My Beautiful Cousin Nancy

 My Beautiful Cousin Nancy 

"To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig."
My mother used to say this as we were coming home from shopping in the big city of Watsonville.

Watsonville was about 20,000 people in the 1950s, which was big enough for a little farming and food processing town, not to mention the brothels, which I probably shouldn't mention, but they were a big part of the town's economy back in the day, and I write for adults, so there, I mention them.
The brothels of Watsonville and Pajaro affected my family's life.

After the death of my grandmother, Lyllian, from Pick's disease (a dementia that affects young to middle aged people. You can look it up) in 1938, my grandfather consoled himself in the brothels of Watsonville, and across the river in Pajaro.
He brought some of the girls home, to the extreme annoyance of his adult daughters, and eventually married one named Sally. They had an agreement that Sally would stay with him until he died, at which point she would inherit the ranch.

But Sally – oh, Sally – at some point got weary of her promise, or perhaps got a better offer, and she ran off for about six months.

When she came back, my grandfather changed his will. She would no longer inherit the whole ranch, however she would get a lifetime income from the ranch, until she died. After her passing the ranch would go to my grandfather’s heirs.

The heirs were my grandfather's four children, Thelma, John, Lois, and Vivian (called Chick).

Two of them, my dad John and his sister Chick, died long before Sally did. Chick from multiple sclerosis (1964) and my dad from heart disease (1975).
Chick and her husband Art had two daughters, Nancy and Charlotte.

Nancy was about 9 months older than me, and we bonded early and deep. After I moved to Washington state, we didn’t see much of each other for a few decades except for occasional visits, but we talked on the phone and sent each other cards and letters.

Nancy and her sister Charlotte and I developed a running joke: "Is Sally dead yet?" Meaning, are we getting an inheritance yet? It made us laugh. We were not exactly holding our breath for that big pie in the sky day.

Nancy and I used to talk for hours on the phone, and one time when she called me, I had been having a rough time and when she asked, "How are you?" I said, "I am - just - *ucking - peachy." 

We both fell out laughing.

Later she was diagnosed with colon cancer and she had surgery and chemo. That went into remission, and then it came back, and “*ucking peachy” seemed like an apt expression for how things were going.

The cancer finally got Nancy in 2014. Isn’t that just *ucking peachy?

 She talked to me beforehand about knowing she was going to die, and knowing the surgery and chemo were stalling tactics, and about the nights she cried, alone in her bedroom, knowing her life was going to end, and how scared and sad she was.

She also lived her finite life to the fullest. She and her sister Charlotte went on road trips around the West. I got included in some of those trips. I went to Glacier Park with them, and decided that Glacier Park should be on everyone's bucket list. My gosh. Natural beauty like I had never seen before.

We also did a cemetery tour in Watsonville, where various relatives were buried. My parents, our grandfather and grandmother, a few great aunts and great uncles, and next generation aunts and uncles. My stillborn sister, who rests in an unmarked plot under grass.

In January, 2014, Nancy went blind in one eye, the result of her chemo treatments.

That’s one of the things about cancer treatment. The treatments can be more brutal than the disease.

At that point Nancy said, I'm suffering, and she decided to stop fighting the cancer.

In April she went into hospice, at her home in Benicia, California.
I went down to see her.

Now, Nancy was the most ridiculously upbeat person I have ever known. I cannot tell you why. Life sure did not give her many breaks.

Her favorite song, which she asked me to sing for her, was, "Smile." The haunting melody was written by Charles Chaplin, and the lyrics were added later by a couple of guys named John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.I sang it for Nancy:

Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it’s breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
you’ll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You’ll see the sun come shining through
for you

Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile what’s the use of crying
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you’ll just
Smile
©Copyright 1954 by Bourne Co. Copyright Renewed All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured

I visited Nancy, I sang the song for her, I said farewell and came home to the Northwest.
Sometime in May her sister Charlotte called me and said that Nancy wanted to talk to me.
Her voice was so gravelly from her illness that I could not understand what she was saying, so I had to ask her to repeat herself a couple of times.

Finally, I got it.
She was saying, "Is Sally dead yet?"*

That was the last time I talked to her.

