FacetsWoman

Things I Never Anticipated in 1964

2012-02-12T12:33:00.002-05:00

1. Taking off our shoes, belt and jackets to board a plane
2. Trash pick-up reduced and replaced with recycling pick-ups
3. Gas that cost more than $3 per gallon
4. Gas mileage over 30 miles per gallon
5. Tiny cars that make a VW Beetle look big!
6. Bottled water
7. 600 e-mail messages every day
8. Networking
9. Metal detector scan to go in a government building
10. Stamps that cost more than $.40
11. Typing on something the size of deck of cards
12. People being arrested for typing while driving
13. Gizmos that convince you to take really bad roads
14. A way to watch TV programs later
15. Channel surfing
16. Telephones that sound like our favorite songs
17. Kids teaching grandparents how to do things
18. Skim milks that tastes good
19. Watermelon in January
20. Cameras without film
21. Blow dryers
22. Pillow Top Beds
23. Hotel beds in all white with loads of throw pillows
24. Plane trips with only peanuts to eat
25. Peanut butter being banned in schools
26. Digital clocks
27. Smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors
28. Candles without flames
29. Water heaters without tanks
30. Countertops made out of granite
31. Solar panels
32. Ugly shoes being “OK” if your feet hurt
33. Money dispensing machines
34. Cafes where everybody is typing
35. Beds that inflate that you can’t also take in the pool
36. Spray on tan
37. Leaf blowers
38. Fax machines
39. 3-D printers
40. Dozens of yogurt choices
41. Public television as innovative
42. Ordinary people going on cruises
43. Suitcases on wheels
44. People writing “blogs”
45. Ice coming from the refrigerator door
46. Air popcorn
47. Organic foods
48. Sea salt grinders
49. Massages for “nice” people
50. APPS!

Electric Gadgets

2012-02-05T11:45:00.000-05:00

My earliest memory of an electric “gadget” was the hand held massager my uncle sent my mother all the way from Germany in the early 1950’s. She could strap little vibrating monster to her hand and massage by grandmother’s sore shoulders.

A few years later we got an electric can opener. My mother loved it because it replaced the hand-cranked model with the little wheel --- oddly, the kind I prefer today. Of course, I open far fewer cans.

My mother had a fascination with manicure equipment and she was especially proud of his manicure tool that reminded me of a miniature power sander. I still have it! But I prefer a simple nail file.

When I was thirteen I received a “Hot-dogger” as a present. You could put six frankfurters in this little device – sticking each end of a metal post. They “dogs” cooked well enough to impress my teenage used it once and then forever it rested under the mini-kitchen counter in the “rumpus room.”

In the early 60s, hair was VERY important to teenage girls and I was no exception. The ability to dry one’s hair without having to sleep in rollers overnight was the ultimate goal. I remember the table top dryer that looked very much like a modern hand-held dryer. I stood on a metal stand and squirted out hot air. The secret was to position yourself so that your entire head eventually got the hot air. Just think – if we had only scrapped the rollers and taken that thing off the stand we would have leapfrogged ahead 20 years in hair-drying technology. But alas, the bag dryer and the table-top dome dryer intervened. It was not until the mid-70s that hand-held dryers came into use. The other hair innovation was hot-rollers. Imagine the idea of rolling your DRY hair with the hot roller that actually produced similar results to sleeping in rollers.

My mother was especially fond of her electric knife. I still have that too, but I never seem to find reason to use it. But she could make short work of slicing a rump roast or ham. I don’t much care for rump roast, and my ham comes spiral sliced—so the electric knife goes unused.
When we first got married, back in 1969, my husband had to have a slicing machine. Over the years it has come in handy for slicing the occasional chunk of cheese or large stick of salami, but mostly it just sits in the pantry waiting patiently for its next slicing job.
We also have a “foot machine” in the closet. About thirty years ago those were all the rage. You would fill it with water, and turn on the heat and it would vibrate and soothe your tired feet. Hmmh, I wonder if it still works! My feet could use a little soothing!

I had a “power” toothbrush decades ago; it ran on batteries. A few years ago I bought another power toothbrush – one that has a little charging stand and costs about the same as a life-time supply of toothbrushes (at least my remaining lifetime anyway).

I have reluctance to dispose of anything that plugs in and still heats, vibrates, files, or slices – you just never know when I might want it again. I think I going to go right now and dig out the foot machine.

Oysters

2012-01-30T07:57:00.000-05:00

I am just finishing up a wonderful weekend in Apalachicola, Florida. All of my life, I have heard of the tasty oysters harvested from this sleepy northwest Florida fishing village. This weekend I have had them every way imaginable and they were succulent and delicious. I especially liked them lightly broiled on the half-shell.

Clearly the economy of this quaint town is strongly tied to the oyster and the residents we spoke with and the museum displays speak of the oyster as a fact of life – something that is just part of the way things are here. The oyster supply must seem unending.

But I know the other side of the story, because I live on a tidal estuary on the Chesapeake Bay. The water is brown and murky, though I know just a few decades ago it was clear. The oyster population in our rivers is down tremendously and we, along with scores of other waterfront homeowners, are cultivating baby oysters in the hopes that they can survive and help filter the water in the river.

This year I have read newspaper articles about oystermen giving up their trade because the harvest is so small. The economic impact of this declining industry is taking its toll, along with the housing market, general unemployment and the rest. This is a far cry from the days when Baltimore packing houses were canning oysters to be sent all over the country.

At home we can still get tasty oysters, including the prized Chincoteague oysters from Virginia. It is still possible to go to a local restaurant and order oysters on the half-shell or fried. And they still taste great. How wonderful it would be to once again know that the oysters were plentiful in the Chesapeake Bay. And the best part is that the Bay would once again be clear!

50 Things I Don't Have to Worry About Anymore

2012-01-22T11:42:00.004-05:00

1. Sleeping in hair rollers
2. Using a pencil for math
3. Worrying if anyone can read my handwriting
4. Getting the snow tires or chains put on the car
5. Adding water to the leftovers to heat-up on the stove top
6. Being a lady going into a liquor store
7. Getting up to change the channel
8. “Teasing” my hair
9. Erasing or covering up typos
10. Change for the toll booth
11. Carrying around a checkbook
12. Keeping a fold-up rain bonnet in my purse
13. Licking postage stamps
14. Tearing up salad greens
15. Having a quarter for a phone call
16. Standing in line at the bank to make a deposit
17. Files of information in case I need it in the future
18. Encyclopedias
19. Saving magazines
20. Saving maps
21. Dictionaries
22. Thesaurus
23. Carrying suitcases by the handle
24. Cutting up chicken
25. Milk going bad in a week
26. Tangled hair after shampooing
27. Lifting heavy boxes of powdered detergent
28. Washing the dishes BEFORE putting them in the dishwasher
29. Winding my watch
30. Being sure that the store where I am shopping is punched on my “charge-plate”
31. Having my feet X-rayed at the shoe store
32. Changing the blade in a razor
33. Refilling the ice trays
34. Whipping cream in the mixer
35. Inspecting a hotel room before accepting it
36. Hand-waxing the car
37. Burning the paper trash in the back yard
38. Long distance charges
39. Somebody opening the car door on the passenger side while stopped at light
40. Getting lost
41. Telling people the hotel phone number for emergencies
42. Putting something hot down on the countertop
43. No way to know if the house is on fire except the smell of smoke
44. Changing light bulbs frequently
45. Locking and unlocking the car with a key
46. Loud, slow dental drills
47. Taking a stack of books on vacation
48. Wearing out the car upholstery
49. The pressure cooker exploding
50. Carbon paper

50 Things I Don't Have to Worry About Anymore

2012-01-22T11:42:00.002-05:00

50 Things I Didn't Have to Worry About in 1964

2012-01-15T11:24:00.001-05:00

I won't say that life has gotten simpler, since I graduated from high school in 1964, but I will say there is more to think about, worry about and generally keep up with. I thought it would be fun to compile a list of some of things that were not a part of my life in 1964.

1. Losing my phone in my purse
2. Losing the remote control in the sofa
3. Finding a key case big enough to hold a really FAT key
4. De-magnetizing my room key
5. The hot tub
6. Losing data
7. Filling up my hard drive
8. Recycling anything
9. Things exploding in the microwave oven
10. Figuring out how to open a child proof cap
11. Having my GPS lead me astray
12. Ice spewing from the dispenser
13. Faxes not going through
14. Fastening my seatbelt
15. Changing my watch battery
16. Identity theft
17. Getting a phone call during a play
18. Remembering to bring the sunscreen
19. Remembering to use bug spray
20. Texting at a traffic light
21. Charging my tooth brush
22. Too many post-it notes
23. Uploading photos to anything
24. Red light cameras
25. The cable going out
26. Rebooting the Ethernet hub
27. Finding an ATM
28. A barcode that can’t be read
29. Wearing the letters off the keyboard
30. The ice maker getting stuck
31. Handling hundreds of emails each day
32. SPAM (not the food)
33. Getting into the HOV lane
34. Getting in the EZ Pass Lane
35. Wearing slip on shoes when flying
36. Putting my cosmetics in a zippered bag
37. Full body scans at the airport
38. Unattended luggage
39. Terrorists
40. Fitting my roller bag in the overhead bin
41. Printing my boarding pass the night before my flight
42. Listening to my GPS complain about recalculating
43. Calling 911 in an emergency
44. Loading music onto my telephone
45. Synchronizing my calendar
46. Pumping gas
47. Storing plastic grocery bags
48. Being on time for the free breakfast at the motel
49. Gaining admission to the airport lounge
50. Opening the garage door when the power is out

Techie or Technophobe - Critical Decisions

2012-01-08T12:42:00.000-05:00

The other day I read an ad for a new kind of computer. This ad was in a magazine for the over fifty audience, and it was promoting a touchscreen computer, with a bright screen and no connector cables. It was designed for seniors who were overwhelmed by conventional computers. The ad made the point is that is too bad that seniors, whose quality of life could benefit from access to the world of the Internet and email, are the very group that has the most challenges in using computers.

At 65, I have friends, my age and a bit older, who use computers all the time and couldn’t live without them and all the latest gadgets. On the other hand, I also have some friends who use a computer in a limited way and still others who never learned and aren’t about to this late in life.
I have to say I am grateful that I am pretty comfortable with computers and gadgets, as it is helpful now and I think it will ensure me a better life when the body starts to fail. Unlike some folks, I find my brain is the best part of the brain/body package and I know as long as I can keep my brain engaged there will a reason to keep on living.

Looking back, I have to ask myself what made me a bit of a “techie” instead of a “technophobe.” There were definite decision points along the way. Decisions I made decades ago set the pattern and it has only continued. How easy it would have been to have gone the other way!

When I was in high school, my mother made me take personal typing. She could type and felt it would be useful for me in college to type term papers. And she was right! I always typed my own papers in college and in graduate school. I never thought of typing as secretarial work, even when I had a secretary to do it for me. I often found myself typing my own work rather than writing it out and giving it to someone else to type. Quite simply, I could think better while typing. The only problem was the whole thing about typos. Erasable bond paper became my best friend until they invented typewriters with correction ribbons.

When I was in graduate school, I had to write this 250+ page paper and it was no fun typing it on my electric typewriter. My husband had access to this amazing typewriter than recorded what you typed onto magnetic tape. I put that entire document into this machine and printed it out. And the best part was I could make corrections on the magnetic type.

But when my husband brought home his first home computer about 35 years ago, he tried to convince me I needed to use it. He told me I could put my magazine subscriber lists on it and my file of advertisers. I told him that I had other ways of doing that and it was more trouble than it was worth. But within a few months he got me to try it and I was hooked, though more often than not, confused.

Shortly afterwards , my husband got a flyer in the mail from Auburn University School of Engineering about a short course in microcomputers. It was being offered in Birmingham and I could stay with my parents. I decided to go and learn what I could. I was the only non-engineer in the class and thank goodness the course wasn’t graded.

Then I started using computers more and more. I had to have my own computer about 25 years ago and have had my own ever since. At work, I was the one who championed bringing in computers.
As the years went by, the computer got be
tter and more powerful. And I kept on upgrading and keeping with the changes. I have been using a laptop now for more than 15 years and some form of desktop machine for more 34 years.

But what would my life be like if I had never learned to type; or if I had rejected computers as irrelevant to me when they first came along?

I have a lot of sympathy for my friends who struggle with computers and with those who refuse to try. Thirty years of learning is a lot to catch up with quickly. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have never used a computer before and be faced with a new desktop computer, a sea of cables and only an online manual written in a tech speak, usually translated from some other language. I consider myself lucky to have made a few good choices decades ago.

A Computer without Data

2012-01-01T09:19:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I would have said that was a really strange concept. But now, in the context of cloud computing, it makes a lot of sense. The data is in the clouds and the computer just accesses the data remotely. I think that they used to call that a terminal – whatever! Of course, we were doing cloud computing before it had a name, and have been operating virtually since 2006. So, what’s to change?

In a nutshell, I am finally ready to keep my computers clean – to store all the data I need someplace else that I can access it and change it from my computers, my cell phone, my netbook or anyone else’s computer. For years, our client databases , accounting files, and management systems have been Web based. Last year, I started saving finished work in what I called Work Product folders, by client.

So what’s left? E-mail was what was holding me back. I had resisted moving where I did email from an Outlook file on my computer because I really felt the online email service was just too slow! So whenever I traveled, I had to take my laptop with me so I could access my searchable email archive. Old habits die hard!

A few things happened to make me reconsider how I handled email. The first was that I managed to repair a relatively new laptop that I had replaced because the cursor jumped around. So now suddenly I have two pretty nice laptops that were basically identical. Then my son and my husband make some changes in the home WIFI network that really speeded up Internet use. Now I can finally get the speed I need to use the Web-based email program.

The implications of using the Web based email program are huge! Now I can do my email on any of my devices and I am actually operating on the server. That means when I delete a message, it is gone (well in the trash and can be recovered until I empty the trash). You know what they say about handling something only once!

On the whole, Web-based email sounds like a perfect solution, BUT! Unfortunately, I get around 500 emails now a day and even just keeping the stuff I must maintain for our company archive would quickly max out the storage I have on my email account. So I left my Outlook account set up on both laptops and let it download automatically. So, yes, I am keeping some data on my computers, but I am only using it as an archive – so I am pretending that it doesn’t count. Besides I have set up an archive folder on the my Web based email desktop and move anything especially worth keeping there.

Since all of our important documents are stored in the clouds and I have solved my email problem, I am really free! Well, not exactly – there is still the calendar. I have had my calendar on my iphone for the last few years and had given up on having it on my computer, Alas, I have discovered (later than the rest of the world, I suspect) that you can link a Google calendar to your iphone. This is nice, though I must admit that I am seldom without my phone. On the other hand, others who need to can easily access my calendar.

So, another year – another radical change! When I stop liking change I will know I am truly old!

Christmas Memories

2011-12-26T17:04:00.000-05:00

It is strange how holidays evolve for year after year; then suddenly everything changes radically.

I have memories of live trees, fragile ornaments, and lights that always seemed tangled and never worked when we plugged them in. My job was to put the tinsel on the tree. Those silvery metallic threads in my impatient hands began a tangled mess, and I am not sure I ever mastered the art of tinsel application.

Those childhood Christmases were happy times. I lived with my parents and my grandparents, and my great aunt came to visit for Christmas, as did close family friends. I believed fervently in Santa and the power of good behavior and my wishes were rewarded with a tricyle at age 3 and a real Schwinn bicycle with training wheels at age 6. Other Christmases brought dolls and cap pistols, and even a Davy Crockett hat.

I remember wrapping presents lovingly at the dining room table and shipping them off to my uncle and his family in Germany. He was in the air force and was stationed there in the early 1950s.
In 1952 my mother had her first big Christmas party. My Christmas present was a black cocker spaniel puppy named Twink. The president of the gas company (where my father worked) came to that party and his wife accompanied him. Twink greeted her and the president’s wife picked her up. Twink wet all over her!
One year my father (and my mother and I got to go too) got to ride in the Ensley Christmas Parade. I think if was because my Dad was president of the Rotary Club. This was the same Rotary Club that had a Christmas party each year and Santa (the REAL Santa was a Loveman’s department store, of course) gave all the boys and girls gifts. I got a plastic tea set each year. I wasn’t into plastic tea sets any more than I was into the fine china demitasse cups I “collected” and often got as presents from relatives.

In December 1958, we moved into our new house in the suburbs, and we were so excited about our first Christmas in our new house . The basement was what they called “unfinished” and Twink’s new home, when we were out, was the basement where she could “run free.” Christmas Eve morning my mother had been busy making her signature fruit cake, heavily laden with raisins, nuts and fruits, and soaked in Bourbon. In the afternoon, we went to the cemetery to put a wreath on my grandmother’s grave. I insisted on stopping at the grocery store to buy a gift for Twink to open. When we arrived home, we went into the basement to catch Twink before opening the garage door. We had left her leash on her to make it easier to catch her. She was nowhere to be seen. Then, as we passed the stairs leading to the upstairs, we saw her hanging by her leash. Her leash had caught under the door frame.

My mother shielded my eyes, and my father took her down gently. We called the veterinarian, who was still at the office, and raced down the mountain. My father massaged Twink’s heart with his hand, but her neck was broken. Nothing could be done! When we finally went into the kitchen that night, much of the fruitcake had been consumed. We speculated that Twink had gotten tipsy from the Bourbon and lost her balance on the stairs.
Just this year I learned that raisins were lethal to dogs! Now I wonder, if it was perhaps the raisins that made her sick and unstable on her feet. I’ll never know, but I do know that my guilt about her death is very real, even more than half a century later.

But life went on and by 1959 our family got with the new Christmas decorating trends. We got a silver tree and put pink ornaments on it. At night the tree came to life when the floodlight with color wheel turned the tree in sequence blue, green, red, and orange. No more conventional Christmases for us!

That was same Christmas that I got to see what it was like behind the scenes for adults on Christmas Eve. Now, at age 13, I got to stay up late and I watched the neighbors (who has younger kids), put an assortment of bicycles and toys together. It was almost magical! I felt so grown up.

In the 1960s Christmas decorating, at least at our house, was anything but traditional. One year my mother and I were into making trees out of whipped soap flakes. We would make a wire frame about 18” tall in the shape of a tree, stick in dowel rod, which went into block of wood. Then we would stuff the “tree” full of newspaper. We use the mixer to whip up the soap flakes with water (I think it was an Ivory product) until they reached the consistency of meringue. Using spatulas, we covered the “tree” with pastel colored soap flakes. We would decorate the “tree” with a variety of things, but mostly I remember the silver balls that you use for decorating cakes. The “tree” was stand proudly in the entrance hall.
From 1959 until her death in 1988, almost every year my mother had a big Christmas party. It became part of our family tradition. Her sausage balls with sour cream and chutney became legendary . I serve that recipe myself each holiday season to friends, and it is always a hit!

Only my mother would be brave enough to serve egg nog to 100 plus people in Birmingham in December. The deck became her cooler for vast amounts of whipped cream, egg whites and egg yolks. If it was a warm December, she chilled it down with ice. Her recipe had only ½ cup of Bourbon per 10 eggs. We still love her egg nog and have it each holiday season. I am teaching the grandchildren to make it. Actually, I think it was my grandmother’s recipe to begin with, so now we have five generations who have enjoyed this calorific treat.

When I was in high school, my mother felt it was important that I invite my girlfriends in for a holiday party. Each Christmas my mother and I (mostly my mother) would set out an array of cookies, along with cranberry punch, and I would invite about 20 of my friends. They would arrive wearing high heels, their Sunday finest, and, of course, the requisite white gloves. One friend learned the hard way that it makes sense to remove the gloves BEFORE sampling the cherry tartlets.
When I was in college, coming home for Christmas was very special. The absence from home made it all the more important. My mother went all out to make sure everything was just perfect. There was always a traditional tree, a holiday party, and a festive Christmas dinner.
In 1968, the week before Christmas I flew to New York City to meet my husband-to-be’s family. But I didn’t stay for Christmas. I was not about to miss Christmas at home in Birmingham!
Even after we were married, for a couple of years, we continued to come to my parents’ house for Christmas. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Then in 1971, everything changed. My husband’s work took him to Southern California and our son was born on December 7. That was our first of five California Christmases. In those years, my parents came to us. My mother’s brother lived nearby and we all got together for Christmas at their house. I had a holiday party each year except 1971-- with some help from my mother, of course!

When we moved to Maryland in 1976, we resumed our tradition of Christmas in Birmingham. About a week before Christmas, we would get up early in the morning and drive straight through to Birmingham. We would arrive about 10 p.m., tired and hungry, and my mother always had sandwiches waiting for us. We always tried to get there in time for my mother’s party, usually a few days before Christmas.

A decade later, we were still trekking to Birmingham. The last Christmas party my mother had was in 1986. She wasn’t feeling too well, but she managed to have her annual party anyway. On January 13, 1987, she was diagnosed with having terminal lung cancer. Her last Christmas was in 1987. By then she was very weak. We went out for Chinese food on Christmas Eve, but we had Christmas Dinner, as usual and exchanged gifts. What stands out in my mind is that my mother pulled herself up from her chair, and made the gravy—as clearly I was not doing it properly.
That Christmas, the azalea by the back steps bloomed. Azaleas bloom in Spring, but this one I think bloomed just for my mother. She saw it on the way out the door shortly after Christmas. She was headed to the hospital and never came home again. She died on January 13, 1988.

The next couple of Christmases my father spent with us. In 1991, we had a big family gathering on New Year’s Day and all of his nieces and nephews came to our house in Maryland. He entertained us all with stories of the old days. By June, he too was gone.

It has now been another two decades and we have fallen into the pattern of having Christmas at our house, with our son and his family. I have eased into the role of holiday party host and cook for Christmas dinner. The decorations are silk and the lights LEDs.

About a dozen years ago we added a new family tradition of Christmas Eve oyster stew with our son and his family at their home. This has become a new favorite part of the holiday season, probably has become a tradition that the grandchildren will continue.

Today is the day after Christmas. For dinner we will have leftover turkey, dressing, etc. with egg nog and left over cake for dessert. The tradition of leftovers on the 26th is as strong as having a festive feast on the 25th. With every bite, I will remember Christmases long ago.

Back to the Beach

2011-12-17T08:34:00.000-05:00

Back to the Beach

I just got back from a drive along the Florida coast between Panama City Beach and Inlet Beach. The sand was still sugar white and the Gulf still roared, but what about the rest? I knew there had been changes – what hasn’t changed in 40 years? But I wanted to see for myself and my husband indulged me.

I have many happy memories of summer beach vacations with my family and their friends. Panama City was (and I guess still is) called PC and spoken of in that special tone of voice that evokes good times. For residents of Birmingham, Alabama, Panama City was the summer beach destination, as well as where everyone went for AEA (that Alabama holiday called Alabama Education Association). Our poor teachers were stuck in meetings while the rest of the state was having fun at the beach.

Today, as we rode along the coast, I tried really hard to align what I saw with what I remembered. The lack of similarity was striking. The names of the beaches were the same – Panama City, Laguna, and Sunnyside. The feel of the areas was somehow the same, though the buildings were different. Panama City was the crowded, more commercial end; Laguna was a mixture and Sunnyside had more private homes. It is odd how an area can retain its character, yet be changed in every detail.

