Happy Birthday Poem

My mother's birthday was yesterday, so I wrote her a poem.

I'm kind of embarrassed to post it, though. I set out to compose an ode in the grand tradition of my family, which generally contains lines like:

I'm sure glad you're my mother
Because you wouldn't be if I'd been born to another.

But I completely lost my head and ended up with something that:

1. Has no meter or rhyme
2. Is kind of a serious effort

My apologies, Mom. I'll try not to work as hard on it next year. Hope this entertains you meanwhile.

An Ideal Mother

Question:

When you were growing up,

Did your mother bake cookies?

Did she take you to a salon for a mother-daughter “spa day”?

Did she plan fun, creative activities for you?

Lucky! You must have had an ideal mother.

Answer:
Yes!

She baked cookies!

Only, it wasn’t cookies, it was food. Cooked from scratch, every day. Rice and gravy, barbecue chicken, potato salad (served warm!), red beans and rice, field peas and butterbeans, pork chops, corn on the cob, meatloaf. Cookies? Pfft, she just bought those.

She took me to a salon for a mother-daughter “spa day”!

Except not really to a salon so much. She didn’t care much about facials and manicures. Planting roses, chopping wood, and refinishing furniture does a number on painted fingernails. No, we left the Scrabble game set up all the time and played a lot. And she gave me books that she’d really liked. And we sat together and talked a lot. Spa days? That would have interfered with our visiting.

She planned fun and creative activities for me!

Or, rather, she left me alone to read, play the computer, ride my bike, swim in the creek, make up stories. That was fun. When I told her about what I was thinking of, she had lots of ideas and suggestions and laughed at my jokes. That helped me be creative. She was always there when I needed her, and not in the way when I needed time to myself.  Plan my activities? Where’s the fun in that?

 

Why, yes, I did have an ideal mother.

Thanks for noticing.

I love you, Mom! Happy Birthday!

-- SJ

7 Quick Takes, May 6, 2011

It's Friday. The cosmos is breathing a heavy sigh of relief, and I am in harmony with the cosmos.

Um. Okay, Darren. Now enough of the New Agey stuff and on to the nice numbered lists. We like lists, remember?

It's been a long week. What can I say?

1. I may have linked to this song before, but I really love it. We were going to sing it for communion on Sunday, but then I found out I'll be serving at the altar, so can't lead music. Oh, well. Planning Center makes it very easy to just transfer it to next week. You can't foil me that easily, schedule!

2. I read a fascinating book this week, "A Bride's Passage" by Catherine Petroski. It's a non-fiction book (left over from my Lent stack of non-fiction) based on an 1855 diary of a new bride who goes to sea with her husband, a merchant captain. During that year, Susan Hathorn wrote in her diary every single day, including the day she gave birth to their child in November. Petroski did a marvelous job of adding interpretation to the bare diary entries, with pictures of Havana, Cuba; London, England; and Richmond, Maine - all of which Susan visited that year. Great book, highly recommended. **Spoilers at the end of this post.

3. I've seen the article "Urban Legends Pastors Tell" referenced several places on the internet this week. I agree with one of the commenters - Christians need their own version of Snopes. A little less credulity might be nice too :) Although I find my own tendency is toward cynicism, a ditch just as easy to fall into and even less pleasant for those who have to deal with me.

4. Thanks to the inimitable Jim Bittel, we have a new computer now. The motherboard of our old one fried during a lightning storm. Woe and lamentations abounded, but joy has now sprung anew. And with the addition of Starcraft II and Titan Quest to my computer game repertoire, I think I'm going to have to start setting a timer for myself like we do for the kids.

5. I am loving Amazon right now. Last weekend my Kindle screen went haywire - wouldn't work no matter what I did with it/to it. (Okay, I didn't try anointing it, but I didn't think oil would be good for it.) So I called Amazon on Monday. They were very sympathetic, shipped me a new one that got here the next day, gave me a label to send the broken one back, and all for free. I think I'm in love.

6. I love listening to Modern Scholar classes on CD while I'm driving. They have really excellent professors. My favorite one is Thomas Madden; I think I've listened to all of his at least once, except for the Venice one.

7. A good blog if you like politics in non-firehoseish quantities: Looking for Overland. A good post today on last night's Republican debate in South Carolina. (And why, oh why, does the 2012 election already have to be starting???)

Spoiler for "A Bride's Passage:" The author does a good job of very light foreshadowing through the book that the story has a tragic twist. And it does, but you don't find out until the very end. Susan and Jode Hathorn were married in summer 1854. They went to sea for most of 1855, and then made a quick trip home to Maine together to drop 7-months-pregnant Susan at home, while Jode went back to Liverpool with the ship. Susan had a daughter in November; you never find out from the diary what the baby's name is (and it takes 10 days before you find out it's a daughter.) The only way we know the baby's name is that it shows up on a gravestone in the Richmond cemetery - Josephine Hathorn lived 2 years and 4 months. But she outlived her father, who may or may not have ever found out that he had a daughter - he died in Cuba after the Liverpool run in early 1856. Susan remarried several years later and apparently had a good life - her obituaries were full of praise for her friendly and happy (and hyper-organized, Type-Triple-A) personality.

