Black Tee Shirts and Kevin Kline

Here are a couple of quotes I have always attributed to my brother Eric:

      You can never have too many black tee shirts. Eric is a huge fan of rock bands and has regularly attended concerts since the late seventies. Along the way, he has accummulated many a rock band tee shirt – most of which have a black background. And I heard Eric say one time, “You can never have too many black tee shirts.” Whenever I see someone in a black tee shirt with a band on the front, I have to smile, and I wonder how many more black tee shirts are hanging in his/her closet? Because, you know, you can never have too many.

      You can't go wrong with a Kevin Kline movie - Eric gave me this advice over the phone one day about twenty years ago when I mentioned to Eric that I was on my way to the video store to rent a movie but did not know which one to get. And this advice has never steered me wrong! French Kiss and Grand Canyon are two of my favorite movies, and I might have overlooked them if not for the fact that I saw Kevin Kline was in them!

111 20150421 Black Tee Shirts and Kevin Kline

Pubert!

 

Eric at 14

    In his early teen years, my brother, Eric, like most kids, rode his bicycle around town and beyond. Living in North Boston, it was a few miles to ride to the other hamlets – Patchin or Boston, to hang out with friends; and it was a couple of more miles in the other direction to pedal to Hamburg and meet up with other friends. And Eric often used the bike for his paper route which was just down Heinrich Road and around Valley Circle Lane. The bike was a practical and respectable form of transportation.

     A respectable form of transportation until, apparently, one got one's driver's license.

     Eric got his driver's license, some time during high school. And Mom and Dad had a 1963 Ford Fairlane that no one else was driving, and so Eric was soon using the Fairlane to motor about town running errands, going to school activities, and of course, meeting up with his friends. Eric's buddies got their licenses that same year too – and they were all riding around in old cars, new cars, any kind of car.

      But not bikes.

      After the acquiring of drivers' licenses, a new pastime came into play. I wouldn't say that Eric and his friends went looking for people on bikes – but it would just happen that they would, while driving along, see someone riding a bike. Now, if it was a little kid, I think he or she was exempt – but a teenager, adult, or senior citizen, male or female, were the targets of my brother and his friends. As the car passed the bike rider, the driver and any passengers who were present would yell out an open window “Pu-bert!”

      I did not understand this new attitude and pointed out to Eric that he was the boy on the bike not too many months earlier. But they all thought it was great sport.

      Of course, that was a long time ago now. Eric's own children are grown and have had their own driver's licenses for years – notably skipping right over the “Pubert!” stage.

Present Day Pubert

      This spring, Eric got his bike out as soon as winter subsided. On weekend mornings, he takes the path along the Ellicot Creek Trailway. Eric often rides with friends, and they have breakfast at a restaurant just off the path – their reward for all the great physical activity. Eric has a goal each year of a thousand miles or so to ride on the bike. With the reputation for bad weather that Western New York is known for , he sometimes has to race to get the miles in before winter – and yet sometimes Eric sneaks in a bike ride during a thaw, a few miles one day, a few miles another, and he finds it very satisfying.

    Pu-bert indeed.

110 20150420 Pubert

Happy Birthday Eric!

Eric & his big sister Chestnut Ridge 2009

      Today is my brother's birthday. Eric is the younger of my two brothers. A few months ago Eric was shocked to learn that I have told one story of our brother, Clark, at storytelling events in town, - the infamous family tale about the letter to Spencer Gifts - but not one story about Eric! Well today is day 109 of my memory-a-day blog, and there have been a couple of stories about Eric so far – the icicle story comes to mind, and the first Sears parking lot story. There will be more. Honestly, Eric is every bit as colorful as our brother Clark!

      In honor of Eric's birthday today, I'd like to relate this brief anecdote:

      One time, I was probably high school age, I was complaining about a headache. From the pain, it was most likely a sinus headache.

      Eric said, “Does your face hurt?”

      Impressed with his concern, I thought about the question for a moment and realized that my face did hurt.

      “Why, yes it does!” I answered.

      “I'm not surprised, because - it's killing me!”

      And he had a very good laugh.

      In the many decades since then, we have all gotten a lot of mileage out of that joke. I ask everyone who mentions having a headache if his/her face hurts – Mike does it too! - surprisingly, very few folks take the bait. But we laugh anyway.

      And I don't think that Eric has gotten as much of a laugh out of this quip as he did that day when he pulled it on me!

