This morning, driving the kids to school and taking Sydney to the fairground, I was bemoaning the overcast damp morning and the lawn (yard) that needs mowing. And then – over the course of half an hour – the sky became blue and my spirits are raised: I will at least make the front look better and then shower and scoot over to enter the adventure ride of hair coloration. Sounds like what they do to B&W movies.

I received a questioning (literally – ??) comment on the post Dagmar below. I suppose it is not immediately apparent what is going on to someone who does not know the trails my mind can take. Sunday I wandered into the mid-part of a showing of “I Remember Mama” on cable TV and I watched it while doing other things through to the end. I had seen it several times before and knew the plot quite well. And, of course, I am old enough that when I was young the references to the radio show “I Remember Mama” were numerous.

Later while lounging on the old north porch with the early evening’s western sunlight filtering in the windows, I thought of the cozy and welcoming place I feel when I think of  the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse. It simply came to me to have a nice Norwegian young woman come to stay.  Dagmar was a young girl in the book – I Remember Mama – sister to the main character who was played by a young Barbara Bel Geddes (Think Miss Ellie of Dallas if you are old enough).

And then I just thought about characters in general . . .  Well, those characters don’t sit static in the unopened books – I’ll bet they do all sorts of things and grow older and whatever while their nature stays the same. Then, when they sense the book being opened, they scurry back to their assigned roles and look as if they have not been doing anything else at all.

So, when that book fell off the train, and Dagmar fell free of the destruction, I chose to make her more of her oldest sister’s age. You see, she would have those years that were not already outlined  by the book. She could come here a blank slate fashioned by the atmosphere of the book.

I can see the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse in my mind’s eye; I can smell the woodsmoke soaked in the beams; I know it is a place where screen doors slam in the summer ann where people hurry into the warmth in winter. A place where we adapt – another table? Well, run and bring down that one from the attic and  drag in those caned chairs we have been storing in the basement. A place where we put’s today’s gadgets and yesterday’s keepsakes on wide window sills – the blue glass insulators from old telephone poles next to the charger for the ipod. The Depression China catch-all dish next to the acrylic seasonal glass.

But you can’t call it quaint, because the air we breathe in the cafe  is fresh and of the 21st century. It is now in the memories of back then. It is a place where butter can catapault out of  the side-by-side refrigerator that I often call the icebox and hit the floor with a major splatter – eliciting a response common to The Sopranos and never heard in B&W movies.

And sometimes I toy with my mind, playing with the idea that I am just a figment of someone’s imagination myself, maybe a wandering character from a book.  But it is just a game and I know who I am. Why, I’m AmeliaJake.

Remember I mentioned how we were located close to the railroad tracks? Well, last evening, just after it got dark, I heard a knock on the door in the back vestibule. I was fairly certain someone was there because the only people who ring the doorbell in back are the kids, whose purpose it to get the dog barking and me to come to the door. I have learned to ignore the rapidly repeated rings; the dog has not.

There was someone standing there – a young woman in a longish coat with a headscarf and a dated-looking satchel. In fact, I was surprised to hear myself think satchel. She said she was from “the old country” – when was the last time you heard that phrase? probably in an old movie – and had apparently fallen off the train and had nowhere to go. Could I put her up for awhile? She said she would work to pay for her keep and she looked as if I were her last hope . . . but that if I turned her down, she would dig deep in her satchel for a hint of more hope. Oh, and her name was Dagmar.

So, when I said all my rooms were full, I also said that maybe we could move the jigsaw puzzle table out of the furnace room and put a cot in its place. “It’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” I said. This morning, I am wondering why I added that since we were only talking about a short layover of a stay – a catch your breath and regroup stay.

While we were getting her settled in, I remembered the surprise I had felt earlier and asked, “You  APPARENTLY fell off the train?” She said that yes, she figured  the car had jolted and some books being shipped slipped out. “And you, too,” I added, half-statement half-question. While tucking in the blanket at her end of the cot, she nodded and told me yes, and explained that most parts of the  books had been  torn apart but she was on had floated off into the grass of the right-of-way.

I expressed amazement that she wasn’t hurt and suggested that she be checked out. She said she was fine and wasn’t really aware the accident had happened until she found herself on the ground with torn books nearby. Actually, she didn’t remember the accident; she surmised it.

You remember nothing? I asked . . . and she thought about it and said, “Well, I remember Mama.”

