Tag: legacy writing

Legacy Writing 365:313

Pictures you don’t remember shooting and forgot you had: You must be this tall to ride the shuttle.


Our friend Steve C with Tom at Moody Gardens in the spring of 2001.

Recently, when Tom and I were in Galveston with my sister and talking about Moody Gardens and the Moody mansion (named after the William Lewis Moody family), I noted that these places would sound a lot less enticing and romantic if the family’s last name had been Cranky. This immediately made me want to write a novel based on a family named Surly. Come to find out, Cranky and Surly are both surnames. I love them.

Legacy Writing 365:312

This is one of my favorite photos I ever took of my sister and her kids. She’s very madonna-like while wielding a hairbrush: 1.5 kids down, 1 to go.

This is the age Josh was–three-ish?–when I asked him how to spell cheese and he told me, “K-R-A-F-T.” So I asked him how we spell relief, and he said, “R-O-L-A-I-D-S.” Oh, Madison Avenue, look see what you did with your crazy advertising.

Legacy Writing 365:311

All year as I’ve plundered photo albums and boxes of photos, each time I saw this one, I knew I was saving it for today. I don’t know who shot it, but it’s me on the November election day when my father first ran for office. I channeled my nerves into cleaning. I swept our house on Twelfth Avenue. Then I swept the front porch. Then I swept the steps, our sidewalk, and the sidewalk next to the street. We had the cleanest sidewalk in Tuscaloosa that day.

I don’t know why I had my mother’s Plymouth at school (it’s the pale blue car parked next to our sidewalk). I must have needed to drive to and from home (a couple of hours away) and the boyfriend’s car wasn’t going to be available (I spy it in the lot across the street). I also notice that I’m in my socks. How typical: Sweep the sidewalks, but ruin a pair of socks doing it. It was the first year I wasn’t a teenager, but I was still doing teenage things!

Daddy won that election, by the way.

Now I have some cleaning to do. I wish I had bellbottom jeans to wear.

Legacy Writing 365:310

I know I’ve mentioned several times how my mother always sat with her legs tucked beneath her. People frequently compare me to her, but in this way, we’re different. I do often sit with my right leg on the chair, foot tucked beneath my left leg, left foot on the floor. But whenever I read at my desk or in the “queen’s chair” in the dining room, I’m more likely to follow the example of my father.

One thing is almost always true if I have both feet on the floor or one leg tucked beneath me. No matter what piece of furniture I’m on, or if I’m in the car, my back rarely touches a seat back. I tend to sit straight up. Reclining makes my spine hurt.

I have no idea how many ways I unconsciously mimic my parents, but I’m always amazed by all of their movements, facial expressions, and gestures I see in their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Legacy Writing 365:309

When a Tuscaloosa roommate moved out of state and I couldn’t afford to keep our house by myself, my old roommate Debbie came to the rescue and offered me a room in her place. She was living in an old house that had been split into a side-by-side duplex while she worked on her doctorate. At one point, her sister and brother-in-law lived in the other half and a couple of years later, my brother moved into that half. The rooms in Debbie’s place were quite large, but it was still a tight fit for two people. However, since we’d begun our roommate relationship years before in a tiny dorm room, space wasn’t an issue.

Those bookshelves are a big mess, but look at all that vinyl!

I don’t seem to have many photos of that place, and none from outside. Here’s a picture of me sitting on the couch in my bedroom with my good friend Susan, who I met when I was working for the VILEST PERSON IN THE WORLD, but she was a bright spot in that ordeal. In time, I introduced Susan to the man who would become her husband–in fact, they married just a couple of months before Tom and I, and both Susan and Joe were in our wedding.

An elderly couple lived next door to that house, and though I rarely saw his wife, Mr. Crawford was a good friend to Debbie and always really nice to me. He had a huge garden that he tended himself, and he was always giving us fresh vegetables that he’d grown.

One afternoon I was in the backyard with my dog Hamlet, and Mr. Crawford came over to talk to me. He decided one of the plants needed water, and as he reached for the hose, he spied something in the dirt, bent over to pick it up, then gave it to me.

