Mary “Wisher” Barthelman and Meg Reuthe

Transcript

Transcript

[00:00]

MEG RUTHIE: My name is Meg Ruthie. I’m 38-years-old. Today is December 22, 2007. We are the Nashville Public Library, and I am interviewing my mother.
MARY BARTHLEMEN: My name is Mary Barthlemen. My nickname is Wisher. I’m age 62, and today’s date December 22, 2007, and we’re recording at the Nashville Public Library, and I’m talking with my daughter, Meg.
MR: Mother, I was hoping that we could use this occasion – you’re coming to visit us – we live in Franklin, and coming to visit me and Eric, and your grandson, Camden, I’m pregnant, and it’s sort of a reflective time at Christmas, and I was hoping we could talk about some of your history to pass onto the future generations that we’re growing.
MB: That’ll be fun.
MR: Let’s start a ways back with your parents or your grandparents, and I’ll just ask you to give me some stories.
MB: OK. I grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I was the middle of five children. I had an older brother and sister and a young brother and sister, so I’m truly a middle child. My paternal grandparents, Dr. and Mrs. James S. Green, were deceased when I was born, but they did live across the street from my family. Elizabeth was a city. We had a nice neighborhood within the city when I grew up, but it was definitely not country living, but it was a lot of fun.
MR: I can remember the big gardens at your house.
MB: My mother was a marvelous gardener as we her mother. My maternal grandparents were alive, and they also lived in New Jersey, and I have very fond memories of them. We spent Thanksgiving at my grandparents. Their names were Skylar and May Webster.
MR: And you’ve been working on some of the genealogy with your siblings lately?
MB: Mm hmm. Yeah. And we’d go up at Thanksgiving, my uncle, my mother’s brother, would come down, and we’d all get around a big turkey at Thanksgiving time.
MR: Was that Uncle Jim?
MB: Uncle Bill, Bill Webster. I think you probably remember him—
MR: Being in a wheelchair?
MB: Yeah, he had diabetes, as my grandmother did, and he had some amputations so he was in a wheelchair, but he was a lot of fun to be with.
MR: I do remember him.
MB: He enjoyed his nieces and nephews, and we’d have Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house. But at Christmastime, and it’s Christmastime now, my grandparents would come down to Elizabeth to be with all of us, and so I’m repeating that by coming to Franklin, Tennessee, to be with my grandchild and my grandchild-to-be.
MR: I wanted to make a point of talking about your nickname, Wisher, because I know that’s from your childhood.
MB: Yup. My first name was hyphenated. It was Mary-Fisher. My maiden name as Green so, when I was little I couldn’t say Mary-Fisher, and I said, “My name was Mary-Wisher,” and I thought that was a much more fun name than Mary Green, which was kind of Jane Doe-ish. My mother liked nicknames. As a matter of fact, Drew gave her – when we were living in Texas when you were born, and she came down to visit, and it might have even been at Christmastime, I can’t remember that, but you’d wake up from a nap, and my mother, your grandmother would say, “Hi Dearie!” And you’d say, “Hi Dearie!” back to her. So her nickname for you and your brother was “Hi Dearie.”
MR: Which having a two-year-old now makes total sense to me because like Camden repeats everything. I could much better understand it now as a mother how a child would that. My memory of where you grew up was coming down the stairs into the kitchen, and Hi Dearie would be, maybe, cooking breakfast in my mind, and she would say, “Hi Dearie!” as I was coming down the stairs, and that’s how I remember it, actually, from her house, and the big staircase that they had in the hallway, and the hidden bathroom underneath it, I remember, right off the dining room, and then there was a BIG library on the other side of it.
MB: My father had a library.
MR: I remember it as a HUGE, cold room.
MB: I don’t know that room particularly.
MR: Whereas the kitchen, to me, was very warm.
MB: Well, it would’ve been, yeah.
MR: Inviting.
MB: Your grandfather had a nickname too. It was Uncle Dick Sir. His name was Richard Green, and he was the youngest in his family, and he had all these nieces and nephews before he had any children, and they called him Uncle Dick, and he said, “Oh no. Uncle Dick Sir,” and that ended up being his name. As a matter of fact, I called him Uncle Dick Sir, even though he was my father, and I also called him father.
