Wanda Tegmeier's Christmas Pageant

People who now know me as a kind-hearted heathen might be surprised to hear I had extensive religious training in a rural clapboard church with peeling paint…at least until my best friend Carol Fujan talked me into playing hooky from Sunday services.

However, even Carol and I knew that as the season neared, Santa was watching, and it behooved us to keep our butts stuck to the pews throughout the sermon and, of course, to volunteer to be in the Christmas Eve church program.

When the annual insanity of the holiday season peaks, I like to travel back to that kinder, gentler time, to the Christmas pageant put on by our Methodist church in O Little Town of Carleton, Nebraska where I grew up.

Wanda Tegmeier, a lovely rotund woman who magically produced one baby boy every year, spearheaded the event.

Her oldest, Dick, was 8, and she cast him as Joseph. I was desperate to be the Virgin Mary, but one look at me, and anyone could see I was much naughtier than nice. However, my friend Carol, despite her sneaking-out-of-church ways, had the perfect holy face, and she got the part. So I ended up as one of the kids who recited a piece of the Christmas story.

Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the wise men were off stage in the Sunday school room when the program began. The rest of us kids lined up in the back of the church with the choir. Wanda gave each of us a lit candle to carry. Thinking back, it doesn’t make sense that little kids would be allowed to transport open flames in an old wooden building, but those were more innocent times.

We marched to the front, singing “Come All Ye Faithful.” The choir took their seats. We placed our lit candles in the holders, dripping wax and narrowly avoiding setting the altar afire. A row of child-sized chairs waited for us to nervously sit until it was time to say our lines.

Rodney Smith took the lead and announced the census by Caesar Augustus. I had a crush on Rod. He looked like a 6-year-old George Clooney with a flat top.

Then Rosalee Penner, 14, beautiful and with a voice like an angel, sang “Silent Night.” The girl knew how to set a mood.

Next came Ricky Widler. He had red hair, freckles, and dripped with mischief. He’d threatened to moon the congregation, and I hoped he would drop his trousers, but he played it straight, introducing Mary and Joseph, who waltzed on stage, looking pure and holy. And so cued, the choir rose to sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I thought it was the most beautiful carol in the whole world.

Bobbie, another one of the Tegmeier boys, stood to announce the arrival of the Baby Jesus. He took his infant brother from his mother Wanda and handed him to Mary who placed him in a cradle, and we little ones gathered around to sing a grotesquely off-tune version of “Away in the Manger.”

And on the pageant went. Doug Smith introduced the shepherds, and they trooped in wearing sheets belted with rope. You could see the cuffs of their dress pants and dark shoes, but they were still able to watch their flocks with stunning authenticity.

The choir sang “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Janet Penner delivered the line about “glad tidings of great joy,” and the congregation rose to sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” which made me think of another Harold, the nerdy son of our school bus driver.

Then it was my turn to say my piece and cue the wise men, my brother John, Bob Stofer and LeRoy Disney, all wearing striped bathrobes. They sang “We Three Kings.”

We all marched off stage singing “Joy to the World.”

Once we kids were seated in the pews, the choir sang “Up on the Rooftop.”

Good old Santa Claus appeared from the Sunday school room. It was my grandpa, and I knew because my grandma had mentioned about a hundred times how the only way she could get the old coot to church was to put him in a Santa suit.

Grandpa gave candy canes to all the little kiddies, and we went home to pick one present to open on Christmas Eve. Even if it was underwear, it didn’t matter, because the real Santa had not yet arrived, and our hearts were still full of hope and wonder.

Home for Christmas

When my brother John and I were in college in Nebraska, we shared a dilapidated two-bedroom cottage within walking distance of campus. Yes, the kitchen floor sloped, and we had to kick doors to get them to open and close, but the place was a mere 120 dollars a month, and it was home to us.

We lived with two dogs, a spirited Brittany spaniel and a mellow half-pint Aussie. My brother took them mushroom hunting with him. You might think stalking toadstools was a recipe for agonizing death, but John possessed a library full of esoteric information on fungi. No mushroom was consumed until it had been positively identified with spore print and all.

The tastiest and most plentiful of the wild mushrooms were morels. Our kitchen was strung with lines of them drying. Fresh or dried, these mushrooms turned ordinary fare into gourmet feasts.

Since we were students, we lived on a microscopic budget. What we ate had to be cheap. We shopped sparingly, and by the end of any month, what was left in the larder was slim.

