Never Sit If You Can Dance

by Jo Giese

  I don’t know that she would have felt the sting so sharply, or would have been pleased to know that her oldest daughter took her “don’t show up empty-handed” guideline so much to heart. But it requires some mental jiggering to remind myself that this perfectly nice person who just arrived empty-handed for a long weekend, for whom I’ve stocked the refrigerator with her favorite coconut milk and the pantry with her gluten-free breakfast cereal, probably isn’t cheap or selfish or thoughtless. She just didn’t have Babe for a mom.

  LESSON 4:

  THANK-YOU NOTES ARE NEVER TOO PLENTIFUL

  Babe was such a stickler about thank-you notes that it seems like I was barely out of the womb when I got my first little box of dime-store stationery. Under her tutelage, I felt as if I had to start writing the thank-you while I was still ripping off the wrapping paper, and I resented it.

  “Thank-you notes are never too plentiful. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell,” Babe explained.

  I was amused to read that the handwritten thank-you note—that seemingly antiquated custom that was commonplace in Babe’s generation—is very much alive and well in the digital age, even among millennials. That would not have surprised Babe. She could have told you it’s the little things that count, big-time, and don’t go out of style.

  Stop and think of the pleasure you feel when you receive a slow, handwritten thank-you versus a fast, thumb-typed “thnks!”

  And when you write a thank-you, you don’t need to drool or get all touchy-feely. Just a few nicely worded one-liners will do the job. Like the one Babe sent after joining us for our anniversary weekend: “My dear Ed and Jo: You have a beautiful home. Thank you for sharing. All my love to you two love-birds. Mom/Babe.”

  Good thank-you notes make the recipients feel good about themselves. They did something cool, and someone noticed.

  Babe’s idea of expressing appreciation by writing thank-yous was reinforced by Dad, who, in one unfortunate incident, took Mom’s maxim to a new low. Back then, the best department store in Seattle was Frederick & Nelson, and getting a present from that fancy establishment was a rare treat. One day when I was about eight, my parents came home with a huge gift-wrapped box from that special store.

  For me? For me.

  I undid the bow, tore open the paper, lifted the lid, and found, lying there in layers of tissue, a coat. A purple winter coat. As far as I was concerned, it might as well have been a huge, slimy slug.

  “I hate purple,” I said, with unconcealed disappointment.

  “It’s not purple,” said Babe, the family peace-keeper. “It’s maroon.”

  “I won’t wear it.”

  “Toots,” my dad fumed, “you’ll wear it and like it!”

  Sensing my sinking spirits and seeking to quell the rising conflict, Babe explained that it had been on sale, so there was no returning it. But Dad wouldn’t have taken it back anyway. As far as he was concerned, any child of his was damn lucky to have a new, warm winter coat—of any color, any size. (He felt the same way about food—parsnips, rutabagas, turnips—which made for some tense meals.)

  “Try it on,” Babe urged.

  Reluctantly, I slipped it on. The sleeves were so long they hung over my hands. I didn’t bother to button it. “I don’t like it,” I said, slumping my shoulders. I had no intention of growing into it.

  “We went to great effort to get you this present,” said Babe.

  “Sister, you’ll learn to be grateful. Or else,” said my dad. Years later, I realized he must have been so bent out of shape because when he was a child he’d probably never gotten a new coat, only hand-me-downs. On the spot, he invented my punishment. I had to write the sentence “I will be grateful for everything I get” one thousand times.

  “That’s not fair!” I whined.

  Every day after school, the little ingrate, a golden blonde (then a natural blonde) with curly ringlets (then natural curls), trudged downstairs to the card table in the basement, where she labored in the coal mines of that sentence. Since she was just progressing from block printing to cursive, and she gripped her #2 pencil extra hard, you can imagine how long it took her to eke out that sentence, even thirty-one times, enough to fill just one page of lined newsprint.

  Time crept by in slow motion. The delicious, yeasty aroma of her favorite Parker House dinner rolls, which her grandmother was baking upstairs, wafted downstairs, as well as the extra loud, happy shrieks of her brother and his friend, who were rubbing it in that they were playing upstairs while she was being punished downstairs.