And that's it for this weeks quick takes. See Conversion Diary for more!

--DJ

Brotherly Wisdom

I have three brothers, all older than I am. Throughout my childhood, they all looked out for me. For instance, every new school year, they'd ride the bus and point out my sister and me to the big kids who sat in the back. "See those two girls right there? If you mess with them, we'll beat you up." We never got messed with.

When not defending my honor, my brothers taught me lots of useful information, such as:

1. How to recognize a Russian missile as it was bearing down on us to obliterate the country (this was in the '80s, after all).

2. That you could hit a tree with a stick to scare those wild dogs that roamed the woods at evening... these very woods we're walking through, at right about this time of day, in fact... DID YOU HEAR THAT NOISE?

3. When walking through snake-infested underbrush (and in South Mississippi, you assumed that all underbrush was snake-infested), you didn't want to be third in line. The first person scared the snake, the second person made it mad, and the third person got bit. Hey, Sara, how's the view back there behind the rest of us, ha ha!

4. Snapping turtles can bite your finger off.

Last week I was able to apply one of these priceless jewels of wisdom. Bet you're pretty interested to know which one, huh? Even if you're not interested, you're going to find out because it's my blog.

Last week I was driving to town and saw something in the middle of the road. A Russian missile? No. Wild dog? I didn't have a stick so good thing it wasn't that. A snake in the underbrush? No, guess I was only the second minivan to pass.

It was a turtle. It had wandered up from a small stream that ran through a construction site, and was stopped in the middle of my lane. I turned around and went back. I've rescued turtles before, and the kids are always delighted when I bring them back to the van for inspection before letting them go.

I noticed that this turtle didn't have the friendly domed shell I was used to seeing. Its shell was spiked along the back. It had a long tail, too. My first thought was, "Snapping turtle!" but I thought, "How cliched that a snapper would have a spiky shell, come on." My second thought was, "It'll bite my finger off!"

Ha. Like wild dogs and snakes and Russian missiles.... riiight.

I picked it up by the sides of its shell. It hissed at me. I, with my lightning-quick female reflexes, squealed and dropped it back on the ground. A little wiser now, I picked up a nearby stick and poked at the turtle's head. It hissed again and latched onto the stick. It had quite the bite. And that stick was a good deal harder than my finger.

I kept a stick-length distance between me and the turtle now. It refused to move off the road even when I nudged it. I finally had to roll it over and over like a croquet ball (hours of family croquet games came in handy there). It dropped into the ditch and sat there on the gravel, looking very sulky.

Once home, I looked up snapping turtles. Guess what? They can bite a finger off.

Neil, Matt, and Jamie: Thanks, y'all. Still looking out for your little sister.

-- SJ

P.S. I wasn't afraid of those stupid wild dogs. I knew you wouldn't let them mess with me.

Firsts, part 2

--DJ

First car: 1979 Ford Pinto (yes, the kind that explode when they're rear-ended). Bright orange, started with a screwdriver instead of a key, and did zero to 50 in 37 seconds (I never could test zero to 60, because it wouldn't go 60 except down a steep hill).

First date: an Italian restaurant in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. After a visit to Chapters (the Canadian Borders) and just before seeing "Toy Story 2," where Sara and I laughed ourselves silly.

First movie seen in a theater: The Bakshi version of "Lord of the Rings" in 1980. I had already read the trilogy by then, but I was so scared by the Ringwraiths at Weathertop that I left. The last movie I saw in a theater as a child was "Return of the Jedi;" Dad was not happy about Leia's costume, and decreed that we weren't going back to the theater. The next time I saw a movie in a theater was the re-release of Star Wars in 1997.

First book I read myself: I think it was some of the stories out of "Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes." Probably David and Goliath, as Mom says that was my favorite. The first one I remember is one of Enid Blyton's Noddy books.

First kiss: Sara, at our wedding. It was, um, more enthusiastic than I expected, leading to my first married words being "You little minx!" after we exited the church. :)

First grade teacher: Mr. Mudrick, who also taught me 3rd grade. He's still teaching 3rd, and I got to see him the last few years when I went back to New Hampshire for the homeschool conference. He's still an amazing teacher. I remember him reading "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" to us, and he also introduced us to "Where the Red Fern Grows," which we 3rd graders considered the absolute height of fiction.

First decision as a father: When Addie had her first dirty diaper in the hospital, I decided to change it so that Sara wouldn't have to get out of bed. Geni Hall had to teach me how to do it, as I'd never changed a diaper in my life.

First moment I thought Sara was an actual possibility: When she came by my office at HSLDA (she was an intern there, and I was a legal assistant) and dropped a trivia card on my desk. With the answers all whited-out. I was charmed :)

Taylor-Made Daydream

-- SJ

A friend posted this parody of Taylor Swift's song "Love Story". Not, of course, that I'd heard the original or even knew what it was until Kim told me. But now I do. I've listened to it. I watched the video.

