Archive for the 'Antique Childhood' Category

Liquid Time

June 28, 2008 | Antique Childhood, Uncategorized

Have you ever looked at your child and seen your own face? And maybe your child doesn’t look so much like you, but there is something that he does, some little expression that he makes that is unmistakably yours.  And just for a split second, the thread that has stitched all of humanity and history together is brilliant and visible and eternity suddenly makes sense.

Last year, when I was in Illinois visiting my parents, a neighbor brought over some old Super 8 movie footage that had been hiding in a closet for 40 or more years. On it were scenes from a birthday party from when her girls and I were little, maybe four or five years old.

 

There wasn’t but a few seconds of me on the video, but seeing myself at that age, especially now  that Sean is that same age, was something beyond eerie.   It was like watching liquid time being poured out into my cupped hands, spilling over the sides and slipping through my fingers.

 

In watching myself as a 4-year-old, I realized that like me, Sean wears every emotion on his face — twitches, twists and puckers that telegraph every thought and feeling. 

 

And so I asked God, why did you make him so much like me, unable to hold his cards to his chest?  He will never be able to negotiate a car deal or even a nickel off on a garage sale item.

 

I thought of that old Super 8 film yesterday as I sat on a park bench, watching Sean as he came barreling down a slide.  The wind blew the hair from his face in just the right way and he wore a familiar expression of unfiltered exhilaration.  But instead of a boy on a slide, this is what I saw:

 

 

   

 

A whole lot of time has been poured out since I sat on the hood of the family car with my brother on a windy day in the early 60s and I haven’t been able to hold on to a single drop.

And I haven’t even wanted to.  Until now.

Now, as I sit on a park bench watching a little boy who looks something like me zip down the slide with the wind in his face, I want to catch every drop and drink it up.

 

Albuquerque

June 8, 2008 | Antique Childhood, Faith

When I was five-years-old, my parents and I drove to southern California from Illinois in their light green unairconditioned Oldsmobile. 

 

I remember quite a bit about being in California and later, the train ride back to Illinois with my mother, but I don’t remember anything at all about the long drive to California except that we stopped and spent the night in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

 

As a five-year-old, everything about being in Albuquerque was a new and electrifying sensory experience.  Even the name – Albuquerque! — was exotic and lyrical and fun to say.

 

As I walked with my parents from the motel to a nearby diner I remember that I felt like Dorothy when she woke up and found that the tornado had dropped her house in Oz — I wasn’t in Illinois anymore.  Instead of the familiar horizontal stripes of yellow cornfields and blue sky, this landscape was a hounds tooth pattern of oranges and pinks and browns and other kinds of browns all swirling and mixing together.

 

While we were eating, a sand storm blew in and when we stepped outside of the diner, hot wind and gritty sand pelted my face and threatened to blow me away.  My dad grabbed one of my hands and my mom the other and then they leaned shoulder into the wind and pressed towards the motel.

 

As we made our way across the street, each step a staggering effort, a gust of wind blew both of my feet completely out behind me. I clearly remember, at that moment, the sensation of flying.  I remember the feel of the scorching wind slapping my face and the tingling stinging blast of sand on my bare legs and the grainy pixels of desert colors I could see through squinted eyes.

 

As my feet flew out behind me, I was not afraid of the mighty gritty wind, but exhilarated.  I was fearless.  I knew my parent’s hands that were gentle and comforting were also capable and strong and reliable.  I was secure in the knowledge that neither they nor their grip would fail me.  And because of that I was able to fly without fear, not just in that storm, but in many storms to come.

 

 

The Prize

June 26, 2007 | Antique Childhood

On the news last night, there was a story of a woman who won a house.  A house! 

A lot of people say, “I never win anything.” I am one of those people who say that.  I never win anything.  Except a pumpkin.  One time I won a pumpkin.

The year was 1969.  It was Friday, October 31^st.  Halloween.  I was a skinny scrawny fourth grader at Our Mother in Perpetual Need of Help Catholic grade school.  The entire month of October, the teacher had a big fat pumpkin sitting on her desk.  Just before the bell rang, she decided to hold a drawing for some “lucky” student to take it home, thus relieving her of the task of disposing of a large and soon-to-be rotting pumpkin come Monday morning. 

You could have knocked me over with a feather when my name was drawn.  I was thrilled!  I had won something!   My nemesis and rival, Erin Flannigan — who was cuter, smarter, had better hair, was more athletic, wore nicer clothes, had a sister and could do just about everything slightly better than me except possibly jump rope — really wanted that pumpkin. But there was no way I was giving it up, especially not to her!  

Intoxicated with the thrill of the win, it did not occur to me that I would have to somehow get that pumpkin home, that I would have to walk nearly a mile schlepping a ginormous pumpkin that weighed not that much less than I did. 

I proudly strode up to the front of the classroom like Miss America to claim my prize.  I was so thrilled.  I slid the orange beauty off the desk and up onto my knee and then I hoisted it up to my tummy, which sent me reeling backwards a few steps. I wrapped my spaghetti arms around my beloved prize and with my back swaying like a pregnant lady, I staggered two or three drunken grapevine steps to the door. Erin made one more generous offer to take the pumpkin off my hands, but I said nothin’ doin’ sister, it’s my pumpkin and I’m keeping it!  And then with trembling knees and sweating brow, my pumpkin and I slowly melted to the ground.

