The Family Sea

I'm a firm believer that bath time should be fun. And educational. I was just reminded of this while talking with my niece whose voice was nearly drowned out by the gleeful giggles and splashes of her two boys in the background.

What can you learn in the tub? Oh, lessons about cause and effect. Properties of (wet) matter. And maybe other things that matter - like family and how we're all connected.

My sister just reminded me of the Family Sea at Mama Darkey's house. The Family Sea provided great entertainment for us kids. It helped us all to know our place in the world. Our mom was the oldest (and fanciest) of Mama and Papa Darkey's "school" of colorful contact paper fishies. On our side of the sea, a daddy fish (probably wearing a toolbelt) swam alongside her, and then behind both of them were the big sister and brother fish, with the littlest (me) swimming among the bubbles.

Each of our aunts and uncles had their own color-matching schools of fish, but everyone swam together, basically in the same direction, fanning out across the wall and around the room.

It started with great-grandmother Lellah (Mom Mom) and great-grandfather Prentiss (Paw Paw). As long as I can remember, the Mom Mom and Paw Paw fish wore halos. And as time went on, halos were added to a few others. Mama Darkey's house in Virginia was sold to developers and demolished to make way for Lellah Court around 2003, but the Family Sea lives on in our memories.

I think every kid today has to do a geneology project in elementary school. This strikes fear in parents' hearts. So many of my generation were not raised with a solid awareness of our ancestors. We may live far away from grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

I'm wondering where I can start a new Family Sea. There has to be a perfect wall waiting somewhere ...

The Seat of Learning

We've been cleaning out our dad's house. It's painstaking work - plus every dust particle disturbed dislodges a fragment of memory.

When we first began to tackle the garage, our efforts seemed futile. After weeks of hauling out recyclables, barrels of kindling, piles of firewood and stacks of good lumber, rusty folding chairs, old garden hoses, newspapers, bags of dirt, boxes of sawdust and abandoned woodshop projects, it looked like we'd barely made a dent. Behind sheets of OSB and plywood, we found pieces of our old kitchen cupboards leaned neatly against the walls. I looked up into the rafters and there were the countertops with the daisies painted over the cigarette burns (our mom's special touch). The wooden ceiling panels from my sister's old bedroom were sandwiched in there. Crates full of empty bottles never returned to The Pop Shop. Pieces of foam insulation. And there, in the corner, was the telephone desk.

Covered in sawdust and cobwebs and a little scraped and battered, but nothing a good sanding and coat or two of paint couldn't fix.

My brother and I just stood there staring at it. Couldn't quite believe it was under all that.

When I was growing up, our house was in a constant state of remodeling. I don't have any significant memories of the little white desk whose seat folded neatly into itself. At one time, it sat in a corner of our kitchen, holding the telephone and piles of phonebooks. I always thought it was kind of cool, but it didn't really fit with the Danish-modern design plans for our 1920s bungalow. So when I was in college and getting ready to move to a house off campus with friends, dad gave me permission to take the desk to East Lansing. I knew it had been mom's, so that made it a little bit special. It went with me to a few other apartments - even to Buffalo. Somewhere along the line, it apparently found its way home.

J chuckled. He remembered the desk in its youth. But seeing it on this day evoked a specific memory: of our pretty young mother chatting gaily on the phone while perched at the desk in the hallway of their apartment one afternoon. With its shiny white enamel, smart, space-saving design and slender legs, the telephone desk suited our chic mama perfectly.

On this particular day, J had just learned about a fantastic pool with underwater lights that allowed the swimmers to see where they were going. "What a brilliant idea!" he said to himself.

The boy who stuffed beans and pennies up his nose had a plan.

So while mom chatted and giggled, and doodled on her notepad on the little desktop, J began to run water in the deep, claw-footed tub. Next, he trotted down the hall in his birthday suit, wearing swim goggles and gripping a desk lamp. He figured it took mom only about a nanosecond after he left her line of sight to catch on to his plan.

Then she caught him just as he was hoisting a leg over the tub ... and right after he'd plugged in the lamp.

"Man, that was the worst spanking I ever got," he said. "I gotta have this desk."

I had to agree. Oh, and I'm pretty sure this is where the phrase "naked as a jaybird" originated.

Tuna on Wheatley

My sister tells the Tuna on Wheatley story the best. After all, she was there. If I can get a video of her telling it with the hand motions, I'll post it later.

There have been times in my life that I've been accused of being a little hotheaded. If that's true, I guess I can say I come by it honestly.

Well, here goes - the first in one of our family's many stories - told in no particular order. Imagine this one in my sister's voice.

In the summer, one of our favorite meals was tuna salad with diced apples, with hot peas on the side. Presentation was always important to mom, so this was arranged prettily in a large oval dish. (It didn't matter that sometimes we were so poor we had to have water on our cereal - dinner needed to be presented.)

Our mom and dad were separated, and we lived in the second-floor apartment in Alexandria we'd lived in together as a family of four. Now just three, mom was doing her best to hold things together financially and otherwise.

On one particularly sweltering evening, as we were getting ready to sit down to our tuna and peas masterpiece, there was a knock at the door. Still holding the dish with our dinner, mom opened the door to a man who said, "I tax your furniture." (He was not a native English speaker.)

The funny little man kept repeating the phrase until mom bopped him over the head with the dish. Holding his head and covered with a fragrant glop of tuna, apples and peas, the man looked at mom with astonishment - surprised at the assault but also the elegant woman who'd inflicted it upon him. (Mom was always very prim, posh and proper in a Jackie-O sort of way.) Then he staggered down the steps to the landlord's apartment to call the police.

This was one of the most exciting events of our lives - and in the lives of those in our little apartment complex! We all got to ride in the police car. Mom sat with her chin up and her hands folded primly in her lap, the picture of dignity and refinement as my brother and I waved jubilantly to the curious onlookers who lined the sidewalk.

The officers at the police station were so kind and gentlemanly, pulling out the chair for our mom and speaking gently to her about what must have been an unfortunate misunderstanding. Best of all, my brother and I were given a little bag of chips and a bottle of Coke - an unheard-of treat.

Mom worked as a legal secretary for some well-known D.C. attorneys, so it was only a short while before they posted bail and we got to go home. I later learned that Mr. Wheatley (the repo man) dropped the assault charges.

The next day, "Tuna on Wheatley" made the front page of our local newspaper. Oh, a proud and historic moment that was. I can't believe someone in our family didn't frame that article.

And that's the story of how our beautiful, Southern-belle, white-glove-wearing mom got herself a teeny-tiny little police record.