Friday, December 28, 2012

Invasion of the Home Snatchers


Even the steely eyes
 of my stare
has not affected
 these people
 
who have invaded
and snatched
 
MY time
 with my feeders and fetchers.
 
Time
to re-arrange
their
valuables which are stuck in
these, mysterious, black bags of un Tallulah- rize stuff.
 
Must be worthless
but
important 
to strangers
because they make
them
impenetrable.
Almost.
I find way in.
to bite
lick
or ignore.
 
I need attention.
Like.
Yesterday.

Now.
Go Away.
 
 
 
 
 



Thursday, December 13, 2012

Charity Lane

David and I always find new ways to enjoy the area around our mountain house. This year's surprise event is a seven mile stretch of road all lit up for Christmas.

Touted as "a community of Christmas lights, lighting the valley for all to see the way home," the drive showcasing these, in some cases, over the top lights was a combination of nostalgia and [dare I type it?] tacky, and you know, there's nothing wrong with "tacky" in moderation.

*wink, wink*

For a ten dollar donation, Christmas light lookers drive slowly on a windy road behind Rabun Gap Nacochee School and gawk to their heart's content -- as well as be thankful they're not the neighbor of the participant who has the song "Jingle Bell" at maximum level [perhaps to be heard at the road for lookers with their windows closed?] on loop for five and a half hours.

*wipes brow*

Known as Charity Lane, the thirty-two different sponsors who set up lights, light poles, volunteered, and, in some cases, donned costumes as well as manned stopping stations range from five different [IMHO -- adorable and sweet] churches to several food banks, Kiwanis and Lions' Club, Paws 4 Life [where they take donations of dog and cat food], Toys for Tots,  and Foxfire. Included in this are the property owners of Wolffork Valley who allow interlopers like us to stop and take pictures and stare at the lights adorned on their houses and barns -- as well as in two cases -- truck and boat.

Totally a festival for the eyes, David and I were glad that it happened to fall on one of our weekends in the mountains. :-)







 Right in the middle of this "drive," we're reminded of where we are... LOL.



Note: My lousy night time camera clicking does not do it justice, but I hope you can see a little of its playfulness.



Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Reindeer Tossing: Another Tallulah Christmas Tradition

Those of you who read my blog might remember the one about Tallulah's fascination with the Christmas tree.

For 2012, she's switched to messing with the mantle -- especially with the reindeer [gift from one of my SCHS students back in 1999 -- I kept it because of that Prince song -- I was gonna post a link to the song here, but it's got copyright laws for the audio -- and why that Prince song means something to me is not relevant for this blog -- maybe later, maybe not later.]

In her words:


Yes, I sit on the mantle. 
At night. 
In broad daylight.
Too.
*drum beat*
Cuz.
I can.

It beckons to me like tree, but the tree is boring.  
Been there.
Done that.

The mantle begs me to jump for it.
Cuz.
*drum roll*
 
Stuff to push around.
Smell.
Investigate.
Ignore.
Mostly that.

It's high.
I shouldn't.
So. 
I do.
Cat. I. Am.
Not bird.
Or dog.
Not that. Or it. Or them.

 Then I see.
*blinks*
Ridiculous red reindeer.
Red. 
Why?
Not realistic at all.
And.
Totally unworthy of position.
*raises paw in protest*

Smells too.
Like attic boxes.
Or.
Mice.

Not a fan of vermin.
Ever.
*licks paws*

 So.
Last night.

Dumped him.
Reindeer overboard.
*snickers*

Pushed his red self to the floor. 

*boom, chicka, bow wow*

Picked him up by his antlers and tossed him like a bad salad.
 Easy peasy.


 Now.

Look.

Another interloper.
 
Sock monkey. 
Eh.
 More ridiculousness.
AND
Easier pickings than reindeer.

Like birds.

He goes.
Tonight.

Or tomorrow.

Depends.
On mood.
Or.