So as Christmas neared that year, we had little food left in the house, not only because it was late in the month, but because we’d planned a 400-mile trip to the other end of the state to visit family. We both intended to load up on our mother’s excellent cooking during the semester break.

For weeks I’d been singing, “I’ll be home for Christmas…” driving John as crazy as any in-store holiday music ever could. Still we were in good spirits and ready for a cozy week with our mom and dad.

Then the storm came. It began with freezing rain. Ice pulled down electric lines and killed power for the area. Our furnace didn’t work without it. Then the blizzard arrived and blanketed the ice.

Our only hope of getting home was to have Santa pick us up in his sleigh, and we all know Mr. Claus has much more important duties in December.

Luckily, we had a gas stove and water heater, so we ran the oven and burners and continually refilled sinks and the bathtub with hot water.

We wore layers of warm clothes topped with parkas and really appreciated having two thick-furred dogs to cuddle with.

The snow got so deep the pooches didn’t want to go outside. We shoveled a clear space for them near the door, but we had to physically carry them out to get them to do their necessaries.

Our food supplies dwindled. Even though there was a great market a block away, it was closed due to the blizzard and for lack of electricity.

I took inventory of what we still had. Flour, potatoes, a few cans of soup and vegetables, powdered milk, cooking oil, and a well-stocked spice cabinet. And, of course, we had those wrinkly morels.

We put together a pot of soup and made bread and managed for the first couple of days. We weren’t about to starve, but it appeared Christmas dinner might be a little bleak.

The morning of Christmas day it was below zero. The power was still out and the roads were not yet cleared of snow. John appeared from his bedroom holding a can of tomato sauce, a package of spaghetti, and an onion. He’d been hoarding!

Add some morels to the above, and we had the makings of a most excellent meal. The aroma of onions sautéing was like heaven. The sauce simmered. The pasta boiled.

John dished up the feast and handed me my plate. I was ready to dive in, and that’s exactly what I did. Our Brittany spaniel took that moment to jump on me, and the uneven kitchen floor didn’t help matters. Whoops! My spaghetti slid off my plate and went flying. The dogs went to work cleaning it up.

My brother stared at my empty plate and then at the dogs lapping rich sauce from the floor.

“Don’t think for a second I’ll share my food with you.” He grumbled, grabbed my plate and filled it with half of his meal. He carefully carried both plates to the table himself. “Sit,” he said gruffly to me.

I did, and the dogs sat, too.

We ate, savoring every bite. All these years later I still remember the taste of that incredible sauce.

The meaning of this season is blessed with the good memories we keep. And we can be home for Christmas, if only in our dreams.

A Coffee Fiend Gives Thanks

It’s predawn on a recent Thanksgiving morning. I haven’t had coffee yet, and I’m in a daze, staring at that sweet old Quaker dude on the box in the pantry. I’ve no clue as to why I’m here.

“Are you going to make breakfast?” my husband asks.

“Yes…that’s it…thank you.” I sound like Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesizer before I get properly caffeinated. But now that I’ve been reminded what I’m doing, I pour oats in the boiling water, and the day can begin.

Finally the coffee’s ready. I take my first sip. Ahh…I’m grateful for this elixir.

Around Thanksgiving many people like to wax eloquent about the things they’re thankful for. My husband gets cranky as a cornered possum when asked to recite his gratitude list, which maybe explains why we’re roasting our own turkey for two again this year. But there are many things I’m thankful for, such as all the factoids I learn from my husband.

He’s at the kitchen table reading news on his iPad. “Did you know the world’s record turkey weighed 84 pounds? Those must’ve been some drumsticks.”

“Hah,” I say, “I bet it was an ostrich with short legs.

As I serve the oatmeal, our Jack Russell terriers mill around my ankles, ever hopeful I’ll drop a morsel their way. Their natural Tasmanian devil personalities are mellow in the morning, and I’m grateful to have these creatures that often look as dazed as I do before I get my coffee.

My husband eats breakfast while checking Facebook postings. “Our pal, Deb St. Julien, says she’s grateful for protein synthesis, cellular respiration, meiosis and mitosis,” he reads.

“Once a high school biology teacher, always a high school biology teacher,” I say.

“I’m glad we have Google so I can look all this stuff up,” he says. “She’s also grateful for quarks.”

“You know what happens when you cross a dog and a duck?” I ask.

“I give up.”

“You get a pet that goes, ‘quark, quark, quark.’”

He groans.

“You’re just jealous you didn’t think of it.”

“I’m going for a bicycle ride,” he says.

