Tag: tiny tuesday

Tiny Tuesday!


Shelves full of whimsical, clever robots turned my attention toward the booth of artist Shawn Corder’s Get Bent Metal Works. One like this caught my eye, but before I could get it, another person picked it up and bought it. There were a couple of similar ones in black, but I really wanted this color. Fortunately, when I asked the artist, he found another in one of his packed bins. The “radio” can connect to my phone’s bluetooth and play my car’s playlist.

I knew the robot would appeal to Tom. But the radio… Maybe if you read the below excerpt from the first novel in the Neverending Saga, you’ll understand. The son is four, and he doesn’t talk. Doctors can find nothing wrong with him, and a specialist says he’ll talk when he has something to say. His mother has noticed that when she sings to him before bedtime, he listens intently. She wonders if music may be a way to communicate with him.

It’s the early 1950s in New York.

[S]he tucked her pocketbook into her son’s stroller and headed to the nearest Woolworth. It was a crisp fall day, a happy one for him as he listened to the world around them. Inside the store, her radio of choice was an aqua-colored Westinghouse. As soon as they were home, she put him in his highchair with slices of apple and cheese while she unpacked the radio. She knew it was silly to feel so nervous, as if some revelation hung in the balance. But when the radio was plugged in and turned on, she slowly turned the dial until music filled the room.

He turned toward the radio, his eyes wide, and dropped his apple slice on the highchair tray. She was disappointed to hear only advertising jingles, first for Alka Seltzer then for bread. She wanted her son to hear real music. She twisted the dial, hoping to pick up a different station, and he said, “No!”

She forced herself not to react to his first deliberate act of communication and simply turned the dial to the next station. Maybe it was coincidence that the song playing was Eartha Kitt’s “C’est Si Bon,” but she agreed with the sentiment. It was so good. She might have to persuade his father that it was okay for a four-year-old to bark orders at his mother, however.

Tiny Tuesday!

I decided to take a backpack when I went to the art festival, and that’s when I discovered that I’d gotten rid of all my old backpacks. The only one I could find is my gym backpack, which I used less often after we moved farther away from our gym downtown, and certainly not any time from 2020 through now.

I got it down and began pulling all the things out of it that were for my use in swimming, working out, or showering at the gym. There are so many little pockets inside and outside the backpack, and I kept finding things I don’t remember keeping in it. No wonder it was so damn heavy; hauling that around was like more exercise.

Then, oddly, I found these shells tucked away in a little pocket.

The last time we went to the beach was to Gulf Shores in early summer 2017, where we got pummeled by Tropical Storm Cindy. I doubt that I collected any shells that trip. Prior to that would have been our trip to Destin in 2013. That means for nine years, those shells have been tucked away and forgotten.

Now they’ll go into Aaron’s Garden with all the other shells when I next clean it out and add new plants.

Tiny Tuesday!

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2022 at 1:6 scale, here is another of the dolls from Mattel’s Inspiring Women Series.

I found this doll I think last October when I was in Barnes & Noble. The associate who checked me out was surprised and said he hadn’t been aware the store had the doll and he thought it was great. I got the sense that he might be going upstairs to put one on hold for himself–not because he collects Barbies, but because of his admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was the longest-serving First Lady in the U.S. White House as wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there is so much more to know about her. I recommend a crash course via her Wikipedia entry to get a sense of the complex woman she was and the human rights advocate she became.

My mother, having been a child during the Depression, was a huge supporter of both FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt. On one of our vacation trips to Callaway Gardens in Georgia, my parents took Lynne and me to visit The Little White House, the Roosevelts’ home in Warm Springs, Georgia.

I’m sure that trip contributed to my interest in the Roosevelts, as well as being folded into my own early passion for women’s rights and civil rights. As always, for me, knowing about the more human qualities of a trailblazer actually makes a person more inspirational. We are not saints; none of us are without flaws. Roosevelt made changes in herself and in the world that remind me that we can all be better, do better.

I can’t let this date pass without expressing my desire to pick up the phone and wish one of my more personal life’s inspirations a happy birthday. I miss you and love you always, MVP.

Tiny Tuesday!

I keep promising a post at the end of February having to do with books I’ve read this month. Those include a biography of Stevie Ray Vaughan. I’ll jump ahead of myself for this post: The story will be long, and at the end will be the tiny part.

After Tom and I moved to Texas in 1989, we were able to go to a lot of concerts that would have been harder to attend in the deep South. In my years in Alabama, I was lucky enough to go to a musically significant concert with my brother, and Lynne and I were fortunate to see a few great bands in Birmingham and Atlanta (and even Huntsville once, with my sister). I knew one advantage of living in a large city like Houston was greater accessibility to all the arts, including music.

