Names including my own have been switched in these stories.
I have always felt different than my family and my friends. I grew up in Traverse City, Michigan. My mother was from Traverse City, so her family was physically close to us. My father was from Akron, Ohio so my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were not close and I never knew them very well.
My mom’s family had grown up poor in Traverse City. Her mother, Mary Jane had raised six kids, while working as a nurse. Nursing was the family career. All my aunts and uncles, including my mom worked at Munson hospital. She had three other sisters, all within three years of age. Each one of her sisters had two daughters. They had married men from Michigan, who were not college educated, barely high school educated. I was the youngest of the cousins, except for my brother. Our mothers were often together, bringing us cousins together to play. We’d go out to Long Lake as our mother’s would spend the day covered in baby oil in their low sitting chairs, their feet never touching the water, the rest of us kids would swim in the water. We’d make up stories of mermaids, and sea serpents. It was our summer routine.
As I reach elementary school I started to realize that I was different. The other kids seemed shallow and mean. I would sit in class, watching the younger children play outside. I would eye on the lone first grader on the swings. I would feel bad and make sure that first grader got on the bus okay. I cared and I didn’t understand why others didn’t.
In the 2nd grade, I wrote a letter to Bill Clinton (who I still have of poster of in my house like most preteens have posters of boy bands). I wanted him to fix the problems at my school. The sad kids, the kids were beat up every day for being different (myself included.)
On summer days we weren’t at Duck Lake I would sit in the house reading stories about the holocaust or Martin Luther King Jr.. I was fascinated by the stories of the leader as a kid as he tried to right wrongs. My father often got annoyed with me curled up on the couch on a 75 degree day and would order me outside to play. Later he would find that I had stolen the key to my mom’s car, got her beach chair out of the trunk and sat in the middle of the yard with my book.
My cousins read books about boys and teenager romances, and my friends weren’t much different. I wanted to discuss the “I Have A Dream” speech or why Hitler was bad. One time when I was eight, I had saw a St. Jude’s hospital fundraiser on T.V.. I told my mom the next day that I was going to be a pediatric oncologist. Later, seeing Free Willy, I would dream to become a marine biologist and save the whales. I rarely had anyone to talk to and would retreat into my books.
As I got into high school, I had found a group of friends in my new high school, the private catholic high school in town. I was relieved to be away from the public schools and the people there. I was fed up completely with the shallowness. My friends at St. Francis didn’t get me either and I was often called eccentric. Eccentric was used instead of weird after I had thrown several fits about the term.
I knew that I was different. I believed there was something deep in me, internally in me that made me different from my family and my friends. I had wondered if I was adopted at times (though obviously I wasn’t) because I just wasn’t like anyone else around me.
By this time my father’s father and step-mother had moved to Chicago. He was excited to get my brother and me to see them as often as possible. My grandfather was college educated, an engineer from Mack Truck and Good Year. He had traveled all over the world, was a US patent holder. I had never known much about how my father had grown up, as he was an emotionally quiet man. So, these trips to Chicago were eye opening. My grandparents lived with my dad’s stepbrother, who was a world renowned rheumatologist. They had a huge house in the suburbs that was built by an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright.
My grandfather would regal us with stories about his life in Brooklyn, or his stories about college. He loved to tell the story of their trip through Africa. My step grandmother, Marion was a retired English teacher, and demanded the upmost of class from her grandchildren. We demonstrated perfect behavior, crossed our legs at the ankle and never used incorrect grammar. (Hopefully, her lessons are apparent in my papers.) Suddenly, this new closeness with my father’s family changed my view on things. There was a world beyond Traverse City, I had just never known how to find it.
On our trips to Chicago, we would go to the museums and aquariums. I felt like every moment in Chicago was a learning experience and would hate to leave my grandparents for the humdrum life in Traverse City. No matter how much I enjoyed this new view I was getting, I still didn’t see myself completely in them. My grandfather was smart, but he would good at building, good at making things. I didn’t have that.
After Marion died my grandfather moved back down to Florida. My parents bought the house he lived in so he could stay there to finish out his days. I was in college by now and had alienated myself from my mom’s family. I was constantly made fun of for my views, not so lovingly nicknamed Sally University and considered a self-righteous, bra burning democrat who’s dreams would lead to the dreaded black boyfriend and get me kidnapped by Arabs in the Middle East along with said boyfriend. Well, they weren’t far off from all that. I did live through a brush with Saudi Arabian border guards and I had a pagan boyfriend with pentagram tattoos. Unlike my family I didn’t think my life was something to look down on, but something to be enjoyed.
So, on breaks and holidays from college instead of going home to Traverse City, I would hop on a plane to Ft. Myers, Florida and spend time with my grandfather. Since Marion had died he was telling us more and more about his first wife and the mother of his children, Sydney. Sydney was an artist who envisioned art in everything she saw. Even though her and my grandfather were wealthy she could be made happy with a set of paints and a blank canvas.
Sydney was a humanitarian. In 1952 they had moved to Mason, MI. Mason in the fifties was a wonderful village for the wealthy and well to do. But Sydney had heard about a small Mexican community in the area that was underprivileged, poor and riddle with crime. Sydney took action soon after she heard about this minority in her town. Within weeks the Mexican enclave had “transformed from a ramshackle cluster of small, old houses into a nice area” my grandfather had written in his own memoirs. My mother had laughed reading that in the memoirs saying, “It’s kinda like you, when you went out to the Mexican workers camp in Grand Rapids and boycotted Taco Bell for not paying their workers enough.”
My mother was right. I was like her. Since, my grandfather and my major source of information about Sydney died in 2008 I have done everything I can to be like Sydney and it hasn’t been hard. I have loved my children fiercely, have gotten into art. I have admired my image of her, but I have yearned to feel her, to be where she was.
So, when my husband and I went with his friends from work to Cedar Point in Ohio I asked him to go by the house in Mason. I couldn’t wait until we left the amusement park, everyone was tired of hearing me complain about cold steel capitalism and how the money that amusement park made in a day could feed Ethiopia for a year. So, we headed out from Sandusky and headed up through Lansing towards Mason. I knew the house wouldn’t be hard to find. It is now a Michigan Landmark called the John Raynor house. Raynor was one the founders of the Mason Village and there is a tall green powder coded sign on the big green lawn with the history of the house.
We found the house easily, it set back from the road. It was brick framed by huge walnut trees. My grandfather had told me it was a Western Reserve, whatever that means. It was right in the village, on a block that was surrounded by other houses built in the 1880s. I slowly observed the house, and walked up to the sign. I snapped several pictures of the outside. There were two cars in the driveway so I snuck around the back of the house to carriage house, it was my grandfather’s workshop. He had made my father’s bed out there, amoung other things. Sydney had bought him a circular saw as a house warming gift when they bought the house in ’52. Suddenly the side door at the back of the house creaked open and an older couple came out, curious about my husband and I tramping through their yard. When I explained that my grandfather had lived in this house they let me in for a tour.
It was filled with antiques, with a huge living area with a stalactite ceiling. The stairs were walnut, winding up to the bedrooms upstairs. In the smallest bedroom, the one they use for their granddaughters there was a French style day bed, built into wall, with cabinets under for storage. An exact replica of the bed my grandfather made me in the Florida house. The bed I was looking at was the bed my father slept in as a toddler.
I have always believed that houses hold the spirits that lived there before. Seeing where Sydney lived was like seeing Sydney. I could feel her painting in the back room, gently scolding the boys to take their shoes off in the mudroom. I could feel her finding the lump under arm that ultimately killed her three years later. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel that I was different, or foreign from my family. I could her, could feel that I was a part of her, and I took after her.
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