SCARLET FEVER

Did you ever stop to wonder just what had to happen for you to be where you are right now? Think about it, what did and didn't have to take place for you to be born? We can look at the obvious, our parents meeting, our births, our successful navigation through childhood to the present day but what about further back, back to our grandparents lives, our great grandparents lives, how they met, what it took for them to find each other, the hardships, the journeys they took, it's a wonder to me how this grand puzzle we call our lives comes together into this intricate fabric called humanity. Up until recently I knew so little of my beginnings, not because my parents were circumspect or anything like that, they were just plain busy and who knows how much they really knew anyway. Heck, my mom left Germany as a young woman who had been tossed around in the tumultuous currents of Germany at war. My father was no better, the only child of a young French girl and a sophisticated world traveler who had literally been around the world at a time when people rarely left their farms. My grandfather on my dad's side died when my dad was eleven years old and his mother worked constantly to keep them going from that point onward. Everything changed for me this last year when I opened up a box that I had been carrying around with me since my father's death 18 years ago. What I thought was in the box, the odds and ends left from a life well lived and what was, in fact, in the box were two very different things.  What I found was all of the letters my father had written to his mother from the day he had enlisted in the Army during World War II.  What I didn't know was in the box, neatly categorized by year, was every letter my Grandfather had written to my Grandmother from the time they met, through their marriage, through the birth of their son and for years after that as my Grandfather traveled his route as a salesman who sold road building equipment during a time when the country's infrastructure was expanding by leaps and bounds.
My Grandfather died in 1932 when my father was eleven years old so I never met the man I'm named for. But what I have learned is that my Grandfather was a lovely man, romantic, nostalgic, family oriented and driven to give his young bride and their child a wonderful life. I haven't read all of his letters but trust me, there is enough information in them to keep me googling for years.
While Googling my Grandfather's name a small article came up that knocked me off my pins and set me wondering at the randomness that is my life.  Written in 1880 it was a weekly round up of the illnesses and deaths that had threatened and claimed the lives of the town's children.  I could just see the stylized, Victorian image of the Grim Reaper implied in the title of the article, "Scarlet Fever".  Scowling and taunting the helpless parents of every child in Spencer, Indiana,  I could feel the fear expressed in every word of that article and with it, the implied thankfulness that their Timmy or Kathleen, their child wasn't on that weeks roll call.

Scarlet Fever
Since our last issue the fever has appeared in several new cases in
rather a grave form but up to Wednesday evening but one more death had
occurred, that of Rosa, three year old child of TJ HARRIS, who died Friday
evening. Ralph, eight year old son of Judge ROBINSON, has been very bad for
several days, --not likely to recover—but up to Wednesday evening hopes of his
recovery were entertained. Miss Emma LANHAM AND THREE OF Clay SURBEE’S
children have been dangerously ill, but their symptoms now point towards
recovery Up to the present there have been but about 15 cases. A few sporadic
cases have occurred.

After reading the article several times I thought of my Great Grand Parents, John Cruden Robinson and his wife Martha Cooper Robinson and I wondered if they had read the article as their son struggled for life.  Had they been shielded by loving family and friends, had anyone had the presence of mind to hide it from them until they were sure that the danger had passed.  Was there ever a thought of "what wouldn't be" if their young son, Ralph had not survived.
As I read the article over 100 years after the fact I couldn't help but imagine what went through their heads as events unfolded.  You see, there had been another son before Ralph, his name was Guy and he died at two years old of an undisclosed illness.  Ralph had reached 8 years old when the Fever struck and Jesse was years younger than that.  Death lived so much closer then, death was always hiding in a puddle of water, in the growl of a nameless dog or in a pot hole that a wagon wheel just couldn't traverse.  And yet how could death be so cruel?  How could death take two sons from a family that was so thankful for so much, a family that gave so much to the community and the world around them?

