Simple Pleasures: A Love Letter to My Grandchildren

Copyright © 2002 by Marilyn R. Moody.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I

The Big House

CHAPTER II

Mimi

CHAPTER III

Tootie and Henry

CHAPTER IV

The Neighborhood

CHAPTER V

Butchie

CHAPTER VI

Traveling

CHAPTER VII

Other Events

CHAPTER VIII

Donnie

CHAPTER IX

Bud

CHAPTER X

Sisters

CHAPTER XI

Other Relatives

CHAPTER XII

Playmates and Friends

CHAPTER XIII

The Big Trip

CHAPTER XIV

Moving From The Big House

CHAPTER XV

Lamartine Street

CHAPTER XVI

Your Grandma

NOTES

These stories are dedicated from the depth of my being to

Danielle (Dani) Stanton,

Nicholas McCarthy,

Tyler McCarthy,

Kaitlyn Burns,

Sabrina Schaeffer,

Shannon Schaeffer, and Ashley McCarthy

Each of you has warmed my heart

Other books by Marilyn R. Moody

Courage & Cancer A Breast Cancer Diary

A Journey from Cancer to Cure

Breast Cancer Sisters

Love & Laughter

The True Story of an Online Cancer Survivors

Support Group

Love, Fear & Other Things

That Cry Out in the Night

Moments Alone with Agoraphobia

Hummingbird Wings, Friendship &

Other Things

A Book of Sonoma Memories

FOREWORD

Connections and networks are words that are often associated with the last decade of the twentieth century. We all need connections and we all need networks. Sometimes we connect and network through friends we have made. In times of national crisis, such as war, our fellow citizens connect and we network together to reestablish peace. Music connects us. We all remember the hit songs of our younger days. And grandmothers connect us. I have read that in Lithuania, during the fifty years of Soviet occupation, grandmothers saved the traditions and culture of that country and that a statue should be erected in honor of their having done so. Marilyn Moody teaches us how to highlight connections.

It used to be that children had connections. They were connected to, and surrounded and embraced by, the loving circle of the many members of large extended families. Those of us who remember those times recall being told that perhaps we possessed old Uncle Joe’s sense of humor, Aunt Marie’s good looks, or a name that had been handed down through the family for generations.

We plugged into our connections and networked within our family. Grandparents baby-sat and told stories of childhoods. Aunts and uncles took us shopping, or taught us how to ride bicycles. Our cousins came to play. Most often they were our first friends. We learned about our families and developed a sense of belonging. Holidays were celebrated together and family traditions were preserved.

That’s how it was. Too often today’s children think grandparents are people who can be found at airports. In the terminals they patiently wait for their parents to point to people coming out of the jet-way entrance and say, There’s Grandma and Grandpa. After a few days, Grandma and Grandpa return to the airport, walk into the jet-way and disappear. The short-lived connection is unplugged.

Aunts, uncles, and cousins often are far away. Job relocation, divorce and remarriage all have an impact on children’s connections and networks.

This is a book about connections. Marilyn Moody lovingly provides them for all of her grandchildren through her stories to her oldest granddaughter, Dani. In her warm, conversational writing style, she does what grandmothers have always done. She gives Dani a family history, delivering a surprise or two along the way. She takes Dani back to Boston and introduces to her, Marilyn’s own grandparents, parents and brothers and sister. Through the pages of this book she lets Dani see how she and her family worked and played in those glorious years after World War II when the country was going full steam ahead.

This book is also about the Eisenhower years, the era of the Korean War, and the time television sets were being plugged into living rooms across the country. Marilyn Moody spent those years in Boston, Massachusetts. She reconnects us to that time and that city. Readers who grew up in and around metropolitan Boston will delight in her recollections of shopping on Washington Street in Filenes’ basement, the teen-aged fashion panel at Jordan Marsh, riding the MTA, and swimming in the Charles River. Descriptions of family outings to Nantasket Beach, Paragon Park, summer vacations at Lake Whalom, and driving along the Mohawk Trail stir long forgotten memories of those vacation spots.

Readers, who did not grow up in The Hub as Boston has often been called, will connect with the author’s references to Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. It was a time when crooners, folk singers and rockers all played a vital part in our popular music. How astonishing that Marilyn Moody should grow up riding the MTA, made famous in a song by the Kingston Trio, and then move to Southern California, the site of Jan and Dean of surf music fame. But, this only serves to show how connections can be maintained despite separations of time and distance.

This book captures the simple pleasures of family and family life and hands them, like the treasured possessions that they are, to the newest members of the family. It also captures the spirit of a dynamic and energized America. Marilyn Moody intertwines her own family history with that of our country’s. Perhaps we should all take a cue from her and work to keep our connections and networks intact for family members yet to come.

by Louise Giacoppe®

March 1995

Dear Dani,

I’m writing this letter to you filled with stories I want you to know. Since your mom and dad separated you and I don’t get to visit as often as we used to. There are times when I feel that you are missing out on tales and events from your dad’s side of your family.

You are my first grandchild. Your birth caused me to know how it feels to be a grandmother. I love the feelings this new role has brought into my life. Dani, I thank you.

When the nurse first put you in my arms, happy tears flowed down my cheeks. My heart swelled with my love for you. I instantly understood the meaning of unconditional love. See little one? That was only the beginning of how much you have given to me.

In the autumn you will start kindergarten. After that I know the years will slip by even more quickly. I want to record some stories for you so you will grow up knowing your roots. I want to introduce you to family members that are long gone, or tell you things that you might not otherwise hear.

There are so many strange stories—some may seem sort of twisted. I’m not even sure where to begin. Some stories are happy ones and some are sad. Some are quite ordinary. It will be years before you can read and comprehend what I’m writing here, but I’d like to have this record waiting for you.

