Da-dum.....da-dum.....da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum.

This morning I asked my daughters if they could remember what our family did to celebrate the 4th of July exactly forty years ago. Neither one could, of course, and they were astounded that I remember. As it happens, it's the only 4th of July ever that I can recall with any specificity. Even last year's holiday has escaped me.

On this day forty years ago, in 1976, America was celebrating the United States Bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We lived in Farmingdale, New York, then. It was hot that summer. While many of our fellow Long Islanders spent the 4th at the beach, we headed off instead to the coolness of a second-run movie theater. We'd missed a blockbuster the summer before, and this was our chance to see what all the hoopla had been about.

At first we sat in near darkness, listening to the whispering of parents passing out candy brought from home, hearing the crinkling of candy wrappers and the tinkling of ice in paper cups, wishing everyone around us would be quiet so we could watch the previews. Then the movie started. and everyone did get quiet. Except for occasional audience-wide gasps and screams, they were quiet until the film ended.

That was the day we saw Jaws. Forty years later I only have to think about it for a moment to get shivers running up and down my spine.

Happy Independence Day to you! I hope you're having a great time with your family today. Don't eat the potato salad if it's sat too long in the heat, be careful if you're creating your own fireworks display, and be oh-so watchful if you're about to step into the ocean.

March Happened.

Oops! Looks like I missed the month of March. I hate when that happens.

Like many parts of the country, we've had rain, rain, rain for the past month. The grass grows tall while the ground beneath it stays so soggy that lawn tractors and dog feet sink right into the mud. My feet would, too, I'm sure, but I'm not about to step off into the muck. Especially since the man who cuts my grass told me he killed two baby ground rattlers last time he mowed back there. Local TV newscasters warned that flooding in low-lying areas was driving snakes to higher ground, but I foolishly assumed they meant other people's higher ground.

So, without going into greater detail, the bad parts of March were snakes, heavy rains, terrorist attacks and Donald Trump, not necessarily in that order. The month held some good things, too.

Our Easter celebration was fun as always. My great-grandson, Owen, just turned six, has recently discovered jokes. He took it upon himself to entertain us. First came the knock-knock jokes, then the cross-the-road jokes, then a mixture of those that he made up himself. We laughed at all of them, and Owen laughed loudest until he told one that made no sense at all. The rest of us laughed, but Owen's smile faded quickly. "Actually," he said, "I didn't find that one all that funny."

Great-grandkids with the Easter Bunny

(L-R) Owen, Jolie, Olivia

A week earlier we'd all attended the first couple of hours of Owen's birthday party. His friends had been invited to a backyard camp-out, and those of us who would not be spending the night stayed long enough to enjoy the cook-out and the company. Little boys that age are so cute and funny--and SO LOUD! I believe the vibrations created by their combined voices could have been detected on the Richter Scale.

My Life Writers' group is back in full swing, and I'm enjoying it as much as ever. It's so interesting that six people can write about a single topic in such different ways; yet, for all their differences--and our differences--the stories remind us how much we have in common. They draw us closer.

Books, music and favorite TV shows filled many March minutes, crowding out whatever housekeeping chores could wait another day. Or week. I'm aware that I need to get busy around here. That was on my mind yesterday, so I bought Swiffer duster refills while I was grocery shopping. And then I bought a jigsaw puzzle.

Spring doesn't end until June, right? There's plenty of time to worry about spring cleaning.

A Pie Dough Kind of Day

When my grandmother baked a pie, she'd roll out the dough, place a turned-over pie plate on top of it and trace a knife around the plate to get the right-sized crust. Then she'd gather up all the scraps that fell outside the circle, roll them together into a small, flat patchwork crust, sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar, and bake it alongside the pie as a special treat for my sister and me. I think that's how we got Leap Day. Horology experts (who presumably had grandmothers) figured out they could tidy up the calendar by sweeping up all the bits of leftover time from four years' worth of ordinary days and smooshing them into one whole extra day.

So is Leap Day a treat? Should it be a holiday? I'd like that, I think. How nice it would be to wake up and think: "Ah, it's Leap Day--twenty-four hours that don't count. Today I have time to read or write or paint or sit outside and daydream in the sun." Actually, being retired, I have time for that on almost any given day, but it feels self-indulgent to do fun things while the rest of the adults in the family are busy at their jobs. Guilt ruins a lot of potentially nice moments. 

The only momentous thing about this particular February 29th is that my grass was cut this morning for the first time in 2016, signifying the transition from tracked-in-mud season to tracked-in-grass-clippings season, the only two seasons that exist here in South Dogdom. If that's all that makes this Leap Day special, so be it. Life is good, and an extra day of it suits me just fine.

Tightly Packed

Our assignment for the most recent Life Writing class was GROWING UP IN YOUR FAMILY. As part of that, it was suggested that we characterize the members of our family. I've done that here, to the best of my memory and ability, but I'm curious: I wonder whether this story would be largely the same or quite different if my sister, Judy, had been the one to write it. She's the only one still alive who lived this with me. Well, she and my Uncle Joe, but he skipped out early. 

Speaking of Judy, I mentioned in the story that we "didn't always play well together." That was true, but I can't think of anyone I'd rather "play with" now than Judy. We have an amazing number of common interests now that I've given up paper dolls and she's given up horse pretensions.

Tightly Packed

I shared a double bed with my mother until I was almost fifteen. Our big dresser stood to my right, Mother slept to my left, and my little sister, Judy, slept to Mother’s left in a small bed of her own. Judy shared her youth bed with a collection of dolls and stuffed animals. It’s a wonder any of us had room to turn over.

Ours was one of three upstairs bedrooms in my grandparents’ home in Springfield, Missouri. The room directly across the stairway landing from ours was usually occupied by renters, college students who attended nearby Southwest Missouri State Teachers’ College. A smaller bedroom centered between our room and the students’ belonged to my Uncle Joe, who was only seven years older than I.

Downstairs, my grandparents, Mammaw and Packy, had the bedroom at the front of the house, a corner room where light flooded through sheer curtains on two sides. A narrow hallway ran from their room all the way back to a fifth bedroom, where my great-grandmother, Dora, could wake up in the mornings and look out on the bright colors of Mammaw’s flower garden.

In 1953, when I was ten, we got our first television set. Grandma Dora passed away in October of that year. The following year Joe graduated high school and promptly took off for Mexico with his best friend, not telling anybody where he was until he called and said he’d be back from time to time, but first he wanted to see the world. Mammaw was distraught, and Packy was fit to be tied. I don’t recall what Mother and Judy had to say about the situation. As for my own reaction, I kind of enjoyed the sudden expansion of elbow room. I thought I might get a room to myself, but I didn’t.

Things gradually returned to normal. Judy and I went to school, Mother and Packy went to work, and Mammaw stayed home to keep the household running. She had the hardest job of all. She climbed upstairs to clean the college boys’ room and downstairs to do the laundry in the basement. She did it all while wearing clunky, two-inch high heels, nylon stockings rolled to her knees, and a fresh, clean apron over a crisply starched housedress, usually one she’d made herself. She hummed as she did her housework. Her smiles were warm and plentiful, and she never complained. When Mammaw rested, she read: Good Housekeeping, Redbook and several other magazines she liked. She also liked flowers, soap operas, and everyone she ever met.

