Tag: nostalgia

Midweek Update

In five days, our plumber is scheduled to come to Houndstooth Hall. This is VERY exciting news to me! If things are fixed on Monday, it means we’ll have gone two weeks without hot water in our house. I’m quite tired of doing dishes and bathing in old-fashioned ways (i.e., having to heat water for everything) and am ready to be back to modern-day conveniences.

I shared this old photo on Instagram a while back. It’s Lynne and me on vacation with my parents when we were probably fifteen. This is the trip where we forgot to pack our cassette tapes, though we had our cassette players. The only tape we had with us was Jethro Tull’s Aqualung. Neither of us ever wants to hear it again to this day.

My Instagram followers were quite taken with my knitted purse, and Lynne said she wished she still had hers (she has hers here, too, but you can’t see it in the photos I have). I think hers was slightly different from mine. I don’t know when we let our purses go, but just thinking about them drove me to search online. In what can only be thought of as miraculous so many years later, I found the identical bag.

It’s a little faded by time, but it’s like getting a piece of my happy, hippie youth back in my hands. It’s pictured with a candle I got around the same time. How that candle has traveled with me and been stored in attics and un-air-conditioned buildings without melting is unbelievable. I wish I were anywhere near as well-preserved as the bag and the candle. =)

Lynne is creating her own pattern similar to this to crochet a bag for herself. I can’t wait to see it!

Tiny Tuesday!

I believe this bull and matador were with the table decorations at our high school band banquet. We were the Marching Matadors.

The matador seems quite dramatic, as I suppose he should be.

I thought of them recently when I shopped for Barbies at an estate sale in our neighborhood. I regret that I never knew one of our neighbors is a Barbie collector. We should have connected! I saw the two pictured below on the first day and didn’t get them. When they were still there on Day Two, I knew they’d waited for me.


A Twenty Year Anniversary Spanish Barbie from Dolls of the World (1999). I am all about her matador look. One of my characters in the Saga in Progress is from Spain. She’s not as nice as Barbie. She may have felled a few human “bulls” in her day. Or had them felled. No blood on that matador’s couture.


This was the one I really regretted not getting the first day. I was so glad she was still there when I returned. The Chilean Dolls of the World Barbie is from 1997.

As the Marching Matadors Color Guard Captain, I’d have loved to have worn their looks. Here are some of my sword-wielding fashions, and I wish I had that hat still.

Salute!

A little midweek pop art

My Peter Max posters have probably not hung on the walls of any house I’ve lived in since I was maybe sixteen. That’s a f**king long time, way too long for me to do the math. They’ve gone with me stored in a box or a bin for decades, and they are not in great shape. That only makes me love them more. We’re a little worn, my posters and I, but still vibrant.

Today, I framed them. They must be handled carefully, In fact, the bottom one below is in two pieces.

Tom hung them in the room where I write these days. I am so happy to be able to look up at them. You can take the girl out of her hippie years, but you can never take the hippie out of the girl.

Pick One, No. 5

Question 1549: TGI Friday’s or Chili’s? (and why…)

Despite the fact that the entertainment industry tried to ruin T.G.I. Friday’s for me by combining it in the movie Cocktail with one of my least favorite Beach Boys songs and someone who hovers near the top of my least favorite actors, I will choose it hands down over Chili’s for a number of reasons.

First, it’s the restaurant that helped put Tom through college (he was employed as a cook) and when he graduated from college and couldn’t find a job, they happily took him back to work as a cook again while we were newlyweds until he began his career in Houston. We moved to Houston, but we still ate at Friday’s, and there was one in the area where we lived in the ‘burbs.

Second, fried mozzarella. The first I ever had, it’s still my favorite version of that appetizer, but kudos to other restaurants and fast food establishments for realizing Friday’s had a winner and stealing the concept.

Third, a dish I think they no longer serve, Mushrooms, Steak, and Mushrooms. The steak, likely a tenderized sirloin, was topped with sautéed mushrooms and onions and then covered in melted mozzarella, and included in the sides were battered and fried button mushrooms. Since I like mushrooms, this was a favorite. On our wedding day, we had to make ourselves scarce after the ceremony so the church/reception area could be returned to order and my family could move the party to our hotel rooms. In the interim, Tom and I went by Friday’s, they treated us to a very late lunch, and MSM was my dish.


The Friday’s matchbook is in a journal I began for all the matchbook covers I’d once planned to put in a collage and never did. Eventually, I plan to write a blurb about each place–my memories of why it was special or who took me there first or which friend made it a regular place or a treat with me. I’m quite surprised I don’t have a matchbook cover for Chili’s, because of course I’ve eaten there, but it fell out of favor with me because they stopped serving the main entree I liked and they are compelled to spice up everything. I understand. This is Texas, and most people don’t think they’ve had a meal unless their tongues are on fire afterward. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those people and don’t enjoy spicy food.


