Halloween phenomena and broken vows

As I walked around Capitol Hill last year I took pics of all of the Halloween yard stuff I saw. It was lots of fun, and some people are so inventive. These are a couple of the photos I posted on Facebook.

But a couple weeks ago I noticed tons of ready-made Halloween paraphernalia (for lack of a better word) at Costco, and also at two different garden shops. I realized that Halloween is the new Xmas. Something to spend more money on. To put time into. Commercialized. I haven't checked, but I'm sure there is a whole line of Hallmark greeting cards for the occasion.

I know, I'm really slow on this. Obviously it's already a thing.

Sure, in our culture, haunted houses and trick-or-treating and pumpkin carving are longstanding traditions. I myself have put together a costume and hosted a front-steps Halloween party for the last dozen years or so. 

But what I realized is that decorating the yard or the outside of the house for Halloween is a commercial growth industry and not simply the work of clever and quirky people. Granted, the phenomenon is probably contributing to the GDP in some positive way (and if we could only have the strings of little pumpkin lights made in the U.S. it would even create jobs!). 

But I didn't want to abet the noncreative aspect of this trend, so I vowed to resist the urge to take pictures of all of the decorations as I take walks around the neighborhood. I would not include these fuzzy spiders or huge blown-up pumpkins in my regular Facebook postings of front-yard sculptures.

But then I saw this yard, and it was so cute I had to break my own pledge. I mean, they even put a basket in the dog's mouth. Makes me smile even now.

My weakness in sticking to what I already decided reminds me of an interview I heard. A veterinarian was asked if dogs really need those little coats that some dog owners put on them in the winter. You know the ones--the poodle with the red plaid vest, the chihuahua with the tiny fleece jacket. 

The vet said absolutely not. She said that dogs have appropriate metabolism and fur that keeps them warm. She pointed out that when humans think their dog needs a jacket to keep warm it is just a projection of the owner.

So the interviewer started naming some breeds that he thought might need coats. 

"What about beagles?" 

"No." 

"Dalmatians?"

"No."

"Westies?"

"No."

"Dachshunds?"

"Well," the vet laughed a little bit. "They really are so cute in those little coats. . . ."

So, there it is. 

But they really are a cute pair of skeletons, don't you think?

Calling the Doctor's Office

I think we can all relate to this today, even though it happened in 2001.

I was at work on Thursday, July 5. I had had pain in my ankle every day since I had fallen and twisted my ankle. The orthopedist I had seen nearly a month earlier had said I had a “non-union” in my ankle. I guess that made me pretty special, because he said that during his career he had seen about 3,000 ankle fractures but maybe only one non-union.

Well, my non-union was hurting like hell and I decided I would have to face the music and call his office for an appointment.

“Please pay close attention, because our calling options have changed. If you are having a true medical emergency, please hang up and dial 911 now. If you are a physician or other health care provider, press 1. If you would like to reach the billing department, press 2. For office location, fax number, and office hours, press 3. If you would like to schedule an appointment, press 4.

I pressed 4. A new recording reported that everyone was already busy and I should stay on the line for the next available person. After just a few seconds (!), a real person answered. 

“I’d like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Klimkiewitz.”

The real person briskly asked me for my name and date of birth. I’m not sure why she needed that, because she then said, “The first available appointment he has is August 7.” Maybe they don't give that information out to people whose dates of birth they don't know. 

Disappointed with the month-long delay, but knowing it was probably futile to try to get in sooner, I said OK.  But then, realizing my referral might not be valid that far down the road, I added, “This is for a follow-up—could you check that my referral from my primary doctor will still be valid?”

“Do you have the yellow copy we gave you? It gives the number of covered visits.”

“Not with me,” I said.

“Hold on, let me transfer you to his secretary.”

A new person answered. I told her I was scheduling a follow-up visit with Dr. Klimkiewitz and wanted to be sure my previous referral was still valid.

She started to tell me that referrals are good only for a certain length of time, but interrupted herself and said “What insurance to you have?”

“Capital Care.”

“Just a minute,” she said. Then I got a dial tone.

I sighed. I looked up the number again (this was before I had a cell phone). I dialed again.

“Please pay close attention, because our options have changed. . . .”

I couldn’t remember which option I has used, so I had to listen to it all again.

I pressed 4 and got the recording that everyone was busy “helping other people,” which by then I was quite certain was a lie. 

