Fragments and full stops

Hans Thoma, "Kinderreigen," 1872

For years, my mom had been talking about wanting to write something about the games she remembered playing as a child growing up in Mercer County, West Virginia. So many of them seemed very specific to that time and place: a game called "Pretty Girl Station," another played in the fall called "Dead Man" where kids formed a ring around a pile of raked leaves, chanting as they circled it until a kid hiding in the pile burst out of it and chased the others off.  

When she got her diagnosis in March, this particular task took on a new urgency. I didn't know that she'd been working on it until she was in the hospital in early May, though. One morning while my brother Mark and I were visiting her, she told me that she'd gotten a start, but added, "I'm such a slow and picky writer...I'd write a sentence and even before I finished it I'd be editing it. So I didn't get very far with it." 

My brother Mark and I both suggested that she and I just have a conversation about the games, which I'd record and then the two of us would co-write the article. Mom was pleased with that idea. She was a folklorist too, after all, so completely understood that sometimes it's more natural and productive to talk about your memories than it is to write about them. 

Of course, none of us knew at that time that she'd be dead within the week.

When she died, I asked Mark--who had her laptop--to keep an eye out for a document about children's games. He found it pretty readily--it was titled, in all caps, THE GAMES WE PLAYED--and emailed it to me about a week after she died. 

Here's what she'd written: 

When I was eight years old, our family moved to Athens and I became one of Kathryn Gibson's fourth graders. For the first time I learned playground games. Concord Grammar School was a two story brick building  surrounded by grass facing the street and play areas on the other three sides. There was the usual playground equipment:  a seesaw, a slide, swings, and a giant stride. It was a frightful thing consisting of a number of chains attached to a tall metal pole. Two metal bars were attached one above the other to the end of each chain. We ran hanging on to the bars one hand above the other and soon we were flying through the air fast round and round.

I remember the games we played as seasonal. In the spring it was jump rope for the girls in the back of the building with all the rhymes we knew. The boys played mumbley-peg and marbles at the side.  The boys’ knuckles would     

I got to that last incomplete sentence and burst into tears. What clearer evidence that her voice had been silenced for good than an unfinished sentence? I'd never even know how she meant to finish that one line, much less the whole piece. But I could see how carefully she'd crafted what little there was--how evocative that description of the giant stride was, both in terms of how it worked and the combination of terror and joy it inspired in the kids who played on it. 

Giant stride on a New York City playground, circa 1910-1915

There was no full stop to that sentence, but there had been a full stop to her life. I was bereft, sobbing inconsolably not for the first time since she died, but certainly for longer than I had before. 

So much regret. Why didn't we do this sooner? Why didn't I tell her about Anne Lamott's concept of "shitty first drafts," and suggest that she try to write a sloppy version of the whole thing, or at least an outline? Why didn't we ever talk about our respective writing processes and practices? 

My therapist tells me that these deep regrets are all part of the "bargaining" stage of the grief process--that bargaining doesn't only include the promises and deals you make to get your loved one to live longer, or to bring them back to life, but also the whole range of "what ifs" that haunt you when the person is gone. 

Mom had hoped to submit her piece about children's games to the West Virginia Division of Culture and History's magazine Goldenseal. I may still try to complete the article; over the years, I know that she had sent me several emails with details about those games, which might include enough information to put something together. But it will never be in her voice. 

Mom had told me about her diagnosis on St. Patrick's Day. On Easter Sunday, her amazing primary-care physician, Teresa Holt, came to mom's house in the afternoon to talk with all of us about the prognosis and mom's options. It was a difficult but necessary conversation, made so much easier by Dr. Holt's no-nonsense and compassionate approach. Seeing her sitting on the couch, holding my mom's hand, and explaining how the disease would progress and answering all our questions, I felt unexpectedly calm. If this was the person in charge of mom's care, I had far fewer worries about what was to come. 

Later that afternoon, I was sitting next to Mom at the dining-room table, helping her with something on her computer. Out of nowhere she turned to me and said, in her sort of mock-severe tone, "Rosemary Hathaway, I want you to promise me one thing." 

"What's that, Momma?"

"FINISH YOUR BOOK." 

My plan, ever since we knew that at some point mom would need round-the-clock care, was that I would decamp to Columbus this summer and work on the book there. "I would love that," she said--and I think it was about the only way she would have tolerated my being a caretaker, if she knew it meant I was getting some writing done as well.

That didn't happen, obviously. And the book remains unfinished, six months after my original deadline for getting it to the press.

