Revisiting Time Machine—Murfin Verse for Matilda Four Years Later

                 

        Matilda and Mom Maureen Murfin.
 

Time Machine

For Matilda Motoko Holmes

July 25, 2021

 

If Millie had a time machine

            she might go all the way back

            to yesterday when she swam

            with her mother

            and danced in the living room

            eyes shining and squealing.

 

More likely she would just go back

            to cuddling with her mom

            and bottle a few minutes ago

            as dawn crept in the window.

 

She would not leap forward

            to check out her first kiss

            high school graduation

            or any other life landmark.

 

And certainly not to see if

            civilization survives. 

What need for a time machine for her

            when it’s always now? 

 

—Patrick Murfin

                

                                            Then--Matilda dancing.

                                            Now--Matilda dancing.

Six Years Ago Today—To Matilda Motoko Holmes on Her Birth

  

Matilda, you were brand new. 

Note—Granddaughter Matilda was born on Sunday, May 31, 2020—traditional Memorial Day that year—at 10:40 am.  That was just in time for me to make the exciting announcement in the virtual coffee hour following Tree of Life UU Congregation Coronavirus Zoom services.  How could I forget. 

To Matilda Motoko Holmes on Your Birth

May 31, 2020

I understand you can’t read this.  You have been very busy getting born, learning how to breathe and such.  Hopefully your mother will keep a copy of this to share with you on some appropriate birthday a few years from now.

On the day you were born the sky was crystal blue and everything was lush green bursting with young life to greet you like the young ducklings on the pond and bunnies in their burrows.  The Web of All Existence greeted you.

 

Your Mom and Dad were there, of course.  

It couldn’t have happened without them.  And frankly you were a lot of work to get born.  It was even a little scary but your new life prevailed.  You were welcomed in the arms of love.

A whole tribe waits anxiously to greet you—two grandmas, aunts, uncles, cousins, and an odd old Papa.  And there is your second Cousin Sienna who is just one year older than you and will be your playmate and guide for years of coming adventures.  And did I mention the dogs Piper and Ginger who will protect you from marauding pirates and Piper at least will curl up to sleep with you.

                         Some of your clan--Papa, your Mom, Aunt Heather, Grandma, and Aunt Carolynne.  There are lots more.

You will come home in a couple of days or so with your Mom to Grandma Kathy and Papa’s little house.  It will be your first home.  You will have others, but that first one is very special.  Grandma will spoil and play with you.  Papa will take you on his walks—the stroller is ready to be your carriage into the world—and looks forward to singing strange lullabies to you and reading books with you when you are a little older.

The day you were born used to be Memorial Day before that holiday got moved.  And in a way that connects you to two great grandfathers, Papa Art Brady and Papa Willard Murfin who were soldiers in World War II which will be 100 years past when you are a young woman.  In fact, you are connected to ancestors on both sides of your family whose interesting lives made yours possible.  You are part of a great river of humanity.

Beyond your kin and home there are many friends waiting to greet you and support you on your life journey—your folks’ friends, your whole neighborhood, the Sisters Grandma Kathy works with, and the good people at Papa’s church.  It takes a village to raise a child and you have many villagers to guide you.

The day you were born everyone wore masks.

But I am sorry, not everything was pixie dust and unicorns on the day you were born.  The wide world was a freighting mess.  You were born in the middle of the great Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 which is why no one but your Mom and Dad could be with you in the hospital.  Even after you get home many of your clan will have to wait to see you and play pass the baby until it is safe.  People will wear masks on their faces.  They are scared for themselves—and for you.

Climate change—I am sure you will have heard of it when you can finally read this—is making over the world.  Where you live it will be hotter and wetter, snowier in the winter, apt to big, dangerous storms.  Everything will change from the way things once were.  Your parents and grandparents will have to do everything they can to keep that change from being catastrophic.

The country you live in is riven by bitter division.  Ominous forces are at work.  The free democracy of your parents and ancestors is threatened.  Fascism—I am sorry you will have to learn what that is—looms and some long for a civil war.  Many good people, however, are doing everything they can to prevent that and to leave you a free and safe country.  But it will be a struggle.  

The day you were born Papa was here to help make the world better for you. 

Even sadder, on the day you were born cities across America were torn by demonstrations, protests, riots, looting, and violence.  All because Black people in this country are not safe from violent assault by police and because a long sad history of white oppression has been unmasked again.  Your world will not be safe until Black children are safe.

That is why Papa on the day you were born went to Woodstock to hold a sign that said Black Lives Matter and march around the Square with hundreds of others.  He pledges to spend the rest of his life fighting to give you a better world than the one in which you were born.

                                Matilda opts for bold fashion choices these days.

The ancient Chinese had a curse—“May you live in interesting times.”  You were born on a day in the middle of interesting times.  Bless you as you make your way through them.

