Driving the seven miles to my mother’s sister Mary and her husband Jack’s house, was filled with sweet anticipation. When we visited, Mary often served a meal, one that might include homemade ravioli with pesto sauce, a tangy salad with clementines and finocchio, and a boysenberry parfait, none of it standard fare for the period. I didn’t know how lucky we were, it was just what Aunt Mary cooked.
Jack built the house they lived in. He dug the foundations, fitted the molding around the doors, and did everything in between. When his wife’s culinary aspirations outgrew the kitchen, Jack gutted it and built a new one – in record time so as not to be deprived of Mary’s cooking any longer than was absolutely needed.
They had wanted children, especially Mary, but one or both of them were not physically capable, and in those days there were no fertilization clinics offering alternatives. So, the creative urge overflowed into daily life. Mary gardened, sewed quilts, cooked, baked pumpkin pie out of season, organized trips, laid many tons of brick, won prizes for her canned fruit at the county fair, taught English as a second language, and did all of it exceedingly well. Jack built potting sheds and hothouses, decorative bridges and birdhouses, loved the outdoors, and in their early years together, he shot movies.
A rather imposing black sedan drives onto the Lopin ranch and stops just beyond the pepper tree. The driver’s door opens, Jack gets out. Mary exits the front passenger door. They walk towards the camera and pass out of frame. A moment later, Jack jogs back into the picture. He forgot to open the rear door for Mary’s parents. He does and Mrs. Lopin climbs out of the back seat on the driver’s side Her husband exits on the passenger’s, they join hands at about the rear bumper, and pass out of frame. Another brief moment, Mary’s brother John climbs out of the rear seat and closes the door behind him. Instantly, the front passenger door flies open and my mother leaps out. As she crosses towards us, her brother Martin appears at the rear driver’s side and exits. Then in rapid succession, Uncle Nick, Aunt Florence, and an unknown neighbor all exit the car together and close the doors behind them at once. Stillness. The rear driver’s door opens slowly, tentatively, and Grandma Lopin climbs out again. She signals to someone in the car, waves, and walks towards the camera. Her husband Nick nimbly follows. All doors open at once and Jack, Mary, and my mother Ann and father Pete exit the car and walk briskly towards the camera. No sooner are they out of frame that in succession, doors open, someone exits, doors close, others exit, crowds pass out of frame. There follows a long pause. Jack opens the driver’s door, climbs out, checks himself in the mirror, closes the door with his hip, and walks towards us while lighting his pipe.
Confession; I had to make some of that up because I’ve not seen the film in at least 15 years, and my memory isn’t that good, but my description is close. The car looks to be from the late 1930’s, so the film may have been shot just before or after the war.
He told a good joke, Jack did, replete with accents, characters, and excellent timing. “Don’t waste your time with frills, he’d advise. Set the scene, establish character or situation, and get to the punchline.” Jack was a union carpenter.
The scene is Santa Clara County fairgrounds, the racetrack. The camera scans the empty bleachers, rather dolefully. The emptiness looms, is sad, total. The camera pans past Mary. When she is almost out of frame, she waves. The camera continues to pan at exactly the same rate of speed, so lonely that it takes a moment to realize Mary’s presence. The camera stops, thinks. Then it makes a tentative reversal, pauses several times while it wonders if the girl it saw was real, and finally discovers Mary. She waves. The camera zooms leisurely, but lovingly, in for a closeup.
There’s more to that one, but I don’t remember the end.
There are several other shorts on that reel of film. I have it in Scranton, well protected. One of the times I was back after moving to Orvieto I intended to go to a reputable photo shop to have it transferred to DVD, but never did. I must. They are precious gems of cinematic art in Jack’s most whimsical and unschooled voice.
How he convinced my family of farmers to participate in his movie-making, I will never know. He made actors of them all. And I learned more about who he was through his film projects, than I ever discovered spending a week at a time with him and Mary at their house in San Jose. That is often true of artists.
With Mary I have the most vivid memories of brick. They had a large back yard with defined zones. There was the area under the Japanese elm, the rectangular lawn fenced with white pickets, the southern side yard with its dahlias and peonies, the northern side yard with hydrangea and azalea, the vegetable garden in the way back, the clothesline and its fruit trees. The lot was connected with gravel paths, and one spring day in the early 1960’s Mary decided to make one of them brick. She asked Jack for a few tips. It was quite successful, so she kept going and eventually laid a hundred or more feet in paths, three patios, several planters, and a low wall around the elm. Then she sat in the sun and read.
Mary died before Jack. For both their sakes, I had hoped that it would be the other way around. Jack had never balanced a checkbook, paid a bill, or cooked a meal. He was lost without her. The drapes in the front window were closed for her funeral, and he never opened them again. When he showed up at family affairs, he was still funny, his timing still spot on, and he had grown softer from having had to summon Mary’s spirit for help in living the day that lay before him. But it felt as though he were biding his time, waiting for his beloved “Mar” to come fetch him, to encourage him in his flights of fancy, to star in his movies, to laugh delightedly at his jokes. To lay brick and bake pumpkin pies out of season and win prizes at the fair.
Ordinary people who quietly do extraordinary things. Our lives are filled with them, when we take the time to notice.
Photo: Jack and Mary’s house, still unchanged from the outside; makes me wanna hug whoever bought it.