Tag: legacy writing

Grease is the word


I don’t know if I’ve shown this house or told this story before on here, but I’m old enough now for people to expect me to repeat myself, so whatever.

Here’s the setup. This was an old house on a shady street in Tuscaloosa that I shared with two roommates who were sisters. The door went into an entryway where I set up a desk with a couple of chairs and held office hours with my students. Right off the office were stairs going to the second floor, and next to those, the room with the double windows was my bedroom. The rest of the downstairs was a separate apartment, with beautiful glass doors locked between the apartment where two guys lived and our part of the house. I don’t remember if we ever opened those doors or just went around to the other entrances, but we hung out with them and they with us, and we all went to each other’s parties.

On the second floor, which was all ours, the sisters each had a bedroom, and there was a large living room, a bathroom, and the kitchen. Off one corner of the kitchen was a sort of trunk room that we could use to store extra furniture, our luggage, and put bikes or whatever if we had them. Closest to that little room was our stove.

Both the sisters had a tendency to peel and slice potatoes and make French fries at all hours of the day and night. (Typical for late-night studying.) The younger sister liked to take tortillas, quarter them, and fry them so that they puffed up. She’d then sprinkle them with powdered sugar, and she called them “fake beignets.” (Here are real beignets; I don’t have a photo of the fake beignets.)

Since they had something greasy going a lot, they just kept one of my iron skillets, filled halfway with cooking oil, on the (cold) stovetop all the time. Me being older and more cautious, I often told them this was a bad idea. The air is full of things: dishwashing detergent bubbles, our exhaled breath, sneeze droplets–need I go on? At the very least, I said, they should put a lid on the skillet. But they shrugged off my suggestion, and so it goes.

One afternoon, I was sitting at the kitchen table, probably writing a paper for one of my graduate classes. I kept hearing this little noise, but no one else was in the house, so I ignored it. It was just by chance that I looked up and across the kitchen, which is when I realized what the noise was. A little mouse was perched on the edge of the skillet and leaning over to lap up grease. What I’d been hearing was his little tongue hard at work drinking the grease of potatoes and dough. After I sucked in air, I stood, and like a flash he was down the stove and slipping under the door to the trunk room.

I disposed of the grease and scrubbed that skillet for who knows how long, and after that, we co-eixsted with our non-paying resident, but the Grease Skillet Bar was permanently closed to him.

A happier task completed

Late every August and into September, it’s impossible not to think of the impact of the flood waters from tropical storm Harvey (it had been downgraded from a hurricane by the time it got to us) on Houston, our home, our family, and so many of our friends in 2017.

I know I blogged a lot about it, and often refer to it even now. When I was pulling all my journals and diaries out of the cabinet that housed them, I found again something very special that I shared here when I found it water-damaged in a bin a few days after we were flooded.

It was a sketch done of my father by a fellow art student in 1949. It hadn’t been in the best shape, but the water further stained and damaged the paper. I was crushed when I found it. Lynne and Debby carefully extracted it from the water and set up a safe place for it to dry.

When I took it out of the cabinet the other day, I decided it was time to frame and hang it, and now it’s in the library.

It hangs between two of his paintings: one of an old fisherman (my brother or sister may know more about this one) and one he painted for me when I was a young adult and asked him for “a city.” He interpreted it in a way I’d never have imagined and still love so much that it’s a pleasure to see it every day. You may even remember the colors inspired one of my tiny One Word Art paintings that I titled “Respect.”

Button Sunday

Blog still being down, I’m filling this space with another of my Legacy Writing posts, this one from November 17, 2012, to recall a time when I was in sixth grade and Debby was a junior in high school.

When we moved to Alabama, my father bought an old Ford Falcon to drive to work so my mother wouldn’t be left at home without a car. It looked something like this.

It was painted light blue, and either the original paint was flaking off, or it had been badly repainted. It had bench seats in front and back. The radio played even when the car wasn’t running and without the key being turned at all. Daddy’s drive to work was about ten miles, and Debby and I went to school in the same college town where he worked. The heater would finally start to warm up the car about halfway there on winter mornings, and the car always smelled faintly of gasoline. And cigarettes, because he smoked then.

