Saturday, April 10

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April 10, Saturday - Took Jean to hospital - did clean-up job. Should be home tomorrow.

April 11, Sunday - Went to Mom's for dinner - real good. Windy all day. Paul and Linda and Joyce were at Mom's too. Felt pretty good.

April 12, Monday - Went to Jean's. She's feeling pretty good - rather pale. I'm so tired. Going to cut down on tranquilizers.

More doctors, pills and hospitals. Jean's pills obviously didn't do the trick.

Paul is mom's oldest brother, his wife Linda, and my cousin Joyce.

Dinner at her mom's was always an adventure. While mom classified it as real good, my dad was afraid to eat Pansy's cooking. Her housekeeping skills were suspect, and her food was, well, inconsistent to say the least. Her kitchen had a particular smell to it. Dad once got so sick from Pansy's brisket that we almost had to take him to the hospital.

Grandma's kitchen was a collection of works-in-progress, as well as medieval cooking instruments - pressure cookers, vacuum coffee makers, and assorted Mason jars full of god-only-knows what. At the end of the kitchen was a rickety set of narrow stairs that led to the basement. The walls were lined with jars that grandma said contained tomatoes, green beans, and peaches, but they looked like they could have come from The Island of Doctor Moreau. One jar of tomatoes had eyes! I swear!

Her Norge refrigerator, situated out on the porch contained dark green bottles that had once contained prune juice, but that had been repurposed for "ice water". Ice water that tasted vaguely like prunes. Joy.

There always seemed to be a thin, sticky, film of some kind over everything in her kitchen, and if I could, I'd go back to that time and place and have it tested. I'm probably better off not knowing. The house no longer exists, and I'm told it burned. I truly believe it was a Superfund site that was razed and buried.

When I see an advertiser claim "Tastes Just Like Grandma's!" I run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.

Mom can't keep up with her drug habit, and nixes the tranks.

Wednesday, March 31

March 31, Wednesday - Came home. Rather hated to leave hospital. Made a lot of friends and met some old ones from the store. House looked so nice and clean. Marv worked so hard on it. Furnace is nice. Marv took Bud to Doctor - he has deep sinus infection.

Home is a special place, more so when you've been away for a while. Dad worked tirelessly to get the place cleaned up for mom's return home. I remember one night that he and I polished and waxed the hardwood floors throughout the house. He could get a bit obsessive, but I also know that he was trying to stay distracted.

Dad was a believer in paint for everything. Our little house was probably a couple of inches smaller inside after all the coats of paint dad put on the walls over the years. I did not get dad's obsessive paint gene.

Our heat plant was a gas-fired floor convection furnace. There was no blower, no heat vents save the large grate in the floor, no return air. When it came on, it did so with a satisfying "whump", and the house heated slowly and mostly unevenly. We often closed off the front of the house to keep the main section warmer. Poor folks have poor ways.

Mom had the chair closest to the furnace, that seat befitting her role as breadwinner. Dad, however, controlled the thermostat. I think it was my friend from across the street, Steve, who christened my dad "Thermostat Rex".

Every fall, dad would take the grate from the floor and vacuum the inside of the sheetmetal heat exchanger, light the pilot light, and balance a square cake pan on top of the exchanger. As the weather went from cool to cold, dad added water to the pan to keep some humidity in the house.

Thinking back, I can't imagine how we all avoided a quiet death by carbon monoxide poisoning.

When my hair went from Vitalis and Brylcreem to Beach Boys to Beatles and far beyond, the furnace served as a rustic, awkward, but extremely efficient hairdryer. This was years before the invention of the handheld hairdryer. 

Google "Remington Hot Comb". 

When you came in from shoveling snow or trying to dig the car out of a snowdrift on 11th Street, standing on the floor grate wrapped you in an column of warm, dry air and you had to be careful if you were still wearing rubber overshoes, or you'd melt the soles to the grate. Even the smell of burning shoes somehow smelled like home.

One of the happiest moments of my life was in 1970 watching the Girl from Iowa drying her chestnut hair over that grate.

Sunday, March 28

March 28, Sunday - Went to church. Bill was up today, also Marv and Bud. Getting anxious to go home. Sure have lots of nice friends. Mary was up tonight.

March 29, Monday - Marv's birthday. Dr. Hesser took tubes out today. Talk about hurt! Had lots of company. Maxine and Mildred wound up the day!

March 30, Tuesday - Talked to the boss and Marie this morning. Have enjoyed the phone. Laid awake and talked to Marjorie till late last night. She's in bad shape.

Not much new here. You have to laugh to keep from crying, I suppose. Mom is stuck in a hospital room. She's just lost a breast to cancer, and doesn't know if she'll be alive in six months. Still, Marjorie is in bad shape and deserves Mom's friendship and steady counsel.

I remember dad and I went to Crane's cafeteria that afternoon.