When Joe Cocker and Stevie Ray Vaughan toured together in 1990, this was a must-see for me. My 8-track tape of Joe Cocker’s I Can Stand a Little Rain got me through bleak nights as I adjusted to the changes of being a college freshman–leaving home, being further from my family and closest friends, and making new friends. A time like that is exciting but also challenging. So absolutely yes to seeing Joe Cocker live.

Probably because of Tom and his appreciation for the blues, I came to Texas with awareness of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and I remember sitting with Lynne one day in that first Houston apartment and playing whatever cassette Tom and I had of SRV, and she said, “I LOVE this kind of music!” So the three of us were all in for that June concert to kick off our summer.

The venue at the Woodlands Pavilion is outdoors, with limited covered seating; otherwise, everyone sits on the grassy hill behind the seating. I’ve enjoyed both choices there, but I was particularly grateful to be in the covered seating that day because I had the GRANDMOTHER of migraine headaches. Not the best condition for any concert, and Stevie Ray was famous for playing LOUD. I steeled myself to enjoy the music despite the headache. At least I wasn’t sitting in the bright sun while we waited for the show to begin.

Every concert has a vibe, and on that day, at that venue, the vibe was a sense of anticipation, of fun, and a kind of laid-back chill despite being a summer day (at the beginning of Houston’s ovenlike season). To take my mind off the headache, I people-watched. One man and woman in particular, in the row in front of us, were like a commercial starring young, photogenic people in love. While I don’t usually appreciate public displays of affection, they had a sweet innocence–they were living in the moment, sharing a happy occasion with someone they loved, glad to be there, young and alive.

Later, I began to watch three men a few rows ahead of us. I don’t know if it was the popped collars… pause for photo:

Popped collars: What transgender writer, activist, and Southerner Basil Soper calls “one of history’s six worst gay trends.”

…or their rigid ability to sit side-by-side, never letting their shoulders touch despite the close seats, sharing only brief glances between them as they talked and laughed, that clued me in that they were gay and being careful not to signal that in any way (beyond the popped collars).

The June 1990 Becky didn’t know any gay people. Does that sound incredible? It’s because I was one of those straight people who undoubtedly had known lots of gay people, but other than one woman who came out to me as a lesbian in college, no one else I knew was ever openly LGBT or had shared that information with me.

As I sat there watching them, I had an epiphany. They were enjoying the day just as much as the man/woman couple in front of me, but they believed they were not in a place where they could be fully themselves. My head hurt so badly, and then my heart hurt, because of the injustice that three people felt they had to hide gestures of happiness–simple happiness–on the dangerous chance that any of the people around them would react badly, might say or do things that would hurt them emotionally, even to the point of escalating to hurt them physically, because of their perceived sexual orientation.

That day changed something inside me. I loved the company I was in, was thrilled with the performances of Joe Cocker and Stevie Ray with his band Double Trouble, and treasured every minute of the music, but images of those three men stayed with me after I left that night.

At the bookstore where I worked, I found a few works of fiction and nonfiction that would provide me stories and educate me about issues and concerns specific to LGBT people. At the end of that summer, on August 27, Stevie Ray Vaughan would die in a helicopter crash while leaving a Wisconsin concert venue, further locking my own concert experience in my consciousness. Four days later, our store hired another assistant manager whose name was Steve. Four days after that, Tom and I got another dachshund as a companion to our dachshund Pete. We named her Stevie for Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stevie Nicks.

Our little Stevie would live eight years longer than the assistant manager Steve, who became one of my most beloved friends. Steve was gay and had AIDS. When he became too ill to work, I became his caregiver and was with him when he died in June of 1992. His friends had become my friends, his family greatly loved by Tom and me. Some of my friends–namely Lynne and Princess Patti–spent time with and appreciated Steve. My mother loved him, too, and Lynne’s son Jess, young as he was, met Steve in the hospital, understood his illness, and had compassion for him. At Steve’s memorial service in 1992, some of my friends who’d never met him came because they knew what a loss his death meant not only to me, but to humanity. He should have had decades left, like so many other people taken by AIDS.

And like Stevie Ray Vaughan.

By the time I got to the end of reading Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan, I couldn’t stop crying. The book is formatted in stories and quotes from friends, family, musicians, and other people who knew SRV. Their feelings of loss and regret that someone so special was taken too soon certainly resonates. My friend Steve and Stevie Ray shared musical talent, a love of music, and a belief in its power to communicate and to heal. Like Steve, Stevie Ray had a goodness, a purity, and a love for others that was returned many times over. The day I saw him in concert, I’ll always believe there was something about Stevie Ray the person, along with his music, that changed something inside me.