I guess I will just start, and jump around as memories pop into my head. You may need to adjust some as the thoughts come to me.

I love you and your younger cousins very much.

Grandma

CHAPTER I

The Big House

One of my first memories was from my second year. It must have seemed a momentous occasion even then. It was our move to the Big House in Boston. I can still see myself jumping up and down on my parents’ full-sized bed. It had been temporarily set up in the downstairs dining room. I had on pajamas, the kind with feet, and I had a full head of very curly hair. As I jumped up and down, with joy and excitement, I could see my reflection in the windows. My hair was flying and I was soaring.

It must have been a tough decision for your great-grandparents, Tootie and Henry, to make regarding the purchase of that house. It was (in my eyes anyway) of mansion size proportions. It had lots of land, especially considering it was located in the city of Boston. I’d heard that they used my Uncle Frank’s Veterans’ benefits in order to qualify for its purchase. He was a bachelor and had no desire to be a homeowner. To this day I’m still amazed that my father Henry, a mechanic with a meager income, could become the owner of such a grand house.

I have a picture of the Big House, which I want to show you some day. I can’t stress enough how I am in awe of how that grand house came to be a part of our family. The Big House has long since been torn down. I went back in the early 1970’s and it was just an empty lot with a long walkway(1).

Dani, you would have loved playing in the Big House. It was meant for children and good times. There was an old-fashioned wooden banister on the staircase from the second to the first floors.

I never outgrew the urge to hop on it and ride down. You know—if it was still there—even now—I’d have to take a ride on it.

We lived there for ten years, and our third and fourth floors went through many transformations during that period. The two floors upstairs were an apartment, separate and apart from our living quarters, even though we were conveniently connected.

When we moved into the first and second floors a family of elderly persons occupied the floors above us. I don’t remember too much about them except that they were old and that they were always very nice to me.

One of the memories I have of them is that they had a large piano. On their moving day I stood at the second floor window of our parlor to watch a most wondrous sight. Down came that piano as if from the sky. It was wrapped in ropes and was being lowered to the front yard below. What a job that must have been for the movers.

After they moved out my grandmother, Mimi, and my grandfather, Rooster, moved into the rooms on the third floor. My two oldest brothers, your great uncles Bud and Donnie, were in their teens. They moved into the two large bedrooms on the fourth floor.

Once during those early years my dad decided to check out the attic. Unbeknownst to me there was a crawl hole opening at the very top of the staircase. One day I was going upstairs to be nosey around my big brothers. Henry took that particular moment to try on an old, black, top hat that he’d discovered in the attic. He popped his head out through the opening in the wall, which looked down upon the staircase, and shouted, Boo. I don’t think that I wet my pants, but I do know I flew—screaming down the three flights of stairs and into the safety of my mother’s arms. It took lots of comforting and convincing on her part to get me to calm down and to realize that the bogeyman was just my dad. It took a very long time for me to get up the courage to visit my big brothers’ rooms again too.

* * *

We owned only half of the Big House. There were two families living next door to us. Well, there was one family with grown-up children on the two top floors, and one old maid on the first two floors. When I say old—in the eyes of a young child anyway—she seemed like she was ancient. She passed away while we were living there and she was in her nineties when she died. I loved that lady, Miss Donovan, and used any opportunity to visit with her.

Her apartment was filled with antiques. It was like a treasure chest. It was a young girl’s playground. Miss Donovan let me spend hours with her at her round, oak table pouring over buttons and scarves and all kinds of great trinkets and mementos. We did this by the light of a real Tiffany lamp. I was never bored because her apartment seemed like a living museum. It was real. Miss Donovan didn’t just do her decorating with antiques because they were fashionable like we decorate homes today. Those possessions were originals from her family. That was the only decor she’d ever known.

She had old photographs to pore over and each came with a story. I would sit enchanted and captivated for hours as she talked about her past. She left all of her land, possessions and money to the Catholic Church in Boston.

After she died my family went to another old house she had owned. She’d told me stories about her other home over the years. It was where she had grown-up, in the countryside of New Hampshire. We went there because Henry was helping her attorneys with the will. I remember that house vividly too.

Even though it had stood empty for a number of years, it was still beautiful. It sat down and off of a dirt road, and there were no other houses in sight. It had white clapboards on the exterior and inside were tiny rooms smelling musty from disuse. Actually, it sat in a large, overgrown field. I wish I were an artist so I could paint the picture it leaves in my mind.

The reason I remember her little house is because when my father and I made our way down its rickety, old steps to the basement, we encountered a porcupine that had claimed squatter’s rights. Surprisingly, I wasn’t afraid of him. Instead I was fascinated with his beautiful quills.

* * *

When Mimi and Rooster moved into the third floor apartment the real fun in the Big House began. My grandparents were then living just one staircase away.

Many nights I’d make plans for a stay-over in their extra bedroom that had a window looking out onto our street. But, my mother knew me too well. I’d miss my own bed, and so the door between our two homes would be left unlatched. I’d start out the night in one bed, and by morning I’d be in another—the one in my own bedroom downstairs.

Mimi used the large dining room in their apartment for her bedroom. Rooster had the more private bedroom off of the kitchen. He went to bed early because of his job. Also the room that was his had a window that overlooked our side yard and it was perfect for his need to crow. Yes, he was a very sane man. He just liked to open the window, stick his head out and crow at the top of his lungs. (I bet your own grandpas wouldn’t be caught crowing out their bedroom windows.)

On Saturday nights I could often be found on top of Mimi’s big, old-fashioned bed. It was so high off of the floor that my skinny, short legs would have a struggle to climb up onto it.

We’d play regular checkers and sometimes Chinese checkers too. Mimi would also give me pennies for combing out her soft, white hair. She was definitely a lady who knew