MR: And what kind of lawyer was he? This is what I remember about Uncle Dick Sir.
MB: [laugh] When we asked him what kind of a lawyer he was, he said, he was a “darn good one.”
MR: [laugh]. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten another answer for that question.
MB: I think he was pretty much a generalist. One of the amazing things about him was that he had to re-build, he was a sole practitioner, and he had to re-build his career several times. He started out in about 1930, in the middle of the Depression, and that’s when he and my mother were married, and then World War II came, and he went and served in the Army during the war, and of course, couldn’t be practicing law then. And I was born at the end of the war, and then two more children after me, and he had to re-build his career from nothing at that point. And then in the 1950s,there was the McCarthy hearings in Washington, and my father, being a liberal, defended quite a few people, who were Communists, and he was quite outspoken in his support of them. And he went down to Washington and represented people in front of the McCarthy hearings, and as such, he was branded as a Communist, and lost some clients that way, and again had to re-build his career. So I’m just really, very proud of him. He was a very—
MR: Were you aware of that growing up or were you insulated form it?
MB: I wasn’t aware of it financially…
MR: But you could see the stress in his life or?
MB: Not too much.
MR: Hear it for the terms or anything?
MB: My parents were quite formal. [cough] Excuse me. And could you ask the question again?
MR: I mean these must’ve been huge changes in his life, and yet he was coming home and being a father to you, and I’m not entirely aware of how old you were in that. So I was curious, if you learned about this after the fact, or if you were aware of these changes going on in your household?
MB: I wasn’t really aware of it so much because as was quite common in those days, the fathers went out and worked and provided, and the mothers and other help in the house, possibly, would be more in charge of the family atmosphere. So my father was a late riser and a late go to bedder, and it was quite formal. We didn’t have dinner with him. We had dinner early, and he had dinner late. Sunday dinner was the only real meal I ate with him.
MR: And your mother had help at home also?
MB: Mm hmm, Betty.
MR: And Betty was an important part of your life?
MB: Oh very much so. We loved her, and we’d eat in the kitchen with Betty, and my parents would eat the dining room, more formally, and with my older brother and sister cause they were old enough to eat properly at the dining room table. [laugh].
MR: Yeah, I can imagine the manners and the silverware was very important in that household.
MB: The three of us were the three youngest, much too young and confusing to have dinner. [laugh].
MR: Messy. [laugh]. My, almost the sole memory I have of Uncle Dick Sir is he was what? 6’4”?
MB: Yes.
MR: And maybe had a bad back, or there was something that at towards the end of his life had him limping, and I was less than five-years-old with my cousin, May, and then I think Uncle Dick Sir would sort of limp after us, and we thought he was Frankenstein, and I feel guilty that this is the only thing I remember about him, but we would run from him and cower, and I think he didn’t realize how truly terrified we were, and he thought it was kind of funny because we did this a lot. So I hope it wasn’t bad for him, but I only really remember cowering under his shadow [laugh] and thinking, “Please don’t eat me.”
MB: He was that way a little bit with us too, when he’d tuck us into bed. We’d have to lie with our arms right now by our side, and he’d tuck the sheets in real tightly, and a point of pride was to be able to flip a quarter on it, and have it bounce like he would’ve done in the Army—
MR: The military.
MB: -- So that we had to be very still. I mean, it was fun, but it wasn’t a real warm and huggy kind of a being put to bed. But we enjoyed it.
MR: Right, and yet you were such a warm and huggy mother, which is an interesting contrast, I think to your parents.
MB: Yeah, definitely. You were lucky that you had two very different sets of grandparents. Your Barthlemen grandparents were very much interested in you as babies and very young children whereas my mother, who was the only one living [10:00] as you got to be older, only one of my parents living, much preferred being with you when you were older than when you were a child. Do you remember spending weeks up in Harborside with Nanna and Grandpa Barthlemen?
