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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
December 31, 2006
Published as Family History
in a Gramma Letter dated December 30, 1997.
© 1997 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Leaf in Fir, 1979
© 1979 by Bud Grossmann
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SKI STICKS
Cooper Spur, Mt. Hood, Oregon
Tuesday, December 30, 1997
Dear Gramma,
“We used to go up to the mountains,” my friend, Mary Elizabeth Wheeler Carlmark reminisced, when I phoned her at her Honolulu home on Christmas Day. Mary Liz was thinking back something like eighty years, to the days of her Oregon girlhood. (This coming May, I do believe, Mary Liz will turn 87.) “We would stay out all day in the snow. When we skied, we didn’t have sticks to push us along or keep us standing up—now that was interesting, let me tell you! Years later, in Alaska, I skied again, but I had sticks then, and it was easier.”
No “sticks”—imagine that! To prompt those memories, I had mentioned my family would be spending these last few days of 1997 far up on Mt. Hood, snug in a cabin in the evenings but freezing our Hawaiian suntans off on the snowy slopes in the daytime. (On New Year’s Day we’ll be back in Portland, and then we’ll wing our way home to the Islands.)
No “sticks.” Mary Liz has had her props pulled out from under her a few times in 1997, but she keeps getting up and moving forward again. Early in March, her husband Carl passed away, leaving her alone after more than sixty good years of marriage. At the end of the same month, in church on Easter Sunday, Mary Liz snagged a heel on an electrical extension cord and went down hard. Cracked her pelvis and lost about three months of the year while the bone was mending.
I say she “lost” three months, and that’s just about what happened—her doctors prescribed painkillers that blanketed her in a fog and changed her into someone her friends and family could not always recognize. Matter of fact, the poor woman sometimes could hardly recognize herself. “Go away, Bud,” she once told me when I came by for a visit. “I am not myself. I must be somebody else ... and I don’t know exactly who. Just, please, go away and leave me alone.”
Eventually, though, the brittle bone healed. Mary Liz wasn’t turning any cartwheels across the living room rug, but she did resume her routine of swimming laps at the YMCA pool. She even dusted off the cobwebs from her Toyota station wagon, got behind the wheel, and herded the car out into traffic just like old times. Along about Thanksgiving Day, some of us younger worrywarts (so she might call us) breathed a sigh of relief when our dear friend at last taped a “For Sale” sign in the window of the car and promised she wouldn’t go shopping for a ’98 model.
I wish I could report that Mary Liz is as vigorous at year’s end as she was at its start. I don’t think I can say that. I believe I can confirm, though, that she has her ski poles in place at this time, and she is gliding on into 1998 with determination and good cheer. We, Mary Liz’s friends and family, will be beside her all the way, ever eager to discover what each new day may bring.
♦
To you, sweet Grandma Grossmann, I wish the scent of evergreens and the sparkle of sunlight on fresh snow. May wonderful memories warm you as you crest the hill of one year and ski on into the next.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! May God bless you in 1998.
Love,
Buddy
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