A Torn Leaf

I have lived through interesting times more than once in my life, and I seem to be pulling out of the most recent iteration. Last spring I lost my job, the one I counted on for health insurance and retirement benefits, the one that covered my mortgage payment, the one that fed my kids. My employer was heading in new directions, and I didn't seem to be a match for any of them. The good news was that I'd always been a saver, and I was vested; in other words, I wasn't broke.

Image by Teece Aronin

What followed were the tough adjustments you might imagine one would experience after something like that, but some great things came, too. I had experience as a resume writer and career coach, so I knew my skills, knew how to articulate and market them and could craft my own resume. I had never lost my passion for that work, so it wasn't long before I was networking in that direction and returning to my roots of writing resumes and coaching people on their next steps. 

Another benefit of that work experience was that I knew what to expect emotionally, and the words I once used to comfort, encourage and empower unemployed people came wafting back to save me. I was relieved to find the words helped, and that I hadn't been feeding people a lot of patronizing poo back in those days. 

I became a list-maker. I made lists of things that would keep me sane. One was a list of things to remember when I wasn't feeling strong; the other was a list of things to look forward to once the kids and I were back on our feet.

Currently, the first list looks like this:

• You actually have a normal life and a bright future.
• You know what to do and are wise; any mistakes you make are human and understandable.
• You're not unemployed; you're self-employed, looking for a great new opportunity, and building a new business.
• When you feel down you should clean your room, buy blankets, buy towels, buy good winter clothes, buy boots, buy silverware, clean the kitchen, read something informative, read sappy novels, remove one obstacle, set a reward, go for a walk, go for a drive, review your lists for when you're on your feet.

My lists for when the finances are better are of things that probably wouldn't cheer up anybody but me, like replacing the flower boxes on the house and painting the front door and the shutters. 

As to my first list, I don't advocate spending as a means of self-medicating. It just happened that we needed more blankets, we needed more silverware and we needed more towels. I wanted to know that although a storm was coming, we had everything we needed to stay warm and dry and feel safe. I wanted to know that we could even go out and play in that storm. I shopped for most of those things at thrift stores. My motto: You scratch my back, Goodwill, and I'll scratch yours.

One thing about storms, though, is that they take little pieces of you with them; a few hairs from your head, a few skin cells off your face, a few beliefs you once held sacred. I choose to look at it this way, that it's less of me to take care of, to fuss over, or to think about. It's less ego to get in the way. I tell myself that each storm leaves me a little more streamlined. And I remind myself that whatever has weathered a storm has a beauty the untouched and pristine among us just can't have.

Like a torn leaf or a chipped demitasse. 

The Surly Bonds of Earth

I am a baby boomer. When I was six years-old, my parents booked a flight for themselves, my two brothers and me from our home state in the Midwest to Southern California where my aunt and uncle lived. It was also the sole residence of Mickey Mouse before he built himself that second home in Orlando. Knowing Mickey lived in the same state as my aunt and uncle made it the most intriguing destination I could imagine.   

Wild Blue Yonder, by Teece Aronin, available on 

products at  Redbubble.com/people/phylliswalter.

Flying was an event back then, and all of us were dressed up. My mother looked lovely in a dress, and my father wore a suit and tie. My brothers were in the sixties' equivalent of business casual, and I was wearing a brown and white striped seersucker dress with a pair of Mary Janes. My parents bought me a pink plush wind-up elephant to take on the flight, and its trunk rotated along to the tune of Frere Jacques. 

Our meals were real food, meat and potatoes and vegetables, and the flight attendant (or stewardess, in those days) gave my brothers each a junior pilot pin. I can't remember what little token of the flight she gave me, probably a junior stewardess pin.  When my father jokingly asked the flight attendant where his pin was, she made a big fuss over applying a junior pilot pin to his lapel. She was blonde, beautiful and spoke with a lovely accent. She reminded me of Inger Stevens.

Last week, I took my daughter, Sydney to the airport so she could fly out to visit her dad and we were abruptly notified at the ticket counter that her flight had been cancelled. The reason given had something to do with bad weather near Baltimore, but I've been told that airlines sometimes do that when a flight isn't full. 