MR: I remember them being more fun. They would get to our level more and have toys and silliness, and they knew we liked candy whereas I think Hi Dearie, as we called her, was more interested in, maybe., more intellectual things and more artistic, and it meant more to impress her whereas we could be more silly with my father’s parents. She was, maybe, more standoffish, and stern, and firm, but I did have the sense I could impress her whereas, maybe, she was less accessible immediately, but then there was something to work for with her.
MB: Well, she loved you very much, and I think you’ve inherited her creativeness. She was an artist, and her mother was an artist, and they both taught art, and both of your aunts on my side of the family went to art school.
MR: I think all of you were very creative people in your own ways—
MB: And different ways.
MR: Jim as an inventor and…
MB: And you’ve inherited the creativeness, in different ways—
MR: I think I have your flavor of creativity. It’s sort of crafty and maybe not formal art—
MB: More graphic than fine art.
MR: Yeah, and maybe, creative with solutions for things rather than taking the normal route on everything [laugh].
MB: [laugh] Not the easy route.
MR: Do you want to talk at all about your teen years or maybe college, or do you wanna move more to starting your family?
MB: One of the fun things growing up was having my sister, Sarah, be so close in age. We were just barely over a year apart—
MR: And Aunt Sarah’s my godmother.
MB: Yup. And while I’m close with all my siblings, we talk on the Internet every single week, so I don’t mean to indicate that we’re two separate families, although in many ways we were, the older two and the younger three, and when Sarah, my younger sister, and I were growing up we’d be dressed alike, and when we went to dancing school, since I was called Mary-Fisher, someone leaned over to my mother and said, “You know it’s so nice of you to dress Mrs. Fisher’s daughter.”
MR: And two slept in the same bedroom too, didn’t you?
MB: Sometimes, yeah. Most of the times.
MR: Although she was more of a troublemaker? You were the good girl, weren’t ya?
MB: Oh I was goody too shoes, yes. And Sarah got in trouble all the time. It was amazing, and she could wrap my father, who was quite Victorian, or right around her little finger, and I didn’t know how she did it because she was going out, and she said, “Well, I’ll be in it at say 10 o’clock,” and she’d come in at midnight, and she’d set the curfew, and then come in at midnight, and it was like, “Why did you do that? You could’ve said midnight and that would’ve been fine.” “Oh, I didn’t know, I was havin’ fun so I stayed out.” Then, she’d be told that she had to stay in for the next week as punishment, and her first week out, she’d do it again, and I could never quite understand her spunk because I was like you, a little bit afraid of crossing my father, but, for as stern and strict as they were, they were very fair and very consistent so that there weren’t surprises. You knew what you needed to do to be on the good side and exactly what wouldn’t get you in trouble.
MR: I would say that was true of you as a parent, and I try to model that with Camden, that the expectations are very clear, and that the reward or punishment be immediately following the action with an explanation. My memory of being disciplined was that I usually looked at myself and said, “Why did you do that?” Instead of looking at either of you for why you scolded me, which was, I think, a nice, it’s an odd, maybe, legacy to pass on, but I think it’s a very valuable one.
MB: Oh, good. I’m glad that worked out. [laugh].
MR: Do you want to talk about getting married with Aunt Sarah?
MB: Well, we were very close in age, and we both found our partners at about the same time, and my father, as you said, was having problems walking. It was his hips. He eventually had one of the first hip replacements in the United States, and then he eventually had a second one after we were married. But it was very difficult for him to walk up and down the aisle, so we decided we’d have a double wedding. So we’d get it all over in one day, and that was a lot of fun. And Sarah and I did a really nice job planning it without friction on who would wear the family veil, and who would actually get married first, and things like that.
MR: The pictures are beautiful too.
MB: It was a lot of fun.
MR: Lines of people, and I remember your formal pictures. They’re in Hi Dearie’s garden, aren’t they? Or they’re in a garden somewhere?
MB: Yeah, the reception was at home.
MR: And there was red somewhere in your, I don’t know if it was on the carpet in the church or something. There’s a strong color of red in some of your pictures.
MB: Yeah, the carpet is red in the church, yeah.
MR: Beautiful pictures.
