Work has been slow this week. There's been a lot of time to listen to the X-mas music on Classical MPR and let the melancholy set in. Not sure why, but I figure there's still some grieving catching up with me, having been so busy-busy these last couple months and not slowing down. Lots of memories come up, bringing lots of feelings, all tied into the season.
The earliest X-mas memories come in tidbits and flashes. There's the tantrum at Grandma's (Brogren) when I hated the silly little present she got me, threw it against the wall, and broke it. Needless to say I was sent to bed without any presents or other goodies, definitely intensifying my mood if not improving it. I was just old enough to be selfish, not old enough to be grateful. And certainly not old enough to understand about budgets and tight times. I suspect that was also about the time that Grandma was newly widowed.
The trees were generally spruces, often cut ourselves, and set in a stand that needed watering yet still let needles drop all over before it was taken down. Tinsel was a must back then, hung carefully after all the other decorations were on, and neatly vertical or we'd done it wrong. The other decorations consisted of regular lights, now the size of night-lite bulbs, and bubbler lights, something still available every few years. Some of the ornaments were shiny foil circles sewn in chains or folded flat for storage and opened up into many layers spread into a three-dimensional shape such as a ball, bell, or star. I've never met anybody who remembers that kind of ornaments outside of our immediate family, but would love it if anybody could come up with a line on how to find some.
Being great on economizing, we also strung popcorn and sometimes cranberries. We never economized so much that we turned to using the funny pages to wrap presents in, though I'd heard about it when raising my kids and thought it seemed like a good idea in the really lean years.
Earliest traditions involved waking up on X-mas morning, waiting for our parents to get up, and then, finally, being allowed to open presents. You had to recognize your own name and only open your own, but it was pretty much every kid for herself/himself. I have no idea what my parents did with opening their presents. One year I got up early and snuck down to peek at my presents. I didn't dare turn on a light because Mom was a light sleeper. I slid open the wrapping paper, careful to make it so I could re-affix the tape later and pretend it was a complete surprise. I'd been hoping for an Easy Bake Oven. Unfortunately, it was so dark and some of the letters were red on black or perhaps black on red, and thus invisible in the dark. So it was still a surprise when I opened it the next morning and got my oven! First time I recall getting just what I asked for.
Some years there were dolls, or gray modeling clay in a block like a quarter pound stick of butter. Often clothes came disguised as presents. When I got older there was a Kodak Brownie Starflash camera. It had some flash bulbs which melted on the outside when they were used. And it came with a roll of black-and-white film. I was busy for a while shooting everything I could, finding out that flash overpowers nearby things and doesn't touch far things, making some interesting pictures. I also learned about budgeting to buy new flash bulbs, film, and paying for developing.
The family went down to Minneapolis most years to join the rest of the relatives who mostly lived down there. There'd be a big Maxson Christmas party while my grandmother Elizabeth still lived, held somewhere large enough to accommodate that huge and growing bunch of us, though we were about the youngest, thus last, of the grandchildren and many of our cousins were old enough to have been our aunts and uncles. Every kid would get some kind of present, and a couple years a photo was taken of the whole group. Looking back it's amazing what we thought fashions should be and how young our parents were. The last year I remember of one of those parties, our parents had told us while we were about halfway down in the car that they'd had Goldie, our golden retriever, put to sleep while we were gone. We never knew she was sick, never noticed her getting old, never got a chance to say good-bye to her. She was older than I was, and had always been a part of my life. I keenly felt the betrayal, and wore it like a Greek tragedy the whole time we were down there. Nobody else seemed to care, and it wasn't like I didn't announce it to anybody I thought might listen and sympathize.
The tiny Methodist Church in Hubbard, the nearest town to our resort, celebrated X-mas with lots of singing of carols and by giving each kid a small paper bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts. There were some candies in them as well, nasty little things, but, hey, sugar! I seem to recall an orange one year. At any rate, these were treats for us and our parents didn't object to us eating what we got, so there was nobody to spoil the gift of goodies. Mom was always so full of rules and cautions that I sometimes wonder how we got to enjoy anything.
While we didn't often get peanuts, every year at Christmas there was a bowl of mixed nuts, along with a nutcracker and nut picks. Walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, and Brazil nuts. Of course we never knew their proper name back then. They were always called "nigger-toes", back before we'd ever seen anyone of African descent, before we had any idea that the name was offensive. We giggled about it, but it was the thought of nuts being named after toes we found so silly. They were the hardest to crack too, needing to be lined up just so in the jaws of the nutcracker, and could take up long segments of time trying to pick the last speck of white nut out of the unforgiving shell.
Speaking of nasty little candies, those were the days of ribbon candies. Pretty until they broke, relatively flavorless, but again, hey, sugar! And too big to put all the way in your mouth so you'd drool while eating them. I found some years later to give my kids, but they were completely unimpressed. Another fond memory/tradition bites the dust.
Once grown and married, we started some of our own traditions. Every year I bought some new ornament for the tree. When the kids were old enough, they painted and glued wooden ornaments, or melted plastic beads in forms to make "stained glass". There were beaded snowflake balls using sequins and beads on hatpins stuck into a cork ball. I handmade felt stockings decorated with sequins including each kid's name, still surviving to this day including the part where Richard chewed off a few of the sequins. If he swallowed them, they seem to have done him no harm. I never did find bits.
While the kids were young, we traveled to southern Minnesota to the Rosa family farm to do Christmas with Paul's folks. Mostly my memories were of how drunk everybody got. Except me. After one drinking disaster during my college years, I couldn't stand the stuff, and was the sole sober person in the room hoping nobody would notice how impolite I was not to be entertained by all the rest of them, hoping I didn't show my total boredom, hoping it was soon bedtime.
There was one amazing exception. Steph was two and Richard a baby that year. I'd just taken her to see the Loyce Holton's Nutcracker, the version filled with tiny kids in mouse costumes. It was a magical time, and the first of several such times we went to such performances until finally the kids announced they were bored with them. But this year it was new, fresh, magic! After supper, the afternoon rain stopped. In the weather's wake a thick fog rolled in. The strong yard lights typical of isolated farms revealed that the rain had frozen on every surface including tree branches, resulting in a glistening and crackling winter wonderland worthy of the best Nutcracker set. The family located the old toboggan, Steph and I dressed in our winter warmest, and escaped for about half an hour into a land of fantasy and ice. Arriving down at the end of the drive near the highway, there were moments where we could imagine we were the only people on earth, until another car came along to spoil the illusion.
One new tradition with our kids was started by my folks. They gave us $20.00 for each kid to spend on other people. The only rules were they had to spend it all on others, and we parents could take them shopping but could not influence their choices of gift. We could inform them how much they'd spent and how much they had left, and often the last few pennies went for a candy cane or some such tidbit, duly wrapped and gifted. The most memorable gift was a toy "Little Bird", a small yellow stuffed friend to the Big Bird on Sesame Street, presented to me by Paul. Of course after I opened it he thought it should be his to play with since I wasn't going to give Little Bird the proper attention he deserved. Paul got properly thanked, and after a few days it went up on a shelf somewhere. But not for long. We gave the kids toys for Easter too, and Little Bird showed up as one of Paul's presents that spring. On another gift-giving occasion, Little Bird went to somebody else, and his travels became a family joke for a while afterwards.
Hmm, I wonder if anybody would remember if I located another one and restarted his travels?
Steph has strongly negative associations with Christmas. The year her father and I agreed to split up, it was just before Christmas. He decided to wait until after the holiday to tell them and move out, so as to not spoil the holiday for them. But by noon on Christmas day he couldn't stand it any more and gathered the kids together and informed them he was leaving. It finally was about him after all. Thanks, guy!
While the timing sucked, the reason for it and the implementation made it ultimately the best thing he did for his kids. We had been visiting my folks for Thanksgiving while they were vacationing on Sanibel Island, relatively close to where we lived then outside Atlanta. Seeing the shock in their eyes over how he treated his kids opened his eyes to what he was doing. While he told a lot of wild stories later about the "why" of the divorce, his reason at the time was that he didn't want his youngest and namesake to go through the abuse that his older son was. At that time, if you yelled Richard's name in irritation at him, his response was to duck and cover his head with his arms. Somehow, we'd managed not to let ourselves see it. It's the one thing I'm most ashamed of in my life, not seeing my child being abused. My only excuse is that I was so busy surviving emotionally myself during those years that I wouldn't allow myself that one extra blow to my defenses.
It still doesn't help much.
There were some particularly lean years after the divorce. It got so bad one year that one day a neighbor came over to announce that we had been chosen to be the family "sponsored" for X-mas by the hospital she worked for. She explained that everybody at the hospital contributed, our family was selected of the ones submitted for consideration, that she was sent to explain the gift, get my permission for it, and get the kid's sizes for new clothes. Later she'd be back with clothes, toys, and food. Even all these years later remembering that Christmas gets me choked up. I'd already had the humiliation of applying for food stamps. The child support, had I known it, was about to go from erratic to nonexistent, and my job was proving insufficient to the task of supporting the family. It had never occurred to me that somebody else had noticed, much less would offer to help. Once back on my financial feet again I've tried to find ways to pay it forward. While I sent a thank you letter to the hospital, I can only hope that they might know how much it still means to me.
This year Christmas is mostly a joyful time. I'm surrounded by loving family, making plans for wonderful new things in my life. All those Ghosts of Christmases Past are still there, but the melancholy doesn't last. Mostly they make me appreciate life today all the more. For all of you and yours, I'm hoping for the same.
Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Reclaimed 4: Two Towers, Part 2
It only slowly really dawned on me just how much courage my daughter has. To the casual observer, the life she lives doesn’t seem to require much courage, though we can never really know another’s demons. But the primary reason is that I never really had to struggle with a phobia as she has, and thus, never really understood it.