Whatever the reason, we headed home for the night. I was just grateful they could book her on the same flight out of the same airport the next day. For a while, because of computer problems, they were insisting I'd have to take her to one of the busier hubs, the kind  patterned on that hedge maze in The Shining. 

The next day, which only felt like Groundhog's Day, we approached the same ticket counter behind which stood an unsmiling, monosyllabic ticket agent. She attached an ID tag to my daughter's suitcase and pointed us toward Security.  

Syd and I were sweating it out because she didn't have her I.D., and we knew it would be dicey explaining things to TSA. Syd's an anxious flyer as it is. Just as we approached the first TSA officer, I realized that I didn't have a gate pass. I've never walked up to a ticket counter with one of my kids and not been asked if I wanted a gate pass. Granted, Syd is 20 now, but tiny as a waif and still in braces, so she looks like someone who would need a grownup to get her to the gate. 

Since I had my mind on my daughter and the intensified security measures she'd be up against, I didn't think to ask for a pass, and I think I had a better excuse than the ticket agent. The officer suggested I go get my pass while they got started with Syd. I walked up to the same ticket agent and smiled.

"I need a gate pass." My request was pleasant enough, I thought, considering my resentment of this woman.

"You didn't ask for one," she said. 

"Because it usually comes up in the converSAtion," I replied. 

When I rejoined Syd, she was standing near a lectern behind which stood a different TSA agent. He was telling her to name a landmark, and at first Syd looked a little blank.

"He means near where we live, honey."

"Don't answer for her ma'am," said the agent.

I didn't think I was. Syd answered a whole slew of questions like that while the officer relayed her answers to someone over the phone. She passed with flying (no pun intended) colors, but still had to be patted down. After that we made it to the "other side," the land of book stores, gift shops, bars and restaurants and gates. 

Syd and I each had a sandwich and a bottle of tea which cost me around $20. Silently, I longed for the days when she was delighted with brown bags of peanut butter sandwiches, string cheese and sliced apples. Sadly, she's had the audacity to grow up. 

And she wasn't the only one of us who'd been detained by TSA. When she was a kindergartner and her brother was about three, we were at the airport with my mother, waiting to be cleared for a flight from Maryland to Michigan. I'd left my driver's license at home after taking it out to scan or copy or something, because someone had mentioned that we might also go to Canada.   

My mother was in her eighties by that time and seated in a wheelchair while we waited at Security and I tried to think of what to say. When I couldn't get cleared, someone from the airport wheeled my mother to the gate while I stood there watching them disappear into the distance. A friend later suggested that if I'd mentioned that my mother was due for her diaper change, the requirement for my picture I.D. would have been miraculously waived. 

I looked around at the other passengers waiting to be screened and spotted a woman in an Army uniform who had chaperoned a school field trip with me a few months earlier. She vouched for me, displayed her own substantial credentials, and TSA let me through. When the kids and I caught up with my mother (who did not wear diapers, by the way), my pulse rate was approaching tachycardia.

Syd made the flight out to see her father without much problem considering, and when it was time to fly home, she and her dad knew to expect another round of enhanced identification measures. But when they asked her questions this time, they were all about Baltimore and the area where her father lives. He's moved at least twice since we all lived in Maryland, and Syd couldn't answer the questions. 

I got on the phone with the TSA officer and willed my head not to explode. Patiently he explained that I was the wild card that got Syd on the flight to Maryland, and her father was the wild card coming back. When she couldn't supply any solid facts linking herself to him, she was grounded. It made sense, and I was grateful not to be a TSA agent having to explain policies like this to furious parents of kids traveling without I.D. 

I offered to send a picture of her birth certificate, but the agent said he couldn't accept anything electronic. Eventually someone put a supervisor from the airline on with me who suggested I send a picture of Syd's birth certificate. I know, that's what I thought. 

"I offered to do that," I told her, "but they said they can't accept anything electronic."

"I know,'" said the supervisor, "but I'll print a copy."

I wasn't about to ask how that was any more legitimate than me texting the same birth certificate directly to TSA. I guess it's that TSA agents aren't allowed to use printers? I'm still confused, but it got Syd on the flight and that's all that mattered. 

Talking to her father later, I said, "I'm so glad I had her birth certificate."

"You couldn't have thought of that last week?" he asked, and we laughed and laughed. Actually, we didn't.

