Birthday Blog

Today I am 39. No, really. At least this year it's true.

And I'm really digging the coming decade, if I'm lucky enough to get another 10 years. I'm not blind enough to believe I'm guaranteed another day, much less years, and that's really not morbid if you understand I'm quite looking forward to getting to the other side. "Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind."

Nick, who is 6'1 and still growing, and 5 of his football friends came trooping up the stairs to surprise me with a rousing, heavy bass rendition of Happy Birthday to You that made me laugh. These 6 giant guys FILLED my living room, but one look at them, and they're all such sweet kids. Ah, to be 16 again. Nick has recently fallen in love and these guys came over for what they termed "an intervention" because he's been spending all his time with his girlfriend and none with them. I had to tell him tonight, I get it. I remember being so ga-ga that even your friends get disgusted, try to go out on a double date, and just roll their eyes at the two of you because you don't want to do anything but stare goofily at one another. He smiled that sheepish grin and nodded and worked out a compromise. The two of them are going to meet the gang for a couple of rounds of bowling before cutting out on the excuse that it's my birthday. Parenthood just keep delighting me. I am incredibly blessed with two wonderful kids. Their birthdays are infinitely more interesting to me these days. But today was lovely. I still think everyone should get their birthday off each year, but what're ya gonna do? Between presents, sunflowers, hundreds of birthday wishes (thank you Facebook), lunch, and PIE, what more can a girl ask for?

Happy Birthday Mom!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Memento Mori

Memento mori is the flip side of carpe diem and perhaps more challenging. I was reminded this morning of what is becoming one of the crystalized themes of how I understand life: remembrance is the key problem of being human.

It's been two years since I taught Hamlet, but for the previous 14 I taught the play seemingly nonstop. One ambitious summer when I was hungry for the good pay that comes with summer courses, I had three literature classes back to back to back. Those of you who've taken summer college courses will probably have one defining memory: those suckers are looooong. 2 hours every day for a month. So for 6 hours straight every day for a week I'd cover scenes from Hamlet, rewind, do it again for two more hours, rewind, do it a third time for three more hours. By the end of that week I hated him. I was lobbying for Hamlet to meet Nike and just do it so he wouldn't stand around yammering for so damn long, scene after scene.

Of course, the philosophical side of me prevailed, but I never again did three of the same classes in a 6 hour stretch in any given summer. You just have to protect both sanity and love for Hamlet.

Alright, I've wandered away from the point (again.) and am ready to get back to it: Hamlet, like life, is primarily about remembrance. It's the ghost's last command as he returns to purgatory and it's the command Hamlet struggles with throughout the play and, in the end, ultimately fails quite miserably at.

The Ghost is plain in his description that he is forbidden to share (clever boy) when he speaks of his confinement to fast in flames of fire until his sins are burnt and purged away. He comes up from the depths of the stage in the production, not from on high. That Shakespeare is writing this and having it performed in the midst of a power struggle most unfriendly to any public suggestion that Catholic purgatory exists is quite fantastic. The ghost wants Hamlet to kill his uncle and leave his mother along to her own guilty conscience, but what he wants most is his last command: remember me.

And then Hamlet promptly and repeatedly forgets. In the end, when he's finally managed to kill his uncle and care a bit about his mother, who is collateral damage in the carnage, we don't hear a PEEP from him about his father. It's all about Prince Hamlet, not the King. The Branagh Hamlet version, full-text with all its warts, does a lovely job at the end having the King's statue struck to the ground in pieces to reiterate the final failure.

Hamlet came to me in church this morning, when the young man tasked with leading the communion began to read the familiar passage, This do in remembrance of me. But He knew we wouldn't, couldn't, not for long and never very well. So while I was contemplating this during communion, one of my favorite Memento Mori poems, in its loose terza rima, arrived unbidden but quite welcome:

When I was twelve, I chose Dante's Inferno
in gifted class—an oral presentation
with visual aids. My brother, il miglior fabbro,

said he would draw the tortures. We used ten
red posterboards. That day, for school, I dressed
in pilgrim black, left earlier to hang them

around the class. The students were impressed.
The teacher, too. She acted quite amused
and peered too long at all the punishments.

