Looking East 7:38 AM

 

That's all.

It's that time of year ..

for Tallulah to toss the reindeer from the mantel.

 

David and I arranged the decorations for Christmas on Sunday, and Tallulah lurked with her usual suspicious self as she eyed the tree, the mantle, and the wreaths with disdain.

 

 

 

. 

 

Then, when the mantle is complete, she hops to it -- because she can,

 

finds the loathsome, red reindeer with 1999 on its left antler, and

 

 

then waits.

 

Monday morning --- 1999 red reindeer lies four hoofs up on the dining room floor.

 

 

Yes, it's officially Christmas.

 

:-)

1963

Novembers in Georgia always can be characterized with the color gray. Of course, there are sometimes bright colorful sunny days, more like October, and then there can be frigid days more representative of January, but mostly Georgia, November days are full of gray.

In the fall of 1963, one of my two, distinct memories of fourth grade was suffering from a type of childhood anxiety, perhaps brought on by my mother's returning to work – a type of separation fear. Scared of all kinds of things that I thought could happen without my mother's being there, I'd wake up on school morning with a “tummy ache” and tell my parents that I did not want to go to school.

 The blogger and her sister in Falls Church, Virginia, summer 1963

My parents did not let us stay out of school with such a flimsy and un-diagnosed malaise, but they were concerned about the frequency of my complaints and took turns, if they could, of helping by walking me to school on those days. Other times since they both worked, they elicited the help of close neighbor Pat Gable, whose daughter Marcie was my best friend, to help me get over those hurdles as once I got to school, they both knew I seem to adjust and be fine.

One morning, I dressed, sick at my stomach, but delayed by my illness, and left late to go to school. I pretended that I had gone, but instead,  hid in a neighbor's yard, let some time pass,  and returned to Pat's house and told her that “I had been sent home.” Pat kept me at her house until my parents got home from work. Since it was discovered somehow that I hadn't shown up at school at all, had told a bold face lie, of course, I was punished accordingly, but they were concerned about this new development in my well-being.

At one point, they considered enrolling me in the school district where Daddy was employed, and perhaps this pushed me to work through that anxiety. I just know I suffered a lot the first months of the fall of 1963, but somehow managed to overcome that anxiety and that problem did not return for the rest of my elementary school years.

My fourth grade teacher was Mrs.Gibson, a middle-aged dark haired woman who had taught fourth grade at Perkerson Elementary for decades. Kind but formidable, she challenged her students to memorize passages of historical documents, poems, and state capitals, do long division, study the battles of the Civil War, diagram sentences, and read. We respectfully loved her and tried not to draw attention to ourselves with any type of overt misbehavior. We stealthily passed notes, drew boy's names on our palms with ink, and whispered only when we were sure of no discovery.

Early in the afternoon of November, 22, 1963, we sat in Mrs. Gibson's class waiting for the school day to be over. It was Friday, Thanksgiving holidays were just around the corner, and we were itching for the weekend. We stared at the minute hand on the big black and white clock on the wall and listened as it loudly ticked off the seconds.  As we tapped our pencils, fidgeted in our wooden, shellacked top school desks, and pretended to complete whatever assignment Mrs. Gibson had given, the door opened and Van Wing, a seventh grader and audio visual aide in the library, swung opened the classroom door and blurted out, “President Kennedy has been shot.” I don't know if he was supposed to deliver something to our classroom, how he knew this information, or what, but he announced it with confidence to our fourth grade classroom as if he had been sent on this errand. Perhaps, he had -- as this was way before televisions were in school rooms  -- all we had were film projectors, record players, and the occasional radio.

Immediately the classroom buzzed, my friend Jackie, oblivious to the rules of democracy, leaned over and whispered to me, “If he dies, will Richard Nixon be president now?”, and a shocked Mrs. Gibson shooed Van back to his job and restored the class to order as best she could.

Van,who lived directly behind us on Bader Avenue, had a reputation for being wild, but even Mrs. Gibson knew that Van wouldn't be bold enough to make that kind of announcement without it being based on good information. The rest of that school day, the little  time that was left, is a blur to me.   It was 2:00 Atlanta time when President Kennedy died in Dallas --- we had probably only forty-five more minutes of academics.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution papers wishing to get out the latest news delayed its evening printing. My brothers both had paper routes, and since they had to wait for the late delivery, arrived home way after dark, exhausted, but having sold out of all their extra papers, a highly unusual occurrence.

 

The weight of what had happened began to settle in our home. Normally a boisterous bunch, egging each other on, fighting, and getting on each other's nerves, each of us tried to process the news – I can only imagine the difference in how we reacted – my oldest brother Hunter a ninth grader, Margaret a seventh grader, and Kenneth a fifth grader – we were in such different places of maturity.

