Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hi, everyone, this is Dawn Klem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and Monarchs.
[00:00:08] Have you ever lost something and you really have no idea where you put it? And you look for it for days and you're thinking, have I lost my mind?
[00:00:23] Like, where could this possibly be?
[00:00:27] Well, this is one of those stories where I lost something.
[00:00:33] And many years later, it came back to me.
[00:00:39] I grew up on river street in Hillsdale, Michigan. There were nine houses on the street, actually eight houses and one house trailer. It was a small little neighborhood. My cousins lived two doors down from us, and they were a little bit older than us, I think. My cousin Marsha was four years older than me, and my cousin Gary was six years older than me. But we were happy to have them in our neighborhood and they babysat us. And it was great.
[00:01:12] Everything seemed so great. We had one particular neighbor whose backyard intersected with our backyard, and we became fast friends, mainly because our parents were such good friends. Both of our dads were on the civil defense. They were both part of the rural fire department, and they went hunting and fishing together every year without fail. They were just great friends.
[00:01:46] Our moms got along good, too. Her mom was an outstanding cook, and so many times after school we would go to her house to raid the refrigerator, much to her mother's dismay.
[00:02:00] Her mom got my mom her first job at the hospital because her mom worked at the hospital.
[00:02:08] So it really was a great, great relationship.
[00:02:13] She had an older brother, but he was quite a bit older than us. I think he was six or seven years older than us. He might have been as old as my older cousin Gary, so we didn't really hang around him that much. And they had a daughter who was one grade younger than me in school, so she was right in between myself and my brother. My brother was two years younger than me, she was one year younger than me. So the three of us hung out together many, many times.
[00:02:51] They were the only couple that my parents ever took a vacation with. They actually hired a babysitter to take care of all of us kids. And they all went up North Michigan to the Upper Peninsula, and they went canoeing and fishing, and they stayed in log cabins and they had a wonderful time. I don't think my parents ever took a vacation after, after that. It's so strange.
[00:03:23] But anyhow, we, us kids were together all the time. We did all the things that you have probably heard about if you watch something like the Andy of Mayberry show, because we were very similar to that. We would throw blankets over the clothesline and put rocks on each corner. And that was like a tent for us in the yard so we could play games. We would take the bus to from the elementary school to the local Bobby's lake and play on the beach and make sand castles. We filled ourselves up with popsicles and Fudgesicles. We just did everything together. We played jump rope together. And to humor my brother, we would try to pitch him baseballs. In the backyard on our property, we had seven apple trees, two pear trees and a cherry tree.
[00:04:27] But behind all of the trees was a huge field. I think our yard was pretty close to an acre, or at least a half an acre. It was a big backyard. And way back in the corner of the back empty field was a big, huge mulberry tree. And we would spend a lot of time there too.
[00:04:49] So we would all go to the backyard to try and pitch baseballs to my brother. He was one of the only boys in the neighborhood, which was so unfortunate for us. I can remember pitching him literally 20 balls. And he would just stand there in his poised position to hit the ball and he would never swing one time. Honestly, I wanted to kill him. I was so angry at him.
[00:05:23] Then finally, I would get so frustrated that I would have my friend come up, Mary, and she would throw the ball to him. Finally, after about 45 minutes of this nonsense, we all decided to quit playing baseball. And the girls just walked away. And he was exasperating, Believe me, we did. Our parents would get together in the evenings during the week, and we always had a badminton tent in our badminton net in our yard. And everybody would come over to play badminton. And they would play till like 10 o'clock at night, which was really great for all of us kids because then we could play hide and go, see, capture the flower, kick the can.
[00:06:11] We were playing just as long as they were playing, and it was great. We knew when it was time to go in because the bats would start to dive bomb the birdie of the badminton set. And I'd be like, oh, yuck, I hate bats, right?
[00:06:30] So we would all disperse and everybody would go home, and that would be it.
[00:06:35] Her dad had the most beautiful garden. And I especially remember his zinnias. Oh, so many bright colors. And he was just a natural outdoorsman at so many things. But he would always bring my mom over a big, huge bouquet of those zinnias to put on our kitchen table. And we were always just so happy because he brought a ray of sunshine with him.
[00:07:03] He had managed to catch two raccoons who were getting into the garbage. And he built a whole cage in the backyard between our yard and her yard. And he kept those raccoons in there for a long time.