Necessity.



It's me.
Or him.

Even though there really is no competition.
Much more fabulous
Is I.

And.

Sock monkey?

Waste of the word "sock."

Later.

Need a nap after all of that rapping.

:-)

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Lauren Olivia

When Jennifer asked me to be the god mother to her newborn, I felt hugely blessed. What an honor to be seen as someone outside the family whom the mother and father trust to called "god" mother to their precious gift from God.

With that said ---





Hello to beautiful Lauren Olivia, born on October 11, 2012, to my friend Laura's daughter, Jennifer and the baby's father Justice

Our first girls' lunch --- October 25, 2012
 

Friday, November 9, 2012

A Small Town's Gesture of Thanks

In Douglasville, Georgia, today, the City Council passed a resolution to dedicate a section of Douglasville Highway in honor of Scott "Boots" Harper.

 After Scott's death, his high school friends made up these t-shirts.
  
 the memorial sign now on Douglasville Highway

 
two members of the Patriot Guard riders

Scott's dad Brian, a former student of mine at Douglas County HS, class of 1984, invited me, and with a full heart for him, I drove out there on a beautiful, fall day with my good friend and former colleague at DCHS, Lynn Harper [no relation to Brian except that she taught him tenth grade English].

 
Brian, Lynn, and Brian's wife

About 150 people attended the unveiling of the sign as Douglas County police blocked off a section of the highway for the dedication.

Patriotic.
Sweet.
Special.

But
Sad -- 
as Brian continues to mourn his only son, a son he told me that " Every day, [he] tries to figure out a way to bring back."

Hugs.

BTW: My friend Lynn lost her only son to cancer in 2009. Her giant heart for giving and loving on others, she bought flags in memory of her son and Scott which are on view three times a year on Marietta Street in Powder Springs. 



Thursday, November 8, 2012

Then. Always.

Robin, Yvonne, Angela, me, Melissa, Ashlynn, Liz
front: Carrie, Emily, Niki

Gathered tonight at Emily's house for a chili dinner, the above ladies were my colleagues at KMHS. Some of them are still there, others have moved on to other schools and other things, but we will always be connected by our shared stories and laughter.

Trust me. 
We did some laughing. 
Then. 
Tonight.
Always.

*smooches*

Hotel's on the Corner, but Buddha's in the Attic



As usual, I read Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford after all the hoopla of book awards and raving, critical reviews. By now, a Hollywood writer has penned the screenplay [or it’s already made], a theater group has performed it on the stage, and it's been translated into twenty languages.

Gifted to me by my friend Wingate, who read it when it was “hot,” I just got around to it, and so, I’m late to not only the reading but the review.

Set in Seattle in the 1980s {I think}, Chinese-American Henry Lee pauses in front of the Panama Hotel, a prominent Japanese establishment closed since World War II, and notes that the new owners in their renovation efforts have discovered trunks, suitcases, and boxes left behind by the Japanese-Americans who were removed by the US government to interment camps in the panicky wake of Pearl Harbor.

Seeing these items triggers an event in Henry’s past, and so begins his memories of his own youth, the discrimination he suffered, and the young Japanese girl he met whose life intertwined with his own.  Flipping between the present and the past, Ford’s novel looks at a ugly time in American history from a different perspective, that of a Chinese boy, and has moments of rawness and honesty, but overall, the story became formulaic, and way before the end, predictable. As much as I liked Henry Lee, he seems a bit too resourceful and the people placed in his path convenient for his purposes.



I don’t know how this happens to me, but it did. I completed the Ford book a week ago and then picked up another novel from my lengthy list: Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.

The title of the novel, which is actually quite witty, becomes significant in the last pages [I actually chuckled], but what blew me away is Otuska’s narrator choice of first person plural.

Yes.  The collective we.

Imaginative, effective, and perfect.

