Member of the Family

In my family, the cartoonists proliferated: my brother, my Aunt Stella, my mother, and in words, my dad. It was hard to be a very serious child. "It's not funny!" was a line I would have used repeatedly but gave it up by age 7 and just smirked instead. The silent treatment worked for them and made me skyrocket in the self-esteem department. I didn't "get it." Why were these intellectuals who could expound on the difference between those old guys Socrates and Plato at the drop of a hat and explicate the origins of Virgil's whatever be such a bunch of bananas? And why were they always laughing at me? What did I do? I remember my mother once saying, "Look! She's standing!" What was that all about? Was this a commentary on naps? In high school, one of my friends made the startling remark, "You are so funny!!!!" My reply brought peals of laughter. "But I'm serious! I am a very serious person." She barely was able to squeak out, "Right!" I began to worry when I took a humor writing class. I was hoping to flunk. It was a project --like my mother putting me in beauty pageants so I could win scholarship money. I tried my best to do poorly. The class, however, always finished up for the day laughing. Yep. Burt kept my stories for last. Then, my dad needed someone to do some cartoons for the retirement community newspaper he had started. I didn't understand why he chose me with all the rich talent handy. Puzzled at my success, I decided that trying to share my serious persona with the world might be like Arthur Conan Doyle's attempt to inform us that there was more to life than Sherlock Holmes. He had to be kidding!! A friend of mine in Eureka finally set the record straight. She said, (laughing),"You are a regular Dalai Lama. He giggles on average 500 times a day." Oh! Now we're talkin'! Now I get it. Really. Seriously! He likes outfits and peace and silly days and writes books. People should have pointed this out when I was a child. I can see why they didn't. I was more fun than a barrel of hoptoads to watch. "Look! She's giving us the silent treatment! Don't disturb her. It's the Heavy Limb pose. It's too funny!" There was a discussion the other day about the Briggs-Meyer personality test. I was in the stratosphere on Service. I would like to tell you at this point that I have been glad to be of service to Earth by being the object of entertainment. Well, sort of. I would rather have been Mother Theresa than the Dalai Lama. She wrote books , had outfits, loved peace and silly days...and best of all, hung out with babies. And everybody took her cerealy.

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.....the blessings of a merry heart and a deeply felt mission be yours....

Transportation

photo credit: Cheryl Dolby

In 1955, my dad was working the graveyard shift at the St. Petersburg Times as an obituary writer. He couldn't chauffeur Moi around to the various activities so necessary to high schoolers. It was time to buy a car. There were two requirements as I saw it. It had to be the right color (green) and it had to be the smallest car on the road. Fortunately, that was the year that the little green and white Nash Metropolitan hit the dealership in St. Pete. It was perfect. I named her Eileen. I discovered the world of bumperstickers and duly adorned her. Gas at the Pure station was 28 cents and my friends chipped in on our adventures. My mother became partial to road trips, the most memorable of which was crossing the Everglades in the blistering heat with no air conditioning and no windows lowered b/c of the swarms of mosquitoes. We made it through on our sense of humor and her stash of fudge. In Louisiana, there was the little red Renault. When the California years began, I decided to "step lightly on the Earth" and quit driving. There were other factors such as a tight budget but mainly, I felt the need to prove the merits of public transportation. And prove it I did. Then in 1988, after my mother came to live with us in North Carolina, it was time for another purchase. Providentially, (of course!) the Subaru Justy made an appearance in Boone. It was white; I named her Clara. Upon moving to Durham, I painted a poem on her in Carolina Blue and the addition of bumperstickers escalated. I bought a tag which read O TERRA for the environment and for the line from the opera, Aida. When Clara began to falter, I donated her to the American Cancer Society which valued her parts at $1700. I was pleased she was appreciated and little Henry waved goodbye as the towing truck disappeared into the distance. That year, Douglas had a Geo Metro, green, which we named Esme for Esmeralda. When he died, she became mine. She was the grandest of helpers hauling my goods up to Roanoke, Virginia. She needed a new plate and I chose ALL 2 U with a star design which indicated she supported the effort to end domestic violence. When I was leaving for a return to California, I looked around for just the right people to give her to. I wanted something or someone symbolic that related in some way to Douglas. I knew I had found the right choice when I met Jim Galloway and his wife, Rose. Jim had sung opera in New York. Douglas had sung opera and had lived in New York. Being of Scottish descent, he had found a rose ring for me instead of a jeweled engagement ring. Opera and Rose. Bravo! I haven't had a car since. I was delighted to see a photo on Jim's sister's blog, http://www.healingwoman.blogspot.com/ and with her permission I share it with you. Rose, on the left and I in the center and Mr. Hullabullah on the right. Jim was also involved in the Low Budget Comedy Hour on local tv so I felt I was getting an autograph with this picture. Don't we all look happy?! Esme is beaming! She's letting the warmth in with the red sun shield absorbing the light. The bumperstickers are on the back and my favorite simply said, "Peace" in olde English lettering. I hear she's still a fan of the Blue Ridge and tunes float from the radio.
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.....may the blessings of ways to go places and places you want to go be yours....