      Happy Birthday Eric!

109 20150419 Eric's birthday

Bartlesville OB

       After arriving in Oklahoma, one of the first things I needed to do was make an appointment with the obstetrician who had been recommended to us and who had already received my medical history from the ob back home.

      I was sitting in the examining room when the doctor walked in, saw me, and with a look of surprise said, “Oh, so you do exist!”

      “Excuse me?”

      “When your file arrived in the mail, I thought my med school buddies were playing a prank on me!”

      “Excuse me?”

      “Come on! Look at this file! You have to admit the names are very strange!”

      I glared at him.

      “First of all, the file says it came from Two naw a da?”

      “Tonawanda – it is a suburb of Buffalo and a Native American word.” Oh my gosh, I thought, how can the man not know how to say Tonawanda – and here we are in the midst of Oklahoma, the state with the highest concentration of Native Americans in the country – does this guy make fun of all of their names?

      “And then the doctor's name – Oxcar Boxcar?”

      “Dr. Aschar – he is from India, and he was wonderful.”

      “And then your name, how do you say it? I'm not even going to try.”

I pronounced my last name – which is was as simple to say as Tonawanda – even though it has a couple more letters and is Italian.

      “Yeah, so you can see why I thought this was all a prank!”

      All I could see was that this guy seemed to think everyone should have as common a name as he did. Okay, I won't put his name in print – but I'll tell anyone who might ask!

      Then he went on to say that we needed to schedule a sonogram to get an updated due date; and after that we can schedule the C-section.

      “No, I was told after Sarah was born that I could have natural delivery for my second child.”

      “Ma'am, you aren't in Buffalo anymore.”

      Clearly.

      “I am not the one who sewed you up after your C-section with your first child. So I do not know how well the surgery was done. Our hospital here in town has a small emergency room. You come in here in labor and your uterus ruptures and you will have to go to the emergency room. Then, if there's a car accident out there somewhere – the ER can't handle both emergencies. So we can't risk a ruptured uterus – we have to schedule a C-section.”

      My brain was spinning.

      “Now if you absolutely have your heart set on natural delivery, this is what you will have to do: when you go into labor, get into your car, drive the fifty miles to Tulsa, check yourself into the hospital there which is bigger, and have another doctor help you with natural childbirth. But you and your ruptured uterus are not coming here!”

      Months later I actually met a woman who went to Tulsa to have her baby, bless her! But I was not that dedicated to natural childbirth or the thought of driving 50 miles while in labor.       So the sonogram was scheduled – the due date was set at December 12^th, a Friday. The doctor asked which Thursday in December did I want to do the surgery? Thursdays were when he did C-sections. I said how about the 18^th, since the baby probably would not adhere to the due date. He said how about December 11^th?

      The receptionist at the obstetrician's office was similar in attitude to the doctor. One day at check-out, she asked what it was like living in a suburb of New York City?

      I said, “I'm from Buffalo.”

      “Isn't all of New York State a suburb of New York City?”

      “Um, Buffalo is 500 miles from New York City.”

      She stared at me as if I had not answered her question.

      A pang of homesickness went through me. Buffalo is connected to New York City, kind of, via the New York Thruway. When you drive on the New York Thruway, you see the most beautiful country scenery you can imagine – farmland, hills, gorges, colors, cows and corn and tractors! Not urban sprawl! Gosh I missed it!

      Another time at checkout, the receptionist looked up from her computer and asked, “Was your maiden name any better than your married name?”

      “How do you mean better?”

      “Well, your married name has so many letters in it!”

      “My married name has eleven letters. My maiden name has only seven letters. But you know what? The fourth letter in my maiden name, the letter smack dab in the middle of the name, is capitalized!”

      The receptionist's eyes got big and she said, “Oh!”

      She probably did not deserve that even though it was a crappy question to ask. And I had promised myself to never say, “Back where I come from” but I sure was thinking it that day, “Back where I come from there are people with with much more difficult names than mine! Some have no vowels in them! And we try, out of respect, to pronounce those names, and we listen as the people correct us, and then we try harder to pronounce them the right way.” And of course, that's an exaggerration – it was not until I myself was the target of this bigotry in the doctor's office in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, that I vowed from that day forward to always treat a person's name with respect.

      When December came along, the C-section was rescheduled for December 4^th – it was more convenient for the doctor. So Amanda was born a week and a day before her due date. She did have a little look of surprise on her face when she emerged – but otherwise Amanda was just fine. So we all survived this adventure – even the doctor and his receptionist.

