Tag: family

Legacy Writing 365:100

I didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to reminisce about today so I did a random pull–of a photo album from among many–and flipped to a random page. And… it’s not a time in my life I enjoy remembering much. But here we go.

This picture is from about ten months after my father died. My mother and I were living in an apartment together in Montgomery. I was working there and commuting to Tuscaloosa to teach and take classes. I was in and out of a bad relationship–I think the man in question was still living there, though he would be moving. We’d all be moving eventually, but that year everyone and everything seemed stalled.


We’re dressed for an evening out. Terri treated Daniel, Mother, and me to a night at a dinner theatre. We saw Carousel. I don’t remember a thing about it, except I’m sure I was happy to be spending time with them. Now whenever I hear or see the words “dinner theatre,” I can think of nothing except Death of a Salesman in Soapdish, one of my favorite movies, and it makes me giggle (DOAS being such a hilarious play, and all!).

On the same page in that album is this photo:


I think it must be Cinderella’s Golden Carousel at Disney World, and I tucked it there to go along with the theme of the musical. I’m glad I went to Disney World once, but like so much of that time in my life, the memory is tainted by association with that ex-boyfriend. Too bad I didn’t go there with Terri, Mother, and Daniel; we’d have had fun.

The best thing about bad memories is realizing I don’t ever have to be there again.

Legacy Writing 365:99

Here are a few more from when we lived in Colorado–these were selected to celebrate today’s holiday.


Apparently somebody thinks he’s too old for the Easter Bunny. Meanwhile, my focus is exactly where it should be–CANDY!–and my sister’s being pretty stoic for a girl who has a telephone pole growing out of her head.


“Wait a minute,” Little Me says, “I don’t have to share with these kids, do I?”


“Tell them to get their eyes OFF my Easter basket.”

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you may remember this story about the last time my mother surprised me on Easter. I still have the bunny.


Happy Easter, y’all!

Legacy Writing 365:98

I’m still struggling to find the right way to work on these old photos. Tom found a Mac-friendly version of the software that came with the old scanner that I can purchase. The company offered a free trial version, which I downloaded so I could experiment with it again. Only it won’t save high quality versions of the photos I edit–I guess they only allow that if I pay for it? Which seems counter-intuitive. If I were a new user, shouldn’t I be so dazzled by everything the software can do that at the end of fourteen days I won’t be able to live without it?

Whatever. The photo above is a rare one. As I’ve said before, my mother gave David and Debby the albums she created using most of her photos of them. So I have limited pictures of my siblings. This is Debby and her first husband, the father of her three children. It was taken in April of the year they married (in June). It occurred me at some point that many of Mother’s photos from that period were taken to send to my father, who was deployed in Korea. That was confirmed when I found this photo of a wall from his headquarters:


He was the Sergeant Major, and in this case, I feel certain he didn’t paint those signs. I know his work well, and these are not up to his standards of lettering perfection.

It’s possible that photo of Debby and her fiancé was one my mother sent Daddy to say: Here’s what your future son-in-law looks like. This is the man who’s STEALING YOUR BABY!

Maybe that’s why Daddy sent this one back to Mother:

I kid! My father and his son-in-law got along fine. Even if some of our spouses later became “outlaws,” giving my parents the grandbabies they adored meant we all stayed family.

Legacy Writing 365:97

Houdini peeping out of an empty toilet paper roll.

This is another of the photos I’m grateful to have found in my mother’s collection.

She was living in an apartment on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa (I think that entire complex might have been destroyed in the tornados of 2011). Tom was still at Alabama, and I was living and working outside Huntsville. So I’d drive to spend weekends with her and get to see Tom, too. In this photo, I’m still in my pajamas and clearly have not brushed my hair–so Tom must have showed up early in the morning. We’re playing with my hamster, Houdini, who I usually called Dini.

For such a small animal, he was loaded with personality. I was living alone, and he was the best company. I’d walk in the door from work and start talking to him and he’d run like crazy on his hamster wheel. For some reason, I wasn’t using my antique bed then–maybe I didn’t have a double mattress and boxsprings–so my bed was two bunk beds pushed together to make a queen-sized bed (Terri will remember them; they were hand-me-downs from her stepsons). I’ve never liked being alone in a place when I sleep, so I’d put Dini’s cage on the other bunk bed and fall asleep to the sound of him running on his wheel, shifting his bedding around, or playing with his toys. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d lie on my side and tell him stories, and I swear he understood every word I was saying. I never dreamed I’d have a friend from the rodent family, but he was incredible.

