TO READ PERCHANCE TO DREAM

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking - I’ve never addressed more than fifteen people and that was at a club meeting - early this morning I found myself dreaming that I was speaking at a high school graduation. When I woke up I remembered a lot of that short but vivid dream; remembered enough that I said to myself: “Self, you ought to write this down.”

I remembered we were sitting in a stretch limo, and I was introducing one Superintendent of Schools to another – I don’t even know any Superintendents of Schools!  I was wearing a white, knee length outfit – pleated skirt and navy trimmed sailor-boy top – and though I’ve had an outfit like that, mine was in pink crepe. And I suddenly realized that I had on knee high stockings and everyone would see the tops when I got up on the stage, so I was scrambling to get them off, but then my feet felt icky in my shoes. The high school was in Pennsylvania – I went to high school in New York.  I was up on stage, talking to the audience and trying to get them seated, explaining that there would be a delay in everything because the backstage clock was ten minutes behind the one in the auditorium.  And then I woke up. I wonder where that dream came from. I didn’t read before bed last night, so this dream segued right into the essay I’d already written:

 

 

I love to dream.  I usually have great dreams, but they seem to depend on what I read just before bed. I’m not much of a movie-goer, but when I’ve seen a movie that evening it too, of course, influences my dreams. I learned early on never to watch a horror movie – they make for nightmares – as do horror novels. Stephen King is a great writer, but I can’t read any more of his stuff.  The Shining stayed with me for days.

 

Several evenings I’ve played a game or two of Solitaire on my laptop and I dreamt cards! Not any Alice in Wonderland dream of card games, no, I’m just piling one correct card upon another, boring, boring, red queen on black king, black six on red seven. No good, no good! If I’ve had no chance to read that day my dreams seem to fall back on one of several ‘themes’ I’ve reencountered over the years.

 

 

 

A little bit of self-psychoanalysis here?  Do I love to read because I love to dream?  Maybe. I’ve been surrounded by books all my life. While I do read
non-fiction, I try not to read it last thing before I go to bed.

I’ve read all of authors such as Robertson Davies, Dorothy Dunnett, Diana Gabaldon, Robert Heinlein, P.D. James, Anne McCaffrey, Nora Roberts, and John Steinbeck (in alphabetical order because I like them all).  I’ve read some, not all, of many others.  I estimate that I read 200 to 250, and maybe more books every year.  They contribute to wonderful dreams.

During one teenage summer vacation of about ten weeks – I think it was the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I know it was before I had a summer job - I set out to keep track of the number of books I read: the total was 54. All were classics from the family library.  The longest: War and Peace!  The shortest: oooh, I don’t remember – but I read lots of Twain, the Bronte sisters, some poetry, Lust for Life, some Dickens – I really didn’t care for Dickens – and many more.  It was that summer that I began to notice that my reading found itself reiterated, usually very strangely, in my dreams.  I’ve been a fiction junkie ever since.

 

NATIONAL POETRY MONTH - APRIL

 

Wordsworth believed that poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility"

 

Thursday, February 28, 2013 was a very interesting day for me. I’ve several websites I check each morning, and The Writer’s Almanac entry set the tone for my day.

 

The poem for that day, one in free verse, which to me means it doesn’t rhyme and has no meter, was Breakfast, by Joyce Sutphen. An o.k. poem, quite a bit toward the prose side of writing, but evoking a pleasant scene.  I thought a bit about it and decided it made for a nice memory.

 

The single birthday entry for the day was that of novelist Colum McCann. I’d never come across any of his writings.  What struck me was this bit: He has had a happy life, he says, the kind that doesn't make for an interesting story. He said, "For me, the logical conclusion is that I have to write outside my life."  All day long that Thursday I thought about how my own happy life was the same – the kind that doesn’t make for interesting writing. Yet in that poem about breakfast with her father, Sutphen took the memory of a brief moment in an ordinary morning from a happy but probably otherwise, for many, uninteresting life, and made a web-worthy poem. Uninteresting lives don’t make for interesting novels, but they’ve got lots of poem potential.

 

I wish I was a poet. I’ve many interesting bits that might come out well as poetry if I just write them out as a sentence and then rearrange it into a few stanzas. It’s something to think about. Could I do that?