Packy, a World War I veteran, was pleasant but stoic. He didn’t talk much, but he did dispense a little discipline by calling Judy or me to come back and shut the screen door properly every time we’d run through and let it slam. Packy wore khaki shirts and khaki pants with suspenders to his job at the furniture store and didn’t change out of them until bath time, whether he’d spent the evening working in his big vegetable garden or watching TV. Mammaw kept a thick Indian blanket over the sofa to protect it from both garden soil and from the tobacco that spilled from the white, drawstring pouch of Bull Durham Packy kept in his shirt pocket. Each time he rolled a cigarette, a few specks of tobacco fell to the floor. He claimed tobacco was good for the carpet, kept the worms out of it. Packy was a reader, too, but his tastes ran to the daily newspaper, the Reader’s Digest (which he kept in the bathroom), and paperback murder mysteries. He was an avid fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and President Harry Truman.

Mother was moody. She could be tons of fun, but when I run a reel of “Young Mother” images through my mind, I see more frowns than smiles. She was beautiful and stylish, especially when she dressed up for work or to go out for an evening. She was a skilled seamstress and made a lot of her own clothes, including a coral-colored, poodle-cloth coat and matching tote bag once. She sewed many of our clothes, too. She contributed income to the household but otherwise didn’t help out much at home. She ironed the clothing that she, Judy and I wore each week, washed the supper dishes once in a blue moon, and supervised Judy and me in the cleaning of our bedroom. Even though she didn’t have many regular chores, she wasn’t afraid to tackle larger projects. I recall holding on to her legs as she sat on an upstairs window sill and leaned backwards into the open air to wash our bedroom windows, and I remember another time she redecorated our room, modernizing it by painting the woodwork white, covering the old floral wallpaper with a shade of paint called Dusty Rose, and adding a rose-patterned border where the walls met the ceiling.

Like her parents, Mother enjoyed reading. She bought murder mysteries and movie magazines at the newsstand near her job. Packy read the mysteries when Mother was finished, and I read all the movie magazines, even one I knew she didn’t want me to read. It was called Confidential  and was a precursor to today’s gossipy tabloids. I specifically remember one story in Confidential about Robert Mitchum, the actor. The magazine reported that Mitchum attended a Hollywood party and, after realizing he was the only person there not wearing a costume, downed a few cocktails, went to the kitchen, stripped down to his birthday suit, doused himself with ketchup, then returned to the assembled guests and introduced himself as a hamburger.

With Mammaw and Packy as backup caretakers and little or no assistance from our father, Mother did a good job of providing for Judy and me. Despite holding down a full-time job, she showed up for every important school event. She entertained us frequently, taking us to the swimming pool, the roller rink, the movies, or just to the corner drugstore for ice cream sodas. Still, I never felt I had enough time with her. When she went out for the evening on a date or with a friend, I missed her. Especially at bedtime. Sleep didn’t come easily when her side of the bed was empty. My child’s mind interpreted her absence once or twice a week as rejection. Now I understand how lonely she must have been.

Judy and I didn’t always play well together. We were four years apart in age and didn’t have many common interests. Judy was active and energetic and liked to play outdoors with friends. My favorite pastimes were quiet, mostly solitary ones: reading or drawing clothes (I called it “designing fashions”) for my paper dolls. On summer days I’d sit on the front porch swing in the shade and peek over the top of my Nancy Drew or Ginny Gordon mystery to watch Judy and her best friend, Cindy. They’d pull their hair back into ponytails and pretend they were wild horses. I could see how much fun they were having, racing around the yard, sweating, whinnying and slapping their thighs to make hoof noises, but I was too lazy for their kind of fun.

We got along better after supper. When the heat of the day dissipated, the children in our neighborhood spilled outdoors from houses up and down the street and congregated on sidewalks and in front yards--usually ours, because we were centrally located. There weren’t many of us kids, probably seven or eight at most. We caught lightning bugs together and put them in jars, or we divided into teams and played games like Simon Says and Lemonade (“Show me something if you’re not afraid!”). Hide and seek was never more fun than when shadows fell between the houses and the tall trees. We felt safe in the near darkness because parents and grandparents sat on front porches, chatting, sipping iced tea, watching over us. We knew to stay within shouting distance of our parents and to be back home when the streetlights came on.

When it was too dark or too cold to stay outside after supper, our family would gather in the living room and watch television. Most of us multitasked, a habit carried over from earlier days when we’d gathered there to listen to the radio. Mammaw would sit in the wooden rocking chair, one eye on the TV set, the other on her crochet or embroidery work. Mother sat in the easy chair, pincurling her hair or filing and polishing her nails. Judy and I staked out separate spaces on the rug, she with a favorite toy, I with paper dolls, drawing paper, crayons and scissors. Packy stretched out on his back on the couch. He’d lie flat like that until Judy’s inevitable nightly request: “Packy, make a hole.” Then he’d roll onto his side and draw up his legs to place the soles of his sock-covered feet squarely against the back of the couch so Judy could climb up and snuggle into the space behind his knees.

One day didn’t differ much from the next back then; our routines were familiar and comfortable. Saturday night suppers were always hamburgers, pork and beans, potato chips and soft drinks (known to Missourians as “pop”). The only part of the Saturday menu that ever varied was the flavor of the pop. Mammaw would ask each of us early in the week what we wanted:  Dr. Pepper, Grapette, Orange Crush or something else. Once she’d added all of our requests to her grocery list, she’d call in an order to the Monroe Street Market, and they’d deliver it the next day.

Sunday’s menu was always the same, too: fried chicken after church. Mammaw made sure we all went to Sunday School every week--all of us but Packy, who never did go that I remember. Technically, Mother didn’t go either. She was on the premises every week, but she stayed in the nursery, tending the babies. I always thought she volunteered for nursery duty so she wouldn’t have to listen to the lesson or the preaching. Mammaw always stayed for church after Sunday School, but the rest of us skipped church sometimes. When we did go, I enjoyed the music more than anything. Our Baptist church had a big choir and a huge pipe organ. The hymns I heard on Sunday mornings filled my heart and touched my soul more deeply than any words our preacher, Dr. Eastham, ever spoke. Young as I was, I disagreed with him about some things. I didn’t for a minute believe God was as mean as Dr. Eastham made Him out to be.

Time passes and things change. Rivers run dry, ships sink, familiar family routines come to an end. The summer before I turned fifteen, Judy and I moved to Texas with Mother and her brand-new husband, whom she’d met only three weeks earlier. We left behind Mammaw and Packy, the house and the neighborhood we loved, and Judy’s youth bed. Most of Judy’s dolls went missing, too. I suspect they were left behind intentionally due to lack of space in the U-Haul trailer, though Mother never did admit it. I left my first steady boyfriend, and, more significant over the long term, my sense of security. The memories, though--the wonderful, wonderful memories--those I kept. All those Missouri days and nights were packed in my head and heart so carefully and lovingly that I can take them out and enjoy them even now.

And I do, nearly every day.

Ten Years Later

I had intended to post a new blog entry yesterday to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Velvet Sacks, but first the shower curtain fell, rod and all, then the dogs went outside and came back in with thick mud-soup all over their paws, and by the time I got everything cleaned up, straightened out and rehung, I was no longer in a writing mood. Doing laundry seemed like a better idea.

Well, guess what! This morning I realized that today, not yesterday, is the actual anniversary date. Apparently, fate intervened and kept me from posting a stupid, self-congratulatory mistake on the Internet. Way to go, Fate (or Coincidence)!

Some things were different ten years ago, some remain the same. I was working full time when I started the blog in 2006; now I'm retired. I didn't have health insurance; now I'm safe in the arms of Medicare. My knees were just beginning to give me trouble; now I have one new, sturdy knee and another, still unstable one, in line for replacement not too far down the road.

