Tag Archives: memories

The Box — Day 3

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Another day, another question in my 10 days of self-evaluation and reflection, aka faux Rosh Hashanah.  The first two questions invoked some strong emotions as I answered the questions.  But, I suppose it wouldn’t lead to true reflection if the questions were soft ball questions.  Asking things like, “Where do you like to eat lunch?” doesn’t really make you think….or maybe it does if you have strong feelings about lunch, lunch foods, lunch habits, and / or lunch places.  I don’t, so the questions that the website 10Q sends are more in line with my expectations.

Question:  Think about a major milestone that happened with your family this past year. How has this affected you?

 

It took me awhile to think of an answer for this question because my first inclination was to try to think of milestone birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, births, etc. that took place this past year.  I couldn’t think of any that I would consider a major milestone.  But it was the 5th anniversary of my father’s death this year, and I relive that milestone each year.

My father’s death marked a major shift in the lives of my family, especially my father’s side of the family.  And while there has been healing, there will never be full recovery.

When I moved into my new house, I also moved a box of files that I brought home with me from Mexico, where my father had been living when he unexpectedly passed away.  Since the time of his death, this box has been sitting in closets, or workshops, or man caves.  Since we closed his estate last year, I had started to finally go through the box and decide what could be shredded and what needed to be saved.  After I moved, it was a project that I took on one weekend.

I only wish that my dad’s box looked so well. A trip from Mexico meant that it was very beat up.

I had looked through this box of files many, many times after my dad first died in an effort to find answers about his health and about his finances.  I knew that the box was a duke’s mixture of items — all the information on the house that he was in the process of buying when he died to a list of the #1 songs on the Billboard chart in 1965.  A single file folder could be a lot of nothing, or it could be full of valuable information.

I hadn’t gone through that box in a couple of years until this year.  And the simple act of cleaning out the box and sorting through his files had a deep impact on me.  I laughed out loud at some of the items that I found, like his application to his 50th high school reunion that took place a couple of months after he died.  On his application, he was asked to answer the question “What have you been doing the last 50 years?”  His response “Living life to the fullest and having a great time.”  Yep.  And he answered the question “What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?” by saying “Being the best at living life to the fullest and having a great time.”  Double yep.

I also felt incredibly sad as I found record of some of the times that he struggled, trying to make ends meet, and sometimes finding it hard to do.

Revisiting this box and its items, without the overwhelming grief that accompanied my first forays into its confines immediately after his death, allowed me to feel like I had spent the weekend communing in some small way with my dad.  That is a major happening, whichever way you look at it.

Two thousand zero zero party over whoops out of time

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Another holiday season is coming to an end.  I’ve been listening to NPR in the car, and there have been several “Best of 2013”, “Most Interesting of 2013”, “Most Polarizing of 2013”, etc. lists going around.  I’m ambivalent about all those lists.  I hardly ever agree with the choices because I see events through a different lens than the authors of the lists, but I enjoy the reminders of the events that have taken place in just 365 short days.  It’s surprising how much can happen in just a year.

But what’s been on my mind lately hasn’t been recent memories–it has been more distant memories, specifically those of my teenage years.  Two things have prompted teenage reminiscing:  my mom just got her first smart phone and my uncle found a copy of an old VHS tape of my dance recital from 1986.

I am excited that my mom got a smart phone.  Now we can text, we can Facetime, she can try all these new apps.  The phone paid for itself when she got to see my nieces and nephew on Facetime all the way across the country on Christmas Eve.  Awesome.

And as my mom was asking me all these questions about her smart phone (as she was talking to me from her “land line”, as we call her home phone), I started to think about not having a home phone anymore.  Matt and I don’t have a home phone, we each have mobile phones.  You want to reach me, you call me.  Want Matt, call his number.  When I was growing up, however, you called a person’s house and you got whomever answered the phone.  It was a crap shoot.  And for a long time during my growing up years, an answering machine was nonexistent.  No one home?  Call back later, chump.

How do teenage girls do it these days?  For me, the home phone was the key to maintaining hope. My mom wouldn’t let me or my sister call boys — “if they like you, they will call you.  Ladies don’t call boys.” — so we had to rely on the boys to make the first telephonic move.

I didn’t have a lot (count any) boyfriends in my teen years, but had lots of crushes and wanted desperately for my crushes to call me on the phone.  Thank goodness I grew up before smart phones because I totally relied on the “he must have called while I was gone” excuse.  The “he has a sister that is always on the phone so he can’t use it to call me” rationale.  The ever-popular “he’s not at home to call me” logic.

