“SING, OR GET OUT!”

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Sadie was a single woman, and she had been single for a lot longer than she had been not-single. There was a husband way back in her youth, and three other men who came close to landing her in their marriage bed—nevertheless, Sadie had remained single. She had lived alone for the biggest part of her 85 years, and it suited her. Whether contentment with it came naturally or as an adaptation to her circumstances, Sadie didn’t know, and what’s more, she didn’t stew over it. A fretful mind had been a troublesome quality of her youth that she had got the better of with time.

          It came to pass that Sadie could no longer live alone, however. She could move in with her son or her daughter. In both cases, she would have a room of her own and the rest of the time would live in the midst of their noisy lives. Sadie opted instead to take a quiet and private one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility for seniors such as herself. It was just the right fit for the independent-minded and self-sufficient Sadie.  

Adjustment to her new surroundings came easily and quickly to Sadie. Course-correcting was another skill she had mastered over the years. One of her favorite mottos was that by not allowing endings to occur, we don’t allow beginnings to form. She looked for opportunities within the structure of her new home to fill her time and to make friends. Toward that end, she joined a group that advertised itself as the Mid-Ohio Senior Chorus that met twice weekly in the recreation room of the facility. The chorus’s current agenda was to rehearse a selection of Christmas Carols as part of a holiday program for the entertainment of the residents and their guests. The show was scheduled to take place on the eve of Christmas Eve that year.

At her first meeting, Sadie slid into the only empty chair at a long table nestled among a total of three long tables in the rec room. Elder women of various descriptions occupied every other chair of two of the tables. The third table was crowded with elder men, two of whom Sadie knew to be single like herself. The other six men were married to six of the women in the group. A few minutes later, a quavering female voice broke into a trilling rendition of ‘Joy to the World’ and immediately was joined by a unison of female voices. The men took no notice of the singing that was underway around them, and they continued in their talking and joking among themselves, a noisy state of affairs that drowned-out the female voices. At the completion of the song, Sadie bent to the ear of the woman seated to the left of her and asked if the men were there to sing in the chorus. The woman replied that she didn’t know for sure.

Sadie’s hackles began to rise like an angry junk yard dog’s. She pulled to her feet at the precise moment the first words in a wobbly female voice took flight in the next song on the itinerary. The voice stopped. Along with Sadie’s independence had come a penchant toward opening her mouth and speaking her mind. “Gentlemen!” Sadie piped up. “Are you here to join in the singing or not?! And if not, then I suggest that you either decide to sing or get out!”

A deathly hush descended on the room. All eyes clamped on Sadie’s ramrod figure. Presently the women began to twitter meekly among themselves and the men’s necks swelled and their faces reddened in disdain for the mouthy woman who had the audacity to denigrate their dominion over that and any and all other proceedings. But soon, the atmosphere began to change. Sadie’s friend Sylvia rose to her feet and said, “Yes, Gentlemen! If you aren’t going to sing, then get out!” Chairs scraped loudly and some toppled over as all the women in the room found their feet. “Sing, or get out!” rang through the space as female voice after female voice joined in the mantra.

Stunned red faces blanched white and Adam’s apples in deflated male necks bounced up and down like loose ping pong balls. Two of the men wrestled to their feet in ready to vacate the room. Neighboring burly hands reached out and pushed them back down in their chairs. Tension coiled to near snapping. The anxious moments ticked by, and then at the furthest end of the men’s table, a melodic baritone gave forth: “Silent night, holy night, star so high, shining bright….”

All twenty-four members of the Mid-Ohio Senior Chorus struggled to their feet and the room filled then with the wondrous harmony of female and male voices come together in a common cause.

Enjoy! And Happy Holidays.©

***

The above story is a fleshed-out reenactment of a dream I had last night. -Linda Lee Greene

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase on Amazon.

#ChristmasCarols, #Christmas, #JoyToTheWorld, #SilentNight, #SeniorHousing, #ChoralMusic, #MidOhio, #LindaLeeGreene, #AuthorArtist

POPPAW’S ROCKING CHAIR

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

That Christmas Weekend of 1952, there was a radio somewhere in the farmhouse of my maternal grandparents, tucked away, gathering dust. It hadn’t been turned on much since World War II when the family was anxious about the fate of their eldest soldier-son in battle with the Germans. By 1952, television had taken the place of radio in most homes, but such a “newfangled machine” hadn’t yet found its place in the farmhouse. The local newspaper held on as my grandparent’s major source of information, and by way of it, they knew that Harry S. Truman would hand over the keys to the White House to Dwight D. Eisenhower the following month; that Elizabeth II had succeeded her deceased father to Great Britain’s Royal Crown; and that war was on yet again, but in a faraway place known as Korea. That Christmas Weekend while my parents and my little brother and I were at the farm, the bulky and black rotary-dial telephone that sat on the stand by the front door of our own house eighty-five miles north of the farmhouse, could ring off the hook for all we knew. No answering machine or voice mail would alert us to missed calls upon our return home. Such conveniences were as yet to come into existence. Like the television, the telephone was another “newfangled machine” that Poppaw scoffed at and Mommaw wanted but wouldn’t get until several years later.

          Christmas was like any other day on the farm: the cows still needed rounded up and fed and milked; the hogs still needed slopped; the chickens still needed fed and their eggs gathered; and the outdoors dogs and cats still needed attended to, as well. That morning Poppaw was agitated over a fox that was menacing the chickens. His .22 in his broad and brawny farmer’s hands, he had slogged across the nearby soupy fields in hunt of the fox, but the wily creature had outsmarted Poppaw again.

