Robbie's Memories

My grandmother loved to iron!  She ironed everything!  Well, not underwear, that I know of, but towels and sheets and permanent press clothes (which are no longer permanent press after they've been ironed a time or two!).  My grandfather was a bus driver and wore a uniform: dark green trousers with a jacket to match in the winter, with tan shirts, long or short sleeved depending on the season.  So there was a shirt for each day, at least.           Tuesday was ironing day.  The wash was taken off the line Monday, and everything to be ironed was sprinkled with water, rolled up and put in the refrigerator.  Tuesday, Mom set up the ironing board in the kitchen, with the tall metal prong on a spring attached to the board that held the cord out of the way.  She would lick her finger and tap the iron to see if it was hot enough.  It had to sizzle!           When I was little, I remember sitting at the ...

           I love jelly donuts.  Well, more specifically, I loved Frannie Belzer's father's jelly donuts, the one's we used to get from Belzer's bakery on 5th street in Olney, back in the '50s and '60s.   Mr. Belzer fried his donuts, so the outside was a little crisp.  He rolled them in granulated sugar, not the awful 10X powdered stuff that gets all over your clothes.  Then he pumped them so full of raspberry jam that the skin on the top started to crack.  They were amazing!            Until the summer of the camping trip: I must have been 11 or twelve.  Our Girl Scout troop camped at Camp Laughing Waters outside of Philadelphia for a week each summer.  We had a huge troop, 66 girls, the second largest in the city.  Every summer we turned into the world's worse softball team so we could keep meeting, and we went camping.  I'm not sure how many went on the camping trip, somewhere b...

     Two friends posted skunk stories on Facebook this summer.  My personal/professional skunk story is too long for that, I think, so I'll post it here.      This took place back in Delaware, when my father was living at Catherine's.  Catherine had a sort of boarding house/ nursing home, taking people in to her home and taking care of them.  She called me and asked me to see some people with medical problems living at her house, when I first opened my practice.  She took good care of those people, while planting a huge garden and raising pigs and chickens and distributing food bags and raising children.  I had never seen that in the city, but in the country I took care of patients in a number of people's homes.  Catherine's was the best, though, and when my father became homeless in Philadelphia, I asked Catherine if she would take him in.  My father was a risk; he tended to fall asleep with cigarettes in his hand....

          Memorial day, the old Memorial Day, when it was a fixed celebration on May 30, not this slippery, sliding, last Monday in May thing, was my mother's birthday.  With the help of her Uncle Clyde, who it seems was responsible for most of the lies of her childhood, she grew up thinking all the parades and celebrations were for her.           I was trying to remember what we used to do on Memorial Day.  I think my grandparents took us to the cemetery to visit relatives graves: cut the grass, leave some flowers, have a picnic.  Later when I was in Girl Scouts, there would be a mass at St. Helena's with all the scouts in uniform.  But that's where the memory gets fuzzy and I'm wondering if it's actually July 4th that I remember.           The fourth of July was a big deal in Olney (a row house neighborhood of Philadelphia) when I was growing up.  Now that I do remember.   ...

          I spent two years in Kindergarten.  My mother sent me at age 4  because I was being bullied by the girl across the street.  Judy and I were born the same day, same year, but she had an older brother.  My experience with my granddaughter leaves me to believe that younger sisters of older brothers are much tougher.  The day Judy caught me in the corner between the steps and someone's porch, stuck her arms out straight with tight fists on the end and whirled around hitting me, until I got past her and ran home crying, was the day my mother decided I should go to school.  On the recommendation of my godmother, Loretta Daly, principal of an elementary school herself, she sent me to Ravenhill Academy.           Ravenhill was a small private, Catholic, girls (after grade 4, co-ed till then) boarding and day school (I was a day student, of course!)  It was run by the Religious of the Assumption, who...

          My mother used to tell a story of picking me up at school on my first day of first grade, with her friend, Donald Baird in the car.  She asked me about my day.  I was so excited, giving her all the details, especially recess and lunch.  I said "And do you know what we had for dessert!  Jello!"           Mr. Baird, matching my enthusiasm, said "Oh, do you like Jello!"          I responded "NO!  Yuck!"  Somehow the grown-ups always thought this was very funny.         My grandmother made Jello a lot.  My grandfather loved it.  It was usually lime, with apples or canned pineapple (it doesn't gel with fresh; she tried) or bananas.  Pop would pour milk on it: he called it "Shimmy pudding".          The ad slogan back then was "There's always room for Jello".  Personally, I thought there was always room for ...

          I did think about becoming a psychiatrist when I headed to medical school.  Seemed to me that if you wanted to help people, that may be the best chance to do it.  The med school psych department soon disillusioned me.           Our psychiatry teaching came in two parts: first a one hour lecture each week for the entire freshman year, followed by an exam.  Then in Junior year we would have a six week psychiatric rotation, monitored by one of the staff psychiatrists.           The freshmen lectures were pretty good: a nice change from gross anatomy and some really good teachers.  In a school that was still 2/3 female, with a large psychiatry department, there was only one woman in the psych department and she was a pediatric psychiatrist.  This was reflected in our final exam.           Really, a solid year of weekly lectures, with no tests or review...