I was the teenage princess of denial, but I had the perfect tool to feed my delusion with the home phone, sans caller ID and voice mail, stuck to the wall somewhere in the house, totally not mobile.

I feel sorry for teenagers these days.  There’s no way to create an illusion of “I missed his call” anymore.  There are no more “missed calls” — the number and time and date of every call that came in is captured until deleted.  There’s no way to call his house and hang up when he answers and not get busted anymore (I don’t think, but I don’t know all the rules).  Everyone’s number and name (and sometimes their picture) pops up when they call you. 

The only thing that you can’t hide is the fact that when they don’t call, you know that they don’t call.  So sad.  I’m sorry, all you teenagers.  Technology’s not looking so great now, huh?

Then there was THE dance recital.  My uncle found the VHS tape and I sent it off for conversion to DVD.  Loved watching us dance to what we thought at the time was the greatest dance ever choreographed.  A little sad to have another delusion exposed.

For your enjoyment, here’s a loop of me (in the middle), shaking it like I was 16.  Hard to believe that I didn’t have a lot of boyfriends, right?

lionm

Billy Joel, thanks, dude

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I know that there have been dozens (or more) of articles and blogs about how music can evoke memories.  You know, the song that takes you back to the year you got your driver’s license, or back to your senior prom, or the song that was playing when you broke up with a serious girl or boyfriend?  For years I couldn’t listen to Bryan Adam’s Everything I Do (I Do For You) without getting sad.  I am not sure why it had such a powerful effect on me — I assume it had to do with the rough patches my ex-boyfriend and I were going through at the time Robin Hood was released.  Now I can listen to it with no problem.

Myrtle Beach Amusement Park
http://youthguy07.blogspot.com/2012/08/remembering-myrtle-beach-pavilion.html

Joan Jett singing Crimson and Clover takes me to the amusement park at the Pavilion at Myrtle Beach and a ride there, where the song was blasting and I felt as good as I have felt.

Then sometimes a song captures the feelings that you are having right now, rather than bringing back emotions.

That’s what happened to me today.

The best way to describe how I’ve been feeling lately is like time is passing and I’m missing something.  I think there are several things driving this feeling:

  • I’m having a mid-life plight.  Not a crisis — a plight.  Let’s get that straight.  But I am pondering how I have spent the last 20+ years and if I want to spend the next 20 doing the same thing.
  • My sister and I closed our dad’s estate last week.  I wasn’t expecting it to make me as sad as it did.  And it also made me think about what a person leaves behind when they pass.  The material things are not important — it’s the stories and the memories by which my sister and I feel most blessed.

So, today, when my iPhone music shuffled to Piano Man by Billy Joel, two things happened.  First, a Billy Joel song took me right back to my adolescent and teenage years.  He was one of my favorite singers when I was growing up.  Second, the lyrics of the song hit me in the gut:

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There’s an old man sitting next to me
Making love to his tonic and gin

He says, “Son can you play me a memory
I’m not really sure how it goes
But it’s sad and it’s sweet
And I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man’s clothes”

Billy Joel http://www.billyjoel.com

Oh, Billy, you say the best.   Time is passing, and sometimes the memory is just out of reach.  But I can take comfort in the fact that the memory is sad and sweet and it was mine.  And I’ll have sweet, sad (and happy) memories from this stage of my life, too.

Now, I just have to find the music that will bring me back to now.

Hey, Matt — let’s buy those tickets to shoot zombies with the paintball guns.  And let’s play some rockin’ music while we do it.

In memory

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I am incredibly sad tonight.

Around 11 AM, I found out via Facebook that one of the firefighters killed in the Yarnell, AZ, fire was someone with whom I went to school from elementary through high school.  While I was in college, he was in a serious relationship for several years with one of my first cousins, so I would see him at holidays and other family events with her.

But my memories of Eric are not from those later years, but always from high school.  I remember a cute boy, a really good athlete, soft-spoken and somewhat socially awkward.

And I am saddened by his death.

I am also saddened by the tremendous wave of nostalgia that has engulfed me as all the memories of high school have flooded back as a result.

For me, this was the time in my life of true innocence.  I had yet to encounter anyone with an ulterior motive; good things seemed to happen to good people; I didn’t really know any “bad” people.  I was blessed beyond all measure.

Life was:  football games, homework, talking on the phone (a land line), passing notes (no texting), spending the summers at the lake, the smell of sweat in the school gym, cruising town on the weekends, going on dates, gossiping about who was dating who, trying to find enough money to go to McDonald’s after school, cheerleading practice, T-P’ing someone’s house….

