Tag: memories

Button Sunday

Over the past couple of weeks leading up to this date, I’ve thought a lot about how we grieve. There’s only one sure thing I believe I’ve learned from my personal losses, from my experience with hospice, with veterans’ awareness, and with AIDS and particularly the NAMES Quilt.

That sure thing is this: Every individual processes grief in his or her own time.

Not all ways of grieving are healthy or helpful ways, but those who grieve need compassion, not judgment.

However you choose to observe this anniversary, or if you choose not to, I wish for any of you who are reading this a day in which you feel love, know hope, hear laughter, extend courtesy, receive kindness.

End of an era

My mother was an avid magazine reader. I can remember from the time I was a child what seemed to be a steady flow from the mailbox to her lap, as she curled up in her favorite chair, cigarettes and ashtray at hand, and depending on the time of day, her cup of black coffee, iced tea (sweetened), Diet Rite, Coke, Tab, or Diet Coke on the table next to her. The magazines: Time, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Redbook, TV Guide, Southern Living. No matter where we lived, those magazines with their articles and fiction, recipes and photos, were a constant. But since the times were a’changin’ as fast as our addresses, she also read Mad, Rolling Stone, Ms., and Mother Jones. I don’t think there was any magazine she wouldn’t read, and even after she lived on a fixed income, she kept up a few subscriptions.


She’s holding Joe Willie the cat here, but next to the end table, you can see her bucket o’ magazines. If your eyes are really sharp, you can also see her lit cigarette. She’s in her early forties in this photo.

By the time she died in 2008, those magazines were coming to her at my address.


Even though I wasn’t as absorbed by them as I apparently was in infancy, I would flip through them and then find homes for them: waiting rooms in clinics and doctors’ offices, Lynne’s break room at work, online friends who might enjoy them. Finally the subscriptions began to run out, and today I got this with the October issue of the lone remaining subscription:

The slogan for Ladies’ Home Journal is “Never underestimate the power of a woman.” I concur, but I would add, “Never underestimate the power of a woman who reads.” A lifetime of books and magazines kept a woman who had to drop out of school in eighth grade to take care of sick family members–whose only work outside the home was as a hospital, Red Cross, and museum volunteer–smart, savvy, aware, and connected to generations of men and women, many of whom thought she was pretty damn special. When I saw my nephew recently, he recounted a story of how her “boys” (a group of gay men who befriended her in her seventies) were going to throw a Wizard of Oz party, at which she would go in character as Dorothy (which was, after all, her name). They were able to find everything for her costume except the ruby slippers–so essential that without them, the party was canceled.

No matter; she pretty much thought all of life was her party, and everything she read was her guidebook for making it more interesting.

Sometime last century, No. 4

It’s been a while since I did one of these, but she’s on my mind these days.

I can remember like it was yesterday the first time I ever saw Terri. She wasn’t the first girl who ever sat in the Dodge Dart’s passenger seat when my brother picked me up from school during my fifth grade year. In fact, a couple of the former ones had been good friends of hers. It was a small town, after all. But somehow, she seemed different. I’m sure all his girlfriends were nice to the little sister who was encroaching on their time with David, but this one seemed more…real. Nice without being gushy. (I never did well with gushy. Still don’t.)

Her hair, in the style of those California girl times, was bleached this color. Seriously! It was long and straight, falling just to her shoulders. She would prop her elbow on the back of her seat, and whenever her fingers caught in her hair and ruffled it, the most divine scent would waft toward me. And her clothes were wonderful. In fact, maybe she was a little like the Barbie dolls I had just begun collecting. A life-sized Barbie doll who loved to laugh and could be not only David’s girlfriend but another big sister for me.

I might have some of the occasions mixed up, but as I recall, the first time she ever came to the house as The Girlfriend was on Thanksgiving. My mother had just had surgery but was determined to lay out the traditional feast. That may have been the year the turkey wouldn’t get done no matter how long it stayed in the oven. But it was definitely the year we knew David was getting serious about Terri.

Another time, on a Sunday, she spent an afternoon with us. Before I went to church that night, she took the time to sit with me and put my hair up in some older girl style–definitely something my own sister would never have done, because those were the years when I was the bane of her teenage existence. (Her name for me was “The Snitch,” and I deserved it.)

In due time, Terri and David graduated. He went off for his Air Force basic training. Our family moved to Alabama. And that December, we went back to South Carolina for David and Terri’s wedding. After a few days, they came to Alabama for a wedding reception, and then he was shipped off for an eighteen-month tour overseas. Terri went back to South Carolina, and sometimes she and her little sister, Jerri, would come visit us.


I have a ton of photos of her, of course, but this may be one of the earliest of just the two of us. I was around thirteen or fourteen, and her hair was back to its natural color.

Then David came back to the States–a lot of their classmates weren’t so fortunate. As family legend has it, miscommunication kept David out of Vietnam. My father was slated to go there, so the Air Force sent David to Okinawa. Meanwhile, the Army had information that my brother had been ordered to Vietnam, so they sent my father to Korea. Sometimes crossed signals are a good thing.

