Dogs I Have Loved (Canine, not Human...)

Some friends roped me into attending a fundraiser to raise awareness of "black dog syndrome," i.e., the lower adoption rate for black dogs (and cats).  Huh?  What weird form of animal adoption racism is this, and how have I never heard of it?  Well, one of the tips for combating the syndrome is to talk about how wonderful and beautiful black dogs are.  I am happy to do my part.

Our first family dog was a splendid black and brown Gordon Setter named Pepper; she was my father's prize birdhunting dog and lies faithfully at his feet in the family photo I posted a while back.  She was equally devoted to my brother and me, functioning as a sort of canine second mother, and would let my brother lie with his head on her stomach when we watched TV in the den. 

After Pepper came a gorgeous though neurotic golden retriever.  His name was Abbey--short for Duke of Abbey--but this caused a lot of gender confusion.  Abbey was meant to be the pick of the litter, a designation which caused much mirth in our household whenever he showed a rather startling lack of brains and decorum.  (Pretty much any time he was actively breathing.)  In this blurry old Polaroid photo (sorry), I am pouting because Abbey would not cooperate with the costume we put together for a parade.  Mom and I thought it would be cute if I dressed up in my riding outfit and put a stuffed fox, also in a riding outfit, on Abbey.  He disagreed and felt that jumping around out of control would have more impact on the judges.  We didn't win the costume prize.

So you see? Go for the smart, soulful brunettes over the shallow, ditzy blondes. (I'm just speaking of canine adoptions here, of course.)

Hidden Truths and Tea Parties

It’s not easy to make me smile when I’m waiting for the (chronically late and overcrowded) bus early on a winter morning. But today the park looked especially beautiful with a light snow falling, and then I spied this cheerful fellow peeping at me from behind the Kennison memorial.

All of Lincoln Park used to be a cemetery. My snowman friend is guarding the alleged final resting place of one David Kennison, who duped the good citizens of Chicago into believing that he was the oldest living survivor of the original tea party—the one in Boston. (Whenever I see headlines about tea parties now, I get all excited for a minute, thinking they mean the kind featuring tiny cucumber sandwiches … and then I see that politics are the only thing on the menu. No thank you.)

Last year an artist named Pamela Bannos added a sign behind the Kennison memorial as part of her “Hidden Truths: The Chicago City Cemetery and Lincoln Park” project. She reveals that Kennison was a con artist; he would have been too young to have dumped tea into Boston Harbor or fought with Washington, and  he likely died at 85, not the 115 years he claimed. These discrepancies didn’t stop the nice ladies of the Daughters of the American Revolution from making Kennison a hero, and more recently his cause was taken up by the Tax Reform Action Coalition, who gathered at the Lincoln Park memorial a few years back.

Perhaps we can all sit down for a nice cup of tea to share Kennison stories. (But remember, no politics in polite company!)

In which I meet my dream man... in a Dick Francis novel

Megan Smith was kind enough to link to my post about Dick Francis in her much more thorough and interesting piece about the late thriller writer on the Blog Her site.  I particularly like the comment she makes about Reflex, my favorite book: "...the main character, Philip Nore, liked women. Not just loved women, had sex with women, or was raised by a woman -- he liked women. That theme carried through many of Francis' novels."

Quite true.  As I've mentioned, I started reading Francis at a young age.  His heroes, physically tough men with surprisingly tender hearts who were committed to fair play in an ugly and corrupt world, made quite an impression on me.  I liked the way they talked to and romanced women... even if I thought the sex bits were kind of gross.

By the way, I stocked up on Francis books whenever my father took my brother and me to the library--Dad had to check out the novels for me since they were marked "A" for Adult, due to those aforementioned love scenes, which were really quite tame.  Afterwards we would head out for pizza.  The waitresses at our favorite restaurant could not get over the spectacle of three otherwise nice people reading and ignoring each other while waiting for dinner, but we all thought it was grand.  (Apologies to the Mariemont library for the grease stains!)

The Provinical Lady in America

Is there anything better than a book in the bath on a cold winter's night? (Wait... don't answer that.)

Anyway. Since Helen Fielding appears to have closed up shop, with no more installments of Bridget Jones's Diary in newspapers or bookstores, I've returned to her literary predecessor. The Provincial Lady is an English wife and mother who has a sideline career as a writer. She is the creation of E.M. Delafield, a pseudonym used by Elizabeth Monica Dashwood. The diaries are a thinly veiled account of the author's life, and balance out Delafield's more serious autobiographical novels such as Consequences.