That innocence, that fun, that lack of responsibility — it makes me sad to think about how I didn’t appreciate those wonderful days when I was there.

Everyone always says that “if they knew then, what they knew now….”   If I knew then, what I know now, I would breathe in even more precious minutes than I did.  Knowing now what I know now, there’s nothing stopping me from doing that.

And if I knew then, what I know now, I would take extra minutes to ask Eric (and Tammy, and Chuck, and Scott, and Kim and all the others that we have lost so young), “Hey!  Want to hang out?”

Have those lips been kissed?

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Twice recently, I have received a bag or a box of memorabilia, mostly related to my father.  It has been wonderful either seeing pictures that I have never seen before or reliving old memories.

But it has also made me sad.  When my mom remarried and sold the house in which my sister and I grew up, I was in the midst of a depression.  We were cleaning out our childhood rooms and going through 25 years of accumulated detritus.  Since I was depressed, I had no sense of sentimentality, at all.  I threw away most of the keepsakes of my youth — pictures, yearbooks, awards.  I wish that I had kept all that stuff.

One thing that I DID keep was a poem.  It was written by Jim Maloney.  We went to school together from elementary school through high school graduation.

Jim may have written this to be satirical (I was often the butt of teasing because of my goody-two-shoes mentality, but my mother had me convinced that anything beyond chaste kissing would result in the total ruin of the rest of my life — no job, no husband, no family, no income — life in the street, living for handouts), but I have hung on to it, choosing instead to think of it as my own personal ode.

Jim–I thank you.  This poem brings a smile to my face, 25 years later.

Have Those Lips Been Kissed

Have Those Lips Been Kissed

Have Those Lips Yet Been Kissed?

Cristy, of extreme beauty and grace,

even more than the goddess of beauty in face,

And the body fair, as a swan in flight.

The subject of many a dream at night.

Upon thinking, one most wonder.

When dreaming, one must ponder.

Have those lips yet been kissed?

Have young men in their velvet prime missed?

One could fight for thee with sword or fist.

For have those lips yet been kissed?

Cristy, of wonderful beauty and charm,

Could any one dare to do thee harm?

The vilest evil, the coldest heart,

Not one could damage, not even start.

When thinking, one most wonder.

Upon dreaming, one must ponder.

Young men would kill for just one kiss.

And when you’re gone the world will miss.

And one would fight with sword or fist.

And kill one another for just one kiss.

–Jim Maloney

The gift of the love note

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Matt and I were invited to a Christmas party at my cousin’s house earlier in the month.  We had a great time (a bonus of not having depression).  Before we left, my cousin, Beth, gave me bag that her mother had sent to me.  It was full of items that had been in my grandmother’s house when she passed away, and my Aunt Linda was sending them to me for division between my sister and me.  It was mostly pictures that Grandma had, and the majority of those pictures were of my nieces and nephew, marking their growth and milestones.

But there were also some memorabilia related to my dad.  There was a school report about baseball (with a grade of 97), a model car that he had put together as a boy, and some of her favorite pictures of him.

Like most people who have lost a close loved one, I think a lot about my dad during the holidays.  I remember the fact that he always put his shopping off until the very last minute.  I remember that Christmas Eve that he tried to fix our stuck back door and we ended up with the back door in the back yard–but it wasn’t stuck anymore.  And when we get together with the rest of our family, I miss his presence.

Thus, the memorabilia that was in the bag that was specific to him felt like a Christmas present.  It was wonderful to pull out the toy car and read the report on baseball.

And I was reminded that my dad was, to his bones, an optimistic person.  He was a natural salesman and spent most of his adult life in some sort of sales job.  He was always quite successful at sales because he connected so well with people.  Maybe because of that optimism I mentioned.

In the bag of items were two love notes that he wrote as a boy.  One of them perfectly illustrates that “never give up” attitude.  He had it even as a young man.

Love note

Love note

Dear Cathy I ham (sic) very fond of you.  And I know you love smity.  And I know you have some more boy friend.  But I still love you.  love Tommy.

I love this love letter.  He recognizes that Cathy loves someone else (Smity), but it doesn’t matter–Tommy still loves her.  It’s that optimistic, glass-half-full outlook that he exhibited until he died.

This little note may have been the best gift I got this year.

Tommy

Tommy

My Music Debut Then and Now!

