Party Dress?

Overheard at a Seattle mall:

Shopper: Do you have any holiday party dresses?

Sales Clerk: No, but Hallmark has Santa hats.

Okay, so now you know. If you can't find a suitably festive party dress for New Year's Eve, Hallmark has Santa hats......Happy New Year!

Christmas Eves

My Mom at the piano many years ago

My daughter, Erin, goofing around with her flute

Brother Dan

Brother Stanley

Son, Christopher and grandson, Nick, about 22 years ago

Me and my Dad singing together

Everything evolves and that includes Christmas traditions. I was thinking about this coming Christmas Eve, only 3 days from now, planning the dinner, making sure all the gifts were wrapped, putting up a few more decorations to make the house look nice. Our tradition now is small, reflecting the size of our immediate family now--at least those that are here in the area. It's just my Mom, my brother, Stanley, my husband and me. Christmas Eve is a nice dinner and a movie. This year's dinner will be baked ham and the movie will be The Christmas Story, the one in which the kid shoots himself in the eye with his new bee bee-gun and the turkey ends up on the floor. It's not as sentimental as some, but it will be fun. We used to play games but Mom can't remember the rules anymore, so now we rely on a movie to add a little spice to the evening.

It's a far cry from the big crowd of relatives that used to stuff themselves into my Grandma and Grandpa Ammon's little front room down on Charleston Street. Aunts, uncles, cousins, eating Grandma's tarts and fudge with raisins, drinking Aunt Carol's punch out of her Depression Glass cups, lining up on the sofa for pictures, laughing, singing while Grandma and Aunt Carol and my mother played carols on the big upright piano. We all looked forward to the evening and I'll never forget the year I had Strep Throat and couldn't go. I sent my husband and my little girls, anyway but it wasn't the best Christmas for me. Those raucous, festive gatherings ended when my Grandpa died and my Grandma sickened and ended up in a rest home.

The next evolution in the Christmas Eve tradition became a gathering at my mother's house. But it was Grandma Ammons who had kept the family together and after she was gone my Aunt Beth and her children celebrated at their home and my Aunt Carol was only an infrequent participant at my Mom's house. For several years we'd gather for chips and dip, Christmas cookies and punch, to which Mom always added ice cream or sherbet. Dad made eggnogs for the ladies and stronger drinks for the men. Mom played carols on the piano and sometimes we'd sing along. But it just wasn't Grandma Ammon's house and we all felt we'd lost something. Then my Mom had an idea that we were resistant to at first. She wanted us to entertain each other with a Musicale. We were all asked to prepare a song to sing, or play and to perform it on Christmas Eve. This seemed a little hokey and contrived, but we wanted to make Mom happy, so we complied.

I think we started this new tradition in the mid-eighties. My mom would always play something on the piano and since she could play by ear she would do her renditions of White Christmas or The Christmas Song or Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and carols, too. She would sing and Dad and she would sing together. Mom had and still has, a clear, beautiful soprano voice and Dad had a nice baritone. He liked to sing a carol like Silent Night more than the popular Christmas tunes. I tried to sing something unusual, searching my big Christmas songbook for a couple of months before and rehearsing for weeks. It wasn't always easy to get my kids involved, but when Christopher learned to play the clarinet and the guitar he joined in. Erin was married and living in Seattle when we started doing the musicales but later she joined us with her flute and her husband, Kent, who played the piano. My brothers were always enthusiastic participants. Both performed music in their everyday lives--Dan was a sometime street performer and a choir director, Stanley played in a band--so their contributions were often hard rock or jazz. None of us will forget the year Dan took it into his head to teach us all the structure of a blues tune. We almost decided the musicales were dead after that! He went on for the longest time, talking about lines A and B and how they repeated in a predictable sequence , leaving us all yawning and restless. It was less entertainment than lecture.

But most of the musicales were as they had been intended by my Mom--we entertained each other with interesting performances and there was more of a point to the celebration, not just chit chat and snacking, though there was plenty of that, too. One year, sad over the end of my marriage, I couldn't bring myself to sing, but I'd been taking Tai Chi classes and my performance was a demonstration of what I'd learned, more like a dance than an exercise.

My Dad died in 2001 and though the Christmas Eve get-togethers moved to my house that year and thereafter, we put together our musicale--my brother and I sang a duet, my other brother played his guitar and Mom played and sang carols. We tried it again the next year, playing Balderdash afterwards, bending over with laughter, but the following Easter my brother, Dan, died and when it came time to decide what to do at Christmas our tradition evolved again. The era of the musicale was gone. The food changed to a full dinner, we played games for a couple of years and then, as I said before, Mom couldn't remember the rules, so we moved on to showing movies. I miss the big family gatherings of my younger years, and the musicales of my later years, but life changes and we change how we celebrate along with it. The thing is to keep celebrating.

My husband brought home the December 22 page from his Stupid Things People Say calendar today and it seems apropos:

"Look now for glad and golden

Hours come swiftly on the wing

O rest beside the weary toad and

Hear the Angels sing."

These are lyrics for "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear," as printed in a brochure for a Redmond, Washington church. I am sad about that weary toad. He must have had an awful lot of shopping to do.

Rock Throwing and Writing

This one of Ali makes me think of E.T. on Halloween

Zuzu in her "eating" hairdo

Our little Pilgrim Turkey

The other part of my Best Laid Plans Triangulation Trip was to leave Norfolk and go to Hudson, Wisconsin via St. Louis. This was accomplished with only a one hour delay in St. Louis while we changed planes. At least we didn't have to sit on the tarmac for 4 hours. And since we had some confusion in St. Louis, Orbitz, who was sending alerts to my son, got it a little wrong causing him to be about a half hour late picking me up. But after those little kerfuffles, all went well and I had a splendid time with my two youngest granddaughters and their Mom and Dad.

My favorite memories of this trip are going to be the walks that Ali and I took down to the river. The weather was extraordinarily mild and so Ali and I went outside almost every day. I was getting a little tired of playing hide and seek and Freeze Tag (where I was always the one who got frozen--Ali's rules)and so I suggested we take a walk one day. The first day we walked up the sidewalk and I learned that my 4 year old granddaughter was well acquainted with all the neighbors and their dogs, introducing me to each one by name. We played pretend games on the walk and I got to see a little more of the neighborhood. The next time we went out I suggested we turn the other direction and go down the sidewalk towards the house that gets lit up with Christmas lights even before Thanksgiving. I guess it is a gift shop of some kind and I was curious how it looked close-up. Little did I know that down that way lay a much more interesting site--the river.

Ali remembered it from a walk with her Daddy and she made a beeline for it--it was hard for me to slow her down. She is in love with bodies of water into which she can throw rocks and this was her goal. There were few rocks along the side of the road and she was willing to pry up pieces of blacktop if it would mean she could throw them in the river, but I wouldn't let her. We found some small rocks even though I wouldn't let her go into people's yards to get more and we saw a school bus and trucks and cars and without exception the drivers and passengers waved at us. The Midwest is a friendly place. Ali threw her rocks and we headed back. The next day we repeated this walk, both Ali and Grandma enjoying the adventure of it--in fact, Ali called these walks "adventures"--and this time she started picking up rocks long before we could see the river. I asked her if she was getting prepared. She didn't know what getting prepared meant but when I explained that here were rocks that she could save for throwing later, she understood the concept and both of our pockets were full by the time we got to the throwing place. It occurs to me that if the weather had been more normal there would have been ice on the river and throwing the rocks onto ice wouldn't have been nearly as much fun for her.

