FAREWELL

Dear Readers,

One year ago today (June 10) Howard preached his last sermon at the Traders Point Christian Church in Indianapolis. When we moved to Cincinnati, Craig surprised me by setting up this blog. It has been a great way to keep in touch with you and to invite you into our world. (You probably know more about the Brammers than you ever wanted to!) It is time to say "Good-bye" for now. Since I own the blog site, who knows....I might pick it back up again when summer is over.

As you could tell by reading the blog, our lives have been blessed this past year. We love our neighborhood which includes our family around the corner and shopping (and eating) within walking distance. Howard continues to enjoy working with the Beavercreek Christian Church as well as the Cincinnati Christian University.

God has been gracious to me as well. I wanted to write my memoirs someday, and now I am deep into the process. (The Pete Kennedy story was a sampling. Part 3 of that chapter is posted) The group meets around our dining room table each Thursday. My instructor is a writer who has taught at the University of Iowa and specializes in "Memoir Writing." How perfect is that? I have learned so much from her. She is a delightful person as well.

I have enjoyed blending into the art community which is vibrant here in Clifton. The new director of the Art Center came for lunch last week. It was a delight to get to know her. I look forward to getting involved with children in the area of art.

I have also enjoyed becoming involved in the Beavercreek church. Howard and I started team-teaching a class on marriage Sunday. Who knows what all God has in store for us. Whatever it is, we are ready for the challenge.

Thank you for traveling along with me this past year. It has been fun!

God bless you all.
Love,
Martha

Memoirs - Pete Kennedy 1st Visit - Part 3

I heard Margaret and Pete talking about getting their clothes and lunches packed for the following day’s departure. I hated to see them go. I loved Margaret dearly and always wanted to stay near her. She seemed to know so much about so many things. I wanted to dress like her and look just as classy when I grew up.


Now that they were preparing to go back to Cincinnati, I thought it was too bad that Pete had missed the excitement of our getting ready for his visit. It was work but still an exciting time. Since his arrival, our lives had slowed down. We were to watch our manners as well as our tongues. We could walk through the house but not run. We were to talk but not yell. We could talk at the table, but not with our mouths full. We could eat anything on the table, but were forbidden to ask for anything we did not see. The list went on and on. There was nothing left but boredom. Life was too perfect. It was not our way of living.


I was only eight years old, but my youth did not prohibit me from thinking that Pete needed to see us as we really were. I thought a “tell all” shadow show would do the trick. We were not the family who used perfect manners and ate with a napkin at mealtime, nor did we keep our tempers and mouths under control at all time. I kept words hidden under my tongue that came out when I tripped over a garden rake or stepped in a cow pile. This is one way country kids handled difficult situations.


Pete grew up as a city kid. He needed to know how the other half lived, and I was more than willing to show him. My production would give him an inside view as to what went on before he arrived.


I was born sandwiched between two brothers in the birthing order. Tom was two years younger than I and Charlie was about the same distance on the upper side. They agreed to be my assistants. They nailed a bed sheet over the door between the living room and the “Big Bedroom”, as we called it. Tom took care of turning the light on in the bedroom during the show and off when it was over. Charlie operated the light in the living room where the audience sat. Their chairs were facing the bedroom doorway which was covered with the sheet.


When Charlie turned the light off in the living room, Tom quickly flipped the switch on in the bedroom. I stepped up on the stool, so my shadow could be seen by everyone in the audience. I immediately turned sideways to show the huge pillow-stuffed belly that represented my mother’s pregnant stomach. She was expecting her thirteenth child. The audience’s response was so overwhelmingly enthusiastic that I went into my monologue with no hesitation. Not only were they with me, but I had them in the palm of my hand. Since they were roaring with laughter, I continued to remain silent, but made gestures that would feed their sense of humor. I scratched my rump and rubbed my belly.


We all knew that Mom’s face ran with perspiration in the summertime, so I wiped my brow and flung it into the air. The more they laughed, the more brave I became. I forgot how thin that bed sheet actually was. Because I was completely out of Mom’s reach, I felt daring and adventuresome as to where I was going to take my audience. It is amazing how much courage an eight-year-old can have when separated from their parent….even if it is only by a thin sheet.


Mom had been seated next to Pete. It was a place of honor when the show began, but a place of embarrassment as the story unfolded. I told details of our preparation that was never to be spoken. I told about Mom in the kitchen trying to figure out her menus. Would he like this or would he like that? Would he drink our cow’s milk or should Dad bring the bought kind home from town? I gave the older kids orders to make sure Pete’s sheet didn’t have a hole in it and, if possible, find pillow cases that matched. I reminded them to get a clean towel and not to worry about matching the washcloth. That would be impossible!