But I remained undaunted for I had won a prize! A pumpkin! 

For the next half mile, I slowly slogged toward home, repeating the knee-lift/hoist/stagger/squat/rest sequence about every ten steps. I was sitting on my pumpkin on the sidewalk resting up for the next sequence, when I saw Paula Vose’s mom zip by in her little VW Bug.  The tail lights turn red.  The car stopped and then whirred back towards me. She rolled down her window. “Wanna ride?” she asked.  God bless Mrs. Vose!  She had mercy on me. I nodded my head vigorously. She got out, put the pumpkin in her car and took me home — a kindness I have never forgotten.

The next day, I noticed the bottom of the pumpkin was beginning to turn black and soggy.  I ceremoniously hauled it out to the burning barrel in the back yard.  I lifted it to the edge of the barrel and with an odd sense of satisfaction, I tipped it in.  It hit the bottom of the barrel with a resounding thud and sent up a cloud of grey ash.  So long prize. And I haven’t won anything since. 

* * * * *

Have you ever won anything? 

It Made Sense At The Time

June 24, 2007 | Antique Childhood, Faith, Mildly Amusing

Whenever I’ve talked about how that at Our Lady in Perpetual Need of Help, where I attended Catholic grade school, our 4th grade class saved up to buy a pagan baby, I’ve gotten one of two responses.  People who did not attend Catholic school in the 1960s will look at me in stunned silence as though I were from Mars.  People who did attend Catholic school will nod their head knowingly and sigh at the utter absurdity of the notion. 

How does a fourth grader go about buying a pagan baby you might wonder?  Well, we brought our scavenged pennies and nickels into school and put them in a jar until we finally had enough to send off for a pagan baby, I guess from the pagan baby store which was probably somewhere in California.  That’s where everything cool was, or at least that’s what mid-western Catholic school kids thought.  If you could get your parents to move to California, then you could automatically be cool.  Anyway, $4 and some box tops later, or something like that, and we were the proud owners of a heathen.  I have no idea how much a pagan baby cost, no one ever told us, and being good Catholic children, we didn’t ask.

Eventually we would get a certificate of some kind in the mail.  The class would vote on a name and afterwards we would have a naming ceremony.  For a baby girl, Sister always pushed us to choose Mary something - Mary Beth, Mary Alice, Mary Margaret, Mary Catherine, Mary Jane, whatever.  The Mary list is endless. For a boy we were expected to choose a name like Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  But in 1969 the names we fourth graders favored were names like Ringo and Twiggy. 

Since it was a class vote with Sister having two votes to our every one, we compromised on Mary Twiggy. We thought it so very funny to exasperate Sister with our zanyness.  As a class, we were supposed to pray for the salvation of little Mary Twiggy throughout the school year. So you see, there was a seed of goodness buried deep deep within such a warped idea.  And somehow?  It made sense at the time.

I wonder what ever became of Mary Twiggy…

Originally published July 2006.

The Ceramic Donkey

May 2, 2007 | Antique Childhood

When I was a little girl, my Godparents lived across the street from me. I spent more time at their house than I did my own. They were the grandparents that I never had.

For more than 40 years, on the coffee table in her living room, my Godmother Rose had an inexpensive ceramic donkey that pulled a cart that held an average houseplant of one variety or another. It was one of her few “look but don’t touch” things. I always loved that brightly colored ceramic donkey because it was hers and because it was always wherever she was. When I close my eyes I can still see the cobalt blues and the bright yellows and oranges and the shy smile of the donkey as though it were right in front of me.

The last time I visited my Godmother in the nursing home, we sat on her sofa side by side, hand in hand, with the ceramic donkey on the coffee table in front of us — exactly where it should be, where it had always been. Sometimes we talked about people we knew from long ago and sometimes we just sat and stared at the donkey and listened to the clock ticking. She would nod off for twenty minutes at a time and then wake up delighted to find me sitting on the sofa with her in Florida and not in far away Texas.

We sat there all afternoon. The shadows of the tropical sun grew long and fell across her window. The room grew gray and dim. She asked me what of her things I would like to have. I felt my Adams apple swell in my throat and the deafening sound of the ticking clock in my ears. I didn’t want her to ask me that question. I looked around the tiny room that she lived in, at the few things she was able to bring with her from her house, her house that had always been a haven for me from the world and from big brothers and mean girls. I managed to force enough air into my throat to whisper, “I don’t want your stuff. I want you.”

I stayed with her until just before dark. I wanted to make the drive back to Orlando where I was staying before the sun set on the day. I hugged her. I looked into her brown eyes. I promised that I would come back to see her again soon. “Okay Cupcake,” she said and she squeezed my hand. As I stood to leave she looked so small, as though the sofa could swallow her up. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead one last time. I walked to the door and when I turned back to blow her a kiss, she had nodded off again. When she awoke, I would be gone. I never saw her again.

Shortly after she died, her attorney contacted me to inform me that I would be receiving a small inheritance from her estate. That news brought me no joy. I didn’t want an inheritance. I wanted the ceramic donkey because it was always wherever she was.

It’s many years later now but I still think about that donkey. And I think about how somewhere in Florida in some thrift shop or on someone else’s coffee table sits a brightly colored ceramic donkey pulling a cart that holds not just an average houseplant, but a big chunk of my life.

