Memory Monday: It's not Christmas that's changed

Somewhere along life's way, Christmas seemed to change. I'd like to think it's because I matured and finally understood the joy of being the giver and not just the giftee, but that's not it.

My sister and I had fairy-tale childhood Christmases. Mother worked very hard to see that we got everything on our wish list and a few things that weren't. Black and white album photos show two little girls with an overabundance of things under the tree. I think she didn't have many merry Christmases as a child and she lived vicariously through us by making sure we did. After I was grown, and in a moment of melancholy, Daddy told me how she would scrimp and cut corners in order to get us things. I'd like to be sarcastic and say it would have been nice to have had more of her instead, but alas, we had plenty of that also. Mother managed it all.

Christmas changes when you move away from home, whether it be to college or on your own. Then, you come home to a house you didn't help decorate. You've grown beyond having a dozen packages under the tree and a big Santa-surprise on Christmas morning. It's sedate. The excitement is gone. You had to come home because the dorm was closed.

I don't think it revs back up until you have children of your own. Then, you can see Christmas again, but this time through their eyes. Sad to say perhaps, but my sons will probably say they didn't have fairy-tale Christmases, because Mother Scrooge didn't get them half the Sears catalog. I used to tell my younger son to just tear out what he didn't want.

But Mother got excited all over again. Having grown and left her, her daughters had redeemed themselves by presenting her with three grandchildren. She was once again in the giving business. This went on until her death when the youngest was in college.

Once our grandchildren came, our period of once-again sedate Christmases was over. They're still very young and not really into it yet (wait until next year), but there was excitement once the packages were torn open this year.

If you believe in Christmas, it would be sad to be alone on that day. But that's a state of mind, an attitude. You can be sad surrounded by a loving crowd of relatives. Christmas hasn't changed: not the reason for the Season, not the joy in celebrating. If your Christmas has changed, it's time to check the internal sensors and turn on the excitement meter once more.

Memory Monday: Daddy's 69th high school reunion

I received (well, Daddy received) a letter from a high school classmate of his last week. It seems she had recently attended their 69th high school reunion. I gather from the odd-year designation that they're meeting more often than the obligatory 5 or 10 year variety of reunion. She included notes about mutual acquaintances and reported that of the 86 members of the 1940 Everett PA graduating class, 31 were still alive.

I remember going to a couple of these reunions. As Daddy usually picked up the "farthest away" prize, we would accompany him to the dinners. The one which left the most vivid impression would have been his 20th. I was in upper elementary, certainly old enough to behave myself and take it all in. It was held at a hotel in a green dining room. Don't remember the meal, but I was so amused by one of the gag prizes. The woman with the most children got an apron with the saying: "I should have danced all night."

The rest of the time would have been spent visiting family and buying my sister and myself more yarn to knit and crochet in the back seat of the un-airconditioned red Studebaker station wagon. That was probably the trip where my aunt and my mother exchanged witticisms and my aunt got the better of Mother by shipping via train the black tom cat she had so admired from afar.

In order to keep him (or so the lore goes), we had to let Daddy name this long-haired ball of fury. Daddy is colorblind. The cat's name: Snowball.

Memory Monday on Tuesday: Reunions

We never went to family reunions. Either my mother didn't want to see any of the family she had (she did stay close with local cousins) or there simply weren't any. I, in turn, married into a family which greatly enjoys them.

But that's not the kind of reunions I wish to talk about. We attended my 40th high school reunion this past weekend. Forty years. Most of these people I hadn't seen since our 20th, some not since the 10th or high school graduation. We hadn't had a reunion in the intervening years.

It was fun to see and hear how people were doing, to realize that without the name tag and the senior annual photo pinned to each chest, I wouldn't have had a clue who most of them were. Certainly not the guys. The gals, and this was a universal gal-opinion, had all held up much better than our male compatriots. The girls I had a better chance of recognizing cold.

All sorts of promises were made, to get on facebook and keep in touch through email. We'll see. We really should try for a 45th, as our numbers are thinning, and 10% are already deceased.

I finally figured out that there were few surprises. People had done just about what you expected of them both in the career and personality (can't think of one who'd changed) departments. So, I guess we really can't outrun ourselves.

Memory Monday: The piano and me: Part 4--Soul Full

After a three-year sojourn in the Eastern Time Zone (How do they do it? No wonder the Coasts have issues: they don't get enough sleep because of their TV schedule.), it was time to move back to the sanity of the Central. What had been a one-bedroom move three years before had morphed into two babies, three bedrooms, a washer and dryer, and a piano.

