Constance Frankland:  

May 26, 2016 I'm amazed: It appears I haven't updated My Story for nearly three years! Well, we got married in spring 2014. Kenneth kept saying we'd be married on our front porch. We love our front porch: the Craftsman columns, the wood swing on a chain, the warbly poured-glass windows, & the spring green I'd painted the porch floor, for instance. But I was convinced it would rain. After all, Boatnik is Memorial Day weekend, & it nearly always rains. So I kept trying to figure out how we'd get 30 people into our little house, & he kept working on the yard & putting up more huge hanging baskets of mixed purple, white, & pink pansies & petunias. He had his way: The weather was perfect, & in celebration of our marriage the huge buckeye tree out front was in full glory, with thick cascades of bright pink blossoms from top to bottom. The strawberry foliage was thick in the raised beds & visible from where our family & close friends sat on rented white chairs on the lawn. The roses were throwing out blossoms here & there as well. My son Brian officiated, & he and my mother made a whirlwind trip from California to be here for us & return home in time to meet their own obligations. Mister Darcy, our Border Collie, was young & beautiful enough that we couldn't trust him not to upstage us, so he got to stay the night elsewhere. Twenty-four hours before the wedding I realized I'd made such a huge mess of the hand-sewn dress I hoped to wear that it literally could not be fixed by anybody living or dead, & so I was out shopping & becoming disheartened. I took a cell phone call, & a nearly-new church friend said, "I'm at the grocery store. I'm yours for the next 24 hours. Tell me what to buy, what to cook, what to prepare & how, & what to refrigerate. I have two other ladies standing by, & if you have the food all under control" (she didn't know me that well yet) "we'll come clean your house or weed your garden." Do you understand how hard it is for a Virgo/only child to relinquish jobs they know they should be doing? These new friends made tons of taco salad, lasagna, and dipped huge strawberries in chocolate. A young theater friend made beautiful cupcakes. I broke down & called the Mormon elders (they look about 14) who were dropping by all the time offering to do stuff & asked if they were serious. Two came, worked five hours, & between them made about 20 hours worth of improvements to the back patio & parking area. (We invited them to our wedding, & my son swears that about half an hour after the meal, I looked around & said, "Where'd my Mormons go?") People kept asking me ahead of time what our "theme" was. Well, you're talking to a wedding couple in their 60s, so we didn't dress as Batman & Robin, did not take vows underwater ... our theme was JOY, something we'd found in one another in our near dotage Our processional music was Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" played on woodwind & brass by friends (he's in a jazz band, she played with the Rogue Valley symphony, & their son is in Hollywood at brilliant-kid music school). We found hymn lyrics, & one of our church elders (also a theater personality) led us all in singing a verse once the "bridal party" was on the porch. My dress & Kenneth's shirt were purple, & our corsages/boutonnieres for family were purple, too. On the way home I bought a number of African violets. We didn't exactly plan a purple wedding; I only bought the dress the day before. But friends who brought flowers seemed to favor purple orchids; Kenneth loved them, & now I love them too. I became Mrs. Kenneth Frankland, treasured & cherished & surrounded by loved ones. We honeymooned at our home for, oh, about two years now. September 30, 2013 Grants Pass just relived "Happy Days" on the GPHS Performing Arts Center stage. It is an upbeat, funny, lively musical based on the TV show, showcasing middle America's teenagers of 1959. I loved it, and not just because I was in it. 1959 was a very good year for me: I was nine years old and had an aqua felt poodle skirt with inset rhinestones on the dog's collar, saddle oxfords of white leather and black suede, a ponytail with a freshly starched & pressed ribbon, and the newest doll on the market. (Most every girl had a Barbie, but not all had her full wardrobe.) I was told daily, by parents and grandmas and teachers and television, that any child in the world would gladly exchange places with any child in America, no questions asked. I believed that: We were Americans, living in the land of the free. Why, here in the U.S., any boy in our school could grow up to be President (not like China), and any girl could marry him (unlike England). I was a lucky girl indeed! The year was filled with great music, great American rock 'n' roll music -- Mack the Knife, Stagger Lee, Sea Cruise, What'd I Say -- and pop icons like The Everly Brothers, Paul Anka, Ray Charles, Ricky Nelson, and Elvis. While some countries banned rock 'n' roll music (just