I’m not saying I wasn’t irrationally scared of something, although I dispute the irrational part. To me it’s rational, knowing that when I was four, observing in innocent curiosity the little black spider crawling towards me on the stick I held, it really did bite me on the webbing between my fingers, and I had the mark of it for a long time after. So my fear of spiders was from experience, not a phobia, and didn’t fall into the same league as a genuine phobia, at least to me. After all, when my kids were growing up, I conquered it long enough to “show them” that spiders were mere nuisances in the house, nothing to be afraid of as THEY squished one or captured it to be released outside. That way, you see, I didn’t have to go get close to one again. The kids did. It worked perfectly.
Not the same thing at all.
But my daughter had the family phobia, on her dad’s side: acrophobia or agoraphobia; there were long discussions as to just which it was by the family members who had it. It was definitely a fear of heights, compounded by the wide open spaces that revealed just how high the height in question was. Low, flat open spaces? No problem. Being high up in an enclosed space that hid the actual height? No problem.
It wasn’t my phobia, and I had trouble giving credence to it when my husband demonstrated his problem while hiking a clear, level path on the side of a low hill, or being near a high window. I knew these places were perfectly safe, and I’m afraid my empathy got somewhat replaced by silent snickering. Then I became pregnant, and the family brought me into the problem: what if the baby had the same phobia? Can one raise a child not to “get” the phobia by not talking about it and never acknowledging it? They thought it was the best way to go, as if it were contagious and no exposure, no problem. Being ignorant, I went along. I certainly couldn’t expose a child to fear of heights, since I gloried in them–as long as there was something to hold on to.
My first indication that this lovely theory was just so much wishful thinking came when she was two, and we were on a field trip to the state capitol building. We were climbing this beautiful marble staircase, which had a lovely marble railing supported by marble columns with–uh-oh–spaces in between where a child could look out and down and see just how much farther away the floor was getting with each step. Her steps slowed, then stopped. I tried the ignore-it bit, urging her to come along like she was just an ordinary dawdling child. We did finally get her to the top of the staircase by switching her over to the center railing where the view was mostly other steps and people’s legs.
We took the elevator back down.
The next opportunity this phobia had to display itself was a trip over the Blue Ridge Parkway when she was around eight. It’s a beautiful place, low, rolling mountains, bluer with the haze of distance. The highway is cut on the edge of the slopes, so land rises above you on one side and drops off on the other. I was entranced, pulling off at nearly every opportunity to park and gaze, soaking up the experience without driving right off the road. My daughter, on the other hand, was soon riding curled up down on the floor in front of her seat, despite the ironclad family seat-belt rule, so she didn’t have to look out the window and see so much “down” extending all around her. I wanted the drive to last forever. She just wanted it over.
The fact that she preferred to sacrifice this vision of timeless beauty for the opportunity to see nothing farther away than she could reach with her hand finally helped it soak in. My daughter had a real, genuine phobia. While I couldn’t achieve the full empathy of understanding how it felt, I did finally get that it was real and powerful.
During the next couple years, it was easy to forget it existed, as few things in her usual environment triggered it. In fact, she willingly climbed up the rope ladder into the tree house we put up in the back yard and showed no discomfort on our high backyard deck.
She was about ten when the family trip took us to Itasca State Park. My family had lived nearby while my brother and I grew up, and it was a regular destination for us. This was my kids’ first visit. One of the mandatory stops was the forestry tower, open to the public for the long climb up flights of stairs, to squeeze through a hole in the floor and emerge in the observation room, windows on all sides to view lakes and trees and, if you were a real forestry employee, watch for and report fires.
The boys were up it in a flash, loudly proclaiming their enjoyment of every step and every viewpoint. Somewhere in the 2nd flight of stairs I paused, realizing my daughter was not keeping up. Not only that, she was curled up in a ball on the landing below me and crying.
All my kids had grown up on my stories of climbing the windmill tower and how glorious it was. They’d also been prompted during the planning stages of this vacation that this forestry tower would be their closest chance–and safest–to live that kind of experience. She so badly wanted to know what this would be like, but her two bouncy, active brothers sent vibrations all through the tower structure and her phobia kicked in, overwhelming her.
She couldn’t go up. Nor, just one story above the ground, could she go down.
I sat next to her and talked to her, trying to find out what she really wanted and to figure out how, or even whether, I could help. What she wanted was to go up to the top. She needed support and encouragement and always the safety of the choice to change her mind. Most of all, she needed her brothers off of the tower, and staying off for however long it took. Not only did they make it wobble, but they would laugh at her, and under the circumstances, that was intolerable.
We talked it over, putting together a plan while the boys had their fill of the tower. Once down, they were soundly enjoined not to set foot on the tower until my daughter and I got back down. They were also not to wander anywhere they couldn’t see the bottom of the tower. Knowing them, I figured that had half a chance of working, at best, but right then, my daughter needed my full, undivided attention.
It worked like this: she would hold the railing with one hand going up and hang on to me with the other. She could close her eyes any time she needed and still feel her way up. At each landing I’d ask if she wanted to continue, and it would be her choice. She could sit down and rest at any time. If she needed to, she could bury her face in me, and I promised to make sure she got down safely even if I needed to carry her.
We started up. And she doggedly, determinedly, kept heading up. We paused occasionally, while she gathered herself and her resources for the next step, the next flight. Finally, a somewhat shaky but triumphant daughter stood in the top of that tower, looking out over the trees, pointing out lakes and matching them to the information inside the walls for identification, seeing how rolling hills made for rolling treetops, and spying birds and clouds above it all, everything she’d heard about from me. She stayed long enough to really savor the experience.
Then, together, we made it back down.
We even found the boys again, after about five minutes of looking and calling. It seems their definition of staying in sight of the bottom of the tower was, well, about what I’d thought it would be.
A lot of years have passed, and she’s done a lot of things to make me proud, make me wonder at the person and the package of skills and talents. But nothing ever matched this.
I’m not saying I wasn’t irrationally scared of something, although I dispute the irrational part. To me it’s rational, knowing that when I was four, observing in innocent curiosity the little black spider crawling towards me on the stick I held, it really did bite me on the webbing between my fingers, and I had the mark of it for a long time after. So my fear of spiders was from experience, not a phobia, and didn’t fall into the same league as a genuine phobia, at least to me. After all, when my kids were growing up, I conquered it long enough to “show them” that spiders were mere nuisances in the house, nothing to be afraid of as THEY squished one or captured it to be released outside. That way, you see, I didn’t have to go get close to one again. The kids did. It worked perfectly.
Not the same thing at all.
But my daughter had the family phobia, on her dad’s side: acrophobia or agoraphobia; there were long discussions as to just which it was by the family members who had it. It was definitely a fear of heights, compounded by the wide open spaces that revealed just how high the height in question was. Low, flat open spaces? No problem. Being high up in an enclosed space that hid the actual height? No problem.
It wasn’t my phobia, and I had trouble giving credence to it when my husband demonstrated his problem while hiking a clear, level path on the side of a low hill, or being near a high window. I knew these places were perfectly safe, and I’m afraid my empathy got somewhat replaced by silent snickering. Then I became pregnant, and the family brought me into the problem: what if the baby had the same phobia? Can one raise a child not to “get” the phobia by not talking about it and never acknowledging it? They thought it was the best way to go, as if it were contagious and no exposure, no problem. Being ignorant, I went along. I certainly couldn’t expose a child to fear of heights, since I gloried in them–as long as there was something to hold on to.
My first indication that this lovely theory was just so much wishful thinking came when she was two, and we were on a field trip to the state capitol building. We were climbing this beautiful marble staircase, which had a lovely marble railing supported by marble columns with–uh-oh–spaces in between where a child could look out and down and see just how much farther away the floor was getting with each step. Her steps slowed, then stopped. I tried the ignore-it bit, urging her to come along like she was just an ordinary dawdling child. We did finally get her to the top of the staircase by switching her over to the center railing where the view was mostly other steps and people’s legs.
We took the elevator back down.
The next opportunity this phobia had to display itself was a trip over the Blue Ridge Parkway when she was around eight. It’s a beautiful place, low, rolling mountains, bluer with the haze of distance. The highway is cut on the edge of the slopes, so land rises above you on one side and drops off on the other. I was entranced, pulling off at nearly every opportunity to park and gaze, soaking up the experience without driving right off the road. My daughter, on the other hand, was soon riding curled up down on the floor in front of her seat, despite the ironclad family seat-belt rule, so she didn’t have to look out the window and see so much “down” extending all around her. I wanted the drive to last forever. She just wanted it over.
The fact that she preferred to sacrifice this vision of timeless beauty for the opportunity to see nothing farther away than she could reach with her hand finally helped it soak in. My daughter had a real, genuine phobia. While I couldn’t achieve the full empathy of understanding how it felt, I did finally get that it was real and powerful.
During the next couple years, it was easy to forget it existed, as few things in her usual environment triggered it. In fact, she willingly climbed up the rope ladder into the tree house we put up in the back yard and showed no discomfort on our high backyard deck.
She was about ten when the family trip took us to Itasca State Park. My family had lived nearby while my brother and I grew up, and it was a regular destination for us. This was my kids’ first visit. One of the mandatory stops was the forestry tower, open to the public for the long climb up flights of stairs, to squeeze through a hole in the floor and emerge in the observation room, windows on all sides to view lakes and trees and, if you were a real forestry employee, watch for and report fires.
The boys were up it in a flash, loudly proclaiming their enjoyment of every step and every viewpoint. Somewhere in the 2nd flight of stairs I paused, realizing my daughter was not keeping up. Not only that, she was curled up in a ball on the landing below me and crying.
All my kids had grown up on my stories of climbing the windmill tower and how glorious it was. They’d also been prompted during the planning stages of this vacation that this forestry tower would be their closest chance–and safest–to live that kind of experience. She so badly wanted to know what this would be like, but her two bouncy, active brothers sent vibrations all through the tower structure and her phobia kicked in, overwhelming her.