With all the love in the world,

Papa

Once Upon a Time Bitter Chicago Cold Snap—Murfin Memoir

A woman braves the Chicago cold and wind in December 1983.

Here in the northwest boonies of the Chicago metroplex we are well into the second week of sub-zero temps and brutal wind chills,  We have missed the major winter storms that have buried much of the nation south of us and even more arctic cold and snow to the north, including brave Minneapolis.  A crusty three or four inches covers the ground and the streets are white with salt.  El Niño promises below normal temps well into February a thaw following a major snowstorm and a string of sub-zero temperatures.  Much of the near foot of snow we had on the ground has melted  and predictions are for continuing mild weather well into February. 

But in the days before Christmas in 1983 there was a cold snap in Chicago when the lowest day time high temperature of -13° was recorded on December 24.  The days immediately before were nearly as frigid.  And therein lays a tale. 

A recent Google Earth street view of our graystone two flat on North Albany.  Not much changed since 1983 except for the wrought iron fencing.

Kathy and I were living on the first floor of a graystone two flat on Albany Street half a block north of Diversey with our daughters Carolynne age 13, Heather aged 9, and not-quite four-month-old Maureen. 

On December 20, Kathy asked me to check up on her grandmother Helen Zgorski.  Neither she nor her Aunt Benita had been able to get her on the telephone to discuss Christmas arrangements.  Kathy had been calling hourly and was getting frantic.  She called me at work to ask me to check up on her.   I could drop by the CHA senior housing building on Sheffield just north of Diversey.  That was easy enough.  I worked at RaySon Sports on North Lincoln Avenue repairing football shoulder pads just a couple of blocks away.  I could pop in before I took the bus home. 

The last winter daylight was fading rapidly when I got there and took the elevator to her floor.  I knocked on the door.  There was no response.  I knocked again.  And again.  Alarmed, I went for the building manager who came with me to unlock the door.  Inside, lying on her bed was Grandma.  She was stone cold dead.  My heart sank. 

We called 911 to report the death and I waited for the police and paramedics to respond.  Then I had to call Kathy at home to break the news.  She in turn notified her mother Joan Brady, who everyone called Lulu, up in Round Lake and Aunt Benita Wilczynski in Chicago.   

I stayed in the small apartment for a couple of hours as the paramedics examined the body, and the police investigated the scene.  Suspicious of the hippy looking guy in a cowboy hat, I was questioned closely about who the hell I was and why I was trying to gain entrance to the apartment.  I had no way of proving I was a grandson in-law.  I’m sure they called in my State of Illinois ID card—I didn’t have a driver’s license—and turned up my arrest record  for keeping a disorderly house when a fracas blew up at the IWW hall while I was Branch Secretary, a disorderly conduct arrest on a strike picket line at the Three Penny Cinema, and, oh, my conviction for refusing induction into the Army during the Vietnam War.  That did not exactly endear me to the cops.  Finally, while searching the rooms, some photos turned up from my wedding to Kathy and other family events.  I was somewhat reluctantly off the hook. 

Benita and Uncle Al arrived on the scene after a while.  I blocked her from the bedroom and seeing her mother’s body.  It wasn’t a pretty sight 

They brought her body down to the ambulance for the ride to the morgue.  Benita and Al gave me a ride home.  We arrived well into the evening. 

Helen Zgorski was a tiny, frail looking woman who could be sharp and abrasive.  She was born in Chicago in 1907 to Polish immigrant parents.  Her mother operated a bakery on North Ashland Avenue near Belmont.  She grew up as a first generation bi-lingua,l and often had to translate for her parents.  The family was, of course, deeply Catholic and loyal Democrats, then nearly inseparable Chicago Polish identities.  As expected, she grew up, married, and had two children, Lulu and Benita.  

But her husband died in his 40s leaving her a widow with two girls.  That’s when her connections to the old Democratic Machine paid off.  George Dunne, who was then 42nd Ward Alderman and would go on be the longtime President of the Cook County Board and Cook County Democratic Chairman after the death of Mayor Richard J. Dailey, found Helen a patronage job as a housekeeper at the old Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium. 

Helen Zgorski with her great granddaughter Maureen Murfin shortly after the baby's birth.

As a struggling single mother, she was stern with her two daughters entering their teens which affected her relationship with both. 

She retired from the Sanitarium after twenty years or so.  When I first met her, she was living in a small rear apartment in a frame building not far from her daughter Benita and her husband Al.   She would attend family functions, including frequent Sunday dinners at our Albany Street apartment.  After dinner there would be card games—nickel 31 and Uncle Al and I would sometimes try to match her shots of Christian Brother’s Brandy. 

For a few months she took care of Carolynne and Heather when they got out of St. Bonaventure School.  They would ride the Diversey bus and walk a couple of blocks to her apartment.  Kathy often worked late at her job at Recycled Paper Products, so I would come to get them after work and walk with them the five or six blocks home. 

