Viking Women DO Care - A Leif-Long Legacy

While visiting family in Summit, New Jersey this weekend, I received an email that was the equivalent of a gut-punch.  A friend from high school and college had died in an automobile accident.  Now I hadn't seen the man since our circle of friends graduated in 1969, but Facebook has enabled many of us to reconnect and catch up on each others' lives.  We had messaged back and forth after I published "Ednor Scardens".  He had been thinking along the same lines, organizing material for his own book, and we traded ideas over several weeks.

A month ago a copy of his book "Viking Women Don't Care - Vol.1, Wrestling with Baltimore" appeared  on my doorstep.  Since it was a non-fiction memoir, I enjoyed delving into it, reliving many of my own teen years and the antics I'd shared within our group.  He was coming down to Baltimore in early December to do a book-signing.  I was readying a list of interview questions to incorporate into an article to promote the event.  Now I'm paging through the book again in sadness as I read his handwritten note inside the cover:  "To Kath, my favorite critic!  Enjoy the memories.  Love, Leif." 

Lawrence Frederic "Larry" "Leif" Evans was a unique guy.  Always sports-obsessed, an activist and organizer, he was like a thousand-piece puzzle that someone put in a can, shook, and dumped out.  Friendly, crazy, and socially-conscious, he was the one who could put together an event for a good cause and make it so much fun that you wouldn't dream of missing it.  He could sell you a bag of dog crap and you'd happily pay for it...and thank him.  He organized school dances, Santa Claus Anonymous charity football events, and much, much more.  Most of us who called him friend didn't have a clue about his painfully tumultuous childhood.  He was one of us, but just crazier.  Leif joined the VISTA service corps after graduation and worked with migrant workers in Florida.  I would have paid to see that.

He labored for several years as a steelworker, and during that time he created a news magazine written by and for the men and women who worked there.   Food banks, group home counseling, community newspapers, community-access television, politics...you name it...if it helped someone, Larry was likely involved in it.

In 445 B.C. the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, "Whom the gods love dies young."  While many would not feel 67 years of age to be especially young, Larry had "promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."  He wanted more time.  So did we.

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To learn more about Lawrence F. Evans, cut and paste this link to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:  http://www.post-gazette.com/news/obituaries/2014/11/17/Journalist-activist-Lawrence-F-Evans-July-13-1947-Nov-15-2014/stories/201411170057

Funeral details:  visitation will be 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, with a 7:30 p.m. memorial service at William Slater II Funeral Service, 1650 Greentree Road, Green Tree (15220).

To purchase a copy of Larry's book:http://www.amazon.com/Viking-Women-Dont-Care-Wrestling/dp/0990544508/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416276257&sr=8-1&keywords=viking+women+don%27t+care

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The Evolution of Beach Life

Returning from five near-perfect days at the beach, I'm always surprised by how different each visit feels.  The visits are stored in my own mental iCloud like reels of celluloid film, quickly becoming more fragile each time I hold a private viewing.

The first trip I can remember was around age eight...the annual family vacation that I know my parents had saved for all year.  Slick-bottomed boogie boards had yet to be invented, so kids either had the inflatable canvas rafts or the cheap vinyl version.  People usually rented the canvas rafts, but the vinyl blow-ups sold for a dollar or two and lasted for about that many days before developing a hole.  My parents spent a lot of time waving their arms for my brother and me to stay in the area directly in front of the family blanket, as the surf constantly moved us down the coastline with each ride.  We would catch waves and ride them in repeatedly until getting caught at the wrong break of a large wave which pounded us down to the sandy bottom.  It was like being churned in a mixer, and unsure which way was up.  Gasping for breath as we finally made our way back to the surface, we would sit out for a few minutes until our courage returned.  There were no skin cancer warnings, and everyone smelled of Coppertone or cheap No-Ad suntan lotion.  There was no such thing as sunblock.  All the kids in our extended family had New Delhi street beggar skin by the time August rolled around. 

Dad took us to dinner at a restaurant twice during vacations.  One night would be at Capt. Bunting's so we could all see the big fish (usually marlin) hanging on the docks while we waited to be seated, and the other night would be Phillips Seafood restaurant.  Every year, without fail, my father would lose it when the waiter took our order at Phillips.  Everyone had steamed crabs except me.  I liked crabs well enough, but for some reason I always ordered fried chicken.  He always groused at having to pay five dollars at a time when fryers sold for nineteen cents a pound.

Vacations changed when I hit fourteen.  My parents bought a lot at Susquehanna Trails and discovered the economies of camping.  I HATED everything about camping: the musty tent, sleeping bags, smelly outhouses and all.  It wasn't confined to only the summer months, but spring and fall as well.  I'd started dating and missed untold parties and events while imprisoned in the woods of Pennsylvania.  Sulking inside the tent, I tried to sleep the weekend away to make the time pass more quickly and avoid the pretense of boring campfires and marshmallows.  Desperate to escape, I landed a full-time summer job and began working part-time the rest of the year.  The extra funds helped to avoid a wardrobe from Epsteins and the dreaded bargain basement clothing of the downtown Big Four retailers.