This time a real person did NOT answer within a few seconds, and I got the on-hold torture: “Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line. This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.”

PLEASE, I prayed to the god of phone trees, PLEASE make this call monitored for quality assurance purposes. Eventually the first person I talked to, so long ago, came on the line.

I tried to sound chipper: “Hi, this is Marian Wiseman again. You transferred me to Dr. Klimkiewitz’s secretary and she . . .”

“What is your date of birth?”

I considered pointing out that we had gone through this before, but I suppressed that urge and gave her my DOB.

“Let me transfer you to his secretary. Her direct line is 546-8613. Her name is Charlintsia.” Then she transfered me. Again.

The call was answered by a woman sounding very much like the woman I talked to before..

 “Hello—Charlintsia?”

“Yes?”

 “This is Marian Wiseman again. We got disconnected when we spoke before.” Please note, readers, that I did NOT say “YOU disconnected me.”

 I repeated my request about the referral.

“When was the last time you saw Dr. Klimkiewitz?” 

“May 9.”

“Was this for your knee or your shoulder?” She had apparently pulled my file and found—I can’t deny it—that I had previously seen Dr. Klimkiewitz for numerous body parts.

“Actually, it was my ankle.”

In what can only be called a tone of superiority, she said, “The referral you had, if anyone had looked at it, was dated for 2000, and was valid up to July 19, 2000.” I pictured Charlintsia, smiling smugly like a frog that just caught a grasshopper. 

I responded sweetly. “Well, let’s just ignore the year part, because we know that was just a mistake and was supposed to say 2001, since I didn’t hurt my ankle until this year. So, I’d like to see Dr. Klimkiewitz before July 19, 2001, which is still two weeks away.”

“He isn’t available next week.”

“What about today or tomorrow?” I would have willingly cancelled  my lunch date and skipped two scheduled meetings to avoid needing to get a new referral from my primary care doctor. Believe it or not, the phone tree and recordings and unreturned phone calls of my PCP’s office made the current interaction with Dr. K’s office seem positively streamlined.

“Today he has clinic, which is double booked, and he doesn’t see patients on Fridays.”

“What about the week after next?”

“I don’t have the schedule for that week.”

I knew that she meant I had to go back to the appointment desk and start over. I decided Charlintsia definitely looked a lot more like a wart hog than a frog. I was pretty sure Dr. Klimkiewitz could have surgically repaired my ankle in the amount of time I had already spent on the phone.

I decide to play the long shot. I did, after all, have a non-union and was prepared to tell Charlintsia that I  was very special to Dr. K.

“I’d like Dr. Klimkiewitz to call me.” 

Nothing daunted, she said, “What about?”

“About my ankle.” I didn’t even use a sarcastic tone of voice.

“What about it?” she asked. Was she kidding? Can warthogs make jokes?

I used small words: “To talk about the pain I’m having and decide what the next step is.”

“What’s your number? Dr. Klimkiewitz returns calls within 48 hours,” she said. 

Wow! Maybe Charlintsia was really a warthog whose inner piglet just wanted to get out.

Finding Grandma at Ellis Island

When I watched the movie Brooklyn last week, I remembered my search of the Ellis Island records for my own family, nearly 15 years ago.

I had noticed a small news item in American Heritage magazine about how the Mormons had contributed millions of volunteer hours to scan all of the immigration records from Ellis Island for the period of 1892 to 1924. And—this part was so amazing—the records could be accessed for free on the Internet.

I decided to try to look for a record of Grandma Baker, my Dutch great-grandmother who had sailed from Rotterdam with her three children. I knew it was around 1906, because my grandma, who was one of those three children, always said she was 5 when they came, and she was born in 1901.

Grandma Baker came to America to join her husband, who must have left Holland about 3 or 4 years earlier, since the kids were aged 4, 5, and 6. I always secretly wondered whether he sent for the family. Could he possibly have deserted them, and Grandma Baker just packed up the kids and came after him across the Atlantic? She was spunky as hell, and I loved the idea of her showing up on his doorstep with their three kids. I knew my imagined desertion story was not very plausible, since the two of them did indeed get together in the new world and have six more kids, plus I never heard anything bad said about him. So I never asked.

