Roxanne Henke

Have I mentioned I hate math?

“Fifty? I have to do fifty before I can go swimming?” I was about 12 years old. My dad was a banker and he decided my first job would be writing service charges for checking accounts by hand. It involved individually counting each check in a statement, then doing the math. A customer was allowed a certain number of checks for 50 cents, then 10 cents a check above that amount. Those little yellow slips went out with tear stains on them. It wasn’t fair that I had to work while all my friends were at the pool.

Three hours turned into five. Then the flight was canceled. The airline said the earliest my daughter and her two kids (ages 9 and 6) would get “home” was Christmas Day.

My daughter gave up on that airline and went to another counter. They could get her out now (for a price). She booked the tickets.

As I tucked my 3-year-old Superman into bed (my first night of babysitting), he said, “Grandma, you forgot to sing ‘You are My Shwunshine.’” I enthusiastically sang a verse, then patted his cheek. “There. How was that?”

He shook his head. “Not that great.”
- - - - - -

When I was young, my calendar started in September with the first day of school and ended in May on the last day of school. June, July and August were bonus months. But, I learned early on that another way to mark time is by turning points. For me, that first one (I was 17) was April 12, 1971, the day my dad died. Ever since, it seems my life has been divided into “before Dad died” and “after Dad died.”

The people in the land marveled at many things. They could Zoom to work from home. They had hundreds, nay thousands, of movies at their fingertips. They could listen to a favorite singer livestream a concert while sitting on the couch. And, on Sunday they could attend church holding a coffee cup while in their pajamas.

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the thumbs down or stop signals before.”

He shrugged his shoulders as he began walking away. “That’s because we never use them.”

He got that right. When he and his sister visit the lake every summer, life is on fast-forward. “Slow down” and “stop” are not in their wheelhouse.

On one of my casual walks down “my” aisle, I saw a woman standing by the table, holding a copy of my book, reading the back cover. I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “I wrote that book,” I blurted. I went on to tell her about the book, how this conference was where it had all happened, how excited I was to have my first book published, and who knows what else. Probably that I was from small-town North Dakota and things like this don’t happen often.

“I guess I’ll buy it,” she said.

“Thank you!” I was still gushing as she walked away.

Oh, we high school girls had our methods of circumventing the rules. If made to kneel (this sounds SO archaic now), we’d pull in our (mostly nonexistent) tummies and push our skirt down as far as we possibly could to pass the step test. The alternative was to wear a longer skirt to school and roll up the waistband as much as we dared. If questioned, all we had to do was unroll and kneel – test passed.

Getting back to the bell-bottomed pants – we weren’t allowed to wear those to school at all. Even to basketball games after school, it was skirts and dresses only.

Frustrated, but as politely as possible, I approached again and said, “My husband and I are paying for this reception, could you please play some oldies?” He nodded more earnestly this time. I walked to the edge of the dance floor and stood beside my young niece. Not one tune seemed to change. I gave up.

A new song started and my niece screamed, “Finally! Something from this decade!”

It took a few beats, but I finally realized that to the young DJ, songs from the 1980s (not earlier decades) were “the oldies.”

I’m going to be blunt: Easter has always felt a bit cold and hollow to me.

There, I said it. Now, let me explain. My dad passed away the day after Easter in April 1971. I remember our minister coming to the house and making what I’m sure he felt would be a comforting analogy that there was something “fitting” about my dad passing away at Easter, the time of resurrection. Even though I was only 17, intellectually I “got it,” but that thought didn’t fill the hole that felt as if my heart had quit beating in its usual rhythm.