Preparations for Christmas were put on hold as the family attended to the flurry of arrangements that deaths always set off.  Lulu, Benita, and Kathy did most of the heavy lifting.  There was a funeral home wake which I must have attended but don’t remember.  

Meanwhile Chicago temperatures were plummeting from merely standard cold to arctic. 

The day of the funeral mass and burial dawned well below zero with cutting winds.  Baby Maureen was also sick—too sick to be taken out in the cold.  Kathy told me that I would have to stay home with her while everyone else went to the services and the traditional after burial restaurant meal with family and other mourners.  Since I found the body, I felt somewhat invested in the whole thing and protested resulting in a nasty spat.  But in the end, there was no real alternative.  I stayed home. 

By afternoon Maureen’s temperature spiked dangerously and was very sick.  In those bygone days before cell phones there was no way to reach Kathy or any of the other family members who by that time were at the cemetery.   I called the family doctor and was told to get the baby in right away.  On a workday there were no neighbors I knew who had a car.  Cab company dispatchers could not even promise a pickup in a sketchy neighborhood to go just a handful of blocks.  Taxis could make all the money they wanted in the Loop and Lakefront neighborhoods. 

A National Weather Service graphic showing that December 1983 was the third coldest month in Chicago with average temps of 14.3°.  From December 21 through Christmas Day it never got above zero

There was no choice.  I had to carry Maureen to the doctor.  I dressed her in her warmest onesie, pulled on her hooded snow suit, mittens, and wrapped her face in a scarf.  I swaddled her in two baby blankets.  And over the whole cocoon put her into a hooded blanket of brightly colored strips that Kathy knitted and woven together. 

Maureen might have been well insulated, but I was not.  I had my long johns on, of course, a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and slick-soled cowboy boots.  My winter coat, blanket lined denim with a corduroy collar like those worn by railroaders was fine in ordinary cold but was way too thin for the below zero weather and stiff wind.  On my hands I had canvas and leather palmed work gauntlets pulled over thin brown jersey gloves.  At these temperatures my fingers were frozen in moments.  I tied a red bandana around my ears and pulled my old Stetson down tight. 

It was not far to the doctor’s office—just south on Albany a couple of blocks to Logan Boulevard, over the wide parkway to the other side and another couple of blocks to the office near the intersection with Milwaukee.  But it was face-freezing cold and snow blowing from rooftops stung.  I was most worried that I would slip on sidewalk ice or trip over the rock-hard piles left by snowplows at the end of each block.  It was a moustache freezer.  Each breath was like a knife to the lungs. We were probably outside for less than 15 minutes, but it seemed infinitely longer. 

The doctor’s office was not crowded.  Few patients ventured out in the weather.  Cooing nurses helped unwrap Maureen’s many layers.  In fact, the baby may have actually been over-heated by the bundling.  She was crying, fussing, and very flush.  Her face was almost burning to the touch.  The receptionist got me a hot, bitter cup of office coffee in a Styrofoam cup. 

Youngish Dr. Findlay Brown saw us almost immediately.  He was the family doctor and treated Kathy and the girls for some time but barely knew me.  He was caring and concerned.  He quickly ruled out the most frightening childhood illnesses.  He wrote a prescription and gave me advice about how to cool her down at home.  He also said in no uncertain terms that I was not to carry Maureen home.  The sun was going down and temperatures were plummeting again. 

I picked up a prescription at the small pharmacy that served the medical building.  It turned out that the druggist used to have the drug store my family used in Skokie when I was in high school.  We chatted a bit.  I tried again unsuccessfully to call a cab.  I left Maureen with the nurses in the office while I went out on the Milwaukee Avenue side of the building to see if I could flag one on the street.  No luck.

 A blue and white Chicago Police Department squad car like this saved us.

I considered the CTA, but I would have to wait with Maureen for a Milwaukee Ave. bus and then transfer to an east-bound Diversey Bus.  Waiting for the busses could easily take longer than the walk.  I still could not reach Kathy or Uncle Al who had a car. 

An hour or so after the appointment, I spotted a police car at the stop light on Milwaukee.  I ran up and tapped on the window.  It was a two-man squad car.  Both cops were relatively young.  I explained my situation and practically begged them for a ride home.  Despite my disreputable appearance, they agreed and waited while I ran in and re-bundled Maureen.  We arrived home about 5 pm and I was profuse in my thanks to the cops who had ignored rules and procedures for us. 

A while latter Kathy and the older girls arrived home.  I was scolded for taking Maureen out into the dangerous cold. 

The next day, her fever broke.  Christmas came despite it all. 

I’ll save the tale of losing our heat and our pipes bursting in another record shattering cold snap in 1985 for another day.