We knew by reputation she was cruel.
The class could see a hint of twisted forms
and asked to be allowed to round the room

as I went through my final presentation.
We passed the first one, full of poets cut
out of a special issue of Horizon.

The class thought these were such a boring set,
they probably deserved their tedious fates.
They liked the next, though—bodies blown about,

the lovers kept outside the tinfoil gates.
We had a new boy in our class named Paolo
and when I noted Paolo's wind-blown state

and pointed out Francesca, people howled.
I knew that more than one of us not-so-
covertly liked him. It seemed like hours

before we moved on to the gluttons, though,
where they could hold the cool fistfuls of slime
I brought from home. An extra touch. It sold

in canisters at toy stores at the time.
The students recognized the River Styx,
the logo of a favorite band of mine.

We moved downriver to the town of Dis,
which someone loudly re-named Dis and Dat.
And for the looming harpies and the furies,

who shrieked and tore things up, I had clipped out
the shrillest, most deserving teacher's heads
from our school paper, then thought better of it.

At the wood of suicides, we quieted.
Though no one in the room would say a word,
I know we couldn't help but think of Fred.

His name was in the news, though we had heard
he might have just been playing with the gun.
We moved on quickly by that huge, dark bird

and rode the flying monster, Geryon,
to reach the counselors, each wicked face,
again, I had resisted pasting in.

To represent the ice in that last place,
where Satan chewed the traitors' frozen heads,
my mother had insisted that I take

an ice-chest full of popsicles—to end
my gruesome project on a lighter note.
"It is a comedy, isn't it," she said.

She hadn't read the poem, or seen our art,
but asked me what had happened to the sweet,
angelic poems I once read and wrote.

The class, though, was delighted by the treat,
and at the last round, they all pushed to choose
their colors quickly, so they wouldn't melt.

The bell rang. Everyone ran out of school,
as always, yelling at the top of their lungs,
The Inferno fast forgotten, but their howls

showed off their darkened red and purple tongues.

-- Diane Thiel, "Memento Mori in Middle School"

feet in the water: a quick photo history

The last post got to me to thinking about how long I've been pluging my feet in cold mountain streams over the years. I want to say this was on one of our first trips up to the Rocky Mountains, in 1974, but I already had the drill down.


Mammammy never trusted that I wasn't going to go falling to my death in those streams. I don't guess it helped that she never learned how to swim, but she held on anyway.


I came by it honest. Mom loves doing this too.


One of the last mountain trips we took when I was still at home, in 1984. After that, things got busy with high school, then college, then out on my own, so this was the last time I'd find myself in the Rocky Mountains for two decades. We went early that year and the river was REAAAALLLLY cold, as you can tell by my typically newbie toe touching move here.

Flash forward 20 years and I finally get my feet back in those streams on our trip to Santa Fe in 2004, with the next generation in tow. It was too long a break, for sure. I'm so thankful I get to do this every summer now. It makes my toes tingle to just think about it.

the hike today

Lower Gold Camp road, one of many small trail heads we'd passed on our mountain drives, finally got us to stop and check it out. Now, on normal, smart hikes, you need to start early in the morning if you're going to get there and back again before noon, when the uncertain mountain weather, especially at high altitudes, can kill you. Now, we're not all that high and our trek is just hike til your ready to turn back ones most of the time, so we'd already broken the start early rule and didn't get going until 11:00.



This was my turn back point shot. We'd lost everyone along the way who decided to wait for our descent, except Dad and me. And as it turns out, we'd just followed the dry creek bed, NOT the trail, straight up, instead of what is sure to be a more reasonable hike on a well marked trail. Instead, we were doing grades of 50% in places. Between the thin mountain air and high noon, this hike was a fantastic workout.


