Frances Stiles Surr

Frances Dodge Stiles Surr, a beautiful, gentle, willowy woman was born January 28, 1908 in Sparta, Wisconsin.  She died a few months before her 88th birthday in Redlands, California. Her parents called Frances Fanny, a name she loathed as an adult.

She was the only child of an older father, Vernon Stiles, a country doctor.  Her mother, Helen, was spoiled and beautiful, the only daughter of the local department store owner. Mother remembered her mother as an eccentric and demanding woman. [I remember Grandma as a quiet plump, warm old lady who lived in a small house and made very nice watercolor bird and blossoms place cards for her gardening club.  Grandma had a mole on her chin with a long hair in it; the mole and hair compelled my eye when I sat on her lap.] 

 One of Frances’s very early memories was of awakening, frightened, to a loud thunderstorm.  Her father took her to the porch, sat her on his lap, and they counted the seconds between lightning strikes and thunderclaps.  Ever after, Fanny enjoyed thunderstorms.  (Her children and grandchildren did too; we learned to enjoy thunderstorms because of this story.)

One night, when she was young, Vernon took her with him on a house call.  She remembered her father hitching the horses to the sleigh, and covering her with a buffalo robe.  They rode out through the starry night with Fanny’s face peeking over the buffalo robe.  She vividly remembered the clouds of the horses’ breath, the jingle of the sleigh bells, the dark glisten of the snow.  At the farmhouse, she sat with the family around the kitchen table while her father examined and treated the patient in the patient’s bedroom.

The Stiles family acquired a model T Ford early, for emergency house calls.  When she was 14, Frances walked to the local Woolworth’s with a friend.  Each of them spent money on a lipstick, and eagerly applied it.  Her father passed the girls in his car, stopped the car, backed it up, and pulled Frances into the car by her elbow.  At home, he marched her into the kitchen and wiped off her lipstick with a rag, saying that he wouldn’t sully a dishrag with that filthy stuff.  She didn’t wear lipstick again for several years.

After a series of strokes her father died; Mother was then in her second year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Her mother Helen, I believe in a depressive rage at his abandonment, carried Vernon’s mattress to the local dump on her back.  This caused scandal.  The aunts and uncles conferred about what was to be done about Helen.  Helen was put in a nearby insane asylum, Mendota State Hospital (then the Wisconsin Hospital for the Insane), where she remained for several years with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia.  The same conference decided that Mother could no longer be supported at the University of Wisconsin; she was transferred to Beloit College, which was, at the time, much cheaper.

[Years later, I took Mother to a Unitarian Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.  The speaker came from Wisconsin.  He spoke about keeping one’s ideas fresh and the prime importance of an open, flexible mind.   Afterward, Mother asked the speaker if he taught at Beloit.  With great surprise he said, “Why yes!  What makes you ask?”   Mother replied sweetly, “You just sounded like someone from Beloit.”  This was the only time I ever suspected my mother of cattiness.]

In the vacations, Frances stayed with her uncle Henry Stiles and his wife, Marguerite.  Marguerite taught Frances how to clean a house, a skill she had never acquired.  Years later Mother quoted Marguerite, “Always pay attention to the floor’s corners.  Sloppy cleaning leaves dirt in the corners.”

After college, and a post-graduate summer at Columbia, Frances took the train across the country to San Bernardino, California, to live with her uncle, William Stiles, his wife Fanny Oakson and their daughter, Pauline, who wrote fiction.  Though she never said so to me, I think that living with this uncle’s family warmed Frances after a bleak few years; she was welcomed gladly by her uncle’s family.  William Stiles, was, as was his brother Vernon, a much beloved country doctor.  San Bernardino was a much larger city than Sparta, Wisconsin, but it was still rural and agricultural (oranges) and it had a wild west flavor.  As Vernon had been, Uncle Will was sometimes paid in produce;  the produce was just a different sort.

Frances soon found a job as a teacher in a very rough school. She commuted to and from work on the streetcar.  Her life was happy with the exception of her teaching, which she hated. (in her fifties Frances recounted the afternoon a student’s father held a knife to her throat because she had given his son a bad grade.)