For a while after his return, they were stationed in Denver, then David left the Air Force and they moved to Alabama. Terri was pregnant. These were the days before you could find out your baby’s gender before it was born, so we all followed her lead and referred to the baby as “Goose.” Sometimes Lynne still calls him Goose.


Leaving the hospital with her new baby.


Newborn Daniel with Terri’s mother, Frances.

From the day he was born, I felt like I’d been given the most amazing gift. For the first few days of Daniel’s life, Terri and David stayed at my parents’ house with him. One night Daniel struggled to see me, too young to keep his head up but trying so hard that I swooped him out of the bassinet and held him so we could gaze at each other. I can still hear Terri saying, “Look at him staring at you. I feel more like he’s yours than mine!”

It wasn’t true–they were a great mother and son from the beginning.


Terri and Daniel.


Daniel and David.


Daniel with my parents, “Oompah” and “Grandmother Dear.”


Daniel with his Aunt Jerri and his grandmother Frances.

There were struggles–like so many couples who married too young with a war going on, Terri and David eventually divorced–but to this day, she says that Daniel never gave her any trouble.


Well, mostly. 😉 Daniel on the far right with his cousins Josh, Sarah, and Gina. Bunch of miscreants.


Daniel the kid.


Daniel the teen.

Terri always remained a vital part of our family: a sister to Debby and me, another daughter to my parents. She was in both my weddings.


Terri and Debby primping in the bathroom together on one of countless holidays when we all gathered at my parents’ house. There’s a twin standing in the background. That bathroom was huge!

Terri and my mother had a great relationship apart from the daughter-in-law/mother-of-my-first-grandchild thing. That friendship was a rock for my mother after my father died; they even lived together for a while.

Wherever Terri lives, I have always been sure of a safe harbor–a place where I can be me and know I’ll be loved and accepted–not to mention given good Southern cooking, the loan of books to read, lots of lively conversation, and a bed to sleep in. I have watched her cope with some of the same challenges that I faced when my mother got sick; Terri’s mother Frances died the beginning of this month after many years of living in Terri’s care. And I realized by the way my brother and sister reacted to the news that despite all our years of living scattered far and wide, and regardless of all the changes we’ve been through, we are still solidly the family we became on the day she and David said their vows.

Or maybe even that first day she came with him to pick me up from school. I love you, Tut.

They shoot horses, don’t they?

Though many others have come and gone, these two work horses have helped me study the world for more than half my life. I’ve turned my iPhone on them in honor of World Photography Day. All the crappy photos I’ve ever taken have been my fault, not theirs. I never took the time to truly understand them, but they’ve stuck with me in spite of a few scrapes, falls, and bangs along the way.

Mama calls…

If there’s anywhere in Alabama that still feels like home to me, it’s that town where I spent the most time, had such a rich variety of experiences and friends, and see a memory or a ghost everywhere I look. Lynne and I took a brief drive through Tuscaloosa to see what progress has been made on clean-up since the devastating tornados in April. A lot has been done. And even though I told Lynne that all the destruction I saw in post-hurricane coastal cities robbed some of the power from images of stripped, mangled, and downed trees, buildings reduced to rubble, entire businesses missing, and houses with those telltale blue tarps, I was wrong. By the time I got back to Houston and was able to look at my photos, my heart was heavy, not only by what we saw in Tuscaloosa, but in Cullman and next to some of the roads we traveled.

I shot this photo in Tuscaloosa’s Forest Lake neighborhood and looked up the back story today. A woman with her five-month-old was in this house owned by her parents. She took the baby to the basement during the tornado. When they emerged–safe–later, she found all that was left of her home: a baby crib, a kitchen wall with a refrigerator, and her parents’ piano.

This field used to be a church. All gone.

Poor trees, left naked and then cut without thought for their health and future growth.

And sometimes, in the midst of nothing, a healthy tree remains.

Family trivia: The building on the hill on the far right is DCS Medical Center, formerly known as Druid City Hospital. It was built just after my brother and sister were born. They were both delivered at the old Northington facility, which also offered student housing to returning war vets (my father and his bride).

Many houses wear this sign.

“We’re coming back!”

And even where leveling and replacing are more likely than repairing and rebuilding, humor can be found.

“Roll Tide.”

The first lines of the University of Alabama’s alma mater are, “Alabama, listen, Mother, to our vows of love.” When the legendary Bear Bryant was once asked why he returned to the school to coach after having played there as a student, he said, “Mama called. And when Mama calls, you just have to come runnin’.” Well, Mama–the beautiful campus with its stately trees and gracious buildings–is as beautiful as ever, and her stadium and surrounding streets are already busy, already looking forward. She will help bring life and energy back to the town, and just as it healed itself after a war and other disasters, Tuscaloosa will again be a lovely and welcoming home to countless people–as it once was to me.

Sunflowers

I’ve taken almost 300 photos in the past three days. I’m sharing them all!

Kidding. I’m sharing this one. The scent and heat and sounds around me when I took photos of this sunflower field were exactly what I remember from sitting on my grandfather’s front porch. In fact, I took a video just so I could hear it again, but I’m not on my iMac now so that’ll have to wait.

Imagine yourself under near-hundred degree sun with more bees than you’ve ever seen buzzing to warn you to stay the hell away from their picnic.

(Click here to view larger version on black background.)