Last call!

Here we are, late in the evening of the last night of my thirties.  When I wake up (hopefully not before 6am like I have the past several days), I'll be 40.  Egads.  I wish I could come up with something pithy or reflective or remotely meaningful to share.  I mean, I spent a bit of time reflecting on the past decade as I went about my errands and housework today.  There certainly were some big highlights - becoming a mom; becoming an aunt (several times over); milestone wedding anniversaries (10th and 15th); the passing of my last remaining living grandparent; selling our first house, buying our second and moving; rejoining the workforce after spending most of the decade as a stay-at-home mom; heck, even being on Jeopardy - but right now?  There's just one thing that is on my mind, and it is this:


I am fairly certain that we have a yeti living in our basement.  I have proof.  Proof in the vast expanses of greyish fur that amass in the collection canister of my vacuum cleaner every time I use it, like earlier this afternoon.  I mean, it just seems obvious that such insane amounts of what is clearly animal fur would come from a gigantic, highly hirsute source like this:

than from something that's smaller than a breadbox (though admittedly pretty fuzzy) like this:

Yep, that's all I've got for this evening, my yeti-in-the-cellar theory.  Clearly, old age has already begun fading away what few brain cells I have left.  (Also, it's 10pm and I spiked my milk with mudslide mix at dinner, so there's that.  Living la vida loca, for sure.)  Before I toddle off to bed, I'd like to make one last plea:


Won't you please, pretty please, with sugar and sprinkles and a cherry on top, please help me make my fortieth birthday wish come true?  You can read about it here.  (I know I've been asking with every post lately, but the good news is that tomorrow is the last day I can bug you about it...)  If you would please join me in doing 40 Good Things and leave me a comment letting me know what you did, I'll be the happiest 40 year old birthday girl ever tomorrow!  Thanks!

This is my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

May truth and freedom come to every nation;

may peace abound where strife has raged so long;

that each may seek to love and build together,

a world united, righting every wrong;

a world united in its love for freedom,

proclaiming peace together in one song.

I might not have had Bob Ross's painting abilities, but I did have his hairstyle...

Those of you who are of increasingly advanced age, as I am, may remember the artist Bob Ross from the back-in-the-day PBS show The Joy of Painting.  

Bob used to talk in an extremely mellow and calm voice, all about the "happy clouds" and "happy trees" and how you didn't make a mistake, just a "happy little accident" and in the span of one half hour TV show, he managed to produce a pretty darn decent painting, usually a landscape, and make it look easy to boot.


Well, back in the day when the Husband was just the Boyfriend and we were poor college student types, we decided that we too could paint like Bob Ross.  Well, "we" in this scenario was actually the Boyfriend, as I've never held the faintest illusion that I could actually paint (or draw, or sketch, or pastel, or sculpt or do anything artistic that involves me using my hands and brain to reproduce something that another human being can readily identify) and this is an opinion with which many unfortunate art teachers from the early 70s through the late 80s would wholeheartedly concur.  I am most pathetically Artistically Ungifted, y'all.  But, I was swept up in his enthusiasm and agreed that this would be a fun weekend activity, so we went to the art supply store and picked up some Bob Ross painting kits.


After doing an exhaustive internet search (read: fifteen seconds with my good friend Google and then five minutes of making Hubby stop the gargantuan computer project he's been working on all weekend to turn around and look at link after link as I hollered at him "Hey, do you think this is it?  This must be it, right?  Oh, no, wait, isn't this the one?  What about this one?"), I'm fairly certain that this was the kit we bought, or it was from the same series at least, although the canvas that came with ours was much smaller (again, poor college students - we didn't have the cash to spend on a deluxe canvas set) and of "landscape" instead of "portrait" orientation.  (Well, that's the way we painted them, anyhow.)  We went back to Hubby Boyfriend's apartment and set up our project.  We worked on our canvases intently and diligently for the better part of the afternoon, finally getting to step 10 (signing our paintings with pride!) and left them to dry.  I'd like to tell you that our painting experience was as mellow and fluffy as Bob and his hair, but it wasn't.  Not even the magic of Bob Ross could turn me into a decent artist.  What should have been a glorious, snowcapped Mystic Mountain, rising up above a lake and river into a happy-little-cloud-speckled sky looked more like a hunk of moldy cheese, smoldering on a shiny salad plate.  Oh well.

Shortly after our Wild Weekend of Art, the Boyfriend upgraded to the Fiancé and shortly after that, we began living together.  I began the practice of proudly displaying our masterpieces side by side in our first apartment and kept the tradition up for many residences over the years, until the paintings got packed away for a move and lost to the set of Boxes One Never Actually Unpacks, but Still Moves from House to House Where They Reside in a Forgotten Corner of the Basement.  Periodically, I'd think "Hmmm, I wonder what happened to those Bob Ross paintings we did?" and even attempt a search of the BONAU,bSMfHtHWTRinFCotB but no matter how many of those dang Mystery Boxes I would paw through, it was always in vain.


