Tag: Marcia

Music: There Will Never Be Another You

The painting in the background with the guitar was by our father.

Marcia, the younger sister, in very many ways, has become the keeper of the flame, not only for the history of the nuclear family in which we grew up back in Binghamton, NY in the 1950s and ’60s, but for the extended tribe as well.

It’s logical. She was the only one who moved to Charlotte, NC with the parents. Leslie and I were already ensconced in college, though of us lived down there for brief periods in the late 1970s.

After my father died in 2000, Mom and Marcia took care of Marcia’s daughter Alex and each other, though as time marched on, Marcia and her daughter were tending more to Mom until she died in 2011.

She still is tending to our parents’ memory, as she has access to decades worth of photos and other material.

As all three of her kids knew, my mom LOVED Nat King Cole. She had a whole bunch of 78s of his, but I have no idea whatever became of them. There were some items in my maternal grandmother’s house, the house my grandma and mom grew up in, and where my sisters and I spent a lot of time. The stuff went into storage and ultimately disappeared long ago, including some photographs of mine.

Marcia was musing about my mother back in November, just before Mom’s birthday. Our mother particularly loved Nature Boy and other familiar tunes by Cole. But neither Marcia nor I had heard him perform There Will Never Be Another You. It’s become one of Marcia’s favorite Nat King Cole songs. And I can hear why.

BTW, neither she nor I ever really learned to play the guitar, though Dad and Leslie did. The painting in the background with the guitar was by our father.

LISTEN to There Will Never Be Another You

Arturo Sandoval

Nat Cole

Doris Day

Happy birthday, Marcia!

Mother’s Day 2017

Mom in her red wig period.

HA! I was looking at my May posts I completed, and I assumed I’d written a Mother’s Day something about my mom. But I was misremembering. I had written about my sister Marcia for her birthday this week, and that post is largely ABOUT my mom.

So I decided the heck with it and picked some photos off Marcia’s Facebook, most of which I don’t believe I’ve posted before.


Here’s my mom with HER mother, Gertrude Williams, and my sisters Leslie and Marcia, in her red wig period.


My mother with her mother’s people, the Yates, including Gert (2nd left), her aunts Charlotte and Deana. I have no idea what she’s looking at. This is in Binghamton, NY.


Mom with our family friend Betty, probably at the latter’s home near Binghamton.


I could ask someone who Sammy is, but this predates my father being on the scene.


Mom with her middle granddaughter, Alex, Marcia’s daughter, in Charlotte, NC.


Mom with her eldest Yates cousin, Raymond.


Mom with her eldest child, in Binghamton.


Mom with her eldest child, in Charlotte.

I will say that, unlike THIS mom, my mom hardly ever swore, and not just in front of her kids.

Yours, Mine and Ours

I said, “If you do not know the title of the movie, I will not take you.”

YoursMineOursI don’t always have a strong memory of movies I saw as a child. I had a vague memory of seeing a film called Yours, Mine and Ours, a 1968 film, starring Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda and Van Johnson, but I couldn’t have told you where or when.

From the IMBD:

When a widower with 10 children marries a widow with 8, can the 20 of them ever come together as one big happy family? From finding a house big enough for all of them and learning to make 18 school lunches, to coping with a son going off to war and an unexpected addition to the family, Yours, Mine and Ours attempts to blend two families into one and hopes to answer the question Is bigger really better?

It was “based loosely on the story of Frank and Helen Beardsley,” and makes the Brady Bunch, which came along a year or two later, seem like pikers. “The film was commercially successful, and even the Beardsleys themselves appreciated it.”

But my “baby” sister Marcia often recalls a whole lot that has left my synapses. She remembers me taking her to this movie. She wrote on Facebook: “I am sure that seeing this movie was not the most exciting thing for him to do that day..anyways…I was so excited to go to the movie with my big brother.
Marcia.Roger
“For a second I could not remember the title. He said, ‘If you do not know the title of the movie, I will not take you.'” That sounds about right. “Well, I remembered as I have many childhood memories. One of my favorite memories with my brother Binghamton, NY.”

So I asked her, “OK, wise one. WHERE did we see this? Maybe the Strand or the Riviera on Chenango Street, near where Mom worked? Or the Ritz on Clinton St, which we could have walked to? Or the Crest on Main, which seems a little far unless we got a ride?”