  You can bet she was not thinking, I’m learning gratitude. It was more like, This is not fair! I’m stuck down here in the basement, my hand’s cramping, my finger’s getting a callus, and I hate my father.

  When Babe was in her nineties, I was telling her about having to write the longest thank-you note in history, and she interrupted, “You never had to write a thousand. You got to stop at five hundred.” I guess I should have been grateful for that. Babe also explained that I had a mind of my own, and I was going to use it. She said I was a smart aleck, and that was why I got the most discipline. Oh. (I guess that also explains why I got my mouth washed out with Fels-Naptha laundry soap.)

  Looking back on that experience, I can’t help but think what a wasted learning opportunity that was, making me write exactly the same sentence over and over and over: “I will be grateful for everything I get.” Was that really the best way to develop a child’s gratitude muscle? I was just beginning to compose stories and submit them to Junior Scholastic magazine—I was working on one about a girl taking ice-skating lessons who was lonely. (Guess who was taking ice-skating lessons and was lonely?) What if my parents had suggested instead that I write about all the people, events, foods, and pets I was grateful for? Wouldn’t that have been a more creative use of my time, a more worthwhile teachable moment for a budding wordsmith?

  Toward the end of Dad’s life, when he was visiting me for what turned out to be the last time, one day at lunch he said, “Can you ever forgive me for making you write those sentences?” He didn’t have to say which sentences. My father was of that generation of men who did not express their feelings freely, yet the unfairness of that stiff punishment had gnawed at him for half a century.

  “Dad, I forgave you a long time ago.” His relief was visible. I didn’t add that it had taken years of expensive therapy.

  Although I seriously doubt that any of the many experts who have shown a link between gratitude and happiness would approve of the way my parents shoved gratitude down my throat, what’s weird is that, in its own cockamamie way, that screwy punishment worked.

  Within that negative wound was the positive gift that I do not take anything for granted. Ever. And I write thank-yous immediately. As my friend Jennie said, “I like giving you presents because no matter what it is, no matter how small, you’re so tickled.”

  This happened again in 2014. I’d bought a small painting of a bear, and I immediately dashed off a quick thank-you to the artist, Robert McCauley, saying his painting was perfect for us, since we’d had a bear in our kitchen in Montana once. He immediately wrote back: “After four decades in mainstream art, I can count on one of my dog’s paws the number of people who own my work who have responded in a like manner. You do that with total consciousness. Your thank-you is much appreciated.”

  Another benefit of this early “discipline” is that years later, when many of my friends were starting to keep gratitude journals, I didn’t feel the need to do that. The idea of gratitude had been drilled so deeply into my psyche at such a young age that, as an adult, I do not have to follow any template and write, “I am grateful for ____ because ____ .”

  As my good friend Linda commented, “You are a born appreciator—of everything!” A born appreciator. With a little help from Dad.

  I regret that in that wrenching moment when Dad asked if I could ever forgive him, I wasn’t sufficiently aware of the positive impact of what he’d done, so that I could hav
e been more generous and with some tenderness expressed my gratitude to him before he died. That would have been a gift. To him. Thank you, Dad.

  LESSON 5:

  MAKE THE BEST OF IT

  Babe had a lifetime of making the best of it, especially during what might have seemed like the worst of it.

  The summer I was twelve, my father’s company had a job repairing and replacing the turbines on the Canyon Ferry Dam, located about fifteen miles from Helena, Montana. Business had dried up in the shipyards on the West Coast and was so bad in Seattle, then a one-company town (Boeing), that locals said it was as if Seattle were a window and someone had pulled the shade down.

  So that’s how we ended up bunking for a summer near the Canyon Ferry Dam. Coming from the rainy, evergreen Pacific Northwest and the lush, wet shores of Lake Washington, it was as though the five of us (now I had a three-year-old sister) had been loaded into a slingshot and—pow!—launched into a prickly, dried-up ditch.