Living Beyond

April 5, 2007 | Antique Childhood, Faith, Sometimes Sweet

Photo Temporarily Unavailable

Since my mother’s sister died in January, my cousins have been dealing with the exhausting task of going through their mother’s belongings. There is a lot of agonizing and sorting and deciding that must be done when trying to dismantle the accumulation of a lifetime.

In a package of things they returned to my mother, there was a picture of me when I was about the same age that Sean is now. When my mother came out to visit recently, she gave the picture to me. I hadn’t seen the picture before and when she handed it to me I was struck by how much of Sean I saw in my own face. Not so much in features, although there is certainly some of that, but something beyond that. Something that can’t be described in words or explained by genetics. Something impish behind the eyes, an almost imperceptible curl of the lip or lift of the brow — something so intimate that it can only be discerned from having looked into a mirror for 47 years.

Photo Temporarily Unavailable

As I held the picture in my hand, peering 44 years back into time, it made my knees weak to see the likeness of my son in my own three-year-old face. I could only think about how in the weaving of the great tapestry of life, God himself picks and chooses tiny filament threads to carry over from parent to child, from one generation to the next, binding us all together through the ages with the double helix of DNA or some other invisible something that is not yet known to man.

I thought about how it is through Sean and the miracle that is his life that I might possibly live beyond my own allotted days on this earth and into a future I will not know and can’t anticipate or comprehend, a time that will be attended to by faces that I will never see, whose names I will never know. I will return to the dust from whence I came. No matter how remarkably I live out my life, sooner rather than later, time will erase every trace and memory that I was here….

Except maybe… at some appointed time in a distant future, God will craft another funny face with something impish behind the eyes and an imperceptible curl of the lip or lift of the brow. And then, even though I might have been forgotten, I will not be gone.

Guest Post - My Baby Is 47

February 1, 2007 | Antique Childhood, Wivian

by Wivian

1960 ~ I remember it well, as though it were just 47 years ago.

I was 27-years-old and ripe as a plum with my third child. I hadn’t seen my toes since Christmas. We already had two children, two little boys, who would turn 4 and 2 in March, but my husband wanted a little girl and so I had agreed to try one last time. It was extremely cold and windy that day, even by Illinois standards. Everyone was complaining about the weather and kept telling me, “You’re probably going to have that baby tonight ~ the weather always brings babies early.” Did I listen? Of course not. Was I wrong? Absolutely!

When my water broke, a neighbor came and stayed with my two boys. The night air was frigid and the wind battered our jalopy of a car as we made our way to the hospital. There are two sets of railroad tracks between our home and the nearest hospital, both of which almost always have a train sitting on them, and I believe it was only the power of prayer that kept the roads clear until we got to the hospital.

Three records were set in our town that night. The wind had never blown so hard and it had never been that cold on that date. The other record was the birth of our little daughter. This was the first girl in my husband’s family for many many years! She topped the scales at just over five pounds and looked like a little doll.

AM’s brothers figured their lives were ruined the day we brought her home and likewise, she was always convinced that there was some mix up at the hospital – that those two hellions could not possibly be her brothers, and would we please return her to the rich family across town where she was certain she belonged. Alas, there had been no mix up and after 40-some years, I believe they have finally come to appreciate one another.

The first word most babies say is “Mama”. AM’s first words were, “Where’s my coat?” I didn’t know at the time how prophetic those words were. As soon as she could toddle, she was ready to leave home. Her favorite place to visit was her Godparent’s house, across the street. At two-years-old, she would pack her dolls and nightgown in a brown paper sack and go across the street where she was appreciated ~ and where there were no brothers to pester her. They loved her as if she were their own and the feeling was mutual. Then when she was 21, she packed what few things she had and moved to Texas – where she seldom needs a coat – and she has been there since.

It has been a joy to be her mother and it has been an even greater joy to see her be a mother. Except for the years between 1973 and 1978, I’d love to do it all over again.

Photo Temporarily Unavailable

Because My Dad Is All That And A Gourmet Cook Too

December 20, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Papa Ed

In 1965, I was in Mrs. Kelly’s afternoon kindergarten class at Wanless Elementary School. Because my parents were young and poor, my dad worked nights and my mom worked at a bank during the day. That meant that my dad had to look after me in the morning and get me to school.

My dad has never changed a diaper or gotten involved in the care and feeding of his kids. Most men of his generation just didn’t interact with their kids like they do today and that’s a shame. But that’s just the way it was. In spite of his nearly queasy discomfort with childcare, he took care of me every school day for an entire year. He fixed my lunch, made sure I had on some kind of clothes and then took me to school in our beloved car that we called Clunker #2 (which was later replaced with Clunker #3).

Every day before school, my dad boiled a hot dog, put it on a fork and served it up on a Correlle dinner plate garnished with a splotch of ketchup for dipping. I remember sitting at the kitchen table eating my hot dog in silence and watching my dad read the newspaper. He didn’t pay much attention to me, but I didn’t mind. Our relationship has always been about just hanging out.

After lunch, he would stand me up on the bathroom sink and awkwardly try to wipe ketchup off my face as I flitted and twitched and fidgeted. 41 years later, I now understand the difficulty of this feat. Then in an exercise of futility, he would clumsily try to convince a comb through my unruly hair before we headed out the door for school.