“We” are the Japanese women who arrived in California after World War I and were set to marry men they had never met and begin lives that they imagined promised more than their native Japan: “ On the boat we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were.  That the crowd in men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock would bear no resemblance to the handsome young men in the photographs.  That the letters we had been written had been written to us by people other than our husbands, professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it was to tell lies and win hearts.”

A short novel, with curt chapter titles, Buddha in the Attic moves chronologically as “we” began lives as wives, mothers, and workers and eventually led to the same fate as the Japanese of Ford’s novel and in American history.

Of the two, Otsuka’s novel stirred me more -- perhaps, because it lacked the sentimentality of Henry Lee and focused on the effects of displacement, disappointment, and disappearance not on the individual -- but a whole community. Well done.

BTW: Forgive me for my corny, blog title.

Only not.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Love it when this happens..

Former students contact me, and then we meet for lunch.

Christie currently teachers middle school English and history, and Kaitlynn, her giggling friend, designs landscapes.

They were awesome to see. Thanks, girls.

Smooches.



Kaitlynn and Christie
KMHS, class of 2007
Mississippi State, class of 2011


Friday, October 26, 2012

Of Witches and Puppies


Growing up in poor, farming families, my parents saw animals as a necessity to farm life, but not a “have to” of the suburban life they designed for their own progeny. To them, having a pet was just another responsibility.

We owned one dog,  Susie, a white and black mix, who eventually graced us with a litter of puppies. My dad, after she weaned her brood, loaded Susie in our Oldsmobile and drove her to the Atlanta pound.  In the back seat of the car, I wept inconsolably and clung to Susie and thought my parents unreasonable and un-feeling. “Dogs,” my dad rationalized, “cost a lot of money that we don’t have, and she’ll just continue to have puppies that we can’t afford to feed.”

Susie was the one and only dog we had.

We did have a succession of cats, who were “less trouble and less expensive,” and we adopted them full grown from the pound.  The first one, named Sybil, had fluffy, white fur and a chronic eye infection that oozed this thick, gunky fluid. Ugh.  After Sybil [I don‘t remember what happened to her], we owned two other cats: Wilbur and Pete.  Both had singular personalities and meows, and both seem infintely lazy. Pete climbed in between the screen and the door, where he propped his paws on the mullions in the glass, and caterwaul to be let in.  Daddy had a soft spot for cats as he let them sleep in his lap, unlike my mother who, well, only tolerated them.

We never owned litter boxes; my mother said “uh, no,” so the cats were “outside cats,” and when we owned them, one of the last nightly events was to make sure that “the cat” was “out.”

We never kept any of them around for long. They either disappeared or chose to move on to a place of canned food, litter boxes, and “inside rights.”

When I was a teenager, I begged my parents for a kitten --- the first one I named Toke, and he climbed the roof, stared us down, and then meowed as if he couldn’t figure out how to descend. The second one I named JaJoe, and as a red cat, his loving personality won my daddy’s heart. Neither of them lived with us into cat-hood -- Toke disappeared, and JaJoe, found by my father at the top of our street where he had been hit  by a car, closed the door on our owning any more. My daddy and I both cried over the loss of that cat.

Thinking of our pets and our one dog Susie led me to think about the Halloweens of my youth, and a story about her puppies and my Daddy I will relate eventually.


In my earliest Halloween memories, the first surrounds the selection of a costume. In the attic of our home, a place only accessible by ladder and hoisting oneself through a square opening in the ceiling of our pantry, lay a black trunk, smelling of sweat and old -- maybe just old sweat. In that trunk my mother folded and packed away a small selection of home made costumes.

I‘m not sure why the delving into the trunk and the selection seemed so monumental since, well, the options never changed. The outfit that I wore most years was a black cotton, long sleeved draped dress with a jagged hem and a conical black hat. Yep. Witch.  As predictable as the Halloween weather, which was either really hot or really cold, I dressed as a witch and ventured out, paper bag in hand, with a dozen or so neighborhood friends and trick or treated.