A handsome young man, John Surr, took the same streetcar to work. John noticed and admired Frances.  He was living with his uncle and aunt, Howard and Betty Surr.  Howard was a lawyer, who was, coincidentally, a friend of William Stiles.  John was a recent graduate of Boalt Hall, Berkeley.  It was the great Depression and he was very glad to work for his uncle’s firm and live with his uncle and aunt.  Frances and John were attracted.  Eventually John and Frances were introduced by their uncles at Sunday brunch at Mapes Cafeteria in San Bernardino.  

Towards New Year’s Eve, John asked Fran to dinner and a dance to celebrate the coming new year..  She had already committed to dining with her uncle Will’s family.  The Stiles family went to the Arrowhead Springs Hotel for their New Year’s Eve celebration.  Frances wore a dress that revealed much of her handsome back.  The Surr family, with John in tow, also dined and danced at the Arrowhead Springs Hotel that night.  John later remembered looking at my mother’s back and thinking what a beautiful woman she was.

John started taking Frances to various outdoor activities.  Frances, except for riding, had not been much of an athlete.  John introduced her to the joys of skiing in the spectacular San Bernardino Mountains.  He took her on walks and picnics with his friends to mountain and desert and shore.  He played tennis with her.  Pictures in his albums started out with John and various beautiful women.  As time passed, the various beautiful women were present in the picnic group pictures, but Frances featured in the individual snapshots.

In 1932, after this vigorous courtship and during Prohibition, John and Fran married.   Frances wore the wedding gown and veil of John’s sister Nancy.  They took their honeymoon on a steamer cruise to Alaska.  Someone gave the young couple a bottle of champagne as a wedding present.  The two toasted each other on the first night of the cruise, then John carefully worked the cork back into the champagne bottle and wired it securely.  Several days later, the small cruise ship encountered heavy waters.  John heard a muffled pop from the suitcase (which held most of his clothes).  All of John’s clothes were soaked with champagne.  The stink of champagne persisted in most of them to the great embarrassment of this usually law-abiding young man.

The young couple began their married life in a tiny house in San Bernardino.  Frances acquired a black Scottie, whom she named Angus.  They continued their social life with old friends.

My sister Nancy was born to John and Frances on June 21, 1934.   Two years later, March 12, 1937,  John (Jack) was born.  I was born in 1939, two weeks before the Second World War began with Germany’s invasion of Poland.  Polly was born on Jack’s birthday March 12, 1944, a year before the war’s end.  Mother didn’t sing often, but she sang lullabies to her children.  I remember sitting on her lap as she sang “Baby don’t wish for the Moon”, “Baby’s boat’s a silver moon”, and not quite a lullaby, but always a delight “Rag Time Cowboy Joe”.

My mother was a woman of peace.  The four children made a boisterous family.  When the children fought, Mother would wring her hands and say, “I yearned for brothers and sisters when I was growing up; why don’t you children cherish one another?”  I think she held the notion that expressed anger in a family marked a failure of the wife.  She clearly had strong feelings but held them with what the Finns call sisu (banked fires, endurance, strength).  She was a disciplined person.

We often went skiing in nearby Snow Valley on winter Sundays, with the car radio playing all the way home to keep the children quiet.  Down the hill in San Bernardino, we sometimes went to Bing’s Cathay Inn for supper.  Bing was a friend of my parents and my parents friends Bess and Gill Wei (shortened to Way).  We all loved the restaurant for its kindly servers, who patiently showed us how to use chop sticks; however, from time to time father would have to carry a misbehaving or crying child to the car until the child settled down.  A four or five foot high frosted cake, erected at the war’s end, was the best feature of the place.  The layers were on small frosting pillars.  Small working electric globes were embedded in the ceiling of each layer.  At the top of this cake two-inch high photographs, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of Chaing Kai Chek, framed in frosting flowers presided.  This unnatural wonder never lost its magic for the children.  For some time after the war, Mother would read the typed card at the base of this cake which told how many pounds of flour and sugar, how many eggs, how much milk had gone into making of it and marvel;  war time rationing remained strong in her memory.

