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Nest Tuesday is Valentine’s Day, a time to celebrate love. As soon as the Christmas holidays were over, the stores blossomed with red hears and they began pushing gifts for that special someone including jewelry, boxes of chocolates and cards. Florists have a special price for roses.

Young love is the subject of songs, poems and stories. I remember the first time eighteen-year-old Kenny told me, “I love you, honey.” It was our last Saturday night date before he would begin a four-year-hitch in the navy. It took several seconds for this sunned, sixteen-year-old to respond, “I love you, too, and I’ll wait for you.” All the next day, I felt like the crooners on the radio were serenading me, especially Nat “King” Cole singing “Too Young.”

But falling in love is thrilling no matter how old you are. When my cousin, Doris, who was in her forties, asked me to be matron of honor for her marriage, she was as giddy as a young girl making plans. I was still in my twenties but, as the mother of three small children, I felt like we had switched ages. Before she met Bob, she had resigned herself to being an old maid like her aunt, who worked as a secretary. She’d even bought her own tombstone so her sister’s family wouldn’t have the expense.

Love also isn’t limited ‘one to a customer’. My friend, Joyce, who was a widow, played euchre at a senior center where she met Sid, a fellow who had lost his wife. They married so they could spend the remainder of their lives together.

There are also couples like Ken and me who are living the saying, “The most romantic love story isn’t Romeo and Juliet who died together…but Grandma and Grandpa who grew old together.”

How have you experienced love?

As a beginning journalist, I spent thirteen years attending local school board and village board meetings. I wasn’t always welcome but the Open Meetings Law assured my access. Before my 10 p.m. deadline, I phoned in reports to the Rockford Morning Star. Most of the people who lived in this community subscribed to the daily newspaper and could read my published articles the next morning.

All of us are affected by the actions of these governing bodies. For example, their annual budgets become part of our property tax bills. If you’re a renter, an increase in your landlord’s assessment may be passed along to you.

The community unit school district trustees, who receive no compensation, hire and fire teachers and administrators. They also decide what can and cannot be taught to the students. In the past, one father influenced his fellow members to add a German language class to the high school curriculum. His son planned to be a doctor and needed the instruction.

Those of us who don’t have kids in school are still concerned. Will our educational system attract families? Will our future community citizens be educated or not?

The village board members, who are paid a stipend, oversee the police department and the public works department. They also pass ordinances that govern the residents such as speed limits on the streets and how a home may be remodeled.

All of them might endure flak from their constituents. A disgruntled citizen may button-hole the public servants on the street, in a coffee shop or at church. Rarely do the trustees receive kudos for a decision.

In the Durand community, there’ll be a Consolidated Election April4 for members of these two boards. Residents have time to learn about the aspirants for office. All candidates run independently–none are affiliated with a party. A variety of representatives is needed because as a wise man once told me, “All of us are smarter than one of us.”

Do you vote in the local elections?

“I don’t want to do that.” Unless we’re dealing with a five-year-old, we don’t hear that candor. Instead, an adult invokes an acceptable social excuse saying something like, “I’d love to, but I’m just too busy right now.” It’s a well-known fact, we can usually make room in our lives for the things we really want to do.

A similar nuance crops up if I run into someone I haven’t seen for a long time. The two of us spend a few minutes catching up with what’s been happening in each other’s lives. The meeting ends with, “We must get together…” but no time is set. Unless cell numbers are exchanged, a promised ‘buzz’ never materializes. We can no longer rely on a phone book or Information.

Another conversational response that’s usually glossed over is the true, physical condition of an acquaintance. Although it happened forty years ago, I’ll never forget a call from an older friend of my husband’s. I answered the wall phone and told Freddy, “I’m sorry, Ken isn’t home.” I knew he’d recently undergone surgery, so I added a casual, “How are you?” I expected to hear, “Fine.” Instead, I listened to a blow-by-blow account of his prostate operation.

Although, I was brought up with the dictum, “Don’t lie,” I’ve also learned not to answer a probing question with, “It’s none of your business.” I skirt the truth with a little embroidery in my response that doesn’t reveal any deep, dark secrets.