ask my parents, grandma, and teachers), my family celebrated it: Dad listened to Elvis on the radio, and as a young family we saw Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, and King Creole. To grow up in Riverside, California, in 1959 was our further good fortune: We were within an hour of the only Disneyland in the whole wide world, Hollywood with its elegant stars and palatial homes, Los Angeles (a city like New York, only better -- ask any parent or grandma or teacher)... an hour southwest to the beach to swim, an hour northeast to the mountains to play in the snow. To grow up in Riverside, with its stately palms and eucalyptus trees lining grand drives, and the possibility most years of eating Thanksgiving dinner on your porch without even wearing a sweater, any child in the U.S. would easily trade places with any one of us Californians! I believed that claim, too. As an adult, I was prouder than ever to have grown up in Riverside: Unlike the nearby wine country city of Temecula, whose history includes massacres of indigenous peoples and countless broken treaties, Riverside was purchased legitimately from the Spaniards and peaceably settled: John W. North, founder of Northfield, Minnesota, advertised that he desired "intelligent, moral, industrious people" to help him create a decent city out west and offered land grants downtown for any who would build a church or school. Riverside early on had a Minister of Trees, responsible for making this place in the desert a beautiful and gracious place to live. Riverside's first sheriff was a black man, an honorable man, we're told, respected by his community. Eliza Tibbetts was the catalyst for the citrus orange industry that made Riverside residents the richest people per capita in the U.S. (well, you didn't count the Chinese in 1920, did you?), when she sent three Washington navel orange trees (actually from Brazil, entering the country in D.C.) to her husband, who was a botanist. That's what we were taught, and we had to marvel at the luck. We only learned in more enlightened times that "the lunch box orange" (ever notice how much easier to peel a navel orange is than, say, a juice orange like a Valencia?) did not just luckily fall into the hands of Luther Tibbetts because his wife saw a brightly-fruited pretty little plant and bought three on a whim:: Eliza herself was a woman of intelligence and skill, east coast and west: Eliza is now identified as a plantswoman, horticulturist, agronomist, pioneer California farmer, spiritualist, abolitionist, and universal suffragist. She traveled independently, and with her husband moved often -- they were encouraged to move, in fact -- after, among other things, he talked a mob out of lynching a black man, and they worked together to racially integrate a community outside a major southern town. Eliza raised a mixed-race child in late 18th-century Riverside, a girl accepted by neighbors by all accounts, who was either her son's offspring or the child of a desperately poor southern friend, depending on the source. In the aftermath of 1941's bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the Feds rounded up Riverside's citizens and residents of Japanese extraction and placed men, women, and children on a bus bound for an internment camp (to the wind-swept desolation of Parker, Arizona, I believe), the Riverside Women's Auxiliary held a farewell affair in their honor, weeping and waving after cookies and hot tea. Cold comfort, you might rightly say, but for its time it was a strong statement of moral conscience after the time-honored manner of good Christian women. We slept better, during the Cold War, knowing March Air Force Base (now March Air Reserve) was at Riverside's back door. Riverside loved its military base and was proud of its airmen, even during the tumultuous VietNam era, when many adults suffered student anti-war rallies and napalm demonstrations with restrained distaste and disapproval. March is one of the oldest military camps in the country, dating to 1918; I read that its first "bombing" mission dropped leaflets ("WHAT IF WE WERE GERMANS?") over a packed sports stadium. Riverside/Moreno Valley's beloved base was treated unkindly in more recent times, when smack in the middle of a multi-million-dollar earthquake retrofit and renovation, with established Federal plans to integrate recently closed bases' refueling forces there, the Feds closed the base overnight with no public discussion and no explanation. The loss to both major cities is a subject for another essay; suffice it to say that post-closure, one local zip code boasted one home foreclosure for every 44 homes and many neighborhood schools were closed. I love Grants Pass and its good people now, but I'll love Riverside, California, as my forever home -- for giving me a 1959 full of bright, sunny skies and fond memories; for its founders' legacy of intelligent thought, laws tied to morality and conscience, and midwest work ethic...Expand for more