Remembrance: Guy Pugh

June 21, 2014

[start with self-deprecating  joke about the "food" theme, ending with…"If food is love, clearly I got the most…"]

Good afternoon.

Fifty years ago,in June 1964,  my mother  moved into this house at Homans Lane.  The house, built in 1753, had been moved just 10 years before to make room for the highway.

Mom was 29,  just a little older than Louisa is now, with a handsome new husband, and a baby on the way.  Unlike Louisa, however, she also had 4 other children under age 6.

The house was in dubious shape, with leaky windows, no water pressure,  and faulty wiring.  There was no yard to speak of, just woods encroaching on all sides.

Faced with these daunting challenges, she did what most of us might not.  She learned to play guitar, got a flock of chickens, and started working on completing her undergraduate degree by taking courses at Harvard Extension School.

Here are some Things I can’t imagine Mom doing:

 1.  Smoking a cigarette

2. Staying inside on a weekend day, no matter what the weather.  The winter before last, there was one of those Mega-winter-storms coming, 2 feet of snow predicted, and the governor suggested checking in on elderly neighbors and relatives.  I called mom as the first flakes started falling -- "Do you need anything?  We could run out quickly with some supplies before the storm".  "I'm fine", she said, "Barbara's coming over and we're climbing Blue Hill.  I heard it might be hard to get out for the next couple of days so we have to go now."

1. Raising her voice in anger against a child or animal, even when Chester, the last and largest of the golden retrievers, shattered by the loss of his master, decided to systematically EAT the house as though it were the Gingerbread version I made the Christmas after they bought it.


3. Finishing a meal and not announcing what’s for dessert.  For Mom, dessert was not an afterthought, and was NOT optional.  It was long after I left home that I realized that most peoples' list of "everyday" foods does not include German Chocolate Cake, Rhubarb, Lemon Meringue, or Banana Cream Pie, Chocolate souffle, Floating Island, Crème brulee,    or on desperate nights when  nothing had been planned, at least vanilla ice cream, topped with a homemade  hot fudge sauce that froze on top like an iron helmet when we left it to boil a little too long.

 [Here I talked about how mom was always swimming, boating and otherwise jumping in water, her creation of the Koi pond behind me, the picture I have of her wading in it.  Also a description of the geography of the cabin at Huron Mountain and her never-fail morning swims in the river and Lake Superior]

When my uncle Bob died, there was a picture taken the next day of the lake shore with a double rainbow coming right down to the sand, which people felt were for him and Aunt Mary Lu, who died so soon afterwards.

 The lake responded to Mom's death as well.  When she died in February, the Great Lake a thousand miles away became angry, or sad, or maybe just exceptionally quiet, and by March had frozen clear across, with ice 25 feet thick. More ice than has ever been seen on Lake Superior since recordings began 40 years ago. And the ice stayed on the lake until June, and we may find pieces floating there when we go for our morning swims in July.

We watch a lot of movies. Movies that remind me of Mom?

 Mrs. Weasley, of course, from Harry Potter, with her rambly house, her brood of kids she’s so obviously proud of, her knitting, and her way of making her overcrowded house always welcoming, so that Harry and his friends never feel they’re visiting, but more that they live there, too.

 Or Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, deaf in one ear, fixing up the old ramshackle mansion, again the passel of ill-defined kids, one of them always banging on the piano, and his deep appreciation for the wonder of life, along with a dark side not always visible.

 But also Citizen Kane, where we find out in the end the meaning of his dying word, “Rosebud” and how it explained this complex character
.
 I found Mom’s “Rosebud” when I took over her iPad and applications and found out her passwords. I was surprised she didn't use something obvious, like her favorite child’s address or something, "gfp57" or her favorite husband’s nickname, but her fallback password was some variation on 0103 – January 3, the birthday of her father, Dr. Frederic Schreiber, known always as "baldy", not because of his hairstyle but as a nickname for his other given name, Woldemar.

Anyone who knew Mom's growing-up family was bound at some point to wonder how it could be that four such wonderful people -- Mom, her brother Bob, who died so recently, and her other brother Mayo and sister Dodie, who are here with us today -- could have been raised by their mother, who most would describe as "difficult".  Our family's nickname for this grandmother, to distinguish her from Dad's mother with the same name, was "No-fun Helen".

Grandmother Schreiber could hold a grudge like the Statue of Liberty holds its torch.  She seemed to subscribe to the "one-pie" theory of Happiness.  "More for you means less for me."  She was, in modern terms, a BUZZ KILL.

But children aren't the product of just one influence, and the remarkable Dr. Schreiber seems to have won the day when it came to forming these wonderful people.

In our family lore, the Schreiber side tends to be elbowed aside by the more numerous and visible McMillan's, but Grandfather and his family were remarkable, too.  His sister married Indiana Jones -- well, at least ONE of the archaeologists said to be the model for Indiana Jones, an archaeologist of such renown that casually dropping his name, as in "you're studying archaeology, how interesting, my mother's uncle was Robert Braidwood" elicits the sort of jaw drops you 'd get if you told a musician your cousin was Mozart.  [Mentioned the presence of their daughter Gretel and daughter-in-law Patty]

He himself was enormously accomplished, being for many years the undisputed  best neurosurgeon in Detroit because he was for a long time the ONLY neurosurgeon in Detroit.

My memories of him as a wryly funny, child-loving man who would roll his handkerchief into a mouse which then skittered magically up his arm must be reconstructions or confabulations, because he died when I was only two and a half, in 1959.

From him, I inherited his middle name, his hairstyle, and my career and alma mater.  Mom'S choice of first husband and career at Harvard Medical School seem to be at least partly related to her admiration for her HMS-trained surgeon father.

As a man he faced unspeakable tragedy when his first wife died shortly after the birth of their child.  I suppose it is a lesson in "silver linings" to reflect that none of us would be here today -- quite literally, in my case -- had this awful thing not occurred.  His industriousness and unfailing humor

As a parent, I have one story to illustrate a lesson he passed on to Mom.  She was sent away to boarding school in about 9th grade and she sent him a letter home where the date included the number 7, neatly crossed, a continental affectation she picked up from her new swank New York friends.

He sent back a letter  which went something like "Dear Anne, I received your letter on the 7th and read it 7 times…every sentence had a SEVEN in it, and every seven was crossed.

Chastened, she never crossed her sevens again, but I think absorbed a deeper lesson about putting on airs, asserting status, or feeling any too proud.

And so we absorb these messages from our parents, and pass them on, consciously and unconsciously  to our children.

The best honey is from your bees, the best eggs from your chickens.  Sheets from the clothesline. Bread from the oven.

These have value.

These ARE values, and we share them with our friends and our offspring.

Play outside

Go in the water

And save room for dessert!