Old Photographs and Memories

I received a letter from a cousin of mine today and enclosed were a handful of old family photos that she had found going through some albums. There were several of my parents and aunts and uncles over the last several years of their lives, but the two on the bottom were the surprise. It was me at eleven years old, wearing a long dress, sitting on a stool in front of one of those big old radios -- remember those? It was taken on February 14, 1945 and on the back of the photo my mother had written that I was going to a valentine party that night at a little club I belonged to and that I was elected Queen of Hearts that night.

I wish I could say I remember the event vividly, but I actually have very few memories of my childhood. It wasn't a particularly happy time except for when the pilots, stationed at the air base near my hometown, and their wives lived with us during the war -- a time I wrote a post about not long ago. As it happened, the dress I'm wearing in the photo was the same one I wore when I was a member of the wedding of one of the pilots. That I remember vividly. Strange what memories stay tucked away in your mind, while others were lost somewhere along the way.

I hadn't seen any of my cousins in nearly forty years when we finally got together again a little over three years ago at my son's house in Dallas, Texas. There are only six of us left, one was unable to make it, but the other four came with wives and husbands from various parts of Texas. My son had just bought his house and I had told them that while it was a great house, he had no furniture to speak of. So, they all brought lawn chairs and coolers and photo albums. We spread out in his big empty den off the kitchen and proceeded to look back over the past forty years. It was marvelous fun!

When I married my children's father, whom as many of you know by now, is black, a couple of my aunts and uncles refused to have me in their house. Now it seemed the time had come to put all that stuff behind us and be the family we had once been. They were impressed with my son -- of course they would be! he's wonderful! We took pictures and laughed and looked old photo albums, ate pizza, toasted the day with a bottle of champagne and it was quite late before they left for their hotel.

We stay in very close touch these days -- of course, email makes that easy, but I'm so grateful we had that opportunity to reunite. Since then the husband of one of my cousins died the next year of pancreatic cancer. About the same time the cousin I use to spend every summer with at our grandmother's house was diagnosed with breast and liver cancer. She's holding on and is amazingly brave.

So, it's been a nostalgic evening, with good memories and sad ones, but the good ones, the lovely ones are the ones to hold on to and we'll all weather the sad ones. Times like these help to put things in perspective. Helps you to realize that the politics will come and go, the country will survive and it is up to each of us to make the very best of our lives, each hour and each day, to enjoy our chilren and families and to let them know just how much they are loved.

So, for tonight I shall push all the grim news of the day, the politics, the doubts, the fears for the future, into the space under the stairway, put on some music, look at the pictures again and remember and be grateful and toast my family with a glass of wine.

All is Well in Seattle

It was a long and nightmarish day, but all is well now. My old email account is shut down, I have a new one.

Wanted to share a bit of humor from my old and good friend, Mako. Believe me, after a day like yesterday, I can use a good laugh. Hope you can, too.


The Right Grandma

The doctor that had been seeing an 80-year-old woman for most of her life finally retired. At her next checkup, the new doctor told her to bring a list of all the medicines that had been prescribed for her.

As the young doctor was looking through these, his eyes grew wide as he realized she had a prescription for birth control pills.

'Mrs. Smith, do you realize these are BIRTH CONTROL pills?'

''Yes, they help me sleep at night.''

'Mrs. Smith, I assure you there is absolutely NOTHING in these that could possibly help you sleep!'

She reached out and patted the young Doctor's knee.

"Yes, dear, I know that. But every morning, I grind one up and mix it in the glass of orange juice that my 16-year-old-granddaughter drinks. And, believe me, it helps me sleep at night.

Hmmmm! Too bad that the daughter of you-know-who didn't have nice grandma like this one.

Summers in Hico

In case you’re wondering, Hico is a very small town in Hamilton County, Texas. It was founded in 1856. According to early day reports, by 1907, more cotton was bought right off wagons on the main street than in any town in the world. But I digress, my grandparents lived in Hico for many, many years and as a child I spent much time there. There were some Christmases with the entire family of aunts and uncles and cousins. I always loved those holidays because my grandparent’s house had a fireplace! I knew for sure that Santa Claus couldn’t miss that and I was confident there would be even more presents that year.

But the most vivid memories are the summers that I spent there with my cousin, Jane Ann, who was a couple of years younger, but who shared the same love of paper dolls that I did. Now back then you didn’t buy paper dolls at a toy store, you cut them out of pattern books that you could find in the fabric section of what passed for department stores in those days.

Hico was a very small town and our grandparent’s big, old house was close enough for us to be able to walk to town. Within a day or two of our arrival, Jane Ann and I would walk downtown, first to the post office to visit with Thoma, a lovely lady who worked there and who took the mail from our grandparent’s mail box for us. She nearly always had a treat for us as well. Our main goal, however, was the store where we knew there might be an extra pattern book or two from the past month that one of the clerks would have kept under the counter just for the likes of us – our grandmother kept them informed of our visits. But before we carried the heavy pattern books home, we stopped by the local drug store to have an ice cream cone, it was always fun to climb up on the tall stools at the counter and watch the man who worked there load up the cones with, what we were sure was the best ice cream in the world. Then, with ice cream smeared faces, we would head for Mama’s house with the pattern book. And if we were lucky we might even be able to find a wallpaper sample book that we liked to have to make furniture for the paper dolls.

We would spend days, cutting out dozens of ladies and men and children from the pattern book. We always had large families – Jane Ann had an older brother, but I was an only child. I wanted lots of children in my paper family – I carried that desire on to my real family many years later.

We played for hours on the floor of living room there in my grandparent’s house. Sometimes we argued over who was to get a particular paper doll and sometimes those arguments resulted in tears. I do remember one summer when I finally succeeded in getting a prized paper doll much to the disappointment of Jane Ann. Later that year when I learned that she had injured her arm, I felt so badly that I had my mother put the disputed paper doll in an envelope and send it to Jane Ann.

The memories of those summers still play out quite vividly in my mind. The sound of the crickets and the birds in the trees that surrounded the house and could be heard so clearly as we lay in our beds on the screened in sleeping porch. I can clearly remember watching my Grandfather milking the cow in the evenings; running up and down along the fence to the small pasture playing with the young calf, poking grass through the wire for him to wrap his long tongue around.

Lovely memories, made even more dear since I was able to reconnect with, not only Jane Ann, but four of my cousins, their husbands and wife. They came to Dallas where I was visiting my oldest son, David. I hadn’t seen most of them in over thirty years and it was the most fun ever. We met at David’s new house – so new that there was no furniture to speak of and they all brought lawn chairs and we sat around his big empty den and laughed and remembered and ate pizza. Those are very poignant memories for me these days because the husband of my cousin, Laura, died this past year of cancer and Jane Ann was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year.

How blessed we all are to have beautiful and happy memories!

The old black and white photo is my grandparents and their five children.
The next is of the house today with the families of the original five, well, without me. We had been out of touch when this was taken. The last photo is a corner on the main street in Hico.