Completing it seems like such a chore. Like mom, I know what needs to be done but my internal editor gets in the way. Already the idea seems stale and overdone to me--what do I have to say about Appalachian history and identity that more recent writers like Elizabeth Catte and Steven Stoll haven't said far more persuasively and eloquently? 

And the mental energy it takes to do that kind of writing...well, I just don't have it right now. 

And part of me is afraid to finish it. The book is in many ways about my parents' experiences growing up in West Virginia and attending WVU, and moving to Ohio and reinventing themselves as Appalachian out-migrants. Irrationally, it feels like finishing the book is consigning them to history, to the past. 

But it is also a legacy to them. And knowing that it was one of my mom's last wishes to finish it...no pressure there. 

I guess it means I have to take my own advice, the advice I regretted not giving mom about her own writing: just get it down. Crank something out. Get some input from a trusted reader. Plenty of time to revise later. 

Plenty of time. It's what I have that she didn't.

Old School, Tom-Style

Like most of the country, Morgantown has had its fair share of cold weather this winter, and more than its share of snow. It's been hat and gloves and scarf and boots weather for months on end, it seems.

Here I am in my Old School get-up.

And I'm out in it almost every day: I have a regular morning routine, in which I head into town across the High Street bridge, stop in at the post office and ship out anything that might have sold, stop at the bank once in a while, and then head into the Blue Moose, where I like to do a little writing.  The Moose, as I call it, is a kind of local watering hole (I think I can call it that, since they do serve beer, including in the morning), but I always stick to a cup of coffee and a danish.

When I leave the Moose, I usually come back over the Pleasant Street bridge, and one day a couple of weeks I go I had one of those encounters that I seem to have here in Morgantown now and then. As I was stepping off the bridge, with my hat and gloves and computer bag, some guy called out to me from across the street. He had a duffel or a piece of luggage, and he seemed to want directions: "Hey, Old School," he said, "can you tell me how to get downtown?"

Well, I told him to just go on across the bridge and he'd practically be there, but I'm afraid I felt like I'd just been tagged with a new nickname, even if it was only in my own mind. It's going to be hard to get rid of, even so.

Hangin' with Queen Ceres

West Virginia is the most festival-crazy place I have ever lived.  It seems that every weekend, there's some kind of local event going on--especially this time of year, when many towns have harvest festivals celebrating whatever the local crop is.

But my favorite, hands down, is the Preston County Buckwheat Festival, which has taken place in Kingwood, the Preston County seat, every fall since 1938.  Kingwood is about twenty miles east of Morgantown, straight up a narrow, twisty two-lane road.

Preston County takes this community event seriously:  the county schools are closed for the duration of the festival, since so many kids are participating in one way or another...showing livestock, preparing crops or baked goods for judging, or marching in one of the innumerable marching bands in the area.

Friday is always children's day at the Buckwheat Festival, and so the midway swarms with preteens and teens out of school for the day, scoping out the rides, games, food, and each other before the day's big event, the kids' parade.  

You have never seen a parade with so much royalty:  there's Queen Ceres and King Buckwheat, of course, but there are also innumerable princesses, junior princesses, and Little/Tiny/Baby Miss Valley District, plus visiting royalty from near and far.  No one, it seems, reaches adulthood in Preston County without having been some kind of festival princess or attendant.

King Buckwheat. After I took this photo, he blew me a kiss.  Swoon!

Queen Ceres

For me, the highlight is always the buckwheat pancake feed at the Kingwood VFD Hall.  It's a huge building, filled end-to-end with banquet tables, and for eight bucks you get a KVFD plate loaded with all the pancakes you can eat, two enormous pieces of homemade sausage, and a half pint carton of whole milk.  Butter and syrup are on the shared tables, and in the past, I've actually seen Queen Ceres herself--tiara and all--busing tables, pouring coffee refills, and bringing extra pancakes to diners. 

We don't get there every year--often the weather is chilly and rainy.  But today could not have been a more picture-perfect day to go:  72 degrees with bright, warm sunshine.  

That, and discovering that one of the prizewinning goats was named Katniss, made it a perfectly lovely day out.

Katniss is the goat on the other side of the fence--the one you can't
see very well.  Camera-shy, just like her namesake.

Happy sesquicentennial, West Virginia

Today marks the 150th anniversary of West Virginia statehood.  Its contentious history, past and present, makes it a place that's difficult to love at times.  But there's no denying its incredible natural beauty.  Emmylou Harris captures both sides of the coin in this song.





