Jane Kramer came into this world as a free spirited Irish Gemini. Her Celtic background nurtured her intuition and outlook on life. Her desire to help teenagers led her into the field of guidance counseling. Here as with most things, she followed her heart rather than rules. It was the same way she lived her life.
An uncle once told Jane she was an example of what the Irish called having “The Sight.” She believes extraordinary and unbelievable life events occurred in her life to teach her the most profound of life’s lessons. Her hope is that her story may encourage others to connect with their inner knowing, empowerment, and inner peace.
Jane extends her deepest gratitude to her co-author, Stefanie Angstadt, who helped to bring her story to life.
“Jane has reinforced my belief in healing oneself, losing fear (the worst of the lot), and allowing the body to know the right thing to do when an illness strikes, whether it be physical, emotional, or mental. ”
— Janet Malone
Jane Kramer came into this world as a free spirited Irish Gemini. Her Celtic background nurtured her intuition and outlook on life. Her desire to help teenagers led her into the field of guidance counseling. Here as with most things, she followed her heart rather than rules. It was the same way she lived her life.
An uncle once told Jane she was an example of what the Irish called having “The Sight.” She believes extraordinary and unbelievable life events occurred in her life to teach her the most profound of life’s lessons. Her hope is that her story may encourage others to connect with their inner knowing, empowerment, and inner peace.
Jane extends her deepest gratitude to her co-author, Stefanie Angstadt, who helped to bring her story to life.
“Jane has reinforced my belief in healing oneself, losing fear (the worst of the lot), and allowing the body to know the right thing to do when an illness strikes, whether it be physical, emotional, or mental. ”
— Janet Malone
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Overview
Jane Kramer came into this world as a free spirited Irish Gemini. Her Celtic background nurtured her intuition and outlook on life. Her desire to help teenagers led her into the field of guidance counseling. Here as with most things, she followed her heart rather than rules. It was the same way she lived her life.
An uncle once told Jane she was an example of what the Irish called having “The Sight.” She believes extraordinary and unbelievable life events occurred in her life to teach her the most profound of life’s lessons. Her hope is that her story may encourage others to connect with their inner knowing, empowerment, and inner peace.
Jane extends her deepest gratitude to her co-author, Stefanie Angstadt, who helped to bring her story to life.
“Jane has reinforced my belief in healing oneself, losing fear (the worst of the lot), and allowing the body to know the right thing to do when an illness strikes, whether it be physical, emotional, or mental. ”
— Janet Malone
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781452523286 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 10/23/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 162 |
| File size: | 699 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Jane Against The Grain
awakening to the mystery of life
By Jane Kramer
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2014 Jane KramerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-2330-9
CHAPTER 1
Living Truthfully
Are they just words, or are you living proof?
My brother and I would call my mother "President of the Temperance League." To abstain from drinking was a vow she made as a young girl—a consequence of Aunt Maggie's binges that left her passed out in the bathtub. My grandfather once related the story about his sister Maggie, who once awoke from her sleep and realized that she didn't have the capacity to get herself out of the tub. She screamed and yelled until someone in the family, who was horrified by the scene of a burly woman struggling to escape the thralls of a porcelain vat, found her in the bathroom. Amid the trauma of pulling and prying at Aunt Maggie's limbs, the members of the family looked at one another and made an oath to swear off drinking for the rest of their lives. It was a promise my mother took to the grave.
It should have come as no surprise to me, then, when my mother presented me with a temperance contract when I turned twelve years old. I suppose she wanted to preserve my integrity before it could become spoiled by adolescence. The agreement stipulated that I would never, in my entire life, drink alcohol.
"With the first sip that goes past your lips," she cautioned, "you have sold your soul to the devil." In fear of this repercussion, I signed the agreement, rather uneventfully, and didn't touch liquor for the next six years of my life.
It was at church, of all places, that I reconsidered my devotion to sobriety. I had left home for college and was attending a sermon at Kutztown's Lutheran Church. I paced up to the altar and cupped my hands to accept the Holy Sacrament. Back at home, communion was grape juice, but here in Kutztown, to my surprise, it was wine. When I took my first sip of the real stuff, I felt liberated.
It was enough for me to want to embolden my brother with a similar sense of freedom. When he turned twelve, my mother dusted off the old temperance contract and set out to enforce the same regime that she had with me, seven and a half years earlier.
