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Photo Finish March 15, 2010
My mother was culling through past travel photos, about 900 or so and I noticed that the collection was, reasonably, mostly of where we traveled, but not so common, there were few photos of the family, the participants in the travel. I know I should be grateful because as I veiwed the photos my parents did take of the family, there was not a single flattering photo of me. There are photos of me asleep with my mouth hanging open, eating or squinting against direct sunlight, I look fat in every one. Maybe I was fat, I don’t trust the photos to give me a reality check.
When my father passed away, my mother picked up his torch and his camera. If there is an unflattering angle, if I’m looking particularly awful, there she is shooting with alacrity; Oh you just woke up, let’s take a picture! Oh look you’re slouching in front of a computer, let’s take a profile shot.
I am still puzzling over my parents propensity towards unflattering angles, capturing me in the worst light, the worst pose possible. This preference for the ugly makes makes me long for the very old fashion days when a camera was the exception, film was expensive and developing was prohibitive. This whole closed eco-system kept producing photos to the bare minimum. The first communion, the wedding, two new grandchild photographs. Because committing such events to film was a big deal, the subject had a chance to prepare: time to make sure the hair is right, the dress is straighten, and a to strike a flattering pose that the latest magazine promised would make you look five pounds thinner. This restraint suits me far better than the collection of spontaneous photographs of: me sleeping on the train, me sleeping in a bean bag chair flush with a fever of 103, me eating a hard stale sandwich in Hyde Park, me scarfing cold cereal in a Motel Six. Me waiting in line for the restroom.
I know I should be grateful that my father never had the opportunity to create the web site, badphotosof Catharine.com. I’m sure he would have loved sharing all those awkward moments with the world, including my potential clients and employers.
So for that, I am very grateful.
National Craft Month March 8, 2010
In honor of National Craft Month – March, this is my personal history with craft encounters:
Cut snowflakes in January – all mine looked alike.
Glued and pasted Valentine cards in February – was relieved to later discover pre-made sets at the grocery store.
Pasted Shamrocks in March – Some class mates could create a pot of gold, a rainbow and make full-scale leprechaun hats, to dress up that one moment on March 17th. My hat never fit.
Dyed Easter eggs in April – my mother was blessed with a steady hand and hours of patience. I was cursed with an awkward technique and a distractible nature. Three eggs; purple, green and a sort of brown.
Created May flowers and hats, we wore the hats about as long as we did the Leprechaun hats, but they were pretty and spring-like. Oh, except mine.
June was a fabulous moment of freedom where the only art project was to mark off the last days of school with a red pen.
My mother loved to suspend red white and blue streamers across the back porch and post flags for the Fourth of July. I stood on the sidelines and watched the annual parade, but declined to decorate a float or perform. Yes, I let the parade pass me by.
September brought back the groove of crafts and activities. We gathered red, orange and yellow leaves and pressed them between sheets of wax paper. That was back when you could play with a hot iron on public school property.
What did my Halloween pumpkin resemble? The terms now a days is special. I created very special Jack O’Lanterns.
We made pilgrim hats for Thanksgiving. This represented my first visceral experience that boys had it much easier in life than girls. Their pilgrim hats were easy to make – they looked like that of a leprechaun. The girl’s hats were impossible white things that didn’t stand up well under increasing frantic folding. And I was only five.
December was so replete with images and creative possibilities; baking, ornaments, hand made gifts, hand made cards, garlands, flags, festive hats, that the mind reeled.
I began to love August because there was no craft project attached to the month.
So here is to August, the month that for me is one long craft-less holiday.
The Coleus Manifesto May 30, 2009
Domestic life in the seventies always featured plants; spider plants, asparagus ferns, split-leaf philodendrons, coleus, rows of green tumbled over the bookcases, the wandering Jew hung by the window in, yes, a macramé hanger.
For a few years half a dozen plants dominated my room all in various stages of distress. I routinely flooded my bookcases when I watered the wandering Jew and flooded my carpet when I dumped my tea into the asparagus fern.