I shook my finger into the air ordering this child and that one to, “Get busy because, Pete Kennedy is coming!” That refrain repeated itself over and over as the show went on.
Pete began shaking quietly with laughter. Mom later said she could feel his arm shaking next to hers.

Since he seemed to be enjoying the show, she decided she would relax and enjoy it along with him. It was about that time that I took it to a deeper level and told about us wondering what would we do with the pot situation. Mom was about to faint from embarrassment, when Pete began laughing out loud. Mom had enough Irish blood to love a good laugh. There was nothing she liked better.

She was more than ready for the play to come to an end. Somehow a kid senses when they have gone far enough. That feeling grabbed me through the bed sheet like the ghosts that jumped out of Grandma Gabhart's bedtime stories.

In closing, I put both hands on my hips with my feet spread apart and yelled, “Put the lime on the toilet, kids. Pete Kennedy is coming!” Laughter bellowed from the audience as Tom flipped the bedroom light off, leaving me standing in the dark. Charlie turned the living room light on so the audience could see their way out of the make-shift theater.

While Mom was trying to recover and apologize to Pete, I stayed behind the sheet afraid to come out. I could hear her throwing apologetic words at him the same way she had given orders to us before he came. He assured her he loved every minute of it. She believed him and was relieved.


That event told more about her and Pete’s new relationship than it was about me or the shadow show. She got a glimpse of his sense of humor; a trait she admired. She saw that he did not pass judgment on her or the way we lived. Instead, she sensed that he admired her. She had already been convinced that he was not a sissy or a push-over. He was gentle and kind with an inner strength she liked. After that night, she thought he would fit into our family like hand and glove. She could envision him and Margaret having a great life together.


Many years later when I walked into the lobby of the Loogootee Nursing Center, Mom was sitting with several lady friends. When she saw me coming through the double doors, she said, “This is my daughter “Marthie”, and I want to tell you all about the time she put on a shadow show for my son-in-law Pete Kennedy.” With a big smile on her face and with her hands replaying the motions I had done, she began reciting the script that had stayed with her for over fifty years. When she finished, she patted me on the arm as if to say, “Thanks for the memories.”

Memoirs: Pete's First Visit -Part 2

We ran to the edge of the yard overlooking the winding lane as Margaret and her new friend made their way up the hill. We screamed, jumped high in to the air and the little ones swung on the wooden gate as they got closer. We loved seeing her. She was beautiful with her pencil-thin waist and slender hips. Her hair was long and so were her nails. Her ivory complexion was flawless against her dark snappy eyes.

She was full of life and was eager to share it with anyone she considered to be her equal. I felt we were no longer on her level, since she had moved away and was much wiser than we ever hoped to be. However, blood runs thicker than water, and that loyalty ran from her veins to ours, which we found to be a lifeline into a larger world.

“Hi kids….I want you to meet Pete Kennedy”, she said in a nervous but excited tone. We quietly smiled back. Pete was definitely from the city. His attire gave him away. His shoes were made of soft white cloth with matching strings. The fabric was attached to the soles by a thin strip of rubber. We could not help but chuckle at those “sissy” shoes. Dad and my brothers wore heavy leather shoes with dark rawhide strings. It was quite a contrast from what we were seeing for the first time.

Pete stood like a scared rabbit. He seemed stiff and uneasy as Margaret began reciting our names. Figuring there were too many to remember, she went back and gave brief descriptions so he could identify each of us more easily. She described me as “the one who sings.” (During her high school days, she had taken me to school on “talent day” and had me sing before the assembly. As a five-year-old, I was scared to death. I cried and asked Mom to make her stop taking me, and she did!)

The nervousness that Margaret showed and the stiffness that held on to Pete, seemed to fade as we swarmed around them asking a million questions. I liked holding and smelling her soft, sweet hands. She was graceful and looked beautiful in her city clothes. In a way she didn’t seem to belong to us anymore. She belonged to a bigger world. She told us about riding in streetcars and seeing buildings taller than our barn. The more she talked about her new life, the farther she seemed from us.

Pete became as inquisitive about us as we were about him. He seemed fascinated with the life we lived and soon began asking questions. He wondered what we did for fun. He did not see any books to read or games to play. There were no bats, balls or dolls. We hadn’t thought much about it. We were learning that country kids have ways of playing that city kids aren’t aware of. We needed to clue him in.

When we told him about swimming in the pond, he wanted to know how we had learned to swim. We told him that the older kids could “kinda” swim from one side of the pond to the other, but the rest of us couldn’t. The shallow end had a lot of broken glass on the bottom, so we were not supposed to wade in that area. He had a look of horror on his face as the thought of us kids in a pond with glass on the bottom. He didn’t think any of us should be in the deep end unless we could swim. We assured him we were fine because Dad had given us inner tubes to hold on to.