  In 1898, there had been a general store, a post office, and a ferry on the Missouri River at the dam. But by the time we arrived in 1959, it was a desolate, dusty, godforsaken dump. The main street in downtown Helena was called Last Chance Gulch, and that would have also been a good name for the deserted area near the dam.

  In that hardscrabble neck of the woods, which was definitely not your welcoming, big-sky Montana, there was nowhere to live—not one house, no apartments, nothing. Even if you go there today, there’s still pretty much nothing, though within sight of the spillway, someone—probably a parks department employee—has added some picnic benches. (Some picnic.) About two miles from the dam, down a remote, deeply rutted, dirt road with no name, Babe found a one-bedroom, one-bath shack to rent. Maybe it had been a miner’s cabin, a leftover from the days when the gravel riverbanks of the Missouri had been mined for gold. The place came “furnished” with one scratchy, green, over-stuffed couch. (God only knows what had taken place on that couch.) The worn-out linoleum smelled sour and curled up at the edges. The bathroom was so tiny that Babe probably could have stood in the center with her hands on her waist, elbows out, and touched all four walls. She scrubbed and sanitized and scoured the inside of that chicken coop of a shack until it almost sparkled. But there wasn’t a thing that could be done about the sad, hard-packed dirt “yard” outside, where random outcroppings of chaparral furnished a cover for rattlesnakes to coil and tumbleweeds to blow by. (By the time I took Ed to visit in 2017, some of the dirt roads in the area had gotten names. Ours was called Cave Gulch. Seemed about right.)

  A few down-on-their-luck codgers who lived off the same dead-end road moseyed on by, curious about the new people who were moving in. The men were impressed by Babe’s industry and success in cleaning up that dump. One guy asked if she’d spruce up his sorry place. The answer was a polite no.

  Somehow Babe crammed a double bed, a bunk bed, and a single into that one bedroom. Now I’m puzzled where she found all those beds out in the middle of nowhere. And did my parents have sex in that room? They had to, right? I mean, we were there for three months. I was your typical hormonally charged, eager-to-buy-my-first-bra, overly inquisitive twelve-year-old. I’d already discovered Babe’s diaphragm once (I’d been snooping in the very back of her handkerchief drawer), and I would have been hyperalert to any interesting goings-on under their sheets. Assigned to the upper bunk, I had a perfect aerial view, but I never heard or noticed anything.

  At the beginning of that parched, rocky road, off to the right, was a wooden structure that served as a saloon, and that’s pretty much where my brother and I hung out, sometimes wearing our swimsuits to stay cool. Even today in rural Montana, where the Wild West is still very much alive, a bartender probably wouldn’t let kids while away their days at a bar, but where else were we supposed to go? Besides, there was hardly any cocktail business during the day. Jimmy and I drank A&W root beers while we spun on the barstools, played the pinball machines, and dropped coins in the jukebox—think Paul Anka’s “Lonely Boy.” Outside, we choked on the dust clouds that got kicked up when a rare vehicle drove by. Thus we passed a slow, hot, dry Montana summer. This was the exact opposite of helicopter parenting. My brother and I were allowed to take a rowboat under the spillway of the dam with no life jackets onboard.

  Nowadays, if a husband had a three-month gig in such a hellhole, a place that’s never seen a better day, the wife would undoubtedly stay behind with the children in their comfortable home, instead of dragging everyone out to the boonies. Maybe they’d make an obligatory family visit. That wasn’t Babe’s style. She was crazy about Dad, and where he was, she’d be. We were there to help keep Daddy company. She made the best of it, and so did we.

  A few years later, we moved to Houston so Dad could start a new business in a fresh place—remember, the shade was still drawn on Seattle. The move was a huge rupture for Babe. For the first time in her life, she was living away from her hometown, her family, her mother, and her sisters. As Dad explained it, “I couldn’t let the family hold me back. My first job was to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. I saw things falling apart in Seattle, and the more I looked around Houston, the more steel I saw. Shipyards, refineries! I thought, This is the place for me.”