And should you need to know more, the Charleston Gazette has "Ten things to know about the West Virginia sesquicentennial."  Including, perhaps most importantly, that there will be free cupcakes at interstate welcome centers today.

Here's to more wild, wonderful years to come.

The hog whisperer

I think it probably goes without saying that I was a weird kid.  I was also a kid who was obsessed with cats.  I hounded (no pun intended) my parents about getting a cat until they finally relented.  When we went to Cat Welfare to pick out a kitten, we took along our family friend Dottie, who had three cats of her own and who had taught me very carefully how to properly pick up and hold a cat.

Dottie demonstrating proper cat-holding
 technique on the day we got Ginger, my first cat 

--and me holding one of Dottie's cats.

This technique has worked with pretty much every cat I've ever had up until the present: our black cat, Stella, doesn't like to be picked up or held at all, and has let me know in no uncertain terms that not only is this technique not "proper," it's tantamount to abuse, and if I keep it up she'll report me to the authorities.

Still, the method has generally served me well, especially on one particular occasion.

My grandmother lived in the very small town of Athens, West Virginia, and when I was growing up, we'd often go down to visit.  Trouble was, there wasn't a whole lot to do in Athens, and the options were further limited by my grandmother's ideas about what was proper for girls to do.  So, I often entertained myself by walking through the cemetery that was just down the hill from her house.  There was a path at the back of the cemetery that led down to a barn and a small pond on some land she owned further down the hill, and it was kind of fun to play "pioneer" down there.

One summer day when I was about eight or thereabouts, I was on my way back from the pond, wandering through the cemetery and reading the headstones, when I caught a flash of something furry out of the corner of my eye.  A cat, perhaps?  It was about the right size.

I followed it and discovered that it was, instead, a groundhog.  He was just ambling along, and when he noted me following him, he stopped.  I crouched down and made the usual clucking noises you make to get a cat to come to you, and much to my surprise, he kind of wandered over in my direction.

Or maybe he didn't: to be honest, I don't remember.  I like to imagine that I enchanted him, like a groundhog whisperer, and he realized that I was a Trustworthy Gentle Person.

At any rate, he stopped, or moved slowly enough that I was able to pick him up, flip him on his back like I'd been taught to do with cats, and carry him back to the house.

I remember being so excited to show everyone what I'd found in the cemetery--my very own pet groundhog!

My mother, of course, tells me that the adults were freaking out when I came in the house cradling a groundhog, but didn't want to alarm me (or the hog).  So, they very helpfully suggested putting it out on the fenced-in stone patio behind my grandmother's house, where I could visit with it.  And my dad (in typical fashion) maintained enough presence of mind to snap a picture.

The groundhog and I stayed out there for quite awhile.  I probably fed it something; I don't recall.  What I do remember is that when I got up the next morning, the groundhog was gone.  I was disappointed, though in hindsight, it was remarkable that it stuck around at all after I put it down!

A few years ago this incident came up at a family dinner and my parents said they supposed the groundhog was sick; why else would it let a kid pick it up and carry it around?

To be honest, though I was well into my forties by then, that thought had never occurred to me.  For the first time ever I was able to see the event as an adult would: Holy crap, does that thing have rabies?!  Put the pest-ridden wild animal down slowly, little girl. 

In addition to the photo, that's the thing I'm most happy to have taken from that experience: the knowledge that at one point in my life, I was innocent and trusting and bold enough* not to worry about such things.

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone!


*and stupid!  Did I mention stupid?

******************UPDATE*********************

Here's my mom's version of events.  Needless to say, I did not witness Chuckie's escape.

We were in Athens for an overnight stay on our way to visit the Beegles and their horses in Charlottesville and then on to Williamsburg. 

You decided to take a wander--unbeknownst to us--to the cemetery.  That's where you discovered Chuckie, as you called him, sitting tamely among the markers.  You scooped him up and carried him back to Grandma's.


Yes!  Dad and I were startled and a bit worried.  It seemed strange to us that a wild animal should be so amiable--perhaps he was sick.  Rabies flitted through our minds.   It took some persuasion to convince you to part with Chuckie:  he would not be happy as a house pet, he was used to country life, we wouldn't know what to feed him, etc.,etc. Finally you reluctantly agreed to free him and he scuttled away--under the washhouse as I remember. And your parents tried not to be too obviously relieved. Now we have the picture and the memory, thanks to Dad with his ever present camera.

