Happy 64th, Tom and Jackie!

Today, January 29, 2009, my parents are celebrating their 64th wedding anniversary. Sixty four years, and I can remember only about sixty-one of them! My mother, Jackie, was not yet nineteen and in her third year of college when she decided to leave college to marry my father, Tom, a twenty-three year old electrical engineer and a graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology, (now Carnegie Mellon University).

They were poor those first years of marriage, and used to ride their bicycle to work. Notice I said bicycle, they had only one, and would take turns standing on the pedals and pedaling while the other one sat on the seat. Good thing they worked at the same place!

Later they had an old car, and I can remember (I would have been about two and a half) sitting in the back seat while they tried to get it going; one would push while the other steered, then they would trade places. I imagine they were trying to pop the clutch. I think this even worked sometimes!

My father is a man of superior intelligence and an inventive mind, and a great lover of nature, in its raw state, untouched by man. He took us for long walks in the woods, pointed out different species of birds, wildflowers, and trees. He taught us other things too, for instance when I was five years old showed me a certain tree, and told me that if I were ever chased by a bear, that would be the right size tree to climb, because the trunk was too sturdy for the bear to shake down, but too narrow for the bear to climb. I've always remembered that, and can still picture the tree in my mind, but thankfully, I've never had to test the theory.

My mother is artistic and creative; she taught me and my four younger sisters to sew; she also gave us drawing and painting lessons. One time when I was four years old and playing outside by myself , as I was too old for a nap, my mother called me over to the window to show me her latest creation. She had heated crayons to soften them and then molded them into tiny animals, which she had placed on the windowsill. I was enchanted..

So many years have passed since those early childhood memories. Not only are my four sisters and I all grown up, but our children are all adults, and three of us are grandmothers.

And my parents? They live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After retiring from his long career as an electrical engineer, my father took up gardening, and at least twice won the Golden Trowel award for having the most beautiful garden in Ann Arbor. He reads the New York Times every morning while watching the birds in his bird feeder, and continues to ride his bicycle, weather permitting. My mother continued her artistic pursuits, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1997 with a BA in Fine Arts, at the age of seventy-one. She was also very active in The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and served as president for a few years. Now she enjoys playing internet scrabble with her daughters. My parents are both engaged in writing stories of their childhoods and family histories; I wish my grandparents had done more of this.

This weekend I expect my two sisters who live near my parents will visit and take some home baked fruit pies, my father's favorite (after corn pie). We are all quite good at pie baking, and I mean from scratch; starting out with flour, shortening and fresh fruit, or corn, as the case may be. We learned to bake pies early, I could do it when I was six. It's a Pennsylvania German thing.

Pictures top to bottom:

Tom and Jackie on their wedding day, January 29, 1945.

Sally, Jackie, Mary, Jann and Adrienne at an open house for the new jr-sr highschool in Mahwah, NJ, 1959. (Audrey not born yet).

At my house in Buffalo, 1997.

At Wendy's wedding, 2005.

The Male Point of View

I picked my six-year-old grandson up from first grade yesterday, as my daughter was in San Diego on business. We stopped at the Dos Lagos shopping mall so that I could buy him a promised Webkinz toy which he needed to register to play games on the Webkinz website. You have to have a Webkinz stuffed animal (with a code number) to register. But Grandma couldn't remember the name of the store that has the Webkinz toys, nor could Mason for that matter, so we walked down one side of the outside mall and up the other until we found the store. Then Grandma remembered that there is a man-made lake at this mall with a bridge, and as it was a warm day here in souhern California, it seemed like a good idea to take a walk around the lake and over the bridge. Mason had no objection to this. There were some flowers growing near the lake, not too many and not too attractive, but nice enough to take some pictures. I got out my camera. "Only girls take pictures of flowers," Mason declared, "Boys lie on the couch and watch television." Hmm, I thought, he's sounding a lot like his grandfather. I said nothing. He must have reconsidered his position, because about a minute later he said, "Girls take pictures of flowers; boys just walk along."

Today I picked him up again. "You know, lots of grown men take beautiful pictures of flowers and put them on Flickr," I told him. "Well, it's a girlish thing," he said. We were on our way to Wal-Mart to buy him a basketball and a portable hoop.

It's Foolproof!

I have always wondered why some people cannot pronounce the word "nuclear," but say instead "nucular." George Bush comes to mind, also Sarah Palin. My high school chemistry teacher could not pronounce this word either; I remember being slightly shocked when I first heard her say the word "nucleus" and she pronounced it "nuculus." She was, however, a very good teacher.

