Tag: photos

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.

Where has all the crafting gone?

Lately, we haven’t been doing much crafting on Craft Night. Last week we might have, but instead we just created a big breakfast feast. No one’s sure why we all love breakfast at dinner. Some of us had parents who did breakfast suppers now and then. One had a mother who would never do it. But there’s something cozy and friendly about breakfast at night, especially when everyone’s pitching in. Including the fresh fruit above, some of the other choices were:


Rhonda’s wonderfully fluffy scrambled eggs. Also, cantaloupe and honeydew melon.


Here, I’m just showing off a Beatles glass, one of a set of four given to me by The Brides at Christmas.

Then there were hash browns, ham, and bacon. Tom manned the pancake griddle and took requests, which is how Lindsey ended up with Barney and T-Rex:

She settled on dinosaurs after he refused to do a Picasso or a Monet for her. Though if she’d said Manet instead:


Manet, White Peonies, 1864

Here’s a white Penny, 2012.

Legacy Writing 365:11


Dressed for one of many high school functions they attended when my father was an assistant principal: Bill and Dorothy…or…

Is it only me, or do other people ever stop and realize how infrequently we hear our own names? If you’re a parent, for example, you’ll hear whatever version of “mother” or “father” your kids use–a lot. At work, you may hear your name now and then. And if you have a good doctor or dentist, you’ll hear it several times during consultations. But in general, I don’t often hear someone say my name.

One of the enjoyable parts of getting to know Jim, Tim, and Timmy was that they not only used my name a lot, but they also used “Beck,” which is something my siblings call me, so it felt natural. And now I get “Becks” occasionally because it somehow came to be my “designer label” for the Barbie fashions. I never minded nicknames–even “Roach,” an early one–and loved being called Aunt Bebe and Aunt Pepi, first attempts from my nephews. Both my sister and sister-in-law still call me Bebe sometimes.

If you ask me things I liked about my parents’ relationship, on my list would be how they always used each other’s names, sometimes even when talking to me about the other one. “Dorothy said” or “Bill likes”–it always made me aware that they were individuals with their own lives that had nothing to do with being my father and mother. My mother didn’t like to be called “Dottie,” and only some of her siblings could call her “Dot.” She was always Dorothy. There were times I’d call her Dorothy when I was teasing her, but I don’t ever remember calling my father Bill. However, courtesy of my friend Larry H, both my parents ended up with nicknames that I could get away with using.

Larry was one of my father’s students when the television show Mod Squad was airing. Michael Cole played the character “Pete Cochran,” and I suppose since it was an uncommon last name in our community, Larry started calling my father “Pete.” The funny thing was, when my father was a kid, his father often called him Pete, so he didn’t mind it. Although I never called him Pete in front of his students–or even “Daddy,” for that matter–as he got older, I’d sometimes use the name Pete to make him smile. (And a few years after he died, Tom and I named our first dog “Pete” in his honor.)

After “Pete” caught on among Larry and my other friends, a movie starring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett came out called Pete and Tillie. That’s when Larry began calling my mother Tillie, and she never minded it. Then again, Larry was the kind of guy who could get away with anything because he was so funny. I will never, ever forget what it meant to me to see him at my father’s funeral. I don’t think we’ve ever talked since, but he’ll always have a special place in my heart for being there, for the millions of times he made me laugh, and for the affection he showed my parents.


Larry and me.

Other people get dolls, too

You may recall that last Christmas I received the Kirk, Spock, and Uhura dolls from the most recent Star Trek movie. This year, along with his annual Hallmark Star Trek ornament from Lynne, Tom received this doll that she found somewhere:

Note that Old Spock is giving the Vulcan Salute. However, just in case you need him to be doing real work around the Enterprise–or the Universe–he comes with an extra hand:

<
small>Note: Could also come in handy–see what I did there?–if you’d like to reenact “the hand of Count Petofi” scenes from the original Dark Shadows.

You don’t know what a challenge it’s been for me to wait THIS LONG SINCE CHRISTMAS to shoot this:

Live long and prosper.

