Tag: photos

Legacy Writing 365:21

I’ve spent hours each day for the past few days looking at old photos, fitting them into the archives, and ordering prints of some of the thousands of photos on my computer. I’m combining these with other items in my scrapbooks. I’m suffering photo nostalgia overload!

I went to the shelves and randomly pulled an older binder and opened it to a page, vowing that no matter what it was, I’d use it for this entry. And look: SHINY!

In 2000, I went to San Diego for our friend Steve C’s big birthday party thrown by his friend Dale. On the day of the party, Steve had to run some errands, so Jim and Bill, who’d come down from Long Beach, took me to lunch and then to La Jolla for shopping. On our way back to Steve’s, we saw this SDSU rugby team raising money via a car wash. Of course Jim needed the dust of La Jolla off his car. Plus we wanted to help these young men out. We’re GIVERS! Afterward, we picked up Steve and drove back by. It was his birthday, after all.

Legacy Writing 365:20

In November of 1990, That Old Woman was living in Salt Lake City, as was my brother. Tom and I, and my sister and her husband Len, decided to visit there for Thanksgiving. It was gorgeous and snowy, and David, who skis, offered to take anyone interested skiing. The day before their planned ski date, he wanted to drive to the desert. My sister, Len, and Tom went along, and they saw all kinds of wildlife including eagles and I don’t remember what else. Mother and I opted not to go because she wanted to see a movie. It was a new release that I’d never heard of: Dances With Wolves. We both loved it–which seems weird to me now, as I’m afraid to see War Horse even though I don’t think the horse dies, yet every freaking animal was dying in Dances With Wolves. But I digress.

That night, while Tom and Len were getting ready for their big ski date the next day, we tried not to tell Debby too much about the movie. This photo was taken then and is one of my favorite pictures of my mother and Tom.

The next morning, my brother picked up the guys. Mother, Debby, and I went shopping and to the movie. My sister did love it. Then we went home to hear about the Great Snow Adventure of 1990. I’m not saying Tom and Len were bad skiers, but at one point after Len came to a–let’s call it less than graceful–stop, they heard someone’s voice call out from the ski lift overhead, “Now that’s entertainment!”

Legacy Writing 365:19

We moved to Georgia sometime before I began kindergarten. We couldn’t get into quarters at Ft. Benning immediately, so we lived in a place called Benning Park. I think I remember three things about Benning Park: a dirt yard, a roach infestation, and a mother who wanted OUT.OF.THERE. By the time I started kindergarten, we were living on post. I looked up our old street, and HELLO. I don’t know if it’s still NCO housing, but if so, they have it a lot cushier than we had it. Big ol’ two-unit houses. (On the other hand, Benning Park sounds even worse than when we lived there. With more than seventy-eight percent of children there below the federal poverty line, Benning Park has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 99.5% of U.S. neighborhoods. Thank you, Wikipedia, for not being dark again on Thursday.) I’ll bet some of those same roaches are still stealing food, too. Those bastards NEVER DIE.

We lived on post twice, since my father was stationed there before and after a deployment to Korea. (This was NOT during the Korean War. I may not really be 35, but I’m not that old.) Here’s a photo of Debby and me with Daddy from our second stay there; you can see the quarters across the street, which looked just like ours, because it’s the military.

I’m thinking there are six to eight units per building. I remember: hardwood floors, because I can still hear our dog Dopey’s nails clicking on them. Central air, because I remember yelling into the unit outside to make my voice sound funny. Some other kid taught me to yell into it, “What’s your name? Puddin’ ‘n’ tame. Ask me again, and I’ll tell you the same.” I don’t know what that means. At either end of the building, or maybe at one end, I don’t know, was a cement slab enclosed by a gray (I think) wooden fence. Inside this fence were clotheslines. Women didn’t have dryers then. I remember sitting in there while my mother hung or took down sheets and listening to the wind flap them around. I love the smell and crispness of line-dried sheets.


I think this is Elizabeth, little sister to Stephen. Their mother, Gwen, was British. She had red hair, too. I loved her accent. They lived across the street from us the first time we lived there. The second time we lived there, a woman who lived across the street used to make hamburgers with steamed buns which I never ate because they smelled like dirty socks.

You’re welcome.


Did I mention that my father used to paint scenes on our windows at Christmas? My sister is probably making this face because her brain is fiercely trying to find a way to eliminate me since the previous times didn’t work. (I wasn’t nicknamed “Roach” for nothing.) My brother is in none of these photos because he’d reached the age when 1. We weren’t his family. 2. A camera steals a boy’s cool.

