I have been very busy the past week with getting my two older daughters moved to college – first Lucia to Benedictine College in Atchison, KS, and then Teresa to Loyola University, just on the north side of Chicago. Now I am here at home with only my youngest daughter, Rosie, left. Both Teresa and Rosie went with me to Atchison and helped Lucia move in, and Rosie also pitched in to help Teresa.It was something of an accomplishment for me to get all this taken care of. Dropping off children to college is supposed to be bittersweet anyway, and it is made all the more so by the fact of Angela’s absence. She would have been so happy and proud to see them settled.
The two move-in trips were different from each other in many ways. Angela and I had visited Loyola twice with Teresa, so there were memories there of the times we were together on that campus, sitting in the little coffee shop in the library overlooking the lake, working on her book manuscript. We hadn’t visited Benedictine, so there was regret that Angela hadn’t gotten to see the school where Lucia will study for the next three years. At the end of the move-in day there was a Mass at which the parents were asked to bless their children, and the children to thank their parents, and that was not easy for either Lucia or me. The drive to Benedictine and back was another long car trip (9 hours each way) which gave me further opportunities to talk to the girls. Loyola, on the other hand, is just at the other end of the city.
Atchison is a small town (10,000) that was built by the railroad and has a lot of impressive Victorian houses and buildings. Teresa and Rosie and I took a trolley tour of the town and visited one of the old homes as well as the local historical society museum. This brought back various miscellaneous memories that I want to record here. The associations are pretty loose in some cases. And they don’t add up to more than just a lot of memories, some of them from our time together, some of stories Angela told about her childhood and youth.
I remembered taking the girls to Indianapolis when Lucia was 3, Teresa was 1, and Rosie was no more than a thought in the mind of God, so that Angela could work in the state archives on her paper about involuntary sterilization of prison inmates in Indiana -- I remembered this specifically because I took the girls to various places such as the Indianapolis zoo and children's museum, but also to the home of Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president. The house tour in Atchison reminded me of that house tour in some way. This brought back many memories of other times and places with the girls when they were little -- visits to the South Bend Historical Museum, and Copshaholm, a Victorian mansion in South Bend that Teresa still recalls as a place she loved, and visits also to St Joseph, Michigan, where we would go to the lovely little Children's Museum as well as the beach, which had a giant play structure the girls always enjoyed.
In the Atchison museum, there was some kind of display about the county’s history, and I was reminded of the fact that Angela’s uncle Herman was a county commissioner in Greene County where she grew up. She told a story about passing her driver’s license examination when she was 16. She hadn’t done well on the test, but the state trooper on seeing her name asked “Are you any relation to Herman Gugalatta?” (That’s how he pronounced “Gugliotta.”) When she said “He’s my uncle,” the state trooper told her she passed the test. She said “I’m surprised” and he said “I am too.” Soon afterwards she was driving with her mother in the passenger seat and came to a dangerous curve on the interchange where I-79 north merges with I-70 – this is a curve where you are supposed to slow down to 25 mph and a lot of skid marks are visible on the side of the road, which slopes up like the wall of a bobsled run (I have driven this many times – apparently it is now slated to be replaced as there have been many accidents there). Angela didn’t slow down enough and started to lose control, and as she tells it her mom had to grab the steering wheel from the passenger seat. After that, Angela really didn’t want to drive on the highway, though when I first met her she had a 1976 Plymouth Satellite which she drove around Pittsburgh and later Baltimore, and did drive between Baltimore and Pittsburgh at least once with me as passenger. After I learned to drive and had bought a little Toyota Tercel (1987), I once followed Angela from Pittsburgh to Greene County where her mother lived, and at an interchange where there was construction and stopped traffic, I hit her car with mine from behind -- causing $1000 of damage to my fender and not even a noticeable dent to her bumper. She forgave me for that though I was incredibly embarrassed.