Me and my impromptu walking stick pose at the end of the worst of the decent. I wouldn't have made it without him!


Some of my favorite moments are the rest stops in the shade, looking up through those straight, dark trees.




The July colors are not as majestic as the earlier summer blooms, but they are the hardiest of the bunch and are always a joy to discover in the meadows between the rocky terrain.



But my favorite part has always been the streams. After a hard hike there is NOTHING better in this world than to dip your feet snow melted streams and let them go a little numb. Ahhhhh.

Some things never change

Loves naps.

Loves playing in the rain.


Love animals (and always feeds strays).


Loves books (and green grass and shade trees).


And still gives you this look.

of Saltsmans

This is one of my favorite pictures of my great grandaddy, John, his wife Lessie, my grandfather Pearson, and all his siblings. He's the tall boy, far left. Beside him is Price, who descended into his own private hell and landed in the asylum. John is holding the youngest, Baby Edith who was never well and died at 19. Between his mother and father is Wilson, the only other Saltsman to have descendents. Then there is Lessie, who died of ovarian cancer because John refused to let her have a hysterectomy, is holding Travis, killed at age 11 when a train hit the ice truck his brother Price had been driving before it stalled on the tracks. Price escaped, but never recovered. Far right is my beloved Aunt Laverne, who had only one stillborn child, but doted on me as her great niece. I will never forget firing her pearl handled Colt 45, her cussing, her blind German Shepherd Buddy, bouncing around in the back of her 50s era Ford truck. But I digress. Which is entirely the point of my blog.

of Saltsmans
My great-great-uncle, Dan Saltsman, of Birmingham, Alabama, undertook to sketch out what he knew of the Saltsman line in 1956/1957. What follows is his recounting of my father's family line:

The name "Saltsman" reaches far back in European History. The family of William Saltsman had lived in the Rhine River Valley for generations. William and family came over the Atlantic in the Steamer Edinsburg on Sept. 16, 1751 and settled in Clinton County, Pennsylvania.

His three sons, George, Anthony, and Phillip served in the Army under General George Washington. George was killed in action; Anthony and Phillip survived the Revolution and brought up families in Pennsylvania.
Phillip Saltsman's eldest son, Martin (1781-1849) is buried in New Somerset M.E. Church Cemetary, Jefferson Co. Ohio. His youngest son, Daniel, was born in 1812.

Daniel Saltsman, age 18, took up work as an engineer on the steamboat "Mary Swan" as she put in on the upper Ohio River at Pittsburg in 1830. Her main work was between Mobile and Montgomery on the Alabama river.
During this time a group of Dutch immigrants arrived at the Port of Mobile from Holland. They were seeking earlier Dutch who had established a gold mine and sought passage on the "Mary Swan" to reach it.

One Miss Mary Fables, age 17, of that company elected not to continue on with her family but take up work at a restaurant in Montgomery where one Daniel Saltsman often visited when his boat pulled into port.
"He spent his off days in Montogmery where they spent many happy hours in each other's company. He taught her most all the English that she ever knew."

[One of my favorite descriptions here]"She was efficient, nice, and always dressed immaculately; she was respectful, for she had been brought up as a Catholic in her homeland."

She married Daniel and had two children, Agnes and "Freddie" and continued her work as manager of the restaurant for years. A working mother in such days!

Daniel, however, grew restless with his work aboard the Mary Swan and elected to take up work designing and overseeing the building of a "Mill and Gin" for a wealthy plantation owner in Coneuch (sp?) County. While away from his family, he met and fell in love with a young 15 year old by the name of Miss Haney Kennedy, a member of the county's oldest and most prominent family.

Mary Fables Saltsman was granted a certificate of separation on the grounds of desertion and moved to Shelby County where she and her son Fred owned and operated a Restaurant and General Store for a number of years before selling out at a profit to move closer to her Fables relatives in Tallapoosa Country.

She bought 160 acres and she and Fred planted a vinyard. They made wine "of the very finest vintage. Wine merchants from Montgomery bought every gallon, because it had the European flavor."