She died about nine in the evening on my birthday in May.

It was about five months after my husband Rick died. I spent some time being a little pissed off at God then. How was I to get by without those two, who had known me the longest, and known me the best, and loved me anyway? You know how I did it - how we all do it - one foot in front of the other, one day at a time. 

How I miss them both. 

*Sally died in 1990 or ‘91.  We did not hear until months afterward.

 

Annals of Aging: the Golden Years

 Photo: me and my friend Charly Franklin, probably at Lisabeulah, many long years ago. It got inserted by accident and has nothing to do with the essay, but I like it, looking at us with dark hair and big smiles. Ah, youth. Well, middle age, I think.

It is my theory that the golden years are golden because of the urine we leak.

Do not pretend that you do not know what I’m talking about.

As we age, different parts of the body throw in the towel at different times, and the progression is different and unpredictable for everybody.

My knees, for example, did not write me a suicide note when they gave up, but that was a process that happened over several years.

When I was younger, I broke a couple of vertebrae in my lower back, and vertebrae do not heal back the way they were. I saw an x-ray, and I swear they looked like a jar of gravel. I am grateful that I can walk at all.

Mobility became harder. I went from a cane to a walker, and now, to a wheelchair.

The wheelchair is because my sense of balance has left the building, and I hope to avoid falling by not trying to walk. It is working so far. Haven’t broken anything since starting to use the wheelchair.

I cannot express how heartbreaking it was to discover I could not get myself up off the floor when I fell. I am independent, and stubborn, so I’m told.

I tried. Pushed my legs so hard with nothing happening until I gave up. I had to call 911 for a floor lift. For a while there I was a frequent flyer with the Fire Department EMTs.  

For the most part the EMTs were gracious, which I do not consider a given because I am obese. Not an easy lift. But they have ways of dealing with these things, and they got it done. Thank you, EMTs. You rock.

But getting back to the gold, incontinence is a common condition. For a lot of women, it began when we gave birth, so we have lived with this condition for a long time. A sudden laugh, a sneeze, a cough, running, standing up! So many things led to leaks, some larger than others. I started wearing pads and carrying spare pads and sometimes even spare underwear and pants when I was going to the mainland. You plan your life around it.

Sorry about the TMI. I would not be so generous with my sharing if I did not know that I am not the only one dealing with this. An inconvenient fact of life for so many of us is what it is.

I have heard that some people have been able to heal incontinence through surgery, or exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor. Not me, at least not yet. I am keeping the adult diaper companies in business.

They all advertise that they don’t leak, but my experience is that they do.

“Wouldn’t you like to wake up dry?” their ads say.

Boy, I sure would.

Darn. Nobody told me that old age would be like this. Wet. Golden.

When you are young, you want to live a long time. You cannot know or understand how different 77 is from 27. Things happen, not the least of which is your body aging naturally, and the accidents which hurry along your decrepitude.

So I say to you, brothers and sisters and gender neutrals, we are all in this together, though dealing with it individually.

And to those of you who are still high and dry: well, aren’t you lucky. Enjoy that.

Letter to a friend whose husband recently died

Dec. xx, 2025

Dear *****,

I did see your daughter's notice of her dad's passing. I am so very sorry.

If you will pardon my saying so, fuck cancer. I hate it. It has taken so many people too soon.

My Rick was 68 when he passed, and I thought he was way too young, and it was way too soon. He was ill for five years.

For the first four and a half months after he was gone, I was numb, and sat in a chair on the kitchen porch staring at my little slice of heaven here. 

About May the numbness wore off and I started to crack like an egg. That was an interesting summer. 

Everyone’s experience is unique.

I will not tell you, “It gets better.” It might not.

I will not tell you he’s in a better place. The best place for him would be alive, and well, and with you.

I will not tell you that God has a plan. If there is such a plan, it is random and brutal.

I will not talk about the “stages of grief.” You may find yourself going through all the stages every day, many times.

It changes a bit as time goes on. I can tell you that.

You are now a member of one of those clubs that nobody wants to join, but you will find that people who have been through it will show you so much compassion, and understanding, and sympathy.

