From Christina Tayler

There were angels everywhere, gracing mantels and side tables, each figure unique with hand-painted paper-mache faces, individualized coiffures from fine yarns, and a gown fashioned from a delicate antique handkerchief.  They came in all sizes from four or five inches to a foot or more, ingeniously made to stand by being propped up on cardboard tubes from paper rolls.  Their lace wings were stiffened carefully by starch and one almost expected them to join in Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus!  

The real angel in the house was, of course, Dolly, hosting yet again the spectacular open-house holiday festivity to a crowd that filled the Stades’ apartment with laughter and good cheer.  Dolly, who over many years made each angel, filled the tables with dozens and dozens of beautifully decorated home-baked cookies (many frozen weeks before in order to accommodate the many guests).  Dolly, always elegantly attired, could easily be mistaken for a guest of honor until one noted how she commanded the kitchen as platter after platter of scrumptious foods that she’d prepared were ferried out to the main table by handsome George who also performed the duties of maître d’ and bar tender  What a team!   

In 1978, I was a late-comer to the circle of friends within Columbia College’s English Department, and Dolly was the first to make me feel a bonified member of the group.  There’s been many a time when I’ve mentally uttered “Thanks Doll.”  My husband, Ted, and I loved Dolly and treasured her for her wit, her mental agility, and the warmth of her loving nature.    

Birthday Toast

Thanks for hosting us for a drink tonight Mom.

I'd be lying if I said this was just as good as having you here in a way that's a little more interactive but it gave us some happiness knowing you would appreciate the illicit quality of the three of us and Genghis in the car visiting your site after dark with champagne and Dixie cups.  When I say "would" appreciate I feel compelled to mention the thoughts of a Man of Science who was in touch with me today.  He reached out to assure me that there is such a thing as a hereafter.  Among the things I deeply miss about you is your skepticism concerning Men of Science.  I have no one to share this skepticism with any more.  Of course the other skepticism we share is of faith and belief in an afterlife.  Still, I'm glad he said that.  I hope he is right. 

There is much else I miss about you so I am trying to be more like you to feel the loss a little less.  For one I am trying take seriously the idea that the significance of this time of year is as a time to experience and show love and gratitude for the people around you.  In that spirit I have been motivated to cook for other people and especially to make some of the things you made.  If you feel so moved, can you relay the recipe for cheese olives?  I found something on line but I'm suspicious of it.  I really need to get this straight from you.  If you could send it to me in a dream I'll trust the source.

You'll note we've been derelict with the stone but we'll get that up soon.  Just know we love you and though we each try in our faith-challenged ways to find consolation and to believe you're somewhere better, we would really prefer to just have you here with us to celebrate.  I know you would understand or maybe you do, who knows.

Happy Birthday, Mom. 

Words for Mom's Funeral

by Kirsten Stade

There is so much I could say about Mom, but the most important thing, the thing that captures the essence of Mom, is something I can’t articulate, except in words that don’t make any sense. Words like

Oh for Heaven’s Sake,

You Complete Nitwit, 

Ch!,

You Idiot!

Mom for me embodies joy, and laughter, and unconditional support that is somehow vaguely threatening.

Mom was just full of love. 













She expressed her love in the incredible things she created, the angels, the trees covered with candy for the kids in the building, the ornaments, the mosaics. 

She expressed it in her gardening and composting and her nurturing of life. 









She expressed it in her love of animals and her indulgence of her kids’ love of animals.

She expressed it in the care packages she was always sending when one of us was away, and in the physical affection she lavished on all of us, human, canine, or of the budgie persuasion.

Mom loved to laugh. Whether at Monty Python or at a Fourth of July firework that made serial whistling explosions, she gave herself up entirely to her laughter and it was impossible not to be swept up in that joy right along with her.







Mom was always good for a hug. 

You could come up behind Mom, wrap your arms around her, and make car alarm noises over her shoulder while you made little explosive gestures with your hands, and while she might remark that you outta have your head examined, she would accept your affection and return it.

Something about Mom was explosive, in a good way. 





Or at least something about her occasioned explosive feelings of joy in me. 

Because of her lack of inhibition about expressing joy and love, I guess I grew up with a similar lack of inhibition

with the result that I often felt compelled to skip into her bedroom while clapping my hands and at the top of my lungs saying HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM. 






And I felt no compunctions about behaving in such a way with her, because I knew her response would be completely affirming and validating—that is, she would look at me witheringly, brows slightly knit, and call me a complete nitwit.