[00:07:19] One of them was named Tinkerbell. And then I can't remember what the other one's name was, but they could get quite mean. And so he didn't really want us going around there and bothering him too much. But he didn't have the heart to kill him either.
[00:07:36] So he was just a great all around guy. And he was definitely my dad's best friend. The adults would get together and they would play pinochle all the time. They were always playing pinochle, Especially at our house. I don't know why our house. We had the biggest yard. So I think they came over so that the kids could be free to roam around and not really bother them. And so it worked out great.
[00:08:06] Nobody really drank alcohol back then, but they all smoked cigarettes.
[00:08:13] I can't stand cigarettes to this day. And actually I'm grateful to all of them because I never really started smoking. I could not stand the smell of smoke.
[00:08:25] So it was a good life. It was a lot of fun.
[00:08:29] One year our moms got together and they decided it was time for us to get Barbie dolls. Now, we were born in the late 50s, right when Barbie was coming out. I think Barbie came out in 1958. And that's about the time we were born too.
[00:08:47] So our moms got together and decided that they were going to give us Barbie dolls for Christmas. And we were all really excited about it.
[00:08:58] We had another neighbor that lived across the street on Oak street. And she had like the Ken Barbie. Barbie. More than one Barbie, actually a Midge doll. And Midge's boyfriend, I can't remember his name.
[00:09:14] And then we would add in our two Barbies and it was great fun. We would make up all these stories about going out on dates or living in the house with all the kids. I mean, we. We spent hours playing with our Barbie dolls and we were so happy. And life seemed to be like just the perfect way life was supposed to be. I wouldn't have known any different, But I just know that we had a lot of happiness and a lot of laughs. And I just remember my dad laughing. My dad had a loud laugh.
[00:09:54] And whenever he was around her dad, they were laughing and they were up to no good. They were big practical jokers, especially to the kids. So they enjoyed teasing us.
[00:10:08] His dad, her dad, Marianne's dad helped us get our first puppy. And I remember my dad came Home with a puppy in a box. We weren't even expecting it at all. We were completely taken aback, my brother and I. And the puppy was a little dachshund, a little black dachshund. And we named her Cleo Cleopatra, because we had a Siamese cat that we named Caesar. So we had Cleo and passed Cleo and Caesar, grown up, Cleopatra and Caesar. It's kind of funny. Later on, Cleo turned into a chubby little dachshund that would chase the mailman every time he came to deliver our mail. Those are the things you remember when you're looking back on your life, those kind of things. And it was a lot of fun.
[00:11:08] I was in the second grade one day and I came home from school, and my dad's car was in the driveway.
[00:11:20] And I was like, what the heck? Why is my dad home in the middle of the week like that?
[00:11:27] And I went into the house. Usually my dad would get dressed up because he was a sales manager at the car dealership, so. So he always wore a sports coat and tie and the whole business back then. And he was sitting at the table smoking a cigarette and just his undershirt. And I remember thinking, this is so strange.
[00:11:51] What is really going on here? That doesn't even seem like something my dad would ever do. I just couldn't understand it for the life of me.
[00:12:02] So my mom took me aside and she told me that Marianne's dad had been killed that day in a tragic accident.
[00:12:15] He was a Culligan man delivery person. So he would deliver the saltwater pellets to people all around our neighborhood and all around the town of Hillsdale.
[00:12:30] And the truck had rolled back and gotten him, and he did not survive.
[00:12:39] That day changed everything for us.
[00:12:45] Our perfect life wasn't going to be perfect anymore.
[00:12:50] And you can only imagine how it was for Marianne and her brother, because their life changed drastically that day, too.
[00:13:04] My dad, I don't think, was ever the same after her dad died.
[00:13:09] I never heard him really laugh again for a long time. Probably three years it took him to really get his feet on the ground and realize, this is how your life is going to be now. He told me later on in his life that he never really wanted to have a good friend after her dad, after Marianne's dad, because he was just the best friend that you could ever ask for.
[00:13:38] And he couldn't even think about having another friend like him again.
[00:13:44] He had his brother, but he. And his brother was so funny. My Uncle Bob, he was a character, but it Wasn't the same as his relationship with Marianne's dad. It just wasn't the same.
[00:14:00] So that life changed in our household because my dad changed. Definitely.
[00:14:08] In Marianne's household, everything changed too. You can imagine. It was so hard.
[00:14:15] She was at our house a lot more now. Not that she hadn't been before, but her mom worked and my mom had. Didn't start to work till we were in the fourth grade. Till I was in the fourth grade.