 

 

Then – two days later on March 2, came this poem, The Key, by Jane Hirshfield. It too is about a morning, but very different, still free verse, but not just a slice of life.  I’m torn as to which of the two I like best. --- I’m still torn, and I’m writing this on March 10^th.  I’ll post it when I’ve got an opening.

 

POCKET DOCTOR

I wish I had a pocket doctor, one I could bring out any time I had a concern.  Wikipedia and Web MD are not satisfactory – they can’t conduct a conversation.  And most discussion boards can be useless if they don’t hit on your exact symptoms and concerns. Many times you can become too agitated over what you read – you need a doctor to set your thinking on the right path.

Besides which, medicos really don’t like it when you bring your own ideas into the consultation room.  If you do consult the net just keep quiet about it until the right time comes up – don’t go in saying “Doctor, I’m sure I have a bad case of bungafatitis.”

 

I did that once, eons ago.  When I sat down with the doctor he asked “What seems to be the problem?” and I said “My gall bladder is acting up.”  Said he: “I’ll be the judge of that”, or words to that effect.  Well, excuse me! I had an honest reason to believe it was – and it was! – my gall bladder acting up. All the women on my mother’s side of the family were afflicted with wonky gall bladders, and many were the times I was present during a discussion and rehashing of symptom, operations, and recuperations.  I must say, my own operation and recuperation weren’t too bad. Having had that operation back in the late seventies, I’ve got a nice, long scar to show for it.  Battle scar, I say! Today there are just three little holes where they go in and pluck that sucker out arthroscopically.  Medical progress is surely wonderful.

I don’t mind that I had a bit more of an ordeal way back when. I’m so pleased that now, when a I’m in my 70’s and will really need advanced medical help one of these days, that medical sciences have made the strides they have.

I’m also glad that I live where I live. Medical help abounds here around Charlotte. My own general practitioner is part of the Carolinas Health Care System that has opened offices almost literally “right across the street” from our community.

 

But I do wish I had my doctor in my pocket.  When I do see him there is so little time to do more than go over what is already in the data base for me. (Why the nurse and doctor have to check this every time is beyond me. Don’t they trust me when I say there’s been no change? What a waste of time having to go through each and every vitamin and supplement on the list, to go over shots I’ve not had because I can’t have them, or the medicines I’m taking.  But then -  going off on a tangent of thought and trying to be diplomatic about it all -  the nurse’s checking this gives the doctor time with whatever patient he’s seeing right then.) If I go with a list of questions I invariably leave out a few.  So if the doc were in my pocket I could pull him out and go over those questions as they arose – never mind getting them on a list.  This is pie-in-the-sky wishing. It will never happen – but wouldn’t it be nice?

 

Who? Well, not this doctor, but of them all he was my favorite!
I think it was the scarf that did it.

 

 

 

FOR THE BIRDS

 

If you are a birder, if you are looking for the ultimate in ‘eye candy’, be sure to go to go to YouTube and see Fast Forward Through a 264 Species Birding Day.  Last week, my regular email of enews from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology alerted me to this great presentation compiled to show, in the same order, the 264 species Team Sapsucker, setting out to see as many species of birds as they could, saw in 24 hours. I was delighted with how many species I recognized right away, but they went by so quickly that my brain didn’t have time to spit out the names.

I’m pleased to have been able to increase the number on my life list to 185 since we moved to the Carolinas. Seeing 264 in 24 hours seems like the Holy Grail of birding – and it is a record.  The group will try to beat their record this year – I wish them luck, and I wish I could go along with them.

HARMONY

Remembering that Palm Sunday was the next day, The Golden Olden Lady on It Helps Fill the Day, observed “I am not religiously observant, in fact, I am contentedly atheist, with humanist leanings and a protestant upbringing, but I am deeply attached to really serious liturgical music, as it's about the best stuff on earth to sing, in my view. So, even if you listen to nothing else like it this Holy Week can I suggest you put five minutes by to try this out for size.”

