Mary Paulic

 

Michael (middle name)

Mikulin (maiden name)

May 1, 1914 to February 2, 2015

 

 

A Final Goodbye, Mom

 

 

                I want to thank you for being my mother and for all the many loving memories.  How proud I am to have had you as not only a mother but as my best friend.

                You taught me to be considerate and use good judgment. You taught me that I didn’t have to follow the crowd to have good things happen.

                You taught me to cook and clean and sew, but also that I could go out and get a job after reaching middle age.

                By your example, you taught me to love teaching the children, whose wisdom and laughter has enriched my world.

                You taught me to love books.  And they continue to light up my mind.

                Your presence, your warmth, your generosity, your endless hospitality and giving were amazing.  Who will ever forget dining at your table or enjoying your Christmas cookies, your poundcake, your pies, your canned peaches or strawberry jam?

                For half a century, you gently encouraged Mimi and I and your grandchildren, Greg and Mark, to mix education and self-improvement with other obligations.  You encouraged us to finish college and take further classes to improve ourselves.

                You have been a keeper of the faith.  Your religion has been the sun that lights your world.  You walked the 3 miles to Saint Catherine’s Church every Saturday night or Sunday that it didn’t rain because you never learned how to drive a car.

                Age made you shorter but didn’t wither or dim the power of your spirit.  You weren’t tall or chic, but you held yourself proudly and that endowed you with great elegance.  Osteoporosis deprived you of some of your motion, but none of your drive.  You weren’t prominent or notorious so your passing won’t make the front page.  You were a modest person who didn’t relish the limelight.  Your obituary will sketch the outlines of a certain kind of life that is fast disappearing.

                First generation American.  Born at 274 Naples Street, San Francisco to two immigrant parents. 

Let’s start with your mother, Kate Mikulin, affectionately called Nani by all of her grandchildren.  She was born in February, 1889.  She came from a village, Osojnik, on top of a mountain on the outskirts of Dubrovnik.   When she was in her teens, she walked to Dubrovnik with bundles of produce on her head to sell.  Her father died at an early age.  You thought he was a butcher.  Her mother lived to be 96.  They were poor and the ground was rocky.

Nani was the oldest of all of her siblings, and she chose to come to America.  One brother went to Argentina and became wealthy raising cattle.  The second oldest brother went to Brazil and had a liquor store.  He never married.  A sister went to Buenos Aires.  A third sister, Tete (Aunt) Nina came to San Francisco in 1929 or 1930.  Two brothers stayed in Yugoslavia.

                Nani came to Ellis Island with a girlfriend from the same village in Osojnik.  They were delayed there a couple of days, and then they took a train to California.  They were going to this girlfriend’s sister’s home.  They came on the USS Martha Washington.

                Nani worked in a laundry when she first came to San Francisco.

                She lived to be 96 as did her mother.

                Grandpa came from Mali Iz in Croatia.  Mali Iz means “Small Island.”  He was born in July, 1889.  His father was a fisherman.  His mother was about 4 ft. 10 or 11 inches.  She was a little dynamo.

                His mother’s name was Mikela and grandpa used the last name of Mikulin.  You were told that it meant son of Mikela.  But all his brothers used the last name of Jelic.  Mikulin was added to Jelic to distinguish it from other Jelic families in Mali Iz. In Europe grandpa was called Ivan.  When he came to the US, he used the first name of John.

                Grandpa came in 1907 with Simitza Martinovich’s brother (not through Ellis island), Anton Zuvich.  They went to East Chicago, an industrial city in Indiana and worked in the iron works.  They were about 16 or 17 and thought they were going to pick up gold on the sidewalks.  They quit working there and went to Hoquim, Washington to do something with the sea.  They stayed with Mary Misitich’s grandparents who had a boarding house.

                Grandpa also worked in the mines in Pueblo, Colorado for awhile. From there, they came to San Francisco.  Mike Martinovich got grandpa a job on a freighter as his cook helper.  Then grandpa took jobs on other steamers and freighters as the cook for the crew and the few passengers.