There were other fun times, games, coloring, playing word-find, original "aminal" rescue stories, seeing Ali's pre-school, the zoo, seeing New Moon with Irene, but the walks were my favorite. The enthusiasm of a 4 year old on a mission is contagious.

************************************************************

Incidentally, for some who have been waiting with me to see what GreenPrints had to say about the piece I sent them, I got my letter yesterday and here is what it said:

"Christine,

'Blue Hydrangea': Good! Tender. Well-expressed. And I really like the connection at the end between the plant's potential and the potential for your relationship with your brother.

But...I get a lot of great stories and I'm not sure this one would get in. It's on the fence, so to speak. If it's all right with you, I'll hold onto it. If it's going to get in, I'll let you know and pay you $100. Hope that's all right. Sorry to be so wishy washy!

Best and Thanks, Pat" (editor)

So there you have it--the note was hand written, which means a lot to me and it's not a "You suck" letter and there's still some hope. But more waiting.....

Thanks for waiting with me!

Ali's World

I got a phone call from my granddaughter, Alison, last week. She wanted to tell "rescue" stories and play games over the phone, which I love to do with her. At one point she said, "Why don't you and Grandma Margy come for Christmas?" I had just visited her before Thanksgiving, in Wisconsin, and so my reply was, "I'm sorry, honey, I don't have enough money to fly back there again so soon."

"But Grandma, you have a LOT of coins in your purse!"

"I would need lots of dollars to buy a plane ticket", I replied.

"It's Christmas, Grandma, you can BUY money!"

Best Laid Plans....

Returning the Aggravation Pump

Grocery Bag Boots

Dominoes by Candlelight
Erin and Kat

There were so many things we were going to do--go to my daughter's knitting circle, visit a jewelry class, take walks, have my grandsons for dinner. But I flew into Norfolk on the night of November 11th just ahead of a Nor'easter and the remnants of hurricane Ida colliding right over the city. We knew we were in for a bumpy ride (I kept thinking of Bette Davis's famous line in All About Eve) and were pleasantly surprised that most of the way East from Dallas we encountered only slight turbulence. But the last half hour, as we approached Virginia, we started to rock and roll. I was sitting on the aisle but the fellow by the window was keeping watch and said the rain was heavy. At one point he asked an attendant if it was stormy in Norfolk--she said yes and that we "had an alternate". He explained to me that if we couldn't land in Norfolk we had another place to go. So there was the possibility of not landing there--I didn't want to think about that or the ramifications. I just hung on and tried to stay calm. The landing, in Norfolk after all, was bumpy but not as bad as you might expect with 50 mph winds whipping all around us. As we heaved a sigh of relief the guy at the window said, "That was a good pilot. He landed on both wheels at the same time!"

My daughter, Erin, was there waving at me as I headed to get my baggage. Outside it was extremely stormy, the water beginning to come up over the roads. I remembered how low Norfolk was, sea level, meaning that high tides could flood a lot of the area. We got home before it got too bad. I had a little snack of cheese and crackers, Top Chef and then it was off to bed with the wind howling through the trees, oddly fun to listen to as I drifted off to sleep. The next morning the news was all about flooding and road, school and business closures. We decided to stay put as most streets around Erin's house were flooded.

Inspired by a recent post I made about baking cookies, Erin got out her recipe for Big Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cookies, one of my all time favorites and in an hour we had gigantic, wonderful, choclatey cookies. This would be one of the last times the oven was functioning. That afternoon Kent prepared a Chicken in a Pot, stuck it into the oven and while waiting for it to do it's thing we watched television and talked. But about 1 hour into the chicken's roasting the lights began to blink out, blink on, blink out and back on. This occurred about 5 times until finally we were left totally in the dark, our chickeny meal a broken promise. That night we dined on cheese, crackers and apples again, and those wonderful cookies. While sitting in the dark, Kent and Erin's young friend, Kat, came to visit, against their better judgement, but young people do what they want. We decided to play dominoes by candlelight rather than sitting around bemoaning our chickenless fate. A neighbor, whose wife was stranded somewhere else, came over offering Baba Ganoush and good, red wine. We passed on the Ganoush, but not the wine and he amused us with jokes as we continued to play. Kat ended up spending the night, at our insistance.

The next day there were still no lights and the rain was still pounding and Kent decided to check the basement for flooding. Indeed, there was a lot of water in the basement and there was no electricity to run his tiny pump. There were also no boots for his feet, so the ever resourceful Kent got himself some garbage bags and some tape and fashioned boots and attacked the flooding. During the day it was discovered that the power outages were widespread but not necessarily in consecutive houses due to ancient power grids. The neighbors behind us had power and were willing to share, so a long cord was run from their house and attached to Kent's pump. There was optimism at first but the little pump could not do the job. That is when the Search for a Bigger Pump began. Since we were getting cabin fever and wanted a hot meal we piled into the truck and accompanied Kent to Home Depot, Lowe's and Costco looking for a pump. The evidence showed that there had been many searchers before us--others had discovered earlier than Kent that their basements were swimming pools. We stood in front of empty shelves with our mouths agape. At least we got a hot lunch that day. At home Kent changed his leaky garbage bag boots for waste paper basket boots and kept bailing.

We ate dinner, cheese, crackers, apples and cookies in the dark again that night, but there were no dominoes--Kent had to go back to bailing. Erin and I amused ourselves with crossword puzzles and her knitting and talk, while her two doggies, Tasha and Maggie snuggled up to us for warmth. The lights stayed off.

The next morning the lights were still off and Kent, Erin and I got in the truck to go to the gym to take showers and to try Home Depot and Lowe's again, hoping more stock had come in. It hadn't. The last stop was Harbor Freight and lo, there was a pump, a gas operated one that wouldn't require electricity. A miracle! We celebrated by having a fabulous lunch at an Indian restaurant and then went home to put the pump to work. A long piece of plastic pipe had to be attached to the pump to move the water out of the basement, but for some reason known only to plastic pipe makers the darned thing was flat. Erin and I spent the next couple of hours making it round--we stood on it, we heated it and stood on it, we stuck a baseball bat and a rolling pin into the ends, we stood on it somemore. We got it more round than flat, put the fittings on the ends and presented it to our supervisor, Kent. But by this time Kent was finding that the Miracle Pump was turning out to be the Aggravation Pump, leaking gas and refusing to start. It was deemed a failure.

But just then, at 5 in the afternoon, the lights came back on, so all was not darkness anymore. The rain had stopped during the day, there was little wind, we heated up sandwiches left over from a hot lunch a couple of days before, Kent went off to his rehearsal of Brave New World and Erin and I settled down to some good old TV watching, which seemed luxurious at this point.

The next two days, my last, were more what I had expected--visits to Barnes and Noble, portions of which were taped off because they were too wet, President's Park and Yorktown. The weather was warm and beautiful, the leaves were gorgeous. We did have an odd meal in Yorktown at a place called The Rivah Cafe'. The name should have tipped us off. Rivah', Southern for river. Erin ordered something called The Hot Brown--it was hot alright, but not brown--open-faced turkey on white bread with a Parmesan Sauce on top and topped with bacon and deep friend onion slivers. It was about as good as it sounds, which was that it wasn't. Later we learned it was invented by The Brown Hotel in Kentucky but at the time it just seemed weird. My lunch was slightly better but with an odd touch--a piece of Virginia ham stuck under my prawns. We walked up the street to a Ben and Jerry's to end the day on a positive and tastier note.