The Pittsburgh (area) jazz scene circa 1948

I had no idea that my dad had been the music editor of WVU's humor magazine, Moonshine, until my mom unearthed a file folder with several issues in it.

In my last post, I wrote about the demise of WDUQ's jazz programming.  Here's a little taste of what Pittsburgh's jazz scene was like back in the day, courtesy of this column from February 1948 (click on the picture to see a larger version):

Woody Herman playing a dance in Morgantown?  Sigh...

(And no, I have no idea what the inside joke about "Boone-Jug" Waldo is at the end.  But I do know that Boone-Jug, aka Ray Waldo, went on to become principal of one of the largest county high schools in the state.  And his staff still called him Boone-Jug.  That's so West Virginia.  Here's a nice little anecdote about him from the Martinsburg Journal.)

Pepperoni Rolls

Pepperoni rolls are a local foodway here in northern West Virginia (and they come with a long origin narrative about having started out as food for guys working the mines).

Rose has had pepperoni rolls on the brain since talking about them in her folklore class recently. So when we saw some pre-packaged ones up on Shopping Mountain today, we thought about buying them to have during the Buckeyes basketball game. Before we even got them in the cart, though, I said, "Hey, why don't we just buy a big pepperoni stick and make our own with the pizza dough I've got thawing out?"

(We often have pizza on a Friday night, making enough dough one week for two weeks' worth of pizza, with the extras frozen and defrosted. We had missed our regular pizza night this week, so it was thawing for tonight.)

Of course, the big pepperoni stick was actually a good bit cheaper than the whole bag of rolls, and the pepperoni itself was good and spicy.

It was easy enough to cut it to length and to mix in some equally lengthy mozzarella (in the distinctly non-foodie-approved form of 'string cheese' that we had left over from a visit from Justin, Rose's nephew).





I rolled 'em up in small bits of pizza dough, sealed on the edge and at the ends; Rose brushed them with some olive oil and sprinkled on a few spices; and then we baked them until they seemed done. They came out of the oven looking pretty much like you would expect.




Served with a spinach salad and dipped in tomato sauce, they came out more like tubular calzones than the traditional local pepperoni rolls (which have more of a dinner-roll crumb, as they would say on tv), but they were quite tasty, for all that.

B+, I think, and better than the Shopping Mountain ones, I'm pretty sure.

Why we haven't blogged in a month (in pictures)

Bathroom remodeling.

Expert help from professional carpenter father-in-law.

Birthday and new year celebrations.

Adorable chubby houseguest (and his parents, big sister, and dog.)

Frenchified cooking:  bread and onion soup.

Baking District 12 cookies for young-adult reading group discussion of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games.

More bathroom remodeling.

Getting closer...

Done!  (Collapse.)

(Not pictured:  starting spring semester; shoveling several major storms' worth of snow.)

Only in Morgantown, Part 1

It seems like every state has its "outlier outpost," the place about which everyone says, "Only in [fill in name of town here]."

In Colorado, this was always Boulder.  Everyone who didn't live in Boulder would hear of something happening there--and it could be anything from a bid to legalize pot to protesters trying to protect prairie dogs--and would shake their heads and say "Only in Boulder."

When we moved to West Virginia from Colorado, someone told us that Morgantown was the "Boulder of West Virginia."  Now, having spent quite a bit of time in Boulder, we had serious reservations about this claim. 

Morgantown is no Boulder.  There's only one microbrewery, and it's not that good, and while the mountains here are beautiful, they're not quite as sublime as the Flatirons, and the people aren't nearly as fit and happy as Boulderites.  Plus, while Morgantown may lean considerably further left than much of the state, it can in no way shape or form be considered a liberal outpost/hippie enclave in the way that Boulder can.  Sure, we have a head shop, but so does every college town (even Greeley did, for chrissakes).

Still, it's crucial to remember the second part of that statement: that Morgantown is the Boulder of West Virginia.  And therein lies the rub.

Now, I'm not entirely sure what it means to people in other parts of the state when they say "Only in Morgantown."  Most likely it's a critique of the ways in which the city is detached from the reality of the rest of the state, since it's a place where unemployment is low, property values are high, and good jobs mean more than work in the mining industry.  Last year, Morgantown got a lot of buzz for appearing to be recession-proof.  

And it may also have to do with the youthful, party-oriented nature of the town, fueled by the 30,000 students who call it home for nine months out of the year.