          My grandmother was a meat and two cook (or three if you count dessert).  Eating out meant a seafood house.  China was a poor nation and the Chinese ate weird things like thousand-year-old eggs and bird' nest soup.  Why would anyone want to eat in a Chinese restaurant?           So I was out of college and working in Baltimore before I ever tasted Chinese food (except canned Chow Mein at a friend's house, and that was awful!).  I had gotten a civil service job as a computer programmer trainee at the Social Security Administration.  I absolutely hated it.  After six weeks, I landed another civil service position as a cardiac cath lab tech at the Public Health Service Hospital.  Unfortunately, in the job switch, my checks got messed up and I went over a month without getting paid!           I ran out of money and I ran out of food.  It didn't occur to me to call ...

          "Darktown Strutters' Ball" was the first song I learned.  My grandmother said she taught it to me as soon as I could walk and talk, and took me down to the sweater mill where she used to work (until she quit work to take care of me), and had me sing it for her friends there.  I don't remember learning it, of course.  It's just something I have always known, along with "Daisy, Daisy" and "Du, Du, Liegst Mir IM Herzen", other songs my grandmother taught.  I remember learning songs from my grandfather when I was 5 or so: The Star Spangled Banner, My Country Tis of Thee, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, and Pop Goes the Weasel.  Pop had a collection of 78's that I was allowed to play, but the only one I remember is Alexander's Ragtime Band.           My grandmother had a lovely voice.  Mass was still in Latin back then, and Catholics didn't sing at mass.  But my grandparents took me to the Novena of ...

          Natalie Goldberg in "Old Friend from Far Away", a book about writing memoir, asked an interesting question.  If you were losing your memories and could only keep one, what memory would you keep?   Been pondering this one for the last two days, which is why I didn't write.           There are the important memories, the memories of life changing events: that magical point in my internship when I suddenly knew I could do this: I could diagnose illness and take care of patients and do it well the afternoon on the banks of the Potomac River when the man I loved said he loved me picking up Diane at the airport or, even better, the day she called me Mommie the parade out to the car the day we brought Nerissa home the experience at Trap Pond and the weekend that followed when I knew without a doubt that there was a God and I needed to trust Him (or Her) the day they put Sammy in my arms in the delivery room and I be...

           In 1972, the year after I graduated college, my mother took me to England for a week as a graduation present.  We went on a charter of people going to the Crufts Dog Show (my mother was a dog show person; we had a Keeshond we showed and she edited Kee Topics, a breed magazine.).                 We had a banquet the night we arrived.  Afterward, my mother said, "Let's take a walk.  I'll show you where Buckingham palace is, and where you can see the changing of the guard.  Then tomorrow, you're on your own".  So we walked from Marble Arch up past the palace at about 10:30 at night.  The gates were open and all the lights were on.  Suddenly the bobbies in their helmets dashed out and stopped traffic, and the queen came by and waved at us!  What a way to start the trip!                 The next day turned out to be the 21st anni...

From "Med School Talking Blues" (written by me while in med school):       "If you want to be a doctor, I'll tell you what to do,        You've gotta start premed by the age of two." Written on a med school bathroom wall:       Will Rogers said he never met a man he didn't like.  Will Rogers never met a premed.       I had wanted to be a doctor since the age of 5, when I had a crush on my pediatrician.  I detoured slightly in high school, wanting to be a vet, but by the time I was sixteen, I had gone back to wanting to help people instead of animals.  But I finished college physically exhausted, financially broke, and wanting just to get out of town.  I got a job in Baltimore, and after a switch, ended up working as a cardiac cath lab tech.  A year later, I knew if I didn't apply to med school now, it would never happen.       This was 1972.  The last of the all male me...

           Not that I ever really got to dress Diane.  Her first words, after "Mommie" were "Me do!"  Her gross motor development may have been delayed but her fine motor skills were way ahead of schedule: she could zip zippers and button buttons well before her third birthday.               Our first Sunday at home after her week in the hospital, where we celebrated her second birthday, I found myself fighting her fists into the sleeves of a little yellow dress, saying "You'll wear this dress because I say you're going to wear this dress!"  Shades of my mother!  I promised us both, then, that we would never fight over clothes.                 Even at two, Diane had definite opinions about clothes.  I quickly learned not to buy her anything without taking her with.  It didn't matter if it was new; it didn't matter if I really liked it; if she didn't ...

           Our family loved croquettes.  At Thanksgiving, my grandmother would buy a 25 lb. turkey for the four of us.  We would have it for Thanksgiving dinner, turkey sandwiches that night and the next day, and the entire rest of the turkey would be ground up for turkey croquettes.  Mommom would get out her meat grinder, attaching it to a cutting board since the table rim was too wide for the vise connection.  I sat across from her many times as she turned the crank, pushing the turkey meat down into the grinder with her other hand.  I, of course, sampled the ground turkey as it came out.                 Mom would mix the ground meat with a thick white sauce, seasoned with salt, pepper and fresh parsley.  She had great contempt for people who added mashed potatoes or rice.  I thought that had probably been the point of croquettes, to extend the meat, but not Mom.  She would ...