My parents, who were strict about television viewing, allowed the small set in our den to run constantly with the coverage. We stayed up late, all huddled about the screen like it gave off heat, and watched President Kennedy's body returned to Washington by plane and noted the grisly image of the dark stains on Jackie Kennedy's suit – even in black and white it frightened me.

Greatly affected by it all, I worried that assassins ran free and one waited in the bushes outside my house to kill me or someone I loved. I lay awake that night playing the day's events over and over in my memory – something I would do for months to come.

On Saturday morning, I played with my friends outside --- an overcast but not cold, gray day --- we rode our bikes, played games, and occasionally referenced the American tragedy;  in our childhood minds, we tried to figure out what it could mean for our lives -- our president being shot and killed.
 

On Sunday, while we attended church, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. We heard the news on the radio on our ride home, and my parents turned to the television news coverage. That grainy black and white tumultuous and chaotic filmed scene played over and over until it was pretty much etched in my mind. That night I worried about who would be killed next. It was a scary time.

My childhood world had been shattered, and my parents knowing that the event had historical significance, called me in from outside to watch any coverage of the events leading up to his funeral. The scenes of the long lines outside the capitol as his body lay in state, the cortege and the flag draped wagon taking his body to the cathedral for the funeral, and then it again as it carried his body to Arlington Cemetery to be interred – that rider-less horse leading the way.

When the magazines of Life, Look, and Newsweek arrived in the mail in the days afterward, the color pictures of Jackie Kennedy's blood spattered pink suit made me queasy, but with my morbid curiosity aroused, I stared at frozen image after frozen image of those tragic days.

Those were sad, gray days of November, and the pall of what happened weighed on the upcoming holidays for that year including Christmas.

Kenneth, Margaret, the blogger, and Hunter, Lynchburg, Virginia, Christmas 1963

For me, the year 1963 will always dredge up that time of upheaval in my childhood when I felt like something firm, something perfect, something safe had slipped away.

Thankful when the calendar date changed to 1964,  I quit scribbling the month, numbered day, and 1963, at the top of my school papers, and I knew we would forge ahead --- somehow leaving those troublesome days and memories behind us. But, we did and we didn't.

Just Reading

For the last six months, as I have picked books from my long, reading list, an inordinate amount of them have been about loss: Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell, Elsewhere by Richard Russo, Blue Nights by Joan Didion, The Gathering by Anne Enright, and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.

 

And yes, Crossing to Safety is like twenty years old. My list is old -- I'm old.

 

 

The Long Good-bye, a Memoir, by Meghan O'Rourke tells of the author's grief after the death of her mother from colon cancer. O'Rourke's honesty as she lays out all her feelings, many of them raw and unattractive, makes this memoir a harder read. Even though I empathize with O'Rourke, at times she comes across as petulant and selfish, but the beauty of those emotional reveals is that it makes O'Rourke's deep grief palpable and moving. I admire her for her brutal presentation of herself as she continues to process her devastating loss.

 

A winner of the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction, Andrew Porter's collection of short stories, the theory of light and matter, has its own themes of loss as well. In these ten stories, various narrators flashback to events in their past where an event changed the outcome of their lives. Whether it's a childhood friend's deadly fall or a suspicion that one's brother involved himself in a heinous act, each of these narrators carries a memory that weighs heavily on him. In the vein of Tobias Wolfe and perhaps John Updike, these stories' themes and characters' struggles, set in suburbia in the modern day, never become stale.

 

 

The third book I read, The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro, veers off this “loss” theme and into the world of art history. Claire Roth, a former rising artist, now uses her artistic skills to make reproductions for a company selling the copies on line. Her life changes when a former colleague asks her to make a copy of a Degas copy for an overseas client interested in good reproductions. Part lesson in painting, part art history, and part thriller, this light novel kept me interested. I needed it after --- well, after all of that loss.

Up next: – Birds of a Lesser Paradise – by Megan Mayhew Bergman – not that I'm gonna blog about it. :-)

ETA: I finished Birds of a Lesser Paradise, a collection of short stories, and it bears mentioning here that it is a wonderful read. The author, married to a veterinarian and an avid animal lover herself, incorporates a love for nature and animals in each of these stories. Her characters and narrators, realistic in a quirky way, charmed me as well as made me laugh. Worth it to read.... just sayin'.

This Tree

 

 

 

 

 

makes me happy

 

and so does the light behind these....

 

ahhh

 

the last days of autumn...

 

 

Time, Text, and Dr. Jim.

Our friend Dr. Jim comes over about once a month and has dinner with us. We love Jim. He and David have been friends since the early 1970s, and when David and I got married in 1988, he became my friend too. Now, he likes me better. :-)

As an avid reader, Jim loans me books, mostly non-fiction, but he also has a mind like a steel trap. His memories of growing up in College Park, Georgia, in the 1950s come across as organized narrative, full of humor and detail, and he and I enjoy reminiscing about old Atlanta. He's a fascinating guy.