It surely was not the visit I had expected or that Erin had planned for me, but I left knowing that my daughter and her husband have a good marriage and that they work well together in a crisis. Some spouses would be getting tense with each other after 2 1/2 days of no electricity and a flooded basement, but Erin and Kent were supportive of each other and demonstrative; if not cheerful, they were at least sympathetic and they communicated well. Kent's frustration level was high as he tried to dry out the basement, but he never took it out on Erin. Erin was trying to make things nice for her Mom but I never saw her lose her temper. Those observations made the trip worthwhile for me. Mom's love to see thier kids happy and content. They have had some challenges over the past year but with the kind of loving relationship they have there isn't much that they won't be able to endure.

This trip will stand out in my memory, much more than a conventional visit would have. It will be the Year of the Nor'easter and one day even Kent will be able to laugh about his waste paper basket boots.

Risky Business

Okay.....So.....I've sent out a piece to GreenPrints magazine to see if they will publish it. I had a goal on my New Year's Papers that we completed on January 1, that I would try to get something published this year and it's taken me until November, but at least I've sent something out. It wasn't so much a matter of putting anything off--it was more that I didn't know where I would send the kind of writing that I like to do. And then I found this little magazine in the oddest place. I had gotten a Garden Supply catalog and I ordered some plant staking stuff from them and in the invoice that came along with the stakes was an advertisement for GreenPrints: The Weeders Digest. I looked them up on the Internet and could see that they were a publication for gardeners, by gardeners, but the stories weren't about how much fertilizer to put on your garden or how to get rid of aphids. One of the sample articles was called The No-Grow Azaleas, about a person who kept waiting for the azaleas to grow bigger only to realize that they were a dwarf variety.

That sounded like a publication that I might be able to write at least one story for, so I bought a subscription and while waiting for my first issue I started a piece about a hydrangea I have, that I bought for my brother's memorial service 6 years ago. The thing about the hydrangea is that it was very flowery at first, when it was in the pot, but has only produced one (very beautiful) flower since I planted it. In my story I compare the slowness of the plant's growth to the friendship my brother and I struggled to have. I was nearly finished with it when I got my first issue of GreenPrints. After reading it I was still convinced that I might have a chance, so I did the final polishing work on the story and sent it to them last weekend.

Now I wait. I don't really know why it's so important to me to get something published at this late date. I've dreamed of it for years, been in writer's groups, read Writer's Digest for a long time--I've written practically my whole life and have loved keeping a blog. I guess I've been thinking about what kind of regrets I might have on my death bed (which hopefully won't be for a long time, but you never know). I think I would regret if I never tried to do anything with my writing, if I wrote, put things in notebooks and none of it ever saw the light of day. I'm still looking for other places I can send things to, because now that I've sent one piece out I'm kind of hooked on the process. Blog writing is fun, but there's no risk to it, other than maybe putting an unpopular opinion out and upsetting a friend. I've never taken too many risks in my life, maybe now is the time. And how much of a risk is it, anyway? The only risk is that they'll say, "No, this isn't for us". Disappointing, but not life shattering.

So we'll see what happens. And I'll keep looking for other outlets and if you have any suggestions, let me know. You've been reading (I hope) the kind of writing that I like to do. And if you are a gardener, you might be interested in that little magazine. Here is the online address: www.greenprints.com

May I have this job please?

Can you imagine if your were the person opening the letters sent with applications for a job with your company and you received this?

"At school he is a student of advertising, on the streets of Chicago he is a student of culture and memes. This is Advertising, finding that elusive why. Charles understands the nuances of culture, the relativity of trends, the impact of memes. He is all of us, he is the Cultural Chameleon."

I looked up "memes" and I'm going to let you look it up because I have a hard time understanding exactly what that is. Great thing to put in a cover letter for a job application, isn't it? This was an actual cover letter sent by a job applicant to a Chicago advertising agency.

Recipe for Happiness

This could be a picture of me--it's not, but the look on that little girl's face and her fistful of cookies, her delight in that huge glass jar filled with delicious cookies--I can relate!

It's funny where inspiration comes from. I was reading an issue of USA Today this morning and reading The Final Word, Craig Wilson's weekly column. The title was: "The formula for happiness: Cookies and milk." I started thinking about my life-long love of cookies.

I am sure I loved cookies from the time I could dissolve them between my gums, but I don't actually remember eating cookies until I was old enough to make them. I started making them young. I used to watch a cooking segment of a local, King 5 show, paying close attention and being in awe of Bea Donovan, when I was a mere 12 years old. Bea was very organized, lining up her ingredients in tiny dishes, dumping the contents of each in a big bowl in the order called for in the recipe: flour, baking soda, cinnamon, oatmeal, chocolate chips, nuts, raisins. It all was so carefully done and it appealed to me tremendously. My Mom wasn't the greatest cook, didn't really care about baking, so I took over. I became the cookie maker and for a long time I measured out each ingredient into bowls and put them all on a cookie sheet, dumping each one into the bowl just like Bea Donovan. I began to collect recipes, then, too.

From the beginning I had opinions about cookies. I recall telling my mother that her friend Gerry's cookies weren't as good as they could be because she didn't sift the flour. I had watched her bake some cookies one day and noted her exclusion of this very important step. I also insisted on the best ingredients, the Toll House Chocolate Chips, the Quaker rolled oats, the better cinnamon, the nuts that had to be chopped, the freshest raisins. I baked cookies all the way through junior high and high school so when I married and started having children the habit was already formed. I baked cookies once a week. They never lasted longer than that, anyway. By the time I had my two daughters my recipe box was filled with a wonderful variety of cookies: Snickerdoodles, Oatmeal Raisin from the Quaker box, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Ginger Cookies, Frosted Kalua Cookies, Spritz, Sugar Cookies, Shortbread, Russian Teacakes, Frosted Nutmeg Logs, Grandma Butler's Date Bars, Grandma Ammon's Tarts, Aunt Carol's Roll and Ball Cookie Starter, Carolyn's Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies, Cocoa and Bourbon Balls, Peanut Butter Cookies. My mouth is watering just thinking about them. Somehow I managed to keep my figure in those days, even though I was probably eating six cookies a day, if not more. It must have been the energy involved with raising kids and keeping house that allowed me to munch at will without becoming a blimp.

In about 1979 I bought my husband Maida Heatter's Cooky Book, because he was interested in cooking and had started making cookies, too. This cook book put the exotic into our cookie jar. Now we were making Big Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cookies (with chocolate glaze!), Chocolate Mint Sticks, Pinwheels, Oatmeal Snickerdoodles. When we divorced I insisted that I get copies of those pages in the book before I would let him take custody of it. In 1993 I met my Greek man and with him came more cookie recipes: Melomakarona (honey macaroons), Brandy Balls, Snow Balls. I have a recipe notebook now, in addition to the recipe index box, with all the cookie recipes I've cut out of the newspaper, out of magazines, from labels on packages, been given by friends. I certainly have enough for my own cookbook.

I love the results of making cookies, but I also love the making of them. I love to cream the sugar and the butter, adding the eggs and vanilla, the taste of it at that point. Then measuring and sifting the dry ingredients into the creamy mixture in the bowl and finally chopping the nuts and adding the raisins, chocolate chips or whatever extra added yumminess is called for in the recipe. I like dropped cookies best as that allows me to lick my fingers often and I don't let a drop of the dough go to waste, using a spatula to get the very last bits from the bowl, which are mostly consumed by me. What can be said of the aroma of cookies baking, except that it is one of the top ten most wonderful smells in the world? At the end they are all lined up on the counter on paper towels, cooling, filling the kitchen with their great smell.

