Jacque-1963-2025

Posted on 13/11/2025 by Grumpa Joe

   

 

Some Recollections of My Baby Girl

    When Jacque was born, we placed her in a crib that had formerly belonged to her brother, Steve, who was born eleven months ahead of her, and that is the instant she became his lifelong competitor. She must have received his vibes from the mattress. Throughout her life, she competed with Steve—anything Steve did, she had to do too. Never once in her lifetime did we set a challenge vocally. This competition lasted through grammar school, high school, and college. She finally beat him by getting a master’s degree in nursing.

     Throughout her lifetime, she was never satisfied with her personal achievements. Near the end of her grammar school years, she picked up a love for the Spanish language. One year, when she was about fourteen, she bugged Barb and me to allow her to attend a two-week language camp in Minnesota. Eventually, she broke us down, and we let her attend. I remember we put her on the airplane and came home with tears in our eyes. She came home two weeks later speaking Spanish. From the time she got off the plane in Fargo, North Dakota, near the Minnesota border, she was required to speak only Spanish until she returned home, and we insisted that she talk to us in English. It was during this period that she joined a pen-pal program and began writing to a young man from Spain called Juan Carlos. As far as I know, they are still at it.

     When she was fourteen, her mother, Barb, was diagnosed with breast cancer. That is when she began working in a nursing home. A year later, she set her goal to become a cancer nurse. After proving to me that she had been accepted to the University of Illinois, she decided to attend St. Xavier University, which is located three miles from home. She became a nurse, and her first job was at Resurrection Hospital in Niles, IL.  About a year later, she found a position as a nurse in the stem cell research program at Rush Hospital in Chicago. By that time, she had enrolled in the master’s program at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.  She worked at Rush full-time and commuted to DeKalb for classes. After a semester of that stress, she decided to quit work and attend school full-time until she completed her degree. Barb and I traveled to DeKalb to witness our baby girl get her master’s degree in nursing.

     Somewhere in time, Jacque traveled to Spain to meet her pen-pal, Juan Carlos. They toured Europe for six weeks by car. Later, he came to America, and she drove him around our country.

     She never returned to Rush but instead joined the VA Hospital in Maywood. There she was in her element, taking care of cancer patients. One of her notable memories was to accompany a seriously ill vet to Washington, D.C., by private air ambulance to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. She had a knack for comforting vets dying from cancer.

     It was at the VA that Jacque met her lifelong friend and travel companion, Kelly. The two of them visited New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and other countries along the way. On one trip, she was to meet Kelly in Tokyo on their way to visit her cousin Claudia, who was stationed with the Navy in Okinawa. Somewhere over Canada, her airplane lost an engine and rolled on its side 90 degrees before the pilot was able to correct it. She was grounded in Anchorage, Alaska, for three days while a replacement engine was air freighted and installed. Eventually, she hooked up with Kelly and Claudia to tour Okinawa.

     In 1990, I was still working at Panduit when my boss presented me with a challenge: go to our division in Singapore and teach them how to maintain our cable tie molds. I had previously turned down this challenge, but I finally decided to accept it. I made the trip three times over the next eighteen months. On my last trip, I asked Barb to join me at the end of the three-week stint so that we could take a vacation together in the far east. She was reluctant to travel so far by herself. She talked Jacque into traveling with her. It turned into a great time. Jacque brought Barb to me, and the three of us traveled together to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Without Jacque, I would never have had this time with Barb.

     To this day, I don’t know precisely how Jacque met her partner, Jeff, but I’m sure he can tell the story better than I could. All I can add from this point is that she got lucky when she found him. Together, they were a match made in heaven. Her desire to travel waned from then on as she accepted the new challenges of marriage, motherhood, work, and pursuing her PhD. The doctorate was put on hold so she could fight the cancer. In the end cancer beat her.

