I wonder . . .

I’ve been watching Dancing With The Stars these past few weeks. The season just ended and for the finale they brought back some of the original stars from the beginning. One of them was Gladys Knight (Pipless of course) and I got to wondering . . . whatever happened to her Pips anyway? I know Gladys struck off on her own years back and if I google it, I learn that it happened back in 1989. But what of her background singers, the Pips? And what the heck is a Pip anyway?

As far as backup singers go, the three Pips were the best. In fact, I saw a comedy sketch once where the Pips performed Gladys-less. They sounded pretty good too. Harmonized perfectly with their doo waas and ooh diddies. The only thing missing were the lyrics of the actual song which made it somewhat of a different kind of experience, regardless of how well it was Pipped. 

But so . . . where are the three of them now? Did they take advantage of that Pip Pension Plan after Gladys gave them the heave ho? Have they all retired comfortably to some remote island in the Caribbean? Or did they have to go on working even after Gladys decided to go Pipless? Maybe they landed another job singing back up. With obviously less notoriety, a less memorable name for their twilight years. Or maybe they had to get a job doing something they were untrained for: someone’s accountant, a bank teller, grocery store clerk. I don’t know about you, but I sure wouldn’t have recognized a Pip if one waited on me at a restaurant. Or sold me a pair of shoes. Or called to offer me a deal on solar panels.

So just where are those Pips anyway? And come to think of it, where the heck did Tony Orlando put Dawn?  

Annual Scrapbooking Weekend . . .

Well it's about time! You've been home for almost three weeks--the least you could do is talk about the weekend!


Okay, okay. I'm sorry. What can I say . . . I've been busy.


How about I share some pictures?


Here's my little spot . . .

And here's the rest of the workroom. Ain't it cute! 

yes that IS facebook up on my screen. But hey . . . I need a break from time to time!

 And here's the basket that Susan won when one of us drew her name.  Darn it! I wanted to win. Once, when I first started coming, they drew my name. It was so cool! All sorts of scrapbooking tools and stuff. . .

 And here are a few of the pages I got done.

We go every year . . . a group of about sixteen of us and we work for four wonderful days, cropping and stamping and glittering and journaling. Sometimes we even take showers and get dressed! But it's not unusual to find us still in our jammies and slippers late into the afternoon. Because, as I said . . . it's all about the work. 

We've used the same location for the last five years, The Red Barn Inn up in Coldspring. Ain't it the cutest little place you ever seen? It's run by the owners who cater to quilters and, of course, scrapbookers but the way they feed us, you'd think we were royalty! 

So I got my son's scout album done while I was there--just in time for his Eagle Court of Honor coming up here on the 4th of February. 

pictures of that will follow   

What Was I Thinking?

It’s funny what you learn about yourself while cleaning things you haven’t cleaned in some nineteen years. That’s how long my husband and I have been in this house. That’s how long we’ve had to fill every nook and cranny of every drawer and cabinet. Okay, okay…  I’ve already admitted to how we are a couple of packrats. So you know I have a tendency to “keep stuff.” I think I got that from my father whose collection ran more along the line of farm equipment and other rusty, old mechanical stuff. Dad had more room than I do so his collection was far more magnificent than mine. I remember one day when he came home all excited because he found a fire truck for sale. A fire truck! Mom wouldn’t let him buy it though. For obvious reasons.

Dad collected lots of other stuff though—stuff folks thought was pretty useless and didn’t want anymore. And he’d usually find a way to put his miscellaneous assortment to work. Like the time someone rolled their car on the curve that ran in the front of the house. See we lived on a really sharp curve. One that people would constantly misjudge. We saw a lot of accidents while we lived there and somehow dad (always the negotiator) would find a way to capitalize. So there was the time of the rolled Corvair. The engine was good but the body was trashed. So Dad talked the owner out of it, tossed the motor into one pile and the body into another. Long about the time I was to get my license, Dad ran across another Corvair owner, one who’d blown his engine. So he talked the owner out of that too. Then he put the two good parts together and made my first car.

Dad was like that. Practical. Me, I just save stupid stuff. Like the things I ran across when I was cleaning out the master bath. Apparently, I’ve saved every “extra button” that came with every garment I’ve bought in the last nineteen years. Just tossed them into an extra drawer.

And those tiny locks that go on luggage when you travel? Seems I bought a new one every time I had a need for one. 

And then there are the more curious aspects to my adventure in cleaning. I mean . . . really? How many pregnancy test kits and condoms does one pre-menopausal woman need anyway?