[00:14:27] So two years later.
[00:14:30] So really she was like Marianne's mom while her mom was working and she was with us all the time.
[00:14:38] But how do you get over something like that? Especially because she was the apple of her father's eye. Definitely. There's no doubt about it. If I had to tell this story 20 years ago, I don't think I would have been able to get through the story because it was just one of those life changing events.
[00:15:03] After about three or four years, her mom started dating again.
[00:15:08] Who could blame her? She was young, she was in her 30s.
[00:15:12] She was a vibrant woman. She wanted to have a father for Marianne and she wanted to have a partner.
[00:15:21] She ended up finding a man, and he lived two towns over from us. In the beginning, it didn't seem like it was going to be too bad because he had four daughters of his own. And I remember thinking, oh, she's so lucky she's going to have sisters now. I think there were two that were close to her in age and then a younger one and an older one. But it seemed like it was going to be okay for her. I remember that thinking, that's good. She's going to have a better life.
[00:15:57] Her mom ultimately did marry him and they moved away to the town, to two towns away.
[00:16:07] That was kind of sad for our neighborhood, I think for me and my brother too, because she was just so much a part of our growing up. And we had had so much fun already in our lives.
[00:16:24] We just.
[00:16:25] It was just evident that life was not going to be the same. Everything was going to change.
[00:16:32] We ended up moving too. We actually moved twice. And then we ended up moving the last time into a house that was on a small lake in Hillsdale, so outside of town.
[00:16:46] And I didn't get to see Marianne very much at all.
[00:16:51] But when I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I really, really wanted her to come to my graduation.
[00:16:59] And I remember she came over like a couple of days before the graduation, and I hadn't seen her in so long. And I remember how happy I was to see her. It Was like she was a part of me because we all started out together, and I didn't realize how much I had been missing her until I saw her that day.
[00:17:25] But then, as you know, if you've been listening to my podcast, after I graduated, I ended up joining the military and I left Hillsdale.
[00:17:39] I think she ended up moving out west, too. She had a boyfriend, and so they moved out west, and eventually she got married to him.
[00:17:53] And. But we never really caught up. We never really called each other. I didn't hear from her. I would ask my brother, have you ever heard from Marianne what's going on with her? Once in a while, she would call my brother still and catch up with him, but we just didn't see each other that much after she left.
[00:18:20] Then when I moved back to Michigan, I got in touch with her. Actually, I think she might have got in touch with me first.
[00:18:32] And we started talking a little bit.
[00:18:36] Now, by now, we're in our 50s, going into our 60s, and her mom had been sick, so she was going to be turning 80, and she wanted all of us to come for her 80th birthday party. And my mom really wanted to go, too. We were excited to go to the party and see everybody. She wanted my brother to come, too, but my brother was living up in the Upper Peninsula. Her mom's birthday was in February, so there was no way that my brother was ever gonna come down to that birthday party. And my mom. I was working at Mercy Hospital then in a director role, so getting a day off was not that easy to come by. And it was in the winter, and both of us kind of just decided not to go. And I kind of regret that. You know, one of those things that you look back on, you said, oh, I really wish I would have gone. Why didn't I go?
[00:19:45] But we still kept in contact a little bit. She wanted to see my mom really, really bad.
[00:19:53] And so she had taken her car into Hillsdale to get it fixed at one of the garages, the local garages.
[00:20:02] And she walked to my mom's house to see my mom. And my mom said she knocked on the door, and my mom got up to answer the door, and she stood there and she goes, do you know who I am?
[00:20:14] My mom said, marianne, I would know you anywhere. And that's how it went, she said. She came in and they sat there and they talked for, like, two hours.
[00:20:28] I think it was good for my mom, and I think it was good for Marianne. I think it brought back all of those great memories that I was just talking about how wonderful a life we really had, and that was good for my mom, and it was good for Marianne.
[00:20:50] But, like, with everything, things change. My mom's getting older. Her mom got older too. Her mom was a little bit older than my mom. And then her mom ended up passing away.
[00:21:08] So when we heard that her mom had passed away, I said, we're gonna go. We're definitely gonna go to the funeral home, mom, we need to go.
[00:21:17] So we drove down. I'll never forget it. It was on my birthday. And we drove down, and we got there, and we saw her. We saw her brother, we talked. Cousins. I hadn't seen them in years, you know? And it was just so, so great to reconnect with her. At that time, I was happy. I was sad that it was at her mother's funeral, but I was glad that we reconnected.