Thursday, March 25

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March 25, Thursday - Got up yesterday five times. Got up today & sat in chair while Karen fixed my bed. Go to bathroom quite often. Flowers and gifts and cards. Everybody has been so nice.

March 26, Friday - More flowers, more cards, more visitors. I have such nice friends and family. Johnson was over today. Mom has a terrible cold & went to the doctor today. We're sure doing our best for the medical profession.

March 27, Saturday - Hesser was in & took off some of the bandages. I have to take at least 15 xray treatments. I'll probably go home next Wednesday.

There really isn't much to add or illuminate here. Mom is dealing with things in her post-op hospital life, a smaller world than she'd like, but one still inhabited by her family and close friends.

She found out that she'll have fifteen Cobalt treatments to come, but home is on the horizon.

Monday, March 22

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March 22, Monday - More blood - and an Xray. Al Mathis stopped, Marv and Bud sent flowers. Marie and Betty J. came up and paid for TV for me whenever I want it. Nice group of people I work with.

23 March, Tuesday - Surgery at 8 a.m. Everything that has ever happened to me has made me a better person in some way. Whatever happens today will be all right  do the same and be all right.

24 March, Wednesday - Not much good today. Bud and Marv came over and spent the day. Oodles of flowers from so many nice people. All my family has been up at least once.

There are few things that will make you feel more helpless than spending the day visiting someone you love while they're in the hospital recovering from major surgery. Mom lost her left breast and a major amount of chest tissue and lymph nodes to cancer.

Dad and I spent as much time as possible on the fifth floor with mom, and then we'd retreat to the coffee shop in the lobby to decompress.

At one point dad went out to the parking lot to smoke his pipe. I stayed inside and tried to do homework, but I was so distracted, I went to find him. He was sitting on the curb, sobbing. It was the first time I ever saw him cry.

I only saw him cry one more time - the day in September 1972 when I left home and moved to Colorado. It shook me to see him like that, and it's only recently that I have come to understand the depth of hopelessness and painful despair that causes emotions to spill out like that. For all his faults and myopic shortcomings, my dad truly loved my mom.

Saturday, March 13

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March 13, Saturday - Made a trip to the hobby shop as usual, then downtown to get underwear. Margaret and Eva got me a pretty gown. Not very busy Gampper said I had a job as long as I wanted one.

March 14, Sunday - Pretty slow Sunday. Feel much better today. Myrtle and Lee came by to see me. Everyone in the store has promised to come and see me. Lois Ward is replacing me.

March 15, Monday - Paid rent, got hair fixed, went to store, did laundry, went to Dr. Hesser. Go to hospital next Sunday, operation Tuesday Went out for dinner and went downtown and shopped.

As usual, mom's expensive kid demands tribute in the form of ready-to-assemble plastic. Gampper, Kroger Zone Manager for Kansas City, Kansas just made a friend for life when he promised mom a job no matter what.

Slow Sunday at the store - Myrtle and Lee are mom's maternal aunt and her husband from Topeka. Lee Crawford ran a laundry a block west of the Kansas State Capitol building. Dad always referred to Lee as my rich uncle, and while he may have been well-off relative to our means, he wasn't a Patton family benefactor, and had a family of his own. His grandkids visited Kansas City a couple of times, but we really didn't hit it off. They were suburban kids, and we, the big-city mice, didn't agree with what passed for a Topeka sense of style.

Grandma Patton (Pansy) with Lee and Myrtle Crawford

Rent. Mom and dad moved us into our little house on 11th Street in 1955 after several years in Fort Scott, Kansas. My uncle Lawrence, aunt Gladys' husband, was employed by Cirese Investments, owned by Big Joe and Mary Cirese. They charged mom and dad $60 a month for the house on six lots. Lawrence and his son Frank helped dad excavate a large enough area under the house to serve as dad's bait factory. (Just thinking about that makes me cringe. There was a small area that held a water heater and room for a washing machine. They dug out five times that much area, hauling the dirt out in buckets. It was like something from The Great Escape.)

Dad's gigantic industrial Hobart mixer had a permanent spot on the original concrete pad, and the rest of the operation horseshoed around the basement, through the center grade beam, and over to the east side of the basement. Dad eventually put a ladder and trap door in our bathroom that allowed access, though not easy access, to our basement in case of a tornado or the beginning of World War III. Either seemed likely in those days. The original entrance, a short ramp facing south, was still handy for doing laundry or dropping off 55-gallon barrels of blackstrap molasses or cheese trimmings that dad used to manufacture various baits. Stick around, this gets interesting later in the summer.

Anyway, sixty bucks a month. In today's money, maybe $550. A few years later, when big Joe died, there was talk of raising the rent, but Mary held off. When dad had his heart attacks in 1962, Mary reassured mom that she would never have to pay more than $60 for rent. Mom finally moved out of that miserable little house and into assisted living in 1979. Her rent was still $60, the equivalent then of about $130. Anyone who says anything bad about Mary Cirese will have to answer to me. She was a saint.