My two beloved dogs from ten years ago, Kadi and Butch, have passed on and made room in my home for two new ones, Levi and Gimpy, who share their days here with my grand-dogs, Lucy and Oliver. Lucy was with us back then, but Oliver came along later, after Winston passed.

The size of our family has both grown and diminished. Three of my five grandchildren have married during this blog's existence, each of those three marriages has produced a baby, and a fourth child is on the way in a few months. In that same time span I've lost aunts, uncles and a few good friends. This very morning my great-niece gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl, and this afternoon a 58-year-old niece by marriage will be laid to rest, too early, near her mother.

Ten years ago I was complaining about President George W. Bush. I was so glad to see the end of his two terms, yet if I match him up against today's crop of GOP candidates, he seems a little more sensible than the rest of them do. Or at least a little less idiotic. That doesn't mean I'd want him back.

Ten years of water under the bridge, and life goes on. So will Velvet Sacks for the foreseeable future. Many thanks to all of you who have joined me in this journey.

"Wake up, open your blinds..."

So began Sister-Three's comment this morning on my last post, which was written three months ago. Many thanks to her and to the others of you who left notes of encouragement while I was absent from the blogosphere.

Yesterday, the last day of 2015, was the first day in months that I was able to sit comfortably at my computer desk and type a few complete, coherent sentences. "Comfortably" and "coherent" are the key words there. My old, worn-out knees were causing me so much pain that most of my thoughts weren't pleasant ones, and if a positive thought did flit across my mind by accident, I couldn't hold on to it long enough to write it down.

But that was last year. This is 2016, and things are different now. Now that the brand-new, metal and acrylic knee I acquired in mid-November has healed substantially, it has given me the gifts of diminished pain, improved mobility, and one heck of an attitude adjustment. I had never realized that pain could be so debilitating, could drive someone to such deep depression that the future looked uninviting, but I have been schooled.  That darkness is behind me now, thank goodness.

An acquaintance recently told me that his father's orthopedist, discussing impending knee-replacement surgery, told him, "You're going to hate me for six weeks, and at eight weeks you're gonna love me." I now understand that completely. I'm at the end of week seven, the pain from the surgery itself is finally abating, my head has been clear of medication side effects for a few weeks, I'm off the walker and mostly off the cane, I've just resumed driving short distances (freedom!), and all of a sudden my personal skies are blue again. What a relief!

I don't want to leave this topic without saying how much my daughters have helped me in the past few months; emotionally and physically, they've been there for me, and I don't know what I would have done without them. Having always prided myself on my independence, it was difficult to acknowledge that I needed help, let alone ask for it. My girls didn't wait for me to ask. They've pitched in with the grocery shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the pet care, the hospital stay, and miles and miles of transportation to and from doctors' visits and physical therapy. They've let me cry when I needed to, and they've made me laugh when I didn't think I could. I'll be forever grateful.

So, back to the future: I'm awake and my figurative blinds are once more open. I'm excited about blogging again, though I'll admit to being a little anxious, too, hoping the burst of enthusiasm I'm feeling today won't fizzle out before I get back into the swing of writing regularly. Thank you for continuing to check in here now and then. I hope you'll stick with me while I give it my best shot.

Happy New Year to all of you! Woo-hoo, 2016!



The song is "Believing" by Nashville cast members Charles Esten, Lennon Stella and Maisy Stella. Thanks to kaid030795 for posting the video and lyrics to YouTube.

Sooey, Pig, Pig, Pig!

At the end of May I saw this Facebook conversation between my sister and an old family friend:

I wanted to get in on that conversation, but if I'd posted there, I'd have felt obligated to acknowledge forty-some-odd other posts by "liking" them, and I just didn't have the energy. I decided to put in my two cents here, where things are quieter.

I'm pretty sure the wild hog incident occurred in 1958, the second summer we lived in Texas and our second visit to Keith's parents' camp at Cow Creek. As former city girls, this was as close to roughing it as my sister and I had ever come, but nothing had prepared us for the wild hogs. I say "hogs," but they were pigs, really--big enough but not yet full-grown. And I say "wild" because they behaved wildly, even though it turned out they belonged to someone.

It was early summer, a month or two before my little brother was born. I was 15, my sister Judy was 11, and I believe Keith would have been about five. Here's a photo of Mother and me at the camp. Click on the picture and look how pretty she was, all happy and expectant. (She was 34. I was excited about the idea of a new baby in the family but embarrassed because people would know by Mother's obvious pregnancy that she'd been having sex at her advanced age.)

We didn't know that marauding pigs had invaded the camp while we swam and played all afternoon in cool, brown creek water. When we climbed up the bank at the campsite,  they greeted us, oinking loudly, racing here and there, rooting around in our overturned ice chests in search of one more morsel of food. They had already eaten everything we'd brought. (I think Judy was right about the number of pigs, but the way they were running around, it's easy to see why a little kid like Keith might have thought there were more of them.)

With dusk approaching and nothing left to eat for supper, the men talked each other into catching one of the pigs to roast. They found some rope and, through trial and error, eventually set up a respectable snare. They had plenty of time to work on it; the pigs didn't seem to be as afraid of us as we were of them and continued running around, making serpentine paths through the camp area. It didn't take too long before one pig stepped into the noose, and Judy or Keith or somebody pulled the rope and caught it, by one hind leg if I recall correctly. One of the men struck the trapped pig with an axe, and the other pigs went nuts.

You never heard such squealing.

That's when the men shooed us women and children away from all the unpleasantness. We didn't want to be there anyway while they finished killing the injured pig, then butchered it. I don't remember seeing the sheriff Keith mentioned, but I do recall encountering the old farmer as we walked down the narrow dirt road away from camp. He wore overalls, a long-sleeved shirt in spite of he heat, and a dirty, floppy hat. He had a shotgun propped over his right shoulder. He looked at us suspiciously as he passed by, striding quickly toward the camp, but he didn't say a word. Neither did we.

We didn't walk much farther after that, just stood around and toed the loose dirt while we speculated about what was happening between the men and the farmer. By the time one of the dads walked close enough to see us and shout for us to come back, the farmer was gone and so were the pigs, except for the one that was just being hoisted over the fire. Later that night I heard some talk about money that had changed hands: the agreed-upon market price of one half-grown pig minus the estimated cost of the groceries they'd consumed.

It would be another 14 years before Deliverance would come out in movie theaters, but I've seen that film half a dozen times since then, and the old man in it has always made me think of the scary-looking old farmer we met the day of our wild pig adventure. I've never forgotten the chaos or the squealing or the creepy feeling of waiting on that dirt road while the sun sank lower and lower in the sky. I remember that captured pig, too. I didn't intend to eat a bite of it, considering its unfortunate demise and the fact that I'd never before eaten meat that I'd met personally in its live form. It took a while for the pig to cook, though, and hunger, along with a sensational aroma, overcame my convictions. Best pork I ever ate!

******

If you can't see the Deliverance video below, click on Watch on YouTube. (And don't worry, this is the Dueling Banjos scene where the old man dances, not the horrible "pig" scene.)

Thanks to Floris Verschuren for posting the video on YouTube.

The Most Beautiful Moon

It was the summer of 1959 or '60, and we were on our way to Kentucky, driving in our unair-conditioned car at night to beat the sweltering daytime heat. Daddy (my stepfather) was driving, and Mother was in the passenger seat with my baby brother, Joe, in her lap. (There were no child safety-seat requirements in those days; cars didn't even have seat belts.) My sister, stepsister and I were too close for comfort in the backseat.