We were, the moving company estimator told me, a big truck move. Besides that, he was eyeing the piano now, moving that would be an extra $175.

So my piano and I had a conference and decided what was another $175? Well, thirty years ago, that's not really what happened. I simply knew that if we didn't bring it with us, it might be years before we found the extra money to buy another one. Besides, the piano was of the same vintage as the house. They were made for each other. If it didn't come, I'd be without and the boys, toddler and infant though they were at the time, would not have access to piano lessons. (Another blog and not a happy one.)

The piano came. It has occupied the same piece of real estate in our house ever since, one of the few pieces of furniture which can claim that. But an upright piano is like an 800-pound gorilla. It does sit where it wants to.

I kept it tuned, endured the boys' piano lessons, played for myself, practiced for choir, listened as my neighbor made it sing one night, and then let it go into disfavor. I stopped getting it tuned; I stopped playing.

Then granddaughter Emily arrived on the scene. Her house has my mother's spinet. Emily likes to sit on the bench and act like she's playing. One day she will, and I'll sit her on my lap and we'll play together. So I had the piano tuned.

Not wishing to waste all that, I've started playing again. Not well, I might add. My fingers are arthritic and my hand span is no longer 10 keys.

But it's working its way back into my soul.

Memory Monday: The piano and me: Part 3--Making a house a home

And then it was gone from my everyday life. I went to college. Pianos abounded but played by people far more talented than I. I hadn't the nerve to sit at one, no matter how deep the urge. (Secretly I think Miss Tennie must have planted some version of "your fingers will always itch for a keyboard" in the garden room air just to get us back for not knowing our theory.)

But I digress. No easily playable piano for seven years. Then, we move to Georgia, to an apartment complex with sets of 8 apartments per building. Four on each side, up and down, with a breezeway. We were the first people to live in ours. There was practically a new house smell! Less than a month after we moved in, a family, the first of many, moved in next door. They had two teenage daughters and a piano. It was an older upright, one the girls had painted yellow and decorated with daisies and flower-power prints. It was in the breezeway and it was for sale.

Seventy five dollars later, it was rolled into what passed for our dining room. It even had a matching bench! It also needed to be tuned in the worst way and something had to be done about the yellow and the flowers.

Figuring the punishment fit the crime of painting it in the first place, I hired the teens to help me strip it and restain it. It was made of beautiful quarter-sewn dark oak. I had now doubled the price of my newest acquisition. But that wasn't all. Having basically put the cart before the horse, I found a piano tuner. Perhaps I should have done that first before the effort of making it into a pretty piece of useless furniture?

He was an older man and quickly informed me that even upon its birth in 1915 or so, my piano had not been first class. I accepted that. I wasn't a first class player. There was no use in casting pearls before... well, you get the idea. Several hours later, having now more than tripled the price of my piano, he played it until it sang.

He left, I sat down and played, probably out of a hymnal, or something borrowed. Maybe Mother had already mailed me my music. I just know I had it and our apartment, far from Texas and all that was familiar, finally felt real. I had a piano and had, in many ways, come home.

What half a century + of love (and neglect) can do

The subject has been teddy bears around the house and with friends and family. I'm having special ones made for the now-and-future grandchildren. That made me think of my old friend, sadly and sorely neglected for many years, but still part and parcel of the household.

He never had a real name, just Teddy Bear. I even found one like him at a flea market once. Only once. The price was $25, which Teddy was flattered to hear when I told him, but alas, that price doesn't do him justice.

I think he's filled with straw. I can hear it crunch. He's been resewn and given new eyes and buttons and had many bows, but he doesn't have one now. I think someone, me!, needs to get busy.

But just to see what a half-century plus of love can do to a stuffed animal, here's the photo of Teddy I have from when I was 9 weeks old. Below it, the man he's become. There's a lesson here I'm sure, about neglect.

Memory Monday: Sweet 16

While I remember birthdays as being happy affairs with lots of (frozen, bought in the freezer case) German Chocolate Cake, (Mother was not what you might call a baker), I don't necessarily remember individual celebrations unless tied to event-years. Eighteen: going off to college the next week. Twenty-one: married less than a week. Thirty: gave myself a bridge party and hired a babysitter. Forty: My elder son's friends presented me with a tee shirt and a mug. Fifty: maybe we should just stop there. Oh, okay. Fajita party at a local restaurant and I made all the pies for dessert! As it turns out, cakes are not my forte either, but I'm a heckuva pie/cheesecake maker.

