Spring Grove: Where Dead People Live

Dear George,

I saw my first dead person when I was in the third grade.  It was our Ogden Avenue crossing guard at Washington Grade School.  His name might have been Scotty, though I’m no longer sure.  He was an elderly man with thinning white hair, spectacles, a round face, and a jolly demeanor.  We learned that he’d died of a heart attack and was laid out in the funeral home down the street.  School children were allowed to visit and say goodbye.  I did so one lunch hour, though with trepidation and only because of pressure from my peers.  It was a memorable experience -- the image of Scotty’s corpse remains imprinted in my brain even today.

The concept of death was virtually impossible to digest as a child.  After worrying about it for five or six years, I managed to put it out of my mind altogether.  It became more immediate when my mother died in 1986, then again with my father in 1993.  When I turned 60, death was starting to take on a personal connotation.  By age 70 I started catching glimpses of a black-robed figure prowling around outside our windows with his scythe.  I don’t know yet what 80 will be like, but I intend to be around to find out.

All of this came to mind when I took a walking tour of Spring Grove Cemetery the other day.  We learned about Spring Grove when we moved to Cincinnati, and we’ve been there many times.  It’s a tourist highlight in the city and has been around for a long long time.  The first burial occurred in 1845.  In 1855 the founders hired Adolph Strauch, a prominent landscape architect, to design the grounds, and it’s his vision of a “garden cemetery” made up of lakes, trees, and flowering shrubs that remains 155 years later.  Strauch also designed two of my other favorite local places, Burnet Woods and Eden Park.  In addition to its many elegant tombs and memorials, Spring Grove has a famous collection of native and exotic trees.  Some of its well-known inhabitants include Supreme Court Justice Salmon Chase, Alphonse and Louise Taft (William Howard’s parents), soap entrepreneurs William Procter and James Gamble, grocer Bernard Kroger, Civil War general Joseph Hooker, and Quaker abolitionist Levi Coffin.  

J took a course on cemeteries during his junior year at Columbia, and his ears perked up when the professor, an international expert, identified Spring Grove as one of his favorite cemeteries in the world.  The next time J came home, we went over and he took a lot of photographs of angels’ heads on the tombs.

My dad came down with dementia in his 80s and moved to Cincinnati.  I took him on a visit to Spring Grove on one of our outings, and he was fascinated.  Rather than identifying it as a cemetery, he decided it was a sculpture garden (which it is), and he reveled in the many works of fine art. 

Katja’s parents, Helen and Buck, moved to Cincinnati in the 1990’s as well.  They had purchased cemetery plots in Philadelphia, but they decided that being near to their oldest child was preferable.  Katja went with Helen to Spring Grove to look the place over; then we all went to inspect a mausoleum.  Helen explained that the salesperson had offered a discount if we wanted to purchase four crypts together.  I asked Katja privately what the arrangement would be, and she said we would be toe to toe.  I was uncomfortable about being toe-to-toe with my father-in-law, but the prospect of being inches away from my mother-in-law for all eternity was unacceptable.  Katja politely declined the offer, and Helen and Buck settled for a joint plot on a hillside overlooking a lake.  Helen wasn’t completely enthusiastic because their spot overlooked a large white cross on the lakeshore below, and, as Jews, she wasn’t sure that they wanted to be located right in front of a cross.  Katja, though, pragmatic as she is, said it was just one cross, and it probably wouldn’t matter that much in the long run.

Buck passed away first in 1995, and Helen remained in mourning for the rest of her life.  They had a single tombstone with both of their names and an image of their wedding ring on it. On our visits to the gravesite, Helen always looked at their two names together and seemed eager to join her husband.  She too passed away in 2001, and since then Katja has had little mental  conversations with the two of them when we go to visit.