MB: But it was fun. And then, your father and I moved out west right after we were married, and eventually ended up in Texas, which is where you were born.
MR: Why were you there?
MB: Bill worked for an oil company, Atlantic Richfield and uranium exploration, and we were stationed in Corpus Christi. I say stationed, we were assigned in Corpus Christi, and his parents lived in Massachusetts, and his father was a teacher. So very often on school vacations they would come visit us, and Easter vacation in 1969, they came to visit us, and I was like 10 days overdue. They were expecting to come and visit a baby, but I was still pregnant when they got there.
MR: That worked out well.
MB: Yep, the day they got there, you were born, which was exciting. What was even more exciting was that I had labor pains, oh maybe, ten minutes apart, and then we called the doctor, he said, “Oh don’t worry about it. Head into the hospital when they’re five minutes apart,” and we hung up, and all of a sudden, I went into hard labor, and they hustled me into the car, and five minutes later, you were born, when we were still in the car, and grandpa caught you. And grandpa was a little bit formal too—
MR: A big man.
MB: Oh yeah, he was 6’4” too.
MR: Another 6’4” leaning over from the backseat.
MB: Your father was driving, and though it was in Texas, it was cold, and the vents were open, and this cold air was blowing on me, and it was obviously wet, when you were born, and I was just kinda cold, and we wrapped you in towels that were clean, but they were your father’s golf towels, and—
MR: I picture your feet out the window of the car [laugh].
MB: Just about. Because he just would’ve shoved me in headfirst, and grandpa caught you, and I can remember being kind of embarrassed because I’d been saying some four-letter words that I had learned along the way.
MR: And he’d never even seen you in your nightgown had he?
MB: No much less had his hands between my legs, catching a baby, because I was grabbing…
MR: Anything you could, probably.
MB: I just was using words I shouldn’t be using in front of my father-in-0law, but it turns out he didn’t even hear them.
MR: He was probably shaking in his own right. [laugh].
MB: And being a little bit of a prude, he cleaned up the car afterwards.
MR: Did it really have white upholstery?
MB: It was light colored before you were born, and kind of a mess afterwards. They cut the cord at the hospital, and then you was just a beautiful, beautiful baby because you had spent no time in the birth canal, and they had you in isolation. You were contaminated, and I just couldn’t imagine how they could call you contaminated because you were so beautiful.
MR: Well, and I think the joke is that’s where my social problems began. [laugh].
MB: [laugh] You don’t have social problems.
MR: And I heard that they dropped you on the sidewalk or something as they were pulling you out of the car? I mean, it was sort of one thing after another.
MB: They had trouble cutting the cord to be able to take you inside, but everything worked out very nicely.
MR: And the funny thing is that my husband, Eric, knew that story, and though my first pregnancy was very well-prepared to have the baby in the car. We had a 20-minute drive form our house to Vanderbilt, and Eric was convinced we wouldn’t make it.
MB: I was too! [laugh].
MR: I was of the opinion -- if I can have a baby in 20 minutes, I’m OK doing it in the car. That sounds pretty ideal to me, and I was actually kind of disappointed when it was 16 hours because I was ready for 20 minutes.
MB: Well, you’re pregnant again, and going to have a daughter, and I just think you’re so lucky to have a daughter because I really loved my daughter and being able to share a lot with her, and this isn’t a wrap up, but I just can’t help saying that daughters are very special, as sons are, but—
MR: Well, and if you’re back this time, we’re gonna work on the driving because last time, I was in the backseat with a bucket between my knees, a car seat beside me, and you were sure we weren’t gonna make it. You drove like a bat outta hell.
MB: But Meg, you were fully dilated at home.
MR: You were ready to go whereas I had told Eric, “Don’t rush,” and so he was pretty calm, and I can remember sitting between the two of you, trying to figure out how much we should rush, and with hindsight, having contractions a minute apart, with your history, I think you were justified in rushing. [20:00] I just remember taking some corners and my cheek pressed pretty hard against the back window, and being sick. Does being a grandmother and watching your daughter go through this take you back or move you forward sort of in your…I would think there must be some nostalgia in that?