In the middle of this past night, I awoke and thought about that, and then I thought of some of the other regulars who have shown up at the vestibule door, stayed a while and either continued to stay or moved someplace and returned to stop in daily. I thought for some time and then I turned the light on and Googled some of their names. I found references to “A River Runs Through It” and “The Grapes of Wrath” and  “The Prince of Tides” and so forth.

With hesitation, I Googled “AmeliaJake.”

The first picture I took showed my stockinged feet sticking out so I bent my knees and took another one.

I’m comfy.

I saw this article on the internet today and immediately thought, “Boy, would these guys like to live in The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse.” Why? Well, because we are located very, very close to a railroad, double track. and have trains go by all the time. It is a big house, with lots of room for family, BUT it is close to the tracks. After we moved here, one lady mentioned to me that the house had been for sale before and she and her husband had looked at it and really liked it and then remarked to themselves, “But look where it is.”  Well, okay.

Sometimes I think of railroad tracks in a great number of places being abandoned and here I live so close to a really active one. Sigh. It is interesting however that my Great-Great Aunt Anna and her husband Ed were killed in 1941 at this very crossing just down from this house. They had one of the first automatic shift cars and somehow at the crossing, Ed must have made a mistake and they went right into the train. He died at once; Anna lived for several hours. Maybe today she would have made it – she was tough.

Grandma was supposed to go with them that day because they were going to visit a minister down here in Kendallville, haveing driven down from Scott. But, for some reason, she did not. My mother says she remembers Grandma going out to the car to tell them she couldn’t go after all. Lots of people later assumed my grandmother had also been killed.

Auntie Annie, as Mother called her, was only a few years older than my grandmother, her niece. Wesley Wisler, Grandma’s father was Anna’s oldest brother. Anna didn’t have a child until she was 42 or so and then, five years later, the little girl, Lucinda Jane, died of menningitis. They brought a doctor up from Fort Wayne, but there was nothing to be done. Later, they adopted a daughter – a five year old- stopping by Grandma’s to exclaim, “Look what we’ve got.”

All those years later, when my mother helped  that now woman clean out the house after the deaths, they found an old built-in medicine chest that still held the prescriptions Lucinda Jane had been given.

Didn’t this start out to be a reference to living near the tracks? I believe it did. Well, that’s what happens when you let your mind wander.

At this moment, I am speechless.

The other day I was digging through boxes and I pulled out an incredibly ugly piece of material – polyester. It looked familiar, but I had my mind on something else and forgot about it. And yesterday I found the material where I had tossed it and tossed it somewhere else, out of my sight. Today I came upon it again and, feeling irritated, I thought where DID this come from. I looked at it more closely and guess what? The material was actually made into a pair of ugly shorts . . . big shorts. Slowly I saw them in my memory. On Quentin’s head while we were playing Monopoly in the den.

I believe Alison had purchased them before she lost weight at the Goodwill and we had all exclaimed, “My Heavens, those are ugly.” So she tossed them on a chair or table or whatever and on impulse Quentin put them on his head as some sort of weird headdress . . . and kept them on. I can see him now – that wide grin, those crazy shorts on his head. Unfortunately I did not get a picture, so I guess I’ll have to just take a picture of the shorts . . . or I could use photoshop techniques. Or not. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

We found this update. Oh, they think they are so bold.

lonzopolooza // May 7, 2009 at 10:05 am

As you read this we are in position in the “underground” poised to pounce. We have made an alliance with the snappy snapdragons and crabby crabgrass. The gnomes are double agents due to their longstanding pact with the fairies and munchkins. Just waiting for the rain signal form the commander in chief Willard Scott.
shazbot

And then ther was this picture with the caption “We are watching.”

We here at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse were going to title this post “G.I. Joe” but we think he is probably tired of that joke – and, anyway, he’s in the Air Force. He is my husband’s nephew, LZP’s older son, and I only put it that way because I can’t take a whit of genetic relativity here . . . Darn. Joe can carry a tune and won state contests. Joe entered the Air Force after graduating last year and performed so well on every test and in every class, he has time and time again been moved up all sorts of training notches. I’ll have to get Der Bingle or LZP to explain what it is he is doing, exactly. I’ll just reiterate: He is doing very well. Super well. Great.

He was named after LZP’s and Der Bingle’s Great Uncle Joe on their dad’s side. There are quite a few “Uncle Joe” stories – I think one of them is about how he kept shotgun shells so long that when they went pheasant hunting one year, the shot crawled to the end of the barrel and fell out.

He’s one to be proud of.

**I just got home and saw this and previous remarks about the Dandelion Situation. I couldn’t wait to post the picture, but now I am turning my attention the stragglers talking big out in the grass.