During the Second World War the feet of the Surr children grew quickly.  Mother worried about this.  Shoes were rationed.  Butter sugar, flour, eggs and oil were strictly rationed;  we had war-time and post war oleomargarine.  A strong dairy lobby had persuaded state legislatures to make selling yellow colored margarine illegal, so the margarine manufacturers cleverly included a small red dot of food coloring in the middle of the plastic wrapped white brick that was the margarine.  There was great competition between Jack and me to see who would get to kneed the margarine brick to obtain the night’s yellow “butter”.  Gasoline and tires were rationed so that we didn’t take unnecessary car trips.  I don’t think that any of the Surr children felt deprived, but I remember great interest in the rationing books, which held different colors of rationing stamps for different kinds of commodities.  I suppose vitamins were in short supply because Mother dosed us every morning with a teaspoon of the very unpleasant tasting cod-liver oil.

At breakfast, Mother’s self-protective side would emerge.  She liked to read until late at night.  She would come to the dining room table, give us what Polly calls “the hairy eyeball”, and say to her children “Don’t speak to me until I’ve had my coffee, children!”  We didn’t.  On the rare occasions that she glared at us, we behaved well.

Mother was absent-minded in the morning.  At least twice, to the delight of her children, she started to clear her breakfast dishes to the bedroom.

One morning, after two children had spilled glasses of milk, Mother said, “The next child to spill milk gets a spanking”.  To our joy, Mother spilled her orange juice just a few minutes later.

The family had two left-handed children, Jack and Polly, the March 12 birthday children.  At family meals, I always sat on the same side and next to Nancy, and Jack and Polly always sat on the other side.  Thus we avoided disastrous elbow duels.  Other duels occurred, however.  Once, goaded beyond my limited endurance, I hurled a half grapefruit at Jack’s head.  He ducked and it hit and stained the wallpaper.  The next day Mother bought and mounted two flower prints, one of which covered the stain on the wall.  I still have the pictures.

Our Father was brilliant, articulate and witty;  he made family dinners exciting and fun.  I was so in awe of him that I didn’t realize how bright and competent our quieter Mother was.

When my little sister, Polly, left home to attend Beloit, Mother filled her empty nest with a potter’s wheel.  As she mastered the wheel, Mother made more pots than any person could use in a lifetime.  They were lovely pots.  We gladly got them as Christmas and birthday presents.  Soon Mother made small clay sculptures, than larger ones of clay, wood, plaster and acrylic.  Daddy was so proud of Mother’s developing skill.

She was appointed to San Bernardino’s Grand Jury; she stayed on the jury for years.  While there she saw the sad lives of people she had been protected from seeing most of her life.
 

Directly after Daddy’s death, anthropologist friends took mother to live with them among the Seri Indians for a few months.  While she was there she sculpted with the Seri, who were famous for their ironwood carvings.

After her time living with the Seri, Mother took a summer-long course sculpting stone in Carerra, Italy.  Sculpture continued to be her vocation until the year she died.

Her sculptures were mid-sized.  They were organic, abstract, curved, and lovely in form.  Mother studied the great sculptors of our age.   Henry Moore, Arp and Archipenko were strong influences on her work.  She did the heavy work of sculpture with great discipline and great joy.  Some of her sculptures took more than a year to fashion.  Each of her children has a few of these sculptures now, and all of us treasure them as beautiful embodiments of our Mother’s  spirit.

Yesterday and Tomorrow

We saw our first bears of the year a couple of nights ago.  The night was rich with the light, sweet scent of wild roses.   A rangy, white-haired man stood in the middle of the park’s dam with his back to the pond, looking down at the field at the dam’s base.  Three bears walked across the street onto the field, a larger bear, only the size of a yearling, and two tiny bears. When they noticed their audience, the three bears cantered in single file across the field into the trees; they ran faster than I knew bears could.

Last night was all about frogs and geese.  The lone woman walking her dog left the park just after we got to it.  Three geese fed in the field at the dam’s base.  The cricket frogs in the cattails sounded like muted castanets.  As we got away from them onto the dam, more joined in and the sound was faster, louder and  like a Geiger counter.  Red-winged blackbirds, green frogs and bull frogs sang counterpoint.  Geese provided the climax, honking loudly as they flew up to the middle of the pond.  We hoped they were startled by bears.