I saw one older two story motel that looked like a place we once stayed at Laguna Beach, and a dozen older homes that look like one we once rented in Sunnyside. By today’s standards the two story wooden beachfront apartments would not measure up as well as their modern stucco counterparts. I wondered aloud if any of those stucco buildings that seem so fresh on the surface are really underneath that outer shell, the old wooden structures I remember.

“Going to Florida,” as we called it was special and sometimes it was even a surprise. My father would come home and say “I have sand in my shoes.” And quickly we would be in the car headed south along the Florida Short Route through rural Alabama until we hit the Florida line at Florala. It was almost magical when the road broke through the pines and the ocean appeared.

In the 1940s and very early 50s we stayed at cottages in Laguna Beach. They were across the road from the beach and one had to be very careful of the sand burrs that stung like fire when they attacked tender young feet. I remember vividly sitting on the front porch at night listening to the adults talk about strange things – like the woman who was allergic to her husband and a popular brand of dog food being made of horse meat. It is funny what you remember!

The older I got, the further we moved down the beach and we went from the cottages across the road to the apartments on the beach side. In retrospect, I suspect this migration toward the Gulf side and further down the beach was driven by my parents’ improving financial situation.

The best part of coming to the beach back then was going to sleep listening to the roar of the Gulf and from the apartments on the beach side of the road, you could hear the roar quite clearly. Last night, as we walked to a restaurant, I came within earshot of that glorious sound. I stopped in my tracks – just listening and remembering a simpler time.

Once in 1961, we stayed at a small motel called the Siesta Motel in Sunnyside. It was my parent’s new favorite place to stay, as it was quiet, the beach pristine and the facilities very nice. I was particularly excited because a neighborhood boy was vacationing a few houses down the beach and at 15, I anticipated the perfect summer vacation with him as my companion. The first morning we were there, he and I went crabbing with a net and actually managed to catch a blue crab. Not a dozen, but just one. Never having seen one before, we weren’t sure what to do with it. My mother said we should boil it until it turned red. We did, and then beat it with whatever tools we could find and extracted the sweet meat. (Little did I know I would eventually live in Maryland where crab picking is a required life-skill.) The next morning we got a call that my grandfather had fallen and we had best come home. It was the custom to tie your wet bathing suits to the radio antenna the morning of departure, telling the world of your beach vacation. We just got in the car and left with no swimsuits on the antenna. My grandfather died a few weeks later.

When I last came here, it was 1971, a few months before our son was born. My mother made me a bathing suit to wear, as a regular bathing suit wouldn’t fit. My husband and I drove down from Birmingham with my parents in my mother’s big, yellow, 1966 Dodge Polara. That trip we stayed at one of those two story wooden frame motels, ate a lot of fried seafood and talked excitedly about the baby’s arrival and our move to California. It was the end of an era in all of our lives, but at the time it just seemed like a nice beach vacation.

So here it is 2011 and all that is left of more than two decades of beach vacations is memories. The time share condo, while much nicer than the beachside apartments, is air-conditioned, across the highway from the beach and a few towns over from the beaches of my youthful memories. The ocean is roaring, but I can’t hear it. I haven’t taken the time to walk to the beach and feel the sand in my toes and the waves splashing at my ankles. It is December and the beach is mostly deserted. I am eating fried shrimp and oysters, but regretting it later, as now my system is accustomed to lighter fare. My parents have been gone for decades and our son is married with kids of his own. In the interim, new beaches have captured our loyalty – Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman and Rehoboth, DE, close to our home in Maryland.

You can’t go home again, and you can’t go back to the beach you remember. Maybe some memories are best left alone.

Cheese

2011-12-11T14:00:00.000-05:00

My mother used to refer to “rat cheese.” I know it was yellow and I suspect it was some kind of inexpensive cheddar. It was the food of choice for mousetraps and the mice did seem to love it.

As a child, I remember cheese in just a few forms. My mother would buy sharp cheddar and hand-shred it using a Mouli grater (I still have hers). There was the American cheese kids ate for snacks or on sandwiches. My father liked Roquefort, but it was too strong for my adolescent tastes. We kept Swiss cheese for sandwiches. Cottage cheese was for dieting and tasted great with pineapple. Parmesan came in a green can and we sprinkled it on spaghetti. Cream cheese was for use in recipes, but not for regular eating.

As a young adult I discovered more and more cheeses. Brie, Muenster, Havarti, and gorgonzola, I learned that real lasagna was made with ricotta and my husband to be introduced me to mozzarella on home-made pizza. Decades ago my mother showed me that cream cheese was great with Pickapeppa sauce or pepper jelly – instant party food.

Eventually, I tasted fresh Mozzarella. And in recent years, I have come to love goat cheese. Feta has become a household staple, and parmesan and Romano now comes into our refrigerator in big chunks. Manchego, a delightful Spanish hard cheese, has become a favorite. Conventional yellow cheddar has been replaced on my shopping list by Vermont white cheddar.

European vacations have let us taste delightful cheeses we never heard of before or since, but have loved as appetizers and desserts. We have also stopped in cheese shops along the road, and picked up some remarkable cheeses to eat in our hotel room with some crackers and red wine. Whether the city be Paris, Naples, or Berlin – this is still a treat!

These days when I go to the grocery store and I admire the selection of expensive cheeses – sometimes I bring something new home to taste. A good chunk of cheese is really an investment, given the price, but the pleasure is in savoring each taste. Cheese is truly one of life’s great pleasures.

Notebooks and Carrying Books

2011-12-02T22:52:00.000-05:00

A highlight of my elementary school days was touring the plant in Birmingham where they made the Subjects Book notebooks. They were made by the Nifty Company – am surprised I remembered that. What a thrill it was to see how they manufactured the notebooks we kids used every day! We watch ed how they made the spiral binding hold the books together. It was almost magic!
These spiral bound workhorses came in bright colors and you could write your name and grade on the outside cover. The insides were ruled with the medium sized line spacing appropriate in pale blue lines. There was a red line for the margin. I think I must still have one around here somewhere – a remnant of grammar school.

In grammar school we carried our books and notebooks in something called a book satchel. They were plaid or solid colored and they had a compartment for pens and pencils.

In junior high, we learned about three-ring binders. They were always covered in blue canvas in those days, and we took delight in decorating them our ink pens. We still had our ever faithful spiral bound notebooks – one for each subject. But by then we were too sophisticated for book satchels.

Our notebooks actually served as our platform for carrying around our textbooks. We would set the books up so that they were two abreast, stacked three of four high on each side. The English Composition book was always the smallest, so it rode on the top. Nobody had book bags or brief cases; we just carried the books around from class to class stacked on our three ring binders. We girls carried them in front of us with both hands (I don’t know how we opened doors). Perhaps the boys, who carried them under one arm stacked the same way, would open them for us. Of course, the theory was that we could stash our books in our lockers and stop by during the school day and pick them up as needed. But somehow that theory didn’t work in practice. We just carried them around all day, quickly reassembling our stack of books right before the bell was to ring for each class.

By high school, our notebooks were thicker because we had more subjects and more spiral notebooks, and we always had to carry around “notebook” paper for essays, homework, pop quizzes and the like.

I really don’t remember doing anything different in college, except that we didn’t always have our classes back to back, so it was possible to go back to the dorm between classes. I have no recollection of a bookbag or anything like that and certainly never a backpack! It was great freedom when you could take one book and a notebook to class.

The notebooks of our college days got thinner lines and they were divided into subjects – so that all of our subjects could be in one notebook. And it seems that in college note-taking became a big deal. There was no way to record lectures and I can’t recall that anyone ever taught be how to take notes. Handouts were rare. Much of learning was regurgitation of what was delivered in lecture format. I wonder if undergraduate instruction is the same today.

In college we were also introduced to the “Blue Book,” a booklet consisting of bound notebook paper with a soft blue cover. We used to have to buy them and bring them to class to use for taking essay tests. With these booklets, there was no starting over or changing your mind and you had to write in ink. In retrospect, it was awful!

In graduate school in 1968, there was more room was personal choice and some tests were even open-book. The whole experience was less about memorization and more about reflection, research and drawing conclusions. Fewer textbooks had to be hauled about. On the whole, I preferred graduate school.

Graduate school led to real life and I became a yellow tablet and file person. In my early professional life, I rarely used a notebook and certainly not any three-ring binders. I wrote everything on yellow pads and gave them to other people to type. I kept files organized in ways that made sense to me and my whole life was sorted into manila folders.

In time, I discovered hanging files, and became a hanging file fanatic. Each company or organization I worked with had different colored file folders. I will NEVER have to buy any more hanging file folders again because I have boxes of them at my storage unit.

A few years ago, I discovered sheet protectors were cheap and I could use them to keep related documents together. They don’t require tabs or labels and if I put them in a three-ring binder I can flip through them in seconds. And when they do have to be saved they can be dropped easily into handing folders.

Today, I made good use of notebooks, filled with projects held together by sheet protectors. For now, they work, but my use of paper is shrinking daily and what I will end up retaining will be very little soon. Today more and more is digital and that is fine with me. I have a speedy scanner that makes quick work of documents.

For those times when I must take notes, I often use a special pen that records while I write. I use something that looks like a spiral notebook, but the paper is specially treated to work with the pen. What magic! I can go back and replay anything I am not certain of. I wish I had, had that in college.

Meanwhile, I see my grandchildren carrying their books around in backpacks. I am sure they would be totally baffled at the sight of a kid with a three-ring binder with a big stack of books on it. I suspect their children will just carry around a tablet computer and no books or paper or pens. Maybe this will lead to a generation of kids with better posture not to mention no bony bulge on the middle finger of whichever hand they write with. I just noticed, my bony bulge is actually almost GONE! I can still write – really I can – I just don’t do it very often.

Maps to GPS

2011-11-20T10:06:00.000-05:00

As a child in Birmingham, Alabama, I always had a good idea of where I was. Vulcan was forever there at the top of Red Mountain. With that single point of navigation, there was no need for a compass. It was almost impossible to get lost in Birmingham. Everybody just knew where they were going and even as a very small child, I could have easily directed an out of town visitor to downtown or any other destination like Ensley, Five Points West Shopping Center, and Birmingham Southern-College. And if one went over Red Mountain, you were in Shades Valley, with Shades Mountain looming to the South.

Basic topography doesn’t change, though they did chop a big chunk out of Red Mountain a few decades back to build the Red Mountain Expressway. In fact, Birmingham is now laced with expressways, just like any other US city. Fundamentally, however, getting around town is still simpler than in most places because of the mountains and Vulcan is still watching over the city.
I never saw my parents look at a local road map, but when we traveled, maps were essential. My mother would serve as map-reader and chief navigator. In those days, maps were free. You simply picked them up at the gas station. We had a collection of maps from mostly Gulf and Standard Oil. And since maps were free, from about the time I could read, I was also given my own map copy so I could follow along and make suggestions.

My first job, summer of my freshman year in college, was a transportation “coder” for the Alabama Highway Department. For a special project, in summer of 1965, they hired a bunch of college girls to work on coding the results of an origin-destination study. Basically, they stopped people traveling down main roads around Birmingham and asked them where they had been and where they were going. Our job was to take those tickets, look at a special map that was divided by zones, and write in the zone for both the origin and the destination. The Highway Department then sent this data to a big computer in Georgia (guess that was the nearest one) to convert this data into a report they could use for planning new roads. It wasn’t difficult work, and our team of rising sophomore co-eds completed the project about two weeks early. For the remainder of the summer we arrived at 8 a.m. each morning at our work place (an old house scheduled for condemnation) and playing cards each day for $1.25 per hour (minimum wage). They wanted us there in case they needed anything, but otherwise, we were to keep ourselves amused!

I graduated from Auburn and then married a New Yorker. He knew his way around the city on the subways. He clearly had a subway map in his head and seemed to navigate by some mysterious force that I could not tap into. He knew which trains went where and even where to stand on the platform. To this day, I just surrender and tag along like a lost child. Of course, they have changed a few things about the NY subways system since he left there in 1964 and he now requires a map.

When we lived in southern Illinois a few years later I was continually lost. There were no mountains to navigate by; just endless cornfields. What I would have given for a GPS!
Navigating in Southern California was not that hard because we once again had mountains to guide us. But we maintained a collection of road maps to use exploring the surrounding areas – mountains, desert and Pacific coast. Cross-country trips home to Alabama and New York, made us quickly gain expertise in reading maps. We always kept a big road atlas in the car, along with our vast collection of gas station maps.

When we moved to the Annapolis, Maryland area in 1976, my husband’s new employer gave him a local map. It was a single sheet of white paper with a hand drawn map of key roads. Unfortunately, it omitted what then called “the New Severn River Bridge.” We had a hard time getting around in our house-hunting efforts until a realtor suggested we buy an Anne Arundel County map book. Once again, we were in sync and able to function.

We always had a rule – never throw a map away. So we continued to collect maps – gas station maps gave way to AAA maps and our collection gained fancy maps with glossy stiff covers. I kept them all in a filing cabinet in alpha order. The years went by and the collection grew.
Then a few years ago, we got a GPS and that changed everything. I have to admit a love-hate relationship with Nigel. I should add that we picked Nigel because he seems to approach it more in a subservient role than does Jill, his US alter ego. Jill always seemed to have an attitude when she said “recalculating.” And of course, that is whole problem with the GPS concept. The GPS is telling you what to do. If you use a map, you are looking at the whole situation and making an informed decision about your route. These are two fundamentally different mindsets and for someone like me, who likes to be in control, listening to a GPS is an annoyance.

I wish I could say that Nigel was 100% reliable. He lost a lot of credibility the other night in DC when he took me through bumper-to-bumper traffic in totally the wrong direction and made me late. I think it is because he took a tumble from the dashboard in a sudden stop and somehow was directing me in a confused state. His head, however, now seems to have cleared, though yesterday I think he was having some cognitive trouble, again in DC. Of course, he is not the only one!
This summer I got rid of many of our maps. We always go the AAA store and pick up new ones for any new road trip anyway. I still like to look at a map when planning a trip. Of course, we will also bring along Nigel and his alter ego, Jill, and our iphones with their bouncing blue ball navigation. Getting “lost” used to be a real possibility. And I still have my built in sense of topography that allows me to “intuit” my way around and to just know when we are approaching our destination.

I just read about a hot new thing that people are doing called geo-caching where people hide stuff in the back country and others seek out the cache using their GPSs. I don’t think I will take this up. Just finding restaurants in DC using my GPS is adventure enough for me.

Candles

2011-11-12T20:38:00.000-05:00

Candles are in many ways an odd remnant from another time. We all have them in our houses and sometimes light them for parties, a decadent bath or a power failure. But most the time they just sit there unlit on tabletops in holders, in candelabra and even on stands in fireplaces.

My personal reluctance to light them is that they have the potential to burn down the house. But they do have a certain elegance about them that makes me feel good when I do light them. A party becomes more festive when the candles are lit.

From my childhood, I recall a few candle rules. The most important one is don’t light them in the morning and for a fancy evening event they are required on the table. When I think about it, that makes sense if the candles were all about providing supplementary light.

When I was growing up, if the power went out, we always used candles to pierce the darkness. We didn’t have any kerosene lamps, until I discovered them as young adult fresh from camp counselor experiences. A few years ago I bought electric lanterns, and these battery powered wonders produce clean, non-dangerous light good enough to read by.

My grandfather’s chifferobe sits in our entrance foyer. Behind one of the doors, I have several shelves filled with candles. I have boxes of red candles and green candles for holiday gatherings, all never lit. I inherited candles from my mother, a vast array of white and ivory tapers. I also have some boxes of dark blue and dark green candles purchased maybe a decade ago on a Williamsburg excursion. I also have two boxes of black candles, which were all the rage in the mid-80s. I also have a collection of “used candles” that we are saving for the power failure that goes on for weeks and runs down the batteries in our electric lanterns.

I keep a box of white candles in glass jars to use on tabletops for events, but have recently learned that they are prohibited in certain historic venues – for the obvious reasons. I have a lot of those small fake window candles that run on batteries, suitable for all just about anywhere.
I like the artificial candles that you can switch on and off. No muss – no fuss and you pretend they are real candles.

I also have a few candle accessories that I especially like. My favorite is the glass rings that go under the candle based to catch the dripping wax. Since candles like to flop around, I have a small container of sticky stuff that goes into the bottom of a candle holder and it keeps the candle stable.

I wonder how many decades more candles will be a part of every household? Or will they gradually lose their relevance? Will the next generation skip the candles and just crank up the lights in the dining room so people can see what they are eating?

Laundry

2011-11-06T13:40:00.000-05:00

My grandmother had a washtub and a washboard and she kept it on the enclosed back porch. She actually used it to wash her clothes – even after we got a washing machine. I am not sure why – maybe because she didn’t think the washing machine was reliable. I can barely remember NOT having a washing machine. The first one we got had an external wringer on it. My mother used Tide in the big orange box. When washing whites, they adding something call bluing to make the whites whiter. And, of course, there was Clorox bleach for the tough stains on whites. Some items like outer garments, tablecloths and sheets were always starched by dipping them in starch before drying.

I remember my father, who at one point in his life, moonlighted with an appliance repair company, telling a horrific tale of going out on a service call for a washing machine. A very unfortunate woman had gotten her breast caught in the wringer and could not get it out. I can only imagine the pain! Something like a mammogram but MUCH worse. She survived the accident, but I never heard any more details. Our next washer did not a have a wringer – wonder why!
My mother and grandmother used to hang the laundry out to dry on a clothesline in the backyard. I wasn’t tall enough to help, but I remember handing them items to hang on the line. In Alabama, late afternoon thunderstorms are common, so it was not unheard of the rush home from shopping time to pull clothes off the line.

The sheets dried on the line somehow captured the sweet smell of sunlight. The towels felt rough to the skin and the underwear felt stiff. Jeans are hard to iron and tended to wrinkle when dried on the line. There was popular stretcher for drying jeans that was a metal frame that you put the jeans in and then dried them on the line.
I think we ironed everything but towels. The process for ironing involved taking the dried clothes off the line and wadding them up into little balls and sprinkling them with water. Sprinkling was the term used to describe this process. We used a sprinkler top inserted in a coke bottle.

The actual ironing was arduous work and took hours and for some reason was left for the afternoon, but one might start ironing right after lunch and not stop until 5 p.m. Our iron was electric and it got very hot, so ironing burns were not that usual.
In our household certain kinds of ironing (the most boring kind) were left for the cleaning lady. She ironed the sheets, tablecloths and napkins. The term “rough dry” used to describe clothes that have not been ironed and “nice people” always had crisply ironed sheets, tablecloths and napkins.

My grandmother taught me how to iron, and I was lucky I had her for a teacher, as she was known to be an exceptional ironer. She started me off with handkerchiefs (yes, everybody used them instead of tissues). I graduated to blouses, skirts, and slacks and by the time I was ten I could iron passably well. While I have never been a great ironer, I can still iron well enough. My grandmother taught me how to iron well, but it was my mother who taught me how to iron fast. I don’t think my father ever touched an iron in his life.

My father and grandfather both dressed in coat and tie to go to work. Their suits always went to the dry cleaner. Their shirts were sent to the laundry and were delivered to the house. They went in a bag, but came back folded around a piece of cardboard, with a paper band across the front and a cardboard insert around the next. They were still starched and really looked like new each week. My job was to rip open the brown wrapping paper and deliver the shirts to my father and grandfather’s chest of drawers. It was easy to tell them apart because my father’s shirts were always white and my grandfather’s were usually striped in different shades of blue or gray. For me, the best part of the whole sending the shirts to the laundry process was the excess shirt cardboard. I had a never-ending supply for small arts projects and school assignments. "Shirt cardboard” was the term commonly used for these sheets of cardboard that were about the size of piece of legal size paper.

Our home laundry capacity grew with the addition of a gas dryer when I was about 5 years old. There was no more need to hang clothes on the line, though the sheets often found their way to the line because line dried sheets smell terrific.

In the early 50s my father acquired an ironing machine from my uncle. I think he might have gotten it surplus from a laundry who was upgrading its equipment. I only recall it being used once when we first got it. It moved with us to our new house in 1958 and we disposed of it when my father sold the house in 1989.

When I was in high school, I wore a lot of wool skirts and sweaters, which has to be sent to the dry cleaner, but I also wore oxford cloth blouses. By then my grandmother was gone and my mother did not share in her love of ironing. The oxford cloth blouses were dispatched to the cleaning lady for ironing. My mother referred to them as those $#%^& oxford cloth blouses.

In 1964, when I went to college my laundry became my problem. My mother made me a red laundry bag that said “Duds for Suds.” Suddenly I became much less picky in deciding that something was ready for the laundry bag. As I recall, there was a washer in the basement of the dorm. But like most co-eds, I soon discovered that doing laundry was much easier at home and those weekends I came home, I always brought laundry. I am sure my mother and her friends complained to each other, but I think they were glad to see us – even with laundry.

The last couple of summers of college, I spent as a camp counselor at a Girl Scout Camp. There was no way to do laundry at the camp, so when we got a day off – every two weeks, we could take our dirty laundry into town to the Laundromat. On one occasion I recall leaving a trail of dropped laundry between the car and my platform tent. I got some good-natured ribbing the next day from my fellow counselors.

In graduate school, I had to use the Laundromat and in a college town that was not easy because the washers and dryers were always in use. I was going home less often by then and living in an apartment. Of course, I also had a car, so I could drive to the Laundromat. I was engaged to my future husband at the time, and he is not a sports fan at all. That year, I missed all the football games. Instead I went to the Laundromat – deserted of course!

When I got married, I ended up with my husband’s laundry as well as my own. That it something I didn’t think about when I accepted his offer of marriage. He was in the Air Force, so in the early years of our marriage, he wore a dress blue uniform which mercifully had to be sent out to the dry cleaner. But in a couple of years, the Air Force discovered permanent press shirts and they came in light blue, short and long sleeved versions. They WERE permanent press, but still required ironing. I was not happy, but soon they came out with the dark blues shirt with long-sleeves and it needed to go to the cleaners. From time to time, he was required to wear fatigues because he was doing something dirty (as an engineer that can happen). I drew the line on fatigues and had them sent out to the Base laundry. It was the Base laundry that forced me to learn his social security number. It was necessary to recite it aloud to pick up laundry. Can you imagine the uproar today?

We bought our first washer and dryer in California in 1971, right before our son was born. Houses in southern California don’t usually have basements, and our house was no exception. The laundry room was between the kitchen and garage. I was still doing my own laundry, but the oxford cloth blouses gave way to polyester. I rarely ironed! Everything was permanent press, even the baby’s clothes.

Our move to Maryland in 1976 coincided with the popular demise of polyester and I think probably California was more into polyester than Maryland. At any rate, I found myself ironing again. It was not a weekly ritual, rather more on an as needed basis. My husband was only in the Air Force as a Reservist, so Air Force clothes were not so much of an issue. He wore permanent press dress shirts and suits to work. The house in Maryland had it laundry room in the basement and I hated to go down there. We still had the same washer we bought in California in 1976.