Looking back, my dad was a pretty sorry mom. He would be the first one to admit that. But I don’t remember it that way. I remember thinking he was a gourmet cook, even after hot dog #83. I remember sitting at the kitchen table and being fascinated with how his soft brown arm hair laid around his wrist watch. I remember sitting beside him on the front seat of Clunker #2 unable to see anything but the dashboard and bumping down North Grand on the way to school. But mostly, I just remember it as being a special time when it was just me and my dad.

And that gives me hope. It gives me hope that Sean won’t remember my many failings and shortcomings and ineptitude as a parent. But that maybe 41 years from now, he will just remember these days as a special time in his life.

Call Me Cupcake

November 12, 2006 | Antique Childhood

I think every child needs someone in their life who thinks they are the cat’s pajamas — someone who, unlike their parents, is not obligated to love them.

I think God made grandparents for just this reason. I grew up in an Italian neighborhood where Nana or Papa lived nearby and were always around to dote effusively on their grandkids. This became my ideal of what grandparents should be like.

My own grandma, my only living grandparent, lived less than a mile away, yet we seldom saw her. When we did, her eyes did not sparkle and her face did not light up in the way the Italian grandma’s did for their grandchildren. There were no hugs or even feigned interest on her part. It was clear to me from an early age, that she saw me as a nuisance, a gnat, a bother. I spent the majority of my growing up years trying to win her friendship and wondering what it was about me that she found so un-loveable.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that it was her own inability to love and not mine to be loved. I think I know why she was the way she was, but it didn’t change things for me. She lived independently into her mid-90s neither giving nor finding joy in her children or grandchildren. And that is life’s ultimate tragedy - to live so long with so little joy.

Nonetheless, God did not leave me wanting.

There are plenty of things about which to criticize the Catholics, but Godparents is not one of them. It’s one of the best ideas they’ve come up with which kind of makes up for Lent. The couple that my parents chose as my Godparents lived right across the street. It is my belief that that decision was providential, mapped out in the heavens before I was even born.

With no children of their own, John and Rose lavished the full force of unrequited parenthood upon me and I gladly and gratefully soaked it up. They took me on camping and fishing trips, to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, they bought me the Chrissy doll I wanted so badly for Christmas that my own parents couldn’t afford, they taught me how to set a table, how to scramble eggs, how to pick out oranges at the store and so much more. I had my own room in their house and I stayed there often. They couldn’t have loved me more if I were their own. They called me Cupcake.

I remember many times getting out of my bed at their house early in the morning and creeping past their room on my way to the kitchen and seeing my Godmother down on her knees, with her rosary, praying beside her bed. I didn’t know at the time how many of those prayers were for me. Once when I visited her in the nursing home, she told me how she prayed for me when I was little and I flashed upon her kneeling beside her bed. She told me that when I was very small and very sick, that she and John were so worried that they would lose me and her eyes filled with tears, even after all these years. And it was then, at that moment, that I finally understood something of how deeply I was loved by this woman.

Rose and John are both gone, many years now, but they left me with a treasure trove of memories and stories to see me through my life. The imprimatur of their love for me is forever upon my heart - a love bound not by genetics but by something that has no description. They never let me forget that they thought I was the cat’s pajamas. They loved me and they didn’t have to. And in the shaping of my life, it has made all the difference.

Crackers of The Rich and Famous

August 21, 2006 | Antique Childhood

“Keebler Club crackers! - or what I called Rich People Crackers. Crispy and buttery and oh so decadent! Without a doubt the cracker of kings and queens. My mom bought store brand saltines, the cracker of the peasantry.”

I’m at DotMoms today.

When I Grow Up, I Want To Be A Gorilla And Drink Tea

July 25, 2006 | Antique Childhood

When I was about six-years-old, my mom was the den mother of my two older brother’s Cub Scout troop. Looking back, I have to really hand it to my mom. For a woman with very few resources at her disposal, she did a lot with and for her kids.

Since there was no place else to put me during troop meetings, I was kind of an unofficial cub and I just did whatever it was my older brothers were doing. And my over protective brothers loved having me around and patiently and proudly looked after me.  No they didn’t. They hated it. I’m sorry, I’m confusing my life with an episode of The Walton’s.

These Cub Scout meetings usually involved some kind of craft or activity. I remember one troop meeting in particular, my mom supervising eight little boys sitting around her kitchen table gluing burnt wooden matchsticks onto cardboard forms in the shape of a cross.  Another one of those “made sense at the time” moments.

Thirty some years later, when this scene comes to mind, several questions spring to mind: First:  Why on earth…? And then the following questions in no particular order: 2) Little white boys making burning crosses? 3) Was there a KKK badge? 4) Eight little boys lighting matches? 5) In the house? 6) Crosses? 7)Why on earth…

Since we were all Catholic kids, making a cross for a craft didn’t raise any eyebrows. Today? The ACLU would be knocking on the front door, right behind the fire department and CPS. Aaah, the 60s! No helmets! No car seats! And Jarts! Good times.

What does this have to do with a tea party you wonder? Very little. It was just a fun little memory I thought I’d share.

Anyway, one time my mom single-handedly chauffeured her den of eight little boys and one little girl to tour the Abraham Lincoln Museum in her station wagon. I’m sure that we were all well-behaved children and that it was an educational and relaxing time for all. As we were leaving the museum, my mom ducked into the gift shop and bought me a little porcelain tea set that had Bambi pictured on each piece. The reason this is such a memorable event in my life is because had I asked for a magic carpet, I would have been as likely to get it as a tea set. Knowing better, I hadn’t asked for anything, let alone a tea set. She just bought it for me for no particular reason. It was a total surprise. I loved that tea set then and I still love it today, although all of the cups and saucers are missing.