You will also notice that people who have not been through this loss really don’t get it. It’s okay. They can wait for their turn.

You will find, if you haven’t already, that he is part of you. Things he said and felt and did are all part of you, melded with you over the years, and he will show up every day in your mind and heart. He is always with you.

Okay, end of sermon.

I wish you all the best. I wish and pray for you to have peace, and grace, and the knowledge that you will get through this. You will. Your daughters, your friends, anyone decent who encounters you, will support you, even if they don’t say a word.

So there.

Blessings, love, hugs,

Mary

There is a graveyard in Manteca

 

There is a graveyard in Manteca

Where some of my ancestors sleep.

Pioneers.

 

When I was in school, learning about "manifest destiny"

And Indian wars and mountain men

And heard about the wagon trains

I wondered if that was how

Our family came out west.

So, I asked my father, 

"Did the Litchfields come west in a wagon train?"

I can see him sitting in his kitchen chair, laughing, holding a cigarette that he was smoking,

Still laughing, he said

"No, they waited until the railroad was built,

And then they came out west."

Oh. 

So the Litchfields waited until it was easy.

I was disappointed.

 

I have since learned that my father’s narrative was not wholly accurate

There were some Litchfields who came out west 

Before the railroad did

And they settled around Manteca, California, where they were farmers.

Later, more Litchfields did come west on the train

They were coming to join their relatives who were already living in the promised land of California

Farming in the fertile soil of the northern San Joaquin Valley

At that time, the railroad across the country had only recently been linked,

East to west, with the driving of the Golden Spike

A Litchfield family - mom, dad, and children

Boarded a train from their home in the Midwest to go to their family members, and a new life, in California.

People rode in one of three classes of passenger cars:

First class were the Pullman passenger cars

Third class were cheaper, for immigrants/emigrants

Sometimes, not usually, people rode in boxcars.

According to a family history, that’s where those Litchfields rode

But they were going across the country on a train in a few days

Instead of spending months in a wagon train, with all its hardships, illnesses, and deaths

So that must have been an improvement, don't you think?

Except

On the way

One of the children became ill

And died.

 

When the family finally arrived in Manteca

They were greeted by their family members

And they were able to lay their child to rest.

I suppose it was good to have a grave to visit,

Instead of leaving his remains under a mound of dirt somewhere on the prairie

So yeah, that was better than going by wagon train.

 

It is common knowledge that many children died all through history,

From various causes

Go to a nineteenth century graveyard, where you will find the graves of multiple children from the same family

 But then Dr. Alexander Fleming came back from vacation in 1928 and noticed a mold growing in a petri dish,

And the mold was killing bacteria

So he fooled around with it, named it penicillin, but abandoned the project in 1929.

Then

In the late 1930s

Two scientists at Oxford University, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, began working with penicillin again

And had production of the drug figured out by 1943

After which it saved the lives of thousands of soldiers who would have died without it

A miracle drug! 

Before penicillin it was not uncommon for children to die

Happened all the time,

Just like women died in childbirth all the time

Death was a common part of life

Maybe you didn’t expect all your children to make it to adulthood

Or yourself to make it through pregnancy and birth.

But I put it to you that the people left behind never became insensible to their losses

They grieved as profoundly as we do

When someone they loved died.

A child, a spouse, a sibling, a cousin, a best friend

Grief made them wail a howl that began in their bellies

And consumed their whole being.

Just like you and me.

 

More children grow to adulthood now,

Fewer women die in childbirth

At least in some places

But death, after all, is what we all have in common

And if you live long enough

You will see a lot of it

And lose a lot of people who were the landscape,

the environment,

even the furniture

Of your life.

 

So yes

S0me of the Litchfields came west on the train

They had it easy compared to the people who traveled

By horseback or wagon or on foot

Right?

I am old

I am old 

I pause now to consider

How shall I live these last few precious years of my life?

I nobly vow to be part of the Resistance

To the terrible fascism that has taken over my country

(Is there any fascism that is not terrible?)

Equally nobly I vow to love as many people as much as possible

And be grateful every day for who I got to be in this life,

And who I am now, despite my advancing years.

Lovely goals for a human being as flawed as I am,

Don’t you think?

