Letter From Elba

In case you don’t know, that nice guy smiling in the picture above is my brother Kenny. He’s sitting with his two granddaughters.  Eliza is the spunky brunette with the peanut and Susannah is the natural blonde swigging the Diet Dr. Pepper.  (His third granddaughter, baby Delia- now six months old- was not yet born when this photo was taken.)

They are all at Wrigley Field.  (In case you didn’t know.)

And today’s post is all about GK.

“Grandfather Kenny.”

Even though I am the older sister and had kids first, as yet, I am not a grandmother.

That’s A-ok by me.  I am in no rush- and have told both my married children so.  Babies hold no charms for me.  I find them baffling, boring, unsanitary and terrifying- all at the same time.

I like dogs.

I’ve always felt this way about babies.  Ick. I never babysat- or even touched one- before I had my own.

What To Expect When You’re Expecting:  When I was six months pregnant with Natasha, my sister-in-law, Mary Lu, thought this egregious lack of tot-tending skills should be addressed.  After all, sooner or later, I was going to be sharing my home with one of these sticky little things.

To that end, she called her pal Judy Cooper who already had a baby of her own- Christopher.  (Christopher, btw, was only the beginning of the Cooper Dynasty.  He was followed by Bridget, Alex, Candace and Kendall.)  ML explained that I was in desperate need of some emergency baby-socialization skills and asked if we could come over so I could meet with Christopher.

Judy saw the logic and graciously extended an invitation.  We were escorted into the nursery where Christopher was regally ensconced in his crib.

I know I was supposed to be cooing over the baby, but all my attention was totally diverted by the presence of an adorable black and white lhasa apso** underneath the crib (Oreo, Judy?  Help me out here.)

** AKC Update:  Mary Lu has just jibed my memory. It was a shih tzu.  Mea culpa, Judy!

As I fell to my knees, Mary Lu reminded me that I had not come all the way from Barrington Hills to play with the dog.

Ha!  What did she know about it?

So my record of never having actually touched a baby was still intact when the nurse in the maternity ward handed me my very own infant.

Hmm.  What to do?  I didn’t know exactly.  And I remember thinking “How can I kiss her? She doesn’t have fur.”

But I didn’t want to goof her up from Day One. (There would be plenty of time- and one messy divorce- for that eighteen years later.)

And so I mustered up my courage, found the furriest spot I could locate- the top of her head- and closed my eyes and puckered up.

And I kissed her.

It wasn’t so bad.  As a baby, Natasha was pretty cute- as babies go.  (That is to say she looked like a doll.  Her temperament was that of a mountain lion.)

Kenny was in the exact same boat. He hadn’t had much hands-on experience with babies, either.  And he was strictly a hands-off uncle when Natasha was born.

I remember an incident when I was anchored down with newborn Nicky on my lap and Natasha, nineteen months older, was crawling too near our sunken living room steps. Uncle Kenny was in striking distance, so I called to him to move her away from the precarious precipice.

He did.

With his gym shoe-clad  foot.

But from these less-than-auspicious beginnings, Kenny soon found his way to fatherhood.  With three boys under his belt, he quickly became a pro at the diapering, burping, middle-of the-night feeding and stroller-pushing that infants require.

And when the boys picked up balls, Kenny really kicked into high gear.

He became the soccer coach and Little League coach and finally Pony League Commissioner for many, many, many years.  (These “manys” are no literary device. Long after his kids grew up, Kenny was still running Wilmette Baseball with a fair- but iron- hand.)

He was the perfect dad for three boys. Although I did have one quibble with his disciplinary style.

All my years as a “dog person” came in handy as I “housebroke” each kid.  I firmly believed  that it was my house and the toddlers should learn to respect it.  To that end, Nicky thought that “No, don’t touch that!” was his name for the first two years of his life.

Kenny on the other hand was much more lenient.  His idea of discipline was to coo, “Don’t do that, honey.” Despite this, my nephews Greg, Andrew and Matt all turned out to be great guys.

And it is the oldest- Greg and his wife Ashlee- who have turned Kenny into GK with their contribution of three grandchildren.

All adorable little girls this time.

Although it was quite a curve ball, Kenny wasn’t thrown by this gender change-up. He is the most hands-on grandfather I have ever seen.