In the end, Death didn't win this round and Ralph, at the age of 26, went on to travel the world choosing to live, along with 700 other young American men and women, in the Philippine Islands.  He stayed for nearly fifteen years as part of a group sent by President McKinley commonly known as "The Thomasites." Named for the ship that took them to the Philippines, the USS Thomas.  Ralph was charged with educating untold hundreds of native Philippine children and adults in farming practices and the english language.  He left at the request of the Philippine Government to oversee the construction of the Philippine Pavilion at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco.  While there he met a much younger woman, a French girl who, as the story goes, was working in a cafe at the French Pavilion.  He courted Leah Allue for four years before marrying her and two years later they had their one son, my Father John Firmin.  As the years unfolded this country boy, known by all who loved him as "Laddie" would write letters describing the sounds made by the tall ships in the harbor off Havana Cuba as they blew their cannons telling all within ear shot that World War One had come to an end.  Written first to my Great Grandmother Martha, the letters soon changed in tone as they became addressed to Leah Allue, the young French girl soon to be my Grandmother.  To my knowledge no one ever asked my Grandfather how or why he got to where he was but I always sensed that the driving force in his life, the thing that took him on his travels, near and far was that brush with death at a very young age. 

Once, while unfolding a piece of delicate stationary with my grandfathers hurried script on it,  a newspaper clipping fluttered to the ground.  Browned and nearly translucent with age, it was an article about a demure young woman with a thick French accent who had captivated a rapt audience of 250 with stories about the French and their relationships with the Americans during World War One.   This brave, self possessed young woman was the person I would later come to know as my Grandmother.  

And that's how life is, it's a whole world of other things and other people coming together and drifting apart, passing in the night or committing to being there for each other until the end of their days.  Events that had to happen before you and I can ever have gotten to be right here and right now.  It's a fascinating story this story of Ralph and Leah and it's one that's filled with love and war, and intrigue, and riches beyond compare.  It's one filled with sacrifice and privilege and not so ironically it's the story of all of us.  Because if you scratch beneath the surface of anyone's life, you're going to find a world that, for better or worse, no longer exists but, that had to exist exactly as it did for it to unfold with you and me as characters 

Mrs. Cunningham

Relative to nothing but, many decades ago my friend Stephen Johns discovered a woman by the name of Mrs. Cunningham whose family owned these wonderful fig orchards right off of Coast Highway in Malibu. Every year Mrs. Cunningham would make fig jam and it was the best fig jam I ever tasted, Golden, incredibly sweet and just delicious. For several years after discovering it (and her) I would order two cases of that incredible jam and I would dole it out to myself, two bottles per month at 12 bottles per case. Ghoulish though it may sound I would always wish Mrs. Cunningham well (albeit only to myself) as I walked away from her little stand with its primitively written “Homemade Fig Jam” sign knowing that, as went Mrs. Cunningham‘s health, so went my supply of fig jam. I’m not proud to admit it but, if I was addicted to anything at that time in my life, it was to that jam and maybe a little bit to Mrs. Cunningham’s wry smile that she gave to me along with my change, knowing that she had hooked me good.

I’ve heard it said that anything bordering on perfection can’t and won’t last and such was the case with Mrs. Cunningham and her Jam.

We had gotten to the point in our relationship where Mrs. Cunningham had given me her private phone number so I could call her to ask about “the Jam” and like clockwork, she was always there to answer the phone and, after a little prodding, would finally say “oh yes I remember you dear, before reminding me that her jam was always “first come first served.” She would go on to explain that she couldn’t possibly put any aside for me because it just wouldn’t be fair. I would have to take my chances like everybody else which I always did. And then one year it happened, I made the phone call and the line was disconnected. Though I knew I wouldn’t have to drive all the way to Malibu to know what I knew was true in my heart, I drove by anyway. I can’t say how many times it was that I made that drive but I did go and it wasn’t until I drove by once and saw that they had subdivided the property and put in a strip mall where I had turned off to get to her little stand that I admitted to myself that she was really gone.

As I said at the beginning of this post, my words are relative to nothing else that’s going on in the world in general or in my world specifically other than one thing. On my birthday, knowing how much I love figs, Stephen and his lovely fiancée Dunnia gave me a large bag of dried figs from Costco.

I don’t know what possessed me but I took a couple of handfuls of these very precious figs, I chopped them up, put them in a pot with some water and, in this case Splenda, and I reconstituted them into my version of Mrs. Cunningham’s Jam. And you know what? It was good. I don’t know what Mrs. Cunningham would say but my jam tasted just enough like hers to my brain that I was able to sit back with a freshly toasted bagel, some good butter and not only the jam but all the sweet memories that came flooding back with it.

I have since bought more figs, made more Jam and with a surety that only I can promise to myself, have guaranteed my supply of Jam, at least until my little stand with my little sign is no longer there on the side of my mind’s Coast Highway and that’s all I can ask for. God bless you Mrs. Cunningham wherever you are, you made my life so much sweeter in ways you’ll never know.