Mrs. Spooner, with hair silver gray, likes to work, but would rather play...
Kindergarten was my absolute favorite year of school because I loved my teacher. Mrs. Spooner made everything an adventure. Her dress-up corner was complete with a fireman’s suit. My favorite science experiment was when Mrs. Spooner lit a candle in a glass and then put a cover on it, snuffing out the flame. Show and tell was an important feature of kindergarten. One day my mother sent me in with a paper fish from Chinatown. We had filled it up with our used Christmas wrapping paper to puff it out. It was a hit. There was always something new and different at show and tell. On Halloween we wore our costumes to school and had our photographs taken.
When I started first grade, it was a disappointment. I longed for kindergarten.
One summer day when I was 9 or 10, I was miffed with my brother and sister, and took off on my bicycle to get as far away as I could. I rode across the highway and behind the town hall to Mrs. Spooner’s house. She was out in her rock garden. Like most runaways, I forgot to pack a lunch. Mrs. Spooner packed us a big lunch, got out her bicycle and we were off on a great adventure! We rode across the highway, behind the shopping center and after about two miles, we arrived at the Cliff Walk in Newport. We had our picnic at Forty Steps,
The summer I was 11 my mother died. I started sixth grade. By the end of my sixth grade year my father was engaged. I wasn’t sure about the whole arrangement at first. What sealed the deal for me was Mrs. Spooner was to be my grandmother! Plus, I got a younger sister, Deborah. I had always been the youngest, the one who gets forgotten, the fifth wheel.
In August after sixth grade the wedding was coming. So was a move to a new house. We used four cars for about a week, back and forth a mile between the old house and the new house to move our prized possessions. My father hired a moving van for the piano and a few big pieces of furniture.
In the middle of all this, Mrs. Spooner had us kids over for dinner. No parents. She served us ice coffee from a shapely big steel pitcher. I felt so grownup! It was delicious. She decorated the dining table with Santa and the sleigh with twelve reindeer. It was magically Christmas in August!
A week later my father married Mrs. Spooner’s daughter. At the reception at our new house, she proclaimed us her instant grandchildren. Shortly afterwards my parents left on their honeymoon to New Hampshire, while Deb and I stayed close to home and honeymooned with Mrs. Spooner. Mrs. Spooner lived in an old house behind the town hall, where Mr. Spooner was custodian. The house was built with pegs. Mrs. Spooner painted constellations around the cracks in the bedroom walls. She showed Deborah and I how to paint pictures on rocks and glue felt on the bottom for paperweights. Even though it was hot weather, we spent time in the attic looking at the pegs that held the house together.
It was New Year’s Eve 1970. Mrs. Spooner had Deborah and me over for the whole night. We were 9 and 13. After dinner, the three of us got into the car, while Mr. Spooner held down the fort in his comfortable chair, and Mrs. Spooner took us to see the Christmas lights on the Navy ships. There were lots of ships and they were all decorated with lights for the Christmas season. When we got home we had fizzy drinks with cranberry ice cubes in them. We stayed up just past midnight after Guy Lombardo brought in the New Year on TV.
Every cold weather holiday, Mrs. Spooner would bring over her props to play games after the meal. Most of these games we played at her kindergarten. The hardest game was to kneel on a chair and try to drop the clothespin into the glass milk jug. Our favorite was musical hats. We pulled enough chairs for everybody into the living room and Mrs. Spooner put on the record while we sprinted around, each in a different hat, until she stopped the record and we had to pass on the hat to the next person. It was so much fun to see my uncle Ralph Angus Shea wearing a straw hat made to fit a donkey. They were all ancient and silly hats. Mrs. Spooner could get anyone to play!
For the summer holidays we played croquet in her backyard that was next to the airport. It was a well-used set that took a beating every time she took it out. My aunt Gail beat everybody when she and my uncle Richard came up from Virginia. Labor Day was exceptionally festive: my grandfather Richard and my father Richard shared Labor Day weekend birthdays and they each had cakes with lots of candles and ice cream.
