Missing Penny

 Having been part of a Life History Group for over eight years, I am missing our leader Penny. Her death on February 9th, 2021, was a shock even though she had recently revealed her health problems. I wish we had been able to meet in person again. I can see her now, in her favorite seat at the library meeting room where, with a twinkle in her eyes, she raised her gavel to call the group to order. Everyone arriving in the parking lot would know Penny was there when they saw her little car with the flower on the antenna.

She loved the town of Waldo working tirelessly for its history and publishing a monthly newspaper, The Waldo Phoenix. I subscribed and received a copy near the end of each month. Sometimes she would include a story written by members of our group even though we were not from Waldo. Penny was a giving and selfless person.

She always let us know about the Waldo Historical Society fund-raising spaghetti dinners held at the Waldo Baptist Church in the fall. I attended a couple of these and was treated like a queen with meatless sauce held back for my vegetarian preference. Penny went out of her way to make me feel welcome and appreciated. Her photos in front of the Waldo red caboose are a testament to her dedication to her town.

I learned a lot about Penny from her Facebook posts. She loved posting puns, and she loved the Facebook games. She posted photos of birthday dinners with friends at Red Lobster with her favorite drink in hand, the Margarita. The celebrations always included her very closest friend, Lucy Cook, who sadly passed away years ago. She brought Lucy to one of our Life History Meetings and proudly introduced her to us.

Lucy, Penny & Linda

From Penny’s Life History stories we know she grew up in Branford, Connecticut, and later moved with her family to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. One of the funniest stories I remember her sharing in Life History was about the first house she bought back in the 1960s. From what I could tell it was built by a real novice with the roof line in front and back being so low the windows had to be set lower than normal, bottoms close to the floor. Standing up at the inside edges had to be done carefully depending on how tall you were. Good thing she was short. The house was left completely furnished (an estate sale) and required lots of refurbishing to be livable. After begging and borrowing most of the down payment, she did a lot of the work herself. There was an old stool left in the bathroom, an ugly old stool, wooden with a homemade cushioned top. Trying to salvage everything she could, she decided a paint job and a pretty cushion might make it usable. She ripped off the ugly material and an envelope dropped out with someone’s name on it, a fat envelope. Inside were several crisp hundred dollar bills in numerical sequence. Surprised (very) at first, then she wondered if they might be counterfeit, but, no, they were real. Due to her young age and the time period (1960s), she thought she might be convicted of stealing if anyone found out, so she decided to spend her found money on fix-up expenses a little at a time. And that is what she did, never telling anyone...until us. Her oral version was a whole lot funnier than mine.

In 2007, one of Penny’s brothers passed away, and she fulfilled one of his wishes by publishing his book, posthumously in 2016, See the Man With No Legs Dance by Kit Cawley. You could almost see the love when she told our group about it. It is beautifully done with an exquisite colorful cover to honor Kit’s artistry. I hope Penny’s stories are saved and that someone will honor her with publication although I do not know if that was her wish. At least her stories will remain in our group memories.

Penny was also instrumental in at least two other publications for Waldo, one a 2016 Waldo Historical Society Calendar, dedicated to the Waldo Schools. In June 2015, Waldo saw the final class of graduates at the Waldo Community School. And in February of 2019, Penny along with Linda Hall Vlacos and Kevin McCarthy, co-published Waldo, Florida: An Illustrated History with the famous red caboose on the cover.

I am happy that Penny held our group together during the pandemic with calls for monthly emails for stories. I know now that at times this must have been difficult. In December 2020, she mentioned how much she missed our Christmas celebrations, and in January 2021 her last message to us was about her favorite television shows, Weakest Link, The Good Doctor, Bull, Mom and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. I never responded and now, that makes me sad. We will miss you, Penny, your unique sense of humor, your dedication, but mostly, we will miss you.

A Eulogy

Last week I went to the funeral of my late husband’s last surviving brother. He was 92. There were 16 years between them, my husband being the baby of the family. Howard, the brother and the oldest, was more like a father to my Jim than a sibling. Jim loved to tell of spontaneous fishing trips, secret candy bars, and surreptitiously-given dollar bills that passed between them as he was growing up. I grew up as an only child so I never knew the deep roots of the sibling bond, making Jim’s and Howard’s relationship of a particular interest to me, almost something foreign. The sibling relationship has to be life’s longest-lasting relationship, longer even than our ties to our parents or our spouses.