Slumped low next to the right-side window, I could see over the front seats just enough to view the night sky through the windshield. What I saw was a dark orange moon that hung just above the horizon and looked as big as a wagon wheel. In the quiet of the car I leaned forward and spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear: "That is the most beautiful moon I've ever seen in my life!"

Mother, turned her head sharply toward Daddy and responded with a sneer in her voice: "Oh, Gawd!"

Daddy looked back at her, gave a little chuckle, and turned his eyes back to the road, the smile still on his face.

That was the entire conversation.

I leaned back in my corner and thought to myself, well, I guess I was being kind of overzealous and dramatic, but I didn't know I sounded that stupid. I made up my mind right then to curtail that kind of enthusiasm in the future. I was almost grown and certainly didn't want to be thought of as silly.

For more than thirty years--nearly forty, now that I'm doing the math--I thought of that incident every time I looked at a beautiful moon or, for that matter, at anything else that tempted me to speak effusively. I always tried to tone it down.

My stepdad died in 1996. One day a year or two after he passed, I sat on the sofa in my mother's East Texas home and listened while she talked about her two marriages. Paul, my biological father, had been a womanizer. She appreciated that Tommy, my stepfather, had not been one.

"Tommy never cheated on me," she said that day. "He came close to it once when I was pregnant with Joe. He'd gone to the boat club, and it was late, and he hadn't come home. I went down there and found him sitting in a car with some woman. He'd had way too much to drink, and all he kept saying to me was, 'That's the most beautiful moon I've ever seen in my life!'"

********

My stepsister and I talked on the phone yesterday about those days when we all lived together, and we talked for a while about our assortment of parents. It was the first time I'd ever remembered to tell her this moon story. She laughed hard at the end of it. When I spoke of my astonishment upon realizing that the two words mother uttered that had impacted my life for decades had had absolutely nothing to do with me, she laughed again. "And now," she said, "do you know what I'll think of for the rest of my life when I see a beautiful moon?"

That's what we storytellers do. We break our lives into bite-sized pieces, then we feed them to others and let them chew on them awhile.

April Already?

This year is whizzing by! Allergy season has arrived and has brought with it a couple of intense bouts of vertigo, during which I could do nothing but lie flat on the bed and watch my dresser and chest of drawers pass by again and again. Fortunately, antihistamines and this exercise seem to have stopped the spinning for now.

The new thyroid medicine has kicked in, and I'm feeling much better than I did a couple of months ago. The sunshine and warmer temperatures helped, too, of course. My spirits would probably be even higher if my summer clothes still fit. Thank goodness for the lightweight, stretchy knits we call "activewear." What a misnomer that is!

The weather this week has been beautiful, warm enough that the little anole lizards are out and about, which makes Gimpy just about the happiest dog on the planet. Every time he steps out the door, he closely inspects the drain pipes, the patio furniture, the spaces between slats in the privacy fence--all the places where lizards hide. He almost never catches one (thank goodness!), but it isn't for lack of trying.

Kim hosted a small dinner party last weekend, and my Goldendoodle boys seemed to think they were the guests of honor. Levi placed his ball in front of each person in turn, allowing everyone a chance to throw it for him, eventually narrowing the players down to one or two people who could throw the farthest. Gimpy played ball, too, but his main objective for the evening seemed to be making sure he left no chin unlicked.

One of Kim's guests had a charming accent (Mississippi, I think). When he spoke of "one feller who had a 'dee-limmer,'" I chuckled to myself at the quaint pronunciation and listened more closely, trying to determine what the fellow's dilemma was. Turns out Kim's friend was talking about clearing trees off some property. What the guy actually had was a delimber, a machine that removes the limbs from cut-down trees. My bad. Who knew there was such a thing?

Speaking of words, the Life Writing class I've enjoyed so much has been canceled, along with all the other LSU-sponsored classes in this parish. Our last class was Monday. It seems that enrollment was so low that the classes weren't cost-effective for LSU. That disappoints me, though I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that continuing education and artistic or intellectual pursuits aren't high on the bucket lists of many people in this small-town community. What delights me is that the members of our Life Writing class have decided to continue meeting and writing together on our own. We've found a meeting place and will start next week. Yay, us!

I'm looking forward to Sunday, when I'll get to spend time with kids, grandkids and great-grandkids all at one time. Those get-togethers are precious to me, and I hope you get to share the holiday with those you love most, too. Happy Easter, y'all!

I'll See You in My Dreams

I didn't imagine I'd be writing any new stories about Butch; he's been gone for three years now. But this morning, when I finally slept hard and late after a night spent tossing and turning, he came to me in a dream.

It was past time for me to get up, and in the dream I did that. I put on my robe, stepped out into the hallway, and there, where I expected to see Levi and Gimpy, I saw Butch instead. He was doing his familiar, happy tap-dance on the tile floor, wagging his tail so vigorously that his whole back end moved. In the way of dreams, I believed I was awake, but the sight of a living, breathing Butch made the wide-awake dream-me think I must be dreaming. I reached out first to touch the door frame, then the green, high-back chair, reasoning that if I could make myself touch real things, then I must be awake.

Butch didn't seem to have any such concerns. He was all over me, wriggling against my legs, pushing his face against my hand, soaking up all the loving he'd missed while he'd been away. I dropped onto the sofa and picked him up, holding him like a squirmy baby, running my hands through his soft fur, sniffing his ears and his popcorn-scented paws, relishing the impossible moment.

My grandmother walked into the room, she who passed away in 1988, and my daughter Kim, too, who is very much alive today but was a young girl in the dream. Still not believing Butch could be here, I asked them both if they could see him. They could not.

I turned to look again and saw him standing by my knees, his tail still wagging, then I looked across the room and he was there, too. He was everywhere I looked. Sometimes I could see four or five of him in different places at once, all of them moving, sniffing corners, exploring every part of every room the same way I would do if I could visit the house where I grew up.

Eventually the long dream changed into a twisted scenario involving a long bus ride with the child-Kim in New York City, and it ended almost immediately after that when I woke up for real. I lay quietly in bed for a long while, soaking up the joy I'd felt at the dream reunion with Butch. He'd seemed younger than he'd been at the end of his life. A little thinner, too, and much more agile. Every bit as affectionate. I've tried to remember whether or not he was still blind in the dream, but I can't recall. It doesn't matter; we could see each other just fine.

Later this morning, after I'd been up for a while, I noticed today's date: March 19th. Butch was a found puppy who came to live with us on the last day of April, 1998. The veterinarian who checked him over that day estimated his age at six weeks, so we counted back into the middle of March to choose a date to celebrate as his birthday. We picked a date we knew we'd always remember because it was my second husband's birthday: March 19th.

To the best of my recollection, this is the first time I've ever dreamed about Butch. Happy birthday, sweet angel--and thanks so much for sharing it with me.

The Deglamorization of the Sunday Special

If I were to turn on the news right now, I'm pretty sure I'd hear about violence in the middle east, one or more of the many politicians considering a run for the presidency in 2016, or speculation about who's to blame for the Patriots' underinflated footballs. By not turning on the news, I'm free to let my mind wander until it stops to ponder the decline in status of fried chicken.

All through my childhood, fried chicken was the star of Sunday dinner. Every single week after church, my grandmother would fry up a store-bought hen and serve it with mashed potatoes, thick white gravy, whole-kernel corn and Brown 'N Serve rolls. In the summertime the corn would still be on the cob (we called it "roastin' ears"), fresh from my grandfather's garden, and thick slices of home-grown tomatoes were added to the menu.