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Waxing Nostalgic

Posted on 27/05/2025 by Grumpa Joe

For some unknown reason, I decided to reread a post from 2010 titled “Nova Scotia, My Side of the Story.” It is an account of a bicycle trip I took with my dear friend Lou Dini in 1995. Our passion for riding bicycles was great. Lou and I worked together at one of the greatest family-owned companies in the world; PANDUIT CORP. Along the way, Lou opted to move from Oak Forest to Dahlonega, Goeorgia where the winter weather was milder and his arthritic life easier. Fortunately, PANDUIT had a division in Cummins, GA. to which he transferred. We remained in contact via e-mail, phone calls etc. We planned a trip to Nova Scotia, Canada together via emails.

Lou passed away a couple of years ago while living in Florida. The rheumatoid arthritis he battled for so many years became secondary to Parkinson’s disease. As I read the account of our trip to Nova Scotia, it reminded me of his tenacity and endurance. His positive attitude eventually waned, and his body began to fail. I am so glad that he wrote a report of the trip and allowed me to publish it on my blog. My story came later and although we both pedaled the same miles our stories are different, but very much the same. I write this today with melancholy in my heart. Recalling all the trips Lou and I took together, like Nova Scotia, Yellowstone Park, and Michigan all make fabulous memories that rise to the top of the memory bank.

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Aloneness

Posted on 07/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Dreams, dreams, dreams, what do they mean, and where do they come from? This morning, after my 6 a.m. pit stop and return to bed, I fell into a deep sleep that was not deep enough to black out dreams. In fact, that early morning second sleep seems to be conducive to dreaming wild ones. I haven’t worked for a living for twenty-two years, yet I saw myself doing what a Chief Engineer does: manage people, discuss solutions to technical problems, and create new products when they come to the desk. The level of my activity was intense.

Then, the dream fast-forwarded to a time when the company decided to move my division to another part of the world. I was no longer doing things a Chief Engineer normally does. I was doing nothing, except purging my paper files to reduce records to what would be necessary for the foreigners to operate, which is nothing in my experience. My staff was down to a secretary, and a few engineers left to manage the move of our stuff to Singapore.

I kept coming to work, and there was less to do each day and fewer people. I saw my desk with the PC atop, but the bookcase, and conference table with chairs were gone, as was the side chair to my desk. The wall was barren of the white board where I drew sketches on countless new projects and outlined myriads of projects, but the clean space was conspicuously still there. I sat staring at a computer, waiting for some emergency from the production floor to need my attention. Behind the wall, the production floor was empty for one lonely molding machine pushing out parts automatically without any human intervention. We had to build an inventory of this part number to cover the time that the machine and mold were on a six week fast boat to the Far East.

I came in the next morning, and my desk and PC were gone, and in the corner of the office lay a pile of miscellaneous clothes from the now-empty closet. I began to daydream about the forty years I spent in this space and all the seemingly important activities I had immersed myself in to feel important while neglecting my wife and kids in the name of making a living. I was all alone in an empty office, in an empty building, my wife dead long before, and my kids dispersed all about the country, earning a living for themselves. I was feeling sadness even though I was sleeping.

The dream didn’t end there. The sadness continued to overwhelm me, but time had moved on. I was now sitting in my car parked in front of the apartment building that I looked at for years from my office window. However, the office was no longer there. In its place stood a six-unit, three-story condo building. Behind this new apartment where the factory once took up 50 acres of land there was now streets and sewers, and power poles. There was not a shred of evidence that there once existed upon this land a living breathing factory that employed thousands of people twenty-fours hours a day to make simple electrical products used by electricians around the world. The sadness kept getting stronger and deeper, and my brain finally began to sense sounds coming from the house, water running, the aircon blower spinning, and I told myself to kill the sadness, get up, and take a walk.
Here I sit, mid-day still feeling blue about life in the past that I can’t change.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Funk, grief | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Happy Easter, Hallelujah

Posted on 17/04/2022 by Grumpa Joe

God Bless America on this sunny but cold Easter morning. I fully intended to attend 7:30 mass this morning, and set my opportunity alarm to wake me at 6:15. It did the job, but instead Grumpa shut it off and talked himself ( 2 nano-seconds) into letting the snooze alarm give him ten minutes more. (HINT! The snooze doesn’t work if you turn off the alarm.) It was 7:15 when I opened my eyes again from a really wonderful sleep, I momentarily panicked. Not to worry I told myself, Catholics invented 9:00 o’clock mass for those who miss 7:30.