                John (grandpa) and Kate (Nani Kovacic) were married on September 21, 1913.  Nani was living with the Toyich family and Grandpa would frequently visit.  They walked down to Mission Street to have their formal wedding picture taken.  Nani wore a floor-length beaded satin long-sleeved dress with a floor length veil mini-flowered in the front with white slippers.  Mom said that Nani borrowed the outfit from a girl who worked in a cleaners with her. In the picture, Nani sits white-gloved, holding a grouping of fresh flowers which flowed to the floor.  Grandpa stood stiffly to the left of her elegantly carved chair.  He was in a suit with white tie and boutonnière.  What smooth skin these newly-weds had.  No wonder.  They were 23 years old and beginning another new life adventure without a single relative present.  No smiles in the picture, but that was probably more a style at the time than an indication of their temperament.

                Grandpa got citizenship papers when mom was in elementary school.  Nani didn’t get hers until maybe 20 years later.  She never went to school even in Osojnik.  A priest taught her how to read and write in Yugoslavian.  Grandpa read English soon after he arrived here probably because he worked with English speakers. 

Nani went before a judge to gain citizenship.  That day there were a lot of people so the judge only asked each person one question.  He asked Nani who was the president during the Civil War.  She got it right and was so proud.

Grandpa worked on steamers until you, mom, were 14.  You remembered radio operators, captains, and crew coming over to dinner.  One radio dispatcher built your first radio and all your friends and neighbors came to listen to the news and the fights on Friday night.  After steamers, grandpa worked on fishing boats through San Pedro also as a cook.  He knew how to make yeast out of potato peelings.  He made great cinnamon buns, bread, and apple pies.  Mary remembers white baked beans with molasses, crab salad with homemade mayonnaise, clam chowder, bouillabaisse, and cioppino.

Even when grandpa was away, Nani always managed to pay the bills to the collectors.  The water company and the electric company had men collectors come by each house at the end of the month to collect.   Mail was delivered twice a day in those days.  Nani would order a ton of coal at time.  Miro made a bin in the basement for it.  Nani would send the kids down to get coal a bucket at a time.

Grandpa made wine in the garage.  He even made a copper still and produced a little liquor during Prohibition.

                You, mom, were born in 1914 at 419 Athens which was the Martinovich’s house. A midwife delivered you after coming in a horse and buggy.  You had no birth certificate and were not registered until you were an adult. 

Nani and Grandpa first lived on Essex Street down by the wharf in San Francisco.  You were a baby there. They took you to the 1915 San Francisco Exposition.  There is a picture of grandpa carrying you at the Fair.

                You were the oldest of your four siblings, Catherine (Kate), John and later came Sam who was 11 years younger.

Kate, John, and Sam were born at 274 Naples Street, San Francisco.  Excelsior Hill was loaded with Croatian people.  Lots of single bachelors.  Nani or Grandpa would order a suckling pig at the market and take it to a bakery on Persia Avenue to be cooked.  All were welcome to join them at the oilcloth covered table in their kitchen. There was always some place open to welcome bachelors from their towns and others.

You had no electricity in those days.  No electric lights.  You had gas jet lights on the walls.  No TV, no radio, no electricity at all.  A cousin, Anton Evoncovich, would come over and throw you and your siblings in the air.  Often a covering of the jets would get knocked off and broken.  Nani would get very mad.  These cousins were waiters and had poor written English skills.  They came over to the house so you, Mary, could write letters for them.

When Nike Evoncovich, their older sister, came to the United States, she came in steerage, the cheapest section of the boat.  She had fleas and spread them to Nani and the kids.  Nani used a fine toothed comb through the children’s hair every day to get rid of the fleas.

At 274 Naples, an Italian family, the Selina’s, lived next door, and the walls were thin between the two houses.  Nani was forever apologizing for their noise especially when grandpa would bring home fishermen, and they would eat, drink wine, and sing.

There were horse lots called drayages all around the Mission area.  Your friend, Tom Yates, lived in the neighborhood.  His father took care of horses around Excelsior and Naples.  People rented work horses to help with their farm or garden, and to pull carriages.