Also in the Atchison museum, I noticed an old player piano. This reminded me of Rita and William Ferrari, an older couple who lived just down the street from Angela’s mother. Rita babysat Angela when she was little, and Angela called her Ritabug, and called her husband Honey, because that is what she always heard Rita call him. After Angela’s father died, Honey became something of a father figure to her, and he walked her down the aisle at our wedding. I was introduced to him as Honey and so that is what I called him, which gave my best man a source of bad jokes at our wedding (“I thought Mike was marrying Angela, and here he was introducing me to this older guy as Honey.”) At some point before we were married, Rita and Honey had rescued and repaired an old player piano from a flood in someone else’s house, along with a bunch of old player piano rolls which they lovingly restored. They had this player piano (pie-anna) in the basement of their house along with the second kitchen (for big cooking days like Thanksgiving) and their two washing machines, the automatic and the “conventional” – the latter had a hand operated wringer, and they still used it. We used to go down into the basement and dance (waltzes and polkas) while Rita or Honey would pump the player piano. New player piano rolls were always a great Christmas present for them – one year we found the sheet music to an old twenties song about flappers, “Roll’em girls,” that Rita liked to play on the player piano. Somewhere in our house we have a cassette recording of Rita and the player piano, with Angela’s handwritten title “Ritabug pumps.” And the first dance at our wedding was actually a waltz to the music from that tape.
Angela's Plymouth Satellite had been a gift from Rita and Honey when they had bought a new car, and they had taken such loving care of it that she felt responsible to keep it going as long as possible. It went with her to Baltimore, where she moved it from parking space to parking space in a futile effort to avoid parking tickets, and occasionally drove it slowly around town. She never minded getting stuck behind a slow-moving truck or double-parked car -- she disliked driving at all fast and would say that her driving motto was "why go when you can stop?" When Angela went to graduate school in Wisconsin the year before we were married, she left the Plymouth parked outside my house in South Bend. Eventually it was ticketed for being parked in the wrong direction, and then we moved it into the driveway. Later we loaned it to some friends on hard times in exchange for their paying for oil changes, insurance, and gas. When they didn't need it anymore, I offered to an incoming professor for free, as long as he would pay for some work it needed -- about $500 of work as I recall -- but after the work was done he drove the car and decided he didn't want it, leaving us stuck with the bill for the work. He will remain nameless (indeed I have forgotten his name, though not the fact that he was coming in with an endowed professorship and I was a junior faculty member at the time for whom $500 was a pretty big deal of money). The garage owner very nicely took the car off our hands, charged us for the work, and then gave us enough free work on our car to make up for the charges. Sometime later we saw the Plymouth being driven around South Bend and knew that the garage owner had managed to sell it.
While in Atchison, I received an e-mail from one of my former colleagues about Angela’s death. He reminded me that Angela had a habit of calling me “Eeyore” whenever I would get into a somewhat morose mood – Eeyore being the character in Winnie-the-Pooh who always looks on the gloomy side of life. I would joke back “Just you wait, it’ll rain yet today.” I then remembered another characteristic expression of Angela’s – “Kennywood’s open.” She would say this if she noticed that I had forgotten to zip up my fly after using the bathroom. Kennywood is a famous old amusement park near Pittsburgh. You can interpret the expression as you like; it’s pretty common in the Pittsburgh area (it’s even made it into urbandictionary.com), but I’ve never heard it from anyone not from Pittsburgh. Angela and I visited Kennywood with a group of friends not too long before we started going out – we rode at least two big rollercoasters, which was a sign of the degree of my interest in her, since I was terrified of rollercoasters. It was worth it to me to get to sit next to her. We had a great time, but her glasses flew off on one of the rides and were never found, so she had to buy new ones. It is nice to remember these things, even if it is kind of sad to think that no one will ever call me Eeyore again, or remind me that Kennywood’s open.
So there are some memories that came to me during my trip to Atchison. More memories came back to me when I took Teresa up to Loyola, but I’ll save those for another post.
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