After not attending mass for two years because of the COVID-19 shut down, it was heartening to see so many families back to meet their yearly obligation. Actually, the obligation is to attend every Sunday, but many of us stretch that into twice a year, Christmas and Easter. On those two holidays Catholic churches swell with attendance. Most Sundays are well attended, but our fellow Christians do not fill every pew and spill over into the atrium like they do on the two holiest days of the Church calendar.

Nine o’clock is the children’s mass, and as I said, there were a lot of kids there. I sat in a pew behind a family, Grandma, Grandpa, Son, Daughter, in-laws and three kids between ages 18 months and four years. A little distracting, but nice because it reminded me of the days when wife Barbara and I had to corral three kids in that same age range. I remember once during mass, Barb was holding our youngest son Mike over her shoulder while he swilled a bottle of formula. When he finished, he did his best impression of Joe Montana by passing the bottle over the heads of several pews into the Sanctuary. This kid was great at sports, but never played football, even though he had a great throwing arm at eighteen months.

It is funny how seeing kids opens one’s mind to memories that have been locked up for fifty years. Someday, I will write a book full of those memories just so my kids can have a laugh about their own antics. In fact, that is such a great idea I will begin by logging the incidents the way I did for my childhood auto-biography titled Jun-e-or.

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It Is Time

Posted on 30/07/2021 by Grumpa Joe

This evening I spent some time reading blogs of fellow bloggers. One in particular got my juices flowing. The Blog is NUTSROK. Author Mary Beth a retired nurse who writes amusing stories about her family and friends. What I didn’t realize immediately that the last post I read was from 2020. When I see gaps like that I am puzzled. I tried contacting her but it seems the blog is shut down. My greatest fear is that we have lost her. She amazed me with the stories she told about her family and friends. Each one was genuine and her writing told me that. They were poignant, reminiscent, and humorous, mostly humorous.

Then it occurred to me that I had visited my brother yesterday and I thought to myself how many more times will I be able to say that? Next week I will turn 83 and in two weeks he turns ninety. We can’t both be living much longer. Although neither of us thinks about dying, we are just as busy and active as we can be. He showed us around his facility and pointed out the tower of tomatoes that he planted with a group of ladies he went to the nursery with to shop for tomato plants. He wanted four, and planted twenty-four. Each of them wanted to plant, but he was the only one with a designated plot at the residence. From his room it looked like a six by six plot with a six foot high center point. The plants were all headed for the sky and the contest was to see who had the first fruit, who had the best fruit, etc. Then he walked us past his flower garden. Another small plot hidden behind a fence but he had it blooming in bold colors. What every square inch the maintenance crew spares him he keeps on planting, and successfully too.

On the way home I asked myself why do I not visit him more often? He is the only one I know who knows more about my parents than I do. He is the resident guru of the family history. We share the same stories about our mother and father, except his begin seven years sooner than mine. That means he can teach me a lot about my genealogy. Another thing I thought about today was what did he do for me as a kid growing up? At first, I thought, nothing. Then I began to remember the letters he sent me from Germany while he was stationed there and I was recovering from my polio. They were a Godsend. I wish I had them now to recall how positive he was and how encouraging he was to keep me going forward. I’ve also heard stories about how he was in charge of me in the buggy when Mom needed some time alone. He was charged with watching me and Sis.

Although that was sixty-eight years ago, I think it may be time to say thank you.

Brother Bill and Mom

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