Cascade's Philomena Connection--Recalling Josie

You probably heard about Cascade's Philomena connection. I saw the film the other night, and anything with Judy Dench in it is excellent. Of course, Philomena's Irish son was adopted by Josie Lane's daughter, married to a dentist in Rockford, IL. I can't claim to have ever met him or the even the daughter, but I am eternally grateful to old Josie, who lived across from Cascade Elementary until the late 1970's.

I was long gone to Clarke, CA and Denver by then, but when I was a kid, 8 or 10, she used to hire me to pull weeds from the petunia border along the curved sidewalk to her back door. Josie also hired me to do dishes after her family left. She was a grandmother several times over, and would tell me anxious tales about her grandson who was a hemophiliac. “You know what that is, don't you?”

“Like a maniac?”

Vocabulary was the least of what I learned from Josie Lane. She exuded art and style and let me watch her paint. She did one of the bishop's (Most Rev. Dr. Loras T. Lane) coat of arms. I'd probably call it garish and ugly now, but she had taken apart some of her jewelry to glitz it up a bit, and I thought it was magnificent.

Doing her dishes when the family came was a trial and a tribulation. You had to have separate water for the glasses, (I know now must have been real crystal) silverware, real silver, and dishes, bone China. I was panic-stricken about breaking something. My favorite things in her house, which I adored, were a glass lamp shade that is still there and I warrant, a Tiffany and a white sheepskin that was on the landing to her stairwell. Long gone.

Years later, Fall 2006 to be exact, I was in an open market in Damascus, Syria and saw just such sheepskin. I ran into the stall and bought it without questioning or dickering, which also befuddles men in that part of the world, but it was ole Josie Lane I was thinking of.

I'd give the critical eye out of my head—the one with the cataract—to be able sit, chat and watch ole Josie Lane paint and talk. RIP Josie!