What was the impetus to drag plants indoors? I don’t recall reading any manifesto that called for all humans to increase the oxygen levels in the house and so nurture the Coleus and the Philodendron and water the ficus. The relentless piles of living green stuff had a certain charm, but I quickly discovered that as charming as the plants were, they were not happy in my care. I watered, flooded, starved, fertilized then watered again until, under my inexpert ministrations, the coleus lost it’s color, the ficus dipped yellow leaves onto the white shag carpet and the spider plant grew more disreputable every day.
I even tried talking to my plants. Discussing future plans and reading out loud to your plants was a popular past time in the 70s. It was also one of the easier science fair entries, if you were bored with the solar system made with Styrofoam planets, then the plant experiment was for you. The plant experiment had the advantage of low overhead costs, all it took was two identical plants. I suppose re-planting weeds from the yard would do, but no one ever went that far.
Once the two plants were purchased and regular water and sun in exactly the same amounts for each plant was established, then the junior scientist was free to read out loud to one plant and hurl insults at the other. It would seem that the popularity of this experiment lay in the ability for 7th and 8th grade children to have license to vigorously yell at something on a daily basis. By the time the science fair rose over the horizon like the largest Styrofoam ball in the center of the universe, the verbally abused plant was always smaller and more yellow than the encouraged plant bursting with green foliage and self-esteem.
I never entered my own results in the science fair, but even after weeks of discussing my future plans with the Wandering Jew, it still grew limp, weak and still. Brown leaves caught in the macramé hanger. It clearly wanted to leave the building.
I still worry that it expired from boredom.
Lions Tigers and Bears May 11, 2009
To the uninitiated, the idea of spending an evening viewing slides packed 100 into a carrousel (my uncle and grandfather owned the latest technology, my father refused to upgrade his single slide at a time projector on moral grounds, or something) may sound interesting, possibly quaint, but no one I knew was burdened with traveling relatives, let alone two sets both of whom traveled to the same destinations, all of whom took photos. All of whom shared.
My Grandparents liked to travel as cheaply as they could. They boarded the coaches (a nice word for a large greyhound bus stuffed with overfed Americans) run by the early travel companies. I don’t know how they traveled or on what kind of conveyance since my own memories are colored by my parents – the original drifter – hostel staying – hitching hiking – five dollars a day travelers – who were horrified by the idea of riding around any country en mass, crammed into a bus with their fellow countrymen, viewing the world through smudged windows.
What can you see out a bus window? The two of them would grouse on the way home. My brother and I were too busy trying to fall asleep in the car to see if our parents would carry us to bed (but they never did and we had to walk to our nice beds) to enter the conversation. We didn’t know much then about Mr. Frommer and his famous book. All we knew was that to travel was to experience life outside the bus, and away from the “tourist” spots. Which I would later discover is a problematic attitude since many things I wanted to see in the world, fell under the rubric of “tourist”.
My grandparents embraced the tourist sobriquet and marched in line to see everything there was to see, as cheaply as possible. I don’t ever recall that my grandparents vacationed; they only traveled.
My grandparent’s slides were of marathon quality, the experience, extreme. My grandfather snapped all the photos during their trip. He then built up an armament of up to 600 slides, per night, blasting through our consciousness, convincing us it was just like being there.
My grandmother was in charge of the running commentary. She had a loud voice, which was too bad since it kept us awake.
My Grandparents were very proud that they could feed their children during the depression and the war. They were quite good at saving, sometimes hording as was the case with my grandfather and tools, but he did not hoard, save or otherwise ration out film. Grandpa was an indiscriminate photographer, something was interesting, or caught his attention, he took the picture. He created hundreds of photos per trip and printed every one out into slides, because that was the only choice, all the photos on film were printed, money spent, take your chances. And since he had spent all that money to bring the photos to life, I’m sure he felt that each photo was worthy of viewing, even if it was the same lion, dangling in the same tree, seven times over.
“Look at that lion, I think he moved by the sixth picture, you should have seen how many other photos the others in our tour took, I only have these seven, I was very discerning and only took another when I thought he moved. See that? He moved in the fifth frame.”
Those photos are now lost, but I can describe that lion to you if you’d like.
