Tag: legacy writing

D-Day Eve


This is a page from one of my father’s scrapbooks. I don’t know if any photos of Polly are among the stacks of photos that belonged to my parents. I only know the page is empty.

I wonder about Polly. She was part of his life from 1941 to 1945. In 1944, he shipped out to land at Normandy on June 6. I know what D Day was like from research and photos. I can’t watch war movies at all because I don’t want to see what he saw even through the lens of Hollywood.

He later moved into Holland and Germany and I know about a few of his experiences from that time. I can only imagine how war changed him. Is that why there was only one more photo? Did she send it to him while he was in Europe? Was she part of a more innocent time forever lost?

In 1947 he married my mother. They made each other laugh. They loved the same books and music. They danced their way through decades, but they also understood each other’s sorrows. She was the right one for him.

I hope Polly found the right one, too.

Anniversary

Tom and I have been married longer than a lot of the people I work with have been alive. THAT IS WEIRD.

Debby had already eaten, but Tim joined us out for dinner. It was a nice way to unwind after a busy, rainy day.

Later, I read some news before I finished my work. Twenty seconds into a video recording, I put my head on my desk and cried. I don’t understand–I don’t WANT to understand–the cruelty that is on display in this country daily. The outrage I feel over injustice and dishonesty, avarice and inhumanity, that is my mother inside my heart. Inside my head are the gifts of my father: his perspective, his reassurance that things have been this bad and worse and can and will be better. We study our history; we create our destiny.

When I’m at my most fragile, that’s when they seem closest. I know there are good and wise people like them still. Tom has been one of those in my life for more than three decades–thirty of those years married.

you can never spend his wealth

Every time I hear New Republic’s song “Preacher” I think of my own grandfather.

When I was a kid, my grandfather was a preacher
He’d talk about life, yeah he was something like a teacher
He said God only helps those
Who learn to help themselves
He was a million miles from a million dollars
But you can never spend his wealth

November 22, 1963

I got on the school bus. Another girl was holding a transistor radio to her ear and crying. When I asked someone what was wrong, he said, “Somebody shot the president.”

I was so young that I couldn’t possibly know the impact. But I remember the TV being on for days and watching the funeral. I remember going into the bathroom and crying into my towel where it hung on the rack and wondering, “What’s going to happen to us?”

Each time I see a child grapple with horrific news and watch innocence die in their eyes, I remember again.

It was a subdued Christmas that year.

Portrait of the Artist

I think I did pretty well after the flood as we started pulling stuff out of the house and I ruthlessly decided what was trash and what wasn’t. “I don’t care” became my stock response to every item someone else expressed sympathy about. But when I found this in a flooded bin, it made me physically ill. I didn’t know I still had it. I’d even asked my brother last year if he had it, and he thought he did.

This discovery about broke me.

Debby and Lynne painstakingly lifted it from the water and found a way to place it where it could dry. It did dry, and the truth is, there was already some staining on the sketch long before our flood, but nothing like it has now.

Written on the bottom: HERE’S AN ARTIST’S CONCEPTION OF ME. I can’t read the artist’s name, but I think the date is 1949, which would corroborate what my mother once told me, that the sketch was done of my father by one of his fellow art students while he was in college.

Today’s Daddy’s birthday. The sketch is weathered but it will be okay. Like me.

He was one of the biggest reasons I’m a strong person.

Found!

Here you go, Lynne. I found it where I hoped it was.

This is a quilt Mother made in the early 1980s. Many of us signed squares for her. Some drew pictures. She embroidered those pictures and signatures to make them permanent–in some cases more permanent than the people who were part of our lives in those years. I’ll probably photograph individual squares of this and post them over time. But not all of them because it’s good to let sleeping dogs lie (though not on this quilt!).

Button Sunday


Today’s button is part of a bigger picture.

A few years ago, Lynne and I were digging something out of her large walk-in closet at her Green Acres house (she’s in a different home now, and about to move again, but that’s a good story for another day), and she pointed out her fringed, suede vest hanging in the corner, a leftover relic from our hippie high school days. I felt a pang of envy that she still had it and wondered aloud what might have happened to my fringed jacket from that same era. I thought I had a photo of Lynne’s vest, but I can’t find it, though I did one time put a high school photo of me in my fringed jacket on my blog, right after I discovered that it STILL existed. My sister had held on to it through the years and taunted that it would remain forever in her possession.

Debby has just moved to Houston–she found a bunch of buttons in her former basement that she brought to me, and the one above was among them. What she did not bring was my fringed jacket. It had been inadvertently left in a closet of clothes she was donating.

I felt a moment of regret, then I let it go. After all, up until three years ago, I thought the jacket was long gone from my life. It would never fit me now, and anyway, though the jacket would be a tangible connection to people and times that are gone but still loved, it’s all alive in my mind, right?

Then–as Debby was unpacking–look what she discovered!

And I’m sixteen again. Lynne will pick me up in her tiny white three-speed Opel, and we’ll go to my sister’s house that is never warm enough to hang out with Debby’s friends and probably Riley will come over and maybe My First Boyfriend and there’ll be cards and frozen baby Reeses Cups and breaking the law, breaking the law, as hippies did.

I still have my memories AND my jacket. Thanks, Debby!

100 Happy Days: 94

I’ve infrequently worn perfume for many years, probably after I began working with essential oils. But I keep a variety of body sprays on hand because sometimes I like a light spritz of scent. I used the very last of this one today. I’ve been expecting to run out of it for a while, but it’s a little bittersweet to have finally emptied it. It’s made by a company called Ben Rickert, which went out of business several years ago. However, it’s not that I’m attached to the product so much as that I remember exactly when I bought it.

It was Tom’s grandmother’s ninetieth birthday and all the kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids converged to celebrate. Though we all gave her nice gifts, one of Tom’s siblings suggested we also buy Grandma ninety of something fun. Tom and I bought her a coloring book and ninety crayons. But I didn’t want to just give her the 120 Crayola box with 30 removed. So we went shopping for some kind of cool container to hold the ninety crayons.

Grandma at her ninetieth birthday party.

I found a collection of Ben Rickert bath products in a gold mesh basket that I liked. We replaced the lotion, soaps, and body spray with Crayons, and I think we also added the products to her other gifts, except for the body spray. I kept that, and every time I’ve used it, I’ve thought of her.

Grandma turned ninety in 2000, and she died in 2002. She never lost the twinkle in her eyes, her ability to tell a funny story, and her willingness to express herself. I don’t know if she ever used those crayons, but she sure made my world a more colorful place, and I was lucky to get her as my grandma by marriage.

100 Happy Days: 90

September 16 is my father’s birthday. In fact, if he were alive, he’d turn 100 this year. His own father lived to be 96–I wish we’d had at least that many years with Daddy.

But I’m very grateful for those that I did have, and it made me happy to think about him throughout the day and remember great family times.

This is also the date we celebrate Margot’s birthday–in his honor and because she truly has a Virgo personality. As her birthday presents, she got lots of treats and I didn’t force her to sit for a photo.