I don't make cookies as often anymore because now there are no longer any kids to chase to keep me svelte--all those cookies go directly to my hips as they pass so deliciously over my taste buds. I make cookies to take to potlucks or to family gatherings or to send to my kids at Christmas and I make them once a month for my husband because he likes to have a "little something" after dinner. I am glad he requests them because if he didn't I don't know how I would come up with excuses to bake them.

There is a new baker in the family now. I was so thrilled the last time my granddaughter, Alison, came to visit me. She was drawing at the table and suddenly looked up at me and said, "Grandma, can we bake something?" Who am I to say no? I immediately got out the old recipe file and looked for one that would appeal to her. She required "cimmanon and vanilla" and since her Grandma likes oatmeal and chocolate chips and nuts, we made Oatmeal Chippers. I measured, she dumped ingredients into the bowl. Together we whipped up cookies made with love. We waited impatiently for them to bake and then we ate a whole bunch of them.

Panties Up the Flagpole

John Sleasman and Wayne Swenson

Chris Eddy Dosa and Blue Frosting Affect

Fred Just, Sandy Harkins, Terrie Baughman , Janet Dore' in the kitchen

Wayne with Captain Jack's Dark Ale

Randy Flowers

Jack Archer, our host

Sandy Harkins and Randy

Is there a better way to spend a couple of hours on a blustery, wet Fall day than with old classmates? I don't think so. Jack Archer and is wife were willing to host us this time, even though they thought they'd be grilling outside on their deck. The weather surprised all of us and we ended up inside, but they had lit candles and the lamps were glowing and I think they might even have had a fire going and the mood was cozy. We were all introduced to Mia, The Begging Dog, who we were not to feed. We are getting spoiled with these convivial home lunches--will we ever be satisfied with a restaurant again?

The topic of conversation that got most people's attention this time was "Who put the panties on the flagpole?" This came up after we'd been discussing some pranks that had been pulled in our senior year--the stink bomb in the hallway outside Mr. King's German classroom, among others. Jack piped up with, "There's just one mystery I want solved--who put those panties on the flag pole?" We thought John Sleasman would probably know--he was known to be a part of some shenanigans when we were in school, but he was clueless. Randy, who was a student leader back then, didn't know either. And even Dean, who said Mr. Huey would single him out to talk to when anything against school rules took place, because even if he didn't have anything to do with it himself, he would know who did--even Dean didn't know who'd done the flagpole trick. Legend has it that whoever did, greased the pole on the way down so nobody could get up there and take the panties down. I'm hoping somebody will read this who talked to somebody else, who knew somebody that was involved in this, because 47 years later it's time for these kinds of mysteries to be solved. Or is it more fun to guess?

Speaking of Randy, it was the first time in a long time many of us had seen him. He came down from the Bellingham area to be with us and I hope he'll consider coming again. He told us he is retired from teaching but volunteers at a grade school several times a week and is putting a daughter through college. Ralph, the Mail Guy, was with us via the phone, but he was resting in his Port Townsend house, getting ready for a trip to Israel and Jordan--incidentally, he had a pacemaker inserted on Monday of this week. Yes, folks, we all have our occasional age-related surprises.

The above pictures mention Jack's beer. We were talking about beer and wine and I mentioned that I love beer. Jack literally leaped up and asked if I wanted to taste his freshly brewed Dark Ale. He brought me a glass of a yummy, smooth beer with a taste that reminded me of apples. Soon I found out that this was Jack's private label, Captain Jack's Dark Ale, which he'd brewed over at Gallagher's in Edmonds. He had his own classy label and he gave us bottles to take home. I have heard that Gary Parker owns a brewery in Eastern Washington and that his beer can be bought at Central Market in Poulsbo. I will try to get more solid facts and share it here another time. It never fails to amaze me what we find out about each other when we attend these lunches.

Don't know when the next one will be, but I hope I see you there. Maybe you'll know who put those panties on the flag pole.

I like beer

The Ink House

Pizzeria Tre Vigne

Grapevine at Charles Krug Winery

When you visit wine country, Napa Valley specifically, I think you are supposed to come away from there with memories of the taste of the wines you enjoyed and bottles of wine that you bought. You are supposed to rhapsodize about the oakiness or the lack of, or the bright tastes or the petulant aroma, or the musky flavors, aren't you? I guess we didn't do it right because our memories are going to be of three fellows we met or observed, not that much about the wine.

The first fellow was our host at the Ink House bed and breakfast that we chose over the internet. We chose the place because it was moderately priced and it had an interesting history and Trip Advisor commenters liked it. Our host wasn't there the first two nights--he was off installing his oldest daughter in her dorm for her first year of college. When he returned he was present during the "wine reception" that took place every late afternoon. While we munched on interesting cheeses, crackers and fruit and sipped or guzzled white and red wine, he answered our questions. And my question was, "Will you tell us the story of when Elvis Presley stayed in this house." His Elvis Slept Here story was long, detailed and scrumptious, better than the wine we'd been drinking. He had details nobody else would have had and you could tell he relished telling the story and had done research to make it better. He hadn't been present in 1961 when El and his co-stars Tuesday Weld and Hope Lang stayed in the house during the filming of Wild In The Country, but he might as well have been, he knew so much about it. He told us how the actors had started out staying in the town of Napa but that it had caused such a ruckus that they moved out to the more remote house in St. Helena in order to be able to control the crowds. The production company proclaimed that Elvis would sign autographs for 2 hours each afternoon, on the front porch of the house, and the girls lines up for miles hours before the signing began. He told us lots more, too much to relate here and he enjoyed every minute of his story. He also gave us great tips to get around the wine tasting fees that every winery but one assessed and he gave us glimpses into the history of the area. I'm sure he could have talked for hours, but we had dinners to go to and he had computer work to do.

Our second character sighting was at dinner at the Pizzeria Tre Vigne. While Michael and I sat on the patio, slurped up spaghetti marinara and heirloom tomato salad and we dunked french bread into olive oil with a puddle of balsamic vinegar in the bottom of it, we observed what we came to call The Affluent Family, sitting near us. There were two families, each with two children. The children ranged in age from about 3 years old to 6 years old. Without exception the children were out of control, but perhaps their parents saw them as free spirits. They were crawling under the table (not an unusual sight--I've seen this before), they were running back and forth among the tables and the 6 year old little girl was eating salt out of the salt shakers from empty tables. It make me very leery of using our salt, let me tell you. One of their parents would scowl occasionally and ask the children to stop doing whatever they were presently doing, but then turn away and resume their adult conversations while the children continued to do whatever they were presently doing. At one point, I heard one of the mothers say to one of the little boys, "If you do that again, it's over." Exactly what would be over we never found out because the little boy continued to do what he was doing and the threat was never executed. The fellow I will remember in connection to these wild children was a man who reminded me of Ted Danson, tall, lithe, white haired, nice hair cut, but young looking, white golf shirt with turned up collar, khaki shorts, loafers with no socks, expensive watch--he had the air of someone with quite a bit of money. They were regulars, the servers knew them and probably were very used to seeing the unruly children running about. I hope they were good tippers. After we got in our car and were leaving, we saw one of the little boys far away from the patio of the restaurant and we considered picking him up and depositing him down the street a couple of blocks to see if his parents noticed, but we decided against it.