Eventually the summer between junior and senior year of high school, I managed to convince my mother to let me spend Memorial weekend at Ocean City, Maryland with girlfriends.  Four of us banded together to save on the room rental.  We discovered the heady power of strutting on the boardwalk in bikini-clad, tanned bodies.  Parties and beer flowed, resulting in days spent on beach blankets, tanning while recovering from the previous night's excesses.  After a few hangover sunburns, we resorted to wind-up kitchen timers to "ding" loudly enough to remind us to turn over.  A slice of 9th Street pizza and a cup of Thrasher's fries were our sole sustenance.  These weekends were what we saved and lived for in high school.

Finally, the beach visits of college arrived with no restrictions.  The numbers sharing hotel rooms increased to allow more money for beer and included both sexes.  One memorable weekend included balcony jumping at a popular motel.  Unfortunately, my last jump was an epic fail from the third floor.  As my hands searched frantically for something to grab onto during the swift fall, I hit the ground and regained consciousness to find myself surrounded by people calling for an ambulance.  Luckily, I jumped to my feet and quickly walked to the elevator back to my room.  If my parents had received a call from the local Emergency Room, I knew that would be the last beach trip as long I lived under their roof.  The next day on the beach was brutal, as I'd scraped the skin off of my fingertips, and had lovely bruises blossoming from the fall.  To make matters worse, I was so hard asleep on the blanket that a friend had to wake me to advise that part of my anatomy was hanging out of my bikini top.

After I married and had kids but no money, the death march camping vacations returned.  I never considered packing, unpacking, cooking, cleaning up and swatting mosquitoes while chasing a two-year-old very relaxing.  This past week's trip was less work than those, as I stayed in a hotel with my daughter and grandkids, but the seven year old wraps herself around me like a vine whenever we sleep in a shared bed.  On the drive home, I mused that since I soon will have more free time on the weekends, I might enjoy a date or two.  Despite her selective hearing loss, the seven year old responded, "EWWW...at YOUR age?"

Maybe someday I'll again share a room with someone closer to my own age, toss back a few drinks and stay up past bedtime .  But no more balcony jumping.     

EDNOR SCARDENS - From Semi-eulogy to Four Book Fiction Series

A cardboard box landed on my front doorstep yesterday.  As the UPS truck drove off, I felt a bit like Gollum from the Lord of the Rings...springing out the door, grabbing the box and withdrawing back into my house cave.  Opened the box and carressing "my precious", I sighed happily that the day I held my printed book in my hands had finally arrived.

The journey from first putting pen to paper - alright, hand to laptop keyboard - had been a long one, and I wondered how many writers had traveled the same road I had.  I was sure that none had started the same way.  Most begin with the intention of writing a short story, novella or novel.  They jot down ideas or carry a germinating story seed in their head for varying lengths of time until, like a baby, it just has to come out.  My own process didn't even faintly resemble that.  My creation was born of fear. 

Allow me to backtrack a bit in explanation.  Years ago, my parents began the sad journey from independent living to assisted living, to nursing facility, and I was afraid that I'd be called upon to put together a eulogy for one or both of them.  I'd been fairly self-centered as a teen, and when I married a military pilot and moved away from home, I missed alot of the everyday things that my parents did.  Long distance phone calls were expensive, and we didn't have the luxury of extended discussions.  The end result was that I missed the opportunities to delve into my parents' past lives, to understand how things really were for them growing up.  My mom had a penchant for spinning yarns about her life whenever she wanted to make a point or issue an obligatory parental warning "from experience".  My sister-in-law and I used to call it "The World According to Irene".  As an example, when she first entered an Assisted Living community, each new resident was welcomed in the facility's newsletter with a brief spotlight based on their answers to general questions.  Mom listed her favorite hobby as ice skating.  She was in a wheelchair, so you get the idea.  Even if I had gotten the time to delve into her past, I'm not sure the answers would have been dependable.

With each family member's passing, my original core of relatives grew smaller, and I had a recurring dream that when my turn came, there would be no one at the service other than my own children and grandchildren.  And they wouldn't know squat about my life before I became their mom.  The dream always continued with one of them standing at the lecturn, fidgeting, and then realizing that they knew very little about me.  It sounds selfish, but who can control their dreams?

So to save them this embarrassment and assuage my fear of an ignominious send-off into the great unknown, I sat down one evening in 2009, intent on typing out a half-assed autobiographic page or two that I could email them for safekeeping until the eventual time came.  What I hadn't counted on was how much I would remember.  As I wrote down little vignettes to keep the account from reading like a timeline diagram, I became possessed.  When I finally looked away from the computer screen, dawn was breaking through the window.  Without realizing what I was actually doing, I sat there, night after night, for three weeks straight, until more than 350 pages had been disgorged.  Surely, my kids never wanted to know that much.

