Mad bomber hats

My mother said to me around Christmas that she had noticed women wearing colorful versions of “that hat you got your dad” – the mad bomber hat. I don’t know where I got it. It was a long time ago. Now Quentin’s WWI aviator’s suede helmet I bought at the original Banana Republic, I didn’t buy it for him. He was little then, but later he found it. He likes it and wears it for the same reason: he tells people, “It’s warm.” Yes, it is. It is also a little odd looking, but then Quentin has the most marvelous smile and the hat takes on a renewed flair.

But I was talking about the Mad Bomber hat, the one I gave my dad. It was sort of a joking Christmas present because when I was in high school, he used to drive me crazy by sticking the zipped-off hood of a parka coat on his head to putter around outside or walk the dog. The sideflaps poked out down around chin level like beagle ears. Overall, it gave him the look of a homeless man. It was some shade of green; I can’t really call it forth clearly in my mind’s eye because I always rolled my eyes when I looked out the window and saw him wearing it.

When I saw the Mad Bomber hat years later, I knew I had to get it for him. That Christmas morning, I remember my mother telling my aunt about the infamous hood and remarking, “She hated it, just hated it.” He wore the Mad Bomber and I think it kept him warm, and that I had learned, was the important thing.

Then these stylish versions turned up at Eddie Bauer and Mother took a fancy to them, so I got her one for a late Christmas present – although she insisted on paying for it. I got her, though, I told her it was half as much as it was. Hers is blue with the fur in the usual places – on the forehead flap that folds down, on the ear flaps and around the edges of the neck. Mother is 81; she has panache.

She wore it down to the bookmobile and into a couple of her thrift shop haunts. She doesn’t wear it to chop kindling; she says she doesn’t want to get it dirty.

The skunking of Little Ann

Little Ann was a cocker spaniel, and, I suppose, in the heaven that dogs just have to go to, I guess she still is – a cocker spaniel angel. We loved her dearly; she loved my husband to bits, was fond of Quentin and tolerated me. She was, however, a free spirit.

Little Ann came from the Butler County, Ohio, animal shelter. She was about a year old and, by the way, had never had her tail docked. I think she was probably born and said, “I’m emancipating myself; I’m out of here.” Of course, she gave Quentin the smiling, happy look that said, “I know you’re going to take me home. I know it. I know it. I’m so happy. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

So we took her home. And she promptly took off. She had used us for her escape. Ah, but she did not know her new adversary. She wasn’t going to break my son’s heart. I kept tracking her down and she kept running away. She did that for 13 years. Of course, somewhere along the line, she would run away and I had learned to shout, “Fine, find your meals somewhere,” and she would be scratching to come in when she had wandered around enough. If you wanted her back right away, the trick was to take about five steps to chase her, and then turn your back and walk away. She would follow.

I remember taking her to the Fairgrounds. When it was time to leave, she would not get in the car. I would drive a few feet and she would run along behind. I’d stop and open the door and she would run off. Many is the time I drove the few blocks home with a dog following a car that stopped every half-block for her. I would get so furious. And I’d turn round and take her to the Fairgrounds the next day. We got another dog, Sally, and Little Ann would get Sally to run beside her and then she would run past a tree and Sally, watching Little Ann, would run into it.

One time, when Quentin was a senior, he got so incredibly upset with her that he bowled her in the porch door. She rolled over and over along the carpet to the other end and bounced off the wall. Did not faze her.

She would come for Cameron when he came to live with us. He was five or six and he would see her make an escape and run for the door, calling, “I’ll save you, Ann.” And she would look at him and come. He called her sweetums. We would get him up late at night to stand in the door and call, “Come here, Sweetums,” when she was being especially stubborn.

I took her to Mother’s a lot, although we just had to take it for granted she would show up when it was time to go home. She liked to make trips out at night and she would buffalo me into believing she had “to go”. She’d be off and I’d have to get Mother to demand, “Little Ann, you get in here right now.” A lot of folks are a bit cowed by Mother.

Anyway, one night, we were there and she went out and came in willingly. Thank you, Ann. She had been skunked, right on the forehead. At 2 am, we bathed her in tomato juice and vinegar and Dawn dishwashing liquid – which is supposed to work. We thought it had. I returned home the next day and everyone exclaimed, “WHAT is that stench?” More baths – nurse baths, the ones where my daughter-in-law scrubbed her with one of those net mesh things and then rinsed . . . and then did it again.