Until last month, that is, when I was helping Kiddo gather materials for school project and opened up the trunk in which I have stored copies of just about every photo we've ever taken of her in the past 7.75 years.  This trunk also contains several other odds and ends in the "memento" realm, like the lock of hair from Kiddo's first haircut, copies of her birth announcements (along with approximately 200 extra prints of the photo we sent out with her birth announcement - um, what the heck were we thinking?) and many miscellaneous photos of ours taken well before Kiddo arrived on the scene.  And there, in the trunk, I found them.  The Bob Ross paintings.  Both of them, tucked away in the bottom of the trunk (which, in hindsight, seems a perfectly logical repository for them, and one I should've therefore thought of instead of one of the basement boxes), in all their technicolor glory.

I haven't hung them up again, though I just might.  I think I'd want to frame them first, which is something we couldn't afford to do back when they were created and something I never got around to in subsequent years.  We'll see if they make it up onto the wall or if they languish on top of the scanner where they've been since last month when I unearthed them.  In the meantime, however, I proudly present the Internet Unveiling of the Smiths' Mystic Mountains:


Mr. Smith's (not too bad, really):

and mine:

I'd like to remind you that theoretically, these should have looked identical to each other as well as pretty darn close to Bob's original:

But hey, if I never did quite match Bob's painting talent, at least I did once rock his hairstyle:

 (image borrowed from the Bob Ross Wikipedia entry)

(me, circa 1987)

Last but not least, I'd like to dedicate this post to my dear Aunt Becky, because she hears Bob Ross's voice in her head (along with Billy Mays, but that's neither here nor there) and because I once promised her that if I ever found the paintings, I'd share them with her.  So, this one's for you, AB!

A truly remarkable woman

Earlier this evening, a dear friend of mine, with whom I worked years ago, sent me a link to a newspaper article about a woman who had just passed away.  She sent me this link because we knew this woman back when we worked together at Syracuse University.  This woman, Kathy Urschel, was a graduate student at SU then, and worked in our office for a while as a graduate assistant.  At the time (this was the early 90s), Kathy and I became friends.  We'd have lunch together when schedules permitted and we'd certainly chat (I've always been a talker - and so was Kathy!) a lot whenever she was in the office as well.  She was a hoot, funny and quick-witted and had a keen sense of observation that could leave me rolling in laughter in an instant.

Eventually, I left Syracuse, got married, moved around and lost touch with Kathy somewhere along the way.  I still thought of her from time to time over the past 16 years, and at one point (still in the early days of the internet and email) exchanged letters with her to reconnect and catch up.  Even with the passing of time since we last were in touch, I was greatly, greatly saddened to read this beautifully written article about my former friend when it arrived in my inbox tonight.  You see, Kathy Urschel was, simply put, one of the most amazing people I've ever known.  I found the following video clip that sums up her story, in her own words, better than I ever could:




The last time I saw Kathy was the summer before my wedding.  We had lunch together, picking up sandwiches from the place next door to my office and eating them on a bench on SU's main quad.  We basked in the sunshine of that midsummer day.  We talked about wedding plans and she asked me all about my newly chosen wedding dress.  It was the week before I was leaving Syracuse, and we promised each other we'd keep in touch.  Tonight, I'm left wishing I had taken the time to track her down and catch up again, now that it is too late.  Just a few months ago, I was telling my daughter about her and the thought crossed my mind to Google her and try to track her down.  I added it to my mental list of things to do and never got around to it.  Please, if you have a few minutes, read about Kathy's life and accomplishments.  She was such a remarkable human being, and I'm proud to say that she once was my friend.

Rest in peace, Kath. 

My haunted apartment

I moved into my first apartment back when I was in college.  It was the summer after my sophomore year, and a really good friend of mine and I decided we'd had enough of the dorms and found an apartment together near campus for the following year.  It was the first apartment for both of us, and I will admit I felt quite grown-up, signing a lease and paying rent and all.  (I was all of 19 at the time.)  We'd looked at several apartments, but with our budgetary constraints, most of the nice ones were well out of our reach.  We settled on a two bedroom, one bath on the outskirts of what was considered the "University" neighborhood - more grad students than undergrads were found living that far away.  The neighborhood was, how shall I put it?  Bohemian.  Artsy.  Sketchy.  The building was right off a street that was known for its shops, bars and theaters - all of the decidedly alternative variety.  In short, had my parents driven up from Jersey to check out our proposed abode before we signed the lease, I don't think I would've signed the lease.  I probably would've found myself living in a dorm for another year.

That's not to say that the apartment was a total dive, mind you.  At least, I've seen worse.  It was on the second floor of a three story building - an actual apartment building, not a converted house, as so many of the student rentals were in that town.  The apartment's best feature was its HUGE living room with large windows and an interesting (albeit dingy with age) black-and-white tiled floor.  We envisioned turning the apartment into a 20s Art Deco style showplace, though that didn't get any farther than buying some black and white sheets with which to cover the hideous couches and black and white plates and mugs for the kitchen.