He’d drop Debby off at the high school. My school was just across the street from the ROTC building. In the afternoons, Debby would walk there from school, and we’d sit in the car and wait for him to get off of work an hour and a half later. Sometimes she had after-school activities, and sometimes I went to my friend Pam’s grandmother’s house, which was just down the street from his building, and Pam and I would watch TV or feed apples to her horse–or someone’s horse–who was pastured nearby.

On the days that Debby and I sat in the car and waited for Daddy, we’d listen to the radio and she’d sneak cigarettes. One day I glanced toward the building and gasped. “Debby! Here comes Daddy!”

She hurriedly stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and slammed it shut. It wasn’t time for him to go home; he was just coming to check on us, he said. He leaned his hands against the outside roof of the car on the driver’s side, where my sister sat, and talked to us for a few minutes. It wasn’t long before I realized that the fire from Debby’s cigarette had relit some of Daddy’s old cigarette butts, and smoke was starting to pour from the ashtray. While she kept him talking, I surreptitiously tried to wave the smoke toward my open window.

Finally Daddy went back inside his building and we almost collapsed from relief that he hadn’t noticed the near-fire that was going by that time in the ashtray.

Many years later, we were sitting around telling stories. Debby mentioned that she used to smoke in his car after school but he never knew it since he was a smoker, too.

“I could see you smoking every day from my office window,” he said. “Of course I knew.”

Ever The Snitch, I said, “Yeah, but you didn’t know about the time she set your ashtray on fire.”

“No,” he agreed. “Why would I have noticed plumes of smoke coming from the dashboard and you waving your arms around in the background?”

THEY ALWAYS SEE EVERYTHING.

Tiny Tuesday!

All of us here at the Hall have been trying to do a little gardening and yard work/cleaning to spruce up the place. I’ll be sharing photos now and then, but for today, I wanted to share a tiny find.

After last year’s freeze, we lost botanicals that I’d been nurturing for thirty years. We had a lot of pots filled with nothing but dirt. After more than a year of being bothered by those plant-less reminders, and prompted by a couple of other things (mini health crisis; finally getting to see Lynne’s new home and her always-gorgeous gardens), I got Tom to help me brainstorm what we could do to provide a more pleasing place to enjoy our yard (when the heat and mosquitos will allow it).

One of the first dirty jobs he did was dumping the old soil from all those pots. There’s a certain section along the fence where some dogs like to dig (notably, the late Penny, along with Anime and sometimes Delta), so he used the soil to fill in there. A lot of it was tangled in old dead root balls that he had to break up. In doing so, he found a ceramic frog that my mother had used in one of her potted plants. Don’t know how it ended up there, but if she were here, she’d remind me that if I maintained my plants better, the frog would never have been lost. (I’ll say it again: ONLY David and Debby got the plant-growing gene from her.)

We’d bought some new aloe for small pots on the back patio because I usually have good luck with aloe. However, there’s one aloe plant in Aaron’s Garden on our front porch that has always struggled. I transplanted it to a new pot in the backyard with a thriving aloe plant, gave it some succulent food, and took one of the new plants for Aaron’s Garden. And that’s where I put the frog, so now his garden has a little gift from a grandmother he loved and who loved him so much.

Aaron and Mother, 2008

Tiny Tuesday!

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2022 at 1:6 scale, here is another of the dolls from Mattel’s Inspiring Women Series.

I found this doll I think last October when I was in Barnes & Noble. The associate who checked me out was surprised and said he hadn’t been aware the store had the doll and he thought it was great. I got the sense that he might be going upstairs to put one on hold for himself–not because he collects Barbies, but because of his admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was the longest-serving First Lady in the U.S. White House as wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there is so much more to know about her. I recommend a crash course via her Wikipedia entry to get a sense of the complex woman she was and the human rights advocate she became.

My mother, having been a child during the Depression, was a huge supporter of both FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. On one of our vacation trips to Callaway Gardens in Georgia, my parents took Lynne and me to visit The Little White House, the Roosevelts’ home in Warm Springs, Georgia.

