The View From My Porch on a Foggy Morning

This photo of my porch is from last summer. I tried to take another picture and send it to my computer, but it doesn't seem to be working. Everything looks much better this year.

This morning I ate my cereal on the porch. While Dave was here we were having bigger breakfasts in the kitchen, but I hate to do that too much and returned to my Fiber One this morning. I feel guilty sitting on my cool porch, watching the cars go by and the fog inch back toward the ocean. I've invited the children to come down. We'll see what another day of 100 degree heat does for them.

Because we don’t have any sort of television receiver here our entertainment is the porch during the day with the radio in the background and movies on the VCR at night. Since it’s Thursday two different trucks will be by today. It is garbage day and it is also the day that the City of Ilwaco sends the street sweeper around to make sure we look presentable for the tourists. I’ll wager there will be a lot of them this weekend coming to escape the heat of Portland and Seattle. The forecast on KIRO radio’s (where my brother-in-law Tim Haeck has been a reporter forever) website says that most of Washington will not be getting the relief that was thought would come today and tomorrow.

The City of Ilwaco has already spruced us up. The chipped yellow fire hydrant in front of the house has been painted fire engine red and the yellow stripe on the curb refreshed. City workers came to do the stripe yesterday and I told them how much I was enjoying their efforts. Our house is located on the street coming into town from Astoria so for folks coming down the Columbia we are the welcoming committee for visitors and although Ilwaco has suffered some tough economic times and there are plenty of buildings that need attention, we are putting on our best face.

Kitty corner from us is another Victorian that’s getting a face lift this summer. The house is owned by a Master Builder and a Master Gardener. When they purchased the place three years ago they added a large kitchen onto the back of the house and shingled it cedar shakes left to weather to gray. The same with the picket fence the husband built—cutting out each and every picket. Unpainted shingles are the way to go down here which is the reason that when we had the South side of our house done last summer we opted to leave it natural. Eventually the whole house will look like that, but the economy has called a halt to further renovations here. In the meantime I can enjoy watching the houses that are getting new shingles or fresh paint this summer. We had to settle for mildew removal on the North side this summer.

Next weekend is our Frieze Family Reunion in Shelton. I will have to return to Gig Harbor in time to cook and bake for the occasion. Mostly I am excited to get to hug people I’ve not seen in years, one as many as 30 and one babe I’ve never met. I am taking my grandmother’s pineapple cookies, soft sweet indulgences that she made for her grandchildren, as well as Aunt Mary’s coleslaw which is different from the usual slaw and is a favorite with us. I love traditions and making recipes that the women in our family might have made had they still been with us makes me feel like they will be there in spirit.

Well, it’s time to move the water and put in another load of laundry. That’s the view from my broom and my porch. My grandmother always said that coming in one door and going out another would bring company so I’ll go through the kitchen and out to the washer at the barn and see if that brings the children!

Saying Goodbye to Mom Casey

This is a picture of me with my granddaughter Linda and her Great-grandma Casey

One of the many ways I realize that I am getting old is where I see friends and acquaintances. It used to be that I saw the people I grew up with at weddings, first at each other’s and then at our children’s. Now it is funerals. I’ve another to go to Friday and it’s a tough one.

My ex-mother-in-law passed away Monday night at home in Milton, WA after a long decline in health. For many the loss of an ex-mother-in-law does not disturb the surface, much less the depths of the pond of life, but mine was special.

I married at age 19 which was a time when my mother was largely unavailable emotionally for me. Connie Casey welcomed me into the family and immediately became a source of love, support and guidance when I needed it and could always make me laugh. She was a good Catholic and a good Christian. In the truest sense she tried to live the very best sort of life and to offer love to everyone who came here way. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

From Mom Casey I learned that there is always room in the dishwasher or refrigerator for one more thing. I learned that regardless of how many people show up for supper you can always "do the loaves and fishes thing" and there will be enough for all. I learned that when St. Anthony is done with a thing he will bring it back, but you can't rush him. From her I learned how to be a mother. I hope I learned how to be a mother-in-law.

When her son and I divorced eight years later I did not feel as though I was divorcing the family and continued to think of them as Mom and Dad Casey. Only in the last few years, when my ex's wife complained that I was usurping her place in the family, did I back away from regular contact with my one-time family.

Mom Casey had breast cancer in the early 1990s and the chemotherapy caused her mind to become quite confused. The doctors said that it would clear up when the therapy was over and to some extent it did, but she was never entirely the same. Still she was a loving force in the family and my children loved her dearly.

