Lilacs in Tin Foil Vases: Thoughts on Home

On my Dad's shoulder's, Bicentennial Parade, 1976

The house I grew up in, built in 1970, the year before my birth, was on a piece of an old farm. No fireplace, no attic, no ghosts or secret passages: just a bland, new story-and-a-half Cape Cod, built in the side yard of the red brick farmhouse next door. A few silver maple saplings were plunked about the bare yard and the devil strip in soil that had been scraped down to unforgiving clay.

In old family photographs, snapped on my Mom's Brownie camera, the house sits on raw soil, a fresh concrete walkway leading past bare cinder block foundation, to a hollow core front door.

1971, a raw foundation on Seventh Street.

But there were remnants of a former place.

A gnarled grapevine on a rusted wire fence hedged the backyard.

In a corner dark and mossy, a contorted dogwood, by far my favorite tree, crouched under a massive pear tree that would become our space ship. Under the pear tree was a place I loved to dig. Here, the soil was soft, moist, and dark, and you did not have to dig deep before you found treasure: shards of pottery, an old bent spoon, a rusty gate latch. Like the Bennetts' old plum tree or the twin massive cherry trees with shiny peeling bark in the Mays' front yard, or the old twisted lilac next to the brick farm house's back door, all along gravel-and-tar Seventh Street, and even under the soil, were remnants of what had been before.

On a Sunday afternoon thirty-five Mays ago, the day before the big parade, my Mom and sister cut bouquets from that ancient lilac. They took those little sprigs and for each one they crafted a little tin foil vase, and filled it with water, so they would not wilt while the Brownies held them in white gloved hand, down Broad Boulevard and all the way to Oakwood Cemetery, to be placed at the oldest soldiers' graves.

Oakwood Chapel, erected by the Ladies' Cemetery Association, 1883

Years later, my Dad would lead the Cub Scout pack, in signature pith helmet, as we carried the DeWitt School Pack 3186 banner with great pride. To march in the parade, you had to have full uniform, which required a trip down to the Scout Shop, way up on an upper level of O'Neil's, across the High Level Bridge, all the way in downtown Akron.

James Gregory, in signature pith helmet, leads Pack 3186 down Broad Boulevard.

The Cuyahoga Falls Memorial Day parade: an event that, although the route may change, is otherwise changeless: politicians, the marching band, Scouts, drum corps, and always, the veterans.
 

A Cuyahoga Falls parade circa 1963, when the route took it down Front Street.

Thirty five years ago, we arrive early, to get a good seat on the curb of the grassy Broad Boulevard median, a block west of the library, and across the street from the house at Broad and Fourth, which has been under renovation all four decades of my life.

The World War II vets are legion, in crisp VFW and American Legion caps and fezzes. The Korean vets, less numerous, still make a good showing. There are but a few Vietnam vets, scruffy and bearded, who get at first reluctant, and then appreciative, applause. The float where the vets enact the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, as always, garners sustained applause.

A convertible approaches, courtesy of Wallace Oldsmobile on Front Street. A few men, perhaps the oldest I have ever seen, slouch in the back seat, in rumpled American Legion hats. They are the World War I veterans. My Dad, a prescient man, tells me, "Stand up, these men won't be with us much longer." We do, and I offer my best imitation of a Cub Scout salute.

The Broad Boulevard Memorial Strip, in a 1960s postcard view.

This past week, three and a half decades after that parade, in West Virginia, the last of the Dough Boys, Frank W. Buckles, passed peacefully, at 110. A Missouri farm boy who bluffed his way in to the Army at age 16, he drove a rear-echelon ambulance on the Western Front, and saw the aftermath of the war's worst carnage.

These are the things that date you: one day you have great-grandparents, and grandparents, and parents, and then you do not. One day your esteemed teachers are still teaching, and then they retire, and then, they pass. One year there are World War I veterans marching in the parade, then just a few in a car, and then there are none.

The cartoon view of the seventies, of free love and hippies and day glow psychedelia, shrouds the more formal Midwestern first decade of my life.

We greeted the Bicentennial with unabashed red, white, and blue enthusiasm. We bought stiff leather "school shoes" from an elderly man with a shop down on Front Street, and kept rubber soled canvas "gym shoes" inside our desks, to be worn only for gym class. We learned to read from tattered Dick and Jane readers, with frayed red bindings, stamped with with the name of demolished Broad Street School, which Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary replaced. Sure, there was a house on Francis Avenue above Mary Campbell's Cave at the great gorge of the Cuyahoga, rumored to be inhabited by hippies, but it was still an era in which, on special occasions, little girls wore white gloves.

The things that date us: Memories of musty downtown department stores. Brownies in white gloves. World War I veterans, lapelled with red poppies, in remembrance of Flanders fields, riding in the parade:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

The day after reading of the death of Frank Buckles, the last Dough Boy, I sat bolt upright in bed, with a sudden need to remember lyrics to a song, sung over 20 years ago in A Capella Choir at Cuyahoga Falls High School:

Fair are the meadows,
Fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming garb of spring;
Jesus is fairer,
Jesus is purer,
Who makes the woeful heart to sing.

It is a very old hymn, of obscure German origin, which even as we sang it over twenty years ago, seemed old fashioned. It was a favorite, apparently of Miss Josephine Long, who established the choral music program at Falls High and was held in such esteem that her favorite hymn was still sung decades after her death, just as the A Capella choir still processed into the Christmas Vespers concert with candles, as she had done it, and applause was strictly forbidden, as she had deemed it to be.

The fields and the meadows of our memories. Fallow until we churn them, and then one thing connects to another. The day after I sat bolt upright and remembered those lyrics to Miss Long's favorite hymn, I was tending a garden I have nurtured some seven years. It is an old estate, surrounded by tolling bells: from several Episcopal churches, from our Lady of Lourdes, from the seminary of St. Charles Borromeo. And sometimes, from the Merion Tribute House, built to honor of those who fought The War To End All Wars. My day's labor is chimed by bells from many belfries, ancient hymns that I have known: my own perfect Eden.

A frieze on the Merion Tribute House honors Doughboys

That brisk March at noontide, the bells were from the Tribute House, friezed with pugnacious mugs of the Dough Boys it was built to honor. Two days after Frank Buckles' death, the noon after I awoke to that almost forgotten hymn, the tune that the carillon chimed was none other than Miss Long's obscure favorite anthem.

This past year I have been startled by encounters, seemingly random, that later drip with meaning.

It's not magic, it's just living long enough to see the patterns. With enough life experience, every thing that happens to you reminds you of something you've experienced before. And everywhere you look, remnants of what is no longer there. An old priest at St. Marys of the Barrens once told me, you reach a point where there is a ghost behind every tree.

1971, I lean against a newly planted sapling.

In the meadows of our memory, in our favorite mossy corners, we find tokens those who came before us left behind. The rituals and the parades, the stories of those who came before us but we may not have known, the songs and the memory of the voices that lifted them: to me that ground at Seventh Street is hallowed, my own Flanders field, connecting me to the community that formed me, and all the saints who now from their labors rest. The little sapling plunked in unforgiving clay of a small house built the year before my birth is now shaggy barked and craggy. The same wind that blew the poppies at Flanders rustles its silver branches yet. This tree. This earth. This ground. This life.

That tree and the author, 39 years later.