Frying chicken was messy work. It dusted the kitchen with flour and sealed it with a coat of grease, but Mammaw put on her apron and did it anyway, because she knew how much we all liked that meal. When I grew up and had a family of my own, I followed her example.

Once a week, every week, I fried chicken. I cooked it for an evening meal, though, not at midday, and it might have been a Sunday or it might not have been. The chicken was a favorite whenever we had it, but it wasn't as special as it used to be when it marked a specific day and time.

Somewhere along in my daughter's school years, Colonel Sanders came onto the scene. Once in a blue moon, usually if we were traveling, we'd stop at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant for a meal. Fried chicken eaten out, no matter how tasty it was, didn't seem special at all. I still cooked it regularly at home.

By the time we moved to Louisiana, KFC had locations all over the place. Soon afterward, Popeye's franchises came to town. When I considered the time and the mess involved in frying a chicken, the idea of stopping at a drive-thru and bringing home a bucket or bag of it fried elsewhere seemed too good to pass up. I traveled that greasy, slippery slope time after time, and it's been years since I've fried a chicken. I don't imagine I ever will again.

As delicious as fried chicken is, it's become fast food, no more special than burgers or tacos or pizza--something to eat because it's convenient, something to avoid if you care about your arteries. I like it still and eat it once every couple of months, whether I should or not. The delicious flavor is still there, but the magic that used to come with it never makes it into the box.

Get Me Through December

The picture below shows the small-town hospital that is nearest to all my Louisiana family members. I took this shot last year, passing by, because I thought the tree at the center of the photo looked pretty. A few days ago my younger daughter suggested that we rent a school bus, pile the whole family into it, and park it right outside this hospital for as long as necessary.

The first in a recent spate of hospital visits came a week before Christmas when my older daughter had carpal tunnel release surgery and trigger thumb surgery. She's done a good job of getting along with one functional hand and is recovering nicely.

An hour after we brought her home, my grandson checked in at the emergency room with severe abdominal pain, where tests were administered that led to an emergency appendectomy. According to doctors, the surgery itself was routine, but my grandson turned out to be the one person in five thousand whose body lacks the enzyme that rapidly metabolizes the drug used to paralyze the patient during intubation. He was left paralyzed and unable to breathe on his own for hours after the surgery. A respirator kept him alive until the drug eventually wore off; only then did the panic endured by his family members subside. He, too, is recovering nicely and was well enough three days post-surgery to get out of bed and cook a gumbo for a family get-together.

When I texted my sister in East Texas to let her know about those two hospitalizations, she told me that her husband had been in the hospital for several days with dangerously high blood pressure and severely swollen legs. I know he made it home in time for Christmas, and, not having heard otherwise, I'm assuming he's doing better now.

On the day after the carpal tunnel surgery and appendectomy, both of my great-grandbabies had illnesses requiring doctor visits. Both kids were much better a day later.

This past Friday my daughters got word that their father was having surgery to relieve pressure on his brain after suffering a blow to the head when he fell off a horse. On Saturday they made the 300-mile round-trip to visit him in the ICU. According to the latest report, he is doing well and expects to go home in a couple of days.

My daughters called while they were traveling back from that trip, and I told them I was glad they were on their way home. I felt fine but was concerned that my blood pressure readings were higher than they'd ever been--some of them in the dark-red range on this chart, indicating that I needed emergency care. I felt well enough that I hadn't wanted to go to the emergency room, and I thought I could bring those readings down by doubling the usual dosage of my blood pressure medications. By the time the girls got home, the readings were lower, though not yet in the normal range. After a lengthy discussion, I promised I would go to the ER if the numbers climbed high again, which they did later that night. Back to the hospital we went. The ER doc assured us that I wasn't in danger since I had no symptoms except a very slight headache. He prescribed double doses of my current medications (just as I had done on my own) and a consultation with my regular doctor after the holidays. I left there feeling slightly silly but reassured. My BP numbers today are right where they should be.

Early this morning my younger daughter was back at the same facility undergoing a previously scheduled colonoscopy. She's home now, she's fine, and she's getting some much-needed rest, the last of us to reach that precious period of relaxation.

Our Christmas celebration together was wonderful, but we won't remember this year's holidays for the lights and laughter, the gifts and good food. I hope we'll be able to laugh when we look back on this season as the one that couldn't be over soon enough.

And, just as I typed that last sentence, one of the dogs threw up. It was Levi, so we'll keep an eye on him.

Come on 2015!

**********

The song is "Get Me Through December" by Alison Krauss.
Thanks to Tiffany Woolridge for posting this video on YouTube.
Click here to read the lyrics.

"...there is a season"

November is my favorite month, the month of my birthday, of Thanksgiving, of cooling temperatures and, for much of the nation, of colored leaves swirling through the air, sometimes followed days later by snowflakes. This year the colors of Louisiana's November have been bolder than ever--maybe no match for the vivid reds I remember from early years spent in Missouri, but quite pleasing nonetheless.

Kim and I spent Thanksgiving Day at Kelli's house, where the food was wonderful and the company even better. Before leaving Kelli's, I sat on a stool next to three-year-old Olivia. "I had fun with you today," I told her.

"Yes," she replied, with a smile on her face and a cookie in her hand. "We laughed."

Indeed we did. We laughed a lot, and I'm grateful that each of the children and grandchildren in our family was born with a sense of humor.

We left Kelli's late in the afternoon, needing to be home in time to give the dogs their supper. Kim drove, and I sat in the shotgun seat and aimed my camera through the windshield. The sun was in our eyes, and as it sank lower and lower during the course of our twenty-minute ride, it lit the trees from behind, causing the translucent leaves to grow brighter with each mile we traveled.

On that day I recognized how much I have to be thankful for. I still do. I always do, yet November, beautiful as it is, has been a hard month. Colder weather has made my knees hurt. My feet, having known the freedom of sandals for months now, are not happy about having to wear more substantial shoes. All the pants that fit me a month ago are too tight now. Comfort food is not my friend.

Even as I am grateful on a larger scale, I am frequently irritated on the small scale that weighs the success of individual days. My coping skills don't seem to be functioning as well as usual. Little tasks (such as calling the doctor to find out why two long-term prescriptions that expired were renewed for one month only) require more effort than I've been able to muster up, yet must be done before we get much deeper into holiday-related office closures. I'm comfortable with routine (set in my ways?), and holidays disrupt it.

I'm getting old. I've never been a high-energy person, and I find I'm getting tired more easily now than I used to. As much as I like November, its physical changes remind me that life is seasonal, that slowing down is a natural process, followed in the plant world by the process of shutting down, either temporarily or permanently and, if nature intends it to be so, followed then by a period of rebirth.

I am aware that a life span is finite, that burying myself between the pages of a book is a lovely way to spend a cold autumn afternoon but not the most productive way to use the remainder of the unknown number of days allotted to me. There are things I need to do.

These thoughts about mortality are caused partly by the changing of the seasons and partly by the notice I received yesterday that my online friend and fellow blogger, Patsy, has passed away following a long illness. Considering words Patsy herself has written about her suffering and her faith, perhaps she was ready to reach this final milestone. I will miss her wit and her wisdom.

I am not ready. Not yet. The splendid colors of the season remind me to take care of business while there's still time.

**********

The song is "Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season)," written by Pete Seeger, performed by The Byrds.
Thanks to mhcaillesrn for posting the video and lyrics on YouTube.

"And I have heard all the stories, you know the stories..."

