Back to the Future

My parents weathered the destruction by tornado of two different homes in the same town—Ankeny, Iowa—17 years apart. After the second tornado in 1990, with us kids all moved away and Dad in failing health, they packed it in and moved back to their hometown of Sibley, Iowa, attracted not only by the prospect of living near one of their children (my oldest sister Lois and her husband John) but by the slower pace of life. Sibley is a county seat town of about 3,000 in the far northwest corner of the state near the Minnesota border. All four Wissink kids—Lois, Jay, me (Bonnie), and Pam—were born there, and the town has changed little over the years. Dad died about five years after they moved back.

The Wissink sisters--Bonnie, Lois, Pam--enjoy a laugh with Mom
(September 2010)

My now nearly-88-year-old mother, fondly known to her descendants as Grandma Neva, lives in relative independence a few blocks from Lois and John, but though she still drives her ’91 Buick Park Avenue (only 80,000 miles on the odometer) for groceries and bridge, it takes a lot to entice her to leave town these days. Such as Skippy peanut butter being on sale for 99 cents at the Hy-Vee in Sheldon, or getting a hankering for a Perkins breakfast (in neighboring Worthington, Minnesota). Though she’s no longer up for the 500-mile trip to visit me in the Chicago area, I get to experience a little slice of vanishing rural America whenever I visit her.

Mom’s rented duplex is well-located with views of the municipal golf course, but even more conveniently sits just around the corner from the First Reformed Church. As we pulled into her driveway at precisely 3:00 p.m. on a recent Saturday afternoon, the church bells were chiming a hymn: “I Love to Tell the Story.”

“My goodness, Mom, that’s loud! How often does the church play the chimes? Doesn’t that bother anyone?” I asked her.

“Oh, no, we just got the chimes fixed and they play different hymns every hour,” she boasted. “I hardly even hear them.”

Mom has a big old radio tuned to the local station, where each morning she blasts the news report consisting of births, deaths, and hospital admissions and releases. On Wednesdays she plays Five Hundred at the Senior Center, where, she dispassionately reports, it’s harder and harder to get two tables together, what with various seniors’ ailments and some recent deaths.

But Mom’s great passion is playing bridge; she’s convinced that game alone is responsible for keeping her mind sharp. One of her two bridge groups recently acquired a new member, who is apparently having a little trouble gaining acceptance—especially with 92-year-old bridge whiz Zeda Thely—because “she’s not a very good player.” If someone leads the wrong suit or trumps inappropriately, Zeda leads the charge in pointing out their error, but Mom retorts with her still-sharp tongue, “Everyone makes mistakes—even you, Zeda!” They serve one another tried-and-true recipes from the church cookbook: peanut butter bars, rhubarb dessert, or that always-popular delicacy, Jell-o cake with Cool Whip. They play for pennies and nickels, and when I call Mom after one of her five-hour sessions, she gleefully reports what her take for the afternoon was: “I made 85 cents today!”

Each Tuesday morning Mom’s sewing group made up of her elderly cronies, the Chickadees—a moniker the group apparently relishes as it was affectionately bestowed by the church’s pastor—gathers at the church to sew quilts for the homeless, gossip, eat donuts and drink weak Folger's coffee. On Friday mornings, many members of the group reassemble to fold and compile the church’s Sunday bulletin with all its various inserts.

I hope that if and when I get to my ninth decade of life, I can enjoy a similar happy, healthy and peaceful lifestyle, with plenty of friends and family nearby. But hymns chimed every hour, world without end? I suppose if my hearing gets as bad as Mom’s, I could even tolerate that.

Over the Bounding Main

May 2010: A Groupon offer came to my email in-box for a 2½-hour chartered sail on Lake Michigan before mid-September, half price. Ten-day advance reservations required.

Picture in my head: A breathtaking Saturday morning, light winds, skimming along in the sunshine as we admire the view of the Chicago skyline sipping bloody Marys.

Call to my good friend Pat: Yes, yes, let’s the four of us do that! Purchase completed. In mid-August we finally decided we’d better get our outing on the calendar, and found that luckily, we were able to get reservations just under the wire.

Reality, The Short Story: We sailed in a drenching downpour with poor visibility and mildly pitching waves as I dry heaved first over the boat rail, then below in the marine head, sick as a dog.

Reality, The Long Story:
All week prior to our sail we watched the weather forecast. Saturday didn’t look promising, with cool temperatures and scattered thunderstorms predicted. We’d been told that we’d get a phone call if the weather precluded sailing, but that probably wouldn’t be decided until just before our scheduled departure. Curt and I held out high hopes that the Heine Effect would once again save the day.

Allow me to explain. Our friends Pat and Carl Heine are the quintessential optimists. Not only do they maintain a positive outlook, but good things seem to come to them. We went on a cruise with them once, and apparently legions of whales were jumping out of the water performing a ballet for Pat and Carl, as Curt and I lollygagged in chaise lounges on the other side of the boat. I believe that’s the same trip that they witnessed a spectacular Aurora Borealis display the night Curt and I turned in early. The year Pat and Carl went canoeing in the Boundary Waters, northern Minnesota logged a record warm and sunny fall—and apparently all the mosquitoes had already died. It’s little wonder that Curt and I are delighted to plan outings with them.