"Tear it up," I advised my brother, upon hearing the news of these proceedings. Years later, he would thank me for encouraging an act of such rebellion.
* * *
When my mother met my father for the first time, she was on a visit with her cousin, who had married my dad's sister and was living in Toronto. There, they fell in love, and he followed her back to Kensington to marry her under the condition that he would retire from smoking and drinking forever.
The women in my family all seemed to have that strong force to them—they had a risk-taking nature, a bold will, an unadorned authenticity. I inherited from my mother—who inherited from her mother—a steel spine that neither persuasion nor manipulation could bend. It was this sense of conviction and decisiveness that led me on my path the way it did my mother a generation earlier. She quit school in the eleventh grade to work as a secretary for the railroad, which lent her the special privilege of stepping on a train and going anywhere she dreamed. There is a photo of her riding a donkey down the Grand Canyon. She traveled the country by train, and she met my father that way.
She always did what she felt was right, often silently, without intention for praise. I remember finding a sweater or a blouse missing from my closet now and then, after she had determined I had not worn the item enough and consequently donated it to a neighbor. She usually never said anything about it and just left the item, anonymously, on someone's doorstep—someone, I suppose, whom she deemed needful of a new blouse.
Later in life, it was my mother's stubbornness that would prompt her to flush her arthritis pills down the toilet.
"Mom, did you take those pills that Dr. Baxt gave you?" I would ask.
"Yes, I took one and didn't like it, so I flushed the rest down the toilet," she would respond unapologetically.
Until the day she died, she would take one pill a day: an aspirin if she felt pain, or a multivitamin if she did not. Her doctor hospitalized her when she developed a kidney infection; he felt he was doing her a favor by assigning her to St. Mary's Hospital so she could be close to her parents, but he failed to realize how unwise it was to put a loyal Protestant Orangewoman into a Catholic hospital (most certainly not my mom). She went missing from her room almost immediately. Eventually, we found her in another patient's room, taking charge at the patient's bedside. "These nuns don't know how to take care of patients," she said. The doctor begrudgingly sent her home with recovery instructions.
I felt that my mother had psychic powers. She always seemed to know when I was sick. It did not matter where she was living; even from her retirement home in Ocean City, she would call me to ask if I was feeling ill. She was right most of the time, and even in my denial over the phone, she would sense it. She'd hang up and tell my dad to get his coat because they would be traveling to Sinking Spring to take care of their daughter. She would arrive on my doorstep, prepared to clean the house, cook dinner, and take care of me. When our first son, Roger, was born, she was so certain that he would be arriving on time, on his due date of November 29, that she scheduled the day off from work. She had been right once again.
My mother's mother, too, was emboldened with titanium conviction. She stood at a mighty four feet and eleven inches in height, but what she lacked in longitude, she made up for in bite. She was a feisty little woman. When provoked, she would often swear with the best of them under her breath. She had settled in Kensington, on Columbia Avenue in a neighborhood called Fishtown. She immigrated to America from Belfast, the part of Northern Ireland that was struck severely by Catholic-Protestant violence in the region. Watching her parents argue over this religious divide fostered in my mother an irrevocable distrust of Catholicism for the rest of her life.
There in Fishtown, my grandmother met her husband, who had emigrated from Donegal, and they were soon married. She and my grandfather would often be seen walking on opposite sides of the street on their way to church, having just had some disagreement, usually over England. Everything would be resolved at church, and they would walk side by side to return home, her standing at four-foot-eleven and him at six-foot-one.
My grandmother loved to cook, and we would gorge on bountiful supper feasts at her table on Sundays after church. There were always two entrees: chicken and beef, or the equivalent. (Once, my grandfather refused to sit at the table until there were two entrees out). For dessert, my grandmother would make a vanilla pudding that was out of this world. She never wrote her recipes down, and if you were brave enough to ask, you would have to be quick to scribble them down as she cooked the pudding. Sundays were usually like this, spent together with my mother's parents around the dinner table, sandwiched between the morning and evening services at United Presbyterian Church. After lunch, we would listen to the radio. Even when everyone was getting televisions, we were huddled around the radio listening to the Irish hour before going back to church for the evening sermon and youth group. The only time I would step away from the Irish hour was to climb the stairs to the second radio of the household to listen to The Shadow, the adventures of a crime-fighting detective with psychic powers. Or I would simply find my grandfather's lap and nestle in as we listened to his hilarious stories that always seemed to tie everyone in knots.