In those days, the firemen still wore leather helmets.  The milkman still drove his old-fashioned wagon with gold script on the side – Spreckels Russell – and, impossible as it seems, the iceman still pulled blocks out with his medieval tongs like a dentist doing an extraction on a whale, making his rounds for those last households without a refrigerator.  The rag man and the knife man, the fruit truck and the coal truck and the dry cleaners, the fish man and the Colonial Bread man and the egg lady – all came down the street with their echoing cries of “Rags bottles trash!” and “Grind your scissors!  Grind your knives!”

Kala, whose real name was Miro Gacina, lived with Nani and Grandpa for 42 years as a boarder.  He was from Mali Iz also.  He landed in Harbin, China, a settlement of mostly Russians from Europe.  He was there about a year before he came to America.  He had a wife in Yugoslavia whom he claimed was always too sick to come here.  But one day she arrived on the Mikulin doorstep.  Mary was in her teens.  The wife was a nice looking kind of heavy set woman.  She stayed a year.  They took a furnished apartment in the Mission District.  She was lonely and went back to her village.  She lived with her sister and brother-in-law back there.  Kala sent her money from his pay every month for as long as he lived.

                You, mom, went to Excelsior Elementary School from grades 1-5.   In our pictures you wore tube-like party dresses and headbands or middy blouses with dark neckerchiefs.  You played in big vacant lots around Naples Street, San Francisco.  You remembered when your class went downtown to see a parade honoring President Coolidge.  You remembered that he was very stiff and not well liked.  You said that President Harding also came to San Francisco and died in one of the San Francisco hotels, probably the Palace Hotel.

You attended Monroe for grades 5-8.   You were remarkably smart always doing well in school.  You skipped high seventh grade because you were scholastically advanced.  You had to make a bib apron, dry cloth, drawstring cookbook bag embroidered with your initials and a pot holder at home in preparation for the eighth grade home economics class.  Evidently fractions were taught in high seventh so you had to teach yourself fractions. 

Nani never felt comfortable going to your parent school meetings or teas because she couldn’t speak English.  So she went back to school at your middle school called Monroe.  There was a lady who taught one class of English after regular school ended.  Nani learned enough to take her nationalization test.  She passed.  She loved the class, but when she got pregnant with Sam, she had to quit.

Lew Powell owned a corner store on Madrid and Brazil.  You used to buy hard candy suckers for a penny each because they lasted so long.  You also bought jaw breakers and Tootsie Pops which were 2 or 3 for a penny. 

When you were 10 years old, Grandpa left on a Saturday because he had been hired to cook on a ship out of San Francisco.   But unbeknownst to him, the ship was carrying dynamite.  So the next day, the family was reading the paper and Grandpa walked in with his suitcase and all of his cooking tools.  The ship had broken up in the bay and he was rescued.  This later made headlines in SF.  Grandpa used to sell punchboard chances.  Winners would get prizes like gold -rimmed dishes which he kept in his suitcase.  So he was determined to rescue this suitcase.

He also kept in touch with Anton Zuvich who had moved to San Pedro.  Anton was disappointed one Christmas when all of his family went away and left him alone. So he boarded a bus and arrived at 274 Naples Street, San Francisco to be with Nani and Grandpa and the Mikulin gang for Christmas.  He was a character and wore an anchor earring in his ear.  You, Mary, had to sneak out to 20th and Mission Street to send a telegraph to San Pedro because no one had a phone in those days.  The telegram told his family that grandpa was OK. 

You did housework for people for $1 for 4-5 hours of work.  You washed dishes and cleaned.  The man across the street would put a cloth on a clothesline and it would mean that he had work for you to do.  There were no telephones in those days.  Also to make money, you sold needles and pins door to door when you were about 11.  You would buy them mail-order from a newspaper article.

You were born on May 1, May Day.  When you were 13, you wanted to go to see Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in Seventh Heaven, but Nani made you go with the family to Golden Gate Park to see dancing around the May Pole for your birthday.

Your first telephone had 4 numbers.

Mission High is the high school you attended for 6 months while they were building Balboa High.  You did summer work at the White House Department Store.  Rich women would come downtown in their limos and order neckties.  You sold to them at 25 cents a tie.  You hated these picky customers.  You knew you were not cut out to be a saleswoman after selling ties. 