The Provincial Lady's adventures take place between the two World Wars and are written in first-person form using much the same comic shorthand and self-deprecating humor later adopted by Fielding for her wildly funny and popular heroine. In the volume I just finished, The Provincial Lady in America (1934), the narrator is sent across the pond to promote her newest work. She neatly summarizes my city in a few lines:

Chicago strikes me as full of beautiful buildings and cannot imagine why nobody ever says anything about this aspect of it. Do not like to ask anything about gangsters, and see no signs of their activities, but hope these may be revealed later, otherwise children will be seriously disappointed.

A page or so later she writes:

Am beginning to feel slightly dazed--cocktails have undoubtedly contributed to this--but gratified beyond description at so much attention and kindness, and have hazy idea of writing letter home to explain that I am evidently of much greater importance than any of us has ever realized.

Doesn't that sound just like Bridget's signature line about being "v. busy and important"?

In Memorium: Dick Francis

My people love murder mysteries, horses, dogs and everything else that goes with country life.  (Meaning English country, not Britney Spears driving-with-baby-on-the-lap kind of country, y'all.  Shudder.)

Dick Francis, the steeplechase jockey turned writer who died on Sunday at the age of 89, had a special place on the (slightly moldy) bookshelf of every Waspy vacation cottage.  At one point I believe four generations of my father's family were reading Francis novels during our holidays on Florida's Sanibel Island: my great-grandmother, great-aunt, father and a very young me.  I was a precocious reader.  One summer vacation, when I was sunburned and bored, Dad tossed a thick volume over to me and said, "Here, read this--it has horses in it.  You'll like it."  The book was the now out of print Three To Show, a trilogy of Francis's best early mysteries, and I was instantly enthralled, caught up in the world of intrigue among the racing set.

I was a faithful Francis reader for many years after that.  I even risked the scorn of my eminent literature professor at Sarah Lawrence when I meekly confessed that I had to skip out on a conference so I could hop the train into Manhattan, where Francis was signing his latest novel at Brentano's.  (For those of you too young to remember, this was a bookstore back before the law was passed that we could only have Borders and Barnes & Noble.)  The bookstore minions had us put our dedication requests on a sticky note, which was then handed to the great author, so he wouldn't have to talk to everyone.  But when it was my turn, Francis studied the note and then looked up at me, asking, "Are you Cas?"  I choked out a shy response.  "No, he's my father, but I love your books too!"  I was rewarded with a smile and a hint of a wink.

What a charming man.  He will be dearly missed.

Finders, Keepers...

I've been snapping up Tailored Woman items on eBay lately.  One of my friends theorizes that so many items are coming on the market because of the down economy.  I know that I will start having to sell some of my closet shortly to pay for all of these new acquisitions, which include leopard print pumps, a pink satin dress, and a navy leather purse that is very Kelly bag-esque.  I've noted that some sellers are checking my blog for information on the store, then including it in their sales descriptions.  I'm only too glad to help!  (Though they are preaching to the choir, since I'll likely be the one buying the items.  It's all very 'meta' or self-referential or whatever the term is.)

A while back I purchased these original illustrations from the Tailored Woman's New York Times and Sunday Tribune advertisements.  The illustrator was Naomi Shapin and the ads appeared sometime in the 1960s.  This rather grand lady reminds me of Patricia Neal's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, sweeping into the apartment of her kept man, the gorgeous young George Peppard, with a cry of, "Dahhling...!"

(Not that I would ever think of buying a young man on eBay or anywhere else, mind you...)

Special Valentine's Day Edition

Here are two Valentines from my grandmother's postcard collection.  (See, it wasn't always just a Hallmark holiday!)  The one below with the burglar cupid on it reads, "CHC, 1912" on the back, so it was given to my grandmother, Caroline How Collier, when she was two years old.   

As for my heart, well, I've always identified with this quote by some obscure French guy named Proust:

Pleasure is like photography.  What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

That used to be from a book called Remembrance of Things Passed, but it's now from a book called In Search of Lost Time.  (I rather like the first title--taken from a Shakespeare sonnet--but the new title is a more accurate translation from the French and therefore more correct in literary circles.  Yawn.)

Nice house, but I'd rather have the $70 Million...

I've been sorting through my grandmother's collection of old postcards and I found this one of The Homestead in Blairstown, New Jersey.  As I mentioned in a previous post, this was the creaky old mansion my great-great-grandparents, John D. and Melissa Gregory Vail, shared with their cousin, robber baron John Insley Blair. 