Aside: Now that I have a child of my own, I understand how a mother’s heart wells up with love for her baby out of nowhere and for no particular reason and how the impulse to purchase something frivolous solely for the joy of pleasing that little person can be nearly impossible to deny. Had my mother been a rich woman we would have been spoiled beyond measure. Luckily we were poor and were spoiled with love and attention instead. Who needs a Barbie Dream House when you can light matches in the kitchen with your brothers while your mother looks on?

Flash forward thirty years: Not one to contain exciting news very well, my mom called last Friday and told Sean that she had purchased a little tea set for him and that she was sending it in the mail. Obviously the desire to please her babies with impulse purchases has not waned with time. He was quite excited about the prospect of having a tea party. Since he does not yet grasp the concept of time, he ran to the window to wait for UPS to arrive with the tea set and like an obsessive dog I used to have, he pretty much stayed there all weekend.

So that he might remove himself from my dining room windows and get on with life until the UPS guy comes this week, I decided that I would let him play with my tea set until his came. After digging it out of storage, I called him out of the window to see it. As I unfolded the bubble wrap to expose the three tiny pieces, he gasped in awe at such finery.

I explained to him that the tea set was mine, and that my mommy — “Bivian” (what he calls my mother) - had bought it for me a very long time ago when I was a little girl. “Wong, wong ago, like weelly wong ago?” he asked.  “Whatever dude,” I snapped. “When Noah put them maminals on the awk and it wained and wained?” he pressed. I felt it best to end the discussion of my antiqueness, so I hurried on to tell him that it was very special, but that he could play with it if he were very careful.

We spent the afternoon sitting at his little table sipping tea and pouring tea and spilling tea and eating maminal crackers. At some point I will have to teach him that in some circles it’s bad form to drink directly from the creamer. But it was special to see him playing with and enjoying something that I loved so much as a child. That is, until he held up his cup in the air as if to toast my fabulousness and announced, “When I grow up I’m going to be a girl!”

He could have said gorilla.  I’m hoping he said gorilla. His daddy would be happier if his boy grew up to be a gorilla rather than a girl.  When I relayed this scene to Antique Daddy later that evening, he said “Do you think you could get your mom to send him a gun?”

And there you have it.  An excellent example of how to take a very long way to tell a very short story.

It Made Sense At The Time

July 20, 2006 | Antique Childhood

Whenever I’ve talked about how that at St. Cabrini, where I attended Catholic grade school, our 4th grade class saved up to buy a pagan baby, I’ve gotten one of two responses. People who did not attend Catholic school in the 1960s will look at me in stunned silence as though I were from Mars. People who did attend Catholic school will nod their head knowingly and sigh at the utter absurdity of the notion.

How does a fourth grader go about buying a pagan baby you might wonder? Well, we brought our scavenged pennies and nickels into school and put them in a jar until we finally had enough to send off for a pagan baby, I guess from the pagan baby store which was probably somewhere in California. That’s where everything cool was, or at least that’s what mid-western Catholic school kids thought. If you could get your parents to move to California, then you could automatically be cool. Anyway, $4 and some box tops later, or something like that, and we were the proud owners of a heathen. I have no idea how much a pagan baby cost, no one ever told us, and being good Catholic children, we didn’t ask.

Eventually we would get a certificate of some kind in the mail. The class would vote on a name and afterwards we would have a naming ceremony. For a baby girl, Sister always pushed us to choose Mary something - Mary Beth, Mary Alice, Mary Margaret, Mary Catherine, Mary Jane, whatever. The Mary list is endless. For a boy we were expected to choose a name like Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. But in 1969 the names we fourth graders favored were names like Ringo and Twiggy.

Since it was a class vote with Sister having two votes to our every one, we compromised on Mary Twiggy. We thought it so very funny to exasperate Sister with our zanyness. As a class, we were supposed to pray for the salvation of little Mary Twiggy throughout the school year. So you see, there was a seed of goodness buried deep deep within such a warped idea. And somehow? It made sense at the time.

I wonder what ever became of Mary Twiggy

Papa Ed

June 17, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Papa Ed

I like my dad. Oh sure, I love him too. That’s a given. But I really like him. I always have.

My dad and I like to hang out together. My parents have a gazebo in their back yard that is enrobed in purple clematis and hanging baskets of pink petunias in the summer. The gazebo rests in the shade of towering trees that were not much more than seedlings when I lived there. Dad and I like to sit out there in the breeze that swirls through and drink iced tea and talk. Or not. Sometimes we just sit.

Sometimes we venture into the garage and make something. That’s how we got the gazebo. One time we ended up with a grape arbor. And then grapes. Another time we painted a mural of a seascape on the side of the garage. I tell him I want to make something. He tells me why it can’t be done. We go back and forth until he is convinced it is his idea. And then we set to work, the two of us, a team. The only team I’ve ever been on that never kicked me off.

My dad has a lot of qualities I admire, but the one I’d like to have that I didn’t get (especially now that I’m a parent) is patience. The man is unflappable. I remember one time when I was about nine, my brothers and I were in the living room throwing pillows and agitating one another and just generally being the rowdy obnoxious kids that we were.