Being like-minded with the Lady, I was ready to “try this”. The ‘this’ in this case was the opening movement of Bach’s St. John Passion. Serious liturgical music indeed it is, and it came to me via Yahoo. I’d never known that they had such stuff in their repertoire, and, needless to say, I had to play some more pieces like that, then and there. I was like a kid with a new toy – I was there for a long time playing old favorites that day.

 

Sundays at our house always meant listening to the radio program of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from Salt Lake City – E. Power Biggs at the organ, of course. Along with the Saturday live broadcasts of the opera from the Met, it was part of our regular family weekend routine. (And in looking up the proper spelling of Mr. Biggs’ name, I discovered that Yahoo had a recording of him playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I’ve got it playing as I type this particular paragraph. Now that I realize the music will play on even if I’m in another window or writing an essay, though I’ve got many CDs, this is so easy: just select something, let it play, and keep on keepin’ on.

 

But I digress! It’s the choral music I was going to cover today. So: the choral music from Salt Lake City, and an old 78 recording of a cappella Christmas Carols by the Robert Shaw Chorale, and maybe a chorus or two from an opera, were my introduction to group singing and my introduction to harmony. I could always ‘hear’ all the parts. I love to sing and I love to harmonize.  I must amend that ‘sing’ bit by saying I love to sing at the top of my lungs.  For me, nothing gets the work done faster than singing along and harmonizing with a CD of a Broadway show – Maybe South Pacific or Cats - or perhaps Sinatra or Streisand or folk songs from the 60’s. I’m old school. My dear Canadian friend loves old-time Gospel music in three-part harmony – and she isn’t even from the South! Well, she is from southern Canada! But what is it she loves? It’s the harmony. Harmonizing just sounds good in my head. If it’s good enough and close enough it really rings.

 

I must say that there are three choral things that can make my eyes start to tear and my nose crinkle when I sing along, that make me ‘fill up’ just thinking and writing about them: any group singing the Navy Hymn, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic,  and any piece from Song of Survival. This last, while not actually sing along at the top of your lungs stuff, is a recording by the Women’s Choir of Haarlem, Holland, of a recreation of orchestral pieces that were sung, or hummed, from memory by women interred in the Dutch East Indies during World War II. Singing, and at first it was popular and folk songs, was what kept them sane, helped them to survive. I like to hum along with them.  As I’ve been composing this paragraph I’ve been finding links to three and listening to some of them. I’m a teary mess! So, enough of that. I did put in the links in case you want to hear for yourself.

 

Winter is late this year in most parts of the continent - actually in most parts of the northern hemisphere!  That means spring cleaning will be later than usual.  I do recommend that before you lift that dust mop you put on a rousing CD – any of your favorite genres will do – and sing out loud – and harmonize - to your heart’s content. 

 

 

 

 

APPLAUSE

 

This morning’s Arts and Letters Daily references, as they do Monday through Saturday, another interesting article. This one, from The Atlantic, is A Brief History of Applause.  Now there’s a topic I’d never have thought of, but it is all quite interesting.

These days applaud is something I’m having to do more verbally than physically.  These old arthritic fingers will no longer straighten up – I can’t easily get my palms to meet to make that distinctive clap.  I’m just happy that I can still type out quick things like this for my blog.

Happy Tuesday everyone – give yourself a round of applause!

EASTER BASKET REVISITED

This essay was originally posted for Easter 2011. I thought some of my newer readers might like to read it.  From time to time I’ll be perusing my essay cache for suitable reposts like this one.                    

 

Today’s array of Easter goodies just boggles my mind. Who would want all that junk? From themed clothing, to masses of stuffed animals, on to fully loaded and cellophane-wrapped baskets, the sales start right after the St. Patrick’s Day green stuff is pulled off the shelves. Again, the ka-ching of profit rears its ugly head. Nothing’s new there; it’s just on a larger scale. But I can calm myself in the midst of all the commercialism by remembering the Easters of my childhood. 

I’ve always loved Easter. Sometimes it came around when there was snow on the ground, but usually it was in the warmth of spring.  My sister and I loved shopping for our new Easter outfits, especially the hats. While the coming holiday meant the small sacrifices of Lent – not too burdensome for most of us kids – we could also look forward to Easter baskets. 