The sun had set and the lingering blue light showed the swimming area ready for the park opening tomorrow.  Park workers had placed the red life guard platforms on the beach and dock and strung the blue and white floats around the swimming areas. Tomorrow the park will absorb, as it does, the sound of swimming children, giggling as the fish nibble their moles, calling to each other, laughing and crying, mothers  calling to the children and even the whistles of the life guards.  This place imposes its peace on the people who come here.

As we left the park the pale yellow sky over the western hills showed the first star.  In the tall grasses fireflies rained upwards.

Sensing Structure

Ox spent his childhood going to sleep to the sound of piano music of Rachmaninoff, Dvorak, and Brahms.  His mother practiced nightly just after he went to bed.  He absorbed music the easy way.  Now he listens to a new piece of music over and over to make sense of its structure.  I love this repetition and listen that way even when Ox is away; I don’t know enough about music to hear the structure of the work.

I had been a voracious and catholic reader for most of my youth.  In my middle years I read a mystery a night, until I got into the sloppy practice of reading the first few chapters and then the last to see if I’d identified the murderer.  I never thought much about the structure of fiction.  In high school literature classes much attention was paid to symbolism and not much to the structure of stories.  

We are learning to find the structure in short stories in my current fiction writing class.  This is hard for me to grasp.  But sometimes when I’m reading the next assignment a tingle of recognition tickles my neurons and I glimpse at least the ghost of the structure of the work. On the second and third reading, the searched-for structure usually becomes clearer. After all the fiction classes are finished, I'll have to look at Paris Review article authors to discover new (to me) and worthy fiction to read.  It will take discipline to keep looking for structure until I get the knack.

Structure in Painting is less mysterious to me. I know experientially that strong feeling can be conveyed to those who don’t know how to find structure; we don't need to understand it to resonate with a work.  I am beginning to understand, however,  that the joy in a work of art is greatly enhanced by understanding its structure.

O Wad Some Power the Giftie Not Gie Us

Generally I like being the age I am.  I haven’t yet felt the aches and pains of extreme old age and I hope when I do I just ignore them.  I feel more confident and competent than I have ever felt before.

This weekend we had a family party.  My brother had an I-pad with him to take pictures of the crowd.  The bad thing about this is that a) we saw no pictures of him from the picnic, and 2) we saw pictures of me from the picnic.

I go through life blissfully unaware of what the people in front of me see.  It’s the crepe-i-ness of age that creeps me out.  It doesn’t bother me at all in other people.  Most of my friends have a little crepe around them somewhere and they are still beautiful to me.  My own crepe distresses me so much because I see it so seldom.  Maybe I should wish for the giftie after all so that the crepe would lose it shock value.

Counting Crows and the Music of the Spheres

One day I must hear the band Counting Crows.  They named one of my favorite discoveries.

A few years ago when I walked from Hazel Street to the office, a solitary crow lurked at the bottom of St. Clair Avenue and cawed at me.  I used to caw back matching him caw for caw and often adding one; he always matched or added another caw.  As I walked uphill out of earshot, I’d throw in a rhythm change and the crow would usually match that. 

Yesterday I mowed the back and then front lawns at the Hazel Street studio, attacked some invading ivy and trumpet vine, and planted some herbs.  A crow was in the backyard when I started.  He cawed; I cawed back three for three.  He cawed five; I cawed five back.

Eventually I moved to the front lawn.  So did the crow.  He began to vary the game.  It was no longer just number and rhythm of caws.  He threw in words.  He began with “caw”.  He added “aeow” then “cee” I tried to match the crow word for word.  I hope he was proud of training me so well.

After returning home, after a shower, Ox and I went to Mint Springs to cool off.  He’d been doing forestry at the Crozet house as I had been gardening at Hazel Street.  We didn’t even walk around the pond; we only went to the middle of the dam and listened in the mist.  First the green frogs twanged their rubber bands.  Later two high pitches of spring peepers started in a steady song.  Red-winged blackbirds punctuated with calls a couple of times.  Just before we left we heard the bullfrogs start up.  They sat well apart from each other around the pond.

Just standing there for half an hour was as salutary as any meditation.