Dad was in the kitchen quietly working on an oil painting. Somehow, one of the sofa pillows went sailing into the kitchen and landed squarely on dad’s painting. He just stopped what he was doing and took the pillow and the painting and deposited them both into the trash. He didn’t even grimace or make a face or even heave a sigh. There was no yelling or well-deserved discipline or even a lecture. If he had only beaten the pudding out of us, it would have been less painful than the silent expression of disappointment. There are many other times when I deserved a measure of his wrath, but it was never forthcoming.

When my dad comes to my house to visit, we get up early and meet in the kitchen for a cup of coffee and the New York Times crossword puzzle. After I fix him two eggs over easy, two pieces of bacon and a piece of toast, we sit down and work the puzzle together. He doesn’t know who Bon Jovi is. I don’t know what an ogee is. We make a good team, each one making up for the deficiencies of the other.

I’m a lucky girl. I have a daddy that I love. But I really like him too.

Happy Father’s Day Papa Ed.

Unfortunately, It’s Probably Genetic

May 3, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Makes Me Sigh, Papa Ed

The other day as I was passing through the living room, I noticed an arrangement of canned olives artfully displayed on the console table by the front door. Ripe. Large. Spanish. On the window sill, was a tower of fruit cocktail. The sight of canned goods in my living room struck terror in my heart. It was already starting to happen. It’s only a matter of time before I find my dresser lodged in the staircase.

Since we have taken the baby gates down and Sean has had free reign of the house, I am finding all kinds of unusual things in unexpected places. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the whimsy a can of olives can bring to good home design, because I do. Not to mention what they can do for a martini. But at the same time it scares me because I know from experience that it starts out innocently enough accessorizing with a few canned goods here and there, rearranging a few pictures, sorting books large to small, but it won’t be long before he’s moving furniture. Ask my dad.

My parents didn’t go out a lot when I was growing up — partly because they didn’t have a lot of extra money for that kind of thing, but mainly because they were afraid of what they might come home to. Anytime my parents went out for an extended period of time, I would get all Laurie Smith and do a Trading Spaces on my house.

In just a few hours and with no money or a carpenter, I could make over our entire house. I would switch everyone’s bedrooms, taking the largest room for myself of course, and assigning my brothers to my small room. I rearranged and organized everyone’s closets and dresser drawers. I re-hung pictures. I made curtains. Sometimes I even painted.

My parents never seemed to mind or at least they put up with it. Or maybe they were just too tired to move the furniture back. And they never asked how a 60-pound 9-year-old girl could move a bedroom suite by herself. Or maybe they were just afraid to know. I have always been a remarkably resourceful being with a very strong back and an even stronger will. Although, one time I did get a chest of drawers stuck sideways in the staircase. You might expect that when my dad came home to find his dresser stuck betwixt and between the two floors that he might say something like, “What the hell???…” But no. The only question he asked was “Where were you planning to put this anyway?”

And that is why finding olives in my living room is so frightening. Because I know it’s just a matter of time before I come home to find my dresser lodged in the staircase.

Walking The Walk

April 27, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Parenting Gone Awry

When I was growing up, we didn’t have very many toys. If we got anything really special, like a bike, we usually had to save up for it or at least pay something towards it. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, in retrospect it was a good thing.

My brothers and I took care of the few things we had because there was never a question that if we lost or destroyed something, it would just be too bad. No one was going to replace it. One time my brother left his bike unlocked outside a store and someone stole it. It was another summer of mowing yards and delivering papers before he got another one. A very hard lesson, but one that wasn’t lost on me. I saved up for and bought my own car at 17 (1977 Mustang - so cool) and I always took good care of it. I knew if I wrecked it or did something irresponsible, then it would be back to walking.

I bring this up because there is a park across the street from our house. Sean and I have been going there at least once a day, sometimes twice, since before he could even walk. It is always astonishing to me to see the things left behind at the playground - expensive scooters, wagons, bicycles, helmets, basketballs, tennis rackets, shoes and coats. When I see these things I always think how if I were ten or eleven, I would miss my bike or scooter. Especially if I had rode it to the park and then walked home. But it’s not hard to imagine that these things were quickly replaced or perhaps that they were not even missed among the excess that is pervasive in this zip code.

A week or so ago, I sat on a bench looking at an expensive red Radio Flyer wagon that had been sitting in the park for several days. I know it’s expensive because Sean got one for his first birthday — not from his cheapskate parents, but from his indulgent Aunt Terrye and Uncle Jack. If it were up to me, he would have had to have saved up for his own wagon. Kidding! Just half of it. I’d chip in something. As I stood up to leave, I looked in the orphaned wagon to see if there might be something to indicate whose it was. I saw a cell phone and a garage door opener. It made perfect sense. The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. And I had to laugh.

Until it hit me like a bucket of cold water and one of the unchanging laws of the universe settled uncomfortably into my bones: If I want Sean to take care of his belongings, then I have to take care of my belongings. If I want Sean to be responsible, kind and considerate, then I have to be responsible, kind and considerate. “Do as I say, not as I do” means nothing to a two-year-old. It’s a daunting to think that I have to be the kind of person I want my child to be.

Damn those laws of the universe.

My Big Brother is 50!

March 13, 2006 | Antique Childhood

My mother’s first child, my brother John, turns 50 today!

From the stories my mom tells about John, it’s a wonder that they had any more children after him. I guess I owe my life to the iron hand of the Catholic church and the fact that John was just so darn cute they couldn’t stop at one.