I know that many kids’ parents did up the whole Easter basket, compete with hard boiled eggs.  Maybe they wanted to have all the fun, but it certainly can be a big mess.  At our house, Mom would hard boil the eggs then sit us down at the newspaper-covered kitchen table with crayons, wire dippers, and coffee cups filled with hot water and a touch of vinegar.  We dropped in the color tablets, let them dissolve and then went to work. We’d make crayoned designs on the eggs and dip them in our favorite colors.  Sometimes we dunked each end in a different color to get a third color band in the middle. Sometimes we messed up and dunked the whole egg several times, and those were usually nasty looking.  But we did have fun. Of course we always wrote our own name on at least one egg. We tried to make our own eggs identifiable so that later on we wouldn’t eat one of the other’s eggs by mistake – that would have been ‘gross and disgusting’.

On the Paas Easter egg dye website I learned that they go back 125 years, and that coloring eggs goes back to the Persians of 3000 BCE. I do remember our Greek neighbors cooking goose eggs and dying them with red onion skins for Greek Orthodox Easter.  Then they polished them with some bacon grease for a beautiful display. It was neat to have two Easters while we lived in that neighborhood: lots of wonderful and different foods. I vaguely remember the bread and a good soup, and other delectable things on the table. 

But back to the baskets. The Easter Bunny is like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy: even when you become one of those characters for your own family you still cherish a bit of their magic in your own heart. On Easter morning many of the eggs we'd dyed found their way into our baskets, and the Easter Bunny had made a visit.  On a bed of shredded, soft, always green waxed paper, there might be a chocolate lamb and several chocolate-covered, egg-shape marshmallows, and in the best of times there was big sugar panorama egg.

Even in the slimmest of times though, we always found a chocolate bunny in our baskets.  There is an official ritual for chocolate bunnies: you must eat the ears first. Yes, it’s true, trust me.  I’m sure it’s all because they are the handiest part to shove in your mouth.  Next comes the tail.  It’s just has to be that way.  The rest gets broken up and eaten willy-nilly, but stretched out over as many days as possible before Mom says “enough is enough,” and puts the baskets away until next year.

 

 

WAFFLE DAY

 

The Swedish like to have extra holidays. Lately I’ve been following

My Life in Sweden - Alexandra always has an interesting blog. In January I reported on Tulip Day. Yesterday Sweden celebrated Waffle Day. I’ll drink to that – with another cup of coffee, to be sure.

 

Saturday is waffle day at our house – I’ll celebrate then.

 

THE ART OF LETTER WRITING IS NOT DEAD - NEITHER IS THE ART OF CONVERSATION

The fine art of handwriting – or the art of fine handwriting – might be dead or dying (I’ve written another blog about that), but the art of the letter is quite lively indeed.

I am just one grain in a big pile of sand, and if I’m carrying on a lively correspondence I’m thinking many, many other people are doing the same. I recently read about the death of conversation. The group under discussion was quite a lofty one. I suppose they were mourning the death of lofty, esoteric conversations. Such exchanges can be fascinating, but the vast majority of us grains of sand are quite content with the more modest level of our own conversations – especially the emailed variety. I’ve a wonderful Canadian friend I’ve never met. We’ve a meeting of the minds and of our personalities, but not of our persons. We’ve been conversing for over a year now, and we’ve not yet run out of conversation. We stay away from the topics of sex, religion and politics: we’re too old for the first, agree that our own brands of religion are tailor-made for ourselves, and we’re both often disgusted with the politics of our respective countries.*

The nice thing about email conversations is that we can take whatever time we need to complete our reply and, unlike a phone call or text, it can be interrupted and resumed later without the recipient even noticing.  Washed laundry has to be put in dryer, bread taken out of the oven, meals need to be made, walls need painting, and even though the other one would never have known the difference, it’s interesting when we let the other one know just what we’re doing on the home front and why we interrupted a letter or where we’re going when we finish.

We converse about clothes and shopping, what the children are doing, what we’re reading these days, or exercise and the lack thereof and our efforts to improve. We kibitz on the care-and-feeding of husbands – especially the care thereof. That in itself could keep us conversing for years.