From their infancy, he has happily schlepped them around everywhere.

And by himself.

He’s taken them out alone all over the city, and he can tell you first-hand about the perils of “GK, I have to go to the bathroom NOW!” when he’s been at Wrigley Field with them.

He’s also indulgent.  Single-handedly drove them to a “bouncy house” birthday party in a snowstorm this month.  Braved the nasty weather and two and half hours of screaming kids going berserk because he couldn’t bear to disappoint them.

This deserves a medal of valor in my opinion.

He baby sits for them, too.  But one afternoon- now that there’s three of them- he caved and called for back-up.

Me.

Granny Sidebar: Mary Lu was already spoken for that day.  But she was on tap to pick Eliza up at her school.

All Kenny and I had to cover was the three year old and the three month old.  But I was way out of my depth here.

Comfort level for Aunt Ellen- zero dark thirty.

I had no intention of touching little Delia, who, although charming-looking, was still so new that she didn’t have the requisite “starch” in her collar to keep her head on straight.

And all the hoop-la around feeding time gave me the willies, too.  Pre-pumped breast milk?  It may have gotten the seal of approval from La Leche League but I wanted to call Wanzer Dairy.

And let’s not even talk dirty diaper-changing.

Kenny was well aware of my phobias.  But he wanted me around for moral support and to lend an extra (unhelpful) hand.

I was scared. But I needn’t have been.  Suze, the intrepid three year old, had the situation well in her little hand.

We referred every question to her and she always knew the correct answer.

Where was the tv remote?

Where was the pacifier?

Where were the diapers?

Where was the bottle?

She showed us.  (Along with a stern admonition not to make it too hot.)

This brainy kid had the whole thing under control. Thank goodness.

There was one dicey moment when I actually had to hold the baby.

Uh oh.

Of course Delia started to cry and I started to sweat.  But I didn’t drop her and I was pacing up and down like “Uncle Dorothy” in Tootsie when Mary Lu walked in with Eliza.

She stared at me in amazement.  Who could blame her?

But the experience was a good life lesson for me.

After all, both my kids will probably want to have one or two of these critters around their houses one day.

Okay by me.  But kids…

Just remember. If there’s a problem…

Call your cousin Suzie.

Now if your dogs need walking?

See GE.

It occurs to me that nowadays, if a man is rich enough, he doesn’t have to be a Mormon to have plural wives.  Splitting hairs (and heirs) on the technicalities, if any guy can afford the divorce attorneys, alimony and child support that usually comes along with big-ticket divorce territory, today’s successful Latter Day (Non) Saint can have as many wives as Joseph Smith.

That’s what my ex did.  True, we all did not bunk together in one big ugly house.  And he did off-load both of us legally- and at bargain basement prices no less.

But we shared the same last name for many years- and the same father of our children forever.  And thus I always felt a special kinship with my predecessor.

His first wife.

Let’s call her Minnie.

Bill met Minnie at the University of Illinois.  It was inevitable.  He was 6’3″ and she was 5’10” and together, he told me, they were the tallest Jews on campus.

They graduated in 1959 and were wed about ten months before July 16, 1960.  I know this because that’s the birthday of their first daughter.  Bill had found himself- much to his dismay- a very young and very unprepared father.

(That didn’t stop him from repeating the experience two more times.  And two more daughters duly ensued.)

I had heard all about their courtship and marriage in 1975 when Bill was wooing me. And brother, did he kvetch about her.

I heard him gripe non-stop about how boring she was.

And how stupid. (He called her a “lunkhead.”)

How messy she was.  (Saddles in the living room!)

How she refused to “grow” with him.

Or go with him when he wanted to move them all to a bigger house in a tonier suburb.

Minnie was clearly the designated villain in the divorce piece.  It was all her fault.  And he didn’t just talk the talk.  In the twenty years that we were married, he NEVER spoke to her.

He wouldn’t even be in the same room with her if he could help it.

When their oldest daughter graduated from Boulder, I got elected to spend three days talking to Minnie at the graduation celebration festivities.  Bill’s stony silence and glowering looks were embarrassing and I wanted her to feel welcome. She was the mother of the graduate, after all.