          Discarding his muddy boots at the back door and propping his rifle in a corner of the entryway, Poppaw traipsed in his stocking feet to the coffee pot on the kitchen counter. He poured a cup of the steaming brew, lightened it with the heavy cream skimmed from the milk of his best milk cow, loaded it with sugar, and chugged it. And then he trudged to his rocking chair in the front room and draped his coat on its back. Poppaw always kept his coat within arm’s reach and his footwear at the back door, because there was no telling what awful things could happen out on the farm. One of the horses could lose its footing on an icy bank of the creek and plunge in to freezing ice-capped water way over its head—especially Old Roger. “That horse ain’t got the sense he was born with no more. He’s jist gitting too old and simple,” Poppaw often complained. Or that crafty fox could get into more devilment. He could sneak back in the henhouse and send the chickens scurrying and flopping and squawking into the farmhouse yard and up on the porch just as soon as Poppaw was out of the way.

Poppaw’s rocking chair was perpetually pulled up as close as possible to the chugging wood-burning stove. The farmhouse was abuzz with the voices of Poppaw and Mommaw’s several visiting adult children and their spouses and their children. I was in hog-heaven because being with my grandparents, my uncles and aunts and cousins was my favorite thing. I was champing at the bit to get Christmas morning underway. In my hands, as always, was my mother’s camera with which I would memorialize my family’s Christmas in black and white images. After what seemed an eternity to my fidgety cousins and me, Poppaw lowered his Abe Lincoln frame to his creaky rocking chair. It was our signal to begin our Christmas celebration.

My mother had stewed over what to get Poppaw for Christmas as she had done every Christmas of my nine years of life at that point. And as usual, she settled on two flannel shirts, two pairs of wool socks, and a couple packs of Mail Pouch chewing tobacco. Just about everyone else had decided on flannel shirts, wool socks and chewing tobacco for Poppaw too, and by the end of the hour, Poppaw had enough of them for an army. I snapped the photo of Poppaw opening the first of our gifts to him, and now I share it with you. Happy Holidays to you and yours. May it be as happy as ours was on that Christmas of 1952.

Oh, and Poppaw! I hope yours is a rocking good 125^th birthday up there in Heaven today.©

                                                                        

***

Several years ago, I wrote a novel about Poppaw and Mommaw, their kids, and extended family titled GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. The novel is a blend of fiction and nonfiction and includes transcriptions of actual letters the members of the family wrote to one another over the years and provide a poignant glimpse into the lives of a particular strata of American people during the twentieth century. Among the catalog of my books, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is my favorite. The act of writing it brought me home again after decades of rootlessness and alienation from my authentic self. It is a novel written from my heart more than any before then or afterwards. If you feel inspired to read the book, it is available for purchase at  http://goo.gl/imUwKO.

                                                                         

#Christmas, #1952, #HarrySTruman, #DwightDEisenhower, #QueenElizabethII, #WorldWarII, #Americana, #FamilySaga, #GuardiansAndOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene, #Author/Artist

 

IN DAD'S SHOES

 

 From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

 

Dad was in the garage,

Working on a car.

One of his,

Or one of his brothers’,

Or one of my mother’s brothers’.

It didn’t matter

‘Cause Dad liked working on cars.

Dad removed his greasy shoes and grimy socks before coming in the kitchen,

And as always before and again that time,

I noticed his feet –

So much like mine,

And I took the photo of his shoes to remind me,

And hoped I would be more like him in other ways with time.

 

©Linda Lee Greene, 2007

 

My father’s given name was Leland Edward Greene, but he preferred the shorter Lee Edward Greene. The briefer version won out and was his name for the entirety of his 89 years of life. I am named for Dad. The distinction is mine among the four offspring of my parents due to the order of my birth: I am the firstborn and because of that accident of chronology, by tradition the name was given to me. As time passed, however, it seemed meant to be, because among my three siblings and me, I resemble my father in appearance most closely. The jury is still out on whether or not I take after him in other, more crucial ways.

          For the past several years, I have been asked to write the eulogies of some departed members of my family. The assignments began with the passing of my father on March 29, 2014. In tribute to him on this day that would have been his 98^th birthday. I am including herein the opening paragraph of the eulogy I wrote for him:

 

“Lee Edward Greene, 89, beloved son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and cherished friend was one of the last of the Greatest Generation, a loving and dedicated family man who was a joyful and steadfast breadwinner. He was a man good with his hands whether the task was to fix a leaky faucet, to make a car purr, or to build a house. But essentially he was a simple man – he held no public office, never attained fame nor amassed a fortune, but within the small circle that comprised his life, he was the center that always held, the rock upon whom everyone depended, the flint against which everyone struck on his/her passage to adulthood. We aren’t likely to see his kind again any time soon…”©

***

                                                                       

If you are moved to read more about my father, the people and the circumstances that made of him the man he was, you can read about it in GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS. It is my first novel that blends fiction and nonfiction. The official genre is listed as historical fiction. Among an author’s catalogue of her/his work, there is always a favorite, the one written from the heart more than any before or afterwards. GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS is mine. My father’s coming of age story mirrors mine in that writing this novel put me on the path to my true home again after decades of rootlessness and of alienation from my authentic self. You can find the novel at http://goo.gl/imUwKO.