The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards contest caught my eye, so I edited like mad, changed the names of people and schools in the story and entered it.  Although I didn't make it to the final round, I wasn't willing to just let the manuscript sit, so I passed it around to family and friends, unaware that they were actually serving as beta readers. More changes came, adding and deleting to better suit a story that some would actually want to read.  It wasn't strictly autobiographical anymore, but the emotions of the main character still glowed in my brain.  I knew I couldn't let the story and the characters end there.  So I kept writing about them through  books 2, 3 and 4.  By the end of the Charm City Chronicles as I've dubbed them, the characters have matured into adulthood, some married, some living through tragedies and some succumbing to them.

I sent out query letters to literary agents and was encouraged by the number of requests I got for fifty page samples, but without magic, vampires and the like, I didn't find one willing to take a chance.  Then one day I got an email from the head of a nascent group...Fantasy Island Book Publishing, and the result is what you see in the photograph.  One journey has been completed, yet the most difficult one lies ahead:  marketing, media, social networking, and sales. 

And although they'll need to clarify which parts of the book are fiction vs. nonfiction, I don't think my kids will have as much trouble delivering a eulogy.  Just don't let let the opening line be, "The World According to Kathleen".         

STALKED BY HURRICANES

In 2006 I moved, returning to my home state of Maryland after spending 36 years in New Jersey, Florida, California, Virginia, Puerto Rico and Louisiana.  If you guessed ex-Navy wife....bingo.  I repatriated to Maryland for two reasons:  family and New Orleans' weather.  For six months out of every year, I was a nervous wreck, watching weather forecasts over my shoulder from June through the first of December.

I'd been relatively lucky, and experienced just two partial house floodings that weren't related to hurricanes.  Both were related to excessive rainfall.  I'd lived in that house for years with no problems, but a combination of poor landscaping, fencing and a neighbor who installed an inground pool sounded the death knell.  After the first flooding, I put in new carpeting and decided to purchase flood insurance.  If you're familiar with flood insurance, you'll know that there is a 30 day period before the policy takes effect.  So, about 22 days after I purchased it, we had 21 inches of rain in 24 hours.  My kids still laugh at my futile attenpt to help the yard drain.....pushing water out of the gate with a broom.  I also knelt on the kitchen floor and cried, praying that the inevitable wouldn't happen.  God probably had too many other people to listen to that night.

Ever since then, my nerve endings would fire up whenever I heard anything approaching torrential rain.  I kept a list of things to pile into the car after having to evacuate twice in the path of hurricanes that missed us:  family photo albums, silver flatware and jewelry(looters), two dogs and a cat.  As August of 2005 came around with its stank heat and humidity, I watched the usual reports of yet another storm forming with an uncertain destination.  As the storm grew in size and intensity, heading toward the bullseye of New Orleans in the form of Hurricane Katrina, I joined the caravan of evacuees and headed toward Natchez, Mississippi to one of the few hotels that allowed animals.  Due to the scarcity of rooms, we were only able to secure a room with two twin beds.  You can only imagine being in that room for four days with the following:  me, my daughter, her then-husband, a 7 year old, 5 year old, 1 year old, two black labs, two cats, a Siberian Husky and a Malamute. 

When my daughter announced she would rather kill herself than stay another night, an old boyfriend of hers invited us to stay with him in Nashville, Tennessee.  I'm inclined to nominate him for sainthood as we stayed there for nearly two weeks before the authorities in Louisiana would allow us to return.   

As anxious as I was to return home, nothing could have prepared me for what I found.  Just a mile from my house, I asked my daughter where we were.  The devastation as we drew closer was unimaginable.  My own home fared far better than most to the south and east of me.  As I opened the front door, the smell of the refrigerator-freezer was stunning.  We bungied it up and hauled the entire unit to the curb.  There was no savlation for that appliance.  There was black mold piled several inches atop my favorite oriental carpet in the family room and forming on the baseboards.  We pulled up the carpeting and padding to join the refrigerator.  I'd had a new roof put on the house the month before (darn it!) which held up well, but lost several sections of the 6 foot privacy fence.  A possum had taken up residence in the garage.

Adding insult to injury, my insurance company denied my flood claim, but having worked in insurance previously, I knew they were wrong.  I argued policy wording with them for nearly two months before I wrote to the White House.  Within a week, the regional superintendant of FEMA came out to the house and decided that my insurance representative must be smoking crack.....of course, it was a covered loss.

So, I finally had the repairs completed, sold the house and moved back home.  Now, I sit at my laptop writing this blog while I keep checking the weather reports for the projected paths of Hurricane Irene.  I've raided my bathroom cabinet for sleep aids and leftover painkillers to suppress the anxiety which swells with each passing hour.  If I didn't have to babysit this weekend, I'd be cozying up to multiple bottles of rum on Sunday.  As far as I'm concerned, Katrina and Irene are both nasty bitches.  I hope God hears me this time.