And the situation never improved, as the girls grew up and got married. Hospital visits to see brand-new grandchildren and older kids’ birthday parties had to planned out like D Day.

At the very beginning of our relationship, I had no reason to doubt his account of her. And by the time we got married, I, too, thought that Minnie was the Anti-Christ.

Except that she wasn’t.

I only met her after we were married and was I surprised.  She looked like Jessica Walter- not Satan.

And she was nice.

As in Sunday School teacher nice.  (Which she happened to be, btw.)

Unfortunately for me, it turned out that Bill was, what we call in the trade, an “unreliable narrator.”  His version of what happened in his first marriage could have gone straight to the top of the “Fiction” side of the best-seller list.

But at twenty-four- and bedazzled by his good looks and little Mercedes- I was too dumb to know that.

Little by little, the awful truth about my husband’s first marriage- and why it went south- dawned on me.  Minnie had been “more sinned against than sinning.”  That’s why Bill couldn’t bear to be in the same room with her.

It wasn’t that she had done anything to him.  More like vice versa.

And when he did it to me, History repeated itself.

Now I was the new villainess in town.

But in the meantime, over the space of twenty-one years, Bill had reproduced five children by both of us- girl, girl, girl, girl… boy!  And I helped raise them all.

This led to some very Brigham Young-like complications.

Like the time that Patti, his second-in-line, had moved in with us.  She was sixteen and she adored her baby half-sister, Natasha- who was almost two at the time.  Patti used to French braid Natasha’s hair to match her own, throw her into her Jeep’s car seat and whisk her away for a day’s adventures.

Patti was tall and beautiful (she looks just like Princess Stephanie of Monaco) and she would get stopped all the time by strangers who wanted to know how old her little girl was.

“Uh, I don’t know.  Twenty-six months?  Twenty-five months?  I’m not sure,” was her usual teenaged reply.

Boy, did she get baffled double takes from people who thought she was a bad mother. Too bad Reality TV hadn’t been invented back then.  Think about what great programming I Am A Teenage Unwed Mother Who Has NO Idea How Old My Kid Is would make.

Or the time that Bill’s oldest grandson came over to play with his six year old uncle, Nick. They were playing together in Nick’s room when I heard a crash and an outcry.  I ran in to assess the damage.

One look and I went straight to the the top.

“That’s it!” I told Big Daddy.  “Andrew just threw Nick’s Lego and broke it.  Your grandson just made your son cry.  You’re done.  We’re turning off the tap.  No more kids for you.”

One thing has changed, though.

I was amused to hear that Bill has finally started talking to Minnie again after all these years.

My guess is that this was the price he had to pay with his “big kids” when Nick and I took off for Colorado and he found himself alone on Sunday nights.  I bet the girls made rapprochement with their mother a part of his rehabilitation.

That’s fine by me.

I’ve always liked her.

Peace.  All these blessings I seal upon you.

(That’s Mormon for “ciao, my friends.”)

Stay warm out there.

I’ve never much cared about New Year’s Eve.  It’s always been kind of a non-holiday for me.  In fact, as I thought about this post and tried hard to conjure up a memorable one, I was rather stymied.

I did come up with a few flashbacks.

1963/64.   Steve Harrison and I in my basement k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

1968/69.  My then-fiance Billy Spatz and I went to Mr. Kelly’s.  I don’t even know who we saw.  Richard Pryor?  Woody Allen?  All I remember was how darn cold it was as I tottered unsteadily in my high heels down an icy Rush Street as we hustled to get inside.

1999/2000.  Watching the Millennium fireworks on television as the new year dawned all over the world.

2003/04.  Mike and I went to a swanky Aspen party at the Hotel Jerome.  We had a reasonable amount of fun, he had one single malt scotch and then we lammed it out of there to get home to dogs that had to be walked.  Mike had smoked a celebratory cigar that night, and as we drove home, he popped a breath mint to get rid of the after-taste.

No sooner had he done that than we were stopped by a traffic cop.

Mike and I looked at each other.  We knew that the fuzz would be armed with citation pads and dangerous that night.  He hadn’t been speeding and he wasn’t even tipsy.  What was up?

“Yes, Officer?” Mike asked politely as he rolled down the window.  “It anything wrong?”

“Your tail light is out, sir.  Are you aware of that?”