Annnnnyhow, it was not a bad place, despite the .........colorful neighborhood, and we happily moved in and went about our lives.  Thanks to Google Maps and my ridiculously good longterm memory, I can show you a picture of the building:

Now, this was an older building (as evidenced by the picture above).  Having grown up in a very old farmhouse (as in: 1740s vintage), I was used to the quirks an old building can have.  You know, the occasional creak or squeak or dripping faucet... None of that sort of thing fazed me in the least.  After a few years of living with roommates, I was used to those sorts of quirks, as well - a light left on here, a door left ajar there, things taken out and not put back exactly where they had been before.  No big whoop.  So, a few weeks into the semester, my roommate and I attended a party at a home occupied by a bunch of grad students (friends of her boyfriend's) that was in the same neighborhood.  In the course of chatting with some of these people, it came up that we lived just up the road.  Someone asked us where, specifically, and when we told him, he said to us "Oh, the haunted building on the corner?"


Haunted building?  Did he just say haunted building?


Yep, that's what he said.  We tried to inquire further, but the noise level and his alcohol level made getting solid details mostly impossible.  He and the group of people we were standing with all nodded vigorously in agreement that our building was most definitely said to be haunted, that much was clear.  My roommate went off in search of her boyfriend at that point, and it wasn't until later when he was walking us home that I realized how upset she was over the news.  I shrugged it off for the most part, chalking it up to a local urban legend at best.


Except all of a sudden, those creaks and squeaks and things that went bump in the night seemed a bit more.....ominous.  The faucet that would start running in the bathroom or kitchen sinks wasn't as easily dismissed as "Oh, she must've left the water running."  Ditto for the lights that we could've sworn we turned off at night before retiring to our respective bedrooms and then find on the next day.  Neither of us were prone to sleepwalking, much less sleep-dishwashing or sleep-toothbrushing, so finding the tap running or a light on in the morning began becoming more and more disconcerting.


Then, it happened.  I was home at the apartment alone one evening, my roommate having gone over to her boyfriend's place for dinner.  Around 10pm, she called me to say that she was staying over there, so I could put the chain on the door, which I went and did as soon as I got off the phone.  I decided to go to bed shortly thereafter, checking the lock and chain on the door, making sure all lights and taps and everything were off, and closing my bedroom door behind me.


Now, I am a sound sleeper.  One might say I sleep like the dead, even.  But that night, something woke me up around 3 am.  I sat up in bed, trying to figure out what it had been.  (Our upstairs neighbors favored loud, heavy metal music and seemed to have footwear solely composed of cement blocks.)  As I came fully awake, I realized I could hear noise coming from the living room.  I got up, turned on my bedroom light, opened the door and found the stereo was on.  The stereo that I had not been listening to before going to bed - I'd had the TV on - was on and set to the radio (I'd been listening to a cassette earlier in the day, so the knob had not been set to "tuner" when I'd shut it off hours before.)


I chose not to think about how and why it was on and instead rushed across the room and shut it off, then ran back into my bedroom, shutting the door behind me, and got back in bed.  Eventually, I fell asleep again.  When I next woke up, it was a little after 7 in the morning.  I got up, opened my door and............. the radio was on again.  On and turned to a station that played jazz way down at the other end of the dial, far from any of the rock stations my roommate and I preferred.  Also, the chairs that had been pushed in under the dining room table against the opposite wall were pulled out, away from the table, and set together a few feet into the living room, facing the windows.  As though someone had wanted to sit and admire the view while listening to some jazz.


In the light of day, I didn't feel nearly as freaked out, so I bravely marched across the room, switched the radio back to our preferred station and then shut it off and moved the chairs back to where they belonged.  I checked once again - all the windows were shut and locked (and besides, we were on a second floor apartment with no fire escapes or other easy means of reaching them), and the door was locked with the chain still on.  At first I was convinced my roommate had come home, somehow gotten in to the apartment despite the chain and had been messing with me.  This wasn't at all her style, but still.  Just to be on the safe side, I called her up over at her boyfriend's apartment.  Nope, she hadn't been home - in fact, I woke them up by calling.  I explained to her what I'd discovered overnight and that morning, thoroughly freaking her out in the process.  She never spent another night in our apartment the rest of the lease without her boyfriend sleeping over, and more nights than not she wound up spending at his place or going home to her parents' house, as they lived nearby.  I, on the other hand, continued to live in the apartment with whatever (whomever?) else had been there before our lease.  I'd even occasionally chastise them aloud for leaving a light on or the tap running, since the utility bills were only being split two ways.  Other than trying to avoid the laundry facilities in the basement unless it was daylight (the basement was spooky in and of itself, haunted or otherwise), I had no major issues with our building's other tenants, human or ......?  Throughout the remainder of the lease, lights would be turned on - usually in the bathroom or kitchen, and taps would be turned on in the sinks and occasionally the tub.  Every now and again, a drawer or cabinet in the kitchen would be open.  Things didn't always turn up where we thought we'd left them.  A few times, small things went missing - loose change, pens, that sort of thing.  

Did we have ghosts sharing the apartment with us?  I couldn't say for sure.  I will say that whatever dwelled there (beyond the death metal Neanderthals upstairs) was fairly benign.  Nothing malicious or harmful ever transpired in the apartment, beyond the slightly higher utility bills.  I never did find out the story behind the building's supposed haunting.  I'm still curious, though...  So, what about you?  Do you believe in ghosts and hauntings?  Have you ever shared a home with a poltergeist?  Can you come up with a more rational explanation for the goings-on in our apartment that year?