Sixteen: Sparklers on my cake.

We'd gone out to lunch, probably a movie after because Mother liked movies. We were in Dallas but I can't remember the restaurant. We sat in a booth. The walls were green. It was late for lunch. And one of us mentioned that it was a double birthday, mine and Daddy's. The waitress brought us a small cake with white icing and a sparkler on top.

What fun! And it wasn't even frozen.

Memory Monday: Twenty pages of someone else's memories

When my mother died 12 years ago, my dad did not wish to live alone for the rest of his life. Within the year, he had courted, and persuaded to move from PA to TX, a woman he'd briefly known in high school. She was widowed and her son wished her well, but she only lived as my dad's second wife for 5 years before dying. At that point, Daddy's stress from caring for two ill wives caught up to him and the rest, as they say, is history. My sister and I decided the best place for Daddy was assisted living and that's where he started his too-short run toward Alzheimer's and where he is today.

However, in the interim Lil, wife two, gathered loads of Daddy's photos from boxes, loosely organized them, GLUED them into albums and wrote brief bylines on maybe 10% of them. So when I began my march through the old albums in order to archive, I found a page labeled: "Dick, friends and time in the service before he married."

There was Daddy in high school with friends, mostly girls. Then a few service photos. More girls, or by this time, young women. Service... women. Women. Women.

Twenty pages with 4-6 photos per page. None did I recognize. Then: "Dick, Velta, family and friends". Whew!

But... twenty pages of old girlfriends? Daddy--you rascal!

So, what happened to this woman?

When my daughter-in-law asked for photos of my dad as a child, little did I know it would open a scan-fest for me. Scan one, scan a dozen. Why not pick my favs and make CDs for everyone? My sister's birthday is coming up. Maybe she'd like a greatest-hits album of our parents?

I have three physical albums dedicated to old photos. There are pieces of others, mainly reprints and doubles, scattered about elsewhere. I found the photos my DIL requested, whizzed them off to her, then started a journey.

We can start with: why don't people mark the backs of their photos, although Mother was MUCH better about it than Daddy. Most of Daddy's are identified in my handwriting when I was making the albums from loose photos, asking him for names and places, and he could still remember.

But this post, my 400th by the way, is about my Mother. Viewing her photos, I see a child whose own mother never looked directly at the camera and whose father scowled at it. But Mother? Mother was smiling. Smiling holding cats (and the rest of the family wonders where I get it from), smiling atop a horse, smiling in a lake, smiling from the top of a picnic table, smiling from under a soldier's cap while at college, smiling in band uniform, modeling a two-piece bathing suit, playing a guitar, hugging her favorite cousin, riding a bike, holding a baby...

Where did that woman go? Ride a horse? A bike? Swim? Sit on a table? Who is this woman? Can't be my mother! She never did any of these things with me!

But it is she. And as she's been dead 12 years I'll never know where all that joy went.

Memory Monday: Shaking loose the cobwebs

I had not meant for a week to pass between my Memory Mondays. Let me rephrase that: of course, a week would pass. Monday to Monday--one week. I meant I thought I would blog in the meantime, but my mac went in for its (I've never assigned gender--isn't that strange?) annual physical, we spent the weekend in the Big City doing anniversary things, the wifi at the hotel was confined to the lobby and the business center... and you get the idea.

Then when we return home last night, I find that Daddy has fallen in the previous hour and been taken to the emergency room of the local hospital. What followed extended the weekend by three hours with a steri-stripped head-skin tear, a CAT Scan and a fiasco of getting him from the hospital table to the wheelchair into the car into another wheelchair... You get the idea. Again. For the record, he is absolutely fine, like nothing ever happened today. I am not.

But, in his trauma-induced, do-you-know-where-you-are-Daddy? head bang, he remembered my name. First time in a couple of months. He still remembered it this morning. He even--and here's the cobwebs shaken loose part--knew my husband as my husband. He called him by a son's name, but they're similar, and by that time, who cared? He knew us! He also was insistent that we, especially me, go. Leave him. Like who will cover up your feet when you kick the covers, Daddy? Hmm? And since he couldn't tell me where I was to go, I shrugged and stayed. Much to his chagrin.

That, I bet, he doesn't remember!