Mom seemed to have a sense for giving you exactly what you needed, whether that was unconditional acceptance and encouragement, or withering scorn delivered in such a way that you felt thoroughly loved.

It is hard to imagine life without her laughter, her humor, her NPR impersonations, her unique terms of endearment and scorn. My hope is that we will keep her with us by keeping alive her extraordinary current of unfettered silliness and joy. 

Comments of Dad at the Service

This is part comments of George Stade, husband for fifty-seven years:

When I was a sophomore at St. Lawrence University, in my psychology class there was a door past the lectern that led out onto a fire escape, where you could look out on the main entrance. And I would see this woman, and I liked how she walked and how she looked and how she dressed. So I asked a friend who knew her for her name, and I called her to ask her out to see a jazz concert in the auditorium.

 She went out with me but she said it was so nice out after a heavy snow the night before that why didn't we just go for a walk.  As we were walking she saw two birds on wires, one above the other, and the bird on the top wire shook so the snow fell down on the bird below, and that bird on the lower wire hunched its shoulders and looked up. And Dolly laughed and hunched her shoulders and looked up, and inspired the first poetic phrase of my whole life - young eyes. Over the years I'd see that look in her eyes when something gave her joy and it always gave me joy.

Dolly, Mom, Nifty Snarkso

by Kirsten Stade

My Mom passed away early the morning of Friday, July 19, 2013.

Although it was not unexpected, when the news came it hit hard. My dad, my brothers, my sister and Florian--none of us could really imagine life without my mom's irreverent sense of humor, her unconditional support, her overwhelmingly generous love and her uninhibited affection. 

So we told ourselves that she was doing well, and in some ways she was--right until the end.



Right up until the end, my mom embodied vibrant joy, intense love, and razor-sharp intelligence that made it easy to hold on to the hope that she would hold on. 


















My mom could bring out in me a feeling of wild, raucous joy blasting out in all directions. 

I don't think I know anyone who is so completely, thoroughly loving, who lived so completely for the sake of giving. Maybe that is why she brought out in me a sensation of being thoroughly, joyously alive and a compulsion to sing, skip, and clap my hands. 












I do believe that there is a current of joy running through the universe, and I think the love I felt with my Mom set me free to tap into it. 

I think her extraordinary love for animals, for her family, for plants and her garden and kids and babies and the world, just made it OK to be who I was, uninhibited. 

I think that maybe the natural state of things is for people to go around singing and skipping and clapping their hands and saying HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM HI MUM, and my mom's acceptance and love and bemused, exasperated acceptance made it OK to lapse into that natural state of things.




I know that I owe some essential things to my Mom. 


My love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with trees and plants and green things that grow.















My love of animals, and my propensity to talk with them as if they understand every word. 































My belief that derision is the surest sign of affection.

 
And there are other things that I will never be able to do like my Mom did. 



Her culinary talent and her knack for entertaining














Her creativity and artistry with all the things she made, the mosaics, 

the Christmas angels and ornaments, the beautiful drawings that decorated every card she sent.

I am still not sure how to go on without all that. I guess you do it by being thankful for what we had, like that one week in the Adirondacks just two weeks before she died, when she got to be in the only place she wanted to be. I am so glad I spent time with her just sitting in her garden, sitting at the kitchen table, going for short walks, driving and talking.

And I guess you do it by keeping alive all the things she represented, the irreverence, the humor, the love of family and animals and nature, and the wild, unfettered, ridiculous blast of joy. 

My Mom was my blog's most devoted reader, and she loved it when I wrote a post that celebrated her and celebrated our family. She was moved when my blog friends said nice things in response to my posts about her and about my childhood. My Mom sometimes felt unappreciated, and those posts were a way to try to fix that. 

Mom, we will miss having you here with us but will think of you as a bright stream of laughter coursing through the universe, a blast of energy bringing your vitality to all living things and nourishing gardens of green growing life as you did when you were here.

A Tribute to Dolly

by Nancy Graham

My sister and I were not good friends when we were young.  Dolly was the first grandchild on both sides of the family and for five years had full attention of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.  So when I came along there were probably mixed feelings on the part of my big sister.  The earliest memories of us together come from the 16mm films taken by my father and the black and white photographs my mother meticulously put in albums.  Most show Dolly having to hold me and try to smile while I attempted to pull the ribbon from her hair.  But being five years apart meant there was little competition between us so we did our own thing and enjoyed a happy childhood in the suburbs of NYC. 

