Birthdays With Aunt Myrtie

Miss Myrtle Marquis, circa 1918.

Time, it has been famously said, keeps on slippin' into the future, and as it moves inexorably on to points unknown it leaves us bobbing in its wake to sink or swim with the outgoing tide. Change is a biological imperative and a key component of God's design. New generations rise to take our place and help us step down to take our last walk into the fading light. It is the most natural of phenomena, and yet I can't help begrudge a few minor points.

I appreciate the fact that my family, once so compact and easily contained, has become a large, gangly creature that romps about like an overactive but well loved chocolate Labrador. Full of exuberance and easy affection, it runs in circles that grow ever wider and far flung. I don't know half my cousins' children by face or name, and I am even a little hard pressed to identify their parents, too. It seems sometimes that I am losing touch not only with the generation that came before but the one that has come after as well. That bothers me a little.

I want to know these younger people, and I think it's a shame that most of them have not had the great privilege to grow up personally knowing the names I hold as famous: Ira, Kate, Della, Myrtle, Lyman, Lee, Perry and more. The wistful attention that I paid to the stories they told of Poly, Eileen, Hannah and Alexander years ago is what motivates me to tell stories like this one today.

Her name was Myrtle Elizabeth Marquis Jordan, although we always called her Myrtie. She was the third sister among Hannah's surviving daughters, and I still marvel at how close she, Kate and Della were. For a long time, they did not let a day go by without visiting one another in their homes, and they even worked together in the laundry at the Old People's Home.

Myrtie lived on Oak Street, too. In fact, she lived at three different addresses on Oak. She and her husband Frank, daughters Gerry and Elaine and sons Paul and Joe lived with the Huffstutlers at 153 during World War II. After the war, they lived across Raymond Street in what we came to know as "Mrs. Purdy's house." Finally, after Frank had died and her children had grown up and left home, she lived across and a few doors up the street with her friend "Aunt" Martha Huber.

Martha was no relation to us, but we called her "Aunt" just the same. She was very sweet but given to sudden lapses in comprehension that somehow always managed to devolve into spirited diatribes on the exemplary character of her parakeet, Buddy. (Truth be told, while she had the dedication necessary to own several parakeets over the years she had imagination enough for only one name: Buddy.)

Myrtie was such a frequent visitor at 153 Oak that she had her own bed there in Kate's room. When it was available, it's where I slept when visiting. If it was not, I ended up on the roll-away. One night, when the house was full to overflowing, Kate made me a bed in the bathtub. More comfortable than Myrtie's bed, which had a pillow that doubled as a sandbag (or vice versa), it became my instant favorite, and I gave Kate ample reason to regret her ingenuity for years to come. (Looking back, Kate may have been trying to safeguard my 7 year old pride during an extended bout with bladder problems and bedwetting--ingenious indeed.)

Myrtie was very sweet, always singing or whistling, eager to talk and laugh. She always shared gum--something no other adult did in my recollection--but she had a habit of sticking it under the table when she was finished with it and no one was looking. None of us ever dared to say a word about it (till now). She also wore clip-on sunglasses over her prescription glasses. It always struck me as so modern and stylish--as if she were a character out of The Great Gatsby--that it still fascinates me to this day.

At some point in her life, Myrtie had developed severe hip problems. I remember how she struggled to walk and how she lurched from room to room. It's only recently (thanks to my own hip problems) that I have realized just how much pain she must have been in--and yet she never complained. Instead, she always smiled, laughed and sang hymns ("The Old Rugged Cross" was always her favorite). She was at peace with her pain. In fact, she always seemed to have that "perfect peace" for which Kate, Della and Ira were so well known.

That's not to say that things didn't affect her. After she moved to the modern high-rise public housing apartment building on State Street, I spent the night there with my cousin (her grandson) Jordie. Space was tight in the tiny apartment, and Myrtie slept on a foldaway couch (how that must have added to her pain!). Jordie and I had the floor and we were fidgety and wound up (probably full of sugar) as 12 year old boys often are. Ten minutes of that and Aunt Myrtle laid down the law: be quiet, go to sleep OR ELSE. The next day, Myrtie was back to her old, happy self.

Myrtie and I had a special bond because we shared the same birthday. Growing up, we shared many birthday parties and cakes at Oak Street as well. She always made a point of singling me out for affection but, like Kate and Della, she also made a point of reaching out to all of my cousins. Between the three of them, they created a strong, wide web of love and affection that helped keep our growing, gangly family close and warm. Theirs was a high standard of family parenting--one to which I hope we can all continue to aspire.

In Like A Lion

When I was a kid, my kindergarten teacher taught us about the seasons. She shared a number of little sayings about the passage of the months, but the only one I can ever remember is the one she had for March. "In like a lion, out like a lamb," she said.

Yesterday's severe weather across the midwest brought that saying to mind last night along with a storm memory of my own and a cautionary tale from my grandparents Kate and Ira's beloved Hamilton County.