Last, but certainly not least in our memories of Wine Country, will be The Wine Snob. I'm so glad we had one, because our stories of this trip wouldn't be nearly as good without him. He was staying at the Ink House, too. He made it very clear early on that he knew his wines. He would start a sentence with, "Do you like Pinots?" and then launch into directions as to where to find the best ones. He was a young fellow, younger than most wine snobs I've met, probably in his mid-forties. He had a very nice, regular wife who worked for the state in their native Michigan. I think it was his Detroit accent that made the snobby comments even better, because when he said things like Cabernet or Pinot it was said with that thing that Detroitians do to their vowels that is so distinctive and so NOT snobby sounding. At breakfast one morning we were all talking about where we'd been the day before, the photo gallery at Mumm's, looking at the art at Peju, the lunch at V. Sattui's picnic area--and he just had to say, "I'm here for the wines." As it turned out, he certainly was serious--he had been to the Ink House five times and each time he came he bought 5 or 6 cases of wine and had them shipped home. My favorite remark of his, the one that nearly put me under the breakfast table was, "And then we had to relax our palates...". I love accents and I would have loved to talk to him some more so that I could have really absorbed his Detroit accent and gotten some more snobby quotes from him. I am afraid I egged him on a little, just to hear more.

In addition to the characters we discovered, we also discovered that we are not really wine connoisseurs . We don't have the sophisticated palates required to know the subtle differences between one Pinot or Merlot and another. They either taste good or they don't. There was one wine that instantly made my nose itch--I knew I'd not want to drink that one again! We didn't taste that many, partly due to the fees charged at each winery for tastings, but also because we weren't that interested. Twice we had beer with our dinners rather than wine. We bought only one bottle, at a winery that offered free tasting. I find that I have a refined beer sensibility instead. I know the differences between a Hefaweisen and a Porter, and regular ale or a pale ale. I don't yet know much about "hoppiness" but I am dying to learn. Too bad we don't have more local breweries around, so that there could be "brewiery tours" like the wine tours. I'd be signing up.

We'll have good memories of Napa Valley but they won't be about the wine. I have to go relax my palate now.

Viewpoint

Cheryl DeGroot, Corky Sunkel, Linda Greaves and Janet Dore'

Janet Dore', Terry Scatena and Ralph Erickson

Terry Scatena, Dewene Buffett, Sandy Harkins with Wes Tonkins and his wife in the background

Today I am happy that I keep journals and that I have been writing in them for forty years. Yesterday I was reading in journals from 2000 to 2003 trying to find a mention of a medical test that I knew I'd had done in that timeframe. I did finally find some evidence that I needed for my current doctor, but in looking I also found entries about what my life was like 9 years ago. That's not very far back when you think about how old I am now--I can remember as far back as 60 years, so nine in virtually nothing, a blink in time.

I was reading about myself, about my husband, about my kids, about my brothers and my mother and my Dad, about my oldest friend. Funny thing is, if someone asked me today what I was thinking and feeling in the year 2000 I'd remember it differently than how it really was. I would have forgotten that my kids were emailing me lots more often then, I'd have no memory of a rift between me and my friend that mimics a problem we repeated recently. I would not have remembered what my brother had said about our Mom and his need for her gratitude, which is similar to some feelings I am having now. I wouldn't remember that my Mother's memory was shifty and that my present observation of her way of thinking is really not new at all. I did not forget the emails that my brother and I exchanged in the two years before he died. I had saved them and printed them all, including the ones in which we misread each other, got angry and then made up, aplogizing and professing our love for each other. I haven't forgotten that because it was so precious to me. It was the first time we'd ever tried to understand each other.

I spent hours reading the entries. It was as though someone else had written them and of course, if I admit that I am constantly changing, then it's understandable that I am less familiar with that Christine than with the one I'm living in right now. I have been reading a book called Crones Don't Whine by Jean Shinoda Bolen. She writes: "The thought that we are spiritual beings on a human path, rather than human beings who may or may not be on a spiritual path, has intrigued me since it first entered my mind". That thought intrigues me, too. That our spirits inhabit a body on a human path, something like Stephanie Meyers character in her book The Host, is a mind warping idea. This spiritual creature inside of this human body, changes so much that nine years later I barely recognize it. It is as though the body has stayed relatively the same, but the spirit has shifted. It has not necessarily shifted in a good or bad way, it has not necessarily learned to be better or turned toward a more negative way, it has changed. And in some ways it has not changed at all. The rift with the old friend has been repeated. The thoughts of my brother have become mine. My relationship with my husband has been affected by the events that have occurred and my reaction to them.

Isn't it that way with our perceptions of our school mates? We can see that their bodies have changed and we think we can remember what they were like and what our awareness of them was 47 years ago. But do we really remember with any accuracy? Don't we have to consider what time has done to our memories? Don't we have to imagine what the passage of those years and all of their experiences has done to the spirits inside of them? If we think about what time has done to ourselves, don't we have to consider the same for them?

In another book I am reading, (Astrid and Veronika, by Linda Olsson), Astrid, a Swedish woman of 80, waits for her despised husband of 60 years to die--when he finally does she realizes that he was not her misfortune, that her demons had begun long before he came into her life. Could it be that some of the things that bedeviled us in high school and that we may have attached to certain people, were anxieties that came from elsewhere, before we even met these people?

I have been told by some of my classmates that reunions are terrifying for them, that their high school years are a time they would like to forget. I was lucky to have had a good time in school, with good friends and, mostly, positive experiences. But I know there are others who were not as fortunate. I also know that some of my classmates have conquered their fears and come to the lunches we have been having. In some cases they have found that they have held misconceptions about old acquaintances and have not considered the spirits inside the bodies that they recognize. And they begin to see that what they know as their own changing has also been experienced by their classmate. Of course this is the case. How could anyone not change? But sometimes we forget that. Sometimes we cast people we once knew in a frozen state inside our memory. Like a fossil they are forever preserved in memory even though in reality they are different people.

Like the evolution of the Christine Who Writes in her Journals, consider your own and everyone else's evolutions. Have you changed? Of course. Have they changed? Of course. If you have not come to a lunch yet, please think about it. We want to see the changes to the spirit inside you.

Lunch on Joyia's Farm

In Joyia's back yard

Left to Right kneeling: Carol Enloe Weber, Joyia Mentor, Marty McLaren

Standing left to right: Terrie Baughman Tenney, Dan McDonald, Nancy (Roi) Goit Wamboldt, Esther Shafer, Bob Wheeler, Karen Jean Robertson, Jack Archer, Chris Eddy Dosa, Ralph Erickson, Wayne Svenson, Linda Greaves Phillpott, Dean Johnson, Joanne Armstrong, Fred Just and Corky Sunkel and Mike Traverso on the phone is Chris's hand

Another fabulous lunch on Wednesday with the oldest friends of all, the people we went to school with. This time we saw some people we hadn’t seen in a long, long time: Dan McDonald, Joanne Armstrong, Karen Jean Robertson and Esther Shafer. I believe Dan lives locally, but Joanne was here from Edmonton, Alberta and Jean came all the way from Boston. When I asked Jean how she ended up in Boston, she went all the way back in her memory to the day she decided that since she wanted to see some places she’d never seen before, she was just going to go—no matter that she was only two years out of high school and that the mores of the time said that girls were either supposed to go to a junior college or get married and have babies. She didn’t let that stop her and she never let it stop her from that time forword.

