“Remoted” – Day 236 (Saturday)

Mummu used to tell my sister and me, and our mother before us, cautionary tales in an attempt to guide us, or maybe to control us, depending upon your viewpoint. When shopping with her, I would gravitate towards the adult cocktail dresses festooned with sequins and rhinestones. When I was about ten years old, we were shopping and I wandered away from her to stroke the fancy evening dresses, mesmerized by all the sparkle. Mummu suddenly appeared at my side. As she steered me back to the department specializing in age appropriate boring clothes for kids she said, “It’s important to keep children away from sequins or they will grow up to be gaudy.” Nice try, Mummu. It turns out that despite her attempt at guidance and direction to conservative attire, my closet has been the recipient of an ever-expanding collection of beaded, sequined, and shiny garments. She probably would have choked if she saw the amazing sparkly everyday outfits available for kids nowadays.

Shiny Pink!

Oh, if she could have seen me dressed in some of my favorite special occasion outfits and themed event ensembles. For a fundraiser event last year with a pink theme, I got a pink and gold metallic tuxedo. For another fundraiser with a black attire theme, the ensemble was black sequin shorts and a black sequin baseball jacket.  

Sometimes, her tales involved horrific warnings of terrible potential consequences for noncompliance. My sister and I had long hair when we were kids. My sister’s hair was (and still is) waist-length and dark brown-black, straight, and silky. Mine was a mousey brownish reddish color with weird waves, bumps, and cowlicks and was never as long, straight, or as pretty as my sister’s. With our long hair, we would do silly things like twist locks of it and hold it under our noses like a moustache. I would pretend a lock of my hair was a paintbrush, or pass it between my lips and blow my warm breath through it. Mummu would see this and tell us “Don’t put your hair in your mouth, you’ll get a hair ball in your stomach and you’ll die.” The absurdity of the comment would have us rolling our eyes and thinking, “yeah, right.” When with my friends, I would tell them Mummu’s crazy story about the hairball.

Today, while adding family members to my Ancestry.com family tree, I added Grandpa Ray. One of the sources in the search results was a front-page newspaper article from January 6, 1926 about Ray’s parents, Hilda and Oscar. The story, titled “Hubby Charged Wife for Rides in His Machine” with the subtitle “Mrs. Kask Gives Divorce After Testifying She Walked to Work While Mr. Kask Rode”, described a court appearance where my great-grandmother Hilda testified before a judge that she walked seven miles to work while her husband rode around in an automobile, and, here’s the kicker, if he gave her a ride, he charged her 50 cents per trip. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she also testified that he made her sleep in the woods near their home and threatened to beat her. This story appeared prominently just below the masthead, and directly above another riveting story titled, “12-Year-Old-Boy Siphoned Beer at “Speak-Easy”.”

Can't make this stuff up!

As if those news stories were not exciting and dramatic enough, I browsed the rest of the front page for entertainment, and two columns to the right, sat this gem of an article: “Ball of Hair Found in Stomach of Girl.” Hot damn. Mummu’s story about the stomach hairball was not nonsense fabricated to scare us after all. It really happened to a real girl, when Mummu was 10 years old. It was so shocking, so astounding, that I called Mom immediately to tell her the hairball story we had endured and rolled our eyes at, was actually real, and in 1926, a 15-year old girl from the nearby town of Ashby had a stomach ache that resulted in surgery and “A ball of hair was found in her stomach.” Now Mom and I have so many unanswered questions. How much hair? How big was the hair ball?  Was it accidentally ingested and accumulated over time or was there some ailment that caused her to literally eat her hair? And we will never know. 

The weirdness contained in that newspaper front page keeps on weirding. That story my grandmother preached to the three of us during our formative years, and probably countless others, appeared on the same front page of the newspaper as the story of the seemingly dysfunctional family she would marry into some 15 years later. I can’t even make this stuff up. But damn, it sure explains a lot.