Now we get to my first best friend, Linda Bishop.

I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t Linda who had a big brother named Stephen. Maybe everyone did. Most of the people in my life have been named Stephen, Tim, Jim, Jeff, and David. It’s weird.

Our dog Dopey had a sister named Beebee. I think Beebee lived next door to Linda but became “her” dog during the day so we’d both have one. When the ice cream truck came, Linda always got a banana Popsicle. I think I preferred grape. We sat on the curb to eat them. Linda would take a lick, then give Beebee a lick. I never gave Dopey a lick of my Popsicle. That’s probably why I’m diabetic today. Linda’s undoubtedly healthy as a horse.

Of course I can’t bring up Linda without repeating my public confession, just in case she ever finds this. We were both in Miss Harris’s kindergarten class. One time when I opened my crayon box and looked at all my broken crayons, I secretly switched my crayons for Linda’s, which were perfect: unbroken and with all the paper intact. Linda cried when she opened her box, and I said nothing. I’M SORRY, LINDA. I WAS WRONG. If you ever find me, I’ll buy you one of those damn 96-count boxes of Crayolas–no generics!–with the built-in sharpener.

Hey, I named a character in Three Fortunes after you. She wasn’t my favorite character, it’s true, but just ask Lynne if she has a character named after her. I think not.

I’M SORRY, LYNNE. I WAS WRONG.

It never ends.

Legacy Writing 365:16

I grumble sometimes when I read stories about people rehoming their animals, but I do know there are circumstances when it’s the best option. And I would much rather people find a good home for a companion, whatever their reason, than drop one off in a neighborhood or on a rural road–or take one to a place that euthanizes. Animals deserve our efforts to find them the best homes, and it’s just reality that someone else may be a better match.


Trust me, my birds Bogie and Bacall were in no danger from my sister’s cat Casey when I took this photo. I’m not sure they knew that.

My sister adopted Casey when she was a single girl in a new city. He immediately tried everything he could to get his freedom, including leaping from a third-floor balcony into the shrubbery. But the two of them worked it out, and when she traveled to visit me, Casey came along. That’s how he met my birds. I, too, was single and living in a new place. My mother and sister had gone shopping with me to pick out stuff for my apartment, and we decided birds would be good companions so I wouldn’t feel alone. Each bird had a cage, but they liked being together, so eventually I hooked them up in a way that they could hang out alone or together–their choice. Sometimes I let them fly free around my apartment, but certainly not when Casey was there!

Once when my mother and sister were visiting, they sat on the patio outside my back door. It had a nice view of fields and hills, and they could smoke and drink coffee while they chatted. I was inside tidying up the place, and I went into the guest room to put something away. When I turned to go out the door, Casey was blocking my way. I spoke to him, and his response was a low, menacing growl. I’ve never been afraid of cats, but then again, I’ve never had one threaten me. I’ve known a couple of people who were scratched or bitten by feral cats or ill cats, so even though Casey had always been docile with me, I was intimidated enough to call for my sister to come get him. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear me, and I was trapped in the room with Casey growling at me from the doorway for the longest ten minutes of my life before she came inside. Of course, he didn’t let her see his badass side, but she believed me, and she started calling him Sid Vicious after that.

After she married, she and her husband were visiting her in-laws in rural Kentucky. Sid Vicious was along, and it was clear that cat and new grandmother hit it off. Since the in-laws were cat-free and wanted a cat, Sid went to a new home. That story people tell about “Fluffy going to live on a farm where he can run free and play”–that actually does happen sometimes. Sid lived a full, long life as happy as he could be. He just was never meant to be an apartment cat.

Meanwhile, Tom and I married and moved to Houston. We still had Bogie and Bacall, who lived in the guest room. But then I met a coworker of Lynne’s who loved birds. Not only was he a longtime friend to exotic birds of his own, but he often rescued birds that people no longer wanted. He’d built this amazing habitat for them and could provide tons of information about each bird’s personality and quirks. I realized that my parakeets could have a much better life with him than with me, so they relocated to his aviary. From time to time he gave me updates; both Bogie and Bacall picked out mates (originally I’d thought they were male and female, but they were both male) and adapted quickly to a new and better life.