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I love to sing!  It is one of my favorite things to do.  When I was little, I just knew that I was going to be a famous singer when I grew up.  I loved Olivia Newton-John and Leslie Gore.  Don’t know who Leslie Gore is?  She sang “It’s My Party” (and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to…) and my mom had her album.  I played it over and over growing up.

I made my singing debut around the age of 8 during my 3rd grade Halloween Carnival talent show.  I sang “Don’t Cry Out Loud” for two shows.  I look back at that and wonder that no one laughed Out Loud at an 8 year singing:

Don’t cry out loud

Just keep it inside and learn how to hide your feelings

Fly high and proud

And if you should fall, remember you almost had it all

I mean, seriously….

My next singing performance was about the same year at the Glendale Springs Missionary Baptist Church, where I sang “Just Build My Mansion (Next Door to Jesus)”.  I still remember what I wore — a blue pleated skirt with a matching blue top, that had a white pilgrim collar with a rose at the throat.  I belted out “It doesn’t matter who lives around me, just so my mansion sets near the throne.”

But here’s the thing:  I can’t sing.  Not a lick.  I think I may be tone deaf.  I didn’t know it (obviously) during my talent show performance nor during singing in church, but my friend, Melissa Sheets, told me soon after the church performance that I couldn’t sing very well.

And other friends continued to give me feedback.  My best friend in high school, Becki, only allowed me to sing on my birthday and prom night, i.e. special occasions.  When I sing now, Matt says that he can hear dogs howling.

Thank goodness for long commutes in my car and my iPhone app Songify.  This app allows me to “produce” myself.  Check it out–I recorded my haiku tribute to Diet Coke.  It rocks.

Let’s See You Match Me With This

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We hardly ever watch network TV in our house, but we have been watching the Olympics since they have been on.  I guess the Olympic-watching crowd is mostly single because I have been overwhelmed by the number of match.com and eharmony.com commercials that come on.  Every time one of these commercials comes on, I think, “I’m so glad that I don’t have to date anymore.”

Matt tells me that I am the worst dater that he has ever met.  He says that he didn’t like me the first, second or third time that he met me.  On our first official date, I remembered that I had a prescription that I had to pick up before the pharmacy closed.  I thought that I was being extremely flexible when I told him that I had to go to the drugstore so we could (1) go together, (2) I could go and he could wait for me at the restaurant or (3) we could call the evening done and talk later.  Matt has said that it wasn’t being flexible, it was being the worst date ever.  (By the way, he opted to go with me to the drugstore.  I told him that I could have bought a bunch of yeast infection medicine and foot fungus treatment and then he could call it the worst date ever.)

My bad dating skills aren’t the worst around.  Recently, we had a girls’ weekend at my mom’s house with my mom, aunts and cousins.  During the course of the night, my Aunt Margo told the story about going on a double date with her ex-husband (her boyfriend at the time) and another couple back when they were all in high school.  I can’t remember the names of the other couple, and it really doesn’t matter, but the story goes that as they were driving through town the other girl yelled, “Stop the car!  I gotta shit!”

Even as I laughed, all I could do was think a couple of things.  First, I was surprised that the teenagers of what I’ve always thought of as my mom’s squeaky clean background would use the word “shit”.  Then I kept wondering why the girl (let’s call her Jane Doe), why Jane Doe would think that it would be okay to just yell out “I gotta shit”.  Did she grow up in one of those houses where talking about that was normal?  Like “I’m thirsty” or “I’m hungry”?  I’ve never been in a house like that, but surely they exist.  Or maybe she was trying to turn off her date?  I guess we’ll never know.

Then my Aunt Bobbie piped up and told us about one time when she was out on a double date.  My Aunt Bobbie worked at the hospital for 30+ years and was working there as a young woman during the time of the story.  She and her companions were out on their date when she realized that she needed to check on a patient that might be released.  She said to them, “We need to run by the hospital so I can check to see if I have a discharge.”

I laughed even harder at this story because this would So. Totally. Happen. to me.  I misunderstand people and they misunderstand me all the time.  Just word choice, I guess, and where your head is and their head is.  Like recently, I had to have a colonoscopy.  Which means drinking this nasty stuff called “movi-prep” the night before.  The next day before the procedure, the nurse asked, “Did you get clean from the movi-prep?”  And I said, “Yes, I took a shower this morning, so I don’t have any on me.”  She said, “No, are you cleaned out?”  Oh, yeah, that too.

And I just realized that my story and my Aunt Margo’s story both come back to poo.  Maybe I do know one of those households and it’s mine.

Happy Birthday to My Mother

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Today is my mom’s birthday.  I called her tonight to wish her “Happy Birthday” and she was getting ready to have dinner with some friends.

