Grandma Falconer makes sand castles with Peter and his sister on Lake Michigan. c 1987 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune

Sunday, September 27, 1987

“Move,” said Peter. “I want to get by.”

My mother looked up from her book and gave my 6 1/2-year-old a hard look.

She was sitting on her sofa, in her house, feet up on her coffee table.

Reluctantly, she moved her feet to let Peter by. He squeezed wordlessly past.

Something was wrong, very wrong, with that exchange, said my gut.

But what? The chilly glare my mother threw at my son? The pleases and thank yous he left unsaid?

It isn’t easy to think clearly after a few days under the same roof with one’s mother and father. When I was a young career woman living in New York City, I discovered the three-nights-and-four-days-at-home rule.

That was all I could take of living eyeball to eyeball with my mother. I could be her kid again for four days, max. After that, it was flight – or fight.

I broke my own rule last summer and inflicted myself and my children upon my parents for an unprecedented stay of eight nights and nine days.

It was not until I was safely home under my own roof in the Eastbay, my feet tucked up on my own coffee table, that I could see what had gone wrong during that exchange between my mother and her grandson.

Peter had no respect.

It was more than a mere forgetting of his pleases and thank yous. It was downright presumptuous of him to think his grandmother should interrupt her reading to accommodate him at all. He should have walked quietly, respectfully, around the table the other way.

Had it been another child, a peer, in Peter’s path, squeezing past with a quick “excuse me” would be okay.

But around grandparents, children should show some respect.

Respect. The very word sticks in my craw. Question authority was the motto of my young adulthood. Challenge it.

There was no place for blind respect for one’s elders during the ’60s. We were equals under God and the U.S. Constitution. Every creature – adult, child, rhinoceros or whooping crane – was to be treated with respect.

Children, the clean slates of the future, were held in especially high regard in those days. As innocents, they possessed a unique wisdom lost to their time-sullied elders.

And today, the young child, the person of the future – not his parents and grandparents, the person of the past – continues to command unusual respect, even awe.

This small bundle of nerve endings is a miracle of creation, the child-rearing books coo. It has needs and feelings that deserve our utmost attention.

Little Samantha, but a fetus, can hear in utero. We should play her Beethoven.

She has feelings in utero. We should think nice thoughts about her as we experience morning sickness.

Unless, of course, we are planning to abort this particular fetus, in which case it is better not to think.

Through all of this, a stubborn something deep inside me has persisted, insisting that it is the grandparents, if anyone, who deserve the extra measure of unconditional respect.

Not because our elders have earned it. And not because our elders are in any way better, smarter or kinder than their descendents.

But because they are the elders.

Peter dotes on his grandmother these days -- and she on him. This is Christmas 2007, twenty years later, and I'm pretty sure he excused himself as he squeezed between the coffee table and my mother's knees. c 2007 B.F. Newhall

My mother deserves Peter’s esteem because of the life she has led as a mother and wife. Because of the potatoes peeled, the casseroles baked, the dustballs chased and the corporate VIPs entertained.

Because she holds the office of grandmother. Because she has done her do.

Peter won’t even clean up his room and he thinks he is on a par with my mother, who has cleaned up his bottom?

My friend Claudia sends her two small children to Chinese school every Saturday morning. “I want them to learn about their culture. I want them to learn that respect,” she explained.

“Your parents live in Michigan,” she went on. “So far away. I would never want to be that far away from my mother.”

The Chinese culture, thousands of years old, venerates the people of the past. It is not unique in this.

The elderly are held in high esteem in her native Belize, according to my friend Miriam.

“Old people are the root,” she explains. “If grandparents come to your house, they don’t sleep on the floor. You give them your bed or your hammock.”

Today’s Western culture, with its silicon chips, videocameras and interplanetary probes, venerates what it still to come.

It stands in awe of the future and its citizens – our children – as though our children possessed a hot line to the truth or, as the Chinese ancestors of yore, to Heaven.