In the fall of 1973, I moved with my husband and daughters to Farmingdale, New York. If I'm remembering correctly, that's the first place we ever lived where cable TV was more prevalent than rooftop antennae, so, like a good neighbor, we signed up for it. HBO was part of the package. On the day the cable was hooked up, I was quite shocked to turn on a movie (Serpico, I believe it was) and hear Al Pacino drop the F-bomb several times in succession right there in our living room. (Hm. Hadn't thought about it, but HBO may be partly responsible for the potty mouth I struggle with daily; I've always blamed it on my old friend Jude.)

My husband didn't like to go out to the movies, mostly because he couldn't smoke in the theater, but he did enjoy watching popular films on TV. The rest of the family did, too. Many nights found us all curled up together on our family-sized, orange crushed-velvet sofa, eyes glued to the latest offerings on HBO.

A few of those movies still stand out in my mind forty years later, mostly because of the feelings they evoked at the time. One that moved me profoundly is Buster and Billie, the story of a popular high-school boy (played by Jan Michael Vincent) who unexpectedly falls in love with the shy, good-hearted town slut, a relationship that eventually leads to harsh consequences for both of them.

Do you remember that movie? If you saw it, I'll bet you do. And I'll bet you still remember the theme song and that hearing even a few notes of it calls up feelings of sweet, sweet love and heartbreaking sadness. Listen and see what you think:

The song is "Billie's Theme" by Hoyt Axton.
Thanks to Skye Moppit for posting the video on YouTube.
Click here to read the lyrics.

Flower Girl and Ring Bearer

Photo by Michelle Gomez

Last night my great-grandbabies posed for a moment before they walked down the aisle in the wedding of their Uncle Brad and his love, Rachel. Congratulations to the bride and groom and also to these two little ones, who seem to have been pretty proud of themselves.

Menses and Other Anatomical Catastrophes

A new session of Life Writing has begun, and I've enrolled for the fifth time. Trying to find a common theme for students at all different writing levels (all women this time around), our teacher asked us to write about our first experience with "the curse"--the biological indication that a girl has become a woman. Here's my story:

______________________________

Two things happened when I was three years old that made me believe life is precarious. One day I saw my ten-year-old uncle, Joe, chase a ball into the street and get hit by a car. Another day, at the grocery store, a Lifesaver got stuck in my windpipe, and I couldn’t breathe for a long moment. Fortunately, both Joe and I survived. When I was older I learned that he’d sustained a concussion in that incident but hadn’t had any other serious injuries. As for my own close call, I was scared and upset but perfectly healthy after the quick-thinking, white-aproned grocer grabbed me up by the ankles and whacked me on the back, propelling the green Lifesaver out of my airway and onto the dark-planked floor. Joe’s accident taught me why Mother had spanked me every time I’d wandered into the street. From my own frightful experience, I learned that most Lifesavers were edible and delicious, but the green ones could kill you.

That’s what small children do. They take their limited experiences, jumble them all together with random bits and pieces of information they’ve heard God-knows-where, and try to fit everything into some kind of framework that makes sense to their fledgling logic.

Like most toddlers, I’d been schooled early on about basic anatomical features--eyes, nose, fingers, toes--and I knew two things about my belly: 1) the food and drink I swallowed (and a penny one time) ended up in there, and 2) people seemed to like to poke the button on the outside of it. Belly, tummy and stomach were synonymous to me; I applied the three terms interchangeably to both the outside and inside of what I now know is my abdomen.

My little sister, Judy, was born 44 days after my fourth birthday. I don’t remember whether or not I knew then that she had been carried in my mother’s belly, but such knowledge might explain why I imagined the human midsection to be a large, hollow vessel. I believed that everything I ate and drank simply sloshed around in the bottom of that big container until I sat on the potty and emptied it. When I learned that an important organ called the heart occupied that same space, I pictured it as a bright red, valentine-shaped object floating untethered in a sludge of chewed bananas, creamed corn and cherry Kool-Aid. That’s when my ill-informed, child’s logic kicked in and my worries began. How big was my heart, anyway? What if I accidentally pooped it out, which was what had happened to the penny?

Those concerns persisted even after I started school. Every time I learned the name of another organ--the more of them I imagined floundering around inside me--the greater I perceived the danger that one of them might pop out of my body and cause me to die. Maybe if I’d ever asked someone if such a thing could happen, I’d have received an answer that ended my anxiety, but I didn’t ask, and no adult I ever overheard speaking in casual conversation about a lung or a kidney bothered to mention that human organs are safely secured.

The fear of losing a vital body part wasn’t all consuming, but it lingered at the back of my mind, where I could take it out and mull it over every so often. By the time I was seven or eight, having never heard of anyone dying from a popped-out organ, nor having ever been warned about it, I concluded it must be an extremely rare occurrence and that children were much more likely to die as a result of running with scissors or playing with matches. I began to relax, lulled into a false sense of security that would blow up in my face a few years later.

One summer night when I was eleven, preparing to take a bath, I peeled off my pastel, day-of-the-week panties and saw a dark red stain. Unsettled, not certain the stain was what it appeared to be, I touched a wad of toilet tissue to myself. All the repressed fear rushed back with the speed and force of a rocket. It was happening, just as I’d always dreaded. Something was terribly wrong with my insides; I would probably die before morning.

Wrapped in a towel, I opened the bathroom door just a crack and called loudly to my mother, who was sitting on the front porch with the rest of the family. By the time she got to the bathroom, I was sobbing. I showed her the evidence of my impending doom, and she rolled her eyes and smiled. What the heck? I couldn’t believe how unconcerned she was; it made me cry even harder. Finally noticing the degree of my distress, Mother patted me on one hunched-up shoulder and began to explain: “Don’t worry,” she said calmly. “This is something that happens to all women when they’re old enough to have a baby.” That concept floored me. As far as I knew, a woman had to be married before she could have a baby, and I wouldn’t be old enough for that until I was at least eighteen. This had to be a big mistake.

Mother went on to tell me that this period-thing would happen every month for many, many, many years. She dug into the cabinet underneath the sink, pulled out the blue box of sanitary napkins and a tangled elastic belt, showed me how to rig everything up, and promised she’d buy me a belt of my own the next day. (As far as I recall, she never said a word that night about the possibility of cramps or the probability of mood swings. That information would be doled out later on a need-to-know basis.)

After a few minutes, Mother left the bathroom, no doubt in a hurry to share the embarrassing news with my grandparents, the same way I’d heard her make a little announcement after I’d tried on my first training bra a few months earlier. I locked the door behind her and considered what to do next. The idea of tainting a tubful of bathwater was disturbing, so I decided on a sponge bath at the sink instead. Tears continued to trickle down my face while I washed away summer’s dust and sweat and pondered the whole overwhelming situation.

My thoughts soon turned to sanitary napkins. I was already familiar with them, having been sent to the corner drugstore numerous times to buy a box of them for Mother, but I’d had no idea what their purpose was. A horrible thought occurred to me. What if some of the neighbors had noticed me carrying those big blue boxes down the street and thought I’d bought them for myself? How embarrassing! Another alarming thought popped into my head. For as long as I could remember, my grandparents had rented an upstairs bedroom to male college students, two roommates at a time, individual students moving in or out as the semesters changed. How many times, I wondered, had one of those boys walked past me while I was playing with my dolls in the living room? How many of them had watched me gently lay my Toni doll on her bed, where her carefully coiffed, brunette head would rest peacefully on the thick, white, gauze-covered Kotex pad that was her pillow?

