An Aries Knows (this site is more fun when people read and comment)
It’s a wonderful day to be inside in Houston. Gray and full of portent. Tim surprised me earlier with Starbucks, the perfect treat for such a day. I’m paying it forward by presenting you all a bouquet of roses in the vase Tom’s mother gave me for Christmas.
She always finds the most stunning gifts in glass. It’s her artist’s eye and her generous heart. I’m definitely blessed in the in-laws department.
In November of 1990, That Old Woman was living in Salt Lake City, as was my brother. Tom and I, and my sister and her husband Len, decided to visit there for Thanksgiving. It was gorgeous and snowy, and David, who skis, offered to take anyone interested skiing. The day before their planned ski date, he wanted to drive to the desert. My sister, Len, and Tom went along, and they saw all kinds of wildlife including eagles and I don’t remember what else. Mother and I opted not to go because she wanted to see a movie. It was a new release that I’d never heard of: Dances With Wolves. We both loved it–which seems weird to me now, as I’m afraid to see War Horse even though I don’t think the horse dies, yet every freaking animal was dying in Dances With Wolves. But I digress.
That night, while Tom and Len were getting ready for their big ski date the next day, we tried not to tell Debby too much about the movie. This photo was taken then and is one of my favorite pictures of my mother and Tom.
The next morning, my brother picked up the guys. Mother, Debby, and I went shopping and to the movie. My sister did love it. Then we went home to hear about the Great Snow Adventure of 1990. I’m not saying Tom and Len were bad skiers, but at one point after Len came to a–let’s call it less than graceful–stop, they heard someone’s voice call out from the ski lift overhead, “Now that’s entertainment!”
Current Photo Friday theme: Pristine
We moved to Georgia sometime before I began kindergarten. We couldn’t get into quarters at Ft. Benning immediately, so we lived in a place called Benning Park. I think I remember three things about Benning Park: a dirt yard, a roach infestation, and a mother who wanted OUT.OF.THERE. By the time I started kindergarten, we were living on post. I looked up our old street, and HELLO. I don’t know if it’s still NCO housing, but if so, they have it a lot cushier than we had it. Big ol’ two-unit houses. (On the other hand, Benning Park sounds even worse than when we lived there. With more than seventy-eight percent of children there below the federal poverty line, Benning Park has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 99.5% of U.S. neighborhoods. Thank you, Wikipedia, for not being dark again on Thursday.) I’ll bet some of those same roaches are still stealing food, too. Those bastards NEVER DIE.
We lived on post twice, since my father was stationed there before and after a deployment to Korea. (This was NOT during the Korean War. I may not really be 35, but I’m not that old.) Here’s a photo of Debby and me with Daddy from our second stay there; you can see the quarters across the street, which looked just like ours, because it’s the military.
I’m thinking there are six to eight units per building. I remember: hardwood floors, because I can still hear our dog Dopey’s nails clicking on them. Central air, because I remember yelling into the unit outside to make my voice sound funny. Some other kid taught me to yell into it, “What’s your name? Puddin’ ‘n’ tame. Ask me again, and I’ll tell you the same.” I don’t know what that means. At either end of the building, or maybe at one end, I don’t know, was a cement slab enclosed by a gray (I think) wooden fence. Inside this fence were clotheslines. Women didn’t have dryers then. I remember sitting in there while my mother hung or took down sheets and listening to the wind flap them around. I love the smell and crispness of line-dried sheets.
I think this is Elizabeth, little sister to Stephen. Their mother, Gwen, was British. She had red hair, too. I loved her accent. They lived across the street from us the first time we lived there. The second time we lived there, a woman who lived across the street used to make hamburgers with steamed buns which I never ate because they smelled like dirty socks.
You’re welcome.
Did I mention that my father used to paint scenes on our windows at Christmas? My sister is probably making this face because her brain is fiercely trying to find a way to eliminate me since the previous times didn’t work. (I wasn’t nicknamed “Roach” for nothing.) My brother is in none of these photos because he’d reached the age when 1. We weren’t his family. 2. A camera steals a boy’s cool.