For me, though, it has to do with a series of seeming contradictions that nevertheless seem to coexist peacefully, even productively.  So, with this post, we're inaugurating what we hope will become a recurring feature here at Romantoes, spotlighting some of the things that make us say "Only in Morgantown."

Today's case in point?  The very existence of this store, which is on a well-traveled route leading from Morgantown to Point Marion, Pennsylvania. Since deer-hunting season started on Monday, this seems like an especially good example to start with.

Rumor has it that one of the main reasons the university closes for the whole week of Thanksgiving is because deer hunting traditionally begins on the fourth Monday of November.  Local high-school teachers tell me that they don't plan anything major for the Monday and Tuesday of this week when school is still in session because so many students will be out hunting.  Hell, even my endodontist told me that he was taking a day off this week just to go "be in the woods" with his buddies, even though he himself doesn't hunt. 

Guns and butter, I've heard of.  But guns and ice cream?  That's pure Morgantown.

Dinner Service for Two--No Maid

West Virginia may now be known across the world as a coal producing state, stereotyped as a place of poverty and hillbillies, but one of this region's most important exports to the rest of the country was once--believe it or not--middle class aspirations.

In the nineteen twenties and thirties, this whole area (West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio) was the national hub for industries producing glassware, china, and pottery. These industries date back even a century or more earlier here: the region's plentiful supplies of coal and gas, sand and clay, as well as the easy access to rivers (and later railroads) for transporting the finished wares made this part of the country a perfect place for these businesses. Morgantown itself had a number of glass factories in the first half of the twentieth century.

But in the twenties and thirties, glass factories and pottery factories in West Virginia and Ohio actively pursued a new, direct marketing strategy, trying to sell their wares to housewives explicitly as the material supports of an aspirational middle class lifestyle. Not only were magazines barraged by advertisements, but many of these factories produced brochures and booklets as giveaways to potential customers, and I pick them up whenever I can, although they are pretty hard to find. They tell a story very different from what we might normally think abut both this part of the country and how middle class values were sold to the country both before and during the Great Depression.

One of my favorites, for its sheer Art Deco brilliance, is the 1928 New Little Book About Glassware published by the Fostoria Glass Company of Moundsville, WV. A 40-page revision of a similar 1925 booklet (the picture at the top, from which the title of this post derives, comes from the 1925 verison), the 1928 booklet's cover shows a woman few people, I suspect would associate with West Virginia in the 1920s, and the text includes remarkable passages like the following: "No longer is it surprising to have the soup course, the salad, or dessert, the after-dinner coffee appear in Fostoria dishes." Glass is presented as a novelty: the use of glass instead of china for the entire service was a fairly recent development: "At first a complete dinner service of glass sounded like a fairy tale or a glittering dream from Arabian Nights." But a Fostoria service is presented here as analogous to a silver service, a civilized necessity for any house or home. But its essential novelty meant that the idea itself needed to be sold, and these booklets are remarkable for how they mix the snob factor of aspirational class identification with the practical matters of housekeeping: the 1925 booklet shows how to set a table for two if you don't have a maid; the 1928 revision notes "the plates stack perfectly, a point much appreciated by the homemaker whose shelf space is limited."


Amazingly, the beginning of the Great Depression seems to have had remarkably little effect on this marketing strategy. The Roseville Pottery of Zanesville, Ohio, printed the booklet shown at the right in 1931, and the Futura line vases shown below in the picture are especially collectible today for their Art Deco designs. Cambridge Glass (of Cambridge, Ohio) put out a booklet called The Art of Making Fine Glassware in 1939, which begins by recounting the high esteem medieval Venice had for members of the glassworking guild. All of these booklets, in fact, take education as their primary mode: the Fostoria booklets educate the housewife on proper table service, even if she doesn't happen to have a maid to rely on; the Roseville and Cambridge booklets give brief histories of pottery and glass technologies and artistry in order to make recommendations for contemporary decorative uses or gift-giving. The ancient and honorable traditions of glassware and pottery are clearly held up as markers of refinement, tradition, and class. The 1925 Fostoria booklet, for example, comments upon "the conservative aristocracy of hand-blown crystal."



Glass is still being made in West Virginia, but more as a studio enterprise than a matter of factories turning out dinner plates, cups, saucers, and goblets by the thousand. These booklets--secondary products of these glass and pottery factories--seem to be rarely collected by libraries (WorldCat turns up fewer than ten copies for any of these booklets), but they tell a story of a key moment in the marketing of middle class material practices as a matter of aspirational class identity. And it's a continual surprise to me that a lot of that came from here in West Virginia.