Seeing South Dakota and other memories

In the weeks leading up to my flight out to South Dakota, my aunts (the same two aunts who gave me the knitted hat that still causes me to cringe 60 years later), took hold of the belief that the same people I was already considering my South Dakota family, were murderers who planned to kill me—things like that happen “out there” they told me. I know that sounds funny, but they really were concerned.

Putting that aside and getting back to the topic, the trip was very good. For someone who had never flown farther than Florida, making the decision to fly halfway across the country alone was exciting. Looking out the window and seeing the mid-western earth below was a lot different than seeing the landscape of New England.

My first view of my friends caused me to think with amusement, “Well, they don't have any weapons.” I said something along those lines to them after we introduced ourselves and exchanged hugs, and Tim, Calla's father, said the weapons were in the car. We all laughed.

I think all of us had a good time getting to know each other better, and I know I was amazed by how big my new family's home state was; I've lived in New England all my life, and would not want to be anywhere else, but we are compact. In the time we spent driving around South Dakota, we could have gone from Maine to Rhode Island easily.

Brenda, Calla's mother, was able to get a day off from work during the week, and the two of us, along with Calla and her siblings, Darrah and Mitch, drove to The Corn Museum—often called the world's largest bird feeder—and had a ball. It was my decision not to see Mount Rushmore; Tim put it well when he said, “Once you've seen one head carved into a mountain, you've seen them all.” He really should write travel brochures.

On that same day, we also made several stops so Calla could take pictures, and we could all go into various stores. I remember the antiques store particularly well, since Calla paused to arrange the old records in order to put Simon & Garfunkel's “Bridge Over Troubled Water” LP in front. I remember that, because my mind raced on, thinking she had saved me the trouble.

The other thing that causes me to remember the store so well was the display of antique dishes and kitchen items (I liked that display so much that I later worked it into a book I was writing). As we were studying an old-fashioned meat grinder, Brenda said something about her mother having had one, and I replied, “Mine, too, and I still use it.”

We both laughed at that old, but still functional meat grinder, I suppose because it beat feeling sorry that we remembered, and in my case still used, something that was in a display case at an antiques store. If Brenda felt older than the hills that day, I felt older than the dirt itself.

I am no stranger to bad weather; New England has more than its fair share of blizzards and hurricanes, and we have even had a few tornadoes, but South Dakota has more; it treated me to a dandy one while I was there. On the farm, we were unhurt, but there did seem to be a lot of property damage in surrounding areas.

The thing that bothered me most was that the phone lines were down, so I had no way to call home to let my family know I was alright. When I did get home, Daddy said it had made the news, but he knew if we had all been killed, Dan Rather would have mentioned that as well, so he had stuck to the old adage that “No news is good news.”

Saying goodbye to my South Dakota family was hard; I shed a few tears when I got on the plane. Maybe part of it was that I feared my aunts would have gotten me another odd hat in my absence, or worse, planned my funeral!

More about my second career

After I returned home, I started writing again. I had a lot of notes and unfinished outlines, but had not been working seriously on them in a while, as I had begun to concentrate more on small hand-crafted items while out on the craft circuit. It was time to get back to my original “circuit” plan of selling not only my crafts but also my books. I had no choice, really—Calla had taken my picture for a new book cover, so I had to get cracking.

Selling books on the circuit had always been fun. I love talking to people, and that was part of the reason, I was good at pitching my own work, whether it was simple crafts or books. Another part of the reason I developed a successful sales technique was that I had learned something in my first career that was helpful in the second one. As Office Manager at the law firm, part of my job was to deal with stationery sales reps who wanted to sell me everything under the sun. Even though my answers to the reps had to be “No, we don't need that” a lot of the time, I learned from them the fine art of being pushy without being obnoxious.

That lesson became especially helpful when I added book signing appearances to my adventures in sales. Imagine yourself selling books in a library lobby, when the very books you are selling are sitting in the stacks waiting to be checked out. I told people that the day would come when owning a book with my signature on it would be to their benefit, and I really sold that idea—I have an honest face.