In 1989, we did some remodeling and were able to bring the laundry room upstairs to the main floor. I was delighted not to have it in the basement a I hate bringing laundry up and down stairs. We bought a new washer and dryer and life was good.

We built a new house in 1992 and included a second floor laundry room. We have been married 32 years and are still on only our second washer and dryer (Kenmore has good genes I guess). Sometimes I wish they would break so could get the new front-loader kind that looks so cool.
Laundry is a Sunday ritual for me and I rarely iron. I do a load of whites and a load of coloreds. I use high efficiency detergent and I never, ever line dry anything. My sheets and tablecloths are all permanent press. I have a magic potent, Downy Wrinkle Releaser that I spray on shirts, cotton tops and slacks and the watch the wrinkles fade away by smoothing out the garment with my hands. The cleaning lady washes and dries the sheets, towels and tablecloths.
Well, I have to stop writing about it and start doing the laundry! And get a bag to together to take to the dry cleaner. So much has changed, but so much hasn’t.

Cooler and Water to Go

2011-10-30T12:26:00.000-04:00

The best part of traveling as a little kid was helping my mother fill up the cooler. Our cooler was big, green and made out of metal. It had a tray in it for things that we didn’t want to get wet (a fantasy that they would stay dry). The ice came from the ice house where we bought it big blocks that the men who worked there lifted with giant tongs. My mother broke it apart with an ice pick. We filled the cooler mostly with Coca-Colas and loaded the tray with things to use to make sandwiches and for snacks.

We also always took a water jug with us. The water jug was also metal and had a spout on the top. My mother would keep the water jug on the floor in the front seat and each time anyone wanted water, she would lift up the cooler and hold it precariously above her lap while pouring into a paper cup.

Maintaining the cooler and water jug was just part of traveling. Once each day we would have to refresh the ice in both. That required finding an ice house and buying ice, emptying the cooler and draining it and refilling it with ice, as well as refreshing the ice in the water jug.
Whether our destination was Panama City, Florida, a day trip away from Birmingham, or the west coast on a multi-day marathon, the cooler and the water jug were essential. Even driving through the Mojave Desert in summer in an un-air conditioned car, we always had a Cold Coke and some cheese (albeit sometimes a bit waterlogged) to nibble on. If the radiator overheated, our water jug was always ready.

As I grew older, the ice house gave way to the ice machine at the motel or hotel or sometimes bagged ice from the convenience store. The cooler went from metal to plastic and grew a drain on the side at the bottom. The contents remained the same. And I was no longer a child, but a teenager, then a young adult.

When I married, we got our own cooler. It was plastic and orange and it served us well. The Cokes gave way to Diet Coke and Ginger Ale, and cheese went from slices to blocks of cheddar we cut with a cheese cutter.

When we drove cross country in 1972 with our infant son, we used the ice chest to help create a “nest” for him in the backseat. In those days, carseats were not required, although we had one on one side of the backseat. But when he was in his “nest” (created by making a upholstered and padded plywood floor to slide in between the passenger seat and back seat cushion), he was free to move about and play with his toys. About 2/3 of the way through our three week multi-stop route that took us from California to New York, to Alabama and back to California, he discovered how to fling himself across the cooler and steal my sunglasses. Somehow we made it home.

About that same time, we discovered a water jug that was a quantum leap over all of the water jugs of the past. You pressed a button on the top and pumped the water up. We got two of them, one for us and one for my parents. My mother was growing frailer and lifting the water jug was too hard for her. My parents have been gone for more than two decades, but we still have their water jug and ours!

We also discovered the solution for short trips. It was an armrest cooler that sat on the bench seat of my 1977 Pontiac. We still have that one too though we never use it. We don’t have a car with a bench seat. But you never know...

The orange cooler eventually developed a leak, as did the green one that came after it. We then bought a blue cooler and a big red one with wheels on one end. We also bought a couple of those smaller coolers. One had a long life between the bucket seats of the Dodge caravan as a repository for maps. Sometimes on the road cooler crises required us to buy Styrofoam coolers. There is nothing quite as annoying as a squeaky Styrofoam cooler. But you never know when you might need one, so we keep any that enter our lives.

We have our collection of coolers and it sits atop the cabinets in the garage. For parties we fill the blue one with sodas and water and the bigger red one with beer. The rest sit there and wait in anticipation.

Somewhere along the way, we acquired two very large plastic water jugs with spigots. I think they were leftover from my camp director days – bought with my own money because the camp was too poor to buy them. Sometimes my daughter-in-law borrows them. For the last hurricane, we filled them with water – just in case.

But times have changed. Now we have bag coolers on wheels and bag coolers in different sizes as shoulder totes. I use my coolers for various events that I host, either personally or for my clients. I fill up coolers with iced drinks for bus tours and picnics. All of this stuff also comes in handy when the power goes out, which seems to happen all too frequently. I also find the bag coolers on wheels are great way to carry trade show items onto the floor.

Our approach to road trips has changed. We no longer head cross country for three weeks. Instead we fly someplace we want to be, and it is often a foreign country, and we rent a car. We don’t take a cooler with us. If I am thirsty, I will grab a bottle of water at the gas station when we gas up the car. Eating and traveling by car are no longer simultaneous tasks. We would much prefer to stop for lunch at local place that gets good reviews—which is easily determined by checking the Internet on my phone.

I admit to having an assortment of small bag coolers and when we do travel in our own car, I confess to chilling down some bottled waters and sodas. I get some ice from the freezer section of the refrigerator by sticking a plastic bag under the chute. I might even put some cheese and crackers in another small cooler bag. So, two small bags, some ice from the freezer and I am good to go. I could have left it at that.

During the last power failure I bought an ice chest that plugs into the cigarette lighter on a car. It seemed like a good idea at the time. What I didn’t count on was that in order to keep the cooler, cool, I had to keep the car in motion. It wasn’t like I could chill it down on a short trip, load it up with stuff from the refrigerator, and keep everything cool. I didn’t take it back. Instead I put it in the storage unit.

I have to say that my parents’ lives would have been a lot simpler with such an amazing device. They could have plugged it into the cigarette lighter and then carried it into the motel room each night and plugged it in. We could have had cold Cokes and our cheese would have never been waterlogged. So I solved their soggy cheese problem. It only took 60 years!

But the old pump top water jugs-- maybe I should use one of those on our next trip? I realize that bottled water is environmentally unfriendly, but it is so convenient. But I could take that old water jug, fill it with water and ice (filtered, of course, through our reverse osmosis system) and bring along some paper cups and make time almost stand still.

But the real question is, will a cooler filled with sodas and cheese and a water jug bring back the wonder of travel that I experienced as a small child? That is, sadly, gone forever.

Denim Jeans

2011-10-23T10:10:00.000-04:00

Denim is a strange fabric – not because of its characteristics as a fabric, but because of how it is perceived. In some ways it is ubiquitous. I would venture to say that most Americans own some clothing made of denim. But don’t try to wear denim to the local Country Club or private school, the last bastions of the dress code.

From Wikipedia…
“Denim (French town of Nîmes, from which 'denim' (de Nîmes) gets its name) is a rugged cotton twill textile, in which the weft passes under two (twi- "double") or more warp threads. This produces the familiar diagonal ribbing identifiable on the reverse of the fabric, which distinguishes denim from cotton duck. Denim has been in American usage since the late 18th century.[1] The word comes from the name of a sturdy fabric called serge, originally made in Nîmes, France, by the André family. Originally called serge de Nîmes, the name was soon shortened to denim.[2] Denim was traditionally colored blue with indigo dye to make blue "jeans", though "jean" then denoted a different, lighter cotton textile; the contemporary use of jean comes from the French word for Genoa, Italy (Gênes), where the first denim trousers were made.”

I am not sure how those institutions that ban denim define denim. Personally, I would hate to the enforcer of such dress rules. I would also not want to show up in anything that looked like denim, even if it did not meet the technical definition. And does denim have to be blue to set off the alarms? And even if it is blue, it might be fake denim made out of cotton and/or polyester.

Of course there is the whole question of what makes a pair of slacks “jeans” rather than just pants. Jeans used to be put together with rivets and have patch pockets. Now jeans are made out of all sorts of fabric, including cotton duck. In fact I have two pair of “jeans” that are black with black stitching, have patch pockets, but are of a softer fabric than denim. I bet they would “pass” if I were brave enough to wear them to a Country Club. Life is sure complicated.
When I was a kid, the little boys wore denim jeans to school (I went to public school). The boys’ jeans were conventional and blue, but the jeans were lined with flannel in bold plaids. The boys wore them with the pants rolled up so the flannel cuff would show.

Being a girl, I only wore jeans after school and on Saturdays. Most of my jeans were blue and made by Wrangler, but I especially loved my red jeans and my green jeans. They were bright, bold colors with white stitching. I remember waking up on a Saturday morning and jumping into my jeans so I could help my grandmother in the garden. And I guess, that says it all, I was WORKING in the garden.

Levi Strauss brought blue jeans to hard-working miners. Hence, jeans became associated with manual labor.

Suburbanites of the 1950s and 60s wore jeans, but mostly for work around the house. My father had a pair of jeans my mother bought him, and he wore them to clean the gutters and cut the grass. He would never have thought of going anywhere except perhaps the hardware store wearing them.

I can’t recall that my mother ever wore jeans. She made most of her own clothes and was known to be always fashionably dressed. She rarely wore slacks until the 1970s and 80s, but never jeans.
My grandparents, who lived with us, never wore denim or jeans. In fact, I don’t think my grandmother, who died in 1957, ever wore pair of pants of any kind. She wore a “house-dress” for working around the house or in her beloved garden. My grandfather, who died in 1961, always seemed to wear a suit, even after he retired.

While the teenage boys of the 1950s wore jeans and T-shirts, James Dean style, the teenage boys at my high school wore khaki and navy colored dress pants, oxford cloth shirts, dark socks and highly polished Weejun loafers. We girls wore plaid shirts, oxford cloth blouses with Peter Pan collars, and the same highly polished Weejun loafers as our male counterparts. Blue jeans may have banned, but it could just have easily been that the boys just shunned them for the “ivy league” look. For sure, girls were not allowed to wear slacks of any kind. I think, however, that some denim wrap around skirts may have made their way into the classroom without comment.
Being a co-ed at a state university in 1964 required adhering to a dress code. Blue jeans were strictly forbidden except within the quadrangle (a cluster of girls’ dormitories and a dining hall). In fact, slacks of any kind were prohibited in the classroom. Of course, we were partial to cut off blue jeans and delighted in wearing them off-campus. The problem was jeans were banned even downtown. Most of us kept a raincoat handy at all times for covering up our cut-offs. (Of course, our cut-offs were not cut in the sense of being hand-cut with scissors and raveling threads.) Our cut-offs were neatly hemmed and were the length of walking shorts. We loved going to the farm supply store, buying blue cotton workshirts and pairing them with our cut-offs.

The hippies were wearing jeans in the late 1960s, so those of us who were not hippies moved away from jeans. In our young married lives, jeans were reserved for the messiest jobs around the house. There is one picture of me in a sweat shirt and jeans covered in barley cereal while watching our son feed himself for the first time.

In the 1970s the jeans had bell bottoms and hip hugging waists. I mostly ignored the whole thing and didn’t buy any jeans again for another 20 years or so. I kept the ones I had, however, thinking that someday I would fit into them again. It never happened!

Back in 1992 I bought some jeans for sailing adventure in the Bahamas. For a few years I wore them for working around the house and for trips to Shenandoah Park and hiking in the woods. Then I outgrew them, but hope springs eternal and they stay in my closet.

In the mid-1990s I noticed that my more fashionable contemporaries were wearing jeans with blazers or even with fancy jackets. I tried unsuccessfully to fit into my jeans again, but never went so far as to buy any new ones.

In the 2000s I marveled at how the young girls and women managed to cram themselves into skin tight jeans worn below the waist. I figured they had to lie down to zip them! I was not prepared for that much contortion, and besides my figure does not do well with clothes that show every bulge.
A few years ago I found some jeans on sale in a size that fit me and I bought them. Turns out the NEW jeans fabric is stretchy. Ah, that explains a lot. My jeans are mostly black, but I have a couple of beige denim jeans as well. I am OK wearing the black ones for work-related meetings, but not sure I would try to pass the country club test.

Right now, aside from the two pair of jeans from the early 90s that have no stretch, I have two pair of real blue jeans. Both of them are stretchy with orange stitching and they actually fit. Still, I am a purist and I only wear them around the house, on weekends or hiking. I can never figure out what to wear with them. I have a jeans jacket, but it is a darker shade then my jeans so it sits in the closet. I have this orange jacket…that is only thing that really goes my jeans. I know these days you can wear jeans with almost anything, but I just can’t bring myself to be that free of convention. I am not sure what I will do when my orange jacket wears out – for sure, the jeans never will.

For our parents’ generation, denim jeans were the uniform of the working class. That must be the generation that wrote the rules banning them in country clubs, private schools, and a few classy restaurants.

For my generation, denim jeans bring back emotionally charged memories – but they are just pants. And as with any other pants, it would never occur to us to cut them with razor blades, scrub them with acid, etc. We are the children of the children of the depression and for us, deliberately making something look worn out is just plain strange. Unlike our parents, we are willing to wear jeans in public, but we are not about to deface them.

Now if I were going a ban a fabric, it would be "fat polyester." But that is another story.

Mail

2011-10-16T13:13:00.000-04:00

The mailman of my childhood showed up around noon every day except Sunday. He took the letters from that the grownups clipped to the outside of the mailbox with a clothes pin. He left letters inside the box, which was just outside the front door. When the dogs yelped, we knew the mail had arrived.

Being a child, I rarely got any mail, with the exception of a postcard from a traveling classmate or letters from my cousin, Mac. We are the same age and corresponded through the challenges of childhood and the awkward teenage years. My name was always preceded by Miss and his by Master. We used our best handwriting on onion-skin paper tablets with see-thru lines. As we aged we went from pencil to fountain pens and finally to ball points.

The adults were happy when they got Air Mail letters. You could tell an Air Mail letter because it came in an envelope with a red, white and blue border. The paper and the envelope were lightweight – I guess to reduce the freight load for the airplane. Air Mail came from far-away places like California or even Germany.

The adults also go bills in the mail, but in those days there were few bills to be paid. There was a monthly mortgage payment and perhaps a car loan and an insurance bill.
There were no credit cards bills or offers, but my mother and grandmother had something that was called a “charge-a-plate.” It was I guess an addressograph plate about the size of a “dog-tag.” It had its own little leatherette sleeve. I believe that it had numbers on it that indicated which stores you could use it at, and I think for us that included all of the downtown Birmingham department stores. This, of course, resulted in bills via postal mail and my first acquaintance with “charge it.”

The mail also brought catalogs, but mostly the BIG ones from Sears and JC Penny. We looked in the catalogs and kept them for reference, but if we wanted to buy anything we went to the store.
My parents were big magazine subscribers. We always had Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, Southern Living, National Geographic and for my Dad, Fortune and US News and World Report. My mother’s favorite magazine was American Heritage. It was a hardbound magazine about American history and she devoured it every month. Like most of my classmates, I got Highlights.

In college mail was mostly letters from my mother, the occasional greeting card or postcard and my monthly bank statement. There were no bills because I had no credit cards. The mail came to a central post office on campus where each student had a mail box. In those days, mail was not a big part of my life. I didn’t like to write letters because I was too busy. Much to my mother’s chagrin. I would prefer to pick up the phone. Of course, long distance calls were more expensive than stamps, so I go some grief over my preference for the phone.

About my senior year (1968) the postal service set up a kiosk on campus where you could buy stamps and mail packages, all from a vending machine. That was a big deal!
Once I was out of college and married, we started to get more mail. There were credit cards and credit card offers. There were progressively more catalogs and junk mailings. We subscribed to more magazines. Long distance got cheaper and letters got fewer, though my mother still preferred to write a letter over making a phone call.

We move to California is 1971, and my parents were always sending us packages by mail. My parents discovered this really cool way to save money on sending packages. There was this little known company called United Parcel Service and they had this warehouse where you could take your packages and mail them. A guy in a brown truck would deliver them a few days later. What a concept! We all know, of course, the rest of that story.

The volume of mail coming into our house over the years has gotten to be so great that I had to come up with a quick and efficient system of dealing with it. For years, I have kept a trash can next to the table where the mail comes in. These days it is a wicker hamper.

Today I guess every household must have a mail handling protocol or we would all be drowning in it. I have a mail table set up in the family room. It is basically an oval shaped end table with a small drawer. On it I have a really large flat round basket from Senegal. Also on the table there is small napkin holder for my husband’s mail and, a pewter cup for pens. Next to it I have a plastic lined wicker hamper for the trash. My husband brings in the mail each day and reviews each item carefully. He takes the mail he wants, including the bills, and scurries off with it to his downstairs office, leaving me with the rest of it. I promptly throw most of what remains away. If I should happen to bring in the mail, I put his mail and the bills in his holder. I leave a stack of magazines and a few selected catalogs on the table for reading later. The rest of my mail I take upstairs and review. I keep a trash can under my desk for empty envelopes and more mail disposal. I also have a shredder under my desk for shredding those ubiquitous credit card offers.

But that is just the system for the household mail. Because I have work virtually, I also have to deal with business mail. The postal business mail comes to a mailbox at the local UPS store. Either I or one of my contractors picks it up almost daily. It goes right upstairs with me to my office and much of it also goes directly into the recycling and or is shredded. In our house we use blue for office paper recycling just in case we ever have to “go through it.” There are always payments to be processed and bills to be reviewed and approved. I have a letter tray that I use for items to be taken back downstairs and distributed to other members of my team. Some stuff I scan in and send to others via e-mail.

For years, I have been tearing the stamps off of envelopes and sending them to my friend, Ethel, in Leesburg, FL. She belongs to the Leesburg Women’s Club and they collect the used stamps to build houses through Habitat for Humanity. I am not sure how that all works, but I know it does and am glad to help.

I could talk about postage, but all I can really say is that I remember $.03 stamps, and how periodically the price would go up. Escalating postage prices have been a reality all my life. What I can say with certainty is that I was very pleased when the self-stick stamps came along.
Today I keep a stock of notecards and a supply of stamps. I can’t recall the last time I handwrote a letter to anyone, but I do send out a fair number of notecards. I have a supply of them for personal correspondence, but also for my companies and a few of my client organizations.

Similarly, I don’t send many real letters any more. Mostly I send letters via email and sometimes follow up with hard copy – if at all.

We have USPS online account and we use it for sending important documents and books. Priority Mail and Express Mail are great services and we take full advantage of them.
I suppose I should mention the fax machine, as it is a mail substitute and one that I have come to hate. Back in about 1978, when I was working for a newspaper, I first encountered a device they called the Mojo. It was pretty remarkable in that a reporter could write a story and send it to the office through the Mojo – almost magic. Decades later, the office fax came along with rolls of thermal paper. For a while, before email, it became an essential office tool for important documents.

Today the fax machine uses plain paper, which is a good thing. It takes up a phone line, which is bad thing and it also receives mostly junk mail. BUT, I can’t get rid of it for two reasons. First, it is the only secure way to send and receive confidential information (like credit card information). Second, everybody expects an office to have a fax machine. The good news is that it doubles as a back- up copier.

Of course, today we don’t just have mail and faxes to deal with we have e-mail and Tweets and messages sent via social media. These days I get about 700 emails each day and that doesn’t count all the wall posts and Tweets. It is exhausting just thinking about it. We are truly living in the Information Age and it is giving me a headache.

Threads in My Life

2011-10-09T15:25:00.000-04:00

It is odd how certain places thread through our lives. These are odd threads that really seem to make no sense in the great scheme of things.

This week I found myself in Atlantic City at a carwash industry trade show. I stayed at the Taj Mahal, as that was where the show was based. I looked out the window of my hotel room and I saw the Claridge Hotel. In 1964, I went to Atlantic City with my parents to attend a conference and we stayed at the Claridge. In those days, Atlantic City was vastly different than it is today and the Claridge was an elegant hotel. There were no casinos. The town’s claim to fame was the Miss America Contest, wicker carriages along the Boardwalk, and the famous Diving Horse at the Steel Pier. In 1964, I rode my bicycle alone, along the Boardwalk and was entranced by the fact that the real-life streets seemed to parallel their relative values on the Monopoly board. If you had told me then that many decades later I would return each year to Atlantic City to an annual carwash industry trade show, I would have been incredulous. But that is the reality!

Another thread got started with that trip to Atlantic City in 1964. We took a bus trip from Atlantic City to the New York Worlds’ Fair in Flushing Meadows in Queens. I marveled at the Unisphere and the exhibits that predicted the world of the 2000s. I don’t remember how much of it they really did right, but I do remember the energy and promise of that day at the Fair.

I went to college; I got married to man from New York City; his family lived in Richmond Hill in Queens. In 1978, their home burned down and they bought another house in Rego Park, also in Queens. This house was in walking distance of Flushing Meadows Park. I remember often taking our young son there and seeing the Unisphere still standing proudly, surrounded by a park that was very much in the present, complete with NYC graffiti. But those days are gone now, as are Steve’s parents and the house in Rego Park. All that remains in my life of the 1964 World’s Fair is disparate memories decades apart.

Back in about 1958, I took another trip with my parents to a convention. This time our destination was Boston. We found ourselves in desperate need of motel as we approached Baltimore from the south. We saw a motel called the Annapolis Terrace Motel on US 50, just north of Annapolis. We got the last room in the motel. It was on the second floor and had an octagonal window. It cost $30 for the night. I kept looking out the window thinking I might catch a glimpse of a Midshipman, as we were so near the Naval Academy and I was secretly annoyed that that we didn’t have time to go to Annapolis.

In 1976, Steve and I, with son, David, moved to the Annapolis area. I ended up running a school summer program, and that involved finding a rental swimming pool. We checked out all of the local motels, and determined that the best deal was, you guessed it, at the Annapolis Terrace Motel. So for several years, we took busloads of summer campers to the motel for swimming. The motel is gone now, replaced by a Jaguar dealership. So unless I buy a Jaguar, this thread is ended. But there is one thing that remains – the octagonal window in our guest bathroom.

Are we drawn to certain places? Or is it just fate? Or does it matter?

The Joan Baez song, “Strange Rivers” says it all very well. “There are strange rivers, rivers that you cannot see; there are strange rivers that know our destiny.”

Old Age

2011-09-25T15:50:00.000-04:00

I guess is should be no surprise that the older one gets, the older “old age” becomes. At 65, I don’t feel much different that I felt at age 25. For me, “old” starts to kick in at about 80, or maybe even 85 or 90.

When I was a kid, “old” people were easy to spot. The ladies had lavender hair and wore housedresses as home and shirtwaist dresses for shopping, and when they got dressed up they wore suits, hats and gloves. The men were bald and gray-headed and wore khakis for casual and pin-stripes for dress-up.

When I was middle-aged, “old” ladies had unnatural colored hair and wore polyester pants with elastic waist bands; when they got dressed up they wore sequins and high heel shoes. The men wore polyester and white shoes and let their gray hair grow longer.
Now “old” women dress pretty much the same way I do. The color for slacks is black and tops can be bright colored or patterned in distinction prints. Shoes are black and low-heeled. Gray hair is in, as is dyed hair, provided it looks natural. Old men wear khaki slacks and sport shirts- - a throwback to their 50s counterparts.

