Lost and found

Eight hundred-dollar bills and one Smith & Wesson.

One of the advantages of finally going through boxes I packed up 3 1/2 years ago when we moved to Woodland Hills is that I found a few things I'd been wondering about, and some things I didn't know I had.

The eight hundred-dollar bills were spread between 4 envelopes given to Rob and me by my dad.  The cash was what he used to call "WAM" which stood for "Walking-Around Money."  (Funny, until this moment, when I actually had to write out the word "WAM" I thought it was spelled "WHAM" but that doesn't make sense, does it?)

More important, though, than the WAM were the poems that accompanied it.  Each Easter and Christmas, he would write customized poems that he termed "topical."  He would work in whatever events or activities or funny stories that had just happened in our lives.  And the rhyming was painfully and admittedly awful.  I noticed that in his last Christmas poem, he had the audacity to rhyme the name "Johnny Cash" with, yes, the word "cash."  That was his idea of a perfect (meaning funny) rhyme.  I had no idea that any WAM still existed, so that was a nice surprise.  But the poems were the real treasure.  Someday I'll assemble them all into a blog post.

Along with the found WAM was daughter Emily's gun.  This was also a gift from my dad.  For several years, he and Emily attended the Civil War Institute in the summers at Gettysburg.  My dad had loved the Civil War and had, through uncle Jack, befriended the head of the Institute, Gabor Boritt.  It was through this love of the Civil War and of Gettysburg that Em decided to go to college there and eventually she became Gabor's research assistant and also worked for the Institute's summer program.

But I digress.  Back to the gun.  It's a Smith & Wesson Model One and a Half.  A 7 shot 32 rimfire second issue, made around 1868.  We know it's second issue by its round barrel, fluted cylinder, birds head grip, and serial number of 125297.  I googled it to make sure.

Dad bought the gun while he and Emily were in Gettysburg for CWI, with Emily attending on a student scholarship.  She was staying in the dorm.  Dad was in a hotel.  That night, he woke up at 1 AM with a terrifying thought - what if Emily is caught having a gun in the dorm?!!!  He promptly woke up one of the CWI employees who agreed to track Emily down and let her know the problem.  That employee rushed to Em's room.  No Em.

Turns out that Miss Em was participating in a "Ghost Tour" of Gettysburg.  Normally she would have avoided the ghost tour at all costs, just as she would have avoided ghosts.  But evidently she was trying to be a good sport and went along.

The employee had to drive around Gettysburg in the middle of the night to see if he could find the ghost tour's whereabouts.  He eventually found them and walked up to the group and asked if Emily was there.  This, of course, scared her even more than the ghosts ever could.

The employee explained the situation and Emily gave him the key to her room so he could remove the gun and give it to my dad.  For safe-keeping.  The thought of my dad having a gun scared me even more.  I grew up with the story of him finding a gun as a child and playing with it all day while he was sick in bed, only to have it go off and shoot a hole in his bedroom wall.  That story does not fade from this daughter's memory very easily....

Somehow they got the gun from Gettysburg to our family reunion in Vail, Colorado.  I'm grateful that neither of them thought to put it in their carry-ons.  So I guess it rode successfully in their regular bags.  In the lobby of the hotel, dad was telling the story to assorted relatives.  At the end of the story one of them said, so where's the gun now?  Dad said, right here on the coffee table!  It was wrapped in bubble wrap but he had placed it in plain sight in the middle of the coffee table and none of us knew it.  I mentally added up the number of children that had passed by that table in the time we spent there and then tried not to let that number cause me to yell at my dad in public at a family reunion.  Fortunately for all involved, no blood was shed in the lobby that day.

When the gun arrived in the Hummel house, I took one look at it and thought - there's no way I'm letting my 16 year old daughter have this in her room.  So I took it.  For safe-keeping.

I stored it in the back of my dresser, thinking that the drawer was so stuffed with junk that no one would ever find it.  Also, I have to admit that I did consider the gun would definitely come in handy if there was ever an intruder.

Later, during our move, it got packed up, bubble wrap and all.  Frankly, the first time I saw it I was so afraid of it that I barely looked at it.  But when I discovered it the other day, I was amazed at how small it was.  Barely 6 1/2 inches from barrel tip to the end of the birds head grip.  It fits my hand perfectly.  Heavy but not too much so.  I compared its color, rivets, cylinder length, serial number to what I could find online.  I have it sitting next to my computer right now and I can't keep my hands off it.  Though I have to admit, I keep it pointed away from me and those I love.

In googling it, I found myself on all sorts of gun websites and 99.9% of it scares the #%&$ out of me.  But this gun is different.  It was made just a couple of years after the Civil War ended.  It looks like a ladies gun, and I imagine that those were not easy times and a gun might mean the survival of your family.  That this gun might have belonged to a Civil War widow and might have brought her some measure of comfort with her husband gone.  Maybe that widow might have walked the steps of the U.S. Pension Bureau building in Washington DC to plead for the pension money that would have been owed to her dead husband, in the building that now is the National Building Museum where Emily once interned.