Regardless of whether I got my hording hormone from Dad, it seems pretty clear that he was better at it than I am. At least he got to do something with most of the stuff he collected. But me? Pssshhh

Anyone need a button? Or a lock? How about a fifteen year old condom? I think I'm finally going to toss them . . . going . . . going . . .

Oh, maybe not.

Human Clay

I was thinking today about a woman I met a while back. I’d been filling in for the teacher in my Core Training class. The class has gotten fairly popular recently and gets pretty crowded. But back then, only a few of us die-hards would show up on a regular basis. And on that particular day, there was only one woman besides me. Needless to say, it was an easy class to teach! 

So it was that the two of us talked a lot for that hour. And somehow we ended up on the topic of how/where/when we grew up. She, it turns out, was raised in New York City where her first nineteen years were spent in an apartment. She talked about how it felt to live sixteen stories up. How the sound of the street was non-existence and how safety was in height.

She told me about when she’d gotten married, taken straight from daddy’s arms into those of her new husband and how the first thing they did was to move. Out of the city and into the suburbs where her one story, single family house freaked her completely out for the first few months. She told me how terrified she was of being at ground level, to hear traffic on the streets outside. To know that the window of her bedroom was all that separated her from the potential stranger lurking somewhere out there.

How odd that I never considered a lifestyle so different from my own. So different from the farm where I was raised, where safety was in distance not in height. In being close enough to the earth to touch the dirt with my bare feet. To walk outside and get lost in the silence of trees and orchard and land and sky . . . for as far as the eye could see.

I tried to place myself in her setting: a taxi cab at the curb instead of an old, rusty truck. Skipping along crowded sidewalks to get to school rather than that one mile walk along a country road where a car might pass on occasion. Tall buildings that reach toward the clouds and crowd the horizon like they own it. As opposed to those endless almond trees, grape vines and barbed wire fences stretching on and on to infinity.

To a certain extent, we’re all carved and shaped by our beginnings. Formed into the persons we become by the mold of our surroundings. I could no easier imagine being rooted in the city than she could envision living out her youth on the farm. And yet, there we both were, together in Tim’s Core Training Class in Houston,Texas, flung together by life, time, age. And possibly the shared need to transcend our flabby middles—a shape we now shared . . . regardless the earlier molds we were cut from.  

Time is a clever thief

Time is a clever thief, he thinks, as it marches out the door

For now that I know full well its worth, I don’t seem to have any more.

I think about time a lot, what a funny thing it is. How, when we were kids, it was actually possible to get bored. We’d whine at our parents, “I got nothing to dooooooo…..” Finally they’d threaten to give us some chores if we didn’t find something ourselves.  

But time changes everything doesn’t it? Changes our attitudes toward things, changes our relationship to it. Time (like other things) seems to shrink with age and we have less and less of it as the years go by. So we try to cram as much as we can into each moment, knowing how precious each one is. But then we wonder, is that the best use of it? To make sure that we have none left over at the end - as if that’s even possible? Or should we let our moments drag while we sit around contemplating things like, well . . . time?

My son and I talk about weird time stuff . . . concepts like beyond eternity and the implications of that. Or what the boundaries of the past’s future would be relative to today. We like movies that play around with concepts of time. Like Deja Vu with Denzel Washington or Frequency with Dennis Quaid or The Lake House with Sandra Bullock. Movies we can argue the plausibility of – as if any of it actually IS plausible.

And yet . . . I was in Singapore in the spring of ’98 for a few weeks of business. It was hectic and there was a lot to do. Plus the whole jet lag thing and, well . . . I woke up one morning and remembered that my anniversary had been the day before. And I’d forgotten all about it. So there I was sitting in my hotel room, feeling like a real bonehead when I realized that time had provided a reprieve. See, Singapore is a day ahead of Houston. So I called a Houston florist, one who did same-day deliveries and I ordered a gorgeous orchid delivered to my husband at work. Then I went to work myself – the day after my husband would get the gift I just ordered. He called me later that day (which was really the day before) and told me how thrilled he was with the orchid! So the gift was perfect and … did I have to tell him how late I'd been orchestrating the whole thing? I think not.

So, wouldn’t it be fun if we could actually do more stuff like that?

