Category: family
Thinking thoughts
One year, I did a picture-a-day project and I liked it. I finished my personal commitment and stopped. I want to do that again.
Wood fire
I will never in my life watch a wood fire burn without thinking of my maternal grandmother. Kate always had a fire place and used it.
I vividly remember going to her house one year for Xmas and sitting by the fire to eat pound cake and drink orange juice. The orange juice was odd. Not as odd as drinking it after brushing your teeth. But, it should have been milk. I suspect something didn’t get picked up at the grocery. And, aside from my grandfather who had already gone to bed, I have no clue where the rest of my family was.
When I reminded her of that night 30-odd years later, she was surprised that I remembered it, too.
After her house was broken into twice after my grandfather died, she decided to take my parents up on their offer to live with them. (She was out of town both times.) That mother-in-law’s apartment had a fireplace, too. When she didn’t remember to open the flue when she started a fire and sat bundled in a blanket with the windows open until they came home from work, her daughter and son-in-law had to start making plans for her to live somewhere with more supervision as they both still had to work full time and there was no one to stay with her when they weren’t there.
I have no idea how many nights we sat by a fire and talked about poetry and history. She was especially enamored of the Tudors.
Orange and black embers with a lick of blue flame is a portrait of my Mama.
Watching together
I do not remember going to the movies with only my dad. I vaguely remember going to the drive-in with both of my parents when I was wee, before I had sisters. and I remember being in the car with the sound box in the window more than I remember the movie, although I’ve been told that’s where I saw Snow White the first time.
Our parents did take all of their daughters to see Blazing Saddles. They had already been to see it and wanted to watch us when the cowboys had beans around the campfire. My sisters were 9 and 7; I was 14.
My mother, grandmother and I went to see Mary, Queen of Scots together. I was shocked by the murder of Lord Dudley. They were surprised by that. Kate said, “You knew he was murdered.” I said, “I guess I didn’t expect to watch it happen.” The only other movie I ever saw with my grandmother was Titanic and she was ready to leave after the ship sank. The love story was uninteresting to her. I believe she thought it was going to be a documentary.
I watched television with my dad. Laugh In. M*A*S*H. Hee Haw. Carol Burnette. I remember the 3 of us watching Ed Sullivan and Red Skelton together. But, when I was older, my mother either did other things while we watched those shows or didn’t really participate in the laughing and commentary.
One of her oddities was her loathing of day time soap operas but love of the night time ones. She did everything she could to stop me watching All My Children and Dark Shadows. I assumed she thought Dark Shadows would give me nightmares. But, I think she just hated that it was a soap opera. I binged AMC 2 or 3 times in my life, watching for a few weeks and then getting tired of it and leaving it alone for years. She always rolled her eyes and nagged me about watching it.f
But, my parents watched the night time soaps together and she loved them. Dallas and Knots Landing were never missed. Except by me. I thought they were stupid, the people and the stories. And not in an amusing way. The 30 minute day time shows amused me and the 60 minute night time shows did not.
Taking my 3 year old out for dinner
Actually, they were probably 2 and a half. I was still sharing space with my first husband in Charleston, South Carolina but, functioning as a single parent. I’ve forgotten where he was. It doesn’t matter. I wanted food I had not prepared for myself and served to me. I wanted some graciousness. We had been going out to eat with my parents for their whole life so restaurants weren’t entirely alien. This was just our first time solo.
I called an Italian restaurant down the road to see if they needed a reservation. They did not. It was the middle of the week and a fairly quiet evening.
We dressed up. My child has always loved to dress for festive occasions and knew that this meant we were doing something special.
When the host saw my date, his eyes got big for a moment. I said, “If there is a problem, we can leave.” He recovered and said, “Oh no. Right this way.” and led us to a booth. “I’m afraid we don’t have any high chairs or boosters.” I said. “We’ll be fine without that.”
A couple across the room saw us and looked worried as they leaned in to talk to each other, shooting glances at us as they talked. Other heads had turned as we walked across the room.
My date had water, glass half full, with a straw and spaghetti with meat sauce, skip the salad. I had unsweetened tea, salad and some other dish. We chatted as we waited.
They were a little messy eating and decided to sit on my side of the table so it was easier for me to help manage the pasta. The only mess was their face, though. Not the tablecloth or the floor. And they stayed with me. No trying to investigate the room. I had decided before we left the house that if any of that started, I would pay and we would leave.
When the waiter brought our check, he had gone from the nervous young man darting looks at my companion to all smiles. He said, “Please, come again. It has been a delight to serve you.”
The other diners around the room smiled at us as we walked by and nodded at the child with a little tomato sauce on their sweater.
The smiling host held the door for us and invited us to return any time.
This is one of the snapshot memories I have of my little child.
Another is two years later. They had samosas while I ate saag paneer at a booth in Greensboro. The Indian restaurant was a little more casual and my child was 4. The staff was quite sanguine about a child dining with their mother.
We’re going out for Indian food this Saturday. They will be 31 on Sunday. Exactly half my age. They say it feels like they’re catching up to me.
Happy Solstice!!
I remember getting so mad at my parents when I was expected to go to bed at 8:00 (or 8:30. I don’t remember. It’s been a minute.) in the summer when the sun and school were still out.
A friend shared this with me in celebration, remembrance and teasing.