I realize that I am now Medicare eligible and quickly approaching Social Security age. My will is made, as is my living will and durable power of attorney. I have written “When I die” instructions to my family, and I have good life insurance in place. My organ donor box is checked. So, I at one level, I am “good to go.” I have done what I must do to deal with the inevitable.

But the reality is, I am not ready to go yet. In fact, I would like to live another 30 years – that is not that long after all. But that would make me 95, and most people don’t live that long – most especially overweight people with a family history of heart disease.

I know that I am well over the age where I could go live in a retirement community. I never have been much of one for organized activities, and I don’t think that will change at some magical point in my life. I hated that kind of stuff in kindergarten and I still hate it today. No thanks, I will stay where I am – aging place as they call it. If the time ever comes when I can’t live on my own, I am fine with assisted living. If I can’t take care of myself, I guess I won’t be fit enough to participate in those dreaded group activities either.

I have a hard time envisioning my own death. There is a part of me that somehow thinks that I will be one person who will beat this whole death thing and maintain the status quo forever. The days keep going by, day after day and I keep waking up each morning.

There will be a day when everything changes. Maybe I will be in an accident or go the doctor and get some horrible diagnosis or maybe be the victim of some criminal. Or maybe I will just die without warning (my preference.

But for today, that is all someday far away. I can’t think about death for very long, for I have to focus on living. I just hope that when the day comes that my affairs will be in good order and I will not have left a big mess for others to clean up. I also hope I will have accomplished a few things that will outlive me and that I have given my son and his family some valuable insights. I hope I will have solved more problems that I have created and that I have helped make some happy memories for someone else.

Time

2011-09-18T11:20:00.000-04:00

I learned to tell time by the clock in the kitchen, and since that day my life my days are forever measured. There are set times for eating and for sleeping, and all the other things that punctuate my life; there are appointments and conference calls, meetings and TV shows. I am always racing the clock and traffic to be where I am supposed to be. I guess that is how it is for everyone.

Before I could tell time, I lived in the moment and I just “was.” There was day and there was night. There was “before”, “now” and “later” --- amorphous terms for existence. The adults were in charge and they talked about “o-clock” with a certain reverence.

When I cracked the code, with a little help from my grandmother and mother, time was no longer a mystery; it was for real and it mattered. The patterns of my life and my family’s life started to make sense. Daddy went to work at 8 and came home at 6; we ate lunch at noon. When I was six and went to school, it started at 8:30 and ended at 3:00. My life started to have its own independent rhythm.

I only recall that clock in the kitchen with its electric cord tail, but the adults all had watches that they wound up every day. Having a watch seemed to be something that came with maturity and responsibility.

When I was about six, my uncle sent my grandmother a fancy clock from Germany. It was called an “anniversary clock” – I have no idea why! It was gold and you could see all the gears turning around in it and the whole thing was covered by a glass dome. It sat proudly on the mantel for years. Not too long ago, I went to the local thrift shop to drop off some donations and there were six “anniversary clocks” all lined up in a row – all selling for $30 each. So much for the fragile treasures of another generation.

My mother got a clock-radio when I was about 8. It was dark brown plastic and the hands glowed in the dark. At night, she would listen to a local phone-in radio show called “The People Speak,” hosted by a fellow named Dave Campbell. I would lie in bed with her until the radio turned off automatically.

My grandmother had an electric clock next to her bed. It was a gift from my uncle; perhaps a BX purchase. It was round and was designed to look like a ship’s wheel. The adults said that the clock stopped when my grandmother died in 1957. My grandfather took that same clock with him to the nursing home and it sat next to his bed. When he died in 1961, that clock stopped again. I am not sure what happened to that clock and its magical properties.

I got my own clock radio in 1958 when we moved to the new house. It was white plastic and never seemed as sturdy as my mother’s, but it was MINE. It told time, but it also played music. I could play rock and roll music on it late at night if I kept the volume really low!

At about age 13 I was given a watch. It had a cloth band and you had to wind it. The business of being an adult had a downside. Remembering to wind a watch was not high on my list of fun things to do, though it only took a few minutes.

When I was ready to leave for college, I was given an electric alarm clock. My mother would not be there to wake me up to go to class. It was plastic and it was inexpensive, but it did the trick. We still have it. It is next to the bed our granddaughter sleeps in when she comes to visit. She has no idea that it was bought in 1964 and what a leap forward in independence it represented.

When we got married in 1969, our fanciest wedding gift came from my father-in-law. He was a clock lover, so he gave us the most impressive clock he could find – an Atmos LeCoultre mantel clock. It still sits on our mantel today. What is special about this clock is that it tells time using barometric pressure; it never needs winding. About once every 10 years it needs maintenance and we have to seek out an expert to repair it.

1969 was also the year of the battery operated wall clock, and we got two of them as wedding presents. One had a sunburst pattern with strips of wood, alternating with metal rods with balls on the end. It was iconic, but seemed to fit with our avocado and harvest gold world.

Most of my adult life I have had battery operated analog watches. The downside, of course, is that you have no idea when your watch battery is going to go. Suddenly time just stands still. It happened to me the other day. My watch stopped at 11:30 and I had to be at a meeting at noon. I was almost late. Fortunately, I was able to quickly get a new battery from a local jeweler for a mere $7.95.

My husband wants to know EXACTLY what time it is. As you might expect, he has an atomic digital watch that resets itself if pointed to Colorado. For me that seems excessive and obsessive, but he is definitely the person to ask if you want to know what time is really is.

I am reminded of the time my husband, son and I went to the Greenwich observatory. We arrived in the late afternoon and if one hurried there was just time before closing to climb a tower. I generally have no interest in climbing towers of any kind, and most especially towers without elevators. So instead of climbing the tower I waited outside and paced along a white line that was painted in the sidewalk. There was a big clock there, so I took the opportunity to set my watch. My husband has always chuckled about my response to “what did you do while we were gone?” It was simply – “I set my watch.” For that one brief moment in time my watch was right!

Today, we are surrounded by clocks, including the ubiquitous digital clocks that require cracking a code to reset. My phone knows what time it is all over the world. My computer also seems to know and they both say it is 9:24 a.m. – no doubt in total agreement with my husband’s watch. The wall clock in my office says it is 9:23 and the bank give-a-way clock in my desk says it is 9:40 (I kept that one fast because I fall for it every time and it helps me get places on time). The digital clock radio beside my bed says it is 10:40. That one hasn’t been right since the power failure and I can’t seem to figure out how reset it. Surely my grandson can help! There is nothing like a power failure to remind you just how many clocks you have around you. We have about 15 clocks in active service and most of them are not in agreement on the time.

Today I read in the paper that our public school system is buying $500,000 worth of classroom clocks and that is not even enough for all of the schools to get new clocks. They say they have to all be aligned with the bell system so that all the clocks in all of the classrooms say the same thing. By contrast, I remember buying clocks for my beloved Chesapeake Academy about 30 years ago when we moved into our new building. I bought ten clocks for ten dollars each. Our total investment was $100. I don’t know if they still have any of those cheap clocks left, but will check the next time I am there.

All I can say with certainty is that the seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and years of life go faster as each year goes by. We should savor each moment as we age, but that is hard to do when we are surrounded by clocks reminding us of duties and obligations.

Seafood

2011-09-10T19:09:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, I used to love to go to Panama City, Florida with my family. We would stay a place on the beach and each night we ate seafood. Everything was fried in those days and only the most finicky of eaters and, of course, Yankees would think of eating seafood that was broiled. Some nights we would have fried red snapper, other nights, fried shrimp or oysters. For me a real treat was snapper throats – white succulent meat like nothing else! We had our rotation of seafood joints, including my favorite, Jessie Cooks, down on the dock in downtown PC (as Panama City is affectionately called by people from Alabama). Cholesterol and calories – who cared --- fried seafood was involved!

Our next door neighbor in Birmingham loved to fish, but I don’t think they much cared for eating fish. Many a night, my mother and father would come home to find our friendly neighbor had dropped off his catch, and they were swimming in the kitchen sink. No matter how late the hour, my mother would clean them right then and there. She chopped their heads off while they were still squirming and within a matter of minutes they were gutted and ready to fry. Crappie, bream and freshwater trout – a tasty assortment fried to perfection in corn meal.

Today catfish is plentiful and an aquaculture favorite. My family, however, always did like catfish, as long as it was “river cat” not “mudcat.” I am not sure what the difference is, but I know eating “mudcat” was something that “nice people” didn’t do. Being Southern by birth and training, I knew early on that I was expected to be one the “nice people.” That required adhering to a number of standards, including not wearing white after Labor Day and eating “mudcat.”

For all of my comfort with watching Mama clean fish at the kitchen sink, I was totally disturbed when at about age 12, at a fancy restaurant, I was served a brook trout with head still attached. This was in Boston, where people were more sophisticated and used to such strange customs.

That same trip to Boston, we went to Buzzards Bay on Cape Cod and stayed at little motel up on a hill. Across the street there was a restaurant where they had the most amazing bay scallops – fried, of course. For my family, it was love at first bite. Down south, we only had the big scallops that it was rumored were really cut from shark fins using a cookie cutter. On a recent trip to Cape Cod, we spent about an hour riding around looking for that restaurant. As far as I can tell, it is long gone, along with the small motel. But after all, it has been more than 50 years!

Another childhood favorite was salmon croquettes, made with left-over potatoes and canned RED salmon. We may not have been wealthy, but we always were able to afford RED salmon, as opposed to pink salmon. After all “nice people” ate red salmon! I never saw a fresh salmon until I was grown.

I grew up taking fresh seafood pretty much for granted, and even in college at Auburn, it wasn’t too hard to get one’s fill of fried seafood. When I was student teacher in Columbus, GA in 1968, my mentor teacher introduced me to the whole fish camp idea. My fiancé and I were treated to our fill of fried catfish and snapper throats.

A favorite memory from graduate school was when a friend and her husband, whose family lived outside of Auburn, drained their pond and had the most incredible fish fry. The fish was great and so were the hushpuppies.

My roommate and I invited a friend down from Birmingham for the weekend, and we decided to broil a snapper. By then I had become more sophisticated and come to realize that broiled seafood could be very tasty. So we prepared the huge red snapper with stuffing and herbs, and put it in the broiler to cook. But after half an hour, that snapper was still only warm. We consulted our houseguest (whose father worked for GE). She opened the oven and asked where the fish was. I said it was in the broiler. She opened the drawer under the oven and explained patiently that we had been trying to broil the fish in the pots and pans drawer.

When we moved to Illinois, I discovered that fish was not so plentiful. In fact, in her rural Illinois town, nobody really sold fresh fish. One time I bought a fish the bakery (they just happened to have a fish), but I ended up throwing it out because it smelled so bad.
If you wanted seafood, it came in the form of a can of tunafish, or from chain seafood chain. I remember one day we were in Belleville and wanted to get seafood at the Cape Codder and didn’t have much money. We dug through the bench car seats and in short order found about $6, which was enough to buy a seafood dinner. For real seafood, we went to St. Louis!

When we got to California in 1971, fish was not exactly plentiful in the Inland Empire (San Bernardino area). One night we went to fancy restaurant called the Castaways and I ordered trout amandine. I wore an opal ring that night – it had about a dozen very small opals. When I got home, I discovered one opal was missing. We called the restaurant and they checked through the vacuum bag, but no luck. I think I ate it, and thought it was just a crunchy almond.
We found ourselves craving fresh seafood and would often take a long drive to Balboa Island and go to the Crab Cooker. They had wonderful grilled fish – and I understand they are still in business. I want to go back there – well, next time I am in Southern California that can go on the ”to do” list.

Maryland is a great place if you are a seafood lover. After 35 years of living outside of Annapolis, I find myself never tiring of local seafood -- crabs, rockfish and oysters – a all delectable, if not periodically endangered. Because this is a “seafood town” there is no shortage of seafood from all over – grouper, tilapia, catfish, salmon, scallops (both kinds), and supermarket and seafood market staples.

I love our periodic forays into New England and I overdose on lobster. A treasured memory is the lobster roll on the front porch of the National Hotel on Block Island. Nothing else comes close! Though I have to say that for more than 40 years I have fondly remembered that lobster supper at St. Ann’s Church on Prince Edward Island.

We also spend a lot of time in Grand Cayman. One or our favorite things to do there is to go out with Captain Ebanks for the day long snorkel trip with beach picnic. The snorkeling is fun and time at the famous Stingray City is special, but the highlight of the day is the conch salad and barbecued fish, freshly caught that morning and cleaned on the back of the boat while we are snorkeling. I remember when Stingray City was just the “sandbar” and we would stop there to look for sand dollars. The captain would clean the fish and the conch in preparation for our lunch; he would throw the entrails over the side of the boat. One year, we noticed a few stingrays, and were told not to worry – they were friendly. A few years later, we returned and by then, Stingray City had been featured in National Geographic. We asked about going to Stingray City, and quickly learned that was the “sandbar” we had been going to all of these years.

My other favorite thing to do in Grand Cayman is to eat at the Grand Old House. That is, hands down, my favorite restaurant – not just in Grand Cayman but in the world! Dinner there is a trip back in time and the food is incredible – especially the grouper. Following dinner, you can walk down to the end of the pier and watch the tarpon. Oh, the memories.
When David was a baby he used to love the song Molly Malone and Steve used to sing it to him regularly – you know, “cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o.” I always wondered about cockles were, but decades later we went to a gathering of the McNeill clan (my grandmother’s family) on the island of Barra, off the coast of Scotland. We took the ferry, but there is a once a day flight on British Air. There is no paved runway and the plane lands on the beach at low tide. The rest of the day, the area of open for people to harvest (I guess that is what you call it) cockles –small tasty shellfish. If you go to any one of the islands restaurants (there are several) cockles are on the menu, with a notation that they are from the local airport (and they mean flown in) daily.

When I think of Greece, I always think of seafood, so when we found ourselves on a small Greek island looking for dinner, we sought out a waterfront seafood restaurant. I looked at the choices and determined that what I wanted to order was something called “white bait.” My husband assured me that it was a mild white fish. Nobody discussed size, though the name should have cued me in. What I got was a plate piled high with what appeared to be minnows, beautifully fried, complete with heads and tails. I pinched off the heads and the tails and ate the middle part, probably much to the amusement of the wait staff. The bones were too small to see.
For our last day in Athens, we chartered a cab for a full day trip. At lunchtime, we had our choice of restaurants and we opted for a place on the waterfront. Our driver knew the place, otherwise we might not have gone there. Somewhat ominously, we were the only diners. Upon arrival, we were asked what we wanted to eat and we said “fish.” We were taken to a cooler and asked to select a fish. The fish was actually wonderful, thought I think it cost about $50 just for the fish. After that, we focused on other less costly Greek specialties.

I went to the grocery store yesterday and I bought two nice group filets. They weren’t cheap, but I know they will taste terrific. Obviously, I could fix them in some gourmet way and fall short of the Grand Old House for sure. I could broil them, now that do know how to use the broiler. But my Southern roots have won out. I think I will fry them with an egg batter and panko – my new favorite ingredient. Of course, I will use olive oil and blot them carefully on a paper towel. After all, fish IS healthy, right?

Power Failure

2011-09-04T12:23:00.000-04:00

The lights used to go out when I was a kid, but it was not a big deal. Late afternoon summer thunderstorms are a part of life in Birmingham and some days the fierce winds would knock down trees and power lines. Sometimes devastating tornados would race through nearby communities. No doubt the victims of these horrific events lost power for many hours, but for us power failures were rare and passed quickly by candlelight.

When I was a teenager, Birmingham experienced some harsh winter ice storms and the power went out for days. It was more of a grand adventure than a disaster. My father worked for the gas company, so we had a gas stove and grill. My mother would host a power failure party and invite all the neighbors.

More than two decades after I moved away, my mother was terminally ill with cancer. It was January and she was hospitalized for the last time. I got the call to come home, and managed to fly in on the last flight before the Birmingham airport was closed due to an ice storm. That same storm took out the power at my parents’ house. My father and I stayed at the hospital at my mother’s bedside until she passed away. That night, we went home to a dark and ice cold house. It was like walking around in death. My mother’s things were there, just as she had left them. The darkness was palpable and the cold, bone chilling.

In Maryland, power failures are common in summer storms, hurricanes and winter ice storms. We have talked about getting a generator, but haven’t yet. Somehow it seems once the storm has passed that it is hard to think about the next one.

The winter power failures are the worst; they go on for days. The cold is intolerable. It chills the soul and it reminds me of the night my mother died. The last time we had an extended winter power failure, we went to a motel.

We just finished with a 6 day power outage due to Hurricane Irene. What is scary is that by the 3rd day I found myself falling into a power-less existence. The restlessness passed and calm set in. I became accustomed to not having TV and finally stopped switching on lights when entering closets. I came to enjoy sleeping with the windows open and reading myself to sleep by electric lantern.

The electricity is back on now. Life is back to normal, but I am not. I keep thinking that I have lost something special that I was just beginning to grasp in the quiet and darkness of the power failure.

The Computer Revolution and Unemployment

2011-08-22T15:40:00.002-04:00

Yes, I think they are very much related. Computers are finally coming of age in offices all over the world, and the result is a shift in how companies staff.

When computers came on the scene in the early 80s in regular offices populated by people with no technical expertise, the buzz was that computers would help us do everything easier and quicker! Yeah, right! Not for at least for another 30 years.

Computers are finally living up to the hype. Or perhaps we low-tech humans with 30 years of dealing with them are finally more competent to use them. The truth is now we are getting a lot more done than we did 30 years ago. Personally, I think every day that I am doing the work that six of me could have done in 1981.

Remember what it used to be like? You would go to work in the morning and review the papers in your in-box. You would look for little pink slips of paper for phone messages to return. Then you would start to work. If you wanted to write a letter, you would take a yellow tablet and write it out in long-hand or if you were a big-shot you could have your secretary take dictation (I never experienced that). In any event, you didn’t type it yourself. Chances are that the letter would have to be retyped because of a typo. A letter I could zip off today in a few minutes via email would take two people several hours.

If you wanted to write a research report, you would gather all of the materials you needed around you. The magazine articles you might cite would come from your personal stash. You had a bookshelf in your office because you needed the books to do research. If you really wanted to get serious about research you would have to get in the car and go to an academic library. A thorough report might take days. And then somebody still had to type it.

If you wanted to do a slide presentation, you had to shoot the slides with a camera, get them developed; and spend several hours putting the slides in the right order in the Carousel tray and setting the timing. Obviously, PowerPoint is a great time-saver!

Our Boomer generation knows how to type and that has probably been our salvation. We didn’t learn to type in anticipation of computers, however. That was a fortuitous accident. My mother, like many others of her generation, made me take “personal typing” in high school so I could type term papers in college and letters when I was a functioning adult. I was in the college prep course, so there was no time in my academic day for regular typing. Besides, I was never going to be a secretary. In retrospect, typing was by far the most useful thing I learned in high school!

While doing anything before the office computer came along was harder than it is today, nobody talks about that decade from 1981 to about 1991 when computers seemed to make productivity go DOWN, not up. Nor do they consider the negative impact of SPAM and viruses on productivity that followed for another decade.

Why would all of these wonderful machines make things harder? The answer is that people had trouble using them. In the early 1980s, to type a letter you had to memorize a bunch of control codes. To add a column of numbers you had to create a spreadsheet and use formulas that reminded you of algebra class. I am not a fast typist (especially back then) and I could type faster than my computer display could show the letters. File names had to be short and have no spaces. In most offices there were a few computer-phobics and it was their secretaries who had to adapt. I was what some of my colleagues called a “computer person.” That meant I could turn it on and competently type and print a letter. I could even create a spreadsheet!

When the computer broke, I was still pretty helpless. There was no “tech support,” but I was lucky that my husband and son are both way more computer savvy than I am and could usually solve the problems. But all of that takes time.

For a whole decade we had offices with a handful of people who could deal with computers and a majority who could not. It wasn’t especially cost effective, but it was a way of life.

By the early 1990s many who simply could not handle computers at all had retired or moved to other careers where computers were not essential. The lingering computer phobic executives had competent administrative assistants who could do their computer work for them. At last we were beginning to realize some of the promise of what computers could do for us. They still broke, but they were easier to use. We still, however, had no access to information in real-time.
Enter the Internet and e-mail – BIG TIME! At first the Internet and its sister e-mail were novelties in the office. I remember having ten workstations in the mid-90s and only two of them had an Internet dial-up connection on shared line with fax machine.

Soon it became clear that everyone needed the Internet we got an Internet hub and DSL and thought we were hot-stuff. Now that everybody could get e-mail, we started using it to communicate. Everyone could get online, so we started using the Internet to research things and order stuff. It was pretty cool!

But everyone else also discovered e-mail and our e-mailboxes filled with SPAM. People started sending dumb jokes around via e-mail and employees, who lacked e-mail at home, started having personal e-mail come to the office and using the Internet to shop.

The bad guys also discovered that the Internet was a great way to wreak havoc, so we started getting debilitating computer viruses – not to mention big bad Trojan Horses and evil worms. Countless hours of productivity were lost in most offices.

But things are different now. We have SPAM filters so much of the distraction of SPAM is gone. Employees have computers and Internet access at home, so there is little temptation to waste company time on personal shopping or sharing jokes. The workflow is fast and furious!
We now have good virus protection software and a computer virus is a rarity. We don’t lose time to unraveling computers tied in knots by Trojan horses and the like. The computers mostly just work. And we have learned what to do when they don’t.

In order to work in an office today you have to be competent with basic office software. That means just about anyone can type a letter, create a spreadsheet, create a Powerpoint presentation, send and receive emails, and use the Internet. And, of course, everyone is self-sufficient. There is no longer much need for lower level employees to provide services for the higher ups. There is a culture of “do it yourself” – even if you are the boss!

I submit that there are thousands and thousands of jobs lost to increased computer productivity. In a tough economy, simply getting the work done is a top priority. Reducing payroll costs for a company may be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. It is unfortunate that many people are not able to find jobs – competent, skilled people who are very adept at using computers. That’s the point – just about everyone is able to use computers well these days.
So what will be the differentiator of the future? I submit that it might just be creativity and problem-solving and the ability to work with little or no supervision. Of course, that assumes there is money to hire anyone new, and that is, of course, the challenge of our times.

Fashion

2011-08-16T20:47:00.001-04:00

At 65, I don’t find fashion of much interest, but then I never did. I get a fashion magazine – I never ordered it – it just comes. Clearly, some computer out there has my birthdate off by about 30 years. Nonetheless, I must confess to occasionally thumbing through it before it goes into the recycling pile. The last issue they seem to be wearing a lot of short dark socks – whatever!
In most of us, I guess there is a herd instinct. We don’t want to stand out in a crowd, but rather be one of the herd members. Any analogies to sheep are purely intentional. For me, that is my only goal with fashion – I don’t want people to stare at me on the street and say – ‘get a load of that!”

