5071 Losing it

Monday, June 27, 2016

"God created Man in his own image and Man, being a generous sort, returned the favor."

-- Mark Twain --

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In a comment on an earlier post, I wrote, in regard to mastectomy: "Daughter told me that losing them entirely will break my grandbaby's heart. "Huh?" Daughter doesn't even fill an A cup, and Nugget (5 years old) finds snuggling into Gramma's soft chest pillows very comforting."

That brought an old memory vividly to mind.

My grandmother was, no other way to say it, fat.  She was almost perfectly round from her shoulders to her knees, with big doughy arms.  She was no more than 4' 7" tall.

I forget how old I was at the time, still a child, anyway (but maybe into middle school?) when we went to visit her again.  We'd been living pretty far from Scranton and I hadn't seen her since the previous summer. 

She was skinny!  She was all flat all over!  There was nothing left of her! 

Mom said Gramma had been diagnosed with diabetes, so she had to lose weight, but that didn't mean anything to me.

I completely freaked.  It took me a very long time to come to terms with that.  I kept wailing, "Grammas are SUPPOSED to be fat!"

See, the way I saw it then, other fat people might take more than their share, but when a Gramma was fat, that meant she had more to give.  I was afraid Gramma couldn't love me so much anymore.

You know, I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that I've gained a good 30 pounds since Nugget was born, and it hasn't bothered me at all?  Now I'm a Gramma.  Grammas are SUPPOSED to be fat!
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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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1722 Faint of Heart

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Shreve, over there at "The Daily Coyote", has a post today about giving Charlie the coyote a deer heart. (By the way, I highly recommend her blog about Charlie. Her photos are beautiful. If you go there, be aware that the diary is several months behind, so the story is now from last fall.) She cautions readers that if they are faint of heart, they should read no further.

I offer the same caution here. You may want to skip this entry.

Beef heart was one of my grandmother's specialties.

That was in the '50s, when one bought meat at a butcher shop, and it was absolutely fresh. The butcher often, uh, see, this is where the first faint part is, butchered the animals himself that morning.

Gramma would put in her order, and when the butcher had a fresh-that-morning beef or veal heart, he'd call her. She'd pick up the heart and a quart of fresh blood. The blood had to be absolutely fresh.

How to prepare beef heart:

• Remove any covering tissues. With a very sharp thin knife, cut out all the major blood vessels. They tend to be tough. Going in through the blood vessel openings, cut out any internal valves.


• Make a stuffing of chopped carrots, turnips, parsnips, onions, leeks, and celery, and a little bread or oatmeal. Season with various herbs, and stuff the heart through the vessel openings.


• Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roast it slowly.


• Make gravy with the blood and a little stock and flour. This is the richest most flavorful gravy in the world.


• Slice, and serve.

It's usual to slice it in the kitchen and serve as slices. Plopping a whole heart on the table tends to startle neophytes.

It was wonderful. If you're a carnivore, anyway. Or a vampire.

As late as the early '70s it was still possible to get a fresh heart and blood, so I have cooked it myself a few times, but it's been some 30+ years since. I miss it. Hearts these days go into hot dogs and dog food, I guess. I suppose during hunting season it's still possible to get venison heart, but I don't know if it would taste the same, and it's definitely not the same without the blood gravy.

Gee. Organ meat is high in cholesterol. I wonder if that's why that side of my family almost all died of strokes.
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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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