I’m sure that trip contributed to my interest in the Roosevelts, as well as being folded into my own early passion for women’s rights and civil rights. As always, for me, knowing about the more human qualities of a trailblazer actually makes a person more inspirational. We are not saints; none of us are without flaws. Roosevelt made changes in herself and in the world that remind me that we can all be better, do better.

I can’t let this date pass without expressing my desire to pick up the phone and wish one of my more personal life’s inspirations a happy birthday. I miss you and love you always, MVP.

Questions, No. 7


From the 3000 Questions About Me book: 2534. Do you know any identical twins?

Two of my most beloved and favorite people in the world are identical twins. I can’t imagine my life without them.

You can probably see differences between them in these photos, but especially when they were children, it could be tricky in person. Not for me–in person, I always got it right. In pictures, while it’s easy to see differences, it’s harder to remember which attributes belong to which twin. There’s not, by the way, a good twin and a bad twin. They’re both good twins, best friends, and have unique personalities.

Photo Friday, No. 788

Current Photo Friday theme: Memories

These jacks belonged to my mother, and as she aged, she used them to maintain dexterity and hand/eye coordination. They are more colorful than the ones I had as a child, but I spent many happy times sitting on a porch or sidewalk playing jacks.

The ball shown with these no longer has its bounce. The BEST part of jacks was when you somehow lucked into the perfect ball–just the right amount of bounce, a good fit to a small palm–such are the joys of childhood, and sometimes, when you revisit the game with your older friends, the glee of adolescence.

Tiny Tuesday!

Who knows, I may talk about Christmas stuff a few more days, or maybe not again at all until some random and incongruous date in the future.

Every few years, I seem compelled to go through our decorations and purge some because we have too many or they no longer align with my interests. I’ve never been a theme tree person, doing everything in red or using bows or paying homage to some era or city (I did once buy ornaments and do a Mardi Gras tree, though at that time, I’d never been to New Orleans or to Mardi Gras anywhere, but the colors were nice and the ornaments were cheap and we were on a tighter budget in those years).

I like my trees to be weird and wonderful, a hodgepodge of things we like and things other people give us. The ornaments are fabric, metal, glass, plastic, ceramic, and wood. Some are expensive (these are most often the gifts) and hang in harmony side by side with the damaged ones I buy at after-Christmas sales as well as the beautiful ones that catch light and shimmer. Apparently, I like my trees to be diverse, quirky, slightly unpredictable, offbeat, profound, funny, regal, and classic all at the same time. Maybe they remind me of the most interesting people I know.

After Christmas this year, I didn’t purge anything. I mostly reorganized it so decorating will be easier next time. One of the things I did was put a lot of the stuff we’ve gotten from Tom’s mother/parents through the years into the same bin, even if it’s not all for decoration. Some of it is stuff that she saved from Tom’s childhood. I may get more than one post out of this, so I’ll start with this little wooden zoo.

The animals are TINY. For whatever reason, I decided I wanted to put it together, so I took a break from UNdecorating and sat at the breakfast room table to do that, while Tom and/or Debby were in and out.

“Some of the fence rails are missing,” I told Tom, “and at least one is shorter than the others. They keep falling out of the corner pieces.”

“I think it’s designed to help children learn patience,” he suggested.

“It’s not doing much for this Aries adult.”

When I finally got the pens up (having to let them share one set of rails because of the missing pieces), I turned my attention to the animals.

“I can’t even determine what some of these animals are,” I said.

“That one’s a squirrel,” Debby said and pointed.

“Then that squirrel is as big as whatever this black dog-looking thing is. In fact, I think this entire zoo is pretty sketchy. The giraffe and elephant may go together, but what is this? A donkey?”

More discussion ensued, but I think I finally figured it out. It is a black wolf, just a jump over a couple of slender rails away from a sheep. The donkey is there to stop him and save the sheep. There’s logic here.

So, Great Aunt Francis who bought this zoo in New York for wee Tom, if it’s supposed to be an allegory for how disparate creatures must coexist, be hard to judge by their appearance, help curb one another’s impulses to be predatory, and not always find themselves in the classiest or most stable place, then you chose well.

In truth, this whole getup is also a lot like my Christmas trees.