The following day was swimming lesson 101. Pete organized us according to size and had us line up on the bank. He demonstrated the various kinds of strokes and how we were to do them. I was convinced he was not the sissy the boys thought he would be. As he swam across the murky water, the muscles popped up on his back like the ropes on our tree swing. Within a few days, we were all swimming. We were safe from the glass because we could all stay in the deep end. I only wished he had come sooner. I had stepped on a piece of glass the week before which cut off the tip of my second toe.

The following day was a day I will always remember. Pete changed our worlds forever. He had been hinting that he had something for us, but we were unable to guess what it was. On that day, he went to the trunk of his car and presented us with a tube of fuzzy green balls. We had never seen anything like them before. We felt them and rubbed them against our cheeks. They were soft and yet firm. They bounced. We wondered what we would do with them. Pete explained that they were tennis balls. These were the balls he played tennis with at the University of Cincinnati. We knew we were not going to be dressing in white shorts and canvas shoes, so what were we supposed to do with the balls?

We invented all kinds of ways to play with them. My favorite was “handy over.” One team threw the ball over the house. If the other team caught it before it bounced on the ground, they could sneak around the house and “tag” anyone on the opposing team thus gaining a point. If they missed catching the ball, they had to yell “handy over” and toss it back over the roof to the other team. For the team on the front side of the house, the big challenge was to catch the ball before it went bouncing down the hill and into the creek. The teams rotated so one did not have the disadvantage of being on the front side each time.

We played this until the sun went down and we could no longer see the ball. This game might sound too simple to be fun, but we would strategize to make it more difficult to win.  My brother, Charlie, discovered that if you threw the ball with just enough force to let it reach the peek of the roof, then it would slowly roll down the other side of the roof and onto the ground. It would surprise the other team, who was standing far from the house thinking it was coming over high in the air. They could not get to it in time to catch it before it bounced on the ground.

Also, we realized you could see through the house since the little bedroom window lined up with the front living room one. We would watch to see heads pass across the windows. That would tell us they caught the ball and were coming to tag us. The other team got smart and bent under the window without being seen. (I’m sure this was another one of Charlie’s ideas.) The opposing team got caught as they watched, thinking no one was coming.

We took the balls down to the meadow, which lay on the south side of the house and barnyard. We gathered thick sticks from the nearby woods and played softball. There was no greater thrill than to hit one of those fuzzy green balls and send it soaring in the air while the outfielder was jumping over dirt clods and running through wild dandelions to make a catch.

My brother, Tom, who is two years younger than I, developed a knack for juggling the balls. He started with two and then advanced to three. They were the perfect weight. They were small enough to fit into a kid’s hand and fuzzy enough to stick to one’s skin. Sometimes he would bounce one on the living room floor and then throw his leg over a it was on its way up. We all tried our hand at juggling, but Tom always remained the champ! Since the balls were rubber and filled with air, we took them to the pond and tossed them across the murky water. They did not hurt when we missed a catch and they bounced off our heads. 

The tennis ball story has stayed with us all these years. We still enjoy talking about the day Pete Kennedy introduced us to the world of tennis! We could not help laughing behind his back at his dainty shoes. We held our breath and later our sides as we laughed about the pants he put on as the sun grew higher in the sky. They, too, were white with slits up the sides. We thought they barely covered his “you know what”. Needless to say, we all gawked and were assured he was okay.

Our curiosity grew until one of us got up the nerve to ask him about his attire. He explained that he played tennis. These were called tennis shoes and the shorts were made so the player could move without being restricted. The slits allowed one’s legs to stretch so he could reach for the ball. The canvas shoes were light weight and would not weigh the player down like a regular pair of shoes would do.

We were a private bunch about seeing each other’s bodies. Mom would not allow anyone to dress or undress in front of the opposite sex. It was a sin she would not tolerate. For the first time in my life, I was looking at flesh in an area I had never seen before. And it was on a person I hardly knew.

Memoirs - Pete Kennedy 1st Visit - Part 2

Craig's Work

Craig is a healthcare researcher at the University of Cincinnati, and is the leader of a project called "Greater Cincinnati Aligning Forces for Quality."

There are thirteen other Aligning Forces programs in the US. Yesterday the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced a major investment of $300 million for Aligning Forces.

Newspapers around the country had articles about the project (Craig is quoted in both Cincinnati papers). Click the links below to read more.

New York Times

Wall Street Journal

USAToday

Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnati Business Courier

Painting In Progress

If you click onto Jason's write up in an earlier post, you will see this painting embedded in the article. It looks small; however, here you will see that it is approx.6' X 4'. The light gold inside the design is a metalic gold. Don't ask me about the eye staring back at you from the wall....I don't have a clue!!!

Memoirs: Pete's First Visit -Part 1

(When I was eight years old, my sister, Margaret, brought her boyfriend home for the first time. This chapter will take you through the ups and downs of that historical visit.)

