Elise’s life was all stories, \u201cTurtles, all the way down.\u201d And when you think you have them all, suddenly another is spawned – not necessarily at the bottom, but anywhere in the chain.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If we begin at the beginning, there is the story and its variants on Puerto Rico. Sometimes the Dominican Republic \u2014 certainly an island close to the coast and approached by boat. I imagine her held on deck, above the safety wall looking at the castle at the entry to Ponce. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where, why, how long she stayed are lost to pre-memory. But she has the clear and striking memory of going to a beach, entering the water, and then being rescued. A large, Puerto Rican native scooped her from the waves and returned her to her mother. \u201cMighty strong Bebe!\u201d, he is reported to have said. So that is the beginning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What follows is a jumble as though the turtles shifted around, almost quarreling like visitors to a carnival pushing to the front of the line for the ride or the amusement booth. Again a story – this as a young adult, in her romance that ended with her first marriage. She was in Switzerland wandering a carnival. The best one is as passive observers at a rifle booth where good shots win a cuckoo clock. A German, sometimes French, usually unidentified man was failing. Elise, to the protestations of her date, proposed the man let her shoot. She took the gun, carefully sighted, and shortly presented the man his prized clock. Her date\u2019s reaction is never reported. Sometimes the story is all her, she is a the booth, she has boasted she could do it, she has been dared, and with aplomb proves her point and him wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes the stories are chained, slipping back down the tier. As an explanation, should anyone doubt her prowess as a target shooter, she takes us to her then recent college years. As she says, in those days there was a physical education requirement to graduate. Interestingly she never mentions a swimming requirement which is reported to have been the bane of many coeds in the days of same sex schools. Like a racehorse, she had broken a leg or an ankle. She fell. On skis.\u00a0 Early in the season \u2014 never doing anything show-offy just standing on the slope, then falling, perhaps she was pushed, and snap. For that term she would miss making her PE credits. For the university, the physical activity was an unbendable requirement \u2014 as it would remain until her adulthood and the passage of the first step towards the act that would become the ADA. To meet the requirements the university scoured for an activity that would not require extensive motion, as these were the days when a break immobilized you in a heavy cast for months. She \u201cjoined\u201dthe ROTC. Prone she could meet the requirement by target shooting. No need to run around. No sweating. Just precision. Concentration. Eliminating distraction. Lining up the front pip with the grooved back sight. They were .22s rifles, so there was little kick and the bipod made by both arms, made it almost weightless and balance at the fulcrum made sighting seem almost natural. Her instincts for competition, and having grown up braced in age by two brothers, the older never kind or a friend, but the younger her clear favorite, she was among men, boys really, in the ROTC unit. For this story, there are no variations, no moments of competitive triumph. Just the woman and her gun, like the Hemingway partisan who plots on equal footing with the males of the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where to now, not bound by chronology it is back to childhood. Here the tower of turtles begins to form a wide and solid base for the future and all the stories to come. She always fondly remembers growing up in the country. Really on the edge of an outer suburb in the last or nearly last house on the road before it became wild at the preserve that even today is a buffer to the newer outer burbs. Her father comes into focus along with the house, the maids, the chauffeur\/handyman who first arrived as a male attendant for her father, although that is climbing the tower before the base is strong. Her father was a doctor and a research scientist. We only ever hear of him tending animals, turning the kitchen into a surgery to repair the wounds to the Tom cats who asserted their territory. His colleagues were likewise researchers \u2014 the sperm races, exploratory trips for animals, visiting English vets and others who tended to the queen\u2019s corgis or the empire\u2019s inhabitants at the zoo. There were always animals. The nod to a farm lay in the chickens and during the war, Johnathon, a fattening pig. The animals, more often, were those of a menagerie. For sometime there was a chimpanzee who ate with them at the table until he became, as always seems the case, too unruly to remain in human company. The young deer, however, was a character and source of many stories. First his accommodations, higher fences in a zig-zag to prohibit a run up to get the speed to jump the fence and return to freedom. Standing close to the fence, perhaps to pet the deer, he would gently remove all the buttons from one\u2019s shirt. The potential for this to become a game tired the adults, especially the maids who had to repair the damage.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Elise’s life was all stories, \u201cTurtles, all the way down.\u201d And when you think you have them all, suddenly another is spawned – not necessarily at the bottom, but anywhere in the chain.\u00a0 If we begin at the beginning, there is the story and its variants on Puerto Rico. Sometimes the Dominican Republic \u2014 certainly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-224","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224\/revisions\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}