108 20150418 The Bartlesville OB

Oklahoma is OK

    Right about the time we realized we were expecting our second child, in the spring of 1986, my husband accepted a job offer in the newly created biotechnology department at Phillips 66.

     In Oklahoma!

     Literally, the very first thought that ran through my head when Hubby first mentioned a job opportunity in Oklahoma was “some night something alive is going to run over my foot as I walk through the house in the dark!” What did I know of Oklahoma? Tornadoes and tumbleweeds! The flora and fauna and culture would be all so very different from everything I knew. Unfamiliar wildlife could somehow get into the house?

     One Sunday, before our move, I looked out the window of our living room in Alden, New York. Staring at the trees and again wondering what Oklahoma was going to be like, my eyes moved to something in the grass. There was a snake - a huge snake, bigger than any I'd ever seen in the wild before! It was slow and majestic as it made serpentine progress across the yard. I gaped in amazement – it was just the sort of wildlife I had imagined I would be seeing in Oklahoma, and yet here it was – parading itself before me just as I was leaving Western New York!

     Movers arrived from Bartlesville. What a great perk for us! They had boxes and a huge truck – and they assured us as they started filling boxes that the contents of our entire house would fit into half of the truck. (They would be packing another house somewhere else into the other half of the truck before meeting us in Oklahoma to unload!)

     Sarah, who had just turned two years old, and I stayed out of the way of the movers, mostly hanging around in the living room with the television and some toys. One of the workers asked, “Ma'am? Are you taking the foam?”

     Oh my gosh! Foam did not make sense, so that meant I was not understanding her accent! I had not anticipated that Oklahoma was going to be this strange! “Pardon me?” I asked.

     “The foam. Are you taking the foam?”

     I pleaded with my brain to figure out what she was really saying!

     “Does the foam belong to you or the foam company?”

     Oh the phone!

    “Yes, the phone is ours, it can be packed, thank you!”

     I put my head in my hands, what am I going to do – not even in Oklahoma yet, and the adventure already felt like a fail.

     A young man who was with the packers and did not appear to be older than high school age, put a box together, grabbed our record albums, put them into the box, taped it, and then wrote with a marker across the top Ricords.

     I admit to being a spelling snob, and I will also admit that there have actually been occasions when I myself have spelled a word or two incorrectly. But ricords? Really? I worried that this young man was a reflection of the educational system of the entire state of Oklahoma.

     Having ricords stuck in my brain instead of giving the state, and even the young man, the benefit of the doubt would eventually cost us some big bucks.

     In July of 1986, we got into our Toyota Tercel and began the trek to Oklahoma. We were mostly on highways, and every time the iconic golden arches came into view, Sarah would proclaim from her car-seat in the back, “Mac Don alds!” Fortunately she did not pitch a fit when we did not stop at every single one!

     It was not too long after we left town, that a bad storm hit Western New York, and an actual tornado touched down damaging a restaurant in a familiar suburb! Tornado? No! Western New York only gets snow! Not hurricanes, not earthquakes, not floods, and certainly not tornadoes! We were on our way to a place nicknamed Tornado Ally – so what was up with a tornado in Cheektowaga? Nothing less than the irony, I guess.

     Bartlesville is in the northeast corner of Oklahoma, an area called Green Country. And it is green – I did not see a tumbleweed the whole time we lived there!

     As we drove into the downtown area, the sign on the bank said it was 115 degrees. Just what a pregnant lady who has spent her whole life in Western New York needed to see!

     Along another street downtown, there was a marquee to a theater saying Louise Mandrell was coming! I thought perhaps cultural/entertainment events would be more affordable in Bartlesville than in Buffalo – but that turned out to be wrong – we did not see Louise Mandrell nor did we even step foot inside the theater during our time in Oklahoma.

     This reminds me of a comment from a graduate student who was in the lab at Roswell Park when I worked there – he was from India – and one day he asked me how much tickets were for something that was going on downtown; and when I answered him, he said, “So here in America, culture is reserved for the upper class?”

     There was a marker in downtown Bartlesville, I can't remember now if it was on a pole or the side of a building, but the marker was about 18 feet up from street level. A plaque, at eye level, explained that the mark was the highest spot that the Flood of the Century had reached! Floods? We were in Tornado Ally – and now we were finding out that there are floods?