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
~Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bed In Summer,” from “A Child’s Garden of Verses”
Piercings
My younger sister desperately wanted pierced ears when she was in elementary school. Our mother told her that she could get some self-piercing earrings if she wanted it that badly. They were hoops that slowly squeezed themselves through your earlobes. And she toughed it out. I thought “If M can do that, so can I. ” and I tried them out.
Nope.
I didn’t make it 24 hours. Those things hurt. My little sister is tough!
A couple of years later, when I was in junior high (before they included 6th grade and started calling it middle school), a friend got her ears pierced at the mall and I got permission to get mine done, too. That gun was genius. Pop! and it was done. I kept them clean and they healed up nicely.
Several years later, I was working at a jewelry store, living on my own, and they did piercings with the gun. I got a second piercing in each ear to wear studs over hoops or other dangling earrings. My mother was not impressed. She asked me when I was going to get my nose done. For. A. Week.
All I could do was roll my eyes and wait for her to get tired of it.
A little while later, might have been a year, might have been a few months, M got one extra hole in one ear. She called me and asked “When is your mother going to quit asking me when I’m getting my nose done?” I said, “Give it a week and she’ll get bored with it.”
I could hear the eye roll over the phone.
Time passed. Our youngest sister went to college.
When she came home with her nose pierced (having skipped over ears entirely), our mother had the grace to say, “I should have shut up about that. Shouldn’t I?”
Butter beans
When I was little, my dad taught himself to play the guitar. When he was actually able to play songs, we would sing along with him. He played for decades and tended to choose old country music, Hank, Patsy, Waylon and Willie.
One of our favorite songs to sing with him was Butter Beans by Little Jimmy Dickens.
In the Episcopal church, the service on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is frequently when babies are christened. The service starts with no lights and no music and as it progresses. Candles are lit and music is added during the collection, which happens around the middle of the service. Eventually, everyone leaves the church to exuberant hymns with candles and lights everywhere, in anticipation of the joy of Easter.
For 3 or 4 years (if I recall correctly, I wasn’t always there) some of the members of my parents’ church were in a jazz band and they offered to do the Easter Saturday music, giving the choir a break from singing before all the action on Easter. The music was always good and the recessional was a kind of Dixieland parade into the parish hall where there was a party for the newly christened, their families and the rest of the congregation.
The year my youngest nephew was christened, they played Just a Closer Walk With Thee. Just the music; no voices. And my younger sister and I got tickled. In the middle of the service. We tried really hard to stifle the giggles. But, we weren’t as subtle as we hoped and our youngest sister, the mother of the candidate, leaned up and asked us what was so funny. And we told her. So, there were all the daughters of the rector snickering in the middle of the christening of his youngest grandchild. We did manage to pull ourselves together by the end of the hymn and finish the service behaving like adults.
Later, in the parish hall, my father sidled up to me and said. “What had you all giggling during the Offertory?”
And I said, “Because, they were playing ‘Butter Beans’ in church.”
Click through and listen. Then, tell me we were wrong.
He couldn’t.
Language of my child
My sister had some friends who thought that the mispronunciations of their child were cute and adopted them into the language of their family. The kid had to go to speech therapy for several months to learn to talk once he began school. I have never been inclined to use baby talk anyway. But, that definitely inspired me to talk to my child as I wished them to speak.
That said, sometimes the way my child learned language often amused me.
We used to love to get the large Entenmann’s Danish pastry to keep around for breakfast or snacks. One morning, I asked C what they wanted for breakfast. “Breakfast.” “Well, yeah. But, what? Cheesey eggs? Grits?” “I want Breakfast.” and pointed to the box. Apparently, I had offered for breakfast often enough that C thought that was the word for it. And we did call it that from then on.
I was never sure how the confusion about the difference between cookies and crackers happened. But, I do recall how mad they got when they asked me for a cracker and got exactly that. They wanted a cookie and it took us a minute to work out where the confusion lay. It only took one explanation of “If you want the sweet one say ‘cookie’ and if you want the not-sweet one say ‘cracker’.” for them to always be accurate after that.
When they were learning to read, they came home from school and told me their teacher didn’t know how to spell juice. “She thinks it’s spelled JUICE.” I asked how they thought it was spelled. “DJOOS” I said “Actually, she’s correct. But, I can see why you thought it was the other way. It does have kind of weird spelling.” C said, “Well, dang. I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all along.”
It’s been fun discussing language with this person for 30 years.
Cake!
We had a party, ages ago, and I wanted to make carrot cake. But, I decided that slices of cake was awkward because it can be hard to slice that very thin. With everything else on the table, I didn’t expect people to want large pieces.
So, I decided on miniature cupcakes. They would be a couple of bites and folks could have as little or as much suited them. In addition, rather than frost all of them, I put the frosting in a bowl so that people could have as little or as much as they preferred. (My child doesn’t care for frosting and would always pick it off. That made me think there might be other people in the world who felt the same way.).
At the end of the night, most of the cupcakes were gone and the bowl of frosting was almost untouched. My family didn’t bother finishing what was left either.
I have quit bothering to make layered cakes. Instead I make cupcakes and freeze most of them. This allows us to have more manageable portion control. A cupcake thaws pretty quickly and we don’t feel that we have to eat a whole cake in a week.
Also, I’ve quit frosting the carrot cupcakes and finally realized that, without the frosting, they are, indeed, muffins.
I am the Audience 