ghosts of Christmas past
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas weekend, if you celebrate. Mine was very nice — as nice as it could possibly be, without having my kids with me. [But did you hear the awful, awful news from Connecticut, about a house that burned down early Christmas morning, and the owner survived but her three young daughters, all under 10, and her parents were all killed? God...could anything be worse, that poor, poor woman.]
This seems like a non sequitur, but I promise it isn’t. Have you ever read A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry? (I feel compelled to tell you I read it before Oprah picked it for her book club….) It’s a beautiful, horrible, sad, tragic story of people trying to survive during The Emergency, in India. It’s so tragic, there were times I had to put it down because I simply couldn’t keep bearing it. Passages I had to read out of the sides of my eyes because I couldn’t tolerate them head-on. One of the characters, Ishvar, just endures more misery than should be possible, but he always says “life is long.” Although the longer his life goes on, the more misery he endures, that’s not what he seems to mean. It’s that life is long, whatever is happening now isn’t necessarily what will always be happening. There is room in the future for other things — better things, perhaps. Whatever is happening now isn’t the only thing that ever will happen.
Plenty of people suffer during the holidays, and feel excruciating pain and loneliness. Christmas Eve is more painful a time to be alone than Christmas, for me, but maybe that’s because of my Christmas Eve in 1970. Late that afternoon, when I was 12, my mother gathered me and my sister and brother and told us she was divorcing our dad. She walked us into their bedroom, where he sat, on his knees on the floor, and told us to tell him goodbye. He pulled us into his arms, sobbing, and told us how much he loved us. We told him goodbye, and walked out the door. Mother drove us to a motel — The Downtowner — where she had already secured adjoining rooms, and where my soon-to-be step-father was waiting for her. She and he were in one room, and my sister and brother and I sat on the ends of the beds in the next room, staring at the tv. We watched A Charlie Brown Christmas…..our eyes took it in, but I doubt any of us were really watching it. Could there be sadder Christmas music than that soundtrack? I don’t know of it, if there is.
So that’s my sad little holiday tale o’ woe…..we all have them, of one kind or another. I’ve come such a long way, and life has indeed been long. I’ve had joyful Christmas Eves, sad ones, lonely ones, endless ones, happy ones, hilarious ones, new baby ones, warm ones and cold ones, and next year’s celebration will be of another form, I’m sure. Life is long. If your holidays were lonely, I’m so sorry; it’s a particular pain, feeling lonely when the whole world seems to be connected and warm and joyful and spending time with loved ones. You aren’t the only one, and those of us who had a lovely time this year aren’t guaranteed those types of celebrations in the years to come. It’s life, and life is long, and you get to experience nearly everything if you live long enough.
what have YOU outgrown?
- a desperate longing to wear capes
- my crush on David Cassidy
- a willingness to eat a bunch of donuts at once
- my childhood dream of growing up to become a paleontologist
This list was prompted by walking behind a woman who was wearing a swingy hip-length wool cape — black and white herringbone — over black riding pants and boots. I nearly laughed out loud because I thought she was wearing a very silly costume, and then I realized it’s what she chose to wear today. When I was a young slump-shouldered girl, I wanted a floor-length gray wool cape (with a hood) in the most intensely-felt way. OH how I wanted that cape. My mother refused to get one for me, saying that I’d look like an old lady. And honestly, though I say this rarely, she was right. It was Texas, first. It was the late 1960s/early 1970s (I wanted this for many years). It just wasn’t done. Over these years I’d periodically think about a cape but never got past that, just thinking about it. I even bought that Folkwear pattern once, the Kinsale Cloak, but somehow never got around to making it. Again, TEXAS.
Seeing the woman on the street just now, I realized I’ve outgrown that wish. I have no desire to own or wear a cape, period. This is jarring to me, but it’s true. Remember how fantastic Meryl Streep looked in that cape in French Lieutenant’s Woman (Lef-tenant, for any of you Brits)? She kept my cape dreams going for quite a long time, but you really need to have long quays in foggy weather to make that look work as well as she did.
So farewell, cape wishes. And David Cassidy, and boxes of donuts, and Gobi fantasies. I’ve grown up. And it’s just fine.
sisters, sisters / there were never such devoted sisters ~ irving berlin, ‘white christmas’ (1954)
I grew up with a sister, though I haven’t really seen her all that much (or known her, for that matter) since I was in high school, and I graduated in 1977. Once every several years she’ll reappear with a bang, we’ll speak for a couple weeks, and it’ll be all over again. When we were very very little, we were quite close, as is often the case in a troubled household. She was my refuge when I had nightmares, which was often; even though she’s 2 years younger than me, I’d run to her room and climb in bed with her for comfort. I was born in 1958, and she was born in 1960, so this movie was part of our childhood and we sang this song over and over, with our arms around each other, singing to each other.
