Maggy Floeter says…

Forty-one years ago, when I was just 11 years old, I began a daily habit that shocked my pre-teen sensibilities and changed my life forever.

I had spent a lifetime — a whole 11 years — being disgusted with daytime soaps and the women who watched them. How could they waste their time on As the World Turns or Days of Our Lives when there was Bugs Bunny of Daffy Duck to watch on another channel?? Those times when I was left frustrated while my babysitter (not my mother…never my mother!) watched her serial had left a bad taste in my mouth. So imagine my horror when I realized I was hooked on a new soap opera called All My Children.

It had begun quite innocently. I’d tuned in by accident as the first episode began. I wasn’t even supposed to be home, but I think I was sick or it was a holiday. In any case, I watched as I ate lunch that day and became enthralled when a girl I perceived as not much older than me began to talk about how she was going to be someone someday. She was going to be a star!

Little did we know…

I never missed an episode. During lunch hour, I either watched it at home or on a TV in a deli close to school. After we got a VCR in 1976, I began taping it every day. The ability to play back the juicy parts was wonderful, and I took full advantage of that opportunity. Even cutting out the commercials, a single viewing could last almost twice as long as the show itself.

When the Internet came along, I immediately recognized this medium as one where I could finally find like-minded people who were interested in really discussing the show. I was an AOL member when the service was new and in 1993 found a forum for AMC on their TV channel. Mine was the first post on that forum. I had no idea whether anyone would ever read what I wrote, but I wrote anyway. In a few weeks, there were a few more posts, and soon, we had our own thriving little community in our corner of AOL where we discussed plot lines, ideas, characters, and made fun of some of the things they made the actors do. It was on this forum that I met two friends who are still dear to me today, Beth and Karen. Beth had an All My Children newsletter that eventually went to thousands every day. Karen was just feisty and very savvy when it came to AMC. I love them both to this day.

One day when I was rereading some of our posts about the show, I got the idea that ABC might be interested in knowing what was going on. This was a demographic that they were really unaware of at the time, and I was sure they’d be interested in being able to get immediate feedback, so I copied 12 pages of the best of our posts and sent them to the executive producer of AMC along with a letter telling them about us and about all they were missing. I didn’t get a reply, but imagine my surprise when they did a storyline that was almost exactly like the one I had suggested and written about in detail on the forum! (For you fans out there, it was the one about Trevor’s sister’s brake line getting cut.)

Little by little, people related to the show began to post on our little forum. A playwright who sometimes wrote with Michael E. Knight became a regular, and it was through her that he and I got to know one another online. I was a Mac maven back then and had a popular newsletter called “The Newbie News and FAQs” to help out people new to AOL and the Internet. Michael was an actor with a new Mac and was clueless. I helped him learn how to use his machine, and he made me laugh. We shared several emails, and unless our mutual friend ever told him, he was never aware that I had been in love with him from afar for many years. I still have recordings from voicemails he left on my answering machine, and I still have his autographed picture hanging on the wall of my bedroom, and there it will stay.

ABC eventually killed our forum and started their own on AOL, and it became huge. A behemoth in fact, where millions of people tried to hold conversations about the show while old regulars began discussing their children, diapers, in-laws, etc. with other older posters who’d by this time become friends. The actors, excited by the new medium, often popped into our chat room. It was wonderful to get to talk to Michael, Susan, and the others when they’d pop in. (Though I remember being a little annoyed when Kelly Ripa would join us. She was a teenager, and we were interested in talking with the adults. I find this hilarious now.) After a time, when things started to get really out of hand with the now huge forum, Beth, Karen, I and a few of our other AMC original posters quietly left the ABC forum and started our own again. You wouldn’t believe the catfight when we were found out, but that’s a story for another day.

I could go on and on with AMC stories and how the show impacted my life, but I’ve regaled you enough for now. Suffice it to say, I have my Erica Cane “biographies.” I have my rarely used bottle of Enchantment perfume and my oft used bottle of Susan Lucci perfume. I have my picture of MEK and my voicemail recordings of him leaving messages for me. (He had a cold at the time…and girls, he said JINKIES!) I have my memories.