Though Spring Grove has a certain curiosity value, I’m not ready to commit to it.  Among other things, Katja and I are on different pages regarding our death wishes.  My dad decided that the funeral business exploited family members’ grief, and he firmly advocated cremation, eliminating the need for coffins, cemetery plots, elaborate funerals, etc.  His children adopted his beliefs.  Katja, however, finds that option unthinkable and plans to be embalmed in order to remain physically intact forevermore.  This seems like one of those conflicts that will only get resolved after one person dies.  So we don’t bother talking about it any more.  But we do go over and walk around Spring Grove from time to time.

Love,

Dave

G-Mail Comments

-Linda C (6-8): loved this, my grief group has had many discussions about this, gift the body or cremains for me. beautiful place tho

-Donna D (6-7):  Fantastic.  We all die, right?

WWII: A FAMILY HISTORY (from Linda Kurtz Craven)

Dear Dave,

So glad Vic survived.  What a loss of all those young men!  Did he ever tell you what actually happened to him in the Pacific?

 

It is so interesting how just a few years in age can make such a difference in memories of something as important as WWII.  I was born in 1943 so I have no actual memory of the war.  However, the war itself had such an impact on my family that I often feel I must have been there when it happened.  My parents were married, and my brother was 3 years older than me.  My dad had lost vision in his eye when he was 16, and I always remember him with a glass eye.  This completely kept him out of the war.

 

My mother's brother, Richard, was also my father's best friend.  He was an aeronautical engineer and was working at Wright Patterson, which was located in Dayton Ohio.  He was involved in working on "big planes" (though I’m not sure what that meant).  About one week after Pearl Harbor many planes were sent to California.  My uncle was not a pilot but he went to Cal. on one of the big planes.  After about another week he came back to Ohio, with one pilot and himself in a small plane.  It was just before Xmas and, in a big snow storm, the plane crashed.  The pilot actually parachuted out, and my uncle crashed.  It’s been my plan, but I have never done it, to find out the real story about why my uncle Dick was killed.

 

Another brother of my mother, uncle Edward (Ted), was in Europe at the Battle of the Bulge.  Today he is 95 years old and smart as a whip, and finally, after many years, he will talk a little bit about what happened.  Like places he was at, who was in command, etc., but never about the personal fighting.  I told him the Ken Burns special about the war was on TV and he might want to watch it.  He watched one night and could not watch again because he had nightmares.  He survived, came home, went to college, got married, and had a successful life.  I’m not sure how he survived without the PTSS everyone has today.

 

Another brother of my mother, her oldest brother, uncle Bill, was in the Army.  He was training in Maine and on the day he left for Europe, two other planes left at approximately the same time.  All had been sabotaged, and they blew up within minutes of each other, killing all aboard.

 

So both of the brothers died shortly before I was born.  My grandparents lived near us and as a child I was so annoyed at how often we had to go to the cemetery and put flowers on the graves etc.  I remember around age 10 I told my mom I thought they should all "get over it" since it was over ten years.  How little I knew about relationships.

 

My father’s baby brother, uncle Mel, joined as soon as he turned 18, fought in the South Pacific, and even though I don't remember it, apparently my father stressed so much about his brother that he was skinny and anxious during the whole war.   And also over the loss of his brother in laws.  Mel did survive though, and I recall him in uniform

 

 

Uncle Mel lived in Arizona, and my dad was very close to him.  He just died this year and never ever would talk about the war.  He did make a career out of the Marines and lived all over the world.  He also never exhibited PTSS that I ever heard about.  He told me he had nightmares a lot but he could always function.

 

My mother had another brother, Tim.  He was also in the war.  However, as I grew up I learned he was in a mental institution, and -- don't ask me why -- I never recall visiting him.  All I knew was he had suffered from "shell shock" due to the war.  As I grew older, I became interested in this and started to ask questions, only to discover he had been sent to training in the U.S. and never saw combat.  My mother said he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and it was  only when he left for training that it became obvious.  My uncle claims he was injured and had a head injury in training.  However, the first diagnosis certainly sounds correct from his behavior.

