Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
Today is the birthday of someone I love with a crazy love. Recently, he asked about a couple of photos, no doubt hoping I’d shredded all copies and the negatives. Um, I rarely get rid of anything sentimental–ask Tom, who’s moved it all several times, and Tim, the Great Purger.
These photos are really for four kids who were given free access to their aunt’s closet and cosmetics, circa 1985. Happy birthday, Daniel.
at least I never took naked baby on the bathmat photos of you
My sister is coming tonight, and I’m continuing a family tradition of cleaning like a madwoman before her arrival. We used to always do this before our mother came for a visit, and Mother would say, “Please don’t! Let me do it when I get there.” Because she loved to clean, and her house was always spotless, which is something my sister and I don’t even aspire to.
I’ve also done what Mother would have done and baked Debby a coconut cake. Let’s hope this doesn’t lead to a Rex ass-plosion like last time. I still giggle when I remember getting a text message from Tim that said, “Rex’s ass just exploded.”
I haven’t seen Debby since just after Mother’s memorial service. When we were together then, she gave my brother and me each a certificate signed by Bush. If you click on it, you should be able to read it.
I think of my father every day, but I think of him with particular gratitude on this day. Although the original Armistice Day was celebrated on the date that World War I ended and honored those who served and lost their lives in that war, it became Remembrance Day in other parts of the world and Veterans Day in the U.S. to honor all veterans. Peaceful person that I am, I still respect those who are willing to risk their lives for freedom and to protect their country, and I’m proud to be an Army brat and the daughter of this man.
Thank you to all the men and women who serve our country.
I was born on a March day [number redacted] years ago in a U.S. Army hospital in Germany. My mother hadn’t expected to get pregnant when she and my older siblings joined my father there, but she’d been trying for a couple of years, so she was happy. She had some complications during her pregnancy, and maybe that’s why my parents had a housekeeper/nanny for the only time during their marriage. Or maybe it was just customary for young German women to make money by working for military families.
When my parents brought me home, I shared Lennie’s loving care with my brother and sister. My mother always said Lennie treated me like her own, and I even still have some clothes Lennie made for me that my mother saved. I have no memory of Lennie; I was just shy of six months old when we were transferred from Germany back to the States. I’ve heard that Lennie cried when we left.
Now a part of me is returning to a home I don’t remember. I’m not sure how the title translates, but this is the German version of A Coventry Christmas. I wonder if Lennie is still alive, will see it, recognize the author name, and maybe remember the infant she once cradled and sang to sleep. This one’s for you, Lennie.
Using certain tags, I’ve gone through four years of LJ archives to fix bad photo links. I know this doesn’t matter to anyone other than me, but when one of my reasons for keeping a LJ is to publish photos, it’s kind of ridiculous to think of people ever meandering through my archives only to see “This photo is no longer available.”
Please, if any of you ever stumble over a missing photo or dead link, let me know. I try to keep this place always at the ready for that moment when one of you wakes in the middle of the night–or the middle of the day for some of you–and MUST FIND THAT PHOTO OF THE KENS WITH BAD HAIR. How tragic if you should be denied seeing it. Not that I remember seeing it when I was fixing things. It could be missing for all I know. My brain is fried from looking at old posts, and what I want to know is, WHY are you people reading this thing? Has anyone ever been more random and unfocused and needlessly verbose than I am?
I figure you’re here for the man and dog photos. So from the true archives–the ones from the shelves in the study–here’s a shot from April of 1999, when Stevie became the first of The Compound dogs to adore Tim. Whenever he was here, she was all his.
A huge thank you to asterapallas for embedding the following youtube link in her LJ. Sometime back, I think a few of us talked about favorite commercials from the past. This was, bar none, my favorite commercial during the 1980s. I had videotaped a TV movie, and this commercial played during the movie, so I had a copy. But of course, that videotape is long gone, and whenever I checked youtube, the commercial wasn’t there.
Now it is, and I know about it thanks to AP. =) Mock me if you must, but this is the one commercial that could make me cry every time I saw it, even more than the phone company commercials: “Little Sister.”
There are some nights that I like to go exploring the Internet wilderness, and by exploring I mean venturing into new blog territory. Some weeks back, I became aware of a blogger connected to someone in my family, and I have to say that reading her blog and those of other people she knows has probably made me happier than I thought could happen this year.