I don’t know if it was the actual skunking or the nurse baths, but Little Ann stayed clear of skunks from then on.

She got old and she got cancer. We did what we could but she got worse. Her spirit was so indomitable I knew she would never give up – I had her put to sleep.

Ah, Little Ann, I can hear St. Peter calling now: “Little Ann, you get back in here . . . Do you hear me? Don’t make me get the Big Guy . . . “

Weather on past Easter weeks

Easter is early this year; I don’t know whether it was early or late or right in the middle in 1965, but that is the year of the Palm Sunday tornadoes. One went over our heads, but we didn’t know it. I wouldn’t remember the day as special had not we become aware of what had happened to our neighbors.

Because of what I saw later that day, I remember the hours before. It was a gloomy day, warm enough to go out in shirtsleeves; we were looking out the windows like we would on any potentially stormy day. My dad and I were looking to the west from the  – okay, we called it “the west room” then. (Later, my father would rechristen it “the cold room” – not to be confused with “the little cold room”.) Mother was looking out the back door of the porch. The old school house was a across a block of field converted to lawn (yard) and beyond that, the tree line. She came and said there were black clouds up high moving very fast.

She and Grandma went to the basement, down the old stairs that had more the angle of a ladder. Daddy and I just kind of stood upstairs, thinking if we should go down or not. Nothing happened. Mother and Grandma came up; Daddy went back to reading the paper and I guess I wandered around, probably thinking of homework I would always put off until it was almost too late.

Someone knocked at the front door and wanted to know if our phone worked. I don’t remember if it did or not, but I know something was said about the Bassett house, which was about the same distance to the northeast of the schoolhouse as we were to the south, being moved off its foundation. That was the least of it. Teddy Gage was sitting outside in a lawn chair beside the towering roots of a once really towering tree. Metal was wrapped around stripped trees. Homes were picked up and dropped in the lake.

Everything was fine right around our house. The tornado had hopped.

Outside . . . at 5 am . . .

I am up because I have to take my daughter-in-law, who doesn’t drive, to work at the hospital; she likes to get there early for her 12 hour shift of nursing. Tomorrow I will do it again . . . but today, today, I see white, slick roadways out there. But this is not as bad as it could have been; our snow measurement is less than an inch and the predictions for much more have been cut back. Auggghhhhhh. Given the percentage of good calls by the weather guys in our area this year, that might mean we will actually wind up snowbound.

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UPDATE: 6:45 am. Sydney’s tracks are filled in and more and the snow is coming down fast and furious. On the way to the hospital I followed a little car with the taillights of  Corvette going 20 mph; no way I was passing him on the right. On the way home, I met a salt truck and my first thought was to be nice and safe in it. Well, it is big . . . but all the salt is behind it. That could be a bummer. Anyway, if this keeps up, we could have a lot of snow. ACK.

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What I am doing here is reacting to the situation in a manner influenced by the Internet and The Weather Channel – this awareness of everyone’s weather and emphasis on our own, in light of what is going on elsewhere. Hey, we have had many, many snows in March and April; this is really northern Northern Indiana and this is the way it sometimes goes.

Shoot, back in 1935, they a terrible time getting to the hospital when my cousin Freddie was born because of a blizzard.

Shoot, back in 2000, Quentin and I went by two semis and lots of cars that had slid off the highway on our way to Indianapolis. In fact, just as we thought we were out of it, we felt the tires let loose on an overpass. We got lucky. And then it was nothing but just rain.
I got him to the airport and then went over to Fountain County to check on the engraving that was supposed to be added to my father’s tombstone. I remember pulling into the cemetery – The Kingman Fraternal Cemetery – very early on a foggy morning. It was too early to stop at anyone’s house and I was really too tired to go anyway. So I pulled the car off to the side of the cemetery lane, climbed in the backseat and went to sleep beneath one of the sleeping bags we never travel without. I awoke to bright sunlight and a clear sky. The morning of incredible snowy ice could have been a dream.

When I got home that night, everyone had tales of how things had come to a standstill after we left – road warnings were issued: stay home. It seems Quentin and I had unknowingly been traveling in a break of the storm – it had been much worse on the highway about a half-hour before we passed and new yuckier ice and snow were following us.

I told them I had slept in a cemetery that morning. Now that impressed them. Hey, it was bigger news than bad weather in Northern Indiana when it was supposed to be spring.