And I can say this: if I'd been anywhere between thirteen and seventeen when this song came out, I'd be dazzled. I mean, this is like the basic fabric of daydreams: castles, dresses, love conquers all, a guy hunky enough to look cool in a ruffled shirt, tryst in the garden by lanternlight... Unfortunately, I'm thirty-three and married. So mostly I just laughed.

What, did you miss the comedy? Oh, well, then. Let me give you a guided tour!

So they meet at school... college maybe? The song says they were "young when I first saw you." I'm thinking, if you're any younger we're going to have to discuss age of consent. But anyway, they saw one another and realized they'd met before. A long, long time before. In another life.

It's not Taylor's fault that when I hear anything about a "past life," what I think of is the conversation from a P.G Wodehouse story:

Sidney: "Is there a Mr. Spottsworth?"
Cora: "There was. He left me."
Sidney: "The low hound."
Cora: "He had no choice. Double pneumonia. No doubt by now he's been reincarnated, but only as a jellyfish. We won't let a jellyfish come between us, will we?"

Next we see Taylor singing in a dress. You can tell it's a medieval dress because it laces up in the back. Now, I don't categorically dislike off-the-shoulder dresses, but this one was a bad fashion choice. It calls attention to the fact that she doesn't have the type of figure one would expect this type of dress to flatter. To put it bluntly, it says, "Hey, look! If I fall out of this dress, there still won't be much to see!" She's got lovely shoulders and neck and hair: too bad it's the default assumption that breasts are always a woman's best feature.

Then there's a ball scene, because that's where real love takes place. (She's dressed better in this one.) I think it's supposed to be like French Revolution-era style, with a playful dash of Victorian and colonialism thrown in. The etiquette code in this court must be brutal. So they slip out into the garden for some nuzzling.

Oh, and petting horses, too. Where the heck did that horse come from? Shouldn't the stableyard be aware that a horse is wandering around the garden at night?

Then they part, and her heart aches, until he shows up running across the field and she flies into his arms and he asks her to marry him. The culmination of a perfect daydream! Except I never was the type of girl to dream about my wedding much, although I liked the idea of marriage because it made sex permissible. (Some things haven't changed.)

Fade out of Revolutionary French Victorianism and back to modern-day meeting of two reincarnated souls. From the way they greet one another, it's obvious that no jellyfish will come between them.

P.S. Who do I think I am, anyway? I *still* like Eididify.

Romance in 1-2-3-4

-- SJ

Journal entry
Page type: Notebook
Association: Teenagerhood

When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to play "the Game." Which looks like something from a Stephen King novel. Trust me: it wasn't that exciting. But then, neither was my teenagerhood.

Our "game" was a variation of that schoolyard classic MASH, but without things like cars or houses to clunk you down in the real world. First we'd list our names, then a matching number of boys' names, then the same number of places, actions, and songs. We hardly ever varied the elements, so a typical Game looked like this:

Sara
Friend A
Friend B
Friend C

Silicon
RBFC
Bromine
Radium

(We used code names for the boys in case our Game was discovered. We were silly, but we weren't stupid.)

Kissing
Dancing
Hugging
Fighting

England
The park
Football Game
Grocery store parking lot

Unchained Melody
Stand By Me
Release Me
Everything I Do I Do It For You

(The list of songs almost never changed; eventually we just abbreviated them. Which is why I still refer to the Bryan Adams' song as Eididify)

Next, we numbered each list 1-4, but in random order. So our names might be numbered 1-2-3-4, while the boys' names were 4-2-1-3, and so on. Once all the numbers were assigned, the results were tallied:

"Sara and Bromine Fighting in England to SBM.
A and Radium dancing in the parking lot to Eididify.
B and RBFC hugging at the park to UM
C and Silicon kissing at a football game to RM"

Then we'd giggle over the results. In this case, I'd have loved B's result -- RBFC was my favorite, as was Unchained Melody. But I was happy "fighting" with Bromine, whom I actually liked quite a lot but wouldn't admit it. C's was funny because Silicon was a football player -- what was he doing kissing her during a game? I guess that's why "Release Me" was playing. And Radium could actually dance, which A could not.

After we'd enjoyed the results, we'd set it up all over again. We must have done hundreds of those Games on into high school. We'd even keep "good" results. As one friend remarked, the laws of probability dictated that we'd get a setup we liked if we just did enough of them.

To girls who didn't have boyfriends to kiss, hug, dance with, or fight with, these Games gave us a romantic thrill. And a lot fewer awkward memories.

P.S. My ringtone for Darren's cell is Unchained Melody.

Water Fountains and Hallways

-- by SJ

I've finally thought of a way to fill up the special journal that Darren got me for Christmas. It's made with a variety of pages -- legal, notebook, graph, blank, etc. Since each type of page has different associations for me, I've decided to write a memory or essay about whatever topic a particular page inspires. I'm not worrying much about composition or polishing, although I do admire how nice my handwriting looks.

I'll share a few on the blog as I fill up the book.

***

Paper Type: Notebook
Association: Public School

When I think of "school," two images to come to mind: the playground at my elementary school, and the red walls and black tile floors of my middle school.