From the movie White Christmas, of course. For two tiny little girls from scrubby old Texas, the idea of snow and Christmas and holiday cheer was as far away as the moon; farther, maybe, because we could see the moon out our bedroom windows.
here we are, sitting on VERY hot rocks in our front yard -- junior girl scout (me) and brownie (her). sisters, sisters, devoted sisters at that time, anyway
Memory lane. A nice place to visit now and then. And now….I’m sure the bathroom floor is dry, so I can resume my housecleaning. Yay?
horny toads and arrowheads, signposts of [some of] my childhood. what are yours?
Hey, I’m nearly done with my Saroyan — I should finish it tonight and get it blocking, so FO photo tomorrow, yay! And the light has started to return, I’m feeling better, double yay. Thank you for your kindnesses, really. It’s such a relief to have words and thoughts again, you have no idea (unless you’ve been there, of course).
flint arrowhead
A few days ago, maybe a couple weeks, I was talking to a friend about my childhood, and how we all had collections of arrowheads because you couldn’t really go too far without finding them. They were everywhere, and we did think they were very neat, and very special, but not much more than that. Indian arrowheads, we knew that’s what they were (and that’s how we referred to them), and we knew that was cool, but they were so commonplace it didn’t have the dazzle that it might have, otherwise. I remember picking them up and stuffing them in my pockets, never thinking about how they’d actually been used. Was the one in my pocket used to kill other people? Animals? Surely. There’s a brand new piece in the NYTimes about some new arrowhead discoveries in central Texas that add to archaeologists’ certainty that people lived in North America much longer ago than they’d believed. Outside of archaeological digs, I don’t think anyone finds arrowheads on the ground any more in Austin.
horny toads
We also couldn’t help but find horny toads (as we called them; their actual name is horned toad, or horned lizard). Full-grown horny toads fill your palm, and they’re all sizes smaller than that, too. It used to be so easy to find baby horny toads, which are unbelievably adorable. They squirt blood out of their eyes when they feel threatened, and yet they weren’t scary to us kids. If you rub their very soft bellies with your fingertip, they kind of get hypnotized (at least that’s what we thought). Many Saturday mornings, my friend Billy Burkhardt and I would take empty shoe boxes out to the field and hunt horny toads. We’d fill up our boxes, and then his mother took us to Frisco Burger for lunch. Our shoe boxes sat on the table next to our plates, bound with a big old rubber band, and they’d move around a bit as the horny toads jostled inside. After lunch, we’d go back to the field and release them all; as far as I can remember, none died.
At least in my old stomping grounds, it’s pretty rare to see one these days. The loss of horny toads isn’t due to the encroachment of people, as much as it is due to the invasion of fire ants that consumed all the little red ants that were the horny toads’ diet.
I don’t have exaggerated fondness for the ‘good old days.’ The good old days had plenty of their own problems too. Whenever someone says something like “I wish I lived back in the (insert old date here), back when life was simpler,” I always want to smack them and say yeah, back when you were lucky to live 40 years, lucky if your children survived infancy, and lucky if you didn’t die from the measles or polio, or something that penicillin could easily cure. Yeah, those good old days.
Every age, every generation, looks at what’s been lost (for me, arrowheads and horny toads) and sighs, thinking it’s so sad, such a loss, that kids these days can’t enjoy them, all the things they’re missing. I do absolutely think there are losses that are sad (including a loss of civility and general eloquence), but the fact that my kids didn’t know, and future grandkids won’t know, the thrill of finding arrowheads, or the fun of catching horny toads, that’s just part of the stream of it all.
Today’s post brought to you by the NYTimes article, 
along with my real desire not to become one of those crotchety old geezers going on and on about how great it used to be.
this coulda been mine….i coulda been a contender
I don’t remember Valentine’s Days of the past, really. I like Valentine’s Day well enough but it’s not like it’s hugely memorable except for the occasional marriage proposal.
