Wilbo Tries to Imagine Sunday Dinner at the Fowlerville Michigan Farm of His Grandparents, Stella and Harry

March 3, 2020 at 9:20 AM

McDonald’s tucked into Walmart

San Antonio, Texas

Sunday is said to be a day of rest, but I keep active on Sunday. Mom told me that her family kept Sunday as a day of rest by making dinner on Saturday. I’m imagining Gerald, Joan and Tom eating at the table with Harry and Stella and then sitting in the yard together. Thanks to Moses and the tablets, the grace of Sunday touched their lives for at least a decade, maybe more.

I can imagine these beautiful Sundays, and then I wonder. Didn’t Harry, the father, keep livestock, chickens and hogs? The livestock would need to be fed even on a Sunday. Maybe they topped off the chicken feeders Saturday afternoon, gave the pigs some extra slop sundown before the sabbath?

I can only recreate the world of those five people, one I never met, by contemplating the clues mother revealed, sitting at the dinner table. Sunday dinner, we were expected to loiter at table and converse, mostly with her. Dad listened in and never interjected.

She would shake her fork at us to make her points emphatic. “If you play your cards right, you’ll get a military commission and live the good life of an officer”. Sorry, mother, I went to college at Michigan State in the eighties, where every person I met was pushing marijuana. Across the hall, a student from Fenton had a stash and he got me high the second night at Wonders Hall.

I experimented. It was easy to experiment, and it technically made me ineligible for a military commission. Just saying no is hard to do when one has to say no repeatedly every, every day. I wasn’t bright enough to know I could lie about it. Billy Clinton brilliantly replied to accusations, “I didn’t inhale”. Maybe I should have been more like Billy.

When asked about marijuana by the doctor at military processing, I gave him a flat no. He probed, “Not a whiff, not a puff, not a sniff”? “No, absolutely, no”. He made a note on the paperwork. I went to the next station.

Deciding that it was a bad thing to begin a military career with a lie, I pulled myself out of the running. Mother was hugely disappointed, and I feel ashamed to this day. I would be retired by now had I just blew off the shame and sinned no more and got on with officer candidate school. I would always have a parade on holiday Mondays as a veteran.

I never met Harry Dombecki, who lived from 1910 to 1949 and now rests in Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, east of Fowlerville, Michigan. He was gone almost fifteen years when I was born in 1963. I could track him through his records, looking for census entries and his death certificate. Archives.Com wants to charge me a membership fee to look at the “official hard copy death certificate, the same used by the United States government”.

I would much rather pay a visit to the courthouse in Howell, Michigan and visit the vital records window. Mom and dad once set up their traveling arts and craft store on a side street next to that courthouse during parades, festivals and car shows. I often helped the two put away the tent and shelves and hand painted figurines and then go for dinner, two hours of hard work on a Sunday. Our Sunday dinner had gone to Ruby Tuesdays.

Mom was reliving her childhood, selling on the Howell courthouse square. It didn’t occur to me that she had worked her way home to Livingston County until today. She bought the farm near Bancroft so she could be close to the farm she worked with her father, Harry. How hard she must have worked for her mother and dad. I know this because she worked so hard for her children.

I remember Gerald and her taking a stroll through the garden between the corn crib and chicken coop, a garden she weeded and planted with us. He walked the rows and looked impressed. The garden looked great because mom had five children to plant and weed. And we applied pure horse shit to the ground, allowed to cure and mellow in a pile behind the corn crib.

I had brought the manure we spread as fertilizer from the Willman farm, shoveling out the horse barn and loading a truck with it. Just like Hercules, I had cleaned the stables. Mrs. Willman gave me keys to the truck, a big red Ford, and never asked me if I knew how to drive a stick. I ground the gears a few times, but I figured it out and didn’t drive into the ditch. In farm life, the farmer hands you a tool and you figure it out. I watched Farmer Judson run a chainsaw and then he handed it off to me. I cut a cord of firewood without lopping off my arm, so I passed the test.

Of the five, I have witnessed as three have walked on, Gerald first and then Stella second and then Joan third. I could ask Tom, the youngest, spared Gerald’s fate, a second and fatal heart attack, thanks to physical fitness and angioplasty for anecdotes about Sundays at Harry and Stella’s farm. I don’t even know where the farm stood although I’m sure mom and dad drove by it at least once on the way back home from church in Fowlerville.

However, Tom isn’t one to sit around and talk. He’ll zoom out to the golf course given a free afternoon. I have an open invitation to visit the two in Gladwin where they have taken to the gypsy life, living in a lovely RV at a park. Maybe he’ll open up and tell stories of his parents and siblings when we sit around the campfire.

Phyllis, one of mother’s good friends in high school, just turned eighty and she gave me a few stories about mother growing up. We ate Buddy’s Pizza, a Detroit style pizza baked in pans made from heavy steel once used in the auto plants. We shared a huge salad that Buddy’s sells as a side. After a few anecdotes about mom, Phyllis returned to the present and shared stories about her neighbors, whom she helps by giving rides, even at late hours of the night.

Sunday, the Unitarian Universalist church celebrated International Women’s Day with a potluck, and I felt lucky that many vegetarian and vegan dishes were set out by the socially conscious members of the congregation. A man in line with me spooned up some black-eyed peas for himself and told me a story from the aftermath of the American civil war. “Yeah, once the black-eyed peas went to feed the cows and hogs. The Union army killed all the livestock, so the southern people began to eat the peas. They must have tasted pretty good to their hungry families because the south hasn’t stopped dining on them”. I got myself a second serving to go with the vegan cabbage salad.

At Four, I visited the Bihl House, an art center on the Fred, the nickname of Fredericksburg Road. The building is two stories high, but the inside uses that room for the rafters of solid timber, true German rathskeller construction. I dipped strawberries in chardonnay as a woman sang torchy songs from the sixties, Judy Collins style, as a retired guitar professor from University of Texas accompanied her on guitar. I sat by a pianist from one of the local symphonies who improvised on his air keyboard, silently, as the program went along merrily. After the concert, I sat in the sculpture garden outside and watched the gathering clouds, promising rain. I wondered why I sat alone on a Sunday evening because Joan never did growing up. Neither did I, growing up.