In 1999, my mother Helen wrote about living on the farm outside McLeansboro during the Great Depression. In the course of describing the place, she made an oblique reference to severe weather.

"The farm had three big barns, a chicken house and a smokehouse. Below the smokehouse was a fruit cellar where we took cover if a really threatening storm were brewing. One of our neighbor families (who Uncle Perry dubbed "the John Rabbits"--I don't even remember their real name) used the storm cellar more often than we did. They had lived through a cyclone or tornado, and just the sight of a dark cloud sent all of them hustling down the road to ask if they might take cover in our cellar. No one had basements, and the underground cellars--like Dorothy's in The Wizard of Oz--were our storm refuges."

DeSoto, IL after the 1925 Tri-State Tornado.

I chuckle, albeit nervously, when I read this for two reasons. First, I immediately think of my cousin Kathleen Layne and the time we rode out a tornado in Elgin (more on this later). Second, I am surprised that my mother wasn't aware that the "Tri-State Tornado"--the single deadliest and most severe (F5) tornado in recorded U.S. history--passed right by Ira's farm in 1925.

Granted, Helen was only six years old when they lived on the farm in 1930, and the family had moved to Elgin shortly after her brother Dean was born in 1922. Still, the event was very fresh in people's minds (as evidenced by the haste in which the John Rabbits went to ground). The storm started in Missouri and ended in Indiana, lasted three and a half hours and killed 695 people. Winds were up to 300 mph, and the storm maintained a forward average speed of 62 mph as it raced across the county. It obliterated Braden, the small hamlet just south of Ira's farm where Kate's sister Della had been born and killed 60 people in rural Hamilton County alone. Frankly, I find it a wonder that the neighbors didn't live in the storm shelter year round.

It is thanks to this storm that we have an Early Warning System (EWS) administered by the National Weather Service. In 1925, no such system existed and radio broadcasters were forbidden to use the word "tornado" for fear of causing widespread panic. Nearly 700 people died because they had no warning of what was coming. With a forward speed estimated as high as 70 mph, death, at least, came quickly.

Yesterday evening, I received a terse text message asking friends and family to pray for my niece, Kate, who, at that moment, was taking shelter as tornado sirens roared in Nashville. I immediately offered up a plea and turned on the television news to watch the storm unfold from a distance even as she, up close and in its midst, ran to ground and safety. The storm passed over, no less furious for not stepping down to earth, and set its course for places further east. While I was grateful for Kate's safety, I couldn't help be mindful of the less fortunate 30 people who lost their lives in Indiana and Kentucky.

Some time in the early 1970s, my sister Donna, my neighbor friend Craig Lieberman and I had run out of things to do. Bored and looking for adventure, we decided to sit at the end of the driveway and enjoy the thunderstorm rolling in from the south. Donna, seated between myself and Craig, held an open umbrella to shield all three of us from the anticipated rain. Across the street, our neighbor Mr. McDonald was working on one of his cars in the driveway. I looked up and marveled at how the sky, nearly black a moment ago, was now the most intense glass green as if one were looking at the world through a bottle of 7-Up.

Three things then happened at the same precise moment: "RUN!" yelled Mr. McDonald; "GET IN THE HOUSE!" screamed my mother from the open front door; "BAM!" the wind slammed into us like a wall of water. The three of us struggled to turn around and make our way up the driveway to the house, pushing against the wind like Sisyphus and his rock. I turned my face up to a loud, whirring sound and watched in disbelief as the next door neighbor's kiddie pool sailed like a frisbee over our heads and soared over the rooftops behind us. Donna, still between myself and Craig, struggled with the umbrella until she inadvertently tilted it back. The wind caught it and suddenly Donna was lifted into the air like Mary Poppins. Mom shrieked as Craig and I scrambled to grab her. The umbrella, overburdened with her weight, collapsed and set her down. Arm in arm, we made it into the garage where Mom hustled us inside and down to the basement where Kathleen--storm savvy and focused on survival--had long been firmly situated beneath the stairs.

To her credit, Kathleen did not say, "I told you so." She had been in the basement for hours before the storm hit. She didn't mess around with tornado warnings. Once a tornado watch was announced, she headed for the stairs. She was a veteran of scary weather, and she knew enough to pack a bag full of snacks and games to distract everyone--including herself--from what was happening above our heads. She understood what was involved and had the patience required to wait out the life of the storm--not just its peak.

In my mind, there were so many people in the basement that day. We played Battleship, Scrabble, Uno and Flinch. Something tells me that that memory has to be an amalgamation of all the times we hid ourselves away from the wrath of God and nature. I can recall glimpses of huddling downstairs in the dark without power hiding from a storm so severe and so longlasting that we brought down the mattresses off our beds. But whatever the specific instance or occasion, what made all of us feel safe was the fact that we were with our family and those we loved the most, focused on prayer and waiting on the Lord.