MB: Yeah, I think the day you were born was probably the best day of my life. It just, I hadn’t expected to have a natural child birth, but the high, after you were born, not during your birth, but right after your birth was just the best natural high and feeling that I’ve ever had, and it brings me to tears even now, almost 40 years later.
MR: But not quite 40 years. [laugh].
MB: OK [laugh]. And when I was with you when your son, Camden, was born it was like living it over again, and I was very proud of you, the way you conducted yourself through your pregnancy, through the birth, and as a mother.
MR: I think I had that euphoria for about three weeks. It was surreal. I didn’t feel even, which might’ve been sleep deprivation, but I didn’t feel in touch with reality, I was so happy. It was the most amazing feeling, definitely.
MB: And it’s coming again!
MR: Yeah. Do you remember being pregnant? I mean, it being so long ago, do you remember any?
MB: I liked being pregnant, and I would’ve loved to have had six children, but…
MR: I’m kinda glad that you didn’t [laugh].
MB: Well, it’s fine now [laugh], but I would’ve liked to have had more children, and instead, I went and started teaching nursery school when your brother, younger brother, started into school. I went and started teaching nursery school so I could be around little kids. And that was a nice transition.
MR: I remember enjoying the sick day, even though I think we were locked in an empty classroom with a mat on the floor cause we needed to sleep. But I remember thinking that was we would go to school with you, a couple times, when we missed school, and we would sleep in some random room, where we weren’t bothering the other kids, but it was kind of a treat to go. I do remember that. Pied Piper was a fun nursery school.
MB: And I’m still seeing those other teachers too.
MR: Oh that’s neat.
MB: We’re still friends, yeah. That’s the nice thing about living in Maine is the close friends that I’ve made there, and their friends of yours and their parents, and we were all still friends after all these years, and it’s not as transient a society as many are, and so it’s—
MR: You’ve been in the same community for a lot longer than I may ever know.
MB: And a lot of other people have been too, so you build history with the same people, which is very nice.
MR: Right, and I think you’ve even had an evolution with a lot of those relationships. You’ve been there long enough that you get close to some, and father from others, and back close again. That’s something I don’t know that I will have moving from place to pace.
MB: Cause when I was growing up, we knew everybody that walked down the street, and they’d stop in, and we know their dogs and cats. It was nice.
MR: I think we have that in Franklin.
MB: I’m glad.
MR: I’m living on a small suburban street, dead-end. I think we have a sense of community within our street, maybe not everyone on the street, and certainly not the whole development. But Camden has children to play with, for example, and he can go out and play in the street. It’s safe, and they can share toys, and it’s nice. It’s a little bit idyllic, which I hadn’t anticipated. So I guess I want to know if you have advice or thoughts, either during my pregnancy or about being a mother.
MB: I think—
MR: You did a nice job.
MB: I was just going to say I think that you’re doing a marvelous job. It’s a little different than I did, but I think, in many ways, it’s an improvement.
MR: How is it different?
MB: I think you’re more open to variations on how to do things.
MR: I think the rules have changed, what people expect has changed, and what’s acceptable and not is very different than 40 years ago.
MB: But yet you’re doing some of the old-fashioned, what may seem old-fashioned these days in teaching Camden manners. He’s very good on spontaneously saying, “Thank you,” and “Please.”
MR: See, I don’t find it to be spontaneous [laugh]. We’re workin’ on it.
MB: For his age, he does a very nice job, and he’s gentle, and sharing, and affectionate.
MR: Did you enjoy seeing him play with the baby?
MB: He has a baby doll that he’s just so gentle with and caring.
MR: Which is surprising. I mean he’s done a nice job being nurtured.
MB: Well, he’s very much a little boy with the trucks and the banging, and yet, when he holds that doll, he’s a real sweetheart. I’m amazed by his vocabulary, his memory, and how he puts desperate, not desperate, disparate things together.
MR: Conceptually?
MB: Well, yeah, the way he calls stores by things that he sees like—
MR: Like Wild Oats is the purple store, and Sam’s Club is the diamond store because that’s how their logos appear or their names appear.