Those mores didn’t stop Esther Shafer either, who showed us a picture of a bumpy time she spent on the back of a dancing camel and told us stories about the years she spent as a missionary in Africa, snakes and all. And even though Terrie Baughman was married for 41 years and had babies, that didn’t stop her from digging up stumps and putting up sheetrock, among other macho endeavors.

Those of us who did what society dictated at the time also had adventures and did hard work, tested our fortitude, but it is always fascinating to hear of someone who took a different road, which always takes guts. And to go on the road or to end up in Africa when you aren't on vacation? Wow!

Thanks to Nancy for this group picture which I snatched off of her Facebook page and was taken by one of the spouses who came to the potluck. Thanks to Ralph for cooking up some delicious ribs, for Dean who helped me flip burgers and for Joyia who shared her beautiful house and grounds in which we basked in memories and ate food lovingly provided by our friends.

postcards from norfolk: Life In Triplicate

postcards from norfolk: Life In Triplicate

Click on the link above and read. My daughter created this list and I think it's fabulous. Can you think of any threes she missed????

Proud X Three

Gabrielle Christine, Jacob Riley and Isabelle Grace Allen

The triplets are born and all three, Gabby, Grace and Jacob, are healthy, pink and beautiful. All weighed over 5 pounds and look just like regular one-at-a-time babies. Their little hats were marked A, B and C, I'm assuming for the order they were pulled out (Nicole had a C-section). The boy was last and you know his sisters will never let him forget it. According to their Daddy, Nick, they will be in the hospital for 4 days, during which the parents can try to get a grip on what it's going to be like to nurture three at a time. It's a good thing they're young because the sleeping stops now!

So I am officially a Great Grandma! Hallelujah! I didn't think it would feel so good!

Life and Lunch is Too Short

Lunch on July 17, Silverdale Waterfront Park

Sandy Harkins, Pricilla Preus and David Frazier

David Frazier and Linda Greaves Phillpott

Bonnie Barnhart Jenkins, Vickie C. Holt Barton, Vickie's niece and Nancy Kvinsland Roesch

Sharon Ward Hill, Bonnie, Nancy, Barbara Jarolim Merriman and Lavonna Rubens

Vicki A. Holt, Susan Mosher Miller, Terrie Baughman Tenney and Sandy Harkins

Two CK Alumni lunches in two days, hours of conversation and laughter, but still too little time.

What do more than 20 people who haven't seen each other, in some cases, for decades, have in common? Cholesterol problems, high blood pressure worries, arthritis pain, shortening memory, failing hearing, dimming eyesight, caring for elderly parents, fascination with grandchildren and certainly not least, being 65 years old. Our group also happens to have gone to the same grade schools and junior and high school. They watched Silverdale change from the quiet, green, agricultural area where they grew up to the busy and crowded cement-covered commercial zone it is now. Bonnie Barnhart hadn't seen Silverdale since a year or so after graduation. It was a shock to her senses. She recognized nothing, except that the high school was still on the hill. But she recognized the warmth we have toward one another, that grows each time we are together.

Our two-day Alum Love Fest started with a picnic in Silverdale on a lovely, warm day. Co-ed lunches have become regular occurrences, thanks to Jim Peterson and Dean Johnson with the help of Mail Guy, Ralph Erickson. This one was planned to snag some of the women who might be coming from out of state for the women's lunch the next day. Unfortunately, the one out of state woman was Bonnie and she didn't arrive until that night. But that didn't take away any of the fun in seeing some others we haven't seen in a long while. Barry Ball and his wife were there from Mexico and David Frazier came from his home in Spokane to visit family. I haven't seen David for many years, but I knew him instantly. The first thing he said to me was, "Don't call me Fuzz!" I did, of course, having only known him by that nickname. He's grown up now and has left that name far behind him, but he still looks like that freckled boy I knew when I was a teenager.

What we find out at these lunches is that even if someone looks the same, as some do, there has been 47 years of experience, getting, holding, changing jobs; raising children; marrying wives and husbands, losing some; joy, luck, war, hard times, bad health, travels--nearly a half century of living to shape and change the inside, and sometimes the outside, of this person we knew at such a young age. Every single story of a life is fascinating, heart-rending, and, as a friend of mine has observed, worthy of a novel.

The knowledge that there is a rich story inside of every person makes it hard for me at these lunches. There is always someone I intend to talk with, who I want to know about, whose life I want to hear, who slips by me. This last lunch it was David Frazier. I saw him, hugged him, saw him talking to others while I was talking with someone else and then it was time to go to the memorial service for Linda Greaves Phillpott's father, and I hadn't gotten to sit down with him and find out where he'd been, what had happened in his life. Later I learned from others who had gotten a chance to talk with him that his time in Viet Nam had made an important impact in his life. I would love to have heard about that. It would have helped me get past the nickname, to the real man. Luckily, in this hyper-technical world we now live in, I have found David on the internet and we can converse in cyberspace and I can hope he will come back to Silverdale again, soon.

The women's lunch the next day, at Vickie C. Holt Barton's lovely place in Brownsville, was more satisfying. There were fewer of us and a longer time to listen. The setting was conducive to conversation--a large porch with comfortable seating, another beautiful summer day. Vickie had saved many copies of The Megaphone, our old school newspaper, and while waiting for all to arrive some of us read old articles and wondered about some of the references, having no memory of what spurred them. For instance, Nancy Kvinsland and I were accused of crawling under houses....neither one of us could figure out what that referred to--we'd love to know. The same article mentioned our ringworm affliction, which we did remember had to do with playing with some kittens and in my case, involved a medication that was also for Chinese Rot.

While eating lunch we found ourselves talking about health issues, cholesterol, blood pressure and so on, which caused Lavonna to lean over to me and whisper, "Did you ever think, when you were in high school, that one day we'd be sitting around a table with the same people, talking about this stuff?!" (I know we did not, in those days when we thought about very little other than school, boyfriends and dating and certainly not about aging.) Thankfully, the subject changed, as the day wore on, from our aging bodies to other, less depressing topics. We talked and laughed for hours, only getting up to leave when the dinner hour started to come into view and we realized that our hosts probably had other things to do and we might, too. There was thanking, there was hugging and then we made our way back into the hot afternoon, past the bee hives and the apple trees and back out into our regular lives.

Two women who had been at both lunches expressed how they felt about the days:

Carol Enloe Weber commented on her Facebook page,

I'm still reeling from the weekend with my classmate brothers and sisters. It wasn't enough time. I couldn't get around to visit with everyone but hugs to all. I treasure hearing a little of everyones stories and would love to hear more. Both gatherings were wonderful.

And Sandy Harkins in an email to the committee after the women's lunch said:

Thank you for the opportunity to talk about 'today' with some women of our 'yesterday'. What beautiful pieces of work and art we have become compared to the rough-gem period we shared.

Well said, women!

Memorial

I am watching the Michael Jackson Memorial this morning and during the singing and eulogizing, the pictures of Michael Jackson flash up on the screen behind and I keep thinking: the poor kid, the poor little kid. He never was able to grow up, he never was able to really become a man. Even through all the controversy about how he lived his life, he was loved, but I wonder if he ever believed the love. So many mysteries have surrounded him and they will go on for months, but in the end, it would be best to remember how much he entertained the world and how much love he tried to show. No matter what, he was a genius.