He died before I was born, but I knew Grandma Baker. When we visited, she sat on the sofa, usually knitting—a pair of mittens, a sweater, maybe—talking animatedly in a rich Dutch accent full of rounded vowels and lots of “ach’s” and “ya’s.” She had very azure-blue eyes that, I swear, twinkled when she laughed, and she laughed a lot, because quips and jokes were standard fare among the Bakers. Her cheeks were moss-rose pink, with soft wrinkles. She had snow-white hair, twisted into a soft pile on top of her head—not drawn tightly back, but pulled gently up so that it waved a little bit around her face.

She was already in her 80s when I was old enough to realize that she was a pretty neat commodity to have, because none of my friends had an alive great-grandmother.

As I typed in www.ellisislandrecords.org, I pondered—as I had many times—what it must have been like for her to say goodbye to her family in Holland, knowing, very likely, that she would never see them again. Did she know anyone else who was boarding the ship? I imagined the kids bundled up in big coats, wearing hand-knit mittens and scarves. Was there a big trunk? Did each child carry a little suitcase or bag? Were they crying or happy? What did they eat on the ship? Did they get seasick?

What I knew about that journey was that  Grandma Baker did join my great-grandfather, who was living in Hoboken, and for several years the family lived on the fifth-floor of a tenement house there. My grandma, who had been the 5-year-old on the trip, told me that when she started school, all the kids spoke different languages. I love the notion of that Tower of Babel classroom, with students speaking Dutch and English, German and Italian, Russian and Norwegian.

Another story—the only other one Grandma told me about her life in Hoboken—was that when her dad played cards with his pals, he would send her and her brother to buy a pail of beer, which cost a nickel. When they brought back the beer, they attached the pail to a rope, and their dad hauled it up to the fifth floor. How I wish I had heard more stories. How I wish I had asked more questions.

The search engine for the Ellis Island database allows a search for a range of years, so I tried 1905-1907. I didn’t think that the children would be listed by name, so I searched for Grandma Baker. She was called Minnie, but that was a nickname for something like “Jaquemina.” I wasn’t sure of that spelling, but I gave it a go.

Given the spelling challenge, it was no surprise that there were no matches for “Jaquemina Baker.” I tried “J Baker” and was rewarded with 97 matches. Each listing gave some summary information—residence, year of arrival, and age. I pored over the matches that came back—Jacob Baker, Jaenne Baker, J. Allen Baker—but there was no one from Rotterdam. No one even from Holland.

I started over, using simply “Baker” with no first name or initial. This yielded 970 names, but, again, when I scrolled through all of the records I found no one from Holland. I wasn’t sure what was wrong. Could I be searching on the wrong years? Was I not using the search engine correctly? Could those Mormons have missed someone?

Maybe “Baker” was an incorrect spelling, although that was one question I had asked Grandma, because “Baker” never seemed very Dutch to me: “Did the name Baker get changed from Baaker or something after you came to America, Grandma?”

“No. It was always Baker” She was adamant. But now I wondered if she could have been wrong. After all, she had been only 5 years old. and everyone knows the stories of how those Ellis Island clerks assigned new names willy-nilly.

The Ellis Island search engine suggests variant spellings, and for Baker it offered a couple dozen alternatives, many of which I would never have thought of—everything from Baaker and Beker to Bacere and Baeger. It allows searches for two variant spellings at a time, so I tried again for the years 1905-1907, this time searching for the variants Baaker or Bakker, which seemed pretty Dutch to me.

That search returned a list of 115 passengers. I started reading through the entries. Mrs. A. Bakker. Aart Bakker. Abraham Bakker. Ailke Bakker. When I got to the “C’s” my heart jumped with a shock of recognition: Cornelia Bakker, Rotterdam, age 7. It was Aunt Cornelia! I clicked on her name. The next page was her passenger record, stating that she had arrived on November 4, 1907, on a ship named Rijndam.

I clicked on “View Original Ship Manifest.” Wow. Here was a scan of an actual ledger page from Ellis island, listing individual steerage passengers. I scrolled slowly down the list of passengers from the SS Rijndam, reading each name, not breathing. Then I saw them. All together, lines 25 through 28:

       Jacomina Bakker; female; age 29

       Cornelia Bakker; female; age 7

       Jannneke Bakker; female; age 6

       Jan Bakker; male; age 5

I stared at the names. There they were, a tidy little group. A family. My family. I was bursting with a thrill so deep it filled every cell, and I had to stand up and walk around the room, crying and laughing.

When I calmed down, I went back to my desk and studied the ledger for more details. So, Grandma, who went by Jennie, was originally “Janneke,” and she was 6, not 5, when they came to America.