 

Yesterday was my 46^th wedding anniversary

Never mind that I observe it alone

It’s a date that resonates in my mind and heart

A bit of Rick lives on in me

I want to apologize to him for the parts I didn’t get right

I want to respect his authentic self.

Better late than never.

 

Meanwhile, I watch Japanese TV

And play solitaire on my computer

And read Alison Bechdel cartoon collections

And have yogurt and granola for breakfast.

And coffee, of course.

I try to keep up with the laundry, and sometimes even

Sort through some of the overwhelming clutter.

I wash the dishes and sweep the floors and rake up cat hair

And doom scroll on Facebook

And keep waking myself up when I catch myself staring off into the distance,

at nothing

Which happens often.

 

I am old

I get confused easily

I can’t hear anything the first time

I sometimes take a nap in the late afternoon

And then I’m up until three or four in the morning

And miss a lot of daylight.

These things can deter a happy mood

But I keep trying

As long as I live, and write, and sing.

 

So let’s change the strings on the guitar.

They are old, too.

 

 

 

 

 

How is life different today compared to when you were a child?

Bottom of Form

 

Are you kidding me?

Life today is different in almost every way from what it was like when I was a child. There were no cellphones, no computers, no internet. No television, at my house.

There was radio, and I remember listening to radio shows with my brother in the early 50s: Fibber McGee and Molly; the Great Gildersleeve; the Lone Ranger; Amos and Andy.

Amos and Andy were a couple of white guys pretending to be black guys. The show was hugely popular but disappeared after about 1960. Times changed.

On Sunday mornings I listened to “Puck the Comic Weekly Man,” a national syndicated program on which a guy read all the Sunday comics, with descriptions, from the Hearst publications. The San Francisco Sunday Examiner, a Hearst paper, was the paper we got, and I loved listening to the Comic Weekly Man.

Milk, in glass bottles, was delivered by a milk man who came along in his truck once a week.

Our family didn’t get its first television until 1957. Well, thank goodness, because all the other kids at school had televisions at home and talked about the shows they watched.

I never got to see Howdy Doody, or Soupy Sales. What I did get to see was “Uncle Gary’s Fun Club,” on channel 8, which ran vintage cartoons and old comedy shorts. Charlie Chase, Laurel and Hardy, the Little Rascals.

I started kindergarten in 1953, at Salsipuedes Elementary School, named for the Salsipuedes Rancho, which took up most of what is now southern Santa Cruz County. Salsipuedes was a K-8 grade school.

We wrote everything by hand with pens and pencils. Typewriters were around, and I took a typing class in high school. I’ve always said that typing was the only thing I learned in school that helped me make a living.

Okay, what I learned in my college journalism classes has come in handy throughout my adulthood.

Across the hall from the journalism department was the printing department. There was a big room full of linotype machines that printing majors learned to use. The printing majors thought they were learning a skill that would guarantee them employment. Alas, linotypes became dinosaurs thanks to the computer.

Computers in the 1950s filled entire rooms, and did a fraction of what a cell phone can do today.

I used to marvel at what my parents had seen in their lives. When they were born, cars had not completely taken over from horses and buggies. A few days after my father was born, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic. When my mother was born, the USA was not yet involved in the Great War, the war to end all wars, later renamed World War I.

So my parents lived through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. My father was deployed in the South Pacific.

The atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

Horses had become leisure creatures, and cars ruled.

I came along not too far into the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.

We liked Ike, Richard Nixon was called, “Tricky Dicky,” a nickname which he unfortunately lived up, or down, to, in the 70s.

Joseph McCarthy ruined people’s lives by calling them Communists.

We saw the Folk Scare (Peter, Paul and Mary? Kingston Trio? Bob Dylan? anyone?).

The Vietnam War heated up under the auspices of John F. Kennedy and his administration, and thousands of kids were drafted to go over and die in the jungle. Eisenhower had warned him not to go there.

The Civil Rights movement, mass protests against the war, the Beatles and the British invasion!

Assassinations: JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK, Malcolm X, and more.

Drugs: marijuana, LSD. Worse drugs came a little later.

Acid rock, country rock, folk rock, fusion jazz, and a man landing on the moon!