 

My brother and I played war all the time.  We had metal soldiers, and my brother always won and I always lost.  We also played “the Russians Are Coming” and spent hours scanning the sky for the planes.  We were obsessed about it, but, when I think of what the family lost, it must have had a huge effect on us as children.

 

I didn't really understand what happened to the Jews until middle school, and even then not the full impact. Since then I have on my own read many many books about the Jews in WWII.  My kids would say I am obsessed with it.

 

I also feel as though I knew both my uncle Dick and uncle Bill because the family talked about them so much.  We lived in a small town, and not long ago someone said that my grandparents had the biggest loss in the county.  When they went places a hush would just sort of settle in -- no one really knew what to say to them.

 

I can hardly comprehend what my family suffered during the time just before my birth.  My uncle, the one that is 95, is just so upset about the war in Iraq and said  he hates Bush and that was not why he fought in WWII.  I just read a saying, “man is a wolf eating other wolves.”  Memorial Day, God what bad memories!  Never a fun day in my childhood.

 

Oh no, this sounds so depressing, but I guess it was the reality.  Jayme has great pics of V, will try to send them to you.  See you.

 

Linda

G-Mail Comments

-Linda C (6-3):  thanks for the great editing and picture, that is a photo i have never seen before.

Memorial Day

                     Vic L (center) and colleagues in the Pacific (circa 1944)

Dear George,

We celebrated Memorial Day with a picnic at Donna’s today and reminisced with her mother, Mayme, about the war years.  I was four when the U.S. entered World War II and was in third grade when the war came to an end.  My dad joined the Navy in 1943, went to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago, then was stationed in the Pacific where he spent time in occupied Japan at the end of the war.  He told my college friend Arnie that this was the most meaningful time in his life.  While he was away, my mom, Steve, and I lived in a dumpy second floor apartment at the corner of Sheridan Road and Kirby St. in a building my grandfather owned.  We missed my dad a lot.  My mother gave birth to Peter in June of 1945, and I don’t know how she managed all of that on her own.

 

The war was a significant part of our childhood.  We spent a lot of time – most of our leisure time – playing with guns: cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and war.  When we played war, nobody wanted to be the Nazis, partly because of the stigma and partly because it was one’s obligation to die at the end of the game.  We hardly ever drove anywhere because gasoline was strictly rationed.  Our car had a sticker in the window that asked “Is This Trip Necessary?”  It almost never was.  Meat was rationed.  So was sugar, coffee, and a lot of other basics.  The war was a significant part of our curriculum at school, and we received regularly news reports there.  Sometimes it was positive, but more often it was scary or devastating.  Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower, Patton, and later Truman were our heroes.  We learned to hate Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirihito, and I spent a lot of time drawing cartoons of the enemy leaders.  There was, of course, no TV yet, and we got our visual imagery of the war via Movietone News at the Lloyd Theater matinees on Saturday afternoons.

                   Vic L, Lieut. JG, in occupied Japan (circa 1945)

On VJ Day I was allowed to go outside and honk our car horn, even if it did wear down the battery.  For blocks around people were honking their horns, and there was a feeling of great communal celebration.  We knew nothing about the holocaust then, though we were soon acutely aware of the atomic bomb and fearful of its destructive potential.  Months later my Dad came home from Japan.  Two of his other close friends came home at the same time, Mike O’Hara and Pat Steffke.  Pat had brought home a young Austrian war bride, Martina, who was an opera singer and, in the estimation of us eight-year-olds, the most beautiful woman in the world. Vic and Doris, Mike and Jean, and Pat and Martina had a homecoming party in our Kirby St. apartment on their first night back.  The men were all in uniform.  My dad was in the Navy, Mike in the Marines, and Pat in the Army, and they kidded one another about which service branch was most essential.  After a while Steven and I were relegated to the back room, and, though we felt bitter about being excused, we watched the adults joke and laugh through a crack in the door.  We were grateful that our dad and his friends had made it home.  These were momentous times.