Early Man Cave May 7, 2009
My grandfather had two places to escape, under his house and behind ours.
Under his house was an ad hoc basement. Basements are difficult to come by in California. Grandpa’s basement was more a space between the down stairs apartment and a huge boulder that made up the foundation of the house. In this space Grandpa built a tool bench and a workbench and then further back, into the ground and completely under the house, he stored more tools. He had a similar set up at the beach house (which I suppose would be his third get away place).
We all remember the proclivities of our elders. Some grandparents or parents stored nails in cleaned baby food jars, nailing the lids onto a board so the jars screwed into the lid. The jars were filled with tiny nails and screw. Some parents outlined each tool on a huge pegboard, so when the tools were in use, the pegboard looked like a crime scene with just the outline of the missing tool left. My grandfather saved Dimension Lumber. To the naked eye, this lumber looked like so much scrap; old, riddled with nails, dirty. But if a piece of wood had measurements: two by four, six by two, four by four, it was considered valuable and useful for later repairs: Dimension Lumber. If you needed a two by four with only a few nails embedded in it to repair the hole in the side of the house, Grandpa was your man. Grandpa claimed he could not hear my grandmother when he was working on his tools at his bench. This was a problem. For my grandmother.
Grandpa’s other favorite escape was my father’s garage, only five blocks away. Mind you, when my parents built this garage, they got nothing but grief from my grandparents. Helen and Lynn thought it was too big, too elaborate, too expensive. It was expensive not only for the wanton use of brand new wood but Dad also went to the trouble to hire a real contractor to supervise the job. Dad may have even secured a building permit. Grandpa offered to store some of his Dimension Lumber in the back of the garage but Dad discouraged him.
Dad did work on the garage building. I think my dad nailed on the shingles himself because there is a photo of my brother and I on the roof with him. And we did not, as a family, indulge in gratuitous roof sitting. So Dad did some of it himself. The concrete was poured professionally. I say that because the patio was poured by friends and family and there was a notable difference in the end results. The concrete floor for the garage was large enough to hold four large cars with space left over for nail and lumber storage. As always there was a lag between the finished cement and the building. So for a few weeks we were treated to a novel pad of perfectly flat cement. My parents used the space to host one of the parties for Beer and Tub – a Nevada City social group. Those people danced. I roller-skated. I hadn’t encountered such ease and perfection since I twisted on the steels skates to my tennis shoes and pushed off. I skated every day until the fabulous glassy surface disappeared under the building. I was sorry to see it go.
Did the garage house four cars? No, just two. The rest was taken up with storage, bins of flour and oats during my Dad’s bulk food buy days and large equipment – a lath a table saw, other saws. And my grandfather. For a man who disdained the size of this garage and the expense to build he, he was an awfully big fan. My grandmother was reduced to phoning out house because her voice didn’t reach over the hill. . My mother answered the phone and say something like “No, I don’t see Lynn Sr.” Because, of course, from the kitchen or dining room she couldn’t see for sure who was hiding in the garage. She may have ratted him out just once because she saw him try to sneak a trailer full of Dimension Lumber down the driveway.
Now the big garage stores pallet size boxes belonging to my brother. Glass jars ready in case my mother decides to can (that was a blessedly brief experiment but you never know . . .) and piles of bags, boxes and sheets for the Children’s Festival in July – mom is the official storage unit for same. My brother used to visit my mother every weekend. But she never saw him. He was in the garage.
Angel Hair May 3, 2009
If it wasn’t for Farrah Fawcett- Majors I would have been able to sleep in.
As it was, because of her magnificent hair, the rest of the mortals on this planet or at the very least, the female members of the class of 1978 were required to work as hard and as long as we could every morning to achieve the Farrah look.
Farrah was married to Lee Majors, the 6 Million Dollar Man. which just shows how much more a million dollars could buy in the seventies.
The triptych of Farrah, Kate and Jaclyn either inspired or haunted. I prefer haunted because who could achieve the ultimate insouciance these women displayed week after week? And who else blindly followed the extortions of a bodiless voice? It was kind of like a cult. But great entertainment.