Thinking back about fashion, I remember my first grade teacher had a long skinny skirt. Before then I have never thought about it one way or the other. When our teachers were wearing straight skirts, we girls were wearing plaid “school dresses” with little puffed sleeves and white socks rolled down.

Before elementary school was over, skirts got full and petticoats started being made of scratchy fabric. Girls wore their cardigan sweaters turned around backwards with little fake collars. Some had furry pom poms hanging down. I never really had a poodle skirt, as I was just a bit too young, but they sure were popular with the older girls.

By junior high, the full skirts and petticoats mercifully were gone, and we were in very tailored pleated plaid skirts with long fuzzy sweaters and oxford cloth blouses with Peter Pan collars. We wore our socks straight up and clip-on bows in our hair.

When I arrived in high school, we went from pleats to heather tone A-lines and from sweaters to blazers with emblems of nothing in particular on the pocket. We wore stiff- starched oxford cloth skirts with button-down collars. By senior year we had ditched our white cotton socks for hose with our loafers. How sophisticated we were!

My mother made my freshman wardrobe. She was a wonderful seamstress and I was very fashionable – but, of course, my mother (nor I) had no real idea what the other girls were wearing. The school had strict rules – no slacks and jeans were a major conduct breach. Mostly we wore the same stuff as in high school, but in spring out came the floral print Villager dresses with Peter Pan collars, pleated fronts, straw belts and beads. Having blazers in navy, red, and beige was a wardrobe essential. A London Fog trenchcoat was obligatory for going to the dining hall in one’s nightgown or out the car for a forgotten item – even in the hottest weather. Technically it met the dress code and we always wore them buttoned up.

By the time I started graduate school in 1968, something had changed and slacks were now OK on campus. Some of the undergrads were not even wearing school, except to class where they were still required. I didn’t get caught up in the whole Hippie dress thing. About the “Hippiest” thing I did wear cut off knee length jeans, though we would buy them pre-cut to avoid that sloppy threads hanging down look. Never to class, of course. This was still the South!

When I started my career in education, the rule was “no slacks.” We tried to wear dresses, rather than blazers and skirts so we wouldn’t be mistaken for the students. No more socks – we were professionals. My mother made me tailored dresses, but I still would wear a blazer and skirt when I felt I could get away with it.

As a young married woman, I tried to look sophisticated, but usually fell short of the mark. Fortunately, my mother kept my wardrobe flowing with new additions, and my beloved blazers and skirts were OK – until we moved to California. But when I lived in Illinois, I learned to wear a wig and wear high heel boots. Lipstick got pale and eye makeup got strange.

Enter polyester – the fabric we loved to hate. In California in the early 70s it was jeans and T-shirts or what we later started to call “fat’ polyester. The earliest polyester had a plastic feel about it – very thick and impossible to wrinkle. It was the fabric of the future. No more ironing (nobody objected to that!). Polyester just went with the whole 70s thing with disco, glimmer balls and the like. I hated that whole period.

About the time we left Southern California in 1976 and came east, Preppy was back. We never called it Preppy, but it was the look I had grown up with. I was thrilled to wear blazers and leather jackets again. Plaid was in again and so was its companion, oxford cloth- though now perma-pressed. Polyester became progressively more refined. It was sometimes indistinguishable except by touch from natural fabrics.

At some point in the 1990s I stopped worrying about things like dress length or even what other people except my immediate colleagues were wearing. I bought what they had in the stores that fit my overweight body. Before Women’s sizes, life after size 16 was definitely limited. My mother was no longer around to sew for me and I had to find clothes I could wear.

In the 2000s my mid-aged and beyond colleagues and I discovered that the secret to getting by in the world was slacks in black, white and beige in a variety of styles. Blouses could be solid colored knit tops and jackets could be bright colors – plaids, florals, anything goes! With black dress and jacket you can go anywhere – mostly especially Washington, DC, the city that appears to be in continual mourning.

What is next – I don’t know and I don’t really care that much. But I know for sure I will not be wearing what those people in the fashion magazine are wearing! Well, maybe the dark socks – but never with a feather skirt and baggy sweater! There are limits ---

My Shoes from Mary Janes to Clogs

2011-08-07T14:20:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid in the 50s, we had three kinds of shoes, leather oxfords for school, tennis shoes for play, and leather sandals for the beach. Life was so simple then!

The first shoes I really remember vividly were Mary Janes, but back then we didn’t call them Mary Janes. I would have remembered because my best friend, from across the street, was named Mary Jane. We just called them Sunday shoes. Usually they were white or black patent leather and we wore them with white cotton socks, rolled down. The rule, as every kid in Brimingham knew, was no white shoes until Easter! Being Protestant, I never associated patent leather with any inappropriate reflections.

For school, we all wore brown oxfords until sometime in the upper elementary grades saddle shoes came along. I think about that same time saddle shoes were all the rage in high schools, and somehow the fad trickled down to us. Keeping them clean was a lot harder than the brown oxfords. The saddle was brown or black and sometimes the sole was a reddish rubber. The main part of the shoe was a hard to clean white!

Tennis shoes, as we called them, came in two brands, Keds and PF Flyers. Keds had the blue rectangle on the back and PF Flyers had the red ball. The Keds were considered cooler in my social set of adolescent girls, though I am not sure why. We had a choice of three colors – blue, red or white. We didn’t buy white because everyone knew white was for P.E. class and for real tennis.
I never much cared for sandals because I didn’t like the way they felt when the sand got in them. But they were, after all, required!

When I got to junior high it was a different world – shoe-wise! Saddle oxfords gave way to rah-rah shoes, which were similar to saddle oxfords but the saddle extended with a long tale to the back of the shoe. They were called rah-rah shoes because cheerleaders wore them with their uniforms. For regular kids, rah-rahs were fun because we could pick choose from saddles in different colors. I vividly remember a red pair I thought was especially “cool.”
No more Mary Janes - -now we had to wear “heels.” My first pair was red patent leather with about three inches high and instruments of the devil. I still remember the pain and the awkwardness of walking in them. After that flamboyant start, I settled on plainer pumps with lower heels.

For gym, starting in junior high and all the way through college, we had to wear white tennis shoes. They had to be inspected every Monday. Nobody liked to wash the shoes because that made they never looked right after they were washed. We resorted to coating them with white shoe polish intended for nurses’ shoes. By the end of the school year, the canvas was very stiff.
By the time I reached high school, there was only one kind of school shoe that was acceptable – Bass Weejuns. Those shoes cost about $30 and had to be special ordered about 6 weeks in advance from the ritziest department store in Birmingham. My mother reluctantly relented after I became despondent about having to wear an obvious “knock-off” brand. The optimal color was brown and the preferred style was the penny loafer (in my world it was not cool to put pennies in penny loafers).

But by the time I was a senior, it was OK to be a bit daring. I remember getting a pair of navy blue Weejuns with a pebble finish and tassels. What a fashion statement!
In high school, there was only one two kinds of acceptable shoes -- pumps and spectators. A basic wardrobe required pumps in black, blue, white and off-white. Brown was OK too if you could afford another pair. We then dressed them up with shoe clips in various styles and colors. For Easter, spectators were a good choice.

Spectators were the dress equivalent of saddle shores because they were white with colored trim. They also had small holes in them similar to a man’s wing tip shoe (BTW, my grandfather, Thomas Green Humphreys, Sr., designed the original mens’ wingtip shoes).

In college, Bass Weejuns still prevailed, as did pumps and spectators. By the time I graduated, however, other shoe style were creeping into our wardrobes. I remember a pair of navy blue shoes with sturdy low heels and big buckles. My mother, who was always every fashionable, dubbed them my “Pilgrim shoes.” I loved those shoes and wore them most days when I was a student teacher in 1968.

In 1969, the hippie movement hit my college, but I was in grad school and saw no particular need to go barefooted. We did, however, hop on the sandal bandwagon with dark brown leather thong sandals – the fancy rendition of the humble rubber flip-flop. We also took our aging Bass Weejuns and made them into strange sandals using razor blades (a summer indulgence for bored camp counselors).

When I got married and entered the professional world, it was pumps and hose in the day time and loafers at home to relax in. We were in Illinois by then and things were pretty conservative on the small, church-controlled campus where I worked. The small town where we lived did not even have a shoe store, so the simplest thing to do was wear my old shoes.

When the military sent us to California in 1971, I was cast into a strange world of synthetic leather and strange styles that my Southern sensibilities found unacceptable. The weather was beastly hot and not a good combination with synthetic leather – talk about foot odor! I finally located a shoe store where they sold shoes to little old ladies and ordered a pair of really ugly brown oxfords. At last, comfortable shoes! My mother thought they were even uglier than my Pilgrim shoes that I had only recently retired due a un-repairable broken buckle.

The entire five years I spent in California I was not happy shoe-wise. On occasional trips to Alabama I would pick up new loafers, pumps or tennis shoes. But I never fit into a world a plastic shoes, platform shoes, and peculiar sandals.

When we moved to Maryland in 1976, I quickly noticed that all of the other kindergarten moms were wearing brown leather shoes with white soles and leather laces. It was love at first sight, and within a week of arrival I had secured a pair of brown Sperry Topsiders. Soon, I bought an off-white pair for a trip to the Caribbean. I have had at least one pair in my wardrobe for the less 35 years – decades before we ever owned a sailboat.

Maryland was certainly more to my liking shoe-wise. My leather pumps, loafers and tennis shoes, along with my boat shoes, served me well for decades, with slight variations in heel design, color, and style.

Then a few years ago, something happened. My feet started to hurt – a lot! Pumps, even with the broader stacked heels that were then my preference, were intolerable. In fact, even my beloved loafers were uncomfortable.

For a trip, I ordered some really unattractive clogs with mesh tops. Within a week, I learned to love them and have ordered more colors, including a fur lined leather pair for winter. I even ordered dress versions that are really pretty strange, but are acceptable for events where I am to be on my feet for extended periods.

I still have some pumps for weddings and funerals, and I still can wear my boat shoes. My tennis shoes have morphed into athletic shoes in black for winter and white for summer.
Because I live in Maryland, I now live by the more restrictive rule on white shoes – forbidden until after Memorial Day and banned after Labor Day – except when at the airport in a flight bound for Florida (of course).

Floors I Have Known

2011-07-03T22:07:00.000-04:00

Floors I Have Known

My husband just installed a beautiful new bamboo floor in our basement room. Who knew we would ever have floors made out of bamboo? When I was growing up, bamboo was used for fishing poles. Later I learned it was an invasive species. Now they are making floors out of it. Now if they could just find a similar use for kudzu, the scourge of the South.

We also re-carpeted the basement stairs in a commercial grade, heavy duty carpet that is called “Expresso” and is dark brownish, with lots of colors if you look closely. I am hoping it will outlast me. For sure it won’t show dirt or coffee spills.

All of this got me thinking about the floors I have known in my life. For sure there have been changes.

The floors in the house I grew up in had hardwood floors and every so often my mother and grandmother would paste wax them. What a wonderful smell! They waxed the floor and I played” train” with the dining room chairs all lined up.
The kitchen floor in that house was linoleum. They cleaned it with a mop and disinfectant. Once they put in a new floor and it was great – all fresh and clean!
I still remember the bathroom floor. It was little octagonal white tiles. Between the cleaning lady, my mother, and my grandmother the floor was always sparkling. Of course, we only had the one bathroom, but at the time there was nothing odd about that. People out in the country still had outhouses.
We had rugs in the living and rooms and throw rugs in the bedrooms – all over hardwood floors. My grandmother loved her canister vacuum cleaner. I got the impression that we were pretty lucky to have such a fine vacuum cleaner, but that didn’t stop me from hating the noise it made. (I still HATE the noise a vacuum cleaner makes.)

The front porch was made of wood that was painted bluish gray. Everyone seemed to have front porches that color—though I am not sure why. It was just the way it was.

In 1958 we moved to a new house. My mother insisted on hardwood floors everywhere except the kitchen (nobody ever did that back then), bathrooms (we had TWO), the basement. My mother used rugs in the bedrooms similar to what we had in the other house, and big oval rag rug in the family room. So far, this was all pretty normal and not a surprise to my 13 year old mind.
To my father’s amazement, my mother had the living room and dining room floors covered with smooth beige flat wall-to-wall carpet. Apparently at that time it was very cool to have wall-to-wall carpet. But homemakers of the day were wise enough to realize that at some point wall-to-wall would go out of style, so hardwood underneath was a necessity!
Sure enough, after 10 years later, my mother ripped up the wall to wall carpet in the living and dining rooms, touched up the hardwood floors, and bought Karastan “oriental” rugs! Those rugs were beautiful and still are – in my living room, dining room and hall.

A couple of years after moving in, my father built a “rumpus room” in the basement. Since I was a teenager, it was expected that I would soon want to be hosting my own “rumpuses.” I never figured out what a “rumpus” really was and the closest I came to it was a slumber party where we played Elvis’ GI Blues all night. But, for sure, we had the right floor for any “rumpus” that might occur. We bought square floor tile (oh my, I think they were asbestos) and one afternoon we installed them. They were beige with multi-colored speckles and we put them down onto the concrete with black gooey stuff. My father cut the “hard ones” with a blow torch, while my mother and I did the easy ones. That was one durable floor! It was still there 30 years later when we sold the house. I am sure, however, the new owners covered over it with something else. I can’t imagine anyone ever getting it up!

When I went to college in 1964 we had dark colored tile floors in our dorm rooms. We had to sweep them, but the cleaning crew mopped them – I think between quarters when we weren’t there! The major problem we needed to deal with was “dust bunnies.” Our rooms were inspected weekly and you could get in trouble for having “dust bunnies. “ No doubt the boys (who were even allowed of live off campus) were not subject to such scrutiny.

In graduate school. I had a couple of apartments and they had hardwood floors , except for the kitchens and bathrooms. When my roommate and I moved into one apartment in summer of 1968 we thought we had a gray floor. With the help of boyfriends, we cleaned it and discovered it was really yellow. In those years, I developed a profound dislike for linoleum.

After we got married, in 1969, our first apartment had ubiquitous beige carpet and linoleum in the kitchen. It was totally uninspiring, but so was the rest of the apartment.

A few months later we moved to brand new apartment. Much to our pleasure, it had harvest gold shag carpet (our other option was avocado)and the kitchen linoleum and bathroom had nice white vinyl tile. We were SO stylish and fashionable.

In 1971, we moved to southern California. We bought a house with avocado shag carpet in the living room, commercial grade carpet in the family room, and beige tufted carpet in the bedrooms. The entrance hall had dark brown vinyl and the kitchen had gray with little blue speckles. The carpets were OK, but the kitchen, entrance hall and bathrooms were a major challenge to clean. I had to use floor stripper – awful stuff. I remember buying a floor cleaning machine that scrubbed the floor and sucked up the water.

My next door neighbor introduced me to Solarian and I had to have it. In short order, we did the bathrooms and kitchen in Solarian and this saved me hours every week. All I had to do was clean it with a damp mop.

When we moved to Maryland in 1976 we bought a house that “needed work.” One place where the house definitely needed work was the floors. The hardwood floors had been stained dark brown and they looked terrible and we had the same green shag carpet in the living room as in the house in California. A few years later, we ripped it out and replaced it with a soft green soft carpet – what an improvement! By the mid-80s I could not STAND shag carpet OR avocado.

The whole time we lived in that house, we struggled with the floors. We covered over most the dark stained hardwood with wall-to-wall (the cheapest solution on a budget) carpet and we put down hardwood parquet floors in the entrance hall and a wonderful new addition. We opted for Solarian in the kitchen and were placed the 60s style tile in one of the bathrooms with random sizes of ceramic tile.

When we built our new house in 1992, we knew exactly what we wanted. The living room, dining room and entrance hall got hardwood and my mother’s Karastan rugs. We bought a matching Karastan runner for the stairs. The kitchen is hardwood (the best kitchen floor yet) and I have commercial carpet in my first floor office. The upstairs hallway is hardwood and the bedrooms have wall-to-wall. All four bathrooms have wonderful textured ceramic tile. My husband’s office and laundry room have wear like iron sheet vinyl.

In this house, installed a redwood “lift-up” floor in the basement room with our hot tub. Underneath the redwood, there is a concrete floor with a drain. Fortunately, we have never needed it!

So here we are today, living with floor choices we made ourselves based on decades of living with and scrubbing floors mostly selected by others. Come to think about it, we are pretty lucky! And I have a cleaning lady who LOVES to clean floors. Life really IS good!

Plane Travel

2011-05-30T11:04:00.000-04:00

My dad used to be a frequent flyer before the term was capitalized and meant points for free flights or walking onto the plane on a red carpet. Back then, he just flew a lot – mostly from Birmingham, AL to Washington, DC. My mother and I would take him to the old Birmingham Municipal Airport and we would sit on the wooden benches and listen to the squeal of the old Capitol Airlines Viscount as the plane took off.

Days later we would return to the airport, often at night, to pick up my weary father. He was a large man and he usually flew First Class, but I recall nights when he would say – “I hitch-hiked home on the milk-run.” That meant, for whatever reason, his scheduled flight was cancelled and he grabbed the first plane South, usually a series of short hops.

I found the airport fascinating, and my favorite activity was picking up travel brochures for glamorous places. I then took them home and played travel agent – my favorite game. I still like planning trips, and my husband thinks I am pretty good at it – he says I should have been a travel agent – now a lost forever opportunity. Oh, well!

In those days, of course, there was no “security.” The airport was an open place where families went right to the gate, even if they were just seeing someone off. The gate, of course, was at the chain link fence between the benches and where the airplanes parked.

One disturbing thing about the old airport was the prominence of the insurance counter, or machine. Even to a kid, it was clear that flying was considered a risky activity. Otherwise, why would they sell this special insurance? My farther took the insurance without fail, much the same way that you might take insurance on a fragile package. A few days later, my mother would get the receipt in the mail. I always wondered if he saw it as a gamble—a way to give us great wealth if the plane should crash. Fortunately, we never got to test the insurance.

They used to say flying was glamorous. Though people joked about airline food, undoubtedly it was better than the peanuts or pretzels choices we have today. I wouldn’t know though, because I didn’t take my first flight until 1968, months before my marriage. There has just been no reason for me to fly prior to that. Even in 1968, there was still no security, plenty to eat, and, of course, the very sophisticated liquor in little miniatures we still have today.

In the intervening years, I have taken hundreds of flights – more than I can count. There have been long flights to Europe and short hops in the Mid-Atlantic. I have experienced First Class many times, Business Class, and the joys of the Coach. From the front of the plane to the last seat in the back, I have done it all. I have been bumped and endured cancelled flights. But somehow there has still been some fun - -some sense of adventure. Today I have access to airline club lounges, so that helps to ease the stress.

I just got back from three weeks of extensive flying, including a long haul to Hawaii in “the main cabin.” The glamor is gone - -that’s for sure and frankly, so is the sense of adventure. Flying is simply not fun anymore.
I think I am getting too old for the security dance! I know the rules. I have to have my ID out to show the person who is taking my luggage and I have to have my boarding pass and ID to show the TSA guard. I have learned put my ID back in my wallet while standing in the security line. At the security check point, I have to stuff my boarding pass in my pocket, but not wrinkle it too much of the bar code won’t work; take off my shoes, jacket and belt; remove my computer (and my printer if I have it with me) and my Kindle; remove my zip-lock bag filled with toiletries, each less than 3 ounces. I have to stuff my purse into my computer bag (so it won’t count as a third item). So I am managing one bin for my shoes, jacket and plastic bag; another bin for my computer, a computer bag and a suitcase. I have to shove all of this stuff onto the conveyor belt with people behind me pulling up trays and pushing mine forward. Then I have to walk through the metal detector with only my boarding pass in my pocket. Recently I have been through the new, x-ray machine because it is round shaped, the door closes and I have to put my hands in the air. Then I have to wait while someone “reads” the results. Sometimes the authorities target my computer bag because I tend to have a jumble of cords. I suppose I am going to have to start using twist ties on my cords – one more thing to worry about.
My poor husband has it much worse – he has metal pins in his foot. Need I say more!

I understand about the peanuts and pretzel choices – I really do! They can shave a few dollars off their fares that way. What I don’t get are the “options” one has for purchase on the plane. These snack boxes are strange combinations of what can best be described as junk food. I was pleased to see that Delta actually offered a chicken salad sandwich for lunch and it wasn’t bad.

As much as I hate all of the challenges of modern flight, I am not going to stop flying anytime soon. It is still the best way to travel long distances quickly – the only way. Would I pay extra to have a decent meal and a comfortable seat? Absolutely! The problem is that the price differential is just too great between Coach and Business/First, so unless it is a Frequent Flyer upgrade, I am doomed to coach.

I wish that we could go back to the days when there were no security lines, and the airlines served real meals, but I have to say I would not want to give up my wheeled luggage.

Visionary Overtaken By Events

2011-04-21T09:51:00.000-04:00

Some people tell me I am a visionary, as if it were a good thing. I guess in some ways it is good to have an idea of what the future might hold. On the other hand, the real world is today, not 30 years from now. And it is the real world that we live in, not the world of the future.

Most of my adult life I have been living about 30 years ahead of reality. I could give you a long list of things I wanted to do 30 years too soon. Here are a few related to my former profession as an educational media specialist. I was teaching information skills when the rest of my educational media colleagues were focusing on library skills and the Dewey Decimal system. Back when portable computers were the size of carry-on bags, I thought each kid should be issued one in 8th grade. Not having the appropriate software, I catalogued a library collection using a mailing list program simply by changing the field names. I can’t help it – I have to do things like that, despite the reaction of others – which is generally “that is not how these things are done.” Now I am hearing, "I remember when you wanted to do this30 years ago."

As I approach age 65, I am not sure what I might gain by living in the reality of 30 years from now. By then I probably will be gone. Besides, I can’t stay 30 years ahead any more. I have some sense of where it is all headed, but frankly the changes are coming so fast it takes my breath away. So I am what you might call a visionary who has been overtaken by events.

When I was in graduate school in the late 60s studying educational media, we knew we were on the brink of the information age. We had a professor on the faculty whose specialty was cybernetics and we worshipped Marshall McLuhan, of “The Medium is the Message” fame. We put slide/tape shows together using Carousel projectors, reel to reel recorders, and using cumbersome and expensive dissolve units. PowerPoint was decades away, but we knew we wanted it! If I had only had PowerPoint in 1969!

In about 1970 I declared that what the world needed was a typewriter where the keys were silent and you viewed your work on a TV screen. You could make corrections on the screen, and when you had it just the way you wanted it, you could press a button and it would come out the bottom of the machine just like a copy machine. Admittedly I got the placement of the printer wrong, but overall not bad!

Back then, we had cumbersome ways of doing most everything, but we did get stuff done and we used various media. But everything was slow and usually painful. I wished for a camera that didn’t use film and was quick – just like the old Polaroids, but with no chemicals. I wanted a phone that I could carry around with me and a device where I could read books a portable screen. I wanted my transistor radio to play tapes. I wanted a copy machine that didn’t cost a fortune and fill a small room. I wanted an adding machine that didn’t make that horrendous number cruncher noise.