Mike assured him that he was, and in fact, the tail light to the Audi Allroad was on back order and due in any minute.

All true.

“Would you step out of the vehicle, sir?” the cop was a little less polite now.

Huh?

Mike was baffled but he complied.  And btw, he wasn’t wearing any top coat.  Only a tux.

But he dutifully got out and I sat in the car in complete bewilderment and watched as that cop put Mike through the field sobriety test.  He made him touch his fingers to his nose, and stand on one leg, and walk a straight line.

All of which Mike passed with flying colors.  He’s a ski instructor, for pete’s sake. He can stand on one leg until the elk come home.

Finally, reluctantly, the cop let him get back in the car and disgustedly waved us off.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

Mike grinned.

“He told me he smelled a breath mint and thought I had popped it to cover up the alcohol on my breath.  I told him that I had smoked a cigar but he wouldn’t believe me.”

“All that for a breath mint?” I was amazed.

“Yeah, and if it wasn’t for the fact that its freakin’ cold outside I could have stood on one leg for two hours.  But you know, it was kind of fun.  That cop was a jerk,” Mike laughed ruefully.

So there you have it.  A make-out session, an icy sidewalk, televised fireworks and a field sobriety test sum up all I can remember over a lifetime of New Year’s Eves.

Not much to write home – or you guys- about.

But I want to turn my attention to the one coming up in a few days.

New Year’s Eve 2013/2014 is going to suck- and I know it.

I’ll be spending it alone.

Now I can just see you all reaching for those tiny violins and breaking out the pity-party music.

Hold up.

I know it sounds kind of pathetic but here are the facts.  I’m back in Chicago after seventeen years away.

All my old friends are married and/or out of town during the winter.

Nick will be in Cali.  Natasha will be in Boston.  (And what’s the difference anyway? Who ever heard of spending NYE with your mother?  How lame is that?)

I haven’t met anyone new at work- unless someone is lurking invisibly in my office as I type this.  (It does cut down on office romances- unless you count the one I am having with myself.)

Mr. Right has been unavoidably detained

But suck though it will, I’m ok with a solo NYE.  I’m going to use the time to ponder my resolutions for 2014.

I don’t drink or smoke and I don’t need to diet*** so these ever-popular ones are off the table.  And I already walk everywhere and ski whenever I’m lucky enough to be on a mountain.

***Alaïa Update:  I can now slip into my slinky, extra small Azzedine Alaïa numbers. However I do need someone else handy to zip them up.  Their Ace Bandage-like fabric prevents me from turning around to grab the zipper.  Job-opening for the right candidate in 2014?

Thus I need a completely different set of resolves.   A “things to do” list.

Thus I hereby resolve that in the year 2014 :

1. I will be more patient.

2.  I will be more grateful.

3.  I will learn how to Tango.

Eleventh Hour Solo NYE Rescue:  My good friend and neighbor has just asked me to dinner and a movie.  Yes!  I will not be spending the evening all alone.

Whew.  That was close.

Now please excuse me.   I’m going to cue up Carlos Gardel and “La Cumparsita” on my iPad.

See you all next year, muchachos.

Make 2014 spectacular.

Ole!

I love Christmas.  Everything about it.  The carols, the weather, the gifts, the “good will toward men” spirit, the lights,  Amahl and The Night Visitors.  The whole nine gift-wrapped yards.

But most of all I love a Christmas tree.

As a kid I wasn’t allowed to have one.  My folks?  No way.  They definitely had a “them versus us” mentality so typical of their post-World War II time and place.

Me, on the other hand?  My best friend Barbara was a Scottish Presbyterian and I vicariously enjoyed Yuletide with her and her family every year.

(As a kid, I was always a little fuzzy on the “do we or don’t we?” philosophy anyway.  I clearly remember a time when I was positively relieved to find out that Jews were allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving- another religious, very Puritan holiday, it seemed to me.)

But each Noël season, as I gleefully sang “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night” in seventh grade choir and made awful green and red Christmas cards in Miss Erst’s art class, I got into the gestalt of the whole season and I reveled in it.

But I never had a tree.

Until I grew up, got married, grew up some more, got divorced, got married again, and our kids were born.

Then I went to Tinseltown.

Of course I made some rookie mistakes that first year.

