Wishing everyone a Happy Summer Solstice! We began the day with some blueberry corn mush, a traditional Native dish that is easy to make and delicious! We always have this on special ceremonial days. We will make corn bread later in the week, when Deb can chew properly once again. She continues to heal well from her oral surgery last Thursday, but her face is still a bit swollen, and multi-colored. The mush went down well for her. During breakfast we played the Songs of the Zuni Pueblo CD. We wish we could be in New Mexico today, but we are in spirit. Later today we will switch out our major wall art, replacing the Spring material with our Summer paintings. It is supposed to be sunny all day today, but very warm, with highs in the high 90s (35+ C).
I managed some piano practice this morning. I must say that a few of those pieces have taken on extra depth and meaning since news of Patti's death reached me last week. Especially the Mendelssohn Song Without Words (Op. 102, #4), and the Chopin Nocturne (Op. 37, #1). Since Saturday, amidst many tears, I wrote down a few memories I have of being with Patti. So it seems fitting that on the first day of Summer I publish a few of them here. She was my summer girl friend for most of my teen years (14-18), when we saw one another at Lake Penage for two weeks each August. We were born the same year, 9 days apart. First I will present the slender obit I found for her on-line, followed by the first part of my own memories. I hope you take the time to read them, and feel free to comment or contact me if you knew Patti. I would love to hear anything about her after we parted.
Patricia Lee Anderson
September 13, 1953 - August 5, 2014
Patricia Anderson, Age 60, of Newbury died Aug. 5, 2014 at her home. Born Sept. 13, 1953 in Cleveland to Leonard and Josephine (nee: Bonach) Anderson, she had been a longtime area resident. Pat enjoyed fishing and being outdoors. She also served as a Eucharistic Minister at St. Helen Catholic Church. Survivors include her siblings Joanne (Joseph) Orichella of Newbury, Leonard of Sagamore Hills and Michele (Louis) Wagner of Massillon; 8 nieces and nephews and 1 great-nephew. She was preceded in death by her parents. FUNERAL MASS will be at 11:30 a.m Tuesday, August 12, 2014 at St. Helen Catholic Church, 12060 Kinsman Road, Newbury. Burial will follow at All Souls Cemetery. VISITATION: 10-11:00 am on Tuesday at the Burr Funeral Home, 116 South ST. (On Rt. 44, 500’ south of Rt. 6/Chardon Square) Chardon, OH.
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Part 1: Meeting Patti and Her Family
The Picnic. Meeting Patti was a world changing event for me. As near as I remember, it was the summer of 1968, Sunday, August 4th, or Monday August 5th. We were both 14 years old, and would be turning 15 in one month, reentering high school as a sophomore (me--I had to repeat Gr. 9 because of poor grades) and Junior (Patti). Every August during the first weekend, the Lake Penage (Ontario) Campers Association would hold its annual picnic. For me it was to be the picnic with a difference. The Fielding family use to mine quartz on the lake, and they owned a large barge, or scow, to transport the rock to a crusher. During the August picnic day, it became a very slow way of arriving at the picnic, held far down the lake in those days. I don’t know why I chose to ride the scow that day, along with my Uncle Jimmy and cousin Ricky, and around 25 or so other riders. But there were two girls with long blonde hair on the scow as we clambered aboard, one about my age and another one, obviously her sister, a few years older.
I was always shy with girls through high school, and had difficulty meeting them without undergoing a lot of stress. So for the two hour ride to the picnic, I never said a word to the girl I was dying to meet. However, she glanced my way enough times, and I her way, to know that I should introduce myself. It took me about halfway through the all day picnic to do so, and we chatted a bit. The rest of her family had taken the much faster family speed boat to the picnic. I had planned to take the fast way home, too, with my family, but when I heard that Patti (I knew her name!) would take the scow back, my mind was made up to do the same.
We were tired and sunburned on that return journey, but we never stopped talking all the way back to the crusher dock, where our families would retrieve us. I learned she was from Ohio, though I already guessed from her speech that she was American. Americans were common on Penage, coming up north to fish and hunt, and enjoy the peaceful wilderness and clean lake water. But I had never met an American before. I was now a man of the world! But when she said that she was from Pepper Pike, Ohio, I knew I had entered a realm of strange and other-worldly fantasy, like many of the books I read at that time. Pepper Pike? Was there really a place called that? There was, she told me, and it was near Cleveland. Cleveland was a city I knew about, as they had a baseball team. But to me it was pretty exotic stuff.