Now here we are, living and breathing in the information age. All of my equipment fantasies are being fulfilled. Talk about pent-up demand! I find myself on the cusp of senior citizen status downloading apps for everything imaginable. Of course, the big problem is I keep misplacing my phone. It gets lost in my purse, in my car or on my desk. Fortunately we still cling to our landline phone, which sits on my desk and can always be found. It comes in very handy for finding the cell phone, but mostly it used for receiving annoying robo calls.

Then there is the whole social media thing. Of course, being a visionary and all, I must use social media. So I have my Linked In, Facebook and Twitter accounts – all with waiting blanks for me to fill in with something profound or at least what I had for breakfast. More and more I am getting friend requests from people I never heard of. I have to admit when someone and I have 27 mutual friends, I go ahead and connect, as clearly it is just some twist of fate that we have never met. The result of course, it is that I can read daily what hundreds of people, some of who I don’t even know, ate for breakfast or thought was funny or feel passionately about.

In my age group, it is not too hard to a techie. Basically, we emerging seniors (I just dreamed up that term- - I rather like it) fall into two groups – those who use technology and those who don’t. If you have a laptop computer, an iPhone, a scanner, a flat screen TV, a digital camera and a Kindle you definitely qualify for techie-hood -- provided you know how to use the stuff without assistance from grandchildren!

My big new thing now, as a publisher, is online magazines that resemble print magazines – you can flip the pages so it simulates reading a magazine. What is really cool, however, is that you can add audio and video clips and make it come to life. In the last 40+ years I have had three overlapping areers -- educational media specialist, publisher and association manager. Wow! Now I have a way to integrate them. I can publish magazines for my nonprofit clients and those magazines can have audio and video components -- talk about convergence!

Back in 1989 I wanted to start a small publishing company. I thought about various names that included the word “publishers.” But when all was said and done, I opted for Bay Media. These days many publishers are putting the word “media.” This was actually my second try at a “media” company – the first was Custom Media Services in about 1974. It was catch-all for whatever it was I wanted to do.

I am hereby confessing that I totally missed the boat with Skype. How could I miss using something so totally amazing and inexpensive for so long? I guess I just figured I had a so many phone options that I didn’t need any more. What with the landline, the cell phone, a bunch of VoIP lines for the business, I did not feel any shortage of phone service. In foreign countries we buy a cheap SIM card and are on our way. But I wasn’t thinking video phone - well, the thought actually did enter my mind, but then they would all see my in my bathrob. Duh! Here I am with a virtual office and some of the people have never met. OK, I am now am all set with Skype and ready to roll with video conferencing for up to 10 people. Of course tne downside is I hadve to get dressed before sitting down at the computer for a Skype call.

I am managing to keep up well enough I guess, despite my slowness to embrace Skype. I am cool with cloud computing and I lust for an iPhone 4 and an iPad, despite my unembarrassed fondness for Windows. In our family -- consisting my husband, my son, his wife and our two grandchildren, I am the only PC person. They are all “Mac” people. That's OK -- it makes me have to me more self-sufficient.

I realize that soon the day will come when I fall behind due to the brain fog of old age. I dread that day, because that will be when the game will be starting to come to an end. Meanwhile, I am opting for keeping up with the technology instead of using bridge or crossword puzzles to keep my brain sharp. I never really liked playing cards or crossword puzzles, so why should I change now that I am signed up for Medicare and the big 65th birthday is only weeks away. I may not be so visionary any more, but the world has finally caught up to my vision and I can have the fun of living in it. I just have to find the money to buy all the toys.

2011-01-15T07:30:00.002-05:00

In a couple of weeks, I am headed to Savannah to spend the weekend with a group of women friends who get together each year in a different city. I will board a plane in Baltimore, change in Atlanta, and in a few short hours, I will be on the ground in Savannah.

Planning for this trip reminded me of my first trip to Savannah. It must have been in around 1953 and I was 7 years old. My grandmother and I boarded a Trailways bus in Birmingham and headed for Savannah. We were to spend a week with my uncle and his family. He was in the Air Force and stationed at Hunter Field. The trip took many hours, and we stopped at every small town along the way. I just remember the hot summer weather and how good a cold Coca-Cola tasted. I suppose one could call it a journey through the last days of the old South, but for me it was just a grand adventure with my grandmother and my first and last long trip on a regular commercial bus.

When I was kid growing up in Birmingham in the 1950s, going to Panama City, Florida was a summer ritual. We would rent a cottage or apartment on the beach. Each year, we seemed to move further away from Panama City Beach, out past Laguna, as far Mexico Beach. We always shopped at Hill’s Grocery store, not the Hill’s chain, but the beachfront store owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hill. One Halloween afternoon when I was in first grade, my mother picked me up early at school, saying my father had “sand in his shoes.” That was his way of saying we needed to go to the beach. I have a very fond memory of trick-or-treating at the grocery store – and of course they had PLENTY of candy. We always drove to Panama City, often stopping for a picnic lunch along the way. On the way back, it was very “in” to tie wet bathing suits to the antenna on the car and dry them off in the breeze. By the time we got to the Alabama line, our suits were dry.

When my parents made the requisite California trip in 1952, I had to stay home with my grandmother. They had a new black Chevrolet that they equipped with cup holders (my mother had to have a place for her Coca-Cola), and a two-way radio. My father was a HAM (Amateur Radio operator) and we always had a radio of some kind in the car. Each night they would call us using some sort of phone patch, and I was very jealous of their adventures with snow in the summertime in the Sierras.

When my father took on a leadership role in a national association (NCUR – National Committee for Utilities Radio), we started to travel all over the United States, including Boston, Denver, and San Francisco. We always traveled by car, and we saw a lot of the United States. My father liked to “make the miles” and it was not uncommon for us to go more than 600 miles in a day. Still, we managed to take in a few major attractions like the Grand Canyon and Disneyland.

My father traveled by airplane, often gone for a week at a time, and usually to Washington, DC. For his trips to Washington he used Capitol Airlines and the airplane was a turbo-prop model called a Viscount. In those days, you waited for planes to arrive and depart while seated outside on rows of park benches, weather permitting. There were some seats inside near the insurance dispensing machine, but it was more fun to be outside and watch the planes come and go. A major feature of the airport was their wonderful rack of travel brochures. I collected those brochures very earnestly and kept them all in a little blue doll clothes trunk. My favorite game was to play travel agent and to put together trips for people (a role I still confess I enjoy). I had brochures for hotels and cities all over the world, including Cuba. Sadly my mother threw them all away while I was off at college. Of course, if I had them now they would be just more stuff to store and leave for the next generation to puzzle over.

Despite all my time at the airport, my first airplane trip did not happen until I was dating my husband. I flew from Birmingham to New York City to meet his family. I felt so grown-up. It was 1968 and I was 22 years old and traveling alone on an airplane, at NIGHT. Wow! What a scary, but exhilarating experience! I remember asking the stewardess what that light was that kept following us. She said it was on the end of the wing – duh – why didn’t I think of that?

In the late 60s I made a few more plane trips – our honeymoon trip to Puerto Rico in 1969 and weeks later a job interview flight to Illinois. My husband was stationed outside of St. Louis and I managed to secure a job at a nearby college.
Airplane travel was, however, expensive, in the early years of our marriage, we traveled mostly by car. Steve was transferred to Norton AFB in San Bernardino, CA and we made several cross-country trips to New York and Alabama. We managed to hit a lot of states and attractions along the way and by the time we had finished, we had seen most of the country.

When our son, born in 1971, was an infant, my husband went TDY to Thailand, and the baby and I flew to Birmingham. Traveling on an airplane with an infant in your lap is not for the weak of heart, and something I vowed never to repeat.

When we moved to Maryland in 1976, my husband took a job with a company was, at that time, owned by an airline consortium. One amazing benefit that went with the job was the ability to use airplane passes on most of the major airlines. We could fly for the cost of a service fee. Travel was space available and you had to dress up – but it was worth it. With a pass, we could travel on any flight for the airline we purchased a pass on, going to our destination, provided there was space. You could call ahead and “check on availability.” We were called “non-rev” passengers and were easy to spot. The men always wore coats and ties and the women traveled in dresses or coordinated pant suits -- always with hose. The way it worked was that everyone else boarded the flight and we waited until called by name. We were sent on the plane in order of seniority and sometimes just told to take any available seat. When it came time for food, we were usually skipped. When all the other passengers were served, assuming there was anything left, we could have it – by then there was only one menu choice – the one nobody else wanted. But we never complained. In those amazing years up until around 1995, pass travel was a part of our lives. I learned to fly alone or with colleagues who also qualified for passes. I went to conferences and visited friends. Sometimes our family, including our son, went to the Caribbean or Europe. Uncertainty was our travel partner and we learned to accept the delays with good grace and figure out ways to enjoy the gift of time in a strange city. Once, when the air traffic controllers in Nice were on strike, my husband and I rented a car and drove the next leg of our trip to Frankfurt. We could have seen it as a disaster, but we saw it as a chance to tour more of France, drive through the Swiss Alps, and see parts of Germany we had not seen before.

Today, the passes are gone and we have Frequent Flyer miles instead. Sometimes my husband and I travel together, and sometimes separately. I routinely travel on business by myself. There was a time when I found traveling alone intimidating, but I did it anyway. Now I find it refreshing and exhilarating, though sometimes tiresome. My laptop and iphone are my constant companions and make the time go faster. I have access to some airport lounges and enjoy the peace and quiet they offer. I know what to do it they lose my luggage or if I miss my flight, or if my hotel or the rental car company loses my reservation. Those things happen – they are part of the adventure. Years of pass travel help make just having an assigned seat and getting on the plane along with everyone else seem like a blessing.

The last frontier, however, for me, was dining alone and taking tours alone. Both of those things used to make me a bit uncomfortable. I used to order a room service hamburger for dinner when arriving the night before my conference. Now I just seek out the restaurant in the hotel and buy myself a nice dinner, with a glass of wine. If I am going to a city I don’t know well, I will program in some time at the end of the trip for a tour. Why should I deprive myself of seeing a new city just because I am there on business or traveling alone?

I know my trip to Savannah in 2011 will be vastly different from my first trip there 58 years ago. But I know there is a side of me who will be just as excited as when I was a little kid boarding the bus with my grandmother. And the best part is that when I get there I will be spending time with dear friends from all over the country .

Squirrel in the Toilet

2008-10-06T11:16:00.003-04:00

I was on the my phone with a client the other day, when I heard some animated discussion coming from my downstairs home office. Two accounting contractors were there working on a project. They called to me, and I explained that I could not come right now, as I was on the phone.

Then I heard my husband, recently retired, saying something like -- "I've never seen that happen before....I will take care of it." I figured some piece of equipment had broken and he, the engineer, was coming to the rescue.

When my call ended, I went to investigate. No it wasn't the copier, the computer or the fax machine. It was a squirrel, dead in the toilet. Steve had removed it, but all concerned were a bit stunned. What on earth was a dead squirrel doing in our toilet?

We offered various theories. The cleaning lady had the deck door open when she came on Tuesday. Maybe he got in then. But why was there no damage or even evidence of his presence until now? Or maybe he got in that very Thursday morning when Steve was putting the trash out.

That night, when all got quiet, I went online and typed in squirrel and toilet. Turns out this is not such a rare occurence.

But here's the interesting part. They come in through the roof vents. Apparently toilets have roof vents. I never knew that, but then I am not a plumber. Squirrels like to investigate roof vents. So when a squirrel (usually a young, dumb one) is sticking his/her noses down a vent and a toilet flushes -- they are sucked down the vent and into the toilet somehow. Apparently, some squirrels survive the experience and emerge from the water angry and confused. So, while I pity the poor deal squirrel, I am glad that he did not escape into the house -- can you imagine the mess!

So, now we have someone coming out to "cap" the vents for the toilets. Wire mesh is required to keep the nosy little characters out. While we are at it, we are also capping the chimney and cleaning the gutters.

My husband did not share my trauma. His theory is that since he has lived 65 years and never before had a squirrel in the toilet, he will not likely see another in his lifetime. But we will never find out because soon we will have vent covers.

--Pat

Prices

2008-01-07T08:04:00.000-05:00

My mother used to complain about how expensive everything had gotten – and that was in the 1950s. Today’s prices would shock her beyond belief – perhaps even more than they shock my husband (and his sense of price is stuck at about 1962).

I wish I understood about economics; none of it makes a lot of sense to me. In high school I took a course in summer school (no I didn’t fail anything; I needed some extra credits for my very cool and impressive Advanced Academic Diploma). It was a very confusing course – somehow if the government spent more than it had had, things were supposed to work our well and everyone will live happily ever after. Personally, I have tried that approach and found it not to work so well in real life. But maybe it is different for countries.

Actually, I think that whole mindset (even for countries) might have been blown out of the water back in the Reagan years. But then again, seems like that is what the politicians are still doing. They talk a lot about not doing it, but they still do it.

My father said that the problem was that the country got rid of the gold standard. He may have been right! On the personal level -- if everyone had enough money in the bank to pay their credit cards and we merely used them for convenience, then what would happen to interest rates? My guess is they would go down – but then I am not an economist and, as I say, none of it makes any sense to me. And maybe if interest rates were lower, then everything would cost less?

When I was a little kid you could buy a nice house for less than $10,000. When I was a teenager, good houses cost about $25,000. By the time I was in my 30s, they cost at least $50,000 by the time I was in my 50s that number had tripled. Now even in a deflated housing market, the average house is about $250,000 and those of us who had the vision to buy on the water have values well over $1,000,000 (at least in Maryland).

I remember buying a car for $5,500 in 1971 and thinking we were being pretty extravagant. Now I have to replace my 1998 Olds and everything new costs at least $30,000 (or at least so it seems to me for the features I want). Strangely, the “regular” cars and the “luxury” cars end up costing about the same when you get the same features on them. It is not that I want anything all that special really – just leather seats, a split fold-down rear seat, and a CD player.

I paid $26.95 for a small container of crab meat last night. It was Backfin—had I gotten lump it would have been $32.95. Well, the crab cakes were tasty and I did use a bit more cracker meal than usual so I was able to squeeze 13 nice crab cakes out that small container.

About the only thing that hasn’t gotten more expensive is technology. But then again, we didn’t have computers in the 1950s. Yes, we DID pay more than $400 for simple calculator back in about 1974. The same thing would cost about $4 today. As I say, none of this makes any sense to me.

Living in the BWA Corridor

2007-09-17T08:16:00.001-04:00

Living in the Baltimore, Washington, Annapolis Triangle

We’ve lived in the Severna Park/Arnold area (Anne Arundel County) for 31 years now, and I have to say that we don’t intend to leave. Sure, the prices are high and the traffic is congested, but the Chesapeake Bay is magical. We live in suburbia, but we have three great cities to choose from to enrich our lives.

Annapolis is my favorite of the three – close, historic, warm and friendly. Although not a resident of Annapolis, I know the city as well as my own neighborhood. I read the local paper and I know as many people in Annapolis as I do in Severna Park and Arnold. For practical purposes, those of us who live just outside of Annapolis as tied in with the city as most residents.

I still get a thrill out of being in Annapolis on a mild fall evening, walking along the city dock, going to dinner at a local favorite, then to a play at Colonial Players (our community theatre). There are the tourist and the Mids, but there are friends to be seen everywhere. It is rare that I walk down the street in Annapolis that I don’t see someone I know. A sense of history surrounds you and it feels good.

Driving in downtown Annapolis requires a high comfort level with narrow streets and tight turns. That is just the way it is and I don’t think about it at all anymore. I can whip a Dodge Grand Caravan around State Circle with ease and can even parallel park the beast on the wrong side of the street, on a curve in front of the State House.

Baltimore is an amazing city – a city I feel that I know and understand pretty well. It is sometimes called “Charm City.” And for sure, it has a certain charm and elegance in places like Roland Park and Towson. Thanks to the Inner Harbor, downtown is vibrant and alive and bustles with excitement year-around. At one level, the city is new and fresh and full of hope. The various ethnic neighborhoods give it a richness – a texture that you don’t find in most cities. There are the “hons” – the stereotypical ladies caught in a 50s time-warp – and they are still there in Baltimore. You might not find them in the Inner Harbor, but you will find them in the neighborhoods. Baltimore is bold and brassy at time, but it has the ability to laugh at itself.

I carry a pretty decent road map of Baltimore in my head, and as long as I stay on the main streets I do OK. It is hard to get very lost in Baltimore, as the streets are laid out on a grid. Whenever we go to Baltimore, I drive. That was a deal my husband and I made when we moved here. I would learn Baltimore and he would learn Washington.

Washington, DC, is puzzle in many ways. As our Capital, it is provokes as sense of awe. A drive down Constitution Avenue makes you stop and appreciate our American way of life – the monuments and museums remind us of the grandeur of democracy.

I always feel a bit disoriented in DC. Because the streets are mostly at an angle, it is easy to find oneself totally lost in some parts of town. There are the famous circles, like Dupont Circle and Thomas Circle. Massachusetts Avenue, Connecticut Avenue and Wisconsin Avenue seem to be where most of my travels take me.

Coming from the east, the best way into town is on New York Avenue – once a “war zone” and now slow gentrification. The other day I saw a panhandler along New York Avenue. He was holding a sign that said “Why Lie, I Want a Beer!” People were rolling down the window of their Mercedes to give him cash. I guess he struck a responsive chord

In order to live here, on the banks for of the Chesapeake in our little suburban enclave, and fully grasp the opportunities – both business and personal – you have to learn to embrace all three cities and to love each of them for its uniqueness.

Solutions to Unnamed Problems

2007-09-09T08:58:00.000-04:00

It seems that much of what technology offers us today is solutions to problems we didn’t know we had. But once we know we have a problem, and we see others solving it with some techie tool or another, we are hooked.

In my lifetime I have driven all over the US without a phone in my car. It never occurred to me that I needed one. If the car broke down, I would simply flag down a passing motorist who would NOT necessarily be an ax murderer and that kind motorist would tell the owner of the nearest gas station. In those days, people took care of each other. Now, of course, if I am driving to the grocery store and forget my cell phone, I have to go home to get it.

Of course, the laptop computer is the “must have” tool for daily living. It has been only about ten years since I got my first laptop and I have been hooked ever since. I can work anywhere. If Marshall McLuhan were alive today I am sure he would refer to it as “wheels for the mind,” I must not be alone in this addiction. Just stand in any airport security line for proof.

They call smart phones “crackberries” and I can understand that. I seem to think I can’t live without my Treo. I left at home when I went to Germany and found it peculiarly freeing and continually frustrating not to have it. In a way it was like quitting smoking!

I have not gotten an I-Pod yet. Maybe I will, but I can play music on my Treo if I want to. Problem is I keep forgetting how to transfer the songs in MP-3 format. Maybe one day I’ll get an I-Phone.

I haven’t gotten a GPS either. My husband has one, but I try not to have anything to do with it. It confuses me. But I know someday I will succumb, as no doubt my next car will come with one built into it or maybe it will be built into the I-Phone.

Then there is the whole online directions thing. I love the convenience of being able to type in addresses and get directions. The other day, however, Mapquest led me totally astray and I drove maybe 20 miles out of my way.

Last Saturday, all of my techie addictions came into play and I was driven to taking desperate action. The Internet was down at the house; I had a meeting to go to in Laurel and I couldn’t print out directions. I stopped at the coffee shop nearby and planned to do some work prior to my meeting and to jot down the directions. The Internet was down at the coffee shop also. So, not wanting to appear to be out of sync enough to call for directions, I drove to Laurel. Finally, I realized I had this wonderful tool in the car all along. It was a MAP book. I remembered how to use it and the day was saved!

2007-09-02T11:13:00.001-04:00

I found my uncle’s old tennis racket in about 1958. The racket was about a decade older than I was at the time. To me, it seemed like an artifact from another time. But money for tennis rackets didn’t grow on trees, so when I wanted to take up tennis later that year, I started with that old racket. It was a great racket! I hated to part with it, but about 40 years ago I gave it to my cousin. It was his dad’s after-all. Both my uncle and my cousin are gone now. I wonder what happened to that racket.

Anyway, once it became tennis was just a twelve year old’s passing fancy, my parents got me my own racket. It was a brand I had never heard of, which they got from some sort of discounter buying club. I think it was the same place they got my transistor radio and bowling shoes.

The problem with stuff from that discount buying club was that nothing was name brand. And while I was grateful for the tennis racket, the radio and the bowling shoes, I have to admit that I gave myself a complex that I was a generic brand second-class citizen. (That may explain why the other day, when I was coming out of anesthesia from my colonoscopy and my doctor was telling my husband about my new lifetime prescription for acid reflux medicine, I made it clear to my husband that I wanted the brand name – not the generic.)

I still have that old discount buying club racket (also the bowling shoes), plus a few other name brand wooden rackets accumulated over the years. Some have covers; some have wooden racket presses. But, of course, one wouldn’t think of showing up on the tennis court with any of them. Using one of those old rackets would be a dead-give-away to my age and the condition of my game (of course just watching me play for 30 seconds sends the same message.)

I played tennis most afternoons and Saturday mornings all through high school. I loved the game and actually with all that practice I got to be a pretty good player. I had a wicked serve and was pretty good at returning balls. My form was never my best thing, and I envied those folks who just seemed to be able to stand there and hit low, fast balls that skimmed over the top of the net. But I had fun and got exercise.

My tennis partner and I went to different colleges (I wonder where she is now). In college I really was too busy with other things to play tennis and I lacked a partner. Spring semester of my freshman year, I took tennis. I was pretty good; I won the class tournament and even beat the teacher. Since I am not at all into sports, this is my one and only lifetime athletic accomplishment.

During the remaining college years, I played here and there and now and then, with friends, but it was an occasional thing and my game suffered.

When I married in 1969, I tried to get my husband interested in tennis. I bought him a racket and we tried to play once. It didn’t work out; he hated it. But then he is not interested in sports in the slightest, although he loves to scuba dive.

My son got to about ten and I tried to get him interested in tennis. I bought him a racket. He tried it dutifully a few times, but he was more interested in other things. Too bad that didn’t work out, as we had great public courts behind our house.

I wonder if my grandson or granddaughter would like to play. Eventually, maybe a family member will actually like the game.

So that was the end of tennis for me until the early 90s when a friend and I played on Saturday mornings for 5 or 6 weeks, but then the snows came and we never picked up where we left off. But during that particular phase I bought myself a new Prince metal racket. I liked it because it had a much bigger area to hit with and was lighter than my old wooden racket.

Just recently, I got it in my head that I wanted to start playing again. I found a friend who was about as rusty as I was. Through a mutual friend, we were treated to a tennis lesson. We played for about 1 ½ hours. We were not as awful as we could have been. Actually, we managed to hit the ball at least a fair portion of the time. Control and form – well those are other matters.

During that game, the instructor was continually reminding me not to crowd the ball and to hit from the side. Of course, I know that is what you are supposed to do, but it is easier said than done – especially when one doesn’t move too fast. But whenever I hit the ball properly, it felt great! That feeling is really powerful!

Then I got to thinking about how I lead my life and I began to see an analogy between the way I approach life and the way I play tennis. During the game my friend said that some of the balls that came her way she opted not to try to hit because she knew if she did her form would be off and she didn’t want to reinforce bad form. That thought never occurred to me! But maybe she is onto something.

