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Freedom for me is the fourteen-year-old Chrysler parked in our garage. I’ve loved to drive ever since I passed the test to receive my license when I was sixteen. When I climb behind the steering wheel, I’m free to go where I want and be who I want.

An hour or two of travel takes me to Madison or Chicago. For a day or a week, I’m a writer among writers sharing experiences and learning new things at a workshop or a conference. My urban friends see the world in a much different way than I do. I don’t agree with them, but I listen to their points of view.

The sedan has taken me to Elmhurst, Illinois, and Dubuque, Iowa. Those two days I was a proud grandmother watching our granddaughter and grandson receive their college diplomas.

From time to time, the automobile takes me to the Laona Township Cemetery. For a few solemn moments, I’m a daughter or a mother visiting the graves of my Dad and Mom and our oldest child, Linda, who’s buried alongside her grandparents in the country graveyard.

On April 17, the chariot took me to the dinner theater Circa 21 at Rock Island. That night I was a happy wife toasting sixty years of marriage with my husband. We piled our plates at a buffet of delicious food followed by a musical performance of Grumpy Old Men. When I’m pissed at that man, the car is my escape hatch. Driving off for a shopping trip in Rockford keeps me from yelling things I’d regret later.

After each respite of freedom, the blue, magic carpet brings me home–the center of my universe. I have a new appreciation for my routine life of wife, mother, grandmother and writer.

How do you define freedom?

We all plan ahead–usually fun things, a dinner out, a weekend party, a tropical get away. My cousin, Doris, bought a tombstone. When her dad died suddenly, her mother purchased a grave marker. She did the same to make things easier for her younger sister. She was resigned to being her niece and nephew’s ‘old maid aunt’. The stone sat in the cemetery ready and waiting.

Doris had been involved in a relationship that went awry ten years earlier with nothing serious since. She was in her thirties and expected to follow in the spike heel prints of her dad’s only sibling, Aunt Florence, who was a single, career woman in LA.

John Kennedy was elected president and started the Peace Corp. Doris spent two years in Venezuela as one of the first volunteers. When she returned, she began an office job in a Beloit, Wisconsin, factory, twenty-five miles from her farm home. She met Bob, who worked in the manufacturing part of the building. He had recently moved into her community and they began carpooling. Their rides together fostered a romance. Doris was forty-something when she became a bride. I stood up with her just as she had for me when I was married six years earlier.

Doris changed everything to her new last name except her tombstone. When Aunt Florence passed away a few years later, the monument company recycled Doris’s marker for the elderly lady. Even plans literally etched in granite can be altered.

Are you thinking about changing plans you felt were carved in stone?

Saturday nights at six, I sit down in the family room with my husband to watch Keeping Up Appearances, a British comedy shown on PBS. I have only one thing in common with the social climbing Hyacinth–we both continually correct people’s pronunciation of our names. She haughtily insists her last name is “Bouquet, B-U-C-K-E-T.” Her long suffering husband said he was Richard Bucket until he married.

Dad named me Lolita with a long I sound like a girl who attended his country grade school. When I was growing up, people din’t know how to say my first name. In places such as a doctor’s waiting room, when my parents and I went for a check-up, the nurse would call, “Alex” and “Edith.” Then she looked at her clip board with a puzzled look on her face. I knew it was my turn.

In 1955, the year I graduated from high school, my problems began. Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov wrote the salacious, best-selling novel, Lolita. The twelve-year-old nymphet’s name was pronounced with a long E sound. Suddenly, everyone knew how to say my name…wrong. I politely respond, “I say Lol-I-ta.” I know there are a few others with a similar name, but, apparently, I’m the only one who pronounces it this way. I enjoy being unusual.

I also blame the novel for my rejection by two different world-wide businesses. When I applied to join Face Book several years ago, I was asked for a copy of my driver’s license to verify my name. While I was thinking that request over, I received notification I’d been accepted. Apparently, someone decided a seventy-year-old woman didn’t have ulterior motives.

A month ago, when our son was setting up my new computer, the company rejected my first name. I dug up an old, high school nickname to use instead. Earlier, they had no problem accepting payment with my credit card.

Dale Carnegie, author of the best seller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, said, “A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

Do you have problems with people pronouncing or spelling your name?