My husband takes off, and I start a load of laundry. Ahh…the washer and dryer. And running water. Pop in a basketful of dirty clothes, and clean ones emerge a short while later. It’s a miracle. Now that’s something to be grateful for. Laundry underway, I head for the garden. Who knows why getting dirt under my fingernails puts me in such a blissful state, but I can’t imagine anything more fun to do on a holiday than pulling weeds. At my age it’s about time I had a little fun.

When my husband returns, I have a mountain of weeds for him to haul to the compost pile. We work a few more hours together in the garden, and then, about the time we should take our showers and get the turkey in the oven, we hear a rat-a-tat-tat nearby.

We know this sound. They’re jack hammering in front of our neighbor’s house. The only reason they dig up the street on a holiday is because the water main has broken once again. Our water’s been turned off. We ask the workers, and they estimate it’ll be 6-8 hours before they restore service, and that’s if everything goes well.

“Ummm…I guess we aren’t going to get a shower anytime soon,” I say.

“What about the turkey?” my husband asks.

“You can’t cook a big dinner without water. You can’t even wash your hands.”

“Cavemen didn’t have running water,” he says.

“Cavemen only lived to 22.”

“But I’m starving,” he says.

“So find some takeout.”

“Excellent idea.” My husband leaves for the hunt. He’s gone over an hour. The sun sets.

Now I’m hungry, too.

When he finally returns, he has a big bag of food slung over his shoulder.

“It smells great,” I say. “Turkey?”

“Pad Thai and red curry.” So we have spicy Asian food for Thanksgiving, and we’re very grateful that one restaurant was still open. About 10:00 PM the water’s turned back on. After some sputtering and banging, our old pipes deliver plenty of water for showers. As the hot stream beats against my shoulders, it dawns on me that the fact we have water again means there will be coffee to drink in the morning.

Yes, there’s much to be grateful for.

My Dad the Super Hero

Lt. William Rachow, in Italy, 1944

This Veterans Day weekend I thought a lot about my dad, who served in WWII and survived to live out his particular version of the American dream.

His survival made my existence possible, so, of course, I’m grateful he made it home. I wish there were no such thing as war, but that kind of world is still in the making. And perhaps the creation of a peaceful planet in part has to do with generations of men and woman in uniform in the service of that goal.

My father passed away at the age of 87, and a group of serious men in uniform came to his graveside service to give him a full military send off. I was moved at how, after so many years of his civilian life, one airman’s service still mattered so intently to these young men.

Later I was honored to speak at Dad’s memorial. This is the story I shared with family and friends:

B-24 bomber

Imagine it’s September 10, 1944. We’re in a B-24 bomber flying over enemy territory. We’ve dropped our bombs, and Germans are firing back from ground and air. We’ve lost two engines, and then a third is hit.

                 

For the men in this plane, this is turning out to be one terrible, rotten day. But they aren’t dead yet. They’re now over Yugoslav territory when the pilot gives the order:

“Bail out!”

Twenty-one-year old, William Rachow (eventually to be known as my dad), is the bombardier on this mission. He opens the bomb bay doors and helps the crewmen take that leap of faith into the wild blue yonder. Then Lt Rachow steps into space himself.

He pulls the ripcord, and the miracle of the silk canopy is above him.

They say at times like this your whole life flashes before you. Lt. Rachow notices it’s a beautiful September day.

He thinks of the letter he received form his bride Rogene and the way it still smelled of her perfume. She’s expecting their first child. He has a lot to live for.

He looks for a place to set down. The meadow looks good, but the parachute takes him to a tall pine. He tumbles through the branches. It’s not pretty, but he makes it to the ground with only a few bumps.

Will he be met by enemy troops known for hanging all captives? Or by Russians with a reputation for shooting first and asking questions later?

Lt. Rachow is lucky to be found by Partisans sympathetic to American troops. The bad news is, none of them speak English. He must put his trust in hand signals that they will take him to safety.

He’s given a bed for the night, fed bread and eggs in the morning, and he’s taken to a British compound nearby where several days later he catches a C-47 supply plane back to his base in Italy.

The whole crew makes it back alive. One has an injured leg, and another had the seat of his flight suit blown off by flak, but otherwise they’re alive and well and find the courage to carry out more missions and eventually make it home to heroes’ welcomes.

I didn’t hear much about my dad’s war adventures until many years later when I went with him to a reunion of his squadron. There I learned Dad’s buddies called him Rocky. They told stories of his heroic deeds.