Houdini was the reason I gave Keelie a hamster in A Coventry Christmas, naming her hamster after my late dog Hamlet. I didn’t know until my friend Lynn B told me that writer Janet Evanovich had already beat me to the hamster pal idea by giving her character Stephanie Plum a hamster named Rex. I considered changing Hamlet to a different animal, but my loyalty to Houdini stopped me. Instead, as a nod to Rex and his creator, I let Keelie stumble on one of Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books and tell Hamlet about him.

Legacy Writing 365:95

By our first Christmas in Houston, my mother had moved to Salt Lake City. She flew down to spend the holidays with us, and when she was going through airport security–long before our post-9/11 world–she was told she’d have to take a photo with her Kodak Instant camera to prove it was really a camera and not some sort of explosive device. She told me that she refused to waste a photo and had someone–whether an airline employee or whoever drove her to the airport–shoot the picture of her.

I found this one and other pictures from that Christmas among her things. I’m not sure I have any photos of that Christmas, but I remember it quite well. While she was visiting, we had a severe freeze, causing pipes to burst in our apartment complex. This meant we spent a lot of time at Lynne’s, and Pete, not thrilled with time alone, turned into a Very Bad Dog.

Or maybe he was just mad because he had to wear a sweater. In any case, we came home one evening to find that he’d pulled a collectible record from all the vinyl he could have chosen and chewed it into dozens of pieces, along with the picture sleeve it was in. He also pulled an ornament from the tree that had been on Tom’s very first birthday cake (remember, Tom was born on Christmas Day). It was a little chewed but salvageable. Why do dogs always go for the things that have real or sentimental value when they decide to act up?

We tried to tough it out at our place, but ultimately, we spent nights at Lynne’s when repairs couldn’t be made in a timely fashion. (Pete went with us.) There was only one guest room with a double bed, and Mother insisted that Tom and I take it and she would take the couch. Martyr! But it was so unusually cold that we kept a fire going almost constantly in the living room, where she was sleeping. She coughed and hacked and swore we were trying to kill her with the wood smoke. Couldn’t have had anything to do with the number of cigarettes she smoked, I’m sure.

Despite all the mishaps, I still remember it as a good Christmas and was happy to find her photos from that year.


Lynne and Jess at our apartment; the couch Mother slept on was much larger than this love seat, I promise. I’m totally digging Lynne’s acid washed jeans.

I might add that the lessons we learned from that Christmas served us well when we rode out Hurricane Rita at Green Acres many years later. That time, we made Mother take the guest room. Lynne and Craig set up a portable bed with an air mattress in their dining room for Tom and me, and Tim used Jess’s room because Jess had married and moved out by then.

Legacy Writing 365:94

Debby and me with Scotty.

Debby or David would have to confirm the dog’s identity, because I don’t remember him. But I do know this photo was taken when we lived in Colorado, which should make this Scotty, our Sheltie. Mother said that Scotty was super-protective of me and when I was outside, liked to herd me into his dog house so he could be sure I was safe. Apparently I thought this was hilarious, especially when he would follow me into the dog house and block the door so my mother couldn’t get to me.

On one occasion, she talked Scotty out, and as I was coming out after him, I caught my finger in some chicken-wire that was on his dog house. I began to scream, as children do, and she was bent over, trying to get my finger loose. Scotty was not amused at the idea that she was injuring me, came up behind her, and bit her on the butt. She said her frontier pants were so skin tight that he couldn’t get his teeth into her, though, and I was freed without any damage, either, so I guess it’s another story with a happy ending.

Legacy Writing 365:91

I have paintings in various stages of progress. I’ve been a little surprised by how happy I am to be painting again. It’s not as if I couldn’t have been painting. I decided to take a break while I was doing the designs for Project Runway All Stars. I wonder if when I have the self-discipline to write fiction again that feeling of happiness will be magnified many times over? Because when I define myself by what I do, then I am a writer who takes photos for fun and paints because I enjoy it. Not writing is not a result of having no ideas or characters. I have plenty. I think what’s happened is that I’ve let outside forces have too much influence over the writer in me. I need to clear away that noise and find a silence to fill with my own voice instead of other voices.

As I wrap up the first quarter of these legacy writing posts, I know that I’ve learned a few things. Many of these photos have a strong impact on me. Sometimes a photo evokes a lot of memories or stories that I simply can’t share because they are too private to me or to other people. Even when people are dead, there are lines I won’t cross. I think writers need to have a certain fearlessness. I struggle with that in fiction, but I simply can’t do it even in this most limited memoir style of writing. It makes me admire memoir and autobiographical writers even more.