She couldn’t go up. Nor, just one story above the ground, could she go down.
I sat next to her and talked to her, trying to find out what she really wanted and to figure out how, or even whether, I could help. What she wanted was to go up to the top. She needed support and encouragement and always the safety of the choice to change her mind. Most of all, she needed her brothers off of the tower, and staying off for however long it took. Not only did they make it wobble, but they would laugh at her, and under the circumstances, that was intolerable.
We talked it over, putting together a plan while the boys had their fill of the tower. Once down, they were soundly enjoined not to set foot on the tower until my daughter and I got back down. They were also not to wander anywhere they couldn’t see the bottom of the tower. Knowing them, I figured that had half a chance of working, at best, but right then, my daughter needed my full, undivided attention.
It worked like this: she would hold the railing with one hand going up and hang on to me with the other. She could close her eyes any time she needed and still feel her way up. At each landing I’d ask if she wanted to continue, and it would be her choice. She could sit down and rest at any time. If she needed to, she could bury her face in me, and I promised to make sure she got down safely even if I needed to carry her.
We started up. And she doggedly, determinedly, kept heading up. We paused occasionally, while she gathered herself and her resources for the next step, the next flight. Finally, a somewhat shaky but triumphant daughter stood in the top of that tower, looking out over the trees, pointing out lakes and matching them to the information inside the walls for identification, seeing how rolling hills made for rolling treetops, and spying birds and clouds above it all, everything she’d heard about from me. She stayed long enough to really savor the experience.
Then, together, we made it back down.
We even found the boys again, after about five minutes of looking and calling. It seems their definition of staying in sight of the bottom of the tower was, well, about what I’d thought it would be.
A lot of years have passed, and she’s done a lot of things to make me proud, make me wonder at the person and the package of skills and talents. But nothing ever matched this.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Not a Concussion?
There's been so much talk of concussion and TBIs in the news lately, between sports and war injuries. Most times they list symptoms, and sometimes I say, "But that was me!" Yet they said it wasn't at the time.
It was second grade. I was attending Nevis school, nearly an hour bus ride each way since we lived on a resort down at the far end of the route. The school then - I haven't gone past for easily 50 years - boasted a sidewalk all along its front, with a small rise of ground and several steps into the front door. (This was so long ago that postcards cost two cents, and letters 3 cents to mail. I recall tagging along to pick up stamps in the Nevis post office.)
Winters were truly cold then, that far north in Minnesota. There was no global warming, and -30 was fairly common. We dressed for it better than kids do today, and were in better position to take what advantage of the cold that we could. The huge hollow in back for the athletic field made great winter sledding. You couldn't bring sleds on the school bus however, so somebody left large pieces of cardboard for us to cling to however we could while sliding down the hill and then trudging up again for the next one to ride. In fact, the cardboard was so popular that it was used on plain grass as well, though it wasn't as slick.
But during lunch breaks, there wasn't enough time to go all the way back behind the school to enjoy sledding. Kids adapt. Somebody turned the slight rise in front of school into a short ramp by piling snow to shape, then pouring water over it. On the frequent sub-zero days - or more likely nights, since I never saw such activity during school hours - the water would freeze nearly as soon as it was poured, reinforcing the snow shape rather than melting through it. Behold: we had an ice ramp! Instant slide, which all but the "babies" stood in their boots to slide on. Only about two feet long, it seemed safe enough, and all those using it were certainly having fun. In fact, it was such fun that using it conveyed status, and/or only those with status got to use it. Some of us just stood around and stared, enviously. So when I was offered the chance to use it, of course I stepped up.
Now, I need to explain something. I was pretty naive for a whole lot of years. My parents were busy people, running a resort, and finding winter jobs to keep the family going. I was a good kid by staying out of their way and staying out of trouble. Assumptions were made about how I was growing up. One of them was that their common sense was also my common sense. Even when there was no background experience or conversation to warrant such assumptions. So I got myself into trouble. A lot. I was into exploring my world, and if I couldn't see a good reason not to do something, especially with a bunch of my peers egging me on, I went ahead and tried it. It had the expected consequences.
One early bus ride, some of the older kids - boys of course - challenged me, declaring me to be too stupid to know the difference between boys and girls. Well, I did so, and told them so. They demanded proof: what is it that boys have that girls don't? I have no clue where, but I had learned that word, even though I doubt it was ever spoken in our house. We, and the culture, were pretty repressed back then. Since I couldn't allow those boys to think I was stupid, I answered their question: "a penis." Of course my folks heard about it almost as soon as I was off the school bus (How could that be, eh, big brother Steve?) and I was in trouble. I learned not to say that word ever again. Well, until much later anyway.
Remember the movie "A Christmas Story"? The one where the kid gets dared to stick his tongue to the flagpole in sub-zero weather and it sticks? Well, I was that kid too. It didn't stick long, because I jerked it off right away, but I did accept the dare. It really, really does happen. Both the tongue sticking part and the naive kid trying to fit in accepting the dare.
Along the side of the school and going way back the width of the athletic field, there was a grove of pines, planted no doubt for privacy, conservation, and windbreak purposes. During recess, however, it was our playground. It was also a good walk back to the school if you had to go potty, thus spoiling recess time. Not only would you miss whatever was going on now, you might not get back at all before recess ended. I had a dilemma: I needed to go but didn't want to leave.
Well, my classmates had a solution for me: go right there. I kinda thought I shouldn't, but they insisted it was all right. After all, they wouldn't tell. Well, why not? After all, on the resort, both my brother and my dad did it, turning their backs to us and using trees to go on. Mom had shown me how to squat down out in the woods when the occasion arose. And these were woods, right? So I did.
And of course the kids told - barely waiting until I was finished. The whole school knew and never let me forget it. My teacher knew and had a private chat with me. My parents knew and had something more than a chat with me. I was totally disgraced. Moving to a new town late in third grade was something of a relief.
Any wonder I still have some trust issues with the herd of fellow humans?
But that naive kid is still who I was when faced with the ice slide. Everybody else was doing it and having a great time, and now I could too. I never gave a thought to balancing or center of gravity or anything else, like whether standing on a slippery ice ramp was actually a good idea. So I put both feet on the top...
And next thing I know I'm lying on the concrete sidewalk, face up, kids gathered around me. I have no idea whether I lost consciousness or just memory. But, hey, I had to get up and get out of there so they could have their ramp back, and hey, just how stupid and clumsy was I, anyway?
Enough, apparently.
I wandered back into the classroom and put my head down on my desk. I felt terrible, and closing my eyes helped. Mrs. Christianson had written the afternoon's lesson on the board, and I tried to read it, but the letters made absolutely no sense. I wasn't even alarmed by suddenly being rendered unable to read. It just made me feel sicker trying, so I stopped trying. Nobody was around, so the peace and quiet was exactly what I thought I needed.
When an adult did wander in, asking if I was OK, I tried to explain that I couldn't read. It couldn't have made much sense, because she left again with no impulse to do something about what I'd just said. Eventually the class returned, and the combination of my head still on my desk and my renewed statement that I couldn't read, got me an escort to the nurse's office to lay down.
I recall hearing later that I'd been one of those kids who use show-and-tell time to spin the most outrageous tales to get attention, so when this seemed a little weird, it was at first ignored. Why hadn't anybody said something? As soon as I heard that comment, I quit spinning tales grounded in my need for attention and started looking for real things to talk about. Being branded a liar was a horrible thing, and not getting attention when it was really needed was nearly as bad. (Such were my priorities at the time.)
Next thing I remember was being in the hospital, nurses bending over me, waking me up and telling me not to fall asleep. Of course, that was exactly what I did the second they left. Mom was there, having had to take time off work for me, so I knew I was really in trouble this time! She kept waking me up too, with the same results the nurses were having. I heard the word "concussion" repeated, with finally the verdict that I didn't have one. At that point I was finally allowed to go home, to sleep without interruptions.
Oh, and the class got a new art project for the afternoon: writing me Get Well cards. They were brought to the hospital before I was released, and I managed to stay awake long enough to read some of them. I finally could, again. I actually remember one of them, or rather its sender, a boy named Gary Plumley. He made it sound like he actually cared, not just completed an assignment as quickly as possible. I still remembered the name when we met again as parents of kids on opposing teams in a swim meet many years and many miles later. And he remembered mine.
Huh.
I was vaguely disappointed by the verdict that I didn't have a concussion. The symptoms seemed important enough to me to warrant some kind of label, especially since they were enough to send me to the hospital. And today, with our increased sensitivity to TBIs, I think it might finally earn the name.
Now if I could just manage to quit falling on the dang ice!
It was second grade. I was attending Nevis school, nearly an hour bus ride each way since we lived on a resort down at the far end of the route. The school then - I haven't gone past for easily 50 years - boasted a sidewalk all along its front, with a small rise of ground and several steps into the front door. (This was so long ago that postcards cost two cents, and letters 3 cents to mail. I recall tagging along to pick up stamps in the Nevis post office.)
Winters were truly cold then, that far north in Minnesota. There was no global warming, and -30 was fairly common. We dressed for it better than kids do today, and were in better position to take what advantage of the cold that we could. The huge hollow in back for the athletic field made great winter sledding. You couldn't bring sleds on the school bus however, so somebody left large pieces of cardboard for us to cling to however we could while sliding down the hill and then trudging up again for the next one to ride. In fact, the cardboard was so popular that it was used on plain grass as well, though it wasn't as slick.
But during lunch breaks, there wasn't enough time to go all the way back behind the school to enjoy sledding. Kids adapt. Somebody turned the slight rise in front of school into a short ramp by piling snow to shape, then pouring water over it. On the frequent sub-zero days - or more likely nights, since I never saw such activity during school hours - the water would freeze nearly as soon as it was poured, reinforcing the snow shape rather than melting through it. Behold: we had an ice ramp! Instant slide, which all but the "babies" stood in their boots to slide on. Only about two feet long, it seemed safe enough, and all those using it were certainly having fun. In fact, it was such fun that using it conveyed status, and/or only those with status got to use it. Some of us just stood around and stared, enviously. So when I was offered the chance to use it, of course I stepped up.