The record gave more information than I expected—not that I know what I expected. Written carefully in columns across two ledger pages were the facts about hundreds of passengers booked on the SS Rijndam, which had sailed from Rotterdam on October 26, 1907.

The columns following Jacomina Bakker’s name offered these details: Occupation: wife. Able to read: yes. Able to write: yes. Final destination: Hoboken.

I pictured the hundreds of weary and excited immigrants, everyone wearing brown and gray (because, of course, that’s how they are in the movies). I saw them at the processing office, waiting in a long line to be logged into this ledger book by an immigration officer. I saw a young Grandma Baker, a 29-year-old Grandma Baker, to be exact, clutching a suitcase, relying, no doubt, on 7-year-old Cornelia to keep the two younger kids in line.

I saw the whole scene: Seated behind a big oak desk, holding a black fountain pen, was a clerk who wore black worsted trousers fastened to brown suspenders over a white shirt. The registration rooms were cold and drafty, so he kept his wool jacket on all day. He, too, was weary, dipping his pen in an inkwell in the desk, bending over the book, recording bits of information about hundreds of passengers in 29 columns across the ledger, asking over and over, “Name? Age? Occupation?”

I read across the columns of the ship’s manifest and learned, from Column 15, that Grandma Baker and the three children had indeed been sent for by my great-grandfather: “By whom was passage paid?” The answer: “husb, self.” For each of the three children, the answer was “fath, mother.”

The answers to the Column 16 question confirmed that they were poor, though I had never thought otherwise: “Whether in possession of $50, and if less, how much?” The immigration officer had written “0.”

Column 27, “color of eyes,” was blank for Grandma Baker. Incredible. The immigration officer must indeed have been weary not to have noticed her blue eyes. I suppose they were not twinkling right then.

                                 *          *          *          *

I called my 24-year-old Rachel that night and told her about the amazing Ellis Island records, about the years of work by the Mormons, about finally using the different spelling for Baker and finding Aunt Cornelia, about finding the little family of names, about being overwhelmed with joy and tears.

She took it all in and paused for a few seconds before she said, “You know what this means, don’t you, Mom?”

“No, what?”

“We’ll have to become Mormons.”

She’s a Baker.

Things That Went Missing

You know that parlor game where you name the person, living or dead, whom you would most like to have dinner with? Well, this is not about that. This is about mysteries.

My fantasy is that there will be a great day of revelation when I can get the answers to all my unanswered questions. The unsolved mysteries of life. The deep secrets that have nagged at me. No, not how Stonehenge got there. Not the crop circles. Certainly not the Big Bang.

The missing pieces from
the unicorn puzzle

My unanswered questions are deeper questions, question that keep you tossing and turning at night. Like, where are those two missing pieces from the unicorn puzzle? Also the ibuprofen pill I dropped in the downstairs bathroom last August. I looked for it, on my hands and knees, for at least 4.2 minutes. Where is it? 

These are Things That Went Missing, and I want to know where they went. Even if they no longer exist, the unanswered question is, where did they go?

To put a fine point on it, this fantasy of finding out what happened excludes the things that I lost. On the great day of revelation, when I get the answers, I don’t have to know about the glove I dropped on the subway, or the cell phone that I left in the movie theater on 48th Street. I know what happened to them: I lost them.

But there are other things that I didn’t lose. Like the cat brush I mailed to Rachel when she lived in Brooklyn. It was a great present. It was a surprise. It never arrived. Nor was it returned to me by the post office. It is a Thing That Went Missing, and by god, I want to know what happened to it.

The cleaver with wooden handle

Until now I never actually made a list. But I’m going to. What happened to the teddy bear that disappeared from my tent at Camp Anna Behrens when I was 10? And that roll of film from the 1984 vacation in Port Huron? I mailed it in to the processing place and they “lost” it. Well, it went somewhere, and I want to know where. And I definitely want to know about the meat cleaver with the wooden handle that was just no longer in the knife drawer one day. 

I’m pretty patient about these things. And optimistic. Long after others might have considered it hopeless, I believe a Thing That Went Missing will turn up. Tom’s two favorite mugs, for example. They are here. They will surface. For the first year I was sure I would come across one or the other—maybe on the shelf by the washing machine, maybe rolling around in the back seat of the car. Even now, going on Year Three, I’m confident the mugs will be found. Perhaps a little less confident than before—I admit it—I bought replacements.