Other chains I went to included Ruby Tuesday’s and Bennigan’s. I do have a matchbook for Bennigan’s. Though there are still some franchised Bennigan’s, the locations I used to go to must have been corporately owned, because those were all closed several years ago. I’d read in 2019 that they were talking about a comeback, but let’s just say these horrific numbers

2-0-2-0,

and figure it didn’t happen.

I loved the Galleria Bennigan’s, but I have no idea if it was the food, location, service, or the company. It’s the place where Denece and I used to meet and talk for hours. I’m not even kidding. She would tell the waitstaff up front, “We will be using your table for three to four hours, but we are not high-maintenance and we will tip you well.” Since we were usually there just after the lunch rush and into the slower afternoon hours, they didn’t mind and always took good care of us. After Bennigan’s closed, Denece and I began having those long conversations by phone every few weeks. You just can’t analyze and find solutions for all the problems in the damn world in less than three or four hours.

President-elect Biden, Denece and I are available by phone if you need us.

Tiny Tuesday!


These have been on my desk forever, and I have no idea when I’ll ever get them on Button Sunday posts, so I’ll share them here.

Along with two of my favorite songs in the world, which I’m happy to still have on 45. I lost a lot in the 2017 flood, but Harvey didn’t take my 45s.


“Hey Jude” and “Something” represent two brilliant songs and three songwriters. I’m glad I grew up in a Beatles world. As much as I liked the 2019 movie Yesterday, the “Hey Dude” joke got annoying real fast. Sorry, not sorry. “Hey Jude” is a profoundly happy family memory for me.

If you want to go back in time to 2006, there’s a long post I wrote here. The comments are wonderful for me to read and remember, too. (Except one which I hid, because it started a feud between two people, lol–neither reads my blog anymore.)

Baby


If you remember the calendar I shared here on October 8 that I decided to repurpose, I just colored the first pen and ink print from it. The cover.


I kind of love him.

The original is a print of a pen and ink. I colored in with pencils.

Sorry to duplicate an Instagram post here, but like most everyone else in the USA, I’m a bit distracted and anxious.

Pick One, No. 4

Question 1733: Charm or I.D. bracelet? (and why…)

On, so very easy for me. There’s nothing wrong with an I.D. bracelet. In fact, probably there have been times when I was called Betty and Betsy and Peggy and Debby that it would have been nice to hold up a bracelet that proclaimed, “BECKY,” and say, “Talk to the wrist.”

Names are good, especially if you like yours and it has meaning for you.

But it’s charms, for this Aries…


Charms are places I’ve been, things I’ve seen. Dreams I’ve dreamed. People I’ve known who have loved me and who I have loved. They are my novels and my characters. Symbols with meanings for me. My varied interests: quirky, true, and passionate.

Microcosms, those bracelets, and I have a baseball in a little gold box that still needs to go on one of my character bracelets.


I have this sweet bracelet, too, that belonged to my mother. For many years, it had a charm for each of her first four grandchildren: Daniel, Josh, Sarah, Gina. One of the times she lived here, I was able to find a company that sold a similar one for her to add her fifth grandchild, Aaron.

Definitely charms.

Button Sunday

Recently, Tom and I ventured out to my favorite Heights antique store because I was looking for something specific (which I found), but of course, I had to browse. I picked up a few little things, including some buttons, and this Eric Clapton button in particular.

I’m a fan of Eric Clapton’s guitar playing, though I’ve never seen him in person. My friends Christine and John did and tell an amusing story about him glaring at people at the concert. Honestly, people at concerts can be jerks, and they probably deserved it. [ETA in 2022: Boy, has Eric Clapton behaved badly through the pandemic. Whatever, I don’t take medical advice from musicians (nor superstar guitarist advice from physicians, probably), but it isn’t EC’s behavior about Covid that soured me on him. It was Patti Boyd’s memoir. Ugh.)

One of the reasons I love YouTube is because I can see so many great blues guitarists in concert together. I can’t even imagine the vibe when some of the brightest lights in the rock firmament shine from the same stage. I get chills watching the videos. The energy in person has to be incredible.

I never made note on here of the fact that former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Peter Green died back in July. In the Eighties and Nineties, I was an avid reader of magazines featuring/books about guitarists. I’ve probably forgotten most of what I used to know, but I remember many stories about Peter Green and Eric Clapton. They were always compared, particularly because Green replaced Clapton in John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.

If you aren’t immediately able to identify Green’s original songs, I’ll name one that you can’t have missed, though you probably know it best as recorded by Santana: “Black Magic Woman.”

About a month before Green died, a good article about him was published by Guitar World. If you like blues guitarists, or guitarists, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, and blues rock and roll history, it’s a detailed, informative read.

One day, maybe I’ll stumble over a Peter Green button in my exploring.