And on that note, Happy Halloween to you and yours from me and mine!  I'll leave you with our jack o'lantern for this year, carved by Hubby and Kiddo (I do NOT do pumpkin guts) earlier this afternoon:

   

Call me Fred. Or Barry.

This afternoon, I went out to tackle the green beast that is also known as our lawn in late summer.  (This would be the second time this week I've had to mow, for those of you keeping score at home.)  I geared up appropriately for the chore with my iPod and headphones and got to cutting.  I did the front and side yards to the strains of my Leonard Cohen playlist, but by the time I got around to the back, I needed something a bit more.... peppy.  Now, Kiddo has recently become enamored of a certain tune on Mommy's iPod, and it is a tune that is near and dear to Mommy's heart.  I first heard it when I was her age or a little bit younger, and I loved it from the very first bongo thump.  It's one that she has been requesting repeatedly for the past few weeks, so it instantly sprang to mind as I scrolled through my playlists.  Perfect choice!

The song of which I speak, of course, is that 70s classic Copacabana by none other than Barry Manilow.  I adored the song as a kid and still do now.  As a child, I was instantly smitten by the drama of the song (not to mention those bongos) and choreographed a dance routine to go with it.  Now, I'm teaching Kiddo the dance moves (and she is embellishing them with lots of added jazz hands.  Kiddo is a big believer in jazz hands) and she and I belt it out when we're driving around town, sitting at the breakfast table, hanging out on the lanai... it's an all-occasion bit of groovy joy.

Anyhow, there I was in the back yard.  Hubby had taken Kiddo up to the playground to burn off some energy, so I had the yard to myself (well, except for the squirrels and bunnies and jays and cardinals, oh and the bees - lots of bees).  I dialed up the Copa and pulled the starter cord on the mower.  (Incidentally, I always feel so.......... macho when I'm pulling the starter cord on the mower.  Especially when it takes a couple of tries before the engine actually catches.  Is that just me?)  I began merrily cutting my way up and down the back .40 and when the disco violins soared above the bongos, I started singing too.  Singing *and* dancing, actually.  Air bongos are pretty much mandated with the Copa, and that dance routine I've been doing for over 30 years now lives in my very marrow (plus Kiddo's jazz hands - she really is right about how jazz hands make anything better).  I think by now it is physically impossible for me to remain silent and still when the Copa is playing.  I've sung and shimmied to it in any form, including Muzak.  (I'm killer in an elevator - the acoustics are fantabulous, you know.) 

So, there I was, just like Fred and his hat rack

See the whole routine right here!

except instead of a jaunty neckerchief with matching red belt and socks, I was wearing a paint-spattered, 10 year old t-shirt over a boob-squashing sports bra and grass-stained sneakers, and instead of a hat rack, I had an old and decrepit lawn mower.  And jazz hands - Fred may've been a great dancer, but he really underutilized the jazz hands.  But other than those tiny details, I was exactly like Fred Astaire.

Naturally, it wasn't until after the last refrain "Copa.....Copacabana" had faded into silence and I was left with naught but the sound of my mower that I happened to catch sight of one of our neighbors.  Specifically, the lovely, older lady whose property backs up to ours, and who had apparently decided to take advantage of the cooler temperatures and breeze today to do a bit of gardening in her back flower beds.  The ones that are right at the property line, which means she had a front row seat for Heather-Fred-Barry and my dance partner, the lawn mower.  Totally busted.  Yeek.  I did what any self-respecting Fanilow would do in such a situation.  I waited for the next song to cue up and then treated her to a little Bandstand Boogie.  With plenty of jazz hands, of course.

Why Tim Gunn will never, ever be my BFF

As I've mentioned in my previous few posts, I was visiting my family down in Jersey last week, and while I was there I went through several boxes of old photographs.  As I looked through this collection of moments in my life, one thing became abundantly clear: I am, and always have been, woefully unfashionable.

These days, I tend to stick to what I've come to think of as my SAHM "uniform" - sweaters and jeans or cords with wool socks and clogs or boots in the winter, long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans or pants with clogs or boots in the spring and fall, short-sleeved t-shirts and capris or shorts with Birks or flip-flops in the summer.  I wear appropriate clothing to church (skirts, dresses, sometimes even heels) and if the occasion demands it (social functions for Hubby's work, etc).  I know I'm not trendy or hip, and I don't particularly care, since I'm not really trying to be "in" these days.  I dress in what is comfortable and practical for my lifestyle, and it works for me.

Earlier in my life, however, I did care more about fashion.  I tried very hard to be hip and trendy, to look hot and therefore be cool.  Tried, and failed, it seems, for decades upon decades.  Looking through the evidence of my lifetime of fashion don'ts, my overwhelming unpopularity among the cooler crowd is suddenly making sense.

Shall we have a photo retrospective to illustrate my point?

