When we toured the White House with high school seniors from Lakeside several years ago, it was always fun to see portraits of the various dogs, cats and other animals that have called the White House “home” over the years. This subject has been on my list of stories to write about, and then recently I received a magazine, PawPrint, that had the same idea. That made my research a lot quicker. So the following list names some of the cats, dogs and even a hippopotamus that have resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., in Washington, D.C. I love their quirkiness and their names!

This Sunday is my dad’s 95th birthday, and I must tell you how he continues to amaze and inspire me. Having just moved into an assisted living facility, he is still doing everything for himself except cooking meals. That was one big thing he was tired of doing, and he did pretty well for a guy who, in years past, would load and unload the dishwasher, but that was about all he did in the kitchen. Since Mother passed away he has been cooking for himself, even searching for easy recipes on the internet. He got to be quite the cookie baker and enjoyed having something to share with his morning coffee buddies. Then in the last year or so, all of his “drinking buddies” have died or moved into the “Big House,” as he calls the nursing home. Now that Dad is in the Big House himself, he is in the same corridor as a couple of those good buddies, as well as our neighbor lady from the farm. We kids grew up with her being across the hedge; now she is just across the hall.

This is a rerun from an old Sentinel, but even if you remember reading it, I think you’ll still get a kick out of it. Personally, I can handle the “Oil Change Instructions for Women,” except my Jiffy Lube is the Hahns!

In the recent move of my dad into assisted living, the five of us siblings had to determine the next ownership of several family heirlooms that, in some cases, now rest in our 4th-generation hands. These items, most of which my dad wrote about in his autobiography, are from both of our parents’ families, and several date back to the late 1800s. The excellent condition of these items, and the fact that they are still around at all, indicates how well they have been appreciated and cared for, and that placed a layer of responsibility on our shoulders that we, as siblings, chose to carry. Perhaps in a future story, I will share more about all of the heirlooms that my parents had, but for now, I want to tell you about two of the items I received.

The Art of Crocheting: Just one more thing I want to learn There are so many things I wish I would have learned from my mother before she left this Earth. One of those things is how to crochet.

My brothers and sisters-in-law have spent more time together recently than usual as my dad moved into an assisted-living room at Bethesda, the nursing home in Goessel. He has been living in a duplex apartment, owned by Bethesda, one of multiple duplex units that surround the nursing home campus. Since my mother’s passing in 2014, and all of us kids and grands living some distance away, Dad has been very lonely and, in the last two years, has talked frequently of moving into “the Big House.” Then, when COVID blew up and the nursing home was in lockdown, with residents basically confined to their own rooms 24/7, he admitted that he was glad he had not moved. Still, every time he had a doctor appointment, he would ask his doctors if they would give the directive that he needed to move to the nursing home; but his doctors would always say, “No, Irvin, be happy you don’t have to go there now.” And he would agree and return to his comfortable, but lonely, apartment.

You young’ns missed out on a lot of really cool stuff that was going on mid-20th-century, stuff that went away, never to return (except in museums). Being a museum relic myself—officially of the baby-boomer generation, specifically the 50s and 60s—I am referring to that period of history when the world was recovering from World War II with post-war economic expansion and great population growth. My parents did their part by birthing four baby boomers themselves, with me being one of them.

Sometimes I think it is just amazing that my sons turned out to be such wonderful men, loving husbands, and awesome fathers. After all, when they were little boys, long before they started school, I read to them at bedtime or any chance we could get. And without a doubt, the most favorite books in our little home library were written by Dr. Seuss. In fact, we have quite a collection of Dr. Seuss books because we belonged to a book club, and for quite a while, we got a new book or two in the mail every month. It was fun waiting for the next book to arrive. Never once did I think I was implanting “racist imagery” in their young minds by reading these books to them.

“I’ll just give this a lick and a promise,” my mother used to say as she quickly mopped up a spill on the floor. I learned from my mother and her mother that, no, we’re not going to lick the floor. It’s just that you are in a hurry or in the middle of something else and can’t take time at the moment to get out the mop. So we just give it a lick with the mop and promise to come back and do a more thorough job later.

Every year about this time, a little jingle comes to my mind, but it doesn’t come in completely. I sure wish that when a thought pops into my head and takes up residence there, it would at least be a complete thought, not just the beginning of a thought that I don’t know how to finish. Things like this can keep a girl awake at night! Such is this one that has been a bother to me frequently.