The elementary school playground was enormous: big enough for three sets of swings, a kickball field, several pecan trees with square benches built around the trunks, and two water fountains. I don't know how big the playground would be to my adult eyes, especially as subsequent construction shaved off two sides. But it's usually not a good idea to revisit the vast spaces of childhood as an adult. Best to let them live in memory.

Those water fountains are worth remembering because I think both are gone now. They weren't your modern shiny single-spout metal deals. No, these things were huge blocks of concrete, three feet long by four feet high. They were light brown; it seems as if the concrete must have had pea gravel mixed in because there were nubby, smooth pebbles all over the block. I tried many times to dig out some of the pebbles. Those fountains were probably cast some forty years before my recess hour: them pebbles weren't budging.

Instead of one spout, there were three, mounted in a line along the center length. The sides of the block sloped in and down, creating a trench for the water to flow off the edge. Water, and sand, and sticks, and leaves, until a teacher told us to stop playing in the water.

There were never three spouts working all at once. Somebody usually wedged a small rock into the circular hole where the water was supposed to come out. I never got a thrill out of vandalism, and I'm still annoyed at the kids who tampered with our water supply. In South Mississippi heat, that was no small offense.

**

The middle school hallway that first comes to mind is the one in what was the "sixth grade building." (That school, once the black school for the town, is now an "intermediate school" housing fourth and fifth graders.) I wonder why I think of it with fairly positive associations: sixth grade was a disorienting year for me.

That was the year it really mattered that I was unstylish, awkward, and geeky. That was the year I -- an effortless A, sometimes B student -- got two Ds on my report card. (One in math, which was no surprise; and one in social studies, where I was supposed to keep all my work organized into a notebook. Whatever.) That was the year I decided to play French Horn in band, the beginning of my dysfunctional relationship with music. Math became murky, but English was so easy I spent class time creating a fake newspaper. I was invited to parties, but not to the kissing games in the backyards -- although that was more of a relief than a sting.

I developed a crush on a cute new boy that year. Then I found out that my studious, also-geeky classmate Debra had a crush on him, too. The knowledge drew us together. My grades improved dramatically once we became friends because Debra kept her class notebooks in order; I could always borrow hers when I needed to organize mine seven minutes before it was due.

Our mutual crush moved the following year, but Debra and I are still best friends. I suppose, upon reflection, sixth grade wasn't a complete failure. It gets at least a D.

I Think We're Alone Now

So I was listening to Pandora, and it plays all this 80s pop for me, mysteriously enough. Who would have thought that "Sara" by Starship is so similar in musical structure to Debussy and Mozart? Or maybe I forgot to add Debussy and Mozart to my list. And maybe I did add "Forever Your Girl" by Paula Abdul, and some other stuff. Anyway, moving on.

"I Think We're Alone Now," as sung by Tiffany, came up today. I remember this song from about sixth grade: a couple of my classmates had written out the words on notebook paper (because you couldn't just Google lyrics back then, children). It was a racy song for 13-year-olds, and we knew it. Here's the first verse and chorus (which I Googled):

Children behave
That's what they say when we're together
And watch how you play
They don't understand
And so we're

Running just as fast as we can
Holdin' on to one another's hand
Tryin' to get away into the night
And then you put your arms around me
And we tumble to the ground
And then you say

I think were alone now
There doesn't seem to be anyone around
I think were alone now
The beating of our hearts is the only sound

See, back then I thought this was a daring and defiant song. The beauty of revisiting songs like this, as an adult, is that you understand their great comic value.

My favorite line is "They don't understand." Don't understand... what, exactly? Oh, passion and sex, right! Because they're parents! Meaning they HAD to have had sex to have YOU! But it wasn't, you know, passionate sex. Not like teenagers have. You know, somewhere outside, in the dark, on the bare ground, after running and tackling.

Maybe the grownups were just trying to tell you that it's worth waiting for a master bedroom with a lock on the door. But what do grownups know?

-- SJ

Easterness

This post is a follow-up to the previous post. After griping about how my church didn't do much a lead-up to Easter, this post is to highlight how I'm carrying on the Easter traditions my mom did with us.

Every year, Mom would line up cups full of vinegar and hot water and food coloring, and let us six kids dye eggs. It was a very fun time, although at the time I didn't get why Mom got so put out when we "mixed" eggs and came up with khaki colored ones. Mom, I get it now.

Most years I color eggs not only with my own kids, but also any random children who happen to be in the house at the time. Here the Joneses and Gracie M. create beautiful(ish) dyed eggs. I remember lovely purple ones in my youth, but so far all my purples come out grey.



It was years before I understood what the Easter Bunny was supposed to do every year. Bring Easter baskets? Oh. Well, my mom did that for us. And surprisingly, even though I do remember the candy, what I most remember is that Mom would put grapes and plums in our baskets. With a household of six kids plus random other kids, the supply of grapes and plums lasted about seventeen minutes. Obviously it was a treat to get my very own in my basket. This year, I filled a completely separate basket with grapes, strawberries, and tangerines. It's beautiful.

