Shirley You Jest!

As I have mentioned in another post, my mother passed away last year. Her name was Shirley. In the last couple of years before she passed I managed to uncover some of the history behind her name.

The basic meaning of her name is "from Shirley, England." Boooooorrrrrrrrring! Oh, but there is so much more to this story than that. To get a bit more concrete than that, it is supposed to mean "bright glade" or "place of hope." Shirley was originally a man's name and a surname.

Mum always struggled to be hopeful in the face of some pretty tall odds - two failed marriages, lifelong health issues, rape, a baby out of wedlock, and dealing with me and my issues. She tried to live up to the name given to her.

Mum loved literature, dabbled with being a writer, a dream that she passed along to me. I think it was in the genes. I don't remember her doing much writing when I was little, but I grew up in a household lined with hundreds of books. Mum, Dad, and I were all avid readers.

She was pleased when I discovered the history behind how she came to be named Shirley. Back in 1849 Charlotte Bronte (author of Jane Eyre) published a book entitled "Shirley." Going against convention, Bronte had given her strong female character a man's name. While the book is all but forgotten by most people these days, it was a best seller back then and forever changed the gender association of the name.
Lovers of the book began to name their girls Shirley instead of their boys.

The association between my mother and the literary Shirley does not stop there. The Shirley in the book is concerned for the poor and the working class during an economic depression following the end of the Napoleonic wars. She becomes involved, after a fashion, in the dealings of labor and the rights of workers. My Shirley, after her divorce from my father and return to the workforce, became first a union steward and later the president of her union's local.

Mum was impressed with the likeness and I gave her a copy of the book for Christmas a couple of years ago. I don't think she ever had the chance to read it. It now sits in my stack of books to be read. I will one day get to it and remember Mum with every word.

In a twist of fate she named her daughter (me) with a name that also used to be a man's name. If you don't believe me, go back and read Little Women. Back in the day Laurie was short for Laurence.

Her name also became a part of one of the most famous running jokes in any movie. In the movie Airplane people say to Leslie Nielsen's character "surely you jest!" He would look at them with a deadpan face and reply, "No. And please don't call me Shirley." Leslie is another name that is slowly making the transition from male to female.

Never Forget -- Memories of the Holocaust

Last night I was watching yet another documentary of survivors remembering their experiences during the Holocaust. I know that there are people who are tired of the subject and others who don't believe that it ever happened.

Trust me, it happened. How do I know? Because I am one of the other kind of Holocaust "survivor."

Say WHAT?

You read me. I am a Holocaust survivor. Okay, technically I died in the mud of a prison camp in Poland. I was then reincarnated into this life time. I am not alone. There are many of us out here around the world. Okay, to understand my story, it helps if your believe in reincarnation. Even if you don't you are likely to be entertained.

During World War II my mother was in her formative teen years. As she eventually learned of what had happened to the Jews she wished with all her heart that she could help at least one of these people. She got her wish years later, but hardly as she would ever have expected.

She started by marrying my father, a man who, though all Scandinavian, looked VERY Jewish. During WWII he had been in the army and faced anti-Jewish bigotry himself in the form of another soldier who hated him with a vengeance and went out of his way to be mean to my father. Then one day the guy found out that Dad's last name was Olson. He then apologized to my dad adding "I thought you were Jewish." Because of that Dad could hardly accept any apology.

It was to these two people I was born. Perhaps my soul had chosen these people in part because of these issues. I could be a baffling little kid, too. When I was in pre-school I would demand that my mother explain to me why we weren't Jewish. I would also seek out Jewish children to befriend in the early years of grade school. That was not an easy task back then since there were almost no Jews in Boulder, Colorado at the time. They had to drive to Denver to go to Temple. I still managed somehow.

As I got older I would have dreams I could not explain. In them I would often be wearing a green woolen coat with a yellow star on the breast. I could dream in fluent German, though when I studied it in school I was crap at it while awake. When I finally learned of the Holocaust I was shocked by the accuracy of my dreams.

As an adult I entered psychotherapy to deal with many of the issues that were turning my life upside down. After awhile I ended up asking my therapist if she could recommend a past-life regression therapist after having read about how successful it was and believing that I had been in the Holocaust. It turned out that she was able to do this kind of therapy. We began the next week.