Flying isn't what it used to be. But I'll bet if Syd could have walked up to those agents and flashed her junior pilot pin, they'd have ushered her straight through.  





  

McCurdy, McCrew, and McLean

One could argue that Elmer McCurdy and Anderson "Andrew" McCrew didn't amount to much in life, but man oh man, if anyone ever earned eternal rest, it was these two. We'll begin with McCurdy.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

Elmer McCurdy robbed banks and trains around the turn of the last century, and according to AllGov.com, someone really did say, "You'll never take me alive!" and that someone was McCurdy. As a result of that defiant determination, the posse that had hoped to take him alive, just shot him instead. He died on October 7, 1911.

The AllGov post continues, explaining that no one claimed McCurdy's body, so the undertaker charged a nickel to anyone who wanted to take a peek at the embalmed corpse. Aside from that, I don't know what happened to him for the first five years he was deceased, but it is said that five years after his death, a carnival snapped him up, thinking him quite the moneymaker, and for the next 60 years McCurdy was sold and resold to carnivals, wax museums and haunted house attractions.

In 1976, a Universal Studios television crew was prepping part of a Long Beach, California amusement park to shoot a scene for The Six Million Dollar Man. When they came across McCurdy hanging from a noose, they assumed it was a wax figure. But when they moved the corpse and the arm fell off, exposing bone, the truth was shockingly clear. Arrangements were made, and McCurdy was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma on April 22, 1977.

Anderson "Andrew" McCrew was a one-legged hobo who fell from a moving train, and according to at least one source, lost the other leg when he was killed. McCrew was an African American man in his mid-forties, and this all went down - McCrew included - in 1913 Marlin Texas.

Like McCurdy, no one claimed McCrew's remains, and after being embalmed by a heavy-handed mortician who preserved him to within an inch of his life (so to speak), a traveling carnival picked him up, dressed him in a tuxedo and propped him in a wheelchair. He toured the country that way for some 50 years. Some sources say he was billed as "The Amazing Petrified Man," and others as "The Famous Mummy Man." It might have been one, it might have been the other - it might have been both - but it's a pretty safe bet that McCrew never aspired to either.

According to AllGov.com, the carnival shut down in the late sixties, and McCrew landed in a Dallas warehouse where he was discovered by Elgie Pace. Pace felt he deserved a proper burial, but stored him in her basement since she couldn't afford a proper buriel. 

Singer and songwriter Don McLean read an article in the New York Times about McCrew and wrote a song about him, The Legend of Andrew McCrew. The official Don McLean website says the song inspired Chicago radio station, WGN to air McCrew's story and played the song to raise money for a headstone. The station's campaign raised enough funds to have McCrew exhumed and laid to rest in Lincoln Cemetery in Dallas, this time with a marker. It reads: Born 1867; Died 1913; Buried 1973.

The next time you tour a haunted house attraction, visit a wax museum, or pop your head into the curtained doorway of a carnival side show, take a good long look at any "dummies" you see - because they might be anything but. 

Peg Entwistle and the HOLLYWOODLAND Sign

I am afraid I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. ~ P.E.

Poor P.E. If she had hung on a little longer, she might have been remembered for her life and not her death, and she might have spared herself the fate of becoming the ghost who haunts the grounds around the Hollywood sign - assuming, of course, that the rumors are true.

Peg Entwistle, photo source/licensing: Wikipedia Commons

P.E. was Peg Entwistle, the 24-year-old starlet who jumped to her death from the H of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, the one with the freestanding letters high up on Mount Lee, the one that now reads simply, HOLLYWOOD and is an icon of the movie industry.

It was 1932. Entwistle had grown despondent over her career; after all, she was a washed-up almost was, having accomplished nothing more than a Broadway debut in her teens and a performance in Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" that inspired a teenaged Bette Davis to rave ". . . I want to be exactly like Peg Entwistle!"

Such is the lie of depression, that it has convinced some of the world's greatest overachievers that they are worthless and have nothing to live for. No doubt, Entwistle could be hard on herself, and reports indicate that she could be "moody." She is said to have shared the following about her struggles to nail a performance:

"To play any kind of an emotional scene, I must work up to a certain pitch. If I reach this in my first work, the rest of the words and lines take care of themselves. But if I fail, I have to build up the balance of the speeches, and in doing this the whole characterization falls flat. I feel that I am cheating myself. I don't know whether other actresses get this same reaction or not, but it does worry me."