With fewer kids to buy for, we can make their baskets a little more lavish: crayons, paints, a new Odyssey collection, and Stuart's favorite card game, Mag Blast. Oh, and a mother and baby swan (in the blue basket) because they were cute:




This family picture was taken at church this morning. The kids are all outfitted thanks to my mother-in-law and my neighbor. Miss Bev got ahold of Nina and asked her to pick out clothes for each of the children, completely surprising us. You can see that she scored on all counts, Miss Bev.


Several Easter mornings, Mom let us attend a sunrise service with her. I'm sure it was a moving experience to worship while the sun rose, but mostly I remember the doughnuts and coffee afterward. No sunrise service for us today, but these days I'm just as happy with blazing spring sunshine.

The service was full of music, because Darren leads worship and Easter is his favorite service. Stuart, who usually just suffers through church, belted out some of his favorite songs. At least five people told us afterward that his singing (which made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in quality) was very worshipful to them. Let the little children come, after all.

So now we're home and eating chocolate. Happy happy Easter!

-- SJ

As It Was Written

Addie and Stuart dragged down a box of my old journals this week. "No, please don't read those," I requested as I threw my body between them and the books. It's not that I had such a salacious and scandalous younger life that I can't let them read about it. It's that I'd rather they know me now, not as I was fourteen, sixteen, twenty years ago.

Still, I couldn't resist reliving the past a little myself. I picked up a journal from 1996, when I was nineteen. The first thing I noticed was that I had overdosed on Jane Austen. My whole journal was written in Austenese. For instance, when writing about how my family rearranged major appliances in the house, did I write, "And then we put the big freezer where the old fridge had been."? No. I wrote, "And then the freezer took the spot recently vacated by the other appliances." The whole darn journal reads like that.

Also, I didn't use words like "darn." Even in my journal, I was insufferably moralistic. At one point, I wrote about how my two sisters and I walked through the woods pretending to be three kids in a horror movie talking about "Crazy Joe" who had a bloody shovel. (Acting out spontaneous scenes was an everyday pastime for us. We called ourselves the Three Weird Sisters.) I ended the description with an apology that "Admittedly, this little game was hardly edifying; but we like to be clever, and don't always choose our subjects well." Doesn't that make you want to beat your head against a wall? Or beat my head against a wall?

There are some fun parts, though. Like the afternoon of a birthday party when I realized I didn't have a gift. I thought a journal-book would be a perfect gift, and it so happened that my sister, Rose, had a blank one. So she sold it to me. Yes, that's right -- she made me PAY her for it. But she did give me a discount because I'd bought her ice cream earlier that day.

Here's an actual excerpt from the journal:

April 10, 1996
After a lapse of three complete days, one might expect that I have much to write. One would be mistaken Uneventful and very quiet, I haven't even any tales about the friends we paid a visit to yesterday. So I say; but let me begin writing down the days' events, and it all shall flood back. I will stem the tide, though: it is 9:30 and I am sleepy, since I actually got up on time."

Please note that this is just the introduction to the day's entry. I wrote like that every day. There are six books for this year, all written in the same style. My 33-year-old self is fantasizing about traveling back in time and attacking my 19-year-old self with a red pen.

The most exciting event, journalwise, was when my sister-in-law, Jessica, called to say a youth leader at their church was interested in getting to know me. (I hadn't met him: Jessica was playing matchmaker.) My family abided by the rules of Courtship as laid down by Bill Gothard, which said that such a request had to be taken really seriously. The only way a guy could "get to know me" was if he had marriage as his intention. Furthermore, I wasn't the one to tell him this: it was my stepfather's job.

Of course, Guy went with what I wanted to do. While I wouldn't have minded writing to a young man, I certainly didn't want to court him, and there was no middle ground. So Guy said no, and that was the end of it. Obviously not much happened, but I certainly got mileage out of it in my journal. (In retrospect, it was the right decision; but the poor guy must have been very confused by the whole rigamarole.)

Reading through the journal now, the parts that stand out to me are the few sentences where I mentioned applying for an internship at HSLDA. Back then I was more interested in the two-week desktop publishing course I took at ATI's Indianapolis Training Center. I thought my future was in ATI. I didn't realize that the internship was actually the gateway to the rest of my life. The internship was when I began to change the way I thought, the way I saw God, and of course when I met my future husband. While I had a grand time at the publishing course and actually did use the skills I learned, it was one of the last ATI events I attended.

My journals at this time included almost no reference to my own romantic feelings. Romance wasn't an approved activity in ATI, and therefore not in my journals. In the hundreds of words I wrote about my desktop publishing class, I completely neglected to mention I developed a crush on one of my classmates.

I still remember him, though: he was calm, a little shy, but when he did speak it was something interesting or funny. I met someone a lot like him a few months later at HSLDA. And I married that one. Now that's worth writing about.

-- SJ

The Song Hunters

Listening to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" recently reminded me of the early 90s, when my best friend Debra launched a summerlong quest to record the song off the radio. She kept her radio on all the time (we always did anyway), with a blank tape in the cassette recorder. The play-record buttons were pressed, and the pause button was on. As soon as she heard the song, she'd fly over to her player and unpause the tape.