MB: Yeah, and he invents these things himself, and is able to communicate them at age 2.
MR: He might have that creativity. [laugh]. Do you notice, you see him every three to six months, do you see a big change in him from visit to visit?
MB: Yes, I do. Yeah. He’s grown up a lot.
MR: Does it surprise you, or is it about what you think you’re coming into when you see him
MB: I wouldn’t say it surprises me, and even more than surprises, it pleases me that he remembers me between visits.
MR: Oh yeah.
MB: And remembers things at my house, although, he’s only been there two or three times, and talks to me on the phone, and you’re very good about keeping a blog for him that lets me know on a daily basis, practically, what he’s been doing, so that when we talk on the phone we’re able to communicate.
MR: What do you think he’s going to remember about this trip? I think there’s one thing that will stick out for him, seeing you this time. I think it’ll be giving him the three stickers last night. First thing this morning he wants to see [Oma] so he can get more stickers.
MB: Well, he earned them yesterday. He was a real sweetheart.
MR: [laugh] And I think the visit this summer was probably the cats and the grandfather clock.
MB: I look forward every year to having my week with him while you and Eric go off.
MR: We look forward to that too. Now, we’re gonna have to figure out how to do it with two kids.
MB: That’s all right. I can handle two kids. Just keep ‘em comin’.
MR: [laugh]. Yeah. How did you manage that transition? I, obviously, don’t remember when I was two-years-old and Tim was born? Did you do anything special to help me bring another child into what I thought was my space?
MB: I don’t remember the transition per say, like you, there were many other babies being born, so you were somewhat familiar with it happening in the neighborhood, and he was a nice quiet baby. He wasn’t disruptive so much, and you were—
MR: I remember being, I imagine this was later, but I remember being generally, sort of, disinterested in him.
MB: Well, you were more than two years apart, and I think you parallel played for a long time. I think in your adult life, you’ve become a lot closer to each other than you might’ve been as children. Actually, you played with the Higgins’ boys’ brothers, who were your same ages, but you played with Eric, and Tim played with Steve, rather than you and Tim playing with each other.
MR: Right. Did were fight a lot?
MB: I don’t recall you bickering. You weren’t physically fighting with each other. We did a lot of things as family like skiing, and ice skating, and going out on the boat, and so you did end up playing with him, if you call that playing, participating with him. But it wasn’t necessarily direct play.
MR: I can remember you being frustrated at our bickering at each other, and now, seeing and I will experience it having two. It doesn’t seem to me that we did that much of it, but I very clearly remember you not enjoying it. [laugh].
MB: [laugh] You will find out very shortly.
MR: Do you have any special memories of either of our childhoods or things you’d like to say about being Tim’s mother also, since he’s not here?
MB: One of the biggest joys in my life has been being a mother, and I was fortunate to be able to be home with you, and instill what I thought my values were, and to watch you grow and mature. It amazed me the giants leap that you would take growing up just learning to read and how that opened just a whole world up to each of you.
MR: I see that with Camden even just being able to talk is a whole new threshold.
MB: Yeah. I found it very exciting. I don’t think there was any bigger job that I would’ve ever wanted than to be a mother, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to put a lot of time into it.
MR: You had two very different children also – personality-wise – night and day I think. So you had to manage [30:00] quite a spectrum there.
MB: But that made it interesting, made it fun. You’re both wonderful children. Adults. [laugh].
MR: Do you have any special…we will always be your kids…do you memories or would you like to walk through the houses that you’ve been in your life? We started talking about Salem. Is it Salem Avenue in Elizabeth?
MB: That’s where I grew up.
MR: Where did you go from there?
MB: I went to college, and that’s where I met your father, and I loved college. It was a lot of fun. It was Baldwin-Wallace in Ohio, and then, we moved to California for a summer, and he was working on his Master’s degree, so we moved to Oklahoma. Then, we moved to Texas, and you were born, and when he was no longer during uranium exploration, was going into oil exploration, he didn’t want to do that, so we packed up and moved to Maine when I was pregnant. [laugh] You move when you get pregnant.