The Gym

Another CK Alum suggested I write about "sock hops". He made his suggestion about 2 weeks ago and I've been trying to figure out what to write ever since then. He probably should write the blog post himself, because obviously he has some memories about those dances.

I have put a picture of the gymnasium at CK High School and one of a sock hop during the early sixties, from a couple of annuals, our Echo--the gym picture because as I was thinking about sock hops I began to think about other things the gym was used for.

Let's start with the sock hops. Until I started to look through my old Echos for a picture of a sock hop, I had forgotten that they were held after football and basketball games. (Those were the days we stayed up LATE!) My very first aural memory when Dean suggested sock hops as a theme, was a song, "Venus", sung by Frankie Avalon. We danced the "chalypso" to that song and others that had a Latin beat. For those of you who don't think I have spelled that word right, let me remind you that the word was a combination of Cha-cha and Calypso. Remember the Calypso, Harry Belefonte and our first exposure to Island music? Day-o, day-ay-ay-o--midnight come and we wanna go ho-ome...Anyway, Venus, Goddess of love that you are...we danced the Chalypso to that song, we did the stroll to some slow tunes, including the one titled The Stroll. We danced our version of the jitterbug, which by the late 50s was the dance that had evolved on American Bandstand, which we watched on our black and white TVs every afternoon after school.

Some girls probably learned how to dance from their older brothers or sisters, but I was the oldest in my family so my partner was the handle of the refrigerator. I danced with that cool partner in the kitchen when nobody was looking, because I would have been absolutely mortified if anyone had seen me. The Trouble and the Beauty with the frig was that it didn't move--when I got with a real partner at a sock hop, he moved, and maybe not even with the beat. I recall liking sock hops, liking being with a group of kids, moving with the music, dancing. I don't REALLY remember, but I'm pretty sure I went with a group of girls--strength in numbers--and there was probably intrigue and nervousness, as we wondered who would ask us to dance. In some sock hop pictures there are musicians so it appears there was sometimes live music, but I recall music coming from other sources--I think the person who suggested this topic would remember better than I where the music came from.

The gym was the hub of the high school and in addition to sock hops we went there for assemblies, pep rallies, to have our pictures taken for the Echo, basketball games, cheerleader tryouts and maybe most memorably of all, P(hysical).E(ducation).

P.E. was and probably still is, one of the most emotionally charged memories of high school. For those not athletically inclined it was an hour a day of mortification, unwanted strenuous activity, communal showers, sweat, complex rules, an hour we tried to get out of in any way we could. I can see all of us girls lined up in our snow-white shorts and blouses, trying to get noticed, or remain hidden, while "captains" were choosing teams, hoping to get on a team with our friends if we had to be on a team at all. If you had no physical talent, as appeared to be the case for me, team play was the worst, because others were counting on me to pass the ball to someone who could score, dribble the basketball only the 3 times allowed in "girls" basketball, not mess up. It was bad enough that I couldn't do a proper summersault during tumbling, or get out of the way fast enough in dodge ball, but if I let down a team member in basketball, I couldn't face myself. I had to pretend to take all the yelling with good humor, otherwise I would have cried. Lots of girls hated the showering after the class, but that was the easy part for me. Run into the shower with your towel around you, get your feet wet so the P.E. teacher would think you'd taken a shower, run out, get dressed. Easy. Kind of like the "ostrich principle"--if you didn't look at anybody else, they weren't seeing you. I got lucky during tumbling season one year--I fell off a chair at home, cracking my tailbone. The doctor gave me a 6 week pass from P.E. What a beautiful 6 weeks that was!

I wonder what P.E. was like for girls who liked sports and who did well at them. I got a little taste of what that might have been like when we played badminton and volleyball on summer potluck nights in the 70s, at a church I attended. I was actually good at both--I had confidence, which grew every time I was able to stretch to hit that birdie or jump to return a volleyball over the net. It was fun, my body worked well, I felt like an athlete. I was astounded that the same person who slumped her way through P.E. could actually do well on a court and that others found me a valuable member of a team. It was a total turnaround from the way I had felt about myself in P.E. and a tremendous confidence booster. I wonder if P.E. is still as brutal a class as it was when we were teenagers.

Pep rallies, on the other hand, were one of the best memories of what went on in the gym. Hundreds of us attended, from all classes, following the cheerleaders in rhyming chants, meant to psych us up and get us ready to cheer our team on to victory in the basketball or football games that night. The cheerleaders, who seemed like stars, worked hard, jumped high, screamed at us to scream louder, raise the roof, follow the leaders. Fight, fight, fight for CKHS, win the victory, we sang. 2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits, a dollar--all for CK stand up and holler! we yelled. We stomped, we clapped, we sang, we roared and afterwards the enthusiasm for the game that night was high and excited. We carried that energy to the games and we yelled and sang there, too, and sometimes we didn't even watch the game, because we were so busy showing our pep. We can only hope the guys running up and down the court or busting heads on the field, trying to win another game for the school, didn't realize we weren't always watching. We loved them just the same and we were always proud of them, no matter how our attention span may have wavered.

The gym--we spent a lot of time there, we sweated, we yelled, we danced, we were thrilled, we were embarrassed, we had romance, we had intrigue, we had hopes and dreams. We were youthful, energetic, confused, happy, frustrated. The gym held us all, and all our emotions.

School Lunch

From left, Nancy K., Jeanette Y., Yours Truly, Anne H., Vicki C., Anges, Helen C.

One of our number, the number being CK Alum of '62, recently challenged me to write about "school lunches" and being the writer type that I am, I am taking her up on that dare.

What I remember about the lunchroom and what went on there is only what I remember, meaning it is not the whole story.  My memory is spotty about those high school days and I am always finding myself responding to some fascinating, what should be memorable, high school story, with "Wow!  I don't remember that at all!"  So, being in my own little world during high school means I only remember my portion of what was actually going on.  I hope some of you will share your memories of "school lunches" so we can get a clearer picture.

I remember that lunches were divided into First Lunch and Second Lunch.  I don't know what that meant exactly, as to WHEN those two lunches were, but I do know it all depended on your schedule of classes, or maybe it all depended on which one you chose when you were choosing the classes you were going to take (a frequent dream of mine, by the way, the choosing of the classes).  I know that my group of friends all wanted to have the same lunch period and we managed to get it, judging by the picture above, so maybe it was chosen BY us, not for us.

I was one of those people who brought their lunch to school every day.  I certainly had many lunch boxes over the years, because I never was able to buy hot lunches, even though I would have died to get them.  I am pretty sure the lunch box I had was red plaid--that's the one that I picture.  And what was in that red plaid lunch box?  Sandwiches, tuna, peanut butter and raspberry jam, or bologna with mayonnaise.  No lettuce, not because I wouldn't have liked it, but because it would have been horribly wilted by lunch time--there were no thermal lunch boxes then, only tin, with a space for a thermos (pint-sized) of milk.  But I got to buy milk and sip it with a straw, which had a certain cache for me, since I couldn't buy the hot lunch.  Better than nothing.  