Remembering Mama in May--the Month of her Birth, the Month of her Death

Greetings friends, followers, and passers-by. That's the kind of hello my mother liked. She was big on recitation and a noticer of time passing. For breakfast I would hear, instead of grace, "Here hath been dawning another blue day. Think! Wilt thou let it slip useless away?" At noon would come, "Full many a flower was born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air."At twilight, it would be, "Time you old gypsy man, will you not stay, put up your caravan just for one day?" In between would be sprinkled snippets of songs aimed directly my way: "Time's running out on you, what will you doooooo?" I got the point early. To live on this part of her earth, one had to be busy. She didn't believe in chores. "Your childhood is golden. There's plenty of time when you are grown to learn how to do dishes." I knew what that meant. A project. A project, of course, should never be a chore. It had to be the freeing of the spirit to do fine things. She did plenty of them (like my favorite, the papier-mache flamingo for a baby shower which she chose over a stork b/c it was her belief storks only lived in Holland). While she and my brother were High Energy, I was the Woolgatherer, a fancy word for chronic daydreamer. I discovered at a very young age that the way to get out of projects was to practice the piano. My mother knew nothing about piano playing so if I practiced scales for hours, she beamed. She didn't know that scales were so boring, I could drift off in minutes to some of my favorite not-hot places like Helsinki or Edinburgh. My brother, on the other hand, was stuck. Because we were a traveling family, every two years some place new, we had trunks. The year my dad was assigned to Washington, D.C., we had something else very useful. Shirt cardboards. In those days when shirts were taken to the cleaner's, they were folded with a rectangle of thin cardboard which my mother rounded up from neighbors. I feared the worst and practiced furiously. To keep my brother from Idle Hands Syndrome, she devised an art project. She was enthralled with Egypt. My brother was a superior artist. She combined the two by having him draw hieroglyphics on the shirt cardboards, cutting them out, and pasting them on a trunk. She then swaddled it in burnt umber and topped it with some kind of finishing touch that smelled like a day in the park with bees. I was fascinated by their work and immediately fell in love with the trunk. It was a spectacular success and my mother knew a good thing when she saw it. Altogether, they did four large trunks and seven footlockers, only one of which she did alone. Perhaps it is because my brother in later years became a minimalist or perhaps because the project was not as fascinating to him, he didn't want them. It landed to Moi to be the Keeper of the Trunks. However, widowhood necessitated letting go in many ways and so I decided I needed to let go of the trunks. The first one I gave to a Wiccan who exclaimed when she saw it, "The hieroglyphics are all happy! There's the giraffe with the palm tree! Do you know what that means???" No, I didn't. I didn't even think there were giraffes in Egypt. I thought camels ruled. "It's good fortune! The giraffe is far-seeing and the tree signifies abundance." Well, I'll be! Obviously she had to have that trunk. When I said, "Take it. It's yours," she almost cried and said the karma would come down in abundant love some day. That worked for me! My daughter was the recipient of the next trunk and in Roanoke, Susan received the one my mother had done alone, a decoupaged trunk in which Susan displayed her skeins. Cheryl received one of the large trunks. I knew it would have a good home at her magnificent mountainside house with the labyrinth in the garden. What I didn't realize was it wasn't the end of the story http://healingwoman.blogspot.com for that particular gift. The photo above is from Cheryl's blog As you can see, she transformed the decades old Lady of the Travels into a museum piece by adding gold leaf to make the figures "pop." My mother would have been amazed and couldn't have imagined where her project, accompanied by the A minor scale on an afternoon of my childhood, would find its resting place: viewed by people all around the world. Sure enough, it was "Time well spent" and "All's well that ends well."