I’m positive Jim would say Howard was one of his best teachers, a staunch protector, and a stand-in caretaker, all leading to an indestructible closeness later in life. Howard and Jim grew up in Beckley, West Virginia, with six other siblings. Their father built houses for a local coal company and their mother, like most others, was a stay-at-home mom. When Howard and his family moved away, the second oldest brother, Jack, stepped in to fill the vacancy, but the bond was never quite as deep as that between Jim and Howard. Even though most direct interaction between them ceased, Howard’s existence mattered just the same.

I met Jim when he was in the Air Force stationed in Dover, Delaware, my home State. We married in 1963 and lived as a family in Delaware for sixteen years. After my mom died in 1975, we talked off and on about moving to Florida where Howard and his family had lived for several years, and finally, in 1979, we followed Howard to Gainesville. I had met Howard a few times at family reunions and funerals, but most of my knowledge came second-hand through Jim. I had little to fear ahead of our move because I knew we had a protector paving our way, and that is exactly how things turned out. All of our moving questions passed through Howard first, and we took his advice seriously.

After we were settled in Gainesville, Howard and Betty became our first best friends. We went to church together, socialized together, and each family lent a hand whenever the other needed help. In the beginning that was somewhat one-sided, but soon the playing field leveled out, and we were on an equal footing with each other.

As I sat at the funeral last week, I thought of all we had shared, the card games, the Christmases, the family dinners, the church excursions, the fishing trips, the rides to Cedar Key for dinners, the pizza night get-togethers at Godfathers, the doctors’ appointments, the Gator games, the horseshoe pitching contests, the blueberry picking, and just sitting around, drinking coffee and talking, such wonderful times in retrospect, but such ordinary times as they were happening.

As my eyes rested on the casket, I thought of all these things and of their early lives in West Virginia. What had they dreamed of doing with their adult lives? Had they turned out as they had hoped? We all have our own memories, but we seldom think of the hopes and dreams of our loved ones during their younger years. I remember Jim once saying he had wanted to be an engineer and live in Brazil. Where did that come from? I wonder what Howard dreamed of? Somehow, sometimes we forget our dreams when we reach that magic age of adulthood with all its pull and push. But in the end, it’s best to be satisfied, cherish our memories and make some more if time allows. Although Howard and Betty moved to Winter Haven several years ago to be near their children, it’s like I said earlier, just their existence mattered most.

Delaying the End

You can probably tell from my book list over on the right side that I like to read. No, let me rephrase that, not like, love to read. This love started at a very young age and has never waned. It’s unusual for me to start a book and not finish it whether I like the story or not. I feel as though I have made some sort of pact with the author when I read that first page. I can’t always be sure the book is a bummer after reading just a little bit even if it feels that way. I have to keep going, looking for the good stuff. Didn’t someone say, “I never read a book I didn’t like”? I may be mixed up with Will Rogers on that one.

The book I am currently reading is giving me a problem I rarely have. I don’t want to finish the story, and it’s not because I don’t like it. I just don’t want it to end. I’m afraid I may not like the ending, or I may be disappointed by it. I may just start over.

I selected this book because it deals with grief. My husband passed away almost four years ago, and I’ve read zillions of nonfiction about getting through the death of a spouse, but this book I’m reading now is fiction. The nonfictions say the same thing because we are all basically alike in our grief. You read one, you’ve read ‘em all. I’m not sure why I had to read so many to understand that. Most of them depressed me even more than I was and kept death and loss in the forefront of my mind. I should’ve known this would happen. Here are a few of the ones I liked enough to own.

 

But this book I’m reading now is different. To me it seems truer than the nonfiction. I think it may be like the suggestion one gets in a writing class for memoir, to write a difficult portion of your life as a fairytale. It's supposed to make it easier to write and the truth may come out of it, a truth you didn’t know when you started.

I don’t remember how I came across this book. I placed the large print edition on hold at my library and got it rather quickly. The title is A Man Called Ove (proper pronunciation here). The name is Swedish. The author, Fredrik Backman, wrote the book in Swedish. It is his first novel, but since this one he has written two more. An inside page says it was translated by Henning Koch in 2013. I was quite surprised when I discovered Mr. Backman was born in 1981. He is definitely an old soul. I love his answers on this interview, especially about how he wrote his novel.

If you asked me why I like this book, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a feeling I have and that will have to be good enough, for now. The ending may change things, but I think I’m ready.

3/1 - Yep, I knew it. I cried through the last ten pages.