But I do remember Valentine’s Day 1964, when I was 6. In the way of first graders, I had two ‘boyfriends,’ Bryan Teich and Robert Fox. Those were their real names, which I strangely remember now, in my dotage. For reasons that remain peculiar and unimaginable all these years later, Bryan and Robert were competing for my attention, and Valentine’s Day represented some kind of OK Corral. Robert gave me a very small cotton handkerchief, white with red hearts stamped on it. He probably bought it at Gulf Mart, which was a local version of a Wal-Mart kind of discount warehousey place, or maybe at a Ben Franklin’s 5&Dime. It was cheap and unadorned. Bryan gave me an enormous box of candy, a huge red heart thing wrapped in shiny red paper and covered with flowers, and a little stuffed dog. Well, my choice was clear, right? I chose Robert. Robert bought the little handkerchief himself with his allowance (I assumed), but Bryan walked into his family’s candy store and just took things off the shelf. Every time I drove past one of the many Lamme’s Candy stores in Austin, as an adult, I thought “that could’ve been mine, if I had different principles.”
Yesterday I saw this photo of a wedding party, and it was so adorable I thought I’d share it with you in the hopes it gives you a smile, too:
a superhero wedding
I’m still sick and coughing and spluttering and my chest hurts and my throat is raw and I think it’s getting shredded from coughing and I’m whiney and pretty miserable (and pretty miserable to be around, too, I imagine). I can give birth without so much as an aspirin and then 6 hours later be at home, vacuuming and cooking for a “she was just born” party, but give me a paper cut or a cold and boy am I complainey. Happy Tuesday, y’all.
memory is SO concentrated, isn’t it.
It’s snowing for the fourth time this year — amazing. This time, it’s those huge fat fluffy flakes, which are my favorites. The previous snows have been the fine diamond dust kind that sting your face, but these float down like bits of lace, or feathers, or clouds. Butterflies. Whatever, it’s really beautiful (though I’ll bet the sanitation workers outside my window who are picking up the mountains of trash find it less beautiful than I do), but it does kind of look like fake movie snow.
I just went to pull a stats book off my shelf and had to move this object off the top of that stack of books:
kinda creepy - it always scared me
This is a very heavy ceramic doorstop that always held the bedroom door open at my grandparents’ house, in Graham, Texas. No one had air conditioning, except for the occasional swamp cooler. We just relied on cross breezes, which could be quite rare, and lots of iced tea. Still, there would be windy days, as there are on the open plains, and heavy doorstops kept the doors held back so they didn’t slam shut.
That one always creeped me out — the face looked scary, mean, sly. Too much make-up, fake cat. And who does their eyebrows like that, c’mon. But I’ve kept it all these years, moved it with me 70+ times, even when I took nothing with me but what I could hold in my hands. It reminds me so much of my grandparents, Mom and Big Daddy. When I look at it, I feel their house in my bones, the particular smells come back, the memory of Big Daddy’s fake vinyl lazy-boy reclined in front of the ancient tv where he sat to watch wrestling, the smell of that green liniment I rubbed on his feet. The smell of pinto beans and cornbread cooking in the kitchen, where we sat on red vinyl chairs around an old metal table. The old quilt I slept on, on the floor, with the soft flannel back that was powder blue with orange rockets, and tied with orange cotton string. Big Daddy’s smell, that was a combination of Red Man chewing tobacco and Four Roses hair oil. Mom’s smell that was a combination of Avon carnation sachet and Dr. Pepper.
I’m a kind of orphan, with only a very small handful of things from my past — this doorstop, a small wooden boat my dad made when he was a boy, a falling-apart copy of Little Women, and a few pictures of my young childhood that I rescued from a dumpster. Each one of these things carries a lot of weight, because they carry all the memories. And you know how memories are; they’re there but you don’t really know it, or think about them except in a category way (summers at Big Daddy’s) until you open that door and see all the detail that’s tucked away inside that category. The sensory details, the stories — like Big Daddy taking me to the rodeo on summer nights, to get us both out of the house and away from my mean old grandmother who was strung out; like Big Daddy waking me up at 4am every morning to ride into town with him — the feelings that aren’t really attached to any one moment.
I guess some day I’ll give that creepy cat to one of my kids, even though it has absolutely no meaning to them. It’s really just in my way, it’s not like I have any space to spare, but it’s far too big to throw away, if you know what I mean.
an ode to myopia.
I got my first pair of glasses right before kindergarten started, at Texas State Optical on south Ben White Blvd., in Austin. There was a flagpole in the parking lot, and a giant oak tree, and I remember walking out into a whole new world of amazement. There’s a flag at the top of the pole! I’d never seen that. The tree had individual little leaves! Wow, I could see that! I wish I had a photo of them; there weren’t so many options for kids’ glasses back then (that would’ve been the summer of 1963), and mine were powder blue cat eye glasses with little rhinestones, like these but more rhinestoney and less cool:
Aside from the very real thrill of being able to see things, the other thing I remember very clearly was worrying about where people in other states got their glasses. The place you get glasses is Texas State Optical! Do they come from wherever they are to Texas? (I was 5.)