You attended Balboa for 3 1/2 years and graduated in 1931.  You always remembered the fabric and cut of the dress you made and wore on that triumphal graduation evening in high school.   But there were no jobs when you graduated.  So you went back to Balboa and took a post graduate course for 6 more months.  You had a little job before landing solid work.  One day you had to count counter-fit money.  It was piece-meal work.  You couldn’t believe how real the money looked. 

Then you went to McMaster Payne Business College for 6 months and they found you a job at $72 a month at Realty Bond Reorganization Company.  In the 30’s you worked there a year before Bennett Richards and Hill Stock and Bond Company hired you.  They were in the same building on Post and Kearny Street.  You stayed with them for 3 or 4 of years.  You took trolleys to work.  They were 5 cents and there was a conductor and a motorman on each car.  Jitney’s were 25 cents and the preferred mode of travel. 

Your family friend and girlfriend, Mathea, and her mother, Mrs. Jakovina, worked for C & H Sugar Company (or the Sugar House as they used to call it) in San Francisco.  Their primary job was to sew sugar bags.  Every year the Jakovinas would invite the Mikulins to the annual company picnic held on Alameda Island.  You would all take the ferry over and play all day on the carnival rides that were a permanent part of the island at the time. 

You enjoyed Monopoly, crossword puzzles, and Whist. There were sand dunes in the Sunset then, parking spaces everywhere, and a lot of crazy talk about bridging the bay. 

You, Katie, and your girl friends would win free dishes and glasses at the movies.  There was always a newsreel before the double feature.  You would often get dressed up in long dresses and go to dances downtown on the bus. You would go to Woolworth’s on Market Street where the lunch counter was on the right, the pet shop with canaries and parakeets and goldfish was in the back.  You would shop at Macy’s and City of Paris and ride in their wrought-iron caged elevators.   Overhead pneumatic tubes carried whizzing brass canisters containing change or receipts.  You rode long-gone trolley cars giving your money to conductors with mechanical change-makers on their belts.

You were one of 202,000 people who thronged across the Gold Gate Bridge when it first opened to pedestrian traffic on May 27, 1937. 

Nani and Grandpa bought the house at 444 Persia in 1937 for $6500.  You and Kate were working then, and you bought all the furniture and silverware, dishes, and glassware.

                You frequently went to the 1939 Exposition in San Francisco at Treasure Island.  Price was reasonable.  Many of the name bands played there.  Each California county showed their produce (large apricots and other things) and they were available for the taking!  The counties that produced coffee were the most impressive – free coffee and it smelled so good!  Jim Paulic played his instrument, a tamboritza, with a group (band) on Yugoslav Day at the Exposition.  Each nationality had a day.  No one was prejudiced; people enjoyed the day of each nationality.  You took the bus to the Ferry Building and then took the ferry. You would often pick up the ferry at noon from your job at Hill Richards and go to lunch at the fair (Exposition).

You married this handsome Yugoslavian tambaritza player, James Paulic.  He was patient and attentive.  By the way, he learned to play the tambaritza when he was young.  Four or five homeless Croatian men who were an instrumental group approached his mother in Akron, Ohio and asked her if they could live in a shack that she had on the back of the property.   It was the depression and they were down on their luck.  She said, “Yes, if you will teach my sons, Jim and Joe, how to play the tambaritza.”  They said yes and that was the beginning of dad’s love of the instrument.

                Jim Paulic (Emerick Stephen on his birth certificate) was born January 29, 1911 in Mayville, Wisconsin (died February 11, 1998).  His father was Lovre (Lawrence) Paulic born July 17, 1876 in Gat, Croatia (died 1956) and mother was Anica (Anna) Jugodic born 1877 in Gat Croatia (died 1954). 

They came to the United States in about 1910 with their 13 year old son Stevo.  When Stevo learned that his mother was pregnant, he wanted to leave their home in the United States, and he return to his grandparents in Gat so they took him back in 1912.  Stevo was born in 1896 (died 1987).  He was drafted into the Austrian Army and was told to fight on the Russian front.  He was captured and held as a Russian prisoner during WWII.  He married Kate, and they had 2 sons, Antun and Stevo II.  Stevo II was killed in World War II.  Son Antun married Lenka and had 2 daughters, Marica and Slavica.

