Grandma

Over the river and through the woods was definitely not the route to my grandmother's house on Thanksgiving or any other day. The road went past the factories and around the taverns.

My grandmother lived upstairs in a dreary German flat on Milwaukee's south side. Even on the sunniest day her house was dark inside; the frugal Germans built these massive blocks of houses with only a few feet in between them.

My father dropped me off at Grandma's house every Sunday afternoon, and I adored being there. My grandmother, a typical German Housefrau in her faded, sagging house dress and run down carpet slippers, was wonderful to me.

Her house did not have a single toy in it, but the hours were richly filled. When I was very little, Grandma filled the old fashioned kitchen sink, and I would stand on a chair and simply play in the water. She also let me bang on the old, out-of-tune piano for hours, a monumental act of patience on her part.

Grandma taught me Canasta when I got bigger. She also made a valiant attempt to teach me to crochet, but I could never get beyond the chain stitch. She was definitely more successful in introducing me to cooking. I watched with fascination as she rolled out homemade noodles and hung them on the chair backs to dry.

My parents came back at dinnertime. The evening meal invariably involved something with noodles and schaum torte for dessert. Ed Sullivan always followed dinner, although he was barely discernible through the snow on the TV screen. Grandma's favorite show came next.

My grandmother, a staunch German Lutheran, was the biggest fan in America of the Yiddish comic, Molly Goldberg. She would have loved to have had Molly as a next door neighbor. My multi-cultural education began early.

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Duck

The lone duck was hunkered down in the sand on the beach in front of our neighbor's cottage. We spotted him when we were going down the stairs to take a beach walk.

We both suspected a problem. Ducks are flock birds; a single one is usually sick or injured with a broken wing, bullet hole or broken foot.

We mutually agreed to take our walk in the opposite direction so as not to frighten this wild, possibly immobile creature. When we came back a while later, the duck had not moved.

"Don't interfere with nature" is a wise rule. However, I suggested that we might bring a pan of water and a dish of cracked corn down and place them a distance from the bird. Rehabbers have told me that many injured birds die from dehydration.

I went back to work in the house, and my husband took down the food and water.

A short while later he walked into the house with a smile and said, "Don't worry, the duck is fine. In fact, he came up with me. He's on the deck now."

I was incredulous. But there he was on our deck.

The duck was a decoy washed ashore by the waves.

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Stitches

My cousin sews a mean seam. She selects gorgeous fabrics, makes her own patterns and sews stunning clothes. I am in awe of great seamstresses.

Unfortunately, I did not inherit the family gene for sewing. Early in our marriage, my husband gave me a sewing machine as a very special, surprise Christmas present. The real surprise turned out to be how ill-suited this machine and I were to each other.

The instruction manual for my sewing machine was positively frightening. Plus it was written in a strange hybrid language best described as Japanese English. No matter how hard I tried to follow the directions, bad things always happened; big loopy stitches, puckered up stitches, very wavy lines of stitches.

I quickly figured out that putting a garment together also required accurate measuring. My preferred method of measuring has always been "eyeballing".

Fortunately for me, sack dresses were in style at that time. I actually managed to sew several large rectangles together with a drawstring on top. Fashion was on my side.

My sewing machine and I parted company one day when I was mending split seams. The bobbin had turned itself into a piece of tumbleweed. I yelled to my 10 year old son for help. He took a long, hard look at what I had done to the machine.

"Just go do something else," he said. "I'll do the sewing for you."

Through the years I have inherited two more sewing machines. I immediately put them out for adoption.

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Voting

It's election day, and I won't have to call my kids and remind them to vote. I tried that once and learned my lesson.

Years ago I phoned my married son to remind him it was election day. When I was shortly into my diatribe, he asked me to stop.

"I know what you are going to say," he said. "You're going to tell me about your grandmother." And then he added, "Of course I've voted."

I laughed and reminded myself that it is wise to desist when your message has been delivered effectively. The following is what I didn't have to tell him... again.

When I was growing up, we always got a phone call before every election from my long widowed grandmother. "Edward," she would say, "can you please take me to vote next Tuesday?"

My father unfailingly assisted his mother year after year in the performance of her civic duty.

My father's family was poor, and my grandmother lived most of her lifetime in a dreary "German" flat. She rented the choicer downstairs flat, thus getting a little extra rent income to help pay the bills. In her final years, climbing the steep, dark and twisted flight of stairs was almost impossible for her. But until the end of her life the pre-election day phone call was ritual.

I must add that she often told my dad, "I have to vote for Frank." For those of you unfamiliar with Milwaukee's history, Frank Zeidler was the last in a long line of Milwaukee's socialist mayors. They studded Milwaukee with beautiful schools, parks, libraries and natatoriums.

To me "socialist" is not an evil word. My grandmother couldn't possibly have been wrong.

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