To Be Continued . . .

 

One of the first pieces I ever wrote and sold was a story about how when I was a kid, I would stay overnight at my Grandma Gert’s house, who also had her mother, my Great Grandmother Cornelia Ledergerber, living with her. Whenever I shared a bed with either of them, we’d lay in the dark, and they would tell me stories. I can still recall how Grandma Gert told me about how her father mistakenly polished his white buck shoes before going to Kennywood with zinc ointment, and how all the leaves stuck to his shoes when he strolled the midway.

Grand Leder, as we called her, told me about how when she was four, she traveled to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, by covered wagon. (Sadly, no one- including my mother and aunts- ever asked her why she made such an arduous journey. It remains a mystery.) She also told me about how her son, my Great Uncle Buddy, crossed the Rhine River in Germany during the Allied Invasion during World War II, how he was missing in action for several days, turning her hair gray. She told me about how they nearly starved during The Depression. They both told me other stories, funny, sad, and remarkable ones about others in our family.

Recently, we had our three granddaughters, Sadie, 9; Hannah, 7; and Scarlett, 5; stay overnight. We made up the cozy sleeper sofa in the spare bedroom and tucked them in. However, one by one they each dragged a sleeping bag into our bedroom and asked if they could sleep in our room. 

 

Thirty-three years ago, we moved into our present house because we had outgrown our previous home as I was eight months pregnant with my third child. After I delivered, we kept my newborn son in a cradle in our room. And every night it seemed my five-year-old twins would drag their sleeping bags into our room asking to “camp out” in our bedroom. I used to quip to my husband, “that we moved to a bigger house to get more space, but we could have moved to an igloo as we were all sleeping in one room.”

In the words of Yogi Berra, having the girls sleeping on our floor was “déjà vu all over again.”

Of course, there was jostling for space on the floor and cries of “she’s kicking my head,” or “she’s breathing too loudly” or “I’m not sleepy.” To get them to settle down, I said I’m going to tell you some funny stories. I told them about the time when I was in third grade and my brother was in first, how a woodpecker made a giant deposit on his head as we walked to the school bus. How he cried as the droppings dripped off his ears and onto his shirt, and how I rushed him home where my mom shoved his head under the kitchen faucet and washed his hair, changed his shirt, and sent him off to school.

I told them how my youngest brother when he was in first grade took to drawing a mustache with my mother’s eyebrow pencil above his lip and how he got in trouble at school for calling the teacher a “turkey” for taking the record I Don’t Give a Damn About a Greenback Dollar off the record player before the song was over.

We laughed in the dark and it reminded me of decades ago when I spent the night with my grandmothers. As they settled down and got sleepy, Sadie yawned and said, “This was fun. I’m tired, but I think we should continue the stories.”

I agree.

My wish is that 40-50 years from now she and her sisters know the great joy of having grandchildren, lying in the dark and continuing the stories.

 

This originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Northern Connection magazine. 

A Blast From the Past

 To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere, without moving anything but your heart. - Phyllis Grissim-Theroux
 

I never met my father-in-law. My husband, Ed, who is named after his father, met him, but he doesn’t remember him. Edmund Palko Sr. died at the age of 27 when my husband was only 11 even month’s old and his older sister was not even three.
 

We knew some things about his father. He was tall at 6’2” and a good athlete, playing football for Derry High School and appearing in the high school all-star game. He served in the Korean War and met my late mother-in-law at a skating rink after the war, and they married. Also, after the war he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which at that time they attributed to a “nervous stomach” from the war. He got seriously sick in April of 1956 and was hospitalized. Peritonitis set in and eventually killed him over the Easter holiday.
 

We have his letterman jacket, the Bible he carried into war, and the flag that draped his coffin. We know from my husband’s cousin, Rosemarie, who was born on his birthday, that he promised that when she turned 21, he would buy Rosemarie her first drink—something he never lived to fulfill.
 

We know about my father-in-law, but we don’t know him. That is until recently.
 

At the annual Palko family reunion this summer, another of my husband’s cousins was cleaning out some of his late mother’s effects and came across some things from my father-in-law that his mom, my husband’s Aunt Emma, had kept. She was one of my father-in-law’s seven older siblings.
 

Among the things was his first-grade report card, and we discovered that he was quite chatty and got unsatisfactory marks for comportment. But the real treasure was the one letter that was given to us dated February 5, 1951, written while he was in basic training in Fort Knox, Kentucky, and considering becoming a paratrooper.
 

Hi Em,
 

I thought I’d say something about the paratroopers. In the first place whoever gave you the idea that it’s dangerous or anything like that? . . . About mom and pop worrying. I don’t see why. I can take care of myself very well and they know it. So, you can tell mom to stop worrying.
 

Your Brother, Edmund
 

We have a few photos of him, but this was before the proliferation of home movies and iPhone videos, so we don’t know how he moved, what his mannerisms were, or how his voice sounded. But this one letter gave us a welcomed glimpse into his personality revealed by his own words, and it was given to us 73 years after he wrote it.
 

And it made me think about how sad it is that no one writes letters anymore. A lot of the things we know from previous wars came to us through letters. Although we have numerous photos and videos today with iPhones, those photos and videos seem to evaporate quickly and exist outside of the material world. A letter is something concrete. It can be kept in a drawer or scrapbook and be taken out and read over and over. You can see the personality in the penmanship and hear the words on the page in your mind and heart, and if it wasn’t for this one missive, my father-in-law would have remained a flat character to us.
But now with this gift of this letter, we have a small glimmer of his personality, what he was thinking, his sarcasm, and how he expressed himself. And as the saying goes - priceless.

This originally appeared in the November issue of Northern Connection magazine.

In the Moment

 

When I was in high school, I was on both the yearbook and newspaper staff, and in addition to writing for them, I was also a photographer for both publications. This meant that it was my job to capture the goings on at all school events I was tasked with covering, everything from school assemblies to field day to candid shots.

Fast forward nearly 45 years later, and I now serve as a publicity chair for a women’s prayer breakfast organization. In addition to sending out notices and publicizing the meetings, it is my duty to take photos of the events and submit them to the organization’s historian.

 

At the last breakfast as I was sneaking around the room trying to capture the speaker in action, the women eating breakfast and socializing, and the band performing, I had a flashback to my high school years, specifically, how as soon as you pick up a camera and begin viewing events through a lens you immediately go from being a participant to an observer. 

 

How many times have you been advised or seen postings advising you to “live in the present moment?” Unfortunately, I’ve learned that when you’re taking photos, you’re not in the present moment; you are one step removed from reality.

I love collecting photographs as much as the next person and the 18 photo albums I have on my bookshelf and the scads of photos on my phone attest to that, but I’m trying to be more judicious when it comes to taking photos.

In fact, a study by psychologist Maryanne Garry of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, says that taking too many photos distorts how memories are made in our brains and that it undermines the way people form memories. Her findings show that because we are taking so many photos, we don’t interact with them. When we take fewer photos, we reinforce that image by looking at the photo more often and imprinting it in our brain. 

 

Whatever the reason, it’s way more important to be present and make memories than it is to get that snapshot. So maybe that old, retort kids used to say, “Take a picture, it lasts longer” is not only snarky, but false. It’s only when we take a picture and cherish it that it has lasting value and grounds us in our life.

 

This article originally appeared in the April issue of Northern Connection magazine.  Read it here!