He was always there for them, they said. He shared what he had, money, cigarettes, even oxygen. One told me about when his mask froze at 30K feet, and my dad handed over his own oxygen. Apparently Rocky didn’t need extra oxygen no matter how thin the air got.

I already knew my dad was an everyday hero, working hard, helping family, friends and strangers alike. And I knew how much he loved our mom, Rogene, the first girl he ever kissed. From the way he joked around with her, to the way he held her hand the day she died, he made it clear she was a precious gift.

And later, when he was so blessed to find Irene and marry again at 80, he impressed me all over again with the way he appreciated and loved her.

I’d seen these things with my own eyes, but I wondered why he didn’t tell stories of his own heroism.

His buddies gave me the answer. “Rocky was our hero, but he never tooted his own horn.”

This was true.  My dad didn’t brag, but was strong under fire. He was able to take a leap of faith and trust in the unknown.  And he knew how to show love and gratitude for the ways he’d been blessed.

That’s my definition of a super hero.

Crazy for Smart Phones

Ms. Rachow would like to dedicate this column to Siri, the disembodied voice in her new mobile phone that did all historical fact checking for this piece.

While growing up in Nebraska, I didn’t dream it would one day be possible to delete emails and post to FaceBook while my husband drove our pooches and me to the beach.

Until just three weeks ago, I wondered why I’d even want to be so obsessively connected. But I confess…I’ve joined the hordes of zombies who are infatuated with constant connectivity.

My insanity was a long time in the making and involved a hundred or so marital “discussions.” The arguing began in 2007 when the first iPhone came on the market. My husband, being an aficionado of all new tech goodies, wanted to get on the smart phone track then, but we still had a contract with the wrong mobile provider…ya-da, ya-da…not a great financial idea to switch horses in midstream.

Besides, at that time we had year-old flip phones that were excellent in many ways. They had terrific sound quality and were so easy to operate I could make a call with one hand while keeping the other on the wheel and my eyes on the road. Using a handheld cell phone while driving was still legal in California in those ancient days.

Months passed, and with each generation of new smart phones, my techie husband would make the case for getting our mobile-phone butts out of the Dark Ages and into 21^st Century reality. Over a billion people worldwide had taken the plunge into a lifestyle where it was possible to be connected 24x7, no matter where one was or what one was doing.

It escaped me why it was so appealing to be on the Internet all the time. It seemed just crazy, mind numbing, whacky, insane, and stupid, stupid, stupid.

I said exactly that many times, but my husband’s not much swayed by emotional arguments. He grew up in the icy wasteland of Quebec where the slightest show of emotion can cause parts of one’s frostbitten face to fall off.

Of course, beyond the first year of marriage one does not win arguments by foot stomping alone. One must remember one’s spouse has inherited his father’s propensity toward pinching pennies.

Whenever the smart phone subject came up, I calmly asked, “What will our data plan cost once we get smart phones?”

Suddenly my thrifty husband would decide our ancient flip phones were gems to be cherished for as long as we both should live.

Nevertheless, he kept up on the new generations of smart phones. Via his research, I learned some users loved the BlackBerry, which seemed pleasantly fruity to me. And others liked the Android…a connected cell phone and a character in a sci-fi novel. My husband liked the iPhone best, although I never asked why.

It wasn’t my job to know all the details of mobile devices. My task was to blindly argue against all smart phones as the technology seasons came and went.

Our old flip phones continued to work well even as they became strange relics of a bygone era. It seemed there were grown men who’d been born after we first got those old phones. I was perversely proud of this, but I also noticed I was less and less willing to let anyone under 30 see me make a call. The flip phones were as embarrassing as our ever-more frequent invitations to join AARP.

However, it wasn’t embarrassment that finally tipped the argument. It was getting puppies.

It turns out if you have pups you need to photograph their every milestone.

“The new iPhone has a fantastic camera,” my husband said.

“We already have cameras,” I countered. But there was a crack in my voice. I already knew how challenging it was to share photos with our conventional cameras. Yes, the world could to wait to see our endless puppy shots, but when one is a new parent, one gets a little overly exuberant.

Still I dragged my feet. I hated to put our perfectly functional flip phones out to pasture. It wasn’t until my husband’s took an “accidental” header onto the pavement that I finally accepted the inevitable

This morning my husband washed cars and repaired the roof himself to save money to pay for the data plan on our new iPhones.

Now we’re off to the beach with dogs and these magical mobile devices. On the way there, I’ll delete emails from the AARP. On the way home, I’ll post the new shots of pups running in the surf.

Crazy? Yes. Happy? Oh, yeah.