Love,

Dave

V Pays a Visit

Dear George,

J and V flew up from New Orleans last Thursday for a long weekend.  We see V every 3 or 4 months, so she has always changed a lot.  This time, at 20 months, it was verbal development.  She could identify “donkey” and “squirrel” and just about everything else in the picture book and was busy learning to say an endless array of names (including “Kentucky” and “caterpillar”).  When we went to the zoo, I watched all the doting grandparents with their little grandchildren. I concluded that all babies and kids are wonderful, and all grandparents are a little loopy about them.  So it is with us.  I thought I would share some of V’s visit.  I know I’m a little excessive, but it’s hard to restrain oneself.

Meeting at the airport is exciting.  V was shy for one minute, but soon was giving hugs to Katja and myself.

I’d been to the thrift shop, and there were many treasures waiting at home.  V quickly started filling her castle with little creatures, and soon it resembled our overflowing attic.

We took V to Dunore Park down the street, and the little playground seemed ready-made for her.  She climbed up the slide herself and then came tumbling down.  

V bonded quickly with her grandma (Na-Na) and began calling for her urgently when Katja left the room.

She seemed to like her grandpa (Boppa) too, though she wasn’t always quite as comfortable.

We went to the Japanese butterfly exhibit at the conservatory, and V was fascinated by the brightly colored flying things.

The zoo was also a big hit.  Here V and the little owl are staring one another down.

V took a liking to this kid’s soccer ball, so he tried to escape (that’s daddy J rushing to the rescue).

Donna came over and gave V the second hair trim of her young life.

Playing with Eleanor and Calvin was a highlight of V’s trip.

Goodbye kisses are always sad.  But we knew we would be seeing V, J, and K again soon in California.  We were left with a lot of happy memories and feelings.

Love,

Dave

G-Mail Comments:

-Jennifer M (5-25): Great pictures of a great girl!

-Linda C (5-25): Wonderful story with pictures, thanks so much. Looks like every one had lovefest time.  It is hard to not feel loopy about her when she is so wonderful  see you all soon

 

Washington School Days: 10. The Safety Patrol*

                         Steven L, Safety Patrol Captain

Dear George,

Like at all schools, kids at Washington Grade School enjoyed differing levels of social status among their peers.  However, one of the few formal social positions available was that of Captain of the Safety Patrol.  There was a girls’ Captain and a boy’s Captain, both appointed by Miss Guimond.  Safety Patrol members – all sixth-graders – staffed the main street corner before and after school and at lunch, watching for cars and holding out a flag to escort the smaller children across the street.  Helen O. was the Captain of the girls’ patrol, and I had the honor of heading up the boys.

 

Safety patrol members wore a badge and a white belt and chest band to make them more visible to motorists.  The Captain had a special badge, larger than the others.  Captains made up all of the assignments for the traffic guards, kept records of who did what, and kept the ship running smoothly.

 

Like most positions of authority, being the Safety Patrol Captain was not all peaches and cream.  Though Captains enjoyed special recognition on the part of the establishment (i.e., Miss Guimond), peers treated it less deferentially.  Helen’s girls were cooperative for the most part, but I felt I was dealing with a pack of fledgling criminals.  In particular, after the first week of patrol duty in September, the novelty of guiding first-graders across the street wore off, and most of the boys under my authority decided that it was more fun to play football than to stand at attention on the street corner.  Since I enjoyed the glory of being Captain, they decided, I ought to be the one to do the work as well.  Jerry D. was the first to abandon his sacred duties, and he warned me not to tell Miss Guimond or else.  I began covering Jerry’s shift.  His chums shortly followed suit.  Within a matter of days I was doing one hundred percent of the boys’ guard duty. 

This seemed unfair to me since it was my football that everybody else was playing with.  I threatened to leave it at home, but, since nobody else’s parents would buy one, this proved to be an idle threat.  Might makes right on the playground, and I acceded to my classmates.

