember standing in line for the check in. I chatted with the people around me. That’s when I met Bill and Peg, kindred spirits from New Hampshire. We became accomplices. We did attend sessions, but we also skipped a few. We were in Philadelphia where none of us had ever been so we became tourists. We saw the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, the art museum with the Rocky steps and the spectacular view from the top of the William Penn building, city hall. Bill and Peg were to be stationed about a 100 miles from me in Tamale then they found out Peg was pregnant. Peace Corps let them stay but moved them to the south a long way from me. We stayed close despite the distance. I saw them during school holidays, and we traveled together. Once back, we lost touch for a long while, but then we found each other again. The years melted away. They are still kindred spirits. We are still the best of friends.

Last night my Hershey bars were a success. Kids showed off the big bars to their waiting parents, and my neighbor told me her daughter told other kids mine was the best house, but I had fewer trick or treaters than usual so I have candy bars still left. I suspect they won’t be left for long.

Today will be warm, 68°. Right now we have sun, but the clouds will be around later. It is quite windy. Everything is blowing. I have a uke concert today. We are playing songs from the 70’s.

Some of my memories drawers are so stuffed I can barely open them. The Ghana drawers are like that. When I was there, I knew I was living a singular experience so I saved the memories. I can still see them all in my mind’s eye, a little bit faded over time but still so vibrant compared to other memories.

In Ghana, my house was on school grounds as were the houses of other tutors as we were called. Mine was a duplex, the last house by the back fence. At night, students would often drop by to visit. Having a white teacher was a curiosity so they’d chat about everything and ask questions about my home and family. On one visit I told them about Halloween. They loved the idea of free candy. On Halloween night, they remembered and showed up at my house and said, “Trick or treat!” Luckily I had peppermint candy, a Ghanaian treat.

My town, the capital of the Upper Region in Ghana, was in the far northeast. It was in the hottest part of the country with a long dry season. Few fruits and vegetables grew there. The local tribe was the FraFras. Many of my students were local but it was a boarding school so they lived in dorms. Everyone in town knew who I was. I think there was only one other white woman. I loved going into town and shopping there on market day, every third day. I wandered all over and bought eggs, beef, garden eggs, tomatoes and onions. The sellers, mostly women, would dash me, give me, a few extra onions or tomatoes. I’d stop at shops and chop bars, sort of restaurants. Everyone greeted me and called me madam. I loved every day. I loved Ghana. I loved my school, my town and my students most of all.