It was the first time I’d ever seen a Walking Liberty half dollar. No telling how long it had been buried before it surfaced, but I’ve kept it all these years to remember our kind-hearted neighbor and the cozy home that I had for a while in Debbie’s house.

Legacy Writing 365:308

Daddy, having fallen asleep on the couch with his book, gets rudely awakened by a photographer. You can see my bedroom beyond the den–this is when we lived in the rock house.

There are the moments captured by snapshots; then there are the moments that live only in our minds.

Of the many photos I have of my parents on Christmas mornings, at Thanksgiving tables… on vacations… dressed for special occasions… posing with families and friends at reunions and gatherings… what amazes me is that I rarely see a photo in which either of them is holding a book. But when I think of them, I can hardly remember a time when my mother wasn’t sitting in her favorite chair, legs curled beneath her, ashtray and coffee cup at her side, and a book in her hand.

And though my father might have the TV on, the only thing I can ever remember getting his undivided attention on the tube was football. More often, even if the TV was on, he’d be kicked back in his recliner reading. When I was in high school and had a boy over, we could sit in the living room alone. But Mother would be in the den next to us reading, and Daddy would sit at the kitchen table, just out of our direct sight line, also reading. Now and again, he’d clear his throat to remind us that he was there and could hear us.

I still love going to a bookshelf and pulling off an old book that belonged to one of my parents. Earlier tonight, when I was putting away some sewing stuff, I was wondering what this one was, so I took it off the shelf. It’s called The Bedside Tales, published in 1945, and has an introduction by The New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. In it, he says, “…I have always believed that there are two things that it is presumptuous in one man to recommend to another. These are–a wife and a book…. This is a little new for me. I have promoted a few things before, but never a book for bedtime entertainment. After all, there are nights when a book wouldn’t do you any good whatever. Let it stand about the way I started. If it’s a book you want tonight, this is the one.”


Some brilliant writers here: Clarence Day, Robert Benchley, Damon Runyon, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner… skewed toward male writers, but those were the times.

I think I’ll be taking this one to bed with me for a while. Nobody’d better surprise me with a camera when I fall asleep reading.

Legacy Writing 365:307

There’s nothing all that noteworthy about this photo Mother took of Debby and me one morning as we sat at the table after breakfast. It’s one of many mornings we spent like that, the three of us. Sometimes a roommate or friend would be there. Sometimes Terri; maybe a grandchild or four. What makes it special is that regardless of the times there might have been mother/daughter friction–of the normal variety–there was never any doubt that we got each other. No matter what, we ended up laughing about something. That still happens inside the family, even with our parents gone.

I know this was taken in my apartment because of the glass end table in the corner and that I’m sitting in my rocking chair. Plus some of the plates on the table are from my old Tupperware picnic set. I think that white blob behind Debby is her dog Spanky. I know it’s Mother taking the picture not just because the photo is with her other Kodak shots, but because her omnipresent cigarette case is on the table.

Still, there are some mysteries. The chair Debby’s sitting in looks like one belonging to Mother’s dining room furniture, but I don’t remember ever having those chairs (I have two now that I took after she died). I also don’t know who this table belonged to. It didn’t come with Tom and me to Texas, because we had to borrow one from Lynne and Craig for a couple of years until I acquired the one I have now (it once belonged to Steve R; his parents urged me to take it after he died). I must have borrowed this table from someone, but I’m drawing a blank.

Also, I wonder why my walls were so bare? Now those walls would be covered with art.

Finally, I can’t figure out why there’s a glass of milk next to my plate and a glass of Coke next to Debby. That’s the reverse of what we’d have drunk at breakfast (I still don’t drink milk, but I no longer drink Coke. I drink water and coffee–and sometimes hot tea–healthier, right?). Maybe we were already up and about to clear the table when Mother made us sit back down so she could take the picture. I guess she, too, liked remembering that a not-that-noteworthy morning could still be something special.