I once sat next to a woman on a plane who was from Blairstown, and when I mentioned the family connection, she said, "We don't think too highly of Blair.  He foreclosed on most of the townspeople's farms to build his railroad."

(Ah. So that would explain the "robber" part of robber baron.  But did I mention that we didn't get the money?)

Our Cousin Obama

My earliest documented Puritan ancestor, Thomas Blossom, was a farmer from a Cambridgeshire village called Great Shelford. He was presumably not a well-educated man, though some—including the amateur genealogists in my family--have tried to argue that his elegant letters to William Bradford prove him to be a Cambridge graduate. (Meaning what, exactly?  That Oxford didn't teach a course on etiquette?)

Blossom fled with a group of other Pilgrims to Holland.  He and his family then tried to sail to Plymouth on the Speedwell, the Mayflower companion ship you never read about in school... because it leaked, and had to turn back.  Twice.  Blossom has enjoyed a surge in Google search rankings of late, thanks to revelations that Barack Obama is a descendant. Upon learning this I sent out emails with the subject line “Our Cousin Obama” to various bemused family members.

I sent no emails advertising the fact that George W. Bush is also our cousin, through the same line. Even Republicans won’t claim him anymore.  (Interestingly, we all share kinship through Blossom with Wild Bill Hickok, another rootin’ tootin’ cowboy, as well.)

What Growing Up Wasp Taught Me About... Growing Up Wasp

I've been reading a ton of memoirs as I continue to work on mine.  Currently I have three going: fellow Chicagoan Robyn Okrant's Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk; Cathy Alter's Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over; and Mishna Wolff's I'm Down, about growing up white with a father who thought he was black. 

My story isn't quite as dramatic, but it was at times a fish-out-of-water experience. Outside our house it was the 1970s, but inside it was the 1890s, and we tended to talk about people who had been dead for a century or two as if they were there in the living room sipping tea.   For some strange reason, this made other people's eyes glaze over with boredom.  It's still a bad family habit, and when we visit each other's houses, we catch up with old pieces of furniture as much as with each other.  ("Why, if it isn't the Phelps divan! You're holding up well!") 

Here's a photo of my parents, my brother and me on the famous divan itself.  It came from my mother's father's mother's side in Richmond, Kentucky... oh never mind.

I'll be reading a piece about my eccentric upbringing, a modified version of the introduction to the book, at Essay Fiesta, a monthly personal essay reading series, at the Book Cellar in March.  Stay tuned for more information!

We Wuz Robbed (But not by Jesse James)

I'm working on the chapter of my book with this title, in which I introduce the character of my great-grandmother Minerva Parke Phelps Russel.  She was a Wellesley graduate, alleged genealogist, and even more alleged Southern belle. (She was more Wellesley than belle, much like a certain former first lady turned Secretary of State.) After her cousin Nettie died in childbirth, Minerva snatched up the much-older widower, John Hooe Russel, known in his youth as the dandy of White Sulfur Springs.

Prior to his marriage to Minerva, Russel was president of a bank in Huntington, West Virginia. His middle name was pronounced, most unfortunately, as “Ho.”  One day just after he headed out for lunch, his bank was robbed by masked gunmen, and Russel and a posse mounted up and chased the bandits.  (None of whom was named Jesse James.)  Minerva told it a little differently.  In her account, Jesse and his boys first cased the joint by pretending to stage a revivalist meeting.  My great-grandfather then ran into Jesse exiting the bank and realized he was no preacher when the gunman swore at him, saying "Well, young man, you are damned late for business!" Great stuff, right?  Too bad not a word of it was true.

Although I have Minerva's signed affidavit that both Jesse and Frank James were present in Huntington, most historians now seem to agree that the foursome consisted of Frank James, Cole Younger, Tom Webb, and Tom McDaniels.  McDaniels was killed by the posse. Webb, also known as Jack Keane, was captured shortly thereafter and served a number of years in prison. 

The three Younger brothers were wounded and captured a year later in what is now known as the James gang's Waterloo, the failed attempt to rob the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota.  Photos of the dead and wounded bank robbers were sent to my great-grandfather for identification, and later turned into souvenir postcards.  (The living were photographed fully clothed, but the dead were stripped to the waist with still-bleeding bullet holes displayed. The postcards terrified me as a child.  Ghoulish stuff.)