Now, I need to explain something. I was pretty naive for a whole lot of years. My parents were busy people, running a resort, and finding winter jobs to keep the family going. I was a good kid by staying out of their way and staying out of trouble. Assumptions were made about how I was growing up. One of them was that their common sense was also my common sense. Even when there was no background experience or conversation to warrant such assumptions. So I got myself into trouble. A lot. I was into exploring my world, and if I couldn't see a good reason not to do something, especially with a bunch of my peers egging me on, I went ahead and tried it. It had the expected consequences.
One early bus ride, some of the older kids - boys of course - challenged me, declaring me to be too stupid to know the difference between boys and girls. Well, I did so, and told them so. They demanded proof: what is it that boys have that girls don't? I have no clue where, but I had learned that word, even though I doubt it was ever spoken in our house. We, and the culture, were pretty repressed back then. Since I couldn't allow those boys to think I was stupid, I answered their question: "a penis." Of course my folks heard about it almost as soon as I was off the school bus (How could that be, eh, big brother Steve?) and I was in trouble. I learned not to say that word ever again. Well, until much later anyway.
Remember the movie "A Christmas Story"? The one where the kid gets dared to stick his tongue to the flagpole in sub-zero weather and it sticks? Well, I was that kid too. It didn't stick long, because I jerked it off right away, but I did accept the dare. It really, really does happen. Both the tongue sticking part and the naive kid trying to fit in accepting the dare.
Along the side of the school and going way back the width of the athletic field, there was a grove of pines, planted no doubt for privacy, conservation, and windbreak purposes. During recess, however, it was our playground. It was also a good walk back to the school if you had to go potty, thus spoiling recess time. Not only would you miss whatever was going on now, you might not get back at all before recess ended. I had a dilemma: I needed to go but didn't want to leave.
Well, my classmates had a solution for me: go right there. I kinda thought I shouldn't, but they insisted it was all right. After all, they wouldn't tell. Well, why not? After all, on the resort, both my brother and my dad did it, turning their backs to us and using trees to go on. Mom had shown me how to squat down out in the woods when the occasion arose. And these were woods, right? So I did.
And of course the kids told - barely waiting until I was finished. The whole school knew and never let me forget it. My teacher knew and had a private chat with me. My parents knew and had something more than a chat with me. I was totally disgraced. Moving to a new town late in third grade was something of a relief.
Any wonder I still have some trust issues with the herd of fellow humans?
But that naive kid is still who I was when faced with the ice slide. Everybody else was doing it and having a great time, and now I could too. I never gave a thought to balancing or center of gravity or anything else, like whether standing on a slippery ice ramp was actually a good idea. So I put both feet on the top...
And next thing I know I'm lying on the concrete sidewalk, face up, kids gathered around me. I have no idea whether I lost consciousness or just memory. But, hey, I had to get up and get out of there so they could have their ramp back, and hey, just how stupid and clumsy was I, anyway?
Enough, apparently.
I wandered back into the classroom and put my head down on my desk. I felt terrible, and closing my eyes helped. Mrs. Christianson had written the afternoon's lesson on the board, and I tried to read it, but the letters made absolutely no sense. I wasn't even alarmed by suddenly being rendered unable to read. It just made me feel sicker trying, so I stopped trying. Nobody was around, so the peace and quiet was exactly what I thought I needed.
When an adult did wander in, asking if I was OK, I tried to explain that I couldn't read. It couldn't have made much sense, because she left again with no impulse to do something about what I'd just said. Eventually the class returned, and the combination of my head still on my desk and my renewed statement that I couldn't read, got me an escort to the nurse's office to lay down.
I recall hearing later that I'd been one of those kids who use show-and-tell time to spin the most outrageous tales to get attention, so when this seemed a little weird, it was at first ignored. Why hadn't anybody said something? As soon as I heard that comment, I quit spinning tales grounded in my need for attention and started looking for real things to talk about. Being branded a liar was a horrible thing, and not getting attention when it was really needed was nearly as bad. (Such were my priorities at the time.)
Next thing I remember was being in the hospital, nurses bending over me, waking me up and telling me not to fall asleep. Of course, that was exactly what I did the second they left. Mom was there, having had to take time off work for me, so I knew I was really in trouble this time! She kept waking me up too, with the same results the nurses were having. I heard the word "concussion" repeated, with finally the verdict that I didn't have one. At that point I was finally allowed to go home, to sleep without interruptions.
Oh, and the class got a new art project for the afternoon: writing me Get Well cards. They were brought to the hospital before I was released, and I managed to stay awake long enough to read some of them. I finally could, again. I actually remember one of them, or rather its sender, a boy named Gary Plumley. He made it sound like he actually cared, not just completed an assignment as quickly as possible. I still remembered the name when we met again as parents of kids on opposing teams in a swim meet many years and many miles later. And he remembered mine.
Huh.
I was vaguely disappointed by the verdict that I didn't have a concussion. The symptoms seemed important enough to me to warrant some kind of label, especially since they were enough to send me to the hospital. And today, with our increased sensitivity to TBIs, I think it might finally earn the name.
Now if I could just manage to quit falling on the dang ice!
Saturday, May 29, 2010
That "Another Story"
In my last post I referred to remembering the Shannon family as "another story". It was all about falling in love, and it twisted through my life for over six years.
Yep, twisted about covers it. But it started so easily, innocently, by pure chance.
I was eleven, making it late spring of 1960, as I would turn twelve in the fall. The setting was the school cafeteria, waiting to go through the line for refreshments being served after the spring concert. It would have been either band or choir, though I can't remember which, and I would have been in both. This amazingly cute boy I'd never seen before in our small town stood next to me in line, and actually talked to me like I was a real human being! In retrospect I guess he can be pardoned for doing that, since he was new to town and didn't know yet that this just wasn't something one did. But I'm sure somebody set him straight pretty quickly, since it never happened again. Not really.
In the meantime, I found out his name - David Shannon - the fact that his family had just moved into town, that his dad was the new preacher in - OMG! - my church, and that he liked classical music. I had in fact just discovered it myself, when Readers Digest sent me a set of all 9 Beethovan symphonies on vinyl, and I had been listening to and liking them. I was even able to answer when he asked which ones I liked best: the 2nd and 7th. I knew the fifth was best known, but thought then it was overrated. Of course, back then I knew nothing about it being a musical joke, and appreciate it so much more now when I hear it and enjoy the joke over and over again. But I responded to the second, and especially to the 2nd movement of the 7th, which to me is all about teenaged angst.
It was perhaps five minutes of my life, but at the end of it I was in love.
He wasn't, of course. We never spoke again, except as necessary when meeting in church and for choir, when he couldn't avoid me. Mostly he was polite, at least in front of adults. But alone, meaning when there were only other kids around, he picked up on a hated nickname, "Heather-Feather", and turned it into a sing-song chant designed only for taunting and humiliation.
Heather-Feather, giggle-wiggle, cha-cha-cha!
Everybody picked up on it. I think it lasted for two years, at least out loud. I have never forgotten it. And yet, I still wasn't out of love. My every emotion hung on seeing him, hearing him, even the possibility of seeing him. I knew his birthday, soaked up every detail I ever learned about him or any of his family, read books about the Biblical David because they shared the same name, but it never helped. Perhaps if I were smarter, or cuter, or had better hair (frizzy-curly when pageboys and flips were the style, replaced by Mary Travers style long), or didn't wear years-old hand-me-downs, or....
But there was nothing in the world, apparently, that would induce him to like me. And apparently the whole world knew it.
Quite possibly the best thing that happened to me in high school, though I couldn't see it at the time, was my family moving out of town to St. Paul at the end of my sophomore year. I absolutely hated, hated the city! And yet, here I had a fresh start, made friends, started dating people who seemed to actually like me.
David Shannon was nearly forgotten history. Of course I had learned several things over those years, like what I couldn't expect out of relationships. They wouldn't be mutual, supportive, equal, kind - or by any means frequent. Indifference, humiliation, cruelty - those would be normal. Romance was for other people, if in fact it even existed and wasn't just a fairy tale. That mindset lasted until well after my marriage ended, and explains a lot about my choices. I simply knew I didn't have many.
I did get over him, finally, the last time I saw him. He was in the student union at Hamline University, just barely recognizable to me by that time, and deeply in conversation with one of the deep social rejects at that time. Despite her very careless grooming (dirty messy hair for example) she had a reputation for sleeping around, something in those days that was the social kiss of death. These days I think you'd call her a skank, or worse if her reputation was in any way factual. (Mine wasn't, so, hard to tell.) Something about his fond acceptance of her compared to his treatment of me dealt me an instant cure. If that was who he was.... I hadn't known him at all, just been in love with the idea of being in love. It was remarkably freeing.
Do I hate him? Am I angry with him? No to both. We were both kids, and my feelings in no way obligated him to any sort of behavior towards me. In fact, I expect my constant-as-possible presence was a bit of a problem for him, and I am sorry about that. If I could change anything, it would be to have somebody I could actually talk to about what was going on, somebody who'd listen, not judge, and comfort and advise me when I needed it. It might have helped. Or perhaps nothing could have.
Yep, twisted about covers it. But it started so easily, innocently, by pure chance.
I was eleven, making it late spring of 1960, as I would turn twelve in the fall. The setting was the school cafeteria, waiting to go through the line for refreshments being served after the spring concert. It would have been either band or choir, though I can't remember which, and I would have been in both. This amazingly cute boy I'd never seen before in our small town stood next to me in line, and actually talked to me like I was a real human being! In retrospect I guess he can be pardoned for doing that, since he was new to town and didn't know yet that this just wasn't something one did. But I'm sure somebody set him straight pretty quickly, since it never happened again. Not really.