One favo(u)rite topic is the weather – after all, the differences in climate from London, Ontario to Indian Land, South Carolina can be significant. I must say though that this past summer’s conversation dwelled too frequently on the incessant, mind-sapping heat in both locations. Our winters, so far, haven’t been too bad. We thank the powers that be for small favors. 

I do recommend that you find a congenial correspondent of your own, or if one seems to find you do not let it get away. It’s sharing everything to the nth degree, it’s finding a sister of the heart.

 

* Do go and peruse the postings in Susanna Says here 

and her new blog Susannah's Journey here,

 

 

SPRING HAS SPRUNG AND GRASS HAS RIZ - I WONDER WHERE THE BIRDIES IS! *

                                    

PLANTS!  I WET MY PLANTS.

* I know where one birdie is - and this morning he was right outside my window, doing his incessant tweeting when I wanted to sleep late.  Ah, well - I got up and got a lot done.
As for the grass rising, our Bermuda grass is still a light shade of brown, but this too will green up.

Happy Spring to all my readers. 

                    

THERE'S LITTLE FUNNY ABOUT SENIORS

I am getting a bit tired of making fun of seniors, even if it is the seniors making the fun. And I'm getting a little bit tired of all this stuffing my email inbox, even if it is the seniors who are sending it.

This is a little ditty, enhanced with pictures culled from the internet, that extolls the idea that even with all their bladder and bowel problems, with their arthritic limbs and hearing loss, among other things, Seniors should be happy because they’re on the Green Side of the Grass – that is, not six feet underneath it. “Tain’t funny McGee.”

I BUY BOOKS...

   Or: my answer to Mr. Seinfeld

I don’t smoke or drink or even chew gum. My vice: I buy books. Many are worthy of any good library, many, some of you might think, are not.  Recent purchases in the former category include Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, and the Merriam Webster New Book of Word Histories. The latter? Well, let’s just call them Fiction: Romances, Mysteries, Romance Mysteries – I’ve a long list of favorite authors.

 

Since 1990 when I stopped lumping in book money with the rest of our entertainment expenditures, I’ve spent just over $14,000.00 on books, many of them used. Egad! That’s a nice chunk of change.  I’m sure the lifetime total would be nicely impressive too, and I delight in every dollar’s worth.

 

I was reading Theodore Dalrymple’s essay Why second-hand bookshops are just my type, and I came upon the telling of a bibliomaniac whose library was sold after his death for only a third of what he’d paid for the massive collection. I sold off my college text books – about twenty years later - but I can’t imagine selling my books now. I’ve always given them away when I was finished with them. I’ve read many of my books four or five times, but usually when I’ve read a book twice – or have gotten only part way into a real dud – it goes into the bag to be taken to the library for the sale room.  Sell them? I’ve not got the time: I’m reading!

Dalrymple’s essay mourns the passing of second-hand bookshops. I’ve rarely had the pleasure of browsing in a second-hand bookshop.* I do now have the pleasure of browsing in second-hand book sites on line. My favorite is Thrift Books, and Britain’s Awesome Books is pretty well that: awesome.

 

Really, really esoteric volumes can sometimes be found, used, of course, at Amazon – but then, what can’t you find at Amazon?  I do browse the shelves of the sale room at the library – always going with book lists in hand to be sure I’ve not read that one before, always looking for new treasures. (And library sale rooms are great sources for children’s books. I’ve got on hand new birthday and Christmas books for my granddaughters will into 2016, but used books are great to hand out throughout the year for un-birthdays and such.) 

 

 

I don’t know if you’ll think this good or bad, but though I’ve always belonged to the library wherever we lived and occasionally do check out books, I’d really rather own a book than borrow it. If it is mine I can take as long as I want to read it: though I read many books in a week, it gives me the itch to have a time limit on my reading.  If it is mine I am happy to let it just sit in my stack of to-be-read and enjoy its being there.

 

In one paragraph, talking about the pleasures of finding markings and various papers and bookmarks in used books, Dalrymple says “there is no substitute for being able to hold the physical book in one’s hand.” I agree wholeheartedly – but for another reason on another plane: I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with an electronic book.  A good friend of mine has shown me the wonders of her iPad, and how she can enlarge the type, and how it remembers where she left off, and all the other delights of electronic reading.  Not for me. I want to be able to flip back to that remembered reference to a certain character or place – and I remember it was on the left hand page about two inches from the bottom. Yes, there it is. I remembered the ‘landmarks’.  Can’t do that with an electronic book. 