I have what I consider a foolproof way to get these phonetically challenged folks to say "nuclear." It works like this:

Take the sentence, "I bought a new clear pane of glass for my window." and have them repeat it fifty times, followed by, "I bought a new clear pane of glass," fifty times, followed by, "new clear pane," fifty times, then just ,"new clear," fifty times. Then they (according to my plan) will be ready to add the word "weapons," but they should picture it in their mind as "new clear weapons." Say it fast and it sounds just like "nuclear weapons," or so close as makes no matter, certainly much better than "nucular weapons." Same with the words "reactor" or "energy":
they would picture "new clear reactor," and "new clear energy," respectively.

I can think of no reason why this wouldn't work.

Barack Obama Wins: America Can Be Proud

My sister called me today. She was on her way to visit her daughter and new grandson, and was stuck at a railroad crossing. "I'm flying my American flag today," she said. "I haven't flown it in a long time, and last night, before the election returns came in, I didn't know whether I would fly it again, or burn it in the fireplace, but I'm flying it." I feel the same way; the picture here is one of our flag flying over my neighborhood. I took this photo more than a year ago but have never used it until now.

The New York Times said today, in an editorial regarding Senator Obama's victory:

"His triumph was decisive and sweeping, because he saw what is wrong with this country: the utter failure of government to protect its citizens. He offered a government that does not try to solve every problem but will do those things beyond the power of individual citizens: to regulate the economy fairly, keep the air clean and the food safe, ensure that the sick have access to health care, and educate children to compete in a globalized world."

I could not agree more.

On Dragonflies and Angels

“Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.” This was the Golux speaking. (James Thurber, "The 13 Clocks")

My tenth grade English teacher read this book to the class. She had the most wonderful voice, and when she read the words, “The Princess Saralinda,” I, who had never thought I wanted children, decided immediately that I wanted a daughter and that I would name her Saralinda. “Saralinda,” I thought, is the most beautiful name I have ever heard. And, indeed my older daughter is named Saralinda.

What is this book, "The 13 Clocks?" I found the following description here:

http://book.consumerhelpweb.com/authors/thurber/0440405823.htm

“Well, it's sort of a children's book. And sort of not.
“The back of the book has the publishers equally flummoxed. They write:
‘It isn't a parable, a fairy story, or a poem, but rather a mixture of all three. It is beautiful and it is comic. It is philosophical and it is cheery. What we are trying fumblingly to say is, in a word, it is Thurber.’
“How can I do better than that? I would tell you it has 124 pages of beautifully illustrated text, but that would barely scratch the surface. It is a poem in prose form. It is a tale fantastical and lyrical. It is a tale of impossibility”. B Redman

It is a story of good versus evil, with the moral (or one of the morals) being, “If you’re on the side of Good, you don’t have to be perfect to win. But you have to be consistent and tenacious, and much more, and always remember which side you’re on…but you don’t have to be perfect.”

Other people know this book well, and have even memorized passages, or perhaps the whole book. My daughter Saralinda told me the following true story:

She was in a small shop in Canada, found something she wanted to purchase, and handed it, along with her credit card, to the gentleman by the cash register, the owner of the shop.
He looked at her name on the card, and said, with no hesitation whatsoever, “She moved across the room like wind in violets…”

How could one forget a book with prose like this?

On Walks Around the Block

My ex husband, Kevin, was a liar...or an accomplished storyteller, or both. He'd read about things in newspapers and magazines and say they happened to him. He was very convincing; most people believed his stories. I did, at first, and so did my family; also his second wife and her family. A close friend of mine, Bill, who had served as a first mate in the merchant marine for many years, once said to me, referring to my ex husband, "I could travel around the world four times and he'd have more stories to tell about how he went around the block four times." Well, yes, but here is the ironic thing...interesting things did happen to Kevin when he walked around the block. Once he took our dog, Charlie, for a walk after dark. Charlie soon came running back to the house, tail between his legs, and smelling like a fish. He ran and hid under one of the beds and wouldn't come out. About fifteen or twenty minutes later Kevin appeared and told me how the house on the corner had exploded just when he and Charlie walked by. The next day there was an article in the newspaper complete with a quote from Kevin, "I heard a crash; it sounded like a tractor trailer had gone through the house," he had told the first police officer on the scene. The occupants had moved out of the house the day before, so luckily, no casualities.

Bill told me how he had, on one occasion, successfully found a dentist at 4AM in Vladisvostok,
to pull a tooth which had been causing unbearable agony.

I liked the Vladivostok story more; it seemed quite a feat. But now I wonder: did this really happen, or did Bill make it up to have something to compete with Kevin's stories about walking around the block?