2001-05-18 - 11:15 p.m.

The Living Years

Harry and I are still sorting through Dad's affairs, but we've reached a sort of impasse. There's not really much more we can accomplish until we get the copies of the death certificates from the funeral home. We're probably not going to see those until Monday Afternoon, so there is not much more we can do.

As I've mentioned before, Harry and I are history buffs, him much more than me. Therefore he suggested that the two of us go visit the Frown Town Historical Society, which was housed in a large Victorian House in the older part of town, near the river.

By the way, when I say older, I mean OLDER. Many of the houses there were built in the early 1800s or even the mid-1700s. On the same street where the Historical Society is there is a house built in 1740 that George Washington slept in when he was passing through Frown Town, many, many years ago.

We took a tour of the house with a guide - it took about an hour. It was actually pretty interesting and it gave an idea of what life around here was like about 175 years ago.

Of course, I should point out that we found out what life was like for RICH people 175 years go. Most of the things we saw were possessions of the well-to-do, and many of them had been donated by leading families of this area.

Things must have been rather grim back then, and there were many reminders of death among the various artifacts. Hung on the wall was a sampler stitched by a 10 year old girl, lamenting her little sister who was "buried in the dust." The facts were that children born in the early 1800s had about a one in three chance of making it to adulthood, maybe even less.

One of the oddest items we saw there was in the parlor, near the fireplace. It was called a "complexion screen." It was a wooden board, about 1 1/2 feet square, that was rigged on a pole so you could raise and lower it. It was decorated with some sort of floral fabric. It was for shielding ladies' faces from the heat of a fire when they were sitting near it, trying to get warm.

Back then smallpox was quite common, and while people survived it, the disease often left the sufferers' faces badly scarred, much worse than acne. Well-to-do ladies would have their servants put on heavy wax make-up to hide the scars and they would often leave it on for days. The screen was to keep the wax on their faces from melting while they sat near the fire.

There was also a creepy haunted item in the house, too.

The tour took us into this gloomy little room off of one of the bedrooms, and in it was a cradle. What was creepy about it was the cradle was grown-man sized.

One of the local rich people was very sick with gout and so lost the use of his legs. A woodworker made the cradle for him, and the servants used to carry him around in it, for example taking him out to enjoy the sunshine by the river. The old man couldn't go to sleep unless someone rocked the cradle.

Well, I've witnessed someone going through their second babyhood, but I've never seen such a stark representation of it before.

There was a spooky legend that went with this creepy item. Apparently the cradle rocks by itself when something tragic has happened to one of the family members. It happened once during the Civil War when one of the uncles was killed in a battle, and again around 1900 when a child drowned in the local creek.

I don't know if I'd want to keep such an eerie memento around the house, would you?

Anyway, it was an interesting way to spend an hour or so. It's odd that I'd never been there before, especially since I lived only three blocks away from the Historical Society for about 10 years.

I live a good deal farther away from it now, in fact Harry drove us there in his car. Generally while he's been up here we've been using his car because my somewhat elderly vehicle has been a little unreliable of late, and his car has some conveniences mine doesn't - like air conditioning and a CD player.

Harry spends a lot of time in his car, and it shows. There's all sorts of paraphernalia lying about, like educational tapes and several bags full of music CDs. From looking in the bags it's plain that Harry's musical tastes have barely moved an inch in the last 20 years. There was lots of Who and Genesis, Phil Collins and so on. A couple of the more recent albums were Country music.

Most annoyingly he had one of my least favorite songs on the CD player, on repeat - "Living Years" by Mike and The Mechanics. I didn't like it when it was a hit 12 years ago, and I like it even less now. It's the sort of sentimental crap I can't stand. Of course the song is full of all sorts of irony now. I have no idea why Harry was listening to it - it utterly does not apply to our current situation.

The gist of the song, as I remember it, is a son is lamenting that he never got a chance to tell his father how he really felt while the old man was alive. What's ironic is that when this song was #1 in the Spring of 1989 it was probably already too late for us to have any meaningful conversations with our father. Also, the son in the song wants to tell his father how much he loves him, while I would more be likely to tell him how angry and disappointed I am.

If I had the opportunity.

Which I don't.