In all these years, friends have come and gone, family members have passed, but All My Children has always stayed. Until today, at 1pm, I don’t think I really thought it would end. But it has, thanks to the shortsightedness of an ABC Daytime exec who doesn’t understand that you can’t use Neilson ratings anymore to judge a show’s viewership. Most of us TiVo or use another DVR now. Unfortunately, he’s too backward to know that and cancelled the show in favor of a food talk show that’s much cheaper to produce. His stupidity is our loss.

AMC is supposed to continue in 2012 on the Internet. I hope they can pull it off, but I don’t have my hopes up too high. I cried like a baby today as I watched the final episode. After 41 years, those people seem like family. I’ll miss them, and I’ll keep the light on hoping to see them again.

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Ha!

You thought I was using hip ’60s slang for drugs; right? Wrong-o! I’m talking about my rarely fed blog. It’s been a downer, man…a real downer.

So, let’s get right to it. It’s been a difficult couple of years. Bad job. (Really bad job.) Beloved pets dying. My mom dying. For a while there, it seemed like nothing good would ever happen again. At first, I started posting about my sadness thinking it would be cathartic, thinking I’d get back to the regular stuff later, but then I’d come back later, and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t post something frivolous after posting about the death of a loved one. It seemed disrespectful. It was depressing. It would have been a lie. So, I’ve stayed away.

But I’m giving you notice here and now. I’m done with that.

Well, almost.

I have one more tribute to post for now. Sadly, there may be some later at some far distant point in the future, but this tribute calls to me now. And I don’t consider it a downer, really. It just is what it is. A goodbye of sorts, a fare thee well, an I’m REALLY going to miss you kind of post. So here goes…man, I hate endings, especially when we’re talking about something that isn’t supposed to end. Boo!

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The word “hack” has gotten a bum wrap.

In the old days, a hack was a horse or a taxi cab. Sometimes it was a writer (like me) who wrote boring prose full of trite phrases. It could even mean what a person does to a piece of wood with an axe. Today, when I think of hack, though, I think of the constant attempts to hack my website. Every day, at least once a day, I get an email notifying me that someone has signed up as a “user” on my website. When I look at the name and email address, it’s always someone named xsestkcxz or pzytrwq, surely people from Latvia or Uzbekistan, since many people from those countries have vowel-less or near vowel-less names. Surely, these aren’t (gasp!) made up names!

So here’s a message to you hackers. I know I haven’t been posting to my blog for a while…it’s just been a place where I’ve announced the deaths of my pets and my mother…but I’m still here, hackers. I’ll still thwart your every attempt at trying to gain access and control to post your ridiculous spam ads that aren’t even translated into English well enough to fool anyone. And soon — VERY SOON — if I have anything to say about it, I’ll be back posting funny thoughts or interesting recopies. But you will NEVER gain control.

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When I was six years old, my mother bought me a baby chick for Easter. I adored that little thing and named him Chicken Little. He was soft and fluffy, and I loved to cuddle with him. One Sunday, we went to church, and when we got home I rushed to find him only to be shocked to find his little limp body floating in the toilet. I scooped him up and ran to Mom crying. She knew that there was nothing that could be done for him, but to make me feel better, she took him and held him in her hands over the floor furnace, and began giving him mouth to beak resuscitation.

I stood next to her, anxious and upset, as she breathed into his little beak over and over, pretending to try to bring him back to life. This went on for several minutes, and I’ll never forget the look on her face when we heard a little peep come from him. She was so surprised! She rushed us both into my bed where he and I lay under an electric blanket until he was warm and dry.

That chicken became quite a pet and a neighborhood institution. At first, everyone hated him, because he began crowing at 4am, but as time went by, he became a beloved neighborhood institution as everyone saw him riding on my bicycle handlebars everywhere I went. He lived a long and happy life.

That’s how Mom was.  Nothing was more important to her than raising resilient children, who could fend for themselves and had a good work ethic, but she would do anything to help us, even if she thought there was little chance of it doing any good. What was important was that we knew she was behind us, and it meant so much to each of us to know that we were never alone when times got rough.  Whether it was a simple pat on the back or a helping hand, her steadfast support was always there, and because of that, Marianne, Craig and I have always been able to face whatever came at us, often with strength we didn’t know we had.