When I was twelve, Mrs. Spooner retired and closed up her kindergarten. My twin cousins, Dan and Bob, were in the last class. Once she retired, one thing she did like clockwork every Friday afternoon, was walk down the street to the nursing home nearby and play favorites on the piano and have a sing-a-long. One year on Halloween she went into her special dress-up trunk and got into disguise. Not one soul at the nursing home recognized her. She played their favorite songs on the piano. All the old people thanked her and said they hoped their Josie was OK. Well, Josie pulled off her wig and surprised them all!
I never could get the hang of calling Mrs. Spooner “Grandma”. Sometime in my twenties, I switched from calling her Mrs. Spooner to her first name, Josie.
One time when my sister Deb was about 19, she borrowed a black beaded dress from Josie’s dress-up trunk to wear to a special dance party. It was from the 1920s. It shimmied every time Deborah even breathed.
Josie liked taking Deb and I to the beach in the off-season. Deb collected white rocks. I collected mermaids’ toenail shells, the thin nearly translucent gold shells. When we got home, we arranged and rearranged our shells and rocks on the windowsills and shelves in our room that we shared. I think many of Deb’s white rocks ended up in Josie’s rock garden.
This is what Mrs. Spooner looked like when I was in kindergarten in 1962: Her hair was silver gray and she wore silver metal cat-eye frame glasses. She always wore slacks, sneakers and a blouse and she was partial to blue. She was tall but I never felt overpowered by her size.
Then when Mrs. Spooner became my grandmother and I saw her on holidays, she wore suits and hats, coordinating shoes and a handbag. I especially remember the handbag: Every Christmas she would forget her handbag at our house. She’d telephone over and Deb and I would drive it over to her a whole mile and a half away. It really topped off Christmas.
Mrs. Spooner always looked fine to me. When she got older, maybe she was 75- she went to England with my step mom, Joanne, Aunt Charlotte, and Deborah for a large Coggeshall family reunion. The hotel they were all staying in had a fire alarm before breakfast. Deb and Joanne shared a room and got outside quickly. It took forever for Charlotte and Josie to come downstairs and join them outside. It turned out Josie would not leave the room without her makeup. Luckily, it was not a big fire!
By this time, Josie’s hair was no longer that fetching silver gray. It was white and curled. It turned out the silver gray flip was to conceal the hair she didn’t like.
Everyday Josie and her husband Richard ate breakfast sitting on stools at a counter with a bird feeder and a wildlife action right outside. One day after nearly twenty years of this peaceful existence, someone bought a little chunk of land right across the driveway and built a house. Now they had new wildlife to watch. Before Josie ever met the couple, she knew the husband and wife worked opposite shifts. One summer evening she asked the wife if she’d like to go to the Creamery for an ice cream cone. The lady turned her down. Can you imagine turning Mrs. Spooner down for a cone?!
On the first Sunday afternoon in December Josie hosted an early Christmas party at her house. Did I tell you that her house was where I went to kindergarten? It looked all different from kindergarten times. There was some antique furniture that Josie took excellent care of. She’d reupholstered the loveseat. They’d had a woodstove installed in front of the fireplace. The picture over the fireplace changed with the seasons. To the left of the woodstove on the wall were framed photos of her four curly haired blonde children: Joanne, Edith, Richard and Charlotte. The family that came to the Christmas parties was Josie’s two brothers, Stanley and Tolly, and their families. There’d be a good twenty people in the living room playing kindergarten games.
The state we live in and where Josie lived, Rhode Island, is very partial to low numbered license plates. The lower the number, the more important the person is thought to be. Every time a new plate was issued Mr. Spooner would nail it up the old plate in the garage. The garage was lined with 4858 plates.
I think the last time Josie drove off the island was about 1976. She went to Providence to see Mr. Spooner in the hospital, had a little fender bender on Route 95. When she and her car were reunited, the afghan she was crocheting was gone. So much for my brother’s wedding gift.
One day a man drove in the driveway and bartered with Mr. Spooner for a 4858 porcelain
license plate in exchange for a Vermont plate of no particular distinction. Now fast forward a few years. Josie gets a traffic ticket in the mail from Central Falls, which mystified her. She asked my father for help with this problem. It turned out that the fellow, who got the porcelain 4858 plate, put it on his antique car and parked illegally on the grass in front of the Central Falls town hall. My father got on the phone with a police from Central Falls and explained Josie’s end of the deal, that she’d never been to Central Falls and she didn’t drive off our island anymore.