I think she managed to get it in batches: first we'd listen to part of "Total Eclipse," then Vanilla Ice, and then there would be a Wilson Phillips, and then MC Hammer, and then another snatch of Bonnie Tyler, and that's how that summer's soundtrack ran when we were at her house. At my house, we listened to a different mix, depending on what I'd recorded off the radio on my own tape. (Of what I remember, that included "The Final Countdown," which I thought sounded SO COOL, "Forever Your Girl" by Paula Abdul, for which my older sister is still laughing at me, and "Squaredance Rap.")

Remembering those tapes, it suddenly struck me as funny. We lived in a small town with no access to a music store. Back then the library didn't even lend out tapes. The idea of downloading any song you wanted to from a world wide computer database was just science fiction. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio, the easiest thing to do was set up your blank tape in your recorder -- stuffing the little holes on top of the tape with notebook paper to make sure it was recordable -- and set it to Record-Pause. Then you lay in wait, hoping the DJ would play the song you wanted. Then when it did come on, you tried to catch it within the first few bars, silently fuming as the DJ talked throughout the entire intro. Once the song was safely captured and recording, you desperately hoped nobody came into your room in the next five minutes.

*Tape silence*
*click of pause button*
DJ/Righteous Brothers: "...third caller to win two tickets to see Bon Jovi in concert May 24! Oh, my love/my darling/I've hungered for your touch/a long..."
Sister: "Sara, Mom says you have to put away dishes --"
Sara: "SHHHH! I finally got this song and you just ruined it!!"
Righteous Brothers: "...and time can do so much/are you/still mine?"
*click*

Just this week I downloaded three new songs and added them to a playlist. Then I rearranged the playlist and downloaded it onto my MP3 player. It's my own customized music mix, without clicks or interruptions. Pretty cool. Pretty scifi. That's what Deb needed the summer she was stalking "Total Eclipse of the Heart."

Still, there's something to be said for the thrill of the chase. Those tapes were our equivalent of deer heads mounted on the wall. We hunted, we captured, we were victors. And we created our own summer soundtracks, clicks and all.

-- SJ

And the Righteous Brother's song excerpted above, which was the ultimate in soul-stirring to my fourteen-year-old self, is titled...?

More YouTube

I regard YouTube as an cultural education tool. Anytime I run across a pop culture reference I don't understand, especially a Top 40 song I've never listened to (which, starting about 1991, is pretty much every one), I race over to YouTube and watch a video. There are some pretty worthless gems on that site.

My friend Deidre told me not to post any more awful YouTube links like Miranda. As compensation, she told me about Literal Music Videos.

The videos themselves were at the forefront of music videodom, and look like they were taped with home camcorders. They simply beg to be parodied, and somebody has obliged. He's changed the lyrics to narrate exactly what's happening. Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing At All" made me laugh till I cried. Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" deserved everything it got.

-- SJ

The Gym Is Haunted

I attended first grade in what had originally been built as a high school back in my grandfather's time. So the place was pretty ancient to a six-year-old -- and the most ancient and forbidding part of it was the old ramshackle gymnasium.

The gym probably dated back only to my mother's time, but that was ancient enough. It was a huge white building with a concrete porch area and massive columns. We weren't allowed to go into it, it was so dilapidated. But we could peek through the old doors and see inside: a big silent room, dusty gym floor, and rows of empty bleachers. One time -- one single, memorable time -- the teachers took us in there to play. On the back wall was a faded painting of the high school mascot, a short little man with a white mustache, big white hat, and a gun: the Rebels. Welcome to the South, y'all.

What was most interesting about the gym, however, were the rumors. By the second week of school, everybody knew that The Gym Was Haunted.

Some of the other kids seemed to know all about it. The gym was closed because, a long time ago, a girl had drowned in the swimming pool. What swimming pool? It was under the gym -- see, if you looked underneath it, in the crawl spaces, you could see where the dirt was piled up. That was the swimming pool, all filled in, with the girl's body still in it probably. Also those other smaller mounds were graves, didn't you know that?

One girl said that when her mother was young, she and some friends sneaked into the gym at night. They saw the mascot on the back wall COME TO LIFE and get down off the wall! I think his eyes glowed green, too.

If I were at all skeptical (and I don't remember that I was), I and a classmate confirmed all these suspicions by scientific experimentation. He got a stick and beat it against the gym wall. We clearly heard someone pounding back! It was all true!

There was nothing else to be done but for me to write it out as a news story. I have a distinct memory of looking down at my paper with my penciled handwriting. (Come to think of it, the paper is white notebook paper; so I might actually have written the article in second or third grade.) I reported that The Gym Is Haunted, and provided all my supporting evidence. I even interviewed the classmate who had banged on the wall. I gave him just one quote, but that wasn't bad for a two-paragraph article.

When I was in fourth grade, the unthinkable happened: the school renovated the gym. Absolutely oblivious to the spiritual danger, workers ripped off the front porch, replaced the old wooden bleachers, shored up the foundation, and painted over the undead mascot on the back wall. They covered the peeling white boards with gray vinyl siding. If they discovered the old swimming pool and the bodies underneath the gym, nobody was saying anything.

