Other Photos
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The same family boat
My brother happened to own a warehouse where he could mothball it indefinitely. He keeps it for the rare times he wants a boat. Like the service for Mom.
I had moved on and bought a cabin cruiser that I used all the time for years.
How taxes brought our family together OR The original boat purchase:
One day when we were kids, over dinner Dad was complaining about taxes again, but this time it was because he was coming to a life-altering decision. Always he had worked to increase the size of his business. He
now had another opportunity to do so, but he was in the 90% tax bracket (yes,
there use to be a 90% bracket). He would have to do more
work and hire more people for almost no personal gain. He said that he might as well buy a boat. So he did.
That's how cripplingly high taxes brought our family together. Instead of increasing the national economy and creating jobs, he bought a boat where he spent times with his family that were the best times we ever had.
Ohio River
This photo hung in
my parent's family room for twenty years and faded, but still you can see the silhouette of Mom setting a grilling-rack full of meat on a grill over the driftwood fire at our camp on the
high sand bank overlooking the boat.
Some weeks on Friday afternoon we'd load the car with food, drive downtown and pick Dad up on a corner and head to the boat. Monday morning we'd get up early in order to get Dad back to his office after a weekend with no running water, electricity, telephone, or any of the other interruptions or conveniences of modern life.
Below are photos of the semi-permanent camp we set up every spring in Kentucky to get away to weekends.
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Eventually I hope to find pictures of a few years later than this when the Cheneys and Brosenes got lots nearby and brought their boats and children. It was picnic tables end to end piled with food while kids were dragged behind boats on skies and tubes and whatever else might support them.
It wasn't just about getting away. Places like these eliminate the walls that separate us in our homes and the activities that keep us away from each other. Just doing homework or watching television or talking on the phone puts one in a world separate from the rest of the family.
Being outside like this keeps everyone together doing things collectively. There is no living room where guests sit while members of the family fix food in the kitchen. It's one big room where everyone is part of everything. Pressures and tensions change, sometimes dissolve.
It so heightened our sense of family and community that Mom wanted to spend eternity there. And she will in a way. Her urn is in Spring Grove Cemetery, but her image is at that spot in the Ohio River. The image of her leaning on the rail I had etched in a granite tile. When we were just off shore at the appropriate spot in the river, looking at the view she loved, I threw it toward shore in the same way I would have skipped a stone. And it did skip. It got most of the way to shore. Then as it slowed, and planed instead of skipped, it built up a small wave in front of itself - just enough to lift it up so that I could see her leaning on the rail - and then slipped almost vertically into the water. I said, "Bye, Mom."
If I'd had any idea it would end with such a Hollywood perfect maneuver, I would have videotaped it and put a link to it here.
The front door of the condo they had in their later years. She always had flowers. Sometimes the flowers spread until it was a trick to find the walk.
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First page of Mom Memorial
2nd page | 3rd page | 4th page