If you ever do need to rehome an animal companion, please work with rescue organizations and no-kill shelters. And be patient. There’s no reason to feel guilty about wanting to find the right home for a dog, cat, or exotic. They count on us and should get our best!

Runway Monday All Stars: A Night at the Opera

On the most recent episode of Lifetime’s Project Runway All Stars, the designers were asked to create a couture look for a night at the opera. When I think of opera and beautiful dresses, I think of Cher in one of my favorite movies, Moonstruck. So who better to model my opera fashion than Clawdeen Wolf? If she’s not inspired by the moon, no one is.


I chose a bold purple satin sprinkled with silver stars to evoke the night sky in Clawdeen’s dress.


I accessorized Clawdeen with silver-accented shoes and a silver lamé evening bag from Mattel.


The colors also compliment the purple strands in Clawdeen’s hair. Have wolf ears and fangs ever looked so adorable?


Clawdeen shows off a little leg as well as the dress’s flowing, ribbony sash in iridescent lavender.


Clawdeen is off to a howling good time at the opera. Hope we see her and you again on the runway!

Thanks to Lynne for the iridescent fabric and the runway fabric.

This season’s previous looks:
Week 1: Unconventional Challenge

Legacy Writing 365:15

She is one of the blank places. I stare and stare at this photo, but she remains inscrutable. How old is she here? Is she a girl? What did she dream about? Want? Or was she already married? She would give birth to four children: three boys and a girl. She struggled with illness, but lived to be sixty-one, not a bad lifespan for a woman of her time.

I can’t remember stories about her, and I once asked my mother why I knew so little.

Mother, who never met her, said, “Her children idolized her, so you’ll never get a picture of the flesh-and-blood woman. They think she was perfect.”

Maude Louise. My father’s mother, who died when my father was nineteen. Here’s the story the way I remember it.

My father played high school football. He loved high school football. He wasn’t a large man, but he was scrappy and–as he said–too dumb to be scared. And maybe too smart for his own good. When he was a senior in high school, he realized he had another year of football eligibility. He deliberately FAILED English so he wouldn’t graduate and could play one more year of football. I have no idea what his parents thought about that, but he got away with it.

There’s a part of me that wonders if maybe he wasn’t quite ready to grow up and leave home because his mother was sick. She died the day he was supposed to graduate. He didn’t go through his graduation ceremony. He stayed in town for her funeral, then he did that most Huck Finn of things, he lit out for the territories. He hitched rides on freight trains. He sat over campfires and ate meager meals with other men during the Depression. He heard their stories and saw the country. He did what work he could to make money to survive, including painting. Sign painting. House painting. Anything that required a brush he could do.

How that boy’s heart must have ached as he missed his mother. How he must have wondered if his father would ever have a reason to be proud of this aimless, wandering youngest son.

I got to know my grandfather, so I know that he was, in fact, very proud of my father.

Maybe what I know about my grandmother is this: What my father learned of love and loss from her helped shape the husband and father he became.

For that, I love her, too.

Legacy Writing 365:14

This is a photo of my bulletin board in the dorm room I shared with my roommate Debbie M our freshman year. I studied it for quite a while to identify what was important enough for me to look at every day. I’ve deduced that I was still a girl with one foot behind me in high school, and one foot moving forward. And some things never change: Family and friends obviously mattered.

What I can identify:

First, I figure most of the cards stuck up there are Valentines, because the calendar lets me know it’s February. Across the top of the bulletin board, I’ve made a train of my empty Animal Crackers boxes. (I still like Animal Crackers.)

There appear to be:

Ten Valentines.
Birth announcements with photos of my twin nieces Sarah and Gina (happy birthday January 14!).
Ticket stubs from Crimson Tide football games.
A “Look Out For The Bull!” poster. Why? I don’t know. I never drank Schlitz Malt Liquor in my life. I guess I liked the ad art.
Two photos of my nephew Daniel.
One photo of my nephew Josh.
My brother’s senior portrait.
My sister’s cap and gown portrait.
Lynne’s senior portrait and cap and gown portrait.
Jim S’s cap and gown portrait.
My then-boyfriend’s senior portrait, a photo of him at his desk in his dorm room, an 8×10 of him, and a black and white 8×10 of him playing in a high school football game.
Two postage stamps.
A set of notes from my roommate Debbie and a photo of her from high school (though I didn’t know her until college).
An 8×10 photo of my high school marching band (I was in it).
An 8×10 photo of my entire senior class.
An 8×10 photo of my high school football team (boyfriend was on it).
Larry H’s cap and gown portrait.
A photo of my high school journalism/typing teacher/newspaper sponsor.
A photo of me from a beauty pageant. (Shut up. I’m Southern.)
A photo of my mother.
A photo of my father.
A picture of Denny Chimes.
A University of Alabama button.
Someone’s name card from a graduation invitation.
What may be a campus parking ticket (must have borrowed the boyfriend’s car).
A campus map.
A memo pad.
A black and white photo of someone I can’t identify.
My high school graduation tassel.

