3998 Stones

Thursday, December 11, 2014

"When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign,

that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

 --Jonathan Swift--

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Daughter complains that I never let past slights or resentments go.  I remember things.  I even still complain.  I still carry anger toward certain people for things they did to me, especially if those people still don't seem to care. 

Well, yeah, I guess so.  But anyone who claims they don't hang on to stuff like that is in deep denial.  Maybe you don't ever think about that stuff, but it's still there at some level, it's always there, and it affects your actions and reactions today.  In fact, the more you "let it go" (actually bury it, you can't let it go, it's a part of you), the deeper you bury it and refuse to look at it, the more likely it is to permeate your life, your thinking.  

If you acknowledge it, pull it out and look at it occasionally, turn it around in your hands and then put it back away, the less likely it is to spin and mutter and burst out under disguise.  So I think my way is healthier.

I came across a phrase this morning in a book I'm reading, "looking like a dog's breakfast", that hit me in a wave of sadness.  You know, my mother never once that I can remember ever told me I looked nice.  Not once.  Not for the proms, not for the wedding, never leaving the house.  
I always 
-looked like a dog's breakfast
-looked like something the cat dragged in
-looked like a bag tied in the middle
-looked like a rat's nest
-was ok, I guess, with a sigh.  

I'll never forget the time I looked up at the dinner table and saw her staring at me speculatively.  She said, "Your nose is all over your face."  What's a young girl supposed to do with stuff like that?

She never made any effort to fix anything, either.  She acted like it was hopeless.  

Now, if I had accepted what she said, if I had accepted her judgement and internalized it, I'd have been the mess she seemed to think I was, and still would be.  But I didn't.  I knew she was wrong, even then, that the problem was hers, not mine, that she was unfair to me.  And every time I take out one of those gems of mother love and turn it over in my hands, I know it didn't define me, it defined her.
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3838 Treasure

Saturday, April 12, 2014

My grandmother hid savings bonds.  I don't know why.  Maybe because she lived through the Great Depression, maybe because she didn't trust Grampa not to drink or gamble it away (Grampa had some serious faults, but drink and gambling wasn't among them), maybe it was just packrat tendencies.

On several occasions in my childhood, teens, and young adulthood, she took me around her home and showed me where it was all hidden.  Most of it was in envelopes taped to the underside of drawers, in her dining room and bedroom.  There must have been tens of thousands of dolllars, especially given that most of the bonds were old, well past maturity and still gathering interest.

She impressed upon me the bonds and their locations were a secret, and that I was the only person who knew this secret.  That if anything ever happened to her, I was to swoop in and gather it all up.  I don't know what I was supposed to do with it except to make sure it wasn't lost or stolen, I guess.

Well, in my late 20s and especially my 30s I was dealing with mental and emotional issues, and not keeping in very good touch with family.  I depended on my mother to keep me posted, which I guess wasn't the best idea.  When my father died, nobody thought to inform me until long after the funeral.  Same when Grampa died.  I found out he'd died when I happened to call Gramma a few weeks after the funeral.  I went to visit her, and that's the last time I saw her.  Nobody told me when Gramma died, again not until long after the funeral.  (I've often wondered - if I hadn't been there when Mom died, would anyone have told me?)

Anyway, several years after Grampa died, Gramma, in her late 80s I guess, had to vacate her apartment, and she moved into one of those senior complexes, you know, with her own apartment and her own familiar furniture, a kitchen but also a dining hall downstairs, nurses available 24 hours, and so on.  Mom said she was very happy there, was still taking the city bus into town to shop, and so on.

I asked if Gramma had taken her bedroom set and dining room set with her, and Mom said yes, except for the dining table, that was too big.  But she sill had the buffet, server, and china cabinet.

Gramma died in her mid-90s.  As I said, no one told me until Mom called one day to complain that Mom's brother's bossy wife had cleaned out the apartment something like the day after Gramma'd died, before the funeral even, and there was nothing left of anything besides a few photo albums.

I was aghast, but for an entirely different reason from my mother!  What about the dining room set (which I had always loved)?  Oh, they threw it all out.  They had a company come in and everything in the apartment went to the dump.

Well, I never said anything to anyone about Gramma's bond stash.  I don't know if it was still there, taped to the bottoms of drawers, but it wouldn't have done anyone any good to know at that point.  There was enough bad feeling floating around.

I still wonder, though.
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3635 Treasure pits.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Carl Sagan: It doesn't pay to be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

-- Carl Sagan --

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Today I (again) came across the story of the Oak Island treasure pit.  Treasure hunters have dug down 150' into a booby-trapped shaft over the past 200+ years hoping to find pirate treasure.  Several people have died in the various attempts.  It's beginning to look well nigh impossible to get to any treasure that might be at the bottom.

Now, me, I'd never have tried so hard.  I'd figure that anyone who burys treasure wants to come back and get it.  Who would bother making it so difficult?  So whatever might be at the bottom was never meant to be disturbed, whether valuable or not, or, if there is anything there at all, it has no value anyway and no one ever wanted to get it back.