According to IMDb, under the direction of Blanc Yurka, Entwistle played Hedvig, the girl in "The Wild Duck" whose life would end by suicide. Bette Davis, who was roughly the same age, saw a performance with her mother, Ruthie and was transformed. Two years later, as Entwistle headed to Hollywood, Yurka hired Davis to play Hedvig.

Entwistle, whose family moved with her to the U.S. from England when she was about five years-old, took some hard hits early on. Her doting stepmother died as the result of an illness, and her father was killed in a hit and run accident. Peg and her younger brothers were entrusted to the care of their uncle, an actor and theatre manager said to have gotten Peg at least one of her early breaks. 

Eventually, Entwistle and her uncle made their way to Los Angeles where Peg hoped to break into films. It was at the height of the Great Depression, and she landed a role in the play, "The Mad Hopes," which also featured Humphrey Bogart and Billie Burke. The play ran its course at the Belasco Theatre in downtown L.A. and earned Entwistle some helpful industry buzz. Billie Burke, by the way, went on to play Glinda, the Good Witch in MGM's 1939 production of "The Wizard of Oz." But according to online sources, while Entwistle was no doubt grateful to be earning a living, she longed to venture outside her "type," which was shaping up to be the amiable ingenue.

Entwistle got her chance to leave girlish roles behind in her one and only film, Thirteen Women, starring Myrna Loy and Irene Dunne. She played Hazel Cousins, a role with scenes running roughly 16 minutes in the first cut but slashed to just four minutes after the film failed to win over test audiences. Some say that the encroaching presence of the Hays Code, a massing force for Hollywood censorship, was to blame for some of the challenges the film experienced. All the same, having her most promising work to date snipped onto the cutting room floor, was a tough blow for Entwistle. "Thirteen Women" premiered in New York on September 16, 1932, the month following her death, and in L.A. the following November.

Entwistle's death is said to have happened like this:

On the evening of September 16, 1932, she left the house she shared with her uncle, saying she was going to the drug store for a book and then to visit friends. Whether that was a ruse, or she impulsively changed plans, no one knows. What we do know is that she made her way to the Southern slope of Mount Lee, site of the Hollywoodland sign, 13 letters, 50 feet tall, advertising a real estate development. She climbed the maintenance ladder at the back of the H and dove off.

According to reports, two days later, a woman desiring to remain anonymous, phoned the Los Angeles police saying she'd discovered a woman's shoe, purse and jacket while hiking near the sign. She added that she'd found what appeared to be a suicide note, and that when she gazed down the hilly terrain, she'd spotted a body. After the body was recovered and a postmortem conducted, the cause of death was determined as "multiple fractures of the pelvis."

Entwistle's uncle identified his niece after reading a newspaper account of an unknown female corpse and a suicide note signed P.E. found near the sign. He told police that she had been "suffering an intense mental anguish."

One macabre side note: When Entwistle was 19, she married actor, Robert Keith. Two years later she was awarded a divorce after alleging cruelty and claiming that Keith neglected to mention his previous marriage and six-year-old son. That boy grew up to be the actor, Brian Keith. Sadly, that Keith's daughter, Daisy died by suicide. Her death came at a time when Keith's health was declining. Two months later, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His death was ruled a suicide, but Keith's friend, actress, Maureen O'Hara, insisted it was an accident and that Keith had been in good spirits. She added that being a Catholic, he would never have taken his life.

Entwistle's suicide caused one of those sensations vintage Hollywood is famous for. Her funeral was held at the W.M. Strathers Mortuary on September 20, and she was cremated and her ashes buried next to her father in a cemetery in Glendale, Ohio.

But that isn't the end of Peg Entwistle. Since her death, people have reported encountering a young blonde woman near the Hollywood sign, dressed in 1930s era clothing. She has been described as "sad," "brooding," and in one case, "disoriented." The smell of gardenias, Entwistle's favorite scent, has been detected during these sightings. She is said to vanish as suddenly as she appears.

If you should ever stumble across a time machine, set the dial for September 16, 1932, go to the Hollywoodland sign and wait for Peg. Maybe you can change her mind.  