The memories she brought up in me. I now remember at least the basics of more than a dozen lives from the past. Those lives did include an astonishing and, at times, horrifying life under Nazi rule. When we started this therapy I had been suffering from bulimia. As soon as we started that problem vanished, never to reappear.

I won't go into all of the details of the memories, that would take ages, and kind of defeat the purpose of the novel I am writing based on these regressions.

During these years I took on obsessively reading biographies and autobiographies of survivors. I was amazed at what strong and resilient people these folks were, despite still carrying obvious emotional and sometimes physical scars from their experiences. My therapist's office was just a couple of doors down from a large bookstore and if there was time before my appointment I would stop and shop.

One evening I was looking over the books for a new autobiography and there wasn't much of a selection. I finally settled on a slim volume and I started to walk away from the shelves, not terribly happy with my choice. All of a sudden, at about three feet away, I stopped, turned around, walked back and stuck out my hand. Beneath it I found a book I had somehow overlooked. It was Beyond the Ashes: Cases of Reincarnation from the Holocaust by Yonasson Gershom.

I couldn't believe my eyes. It was my subject. I dropped the other book back on the shelf and grabbed this one. It was like I was having some sort of a religious experience.

In that book I discovered that not only was I not alone, I was also right in line with the statistical norm of those who reported these memories and certain behaviors. Rabbi Gershom had noted that most of the people telling him about their experiences were baby boomers and had baffled their parents with unusual questions and/or behavior as children. That was me.

The people who had survived the Holocaust alive are dwindling as the years go by. Many of them have left their stories for us, but we still run the risk of forgetting one of the most regrettable and horrifying events in history. The duty of remembering is falling to those who remember in a different way.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~ George Santayana

Kilts and Kin

Okay, men, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Women find a man in a kilt very sexy. I don't

know exactly why, but we do. It can't be the knees really, because shorts don't do it so much.

It could be that we hope for a windy day, but since you are all built with pretty much the same equipment, I don't think that this reasoning holds up either.

My favorite reasoning gets into Scotsmen and Irishmen being secure enough in their manhood to be able to wear a skirt, but I've had to rethink that when you consider that men have been wearing kilts far longer than women have been wearing short skirts.

Now I am wondering if it isn't some sort of cell memory handed down from our fore-mothers and the men they fell in love with centuries ago. That or past-life memories we harbor of men we loved in a previous existence. I don't know

What I do know is that I can go to the Scottish/Irish Highland Games in Estes Park, Colorado each September and sit and watch the caber toss for hours without realizing that I am actually watching SPORTS. Okay, men hurling telephone poles isn't exactly the sort of sport that saturates ESPN and there is definitely something overtly phallic about the event, but it is still sports. I rarely choose a single man to cheer for. I seem to just sit and enjoy the view (and I'm not talking about the mountains, which ARE fantastic).

My friend Randi would be sitting right beside me and noting the same thing, trying to hold back the drool and laughing at herself.

Randi doesn't know if she has any Celtic blood, but I know I do. I am descended of the Davidson clan in Scotland. For anyone who really knows me, it should come as no surprise that the Davidson lands are in Glen Ness, not far from Loch Ness. For anyone who is reading the Outlander book series by Diana Gabaldon, the Davidsons were/are neighbors of the Frasers and McKenzies. For anyone who isn't reading the series, I highly recommend it.

I do not possess a kilt in clan tartan. Instead I have a modest woolen scarf. The tartan strongly resembles the more popular Black Watch tartan. While wearing it at the Games I found that Davidsons and those from the Black Watch frequently mistake each other for clansmen, which can prove quite amusing. A Black Watch gentleman and I stopped short once and sized one another up. Then we exchanged clans, laughed, and moved on.

While I'm confessing my drooling attraction to men in kilts, I may as well make one other confession -- I LOVE bagpipe music. Yeah. I never claimed to be sane.

The Depression

Okay, I had originally planned to write about mental depression, but it was too depressing. So I thought I would write about the Great Depression, which is slightly less depressing. It's a matter of degrees.

