Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
The first baby I ever fell in love with was born on November 12 (I’m a day early, here). It’s because of everything he made me feel–both then and in the fifty years since–that I learned what it is to be an aunt, an experience that was repeated several times–and that I can write one of my character’s deep love for children, though I was never a mother.
Happy birthday, Daniel. Thank you for being born!
How’s it possible this critter has been giving me starshine for forty years?!?
Happy birthday, Jess. A couple of hippie girls never saw you coming, then could never imagine life without you.
Tom bought these by accident on a recent trip to the grocery store.
I ate Cocoa Puffs damn near every weekday morning of every year of elementary school, and more years of junior and senior high than I can count. (Weekends were more likely to offer up eggs/bacon/grits with toast or biscuits–or occasionally, pancakes!–prepared by one parent or another.) Cocoa Puffs and Nestlé Quik were the only way my mother could get milk into my body. I still don’t drink milk, though I occasionally will drink chocolate milk, but not by making it with powder.
What the heck is it with straw-using birds and rabbits? Is this subliminal cue why so many kids grew up to do cocaine in the 70s and 80s?
When we would visit Uncle Gerald’s family in Starkville, their grocery store didn’t sell Cocoa Puffs, so Aunt Lola bought Cocoa Krispies for me. Though I don’t eat a lot of cereal, I’ll still eat those when I’m in the mood for something out of the corn flake/shredded wheat/raisin bran range. Having eaten my first bowl from this box, Cocoa Puffs don’t seem to shred the inside of the mouth the way they used to. When I was growing up, that was a bonus feature because it kept everyone else in the house from wanting to eat my cereal.
In the ghost novel I haven’t worked on in years, my teenage character Emma eats Cocoa Puffs for that same reason. The mouth shredding is worth never having to share her cereal with her older twin sisters, who are the bane of her existence.
While there’s a background story from the 1940s that impacts the characters and plot of the first book in the Neverending Saga, that first book is set in the mid 1950s through 1967. If I decide to self-publish it, I want a cover for it.
With that in mind, I took a recent stroll through my favorite antique mall looking for inspiration or ideas. I ended up purchasing this silly thing for reasons completely unrelated to my novels.
This rubbery Poppin’ Fresh has a 1995 stamp on the back of his hat, and I’m sure he was some kind of Pillsbury giveaway.
So, too, was one I got when I was a little girl. My mother mailed off the proof of purchase from some Pillsbury product and maybe the price of postage, and I received a pillow, about fourteen inches tall, of Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy. His fabric was the same as old flour sacks, smooth and soft, and I did love to hug him and tuck him next to my teddy bear.
My Poppin’ Fresh is long gone, but I found a photo of one like him on the Internet. Does he make you want to poke his belly to hear him giggle?
Grief is a place without boundaries
So it seems in its vastness
You think you’ve left it behind
Seen the last of it in your rearview mirror
Only to round a corner and find
You’re still there
Grief might want a separation
As much as you do
The truth is the two of you
Found a home in each other
One of my favorite family photos–my father holding his oldest grandchild Daniel.
He left us on this day in 1985, and he was: a loving father and grandfather. A devoted husband. A retired Army vet. An educator. An artist. A writer. An historian. A public servant. A youngest brother to three siblings and an affectionate uncle and son who never stopped missing his late mother and late father.
As I miss mine. If he were alive today, he’d be utterly horrified by the country for whom he landed at Normandy on D Day, willing to sacrifice everything from the most basic comforts to his own life for liberty and justice.
I’m grateful he’s resting in peace.
I’ve published this photo with a little bit of story on here before. It’s worth sharing again, I think, because of the way a bucolic day for my mother, Uncle Gerald, and friends became something else. The date on the back of the photo is December 7, 1941.
The day the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked.
A few days ago, there was a shooting at Pearl Harbor: three killed, including the gunman. A friend’s son (civilian) works in the area where the shooting happened but wasn’t there at the time. I am so, so glad he’s okay.
Current Photo Friday theme: Family
I’ve shared this photo before. It was Christmas of 1983 and I was using my tripod and the timer on my Canon AE-1 to shoot family photos. This one is me trying to get into the picture and somehow falling into David while Debby turns her back to protect herself. Daddy, ever the good soldier, is following orders and smiling at that damn camera no matter what, while Mother is laughing at us and the dumb bow David has slapped on his forehead.
I wasn’t supposed to be there. Debby’s family and my parents were living in Kentucky at the time, and I’d gone up for Thanksgiving because I wouldn’t have enough time off at Christmas. Except then I was fired by the second-worst employer I ever worked for. I’d immediately started another job, but that business was closed for a couple of weeks, and David offered to drive us up for a family Christmas.
I will share more than I usually share on here because recent conversations make me understand these things can be important. I never know who’s reading. The man I was dating at that time was angry that I went to visit my family at Christmas, reminding me that we’d gone at Thanksgiving because I couldn’t go at Christmas. My holiday plans didn’t interfere with his at all (he didn’t go with me in December because of his own job and family), and it was eye-opening to me to realize he resented me for going and begrudged me time with my family.
There were other reasons why that relationship had to end. He was emotionally and physically abusive. I rarely speak of him even privately, much less publicly. It took me a while to have the courage to end it, and I’m relatively sure this was one of the final nails in the coffin.
When a person tries to poison your relationships with your friends and separates you from a family who loves you (and who you love), GET OUT. Don’t waste time. Don’t think it will get better. Don’t think it’s your fault.
When a person physically hurts you, GET OUT. Don’t waste time. Don’t think it will get better. Don’t think it’s your fault.
Lean on your support system. Find a safe space. Nothing about you, no action, no character trait, no flaw, no strength, deserves emotional and physical abuse.
This was the Christmas when the one I call my Muse died, and I was with my family and not alone when it happened. This Christmas was my father’s last healthy one, and I could never have known that. I will always be grateful that I went despite the pressure on me not to. I will always be grateful that my family, who had no idea what was going on in my relationship, were exactly the goofy, fun, clever, sometimes maddening bunch we could be. Their love and that bond sustained me then, and even though our parents are gone, everything my family has given me through the decades sustains me still.
If your birth family is not that support for you, find your people. Find your tribe. Your framily. Let them love you the way you deserve to be loved. Love yourself the way you would love others. Take care of yourself.
Use this resource if you need it: National Domestic Violence Hotline.
Now that I can access all my photos that were on the old-nearly-dead-Mac, I can also access all the family photos I scanned in.
Thus I get to enjoy a wonderful look back at my first great love, my nephew Daniel, appearing exactly like he should in that era. I can say it every day: Being an aunt is the absolute best.