Growing up, my sister, cousins and I used to have the best birthdays.  They weren’t huge parties and they didn’t involve huge cakes or mounds of presents, they just included small parties at my Mamaw and Papaw’s house.

Wendi, Matt, Birthday Girl JJ, Cristy & Ashleigh

On the Sunday closest to the birthday, after all the lunch dishes were washed and the kitchen table was cleared, the birthday cake was brought out and placed before the guest of honor.  The rest of us gathered around and sang “Happy Birthday”, while our aunts and Mamaw looked on, then we got down to eating cake and opening presents.

Ashleigh, Birthday Girl Cristy and Matt
Aunt Baby, gamely wearing her headdress

I don’t remember any of us having big parties where lots of people were invited, where school friends came, where venues were rented out to entertain all the attendees.  Instead, I remember these simple Sundays at Mamaw’s with just my family.

One birthday that stands out was either my cousin Matt’s or my cousin Wendi’s.  I know it was one of them because the mother of the birthday girl or boy was responsible for bringing the cake and on this birthday, the cake had had an accident.  My Aunt Mary June (Wendi & Matt’s mom) had put the cake on the roof of the car while packing the car, unlocking the door (back in the day of inserting a key into a door lock), etc. and she forgot it was on the roof.  She drove off and the cake fell off.

The damage was minimal.  We only had to pick a little bit of gravel out of the icing before we cut into the cake.  We kids thought that was hilarious.

Front:  Birthday Girl, JJ, and Cristy
Back:  Mamaw, Aunt Margo, Mom and Aunt Baby
(One of my FAVORITE pictures–love my Mamaw in a birthday hat)
Birthday Girl, Ashleigh

If it wasn’t our birthday, we didn’t expect to get any gifts.  Only the birthday boy or girl had presents to open, and the rest of us were okay with that.  But, the birthday guest of honor usually let the others play with his / her presents.

I hear about the parties that parents throw their kids these days and I’m a little astounded.  They seem like very complicated and expensive.  But I don’t have children, so this is a current mystery that I just cannot answer.

But I can say with complete confidence that these birthdays of my youth were wonderful days, full of laughter, happy expectations, and feelings of being special for the day.

I hope that my mom is having as wonderful day today as she provided for me all those many birthdays.

Happy Birthday, Mama!

Kindergarten Memories

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I met one of my good friends for dinner the other night (*waves* Hi, Nikki!) and one of the things that we talked about was her oldest child starting kindergarten this fall semester.  She’s excited and proud and nervous (about him potentially riding the bus) all at once.

Waking up for the first day of Kindergarten

I started to think about my first day at school, and yes, that included riding the school bus.  Mrs. McConnell was my kindergarten teacher and I remember walking into the school room full of other kids.  Here, I met Marla Miller, Scott Bare, Jimmy Thompson and Lance Shumate.  I remember Marla being the first one to talk and play with me (I was too shy to talk to another kid first myself).  I remember Jimmy Thompson kissing Vicky Barker and being shocked (I was a strict rule follower and kissing definitely didn’t follow the rules of the classroom).

And on the bus home that afternoon, our neighbor’s son, Jamie, who was in 7th grade, took my hand and walked me up the bus aisle and helped me climb off the bus.

Waving “Good-bye” on my first day

Marla, Jimmy, Scott and Lance were friends until we graduated from high school.  With the creation of Facebook, I actually know a lot about what is going on in the lives of many of these same people.  Where they live, what they do for a living, if they have children, even what their children look like.  Kindergarten is definitely a watershed moment in a life.  A great beginning — to make friends that can last for the rest of your life, to begin the journey of learning, to begin the process of your world opening up beyond the confines of your family.  I’m a little jealous that I don’t have any such “big Milestone” moment left in my life.

As I look at these pictures, however, I think that my days are actually not that much different than they were back in kindergarten.  I look pretty much the same when I wake up (no “bright-eyed”, morning person for me).  Then I wave good-bye to Matt and head to work.  Sometimes, though, work feels like spending my day with 5 year olds, fighting for attention and arguing over toys.  “I didn’t do it.  He did it.”  “No, she did it.”  “It wasn’t us.” echo around the halls.  The only thing missing is nap time.  And we aren’t as cute with milk mustaches.

And like in kindergarten, whether I end the day with my name in the column for making good decisions or in the column for being a poopy head is entirely up to me.  I don’t wanna be a poopy head so I’ll do my best not to be.  Unless someone kisses me, then all bets are off.