By my last year in elementary school, the gym was new, improved, and apparently exorcised. Even at eleven years old, I felt a little loss every time we marched single-file onto the bright polished floor. I knew by now that there were no ghosts, no graves, no glowing eyes.

Even if I pounded the wall, all I'd hear back were echoes.

-- SJ

The Daily Fib

I don't remember how it got started: it was, after all, a long time ago that I was in sixth grade. I sat in Row Five in English, the subject that came easiest to me so afforded me lots of free time. Apparently it did the rest of the row, also. Either that or they just didn't do their work.

Somebody on the row (possibly me, but I don't remember actually) wrote a funny "news" story about the school and passed it along the row. Somebody else added an advertisement to the page, and somebody else wrote a personals ad. When that sheet was filled up, somebody started a new one. Row Four got in on the game within the next few days, and soon we had a sheaf of handwritten newspaper. Somebody found a folder for it. And somebody -- me, I'm pretty sure -- titled it The Daily Fib.

The Fib seemed to last for weeks, but then again, we were only twelve and thirteen and there was more time in the world back then. We did fill up that folder, though: we were a self-organized news team with a steady stream of contributions. People would hand me pages all through the day, and in English we'd pass them back and forth and put them in the folder. Mrs. Lawrence couldn't possibly have not noticed, but I don't remember that she ever stopped us. Maybe she was impressed with a spontaneous project among kids who couldn't be bothered to keep their own schoolwork in order. Or maybe, since it was the end of the day, she was just glad we were quiet.

For every new page, I wrote out the masthead and listed the "editors." I didn't know what an editor did, but knew that newspapers had them. So everybody who contributed was an "editor." I think there were about seven on the paper, and no reporters. I'm pretty sure my name was first. I always was a follower in school, so the fact that I, as the self-proclaimed writer of the group, was sort of in charge, was pretty heady stuff.

The content of the paper ran along the lines of a classifed ad for a bike: "FOR SALE: Bike. Great condition! Needs tires, wheels, seat, handlebars, chain, and sprockets. Otherwise it's all yours!" Practically SNL for sixth graders.

I remember one submission being a news story about two friends who were "going together." Somebody wrote it and then drew a picture of stick figures. The picture was supposed to be a photograph of the girl standing on a street corner and the boy giving her money. (We knew very well what that entailed.) Since I also had a reputation for drawing at the time -- I outgrew the reputation when my drawing skill peaked at age 14 -- I was asked to redraw the "photograph." I did. I made the girl rather well-endowed, as I recall. This girl didn't sit on Row Five; she was on like Row Two or Three. So it was a day or so before she saw the picture.

In the ensuing editorial squabble, I pointed out that somebody else had originally drawn the picture. That somebody else replied that HER picture was just a lot of sticks and you couldn't tell what was going on. I removed the article, and I sincerely hope that The Fib apologized in person. I'm still apologizing, mentally, twenty years later.

What happened to The Fib? Eventually the notebook came to me for safekeeping. A year or so later, I leafed through it and was embarrassed by what we'd written. So I threw it away.

Those who remembered it from the year before were irritated at me. I'm irritated at me, too. But it's likely for the best. Some things, like your seventh-grade crush and your favorite childhood cartoon, survive best in fuzzy memory.

So here's to the fond, fuzzy memory of The Daily Fib.

-- SJ

A Fun Trip to the Past

Today on the internet, I saw this link to an ancient Carvel commercial. I remember watching this commercial!

I also remember taking a field trip to a Carvel store, either while we were homeschooling or when I was in Christian school. They gave us free samples of their ice cream, so I classify it as a highly successful field trip. McDonald's did the same thing when our support group went there.

I'll have to make sure I get in on my kids' field trips :)

--DJ

The Social Dynamics of Children

When we were looking for a new house 5 years ago, we were immediately attracted to the neighborhood because when we came to view the house that was for sale, there were kids playing everywhere. When we moved in 3 months later, we were delighted to find that right across the road was a family with a daughter the same age as Addie. She and Mollie have now become fast friends.

There is a little girl down the street (I'll call her River) who is also good friends with Mollie. I often look outside and see Mollie, Addie, and River playing together. However, Mollie is the glue. River rarely comes over to play with Addie. When the 3 of them are together, Mollie is the one who assigns roles, decides what games to play, and generally runs things (even though River is older).

It reminded me of growing up on Chestnut Hill, where Blake was the glue. Keith and Evan and I rarely played together if it was just the 3 of us, and I never played with Camille and Justin. But we would all get together at Blake's house, where he would assign us roles, instruct us in what games to play, and generally run things. Most of my summer days as a kid were spent over at Blake's house, where I'd stay after we went to 9:00 hour in the meeting room above the garage.

It's fun to see these dynamics play out from the perspective of an adult. I think that Addie plays the role of Keith - if she doesn't like how something is going, she'll just go off to do her own thing (although her leave-taking is far more dramatic than anything Keith would have done). Stuart, I'm afraid, tends to be more like me - if he doesn't like something, he will cry to try to get his own way. I was very bad about doing this as a child.

Blake, by the way, is now in seminary. I think he'll make a good pastor. And I still enjoy having someone else in charge, which is a major reason I'm a deacon, not a priest. Keith is off saving the world and raising 3 boys (a prospect that daunts me).