The sales pitch worked, and I would generally sell about 20 volumes whenever I was at that particular venue. While I never believed that my signature would actually be worth something, my customers did; I have seen books I autographed, for sale on various websites. I hope the people get their price.

Let's travel through time

I have talked a lot about my father, probably because we had reached the point in our lives where we were more than father and daughter—we were actually best friends who talked about anything and everything, plus we had taken a great many vacations together, so we also had other shared experiences to discuss.

The thing I do not want to do is give the impression that I did not love my mother every bit as much as I loved my father, because I did. Sadly, Ma did not live long enough for us to reach the point where we could be best friends. I am truly sorry for that, but there was nothing wrong with our mother/daughter bond.

My mother was an incredible woman; she spoke her mind, and you always knew exactly where you stood with her. She was honest, fair in her dealings with other people, and she worked harder than anyone I ever saw. She was always the first family member up in the mornings, and the last one to go to bed at night. If the Hooper household did not run smoothly every day, it was no fault of hers. I always saw her as a kind, loving mother who could make anything better just by saying it would be, and she had the warmest, most wonderful smile of anyone I knew.

One of my favorite childhood memories is of the summer day she and I spent alone when I was about 11 years old. My father had taken the opportunity to work on a Sunday (I think he got paid double time, and my parents needed it, as they were still paying off my sister's wedding from that spring). With Daddy at work, and Maureen having gone to New Hampshire with my two aunts and my grandmother (Nana and my aunts still lived on the first floor), Ma and I had the house to ourselves.

We walked to church, and then came home; Ma made a delicious breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast for us while I took our dog, and also Nana's dog, outside. After breakfast, we decided that we would walk out to the old Burnside Theater that afternoon to see a new movie titled, “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.”

I cannot honestly say that I remember the plot of the movie; all I remember is the simple joy of having my mother all to myself for an entire day. It was a dream come true for the third child of the family. Many years later, just a matter of weeks before her death, actually, I asked Ma if she remembered that day. Touching my face tenderly, she said, “Yes, I think of it often.” My heart melted. It was as special a memory to her as it was to me.

Another thing I often think of is something I touched on, briefly, in an earlier post. Daddy and his brother, Art, did their grocery shopping on Thursdays during their retirement years, and one Thursday in particular was destined to become the memory that got both Daddy and I out of the blue period that followed Ma's death.

On that particular night, Daddy casually mentioned that, before he left his brother's house that day, he had brought the mail in for him. “Boy, that old north wind really stung, when it hit me in the face,” he said, with a small chuckle. Ma responded, “Art's house doesn't face north.”

To make a long story short, the directional battle raged through the weekend. At one point, Daddy actually took out a street map to prove that the house did, in fact, face north. “It faces west,” Ma intoned, before finally saying, “Wait a minute. Are you talking about the front door, or the side door?” Yes, in her mind she was going out the wrong door. The door to the driveway did face west. Daddy and I both howled; grudgingly, Ma smiled, before finally giving in to a good laugh of her own.

One night after her death, I was having my usual cry at the kitchen table, and Daddy was just sitting there looking glum. At length, he said, “When we can laugh over something your mother said or did, we'll be fine, honey.” At the same moment, we both said, “Uncle Art's house doesn't face north.” Daddy was right. We started to do better after that.

When Daddy passed away in 2010, it was a mere two days after he said “1-2-5” over and over in his sleep. I glanced at the hospital's wall clock, and saw that it was just 5 minutes after the noon hour. It struck me that “1-2-5” meant something after all, and I smiled. He had been trying to prepare my sisters and me. Daddy was like that; he never wanted anyone to be blindsided.

He would have been surprised by what happened to me some years later—blindsided does not even touch it! I am sure we will do more time traveling at other points in this blog, but, for now, let's move on; I may never write such a great tie-in again.