HAPPY BIRTHDAY LILLY!

THIS POST WILL NOT BE SEEN UNTIL JULY 26, 2016.

Tulsa to Missouri

We left Tulsa at 6:15 AM, in the dark, three generations in a white Toyota Corolla. I was driving, Mom had the front passenger seat, and my daughter Lilly took the back. We were mostly quiet as the sun rose over the flat Oklahoma landscape. Gradually the deep red illuminated the stippled underside of the clouds and revealed the fields, lined with trees and dotted with black cows.

In Missouri, my daughter and I were delighted to see the native grasses growing unchecked We openly admired the waving swathes of green, the seed heads pale or touched with burgundy, the occasional patches of yellow rudbeckia, blue ironweed, white Queen Anne’s lace, and purple yarrow, but Mom said they should mow. Mom likes order and tradition.

She also complained the entire two miles away from the highway we had to drive to reach the diner in Mt Vernon, but the biscuits and white gravy tasted homemade, and while Mom pointed out that the hash browns could’ve been crispier, the bacon was real, the eggs fresh. I ate enough to keep us on the highway until dinnertime.

My teeth were set on edge by her complaints, so when Lilly slipped behind the wheel and Mom took the backseat, I let her. The better to appreciate the changing landscape, the grasses ceding to the rising altitude, the outcroppings of limestone, blasted through for the interstate, and the scrubby oaks that presaged the Ozarks. The signs featured cartoon hillbillies, Stucky’s, the “largest gift shop in the world,” and battle sites; Peterbilt and other semi dealerships, trading posts with names like Wolfman’s and Mule’s, a fake frontier town, and an American flag the size of a blanket furling and unfurling over a car lot.

I was on this road trip to gather stories and uncover the family secrets. I’d left the life I’d built for myself back in New York City to follow up on what I’d started in February by asking about my Other Brother[s], the illegitimate sons of my long-dead father, and yet I was hesitant to ask the questions, waiting for the answers to rise to the surface. I was also as cranky and impatient as a teenager, refusing to play the word games Mom started to pass the time.

Mom must have picked up on my impatience, and whether she was playing the sympathy card or merely thinking about her childhood – we were taking her back to Mendota, Illinois for her 65^th high school reunion, after all - she told us her mother didn’t want her.

How many times had I heard that my mother, a caboose child and the youngest of four, was born when her brother Sidney was 13, Kermit 11, and her sister Ferne 9?

But then she added a twist I didn’t remember hearing before: “When Uncle Mert came to see my mother and me in the hospital,” Mom said, “he said ‘Cute baby,’ and my mother said, ‘You can have her.’”

Lilly said she’d heard this. She’d spent two months the summer before living with her granny, and now she encouraged Granny to keep talking.

Uncle Mert, Merton Larson, was married to Aunt Edna; he’s the one who turned Edvarda Julia Hagerup Larson into Edvarda Julia Hagerup Larson Larson.

“Aunt Edna had the longest name,” Mom said. The other two: My grandmother Lilly Marie and her brother Lloyd Fritzkov. Mom doesn’t know if Waldis, who died when she was six, had a middle name.

I must have heard the name Hagerup before, but it only registered now that I’d been to Norway and walked through Troldhaugen that my great-grandmother named her third daughter after her famous cousin, Edvard Hagerup Grieg. Did she give Edna this name because she’d given up on having a son?

No one talks about whether Edna was depressed or unhappy, but Mom frequently mentions that Edna drank Lysol. Somewhere near Springfield, she mentioned her suicide attempt again. She also brought up Steven Truman, her baby whose heart pumped blood the wrong way and lived only one day.

My grandmother told Mom that it was “just a baby,” “My mother saw a lot of dead babies, dead babies with pennies over their eyes,” she said. “The big ones died in the birth canal.”

Mom, though, did not feel that her third child and second son was “just a baby.” She begged the nurses to let her see him – she had to beg the nurses, who finally put her in a wheelchair and let her see her son through the glass. “He turned blue,” Mom said. “I never got to hold him or feed him.” It’s hard to imagine such a thing happening today.

HOW TO SCHEDULE AN UPDATE

Step one: write the post.
Step two: save it as a draft, write a couple more posts. Save all as drafts.
Then: schedule the post to be published at a date and time in the near future
(usually the next morning or evening)

This is how you schedule that update:

1) under the Publish, Save, Preview, Close selection on the right hand side of the browser click "Schedule":

2)

3)

4) Click "Publish" and you're done! Your post will appear at the scheduled date and time, no matter where you are or what you are doing. Are you writing for an early morning crowd but you like to sleep late? No problem, write at night and schedule your update for the next morning. Like to write in the morning but don't want to post too much at one time? Stagger your posts so they come out a couple hours apart.

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.

LCA

First post

 This introduces the piece. This blog is all about your daily life. Instead of posting to Facebook co, post links to entries on this blog here. Link often to your other pieces.

How to link:

1) Highlight linktext and click the Link button on toolbar:

2) copy & paste web address for the page you want to link to, click "open in a new window":

3) that piece of text will now direct traffic to a new page:

 an entry with background information and other anecdotes, a friend's website or press statement, link away. Hypertext links are a fun way to travel the internet.

Think: Wikipedia Surfing.

It is better to post one update a day than to post many updates at one time. Stagger them to reach a larger audience.

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