So I had my lunch, which sat in my lunch box in my locker until lunch time, getting warm and soggy.  I suppose there was fruit in there sometimes--or a cookie--something to break up the monotony of the sandwich.  I didn't pack my lunch--my Mom did--and she wasn't very creative about it, I'm afraid.  But I didn't care, because my main goal at lunch was to get something off of somebody else's hot lunch tray!  Not a single one of the girls I had lunch with seemed to understand how cool it was to be able to have a hot lunch.  They took them for granted, I guess.  They hated the food that was dished onto them, particularly Shepherd's Pie.  Well, lucky for me and for them, Shepherd's Pie was one of my favorites of the coveted hot lunches.  When Shepherd's Pie was on the lunch menu for the day, I was in heaven.  I knew that at least one of the girls at our table would let me have the whole thing.  They would eat whatever else was on the tray, but I would get the Shepherd's Pie.  Oh, glorioski!  Did I ever love those mashed potatoes and carrots and string beans and meat and gravy all mixed together. I can still taste that Shepherd's Pie as if it was yesterday.   I liked the Swiss Steak, too, which most of my friends did not like and there were probably other meals they gave to me.  It's a wonder I didn't have to diet in those days, isn't it?

The other thing about school lunchtime that I loved was the laughing and the talking we did.  Was the lunch an hour or 30 minutes?  I don't know.  But I do know that we filled it with gossip about boys, joking, teasing each other, griping about our brothers/sisters, complaining about teachers, homework, organizing slumber parties, wondering who was going to be asked to dances, making elaborate plans for how to get a boy's attention.  I don't recall talking about clothes much, we didn't wear makeup except lipstick for some of us, we didn't talk about our weight or our hair, that I recall. 

I suppose we talked about what we were going to wear to dances.  That was always a problem in my house--how we were going to afford the dress for the dance.  I remember getting a used white dress for one of the dances and buying green velvet ribbon, which I made into little bows and sewed onto the dress.  It reminded me of a dress I'd seen in Gone With the Wind, so I was happy with it.  And with every dress there had to be shoes and gloves, because (remember?)  we used to wear gloves then.  I had a pair of little white gloves (and one pair of white heels) and probably one of the lunch discussions was how to wash the white gloves and keep them clean.  We might have talked about the white buck shoes we all wore then--and the little powder packet we used to slap on the shoes to keep them white.  We might have talked about starching and ironing our petticoats, the more petticoats you had under your full skirt the more status you had.  I only had 3.  Poor me!  We might have talked about getting permanents to keep our hair curly--for those of us who had straight hair.  Many of my friends had curly hair and I don't believe there were hair straightening techniques then, or they would have used them.  No teenaged girl is ever satisfied with her hair.  My mother started me out at 4 years old with my first perm and bankrolled them, at the Cinderella Beauty School in downtown Bremerton, for the rest of my school career.  After high school there were no more perms for me.  The smell of the "neutralizing solution" was enough to put me off them forevermore.

I bet we talked about football and basketball games and cheer leading.  Some of our circle aspired to be cheerleaders and one of us, Helen Callison, actually achieved that goal.  Bonnie and I tried out once, but alas, we did not succeed.  But we all went to the games and cheered for our Cougars and sang the school song and the fight song and in my case, didn't really watch the games.  I knew all the rules, because I watched sports on television with my Dad, but high school sports, for most of us girls, was more a social occasion than a sport to follow, unless one of the boyfriends was on the team.  Then it was a different ball game, so to speak.

Which brings us full circle back to school lunches, which were not about eating, except when there was Shepherd's Pie.  School lunches were about being social, about eating with friends, about laughing, as that picture, which was in the Senior section of the 1962 Echo,  shows.  They were about belonging and that high school family that you form, that is more important, sometimes, than your real family and often more supportive.  There is a movie that I would recommend, called Mean Girls, that is all about high school, about lunch rooms, about the angst of the teen years.  I don't recall being one of the Mean Girls.  I hope I wasn't, though, as I say, others might have different recollections.  I hope we didn't cause angst, because we had enough of our own--in our families, in our "romances", in our insecurities, which are at their height in high school.  Any and all of our anxieties could have been aired at that lunchroom table, during that one blessed hour (or half hour) of the day when we were allowed to forget about classes and what might be going on at home.  Mostly, though, we just laughed.

PS:  I nagged Silver City Brewing (www.silvercitybrewery.com), in Silverdale, to please add Shepherd's Pie to their regular menu and they finally did.  Try it some time--it's absolutely delicious and the taste of it takes me back to that lunch room 40-plus years ago.  But now I have to pay for it with money rather than with my dignity!  I think it tasted a little better when I had to grovel for it.

Sponsoring a Child in Africa

What an incredible rush (as we used to say back in the day)!!!  I just committed to sponsoring a child in Senegal, West Africa.  I listen to KZOK radio every morning--specifically the Bob Rivers Show.  They are the ones who create Twisted Tunes and they don't play much music, other than what they have created.  Mostly they talk, interview comics or scientists (Bob is very into science) or people in the news, but for the past couple of years they have been involved with World Vision, an organization that Bill Gates also supports.  Bob and other members of his show have been to Senegal to see the conditions first hand.  They have all sponsored children and have child-sponsor drives every year.  This year Bob's son, Keith and his wife and Arik, the show's producer, went to Senegal.  It was a world-view changer for Keith.  Keith just returned and he was on the radio show this morning trying to explain his feelings.  He couldn't stop choking up.  I have been listening to these drives for a few years now and been tugged and pulled, but had resisted actually sponsoring a child--it s $30 a month commitment and I felt that it was too much for my limited budget.  Yes, I have a husband who is rolling in dough, though most of it goes into savings for our retirement, but our finances are kept separate, so anything like this comes out of my Social Security and pension from the State, which isn't huge.

However, this morning, listening to Keith talk about these kids and his epiphany, listening to him come to tears every time he attempted to talk about it--that got to me like nothing has before.  So I got online and I went to the website that KZOK has put links to all over their website and I chose the second child they showed me, because she is almost exactly the same age as my granddaughter, Alison.  Her name is Sokhna Diarra, born March 15, 2005.   She doesn't go to school yet and my donation will help her do that when the time comes.  I have the World Vision address so that I can send her letters, which I will do as often as I can.  I felt that I spend so much on stupid stuff, coffees, books I don't need, (shelves of them I haven't read yet), clothes I don't need and my grandchildren have everything they have ever wanted and more.  I can afford this and I must do it.  I used to dream of becoming a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa and then marriage and children happened and the Peace Corps became something that wasn't ever going to happen.  I also used to dream of being Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall, going to Africa, studying primates.  Well, that was pie in the sky--no degree in anthropology or any science that would get me there and an aversion to outdoor camping(!).  So Africa has been in my dreams for decades.  Here is my connection to that continent.  Rather than being a tourist there, which is still a possibility, I am going to help this one child.  

I will put addresses here to the KZOK website and to the World Vision website, just in case anyone who reads this has a charitable inclination.  It feels good, but more important, much more important than how I feel right now, is that this little girl may have a better life because of the money I am sending.  She may have more opportunity, she may have more faith in life from the letters I will send her and the gifts I will send her.  Hopefully, one day I will meet her.  They wrote in the little description of her and her life, that she is in "satisfactory" health.  Maybe this will help her achieve good health.   

www.kzok.com 

  www.worldvision.org  

I'll keep you posted on how this is working out, but I have great hope that Sokhna will benefit and it's going to feel damned good to write to her and send her things.  She will be grandchild #7.  And 7 is a lucky number.

Summer Laundry

Who can do a long post when the weather is so beautiful that all you want to do is hang your laundry outside and sit in the shade and drink cold things while it dries?  As we know oh so well, it will be over before we have a chance to get used to it.

And, in other news:  Welcome back to the Real World, Ralph!  I hear your bridge is open.