Hunter in the clown costume, October 1954.
Hunter and Margaret in tiny hats, October 1954

My sister remembers another choice as being a clown costume, but I don’t remember wearing it. My brother, on the other hand, recalls that most years he was a bum because he “could put together the costume from his own dresser drawers.”  After Kennedy was elected in 1960 and before he was assassinated in 1963 [so one of those years], my brothers dressed for Halloween as indigents. My mother completed their look by attaching a sign to their backs that read “I collect cigarette butts for Kennedy.” 

It must have been some private joke my mother enjoyed since, in retrospect, we don’t remember why she found it so humorous; however, we know that she embraced with gusto the festivities of Halloween. My mother had what we called a “flair for the dramatic,” and Halloween was one of the holidays where she demonstrated that side of her. [I think I have already blogged about our Christmas performances.]


One year, she donned the witch costume, and resplendent in black drape and conical hat, pulled a cast iron black pot into the porch [similar to a cauldron - yes, really-- saved from her parent’s farm], filled it with dry ice, and stood on our front porch, in a type of frieze, and stirred the pot as she waited for the trick or treaters. 

Her little Halloween drama simulation and outfit deterred a few of the younger set from our door, but my mother’s presentation ended up being kind of legendary, or at least that night. By word of mouth, her effective performance brought, from literally miles around, trick or treaters and adults alike who gazed and gaped at our house, our front porch, and my mother in all her eerie grandeur.  A crowd gathered not only in front of our house but at the top of our street.  Very surprised I was, as I tricked and treated, to hear others in the masked masses whisper and tell of what was to be “seen on Oana Street.” For my young ears, and what I thought of as a fragile reputation, my mother’s spectacle offered me a mixed of awkwardness, embarrassment, and pride.

A lot of the costumes in my day were homemade -- but a few lucky friends of mine bought ready made costumes at Woolworth’s. Those costumes glittered in their completeness-- from tiaras, wands, and pink tulle and net dresses for princesses to a rubbery mask, horns, pitchfork, and red, shiny, slippery shirt and pants for anyone wishing to dress as a devil. I coveted those ready mades as they lay folded on shelves or hung on racks on the seasonal aisle of that five and dime store.

These aren't Halloween costumes, but they should be. I was, mercifully, absent from this photo.

Carrying our grocery, two handled, paper bag with crudely decorated drawings of Jack-o-Lanterns, we giggled and screamed as we ran from house to house. We rarely used the sidewalks and driveways but instead dashed across yards, down banks and hills, crossed back yards, and opened gates as we skipped and staggered, with our weighty bags, from house to house. Knocking at the houses with porch lights on [ a signal that “treats” would be given out], we shouted “trick or treat,” and the givers dropped unknown goodies into our bag. In a frenzy, we took off to the next one -- trying to get in as many houses as we could before our scheduled curfew: “dark-thirty.”

We encountered hundreds of masked marauders, classmates, neighbors, and older kids we knew; we jumped out from behind bushes to scare each other, squealed when a realistic costume or mask scared us, and shouted and greeted each other in an excitement unmatched by any other time -- such freedom to run rampant and un-chaperoned at night seemed surreal;  all rules about school nights pushed aside for this one crazy, and really unexplained, traditional holiday.


The treats distributed by the occupants of the houses varied, but we knew the houses who had the best ones and made sure we got by there before the night was over.  We accepted and thanked whatever was doled out: homemade goodies wrapped in wax paper or cellophane, Rice Krispy treats, candied apples, popcorn balls, or cookies, and a the few who gave “store bought,” lollipops, Sweet Tarts, Tootsie rolls, or candy corn: my personal favorite -- candy cigarettes, four to a pack. Marcie, my BFF at the time, and I savored those “cigarettes.” We placed one in our mouths at a jaunty angle and imagined ourselves as one of the wild bunch.  Imagine giving children "pretend" cigarettes. LOL

At some point as we advanced into the ripe old age of seventh grade, we gave up the annual event as “kid’s stuff"and became the giver of the treats at the door to a new generation of Supermans, Snow Whites, and Richard Nixons.