Now my tears were angry ones. If Mother had only told me sooner about monthly periods, I could have avoided both the public display of personal items and the fright I’d experienced minutes earlier. When I finally mustered the courage to leave the bathroom, Mother must have read the expression on my face and realized I was mad at her. She explained as we went to bed that night that her own first period hadn’t arrived until she was sixteen, so she’d thought she still had plenty of time to fill me in.

Maybe so. But considering all the conversations we should have had--and didn’t--before I grew up, got married and had children of my own, I suspect the real reason was that she just didn’t like to talk about those kinds of things.

Teen Town, 'Tween Town

A couple of years ago my cousin Karen sent me a manila envelope full of letters I'd written to her between 1955 and 1957. Deep down I'd always known I was a geeky, awkward adolescent, not one of the cool kids, and any shred of doubt I might have had about that was erased when I read those letters nearly sixty years after I wrote them. This one, dated Jan. 15, 1957, is a good example:

At my current age I don't have the patience to turn that letter upside down and all around to read what I wrote back then, although the straightforward, left-to-right section in the bottom left-hand corner jumps out at me: "You bet I saw Elvis on T.V. the other night. I wouldn't have missed it for anything."

I was not alone in the geeky department. Karen wrote back to me in invisible ink, as evidenced by my next letter to her, dated January 24, 1957:

See how I oh-so-cleverly replaced all the punctuation marks with the spelled-out names of the punctuation marks? Gah!

Anyway, here's a translation of the second paragraph of the second letter: "I guess I haven't told you about Springfield's new Teen Town, have I? I really like it! We have dancing, ping pong, and bowling. There is also a television set. It is open on Friday and Saturday nights from seven to eleven o'clock. Most of the time we use the juke box for music, but once a month we will have a dance band. There is a snack bar where we can get hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, candy bars, ice cream, et cetera. We can also get almost any flavor of pop for a nickel. The first night of Teen Town they had free cokes and potato chips. Tommy [my ninth-grade boyfriend] drank nine cokes that night. It opened January fifth and I have gone one night each weekend since then. I sure do hope it succeeds."

The letters may be those of a silly little girl, but it was the budding young woman inside her who showed up regularly at Teen Town. What I've remembered all these years isn't the junk food or the ping pong or the bowling. On the rare occasions when Teen Town has crossed my mind since the last time I was there, what I've remembered is slow-dancing with Tommy to this song:

The song is "Gone," by Ferlin Husky.
Thanks to Michael Daigle for posting the video and lyrics on YouTube.

Elementary School: Before We Took the Blinders Off

Yesterday I registered for the September-October session of "Life Writing." It'll be my fifth time taking this class, and I can hardly wait to get started again. It's been difficult coming up with blog post ideas this summer, so I'm hoping that the assignment of specific topics in class will reawaken my writing muse.

In looking through my class notebook, I realized that I haven't shared with you my story on the subject of elementary school. You may recognize one or two incidents from earlier blog posts, but this was the first time I put it all down chronologically, grade by grade.

Depending on your age, parts of my story may closely mirror parts of yours. Please let me know if they do.

**********

The playground at the rear of Phelps Elementary School was five blocks west and one block south of the house my grandparents shared with us in Springfield, Missouri. Sometimes I switched up the route, placing the southward jog earlier in the journey, but I almost never walked the extra distance required to enter the front of the building. I started school there in September of 1948. The youngest student in my class, I wouldn’t turn six until the day after Thanksgiving.

Phelps School.

Photo courtesy of the Springfield-Greene County Library District.

Mother told me years later that she had walked to school with me every day of my first week in first grade, taking the most direct path to help me learn the way. The second week she walked a few steps behind, letting me take the lead. The third week, she said, she walked half a block behind me and carried a switch to keep me from turning around and heading back home. Fortunately, my opinion of school improved; it was soon my favorite place to be.

All the teachers at Phelps were women. So was the principal. The only man in the building was the janitor. All of the staff and all the students were Caucasian, most of us with surnames that originated in the British Isles. Nearly all of us were Protestant, predominantly Baptist. If any of my schoolmates were Catholic or Jewish, I wasn’t aware of it; we hardly ever compared notes about religion. A boy named Tony Robertson and I were the only two students in my class whose parents were divorced.

We started each day at Phelps by placing our right hands over our hearts and reciting “The Pledge of Allegiance,” changing our recitation in fifth grade when the words “under God” were added to it. In an era that was largely peaceful, we filed outdoors two-by-two for fire drills and occasionally practiced ducking under our desks in case the Russians bombed Springfield.

During the Christmas season the entire student body sat around an enormous tree in the main hall and sang Christmas carols. Once a week the music teacher rolled a piano into our classroom and taught us to sing “Oh, Susannah,” “The Erie Canal,” “The Marine’s Hymn,” “America the Beautiful” and other traditional songs. We also sang “Dixie” without giving a single thought to its history or its lyrics.

In art class we dabbled in poster paints, clay, and papier-mâché on brightly patterned oil cloth brought from home to protect our lift-top desks. The distinctive smell of the oil cloth was a favorite scent, as was the minty aroma of the white paste we used for art projects. Each February we decorated shoeboxes and cigar boxes with red and white crepe paper and passed out Valentines, but only to the kids we liked.

We joined after-school organizations that encouraged good citizenship and taught us important life skills, such as how to make Rice Krispie Marshmallow Treats. In second grade I was a Blue Bird. Instead of progressing to become a Campfire Girl, I dropped out and later switched to the Girl Scouts. No matter how many friends I made among the students, it was the teachers who meant the most to me.

Me, wearing brand-new Girl Scout uniform - 5th grade - 1953.

In this photo I was facing our house. The buildings behind me were

part of what was then Southwest Missouri State Teachers College.

My first-grade teacher was Miss Davis. (We called them all “Miss,” though many of them were married.) Miss Davis was a grandmotherly woman with a kind face and fluffy silver hair. Wanting to learn the names of all those children I’d never met, I concentrated each morning as Miss Davis called the roll, beginning with Jimmie Paul Allen, on to me and then Jane Kay Burke in the B’s, and on through the alphabet as far as Edward Lee Wheeler. To this day, if I think of a child who was in my first grade class, I usually remember his or her middle name.

I took learning seriously and was apparently distressed when it didn’t go fast enough to suit me. Miss Davis once reported to Mother that she’d found me crying because I didn’t know how to spell elephant. She showed me how that day. Writing and arithmetic were fun, but it was reading that excited me. We whipped through the books about Dick and Jane and Spot and Puff and I wanted more, more, more. In April of 1949, near the end of first grade, I read for myself the newspaper article about Kathy Fiscus, a three-year-old California girl who fell into a well and died while the nation waited and prayed for her rescue. That’s my first memory of being deeply moved by something I’d read.

Second grade is a bit of a blur. I remember that my teacher was Miss Hutchinson, a perky young woman with a blonde pixie haircut, and I remember having a boyfriend, Bruce Crane (Alan Bruce Crane), a crush that carried over from first grade. Bruce was the son of our postman, and I liked him off and on all through grade school.

Compared to the other grades, third grade was the pits. Miss Butler stood only about half a head higher than her students and was as big around as she was tall. She couldn’t reach her feet to tie her shoes, so she’d show up each day wearing slippers and appoint one of us children to assist her into her work shoes. She was never without her wooden stick--one I now recognize as a conductor’s baton--and didn’t hesitate to use it. Miss Butler rarely smiled. What she did do, for which I’ll forever be grateful, was read to us every afternoon from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. I wrote a letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder that year and received a handwritten answer from her. I wish I knew what happened to that letter.

