Good Neighbors

One of my best friends, growing up, was Lulu (aka, Laura). Lulu was three years older than I. Still, we were inseparable when I was age three through ten. I was the youngest of four sisters, she was youngest of the three. Our houses were across the street from one another and were part of the same development – so our homes had the same dimensions, the same number of bedrooms.

Whereas, our house was chaotic and topsy turvy, Lulu’s was not. This was because of her mother. Her mother, Goldie, took very good care of the house. Lulu's parents were of Danish descent, and there was a certain rule of householding that carried over. Each of the three girls had chores and they were not allowed to do anything else until the chores were done. So, I spent a lot of Saturdays at Lulu’s vacuuming, dusting, and doing dishes. I didn’t do these things at home, but if I wanted to enter their house (which I usually did) during chore time, I had to help.

Lulu’s father, Helge, was sort of a dreamer, a visionary. Less practical than his orderly and clean wife, he thought of artistic and creative things all the time. One example was the way they renovated the very structured layout of the house. They remodeled the rooms and expanded the master suite into the backyard, filled with windows. It made living in the room like living in a garden. Helge made beautiful jewelry and other things, too, in his workshop. In fact, I was over there one day when he cut his finger off while working with a circular saw. Ugh.

Helge was really, really funny. He made a joke of his stubby finger later. Even when I wasn’t hanging out with Lulu, Helge kept an eye on me. His garage/studio opened onto the street. As I ran to the other neighbors or came home from playing with other kids, I would hear him call: “Karie bearie!” or “Meep-meep” or “Prune the Goon!” These were all of his pet names for me. He’d beckon me over for a minute or two and find out what I was doing. Helge was pretty strict with his girls and he had a temper sometimes, but he was always gentle with me.

I remember being introduced to various foods at Lulu’s house. Very simple ones, but everything they ate tasted better than the food at our house. For example, when my mom made tuna salad, she put everything but the kitchen sink in there. I’m not kidding, Miracle Whip, green olives, green onions, green peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, all chopped up in big chunks – and then she’d try to make a sandwich out of it. What was that anyway? At Lulu’s, Goldie used some kind of mayonnaise (not Miracle Whip) with sweet pickle relish that she added to the tuna. She toasted the bread and the put big leaves of fresh, crisp iceberg lettuce on top of the tuna. It was terrific.

And they had English muffins. Lulu and I loved English muffins. They also stocked other types of jelly than we did at our home. We only had grape jelly. Goldie bought raspberry jam and strawberry preserves and exotic things like that. Lulu and I had a special recipe for our toasted English muffins. We slathered the butter or margarine on there, then we put just a tiny bit of peanut butter on the butter and sort of melted it altogether and then – to top it all off – a tiny scoop of raspberry jam. Yum. To this day, I love English muffins.

They also had wonderful soup. At our house we had watery Campbell’s chicken noodle. We were fed chicken noodle soup at the first sign of a sniffle or as the first food after the stomach flu (after we’d kept down Ginger Ale and dry toast). At Lulu’s they didn’t have Campbell’s, they had this wonderful Lipton’s noodle soup. It didn’t have those annoying chunks of chicken and it was completely filled with thousands of tiny noodles. The broth wasn’t all pale and watery, either. It was salty and flavorful.

One summer, Lulu went off with her family to a week-long seminar at Asilomar retreat center. The family came back full of vim, vigor, and enthusiasm for the inspiration they’d received there. I didn’t know it then, but it must have been some kind of a Christian retreat. Lulu taught me every song she’d learned. We sang, “We are One in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord” at the top of our voices. She and her sister, Louise, taught me the call: “Now let us sing” (“sing” was sung in a deep bass voice) and the response: “Sing ‘til the power of the Lord come down.” They must have broken these up into male and female parts on the retreat, because we always sang the call in a bass voice and the response in high soprano.

We played “Chopsticks” on the piano, and “Heart and Soul” for hours on end. When we got a little older we listened to LP records on the portable stereo Lulu shared with her sisters. We would put a speaker on either side of our heads and become “freaked out” by the stereo sound moving back and forth, side to side.

I know things weren’t perfect at Lulu’s house. There was one time that my dad and Helge had too much to drink and the two of them decided the three girls needed a hair cut (all three had waist-length blonde hair). When Goldie got home, she found her three girls with equally bad bowl-cut hairdos. But things at Lulu’s were much, much better than at my home.

I spent the greater part of my childhood over there – learning to clean, cook, play piano, and having just plain fun. Everyone referred Goldie as, “my second mom.”

We moved to Minnesota just as I was ending junior high. By that time, Laura and I spent less time together – going to different schools and entering adolescence had caused us to grow apart. She was in high school by that time. I do remember riding with her and Louise in the family convertible all over the Palo Alto hills when Laura got her license.

Whenever I thought of Lulu in later years, I thought of her, her sisters, and her funny dad. I rarely thought of Goldie, who was more of a fixture than a character in my memories.

Years later, after raising my own family, I visited my elderly mother who was living in a bleak little trailer in Arizona. My sisters were visiting, too. I was sitting in my mother’s living room and I heard the most familiar voice outside, talking with my mom. As I headed to the screen door, the voice said, “Where is my Karie Doll?” I burst into tears and couldn’t speak as Goldie came through the door and gave me a big hug. (I cried my way through the better part of that night, too, remembering the moment.) In that one moment, I saw in a way I hadn’t before, all of the things Lulu’s mother had done for me.

I remembered the meals, the sleepovers, the cleaning, the listening, the laughing, and the teaching. I remembered a very serious conversation that I had with her as a twelve year old, right before we moved, which I had completely forgotten. She could see what I could not: that I was headed down the wrong road. Not that anything she said at that point could have re-directed me. But I have to believe that all of the other things she and Helge did – day in and day out – helped to keep me in one piece. And their loving care and taking me into their family helped to give me a “self” – to which I eventually returned.

Goldie could only stay a little while, but just those brief moments were enough. Grace washed over us and gave us little glimpses of heaven. Goldie laughed and showed me the little locket she wore beneath her blouse that held a few of Helge’s ashes. The rest of the ashes had been scattered on various gardens and trees. But this little bit, she thought, would like being nestled so close to her breast. Her eyes twinkled as she spoke. I will not forget them.