Mary and Fred lived quite happily until the "War between the States" broke out in 1861. Louis Frederick Saltsman, born May 9, 1843, had turned 18 that year and thus took up the call from President Jefferson Davis and joined the 14th Alabama Regiment of Volunteers as a private. He was wounded at the Battle of Fredricksburg but survived the war to return home and marry Miss Martha A. Davis who bore him four children and then died.

Left alone with four small children, he soon married again to one Mrs. Mary Gamble Davis, a widow with three small children of her own. Thus the couple started the marriage with seven children and Mary bore Fred another ten children from their union.

The eldest of these ten was John Frederick, born January 22, 1879. His grandmother, Mary Fables Saltsman, died a month after his first birthday on Feb. 17, 1880. Louis Frederick Saltsman died March 4, 1904 when John Frederick was 25 and his mother and 9 younger siblings were left without a breadwinner.

His grandfather, Daniel Saltsman, was buried in Evergreen, Alabama in 1864 where he left his second wife and their ten children. The two Saltsman families, one in Tallapoosa County, the other in Monroe Country, had no knowledge of each other until the Spring of 1929.

John Frederick's birth in 1879 was welcomed by his seven half-siblings and soon John was working hard on the farm alongside them while every two years another Saltsman baby was added to the mouths to feed. His older half-brothers left home very young [hmm, wonder why?] and John put in a full's day work alongside his dad.

When the farm work was done in the fall, John attended school until the beginning of March when corn was planted. "However, it is to be thought commendable of him when he had the opportunity to attend school, though he had to walk miles to school, he never missed a lesson or was tardy a day."

By the time John was 15, his father had hired him out for $5 a month to help supplement the family's meager income. The $15 he earned from his first three months salary purchased the family milk cow, which was a godsend in particular to his frail half-brother Jeff, the only one still at home, who could only have milk and eggs in his diet. When the doctor's collector came to collect for Jeff's medical bills, he was paid with the cow and her calf. He then worked a year for F.M. Nelson at Sanford Bridge for $8 a month, all of which went to his father's farm, and then the next year at $10 a month plus board for John Sassar, again sending every penny home.

The year after, he went to work at a saw mill earning 85 cents a day and was able to finally save a little of his earnings for himself. He and his best friend, L.B. Yates, took a trip to Corsicana, Texas, arriving on December 31, 1902 to work for L.B.'s relative, rancher Wallace Brown, making $15 a month. At age 18, John fell in love with Texas and the freedom from the family farm and he resolved to build his future here. "Alas! In less than a year, chills and fever (malaria) seized him; his health failed; reluctantly, he returned to his home in Alabama."

He continued to work tirelessly for the large Saltsman clan, renting land nearby and producing a large crop. But a tornado ripped through in late summer that year, destroying his hopes. The next spring, working as a sharecropper, word came of his daddy's death, dropping the the fields of a heart attack, leaving no income and no prospects for a crop on the family farm.

John moved back home to assume the head of household and took a second job at the gold mine. They took in boarders at the house, where his six younger siblings still lived, to pay off the mortgage, and had good crops in 1904 and 1905 so that they could improve the buildings on the farm and invest in better tools for planting. The youngest of the Saltsman 10 was little Dan, age 8, [who would undertake to write this history down some 50 years later.]

John, now aged 26, hired a man named Barker to run the farm so that he could get married to Miss Alma Lessie Pearson, 19, of Bluff Springs in 1905. "They fell hard for each other; he was a handsome young fellow, slightly tall, had dark curly hair, sky blue eyes and a fair complexion. He had a most pleasant smile for everybody. She was slightly tall, dark wavy hair, large blue eyes, and had a fair complexion. She had a most beautiful and pleasant personality."