The other week when he came over for dinner he brought a Time magazine dated August 6, 1979, with a cover story titled Leadership in America: 50 Faces for the Future. He found it in his basement, apparently he hadn't cleaned it out in a while. Jim's kind of a pack rat, and he hasn't remodeled the interior of his finished basement since the 1970s either – it has shag carpeting, a Naugahyde covered sofa, and probably a Betamax player. In fact, I know he still has a Betamax player.

Some of you might have to Google that... Betamax, not Naugahyde.

 

Just a few of the interesting things in the Time magazine, including the fact that at that time, no pun intended, the magazine editors and writers aimed their text at a reading audience. I was totally amazed at the amount of text in the magazine. Running full of text, overflowing with text was the first thing that I noted -- three columns of it and pages – sometimes as many as ten.

Really?

Yes. Unbelievable.

One of the ads showcased Kool Super Lights cigarettes – “a light menthol blend gives low tar smokers the smooth taste they want. Never harsh tasting. Now you can make the smooth move to Kool Super Lights.”

 

Even the ads had text.

“Buick LaSabre. What $6110 buys these days could be a pleasant surprise.”

 

Apparently, you couldn't buy a Toyato Cressida, a VW Dasher, a Datsun 810, or an Audi 5000 for that price. Just saying.

 

Datsun? I feel old.

Time's ads mainly were for booze, cigarettes, and cars.

On page 10 is an article on Rosalynn Carter, who campaigned for her husband for his second term. I think he lost.

“Bundy: Guilty – He faces life – or death” graces page 22 with a two column article dedicated to the the former law student turned serial killer who murdered at least thirty-six young women in the 1970s.

BTW: The state of Florida executed him in 1989.

Don't Google him.
 

In the special section, which ran about twenty pages, Time covered fifty-up-and-coming men and women who would influence leadership in this country  in the next years. Among them --- Marion Berry, age 43, William J. Clinton, 32, Gary Hart, 41, and the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, 37. 

 

Hmmmm.

The other forty-six --- well, I don't have that kind of time. Sic.

Only one page featured People, and they were not all celebrities – it included a bull fighter, a mayor, the world's first test tube baby, and Jane Seymore and Christopher Reeve who were starring in a movie titled Somewhere in Time. Heh. Didn't see that movie --- cause Jane seemed to be in mini-series that made me wanna poke my eyes out. Then. Now. Always.
 

Only one page for celebrities --  Show Business featured George Burns.
 

Other areas of the magazine had sections with the latest news on Medicine, Economy and Business, Living, Education, Sport, Press, Books [no kidding], and Religion.

Pshaw. What was all that about?

Hard to believe, that anyone ever had the time, no pun intended, to read all that.

Just sayin'.

Just wanted to note this ad: “Before you buy a word processor, talk to all three. Here are their telephone numbers.”

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I feel old.

 

All in: Andrew and Kayla Took the Plunge

 The fall day of September 27 brought gorgeous weather for Andrew and Kayla's wedding at Venue 92 in Woodstock. A crowd of 150 gathered at this renovated space and celebrated the couple as they exchange vows and tied the holy knot of matrimony.

 

 We arrived early for the ceremony and watched as the professional photographs were taken, and as always, the amateur photographers in my family [Hunter and Bryan] did their usual.

Ralph and Margaret watch the waning moments of their son's bachelorhood.

 the green bow ties matched the bride's shoes -- 

my sister looked lovely in periwinkle 

Brooks [second  from left] "say whut?"

 

 Stephen and Andrew

 

 

I love this photo!

 

this one too..

 

 

I channel my inner teacher: Bryan, give me the camera, now!

[Bryan, my niece's husband, is notorious for his candid shots.]

 

David, looking for an escape plan, checks his phone.

 

 

She's "officially and legally" in........

 and gets ALL, yes ALL, these people as bonus!!!

 

as we wait for the ceremony to begin

 the groom's family entertains themselves -- good luck, Kayla!

{no wonder the rows behind are empty}

  

Since we had all bathed for the occasion, here's the extended family groupings....

the Woodstock McDaniels

 the Boulder McDaniels

 

Didn't want anyone to miss these shoes!

 

us

Married!

 

Reception Time

  

 

James, the best man, makes a toast

 

the cousins discuss the new numbering system...

Chapman: I'm really number 7?

Kayla: I'm 21?

Margaret: 22? 

Glenn: It's complicated but brilliant.

 

           Glenn and James wait for sparklers and the good byes to the newlyweds

 

 

*waves *

 Blessings, Andrew and Kayla, sweet blessings.....