TV commercials for Cheerios remind me of Dad. While I was growing up, he and I listened to The Lone Ranger on the barn radio during evening milking. When the latest ring offer came on the air, I wanted to send in a Cheerios box top and twenty-five cents in coin, but I didn’t like to eat cereal. Dad pushed aside his usual corn flakes for breakfast and consumed the little Os that sponsored the program. When the ring arrived in the mail several weeks later, he squeezed its adjustable band together to fit on my small hand. I painted the shiny, gold-colored metal with clear fingernail polish so it wouldn’t turn my finger green. I accumulated a large collection. The last was an atomic bomb ring. I’d sit on the floor in my closet where it was dark, pull the red tail fin away from the body of the gray bomb and watch the tiny, exploding lights. I don’t remember how they tied in the modern invention that ended World War II with the hero who thundered out of the past astride the great horse Silver.

At that time, I wore ‘spender overalls and tagged after my father. He was a busy farmer, but when he needed to go to town or the neighbors, he waited for Mom to wash my face and comb my hair so I was ‘presentable’ to go along. For our last trip together, I wore my white wedding gown and he escorted me down the aisle. Dad never said the words, “I love you,” but he taught me to love a good man.

What fond memories do you have of your father?

“I need a three-week vacation,” I muttered as I flopped on the bed. Our three teenagers were driving me crazy. A moment’s respite alone in our room gave me energy to prepare supper.

A few days later, on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend 1980, I was having trouble breathing. When our daughter, Lisa, ran to the house from her part-time job at Durand Ford to eat a quick lunch, she was alarmed by my condition. Before returning to work, she phoned her dad at the sheriff’s department and asked him to come home. My husband and I realized if I didn’t go to the doctor that afternoon, I’d have to wait until Tuesday. Ken drove me to the clinic in Brodhead, Wisconsin. The man who recently replaced our long-time, family physician sent me to St. Clare Hospital in Monroe where I was admitted.

My left lung had collapsed. Two weeks of tests led to a diagnosis of histoplasmosis, an infection caused by a common fungus found in the soil, often from bird droppings. My lung was surgically removed and I returned home Friday, June 13. While I was gone, Mom had helped care for Linda, our special needs daughter. Ken and our other two children got along fine without me. I’d missed my family and was glad to return.

While I recuperated, I pondered my ordeal. I’d spent exactly three weeks in the hospital. Did God consider my lament a prayer and answer it with my medical problem? I wish I had specified a vacation at an ocean beach. It would have been cheaper and a lot more fun than the hospital.

On Thursday, June 13, I’ll celebrate another year of survival with one lung. It’s been almost as long as I lived with two. I don’t do marathons or even run to catch a bus but otherwise, I don’t notice a difference.

Have you had a problem that could have been God’s answer to a prayer you didn’t realize you were uttering?

Last Sunday afternoon, we observed Lisa’s birthday a month late. For our family, it isn’t the date on the calendar but the people we spend the time with that matters. Our active daughter instigated zip lining at Lake Geneva Canopy Tours to celebrate. At 2:30, Lisa, her friend, Jeff, our son, Kurt, daughter-in-law, Sandy, grandchildren, Jacob and Katelyn, her fiance, Sean, Ken and I slithered into harnesses that served as comfortable swings and red hard hats, which our daughter inscribed with out names. Heavy gloves would protect our hands when we braked at the end of a line by placing our dominant hand against the wire. Our young guides, Kyle and Zoee, added pleasure to our adventure and took pictures to aid our memories.

Mother Nature smiled on us with temperature around eighty and sunshine. We started out riding in a wagon pulled by a tractor but that luxury was short lived. Trekking uphill on the shaky, wooden bridges and climbing the spiral stairways to the nine platforms was more strenuous than whizzing along the cables above the tree tops. Each trip was solo until the last one when we doubled up and raced. My opponent was my husband who won. Ken and I, both octogenarians, are grateful to be able to participate in three-generation escapades.

After two-and-a-half hours, all of us had worked up appetites to enjoy supper at Popeye’s (not the fast food chain). We topped off the day at our house with a homemade angel food birthday cake and strawberries. The nine of us were ready for an early bedtime.

How do you celebrate birthdays?

In the nineties, a popular, parlor game was ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’, the prolific movie actor. It’s based on the concept that assumes any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart. All of us are playing that game more and more today when we want to call someone who isn’t in our cell phone list of contacts.