.

Soul Flier

How could you have grown up so fast, when the day you were born, you, grown up, seemed a million years away? 

Syd and me when she was about 13.
Photo credit: Jon Aronin

How did you get so capable, because when you were two, you needed me for everything? 

How could you have needed me for everything, then barged ahead anyway, my pigheaded angel-face, convinced that you needed me for nothing? 

And how did you get so strong, my fairy warrior princess, when there was a time that you worried about everything?

Remember that day on the bed? You said you were so afraid to die. I tried to think what could have made you that anxious. Then, you spoke of stresses from school, your parents' divorce, and unreliable friends. You cried about missing your grandma, leaving your childhood, losing your home, and growing old. 

No wonder you were frightened; you'd worried yourself full circle to confront your own mortality. And we went around and around and around, I trying to comfort you and you still not comforted.

Then I, a discontented agnostic, struggling to believe, said the last thing I could think of that might help, that after I died, I would watch over you, and that when you died, I would watch then, too, and fly down from Heaven just in time to catch your soul, that I would hold it tight against me and pilot it to Heaven. 

So far, my help hadn't helped, so I braced for your scoff. 

But you said, "You promise?"

And I said, "I promise."

Losing Our Faith

Faith, my ex-husband's mother, died a few weeks ago - she of the indomitable will and the bottomless spirit, the woman who, despite our differences on so many things, I cared a lot about. Even on those post-divorce days when I'd walk into the laundry room, grateful that she would never again be privy to the messes I squirrel away in there, I still cared.  


Turns out that at the end of her life, when we hadn't seen each other for years, she still cared about me too. 

Whenever the topic of my mother-in-law comes up, I tell people to imagine Joan Rivers. Faith was tiny, even before cancer, and she was viciously made even tinier because of  cancer. 

She was blond, Long Island born and raised, Jewish, whip smart and opinionated - and she could be runway ready with a half-hour's notice. We were so different that the gods of New York must have conspired with the titans of Michigan, laughing themselves sick as they pulled the switches and pushed the buttons that would result in us meeting.  

Sometimes we drove each other crazy, like when she would insist we were running out of gas when we still had half a tank, and I would absentmindedly lock us out of the car - with it running and worse, with just half a tank of gas. 

A few weeks before she died, my ex-husband, Michael asked me to bring the kids to Maryland where Faith lived in a care facility near him. I wasn't sure how she felt about me anymore and wondered how seeing her would go. But when she introduced me to her caregiver, she said, "This is my former daughter-in-law, Teece, who for some reason I'm still very fond of. What can I say; shit happens."  

Hearing that she still cared, I tentatively called her Mom again, and she didn't seem to mind.
She was in a lot of pain and very tired, but when Michael teased her, she'd close her eyes and make the blah-blah sign with her hand, having the last word without speaking. One day when we visited, we brought her a candle in an off-white bisque holder. She couldn't light the candle because she had oxygen tanks in the room, but I knew her well enough to know she'd like it for the bisque holder and for the fragrance. She had us place it on the television stand where she could see it from the chair which was where she now spent nearly every waking hour. 

Since Faith's passing, memories of our 13-plus years together float through my mind. Once, when the kids were small, Faith was with us at a friend's party. For some reason, Michael had driven separately, so on the way home he was in his car, and I was driving Faith and the kids. Suddenly the car took a lurch and thumped down on one side. 

"Oh my God! Did we just have a blowout? We just had a blowout!" Faith yelled. 

"We did not just have a blowout," I said, knowing full-well that we had just had a blowout. But the dread of Faith suspecting we were neglecting our tire maintenance when we had kids to keep safe made me determined to will that tire back into one piece.

"Teece, don't you think you should pull over?" she gasped.

"Nope," I said, "We're fine." 

The car rode like a wheelbarrow without the wheel, and the fact that I kept relentlessly pushing it on was a tribute to the pigheaded attitude I sometimes fell victim to when Faith was involved. 

"Teece, really, don't you think we should stop?" she pleaded, and after a few more seconds, the fact that driving that way was idiotic and a danger to my kids finally sank in and just as my hubcap went winging into parts unknown, I pulled over. Michael pulled over too. 

