Today is Flag Day. We attended a No Kings protest event in Grand Rapids this morning, and the organizers (Indivisible Greater Grand Rapids) righteously saw fit to turn the American flag upside down – a “traditional signal of distress or extreme danger”.
I grew up next door to a veteran of the First World War and his wife. Calvin Coffman was born in 1893. He was only twenty-three years old when he enlisted on 25 January 1917. He served with Company H of the 148th Infantry his entire time in the Army. He was at Meuse-Argonne, Ypres-Lys, and then part of the Defensive Sector. From 23 June 1918 until 28 March 1919, he was with the American Expeditionary Forces. He was honorably discharged on 21 April 1919. When I knew him in the 1970s and 1980s, he was more than half a century removed from his time in the service. He still had trench foot and visited his podiatrist once a week. He had some unknown (but large) number of buckets of surplus green paint, and any item of yard or household maintenance that stood still long enough – he painted green. He flew the American flag outside his house next door to us every day. He would turn in his grave if he knew how his sacrifice for American freedom was being mocked, wasted and abused today.
Betty was Calvin’s second wife and our third grandma. We grew up over 200 miles from our grandparents, and Betty fit right in. When my brother was born, Betty came to stay with me while my parents were at the hospital; and when my sister was born, she was there to stay with my brother and I again. When we were very small, we were only allowed one trick-or-treat stop, and Betty would pretend so hard to be scared by our pillowcase ghost costumes. She would sit in her yard swing with us and read to us, or listen to us read, or sing songs with us. She taught us little rhymes that kept us safe – “stop look and listen, before you cross the street,” which we practiced even when crossing her driveway to play in her big yard or when we were allowed to sit in her “pinochle house” – a repurposed garden shed she had made into a little haven for herself and her friends to play cards and have fancy drinks. She kept Jujubes in her kitchen drawer and (if Calvin wasn’t home) we were allowed to go inside to get one. I can absolutely remember sitting in Betty’s swing reading Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne. I can still feel the worn brown-and-orange cushion behind me, smell the magnolia tree in bloom at my left, with the sun warm at my front, my toe in the grass pushing the swing, and Betty humming a tune to my right while she puttered around in her flower beds. I was proud because I was six, and I had got it into my head that I wouldn’t be able to read that book until I had achieved six-hood, so I was doing it. I can remember my brother and I sitting on either side of her in that swing, while she swung it too high and all three of us sang the peanut song at the top of our lungs, laughing until we couldn’t breathe.
Betty was born in 1906 in Ohio to Wesley and Jessie (Trimble) Fleming. She was first married in 1929 to Raymond Sarbaugh, who died in 1933. She was married again in 1935 to Glenn Walraven, who died in 1968. Betty and Glenn had two children, Roger and Juanita, and we grew up hearing about them and about their children, Betty’s grandchildren. Betty was married a third time in 1969 to Calvin Coffman; they moved to Westerville, Ohio before Calvin’s death in 1984. For the years that they lived on Grant Road in what was then Pontiac, Michigan, they were a bigger part of our lives than many of our blood relatives living in Indiana. I didn’t know any of the facts of Betty’s life when I was little – she knew the facts of mine, though, backward, forward and inside out. Betty Mae Fleming Sarbaugh Walraven Coffman passed away in 1999 at the age of ninety-three years. Her daughter Juanita wrote to me after her mother’s death. She held on to her mind her entire life. She was smart and witty, kind and giving, and if she didn’t love us more than her own grandchildren, she did a good job of pretending. I am who I have become today because of my parents and grandparents, of course, because of my teachers and friends…but there is a big piece of me that is made up of Betty because she was everything to me for such a formative part of my life.
My family was my family, they had no choice, they had to love me – Betty chose to love me and made a space for me in her life for no reason whatsoever other than proximity, and I have thought of her at every important moment in my life. When I asked her “Why?” she always took the time to give me a real answer, even when other grownups in my life were too busy to say more than “Because I said so”. I always took that to heart, and if a few times I told my children “Because I said so,” instead of giving them a real explanation, it was only as a last resort! I hope my kids have always felt entitled to an explanation – that they were always fully versed in logic and reasoning for why they had to do things. I tried to make sure that my kids learned the same silly songs Betty taught us – the ones she learned a century before my children were even born. If there is such a thing as an angel, Betty was one. The world is poorer for her absence in it.
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