[00:21:51] So after that, we kind of would text occasionally back and forth. I think we were on Facebook together for a little while, and one day she texted me to tell me, I found something of yours, and I'm gonna be sending you a box in the mail. I'm like, huh? What is it? She says, you'll see when you get it, you'll see what it is.
[00:22:19] I'm like, come on, just tell me. She's like, no, you're gonna have to wait.
[00:22:26] So, sure enough, it was in December, so it was almost like getting a Christmas present from her, you know? And I was excited. Sure enough, the box arrives, right?
[00:22:38] And I open the box, and in the box was my Barbie doll.
[00:22:46] Can you imagine that? Yes. My original Barbie doll was in that box.
[00:22:53] And there was a note. And this is what the note said.
[00:22:59] The story goes, my grandma was wanting to make Barbie doll clothes.
[00:23:07] Unfortunately, my Barbies were given to my cousins in New Jersey by accident. It's a long story. I'll tell you that later.
[00:23:22] But you were there when my grandma was making those remarks, and you freely handed over your Barbie doll to my grandma to use.
[00:23:36] Now fast forward 30 plus years. We are moving my grandma out of her house.
[00:23:43] Mom, find your Barbie.
[00:23:46] Was hoping to give this to you in person, but glad she is heading your way. I love how she has her old dress on with her purse, plus the old piece of string in her hair. Enjoy your blast from the past. Sorry it took me so many years to get her back to you. Love you, Marianne.
[00:24:13] Sure enough, she's in a blue and white, blue and yellow shift that has a belt and a matching purse over her shoulder. And she has the Long black hair with a string tied around it to make it into a ponytail. No shoes. We always lost all the shoes. They were just so little. And none of us ever ended up with any shoes on our Barbie doll. So funny. My mom was still alive when I got that Barbie doll, and she said, oh, for heaven's sakes, do you know how long we looked for that Barbie doll? And I'm like, no.
[00:24:57] I was the kind of kid that lost everything.
[00:25:02] Everything.
[00:25:03] You know, mittens, gloves, hats, scarves. I spent every Friday in the lost and found at school looking for things, and I never ever found a match set of anything. Believe me. I don't know where those mittens, hats and gloves went. I lost three pairs of glasses. The last ones were my absolute favorite ones. But how do you lose glasses? I have no idea. My parents just decided after the third pair of glasses, you're gonna have to make do. I had astigmatism, so I figured, okay, I can. I'll try to tough it out. It wasn't like my eyes were really bad, and I still have the stigmatism and rarely wear my glasses, so that tells you.
[00:25:52] And so I lost my wallet once, which doesn't seem like a far stretch, does it? And that taught me that I was never going to be carrying a purse again. I started just putting my driver's license in my back pocket, which was mostly to her dismay. My mom, she just couldn't understand how she was raising a tomboy. She was quite feminine herself. She always wore makeup, you know, eyeliner and mascara. She always had her hair done and frosted, all that stuff from the 60s. And here was me out playing softball with my brother. You know, it's just how it was.
[00:26:39] I do wear lipstick on occasion, just to let you know, but rarely did I wear makeup in my life. It's just one of those things.
[00:26:50] But the fact is that the Barbie came back, and that's the best part of the whole story. And my mom was so happy to see that Barbie. And I have her in the box with the note in my memory box of things that I have saved over the years.
[00:27:15] And I got her out for this story, and I have to say she brought a lot of joy back to me.
[00:27:30] Thank you so much for listening today. I hope you like the story.
[00:27:36] Barbie joined me.
[00:27:39] If you have a story you want to share that you would like me to tell on my podcast, or if you would like to be interviewed even, please go to my webpage. It's milkman.comm I l k.com and at the bottom of the page you can see a section where you can submit a question. We have our parent company right now who we hired to help us with marketing looking over our form to make it more accessible for people. So we'll see if that comes to pass. And the other thing is you can also email me. I set up a different email now so you could email me directly at Dawn D A W n dot Milkman M I L K M o and I will respond to you.
[00:28:30] Also you may have seen my reel that I posted on Facebook and Instagram so you know that I'm now selling canvas bags that say Milkweed and Monarchs on them so if you're interested in purchasing one of them you can also email contact me through my email dawn milkmind.com and I will respond.
[00:28:54] The cost of the canvas bag is $10. Happy to ship them out to you wherever you may be.
[00:29:03] Thank you so much.
[00:29:09] Until the next time.