 

Late in the fall Miss Guimond asked to review my records of the Safety Patrol assignments.  Since I’d been the only one on duty most of the time, I hadn’t kept any records.  Miss Guimond scolded me for shirking my duties, and I vowed to improve.  From then on, I made up fake records, inserting the names of the various football players while I covered their assignments.  Being in charge of things, I learned at this early stage of life, isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

Love,

Dave

*Pseudonyms used in this story

G-Mail Comments:

-Linda C (5-19): Love descriptive blog. Sorry to say I would have been one of the children to have left you in the lurch.  maybe Jayme can tell you her safety patrol story.  Was picture you or your bro? 

Is Jack Bauer a Right-Wing Superhero?

Dear George,

The Fox Network’s smash hit, “24”, is winding up its eighth and final season this month, with just a couple of hours left for counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer to single-handedly save America from nuclear destruction.  Jack (played by Kiefer Sutherland) has not only the Russian and Arab terrorists to worry about, but he is being pursued by the FBI and the NYPD, with their orders being to shoot on sight.  Probably because of the intense anxiety the program generates, we’ve been hooked on “24” from its very beginning.  In addition to worshipping Jack, we despise the vicious evil-doers who are trying to murder him.  It’s a shock every Monday night when a sixty-minute episode comes to an end, and we can hardly bear to wait an entire week to find out what’s going to happen next.  Only now and then do we remind ourselves that all this is a Fox Network production, the home of Fox News and their right-wing mogul Rupert Murdoch.  When this fact does pop into mind, we’re forced to reconsider whether “24” is designed to propagate right-wing ideology.

 

There’s a long history of research in social psychology on political conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism.  The initial work began shortly after World War II in psychoanalytic studies of the social and personality origins of fascism by Adorno and colleagues, and it’s represented more recently in studies of the psychological bases of right-wing political ideology by social psychologist Robert Altemeyer.  Right-wing authoritarians, according to this work, tend to rigidly dichotomize the social world into in-groups (i.e., those groups with which they personally identify) and out-groups (who they regard as antagonistic enemies).  They adopt excessively submissive stances toward in-group authorities and hold hostile attitudes toward members of outgroups.  In the international sphere, this takes the form of blind attachment to America as the morally perfect human society and a view of foreign nations as morally inferior and antagonistic to America’s interests.  Other features of authoritarianism include tendencies to think in stereotypic all-or-none terms; projection of one’s own hostility externally to outgroup members; prejudice and punitive behavior toward a wide range of minorities; and a preoccupation with excessive masculinity, power, and toughness.

 

The entire “24” series, of course, is based on the premise that America’s survival is under threat from foreign parties and that mass destruction of our urban centers is imminent via nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. In these “we-they” conflicts, the “Other” almost always consists of foreign nationals -- either officials of foreign governments or members of rogue terrorist groups operating under the aegis of foreign countries (e.g., Russian, Chinese, African, Middle Eastern, or Eastern European nations).  The villains are mostly male, frequently persons of color, speak with foreign accents, and are in control of weapons which can annililate American society (e.g., dirty nuclear bombs).  They are sometimes assisted by traitors or incompetents in the U.S. government, which puts Jack Bauer at direct odds with bureaucratic officials.  Because the various U.S. presidents over the eight seasons are either corrupt or well-meaning but ineffectual, our survival depends upon Jack Bauer’s ability to defeat an overwhelming enemy.  Jack relies exclusively on violence to destroy those opposed to the American way of life, often acting outside the boundaries of the law and justifying physical torture as an essential and effective means of accomplishing national ends.