Dad’s dad and mom, Lovre (Lawrence) and Anica (Anna), with their small children, moved to Akron, Ohio.  Lawrence was originally from Got (a city in Yugoslavia) where he was in the Austrian army, and Anna was from a village near Got.   

 He had three other siblings.  Sister, Anne, was born in Horicon, Wisconsin on September 27, 1914 (died December 25, 1991.)  She married Stanley U-Rycki and had seven children.  Brother, Joe Paulic, was born in 1912 and died September 13, 1994.  Brother, John Paulic married Katherine and had two girls.

                Jim (who was known as Hank in Akron, Ohio) played in a band and one of the band members got an offer to play bass in San Francisco for more money.  After about 6 months, he sent Jim a letter and said come to San Francisco.  There’s lots of work.  Jim came too and met Tony Ubojcic who played the bugaria, a tambaritza that played chords.  They remained friends and played together for the rest of their lives.  When Hank moved to California in 1936, he bought a suit and fedora and became James Henry or “Jim.” 

                Jim lived with Yama (nickname for Tony Uranovic).  They worked together at Bethlehem Steel Corporation in South San Francisco.  Yama worked the furnace there and was paid 10 cents per ingot which was a lot of money for the day.  They lived on Olive Avenue in SSF in an apartment.  Yama once said to dad, “Why do you want to walk in the street (meaning get married) when you could walk on the sidewalk?”  But he grew to love you and the entire Mikulin family. 

Dad was a laborer for one year working an outside lifter.  Then a boss asked him to come into the office where he worked his entire career.  He taught himself math and hated it when Bethlehem changed some number tables that he used.  He had never attended high school at all.

                Dad formed a tambaritza group in San Francisco.  Your brother, Sam, joined and they needed a place to practice.  Sam volunteered the spare downstairs room at 444 Persia.  That’s were you met Jim.

After you and Jim were married, you bought a little one bedroom house at 420 Naples Street in San Francisco.  It was old.  You found newspapers in the wall dating to 1900.  He enlarged the old house paneling the downstairs with knotty pine boards, plumbing expertly, pouring a new driveway, making a back porch into a bedroom.  He did all of this while in his 30’s. 

You did the laundry (dropping clothespins into the sewn-in pockets of your apron) matching socks, starching shirts; you did the dusting and all the dishes by hand.

You went out in Jim’s ’32 Plymouth convertible.  It even had a rumble seat.  His next car was a 4-cylinder ’30 Chrysler Couple.  You would drive to Playland-By-The-Sea.  They had a “tunnel of love” with the word LIMBO blazing over the entrance in fiery letters.  The roller coaster had no seat belts or guardrails or any of the contraptions that we have today. 

Sometimes you took a streetcar.  When it lost electricity, the driver had to walk outside with a long pole to reconnect the wires while you sat and waited – sometimes in the dark.

In your first years together, you each learned about the other’s tastes.  Dad liked half and half on his cereal.  It was hard to get during the depression, but Nick at the corner store would save a quart for you when he could. 

You needed ration stamps for meat, shoes, gasoline, salad oil, or any oil.  You cleaned and strained fat from meat and chicken.  The butcher would weigh it and give you so much a pound for it.  You remember his butcher block all crisscrossed with the marks of his cleaver.

You remembered waiting in a ration line the first time that you were pregnant, and you felt sick.  You heaved in line rather than lose your place.

Men stubbed their cigarettes out against their shoes and then tore them apart so the tobacco floated in the air.  A soldier’s habit.  So the enemy couldn’t track them.

You had two daughters, Arlene (me) and Mary Ann.  We were both born in Saint Joseph’s Hospital in San Francisco.  You labored for 24 hours in a hallway bed before giving birth to me.  It was wartime so there were beds all the way down the hall.

You remembered that when I was a few months old, strollers were in great demand because during WWII there was great need for metal and rubber.  Strollers were rationed.  Your friends from San Pedro packaged their old stroller and sent it to San Francisco through the mail.  You were so grateful. 

In the 40’s, Jim took you to see a football game, Cal. vs. Oregon, at the Berkeley stadium.  You took a trolley that was on a train track on the Bay Bridge.  Sam had gotten the VIP photographers passes or you would never have gone.  Shortly thereafter, the trolley line was dismantled to make more room for auto lanes.