A few months ago, I heard about a neighbor who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The news came from someone who had overheard the woman’s husband talking in the coffee shop. He was looking for people to take his wife for her chemo treatments because he was busy working. In our rural community, we consider everyone our neighbor, but these folks weren’t close friends. I could help but I couldn’t get in touch with the couple. I racked my brain trying to think of someone I could call who would have the woman’s phone number but to no avail.The telemarketers have no problem ringing my number but, so far there’s no way for acquaintances to reach one another without a mutual friend to provide a phone number.

In the good old days, I could pick up the phone book and find most people’s home number and address. Only a few, such as cops, asked to be unlisted in the publication. It was simple to call all of the families in a child’s school class or members of a church’s congregation. When my husband and I stayed overnight in a strange town, we checked the local directory to see if any Ditzlers or Tschabolds were listed.

Would you like a phone directory listing cell phones or do you prefer receiving calls only from those you share share your number with?

According to publications, this year the trend in footwear is the fashion-forward flat. Low heels are all the rage with celebrities including English royalty. Seventy-nine-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told “Sixty Minutes” she works in three-inch heels but, if you’re like me, you’ve taken your stilettos to the Salvation Army resale store. One in a while, like the stopped watch that’s right twice a day, we’re chic without trying.

Flats are safer and more comfortable. My new, favorite is a pair of warm-weather, taupe sneakers that I saw pictured in a magazine. Seeking the latest thing is unusual for me. I tend to stick with classics that I wear for years, but I couldn’t resist those. I spent weeks trying to find the style so I could try them on before I bought them but, contrary to what the ad said, no store in this area carried the brand. I was forced to order them on line and they fit fine.

Earlier, I had a Christmas gift card to use at an emporium that was closing. All of the spring trousers hanging on the racks were tapered. I think tight-leg pants look good on about one percent of women, but I bought a pair of slim, turquoise jeans. I added a harmonizing, print top. This summer I’ll wear the outfit often with my taupe tennis shoes and be up-to-date fashion-wise until the ‘in-thing’ shifts.

Do you follow current styles or avoid buying new things when they don’t suit you?

My mother died sixteen years ago and it’s been a lot longer than that since she told me what to do. Yet, whenever I prepare to leave the house, I still hear her admonition, “Go to the bathroom and get a drink.” It doesn’t matter if I’m strolling three blocks to the post office or embarking on an all-day ride in our ’65 convertible, I can’t walk out the door until I’ve followed her rule.

When I left home as a young bride, I vowed I wasn’t going to be like my mother. The first time my husband upset me, I was as shocked as he was when her words shot out of my mouth. Marriage quickly taught me how frustrating a spouse can be.

Mom was a good cook and instilled in me a love of cooking. One of the first things I did in my own kitchen was buy a set of measuring cups and take them apart. I put the 1/4 cup in my sugar canister and the 1/2 cup in the flour like she had.

It took me a while to realize I didn’t have to search for a role model. My mother was a wise, strong, independent, hard-working farm woman who showed her love for me with her actions. I’m a town gal, but I’m trying to fill her shoes that often were spattered with cow manure.

Do you strive to be like your mother or do you rebel?

Wednesday, April 17, marks 60 years since Ken and I promised “to have and to hold from this day forward for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; to love and to cherish until death us do part.” That optimistic young pair didn’t realize how our life together would mirror those vows.

The two of us will spend the evening at the Circa 21 dinner theater in Rock Island seeing the play, Grumpy Old Men. Afterward we will stay overnight in a motel. On Sunday, April 21, our kids and grandkids will meet us for brunch at The Hoffman House in a combined celebration of our anniversary and Easter.

Ken and I courted for seven years before we married, including his four-year hitch in the Navy. Looking back, I see a lot of ‘what ifs’ during that time. What if sixteen-year-old Kenny had been to shy to ask me to ride on the Ferris wheel while I walked around Davis Days summer festival with my boyfriend, Ronnie, July 18, 1952? What if I’d said no? What if I ‘d just said good-bye when he started his four-year enlistment in the Navy in ’54 instead of promising to wait for him? What if he’d found someone else during his travels? What if he’d been aboard that ill-fated plane that crashed in the Grand Canyon in ’56 instead of letting another sailor use his ticket while he took a later flight? What if one of my mother’s worries had come true and I succumbed to either the life-threatening appendicitis infection when I was fifteen or TB when I was nineteen? I firmly believe we were meant to be together.

‘What ifs’ have shaped your life?