Mainly due to my mom's strong faith, church was a big part of my upbringing. My dad was involved, too—he was on the church council—but his involvement had more to do with the sense of community than the sanctity of religion. The congregation at Norris Square Presbyterian was primarily Scottish and Irish, and for that reason, when one walked in the door, he or she would be hugged and embraced. It was a community; we were there for each other. It was the people that made an influence in my life.
I made many cherished friends and built wonderful memories at Norris Square, save for maybe the sermons. I could not particularly remember any of them. I rarely paid attention; I went to a different place. I was a daydreamer, after all, spending so many afternoons at my desk in school, gazing out of the window and visualizing trees and flowers. I had set my intention on this vision early in my life, and it was a dream that would materialize for me years later.
Apart from the daydreaming to distract me, I was also not one for dogmatic religious principles. Part of this was attributable to an early childhood memory of being told in Sunday school that the Jews would never go to heaven because they crucified Jesus. I was seven, maybe eight years old, and the thought of my best friend, Rochelle, not getting into heaven devastated me. My mom did not understand why I was so upset when I came home crying that day. I told her that I didn't care what they said at church. I told her that I was going to get a big raincoat and tuck Rochelle under it and take her into heaven with me.
* * *
If he had known about it, my father would have ripped the temperance contract apart himself. While my mother belonged to the abstinence camp, my father was among the opposite. His later position as assistant superintendent of maintenance for the Pennsylvania Railroad endowed him with the coveted role of party planning. At 30th Street Station, where he was posted, there always seemed to be a reason to celebrate. There were parties to plan for holidays, retirements, birthdays, and company milestones. My father delighted in arranging the details. He was a social creature. He worked hard, but he also loved having a good time, and he wanted everyone else to have one, too.
My dad especially loved his adventures with Uncle Bob, my mother's sister's husband. Uncle Bob was a Scottish man and carried the accent that embodied his spirited nature with him until the day he died. He and my dad loved to go on adventures together that always seemed to get them into some sort of trouble. Once, they phoned me and asked if I would politely inform their wives that the two of them would be departing for a brief vacation in New England. On the trip, they rented a room in a motel that was so close to the superhighway, the beds would rumble every time a truck drove by. By morning, my dad awoke to find Uncle Bob's bed empty. He looked around and couldn't find him anywhere. He opened the door of the room and looked outside, coming upon the image of Uncle Bob, naked, doing his morning calisthenics in the parking lot.
On another of their outings, my dad noticed that a woman at the bar was giving him dirty looks. He couldn't figure out why. He later learned that Uncle Bob had been pinching the woman's rear every time she swung by him with her dance partner.
It was not until later in life that I could comprehend why my dad loved drinking—not to get drunk, but for the amusement that it facilitated in social settings. I never saw him drunk; even when others would not make it home from the party, my dad always made it home.
He just loved a good story. I suppose he found it justifiable, then, to spike the punch bowl at the company outings. I mean, heavily. Most likely with whiskey. He just wanted everyone to enjoy the holidays.
Our house on Palethorpe Street, the home in which I spent my childhood, was situated in West Kensington, a lower-middle-class neighborhood back then—not poor, but no one had much. I thought we had a lot because I never went for want. Our home was four houses away from a railroad track and an iron yard. Among other neighborhood landmarks was a paper mill, which always seemed to be on fire, and a chemical factory. There was not a blade of grass anywhere. Palethorpe Street was a dead-end street, both ways.
The old cellar's ceiling panels were the hiding place for my dad's liquor bottles—full ones on the one side and empties on the other. When his brothers and friends would come over, they would go downstairs, and that's where they would entertain themselves. Down the shore, my father and Uncle Bob would go fishing and then stop at the local watering hole called Twisty's. My father would bring Uncle Bob home to pass out on the sofa. Uncle Bob had trouble "holding his drink." My mother would sigh and say, "Oh, just look at that Uncle Bob—he is so tired," and she appeared to believe it.
I can only remember one occasion where my father drank in front of my mother. Generally, he would share a drink with his friends. He always seemed to be laughing, telling stories. He was a free spirit. In his later years, he would ride around on his big three-wheeler bicycle at the shore just to visit with people. As a milkman in Kensington, he would have a drink with the priests at the Catholic Church when he delivered their milk. But he tried his best to respect my mother's temperance by practicing discretion around her. She chose to look the other way with my father.