 

Reportedly Bush administration officials and members of the CIA have been ardent fans of 24, and it’s not too big a stretch to speculate that Jack Bauer is generally a superhero to the radical right.  If we take consider the various ingredients which make up right-wing authoritarianism (hostile inter-group attitudes, super-nationalism, paranoia, punitive and aggressive behavior toward outsiders, distrust of government, salvation from powerful individual leaders), this gives us a pretty complete list of the plot ingredients which have made “24” a popular mass success.  I guess we should give Rupert Murdoch’s writers credit for creating an enthralling rightwing soap opera.  With only two episodes left, we’re not going to worry about the political implications though.  We’re just sitting on the edge of our seats, waiting to see if Jack will save America. 

Love,

Dave

G-Mail Comments:

 -Linda C (5-18): i wish i had gotten hooked, i know j*** and friends are very involved and watch it every monday night, love the description , ben and theo intend to save the nation with legos, me, i just pray the politicians i hate will die. see you hopefully in ca

We Like Those Upper West Siders

Dear George,

We are excited about Barack Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court.  She offers a close fit with Obama’s world-view, has impressive credentials, and is a charismatic individual in her own right.  With her confirmation a seemingly sure thing, it will be the first time in history with three women justices on the Supreme Court.   Kagan would also be the eighth Jewish justice in the court’s history and the third on the current bench.  Here are some things the news media has had to say.

 

Elena Kagan was born in New York City in 1960, the middle of three children, and grew up at West End Avenue and 75^th Street on New York’s Upper West Side, just a few blocks away from where we visited Ami and Bruce many times in the 1970’s and 80’s.  Her mother Gloria taught 5^th and 6^th grades at Hunter College Elementary School, and her father was a Yale-educated lawyer who represented tenant associations in New York apartment buildings.  Friends call her her father’s daughter because of her adopting his love of opera, the New York Mets, and the law.  The family enjoyed discussing and debating current events, and dinner conversations were characterized by verbal sparring.  Kagan has said, “Where I grew up – on Manhattan’s Upper West Side – nobody ever admitted to voting for Republicans.”

 

Kagan was strong-willed and independent as a youngster.  She clashed with the rabbi over details of her bas mitzvah ceremony.  She was a standout among the ultrabright girls at Hunter College High School.  One classmate recalls Elena’s teenage dream of becoming a Supreme Court Justice.  She was the only female student known to smoke and was instrumental in getting smoking “legalized” in one of the girls’ bathrooms.  Her crowd didn’t join the disco party craze, but were more likely to spend their time talking on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum.  Kagan was elected president of the Student Government and was pictured in her senior yearbook wearing a judge’s robe, with an accompanying quote from Justice Felix Frankfurter.

 

Kagan entered Princeton in the fall of 1977, became a history major, and soon found a home at the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper.  She was editorial chair of the paper by her senior year and wrote columns about politics.  One of her close friends was Student Body President Eliot Spitzer, who was to become Governor of New York and gain some additional notoriety in the press.  Kagan worked for liberal Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman in her race for the U.S. Senate.  Kagan’s senior thesis concerned the decline of socialism in New York City from 1900 to 1933, and she attributed her interest in the topic to her brother Marc’s involvement in radical causes.  She graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, receiving one of Princeton’s highest scholarly awards.  After graduation she went to Oxford on a fellowship for two years and then enrolled in law school at Harvard.

 

At Harvard Kagan was selected as supervising editor for the Harvard Law Review.  She won two highly prized clerkships, first for Judge Abner J. Mikva (later an important mentor for Barack Obama) in the federal appeals court and then for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.  After graduation she worked as a litigator in a Washington law firm.  In 1991 she took a tenure-track position in the University of Chicago law school, the same year the Illinois state senator Barack Obama began lecturing there.  A mentor at Chicago told the New York Times, “She was tough, she was independent-minded, she was demanding of her students, she had a good sense of humor.  The students admired her and raved about her right from the beginning.”  Kagan received tenure in 1995, though some colleagues thought she hadn’t published enough.  Shortly afterward, she was offered and took a position as an Associate White House Counsel, working with Bill Clinton’s director of domestic policy. 