My approach is to try to hit every ball except those that are clearly out of bounds or just ridiculous to get to. Otherwise, I go for it. I hit balls overhead or with the racket in front of me; many of my shots have that “thunk” that you get when you hit outside of the racket’s sweet spot. Sometimes those off shots go over the net; sometimes they don’t. But when they do go over, they are usually high or poorly placed.

In life. I really do try to “hit every ball” the best way I can. Opportunities come my way and I try to take advantage of them unless they are clearly “out of bounds” or really not a good fit. That is just like my tennis game – whether it is today or 45 years ago.

Sometimes in business I get that same feeling I get when I hit the tennis ball in the sweet spot. In business, this feeling might be defined as having all my preparation work prior to a meeting, arriving on time, and walking out the door with a contract in hand. Other times, the job gets done, but I am overcoming obstacles every step of the way. I would say this is the equivalent to a hit outside of the sweet spot. Then there are those misses and bad hits – true in both business and in life.

What if I could, through practice, hit in the sweet spot more and more often. What if I could learn not to run to try to hit every ball that comes over the net, but to evaluate the odds and make a decision? What if all of my hits were low and fast?

Then, I wonder, if I could train myself to approach life and business this way? Would it make sense to start with tennis and wire those circuits in my brain to work that way? Interesting! It might work, and just think of the good exercise and the fun of playing tennis instead of sitting at my computer.

Of course, while I am playing tennis I am not working and if I am not working, I am reducing my odds of hitting the sweet spot in business. Or would my brain, fully rewired and refreshed, be able something make me just that much more efficiently? Hmmh…

Then on TV they say 1one hour of exercise increases your life by two hours. That sounds promising. I wonder if it would be possible to have those extra hours in the form of 26 hour day for next ten years instead of having them added on at the end. That way I would have time to play tennis, train my brain to hit in the sweet spot, and still get all of my work done?

Guess not!

But before I play tennis again I have to deal with the matter of my racket. The grip is disintegrating. My right hand was totally black after the game last week. The racket says it is a graphite volley. I think I have found where they store the graphite. I need a new grip; but it is probably cheaper to buy a new racket. Maybe I can pick one up at Costco – discount buying clubs have come a long way!

Coming Home to Birmingham

2007-08-22T11:05:00.000-04:00

I cried the night before I got married. I cried because I was leaving Birmingham, Alabama – this time for good. Of course I knew that things would not stay the same, and that I could never recapture the feeling of home. Leaving for college is one thing, but leaving with a husband with a military career ahead of him was quite another.

Over the years I came home a few times each year. When my mother was dying, I came more often, and two years later, when my father was dying I stayed for several weeks at a time. Gradually most friends and relatives moved away or passed away.

This past week I came home to Birmingham for a family reunion I had arranged for my father’s family. It was great fun to see everyone, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

We had a little time to drive around town, so I loaded by husband, son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren into a rented van and I gave them a guided tour on the old roads.

Driving down the street in Birmingham I see what “is” with my eyes and with my memory I see what “was.” Nothing much has stayed the same and there are memories everywhere I turn.

See that building that says Dialysis Center; we used to go there every Sunday afternoon for ice cream.

See that boarded up apartment building that looks like a castle; my aunt used to live there.

See that flat area over there beside the freeway; my high school was there. They built a new one and I have no idea where.

There’s our old house where my parents lived for 1958 until 1989; it looks great! What is that music? Oh, it is a mariachi band in the carport across the street.

There’s the 16th Street Baptist Church; that Easter Sunday bombing changed everything. That was the deep wound, after which the city knew it had to heal.

That is the house where we lived until 1958. See where that carport is; that was where I had my swing set. My grandmother had a beautiful garden in the backyard. They have torn off the brick railing and replaced it with wrought iron.

That’s my old elementary school. I wonder why they have a giant antenna in the front of it. Strange! See they cut down the one tree on the playground.

See that boarded up department store; that is where we used to shop. Yes, we used to get all dressed up to go downtown to shop. It was an all day thing.

See that shopping center. I remember when it opened with just a few stores in 1958. No, all of the others are new. Yes, the Shell station has always been there on the corner.

The list goes on and on. Memories pile onto memories. I can’t stop the flow!

I love Birmingham, but I know I can never go home again. The people who defined my life are mostly gone; the places have all changed. I will find excuses to come back to visit from time to time. There is a compulsion to watch the changes.

My life is in Maryland now. In the 31 years we have lived there I have seen many changes, but I have had a chance to internalize them. I don’t have to relive the memories every time I drive down the road. I can live in the moment, and that has to have some value!

Bluetooth Headset

2007-08-05T23:09:00.002-04:00

I finally broke down and got a Bluetooth headset. A few years ago, I tried a borrowed one, and it drove me nuts, so I returned it. But Friday afternoon I decided I had to have one. Why? I don’t know!

There has to be something to it. If there wasn’t why would all sorts of people being wearing the things? I have to admit that driving and holding a cell phone is not a good thing. I also have to admit that rummaging through my purse or grabbing at my waist to answer a call is not much fun either. So maybe with this little device I will have less aggravation in my life and be safer on the road.

Of course, the units, especially the one that I bought, resemble a giant cockroach with a blue light (which is sometimes red or purple) embedded in its head. What’s not to love?

I bought a small, very lightweight and too expensive model. The instructions had to be located online (no small feat) and downloaded and printed out. I followed them to the letter and nothing happened, so I took it back to the store. Actually, I thought it wouldn’t work with my cellular phone, and wanted to return it. But it was non-returnable because it sticks in your ear. The sales manager quickly got it operational and I was good to go. I still wasn't sure why I was doing this, but...

A key thing about Bluetooth is that it has to “pair” with another Bluetooth device. My cell-phone and the headset have to find one another. In this particular electronic device mating ritual, the cell phone first has to have its Bluetooth turned on. And very quickly, it is necessary to get the headset to get in the mood for mating. You know it is ready when it flashes red, then blue. The boom, they are connected! Now for most phones and headsets, that is the end of it. But, of course, I would have some compatibility issues, and my headset has to be rebooted following pairing --every time. I wonder if a Bluetooth counselor could help them work out their differences?

I wore the headset Saturday night while cooking dinner. Not that I was expecting any important calls, but it was my new toy and I wanted to try it out. My husband chuckled as he asked me if I was going to be wearing it all the time. He said that he always had a compulsion to ask headset wearers how are things on the mothership. Clearly he did not share my excitement!

It supposedly can handle voice dialing – that is if I buy a program for my phone and teach the phone how to understand my speech. I am not sure I up to tutoring my cell phone and trying to get it to come to terms with my southern accent. But it certainly would be cool not to have to dial the phone in the car. Pulling over to the side is a drag! We’ll see!

It does work – provided I cater to its rebooting needs. Tomorrow is Monday. I should be getting lots of calls. I will try it out again –this time for real! I could try wearing it into the grocery store. It is, after all, a very cool fashion accessory. I admit it would look better with the long hair, huge hooprs, hip-huggers and a athletic shoes favored by the younger generation. But maybe it will look OK with my short hair, old lady cropped pants, clip on earrings and clogs. And if it doesn’t – who cares!

I finally figured out why i had to have one. And this is a REALLY, REALLY good reason!

This is really all about being able to type on my laptop with two hands while talking on the phone. Life’s too short to do one thing at a time! You know you are truly multi-taking when you are having an email conversation (unrelated to the call) with someone who is on the same group conference call you are on. So bring on those calls and simultaneous emails!

Berlin

2007-07-24T21:44:00.000-04:00

My husband and I went to Berlin for a week at the invitation of our son and his family, who have rented an apartment there for the summer. Although we have been to Germany many times, we had never been to Berlin. While I had suggested it in the past, it was not a practical thing to do before the wall fell.

When the Berlin wall came down, my father commented that he never thought he would live to see it happen. Frankly, neither did I – much less think that I would spend a week of my life living in what had been East Berlin.

I guess I expected to see dramatic differences, even today. I imagined East Berlin in shades of gray – the dismal colors of the communist regime. But this is 2007, and East Berlin is in many ways like every other city, alive with a Technicolor vibrancy.

There one thing in particular that struck me about the city, whether it be East Berlin or West Berlin, and that was its youth and energy. I looked around and saw few people older than myself. Most of the people I saw seemed to be 50 or younger. Everyone was in motion – whether walking, riding bicycles or sitting on the train or bus.

At 61, with little tolerance for walking and hot weather, I found myself constantly seeking out places to rest. There were plenty of street cafes, with a cold beer the price of admission. A few times I succumbed to the pain in my feet and ordered a beer.

I lost ten pounds in one week, and I think it was a combination of walking and heat that did it. Though the first few days were cold and rainy, we were soon in the midst of a heat-wave, with the thermometer topping 90 degrees. Not something that I notice at home in my little sedentary, air-conditioned world, but something that really got my attention in Berlin. Without air-conditioning and relying on my two feet and public transportation, I was quickly the victim of heat exhaustion. But, I felt good – alive in a way I don’t at home.

They left some of the wall standing. It was thinner concrete than I had imagined – not much more in some ways that an extra tall Jersey barrier. The course of the wall is marked in stones on city streets. It amazed me just how easily we could cross from one side or the other. I could only imagine what it was like before.

While we were there the Brandenburg Gate was mostly blocked off with a series of elaborate white tents. Turns out this was fashion week in Berlin, and fashionable people were there from all over the world, presumably to find out what was hot. Contrast this to scenes from the Third Reich.

When we go to Germany, we enjoy eating traditional German food. Our son had warned us, however, that Berlin was very cosmopolitan and real German food was not that common. But we did enjoy several excellent German meals, mostly at beer gardens. We also enjoyed fabulous pizza, as well as delightful French and Russian food.

We toured a museum (in a shopping mall) that focused on the history of Berlin. A commercial venture, it was indeed worthy of the Smithsonian. It was a great way to spend a cold and rainy day.

At the conclusion of the tour, there was an optional tour of a fallout shelter under the mall. I guess of everything I saw, this shelter shocked me the most. Built in 1974, it could accommodate 3,500 people – first come, first served. There are four of these in Berlin. According to our tour guide, two weeks notice would be required to stock the shelter with food, and after the 3,500 people had stayed there for only two weeks, they would have exhausted all the supplies and air, and would have to leave. I remember 1974; we were living in Southern California. By then I already had come to terms with the reality that if the bomb dropped, it was all over for us. We were told that the shelter could still be used. Amazing!

The scars of Nazi Germany were visible, intertwined with modern life. Walking down the street, one can see small brass markers that show where the Jewish families lived. It made the Holocaust seem all too real.

We visited a small museum focusing on the life of Anne Frank. The museum was in the attic of a small building. This venue made it easy to envision how Anne Frank must have suffered in a sweltering attic in hiding with her family in Amsterdam.

Clearly, Berlin is a city that has endured a lot of pain, and it shows. There is as much graffiti per square mile probably as Queens. But what impresses me is the city’s resilience – the way it embraces life. Its focus is clearly on the future, and there is an energy that is electric. Late at night young men and women, some drawn together by the Internet and a shared language, are gathering in cafes and beer gardens and talking of things that matter. Something powerful is bubbling just beneath the surface.

For our son, his wife, and most especially for our grandchildren, living in Berlin for the summer has to be a grand adventure. For us, it was a glimpse into another world.

We are home now; back to our cars and our air-conditioned, comfortable suburban world. There is no walking up the street for a gelato or catching a subway to go to a museum. Everything is easier here, but what is missing is creative tension and energy that happens when you get outside of your comfort zone.

Holidays Mark the Speed of Life

2007-07-05T09:51:00.000-04:00

You know how with reel-to-reel tape recorders, the closer to the end of the reel, the faster it spins. At 61, my life feels like it is spinning ever so fast, almost out of control. I guess that is normal, but it is disorienting, and it just keeps getting faster and faster. Ironically, this phenomenon coincides with the intellectual knowledge that one’s life is coming to a close, sooner rather than later. My mother died at 69; her mother at 67. I wonder how much time I have left.

I can tell you what songs were popular in the 1960s or even the 1950s or 1940s, and even usually what year and who the artist was. But I am hard-pressed to make a distinction for all the other more recent decades, much less know the artist. It all just sort of runs together in a blur. And the bottom line is – I really don’t care, so I don’t focus on it.

When you are young, everything is an adventure. There are new things to experience; new foods to try; new places to visit. And, of course, when I was younger those new experiences and places to visit were more diverse and intense than they are now. The world is quickly getting to be all the same. One has to look for differences, and they are more subtle than in the past.

At the same time I am discovering that cultural distinctions are harder to find, I am also discovering that I really do enjoy being set in my ways and the comforts of home. I love my home, and travel is harder than it used to be. Suitcases seem to be heavier and my feet have less tolerance. I don’t like to be too cold or too hot, and I like an extra firm mattress and bottled water. If I can’t hook up to the Internet or there is bad cell phone reception, I am totally out of sorts.

The Fourth of July was yesterday. For the 30 years, we have done essentially the same thing. We have participated in the local parade in one form or another, then had lunch with family and dinner at a friend’s potluck. While there was a disquieting sameness to this ritual, there was comfort in it as well. Then this year, everything was different. Our son and his family are away in Germany; we borrowed our son’s convertible to use for the parade, but it wouldn’t start and the top wouldn’t go down; there was no potluck. Steve is having a colonoscopy today, so he was on clear liquids. So no parade, no family, no potluck, not even any food for Steve. It didn’t feel right, but I seized the time and, you guessed it, worked! This is a Fourth I will remember because it was different. But next year, it will come around again. Maybe my family will be in town; maybe the car will be fixed and we can be in the parade; maybe the potluck will be back on, and surely Steve won’t have to have another colonoscopy. Or maybe we will try something totally different and get out of town or start a whole new ritual.

I remember Christmas of 1985. We were making our annual trek to Birmingham to be with my family. I knew it would be a long and exhausting trip, and I somehow envied those who didn’t have to leave their homes over the holidays – the people who had Christmas trees, had parties and cooked Christmas dinner. But it was a passing thought, and one I now wish I had never had. Being with my family at Christmas was always very special. My mother had big holiday parties, and the house sparkled with holiday cheer. We all felt loved and past of something bigger than ourselves. It was worth the grueling 15 hour drive.

That was our last real Christmas together. A few weeks later, my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. By January 13, 1987, she was dead – a year to day after her diagnosis. We were all together for Christmas of 1986. There was no party; everyone was depressed; Christmas dinner was prepared by myself and a family friend, under my mother’s none too patient supervision. We are Chinese take-out Christmas Eve. We exchanged meaningless gifts. I got a camcorder, but my mother wouldn’t let me take her picture. She did not want to be remembered looking the way she did. We left tired, discouraged, and profoundly sad.

It is strange about holidays; they are the same for decades, then suddenly everything changes. Old rituals give rise to new rituals, and we find comfort in the sameness as the years go spinning by, faster and faster. But without holidays, the days and nights would totally spin out of control with no anchors to hold us our past.

New York

2007-06-08T13:43:00.000-04:00

I first visited New York City when I was about twelve. I looked forward to the trip with great anticipation. At last I would see all those places I had heard about. We drove in through the Lincoln Tunnel. We were low on gas; my father has been looking for gas station and now we were heading in Manhattan and he speculated that there would be no gas there either. But worse than that, he worried about running out in the tunnel. I sat in the backseat and ate soda crackers and drank a Coke. My mother and father shared worried looks.

We did make to into the city and to our hotel, without running out of gas. The hotel was the Commodore. Wow! It is am impressive city, and just a little bit scary for a 12 year old.

We had lunch at an “Automat.” We had never seen anything quite like it. The food wasn’t very good, and people we didn’t even know sat down at the table with us.

One meal, we ate a Jewish deli, but we didn’t know it was a Jewish deli. We got what we thought was ham, but it was very rare roast beef. They gave us seltzer water to drink. The only thing I ever remember anyone doing previously with seltzer water was when Clarabell (the clown on Howdy Dowdy) sprayed it. As Southerners, we thought the whole thing rather strange. We had Jewish friends, back in Birmingham, but they pretty much ate what we did, except for no pork or shrimp.

We went to the top of the Empire State Building. For some reason, I felt compelled to have hot chocolate there. I burned my tongue. While I have burned my tongue a few times in my life, this one was by far the most painful.

To get an overview of the City, we took a Circle Line Tour. I had a small camera with black and white film. I took pictures of absolutely everything I saw, most things being totally not worth film. I still have those photos.

We walked along 5th Avenue on a Sunday morning. My mother had dressed me up in one of the outfits she made for me-- a linen suit I believe. I had a matching purse and hat. My mother said I turned heads of 5th Avenue – this was always one of her favorite stories. I just remember being overdressed and self-conscious.

The next time I went to New York was 1964. I had gone to a conference with my parents in Atlantic City. I remember I had a really great nylon windbreaker with burgundy and navy flowers on it. I wonder what happened to it?

Anyway, we went to New York City for the day on a bus and we were going to the New York World’s Fair. By then I was 18 and this would be one of the last trips with my parents. But I was VERY excited to be going to the World’s Fair.

The bus went through the Bronx on one of the freeways. Traffic was all backed up, and I just remember looking out the bus window and seeing a man lying in the road; he looked dead. I can still picture the scene.
The World’s Fair lived up to its hype. I remember the Unisphere and all of its promise was a united world. I marveled at the house of the future and the cars of the future, and came away feeling that I had been given a glimpse into my adult life. For sure, it would be easier than my parents’ life.

The next time I went back to New York was December 1968. I was then 22, and going to meet my future husband’s family in Queens. My mother made me a beautiful green plaid wool suit with leather buttons, and I brought my best clothes. I wore my best black pumps and my camel hair coat.

His family was great, if not a bit overwhelming. He is the oldest of eight children, and I am an only child. “Nuff said. But they are wonderful people and welcomed me warmly – and still do.

Christmas was coming soon and we went on a shopping expedition. First, he needed some sort of electronic part in Jamaica. We rode the subway there, if we didn’t walk the whole way back to the shopping area at Queens Blvd., we came close. Somewhere along the way, we stopped at a record store where I bought at Glenn Yaborough album. We stopped a Macey’s and bought matching flannel nighgowns and hats for his two youngest sisters. (Steve’s Dad took photos of them in those nightgowns Christmas morning, and those photos are always source of amusement today). My feet have never been the same – so much for the black pumps.

Steve took me to meet both grandmothers, and I got to meet some aunts as well. Clearly, their culture and lives were very different from mine. The differences between suburban Alabama and Queens were hard to absorb.

But I guess we all passed our respective tests and we were married in summer of 1969.

We visited New York frequently over the years. It took a day and half to drive from Illinois and nearly a week from California. It was just about five hours away by car from Maryland.

In the decade of the ‘70s, we saw the city grow pretty dismal. Mostly we spent our time in Queens, but once each visit we would go to Manhattan. We would eat out and go to a play. I remember stepping over drunks, once being offered drugs while standing in a ticket line in Times Square, and being appalled by the filth and graffiti.

But the years passed by and the city started to change. The changes were gradual and they were subtle, but eh city did get cleaner; there was less graffiti. I began to appreciate the beauty of the city and its energy.

On September 11, I grieved for the city, as I knew life would never be the same. The bravado and brashness of the city with a big ego was gone. It was humbled and wounded, but it was still the Big Apple. There was still graffiti on the subway: there were still drunks on radiator grates. But there was still 5th Avenue and Central Park, and somehow both extremes of modern culture co-existing. But the brashness of gone!

As I write this, I sit on train going between Penn Station and BWI Airport. We are headed home. Actually, Steve and I have had a lovely weekend in the New York City. We had lunch with representatives of my printer from Hong Kong,. They are delightful people and it was so much fun to meet them in person. Steve suggested Fraunces Tavern so they could get some sense of US history. It was a great choice, as the food was well prepared and typically American.

We sat in the bar of the Waldorf Astoria and pretended we were rich enough to stay there without even thinking about the price.

We had another drink in the bar of our hotel, The Barclay. This is a very lovely, traditional hotel. Fortunately for us, we were able to trade my husband’s Priority Club points for a free night,

We had dinner at a small Italian restaurant near the theatre. No place special – just a small restaurant with good food and drink.

We went to a Broadway show, The Year of Magical Thinking, with Vaneesa Redgrave. It was an amazing performance!

By the time we got to the theatre my feet were hurting – not just a little bit, a lot! I thought the low-heeded black pumps would be comfortable. But candidly, they were no more comfortable than those black pumps for 39 years ago, except they do have lower heels.

New York is an exhausting place to visit. It is the relentless walking that wears me down. You would think after all these years I would know to wear comfortable shoes. Problem is -- I think I AM wearing comfortable shoes, but when put to the NYC test they turn lethal.

When I get home tonight, I am going to order some nice comfortable shoes --- forget if they are pretty or not. We’ll see. I’ll be back to New York in July.

Seasons

2007-05-05T09:38:00.000-04:00

Each season in the South I grew up in was vastly different -- not only in terms of temperature, but in terms of how we lived, what we ate, and how we spent our time. When I reflect on those childhood days, I find myself longing to return. While I could go back to Birmingham, I can never go back and recapture those times.

In spring, the weather was restless and the vegetation amazing. Tornadoes were a frequent occurence in the Birmingham area, and we learned to just live with the possiblity that one day our lives would be totally disrupted by a tornado. But, for us, it never happened! The dogwoods and the azaleas provided a colorful backdrop for our lives in the spring. My grandmother planted flowers. We ate fresh strawberries from the curb market and slept with all the windows open at night. My grandmother wore housedresses, and we cleaned the house from top to bottom. The days were filled with the promise of new life.

Summer was heralded by the arrival of the lightening bugs. I used to catch them in a jar with holes punched in the top. That is what all the kids did without the vaguest regard for lightening bug life or death issues. Once at week we went to the curb market and bought corn, butterbeans, gren beans, black-eyed peas, yellow squash, okra, watermelon and cantalooupe. The farmers drove in all over the area and the food was fresh and luscioius. Summer afternoons were spent snapping beans and shelling peas, and they let me help. Sunday dinner was a feast with fried chicken, fried corn, butterbeans, and rice, along with peach pie. The grownups had iced tea with dinner. My mother punctuated each of her many accomplishments with consuming a Coca Cola and I got part of each one. The attic fan ran night and day and a gentle breeze swept through the house. My grandmother tended to her garden, and we would water it every night when no rain was forecast. Summer storms were powerful, with thunder and lightening and sometmes hail and high winds. The gutters running down our street (we were on a hill) became raging torrents. Then after each storm there was a period of extreme calm that resonated deep into your soul. Even the grownups seemed at peace.

Fall meant falling leaves, new school shoes, and new notebooks and pencils. I loved the fall! The colored leaves, the rich smell of woodsmoke, fresh apples, and the sense that I was a year older and wiser. My favorite fall memories are of cookouts with my parents and their friends. We used to go to the top of Shades Mountain and build a campfire in a small park overlooking the valley. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows and the grownups told stories of before "the war." Fall meant Halloween and trick-or-treating. I always went as gypsy in a costume my mother had made me. It was a great costume by any objective skeleton, but there was a side of me who would have preferred to be a devil and wear a stiff (and tacky, according to my mother) store bought costume.