Legacy Writing 365:10

Tom and I have done a lot of traveling by car, and he’d tell you that wherever we go–or any time I come home from a solo trip–at some point, I’ll say, “I could live there.” I’m always delighted by something in every city, state, or small town I visit. It may be the people who charm me, the landscape that dazzles me, or the climate that tricks me (because unless you visit a place frequently, the vagaries of its weather are a mystery). Only one time did a particularly unpleasant incident put me off a state (which I won’t name, because you can’t condemn an entire state based on the behavior of one wanker, right?). And I know Manhattan would eat me alive, so it’s better left as a place I love to visit. All in all, though, I’ve found that most places have something good to offer so I try not to judge them, particularly if I’ve never visited there. That would be like hating a book I haven’t read or a movie I haven’t seen or a musical artist I’ve never heard, and who does that?

Hmmm. Let’s shelve that question.

Anyway, as soon as I read that The Advocate magazine had named Salt Lake City the gayest city in America, I knew there’d be hue and cry. I won’t debate the merits of the judging criteria or what “gayest” can really mean. There’ll never be a more diverse and outspoken group than those individuals who get grouped in the LGBTQIA acronym; I’m pretty sure my voice won’t be needed on this one.

All I’m going to say is that these photos, taken at Salt Lake City’s Gay Pride parade in 2001, tell a wonderful story of my mother and the community who welcomed one “straight old lady named Dorothy” with love, and shared with her many, many times of laughter and a few tears. I can’t give a photo credit, because I don’t know who took the photos. My copies are not high quality because no telling how many emails and computers they went through before they made it to me.


Dorothy has been spotted along the parade route.


She gets swept off her feet.


She’s been put on the float.


If only she weren’t so shy…


That year, then-SLC Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson was the parade’s Grand Marshal. No surprise that she’d find and be photographed with the local politico–or that she’d be wearing her Alabama Crimson Tide shirt.

To that bigoted person with whom I once worked who admonished me for my passionate belief in legal and civil equality for EVERYONE by saying, “I know how you were raised. What would your parents say about this,” I answer:

My parents would say I’m the daughter they taught me to be, and they’re proud of me for speaking out about my beliefs on fairness and justice. And also, they think I should laugh more.

A literary outing

This Saturday past I had the pleasure of going to a triple booksigning at Murder By The Book.


Check out these links for new works from Jaye Wells, Kimberly Frost, and Martha Wells. They are a smart, funny group of authors, and I particularly appreciated their comments about a writer’s prerogative in world-building within the realms of fantasy, supernatural, and paranormal.

Authors: your characters, your stories, your rules.

I bought Kimberly’s new novel there, then came home and figured out how to buy Google books through Murder By The Book’s web site and load them onto my Nook. That enabled me to buy the first of Jaye Wells’s series. Then Tom bought two by Martha Wells; there just seems to be some difficulty loading them to his Nook. Hopefully we’ll get it all figured out soon. Being able to buy through an indie store removes my last anxiety about using an eReader for some of the books I buy. The authors get royalties, and I’m supporting a locally-owned store. (This doesn’t work with Amazon’s Kindle, however.)

By the way, if you’re curious, the two Wellses aren’t related except by profession.

Legacy Writing 365:9

I think anyone who follows college football in the US will indulge me with a celebratory moment. My alma mater won the National Championship game tonight. Roll Tide!

I was just looking for a reason to use this photo I found of Denny Chimes in my mother’s photos. I assume one of my parents took it when they were living in Tuscaloosa while my father attended the University of Alabama after they married. I had several colleges/universities to select from when I left high school, but my choice was probably made the first time I listened to my parents talk about their times there. I drank the red Kool-Aid! My brother (Auburn University) and sister (University of Kentucky) did not.

There’s no city on the planet that’s home to me like Tuscaloosa. No place I feel as comfortable as the Quad on the UA campus, where I spent many hours walking, lounging, partying, reading, biking, people-watching, tossing a Frisbee or football with friends, and maybe even a little studying. Denny Chimes is on the Quad, but its music reaches the farthest corners of campus and beyond. Visitors can walk the sidewalks around its base and see the handprints and footprints of all the football team captains since 1948. My very first time there, I put my hands inside the prints of quarterback great Joe Namath.

Apparently when I took this photo my junior year, I was more dazzled by a rare snowfall than getting the top of poor Denny Chimes in the photo.

And here I am at the limestone base of the Chimes the day I graduated. I’m the short one on the right, who didn’t have a blue magna cum laude stole. At least I always dated smart boys.