One of my favorite memories of Halloween has to do with our dog Susie. About six weeks before Halloween, Susie had given birth to six puppies, and we hoped to find homes for them. My father, in a moment of brilliance or extreme humor, met the various trick or treaters at the door and tried to place a puppy in their opened bag. He convinced at least four of the many costumed to take the puppies. Only two of the puppies were returned.


One of Susie's puppies
My siblings and I still laugh about that Halloween and my daddy’s derring-do, and we know that one of those puppies grew into a big dog on a neighboring street. Each time we walked by that house and saw that dog behind the fence, we got a huge chuckle.

BTW: I don’t know how many parents came to our door that night with a Halloween puppy to return or whether or not they were as amused as my daddy or angry about his “trick,” but it’s one of those memories from childhood that I love to tell as it is just as characteristic of my daddy as the Halloween production is of my mother.

Happy Halloween!





Thursday, October 25, 2012

Celebration 2.2 or THE Wedding

That's what it was known as: THE WEDDING.
 For almost two years, we waited for October of 2012, and for Paul and Angie to get married.

*claps*

Right now, the 'phews and 'news [the news are done, actually] average a wedding every two years -- Amy and David in 2008, Nora and Bryan in 2010, and now Paul and Angie.

With five 'phews to go, and if the mean average stays, then by my lame calculations, the last 'phew gets married in 2022. At that rate, I will be older than Methuselah.. and
the Four Horsemen will have arrived -- hmmm?
Phews?
Let's double up or triple up -- what do you say?

At 2 pm on October 6, 2012, Angie and Paul married at Something Special in Newnan, Georgia.
{BTW -- I love that the venue called itself that -- as opposed to Mediocre Memories.}

Around 10:30, David puts curls in Angie's hair while she chows on a bagel.
After the hair is done, Angie's posse poses for a parting shot.
Before the wedding, David and I eat a sandwich on the square in downtown Newnan.
David girds up for the wedding.
 
Andrew and Kayla
Kenneth, and his son, the handsome groom, Paul
Bryan and Nora
 
Margaret, Chapman, and a mum on steroids






Bridget and Glenn
Janet and Hunter
Aren't these bridesmaids' dresses fun?
No matter how exciting a wedding is --- it's imperative to check Facebook? NYSE? Twitter? Suri's Burn Book?
Bryan, the best photographer in the family by marriage, loves to capture other  people taking pictures. Thus, Ralph takes a shot from the corner. Ha. I make Ralph sound like Pete Maravich.
Nora and  Stephen
 Hunter checks his F-stop and frowns?
Hunter and me
Half way through the festivities, David re-works a pin.
Frogs on the cake.... ducks on the pond... sorry, couldn't help myself.

Got ya, Bryan.
So Hollywood

Angie and Paul
Bryan has a lens that Bardwell {Chapman's Margaret} calls the Hubble. Here Bryan catches us {Hunter and sister Margaret] from across the room. 

As we waited for Angie to change into her "going away dress,"we got into the bubbles. We had a [unannounced] bubble blowing contest -- much to the chagrin of the wedding planner who thought we were "jumping the [wand]."
*snickers*
  No worries. There was enough bubbly there to send off all of the wives of Larry King.




David won.
David and Hunter contain their excitement.
Andrew, Kayla, and Stephen leave a space for brother James, who is in the Air Force, and unable to attend his cousin's wedding.

Glenn's well known for his "thumbs up" -- this time it means the getaway car is ready.

Glenn, Paul, and Amy
The Tribe


Awww.
One last chuckle from Bryan with his Hubble -- the removal of my shoes in the parking lot.





 NEXT.
*tee hee*