 

 

This is my third grade class picture.  We had just moved to our new home in NJ and I started third grade a few weeks into the start of the year.  I was a year younger than my classmates, from a small, upstate NY town that was light years behind the much "faster" and more mature culture of the tri-state area, and I was smart.  Really smart, and bookish and talkative and without meaning to be, an instant teacher's favorite.  I also was wearing glasses (though not all the time yet, just for distance things like reading the blackboard), and I lived on a working sheep farm in the middle of an increasingly developed, suburban community.  Only one other kid in my grade lived on a farm, and he wasn't exactly the epitome of coolness either.  My parents tended to fall on the conservative end of the spectrum, and furthermore didn't believe in the "importance" of having all the latest and greatest things.  While I did have some teeth in my mouth again (the previous year, I'd had twelve pulled during an overnight stay in the hospital, including all my top and bottom front teeth.  The hanging-down threads of the stitches were the only things protruding from my gums for a couple months there that year), the teeth I had were wonky and screaming out for orthodontic intervention, which they soon received in the form of every appliance known to modern dentistry as well as six years of braces.  When you add all the above factors up and then look at my fashion choices, it is no wonder that I spent the next three years in abject, mostly friendless misery, followed by a junior high and senior high experience that definitely did not find me running with the "in" crowd or sitting at the "cool kids" table in the cafeteria.

You think I kid?  Check out the following year:
 

This was my most favorite dress, ever as a child.  I thought of it as my Laura Ingalls dress.  I adored it and would wear it to school whenever my mother would let me.  With knee socks and Mary Janes.  This is the late 70s now, mind you, when tight designer jeans and long, feathered hair were in vogue.  Not whatever I had going on on top of my head and the Little House on the Prairie look.  This was the last year I only was a part-time Four Eyes, and I'm fairly certain I was holding my retainers in my other hand.

Speaking of the farm, here I am in a casual moment, sometime around 1980 or '81.  While I'd like to give myself points for having a shirt with my name on it (if memory serves, my mom ironed the fuzzy letters on herself), I'm fairly certain the rainbow sneakers kill any chance of coolness the outfit might've had.  Also, those were either Lee or Wranglers jeans, not Jordache or Sergio Valente.

Let's skip ahead into the formative teenage years now, shall we?

Here I am in high school.  Freshman year, I think.  This was taken at Christmas (at my aunt and uncle's house - my parents never had that color shag carpeting on the farm), and my outfit of choice?  A red, polyester blouse with a red and black bowtie, black sweater vest with a white argyle-esque print, a white skirt (with pockets! that I used!) and oddly orange-toned pantyhose.  (I believe those were my favored "suntan" color hose by No Nonsense, which was a sad case of me believing the marketing. I really should've stuck with the "nude" color.)  Tell me, what 13 year old dresses like this voluntarily?  I remember, once again, thinking I looked good.

It really was downhill throughout the 80s.

This is me on vacation with my family at Disney World, spring break of my sophomore year.  I don't know where to begin here.  The dark indigo Lee jeans poorly pegged at the ankle, the purple t-shirt under the pastel, striped, short-sleeved jacket, the hair, the earrings, the sunglasses, oh dear Lord, the sunglasses.

Seriously.  WTH?!?!

The only good thing that can be said for this period was that I hadn't yet begun the Big Perm phase of my later teenage years (which was the sequel to my Big Perm tween years).  That came the following year...........

This was a publicity shot for one of the shows I was in during high school.  (What?  Of course I was a theater geek, to go with the music geek and literary magazine geek and co-president of the Spanish Club......)  My hair was too big to fit into the frame, y'all.  (Also, that is a zit, not a Cindy Crawford wanna-be "beauty mark" there by my mouth, beautiful.)  I remember being disappointed that I didn't have some of my larger earrings in that day, as we were all just grabbed when possible by the teacher who made up the cast board with the photos.  What you're mercifully missing in this picture due to its lack of color is my eye makeup and lipstick, which were both always loud (remember that dayglo blue mascara?  Owned it, wore it, LOVED it.  Also dayglo green.  With even louder, neon-er eye shadow and liner to match), and also my hair, which by that point I'd lightened to a strange sort of orangey-red by using chamomile soap.  (Color photos of that color and further enlightenment as to my lifetime of being a fashion don't can be found here.)  At least I was out of braces by then, so my teeth were no longer a wonky nightmare.  The frosted, ice-pink lipstick I preferred in high school set them off so well...

Here's another one from high school.  This appears to have been taken at my sister's Confirmation, which means she was in 8th grade and I was therefore a junior in high school.  (Side note: the older gentleman to the right of the frame is my late grandfather, who lived with us following my grandmother's death until his own death a few years later.  *sniff*)  Please ignore the face I'm making as I'm about to inhale a piece of post-church service refreshments, and just let me point out the white pants with black pinstripes.  I loved those pants.  Loved them.  Here's the thing: I wore those year-round because hey, they're white but they had black in them, too!  Seriously - look:

See me there?  That was taken in January.  Yep, the same white, light cotton pants with a black turtleneck, white stockings and black shoes and I was good to go.  At least when I was wearing them in church that day the previous summer, they were seasonally appropriate, even if the black belt didn't tie the outfit together quite as much as I thought, nor did it go with the white purse or heels.  I had a particular fondness for that sweater, as it was one of only two Benetton clothing items I owned.  I cringe to admit that I wore that sweater well into the 90s, too.  Oh, if you look closely at the first photo, you'll see some of my favored collection of silver rings.  I wore rings on every finger, including my thumbs.  If you look really closely, you'll see the "spoon handle" ring on my one finger - it was made of two welded-together spoon handles and it was huge.  It would pinch my hand when I played piano and leave me with some nasty blood blisters, as would a few of my (many) silver bracelets.  (No, I would not take them off just to spare myself the wounds.  You have to be willing to suffer for fashion, right?)