Now we get to my first best friend, Linda Bishop.
I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t Linda who had a big brother named Stephen. Maybe everyone did. Most of the people in my life have been named Stephen, Tim, Jim, Jeff, and David. It’s weird.
Our dog Dopey had a sister named Beebee. I think Beebee lived next door to Linda but became “her” dog during the day so we’d both have one. When the ice cream truck came, Linda always got a banana Popsicle. I think I preferred grape. We sat on the curb to eat them. Linda would take a lick, then give Beebee a lick. I never gave Dopey a lick of my Popsicle. That’s probably why I’m diabetic today. Linda’s undoubtedly healthy as a horse.
Of course I can’t bring up Linda without repeating my public confession, just in case she ever finds this. We were both in Miss Harris’s kindergarten class. One time when I opened my crayon box and looked at all my broken crayons, I secretly switched my crayons for Linda’s, which were perfect: unbroken and with all the paper intact. Linda cried when she opened her box, and I said nothing. I’M SORRY, LINDA. I WAS WRONG. If you ever find me, I’ll buy you one of those damn 96-count boxes of Crayolas–no generics!–with the built-in sharpener.
Hey, I named a character in Three Fortunes after you. She wasn’t my favorite character, it’s true, but just ask Lynne if she has a character named after her. I think not.
I’M SORRY, LYNNE. I WAS WRONG.
It never ends.
I grumble sometimes when I read stories about people rehoming their animals, but I do know there are circumstances when it’s the best option. And I would much rather people find a good home for a companion, whatever their reason, than drop one off in a neighborhood or on a rural road–or take one to a place that euthanizes. Animals deserve our efforts to find them the best homes, and it’s just reality that someone else may be a better match.
Trust me, my birds Bogie and Bacall were in no danger from my sister’s cat Casey when I took this photo. I’m not sure they knew that.
My sister adopted Casey when she was a single girl in a new city. He immediately tried everything he could to get his freedom, including leaping from a third-floor balcony into the shrubbery. But the two of them worked it out, and when she traveled to visit me, Casey came along. That’s how he met my birds. I, too, was single and living in a new place. My mother and sister had gone shopping with me to pick out stuff for my apartment, and we decided birds would be good companions so I wouldn’t feel alone. Each bird had a cage, but they liked being together, so eventually I hooked them up in a way that they could hang out alone or together–their choice. Sometimes I let them fly free around my apartment, but certainly not when Casey was there!
Once when my mother and sister were visiting, they sat on the patio outside my back door. It had a nice view of fields and hills, and they could smoke and drink coffee while they chatted. I was inside tidying up the place, and I went into the guest room to put something away. When I turned to go out the door, Casey was blocking my way. I spoke to him, and his response was a low, menacing growl. I’ve never been afraid of cats, but then again, I’ve never had one threaten me. I’ve known a couple of people who were scratched or bitten by feral cats or ill cats, so even though Casey had always been docile with me, I was intimidated enough to call for my sister to come get him. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear me, and I was trapped in the room with Casey growling at me from the doorway for the longest ten minutes of my life before she came inside. Of course, he didn’t let her see his badass side, but she believed me, and she started calling him Sid Vicious after that.
After she married, she and her husband were visiting her in-laws in rural Kentucky. Sid Vicious was along, and it was clear that cat and new grandmother hit it off. Since the in-laws were cat-free and wanted a cat, Sid went to a new home. That story people tell about “Fluffy going to live on a farm where he can run free and play”–that actually does happen sometimes. Sid lived a full, long life as happy as he could be. He just was never meant to be an apartment cat.
Meanwhile, Tom and I married and moved to Houston. We still had Bogie and Bacall, who lived in the guest room. But then I met a coworker of Lynne’s who loved birds. Not only was he a longtime friend to exotic birds of his own, but he often rescued birds that people no longer wanted. He’d built this amazing habitat for them and could provide tons of information about each bird’s personality and quirks. I realized that my parakeets could have a much better life with him than with me, so they relocated to his aviary. From time to time he gave me updates; both Bogie and Bacall picked out mates (originally I’d thought they were male and female, but they were both male) and adapted quickly to a new and better life.