John pretty much ruined it for my middle brother and me in terms of getting any perks. For example, if it weren’t for John, I could have had Beatrix Potter-style Peter Rabbit wallpaper in my bedroom. I know this because the remains of it are still in the closet of what was my bedroom in my parent’s house.

When I was a little girl, I asked my mom why the pretty bunny wallpaper was in the closet and not in my room and she told me the story of how as a young mother, she scrimped and saved to buy the Peter Rabbit wallpaper for John’s nursery. And when she could finally afford it, she worked an entire day to hang it. Then she lovingly put her precious first-born child to sleep in his beautiful room with the Peter Rabbit wallpaper. But he later awoke from his slumber in a creative mood and decided to do little baby caveman poo poo drawings, defacing the very image of Peter Rabbbit. That was before the days of scrubbable wallpaper. And that was the end of the wallpaper. Thanks a lot John! Sometimes when I look at my own little boy, I see a lot of my brother John. And that terrifies me. And then I have to go lay down. With a martini.

I figure there were probably lots of cool things other than wallpaper I could have had if John hadn’t been born first, like seconds at the dinner table. But that is all water under the bridge. Today, on the occasion of your 50th birthday John, I forgive you for the Peter Rabbit wallpaper.

Happy Birthday Old Man!

Love,
Your Antique Sister

The Silver Skates

February 23, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Wivian

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was first introduced to figure skating while watching Janet Lynn compete in the 1968 Olympics on television. It was love at first sight. Something about the way the skaters moved across the ice resonated deep within me.

I readily identified with Lynn. Like me, she was a small blonde girl from Illinois with a bad pixie haircut. I immediately began imitating the spirals and spins in front of the TV on the hardwood floors in my socks. I knew it was just something that I had to do. I intuitively knew it was something I could do. But what was an 8-year-old girl to do? I had no skates and I had no money. Ask Mom.

My mom was the master at making impossible things happen. I might have just as well asked for the moon as a pair of skates — there just wasn’t money for that kind of thing. With the powerful combination of prayer, resourcefulness and $2, Mom found a pair of skates for me at the local thrift store that fit me exactly. For some reason unknown, they had been spray painted silver, but I loved them. Then she drove me to the neighborhood park that had a makeshift ice rink (an asphalt rimmed basketball court that they flooded in the winter) to try out my “new” skates.

As I sat in the car lacing up the silver beauties for the first time, Mom gave some basic instructions: Hold your hands out for balance and try to fall on your butt and not your front teeth. And so I hobbled out of the car wearing my snowball hat and my silver skates and made my world debut as the next Janet Lynn to an audience of one. Skating was as natural to me as walking. By the end of the session I was confidently skating backwards and fearlessly trying the jumps and spins I had seen on television.

Figure skating is not a sport for the economically challenged. Over the years, Mom managed to cobble together enough money for some lessons and competitions and eventually some good skates, but it was always tough. Most of the girls I skated with had a wardrobe of expensive costumes and the finest gear. I didn’t know at the time the serious sacrifices my parents made so I could do this thing that I loved. I even got to compete once at Wagon Wheel in Rockton, Illinois, Janet Lynn’s home rink. I skated as much as money would allow until the middle of my high school years when other things, like boys, began to seem more important. But being a figure skater remains central to the core of who I am.

I still love the cold stale smell of an ice rink. I still love to skate, although I’m not as fearless or as flexible as I used to be. And while I did not become the next Janet Lynn, I did get to live out a dream to the best of my ability and resources - thanks to my resourceful mom and the silver skates.

The Fine Art of Goofing Off

February 19, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Papa Ed

Here in the northern reaches of the great state of Texas, it was 85 degrees on Thursday - a wonderfully warm winter day perfect for doing nothing in particular. Sean and I took the opportunity to get out and about in the neighborhood where I hoped to instruct him in the fine art of goofing off.

Goofing off is best done in pairs. My dad and I, who are similarly wired, have always liked to goof off together. Whenever I’m home, Dad and I still head out to the garage and make something with whatever we find out there. And then we paint it. We won’t know what it is when we’re done. We won’t even know when we’re done, unless someone hollers “Dinner’s ready!” Then we’re done.

The memories I have of just hanging out with my dad and doing nothing mean nothing and everything at the same time. Nothing in that nothing extraordinarily memorable happened, everything in that we spent a lot of time together over the years (doing nothing) and that means everything. Today they call that quality time, a term I cannot bring myself to use, in the same way I cannot substitute the term dialogue for talk. You may dialogue. I talk. You may have quality time. I goof off.

Now that Sean is two, it’s time he claimed his heritage and learned how to properly goof off. And Thursday was an excellent day for that. Since Sean is still too little for power tools and paint, we set off together out the front door, hand in hand, with no plan and no purpose, just to see what we could see.

It wasn’t long before we found a very nice big stick. People skilled in the fine art of goofing off recognize the treasure in such an item. It was perfect for poking into gofer holes, perfect for swatting against the trunk of a tree and perfect for carrying like the staff of Moses. Sean was thrilled with the find. “I gotta cane! I gotta cane!” he exclaimed. “Papa George have a cane!” he reminded me, brandishing it like a saber as he kangaroo-jumped over the sidewalk cracks.