That's what I truly adore about this story.  It goes from love to fear (lots of it!) and back to love again.  My dad's love of history led to the gun which then led to my dad's fear of the gun in the dorm.  That fear led to increased fear on the ghost tour, later to fear in a hotel lobby, and then to fear in my own home.  But now I hold that Smith & Wesson Model One and a Half and think only of the love that drew my dad and my daughter together in a shared love of history.  How proud he would be to know that his CWI buddy was acknowledged in two of Gabor's books, was an intern in a Civil War pension building, and later completed her Masters in "public history."

I guess it's time.  Em, you can have your gun back.  You earned it.  Now, if only I could find the cannon ball dad gave to Claire.  It might come in handy if I need to defend myself...

Things I learned from my wedding - Part 3 - ARMPITS

Mom and Dad

As I mentioned in a previous post, I wore my mother's wedding gown for my wedding.  The dress was sewn by my grandmother on her treadle sewing machine.  I grew up worshipping that dress.  Turns out my mom didn't.

I would pour over the photos of my parents' wedding and knew every detail of that dress, from its regally-wired standup collar, to the row of satin buttons down the middle, to the delicate point of the sleeves at the wrist.  Recently, I googled "1950's bridal gown pattern" and, after browsing through a few hundred vintage pattern photos, eventually found out it was Vogue "Special Design" pattern #4171.

When I first started sewing in 7th grade, Vogue patterns were a distant fantasy.  I would never have dreamed that I could sew such a pattern, or even wear anything associated with the Vogue name.  It was the best of the best, and the patterns were the most expensive of all.  I was a McCalls or Simplicity gal through and through.  I eventually worked my way up to Butterick, but I can count on one hand the number of Vogue patterns I've sewn.

So, for my mom to have chosen such a pattern must have been a big deal at the time.  I guess that's why I was shocked to learn that mom didn't love her dress as I did.  Maybe she would have preferred a store-bought dress?  I don't know.  I never asked her.  

After my wedding, mom took the dress home with her.  I assumed she would have it cleaned and boxed up, especially since it was thirty years old at that point.  I assumed wrong.  The dress was hung in a closet as is.  When I found it many years later, it was dangling from the hanger like a weary spider web.  The lace had disintegrated wherever it had come in contact with makeup or lotion or deodorant.  It no longer had armpits.

I rushed the decaying carcass of a gown to the nearest dry cleaner who did his best to clean it, stuff it, and fold it gently into one of those giant wedding gown boxes.  I put the giant wedding gown box in the back of my closet.  

Periodically, usually when in the middle of a marathon closet cleaning session, I'd open the box and peer at what was left of my dress.  It did not take me to a happy place.  In fact, each time I looked at it, it seemed a little more lifeless, until eventually I felt like I was protecting a corpse.  Time to make a decision.  It had to go.

I spread the gown out on the floor.  I looked for the sections that remained unscathed from the ravages of time.  I grabbed my scissors. And I began to cut.  I cut out one small square for Emily.  And one small square for Claire.  And one small square for me.  I included part of the bodice to which we'd added some tiny pearl beads.  The three pieces were carefully folded, slipped inside a carved wooden box, and then placed in a bookshelf next to my bed.

I can honestly say that those three pieces of lace, tucked inside that wooden box, gave me far greater pleasure than the decayed stuffed remains lurking inside the giant wedding gown box.  

There was the lesson.  In trying to do what I thought a good daughter/granddaughter was supposed to do, I was dutifully clinging to something that actually made me sad and resentful.  It wasn't easy making that first cut.  I kept saying to myself, "Who does this?  Who cuts up their mother's wedding gown sewn by their grandmother?"  But as I carefully chose the good bits of lace and trimmed away the bad, I felt more and more confident that I was doing the right thing.  My three small squares of perfect lace gradually buried the memory of rotted lace. 

In deconstructing the dress, I found its real beauty.  The beauty (of course!) was in the idea.  The idea of love that precipitated it, that planned it, that created it, that wore it down the aisle.  And that love could never in a million years decay or disintegrate.  

I had traded my giant wedding gown box of gloom for a carved wooden box filled with freedom, joy, and love.  It was a good trade.  And we had a lot more space in our closet.

Things I learned from my wedding - Part 2 - BIRDSEED

Rob did not have a laundry list of demands about our wedding and reception.  He had one, and that was DO NOT under any circumstance let anyone "decorate" the car.  He arranged for our friend Jim Thurman to be the enforcer.  Jim was given the car keys and the responsibility to keep evil forces away from the Prelude.

That was not to be.  I don't remember exactly how events transpired, but this is what greeted us as we left the reception:

Because Rob did not have a laundry list of demands, and because this was his one and only concern, he was (to put it politely) not a happy camper.  His greatest fear had come upon him and all the assurances in the world from me that everything was going to be all right fell on deaf ears.

The culprit was, not surprisingly, Bram.  Bram was a long time family friend who was married to Rob's cousin, Robin.  He was a notorious prankster at weddings and had evidently outsmarted enforcer, Jim.  There was shaving cream and crepe paper and tin cans.  But the worst was the birdseed.