On another blog I read (not the blog of a gay person, which I tell you only because of what follows), I left a lengthy comment about politics for someone with whom I disagree. (Fear not: I was my usual civil self.) As a result, someone else responded to me positively, and when I went to check out his blog, he’s a gay Canadian living in the U.S. Figures. I always get along with gay men Canadians. 😉
Something on his blog led me to look for something else, which landed me right in the middle of the blog of someone I know in Houston (who I didn’t know blogged). And THAT took up lots of time, because he’s quite entertaining, and I like him a lot. In one of his blog entries, he was remembering the first cassette tape he ever bought for himself with his own money (the Bangles). That reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Rhonda when I was recalling My First Albums. Which sent me to the photo archives for this:
Now normally I wouldn’t show you a blurry, scratched picture of me being all surly and turning my head away when my mother is trying to take my photo first thing on what is apparently Easter Sunday morning (a guess because I appear to be holding a rabbit). It’s not ME you’re supposed to be looking at, but that olive drab green box (note the arrow) on a faux wooden cabinet against the wall. It’s not a box. It’s the record player my mother bought me when I complained because LYNNE had a record player and whatever LYNNE had I had to have. That poor woman. But I digress.
My father was overseas on the birthday when she bought me the record player. (I say that because it meant he made a little extra pay, which is probably why I got a record player at all. Seriously, there weren’t many luxuries in those days.) It folded up into that little box thing like you see there, but the front pulled down to access the turntable, and the speakers were hooked on the sides but you can’t see them here because they were detachable and connected by SIX FEET of speaker wire so they could actually be in different parts of the room–stereo, woohoo! I would stack way too many albums or forty-fives on that thing, and you just know what kind of damage was done to my records from falling down on each other.
I had a few records I’d inherited from my older siblings, and my cousin Bruce (the one who threw a penny into my mother’s grave on behalf of his late father) had given me some records, too. But when I got the stereo, I also got three albums–brand new albums owned by no one before me. I was the one who got to tear off the cellophane and pull out the pristine vinyl that bore not a single scratch or smudge. And even though I was only like, um, minus two years old or something, I still remember what all three albums were:
Apparently, I was very loyal to Columbia Records.
I wore those things out and can still sing every word of every song on all three of them, I’m sure. Though they are stored with a few hundred others in a window seat in my house, I’m betting they’re unplayable.
And just to bring this full circle, the other arrow is pointing to a bassinet with my Betsy Wetsy doll sitting in it, but it was actually the bassinet of the family member I was talking about in the first paragraph of this post.
Good memories.
Current Photo Friday theme: Garden
Current Photo Friday theme: I love…
…the scratches and worn grooves on the wedding ring my father gave my mother six decades ago.
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The breast cancer awareness movement began when the first Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure® was held twenty-five years ago, in October 1983, in Dallas, Texas, with eight hundred participants. By 2002, more than 1.3 million people participated in races throughout the U.S. and other parts of the world.
The first pink ribbons connected to breast cancer awareness were handed out at the 1991 New York City race for breast cancer survivors. In 1993, Evelyn Lauder of the Estée Lauder Companies founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and established the Pink Ribbon as its symbol.
During this month, many companies adorn thousands of products with pink ribbons, color their products pink, or otherwise specially package them with a pledge to donate a portion of their sales to support breast cancer awareness and research. Several advocacy groups reject such commercialization as a marketing ploy, and question the use of possible cancer-causing agents in some of the very products sold to raise money. Even Barbie was in the middle of the controversy in 2006.
I might not buy a product specifically for the purpose of raising money (say, a pink Dyson vacuum cleaner, because for one thing, it’s out of my price range), but if I’m buying something I use or need anyway, it’s nice to know some of the money will go to breast cancer research. You already know which side I’m on in the Unrealistic Body Image Doll versus the Develop Your Imagination Doll battle. Politicize dolls if you must, but I had a step-grandmother who had a radical mastectomy and lived to be old enough for me to know her as my only grandmother. Her spirit, her love for my grandfather and my family, and her kindness to the bashful child I was, made her beautiful, and no Barbie has ever made me see her any other way.
Dream, dream away.
Magic in the air.
Was magic in the air?
I believe, yes I believe.
More I cannot say.
What more can I say?
On a river of sound.
Through the mirror go
round, round.
I thought I could feel.
Feel. Feel. Feel.
Music touching my soul.
Something warm, sudden cold.
The spirit dance
was unfolding…
John Lennon, “No. 9 Dream”
Last night, I was on the phone with Marika, looking back through my e-mail filing cabinet for something. I realized that I’d fallen completely silent and quickly told her goodbye. I’d stumbled across some e-mails from 2004 between Riley and me, and as usual with our interchanges, talk turned to John Lennon and his artistry–John Lennon being Riley’s forever muse, inspiration, hero…
Today would be John Lennon’s sixty-eighth birthday, and I try to imagine how many ways he’d have stayed relevant and rebellious as he aged. But mostly, I think of these two kindred spirits moving across the infinite dance floor.
John Lennon John Riley Morris