Legacy Writing 365:306

I have the most excruciating headache today–it makes me dizzy–and I’m blaming Sandy, because why not. I still can’t understand why a hurricane who’s named like a girl in a Bruce Springsteen song had to be so mean to New Jersey. Much less New York. Shame, Sandy; shame on you!

Though I’ve never been to the Jersey shore, I’ve traveled through the state going to and from Manhattan. In honor of the very cool Asbury Park, here are some old photos of my nephew Josh as a baby in the city of his birth.

Legacy Writing 365:305

My freshman year, living in the dorm, we had mandatory meal tickets; they looked like this. Apparently I had some meals left at the end of fall semester. I’d like a refund!

Very old school, in the days before all the information in the world could be put on a magnetic strip.

On Sunday nights, the dorm cafeteria was closed, so we were on our own. This is how I came to eat my first slice of pizza ever.

There were Pasquale’s Pizza places in (or near) both my high school towns, but I never ate pizza at them. At one of them, Lynne and I just hung out to flirt with the guy who worked there. The other I went to after high school football games but I always ate their roast beef sandwich. Lynne thinks I used to go with her to a local pizza place that’s still there, but she’s confusing me with her other friends. I didn’t go to that one until after I was out of college.

There was a Pasquale’s in Tuscaloosa, too, but it didn’t deliver. I think our delivery almost always came from Pinocchio’s, although apparently there was a Domino’s even then–I only know this because I saw a Domino’s box in a college yearbook photo.

But given the choice, I always opted to go to my favorite deli, Uncle Andy’s. It was just around the corner from our dorm, and their sandwiches were SO good. In fact, in the decades since, I’ve never had another deli sandwich that came close to my favorite sandwich from there.

I can remember lots of other restaurants (and bars!) I frequented in my years there (I lived in Tuscaloosa three separate times), and at the end of my undergraduate years, one of the pizza places had a phone number that was one off from our home number. This meant we got lots of drunken calls between midnight and two a.m. for pizzas to be delivered. Usually we let them know they’d dialed wrong, but sometimes, if we were really irritated at being awakened and the callers were particularly demanding (“Large with everything, except no anchovies, light on the sauce, extra cheese, wait–only put the mushrooms on one half, and the black olives on the other half–and two Diet Pepsis”), we’d just tell them to expect the delivery in half an hour and then we’d go back to bed.

Senior year, my favorite pizza place was on the strip about half a block from our house. Plus it was next to where I did laundry. Plus two of my favorite people in the world worked there. In fact, they met there and later married and had a son. I loved hanging out with them and our other friends there (and I still remember that David K got onions on his pizza–something I never did and still don’t–onions ruin a pizza for me).

Kathy and Mike
This is a little menu. A 17-inch pizza was $4.80. I’m old.

Legacy Writing 365:304

There’s a box of photos that belonged to my mother that I forget that I have. Looking through it today, I found more photos from when I lived in that rural area I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago. It was a good meeting place for my family, pretty much equal distance from the various cities where they were all living at the time (except David, who was already living out West then). I found this photo of Debby still in her nightgown one morning, looking as if she’s being edged off the chair by her cat Casey Sid Vicious.

I include this picture mostly because I think Lynne may be the only person who’ll remember those bizarre and mostly unidentifiable animals on the shelf behind Debby. There were more of them than are pictured here. I bought them at World Bazaar in Birmingham and called them “the ugliest animals in the world.” I don’t know where they were imported from, but they had real animal hair and amateurishly painted faces–almost as if the painting were done by small children (likely) with nail polish (or some paint containing lead, no doubt). I kept those things forever until I was finally shamed into throwing them away by everyone who was repulsed by their hideousness. Poor ugly animals; I loved you.

In that same batch of pictures is one of Josh, Gina, and Sarah’s father. I include it because there’s that ashtray I made in art class that my mother ended up breaking. Remember how I said I never used it as an ashtray? The fact that it’s on the table by her cigarette case is proof that she was always dragging that thing out against my wishes. Stubborn old woman.