As many of you know, Mom was a teacher, but what many of you may not know is what an absolutely wonderful teacher she was. In the classroom, she was strict – she didn’t allow decorum to be breached by anyone – yet her students adored her and many have remained in contact with her throughout the years. They loved her not only because she had a wry sense of humor and irony that she used often, not just because of her amazing talent as a teacher, but because she respected her students and treated them like adults. She knew what many teachers then and now don’t quite get…that when you challenge someone to go beyond their known abilities; you give them the gift of phenomenal growth.

She challenged her children in the same way.  While other children were read nursery rhymes and fairy tales, Mom read us poetry and prose by the greats – T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe and others – from the very beginning of our lives.  As a result, we grew up loving literature as much as she did, and all of us learned to read at an early age.

I can remember reading nursery rhymes and Dr. Suess at the age of five or six and feeling sorry for other kids who had to stick to only that kind of reading.  Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed a little Horton Hears a Who and Green Eggs and Ham as much as the next kid, but even at an early age, I wanted more, and often put down those books to read, instead, The Cask of Amontillado or The Tell-Tale Heart. Craig and Marianne were the same, and Mom let us explore whatever interests we had, whether they matched hers or not, and was always excited to listen as we talked about what we had just seen or done or read as if it were the most interesting subject on Earth.

She also made it her job to ensure we all mastered the English language. As children, we all quickly became accustomed to Mom’s “pop quizzes” as we went about our daily routines. She made a game of having us conjugate verbs, and while that might sound deathly boring, we all loved it. I’m sure, too, that I was the only six year old to know the difference between the subjective case, the objective case, the possessive case, and the nominative case of almost any noun or pronoun.  I asked Mom once why she quizzed us like she did, and she told me that besides it being fun, she wanted us to be able to hold our own in any conversation so people would respect our opinions and take us seriously. And it worked.

The challenges Mom put before us helped us grow in ways that would have otherwise been impossible. Because of her faith in us and our faith that, if we failed, she would always be there to buoy us, we have never been afraid to take chances in life. The need to succeed has been important, but the cost of failure has never been Earth shattering.  Instead, we have been able to take each failure as a learning experience to strengthen our bid for success the next time around. We have Mom to thank for that.

When Mom left us on Monday, one of my first rational thoughts was how much I’ll miss sitting in her living room with her at family gatherings, reading poetry to one another.  No one could read a poem with more feeling and meaning than Mom, and no one more appreciated hearing one read well. A few months ago, Mom’s sister Dora Fay passed away, and Marianne and I took her to Mangum for the funeral.  After the long drive home, even though we were all exhausted, we stayed for a while and pulled out the books and started reading some of our favorite poems to one another. Before long, we were all in tears, filled with the emotion that the poems wrought from us, but also with the emotion engendered by the act itself.

This was a ritual that has remained with our family throughout our lives, and one that we all cherish, so the tears flowed easily. I think party because we knew in our hearts that we wouldn’t be together much longer. Of course, we had no idea how quickly that end would come. Mom was in such good health and mind that we thought she’d be with us for years to come.  So, of course it made me sad to think we’d never sit with family again to share good poetry.

Then it hit me that, because of Mom, that tradition would never really end. Our own children have also grown up at her knee loving good literature, and we have sat together in our own homes reading to one another and sharing tears and joy at the beauty and meaning in those well etched words.  Now, with her passing, those events will be even more meaningful, because we will know in our hearts that this, too, is a gift from Mom that can never be taken away, even though she is no longer in the room with us.

When our father died when we were very young, Mom helped us cope by often reading us a poem by one of her favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Milay. I think it’s fitting that I end by sharing that poem with you today. It’s called Lament, and while it’s written about a father, but it will always remind us of our mother.

Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I’ll make you little jackets;
I’ll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There’ll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why. 
 
Mom…we love you dearly and miss you more with each passing day.

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“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.”