Another question that doesn’t really want a true opinion is, “What do you think about…” It’s obvious that concurrence is sought, not argument. All I have to do is figure out the person’s stance and come up with a non-committal reply if my thoughts go in the opposite direction.

Do you use subterfuge at times?

Each one of us is unique and can be identified by a finger print or DNA. Personality and lifestyle combine with genetics to make each individual distinctive. I can cite several things that have contributed to my being different.

When I was bussed to the new Durand Junior High School and joined the seventh-grade class of more than 30 pupils, I was the only one who didn’t have a sibling and did still have my tonsils. It was an era when tonsillectomies were as much a part of childhood as losing baby teeth. But my parents didn’t believe in surgery unless absolutely necessary.

In high school, I began dating Ken, who’s still the man in my life. The year I graduated, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov published his best-selling novel, “Lolita,” pronounced with a long “E” sound. Dad had named me Lolita with a long “I” sound. Apparently, I’m the only one who says it that way–I’m always correcting strangers who think they know how to enunciate my name.

Some of my habits set me apart; I enjoy my own company. The advent of COVID forced people to be homebound instead of working and socializing with others. It didn’t make much difference in my life–I was used to spending most of my time in our house. When I go shopping in the city, I eat lunch alone in a nice restaurant. Looking around the dining room, I’m the only person sitting at a table for one.

Although I’m a writer, I’ve always enjoyed working with numbers. At conferences of wordsmiths, I’ve found the others abhor math. At a recent gathering of grandmothers, the conversation drifted to helping grade-schoolers with homework. The group agreed–arithmetic story problems were the worst. I’ve always found story problems fun.

What attributes make you unique?

During the 1970s, the TV show “Emergency!” introduced viewers to emergency medical services (EMS) provided by paramedics John Gage and Roy De Soto who staffed the Los Angeles County Fire Department ambulance. As communities across the nation adopted the assistance, local twins, Gladys Bliss and Grace Thoren, decided it was time for the Durand community’s Fire Protection District No. 1 to have an ambulance and donated one. A few of the volunteer firefighters each spent more than 100 hours at a hospital in Rockford being trained as emergency medical technicians (EMTs). As residents got used to having an ambulance available, calls increased. Voters approved a tax hike to contract a professional crew to be at the local fire station 24/7.

First responders pursue a demanding career. Physically, it requires carrying patients of all sizes while working indoors and outdoors in varying weather such as rain, snow or heat. While working long shifts, they must remain calm and professional plus be emotionally supportive to patients who may be vomiting, scared or drunk. The workers risk exposure to contagious diseases and viruses. Like other aspects of the medical field, there is a need for more EMTs and paramedics to replace those retiring or leaving. The pay, which averages $30,000 to $40,000 annually, convinces some there are better ways to earn a living.

We never know when we might experience a serious, unexpected and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action. Last Halloween morning, Ken and I attended the funeral of my 100-year-old aunt, Viola Tschabold, at McCorkle’s. Following the service and burial in Durand Township Cemetery, we were sitting at a lunch table in Cimino’s visiting with some of my cousins and enjoying the Italian food. My last bite of pizza caught in my esophagus and I started coughing. I couldn’t get it loose. A nurse in the crowd came over to assist. I fainted and was laid on the floor. Someone called 911. An ambulance staffed by two EMT’s arrived to take me to the hospital in Monroe, Wisconsin, where I was kept overnight.

Have you ever needed an ambulance?

During the recent holidays, I missed dressing up for events. I’m comfortable in jeans, I’ve worn them all my life, but I enjoy a change.

While I was a girl, playing dress-up in Karen’s attic was a favorite Saturday pastime. My bestie and I put on her mother’s cast-off, good dresses and high-heeled shoes for dates with our imaginary boyfriends. The movies we’d seen supplied our knowledge of the make-believe nightclubs we visited.