One thing we both loved as children was the annual visit to our grandparent’s home in South Hero, Vermont.  While it must have been considered a duty to our parents, we loved the old farm house, the barn and the afternoon trips to the rocky beach on Lake Champlain.  We spent the mornings at a neighbor’s farm, finding kittens in the hay loft, petting the calves, riding on the hay wagon and enjoying a life much different from that in Floral Park.  Meanwhile our father was doing repair work on the old farm house and our mother was helping Grandma cook on the wood burning stove and learning not to waste the hot water which had to be pumped in and then heated on top of the same stove.  While there was a bathroom, the outhouse was still an option as were the chamber pots in the upstairs bedrooms.   Our Grandfather loved to grow things and that trait was passed down to our father and to us.  Both Dolly and I fondly remember Grandpa’s garden.  A big bowl of fresh berries (currents, raspberries, gooseberries) was on the table for every meal along with fresh vegetables from the garden.  There were lots of flowers in the garden but gladioli were Grandpa’s specialty, something that carried on to Dolly and which she grew so well and enjoyed immensely.

When Dolly went on to Sewanhaka High School she wanted to be called Dot.  She and her friends were in a different world from mine then so most of what I remember is that they called me ‘the brat’,  She had a cadre of girlfriends who would frequent the local soda shop “Dick’s” and hope that the  boys would show up.  I don’t think she ever had a serious boyfriend but did have crushes on several teenage boys during those high school years.  Dolly kept a diary but as hard as I tried I never got to see what was written in it.

When it came time to apply to college, Dot (still Dot) wanted to go to the University of Vermont.  However, being so smart, she won a NYS Regents Scholarship and with some pressure from our parents, decided instead to go to St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.  That was a very fortunate decision because there she met George Stade, who she married shortly after graduating and with whom she shared almost 57 years together.  At SLU, Dolly (not Dot anymore) was an outstanding student and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Beta Beta Beta.  

It was about this time that Dolly and I became close.  She and George planned a December 1956 wedding so Dolly moved back home for several months and commuted to her teaching job on Long Island.  She used George’s car, a Chevrolet with a stick shift, to go to work so when she was home grading papers at night she let me use the car.  That was so great for a high school  senior and I have always been thankful for having access to wheels at that age.  

The wedding took place on December 16, 1956 at the Floral Park Methodist Church.  Dolly looked radiant and George was a handsome groom.  Mom and Pop, Eva and Kurt all beamed  and were happy for this beautiful couple.   They then took up their lives in NYC where they spent so many years together. Children arrived in a few years: first Barry, the Eric, Nancy and finally Kirsten.  Dolly was a wonderful  wife and mother.  She made their home a welcoming place not only for the immediate family but for any friends who may be looking for some warmth and a good home cooked meal accompanied by a bit of wit and maybe some sarcasm.

Over the past years we became very close.  We would often talk about our gardening issues.  Since we both loved working in the dirt, we called it the “Fletcher Curse”.  Dolly would grouse about her problem, something called gout weed, while I complained about my nut grass.  We could compare notes about what we had in the vegetable area:  she always beat me on the greens and salad while my only success was with the tomato crop (because the growing season in upper NY state is so short.)  We both loved to grow things and so many plants in my garden bring back fond memories of Dolly.  Her gardening talents crossed over to her artistic expertise as Dolly would make beautiful pressed flower collages which she framed and now I can look at every day.

Even as a youngster, Dolly was artistic.  She could draw, paint with water colors and oils.  Later on she branched into mosaics and other handicrafts.  She could take scraps of old linens and make them into beautiful Christmas trees.  Old pieces of fabric became dolls or angels.  And plain Styrofoam cones were transformed into elegant candy trees.  But she never bragged about this talent.  She just kept using it to the enjoyment of her family and friends.

Dolly’s culinary abilities were amazing.  Her pies, all made from scratch, outshone any commercial baker.  She said it was easy, but I know that isn’t so.  Not only were they delicious, they were always decorated with the most extraordinary care.  On the top, crust was cut in leaf shapes, or twisted into braids or punched with a decorative pattern.  These were no ordinary pies.  They were the best ever.  Even before we got to desert, there were wonderful things with which to indulge:  starting with mini pizzas, pork balls and “tunnels” to name a few.  Dolly’s table was always set with a crisply starched and ironed table cloth and napkins and a beautiful flower arrangement.  The main course (usually a Thanksgiving turkey and tofurky with all the side dishes)  was always followed by a salad before desert.  One never left the Stade home hungry.