 

This is just a fraction of th books I once owned. I keep them
and all my litle dustables in our bedroom - this way none of it
has to be dusted very often.

I want to hold the book and not have to be too careful not to drop it in the toilet if I’m in a bathroom reading session – though there I usually read magazines. I want to refer every once in a while to the jacket’s cover picture or inside blurb and bio.  I want to see my books – especially the ones I’ve kept and reread for years.  Just seeing the books on the shelf gives me a fleeting remembrance of the story. I can’t get that feeling with an electronic device.

 

Books are neat and compact, easier to collect and store and dust (though I rarely do) than say salt and pepper shakers or automobilia. Yes, for many reasons on many levels, I’ll stick to books as my vice of choice.

 

 

*but I love pictures of them – so higgledy-piggledy, stacks and stacks.  As the bibliophile’s lament goes: So many books, so little time. 

OBSESSION WITH BOOKS

 

“What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they're trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?”

                           ― Jerry Seinfeld

 

In answer to Mr. Seinfeld, I say “read my post this coming Friday.”

GOOD GROOMING

A dear friend of mine delighted me with a narrative about her fun foray into turquoise, one of the ‘different’, shall we say, nail polish colors. The colors are not so new to the world, though I really do think that any but the red and pinkish shades are ugly, but they’re new to senior gals like us. She got me to thinking about finger nails – and there lies (lay?) an essay.

Nails? I just try to keep mine clean and neat. My Mom never used polish on her nails, although she had lovely hands. I must be a throwback: I’ve got short, stubby hands. My father was a pianist and had long fingers, but I can just about reach an octave. To top it off, I bit my nails until just before I was married. Couldn’t have ratty nails when I showed off my new, old wedding ring (it’s my husband’s Grandmother’s wedding ring from Norway in 1901) so I finally let my nails grow. If you know what you’re looking at, you can tell that I bit my nails for years. I know several gals with model-worthy hands and nails. I think they’ve been taking good care of their hands and nails since waaaay back. It’s ingrained in them, not in me.



This wasn't me - I bit my nails for years.

Good grooming is ingrained in many if not most women. As a young girl, the closest I got to any tips and know-how was the Good Grooming Badge in Girl Scouts. It’s not that my Mom wasn’t well groomed – she was. It’s just that she rarely if ever had my sister or me in to see what she did with herself: Mom had too much on her plate to even think about stuff like that. I do know that she was one of those women who couldn’t wear perfume – it turned sour on her and reeked. And she loved the smell of perfume – her favorite was always Chanel N°5. She kept a bottle of it on her dresser and gave it a sniff every once in a while.

I think that my Mom absorbed her grooming knowledge from her older sister. Like me, she wasn’t very good at teaching others the things she had just assimilated from observation. She just did her morning prep and that was that. In my mind’s eye, as I think about such things, I can see myself only watching her cook, clean the house, or take care of chores. I can’t ‘hear’ that she’s telling me anything – I’m just watching her. Oooh yes – she did teach us the proper way to iron. I get a ‘visual’ on that one! I think she hated to iron. I know that in later years she told me that when we were little she had enough hand-me-down dresses for my sister and me and enough playsuits for my brother so she had to iron only once a month. It was economical to be in a family with lots of cousins. She was delighted when we went to school and wore uniforms.

Maybe Mom was unconscious of us is a way. When I started on a ‘real’ job – not just baby-sitting and summer jobs – I bought a lovely, lacy slip with some of my first pay check. Mom commented that she didn’t know I liked such frilly things. No, of course she didn’t. We never thought to complain or comment on what she purchased for us. It wasn’t in us to have comments or complaints. She purchased whatever we needed and what she purchased in the way of most clothing was to her own tailored taste.

The Girl Scout Good Grooming badge showed Cinderella’s pumpkin and glass slipper. Well, I was sort of the pumpkin type. Oh, I was allowed use a little Tangee lipstick on occasion – remember that stuff? You can still get it at Vermont Country Store - but that was about it until I spent some summer money and learned a bit about makeup from a friend. She didn’t use much either, so it was almost the blind leading the blind.