So much of what I became, the purpose I found, the focus I had, and the work I did as a writer, can all be traced back to that concert in 1990. Because I saw. I understood. I wanted to find some way to make a good change. In the novel I was working on back then, I wrote my first gay character, a musician. It was my fledgling attempt to find words for that epiphany.

After I closed the book last week, I checked my online miniature instrument source, and they do have replicas of three of Stevie Ray’s guitars, including the one he named Number One, but they are 1/4-scale models instead of the 1/6-scale I prefer. So I thought, maybe I should look for a guitar pick. I found one, using a picture of Stevie’s head bowed as he holds Number One, as shown in this photo.

I ordered it. The woman at the online shop emailed me and said that she felt bad about the amount of postage I had to pay for such a small item, but that’s a post office rule, not hers, so she was including a bonus gift for me.

The day her package came in the mail, Tom brought it to me and waited while I opened it. The pick is perfect.

The bonus gift is a dog tag using a different SRV picture, still with Number One.

And when I turned it over, as if she knows me, this generous woman had put this dog tag on the back.


Tom Petty. Who I also saw at The Woodlands on a magical night with Tom. Whose music has been part of my soundtrack since the year I graduated from college. Who is forever connected to Princess Patti for me.

There is so much wonder in our lives, so many gifts from others, tangible and intangible, tiny and tremendous, so much magic in the Universe for us to cherish. I embrace it all.

Tiny Tuesday!


Giving you a sense of scale of this bowl by shooting it next to a Sharpie.

Probably as March begins in a couple of weeks, I’ll account for any progress I’ve made on reading during February, so I won’t mention which books yet. But one that I’ve finished had three separate parts, set in different times, and in each of them, a certain bowl shows up. It looks nothing like the bowl pictured here, but as I read, I kept thinking of this one.

I can’t remember where we got this one. Was it a gift? Initials on the bottom match initials of three artists we know, so perhaps one of them made it and gave it to us? Or did Tom or I see it somewhere and decide to buy it? Maybe he knows; I’ll have to ask.*

I only know that it lodged itself in my mind as I read, and I like the feeling of mystery and magic that it evokes. The pattern and distressed rim both hold poetry for me.

*ETA: Tom and I agree this bowl is likely created by one of his artist sisters. =)

Tiny Tuesday!

The other day I went through the pantry because there are so many things in there that haven’t been touched in a long time. Almost all of these involved some kinds of beverages brought by visitors who like to drink them. There were many varieties of tea, instant coffees and cocoas of the “just add water” type, plus some dried fruits, candies, specialty crackers, pudding, etc. I looked at the “best by” dates on everything. Some of that stuff must have come with us from The Compound, because “best by” predated our move to Houndstooth Hall at the beginning of January 2015. All of it ended up being tossed except for one batch of instant cocoa that had been put in a Swiss Miss tin. The tin’s original contents had expired, but the replacement cocoa was still fine.

Among the teas was a collection in this tiny tin:

After I emptied and tossed the contents, I was pleased to add the tin to my Beatles/London shelf in the writing sanctuary.

Tiny Tuesday!

This is a rather small diary I kept during my sophomore year at college. (I shot it with a pair of my glasses to give a sense of scale.)

I have so many diaries, journals, datebooks, appointment books, dating as far back as eighth grade. Some have only a few entries. Some of the journals have more, but with big time gaps between entries. I rarely read them, and when I do, I don’t have the patience to read them in their entirety, mostly because I’m so far away emotionally from where I was during the writing. Each time I read excerpts from any of them, I’m surprised how well I remember events, and how often time has softened my reactions to events.

If asked to list two of what I see as my assets, they are: *I don’t hold grudges. *I forgive.

I perceive these as strengths, because I believe that mentally staying in a painful place, brooding over a relationship gone bad, rehashing being done wrong, lets all that live rent-free in my head. Fuck that. I have too many better things to think about. Thinking is my favorite thing, and I’m not squandering it. I struggled with this last year because a few newsworthy events triggered bad memories for me. I worked through it.

When I read my accounts of other times, I do see plenty of motivation for letting go of toxic people. I don’t think any of them miss me. Likewise, I don’t miss them; we’re all good. Some of the people I hope never to see again have fascinating, humorous, slightly sinister, or quirky traits. There was a reason they were in my life and journal-worthy in the first place, and if nothing else, they can be a few threads woven into characters.

In fact, the reason I ended up glancing at this diary was because I was looking through bins and folders for a song a character wrote so I could use it in a chapter. I finally found it in the last folder I had to look through, because apparently, I had lots of time. [insert eyeroll] The date on the song is 1981. I don’t think I wrote it in 1981. I think I wrote it in the 1990s, so I guess the character wrote it in 1981 in his world. Maybe. Who knows.