You bought one of the first television sets.  It was 7 inches and all of the Naples Street neighbors came to see it.  You watched the news with John Cameron Swayzee, Ed Sullivan at 8 PM on Sundays, Lucy and Desi in the “I Love Lucy Show,” Ralph and Alice Cramden in “The Honeymooners,” and The Ted Mack Family Hour.

You, Kala, and Sam bought me candy at the store on the corner.  I remember long ropes of Bub’s Daddy gum in nuclear-age reds, greens, and purples; wax lips, fangs, and mustaches that could be worn only for a minute or two before puncturing and leaking a sweet liquor into my mouth; bubble gum cigars and pistols; and coils of blackjack licorice.  There was a pinball machine there also. 

In 1952 you moved to Burlingame, a good place to raise kids in those days.  Burlingame with its stately library where you felt safe.  A train station with its tall-backed waiting benches.  The bus station on Bayswater Avenue doubled as a newsstand and small coffee shop. 

The house, built in 1907, cost $6500 and had no foundation.  Dad rebuilt the old house adding a work shed in the backyard where he put his levels, tape measures, and boxes of nails to good use building everything from cabinets to his beloved tambaritzas.  You called the phone company and got a number that never changed, Diamond 3-3159 in 62 years.  You joined the PTA board at Washington Elementary School, and you were a Brownie leader.  Your days were full.  Maybe you’d take an excursion to the fabric store, run up a cute gingham apron on the sewing machine and/or bake cookies before beginning dinner. You had the luxury to stay at home and raise two healthy daughters.

Hats were the vogue in those days so you took a millinery hat-making class at the College of San Mateo which was located a short walking distance from your house.  You met some life-long lady friends and had fun although you weren’t pleased with your end products.  In fact, you were so particular that when you threw one of your hats in the garbage another lady student thought it was so good that she grabbed it and finished it off.  (With your approval.)

But you were also strong.  When Mimi was 5 years old, she broke the large femur bone in her leg on a school merry-go-round.  You carried her 6 blocks home.

But you continued the close family ties with your two brothers, Sam and John, and sister, Catherine, by driving to San Francisco every Friday night for “family dinner” with your mom and dad at the house on Persia.  They were a spirited and lively group with endless family stories that were told and retold.  Grandma was warm and inviting so you never knew who would show up.  The women spent quality time in the kitchen and produced a fish feast accompanied by grandpa’s homemade Chianti-ish wine then cigarettes and port.  But I remember much conversation in the living room on the velvet Chesterfield (as we called the sofa).  That’s where we watched the Friday night Madison Square Garden fights sponsored by Gillette and Pabst Blue Ribbon on the TV but with the radio giving the best commentary; we watched Sid Caesar and What’s My Line.  I personally remember missing school dances and get-togethers because our SF family Friday night dinners were sacrosanct. 

When Mary Ann and I were teenagers, you went to work as a secretary at Roosevelt Elementary School in Burlingame and devoted 21 years of your life there. You took the bus to work passing the flag pole every morning, uncovered your typewriter and began your day.  Maybe you would take dictation in your slim steno book with its straight cardboard cover.  You were taught that your shorthand had to be so neat and so legible that anyone could pick up your steno book and type the letters for you.  It was supposed to be a 4 hour job at $1.50 an hour, but turned into a 6 hour a day job which was fine with you.  It eventually turned into an 8 hour a day job.  You worked there 21 years -  13 with Gene Green, 1 with Don Tuxford, and 7 with Fred Heron. 

Interest rates were low and the income tax minuscule.  But you didn’t gamble.  You stayed in the same house.  Stability was important to Jim and to you although you bought a lot in Cupertino right on Bollinger Road. Your plan was to remove some of the 16 prune/plum trees and build a house on the ¾ acre property.  Dad’s father was going to come from Akron, Ohio and live in a garage that would be the first structure erected.  Then he’d continue helping dad build his dream house.  But the lot was too far away from your San Francisco relatives and dad’s SSF work.  When a man knocked on your door and offered you $4,000 for this property that you paid $2,000 for, you sold it. 