MR: Yeah, this seems to be a tradition in our family to pack up and move as your belly’s growin’. We had a beautiful home, well, I guess first we lived in the apartments, right?
MB: Right, and then soon after—
MB/MR: Tim was born,
MB: We moved to the farmhouse, and that was a lot of fun. It was nice for me because there weren’t a lot of children around. You have just the opposite experience, liking a lot of children around. I liked having more control.
MR: I remember feeling isolated, but I also enjoyed having a lot of space. We had so much yard space that we could do different--
MB: We had 11 acres.
MR: --different rooms in our land there, so we had fairly land, and tiger land, and trails out in the woods, and a fort, and things we couldn’t begin to fit on our little postage-sized place in Franklin. So there was definite advantages. We had the ice-skating rink and the cross-country skiing trails. Those were nice
MB: And you had friends over when it was convenient for us.
MR: And then you built your dream house. Would you call that your dream house?
MB: It was at the time, yeah.
MR: You went down to every detail on that.
MB: It was fun building the house and having the concept, two-dimension, on paper, and seeing it actually built in three-dimension, and then moving into it. But now, I’m living in Portland in a small house with my two cats, my one cat, and your one cat, and I like that life very much too. I’m back to being a city girl.
MR: Do you think you’ll stay there when you retire?
MB: Yes. I hope to travel more and come visit you.
MR: Enjoy your two kid grandkids, and there will be only two. [laugh].
MB: From you. [laugh].
MR: Do you have hopes for either your children or your grandchildren? And they could just be very simple ones. But are there things that you would like them to know in life?
MB: My hopes for both you and my grandchildren that you be happy and contributing adults to make the world a better place for everybody, just like most parents, and to date, I’d say you and your brother and Eric have lived up to that very nicely.
MR: Even though you didn’t always know if I would. [laugh]. Through some rebellious teenage years.
MB: That’s to be expected, and it’s part of becoming your own self.
MR: Fearful from where I’m sitting right now. I’m fearful of it. Do you think that those hopes and expectations are the same ones you started out with? And I don’t expect you to remember 40 years ago, but do you think when you were a young mother that was what you hoped for and looked for?
MB: Probably. I never had any specific dreams for you like that you would be a doctor or a teacher. I had hopes—
MR: That I went to college was big.
MB: Yes, I wanted you to go to college and graduate. But you were interested in more education after that and did that all on your own right after college and then even later.
MR: And that I have good table manners. You were a little bit like your parents in that sense [laugh].
MB: Oh yeah, I’ll admit to being old-fashioned.
MR: [laugh] And I’ll probably do the same to Camden.
MB: But I don’t think it was wasted, and you did learn it so that was good.
MR: Yeah. Do you have any predictions about your granddaughter since she’s such an unknown right now? You wanna make a guess about the future?
MB: Yeah, she’ll have a very happy grandmother and very happy mother, and hopefully, a very happy brother. She has a nice father, so it’ll be a nice family unit that I’ll come and pester you as often as I can.
MR: I was gonna say will you keep visiting?
MB: Oh yeah.
MR: You’re a nice, welcomed visitor, an easy visitor.
MB: Thank you.
MR: Camden was really looking forward to your visit this time. It was Oma and Santa, and he was very excited about both so.
MB: Well, it was very nice to walk out in the airport instead of just meet you on the curb to have him come running with his arms yelling and everyone looking at little two-year-old running across the concourse saying, “Oma! Oma!”
MR: Yes. And we’re gonna have a lot of fun at Christmas. I think it will be fun to watch a two-year-old opening his presents
MB: And adding a new ornament to the tree each year. Are you doing that?
MR: I think we need to make this year’s still, so we’re still working on it. But we’re really glad that you came out, and I think this has been a great experience for you to share some of your history with your kids and my kids, and our grandkids, and on and on.
MB: That’s kind of scary. [laugh].
MR: [laugh]. I know, maybe, they’ll laugh at us a hundred years from now.
MB: Well, I’ve been very honored to have both you and Tim as my children, and I’m very proud of both of you, and I thank you for this opportunity.
MR: Thank you. I love you.
MB: I love you too.
[36:01]