I asked her if they had unicorns in Pepper Pike. I had heard her laugh a few times that day, but she really laughed a lot when I asked her that (later I would teasingly call her Princess Patti from Pepper Pike; she would then accuse me of making fun of her). Anyway, that is how I met Patti. Soon a followup meeting was planned. That was no easy task. Our camp was on the mainland, while she was on an island (good planning, Mr. Anderson—three beautiful daughters are much safer from roving Canadian boys if they are on an island). To visit her I depended on Uncle Jimmy to transport me, and when she came to visit me it was Mr. Anderson who became her taxi driver (Jimmy was more like an older brother to me, and even lived with us for a time; he was fated to die in a car wreck near Parry Sound in 1978, a tragedy that shook our family for years).
Right away we knew that our relationship had a big problem. Patti came north for two weeks each year. My family did not seem like they would wish to spend two weeks a year in Cleveland, though I did try to persuade them often enough. So we thought that we wouldn’t get too serious with each other. But we did. Our first break up that summer was a very bad time for both of us. When one is 14, waiting 50 weeks to see your girlfriend/boyfriend again is a very excruciating experience, I can tell you. It seemed like an entire lifetime. And we did it for four years, at least.
We both agreed that it was fine to see other people (girls for me, boys for Patti), though I swore I never would. But by the time I was halfway through my 15th year I was girl crazy. Nothing was held back in our letters. She learned of any girl I was dating, and I learned about her friends. One very cool thing she did for me was get me an honorary membership to the Chagrin Falls Astronomy Club. I had a telescope and used it a lot at night at Penage, but there were no clubs in Sudbury. One of Patti’s friends from high school was in the Chagrin Falls club, and I wrote back and forth to him a lot, and received club newsletters. That club is still going strong, and I feel someday that I should go down and give a talk about observing from northern latitudes, and my time as a member.
The Card Game. Yes, the card game. There were lots of evening and rainy day card games back then, and everyone played cards. On my earliest visits to Ben Isle, we played cards in the screened veranda up at the camp. Usually it was me, Patti, Joanne (the older sister from the picnic scow ride), Leonard (her only brother), Michele (little sister), and my driver, Jimmy, who was six years older than me (I think he liked Joanne for a time). Mr. and Mrs. Anderson would sit inside the main camp while we kids talked and played cards out front. Well, it was my third or fourth visit to the island, and getting close to the time when Patti and family would be leaving for home. As I said, I was shy with girls. I hadn’t even kissed her, but it’s also true that we were seldom left alone. Patti made the first bold move between us. Patti was sitting opposite me at a large and long table, with the other people mentioned sitting around us. Suddenly I felt someone playing footsie with me. I will say right now that Patti could keep a poker face when she wanted to. It was a very interesting evening, as I looked closely at everyone playing cards that night. Michele was too short to reach me, and far too young anyway. Leonard was beside me, but he didn’t look the type. Jimmy sat on my other side, and he was ruled out for the same reason as Leonard. Joanne was opposite me, but further away beside Patti, and, like Michele, was just too far away. That left only one suspect. Patti looked the most innocent of them all. As the card game continued, she managed to remove my socks with her feet, with nobody noticing anything! Afterwards, as Jimmy and I were preparing to leave later that night, I whispered to Patti, “I hope those were your feet under the table.” She looked straight at me and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Five seconds later, when I was starting to believe her, she folded nearly in half and burst into an almost silent laughter. I thought she would fall in the lake. No one else knew what was going on, and until this moment no one ever has.
Returns. Awaiting Patti’s annual return to Penage was pure agony. I counted down the weeks. 48 more weeks to Patti. 32 more weeks till Patti. 20 more weeks. 8 more weeks. 2 weeks (the longest stretch of them all by far). And finally, The Return. But a new complication had arisen. I had summer jobs, and during the week could only come out to Penage once or twice. I would be exhausted. Leave Sudbury after work. Drive to Penage (about 50 minutes). Borrow a boat to get to Ben Isle. Visit for maybe 90 minutes. Back to my camp to sleep. Up early and back to work in Sudbury next day. Weekends we spent together, but there was never enough time. Looking back from today’s perspective, I don’t know how we managed. I use to have long and frustrating dreams of trying to reach Patti, either by phone or in person, and the dream would throw continuous blockades at me, so that we would never get together. Could have been premonitions of our future selves.
We would always first meet up again at the annual picnic, taking several hours to get reacquainted, and then happily carry on from there. It became quite the ritual. We never had to catch up on news, as our letter writing did that for us.