In 1916, the year war against Germany was declared, the young couple decided to revive John's dream of making a life in Texas, where Lessie's family had already moved. They arrived in Mart, Tx. with $500 in his pocket and six children: Pearson, LaVerne, Wilson, Price, Edith, and Travis. [my grandfather, great-aunts and great-uncles]

John worked as a share-cropper for seven years, finally earning enough to buy a small farm down by the Navasota river above Fort Parker Lake, about five miles from the oil town of Mexia. [My daddy now owns this property.] John ran a fishing camp on his farm "the most famous and popular fishing camp in central Texas from Dallas to Houston. All fishermen, from Ennis to Palestine, Texas come and fish at Saltsman's fishing camp on the Navasota River."

[We now return you to Tori's account of events, as told to her by her dad]

The fishing camp was still going in 1957, when Dan wrote his memoirs of his big brother and father figure, John, and their ancestors. He makes mention at the end of the tragedies of the family, including the death of John's youngest son, Travis, although without many details.

It seems Travis and Price, ages 12 and 17, were hauling ice through the county, selling it as they could, when the truck stalled as it crossed the train tracks. As a train approached, Price, driving, leapt from the truck, but Travis did not. What happened exactly is lost to us, but Travis' death profoundly affected Price, who descended into alcoholism and mental illness. A story my Daddy tells is one of John going to visit his adult son Price who was a patient in the State Hospital. It was the middle of the sweltering summer. John wore a suit, of course, but the suit he owned was made of wool and by and by he decided to take off his pants that were itching and burning intolerably during that long and, of course, unairconditioned, drive. Of course, the car was speeding and was pulled over by an officer who discovered old John in nothing but his underwear.

Edith, the younger of John's girls, was born sickly and died of a heart ailment before she was 21. That left Pearson, LaVerne, and Wilson as the children who would marry. LaVerne devoted herself to taking caring of John in his old age, living in another house on the farm until nearly her 90th birthday. I have many fond memories of visiting her there myself, playing down by the river, of her old, blind German Shepherd Buddy who was my companion. Aunt Laverne let me fire her pearl handeled pistol and ride in the back of the pickup across the land. She didn't take crap from anybody and she's the only family member I can remember hearing cussing. I loved her. She married George Bozeman and they stayed on the farm. Their only child was stillborn and is buried in the Fort Parker cemetary next to them. John, Lessie, Travis, Price, and Edith are all buried alongside them as well.

Dan's memoirs make mention of a late-in-life second marriage by John to another woman. He very delicately suggests she decided soon after that farm life was not for her. The truth is, LaVerne spotted her for a gold-digger and ran her off. Dad also recounts the death of Lessie, his grandmother, was due in large part to John's refusal to allow her to get surgery for her ovarian cancer because he thought it would "ruin" her for him. I try to balance these facts with the glowing portrait Dan paints.

Pearson, the eldest son, is my grandfather, who married Lometa Hayes, and had my aunt, Dorothy, and then, some 12 years later, my father, Frederick Pearson. Wilson is the only other Saltsman from this clan who has descendents out there, although I know little about them, apart from his sons' names: John and Dan, and that they lived in Temple. My Aunt Dot has passed on, as has her son, Walt, which leaves me with one cousin, Christie, who has four beautiful sons and lives in Austin with her husband Thom.

I was the only child of Fred, and have thus ended the Saltsman name at marriage. The only remaining Saltsman names from this genealogy are now through Wilson's two sons.

It is humbling to look back, to know a bit about a family name that is quietly closing after such a long run.

I shall leave you with one last passage from the closing of Dan's memoirs. Apparently his 1955 visit to the family farm before returning to Alabama was capped with a family supper that was attended by all the clan. My father would have been 9 years old:

There was a huge platter of Southern brown fried chicken, at least four in number; a large bowl of brown gravy; a large bowl or boiler full of tender string beans cooked in a pool of hog fat; another large bowl of fresh Irish potatoes emerged [sic] in butterfat; a bowl of potato salad; bowls of green English peas and dried beans; every kind of pickles -- peach cucumbers, both sweet and sour. On top of all, there was a sugar pan of dewberry pie for dessert.