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....may old sayings and exuberant projects be part of your life to brighten all its days....

Every Little Thing

When someone says he or she has a lot of "stuff," I usually think books. This is not true of the Shire. The Shire is packed to the rafters with stories instead. Yes, there are some books but you might not notice them for all the other Things. Every Thing here has a story. Everything. As I look around, I see only a few purchased items: a couple of toys, my loveseat sofabed, a Carolyn Meyer First Edition not left anonymously in the bookdrop of the Humboldt County Lbrary, a bird's nest lamp, and a suitcase. All the rest is comprised of gifts and hand-moi-downs. On the wall is hanging a sweatshirt from Erik & Kate printed with the words, " Careful or you'll end up in my novel." The two clocks came from Julia Miller. She was a young woman in Prelutsky's writing class who called herself a torch singer. Her father wrote music for the movies. She was given to mailing long, impassioned, philosophical letters which I have kept in a box labeled Helpers. I lost touch with her after moving to North Carolina but I have her clocks. Her husband manufactured clocks. She sent me two and told me to keep whichever one I liked. I liked both. One I right off named Donna, after my lovely voice teacher. Donna is a round mirror clock. The other is a sturdy square clock framed in pine. It seemed to shout the word, "Carpenter." I decided to call it Daniel after the Elton John song.The design has the numerals 1,2,3, and then it says,"etc." Donna ran a little slowly. Daniel was ahead by ten minutes all the time. I wrote to Julia to tell her I hadn't made up my mind and would return one as soon as I could. She wrote back telling me she couldn't separate Donna and Daniel and to keep both. This was in '79 and what I have done on all my moves is to keep Donna across from Daniel in the various rooms as though she is pining for him. At some point, as in the poem about Evangeline by Longfellow, I will move Donna next to Daniel to be with him at last. Another story is the string of stars. One summer in Roanoke, the Star City, Barbara and Henry spent some Mimsey Camp time and we made paper stars of all sorts and strung them on a wire. Wherever I go, I have the string of stars with me. I keep two stars in that suitcase mentioned earlier. Then there is the Winston Graham's garden poster--another story which deserves a blob of its own. And the art. Paintings galore. And rocks from my childhood wanderings with my brother. And wooden camels from my mother and scarves from Gone CoCo decorating the left-behind mattress from a former occupant at Lucille's which I turned on its side to become a headboard. There is a trunk rejuvenated by my brother and mother when I was nine. It is whimsically stuck all over with "antique" hieroglyphics. On a table borrowed from Stephanie, there is a playbill from a production of South Pacific from a time before zip codes and out in Bag End, there a cat wind chime of Lucille's. There is a found plank from a backyard in Durham on which I scrawled, "Whatsoever things are lovely." I have a collection of boxes which at one time was my favorite gift if anybody asked. I like the secret surprise aspect of small boxes. I like to decoupage cartons with quotes from old magazines. Oh yes, I forgot to mention pillows. There is a tiny one on which I was able to stitch part of an Emily Dickinson poem, "'It's all I have to give today, this and my heart beside." There is a shamrock pillow made by Daff in junior high and...well, I think you are getting the idea. There is a blue bottle collection b/c I love notes in a bottle and tend to come home from people's houses with a small one they won't miss. One is in the shape of the lighthouse at Cape May. No, I don't steal them. Such a materialist! So many things!

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photo credit: Cheryl Dolby-- from her book, LAYERS

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......may the blessings of simple gifts and pleasures be yours, be they neither a burden nor a task.....