Miss McDonald taught fourth grade. She was tall and slim, with collar-length brown hair parted and swept to one side. She liked the theater and directed our class in two plays we presented to the whole school. The first was a Christmas pageant in which I played the non-speaking role of the innkeeper’s wife, and the second was Blue Willow, an adaptation of the Doris Gates book about the daughter of an impoverished migrant worker and the Blue Willow plate that was her prized possession.

By fourth grade I was riding my bike to school. Local ordinances prohibited bicycles on sidewalks, so I rode in the street, near the curb. One day, returning to school after I’d gone home for lunch, I saw a man come out of a house half a block away and get into his car, which was parked in my path. He didn’t start the car immediately, so I continued riding until I was about a car-length behind him, then stopped to wait until he drove away. I expected the man to drive forward, but he didn’t; he suddenly began backing up to turn onto a side street. I jumped off my bike but didn’t have time to pull it out of the way before he ran over it. The man leaped from his car and appeared to be horrified at such a close call. He tried to talk to me, but he was a stranger, so I left the broken bicycle in the street and ran all the way to school.

The lunch hour hadn’t ended yet. I ran past all the children on the playground and up the stairs to Miss McDonald’s empty classroom. She found me there minutes later, scared and shaken. As I tearfully explained to her what had happened, the principal arrived. The man had followed me to school, bicycle in his open trunk, to make sure I wasn’t hurt. I guess the principal had spoken with him and then gone from classroom to classroom in search of a child in distress. After a brief telephone conference with my mother, who was at work, it was decided that the principal would accompany me home to the comforting arms of Mammaw, my grandmother. The stranger who’d run over my bike drove us there.

Miss Challis was my fifth grade teacher. She lived close enough to us that I could ride my new bicycle (a gift from you-know-who) to visit her at home sometimes. The worst day of my elementary school career was the day of our fifth grade Halloween party. I don’t remember what my costume was supposed to be, but I recall teetering across the playground in Mother’s high heels and seeing Jim Burns, a big, strapping sixth-grader, punching on my fifth-grade classmate, Jimmie Allen. Jimmie was the smallest boy in every grade; I was a head taller than he was. I wobbled over to where they were and turned to face big Jim. I must have said some variation of the line about picking on “somebody your own size,” because that’s what he did. He socked me right in the stomach. I remember sitting in the playground dirt next to Jimmie and looking at my outstretched legs, the toes of Mother’s shoes pointing skyward as I sucked in big gulps of air.

By the time I’d recovered and made it upstairs to Miss Challis’s room, the temperature had begun to drop sharply and a light rain was falling. When the last of the jack-o-lantern-shaped cookies had been consumed and the dismissal bell rang, the rain had turned to sleet, and the air was so cold that the sleet was sticking to the ground. I didn’t know that Mammaw had driven to school to pick me up because of the nasty weather. She waited for me to come out the back of the building the way I always did, but I, not wanting to get fresh playground mud on Mother’s shoes, had gone out the front door. Mammaw and I missed each other. I trekked all the way home in those floppy high heels. Every few yards I’d have to stop and balance on the slick sidewalk to hitch up the borrowed nylon stockings that kept slipping out of their loose garters and falling to my ankles. The wet, droopy nylons were sheer misery.

In sixth grade I was in Miss Engleking’s class in the same classroom that Miss Butler had used when I was in third grade. Miss Engleking, tall and stout with tight, iron-gray curls, permitted no nonsense. When a boy named Luther annoyed the boy in front of him, John, by repeatedly thumping him on the head, Miss Engleking allowed John to choose the largest book he could find--an enormous dictionary--and give Luther one good whack over the head with it.

One day well into the school year Miss Engleking confronted me in the lunchroom as I passed the teachers’ table: “Someone told me you were singing a song about me being fat, and I’d like to hear it.” I hemmed and hawed, saying that I didn’t really remember what I’d been singing, that it was just something silly I’d been making up on the spot. “I want you to sing it,” Miss Engleking demanded. “Here. Now. Loud.” I did sing it, my head bowed, voice cracking in shame and embarrassment. When I finished, Miss Engleking surprised me. She laughed, and then she encouraged me. She told me the song was “very clever” and that I should write more to develop my writing skills. Then she added one more bit of advice: “Next time try to write something that will make someone feel good.”

We learned so much in the safe cocoon of elementary school. We had no idea how much more there was that we needed to know--or that we’d spend the rest of our lives trying to learn it.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June!

Today is my mother's birthday. If she'd lived, she'd be 91 years old, which seems odd, since I can reach into my heart and pull her out at any age I remember her, but I can't imagine her being as old as 91. I don't think she'd have liked it much; the aging process was always her enemy.

Sixty years ago, when she was 31, she was the working mother of two daughters. She'd been divorced from our father for six years, and some of those years were lonely ones. In that summer of 1954 she played one record over and over. She said it was her favorite song and explained to me one day why the little things, the daily kindnesses a good man might show her, were more important than any material things.

Mother remarried in 1957, and she and my stepfather had a son together the following year. She lived until 1999, long enough to see her children grow up and to know and love her grandchildren and her first four great-grandchildren. I'm pretty sure she's still keeping tabs on all of us, including the little ones she never got to meet in person.

I don't know if this song remained her favorite for the rest of her life, but the fact that we had that little talk about it way back when has always made it special to me. A loving, lasting memory is the best kind of little thing.

The song is "Little Things Mean a Lot" by Kitty Kallen.

Thanks to robynfentyfan for posting the video and lyrics on YouTube.

Corn on the Cob and Strings of Ash

It's America's 238th birthday and I feel excited! Well, maybe not excited enough to justify the exclamation point at the end of the previous sentence, but a pleasant, anticipatory sensation nonetheless. Don't ask me why. July 4th used to excite me because it meant a holiday from work, but now that I'm retired, every day is a holiday, so that's not the reason.

We aren't celebrating with a festive cookout, though tonight I will cook oven-barbecued sausage links and serve them with store-bought potato salad, slices of the single home-grown tomato remaining from those my younger daughter brought us from her garden, and maybe we'll finally eat that corn on the cob that's been in the door of the freezer for god knows how long. That all sounds holiday appropriate, doesn't it?

What I'm feeling might just be residual excitement from childhood. The 4th of July felt like a really big deal in the '40s and early '50s, though the truth is our family celebrations weren't elaborate even then. We usually had a watermelon, which made the day special, and we must have had some kind of picnic food, or else why would I think the occasion calls for potato salad and corn on the cob?

I'm not excited about fireworks. Fireworks displays are nice to see, but my enthusiasm for them has diminished in inverse proportion to the number of dogs I've had who've been frightened by them. When I was a kid, we lived in town. We couldn't have Roman candles or any other kind of "bombs bursting in air." We did have small firecrackers that the grownups would light. Sometimes there'd be a few cherry bombs we could throw hard against the sidewalk, and we could count on having sparklers year after year. I was always afraid of sparklers. (Whose brilliant idea was it to put fire on conductive metal wires and hand them out to children?) I gritted my teeth and waved them around anyway, because my little sister wasn't afraid and I needed to be as brave as she was.

My favorite firework back then (if one can call it a firework) was made of some type of gray-colored material that had been compressed into the shape of a sitting dog no taller than the diameter of a half-dollar coin. A lighted match held briefly to the dog's rear end would cause a long, continuous string of black ash to shoot out of its butt, a sight that cracked me up no matter how many times I saw it. Now that I live with four real canines, dog poop doesn't seem so funny anymore. Although dogs do look funny when they do it.

Whatever. I can't really explain the source of my mild excitement, but it's Independence Day in the US of A, and maybe that's reason enough.