 

It was the day after tomorrow and Ronda remembered that she’d forgotten her brother’s birthday. So she set the clock back several days and went shopping, picking out a sweater she’d seen him wearing the following week. Then she snuck back into his birthday with the gift wrapped in next Sunday’s paper. She set the gift on the new coffee table, the one he’d buy with the money he’d get for his birthday. She snuck out the back door, barely closing it before he got home from work the next day. It seemed she’d been gone only a few moments but in reality, she hadn’t been gone at all. He looked up and smiled, already wearing the sweater. It fit perfectly. Of course it had to - after all, he’d been wearing it for a while now.

   

But no . . . we can’t do anything like that, can we? We’re stuck within this linear flow of time, living from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, trying to cram all we can into each one. 

It was just yesterday when I was floating around in the pool thinking about time . . . specifically, how little of it I have left to enjoy my backyard oasis. Only one more summer before my husband’s retirement will take us up into the Blue Ridge Mountains. I suddenly realized how close that really is! How the next two years will barrel down on me like a derailed freight train. So, I paddled around a little longer, trying to appreciate these last "few moments" before they're gone! 

And I guess maybe that's it, isn't it - how we choose to spend what little time we have. Perhaps we should be going for quality rather than quantity, be more selective about the activities we participate in - the thoughts we choose to think, the people we opt to spend time with. Maybe we even need to try to be bored from time to time. Just so we can feel that sense of standing still. Rather than trying to outrun the freight train.  

Everybody's Grand

I was walking today, listening to a talk I'd downloaded onto my MP3 player. The discussion was about the ego and how full of it we are. There was a comment made, comparing us to our parents and/or grandparents, suggesting that we take a moment to ponder the differences between their lives and the lives of us narcissistic baby boomers. While I didn't do much pondering over that, the comment did make me realize something that I'd never considered before - how I'd never had a "normal" set of grandparents.

First there was my dad's mom who, as near as I could tell, never had a husband. Over the years there were hints made of one but the impression I got was that he was a useless, shiftless excuse for a man whom grandma either divorced or killed. I never really knew which but some part of me could imagine the later, especially given Grandma's wild, Irish tempter that would flair and curse and throw things. Of course, none of that was ever directed toward us grandkids. But the mere mention of dad's dad and sparks would fly from Grandma's eyeballs and all us grandkids would scramble for cover. I never did find out what happened to him, but, as I grew older, I found myself wondering how the man ever got close enough for Grandma to have born him three children.

Then there was my mom's mom who stirred that same question in me. But Chub (which is what everyone called her - don't ask me why), unlike Grandma, did not limit her wrath to just her ex husband (grandpa Pop who I'll get to in a minute). Nope, Chub believed that all men were created equal and none of them were good for anything. There's not much else I remember about Chub, other than the fact that I managed to become her favorite grandkid. Maybe it was my own devil-may-care, hell-bent-for-trouble attitude that she could identify with. Whatever reason, she would always have a gift waiting for me whenever I'd go for a visit - odd things like a lace shawl that was so out of style all I could do was love if for its beauty and then hang it in my closet with other things I never wore. Or a set of silverware with three pronged forks that reminded me of mini pitchforks. If QVC were a thing back then, I'm sure Grandma Chub would have been all over it.

I felt bad for her when health forced her into my parents' home. She took my old bedroom, which obviously meant I'd moved out by then. And she stayed tucked away in it as much as possible, far from my father - the man. Chub died right there in my room, in the chair in the corner by the window.

Grandpa Pop, her ex, might have been the reason for her deep seeded hatred of men. He went on to marry five more times after their divorce. This in spite of the fact that he was paralyzed from the waist down and was "useless as a eunuch" as my uncle used to say. But Pop never let a small thing like paraplegia stop him. He'd had his accident at 34 when a motor boat he'd been fixing up slid off its braces and toppled onto him, crushing his pelvic area. He lived out the rest of his 29 years in a wheelchair that me and the rest of the grandkids thought was wonderful. We'd wait 'till he was out of it and then push each other up and down the ramps that peppered his customized house.

His car was a cool thing too. He'd heft himself up into it and then lean out far enough to fold up his chair. Then he'd muscle it into the car behind him and off he'd go. Of course without the use of his legs, he'd had to have the car modified so that, instead of a brake peddle, there was a hand brake up by the steering wheel. Pop drove himself everywhere he needed to go.

His favorite thing to do was to travel. And collect wives. I remember once, when I was about eight, he went to Mexico on a fishing trip. Came home with a boatload of different kinds of fish that my mom cooked up and we ate on for weeks. He also came home with a wife named Maria who was younger than my mom. Maria's two kids were younger than I was too and for a while there, my older sister had an uncle and an aunt who she got to babysit. Then there was Junga and Shumbay from Korea. Don't ask me how Pop ended up married to a Korean woman. All I remember are their names. And the time Shumbay tricked me into sticking my finger in a light socket, the mean little jerk.