If you ever do need to rehome an animal companion, please work with rescue organizations and no-kill shelters. And be patient. There’s no reason to feel guilty about wanting to find the right home for a dog, cat, or exotic. They count on us and should get our best!
She is one of the blank places. I stare and stare at this photo, but she remains inscrutable. How old is she here? Is she a girl? What did she dream about? Want? Or was she already married? She would give birth to four children: three boys and a girl. She struggled with illness, but lived to be sixty-one, not a bad lifespan for a woman of her time.
I can’t remember stories about her, and I once asked my mother why I knew so little.
Mother, who never met her, said, “Her children idolized her, so you’ll never get a picture of the flesh-and-blood woman. They think she was perfect.”
Maude Louise. My father’s mother, who died when my father was nineteen. Here’s the story the way I remember it.
My father played high school football. He loved high school football. He wasn’t a large man, but he was scrappy and–as he said–too dumb to be scared. And maybe too smart for his own good. When he was a senior in high school, he realized he had another year of football eligibility. He deliberately FAILED English so he wouldn’t graduate and could play one more year of football. I have no idea what his parents thought about that, but he got away with it.
There’s a part of me that wonders if maybe he wasn’t quite ready to grow up and leave home because his mother was sick. She died the day he was supposed to graduate. He didn’t go through his graduation ceremony. He stayed in town for her funeral, then he did that most Huck Finn of things, he lit out for the territories. He hitched rides on freight trains. He sat over campfires and ate meager meals with other men during the Depression. He heard their stories and saw the country. He did what work he could to make money to survive, including painting. Sign painting. House painting. Anything that required a brush he could do.
How that boy’s heart must have ached as he missed his mother. How he must have wondered if his father would ever have a reason to be proud of this aimless, wandering youngest son.
I got to know my grandfather, so I know that he was, in fact, very proud of my father.
Maybe what I know about my grandmother is this: What my father learned of love and loss from her helped shape the husband and father he became.
For that, I love her, too.
Friday the thirteenth seems to be a good time to discuss Redshirts. I’ll admit that though I saw a lot of Star Trek when I was a youngster, it wasn’t until I grew up and began to meet REAL Star Trek fans that I learned the significance of Redshirts. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, in general, on the original Star Trek, when a character you didn’t know and weren’t invested in was wearing a red shirt when he was part of a mission, he’d die during that episode.
Is it because we were ignorant way back when that we allowed my nephew Daniel to venture into the world wearing this?
Did he know, I wonder?
I swear we loved him and didn’t think of him as the sacrificial lamb in our family dramas. Fortunately, he survived his dangerous wardrobe and abandoned Star Trek for Star Wars along the way. And NO, George Takei, you are WRONG about the real enemy. Stop that!
I didn’t know until I went digging around on the Internet to read more about Redshirts that there’s a trope called “Anyone Can Die.” But I was gratified to see that they listed the TV shows Lost and The Vampire Diaries as examples of this, as I have been jarred again and again by the body count of CHARACTERS I LOVE on these shows. Fortunately, those characters tend to reappear in flashbacks, dreams, or as ghosts. Sort of like school photos: They never really go away.
One of the challenges I’ll face this year when digging through old photos is that many years ago, my mother gave David and Debby the photo albums with the pictures documenting their lives. So short of traveling across state lines with a computer and a scanner, I’m limited to what she kept and what extras of my siblings I can find in the photo album she made for me.
For example, when Cousin Rachel married Charles, I have a vivid memory of my sister wearing the long white dress my mother made her so she could be a junior bridesmaid. And I don’t remember what my brother did in their wedding, but I’m pretty sure he was all adolescent Cary Grant in a white dinner jacket, black pants, and black tie.
What did I do in the wedding? I’m glad you asked.
NOTHING. I was shut.out. And this after I had learned from Cousin Rachel not to chew my tomato sandwich with my mouth open! I had ETIQUETTE. And after she and Charles had once traumatized my delicate self by taking me to the drive-in on one of their dates, where we saw a scary, suspenseful movie (and don’t think I’ve forgotten that scene where the tortured heroine runs over her rotten husband again and again!). And even worse, I had expressed my intention to grow up and marry Charles. Way to RUIN MY LIFE, COUSIN RACHEL.