I could go on - sadly, there are hundreds more photo examples of why Tim Gunn will never, ever be my BFF - but I'll leave you with one, last picture to prove that I've always been fashionably hopeless:

'Nuff said.

Only in my dreams...

I know I'm not the only person on Earth who has a recurring nightmare.  Mine started shortly after my eighth birthday and I still dream it to this day.  That's thirty years of the same, exact nightmare, for those of you keeping score at home.  A darn long time to be haunted by the same dream.

Like I said, I'm not the only person on Earth who has a recurring nightmare, but I betcha I'm one of the only people on Earth who has a photograph of it.  You see, on my visit to my childhood home this past week, I was going through old photographs that my parents have in boxes (and boxes, and boxes) in their house.  I was looking for a few, specific pictures out of what must be tens of thousands of photographs, and I wasn't holding my breath that I would find those few for which I searched.  (My father has been an avid photographer for my entire life, photographing just about everything right down to my very first diaper rash.  I kid you not, though that wasn't the picture I was trying to find.  I've inherited his shutterbug tendencies, and as such can rival Dad's collection of pictures already, though the vast majority of mine are digital and therefore just taking up space in the external hard drive, instead of haphazard piles in no particular order stuffed into cardboard boxes.)  I found some of the ones I had hoped to find, along with many others that I set aside for future blog posts and/or blackmail (I've already sworn a solemn vow to one of my sisters that certain photos of her from our childhood will never be posted by me to Facebook...).

The one I didn't intend to find - one I didn't even realize existed at all - was the one that captured the moment of my recurring nightmare.  Here it is:

It doesn't look too nightmarish, I know.  What you're looking at is a photograph of an evening in December, 1979, when my parents took me, along with two friends, into New York City to celebrate my eighth birthday.  We went to Rockefeller Center and saw the Christmas tree.  We saw the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular.  We saw the decorated windows at Macy's and along Fifth Avenue.  We then went to the Trump Tower, which is where the picture above was taken.  I am the girl in the bright orange hat with the pompom almost as big as my head on top.

If you aren't familiar with Trump Tower, the interior is gorgeous.  Here's a shot I found online of the inside:

Coincidentally, it appears to be decorated for Christmas as it was on that night in December 1979.  (There are other shots of the Trump Tower here and here, for those of you who aren't familiar.)


That night, as we went up the series of open escalators, I first felt the gripping fear that would become my biggest phobia - a fear of falling from a great height.  (I do not have a fear of heights, per se, but only one of falling from a height.  I feel perfectly fine on top of the Empire State Building, where falling over the edge accidentally is a virtual impossibility - falling on purpose from the top must take some serious effort, indeed! - but standing on a balcony just one or two stories up and looking over a railing freaks me out.  I do not know if this technically is just acrophobia, or fear of heights, or if it is something separate.)  I was looking down as we climbed the floors and my palms began to sweat, my heart began to pound, my skin became clammy.  I shook it off at the time, but that was the beginning of the end of my previously phobia-free existence.


The nightmare, which I first had that night, is this: I am with my family at the Trump Tower at Christmastime.  In my dream, I am of varying ages; sometimes I am a child, sometimes I am my actual age at the time.  However, in my dream, my youngest sister - who would've been two at the time of the dream's onset - is always an infant, and for whatever reason, my mother has given her to me to hold.  I am holding her, both of us bundled in our winter coats, scarves, mittens, and we're climbing the escalators.  As we rise higher off the main floor, my sister moves suddenly in an attempt (I always think) to see the waterfall that cascades down the one interior wall and I lose my hold on her.  She falls from my arms, plummeting over the side and then I wake up.  She never gets rescued nor does she hit the floor before I am awake, panicked and sweaty, sometimes having screamed aloud.

That was the nightmare I had that first night, back in December '79, and it has been virtually the same since then.  I do not dream it as often as I did as a child, and there doesn't seem to be any one, specific trigger for it, but I do still have it occasionally to this day.  This is the only recurring nightmare I have.  I had one other as a child, but that one (about a giant, floating eyeball, of all things) stopped when I was maybe 11 or 12.  I just never realized there was a photograph to go with the dream.  Freaky, huh?

(By the way, I have been to Trump Tower many times since that night.  I've even ridden those same escalators, both as a child and an adult.  It never did alleviate the nightmare.)

What about you?  Am I the only one to have a recurring nightmare that began in childhood?  Anyone else share my fear of falling from a height?  Have I just outed myself as certifiably freaky?
 