In the meantime, I found out his name - David Shannon - the fact that his family had just moved into town, that his dad was the new preacher in - OMG! - my church, and that he liked classical music. I had in fact just discovered it myself, when Readers Digest sent me a set of all 9 Beethovan symphonies on vinyl, and I had been listening to and liking them. I was even able to answer when he asked which ones I liked best: the 2nd and 7th. I knew the fifth was best known, but thought then it was overrated. Of course, back then I knew nothing about it being a musical joke, and appreciate it so much more now when I hear it and enjoy the joke over and over again. But I responded to the second, and especially to the 2nd movement of the 7th, which to me is all about teenaged angst.
It was perhaps five minutes of my life, but at the end of it I was in love.
He wasn't, of course. We never spoke again, except as necessary when meeting in church and for choir, when he couldn't avoid me. Mostly he was polite, at least in front of adults. But alone, meaning when there were only other kids around, he picked up on a hated nickname, "Heather-Feather", and turned it into a sing-song chant designed only for taunting and humiliation.
Heather-Feather, giggle-wiggle, cha-cha-cha!
Everybody picked up on it. I think it lasted for two years, at least out loud. I have never forgotten it. And yet, I still wasn't out of love. My every emotion hung on seeing him, hearing him, even the possibility of seeing him. I knew his birthday, soaked up every detail I ever learned about him or any of his family, read books about the Biblical David because they shared the same name, but it never helped. Perhaps if I were smarter, or cuter, or had better hair (frizzy-curly when pageboys and flips were the style, replaced by Mary Travers style long), or didn't wear years-old hand-me-downs, or....
But there was nothing in the world, apparently, that would induce him to like me. And apparently the whole world knew it.
Quite possibly the best thing that happened to me in high school, though I couldn't see it at the time, was my family moving out of town to St. Paul at the end of my sophomore year. I absolutely hated, hated the city! And yet, here I had a fresh start, made friends, started dating people who seemed to actually like me.
David Shannon was nearly forgotten history. Of course I had learned several things over those years, like what I couldn't expect out of relationships. They wouldn't be mutual, supportive, equal, kind - or by any means frequent. Indifference, humiliation, cruelty - those would be normal. Romance was for other people, if in fact it even existed and wasn't just a fairy tale. That mindset lasted until well after my marriage ended, and explains a lot about my choices. I simply knew I didn't have many.
I did get over him, finally, the last time I saw him. He was in the student union at Hamline University, just barely recognizable to me by that time, and deeply in conversation with one of the deep social rejects at that time. Despite her very careless grooming (dirty messy hair for example) she had a reputation for sleeping around, something in those days that was the social kiss of death. These days I think you'd call her a skank, or worse if her reputation was in any way factual. (Mine wasn't, so, hard to tell.) Something about his fond acceptance of her compared to his treatment of me dealt me an instant cure. If that was who he was.... I hadn't known him at all, just been in love with the idea of being in love. It was remarkably freeing.
Do I hate him? Am I angry with him? No to both. We were both kids, and my feelings in no way obligated him to any sort of behavior towards me. In fact, I expect my constant-as-possible presence was a bit of a problem for him, and I am sorry about that. If I could change anything, it would be to have somebody I could actually talk to about what was going on, somebody who'd listen, not judge, and comfort and advise me when I needed it. It might have helped. Or perhaps nothing could have.
Friday, May 28, 2010
How to Feel Really Stupid
I mean really, really, REALLY stupid! Now obviously, like some of the rest of you, I've done this more than on rare occasions. But a pair of occasions really stick in my mind, going back to that wonderfully awkward time of adolescence, and involving the same person both times.
Growing up in rural Minnesota back in the 50's, I didn't get any kind of musical education. At least nothing formal. My first song of memory was over the radio, Tennessee Ernie Ford's deep bass voice singing "Sixteen Tons." It was about shoveling coal: "Sixteen tons, and what do you get? A little bit older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store." If somebody has posted it anywhere online and you've never listened to it, go and do so.
We didn't have TV yet, and no record player, so the radio was our only recorded source of music. Music was also what you did with the family, singing nursery songs and X-mas carols, or singing along in church. It was playing the triangle in elementary school, learning whether notes went up or down from the previous one, and eventually singing in school choir and playing in marching band. That distinction is important: it was marching band, not orchestra, and the emphasis was on keeping step and straight lines and accompanying the local team at ball games. Music theory was strictly hands-on, keep up with the rest. In other words, there wasn't any.
I was so ignorant back then about how wide the real world was, that not only did I not know the answers to the questions, I had absolutely no idea that there actually were questions, much less what they might be. If it wasn't spoon fed to me in school, or perhaps through the Reader's Digest, I had no idea it existed. But my world was about to start changing.
We got a new minister to our Methodist Church about 1960, Rev. Edward F. Shannon. He came along with his wife, Jewel, who became our church choir director and started opening up our musical world. She taught us new music, complicated pieces that her skill and confidence in us led us to master with seeming ease, such as Cesar Franck's "150th Psalm." We grew so practiced and skilled that we eventually went to sing before the Methodist Annual Conference at Hamline University. (I fell in love with the campus at that visit and determined that I must go there, but that's another story.)
They also came with 5 children, a son a few years older than I was, David, 1 year older, Robert, a year younger, and Kathleen and the baby of the family, another son. Either the eldest or youngest was named Kevin. I surprise myself to discover after all these years I actually don't remember which it was: I had once thought I would never forget anything about that family. That too is another story.
I don't know if they all had special formal training in music, or if that just came from their mother, but "talented" describes the least of them, musically, and I suspect "genius" could be applied, at least to Robert. I was in awe of him, musically, and it was in dealing with him that I felt my most stupid.
First - in recollection, not necessarily chronologically - was the discussion where I was asking him about a piece of music by Bach. Just what exactly I was asking is not the part that sticks tenaciously to my memory cells. What followed is. He wasn't able to identify the piece by the meager clues I was offering him, and asked me "Which one?" meaning, "which Bach?"
I found that an inordinately stupid question. "THE one, of course." He just continued looking at me steadily, inscrutably, a look I now interpret as, "You are so completely hopeless, but I've been raised to be too polite to tell you so." As the silence stretched, I filled in, "Johann Sebastion, of course," thinking that ended the matter. How could he be so dense? But as he did seemingly continue to be so dense, it occurred to me to ask, "Why, are there more?"
Now that was born completely of ignorance, and my lack of a musical education, but I compounded it by my own stupidity in not realizing he wouldn't have even asked the question unless there were, in fact, more than one.
Hello!
The second incident involved a performance that I got roped into by his mother. She liked to have everyone in the choir who possibly could do some sort of solo or duet in front of the whole church. I got to sing a verse of something called the "Mexican Christmas Carol" once and had a great time. I can't judge whether the listeners did also. But she got it into her head that I could play trumpet.
Mind you, I actually did play trumpet, if what I did could be called playing. I made noises, usually loudly, but with no ear to tell whether or not it was sharp or flat even if I could tell it was off. And since I'd never yet heard what kind of sweet mellow tone a real trumpet player could coax out of the instrument, that was good enough for me. A bit of practice and I didn't even fumble the fingerings too badly, but unfortunately, that's exactly what I didn't do: practice. Oh sure, I carried the case home every night, and carried it back again every morning, but mostly it sat where I dropped it until morning.
Still, she had confidence that I could actually play this thing, and I couldn't find a way to get out of it. The day arrived, the moment arrived, I picked up my trumpet where I had it stashed next to me in the choir loft, went to stand next to the organ where Bobby was playing, took a deep breath, blew, and ...BLAAAATTTTTTTTT! in a completely discordant note. He and I both stopped. He by now probably knew how musically awful I was, because he decided he needed to remind me that we were playing in the key of C. I insisted that I was, and it was true: every single piece of sheet music I had ever seen for band told me that this key and this note was middle C. We tried again, same result. The whole church was holding its breath. (In retrospect, it was better than laughter.) I wanted to crawl into a hole and haul Bobby in it with me. After all, I was doing it right, wasn't I? He looked at my sheet music, and it did indeed say C. He mildly informed me that he needed to figure out what key I was really playing in, when it dawned on me. Sometime long ago and far away, I had heard my instrument referred to as a B-flat trumpet. Did that help?
Sure it did, so now would I please just change the key I was playing in to a proper key of C?
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
He must have read the panic in my eyes, because he just said "Never mind" and instantly in his head transposed his part what we were doing so that the organ matched me. For him it was as easy as if someone had switched from writing with crayon to writing with pencil. I actually think he was surprised that not everybody - notably me - could do it. Somehow I managed to make some kind of sound come from the trumpet and finished my piece - or should I say our piece, since he's the one who made it possible. My contribution, most likely, could compassionately be considered barely adequate. Somehow, somewhere in my past I had been trained that you never quit and slunk away in the middle of a public disaster, that you stuck and finished it, no matter what. It's the only thing that kept me up there, and if anybody was fooled into thinking my flaming red face was caused by blowing through the horn, well let 'em!
Again, you're thinking what I told you was a story about ignorance, but the stupidity was in never once thinking about having to rehearse beforehand. After all, one note was all it would have taken.
Growing up in rural Minnesota back in the 50's, I didn't get any kind of musical education. At least nothing formal. My first song of memory was over the radio, Tennessee Ernie Ford's deep bass voice singing "Sixteen Tons." It was about shoveling coal: "Sixteen tons, and what do you get? A little bit older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store." If somebody has posted it anywhere online and you've never listened to it, go and do so.