So Friday I will be going to another funeral; one where I am not a member of the family per say, but feel as though I have lost another of the important grownups in my life. I will never forget the things I learned from Mom Casey when I was a young woman and mother. It was an honor knowing her and to be able to call her “Mom.” If I can be half the mother-in-law to my daughters-in-law that she was to me then maybe I will have achieved my desire.

Homage to Betty Mahmoody

The election of Barak Obama has changed the way we look at each other and the way the world looks at us. Already President Obama has begun to heal the damage the United States has done to Middle East relations in the past fifty years and begin to thaw our relationship with the land where my youngest son's father was born, Iran. I have my own love/hate relationship with the land of Cyrus the Great.

Part II

By the time we moved to CA my husband had told his parents about our marriage and I had even spoken to his father, whose English was passable, on the phone. They said they wanted to send me gold jewelry as a wedding gift, but that the Revolutionary government would not allow gold to leave Iran. They sent a dress and a table cloth instead.

California felt like a foreign country to me. I’d lived in the Puget Sound Area for all of my conscious life and missed my extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles and most of all my father. Life in California was so different from life in Kirkland, Washington that I thought we ought to have had to have passports to get in the place.

For six months we lived in a two bedroom townhouse apartment in East San Jose, the second toughest area of that city where my boys slept in the living room and my mother and daughter in the smaller of the two bedrooms. The public park across the street from our apartment was the scene of confrontations between Black and Mexican Americans on a regular basis. We couldn’t afford a TV or cable, but opening the front drapes was our own little episode of Hill Street Blues. I kept them closed.

One day the doorbell rang. There stood two small Mexican American boys. One was bleeding. “Please lady,” the older one said, “call the police. A bunch of Black boys beat up my brother.” With absolutely no street savvy it didn’t occur to me not to get involved. I dialed 911 and when two San Jose policemen arrived they questioned the boys who seemed to know who had attacked them. I stayed out of it beyond giving my name and telephone number and explaining that I knew nothing. The police left with the boys and I closed the door. That didn’t close the incident. I actually had opened the living room drapes when I saw a parade of angry looking Black adults briskly pounding down the street and up to our front door. I opened the door, but kept the screen locked. They loudly wanted to know who the hell I thought I was calling the police on their boys. My naiveté may have helped to defuse the situation. I informed them that I knew nothing about what had happened, had boys of my own, and what would any of them do if a bleeding child showed up on their door step. What doubtless appeared to them to be complete stupidity seemed to take the wind out of their sails to find out that I didn’t have a stake in Mexican/Black relations and they left much more causally than they had arrived.

These were hard times with Reganomics not trickling down to many Americans. Some my Fiat got repossessed which freed up the carport behind the townhouse for people living in their car to park and sleep at night. As hard as it was to keep food on the table at least we had a roof over our heads. We had to make it since living in the car was no longer an option. I bought a folding shopping cart and walked the six blocks each way to shop and do laundry for six. The children were recruited to help tote things. I availed myself of San Jose’s wonderful bus system and would leave the children with my mother and ride different lines to the end just to see where things were. Bus drivers as a group are nice people and the ones I met were happy to warn me when my stop was coming up and to tell me about the city.

When my husband found work as a programmer for Epson Computers in Hayward we moved to Union City on Halloween 1981. A blue collar community that had plenty of cultural conflicts between Blacks and Mexicans itself, it felt safer than East San Jose and it was here that we had a son in 1983. In 1985 I got a part time job as a library clerk with Alameda County library system at the Fremont Main Library. I rode the bus or BART to work. I loved my job and coworkers and brought stacks of books home to read to the children.

Because of his fear of the Islamic Revolution in Iran stirring up trouble with Iraq’s Shia majority and long history of border disputes on September 22nd of 1980 Saddam Hussein launched a war against Iran. My in-laws lived in Esfahan which was bombed from time to time. Food shortages were experienced all over the country, but because my father-in-law was a khan of two villages they were able to get fresh fruit and vegetables from the countryside. The Revolutionary government ended up taking one village away from my father-in-law along with one of his pensions. Life was not good for them and for my brother-in-law who was denied permission to leave the country for heart surgery and who feared being drafted into the Iranian army despite his physical condition. Looking back on that war and knowing that before its end in 1988 Iran was drafting any Iranian male between 12 and 75 (the scene in Not Without My Daughter where Betty watches young boys being snatched off the street and whisked into the army is true), I imagine my father-in-law paid a hefty price to keep his youngest out of that conflict where old men and young boys walked through fields of landmines to detonate them. My husband returning to Iran to visit his parents was out of the question.