Bram Johnson, John Fiedler, Rob, Jim Thurman

According to our reconstruction of events, Bram had coated the dash and steering wheel first with vaseline, and then with birdseed.  This, of course, meant that not only was the car coated with those things, but eventually by riding in said car, parts of us and our belongings also became coated with vaseline and birdseed.  

After leaving the reception, our destination was the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego.  But the few words I could get out of Rob gave the distinct impression that we were going to our apartment first.  To confront Bram, I suspected.  I'm a little fuzzy on details here, but I remember waiting with Robin and her son Jason while Rob and Bram went for a walk.  Not exactly how I had pictured the beginning of my honeymoon, but if you're going to have to wait while your new husband lets off some steam, you could do no better than waiting with the ever-calm Robin.

The boys came back.  There was no blood as far as I could tell.  I think that we all hugged each other.  And we were off in our hastily cleaned up car.

Of course, I thought that mess was now behind us and we could enjoy the start of our life together.  That might have happened if not for Rob turning on the air conditioner which blasted seeds at our faces, cruel reminders of that which were trying to forget.  We opened the moon roof, more seeds.  Glove box, more seeds.

Rob pulled into a Burger King after realizing that neither of us hadn't eaten.  More time to cool off, I thought to myself.  A couple of whoppers later, Rob seemed a little more settled and I no longer feared that he would accidentally drive us off a cliff.

We arrived at the Del Coronado and went to our ocean-view room.  All thoughts of birdseed expunged from the record.  Happiness.  We looked at the ocean and at each other.  More happiness.  Then, we open our suitcases.  We shouldn't have been surprised to find them filled with birdseed.  But we were.  Piece by piece we pulled items out of the suitcases and shook out the seeds.  Then Rob took the cases out on our beautiful balcony and dumped the seeds outside.

The next morning, we had a Hitchcockian moment when we looked out on to the balcony and saw it was covered with what looked like thousands of seagulls, all scrambling for their brunch of wedding seeds.  I think by that time we might have been able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation, but to be honest, I don't know that for sure.

The following spring, after a good rain, the ceiling around the moon roof started to leak so Rob took the car in to be repaired.  The mechanics had to take apart the entire roof.  They called Rob to tell him what they'd found - the inside of the roof was filled with sprouts.  Apparently, some of the seeds Bram had put into the moon roof cover had worked their way down into the roof itself, and with a little bit of water, had sprouted.  We had a roof filled with sprouts.  Bram.

 It might have been tempting to hold a grudge against the person who had pulled such a prank, especially after being warned not to.  If the prankster was not Bram, that is.  Instead, as the years went on, Bram steadily and powerfully nurtured our friendship.  We were lucky that L.A. was a part of his travel for FedEx.  He called every time he was in town and we lost track of how many dinners we had together.

The most memorable was when Rob had expressed the feeling that he was stuck in his job at Technicolor and really wanted to move on but couldn't because he had a mortgage and a wife and a baby and and and.  Bram said, "Okay, what if I pay your mortgage for a year.  NOW what are you going to do?"  Together, Rob and Bram came up with a prioritized list of who Rob was going to contact.  And it was from that list that Rob did move on.  And Bram didn't need to spend a dime of his offer.  It was all about setting goals and then achieving those goals.  And no one was spared.  No one within his sphere of influence could escape his questions or his enthusiastic support.  We could do anything we set our hearts on, and even do things we had never thought of doing.  He'd be in the middle of grilling one of us and then turn to someone else and say, "Don't think I'm letting YOU off the hook!  You're next!"  Once when Emily was housesitting for Bram and Robin during her spring break, Bram came back early from a business trip.  The next day he taught her how to drive a stick shift and then took her to shoot skeet.  Just an average day with Bram.

For the rest of the time we owned that car, whenever we turned on the A/C, some random seeds would fly out and yet again hit us in the face.  Each year fewer and fewer seeds, but it only took one to remind us.  Oh, Bram again.  He passed away almost four years ago.  It was one of the biggest shocks of our lives.  Little did we know at the time how deeply Bram had planted seeds in our hearts and souls.  The seeds were not meant to remain as seeds.  The seeds he shared were meant to grow.  Maybe he didn't intend for them to grow inside the roof of our car.  But he did intend for us to water them and watch them sprout and grow in our lives.

This photo shows Bram relaxing at my dad's house in Laguna and me, happy to have him there. We always knew it wasn't easy for him to travel on business and also trek on over to meet us for dinner, especially after long flights and long hours.  But he did it anyway.  And never complained for a second.

So, Bram, thanks for the zillions of seeds - in our car, in our suitcases, in our lives.  We no longer have the car, but that hasn't stopped the seeds from flying in my face at the most unexpected of times, and I say to myself, "Oh, Bram again."  Each time I know it's another reminder to take the seeds we've been given and make sure they aren't gobbled up by the seagulls, but that they sprout and grow and produce other new seeds.  And that seed produces new seed, and the cycle continues... 

I'm not sure anyone could have convinced me on November 28th, 1981, that I would ever be thinking of birdseed with anything other than fear and loathing.  But now I realize it's not all about the seed.  It's more about the sower.  And we were blessed with the best.  Thank you dear Bram.  We love you.