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As the 1950’s were arriving, Mom and Dad’s oldest kids were preparing to leave. Mom was only seventeen when Margaret, her first-born, arrived. They were, for all practical purposes, like sisters growing up together. It was hard for Mom to let her go.

A job opportunity in Louisville, Kentucky coaxed Margaret to move there. While on the job, she met a cute young guy by the name of Peter Kennedy. He collected and distributed mail throughout the office as summer employment. Margaret soon discovered that both of them shared great aspirations for themselves. He was definitely a person of interest.

Letters arrived back on the farm telling us about her new acquaintance. Mom seemed delighted about the possibilities of having a future son-in-law; something new and exciting for her. It didn’t take long for us to figure out that he was from the upper side of the tracks. He had grown up in Cleveland, OH with only one sibling. The two brothers had an easy life with a father who had a healthy income and a mother who doted over them.

Our curiosity built with each letter. My brothers had him pictured as a “sissy.” Since Margaret was born bossy, we figured he had to be someone she could push around. She was known for being smart; so we thought he would have to be equal on that point, or she would never have looked at him in the first place. Mom said Margaret could read the newspaper at age five. That was something none of the rest of us accomplished.

The day we all dreaded was near at hand. She was bringing Pete Kennedy home to the farm! Our house was not, nor would it ever be, ready for guests. Where would he sleep? How would he manage our outdoor “John”? We all used the same enameled pot during the night, but I could not imagine him taking a turn.

Our kitchen table was too small to seat everyone at the same time. We ate in shifts. Would he eat with the first group, which consisted of Dad, my brothers and small siblings, or wait and join the women in the second? We decided we were wasting our time trying to figure everything out. Margaret would have it all under control. She would leave no stone unturned.

We watched the mail and waited for her instructions to arrive. It was not long before we received the list of do’s and don’ts. She said he would sleep in the “little bedroom,” as we called it. All of our rooms were small, but this one was unusually so. A small cracked window faced the west, looking toward the vegetable garden, the smokehouse and the old stone well that my mother had drawn water from as a child. The bedroom floor slanted, so books were used to prop up one end of the bed.

The north side of the room was filled with old coats and outdated suits. Mom kept them as a resource for making small coats and jackets for us kids. Their smell gave the room a musty odor. We covered them with blankets when the room was converted into guest quarters and raised the window for fresh air.

Margaret said her friend would not be going outside to the “John” in the middle of the night. He would have the pot all to himself. It would be placed near his bed for his convenience. She said the rest of us knew where the “outhouse” was, and we could go there for the short time he was visiting. I could see that this guy was important to her, and she was asking us to sacrifice whatever it took to impress him.

Our entire lives began to evolve around the upcoming visit. It was our first opportunity to see a sister’s boyfriend. How would we treat them when they arrived? Would they kiss in front of us? Should we leave the room when they entered? When they walked in the woods, could we join them? When setting the table, would we be obligated to give him all three pieces of flatware? We didn’t have enough to go around for those of us who lived there. If one person got a spoon, more than likely, the next one got the fork. Wouldn’t it look strange if he got all three? Again, why worry? Margaret would have the answers.

We scrubbed, waxed and cleaned every inch of the house. The linoleum floors were left looking wet and shiny. The vinegar and water solution worked well on the windows; however, the broken panes became more prominent. Dad put switch plate covers on the electrical outlets which was something Mom had been wanting. He had become an electrician by trade. He would take what he needed from our house and give it to his customers with a promise to replace it. With guests coming he should, and was more than willing to spruce up the place anyway he could. He got caught up into the same frenzy we were all in.

We had no closets, so things got stuffed under beds. There were no bedspreads to hang low and cover the plunder, so we pulled quilts down on the front side leaving the back exposed. The bedrooms looked neat and tidy as you entered the room. It was a different story viewed from the other side.

The day arrived much too soon. We wanted everything looking better than we were capable of achieving. It was clean, by our standards, and that was the most important thing. This guy was not only going to have clean sheets, but we also gave him his own towel and washcloth, which were folded neatly on the dresser. We had never had our own towel or washcloth, but this was a visitor to impress, and we were pulling out the stops. We were taking the job of hosting to a whole new level.

Birthday Party At Maggianos

The Brammer clan gathered at Maggiano's last night to celebrate our daughter-in-law, Carol's, birthday. From left to right is Madeline, Mary Grace (Taylor's girlfriend), Taylor, John (Taylor's buddy), Crosley, Sawyer and Carol. We left with three bags full of food. What a feast!

Craig was worn out after a long day at work and a belly full of spaghetti!

Happy Birthday Carol. We are not going to ask how old you are!!!!

These pansies have been on our front porch for weeks now. I thought they would have been gone by now. These cool, rainy days keeps them going.

Artist Of The Month

If you would like to read about Jason and his art, Click on this photo for the write up.