While Ken was a member of the sheriff’s police, we joined the other deputies and their wives for a Christmas party dinner and dancing. My husband wore his suit and a tie. Each year, I made myself a new frock. One time, I cut off the long gown Lisa had worn as a bridesmaid; the garment wasn’t frilly like they usually were.

New Year’s Eve, one of our group of friends hosted a get together, but we still wore our best. It was a lot cheaper than going out to a restaurant to celebrate and the food was more plentiful.

As time passed, we aged and fashions changed. Now casual clothes are worn for most occasions.

An exception occurred a couple years ago. Our granddaughter’s wedding called for Ken to acquire a new suit and tie while I purchased a dress and panty hose. We don them again when we go out to eat to celebrate our anniversary. Usually, we’re the only ones in the restaurant who are wearing our ‘Sunday-go-to-meetin’.

Recently, while visiting with a friend who had just attended a wedding in Chicago, she had a fashion tip for me–women no longer bother with panty hose. I’d noticed it was harder to find a new pair. No longer are the white, egg-shaped containers hanging on a rack in the drugstore and the counter in a department store has become much smaller.

Do you miss dressing up or are you more appreciative of the casual look?

Saturday night we’ll celebrate the ending of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. Time seems to be passing faster as I age. Things crossing my mind that I think happened a year or two ago are actually five or ten years in the past.

Every morning while I’m eating breakfast, I hear the clock on the wall ticking away the seconds. It makes me think about how we as older people are spending our time. Raising families and working at jobs are behind us, leaving more leisure to do the things we want to do. For example, our friends, Joyce and Sid, who enjoy socializing, join others playing euchre several afternoons a week at nearby senior centers.

My husband, Ken, who left law enforcement behind after serving for 37 years, is a farmer at heart. Each spring, he plants a large garden in our backyard. He places his surplus fresh vegetables on a picnic table for others to help themselves.

Our daughter, Lisa, a former trooper who spent duty shifts patrolling Illinois highways, volunteers several days a week to drive area veterans to appointments with doctors at the VA Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.

My favorite painting was done by my cousin, Doris, when she took an art class after retiring from delivering the U.S. mail in rural areas. Her 16 x 20-inch picture is copied from a black and white photo taken on a threshing day at their farm eighty years ago. With a backdrop of the yellow, straw stack, I’m the four-year-old wearing a red dress and sitting on the spring seat in an orange wagon pulled by my uncle’s brown team, Adam and Eve. Dad is climbing into the wagon. Although he’s wearing a blue, work shirt and bib overalls exactly the same as the other farmers, I recognize his back view by the way he cocked his straw hat.

Since my memoir, The View from a Midwest Ferris Wheel, was published by Adelaide Books, a New York firm, I have been posting every Wednesday to my blog, lolita-s-bigtoe.com. I agree with Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for her narrative, Eat, Pray, Love, who says, “Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something, where–if you missed it by age 19–you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser.”

Priscilla Long, a poet and writer who is nearing age eighty, has a new book, Dancing with the Muse in Old Age. It’s an anti-ageist manifesto that debunks the myth of peak creativity from ages 39-42 with inspirational anecdotes about writers, artists, scholars and athletes who work long into their 90s…and beyond. I’m looking forward to reading it.

How are you planning to spend your time in this new year?

Like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ novella, “A Christmas Carol,” ghosts from Christmas Past visit me while I’m working preparing food ahead for our holiday meal. I think about the loved ones who live only in my memories.

During the years I believed in Santa Claus, I had to take Mom’s place helping Dad do the Christmas Eve chores. Although I couldn’t milk a cow by hand like she did, I could do small tasks such as dumping some milk into a dish for the cats that lived in the barn. While we worked, Dad heard Santa’s sleigh bells. When I returned to the house through the back door, Mom was busy in the kitchen preparing supper for Aunt Frannie, Uncle Hookie, and their grown daughters, Doris and Sis, who would join us to eat and open presents. I checked the decorated tree standing in the living room and was excited to see my wrapped gifts left by the ‘Jolly Old Elf’, who had entered by the front door.