Ah, the tortured angst of youth

My brother-in-law has been reading the Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia with my six year old nephew.  Specifically, he's been reading the boxed set that belonged first to my older cousins, then to me.  I discovered them around age 9, on a shelf in my grandparents' house, and read the series through a few times over the next several years, leaving the books behind at my parents' house when I went off to college.  Well, that set found its way to my sister's house, and thus, a new generation has begun to enjoy the stories.

One night, while reading one of the Narnia books to my nephew, my brother-in-law turned the page and out fell two sheets of paper.  Technically, they're not paper paper, but computer punch cards for the NYSE, which came in books and which my grandparents had in abundant supply, as my grandfather was a vice president at the NYSE back in the day.  The one side has lots of different boxes for bid size, ask size, sold, cash, close quote, etc, and the reverse was blank, that side being the one my family used for note pads.

Well, two such sheets fell out, and my brother-in-law immediately called for my sister, as he had no idea what in the heck he'd found.  Turns out what he discovered was a poem that my sister quickly identified by the chicken-scratch handwriting as being a Heather original creation.  She called me the following morning, giggling like a fiend, and told me of the discovery.  She promised to send up the poem to me, but as life tends to get in the way of such things, she didn't have the chance to, until I saw her in person earlier this week while the kid and I were on our annual summer trek to New Jersey.  (More on that later.)  There we stood with our kids on a blindingly sunny, hot beach and she handed over to me this relic of my youth.

And what a tortured youth it was, apparently.  Now, bear in mind that I've always fancied myself something of a writer and poet (also a lyricist and composer - oh, to have properly transcribed the melody lines of the songs I wrote as a teenager... alas, I have naught but the occasional fragment of verse and chord notations from which to recreate my attempts at emo 80s pop).  Obviously, one is never more Angsty and Tormented than when one is going through the hell that is puberty and adolescence, and I was never one to suffer from a lack of an overactive imagination or delusions of grandeur.  It was the pitfall of being a kid whose nose, more often than not, was stuck in a book and whose ears were typically covered with headphones through which music, that food of love, played on and on and on.  What I'm trying to say, basically, is that I tended to the dramatic and the melodramatic.  In my mind, I was Catherine on the moors, Scarlett in Atlanta, Anne in Avonlea and the leading lady of every Shakespearian drama, Eva Peron and Grizabella and Sally Bowles and Cosette, Katie in The Way We Were, the Baroness in Out of Africa, Etta Place hanging out with Butch and Sundance and Sophie with her horrific choice......

This is all a means to attempt to explain - justify? - what I'm about to transcribe.  Yes, dear readers, I'm about to give a Lost Work of Staggering Genius its decades-belated, long overdue public debut.  I'd save myself the transcription effort and scan them in, but my handwriting has never been beautiful and was even less so as a Tortured Teenage Artiste.  Go ahead, laugh, I sure did.  I think, reflecting back on this piece of what surely can only be rightfully termed dreck of the greatest magnitude, that it is eminently clear why I never became the Next Great American Writer, the female Jay McInerny, the 80s Sylvia Plath that I once aspired to be............

*deep breath* Here goes.  The poem is untitled, and I honestly do not remember what traumatic event caused me to write this in response.  More likely than not, it was some fight with my parents.  Perhaps my mom had gone into my room (as she was wont to do) and gone through my belongings, finding something I didn't want her to find.  I'm transcribing this verbatim, mightily resisting the urge to edit as I do:

Walking down a winding path

of darkness patched with silver

sewn into the shadow-filled

billowing

darkness by the

far off

distant moon

High above this forest-topped hill

Bravely gleaming all alone

for the host of stars are very faint

The ground below my feet dips and swerves

it is foreign to me, and evil

I yearn for a friendlier path

One through a meadow I have walked before 

worn smooth over years of travel

But somehow

I have entered this

secluded wood

full of unknown dangers and challenges

I fear I am not

experienced enough a traveller

but now

I have no choice

Gone are the easy days, days

when the path was wide and clear

and home was waiting

at the end of the lane.

The wind blows

sharp and icy cold

The old door is barred.  It stands welcoming

ajar

no more for me.

It is no longer the end

no longer my destination.

This path

leads not to what once was my Home

Now I must press forward, through the black,

the unknown

I must safely make my way,

alone and unguided

to a clearing in this strange, new wood

And with no background, no past

Nothing of old to call my own

I must build myself

a new Home

in the shadows of these trees

Send down my own roots, create

my own history

build up new walls, as these old crumble down

And protect myself from the past, from the future and its 

unknown frights

Make my own hearth and lay my own fire

to warm myself by.

What I once thought was my own

is no more.

Now I am alone, to begin

here

in the darkness

When I do build my new Home

will you share it with me?

 
I'm suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to find a better example of my teenage writing, to prove I wasn't always as horrible a writer as this would lead you to think.......

Mostly Wordless Wednesday...Lucky Number Seven

May 2003:

May 2010:

Happy birthday, lovebug!

Phriday Photo Phun - Eggstra Eggciting!

Ye Annual Dyeing of the Easter Eggs, 2009!