We didn't have TV yet, and no record player, so the radio was our only recorded source of music. Music was also what you did with the family, singing nursery songs and X-mas carols, or singing along in church. It was playing the triangle in elementary school, learning whether notes went up or down from the previous one, and eventually singing in school choir and playing in marching band. That distinction is important: it was marching band, not orchestra, and the emphasis was on keeping step and straight lines and accompanying the local team at ball games. Music theory was strictly hands-on, keep up with the rest. In other words, there wasn't any.
I was so ignorant back then about how wide the real world was, that not only did I not know the answers to the questions, I had absolutely no idea that there actually were questions, much less what they might be. If it wasn't spoon fed to me in school, or perhaps through the Reader's Digest, I had no idea it existed. But my world was about to start changing.
We got a new minister to our Methodist Church about 1960, Rev. Edward F. Shannon. He came along with his wife, Jewel, who became our church choir director and started opening up our musical world. She taught us new music, complicated pieces that her skill and confidence in us led us to master with seeming ease, such as Cesar Franck's "150th Psalm." We grew so practiced and skilled that we eventually went to sing before the Methodist Annual Conference at Hamline University. (I fell in love with the campus at that visit and determined that I must go there, but that's another story.)
They also came with 5 children, a son a few years older than I was, David, 1 year older, Robert, a year younger, and Kathleen and the baby of the family, another son. Either the eldest or youngest was named Kevin. I surprise myself to discover after all these years I actually don't remember which it was: I had once thought I would never forget anything about that family. That too is another story.
I don't know if they all had special formal training in music, or if that just came from their mother, but "talented" describes the least of them, musically, and I suspect "genius" could be applied, at least to Robert. I was in awe of him, musically, and it was in dealing with him that I felt my most stupid.
First - in recollection, not necessarily chronologically - was the discussion where I was asking him about a piece of music by Bach. Just what exactly I was asking is not the part that sticks tenaciously to my memory cells. What followed is. He wasn't able to identify the piece by the meager clues I was offering him, and asked me "Which one?" meaning, "which Bach?"
I found that an inordinately stupid question. "THE one, of course." He just continued looking at me steadily, inscrutably, a look I now interpret as, "You are so completely hopeless, but I've been raised to be too polite to tell you so." As the silence stretched, I filled in, "Johann Sebastion, of course," thinking that ended the matter. How could he be so dense? But as he did seemingly continue to be so dense, it occurred to me to ask, "Why, are there more?"
Now that was born completely of ignorance, and my lack of a musical education, but I compounded it by my own stupidity in not realizing he wouldn't have even asked the question unless there were, in fact, more than one.
Hello!
The second incident involved a performance that I got roped into by his mother. She liked to have everyone in the choir who possibly could do some sort of solo or duet in front of the whole church. I got to sing a verse of something called the "Mexican Christmas Carol" once and had a great time. I can't judge whether the listeners did also. But she got it into her head that I could play trumpet.
Mind you, I actually did play trumpet, if what I did could be called playing. I made noises, usually loudly, but with no ear to tell whether or not it was sharp or flat even if I could tell it was off. And since I'd never yet heard what kind of sweet mellow tone a real trumpet player could coax out of the instrument, that was good enough for me. A bit of practice and I didn't even fumble the fingerings too badly, but unfortunately, that's exactly what I didn't do: practice. Oh sure, I carried the case home every night, and carried it back again every morning, but mostly it sat where I dropped it until morning.
Still, she had confidence that I could actually play this thing, and I couldn't find a way to get out of it. The day arrived, the moment arrived, I picked up my trumpet where I had it stashed next to me in the choir loft, went to stand next to the organ where Bobby was playing, took a deep breath, blew, and ...BLAAAATTTTTTTTT! in a completely discordant note. He and I both stopped. He by now probably knew how musically awful I was, because he decided he needed to remind me that we were playing in the key of C. I insisted that I was, and it was true: every single piece of sheet music I had ever seen for band told me that this key and this note was middle C. We tried again, same result. The whole church was holding its breath. (In retrospect, it was better than laughter.) I wanted to crawl into a hole and haul Bobby in it with me. After all, I was doing it right, wasn't I? He looked at my sheet music, and it did indeed say C. He mildly informed me that he needed to figure out what key I was really playing in, when it dawned on me. Sometime long ago and far away, I had heard my instrument referred to as a B-flat trumpet. Did that help?
Sure it did, so now would I please just change the key I was playing in to a proper key of C?
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
He must have read the panic in my eyes, because he just said "Never mind" and instantly in his head transposed his part what we were doing so that the organ matched me. For him it was as easy as if someone had switched from writing with crayon to writing with pencil. I actually think he was surprised that not everybody - notably me - could do it. Somehow I managed to make some kind of sound come from the trumpet and finished my piece - or should I say our piece, since he's the one who made it possible. My contribution, most likely, could compassionately be considered barely adequate. Somehow, somewhere in my past I had been trained that you never quit and slunk away in the middle of a public disaster, that you stuck and finished it, no matter what. It's the only thing that kept me up there, and if anybody was fooled into thinking my flaming red face was caused by blowing through the horn, well let 'em!
Again, you're thinking what I told you was a story about ignorance, but the stupidity was in never once thinking about having to rehearse beforehand. After all, one note was all it would have taken.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Arachnophobia
I suspect I first saw it crawling from place to place and picked up the stick, put it in the spider's path, picked it up when he climbed on his obstruction, and brought it close to see what he would do. It was what we'd do for any crawling bug, easier than trying a direct pick up and kinder to the bug than getting pinched by clumsy fingers.
We lived on the resort at the time, Pleasant Ridge Resort on 2nd Crow Wing Lake, in Hubbard County, MN, just east of the town of Hubbard. I recall myself being four at the time, which is likely correct, since we owned the resort from about when I was three until late in third grade. I was old enough to (mostly) mind Mom's restrictions, and was pretty much given the run of the place as long as I avoided the lake, avoided the cabins since other people were staying in them by the week, and I came promptly when Mom called. If I followed the rules they were confident I was safe, since the biggest hazard those days was poison ivy.
Well, it probably really was me, but that's another story or two.
There was a path which ran all around the lake. At some later point in my life I would follow it in both directions to each of the neighboring resorts, but this day I was down in front of a couple of cabins on our own resort, unafraid, watching this little black spider as it crawled up the stick to the end, then with nowhere to go, down the stick toward me. Oh cool! (Except we said, "Neat!" back in those days.) It climbed onto my hand. OW! Not so cool, as it "bit" me right on the tender webbing between two fingers! It hurt, and continued to hurt for some time. Eventually the pain went away and I forgot about it, until some weeks later a big chunk of skin fell off between those fingers and I remembered what had caused it.
I was fine, but one thing had changed. I was now deathly afraid of spiders. All spiders, even spider look-alikes like daddy long legs. If I so much as saw as spider on the wall or ceiling, I would leave the room. Unless, that is, it was coming down its thread from the ceiling somewhere in the middle of the room. In order to leave my chair I would have had to actually move closer to that spider, and that I simply could not do. I was a prisoner of that chair until I yelled for somebody else to come and kill that horrible spider and clear the way for me to move.
They jump, you know.
One thing I could do, occasionally, was kill them. But only if there were some way I could assure myself that there was absolutely no way that spider could get away and come and attack me in the process! Often that took a big towel or newspaper, or even - sacrilege! - a book.
It was still bad enough when I was raising my own kids that I couldn't even bring myself to touch the pictures in a child's book about spiders while I was reading it to the kids. It was part of a great set that was offered in grocery stores, buy a volume a week for a cheap price with a $___ purchase. They covered cats, wild ponies, dinosaurs, and a whole plethora of topics about the natural world. Unfortunately for me, the kids liked the spider book rather more often than I liked reading it to them. But I couldn't let them know how I was feeling. I had to clamp down hard and pretend nonchalance each time we went through it. After all, I had a PLAN.
That plan was, simply, to get my kids to kill or remove all spiders that came to visit our house so I wouldn't have to deal with them. In order to accomplish that, I had to persuade them that spiders weren't scary, just a nuisance to squish and flush, or - best case - deserving of an outdoor home where they could find proper meals for themselves. It worked for years, and in the process I managed to actually conquer my phobia, getting it down to the level where I find them distasteful but can manage to dispatch them myself without a full-blown case of the screaming meemies.
I actually managed a pair of encounters with black widows when we lived in Georgia and I worked at the garden center. Even after being called over to examine one as an alert from the owner that here was something new to be careful of while handling stock, and days later moving a bush by grabbing the stems and feeling one under my hand (Toss! Fast! Nevermind if you kill the bush!), I managed to come away without a case of PTSD.
Pretty amazing, really.
Occasionally I can even appreciate them - usually with a long zoom lens.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Memorable Teachers
Unlike Steve, who pays homage to his best teachers, I remember most vividly the worst teachers I had.
The single exception to this was for 2nd grade, Mrs. Christianson. What I remember was all the different things we did in her class, things that we never thought mere second graders could do. She knew somebody with a kiln who was willing to share time. For Christmas that year we made clip-on earrings, starting with a flattened hemisphere of clay which we each painted and glazed before it was sent off to the kiln. We also made a trivet, rolling out a square of clay, laying a pattern over it, cutting it into pieces, baking, then painting and glazing before sending it off to be baked again. Once that was finished, we glued it onto a square of Masonite and grouted between the pieces. We were allowed to pick our own pictures, whatever we wanted, and colors too. I found a little mouse with a long arcing tail set inside a circle. The teacher warned me that the tail might break, but I really wanted THAT mouse. After giving it (very little) thought, I went ahead, and with much patience, something I was not known for, successfully completed my trivet.