Like buying a tree who’s needles looked great and smelled piney but were lethal to the touch.  Especially on the dismount end- when everything had to be taken off and the tree tossed.  Ouch.

I soon learned to go for the soft-needled tree.  Much kinder on my manicure.

Belated Thank You Note Sidebar:  Throughout the many Christmas seasons en famille, I never ever succeeded in getting any assistance from the Ross clan on the takedown.  As excited as they were to help decorate, the kids always vanished into Aspen’s thin air when it came time for undoing what we had done.

I was always solo- except for the year that I broke everything skiing.  I wasn’t standing upright any more but my Christmas tree still was.  So now a much-overdue “thank you” goes out to the Lee and Zisook clan for the year you guys dismantled my tree.

I also didn’t realize that one has to buy ornaments.  Especially if one is first-generation festive.  I didn’t have any antique, glass hand-me-downs from Great Aunt Abigail or quaint, hand-made beauties from Grandmother Martha.  I didn’t have squat.  So off to Crate and Barrel I went.

I was in a hurry and bought for quantity more than for quality.  No theme.  Just a hurried “grab and go” method.

And that first year, my tree looked like it.

Awful.

Then Med Lange- my florist from the Crest of Fine Flowers- came to my rescue.

I had started giving a Christmas party on the Sunday after the Crystal Ball every other year.  (I wanted to give it every year but my then-husband wisely intervened.  He said that if we gave a party every year, people would come to expect it and get blasé.  I have to admit that he was right.)

Med made two major alterations to my Christmas tree scheme.

First he sent me a miniature boxwood tree that stood proudly on my round table in the foyer.  The other was to personalize and decorate the big tree in our living room with my all-time favorite thing- roses.  He covered a gorgeous tree in tiny gilt baskets crammed with teensy red tea rosebuds.

Oooh, swoon.  Now I got the idea.  When you’re artistically-challenged like me, always have a professional do it.

Long Ago Christmas Memory:  Nick had his own Christmas tree gaffe, too. When he was three, we took him to the kids’ holiday party at our club.  His eyes lit up at the sight of a giant tree covered in adorable gingerbread men.  And before I could grab him, he darted over, reached up and yanked.

Down came the entire tree.  With severed gingerbread heads rolling everywhere- more like Bastille day than Christmas- the other tots immediately set up an unearthly wail.

I was privately chastising him in a corner when the club manager came over.  “Now, Mrs. Ross,” he reminded me.  “Don’t be too hard on him.  Don’t forget.  He’s the member.”

(The next year, however, the gingerbread men were safely stowed in a basket on a table so that Nick couldn’t decapitate them again.)

When we moved the holiday out to Colorado, I was enraptured. Aspen has to be the most Christmassy place on earth.  The whole place is decorated by Mother Nature for the season- and she didn’t need any assistance from Med Lange.

Frosted with white, topped with twinkling stars, smelling deliciously of pine woods and roaring fireplaces, the town even comes equipped with sleigh rides and sleigh bells, hot chocolate and Santa’s reindeer.  (Ok, so it was an elk herd.  They were close enough for me.)

I was in winter wonderland Irving Berlin heaven.  For me, Christmas in Colorado was the pinnacle of holiday happiness.

And to be on the safe side, I had Judy- my decorator out there- do my first tree.  And what a bang-up job she did.

My very first Snowmass tree was pure cowboy- with sheriff tin star badges, little horses, tiny six-shooters, (sorry PC Police) cowboy boot ornaments, red bandana bows, turquoise bead swagging and tiny Italian lights to show off the whole John Wayne western picture.

Well, this year things are going to be different.  I’m going to celebrate my first Christmas back in Chicago in many years.

But with no kids to help decorate the tree.

I could get all choked up about this or…

I hereby invite all of you to a tree-trimming.  I’ve got my box of Colorado cowboy ornaments out, I’ve located the tree stand, and a blue Douglas spruce is on its way.

Let me know if you can make it.

The hot chocolate’s on me.

Christmas Tree Eleventh Hour Update:  Nick has just told me that he and his wife, Missy, are sending me a miniature boxwood tree from the Crest.  Just like the ones I used to know.

Thanks, you two.  It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Merry, merry dear readers.

And God bless us everyone.