As we continued towards the pond on our unplanned adventure, we saw a man and his son fishing. Sean held up his stick and a light bulb lit up over his head. “I do go fishin! I do go fishin!” So off we went to the pond to see what we could catch with this fabulous stick. He cast his imaginary line over and over, long and deep, imitating the man and his son. He reeled in a bounty of invisible fish that we pretended to eat. We both agreed that they were the most delicious fish either of us had ever eaten.

As the sun began to set and the wind turned from the north, I hoisted him onto my back like a mother Koala and we headed back down the path towards home. He wrapped his arms around my neck and as he pressed his face into mine and I felt his eyelashes flutter against my cheek. It reminded me of the first time I felt him move in my womb. It had been a good day.

When we reached the end of the driveway, I set him down and stole a hug. Instead of pulling away and running off like he usually does, he leaned into me and looked into my face, in a manner beyond his two years, as though he was searching for something. I wondered what he was thinking. Could it be that someday he will remember how his mother looked on this warm winter day? Probably not. Perhaps like me, he will remember nothing in particular, only that we never missed an opportunity to do nothing together. And that will mean everything.

EB Claus

February 9, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Antique Friends

My friend EB is an over-indulgent grandmother and an over-indulgent friend and I adore her. Her grandson is a year or two older than Sean. About once a month she shows up at my front door with bags (yes plural - bags) of clothes and toys that her grandson Preston has outgrown. Preston must have a closet the size of Old Navy. We have started calling her EB Claus because when she comes over it’s like Christmas. I remember the day EB gingerly asked me if I would be offended if she brought over some “gently worn” things for Sean. My response was “Would I? How fast can you get here?”

I love hand-me-downs because they come with a history. And they remind me of a simpler time. When I was growing up, I thought the only store in the whole world was K-Mart and that was where the rich people shopped. To get a brand-new store “boughten” (I thought this was a word until I moved out of the mid-west) dress was a very rare thing. I grew up wearing hand-me-downs that came with the history of an entire neighborhood. It was always exciting to see Mom come home from down the street with a brown grocery bag packed with “new” things. With no sisters, it always made me feel cool to wear a dress that I had seen one of the older girls in the neighborhood wear.

A bag of clothes would travel from house to house, season after season as kids grew. A dress that originated down the street would next year go across the street. The following year I would get it and the year after that it would go back across the street. If all the kids in the neighborhood put all their class pictures in a box you would probably see the same dress on a different girl a number of times.

There were many things besides the hand-me-downs that glued this neighborhood together. Like my parents, most of the couples moved into the neighborhood in the 1950s when they were first married. All of them were blue collar. Most of them were Catholic and second generation Italian immigrants. My family is not Italian, although I didn’t know this until I was about seven. I often thought we should buy a few vowels for our last name to keep up. Most of them had at least three kids but some had more. And all of those baby boomin’ kids grew up going from kindergarten through high school together. It was like having 25 brothers and sisters. There was no such thing as a “play group.” If you wanted to “play” then you went outside where there was a “group” of kids playing Freeze Tag or some made up game. Everyone was united in a common struggle to raise decent kids and to get by. Fifty years later, most of those post-WWII couples, including my parents, are still married and still live there on the same street in the same houses.

While my parents could not afford to give me “store-boughten” clothes, they did provide me an environment of stability and steadiness that can only be bought with time. Now as I struggle to figure out how to create a sense of community for Sean, I realize what a rare and tremendous blessing that was and how hard it is to do these days.

Sean really enjoys his hand-me-downs from EB Claus. Next year when he has outgrown them, we will pass them along, but probably not to anyone who lives across the street or down the block. I love my neighborhood and care deeply for our many friends here, but there is not the glue of common ethnicity or faith or circumstance. There is no real common struggle. And part of me holds something back because I know that there will be no history to be built over the course of Sean’s childhood, because by this time next year, many of my neighbors will live some place else.

The Scavenger

January 17, 2006 | Antique Childhood, Makes Me Sigh

The summer I was about eight or nine, my girlfriend and I would walk to Vespa’s, the local family-owned grocery store about once a day. As we walked the quarter mile to the store, we would look in the shallow ditches for soda bottles. We’d usually find one or two or sometimes even three. Vespa’s would give us five cents for each bottle we brought in. We would then take our earnings directly across the street to B&B, a family-owned candy store, and spend 45 minutes to an hour studying the glass case trying to figure out how to best spend our earnings. That was the day of penny candy and you could get a generous bag of candy for 10 or 15 cents. So much to choose from — wax lips, candy cigarettes, Jolly Ranchers, Pixie Stix, Jaw Breakers, things that would fizz and pop in your mouth. And then without a care in the world, we would slowly walk home eating our way through the little waxy white bag of goodies and arguing over who was cuter, David Cassidy or Donny Osmond.

My son will never have to scavenge soda bottles for candy. And that is unfortunate. I am in a position to give him anything and everything except for the one thing I would really like to give him, something that has been lost to the ages — a lazy carefree, unscheduled, unsupervised summer afternoon of enterprising scavenging with a friend.

There are no sidewalks with ditches around here. There is no family-owned corner store. There are no more penny candies. There is no candy store. And even if there were I would never let him get a quarter mile out of my sight.

The new millennium has brought us so many good things — so many things that will make his life better and longer. But as I look at a little boy who will never know what it’s like to be the boss of his summer day or feel the wind blowing through his hair as he independently explores and discovers the world on his bike, I think I would like to give back some technology in exchange for some innocence.