After moving from Nevis to Park Rapids at the end of third grade, I faced a 4th grade teacher that I learned to hate. I loved school, and had loved all my teachers up to this point. It had simply never occurred to me not to. Mrs. Crowell came as a complete shock to me. She started by having every student read aloud so she could place us in with either slower or advanced readers. Somehow she forgot to test me, and simply placed me with the slow readers. Thus far in school my only problem with reading was, having breezed through the book in the first couple of weeks, feigning enough interest to be able to find the place to read when it was my turn, or skimming through the story as the class finally got to it so I could refresh my memory of what it was about. Needless to say, I was outraged! I was also excruciatingly bored, having to wait while someone painfully tried sounding out a word in front of all of the rest of us, and still not getting it quite right.
My parents had already taught me that the teacher was always right. Whatever it was about, whatever happened, there was only one side of the story. So I didn’t bother complaining to them. I just got more miserable as the year progressed. Once report cards came, however, it was a whole new story. They demanded to know why I’d been placed in the slow reading group, so I explained I hadn’t gotten tested like the other kids had. Why hadn’t I said something? I’d been trained not to. They immediately contacted the school, and I got placed in the reading group where I belonged.
Fifth grade was a whole story unto itself.
In seventh grade, we were presented with a first-year latin teacher who was so repulsive we uniformly ganged up on him and drove him out of teaching. I’m not just talking ugly, which he was, or nervous, which he also was, or inexperienced, which was obvious. His personal hygiene was terrible, topped off (all puns intended) by a galloping case of dandruff. The worst part of it came at lunch time. School was laid out so that the cafeteria had a small room off to the side with a glass wall where the teachers ate. They got a break from us but could still observe our behavior, helping to keep us in line. But we could also watch them. Imagine trying to eat lunch when you can see your latin teacher leaning over his plate, scratching his head, allowing visibly huge flakes of dandruff to fall onto his food!
Things settled down until we moved into the big city of St. Paul, and I went from a class of 125 to 600 at Central High School. The first disappointment was the band. He was just not a marching band director, and I came from a small school with a state-wide prize-winning record for marching bands. Band was still the social events class, both because we socialized within it, and because we attended social functions like ball games as a unit. I was surprised to find out later, naive as I was, that the band was considered a clique. Despite lacking all pride in this band, my two best friends at this school came from it.
Eleventh grade college-prep English was taught by Miss Korfhage. I’d say she was a competent enough teacher, but she had one habit that drove me nuts. When she asked the class a question, she called on the boys first. Only when none of them could answer her would she ask one of the girls, no matter how long their hands were raised. I, of course, was quite unused to being ignored in this way, and soon figured out her pattern. One day I raised my hand and kept it up until she finally gave in and called on me. I told her my observations, complaining that we girls deserved to be taught too. She left the room in tears. (I also wasn’t known for tact in those days.) Half the room turned to me and told me how mean I’d been, and half admitted privately that what I’d said was right. After that day I got called on quite a lot - when I didn’t have my hand up and didn’t have an answer, of course. I put up with it, figuring I probably deserved it. But at least she started calling on the rest of the girls in class from then on, at least for that year.
Senior year netted me the dreaded Mrs. Norbeck for social studies. Every year it was the same thing. Everybody hated her class, and tried to get out and transfer to another teacher. There just wasn’t room, and each year only one or two made the switch. We rest were stuck. The school defended her to our parents, saying she was a real prize, having come to this poor public school after a distinguished career in private school. We found this hard to believe. With the exception of the few days a year she had to teach to specific standards, when we learned about government branches and people filling high-profile positions, every day was boringly the same. She sat at her desk and droned on for an hour about some person or another and what they’d done and their high principles. This was probably stuff we could benefit from learning, but the presentation killed it. It wasn’t just the droning voice, no interactions or questions, but the view of her sitting at her desk patting the hairpins back in to where they were holding her coiled braid in place at the nape of her neck. Apparently no hairpins were made that could do the job adequately, for she was constantly pushing, patting, pushing, patting, pushing....
That’s what I remember form a whole year of social studies. Pushing, patting, pushing, patting....
The single exception to this was for 2nd grade, Mrs. Christianson. What I remember was all the different things we did in her class, things that we never thought mere second graders could do. She knew somebody with a kiln who was willing to share time. For Christmas that year we made clip-on earrings, starting with a flattened hemisphere of clay which we each painted and glazed before it was sent off to the kiln. We also made a trivet, rolling out a square of clay, laying a pattern over it, cutting it into pieces, baking, then painting and glazing before sending it off to be baked again. Once that was finished, we glued it onto a square of Masonite and grouted between the pieces. We were allowed to pick our own pictures, whatever we wanted, and colors too. I found a little mouse with a long arcing tail set inside a circle. The teacher warned me that the tail might break, but I really wanted THAT mouse. After giving it (very little) thought, I went ahead, and with much patience, something I was not known for, successfully completed my trivet.
After moving from Nevis to Park Rapids at the end of third grade, I faced a 4th grade teacher that I learned to hate. I loved school, and had loved all my teachers up to this point. It had simply never occurred to me not to. Mrs. Crowell came as a complete shock to me. She started by having every student read aloud so she could place us in with either slower or advanced readers. Somehow she forgot to test me, and simply placed me with the slow readers. Thus far in school my only problem with reading was, having breezed through the book in the first couple of weeks, feigning enough interest to be able to find the place to read when it was my turn, or skimming through the story as the class finally got to it so I could refresh my memory of what it was about. Needless to say, I was outraged! I was also excruciatingly bored, having to wait while someone painfully tried sounding out a word in front of all of the rest of us, and still not getting it quite right.
My parents had already taught me that the teacher was always right. Whatever it was about, whatever happened, there was only one side of the story. So I didn’t bother complaining to them. I just got more miserable as the year progressed. Once report cards came, however, it was a whole new story. They demanded to know why I’d been placed in the slow reading group, so I explained I hadn’t gotten tested like the other kids had. Why hadn’t I said something? I’d been trained not to. They immediately contacted the school, and I got placed in the reading group where I belonged.
Fifth grade was a whole story unto itself.
In seventh grade, we were presented with a first-year latin teacher who was so repulsive we uniformly ganged up on him and drove him out of teaching. I’m not just talking ugly, which he was, or nervous, which he also was, or inexperienced, which was obvious. His personal hygiene was terrible, topped off (all puns intended) by a galloping case of dandruff. The worst part of it came at lunch time. School was laid out so that the cafeteria had a small room off to the side with a glass wall where the teachers ate. They got a break from us but could still observe our behavior, helping to keep us in line. But we could also watch them. Imagine trying to eat lunch when you can see your latin teacher leaning over his plate, scratching his head, allowing visibly huge flakes of dandruff to fall onto his food!
Things settled down until we moved into the big city of St. Paul, and I went from a class of 125 to 600 at Central High School. The first disappointment was the band. He was just not a marching band director, and I came from a small school with a state-wide prize-winning record for marching bands. Band was still the social events class, both because we socialized within it, and because we attended social functions like ball games as a unit. I was surprised to find out later, naive as I was, that the band was considered a clique. Despite lacking all pride in this band, my two best friends at this school came from it.
Eleventh grade college-prep English was taught by Miss Korfhage. I’d say she was a competent enough teacher, but she had one habit that drove me nuts. When she asked the class a question, she called on the boys first. Only when none of them could answer her would she ask one of the girls, no matter how long their hands were raised. I, of course, was quite unused to being ignored in this way, and soon figured out her pattern. One day I raised my hand and kept it up until she finally gave in and called on me. I told her my observations, complaining that we girls deserved to be taught too. She left the room in tears. (I also wasn’t known for tact in those days.) Half the room turned to me and told me how mean I’d been, and half admitted privately that what I’d said was right. After that day I got called on quite a lot - when I didn’t have my hand up and didn’t have an answer, of course. I put up with it, figuring I probably deserved it. But at least she started calling on the rest of the girls in class from then on, at least for that year.
Senior year netted me the dreaded Mrs. Norbeck for social studies. Every year it was the same thing. Everybody hated her class, and tried to get out and transfer to another teacher. There just wasn’t room, and each year only one or two made the switch. We rest were stuck. The school defended her to our parents, saying she was a real prize, having come to this poor public school after a distinguished career in private school. We found this hard to believe. With the exception of the few days a year she had to teach to specific standards, when we learned about government branches and people filling high-profile positions, every day was boringly the same. She sat at her desk and droned on for an hour about some person or another and what they’d done and their high principles. This was probably stuff we could benefit from learning, but the presentation killed it. It wasn’t just the droning voice, no interactions or questions, but the view of her sitting at her desk patting the hairpins back in to where they were holding her coiled braid in place at the nape of her neck. Apparently no hairpins were made that could do the job adequately, for she was constantly pushing, patting, pushing, patting, pushing....
That’s what I remember form a whole year of social studies. Pushing, patting, pushing, patting....
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Puddle-Crunch Wonderful
Ahhh, Lent, when the world is puddle-crunch wonderful....
My apologies, of course, to e e cummings, and his poem about spring. Where I grew up, in north central Minnesota, Lent was a harbinger of spring, and somehow the ideas just kinda meshed.
I realize that for some Lent is a time of ritualized sacrifice, a lead-in to the crucifixion and the celebration of Easter, me-tooism at its Christian best. For some it's the hangover from Mardi Gras, that time to party hearty for tomorrow and for weeks after we celebrate death. For much of the world, by the time Lent arrives, it's already what we Minnesotans would celebrate as spring: mild weather, sunshine, the start of the growing season. Heck, by the time Easter rolls around, most of the country can even hold egg rolls or hunts outside in the grass!
We're lucky if by Easter we can see the dead brown remains of last season's grass in patches through the remaining snow. Nobody'd subject their kids to an egg hunt in that mess! Still, Easter holds the promise of spring arriving, and sometime during Lent every year it became manifest in a very particular way.