I can't remember the rest of Pop's miscellaneous wives but it sure seemed like there were enough of them. Even so, between my five step-grams and four biological ones, I never once had a normal sense of grandparentcy. Don't get me wrong, I loved them all (the biological ones at least). And I have to admit, they had a collective spice to them that kept life interesting.

I wonder now whether that's the kind of pondering the guy on my MP3 player was thinking of. But I kind of don't think so.

Custodians of the Totally Useless

We (husband, son, and self) have collectively collected enough useless stuff to last our three lifetimes. When I think about it, we’ve probably collected enough for you too. Take that ice cube with a spider suspended inside of it. Something my son made at a Cub scout camp out years back, made of resin and whatever critter the boy happened to locate while foraging in the forest that weekend. I think the goal was to let the resin harden then drop it into someone’s drink when they weren’t looking and wait for them to squirm. But that’s never happened and so the spider sits forever on the sill of my kitchen window where I can visit it on regular basis.

Buried somewhere under our collection of remotes (only three that we actually use), and sitting at the very bottom of the decorative bowl we keep our remote collection in, is my husband’s fart machine. There are two parts to it, the noisy part, that which emits the actual fart, and the remote that prompts its flatulence. I remember how my husband had to have it after seeing the neighbor kid playing with his. The neighbor kid is now in his mid twenties, graduated from college and on to bigger and more interesting gadgets. But we still have our fart machine. My husband and his brothers toyed with the idea of slipping it into their mom’s casket when she passed away years ago. But none of us wives would let them.

Up there in the attic, buried under a thick layer of insulation, cobwebs, cockroach carcasses and dust, hides my son’s baby furniture. There’s a crib, a playpen, a highchair, a basinet and I’ve forgotten what else. Oh and all of my “good” maternity clothes, trussed up tight in a big plastic bag. Now this might not seem such a bad idea to save this kind of stuff - hand me downs and all. But I am in my mid-fifties and not likely to need maternity clothes again unless I really let myself go. And my son is about to turn sixteen, somewhere between the age of needing his crib to sleep in and using it for his own infant child.

Under the desk in the office is every piece of software we’ve ever used on every computer we’ve ever owned. Some of this software was available only on floppy disk. Floppy disk! All of which we still possess. There seems no use for such relics other than to add them to our similar collections, things like the cassettes and eight track tapes that lurk somewhere in the hall closet. Or maybe the four foot stack of albums in the bottom of the china hutch. Note that there is no device in our possession that will play any of these types of media.

One closet in our office is dedicated solely to pictures and paintings we will never hang. They are preserved quite perfectly in sealed boxes and big round tubes, stacked against the back wall of the closet where they’ve begun their own collection of dust.

Following family tradition, I have dutifully saved all my old, chipped (but still usable) Corelware on the slim chance that my daughter might set up housekeeping some day; my daughter, who is twenty six and has been living on her own now for several years. I have to wonder what she’s been eating off of all this time.

In the garage, packed away for that “just in case” moment you’ll find my husband’s leather working kit from high school. Once, about three years back, he actually pulled it down, dusted it off and made a leather money clip. Then he packed it all back up and it’s been there ever since.

I have my ski boots from twenty seven years ago although I’ve only skied once in that much time. They cower in the highest part of my walk-in closet next to my moon boots, ski gloves and mask. Keeping them company are my racket gloves and racket because once, when I was young and lithe, I was quite good at the sport and now I like to wax nostalgic on how it felt to be that way. I have every tee shirt I ever earned running the many 5 and 10 K’s I used to run. This in spite of the fact that I never (ever) wear tee shirts. I have jeans that fit me when I had a body like Twiggie, I have leg warmers. Leg warmers!

But I have to admit that sometimes this rat-packedness comes in handy. We got a new puppy a few months back. She came to us pretty small, weighing in at 4 lbs something. And utterly naked. So I rummaged through the collection of collars we’d saved from seventeen years of previous pets, collars that had outlived their owners, collars that had been outgrown. Imagine how happy I was to find a perfect fit in the later part of the collection! By keeping all those collars, I’d managed to save a whopping three bucks. It was a shining moment, indeed! One that validated the possession of all this other stuff. Because after all, you never know. You just never know.