Actually, for that weekend, I enjoyed my time with my parents. While the others were busy doing wedding stuff:
I did my Esther Williams pose.
And my Evita pose.
My parents often said that wherever we went, I always disappeared for a while after our arrival. I’d then come back and tell them where they could find the ice machine and the Coke machine, details about the desk clerk’s family and background, the hours the pool was open, what the story was on that station wagon full of people who’d arrived just before us, and how to get extra towels.
Imagine what I could have told them if I hadn’t been such a shy child?
World-class accommodations in Columbus, Mississippi.
Long gone.
An old post card I stole from the Internet.
Lately, we haven’t been doing much crafting on Craft Night. Last week we might have, but instead we just created a big breakfast feast. No one’s sure why we all love breakfast at dinner. Some of us had parents who did breakfast suppers now and then. One had a mother who would never do it. But there’s something cozy and friendly about breakfast at night, especially when everyone’s pitching in. Including the fresh fruit above, some of the other choices were:
Rhonda’s wonderfully fluffy scrambled eggs. Also, cantaloupe and honeydew melon.
Here, I’m just showing off a Beatles glass, one of a set of four given to me by The Brides at Christmas.
Then there were hash browns, ham, and bacon. Tom manned the pancake griddle and took requests, which is how Lindsey ended up with Barney and T-Rex:
She settled on dinosaurs after he refused to do a Picasso or a Monet for her. Though if she’d said Manet instead:
Manet, White Peonies, 1864
Here’s a white Penny, 2012.
Dressed for one of many high school functions they attended when my father was an assistant principal: Bill and Dorothy…or…
Is it only me, or do other people ever stop and realize how infrequently we hear our own names? If you’re a parent, for example, you’ll hear whatever version of “mother” or “father” your kids use–a lot. At work, you may hear your name now and then. And if you have a good doctor or dentist, you’ll hear it several times during consultations. But in general, I don’t often hear someone say my name.
One of the enjoyable parts of getting to know Jim, Tim, and Timmy was that they not only used my name a lot, but they also used “Beck,” which is something my siblings call me, so it felt natural. And now I get “Becks” occasionally because it somehow came to be my “designer label” for the Barbie fashions. I never minded nicknames–even “Roach,” an early one–and loved being called Aunt Bebe and Aunt Pepi, first attempts from my nephews. Both my sister and sister-in-law still call me Bebe sometimes.
If you ask me things I liked about my parents’ relationship, on my list would be how they always used each other’s names, sometimes even when talking to me about the other one. “Dorothy said” or “Bill likes”–it always made me aware that they were individuals with their own lives that had nothing to do with being my father and mother. My mother didn’t like to be called “Dottie,” and only some of her siblings could call her “Dot.” She was always Dorothy. There were times I’d call her Dorothy when I was teasing her, but I don’t ever remember calling my father Bill. However, courtesy of my friend Larry H, both my parents ended up with nicknames that I could get away with using.
Larry was one of my father’s students when the television show Mod Squad was airing. Michael Cole played the character “Pete Cochran,” and I suppose since it was an uncommon last name in our community, Larry started calling my father “Pete.” The funny thing was, when my father was a kid, his father often called him Pete, so he didn’t mind it. Although I never called him Pete in front of his students–or even “Daddy,” for that matter–as he got older, I’d sometimes use the name Pete to make him smile. (And a few years after he died, Tom and I named our first dog “Pete” in his honor.)
After “Pete” caught on among Larry and my other friends, a movie starring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett came out called Pete and Tillie. That’s when Larry began calling my mother Tillie, and she never minded it. Then again, Larry was the kind of guy who could get away with anything because he was so funny. I will never, ever forget what it meant to me to see him at my father’s funeral. I don’t think we’ve ever talked since, but he’ll always have a special place in my heart for being there, for the millions of times he made me laugh, and for the affection he showed my parents.
Larry and me.