You don't hide something so well that even you can't recover it.

My mother learned that when she was about 10 years old.

Gramma had a pair of Staffordshire dogs that her mother, Great-Gramma, had brought from Wales.  Mom had a fine gold chain necklace she wanted to hide from her brothers, Richard and Raymond.  The dogs looked almost exactly like the ones at the link above, about 12" in height, with a tiny air-hole at the back of the neck. 

Mom decided that was the perfect place to hide her necklace - in one of the dogs.  She fed the end through the hole, and the instant she heard the clasp hit the bottom she knew she had screwed up.  There was no other hole in the dog.  There was no way to get the necklace out.

Gramma asked her one day where the necklace was.  Mom lied and told her she'd left it on her dresser, and it disappeared, one of the boys must have taken it.  Off course they denied having seen it.

Many decades later Gramma moved into a tiny assisted living apartment.  She gave one of the dogs to her sister's daughter, Annette (Mom's cousin), and the other dog to my mother. 

[Absolutely the wrong thing to do!  First of all, every pair of the original Staffordshires is unique and perfectly matched - the old molds were used only once and the hand gilding was unique to the painter - so you don't split them up!  Secondly, it caused a rift between the two previously close cousins.  Each coveted the other's dog.]

Well, when my mother got her dog, she shook it.  No rattle.  Annette had got her gold necklace, too.

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I now own two pairs of the tall white Staffordshire dogs, one pair bought at auction, the other at an antiques fair.  Also two pair of smaller more colorful antique copies made for the lower class purchasers.

None of them rattle.
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3053 Russia is burning, Pakistan is flooding

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

"Oh, my dear little librarian, you pile up enough tomorrows,
and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.
I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering."
-- Professor Hill, "The Music Man" --

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Today is my mother's birthday. She would have been 86. She was one year older than I am now when she died of congestive heart failure. She seemed so old then. I feel so young now.

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As the title says, Russia is suffering more than 900 scattered forest fires across over 300,000 acres that have burned entire villages, and Pakistan is is suffering flooding that has already affected 14 million people, killing more than 1,600.

This week's photo essays from Boston.com (which include the links to last week's stories on the fires and floods):
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/continuing_russian_wildfires.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/continuing_pakistani_floods.html
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1760 No Excuse

Sunday, April 13, 2008

African Proverb: It matters not what you call me, but what I answer to.

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I went to a luncheon today, and on the way home I had some fun with the GPS. I knew exactly how I wanted to go home, but the device wanted to take me up the Thruway. I didn't want to go on the Thruway, so I didn't take the turn. The supercilious voice informed me she was "recalculating", and she tried to take me to a U-turn back to the Thruway - three different U-turns, because I didn't take any of them, either.

Now, I could have turned it off, but it started to be fun. I wondered how long it would take her to give up. Since I was paralleling the Thruway, she kept trying to get me onto it, and got upset every time I refused.

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On the way, I passed the yellow house.

I go to a lot of the big fancy craft fairs, and there was a local guy who made tiny models of well-known local historic houses out of tiny bits of carved wood. He took pictures of the real houses, and then copied them. They were sturdy and beautiful, perfect down to the smallest detail, and if you lifted the roof off a house, it was a tiny velvet-lined box.

A few years before my mother died, I gave her several of the tiny houses for her birthday, each wrapped separately. Most of them were fancy mulit-colored Victorians with towers, but one was a rather plain white-trimmed yellow house with a wrap-around porch, multiple gables, and white gingerbread. She opened the gift boxes one at a time, and the yellow house happened to be the last.

She was shocked speechless by that house. When she could speak again, she asked me why?/where?/how? I had chosen it. I told her I knew it didn't match the others, but I picked it because it was on a road I frequently traveled, and it was one I was familiar with.

It turned out that all her life, since childhood, she had had dreams involving a particular house. Whatever else went on in the dream, the action took place on the sloping lawn, with the house in the background.

It was this house.

She had never been in this area, never on that road.

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Ok, maybe I'll get in trouble for this one, but it's real, and mine, so there.

There was a show on PBS today about how stress affects health, the eventual focus being on how racism creates constant stress, affecting even things like a high rate of premature births among Black and Hispanic mothers.

Ok, I buy that.

Then there was a group of mothers talking about how even little things affect them, lifelong, like when they take their child to the playground, and their 3-year-old runs up to a group of white children playing, and asks to play with them, and the other kids don't say anything, they just turn and run away, and how such racist attitudes can affect even a 3-year-old.

My immediate reaction was "Bullshit!" I wish I'd had such a convenient excuse when MY blond 3-year-old got exactly the same treatment!

That just happens. When a group of little girls are already playing together, they don't open up to admit a latecomer unless they already know her. That's just the way it is. Color may or may not have had anything to do with it, and there's a fair chance it didn't.

I get really really upset when people immediately jump to assume racism. That's racist, too!