Our beloved Mary Virginia Wolverton passed from this world on Monday, August 30, 2010 after suffering a heart attack in her home on Sunday, August 22. She would have been 87 on October 15. Mary Virginia was born in Vinson, Oklahoma in 1923, the sixth of eight children born to Mattie and Ernest Ownbey. Her early life in dustbowl western Oklahoma during the depression was not an easy one. Her mother became a widow when Mary Virginia was only three, but hard times only made the family stronger, and they all grew up with a strong work ethic and a love of family that carried them through dark days and brighter times.

Mary Virginia was known for her love of good literature and was particularly fond of poetry, and she shared that love with her children, grandchildren, and hundreds of high school and college students. When she read a poem like Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken to a classroom of normally raucous teenaged students, it was with such feeling and flair that all those present were enrapt in the moment and it wasn’t unusual to see their eyes fill with tears and hear sniffles peppering the silence. Because of her gift, those touched by her have been left with a love of beautifully woven language that they might otherwise have never known.

In her later years, Mary Virginia was always so happy to see her family, and never failed to tell them how very much she loved them and how special they were to her. The feeling was and is entirely mutual. She will be greatly missed.

Mary Virginia was preceded in death by her two beloved husbands, H. Quentin Owens who passed away in 1962 and Warren Wolverton, who left us in 2000. She is survived by her three children, Marianne Owens Determan, Craig Q. Owens, and Margaret Owens Floeter; her three grandchildren, Jeffery Luikes, Amanda Cox, and Michael Floeter; four great grandchildren, Cody Nelson, Brad Nelson, Katy Nelson, and Ethan Cox; and three sisters, Florence Hogan, Ernestine Craig, and Imogene Williams. A memorial service will be held at Becker Funeral Home in Lawton on Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 1:30pm. Please join us to give thanks for Mary Virginia’s life.

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I miss Mickey.

It’s funny how a little ball of fluff can work her way into a person’s heart. Especially a special one like Mickey.

She was such a beautiful animal. Her long, silky, silver fur was so soft. Her tail, so exquisitely long, was always held so regally high. Her amber eyes were so sincere. But she was so much more than mere beauty. She was a true friend.

Never have I known an animal so devoted to a person. Mickey lived her life to love me. When I got home from work, she greeted me, throwing her body against my leg and rubbing against me as she looked lovingly into my eyes. When I sat down, she would leap into my arms and kneed my chest and arm until she drooled with pleasure. Then, when she tired of that, she curled gently into a ball and fell asleep in my lap where she would stay as long as I let her.

At night, she decided when it was time for me to go to bed, coming into the living room to squeek her sweet little meow at me. “I’m coming, Mickey” I’d say, as our eyes met, and she would start toward my room, prancing ahead of me down the hall. Once we got there, she jumped onto my bed and waited for me while I completed my nightly ritual. And then, as I crawled under the sheets, she stood, waiting patiently until I got comfortable. When she knew I was ready, she got on my pillow, plopped herself down, curled up next to me, and nuzzled her head into the palm of my hand where she would sleep all night.

I think the hardest part of losing her was how fast it was. On May 1, I didn’t even know anything was wrong. By May 5, we had been to the vet several times, because she couldn’t keep food down. On May 7, I took her to the emergency vet hoping they could help her. The last time I saw her, the vet had her in her arms, kissed her forehead and took her out of the room. On May 9, Mother’s Day, Mickey died of lymphoma. Alone with strangers.

It tears my heart up knowing she had to spend her last days wondering why I wasn’t there. In 10 years, she had only left the house once, and it had terrified her. To think that she was scared and alone in her last days breaks my heart in ways I can’t begin to describe. I hope she knew how much I loved her as she slipped away. I hope she didn’t feel abandoned. If I had known there was no way to save her, I would have never put her through that. I would have held her in the end. She would have had no doubt of my love.

I adored that little fluff ball. I miss her eyes looking lovingly into mine. I miss her smell. I miss her touch. I walk into my room and, for a moment, I expect her to be there. It breaks my heart when I suddenly remember she’s gone. I can’t lie down at night without crying, knowing I’ll never have that little head nuzzled in my hand again. The bed is so empty without her.

Some would think I’m silly for being so torn up over the death of a cat, but she was so much more than that to me. We adored one another. She was like a child to me.

I love you, MIckey.

April 1, 2000 - May 9, 2010

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