The one time she looked directly, they were at our shore house, and my father was holding a bottle of beer. "Put it down," she commanded, and my father proceeded to drink the entirety of its remaining swill. Out she went, slamming the door.
"She told me to put it down," he said. "She didn't say where."
The sharp contrast in their drinking philosophies was rivaled only by that of their political ideologies. My mom shook President Taft's hand as a child and became an instant Republican. My father became a Democrat when he was welcomed into America with citizenship. Upon returning from the voting booth, my mom would proudly proclaim that she had pulled the straight Republican lever, all the way down the column. My dad announced the same act with the Democratic one.
The house was never quiet; we said what we thought. There was always an interesting undercurrent in our family over these divisions. I don't know how it worked between my parents, but somehow, it did. They always left the house holding hands. There would be the occasional fight between them, but my dad had a way of charming my mom into reconciliation. He would just smile at her, beaming the twinkle in his blue eyes that everyone so admired. The friction seemed to dissolve when he would take her into the living room and sing "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."
"Let me call you Sweetheart I'm in love with you Let me hear you whisper That you love me too"
My father was from Donegal, the part of the country that eventually seceded to become the Irish Free State, which in 1949 became the Republic of Ireland. Despite his country's achievement of independence, my father continued to blame all of Ireland's problems on England, just as my grandfather had. These feelings continued even in his older years, after having lived the past seven decades of his life in America.
No, his revulsion for England could not be tamed. He would be found complaining about the "witch" that kept waking him up in the middle of the night when he was in the nursing home at Cornwall Manor. The staff and his friends at the home were shocked to hear these harsh words from him, as he was otherwise a loving person. Later, it was discovered that the "witch" to which he had been referring was the night nurse, newly employed by the retirement home upon her recent emigration from England. Fortunately, the nurse graced my father with understanding and politely excused herself from his room; she replaced herself with an American substitute.
These divisions ran deep in my family, and although they ruffled feathers, they never caused war. My father had no choice but to get along, growing up in a family with eleven children. He acted on what he felt was right, for the good of his family.
Perhaps that's why, in 1923, at sixteen years old, he left his family's farm to venture across the Atlantic by boat, by himself. His parents had arranged for their eldest son, John, to make the journey to Toronto to live with his cousins, who had immigrated there a generation before. When the time came to make the journey, John could not do it. His parents, having already paid the travel fare, grew distressed over the thought of a missed opportunity. My dad, being the second oldest son of the family, quietly offered. "I'll go," he said, and he proceeded to crawl into the bowels of a ship for the journey overseas. Later, I learned the trip caused him so much nausea that he could not bring himself to step foot on a boat until years later.
My dad's parents and his siblings eventually followed his path to the United States, hoping for a better life for their family. They settled in Ithan, Pennsylvania. After my grandfather passed, my granny moved to Gulph Mills to live with my Aunt Grace and her husband, Pete. This was a house forever filled with people. Once a month, my father would take us to "Granny's" house, where all his brothers and sisters and their children would often spend Sundays. We would beg Uncle Sonny to tell stories from the war. We had seen the glorified news clips at the movies. But Uncle Sonny did not talk about it. Later, I would come to understand how horrific his experience had been while he was in the service. He had been on the front lines of World War II, serving in the Ranger brigade that went through Africa and ended up at the Battle of the Bulge. Upon hearing the name of the division in which Uncle Sonny had served, a veteran and friend of ours responded, "We were the boys; they were the men."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jane Against The Grain by Jane Kramer. Copyright © 2014 Jane Kramer. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, xi,Introduction, xvii,
Chapter 1 Living Truthfully, 1,
Chapter 2 Growing in Hardship, 11,
Chapter 3 Discovering the Path, 17,
Chapter 4 Against the Grain, 31,
Chapter 5 Mindful Medicine, 43,
Chapter 6 Dissolving Fear, 56,
Chapter 7 The Power of Thought, 72,
Chapter 8 Honor the Mystery, 88,
Chapter 9 We Are All One, 103,
Epilogue, 117,
My Reflections on Writing This Memoir, 129,
With Deepest Gratitude, 135,
Additional Resources, 137,
References, 139,
About the Authors, 141,