The cat with tourmaline eyes

Some things that went missing are found, and, as noted by Jesus in the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3), there is great rejoicing when this happens. Like the tourmaline gemstone that serves as one of the cat eyes in the Steuben glass cat that reposes on the mantel. One day, shortly after we moved into the house, I noticed he had only one eye. What?! When did that happen?! Tom and I searched, and searched, and searched. No dice. Also no cat’s eye. Then, about four months later, I found the little thing in the corner of my jewelry box. Vaguely I remembered putting it in a safe place (the surest way to lose something, I might add) before we moved. Much rejoicing.

The missing earrings

In my fantasy of the great revelation, the missing socks (that universal experience) will also be accounted for. Their mates are somewhere—and I will sit down with the God of Missing Things and find out where. Until then, I keep the singleton socks in a special little cloth bag in the bottom drawer. Similarly, I keep the singleton earrings in that special section of the jewelry box where I found the cat’s eye.

Searching for lost things, holding on to the unmated socks--these are the works half of the faith and works doctrine (“faith without works is dead”—James 2:20). We have to do our part: I hold on to the unmated socks, I continue to search for the mugs, I go to the post office and ask about the lost packages. And I am optimistic (faith) that they will be found.

Most of all I dream that on that great day of revelation, all will be found.

Can this Turtle Be Saved?

This is a true story.

Clyde the desert turtle had been part of Bob’s family for 12 years, and in the divorce settlement last year, Bob got custody of Clyde and his wife got the two kids. It has never really clear to me if there was an actual court battle over custody, because the obvious but un-askable question is, “Who won?” At any rate, Bob loves Clyde like a child.

My friend Judy was turtle-sitting recently for Clyde while Bob, now Judy’s fiancé, was out of town for the weekend. On Saturday morning Judy noticed that Clyde was dangerously close to the edge of the pool. (This story takes place in California, where, Judy assures me, all homes have pools.) Being a desert turtle, Clyde did not swim, so Judy carefully carried him to the bushes at the edge of the yard, as far from the pool as possible.

Thus discharging her turtle-tending tasks, Judy went through her Saturday ritual of doing her nails and hair, then left for lunch and shopping with her mother.

When she got back, you guessed it: Clyde was at the bottom of the pool. Judy became hysterical. Not hysterical enough to dive in, of course (she had just done her hair, remember), but hysterical enough to run out into the street shrieking, “Help! Help! Clyde’s in the bottom of the pool!” But no one was around (a fact for which I think Judy should be grateful). 

One can only guess the urgency and fear that gripped Judy in those moments. It reminds me of the time when Lassie got her foot caught in a coon trap, and Timmy had to run to the barn to get help, but no one was at the barn.

Finding no help at the barn, so to speak, Judy ran to a neighboring house. There she found a teenager who offered his services (don’t ever say today’s teens aren’t willing to lend a hand), and they raced back to the pool, where the teen dove in and brought up a limp, dead Clyde.

Judy knew how much Clyde meant to Bob, and she knew how to do CPR. Love can motivate us to do strange things. So, you guessed it, she turned Clyde over on his back and started pressing rhythmically. But, alas, after several minutes of pumping, there were no signs of revival.

Judy decided drastic steps were called for. She instructed the helpful teenager to hold open Clyde’s mouth, and she began blowing into it. Soon tiny bubbles started coming out of his nose, er, nose holes. More cardiopulmonary compressions. More blowing. Unbelievably, Clyde started breathing on his own! No doubt his little turtle heart started, too, but really, how can you tell?

But all was not well. Clyde’s back legs hung limp. Now Judy asked herself the heartbreaking question, would Clyde have been better off dead than living as a paraplegic? And even worse, what if he was brain-damaged? She faced the horrible fact that the moments lost while she ran looking for someone else to dive in might have been the difference between an able-bodied and a disabled Clyde.

But this story has a happy ending, at least for Clyde. Judy called the turtle doctor (remember, this takes place in California) and, as instructed, wrapped Clyde in blankets. When he came out of shock, he had full use of his legs and full mental capacity, Judy reports. (Another un-askable question: how can you tell if a turtle has full mental capacity?)

Judy told Bob the whole story, fully expecting a shower of gratitude and something akin to adoration for resuscitating a desert turtle. Bob, however, was more miffed that she hadn’t immediately dived in to save poor Clyde. So, the ending for Judy and Bob remains to be seen.