Saturday morning dawned cold, cloudy and rainy, just as predicted, but according to the weather tracker app on Carl’s Droid, the front was passing. We dressed in layers, and Pat had brought heavy-duty raincoats. After a stop at Starbucks we got ourselves to the harbor where we crowded under trees in a downpour waiting for our captain.

“Look how beautiful these acorns look dripping with rain,” Pat observed. “My new shoes are so comfortable,” Carl offered. “Aren’t all these boats magnificent?”

Captain Mike appeared, greeted us and reported that after quite some discussion with the charter company’s owner, the sail was still a go. We soddenly trod down the pier and boarded, but found the seats all drenched; undaunted, we went belowdecks to wait it out a bit longer. As Mike went up to towel off the seats, Curt popped the cork on the champagne (no bloody Marys allowed because of the potentially staining tomato juice) and the four of us sat dripping and shivering in our rain gear as we raised our glasses: “Here’s to sailing in the rain!”

Just before disembarking--don't we look as though we had the time of our lives?

Before long it seemed to let up so we hit the deck and set off. Choppy water threw us around a bit before passing through the breakwater, but Captain Mike assured us that was always the worst part. As he raised the sails, the rain started down again in buckets. Out we sailed, no other boats in sight. Soon we even lost sight of the Chicago skyline in the mist. The lake remained choppy and the boat rolled in the waves. I could feel water running down my abdomen, despite my hooded raincoat. We chatted about Mike’s years as a sailor, other trips we’d taken, and life in general as we adjusted and readjusted our hoods. We sat on plastic and covered our legs with more plastic, dumping off the water as it puddled around us.

I started to think I felt a little “off,” because I had only had coffee (and champagne) for breakfast. Before long I was at the rail, dry heaving with seasickness. Curt had had enough of being thoroughly drenched (he wasn’t wearing one of Pat’s raincoats), so he went inside; on wobbly legs I pitched myself down the stairs, too, making for the marine head for some follow-up retching. Pat and Carl stayed above with the captain, and I’m pretty sure I heard them remark about how the wonderful rain moisturizes and replenishes one’s complexion.

Not soon enough for me, Captain Mike pulled in the sails and turned on the motor, and as my life passed before my eyes, every ounce of my being wished the trip to be over. As soon as we pulled up to the dock, my equilibrium returned and like magic, I felt just fine.

And guess what? All things considered, we really did have a great time. I guess the Heine Effect was at work after all, but it’s not that everything is always perfect wherever they go. It’s that it’s always enjoyable to be around positive people. There’s still a ways to go before we can call it the Welsh Effect, but we’re working on it.

Return to the Scene

Labor Day weekends the past few years have offered the opportunity to visit my mom in Sibley, Iowa, due to generally agreeable weather and an extra day for the 1,000-mile round trip. Curt and I just returned from this year’s pleasant and uneventful trip to the town where I was born and lived my first nine years.

Flash back to Labor Day Weekend, 2009: My daughters and grandkids drove with me for the visit to Grandma Neva and Aunt Lois and Uncle John. The women decided to take the kids to the Sibley City Park, where to my delight the two imposing metal slides from my childhood are still providing thrills. There’s the big slide—the two-humper—and its little sister, the one-humper.

As we sat on a park bench watching the kids play, my daughter questioned the wisdom of leaving these slides in place to endanger life and limb, especially in view of the fact that most of the other unsafe equipment had been removed: the big metal jungle gym and monkey bars, where I chipped my new front tooth at age 6; the trapeze bars with the benches you could push as far apart as you dared leap; the whirling merry-go-round that rose high and low as you ran along beside it. I sniffed that I had grown up playing in this park, and did not recall a single incident of anyone being injured.

Right about then, my grandson Will called to me to remove a suspicious mass at the top of the little slide (which, I might add, is “little” only in relation to the giant towering next to it). After climbing to the top and wiping off what turned out to be bird poop, I observed that indeed, the slide did appear wide enough to accommodate a posterior of roughly my dimensions, and sliding on down just seemed like the right thing to do.

Let me just say I knew I was in trouble the moment I started down, because I was FLYING and I knew I had to land on my feet at the bottom and run. But there was loose gravel at the bottom; my feet flew out in front of me and I reached down to brace myself. Then I was on my butt, looking up sheepishly at my “empathetic” elderly mother and big sister and daughters, all with tears of laughter streaming down their faces. I wanted to laugh, too, because I was pretty sure I’d made an ass of myself, but I really wanted to cry. Dear Mom suggested a sign should be placed nearby: “No one over 12 admitted.”

An hour later I was in the emergency room of the county hospital. I had to wear the cast for six long weeks. At least, though, when asked what happened, I didn’t have to say something lame like “carpal tunnel surgery.” No one expected a woman in her mid-50s to answer: “I broke my wrist going down a playground slide.”

A return to the scene: more deadly than it looks

On this year’s trip to the Sibley Park, no one expected me to be daring enough (or dumb enough) to chance a re-enactment of last year’s escapade. I warned my sister Pam that it was dangerous but she actually chanced the two-humper, while I stared down my nemesis, the killer one-humper. Oh, well, there were still no warning signs posted.

Pam on the two-humper (much the more impressive of the two, I admit)