I also have to place limits on how long I work on organizing or reviewing pictures. If I spend too much time with my mother’s collections, my heart and stomach literally begin to hurt, and I have to step away from it. Or… here’s another example.

While looking for the photos below, I find this one. I think I’m at my parents around noon and my father has come home from work for lunch. I’m fooling around with my camera while we sit at the kitchen table. My mother is probably there making him a sandwich, not because he wouldn’t make his own, but because they both still like doing things for each other. He’s talking to me about something when I take the picture.

I look at the photo and think, What wouldn’t I give for just one more chance to sit at the table and talk to him?

And when I do that, I can be crying in nothing flat. My father died in 1985. I don’t dwell on it. I don’t think about it all the time. Most days, even if I think about him, I don’t think about his death at all. But in certain moments, that loss can be as sharp and fresh as if it’s new.

So sometimes writing here is emotionally draining, but that I’m doing it reassures me that I’m still a writer, because as satisfying and enjoyable as it can be, fiction writing is also emotionally draining for me. I don’t know if this is true for other writers. Because other writers say things about their process that are just about as foreign to me as speaking Russian would be. (I don’t speak a word of Russian, unless “Smirnoff” or “Dostoyevsky” count.)

That same day in my parents’ kitchen, my father paused to work on a painting he was doing for a former student of his. She’d married a veterinarian and they had a Doberman. Daddy was doing the painting as a gift, I believe. When I look at this photo, several things come to mind. Like how he would steal minutes here and there to expend some creative energy. He always loved his jobs–whether in the military, education, or politics–and he didn’t paint as often as he should have. Even when he finally retired from everything and had time, he spent more time writing than painting. This makes me smile. My father was an artist who liked to write. I’m a writer who likes to paint. Do we have some weird gene that makes us this way?

Also, my father was missing the little finger on his right hand. He was right handed. He trained himself not to need that finger. (I don’t know how old he was when it was amputated except that I believe he was already married to my mother, and he married her when he was thirty-two.) He had blood poisoning and almost lost his arm, but they were able to reduce the infection down to that one finger.

Then, in the period after this photo was taken, tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease progressively affected his right arm and hand. He retrained himself to write and paint with his left hand. I think “indomitable” is a good word to describe my father.

This last picture is taken at my house. At first, I thought it was the same day at my parents’ house as the others. Then I realized that based on the year, the piano behind him had already been moved from their house to mine (this was after I graduated from college). And then I spotted Frisky the dead fox squirrel on the wall to the right of him. My first husband was a hunter. I didn’t particularly want a dead animal mounted on the wall, so I named him and pretended he just liked hanging out in our living room.

I digress. Here’s the finished Doberman.

A few years ago, the former student got in touch with me and we corresponded for a bit. I always liked her, and I appreciated her kind words about both my parents and what they meant to her. I never had the nerve to ask if she still owns this painting.

Legacy Writing 365:85

One Thanksgiving when Daniel was still in high school, members of my family met up at my place. We had Thanksgiving dinner that year with Tom’s family (he and I weren’t married then). Of course Thanksgiving is when the Alabama (Roll Tide!)/Auburn rivalry heats up before the Iron Bowl is played. So Terri showed up with her dog Trixie dressed to taunt me:


Daniel and Trixie.


Terri and Daniel going all Blues Brothers. Daniel towers over his mom!

These are all photos that were taken by my mother, and it was fun to see them again–plus I got to peruse my bookshelves and see what books I’ve gotten rid of over the years.

By the way, Auburn beat us 10-0 that year. Whatever.

Legacy Writing 365:84


Oh, look, Debby! Watermelon! So the watermelon incident could have been Uncle Dwight’s fault.

I always think of Uncle Dwight’s house when I talk about children who behave badly. He, his wife Geraldine, and their children traveled a lot, so their house was full of souvenirs from all over the world, plus Aunt Geraldine just had a lot of fragile knickknacks, in the way of Southern women of a certain time and age. I was reminded to TOUCH NOTHING every time we went to visit. Even a hands-clasped-behind-my-back perusal of items on a side table could earn me the Death Glare™ from my mother, and we all know you risk great peril if you ignore that look. I’m not sure what I thought would happen to me–I don’t remember any specific punishments promised–and I never wanted to find out.

My mother set the bar high, and yes, as a result, I JUDGE YOU when your children are destructive, uncontrollable little hellions in other people’s homes or out in public. Cultivate the Death Glare™, parents. If you didn’t learn it in your childhood, find a friend with a cat. Cats know how it works.