Who really needs to leave the island when you’re a twelfth generation islander? Josie knew everybody. Now, being Josie’s granddaughter, some of her relatives became my relatives. The boy who sat behind me in math class, Jay, calls me ‘cousin’. I call him ‘cousin’. It’s fun!
Josie made it to 89. Her good friend Natalie, who she used to skate with, made it to 100 in January. Josie would see herself in the mirror and say she didn’t recognize the old person she saw in her reflection. She still felt young inside.
The Quarters from Globe
Sometimes you learn a lot about a person after they die, and I don’t mean from their obituary. After Josie died, I found out that she was an excellent archivist. My aunt Edith from Tucson and I spent three days sorting out Josie’s household possessions: her clothes closets were incredibly tidy. Like were colors were together. The blue section was the biggest. We were sorting out the clothes to go to three different thrift shops. My stepmother said we shouldn’t give her whole wardrobe to one thrift shop so we divvied it up. I made sure to check the pockets on everything before it hit the pile. Well, I hit pay dirt when I got the hanger with the striped robe from the navy blue section: on the same hanger was a basic black swimsuit and in a pocket of the striped robe was a zip-lock bag with $5- worth of quarters with a handwritten note that said “I won these quarters last February in Globe, Arizona.” My Aunt Edith and Uncle Ed had taken Josie for a weekend excursion to Globe. Ede had gotten a deal on the hotel. They had fun eating, swimming and a little bit of gambling.
Now, who’d a thunk Josie was a gambler? You just never know about a person.
Growing up Josie
Well, Josie and her brothers, Stanley and Tolly, did pretty much whatever they wanted and traveled as far as their bikes could carry them. Josie told me that in the summertime they liked to swim. They went to the one beach that didn’t charge an entrance fee. The ride to the beach was mostly downhill. Piece o’ cake. After getting refreshed in the ocean, it was an uphill excursion home. Josie wore the basic black bathing suit of the day. I think it came below the knees. It was pure wool. When it got wet, it itched up a storm. So by the time she got home again, she was sweaty and itchy all over. Her brothers had it a little better. There was a little less suit to chafe.
Josie’s Mother
The first time I met Josie’s mother was at my parents’ wedding reception in 1969. She was small, wore a hat, and sunk down deep into the chair in our living room. I didn’t know who she was but she caught my attention when she tugged on Josie’s sleeve and asked who the cute young man was. The cute young man was my father. Josie told her mother he was Joanne’s husband. Josie’s mother’s name was Laura, Laura Tolderland.
She was a little senile and she definitely liked my father. It was like Josie was the mother and Laura the daughter. Josie was always a take-charge kind of gal. And from what I’ve gathered, Laura was always kind of dreamy.
I didn’t really know where Laura lived but I know when she broke her hip, she came to stay with Josie for several months. Somehow the bed squeezed into the TV room. One time Deb, Joanne and I went over to see Josie and Josie welcomed us in with her finger over her mouth. She walked us over to the TV room doorway and there was Laura sleeping away sweeping her hands back and forth, up and down over the bedclothes, playing the piano. On holidays Josie and Laura would play duets on my father’s grand piano.
Josie’s Inheritance
After she retired, Josie cleaned a few houses for ‘older’ ladies. To be honest, these ladies were about the same age as Josie. Unlike Josie, they weren’t still riding their bicycles and dressing up for Halloween. I suspected they visited as much as Josie cleaned. Josie often came home with something pretty choice. Deb and I both got necklaces that belonged to one lady on Wyatt Road.
I found out about Josie’s inheritance at Christmas time after she got it. She got $13,000 from an ‘older lady’ she cleaned house for. Now the very first thin she got with it was a Yamaha lap piano. She brought it over on holidays and played requests right in the living room.
That lady must’ve really like Josie- Josie really enjoyed her Yamaha lap piano!
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