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Later: BTW, before objecting to my observation, take a good look at the photo up there on the top right.
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1667 Itchy Skin!

Sunday, February 3, 2008

I ITCH today! I itch everywhere. When I run my hands over my skin, especially on the sides of my waist, my neck, upper back, upper chest, and forearms, I feel like I'd fallen into a cactus patch. Little electric shocks, like there are tiny spines stuck in my skin that stab me when I touch them. I can pin some of them down to a specific spot, and when I look, there's nothing there, but when I run a finger over it, it bites me. The nerves fire.

Yesterday's volunteer gig was at a vocational school. They have all kinds of workshops there, and I'm wondering if I've picked up some tiny bits of insulation or something, floating in the air. Sitting next to the door as I was, I'd have been in a high-flow area. I have showered since, but if they're stuck in my skin.... I tried applying and pulling tape, like you would for cactus spines, but it didn't fix it.

It's driving me slowly crazy.

My grandmother had the most amazing skin - smooth and soft and very pink and white. She credited Ivory soap, but my mother's skin was similar, so I think it was genes. Gramma's skin wasn't particularly sensitive, except in one way. She couldn't be around fiberglass, in any soft form.

In the 50s it was fashionable to cover Christmas trees with a web of fiberglass. Before she entered any house, Gramma would have to ask what they'd used on the tree, and if it was that fiberglass, she couldn't go in. She'd swell up all over, even if she didn't get near the tree. The stuff was in the air. (You have to wonder about people's breathing it.)

Once house insulation was installed and closed up, it was ok, but she couldn't enter a new house, or one that had just had insulation work done. In the 60s, fiberglass drapes were popular. Gramma could be in a room with them, but they couldn't be touched while she was there.

She was the same way about peaches. If Gramma was touched by a peach, she'd swell and itch. The peach fuzz got into and irritated her skin. I remember my grandfather chasing her around the house with a peach one day when I was very young, and I was afraid of "poison peaches" for a while after.

And that was about it - just fiberglass and peaches. Weird, huh?

People have said that Marilyn Monroe photographed so well because of the reflective quality of her skin. She had a thin outer layer, with white fat under, so that her skin reflected light, and she seemed to glow.

Mom's skin was like that. She glows in photographs. She showed me an old yellowed newspaper clipping once, a photo of her high school class at graduation. There were several hundred faces, caps and gowns, rows and rows in auditorium seats. No face was more than 1/4 inch high, if that. She said, "Find me", and I pointed to her, about a third of the way back, without hesitation. She glowed. Her face was the cream in a sea of sepia.

So, then there's me. Gramma's itch, without the glow. Shuffle the cards again, please.
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1425 Losing Parents

Friday, August 10, 2007

I have two very close friends who are worried about losing their parents. We're at that age, so they're at that age. Roman lost both his parents within four days of each other last January.

People assume that I would understand their feelings, because both of my parents are gone. I've been through it.

Actually, maybe I don't understand fully. I didn't have the relationship with my parents that most people have.

When my father died, thirty years ago, the "on top" reaction was merely relief. I wouldn't have to be afraid of him any more, and I wouldn't have to worry about my younger siblings any more. (Which actually was wrong, because the damage done lingered for decades.) I thought we were all finally released.

That was on top, the rational part. Deep down was different.

I never saw him dead, so deep in the dark places I didn't believe he was dead. Daughter was very sick and in the hospital when he died, so I wasn't able to go to the funeral (which was moot anyway, since no one told me he had died until a week later. I don't know why).

Deep in the dark places in my mind, I was convinced that people were just telling me he was dead that so I wouldn't try to kill him. That he was hiding, and would come after me or Little Brother as soon as I got comfortable. I had nightmares for over a year in which I was hiding Little Brother from him, and he kept finding him and beating him. I'd wake up screaming and shaking. During the day, any unexpected movement glimpsed from the corner of my eye would have me shaking. It took a few years before the dark places relaxed.

My mother died seventeen years ago. I was holding her hand when she died. At first, for maybe two days, I felt like an orphan. Like my safety and support were gone, and I was alone. And then that dissipated, and I felt nothing. It took another five years for me to realize that I felt nothing not because of depression, but because there was simply nothing to feel.

She was never our safety and support. She made no effort to protect us (other than shouting "Not the head! Not the head!" when we were being beaten). She never gave us any advice or guidance. No praise or encouragement. She pretty much ignored us. We kids grew up competing for our mother's attention, and learning to deflect our father's anger away from ourselves and onto each other, which doesn't lead to good sibling relations. Our mother was really nothing more to us than the quartermaster, the person we went to for necessities.

We wanted to love our parents, we tried very hard, we wanted them to love us, we tried very hard, we convinced ourselves there was some connection, but it in actual fact, it just wasn't there. If my parents had been rich, we kids would probably have been in year-round boarding school from the age of five. That might have been better.

So, no, I probably don't fully understand how my friends feel when they lose their parents, certainly not the depth and breadth.

I wish I did.
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