My husband would not invite his parents to visit us, but when I approached him about me taking our two-year-old to Iran to visit them so they could see the oldest son of their oldest son he seemed amenable. I was anxious to see Iran and for my in-laws to meet our little boy. He was so beautiful and sweet that I had no doubt that they would love him. I thought that somehow whatever rift there was between my husband and his father would be bridged by our son. My plans never got beyond the musing stage for which I am grateful. While I was wheeling groceries home from Alpha Beta and shelving books at the library, Betty Mahmoody was fighting for her life and the custody of her American child in Iran.

Homage to Betty Mahmoody

For Tacoma News Tribune readers of "In Your Neighborhood" my story will be somewhat familiar. The following is a more indepth account of what happened to our family.

Part I

As part of their Springboard English curriculum at the sophomore level, Gig Harbor High School students examine cultural conflicts as seen in the novel Kite Runner and the movie “Not without My Daughter” based on the book of the same name and written by Betty Mahmoody. Both are wonderfully powerful and for me the movie touches my heart. Because of the courage of Betty Mahmoody, the woman played by Sally Fields in the movie, I possibly escaped a similar fate.

During most of the 1980s I was married to an Iranian and living in the Bay Area along with my mother and my three children from a previous marriage. We had met in the late ‘70s while students at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1983 we had a beautiful son we named after my husband’s two brothers. I cannot and will not say that our lives were perfect. Financial problems and my husband’s explosive temper (something I had not witnessed until we were married) were probably our biggest obstacles to happiness. Those two things were absolutely connected.

These were turbulent times for Iranians the world over. The Revolution was in its infancy with many happy to see the Shah depart, but at the same time concerned about how the Ayatollah Khomeini seemed bent on dragging Iran back into the 6th century. My husband’s youngest brother, who had just completed high school in Seattle, returned to their parents almost immediately following the Revolution. I never met him. By the time my husband and I met he’d gone and would later regret it when the regime refused to let him return to America even to have heart surgery.

My husband’s relationship with his parents and siblings was and is complicated. He is the oldest of his father’s sons, a weighty position in an Iranian family. In his early 20s he’d become responsible first for his next youngest brother when he arrived to attend the UW, followed quickly by their high school age youngest brother. My husband always said that his prematurely gray hair happened as the result of the responsibility for his brothers. I do not mention his mother here because Iranian wives are little more than chattel. She was, is, his second wife and of note because she produced three sons. The first wife had only two daughters and was abandoned by my father-in-law who took the girls and introduced them to their step-mother who was more of an age to be a classmate than a step-mother.

I knew that my husband’s relationship with his parents was different from my Western ideal of what a family ought to look like. I knew nothing of Iranian families and thought perhaps they had continued to relate to him like he was 18, the age at which he’d left Iran. His mother had been to visit once or twice over the years and he spoke of her lovingly. On the other hand I had seen him lock himself in the bathroom of the apartment he shared with his brother rather than talk to his father. This was pretty childish behavior for a man in his mid-20s. I should have taken more note of that at the time, but I ignored my first inkling that Americans do not have a corner of the dysfunctional family disorder.

Another alarm rang after we were married. My husband never called his family in Iran. That was hardly surprising because money was tight and calls half-way ‘round the world were not cheap. Reaganomics had failed to trickle down as far as I was and I had withdrawn from the university before we married and was working in the call center of a marketing research firm which paid blessed little. My child support from my first husband was erratic and slim-to-none. It was when his parents called us and my husband did not tell them we’d married that I put figurative cotton in my ears and didn’t hear the ringing.

When my husband graduated from the University of Washington he began to look for a position as a computer programmer. He applied at the fledgling Microsoft, but did not get the position. Whether or not the American hostage situation in Iran had anything to do with his not getting the position I can only speculate. Almost every night on the news we were treated to film of angry Iranians demonstrating against the United States with chants of “Marg-bar Amreeka!” “Death to America.” Whatever the reason he wasn’t hired, my husband never forgave Bill Gates. It became personal for him. I wonder how different things might have turned out if he’d gotten the position all those years ago. So instead, my husband headed to Silicon Valley in search of a position at a time when the economy was dismal and Iranians were hated by Americans. I stayed behind until Memorial Weekend 1981 when we followed him with all our worldly belongings in a Ryder truck which I drove, trailed by my mother driving my Fiat and leaving extended family behind.