Early in January of this year, I came across a 1974 calendar that I had stowed away in my closet. The days correspond exactly to those in 2019. So I decided to reuse the calendar, as I have done with previous old calendars. (Talk about a cheapskate! See my chapter on economy in The Girl From Copenhagen.) On this particular calendar, my mother had noted birthdays, doctors’ appointments, dates when taxes were due, and other salient things she had to attend to. The majority of the doctors’ appointments were for my father’s aunt and two uncles, also for Mary Trainor, a long-term friend of the family who the Petersons, Grace and Walter, took into their apartment in Jersey City during the Great Depression. With minimal government assistance programs available in those days, people had no recourse but to help each other cope with trying times. And so they did. During these years the Petersons also took in a young boy named Leo. He was related to the Petersons through a cousin, I believe, but I don’t recall what the circumstances were that made it impossible for his parents to take care of him. In any case, Leo went on to distinguish himself by becoming a draft dodger in World War II and was never heard from again.
Mary Trainor, incidentally, outlived Grace, Walter, and George, who had provided a home for her since the early 1930s. In her final years, into her eighties, she was taken in by another branch of the Peterson family headed by Albert Peterson.
My main purpose in this entry is not to provide a history of the Peterson family, but to show how lnge, unable to pursue a career in nursing in her native Denmark, nevertheless went on to be a health care provider throughout her life. Several times a month she would make a nearly hour-long drive from Pennsylvania to Raritan, New Jersey to bring Grace, Walter, George, and Mary to their doctors’ appointments. When George Mills, suffering from lung cancer in the 1980s, became bedridden, my mother stayed with him night and day, cleaning him up when he soiled his adult diapers, giving him his medications, and spoon-feeding him yogurt. I would drive into Raritan a couple of times a week to help out. The smell of feces made me gag, but it did not seem to bother my mother, who would expertly roll George from side to side as she changed his diapers. So my mother’s training in nursing school did not go to waste, here in the days before home hospice care became available.
I need to backtrack for a moment to place another piece where it belongs in the puzzle. Before uncle George became sick with lung cancer he called up to say that his electric razor wasn’t working. So my mother and I drove into Raritan only to find that George had simply neglected to remove the plastic cover from the head of his shaver.
While I found it difficult to mask my irritation at being summoned to this fool’s errand, my mother betrayed not the slightest sign of annoyance. She was the most even-tempered person I ever knew. I never thought to ask her how she felt about running errands for Bob’s occasionally disfunctional family, while her own family back in Denmark had to do without her.
By the way, the days on an old 1991 calendar also correspond to those of the current year. So more than a year after her death, my mother, through her dutiful entries, continues to remind me when my estimated tax payments are due. But the 1991 calendar has a sad story to tell. There were no more doctors’ appointments for Grace, Walter, George, and Mary, who had all passed on by now. Mother noted an appointment with a lawyer, no doubt to wind up Bob’s estate-he had died in March of the previous year. She also listed two doctors’ appointments for herself. In subsequent years she would be listing a steadily increasing number of appointments. She also recorded on this 1991 calendar a trip she made by herself to Denmark in May. By now both of her parents were gone, swept away by the continuing wave of deaths that was taking out our family.
So that’s it for now. Enough about old calendars. But they did serve to jog my memory.