Kiddo's getting better at dyeing just the egg, and not her hands/shirt/pants/the table/the floor anymore:





I seem to remember the Paas egg kits coming with a "clear" crayon for marking the eggs before dyeing, so the writing would magically appear when the egg was lifted out of the cup. There wasn't a crayon in this kit, but we made do with a white one out of Kiddo's vast crayon collection. Worked like a charm.



Kiddo is old enough now to manage the trickier egg-dyeing maneuvers, like the two-color egg, without any difficulty:



Ta da! The artist and her finished work!



Okay, okay, I confess - I dyed three of the dozen myself, including the dark yellow one third from the right on the bottom row. Two I dyed as exemplars for Kiddo (for the double-dipping and crayon techniques) and the dark yellow one was in homage to my childhood. (If this were an early-season episode of Lost, this is the point at which we'd zoom in for an extreme close-up of my eyes as I did the Flashback Stare.....) See, back in the day (that day being in the mid-70s), my next-oldest sister and I would watch those classic Rankin-Bass Easter TV specials each year (you remember, the ones that had this at the beginning:

Man, that always got us SOOOOO excited!) and our favorite of all the Easter programming (sorry, Jesus) was Here Comes Peter Cottontail. Now, in HCPC, there was a Bad Bunny who sabotaged Peter and turned his eggs all a horrible, dark green at one crucial point of the story (sorry if this is a spoiler, but come on now, the special is as old as I am....). Anyhow, that was our favorite part of the special, and each year when we were dyeing our Easter eggs, my sister and I would try to dye one so dark green that it would come out like the Bad Bunny's egg. (Wikipedia helpfully reminds me that the Bad Bunny's name is January Q. Irontail, and he was voiced by the fantabulous Vincent Price, just in case there was any doubt as to his villainy.) Anyhow, each year when we had finished dyeing our dozens (yes, plural - we usually did 4 dozen, though some years we did only 3 dozen) of eggs, Mom would start to collect up the dye cups to pour them down the sink and thusly discover our Irontailesque attempt. Invariably, she'd chastise us and toss that egg out, but one year, one glorious year, we hatched a plan (hatched! an egg pun! woo!) wherein we ever-so-generously offered to clean up after ourselves when done with the dyeing. Mom, who should've known enough to be suspicious of any such offer from the likes of us, was apparently sleep deprived enough that year (as my youngest sister was then just a baby) that she agreed and summarily left us alone in the kitchen. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! We proceeded to pour several of the darkest dyes together - green, blue, purple - and dunked the last undyed egg, which we'd hidden away (easy enough for Mom to lose count when there were so many eggs being colored), into the cup. We then hid the cup on the back of a shelf, tucked behind the flour canister where it wouldn't be discovered. After dinner, I snuck back into the kitchen, retrieved the egg from the shelf and stuck it in the fridge with the rest of its brethren to await the arrival of the Easter Bunny.

It was a total triumph - the Easter Bunny (who may or may not have borne a strong resemblance at the time to our dad...) never noticed the peculiar dye job on that one egg and just hid it along with the rest of them the next morning. During the Easter egg hunt that year, my sister and I could barely contain our glee as we searched for the egg. It came out a most putrid blackish-green, as you might expect, and we were positively cackling when we came upon it in the back yard. My mom (again, in all probability rather sleep-deprived) went to peel it in the kitchen after the hunt was over and was horrified to discover that the dye had penetrated through the shell, rendering the white and even the yolk a nasty grayish green color (and yes, that egg did get tossed and was not eaten). (Though, there were other years when we wouldn't manage to find all the eggs - even with Dad's "list from the Easter Bunny" of where things had been hidden - and then weeks later, one of the dogs would find and eat that missing egg, only to return it to us in the form of voluminous vomiting a short time later, usually inside on a carpet.)

Anyhow, we wound up telling Mom what we'd done, and surprisingly enough, not only were we not reprimanded, but from that year on, we were allowed to try to dye one egg as dark as we could, always trying to outdo that first year (we never quite managed) and that egg was thereafter known as the Heather Egg. So, in honor of the Heather Egg, I dropped one egg into the yellow dye and left it there as long as Kiddo would let me. Once she grew impatient with my dye-hogging, I pulled it out. It still got fairly dark, though, dontcha think?



Now, I didn't fully explain why I was hogging the yellow dye to Kiddo, but I did tell her it was something her aunt and I used to do when we were kids. Goodness knows, Kiddo has already heard her share of "back when I was a kid" stories out of me. Heck, some of them she can even repeat back to me, like the story of How Mommy Got That Scar on Her Cheek (subtitle: The Time Mommy and Aunt A Didn't Listen to Grandma and Scratched Their Chicken Pox Spots) though I have plenty more saved up for future use... I mean, Kiddo isn't quite six yet, I can't burn through my whole repertoire now, or whatever will I have to pull out and use during the teenage years?

I wonder if that special is still around - maybe it's on DVD......... off to Google it I go!




For more Phriday Photo Phun, drop by Candid Carrie's, and wish her congratulations on the adoption finalization of her youngest two kids while you're there!