Oh. And my class schedule. Nice to recall what I was there for.

But the real story of this bulletin board happened in the wee hours of a spring morning. Our room was on the eleventh floor. There were no screens on our window. We’d just turned out the lights and crawled into our beds. (Ugh. Dorm room beds. TORTURE.) Everything was quiet, then I heard a little thump. A few seconds later, Debbie quietly asked, “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What do you think it was?”

“I’m not sure I want to know,” she said. But she turned on the light and there, in the middle of my bulletin board, was the most ginormous palmetto bug (nice name for flying roach) that ever lived. I shrieked and ran to her side of the room. The bug dropped to the floor, which meant it was under my bed. Where all my luggage was stored.

Debbie reached for her tennis racquet and began using it to gingerly pull out my luggage a piece at a time while I stood on her desk chair and was generally no help at all. Suddenly the bug came running out from under my bed, and Debbie beat it to death with her tennis racquet.

MY HERO!

Legacy Writing 365:13

Friday the thirteenth seems to be a good time to discuss Redshirts. I’ll admit that though I saw a lot of Star Trek when I was a youngster, it wasn’t until I grew up and began to meet REAL Star Trek fans that I learned the significance of Redshirts. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, in general, on the original Star Trek, when a character you didn’t know and weren’t invested in was wearing a red shirt when he was part of a mission, he’d die during that episode.

Is it because we were ignorant way back when that we allowed my nephew Daniel to venture into the world wearing this?


Did he know, I wonder?

I swear we loved him and didn’t think of him as the sacrificial lamb in our family dramas. Fortunately, he survived his dangerous wardrobe and abandoned Star Trek for Star Wars along the way. And NO, George Takei, you are WRONG about the real enemy. Stop that!

I didn’t know until I went digging around on the Internet to read more about Redshirts that there’s a trope called “Anyone Can Die.” But I was gratified to see that they listed the TV shows Lost and The Vampire Diaries as examples of this, as I have been jarred again and again by the body count of CHARACTERS I LOVE on these shows. Fortunately, those characters tend to reappear in flashbacks, dreams, or as ghosts. Sort of like school photos: They never really go away.

Legacy Writing 365:12

One of the challenges I’ll face this year when digging through old photos is that many years ago, my mother gave David and Debby the photo albums with the pictures documenting their lives. So short of traveling across state lines with a computer and a scanner, I’m limited to what she kept and what extras of my siblings I can find in the photo album she made for me.

For example, when Cousin Rachel married Charles, I have a vivid memory of my sister wearing the long white dress my mother made her so she could be a junior bridesmaid. And I don’t remember what my brother did in their wedding, but I’m pretty sure he was all adolescent Cary Grant in a white dinner jacket, black pants, and black tie.

What did I do in the wedding? I’m glad you asked.

NOTHING. I was shut.out. And this after I had learned from Cousin Rachel not to chew my tomato sandwich with my mouth open! I had ETIQUETTE. And after she and Charles had once traumatized my delicate self by taking me to the drive-in on one of their dates, where we saw a scary, suspenseful movie (and don’t think I’ve forgotten that scene where the tortured heroine runs over her rotten husband again and again!). And even worse, I had expressed my intention to grow up and marry Charles. Way to RUIN MY LIFE, COUSIN RACHEL.

Actually, for that weekend, I enjoyed my time with my parents. While the others were busy doing wedding stuff:

I did my Esther Williams pose.

And my Evita pose.

My parents often said that wherever we went, I always disappeared for a while after our arrival. I’d then come back and tell them where they could find the ice machine and the Coke machine, details about the desk clerk’s family and background, the hours the pool was open, what the story was on that station wagon full of people who’d arrived just before us, and how to get extra towels.

Imagine what I could have told them if I hadn’t been such a shy child?


World-class accommodations in Columbus, Mississippi.

Long gone.

An old post card I stole from the Internet.