Mind you, in my parents’ lives they’d gone from horses and buggies to a moon landing. How do you wrap your head around that kind of change? Not that they had a choice.

Tricky Dicky got caught in the Watergate scandal and had to resign the presidency.

My father died in 1975.

The 1970s, a “blister of a decade.” - Doonesbury

Disco. Ridiculous haircuts and fashions. Polyester.

President Jimmy Carter, a fundamentally decent and progressive guy, so he had to go.

The Iran hostage crisis.

The 1980s: Ronald Reagan becomes president, and starts doing to the country what he did to California. Iran/Contra/a failed assassination attempt. George H. W. Bush presides for four years; Dan Quayle can’t spell potato.

Bill Clinton comes along and starts cleaning up the mess left by the Republicans, who catch him exercising what was traditionally powerful male privilege: fooling around with a woman who was not his wife. Republicans lose their minds and try to nail him to a cross for that, for years, spending millions on the effort.

Pretty funny, in retrospect, when you look at the Republican moral examples we have now.

So Bill Clinton leaves the presidency with the books balanced and a surplus of funds, which the Republicans, under the figurehead of George W. Bush, proceed to blow.

In the mid to late 90s the personal computer revolution begins. Amazon and Google are born. We all get on the internet.

My mother dies in 2001.

9/11 happens. We start a pointless war in Iraq, and then Afghanistan. We lose thousands of people and we don’t get out for twenty years, and the Republicans lose their minds criticizing Joe Biden for the way we got out. People died!

We will lightly gloss over the thousands of people, US and Iraqi and Afghani people, who died during the twenty years we were there.

The Great Recession warms up in 2007, and the housing bubble bursts, Barack Obama becomes president in 2009, and of course is blamed for the financial mess the Republicans orchestrated.

Meanwhile … a couple of space shuttles exploded and that program was put to sleep.

And so on.

In 2016 the unthinkable happened: Donald Trump became president, and set the country well on the way to becoming a fascist dictatorship, with DJT as the dictator.

Joe Biden stepped up in 1920 and tried to save the country. For which he was attacked and libeled and hated.

Now DJT is president again, and is busy tearing down and destroying the America I grew up in.

We used to be the only place a lot of people could run for refuge. Where shall we run?

And that is how different life now is from when I was a child.

Annals of Aging - The Reacher-Grabber

As we age, and as some of us begin to have trouble doing things physically that used to be a piece of cake (mmm ... I could go for some cake), there are certain aids and tools that clever people have invented to  help us out.

The first one I want to address is the reacher-grabber.

If you do not know what a reacher-grabber is, it is a tool for picking things up off the floor, usually, or pulling something that's not too heavy down from a high shelf, or getting into a tiny space behind a heavy piece of furniture or an appliance. 

It consists of a long metal stick with a claw at one end and a handle that opens and closes the claw at the other.

The original concept of the reacher-grabber was the Long Arm, a wooden pole with two slats that functioned as fingers that were manipulated by a cord. The Long Arm was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1768 for pulling books down from high shelves. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything Benjamin Franklin did not invent.

From Franklin's retriever of books, the idea was developed and the tool was changed and refined, until today we have these lightweight aluminum reacher-grabbers in many different styles, and even in colors, which are inexpensive. Most of them are 26 inches long, though some are 32 inches. Some of them fold, for easy transport.

There are different styles. My favorite has serrated “teeth” on the claw (the better to hold on to you, my dear), and a magnet at the claw end of the stick, which really comes in handy sometimes.

There are other styles that do not have teeth but have smooth little pincers. They work most of the time, but things slip out of those smooth pincers easily.

You do not have to be old to use and appreciate a reacher-grabber. It is handy for all of us when something is just out of reach.

I still have the ability when I am standing to bend over and pick things up, but if there are like six little pieces of paper on the floor, and I am in my wheelchair and not excited about standing up on my aged knees, the reacher-grabber becomes my best friend, and I pick things up with it.

So you can see what a nifty helper the reacher-grabber is. I try to have one or two in every room of the house. Because one of anything that is good is never enough for me.

Reacher-grabbers are good. You might want to pick one up.