Themeograph

Ha! Y’all are in for a long trip into the distant past today. You are SO LUCKY. I believe we read Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest in ninth grade. If I still had the book–which I kept for a long, long time until it became apparent I was going to have to purge some books–I’d know for sure because I usually dated my books somewhere inside. With my name. Because humans love leaving our names everywhere. However, in looking at my handwriting in photos below, that’s ninth grade handwriting, not seventh grade handwriting. (I know it wasn’t eighth grade because I remember my eighth grade teacher too well, and also know what we read that year that had the most profound effect on me was Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” But I digress. Mandatory Southern storytelling behavior.)

Our teacher assigned us to do a Themeograph for the book. We chose quotes randomly from the book and cut out magazine photos to go along with them. I still have my Themeograph and will now offer up commentary along with pictures.


First, kudos to me for finding a magazine picture that mimicked the paperback cover. I can’t really dwell on this because I have fixated on the pencil writing in the upper right corner. It says “25/Late.” So what was the highest possible score? Did I get counted off for being late? Was it five points? Twenty-five points? I NEED TO KNOW. I hadn’t yet reached the time when anything less than an ‘A’ in English made me hyperventilate and go to bed in a dark room. So I wouldn’t have given a shit, probably. The point is, I GIVE A SHIT NOW. But I will never know the answer. I can do nothing but move on.


Whatever, small boy, moving along.


There is a current disagreement in my household about the top picture. Tom says it’s a picture of Dennis Wilson. I say it’s a picture of someone else, and the themeograph just barely predates my complete and total and eternal preoccupation with Dennis Wilson. It could go either way. I thought it was DW for a while when I first looked at it, but I came to believe it’s not. He’s very pretty, though. Kudos to you if you realize that I rarely discuss Dennis Wilson on this blog and if you try to wade into such a discussion, including this photograph, you should step gingerly. I’m extraordinarily touchy. Really, only Lynne gets to talk about DW with me without fear. And usually Tom, because he treads softly.

On both photos, look at Ninth Grade Becky using ellipses correctly to indicate missing text. That should have earned me bonus points. 30/25!


Damn, I’m literal.


WTF? I’m using Walter Cronkite’s picture for Uncle Wilse, “a powerful, heavyset man…with slaty, less-friendly eyes?” It’s UNCLE WALTER, the man who once had to tell America and hand-wringing Becky our president was dead. Bonus deducted. 25/25.

Finally. A little less literal on the second picture, because that’s a high-heeled and not a moccasined foot. But what I need to know is whether Richter misspelled “forrest” or I did. This could affect my score.


Nice picture choice, nice quote. I see “forest” is spelled correctly. So, Richter, are you inconsistent or do I need to deduct more points from my score? Why the hell didn’t my teacher mark the other misspelling? I’m glad my teacher didn’t mark the other misspelling. I don’t need her scribbles all over my masterpiece. And if she marked in light pencil, I likely couldn’t read it anyway.


Back to being very literal with my picture choices. I must say it’s nice to know children in the 1700s were as bratty about wearing clothes as children in the 1970s. Kids. So ungrateful.


Probably my favorite of them all. This quote and picture make me want to read the book again. I’ll add it to the thirty-one others in my TBR pile.


Oh, so much to work with here. First, I clearly knew and accepted that Aunt Kate is a judgmental bitch. This remains one of my least favorite human expressions, but it’s real. I might have to add some points for that. Does anyone know the identity of this woman? She was probably the head of the Peace Corps, photographed on a rough day. Sorry, “Aunt Kate.”

On the upper right, I also am pleased with the illustration I found for the mountain, which rose “brown and furry like the back of an immense beast.” Marika, if you’re reading, let’s just say it’s a bear and get your Daily Bear Sighting out of the way.

I see I correctly used the ellipsis again. I demand a recount if I got points removed for being late. I was a freshman. I was madly in love. It’s fortunate I turned this thing in at all.

Since I did, at least I knew how to find my way to a bottle of rum. In a magazine, I mean. I didn’t drink rum at that age. I drank scotch. And I never gave my fire water to Native Americans to ruin them. I was too busy ruining me.

This is the end of our flight back in time. We know there are other time carriers and appreciate that you fly An Aries Knows.

I love, I love, I love…

…my calendar pigs…

Pretty sure that’s how the Neil Sedaka song went. I found these calendars in my bin ‘o stuff.


A 1978 Famous Pigs calendar; 1981 Pin-up Calendar of Pigs; 1982 Whole Hog Calendar


Now that pin-up calendar… Isn’t there something a little disturbing about pin-ups from Dean Sausage Company? Admiring your meal? We used to have a favorite restaurant in the suburbs, now closed, where the steak was excellent and you looked out big picture windows to where cattle grazed the pastures. I recognized the irony. It was where I once watched Lyle Lovett across the dining room, and I’m not sure how that’s related, but somehow it is.

Some of those calendars provide insight into what I was doing during those years. But the one I’m for sure saving is this one:

Though only to cut the drawings out to color later, ’cause they’re sweet.

P.S. Y’all see that I’m regulating my blood pressure and stress level by not discussing politics, right?