 

At the White House Kagan soon developed a reputation as an in-house constitutional lawyer, batting ideas around with the president and winning over important Republicans like Senators John McCain and Bill Frist of Tennessee.  In 1999 she took a visiting professorship at Harvard.  Four years later she was appointed Dean of the Harvard Law School.  Harvard Law at the time was in a state of disarray – battling professors, dated curricula, poor physical facilities, and disgruntled students.  Kagan undertook a top-to-bottom transformation, often wooing faculty members over dinner at her home, and she added 22 faculty positions over a six-year period.  In an April Fool’s parody, the Harvard Law Record featured the headline, “Dean Kagan Hires Every Law Professor in the Country.”  While Kagan rarely spoke out on political issues, she was adamant about the military barring gays from serving openly in the armed forces, and she actively supported a policy barring military recruiters from using the law school’s facilities. 

 

In March 2009 Kagan left Harvard to become Solicitor General, the top appellate lawyer for the federal government.  She was described by a predecessor as “open-minded, pragmatic, and progressive.”  Six months later she made her debut at the Supreme Court, unfortunately losing in a case in which the judges voted 5-4 to allow unlimited corporate spending in candidate elections.  President Obama nominated Elena Kagan on May 10, 2010, to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the pending retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens, the court’s liberal leader.  Obama is said to have been looking for a justice who can counter the court’s tilt to the political right.  In brief remarks upon her nomination, Kagan spoke of her love for the law “…because law matters; because it keeps us safe; because it protects our most fundamental rights and freedoms; and because it is the foundation of our democracy.”  We look forward to following her participation on the Court for years to come.

Love,

Dave

[Sources: New York Times, msnbc.com, scotusblog.com, Wikipedia]

Why Moms Are the Greatest

Dear George,

Just as I was writing this, the phone rang, and it was J calling to wish his mom a happy mother’s day.  I overheard her tell him, “It’s the best thing I ever did.”  She’s often said that in the past.  I’d been looking through a family photo album recently, and it reminded me of why.  Here’s a sampling.

Katja couldn’t get over what a beautiful baby J was.  Here he is with his mom and our poodle Jacques.  Jacques was three when J was born, and they grew up together.

J had his own room at the Williamsburg Apartments, but he much preferred to snuggle in our bed with its leopard blanket.

On Sunday mornings we’d take a family hike in Mt. Airy Forest, following the long trail down to the creek where we could climb on the rocks and watch the horses running in the field.

We went to Menominee each August and stayed at river house.  Swimming in the river, boating to Pig Island, and exploring the forest was a lot of fun for an urban kid.

Then, at the end of August, we would drive east to Buck and Helen’s house and go to their cottage at Beach Haven on the Jersey shore.  Katja liked relaxing on the beach, and J was fearless in the ocean waves.

Katja was all for independence, and she started sending J off to visit his grandparents in Philadelphia at age 4.

There was lots of affection and love between mother and son.  Here’s Katja giving J a big smooch.

J, however, had more fun pinching his mother’s nose.

 

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY to all the Moms in our family: Katja, Vicki, Margie, Faith, Kier, Jennifer, Hilary, Rhys, Kazandra, Susan, Linda, and Jayme.

Love,

Dave

G-Mail Comments:

-Donna D (5-12): David, this is really wonderful...Katja is such a beauty and Justin looks so happy!!

-Vicki L (5-10): Dear David, Thanks so much for this retrospective on your early family years. I never realized how much Justin looks like Katja (unbelievable in that leopard blanket photo...seeing his profile in her face). Such beautiful pictures.  Thanks for the inspiration and love. Vicki

-Jennifer M (5-9): Great photos and sentiment.  I had a great Mother's Day: breakfast in bed, a hike in a new-for-us part of Mt. Airy Forest, and ice cream at Putz's.  And all before 1pm!  :-)

-Linda C (5-09): what a wonderful tribute to the mother of your son on mothers day. tell her i am so happy that she gave birth the wonderful boy and man i see in these pictures