Through my life, I’ve had dozens of pairs of glasses, including these charmers. I don’t think they’d have been so bad if they weren’t crooked on my face. They were permanently crooked because I fell asleep every night reading, lying on my side with my glasses on. And to complete my truly awful ensemble, the blouse (buttoned all! the! way! up!) was red, and that ponytail was decorated with yellow yarn. Sigh. My school picture in 5th grade, 1968. I think I was wearing my yellow striped bell bottoms (with blue and maroon stripes) and a nasty old pair of moccasins. And I think I wore that outfit too often each week. And I thought I was styling. Sigh. I was a book nerd, what did I know from styling. (But I could quote long passages from The Hunchback of Notre Dame! Just ask!)
I’ve had octagonal shaped granny glasses, pink glasses, white glasses, blue glasses, black-framed glasses, rimless glasses, and currently I have a pair of apple green ones I love and a pair of brown Danish ones I love. Well, I love them but I can’t see out of them. Last week I learned that yes, my eyes have 
gotten substantially more near-sighted….like, substantially. I’ve been seeing bright orange glasses on people lately and just love them, and I’ve loved my apple green ones, so this time I chose red, despite my dread and horror of (a) reminding people of Sally Jesse Raphael, and (b) becoming one of those old ladies who wears red glasses to seem young.
Y’all will tell me the truth, right? Please? If either (a) or (b) comes to mind (or both!), you can tell me, I want to know. OK, with no further farting around, here they are, taken with the always unflattering (on me anyway) “hold your arms out as far as you can and shoot” pose:
hi! I have new glasses! And I can see!
I can see! I can see!
awww….sesame street was so great.
Girls, remember these? I sure do.
the 1960s were so much more than drugs and sex and rock and roll. they were rudolph and frosty, too.
my hair - the "flip" - was the height of fashion! my dress was red velvet.
I adore Mad Men – love it love it love it. I love the stories, the secrets, the every little detail. The most recent episode, the one with the office Christmas party, was so incredibly familiar it made my teeth ache. The very specific reds and greens, the music, the decorations, every. tiny. little. detail. So familiar. I breathed the air around those decorations, even if my father wasn’t working on Madison Ave.
The other day I was reading a review of this past episode and realized that I would’ve been the same age as Bobby, in the series. It took place December 1964, and I would’ve just turned 6. I can feel the construction paper between my fingers, making chains of rings for the Christmas tree. I can smell the paste, sticking a little red puff onto Rudolph’s nose, I can feel the bits of glitter stuck to my fingertips.
Childhood is such an evocative time; the saying is ‘youth is wasted on the young’ but I think it’s true that nothing is wasted on the young. The tiniest details become so firmly woven into our psychological fabric that they revisit us – with happiness, and with haunting – as long as we live. The photo above was taken in 1969, so I was 10 or 11, depending on when it was taken. Just over 40 years ago, and I can feel the table I was sitting on when the picture was taken; I can feel the wrong side of the polyester velvet of my dress, made by my mother; I can smell the Aqua-Net, sprayed from a tall blue aerosol can, that covered my hair in a misguided effort to make it hold that shape. I can quite literally feel the day in my muscles, and written into my bones.
Memory is really an incredible gift of human-ness, even if they’re not always pleasant. The way a passing smell can bring back other people, other times. The way an old song can fill you with an entirely different feeling than you felt moments before. I just love this part of being alive, don’t you?
,
aw…laurel and hardy, and my daughter and her dad. read and watch the video.
My kids were weird, it’s true. On parents’ night in kindergarten, you know how the teacher would post the kids’ things all over the walls, and you’d walk around looking for your kid’s stuff? One year, the kids filled out a list of their favorite things, one of which was food. I walked around, reading “my favorite food is pizza…” “…hamburgers…” “…macaroni and cheese…” “…artichokes..” The last one, that was always my kid.
They loved jug band music. My son cracked us up singing If You’re a Viper, by Jim Kweskin and the jug band. They loved Laurel and Hardy. LOVED ‘em.
So the totally impromptu dance that Marnie did with her dad at her wedding included a bit from Way Out West, one of their favorite Laurel and Hardy films. I’ll bet Marnie hasn’t seen that in years – maybe even since she was a kid.
they just spontaneously did this
the originals. and they really were.
And here’s the very short video – it’ll make you laugh. At least, it makes ME laugh. And get all misty-eyed, remembering my nutty little kids, parked in front of the TV falling over laughing at it.
The video is 2:01 in length, and they ‘commence to dancin’ at 33 seconds. I start my day with happiness in my heart.
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