She replied, “We walked…and the conversation about to go or not to go was standing at that little cut-through at the end of Gaines Street…so it would have been the Ritz on Clinton Street. I can remember that conversation like it was yesterday…” The “little cut was a driveway to a very cube-looking gray building that never seemed to have anyone living or working there.

“It was a cloudy day…omg.” NOW she’s just showing off. Funny thing about that driveway: it was next to the Greene’s house at 13 Gaines, a white-and-green structure. We lived at 5 Gaines, in a green house. We often got each others’ mail.

Happy natal day to my baby sister. She’s turning…some number less than 63.

Skyping the sisters

I’ll tell you the truth; I’m not a big fan of Skype.

TallBldg

I’m pretty sure this is true: I haven’t seen my baby sister Marcia (she’s in the foreground, above, a tad younger), or, for that matter, sister Leslie, since shortly after my mom died in 2011. I know the Wife and the Daughter went down to North Carolina some period after that, but that was four years ago too.

Marcia and I talk on the phone, though there was a big gap from before Easter to late April, mostly to do with my busyness. We email, and we even text occasionally, though I’m not a great fan. Apparently Marcia and sister Leslie text all the time. I think my disincentive is that the messages are SO long on my not-really-made-for-texting device that I cannot read the whole thing; I end up emailing the message to MY email and reading them there, THEN replying.

I HAVE invited her up to visit from NC to upstate NY, but it hasn’t worked out yet.

Marcia’s decided we need to do the Skype thing. I’ll tell you the truth; I’m not a big fan of that, either. It looks weird to me, like selfies. BUT I see the value of the exercise.

We have a small tribe: me with my wife and daughter; Leslie, her daughter and son-in-law; Marcia and her daughter. Provisions must be made.

It’s Marcia’s birthday; happy natal day, baby sister.

G is for the Greens

NO ONE left IBM in those days, and certainly not for some likely short-term government job.

rog.leg.meg.1962aprI grew up in Binghamton, which is in the Southern Tier section of New York State, not far from the Pennsylvania border. I had, and have, two sisters, Leslie Ellen Green, born about 16.5 months after my birth, and Marcia Elayne Green, born a little more than five years after me.

We grew up with our parents, Leslie Harold Green and Gertrude Elizabeth (nee Williams) Green, at 5 Gaines Street in the city’s First Ward. When I was born, my parents lived upstairs in the two-family dwelling, but soon my parents moved to the first floor, and my paternal grandparents, McKinley Green and Agatha (nee Walker) Green then lived upstairs.

The house was owned by my maternal grandmother, Gertrude (nee Yates) Williams, who lived a half dozen blocks away at 13 Maple Street with her baby sister Adenia (Deana) Yates. Our house was a small place, with a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and what was essentially a large hallway.
rog.leg.meg.1962

After Marcia was born, when the girls were destined to get the second bedroom, my father built a couple of walls in the hallway to create a very small bedroom for me. He painted the solar system on my ceiling.

Our mother worked at McLean’s department store downtown, first as an elevator operator, then later in the bookkeeping department. Although we were supposed to attend Oak Street Elementary School, since we went to Grandma Williams’ house for lunch, it was determined that we would instead go to Daniel Dickinson school instead. This, of course, had a profound effect on us in terms of who our childhood friends were, a surprising number of which we still are in touch with.
rog.leg.meg.1964
Our father had several jobs: truck driver, florist, painter (both artistic and sign painting). He had a job working at IBM for about six years. It was at night, and it wasn’t particularly intellectually stimulating, moving inventory on some conveyance.

When Dad quit his job to work for something called Opportunities for Broome, a project funded the US Office of Economic Opportunity, my ninth grade homework teacher, Mr. Joseph, told me that my father was crazy. NO ONE left IBM in those days, and certainly not for some likely short-term government job. Frankly, I thought it was a great decision, and time proved this to be correct.

Grandma Green died in 1964. She was one of my Sunday school teachers, and she taught me how to play the card game Canasta. I taught my Aunt Deana how to play canasta, and we also played 500 rummy and other card games; she died two years after Grandma Green. I played bid whist and pinochle with my parents.

Each of my parents was an only child. This meant that my sisters and I never had uncles, aunts, or first cousins. This makes our tribe rather small these days, with our parents deceased, and each of my sisters and I each having just one child, a daughter.

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