It's ideal maple syruping time, with days above freezing and nights below, when the sap flows at its heaviest. Of course, most of us didn't tap trees for sap. We did, however, walk outside. There the snow melted a bit during the days, and refroze into ice puddles at night. Sometime after the surface of those puddles froze, the lower parts remained liquid, slowly draining away. What remained were air bubbles, tempting white shapes under thin ice, ready for any kid who came along to stomp on and break: crunch! crunch! crunch! Those of us who really found this an entertaining diversion from the usual dreariness of winter got positively energetic about breaking every possible piece of ice along our paths. Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! If necessary, jumping was permissible to get those thicker pieces. If you were walking with another kid, etiquette demanded that you share, taking turns breaking the ice, or taking only one side of a particularly big puddle. STOMP! STOMP! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
Break every bit! Tomorrow there'll be more.
Now that I'm a geezer, I have to be very careful on ice. There have been too many falls, and each does more damage. But during Lent, when the world is puddle-crunch wonderful, and conditions for safety allow, you can still catch me going crunch! crunch! crunch!
My apologies, of course, to e e cummings, and his poem about spring. Where I grew up, in north central Minnesota, Lent was a harbinger of spring, and somehow the ideas just kinda meshed.
I realize that for some Lent is a time of ritualized sacrifice, a lead-in to the crucifixion and the celebration of Easter, me-tooism at its Christian best. For some it's the hangover from Mardi Gras, that time to party hearty for tomorrow and for weeks after we celebrate death. For much of the world, by the time Lent arrives, it's already what we Minnesotans would celebrate as spring: mild weather, sunshine, the start of the growing season. Heck, by the time Easter rolls around, most of the country can even hold egg rolls or hunts outside in the grass!
We're lucky if by Easter we can see the dead brown remains of last season's grass in patches through the remaining snow. Nobody'd subject their kids to an egg hunt in that mess! Still, Easter holds the promise of spring arriving, and sometime during Lent every year it became manifest in a very particular way.
It's ideal maple syruping time, with days above freezing and nights below, when the sap flows at its heaviest. Of course, most of us didn't tap trees for sap. We did, however, walk outside. There the snow melted a bit during the days, and refroze into ice puddles at night. Sometime after the surface of those puddles froze, the lower parts remained liquid, slowly draining away. What remained were air bubbles, tempting white shapes under thin ice, ready for any kid who came along to stomp on and break: crunch! crunch! crunch! Those of us who really found this an entertaining diversion from the usual dreariness of winter got positively energetic about breaking every possible piece of ice along our paths. Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! If necessary, jumping was permissible to get those thicker pieces. If you were walking with another kid, etiquette demanded that you share, taking turns breaking the ice, or taking only one side of a particularly big puddle. STOMP! STOMP! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!
Break every bit! Tomorrow there'll be more.
Now that I'm a geezer, I have to be very careful on ice. There have been too many falls, and each does more damage. But during Lent, when the world is puddle-crunch wonderful, and conditions for safety allow, you can still catch me going crunch! crunch! crunch!
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
On Being Heather
They’re turning up more and more often these days, this new crop of Heathers. They’ll be wearing their name tags at the check-out line at the store, or sitting behind their name plaque on the reception desk. That’s how I know who they are, and how many of them there are.
You see, I’m a Heather. But I go back to when I was THE Heather. No other one in school, or in the small towns I grew up in, or at any stores anywhere. I never in fact met another one until junior high, when friends of friends of the family invited my folks to their home in some unremembered part of the state for some unremembered event. Unremembered, that is, except for the fact that they had their own Heather.
The only thing I remember about her except for the name was that she was better at finding agates in the dirt than I was. It’s not that I wasn’t always looking, for one even the size of the head of a hat pin was a find, just as precious as finding a penny, which I also always looked for. Maybe their driveway was just a better spot to look for them. Anyway, after the event, we went our separate ways and never looked back.
But now I knew I wasn’t really the only one.
Mom told us that she had tried to find unique names for her children. My brother was part of the vanguard of the baby boom, following my dad’s return from WWII. She looked and looked and finally decided that “Stephen” was unique enough. Unfortunately for her, so did about a million other parents at the same time. When it was my turn, she picked out “Heather”. This time it worked.
I never thought it was a gift. All around me were Lindas and Judys and Susans and Nancys and Carols and Alices. Nobody had to figure out how to pronounce their names, or ask over and over how they were spelled. And being unique, way too many people found it hilarious to mispronounce it “Weather” or “Feather” or “Heather Featherbed”, which young boys found particularly gleeful. By far the worst was the singsong chant by the 13-year-old boy that I had fallen head-over-heels in love with at the tender age of 11, the first time I ever knew boys actually existed, really knew. Even more humiliating was everyone around taking it up in the mocking way kids do. “Heather-feather, giggle-wiggle, cha-cha-cha!” I don’t think that ever went away until the family moved down to St. Paul.
I still remember it.
In high school there was another Heather, and through the years there was a sprinkling of others, but we were rare. The name began to be more special, as the people around me grew up and became more polite. I had always known it meant a flower (weed, my brother insisted) on the Scottish moors. Our family recognized the Scottish ancestry more than the other mixed-in nationalities, and I came to feel I rightly “owned” my name. One year heather actually showed up in the local stores, and I brought a pot home and promptly killed it, though not deliberately. Another few years later I received a name bookmark as a gift, and it was defined in meaning as “joyful spirit”. Hmmm, cool. It was getting better and better.
Then Heather Locklear became famous, and suddenly it seemed that every third baby girl was named “Heather”. I experienced more than twice the weird event of minding my own business shopping in a store when suddenly I would hear a yell, “Heather! Quit that and get back here!” or, “Heather, put that down!”, or,”Heather, shame on you!” Each time, it would cause me to startle, look around, and wonder what on earth I had been doing this time.... Oh wait, they didn’t mean me. I wasn’t still that kid, and this wasn’t my mother, no matter how well they imitated THAT VOICE, the one that promised instant consequences in no uncertain terms, the one that saw and knew everything, the one that must be obeyed.
Whew!
Not me, not this time.
Whew!
It always had been of course, being the only one in my particular universe with my name. But finally, not now. I could pull myself back together, continue shopping, and feel sorry both for the little girl of long ago who seemed to always be in trouble, and for whichever little girl was in trouble now.
It’s taken some getting used to, wearing a common, ordinary name, finally. I get a bit of a kick out of folks who know only my name and make assumptions about my age and interests, though if they’re telemarketers, my amusement doesn’t delay one bit my hanging up on them. And when I see another Heather, I feel that momentary impulse to blurt out that I’m one too. I’m learning to hold back. It used to mean something. Nowadays, they just wouldn’t get it.
You see, I’m a Heather. But I go back to when I was THE Heather. No other one in school, or in the small towns I grew up in, or at any stores anywhere. I never in fact met another one until junior high, when friends of friends of the family invited my folks to their home in some unremembered part of the state for some unremembered event. Unremembered, that is, except for the fact that they had their own Heather.
The only thing I remember about her except for the name was that she was better at finding agates in the dirt than I was. It’s not that I wasn’t always looking, for one even the size of the head of a hat pin was a find, just as precious as finding a penny, which I also always looked for. Maybe their driveway was just a better spot to look for them. Anyway, after the event, we went our separate ways and never looked back.
But now I knew I wasn’t really the only one.
Mom told us that she had tried to find unique names for her children. My brother was part of the vanguard of the baby boom, following my dad’s return from WWII. She looked and looked and finally decided that “Stephen” was unique enough. Unfortunately for her, so did about a million other parents at the same time. When it was my turn, she picked out “Heather”. This time it worked.
I never thought it was a gift. All around me were Lindas and Judys and Susans and Nancys and Carols and Alices. Nobody had to figure out how to pronounce their names, or ask over and over how they were spelled. And being unique, way too many people found it hilarious to mispronounce it “Weather” or “Feather” or “Heather Featherbed”, which young boys found particularly gleeful. By far the worst was the singsong chant by the 13-year-old boy that I had fallen head-over-heels in love with at the tender age of 11, the first time I ever knew boys actually existed, really knew. Even more humiliating was everyone around taking it up in the mocking way kids do. “Heather-feather, giggle-wiggle, cha-cha-cha!” I don’t think that ever went away until the family moved down to St. Paul.
I still remember it.
In high school there was another Heather, and through the years there was a sprinkling of others, but we were rare. The name began to be more special, as the people around me grew up and became more polite. I had always known it meant a flower (weed, my brother insisted) on the Scottish moors. Our family recognized the Scottish ancestry more than the other mixed-in nationalities, and I came to feel I rightly “owned” my name. One year heather actually showed up in the local stores, and I brought a pot home and promptly killed it, though not deliberately. Another few years later I received a name bookmark as a gift, and it was defined in meaning as “joyful spirit”. Hmmm, cool. It was getting better and better.
Then Heather Locklear became famous, and suddenly it seemed that every third baby girl was named “Heather”. I experienced more than twice the weird event of minding my own business shopping in a store when suddenly I would hear a yell, “Heather! Quit that and get back here!” or, “Heather, put that down!”, or,”Heather, shame on you!” Each time, it would cause me to startle, look around, and wonder what on earth I had been doing this time.... Oh wait, they didn’t mean me. I wasn’t still that kid, and this wasn’t my mother, no matter how well they imitated THAT VOICE, the one that promised instant consequences in no uncertain terms, the one that saw and knew everything, the one that must be obeyed.
Whew!
Not me, not this time.
Whew!
It always had been of course, being the only one in my particular universe with my name. But finally, not now. I could pull myself back together, continue shopping, and feel sorry both for the little girl of long ago who seemed to always be in trouble, and for whichever little girl was in trouble now.
It’s taken some getting used to, wearing a common, ordinary name, finally. I get a bit of a kick out of folks who know only my name and make assumptions about my age and interests, though if they’re telemarketers, my amusement doesn’t delay one bit my hanging up on them. And when I see another Heather, I feel that momentary impulse to blurt out that I’m one too. I’m learning to hold back. It used to mean something. Nowadays, they just wouldn’t get it.
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