We laughed over so many things together and commiserated over others.  We talked about how no matter how old your children are, you still worry about them.  She was a wonderful daughter, taking great care of our mother, making sure she was in good hands when she was unable to live on her own.  Dolly was a great wife and mother and she was the only one who called me “SIS’.  I will miss that.

Dolly Stade b. 1934 d. 2013

Dorothy Louise Fletcher Stade was born December 5, 1934, to Elmer Lee Fletcher and Laura Fletcher, nee Brewster.  Her sister was Nancy Graham.  Her husband of almost fifty-five years was George Gustave Stade.  She had four children -- Bjorn, Eric, Nancy, and Kirsten Stade -- and three grandchildren -- Jack and Nick, and Ursula Ngoc Stade. 

Our mother was profoundly intelligent.  Her intellectual interests were broad and deep, covering nature, medicine, literature, history and politics to name a few.  She was Sir Richard Attenborough in the field, conjuring names of exotic flora from her encyclopedic botanical knowledge, all of it neatly indexed and readily retrieved.  She could pull a quote from literature to illustrate any point she wished to make. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child was among her favorites.  She admired the founding fathers, perhaps as much for their interest in gardening as for their contributions to history.  Not surprisingly, she was a Mensa member.  I often thought I'd like to be as smart as she was.  In truth, it was probably a liability.  With those chops the times you live in must always seem insipid.   

Maybe that is why she was so funny, because humor could palliate the imbecilism to which she was so finely attuned.  Her sense of humor ranged from silly to Swiftian and encompassed everything in between.  When we gathered her house plants to donate to neighbors we came across an Afro pick with a Black Power fist stuck into the soil of a philodendron.  That combination of irony (what's a fine haired girl with New England ancestry dating to around the Mayflower doing with an Afro pick) and sincerity (because she was a free thinker, and had deep sympathy for the civil rights movement, having declined membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution because of their history of refusing to have Black performers at their concert hall) was pretty typical.  She had a special gift for the caustic.  Driving past the Takoma Park Republican Voters Garden -- a few rangy azaleas on a corner lot -- provoked one of her scornful rhetoricisms: What do you think they plant there, stink weed?  It was with utmost affection that she called her children nitwits and other more obscure terms of similar connotation from the mysterious lexicon she wielded.

More than anything else she gave.  To her husband and children, to a long list of charities.  She gave in her endless nurturing of flowers and plants, in her love of animals and nature, in the ornaments and mosaics she made, in the ink sketches of owls.  The night of her death we brought some of our mother's boxes down from the closet and unpacked two handmade cloth dolls she made for her daughters years ago. They had hand-embroidered fur-lined cloaks that could be removed to reveal elaborate skirts made from our childhood dresses, petticoats, and underneath stockings and boots she'd made from old ribbons. She was constantly sending off notes to her children and grandchildren, penned in her beautiful hand, and decorated with sketches of her beloved dog Dizzy or folkloric hearts and flowers.  The work I most associate with her is a mosaic made from the glass tiles she purchased perhaps fifty years ago, from an antique store in the Village when she and my father were living on Jane Street.  The mosaic is of a blue eyed woman with her arms wrapped around two children, one fair-haired and one with dark hair.  An art critic from the day had the audacity to review her tile work somewhat derisively, titling his piece Artsy Craftsy Betsey Stade.  He couldn't appreciate the absence of irony in her handiwork.  The things she made with her hands came from a place of pure love.

She was less interested in receiving, and though we struggled with it one had to admire her determination.  She became more and more obstinate that she'd live and die just as she chose.  I am glad that in the last few decades of her life she visited her children wherever we were - all over the Southwest, Northern California, Colorado, Counties Sligo, Dublin, and Donegal, Central Mexico - but her first choice was always the cabin set on seventy woody Adirondack acres our parents purchased in 1970 and visited every summer for the next 43 years.  Following my father's retirement, their summer vacations ran from May to October, until 2012, when even Dolly acknowledged the care and maintenance might be more than they could continue.  Towards the end she did accept a gift from my sister, who went with my parents to spend a few days in early July in the old home on the Benson - Bleecker road.  I am grateful she had those days.

The family is holding a private service at Francis Collins Funeral Home and Rock Creek Cemetery, where her ashes will be interred.  If you would like to honor Dolly, you may do so by making a donation to the Washington Humane Society in her name, or by posting your memory of Dolly as a comment to this blog.