--DJ

High Society

I don't know why I try to watch movies for entertainment.

One exception worth mentioning is that Darren and I just watched the movie version of Louis Sachar's book "Holes." If you aren't familiar with "Holes," then stop reading this post right now, get thee to a library, and check out a copy of the book. After you've read the book, get the movie. Like pieces of a puzzle, the story starts out disjointed, only to lock into an extremely satisfying big picture by the end.

Back to my regularly-scheduled movie rant.

(This post originally was much longer, but I snipped it.)

I watched the last fifteen minutes or so of "High Society" last night while folding clothes. It's unusual that I watch movies by myself, but I'd been seeing this one in pieces and decided to finish it. It stars Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby, and is a jazz-musical remake of "The Philadelphia Story," which featured Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and a young Jimmy Stewart. (I'm in love with Jimmy Stewart.) I've seen both movies a few times before, always with the hope that *this* time I'll understand the story. I never do.

Basically, Kelly plays Tracy Lord, a rich young heiress with implacably high standards. When anyone -- a husband, a father -- fails to live up to her expectations, she shunts them aside. On the eve of her second marriage, to the equally high-minded George, Tracy evidently has a drunken fling with a visiting tabloid reporter. She can't actually remember what happened, but unfortunately both her husband-to-be, and her husband-that-was (Dexter, who hangs around because he's still devoted to her)witness her midnight return to her rooms, with the reporter, wearing nothing but bathrobes.

George of course is shattered, while Dexter (illustrating how he loves people Just The Way They Are) takes everything in stride. Tracy herself is devastated that she possibly could have committed such a moral travesty. It's the morning of the wedding, and all of a sudden Tracy is chastened and apologetic. Now she knows what it is to be flawed. She sees everyone -- including her unambitious first husband and her adulterous father -- in a new and charitable light. It turns out and she and the reporter didn't do anything, but she and George call things off anyway. Instead, she marries Dexter again. It all ends in a jazzy wedding march and kisses all around.

Generations of movie-watchers file out around me, satisfied with a happy ending and beautiful clothes. I'm left holding an unmatched sock in my hand and apparently the only one who can't believe that this would all end happily. Tracy is now forgiving and full of grace for flawed mankind? Dexter really can make it as her husband a second time? And am I the only one who noticed that a running moral of the story is, If a man has flings with other women, but says he's sorry when it happens, then he should be forgiven and beloved again? The story doesn't deliver what it promises, and I'm left chewing on it over and over again, trying to make it fit.

Everyone else replies, "Then stop trying to make it fit! What does it matter anyway?" It doesn't matter, of course. Except that movies reflect accepted attitudes, and movies mess with our reality, so we sometimes think that a ten-minute life change really is possible and happy endings our due. Still, why do I do this with forgettable movies? Probably because I don't watch heavier ones, ones that really warrant thought and energy. If I get this involved in "High Society," imagine what I was like after seeing "Braveheart" years ago. I was exhausted for a week.

-- SJ

Undecorous

I'm not such a great hand at used-book sales. Possibly it's because I don't read much fiction, or because I'm not patient enough to sift through piles of junk to find gems, or because I don't keep a mental bank of "authors I always like." (At least, not the recently-alive ones.) Darren can browse for an hour and round up twenty books. I browse for an hour and manage to scrounge up five, one of which Darren finds for me. Then I come home and throw out three of them.

Occasionally I hit on a good one, though. One of my best finds, a year or so ago, was The Doubleday Book of Interior Decorating. I don't really like decorating, but I do like reading about it. Still, a book on interior decorating probably wouldn't have survived the initial at-home purge, except that this one was published in 1965.

Imagine all the decorating distinctives of that era: the colors, the furniture, the "modern-art" wall-hanging. Yes, it's all in this book. I read it like other people read Stephen King: thrilled by the horror. It's written in a formal, patronizing tone, with absolutely no inkling that later generations would find the advice, sample rooms, and discussion hideous.

For example, here the author is instructing the unwashed masses in choosing colors for a living room:

"To start, paint your walls, ceiling, and woodwork pale lime-green. Or paper the walls with greenish-gold grass cloth. Grapefruit-yellow draperies will look well against either. Cover the floor with dark brown, earth-colored carpet. Upholster the two armchairs in lemon-colored damask. On a lime-green sofa, shower cushions ranging from gold to tangerine...."

Or a bedroom:
"The walls, ceiling, and woodwork are pale yellow. The floor is completely covered with a tobacco-brown carpet. The draperies and bedspread are a flowered print based on the marigold colors: yellow-gold, orange, and brown, with touches of pale green. An armchair is upholstered in persimmon leather. Two benches are covered in tobacco-brown corduroy. The furniture is bleached ash."

Fortunately there aren't pictures to accompany every description; the pictures which are included are quite enough. Why do I read this book? Because I like "recent history." Because I'm fascinated by what bygone eras thought was beautiful. And because, after seeing the room with brown paisley covering the wall and sofa so that it all blended together in one uniform nightmare of paisley, I don't feel so bad about my own house.

-- SJ