There was pretty much nothing left on the rim but a few shreds of clinging rubber, so Michael called AAA.

"What about your hubcap?" asked Faith.

"Well, I guess it's lost," I said. To me that was the least of our problems.

"Don't you think we should go look for it?"

I glanced in the direction the hubcap had flown and saw nothing but a guardrail, a treacherous drop and a thick ground-cover of brambles. I looked back at Faith.

"No, I don't think we should go look for it."

"But wait! Down there! Isn't that it?"

Down there, as she put it, was way down there where a faint glimmer of something metallic was barely visible.

"Even if it is, it might as well be on Mars," I answered. 

"I don't mind! I'll see if I can get it!"

"Don't you dare!" I yelled, even as she was scampering off. "You'll kill yourself!" One leg swung over the guardrail and then the other. "It's just a hubcap!" 

Before you could say, "Sir Edmund Hilary, Faith was beginning a sharp descent down the treacherous slope. I couldn't bring myself to watch, I was so sure she'd fall.

I took a peek when I heard a whooping victory cry and saw her at the bottom of the hill, waving the hubcap over her head like a first kill. 

"For crying out loud," I sighed, laughing at the same time, "she's nuts."

Faith clamored up and hopped back over the guardrail, grinning and thrilled that she'd saved us from replacing the hubcap. 

Never once did she lecture me about neglecting my tire maintenance. My fear that she would was just me being part of our problem. 

Now the real problem is that she isn't here anymore.  

Bricks and Mortar

I almost never go inside a store anymore - not a physical store anyway. I am one of those people helping to toll the death knell for big box stores and shopping malls. Some people still love to shop in a store. To them I say more power to you, but my first choice is shopping online. 

Graphic by Teece Aronin

Even though I'm a baby boomer, I just cannot imagine walking all over hell's half-acre trying to find one oddly-sized light bulb, just as I can no longer imagine having to answer the phone if I want to know who's calling.

A couple of weeks ago my son, Jon and I had time to kill before an appointment so I said, "Let's run into Target and get toothpaste. Besides, I really have to use the bathroom."

Inside, Jon strolled around while I dashed into the ladies room. There was a female store manager in there looking flustered. 

"I'm afraid you can't use the bathroom right now," she said. "There's been a water main break and the township is shutting off all the water."

"Now or in a few minutes?" I asked. "Because I really do have to use the bathroom."

A woman stepped out from a stall next to us, and the manager leaned to the side and peered in.

"Well, from the looks of things, you can't flush now," she said.

For no amount of money would I have traded places with that woman in the stall with her toilet bowl contents open for inspection.

"Oh, that's not necessarily true," said the woman in the stall. "I was just waiting for instructions before I flush. Should I try it, do you think?"

"Yes, go ahead, " instructed the manager. Both women were talking as if they worked for NASA, and the toilet was a rocket ship in trouble. The woman disappeared back into the stall and we heard a mournful, yowling growl from the toilet, as if a dragon was in there giving birth.

"That's just what I thought," said the manager. "You can't flush."

See now, that's a perfect example. If I was shopping online, I'd just put the laptop down and scamper off to the bathroom, then flush once the water was back on. I would not have to show my toilet contents to anyone else even if they did work for NASA. That's partly because, unlike some people, I know that a toilet is just a toilet and not a rocket ship, no matter how high someone is when they use it. When I shop online, the biggest irritant is the occasional error message because of outdated credit card numbers or passwords - unless I have to call customer service.

"Yes ma'am, it is certainly upsetting when you click to make a purchase and the item fails to appear in your cart. I know I would find that most frustrating." This was no doubt read to me from a script with a blank space for inserting my problem. 

"Well, can you fix the issue?" I ask.

"Ma'am, that depends. Did you click on the word buy or on the picture of the item you wanted to buy?"

"I clicked on the word buy."

"Ma'am, you were supposed to click on the picture."

"That doesn't make any sense. Who clicks on the picture? Besides, the word buy is bold and in italics."

"That's just an idiosyncrasy of the system, ma'am."

"An idiosyncrasy?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Wouldn't bolding the word buy and putting it in italics be a choice made by a human? How can you say it's an idiosyncrasy in the system?"

"Well, ma'am, because it really just is," said customer service. 

And those last italics were a choice made by this human.