                Because you were so stable, we could all count on you.  You never failed to vote.  You were the one who took care of Dad for years under the hardest of circumstances.  You were the one who ran the house alone for decades, cutting your own lawn with a push mower until you were 85 years old.

When you were 38, you used to plant 60 tomato plants each season in your overburdened garden so you could bring boxes of produce to people.  You had red tomatoes, green peppers, green onions, bush and pole beans to name a few summer crops; chard, broccoli, carrots, and lettuce in the winter.  Dad would spade the ground in the spring.  But all summer you would water and weed.  In the fall you would put up tomatoes and sliced peaches and rhubarb in Mason jars, filling the kitchen with clouds of steam.  When you were 93, you still planted 15 plants so you could give fresh tomatoes to all of us. 

You were the one who washed all of your lettuce and chard before giving it to neighbors and friends.  You were the one who painted fences and all of your outdoor furniture.  You were the one who paid all of the bills and did the taxes for not only yourself but your sister.  You were the one who reminded me when it was time to pay my taxes.  You shopped and brought Katie all of the food and necessities she couldn’t get for herself.  You packed care packages for my boys when you got bargains at the store.  You had an intellectual curiosity and did a crossword puzzle every day until you were 94.  You resumed them again at 95 after your cataract operations.  You knew every fluctuation in the price of gas at the local station even though you never learned to drive a car.

You read the newspaper every day.  In fact, one day I needed some newspaper to wrap something in.  You said I could only take the “sports” section because you hadn’t read the rest.  You were 93 then.

You generously donated to charities especially at Christmas.  Many Catholic churches, the Disabled American Veterans, Hanna Boys Center, and the American Heart Association were just some of the recipients.

You truly believed in the Catholic Church.  The incense from the censer, the stately movement of the priests in their robes as they walked down the aisle swinging them, sending pale smoke into the air, their free hands placed gently over their hearts.  There was so much to enjoy before the priest said “The Mass is ended” and you knew the response “Thanks be to God.”

                We should all have your positive attitude and be as active, healthy, and alert as you were. You had rheumatic fever when you were a teenager.  With aging, calcium deposits develop on the valves of the heart.  These may explain your aortic stenosis.  You couldn’t get your breath after walking and fatigued easily. You had the heart problem for years.  Not until 94 did your fine handwriting lose its clarity.  Even your extreme scoliosis didn’t slow you down until your 90’s. 

                You were so organized and real.  You wrapped beautiful gifts with no Scotch tape.  You wrapped sandwiches with waxed paper never using Saran-Wrap.  You tried to make your death easier than normal for us.  The books are in order.  The attorney’s papers are in the safe.  You always planned ahead.  We thank you for that.  Your cineraria and daffodils will return every spring. 

                You were such a fighter for life.  Even though your shoulder and back throbbed and stung and must have been excruciating, you fought through the various pains and made each day a victory.

At 96, you had me buy you a new washing machine although I suggested that you give me your dirty laundry each week.  You didn’t want to be dependent on anyone.

At 97 (2012), Mark and I took you to dinner at Schroeder’s, an old German restaurant in the financial district.  You had Hungarian Goulash and said that you remembered the restaurant and were often there in the 30’s when you worked downtown.

Always being prepared, you had me and Mimi drive you to investigate rest homes, just in case.  You chose Atria as your favorite.  Good choice because you were working in the backyard when you fell and broke the second vertebrae in your neck making it impossible to live at home any longer.

At Atria, you had your own room and meals, and you made new friends.  You continued to pay your own bills and organize your income taxes, but you were slowing down.   In 2014, another vertebrae, this time in your lower back, cracked.  Shortly after, your femur broke requiring a pin, two screws, and 18 staples. 

You fought the good fight, but it was hard to stay strong.  All your care-providers admired your strength.

                Children must accept the parents they get, but you were just what I would have ordered.  You leave me with warm memories and the challenge of living up to your legacy.  You brought great joy into my life.

 

 

 

 

 

Mom wasn’t famous, but she was the most important person in my life because she was my teacher and my friend.  She was the one who cared the most.  For ten years, she cooked me dinner every Friday night, and after dinner, we went shopping.  It was something we both looked forward to.  During those dinners, she shared the details in this booklet. 

 

by Arlene Paulic Scallon