So because of Charlie’s Angels, I dragged myself from my warm bed into the cold room and plugged in the curling iron and tried to both curl my hair and keep the iron from resting on my forehead (it happened to all of us often enough) in the dim morning light.
Why? Because the feathering look was in and the in look was only possible through chemistry and physics. There was no such thing as naturally feathering hair. So every morning I’d get out of bed early and patiently sit in the low light of my room and curl my hair so it rolled out from each side of my face. It took about twenty minutes. The project felt like hours. I tried to read a book while holding the curling iron, but that did not work, I have the burn scar to prove it.
I cannot even tell you if the feather- look was right for me because that was hardly the point. What mattered was that I achieved the look every weekday morning and marched out of the house with the look in place and lost the look by mid-day.
When Charlie’s Angels retreated from Prime Time, I was not sorry.
Guns and Butter May 2, 2009
My grandparents served butter. My parents insisted on buying margarine.
I thought this was not a culture war so much as a health war. But when I think about it, of course it was a culture war. My parents were at the front lines of the latest health information, they were modern, they were committed to baked foods, no frying, no breading and no buttering. My grandparents were the stolid traditionalists confident in their farm ways (that the farm was in Healdsburg CA didn’t make it any less than a farm I suppose). They always used butter. My dad always bought margarine (Imperial Margarine made you feel like a king/queen).
Here’s what I remember from my grandmother’s hot dinners: big chunks of butter, bright yellow butter sinking into green peas, chunks of butter that must cover every exposed inch of baked potato, melted butter sliding along the plate to mingle with the roast juices. There was nothing better than real butter. And eating it was so satisfying we gladly traded a night of butter for the lecture in the car on the way home: the margarine is healthier than butter and if your grandmother would just listen to reason and change her ways your grandfather would be much healthier lecture. Which, since the drive was brief, only lasted seven or so minutes.
But the repetition did its work and we knew that butter was bad, dangerous, delicious. If we learned anything from the butter/ margarine controversy it was this: the unhealthier a food, the better it tastes. And once my father moved deeply into whole grain health foods we could also say that to experience salubrious nutrition one must completely forgo flavor.
Who’s Afraid of the 70s? April 30, 2009
I read an article in a business magazine titled Who’s afraid of the seventies?
In the seventies we seemed to all live an ordinary life.
We walked along the shore happy when we discovered the odd whole shell that washed up. But before we knew what was happening, a tidal wave off shore was gathering momentum, then speed and suddenly a wave filled with objects of need and want loomed large, even over the higher ground. The wave paused just long enough for those on the ground to admire the shiny objects caught in the deadly water before the whole smacked down and engulfed us all in waves and waves of objects and desires.
After a few years of churning haphazardly through the tide, often bruised by floating objects since desire and acquisition have sharp corners. Just as abruptly, especially to those furiously dog paddling and simultaneously grabbing at more stuff, all the while just keeping their head above the water, the tide sucked back from land as violently as it hit.
Now the water wave pulled away all the things, all the objects and all the dreams that those who had been treading water managed to keep afloat during the flood, back out to sea and into deep water. And we wake, and drown.
Parents – the key to childhood January 19, 2010
Tags: 70s, commentary, garages, memoir, personal stories
I am writing a memoir.
Often times writing means staring at a jumble of words on the screen and feeling like I have nothing to contribute to the genre.
Since I enjoyed a happy childhood, I often feel I have nothing unique to say.
I said so, in so many words, to a friend and my coach.
“Didn’t everyone’s father spend hours a day in the garage figuring out how to smooth down the edges of the glass ware collection made from discarded wine bottles so they could be used on the patio for summer dining?”
“Didn’t everyone have mothers who sat with us, the children, for hours a day to create Playdough ashtrays, magazine collage pictures, potato stamp wrapping paper and needlepoint pictures suitable for framing?”
“No,” she said. “They did not.”
To give it away; my parents did not spend all of their day making money. As teachers, they only spent part of their day making money, the rest of the day, Christmas, summer, was spent traveling, exploring and finding a way to make a dining room table from wine barrel staves.
Apparently, that is a different experience.