The fact is, we and our forebears created the world into which our children are being launched.

We have done our best, sorry as it may be. We have done our do. And for that we deserve some respect.

By gosh.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

The Oakland Tribune, August 9, 1987

Up in Siskiyou mountain country, in the northwest corner of California, there is a spot known to the Karuk tribe as Kota-Mein.

In the Karuk language, Kota Mein means “center of the world.”

Like their ancestors before them, the Karuk people hike up to sacred spots like Kota-Mein, Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock to talk to the Great Spirit and to receive power.

I have never been to Kota-Mein, but I have been to Bass Lake, Mich.

If I were drawing a map of the world, its center would be at Bass Lake, just where its outlet flows into the great, blue Lake Michigan.

I have lived in California for nearly two decades, but like my forebears – my mother, her mother Toto, her mother Nana, and her mother, Grandma Harlow – I return to Bass Lake every chance I get.

I am drawn there as surely as a Michigan mosquito is drawn to the juicy ankles of anyone foolish enough to venture outdoors after dark in a Michigan summer.

Chimney Rock and Doctor Rock have been compared by their devotees to black holes in space, vortexes, whirlwinds of energy. Those spots on Earth have, it is said, the power to give the worthy pilgrim a vision of transcendence.

Last month, I left my husband behind in the Eastbay with a freezer full of spaghetti sauce and meatloaf.

The children and I boarded a Boeing 767 for a pilgrimage to Michigan. I wanted to show them my secret spots. Peter, 6, and Christina, 3, were enthusiastic.

They donned hats and mosquito netting to pick raspberries in the woods with their grandfather.

They watched the cherries being harvested. They caught a toad and inspected a patch of poison ivy.

Peter and Christina aboard a classic inner tube.

They learned to soothe their mosquito bites by wiping them with spit.

They met their great-aunt Ruth and made friends with a half-dozen second cousins, some of whom were drawn here, as we were, all the way from the West Coast.

They chased minnows in the warm, brown water of the Bass Lake outlet.

They took wet fistfuls of the creamy, miraculously clean Lake Michigan sand and let it drip off the ends of their fingers to make dainty drip castles.

They heard the story of the drip castle party their Uncle David and Aunt Alice once threw on the shores of the Pacific.

My brother and his wife, also a Midwesterner, once invited some California friends to a beach party, promising to initiate them in the intricacies of drip castle building.

They discovered, to their chagrin, that Northern California sand does not drip. The project was a flop.

Christina and Peter drift toward Lake Michigan.

When they grew sweaty, my children waded down the outlet into the Big Lake. They threw their bellies onto the breaking waves and dove for the smooth rocks buried in the sand.

Again and again, they climbed aboard a much-patched inner tube and drifted down the outlet into the Big Lake.

The hours passed.

My mother sat on a beach towel spread on the sand, watching her daughter and grandchildren. “This is life,” she sighed.

Behind her, Lake Michigan’s waves crashed noisily on the beach, just as they had crashed when I was a girl and when she was a girl and when our great-grandmothers were girls.

When I was a seventh-grader, I painted a picture of this beach in art class. Sand, grass and lake blended together in a misty – and I thought – very successful portrait of my beach.

My art teacher was displeased. “It doesn’t look real,” she said. “Too sweet.”

Before we left, I showed Peter and Christina one last secret spot – the view of the Big Lake and outlet from a high sand bluff to the north.

From this bluff, there is nothing to see but beauty. Even the human bathers, many of them grown fat on too much cherry pie and sweet corn, take on a certain grace when seen from up here.

Photos c 1987 B.F. Newhall

I had my Nikkormat along and, as always, I took a picture of the outlet.

The Siskiyou Indians forbid photographs of their “power sites.” When my pictures returned, I saw that, sure enough, it had happened again.

My magical spot was gone. What I held in my hands was a 3 ½ by 5-inch glossy of – just another beautiful beach.

I’ll have to go back and try it again.

© 1987  The Oakland Tribune