The Depression was a terrible time in this country, but it was not just about the economy even though that is what most people focus on. It was also a time of severe drought and one of the biggest man-made ecological disasters in history. Good times.

WHAT?!?

Allow me to digress. There was so much difficulty in the world that ordinary people became heroes. They weren't jumping over buildings or stopping trains with their bare hands, but they were out there finding ways to support their families when there didn't seem to be a way. Times like that often brought out the best in people.

My mother was born just before the stock market crashed in 1929. It was the family joke that it was this was the catalyst that started the chain of events that led to the crash. Yep. It was all her fault. So she was raised in that time of lack and want, and it affected her for the rest of her life.

Before she passed away, Mum had been writing a memoir about this time in history and the way families were drawn together. It is about the simple life that was lived during these times. She died before she finished the book. I have it on disk, but I have not yet felt like facing it yet. Someday I hope to finish it for her.

She told me many of the stories of growing up in that day and age. She would come home from school, grab a pickle out of the fridge, and go lie on the living room floor with her head under the radio while she listened to her favorite kids' shows. It was what kids did back then before computers and television.

My grandmother was the local busybody. This was not for the gossip value though. She would stand at the window as children would walk to and from school and make notes on who was missing shoes or warm coats. Then she would contact churches and the Ladies Aid Society to find these items for the family. In addition to taking care of her own family, she did her best to help other families as well.

Many women did what they had to for their families. In many cases they had to find ways to feed their families with little or no income. They would pickle green tumbleweeds and purslane. Purslane is a common weed -- almost as common as the dandelions. They would also pick the tender young leaves of dandelions to cook for a nutritious side dish.

My father and his brother hunted small game such as squirrels and pigeons to help their mother put food on the table. Their father suffered from tuberculosis and was often away in a sanitarium. When he was home he was a barber during a time when most people chose to cut their hair at home to save money. There were times when he was lucky to make 50 cents a day to support a family of 7.

When the collars or cuffs on a man's shirt became worn and threadbare his wife would remove them, turn them around and sew them back on to extend the life of the shirt. When garments were completely worn out my grandmother would remove buttons, hooks and eyes, and zippers so that they could be used to make the next outfit.

My grandfather was a banker in a small bank -- one of the few to not close its doors in the panic after the stock market crash. He made sure that he remained present in the family and kept a critical eye on the family finances to make sure that the kids always had what they needed. This was especially important for my mother who was sick with allergies and asthma a great deal of the time and had managed to contract a serious bladder infection during these years. Back then no one had health insurance and so you had to be prepared to pay everything out-of-pocket.

Men who lost their livelihoods during this time suffered most of all. Jobs were not just how they supported their families, it was a definition of who they were as a person. Some managed to reinvent themselves and create new jobs and identities. Others found different ways to support their families. Doing either took a great deal of inner strength.

It was a time when taking any sort of charity or perceived hand out was considered a failure. Even taking a job with one of the many public works projects going on at the time was seen by some men as a failure. It meant giving up on their chosen path in life and resorting to accepting some sort of help from outside. These men were heroes for doing what had to be done. They showed up every day, often doing things they were ill-suited to do, to make sure their families survived.

There were no social safety nets back then. When men lost their jobs the family income generally ended. There was no welfare. There were no food stamps. There were no food pantries to give food to the needy. Many of these programs grew out of what happened to people during the depression.

To get by one of the families in my mother's neighborhood took advantage of the drought. As the drought dried out the lakes of Minnesota they would collect turtles and sell them to the big hotels in Minneapolis for soup. It didn't make them rich, but they were able to survive.

Many of us today spend some time living a modern version of the Depression whether it is due to unemployment, being underpaid, or having amassed a large amount of debt. This is when ramen noodles become a mainstay of the diet.

A friend of mine and I were discussing the things we did to get by when we faced times like these -- from eating cheap mac and cheese to cutting up worn out sheets to use instead of toilet paper. I worked part-time cleaning motel rooms while job hunting once and saved the used bars of soap to grate into soap powder to wash clothes and dishes. Fortunately times are better now.

It's a good thing that things are better now. I can't handle the thought of one more bite of ramen noodles in this lifetime.