     The Caney River flows through Bartlesville. And apparently it overflows from time to time. My thought when reading the plaque was that if the area has so-called Floods of the Century, then based on the date on the plaque, we were probably due for one soon!

     Yikes! What more surprises were we going to encounter?

107 20150417 Oklahoma is OK

The Eye of the Needle

      In Oklahoma Sarah and Amanda and I attended First Presbyterian Church in Bartlesville. We had several adventures there – gosh, lots that I can think of – and we lived in Oklahoma for such a short time!

      One of the most colorful things I ever heard a pastor say was by the First Presbyterian preacher – in essence it was - you have heard that Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven, but Jesus did not say it was impossible for a camel to get through the eye of a needle – it is just that the camel won't look much like a camel once it gets through to the other side!

      The congregation groaned in unison at the image of a camel actually squeezing through the eye of a needle! I still feel the rumble when I remember it now!

      And yes, we know that the eye of a needle was an expression back in Biblical days that meant the narrow opening into the walled city that a camel cannot get through (especially if there are too many of the rich man's packs on his back). And I think there are those who say that that explanation is incorrect, and the eye of the needle meant something else entirely in Biblical days – but still the expression itself is not to be taken literally.

      But the pastor that day in Oklahoma expressed it in as literal a picture as he could – squeezed that real camel through a little tiny hole in the everyday sewing needle with which we are all familiar.

       And we got the message.

      The camel has to shed and sacrifice, bend and morph; the camel has to give up “I” to such an extent that it is unrecognizable as “I” when it is finally worthy to enter heaven.

      That's a lot to ask of us pitiful fat rich mortals.

       Even if one does not believe in the Good Book, or the Word as delivered by whatever prophet – one most likely believes we are capable of being decent human beings. But to give up “I” to do it – to morph into something unrecognizable to do what is right all the time – it is probably easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

        But not impossible!

106 20150416 Eye of the Needle

Clark A. Junkin

   

Naturalization Papers 1941

    On this date in the year 1900, my grandfather was born. His name was Clark Alexander Junkin. I'll mention one of the memories I have of my grandfather, and one story that my grandmother told me.

      When I was a kid, I was enthralled with adult conversation – mainly because I was usually banned from it – told to leave the room and go play with my brothers or cousins. And that made me more curious – what did big people talk about – and why was the subject matter not for my ears?

      If we were visiting my grandparents on a Sunday night, my Mom and grandmother would be in the kitchen gossiping mainly about the different neighbors who Mom still knew. I always wanted to be in the kitchen with them – listening, watching their eyes light up with the conversation – I never knew who they were talking about, but I felt I could learn something from their kitchen-talk examples.

      Invariably however, whenever I was in the kitchen with the women, my grandfather would call from the living room, “Denny! Come see who Ed Sullivan has on!” I did not want to see who Ed Sullivan had on – probably some boring circus act - I wanted to listen to Mom and Granny in the kitchen! But I couldn't ignore my grandfather, so I would reluctantly drag myself to the living room. Grandpa would give a slight point of the finger to the television as I approached, and his face would be smiling with humor at the Sullivan show and also with delight in sharing it with me.

      The groan I wanted to utter stayed inside as a man spinning plates on poles was the act I mostly remember on the Sullivan show on those nights when I was called to watch. How could grown people find plate spinners amusing?

      Now that I am a grandparent, plates twirling on poles and kept from falling by a frantic performer are scenes I would love to share with my own beloved grandchildren!

      Clark Junkin was born and raised in Ontario, Canada; Dolly moved to Ontario from England when she was 11 years old. As a young woman, Dolly got a job as a switchboard operator at a hotel.

      She had three suitors.

      One was a son from a wealthy family.

      One was a student in medical school.

      And one was poor.

      The poor one had a job working on the construction of the Welland Canal – but when the Canal was finished, Clark had to find new work.

my grandparents 1946

       As you might guess, Clark was the beau Dolly liked the best. They got engaged – but almost immediately they realized that neither family would approve.

       So they eloped! They were married in Niagara Falls, Ontario. 

       The year was 1925. And the new married couple decided to move to Buffalo, temporarily, – just the other side of the border, in the US – because they heard jobs were more plentiful there.

       Well, that's Dolly's story. Just think, the existence of their children, and grandchildren, and the two generations after them, is all thanks to Dolly;s picking of beau number three and their choice to move to Buffalo, just across the border!

105 20150415 Clark A. Junkin