For our first Christmas together, Ken and I bought an expensive, 35 mm camera as our joint gift. I was pregnant with our first baby who would arrive in February. Daddy wanted to be ready to take outstanding pictures of our family. Spending the day at his parents’ house with his extended family, which included his sister’s six, young children tired me out. I wondered how I would handle motherhood.

After several years of my family’s going to my parents for Christmas Eve supper, I took over preparing the meal. It seemed easier than packing up our three little ones and our gifts to return home after an evening at Grandpa and Grandma’s.

For a brief moment in my thoughts, we’re young parents crawling out of bed when we hear Linda, Lisa and Kurt giggling while coming down the stairs early Christmas morning to see what Santa left. It seems like we just went to sleep after assembling their toys.

Our off-spring became adults and I see three people in uniform while I juggle police schedules to plan a Christmas meal. We added a daughter-in-law and two grandkids. Then, those two grew up and enlarged our group again.

This year, our family will come together December 26. The time is compatible with a police schedule and the other sides of the family. It’s the people who make the holiday memorable, not the date on the calendar.

Who are your ghosts of Christmas Past?

The other day in the grocery store, the woman at the checkout counter sprayed a paper towel and used it to dampen her fingers so she could separate the plastic bags she needed to use for my items. It reminded me of how useful our spit is. At home, I lick my fingers to separate things such as pages in a book. To thread a needle, I stick the thread into my mouth first–it goes through the eye easier when it’s wet.

I was a preschooler when I first saw spit used as a grooming aid. I sat on the edge of my cousin Doris’s bed watching her get ready for a date. She didn’t have a glass of water in her upstairs bedroom to moisten her Maybelline cake mascara so she could apply it to her lashes–she spit on it. When I had kids of my own, I’d stick my fingers into my mouth before I wiped a smudge from my child’s check or controlled a few wild hairs.

Drool also is used to symbolize how worthless something or someone is. We say, “It doesn’t mean spit.” Expectorating on someone is the height of contempt. Police officers and Viet Nam vets are familiar with that humiliation.

Watching “Gunsmoke” on TV, I thought the worst job in the Old West would be cleaning the brass spitton used by the cowboys who chewed tobacco in the Long Branch Saloon. I was familiar with the habit. When Dad’s family came to visit while I was growing up, Grandpa, who used the smokeless tobacco, asked me to get an empty, tin can for him to spit into. After he left, his container could be thrown away.

Most of the time, we ignore our saliva. It’s always there unless something scary like public speaking leaves us with a dry mouth. Some pills leave people with xerostomia–another medication counteracts this problem.

How do you view spit?

Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. Eighty-one years ago, December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Hawaii thrusting the United States into World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Address broadcast on the radio termed it “a date which will live in infamy.” Men from every family enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces–16 million served.

The women and children left behind sacrificed. Similar to World War I, the females on the home front took the places of the males who went to fight. “Rosie, the Riveters” worked in the factories, which had converted to making war materials instead of assembling cars.

Sugar and meat were among the products rationed. To cope with the shortages, mothers found cookie recipes that used local honey instead of imported sugar. They bought small, wooden boxes filled with dried cod fish, creamed the seafood and served it over mashed potatoes for dinner.

Qualified teachers were in short supply. Young ladies with little more than a high school education were granted emergency certificates and taught in one-room, country schools like I attended. They led their students to begin each day by standing beside their desks, facing the flag and placing their right hands over their hearts to recite the “Pledge of Allegiance.”

Instead of buying candy with their coins, children purchased savings stamps, which were pasted into a booklet. When it was full, they traded it for a war bond costing $18.75. In ten years, the certificate could be cashed in for $25.

In 1945, the Allies victory ended the conflict. Our nation’s people celebrated in the streets and then everyone headed home. Although my generation were children not soldiers, the war instilled in us a deep love and loyal support of our country. In the words of former Illinois governor, Adlai Stevenson, “Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.”

According to the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs, there are just over 167,000 veterans of the Big War remaining. They are in their 90s or older. When the Greatest Generation is gone, will the American people still “remember Pearl Harbor’ so that it never happens again?