But here I am at seventy, and I think I’ve done all right by myself in the grooming department. Because my hair is blond verging on white, if I don’t want to look blank as my blond aunts did in their old age I have to use eyebrow pencil and mascara. But those and a bit of lipstick seem to do the trick. Sometimes we oldsters go about things wither with complete neglect or with a heavy hand, so I’ve asked my stepdaughter and daughter-in-law to tell me if I make a mess of anything or need more of something in the way of my grooming efforts for my face or body.  I appreciate all the help I can get!

 

I'm more of a plain moth than a butterfly.

 

MAMA AFRICA

Google tells me that today would have been Miriam Makeba’s 81^st birthday. It evokes wonderful memories for me. My sister and I loved Miriam Makeba’s songs. (My sister’s other favorite was Edith Piaf. Shows you how catholic she was in her tastes.)  We had her first two – and to us the best – of her albums: The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba and Miriam Makeba.  We would dance around her living room to the Boot Dance or the Click Song – and we never could say ung-a-twine.  Some of the songs were lively, some were haunting – we loved them all.  What ever happened to my LPs? I think I’m going to check out what’s on CDs.

 

 

I WANT TO BRAG

This is the gorgeous Adirondack Gruide Boat that Frank
made in our New York basement workshop!

Frank is out of commission for a while after his shoulder surgery, so I thought I’d pay a small tribute to him and the body of work he’s done during his retirement years. Many of you know that my husband is one of the handiest guys on earth. There’s very little that can go wrong around the house that Frank can’t fix, and, needless to say, he’s done a lot of work updating and refining this house and our three previous homes in New York. But most pleasing to him – and to me – are the many things he’s made for our home and for our grandchildren.

This cradle was made twenty-four years ago for our first grandchild.
I had the opportuity to make some digital photos of it when it was brought east
from Texas for the three new grandchildren in South Carolina.
It's now back in Texas and has already cradled our first great-grandchild.
The cradle will swing on the stand or rock on the floor. We designed it
around a small cradle mattress and the result, in cherrywood,
is one of our treasures.

This is the fourth edition of the rocking horse made for that first grandchild.
The original mas made of maple from our own property.  This one is cherry.
Of all the things from the shop we are proudest of the rocking horses.
We planned the first out from a photo in a country decorating book. The photo was no bigger
than this one. We marked it off, and judged the sizes, and were so pleased that when the head went on it balnced perfectly!  Kids love this rocking horse, and especially when
they're not feeling too well they can just rock and rock.

Just after he retired I was smart enough to begin keeping lists of what he made and for whom. He’s worked in wood and wrought iron, and even done some stained glass work. Over twenty-five years later the lists are extensive – everything from kitchen spatulas and spreaders to a wonderful Adirondack guide boat. He’s made many toys, large and small, for our grandchildren. He’s made all the beds in our house, and most of our living room furniture and lamps. Do you think I’m spoiled? I am – and I am soooo lucky.

We’ve kept two fat scrapbooks of pictures of the things Frank has made, but not too many of the photos have made their way to my PC files. Here’s a small selection of what I do have for you to see.

All made of cherry, Frank made the side table, mazazine rack, foot stool,
lamp, couch, and the rocking chair made to order for my not-inconsiderable
measurements.

Frank made the wrought iron lamps, the little butterwood chest, the
cherry Shaker style high chair, and the maple buffet. Again, the maple
came from our own property

The wrought iron Owl Court owl.

  

Here you see, on our front porch, a mirrored plant holder and
part of a quatrefoil Frank copied from one we saw in Volterra,
in Tuscany

For post-stroke therapy Frank began chip carving. This box he made
for me is one of my favorite things.

Just rowing along. The guide boat is one of the fastest man-powered things
afloat - and beautiful too.

Post script on Sunday, March 3 - I discovered that I had, elsewhere in my digital picture collection, two pictures of Kate and her first toys made by her Grandfather.



Here she is on the kiddie car, holding on to the doll carriage that Say -
she called her Grandfather 'Say' - made for her.



And here she is on the maple rocking horse.