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The last time my husband and I ate supper in an upscale restaurant, the host seated us at a table covered with a white cloth. A young woman introduced herself as Becky, our server. She asked, “Can I get you guys something to drink?”

Sunday at church, two boys and four girls gathered around our female pastor for the children’s sermon. She greeted them with, “Good morning. It’s great to see you guys.”

While I watched a high school girls’ softball game recently, one of the players shouted, “Come on you guys, let’s get some runs.”

I cringed each time I heard gals referred to as guys. I was part of the women’s movement in the sixties and seventies that changed our country including our language. Our daughter, Lisa, became one of the females who invaded all-male bastions such as police and fire departments to become police officers and firefighters. Men joined women as flight attendants and nurses.

Why go backwards? In the fifties, Becky would have been our waitress, our pastor would have been a man and there would have been no girls’ ball team. My female school teachers assured me that documents such as The Declaration of Independence with the words, “All men are created equal,” meant girls, too. When I became an adult, I learned that wasn’t true.

The English language provides words for a mixed group such as people and children that don’t have a gender connotation. Ball players can still be ladies.

How do you refer to females or groups including both sexes?

I believe we never start our life over. We may turn down a different road, but we are all of the personae from our past like Russian matryoshkas, the wooden nesting dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other.

My doll has nine incarnations. The smallest, a four-and-a-half-year-old wearing a cowgirl hat. Dad rode his horse, Mickey, and held a lead rope snapped to my pony’s bridle when we took jaunts together. One sunny, summer afternoon, I slipped from my sadde and landed in a bed of sand. I wasn’t hurt, but I was scared and started crying. Dad jumped down, picked me up and checked that I was okay. “Come on, get back on and we’ll go to the barn.”

“No. I don’t want to ride Millie any more. She threw me off.”

“She didn’t throw you off. You just fell off.” He lifted me onto my pony’s back and planted my feet firmly in the stirrups. I clung to the saddle horn with both hands while we slowly walked the animals to the stable. I’ve been getting back on the horse that threw me ever since.

The next is the 16-year-old, high schooler who my 18-year-old boyfriend left behind while he served a four-year hitch in the Navy. She is followed by the 19-year-old, office worker who spent five months in a tuberculosis sanitarium recovering from the life-threatening disease.

Ken returned home and I added two more, a wife and a mother. After our three children were in school, I found my calling as a journalist. Our kids grew up and our son made me a mother-in-law and a grandmother. The one you see is an older woman who is missing a piece of her heart. Ten years ago, my husband and I buried our eldest child who died of breast cancer.

How many dolls lurk inside you?

The less I do, the less I can do. That reminder is at eye level on my refrigerator door and I firmly believe it. When confronted with a task, it’s easy to think, that’s getting hard to do. I’m not going to do it anymore.

Earlier this summer, Lisa proposed that our family go zip lining to celebrate her birthday. I thought about it overnight and talked it over with Ken. For several years, my husband’s had acrophobia when he tried to climb a ladder. We decided we both would participate. I called our daughter to include us when she bought the advance tickets. We were committed. It turned out to be a beautiful, Sunday afternoon and the nine of us had a great time. The memory gives me a push to continue doing physical things. I remind myself, I crossed the shaky, wooden bridges that slanted uphill and climbed the spiral staircases to the nine platforms to do the zip lining. I have no excuse for not cleaning the house or other tasks I never did like doing. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve earned the right to retire from doing a hateful job, but I don’t really want to.

When my independent, octogenarian mother asked me to take over her checkbook because she was forgetting things, my reply was, “What are you forgetting?” The second the words were out of my mouth I realized how stupid it sounded. But, I hadn’t noticed any forgetfulness during my daily visits to her home. Apparently, she had. I always trusted my mother’s judgment. I began writing the checks to pay her monthly bills.

As we age, we need to decide whether it’s time to give up something we’ve always done or push to continue doing it. Our loved ones shouldn’t have to make these judgments.

How do you make these decisions?

I am an only child by chance, not choice. Two baby brothers died at birth when I was six and seven years old. I grew up on the farm with my English bulldog, Tony, and my pony, Millie. On holidays and special occasions, my parents and I celebrated with Mom’s oldest sister, her husband and their two daughters, who were more than ten years older than I was. I felt like a little adult who became a big adult.

I attended the nearby country school that never had more than ten students. For six years, I was alone in my class. I whipped through text books at my own rate. Beginning with seventh grade, I rode a yellow bus to junior high in town. Each of my thirty new classmates had at least one sibling. I was an anomaly. Only boys could participate in competitive school sports so I never learned to be a team player.

When I married and became the mother of three children, I felt it was my duty to join school and church groups. Most committees drove me crazy. A whole meeting could be spent discussing the pros and cons of serving peanuts or mixed nuts with refreshments at an upcoming event. My thought was pick one and move on. The zinger came later when a phone call from the chairperson changed the decision finally reached.

I have friends, but I’m more apt to get together with one or two instead of a bunch for lunch. When I spend a day shopping in the city, I’m comfortable taking a break by myself in a nice restaurant relaxing with a glass of wine and eating a salad topped off with dessert.

As a writer attending conferences, I know the value of making contacts. At the end of the day, I’m happy alone in my hotel room.

How have siblings or lack of them shaped your life?

I wonder what makes a word good or bad. One of comedian George Carlin’s monologues was “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.” Four-letter words dominated the list. We may say a couple “made love” or “slept together” but the f-word, which is often a more accurate description of the interaction, is banned in polite society. On the farm, I shoveled a lot of manure, but I mustn’t call it s***.

When I was growing up, we used a lot of euphemisms. Instead of saying a mother-to-be was pregnant, we referred to her as ‘expecting’ or ‘having a date with the stork’.

As a writer, I find myself looking up words I know to make sure the one I’m using is exactly right. Those, which in one context seem to be interchangeable, can be misleading in another. I can write, “It was a starry night,” or, “It was a starry evening,” without altering the meaning much. If I write, “The woman wore a nightgown,” your mind’s eye flashes a much different picture than if I write, “The woman wore an evening gown.”

What we say and what others hear isn’t always the same thing. Our own experiences color how we interpret words. For example, when someone says, “We had a little snow last night,” a person from Wisconsin expects snowplows to clear away three or four inches before drivers start their morning commute. A person living in Washington, D.C., knows an inch of the white stuff will paralyze the morning rush hour.

What have you said that was misconstrued by the listener with disastrous results?

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?