  But maybe not so much for Babe. We’d hadn’t been there long when she got the long-distance phone call that her mother had died. Babe’s sisters, Aunt Evie and Aunt Dell, assured their sobbing, inconsolable baby sister that she didn’t have to return home for the funeral, which was just as well, since back then people didn’t hop on a plane like they do now.

  Grandmother Josie died right before Christmas. We’d already shopped for her presents and wrapped them, and Babe had already spent months tenderly embroidering a wall calendar to hang in her room in the nursing home where she lived. (My parents had invited her to move to Houston with us, but by then Josie had fallen and broken her hip and was wheel-chair bound.) So Josie never got to open her Christmas presents, never got to see the beautiful linen calendar Babe had worked so hard on, probably thinking of her with every stitch. Mom rolled up that little needlework masterpiece, with our birthdays highlighted in cross-stitching and sparkly sequins, and buried it in the back of her dresser drawer.

  She blew her entire inheritance, such as it was, on a used, candy-red, 1960 Ford Sunliner convertible. At the time, we were living in a little rental starter house. Faced with the choice of buying either her first AC window unit or a turquoise area rug, Babe went for the rug and quickly learned about Texas heat and humidity. When money was that tight—rug or AC, AC or rug—it took some spunk to lift your own spirits by splurging on a car.

  “A self that goes on changing,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “is a self that goes on living.” That described Babe. Her mother may have died, but she was going on living.

  That summer, she drove my brother, a friend of my brother’s, my sister, and me to Seattle to visit her mother’s grave. My fourteen-year-old, bikini-wearing self lounged in the sunny backseat (pre-seat belts). I was determined to show up in damp Seattle, where all our relatives were pale, with a Coppertone tan. Babe obliged me by driving with the top down most of the way.

  We did place flowers on Josie’s grave—a small, simple, solemn granite marker that was level with the closely clipped grass:

  JOSEPHINE KENNEY

  MOTHER

  MAR. 1880–DEC. 1961

  Babe had also timed it so that we got to visit the Seattle World’s Fair. It’s hard to explain how giddy the five of us were as we rode the elevated monorail to the fairground and went up in the Space Needle. The Space Needle! It had been on the cover of LIFE magazine, and now we were up there. We gorged ourselves on Belgian waffles (with strawberries and cream) and licked at plumes of pink cotton candy as we toured the Science Pavilion and visited the House of the Future.

  Now that’s making the best of a visit to your mother’s grave.

  What a Babe.

  LESSON 6:

  SHARING FUN IS THE WHOLE THING<
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  In 1961, meteorologists in Houston were predicting that the eye of Hurricane Carla, one of the most powerful storms ever to strike the United States, with 175-mile-per-hour winds, was headed for Houston. Texas coastal areas were on an intense hurricane watch. Some people prayed, and some prayed and packed and taped up their windows, just like Dan Rather’s colleagues showed us how to do on TV. While we still had power, the news reports reminded us of the deadly hurricane of 1900 that had washed out Galveston and killed about eight thousand people. Along with a half million others, we prepared to evacuate.

  The plan was that Babe and her three kids, and Eileen, our next-door-neighbor, and her five kids, would squeeze into Dad’s Studebaker. Except when Eileen showed up with all her children and her parakeet in its cage and a huge jug of water, Babe realized that our neighbor didn’t know any more about evacuating than she did.

  So our group of potential Hurricane Carla refugees stayed put. Since everyone was stuck in the same situation, with no water and no power, and since Babe had a knack for gathering folks together, in no time most of the neighbors—the McKays from across the street, the Dederers from down the block—had gathered in our living room around a campfire of candles and lanterns.

  Hour after hour, as we waited for the hurricane of the century to slam into us, we hung out together, playing board games and eating food, such as we had. “Sharing fun is the whole thing,” explained Babe. Carla spent her fury in Galveston. Since I was just twelve and hadn’t personally witnessed the total ruination of Galveston, I still savor Waiting for Carla as one of the scariest and friendliest times of my childhood. That crisis, which brought the neighbors together—glued us together in our living room—fulfilled an intense longing for connection.