One time Patti took me to her crying rock, on Ben Isle. I had shown her several lookout rocks near our camp, and one day she took me by the hand and led me across the island to the far shore. There sat a little rock, perfect for one person to sit upon, right beside the lake. I asked her what she cried about there, and she would just answer, “Oh, usually no particular reason.” By this time I was a bit better acquainted with teenage girls, and so I pressed her no farther.
The Family. I don’t think that I had ever met a family as wonderful as the Andersons; Mom, Dad, and 4 kids. Beginning with Patti, she was one of the sweetest, kindest, most gentle persons I have ever met (and gorgeous, too!). And often she was very funny. She would talk very fast sometimes, at other times she would talk almost like a ventriloquist, hardly moving her lips and enunciating poorly. She would gently tease her brother and younger sister occasionally, but nothing harsh. Mr. and Mrs. Anderson seemed like super parents. I never heard a voice raised, but the kids listened and obeyed. They both spoke directly but calmly. They were generous to me, and I shared many meals at Ben Isle. They never chased me away, or said that I should see a bit less of Patti. They never interfered at all, and many times they dropped Patti off at our camp, trusting my parents that Patti would be well looked after (she was). Mr. Anderson knew the lake well, and we enjoyed many summer boat rides with him, at speed, through waters filled with shoals where I normally feared to tread.
One time Patti and I, at my insistence, asked to take out Mr. Anderson’s brand new canoe for a quick paddle around a nearby island. Halfway around the island the wind had picked up, and it was hard to paddle. No problem; the island was very slender at one point, so I suggested we portage the canoe across the island, and return from the other side with the wind at our backs. Well, it proved to be a harder portage than this Canadian canoeist had planned. By the time we were done, the new canoe looked like it had been through every portage in Ontario. It was scratched, had some small dents, and there was paint missing in places. Patti was aghast. So was I, but I had to keep calm. We had two choices. We could paddle out into the wilderness, never to return. We could have built a log cabin, or perhaps found an old one somewhere to fix up, and live off the land. That was the choice Patti would have preferred at the time. She did not want her dad to see the canoe. Our only alternative was to head back to Ben Isle and face the music. The best approach we could come up with was to attempt to put the canoe back without anyone seeing us. However, Mr. Anderson was on the dock, either fishing or getting his equipment in order. When he saw the canoe, I thought he would go through the roof. I had expected a good and harsh lecture. Instead, once he saw the damage he asked what had happened. We told him, he shook his head, and that was it. Whew. Things may have been said to Patti afterwards (such as something about her fool of a boyfriend), but I never heard another word about it. The canoe was now officially baptized, at any rate.
Later, when Patti and I would wish to be alone on the veranda at night, Mrs. Anderson would call Leonard and Michele to bed at an appropriate time, allowing us our privacy. Michele was a total cutie, but I remember so little of her. A bundle of energy, always seemed to be smiling (except when called to bed; but she was obedient, and never had to be called twice), she would scrutinize Patti and I very closely when we were together. Leonard was always a great guy, into all manner of things mechanical. I remember the first time he sped by our camp in his little speedboat. My younger brother immediately liked Leonard after that. Leonard never pestered us, and he seemed like a calm person, well spoken, and very quiet. Later in my relationship with Patti, he was concerned about the Vietnam war, and whether he would be drafted when he was 18. We were all worried. Joanne was similar in many ways, never bothering us, and also calm and quiet. And very intelligent, and very artistic. I remember first seeing some of her sketches, staring at them in disbelief. I hope she still uses those skills today. But these are only fleeting glimpses from a teenage boy that had eyes only for Patti. Everything else was seen as through a haze.
The Anderson Family Station Wagon. Back then, but more so even today, I try to picture the family packing the station wagon in Pepper Pike for their annual ride to Lake Penage, over 500 miles away, with all the things they would need for their two or three week vacation. Six people added in, and then, near Sudbury, the required groceries fitting in there somewhere, too. A late night arrival at the marina. Unloading the station wagon, and loading the boat. Two trips to Ben Isle likely. Unloading the boat, and carrying everything up the hill to the camp. Mr. Anderson must have really loved Penage (originally it was Lake Panache, because of the incredible leaf colours of autumn).
These are some of the memories I have of the Patti years on Lake Penage. The last summer we spent time alone together was 1972. In the next segment, I will talk about my trip to Cleveland in early summer of 1973, and why I made the journey.
Mapman Mike
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