Winter was cold -- sometimes even below zero. We had a big metal therometer with the sole of shoe as a baskdrop for the the glass tube (my grandfather worked for a leather company). It was always a guess to see just HOW cold it was going to get! Birmingham is in the South, but it is colder than many places nearby because it is in the foothills of the Appalchians. Sometimes it would snow. Once I remember my parents sliding down the sidewalk in front of our house on garbage can lids and coal shovels. I was three and sick. I lined up my dolls in the living room window. When I did finally get to go out in the snow I had to wear a snowsuit. It was hard to get me in it, and harder to get me out of it. In winter we ate canned vegetables and fruits and potatoes and rice. On Saturday nights we had spaghetti and my parents invited their friends over. We had country fried steak, chicken pie, chili and potroast. We felt warm and cozy and stayed indoors.

Now I live in Maryland. After five years in southern California, I was ready to return to seasons in 1976. On the surface, one would think the seasons here are the same as in Alabama. The seasons here in Maryland seem less vibrant. We have azaleas and dogwoods in spring, bright colored leaves in the fall, snow in the winter, and storms in the summer, but it doesn't feel the same. Maybe it is because I don't actually interact with the seasons the way I did when I was a kid. The culprits are air conditioning, supermarkets with fresh produce year-around, no reason to be outside, and the changing perspective of old age. And now each season goes by so fast!!!

Values

2007-04-28T10:48:00.001-04:00

When I was a child, I recall the dinner table was the place where ethics were discussed. There was the man my father knew who cheated on his wife whenever he traveled on business. There was the vendor and neighbor who tried to bribe my father with amazing gifts. There was the neighbor woman who set fire to piles of leaves under my parents’ guests’ cars and who shouted profanity to their dinner guests when they went to move their cars. There were all women my parents knew who fell prey to a World War II era con man. My parents spoke with disdain about those unfortunate incidents and with good cause. I took it all in!

My own values got tested as a high school senior when the “friend” who sat behind me kept trying to hand me her chemistry final exam paper while the teacher was out of the room. She knew I had trouble with the questions, and she had a gift for chemistry calculations. I rejected her paper repeatedly and we never spoke after that. Graduation was the next day and we went our separate ways.

In college I watched other girls sneak in and out of the dorm, drive around town drinking beer, be promiscuous, cheat on tests, and break the drinking laws routinely. I never did any of that. I considered trying to buy beer one night, but ended up with a banana popsicle instead. I just don’t have it in me to break the rules (except for a bit of a lead foot on the accelerator which I don’t quite understand for an otherwise “goody-two-shoes.”)

Over the years I have encountered people without integrity here and there along the way. One woman stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from a nonprofit I helped found. We were devastated. A cleaning woman stole hundreds of dollars from my frail father. Someone walked into my office and took credit cards out of my wallet and once someone removed a credit card from my desk drawer. Just yesterday, I discovered thousands of dollars of fraudulent credit card charges on one of my business cards.

In business, there are always opportunities for kick-backs. Some are legally called commissions and disclosed. Others are under the table referral fees. This whole business is messy and very gray. But even so, I prefer the moral higher ground and only do what is legal and disclosed and what feels to me. If it doesn’t pass the “smell test” I won’t do it.

I guess we all have our own standards and mine are the result of a strict Southern upbringing. I can’t change it, nor do I want to! But the one thing I have learned is that my values are what they are, but I can't impose them on others -- nor do I want to. And that is the most important thing.

Memory Matters

2007-04-08T13:24:00.000-04:00

I think it is great that just as my own personal memory is starting to fade, I was able to buy a new external hard drive with 250 GB of memory. I am sure everything in my brain would probably fit on that hard drive. Maybe I should start backing up before the real thing goes altogether. Interesting thought…

If I were to back-up my personal brain, what would I want to include? I would start with where I left my car keys and the TV remote, as well as my shopping list. But I could record all of that easily enough on my cell phone. Of course, sometimes I misplace my cell phone. More often than not it is lost in my purse, along with the car keys and the shopping list. I don’t, however, put the TV remote in my purse – except when I mistake it for the cell phone.

But wait a minute--- what about the rest of my past life? The childhood memories, my parents, my grandparents, teenage angst, college and grad school, the early years of marriage, our son, his family, my professional life. Yeah… I guess really need to keep all of that stuff as well. Without it, what meaning would my life have?

Of course, I could never “back-up” all of these memories successfully unless I wrote about them and then added video clips, audio clips, and a musical soundtrack. Sounds like a movie, doesn’t it? Or maybe a PBS special? But then what about smell? And who would care but me, making it all financially unrealistic.

But as I think about my life, I start to realize that it is all about interaction and synergy, not to mention context. Everything I do, I do within the framework of my life. Memory is not just as simple as pulling up a file on the computer. On the contrary, depending on the circumstances, I call up my memories in different ways. Sometimes I recall one thing, and others, another – different tidbits for different circumstances. So when I make a decision, I rely on my memory– it is just not the memory itself, but the conclusions I have drawn based on what happened and how I remember it. Sure, that makes sense, right?

Perhaps this is what truly distinguishes us from the machine we create. Computers, at least not the ones real people like us have, are not programmed for this kind of analysis. They won’t go back for us and look for files related to my current project and make a recommendation. Maybe the next version of MS Office will include something called Concluder. Well, I take that back, Amazon.com is coming close when it recommends books for me to order. Problem is – another program kicks in from the depths of my brain and that program says – you have already bought one book about that, do you really want another? It is not often that I totally immerse myself in a subject, but maybe I am odd. Imagine, however, what kind of program Amazon would need to figure out just what is going to tickle my fancy next!

I bought a new little hand-held video camera. The last video camera we bought was VHS recorder that traveled in a small suitcase and weighed down my shoulder when I used it to record. Then there was the little Super 8 camera from the early ‘70s.

Now I am the proud owner of this new little video camera gizmo. It shoots great quality video that it will record either on a small tape or a card. (the same kind of card used by my phone and my still camera—that has to be a good thing). Although I have a masters degree in instructional technology, I have to admit I am intimidated by the digital world. So I carefully read the directions and did exactly what they told me to do. Truth to tell, this little video camera works a lot like the VHS monster camera from the ‘80s and the Super 8 camera from the ‘70s. Once I understood that simple truth, I could follow all of the instructions. Basically, you have to take the lens cap off (that never seems to change), put the tape in, hit record and a red button comes on. There really are similarities.

Within the last week I purchased also purchased an exercycle. It is a nice one, like the ones they have at the gym (where I don’t go anymore because I don’t have time – i.e. too lazy). [This one came cheap through a friend who knew somebody with 600 of them in New Jersey in a warehouse ready of fast liquidation.] I am determined not to make it into a clothes rack –like I did with the treadmill (now banished to another room because it is too big, too ugly and too noisy, and too broken to live). This particular excercyle is a lot smarter than the one I got rid of last fall. That one I had for 30+ years and put a mere 25 miles on its odometer. Why? Because the thing was an instrument of torture. I tried three different seats and a sheepskin seatcover. Nothing helped! Finally it got relegated to the basement and last fall to Salvation Army. Of course, it was a gift from my husband, so he was not thrilled when I produced yet another exercycle for him to assemble a mere 30+ years later. I bring this exercycle up in the context of memory, because this is a “smart” exercycle. The last one, the cheapest Montgomery Ward had at the time, was not only uncomfortable, it was dumb. It only knew how far I had gone (not far) and how fast I was going (not very). This new one, on the other hand, has all sorts of sophisticated electronics. It has exercise programs built into it and it monitors my heartbeat (fast).. Of course, all of this has to be deciphered and an instruction book translated from some other language. What it comes down to is the same thing as with camera – you push buttons up and down and left and right and different things happen, depending on the phase of moon. Of, as long as I understand that I am fine.

I remember a time when things had a dial or two and maybe an on-off button. Today everything has buttons that change meaning, digital displays that only the 22 year olds who designed them have vision good enough to read, and more capacity than I want or need – or for that matter will ever figure out how to use.

But this 61 year-old is in there trying to take advantage of the digital world. I have a Treo, a digital camera, VOIP, a CD boom box, a digital iron, a DVD player, laptop and desktop computers, a card scanner, an all-in-one, a laser printer and now a digital exercycle and a video camera. I may not use them to capacity, but I use them! The problem really is with my personal internal memory. I just can’t remember how to push all of those tiny buttons in the right sequence to reveal all the possibilities, and once I do push them I can’t tell read the print. Oh well…

Bedspreads

2007-04-02T22:29:00.000-04:00

For the last twenty years or so I have been having a bedspread issue. You see, I am accustomed to bedspreads that are big enough to fold over the bed pillows. That is the way bedspreads are supposed to be.

The newer bedspreads aren’t really bedspreads at all; they come in fancy sets for ridiculous prices and include pillow shams. I don’t understand the whole pillow sham thing. Does anyone really expect me to either sleep with my head on some fancy decorative fabric that matches the bedspread (or short imitation of a bedspread)? Or perhaps I am supposed to remove the pillow from the sham every night and then tuck it back into it the next morning. Yeah right! And imagine training a husband to do that!

For our king-sized bed I use a quilt-like comforter that is really very nice. It is white, light and feels good in any temperature. But, nice as it is, it won’t stretch over the pillows. I am one of those people who actually uses normal pillow cases on the pillows. They are made of the same fabric as the sheets. In frustration, I have given up and simply throw the pillows on the bed in their regular pillow cases. Then I have two throw pillows that get thrown into the crack between the two pillows. Does it look great? Absolutely not! On the other hand, it is simple enough. Of course, the first thing my husband does every night is throw the pillows on the floor with a sigh.

I have some really nice quilts that sometimes I put on the guest beds, but for regular every day guests (like my son and his wife and the grandkids) I opt for a chenille bedspreads. I have managed to hang onto a few of them in double and twin sizes. True they are a bit old and pulled here and there, but they feel just great on a summer night and fold over to cover the pillows the way they are supposed to.

I have been bothered by this situation for some time. I would love some new bedspreads – you know real bedspreads like the kind I grew up with. I tried to track down the manufacturer of some of my old bedspreads to no avail. Meanwhile, every morning when I make the king size bed I curse the fact that I just can’t handle the pillow sham thing.

Whenever I see a bed with pillow shams, I wonder --- do the people sleep on them or spend time every morning and every night stuffing and unstuffing the things? Maybe I am missing something, but for me life to too short to spend it trying to stuff or unstuff a pillow from something marginally big enough to hold it.

Hotels are a different thing altogether. They actually seem to find bedspreads that are long enough to cover the pillows. Could it be they are able to do that through mass purchasing? I guess if I came in with an order for 50,000 bedspreads I could get them any size I wanted.

But hotels these days also seem to have a fascination with pillows. Mercifully, most do manage to have regular bed pillows with regular pillow cases buried down under all the throw pillows and pillows in shams.

I do recall one Las Vegas hotel with only one regular pillow stuffed on the top shelf of the closet. Strange – but then Vegas IS strange. That hotel had some rawhide pillows too and rawhide fringe hanging from the bed. This room was part of a suite on the concierge floor. As we walked the door I was getting excited. They would put me in it for only one night because it was VERY special and they had no other rooms. The room was odd in many ways, including lights that would only dim - -not turn off and a phone outlet that sent my laptop into fits or error messages about high voltage. The next morning I was at the desk begging for normal room! I wish I could have seen the “rest of the suite.”

A few weeks ago we stayed at a rather nice hotel on Hilton Head. I have seen hotels with lots of pillows, especially in the last year, but this one took the prize. I didn’t count them, but I would estimate at least baker’s dozen on each bed. We threw them in a large pile in the corner of the room. I feel sorry for the poor maids who have to rearrange all these silly pillows daily.

At any rate, my problems are solved. I was thumbing through my copy of the Vermont Company Store catalog and they have bedspreads – real bedspreads that fold over to cover the pillows. They even have the chenille kind I grew up with, and also some lightweight summer bedspreads that don’t need ironing (not that I would ever want to iron a bedspread). I am getting my order together now!

Vacations

2007-03-17T18:29:00.000-04:00

Vacations

Lately there has been a lot of buzz about whether vacations are best spent unplugged from work or connected. Of course, it would not have occurred to me 40 years ago when I entered the work force that one could really work while on vacation. It simply wasn’t possible, so we didn’t.

But somehow it has come to be that I actually don’t want to take a vacation without taking my work along. Somehow that seems like a contradiction -- a vacation with work. But I am not by myself. More and more people are taking recreational travel with cell phones and laptops.

There are those who, probably with some wisdom, say that it isn’t really a vacation unless you can totally disconnect and that you really do need a week or even more to truly feel refreshed. That makes sense in principle, but…

What good is it to try to relax for a couple of weeks while simultaneously worrying about what opportunities you are missing out on? This isn’t about trusting or not trusting staff. I’d trust my life with my staff members, but they can’t do what they can’t access or don’t know about and they can’t read my mind (though we often work on – “how Pat thinks.”)

As they say on TV, “life comes at you fast.” Absolutely! Every day of my life I must filter through tons of information from all sorts of places – much of it email. A jewel of an opportunity is likely to be buried in my Spam box with unlikely bedfellows. And if it is lost, it is lost. Ditto for phone calls.

Our offices are now virtual, so there is not a lot of difference between my home office and a hotel room in Chicago or New Orleans or Hilton Head – provided there is good phone reception and a working Internet connection.

And there’s the rub --- not every hotel has good phone reception and some don’t even have an Internet connection. And the more remote the location, the more likely this is going to be case.

The last two trips I have taken I have had to have my room moved due to either bad phone reception or bad WIFI. These aren’t options. They are necessities.

But I think it is important when traveling on vacation, or even when traveling on business, to keep the work load in perspective. My rule is simple – when I am on vacation, I am in reactive mode. I respond to other people, but I don’t start anything unless it is a rainy day and I have nothing better to do. Realistically, this means that much of what I need to do daily can be done on my Treo cell phone, and that includes email. For a short trip, I sometimes only take my Treo. With just the laptop and no Treo, I can count on about an hour each morning and about an hour each evening being spent on email. With the Treo, I can get by with only about half hour spent each evening on the laptop because I can handle all the email traffic in bits and pieces here and there.

Is going on wired vacation as much fun as going on an wired vacation? Probably not, but there is more peace of mind knowing what really IS going on rather than imagining what COULD BE going on. And the good part is that when you get back you don’t have to spend a week digging out and making explaining you were away.

I honestly prefer shorter trips to long ones. I love a Thursday through Sunday or Monday vacation and the recovery period when home is brief if I have kept up while away. I have learned that I can enjoy 8 or 10 little mini-vacations (sometimes just an overnight in a close-by city with my husband) in a year and really never miss a beat. At my age I don’t think that is too bad!

Aging

2007-02-25T23:51:00.001-05:00

I don’t like to think about dying, but I guess at age 60 it is something worth contemplating. First we have aging, then dying. For most of our lives, we tend to think of ourselves as immortal.

I realize my body will simply cease to be one day. Maybe it will be car accident, or maybe cancer. Most likely it will be a heart attack. I guess a massive heart attack would be my preference. It is quick and in my genes to go that way! I would rather go quickly that to fight a long-drawn out battle with cancer. But, no matter how I go, I know the world will go right on spinning around without me. Those who care for me will grieve, but they will get over it and get on with their lives.

But in the meanwhile, I am dealing with aging. Like most boomers, I really don’t feel all that old. I certainly don’t feel like I am as old as my grandmother or even my own mother at my age. In fact, I don’t even feel like I am as old as some of my friends. Part of it I think is in the head. I look in the mirror and I don’t see a 60 year-old.

What I do see is the same person I have been seeing all these years. My face is a bit puffier and hair is gray (I prefer to think of it as naturally frosted), but who cares. Basically, I am the same teenage girl, minus the pimples and teased hair. I have never been one to spend a lot of time in the sun, so my skin is in decent shape and I don’t have a lot of wrinkles.

Despite the youthful way I feel, others can tell I am 60. Why else would they offer to help me to my car with two meager bags of groceries? Why else would they offer me the senior discount? Hmmmn… I guess it IS noticeable.

Winter Power Failure

2007-02-18T08:40:00.000-05:00

The power didn’t seem to go out very often when I was a child in Birmingham, Alabama. We had candles on hand for emergencies, but I honestly can’t recall more than two or three times when we used them for light, and that was in the summertime. I can’t recall a single winter power failure when I was a child.

But when I was a teenager, we moved to the suburbs. About that time, Birmingham started experiencing ice storms. The roads would close, the power would go out and the schools would close. We used the free days to go sledding, drink hot chocolate and tromp to the shopping center.

One power failure, I remember vividly. It was a New Year’s Day. Our next door neighbors were having a party, but they had no electricity and were unable to cook. We, of course (because my dad worked for the gas company) had the ability to cook (both on the stove and on the grill). We cooked everything and took it next door. All the neighbors, most of them cold and hungry, came to the party. I don’t think I have ever felt closer to neighbors in my life. We were all there, young and old, trapped in our own little world, and enjoying each others’ company, with a raging fire in the fireplace and hot food and drink.

I left for college and left the ice storms behind with my parents in Birmingham. The storms continued and they finally bought a generator. I was never there when they used it. Summer power failures were tolerable, but the winter ones were different and as they aged I think they reached the point where they couldn’t stand the cold nights. But I think what pushed them over the edge was the time that they used the burners on their new gas stove with the built in microwave oven above it to keep warm. The heat (because there was no exhaust fan) melted all the controls on the microwave oven.

But I went on with my life many miles away in places where ice storms didn’t happen or were rare. My parents had their generator and gas for the stove and coped the best they could.

We were in Birmingham with my parents for our last Christmas together. We all knew it would be our last Christmas and it was so strange. My mother was dying with lung cancer and had days left. The weather was strangely warm. An azalea bloomed by the back steps, despite the season. My mother loved azaleas in bloom. I sometimes think this one bloomed just for her.

Days after I had returned to Maryland from this dismal holiday visit, I got the call to come home. My mother was fading away quickly and I needed to get there. The weather was terrible in Maryland, but it was worse in Birmingham. I arrived in Birmingham in the midst of an ice storm. Power was out all over town, including my parents’ house. The roads had just been cleared and I was able to get to the hospital. Within two hours, another ice storm hit and the roads were once again impassable.

My mother clung to life and my father and I stayed with her at the hospital, taking turns sleeping on a recliner in her room.

Two days passed by; the roads were clear. We needed some things from the house, and my father asked me to go there and get them. We knew there was still no power, but it didn’t matter; I was only going to be there for few minutes.

The house was horribly cold. Even in my coat and gloves I shivered my way through the house picking up needed items. But what really got to me was that I felt like I was walking through a grave. Everything I touched was cold. Nothing seemed the same. And I knew nothing would ever be the same again. It hurt at a very deep level. I saw my mother’s things sitting there, knowing she would never see them again. And she never did and life was never the same. The power came back on before the funeral, but the life never came back to the house.

In Maryland, from time to time, we have lost power over the years in the winter, but usually not for very long. We have learned to live with it and expect it. I have a cupboard with kerosene lanterns, flashlights, and radios. There is a stash of firewood always on hand. And for most short failures, this is enough. In retrospect we should have kept my father’s generator, but we gave it to his brother.

But this power failure was different. Steve was away. The power went out early on Wednesday morning. It was no wonder, as all the trees and power lines were coated with ice, just like the roads.

That first day wasn’t so bad. I stayed busy chopping ice on the driveway and shoveling it away. I could read my paper by my new fluorescent lantern. I was able to check my email on my Treo. The roads were cleared and I could keep my business obligations.

The local coffee shop offered a warm refuge in the afternooon and a place to plug in my laptop and use the WIFI. I was one of about 30 people who set up shop there that afternoon. We were each alone with our laptops, dressed ever-so-casually, working diligently on whatever couldn’t be put aside, while sipping coffee to pay moral rent on our seats.

Steve got home safely and finished off the driveway and sidewalk. I brought chili home from the coffee shop and heated it up for dinner on the gas stove. We ate by the firelight and went to bed early, under layers of blankets and comforters. And we awoke to a VERY cold house. Steve dressed and left for work.

I dressed quickly and realized that I could not stay at the house and accomplish anything. It was just too cold. The thermometer in the bedroom read 42 degrees. By 8 a.m. I was back at the coffee shop with my laptop. I quickly realized that the cold, dark house brought back all those painful memories of my mother’s death. The pain of those memories was almost as bitter as the penetrating cold.

Throughout the day on Thursday, I checked to see if we had power at the house. The test was easy --- if I got a tone when dialing the fax machine I would know the power was back. But I got no tone – the phone just rang and rang. So I sat at the coffee shop working – breakfast, lunch and mid-afternoon snack and water along the way. I was once again trying to pay rent on my seat.

Various friends emailed me offering us a guest room and a shower. I thanked all. If it really got bad we could go to our son and his family’s house nearby. But I nurtured the firm belief that our power would be back before sunset and all would be well.

Steve called from the house about the time the coffee shop was closing (6 p.m.) and told me that the power was still out. He had called the Navy Lodge at the local Naval Station (near the Academy) and had us on the standby list for a room. It would be less disruptive for all if we went there than if we stayed with family or friends.

I came home and found that Steve had a fire raging in the fireplace and the lanterns lit. It didn’t matter. The house was still bone-chilling cold. The fire made little difference. Everything I touched was frigid. The horrible feeling associated with my mother’s death came back. I had to get out of the house. There was no way I could spend the night there – the physical and mental discomfort was too much!

We did succeed in getting the last room at the Navy Lodge. It was a nice room, just like a motel, and we had lights, heat and hot water. But I was determined that we should not just sit in the motel room and work. Instead we went to a movie and then out to dinner afterwards. During dinner I checked the power at the house and found it was on. We stayed the night anyway, and while we could have gone home and cooked breakfast, we chose to go to a downtown Annapolis favorite, Chick ‘n Ruth’s deli, and get a hot breakfast. Our evacuation actually turned into a bit of a mini-vacation.

This crisis is over now. The house is warm again and I am back on schedule with my work. But I am changed. I don’t want this to happen again. We aren’t as young as we used to be. They have a new kind of whole-house generator that you put in place permanently and hook up to the propane tank. I think that is what I want for my birthday this year!

New Orleans and Mississippi Coast Revisited

2007-02-05T10:41:00.000-05:00

I went back to New Orleans after Katrina. We had been told there were two ways to help –come and help with the re-building or come and spend a few days and help out the local economy. Given my carpentry skills, the latter seemed more practical.

As our flight landed, the signs of damage did not seem to be immediately obvious – just an occasional blue tarp here and there. But in retrospect I realize that it must have been our flight path coupled with the fact that I didn’t know what to look for. On the flight home I noticed white FEMA trailers and blue tarps and swimming pools that without the usual blue shimmer dotting the landscape.

We stayed at a small time-share condo in the French Quarter. It was on Burgundy Street (pronounced Bur-GUN-dy by the locals). Our location was a good one in terms of overall convenience to things within the quarter. We made our usual rounds to our usual favorites, plus added some new destinations. On the surface, everything seemed normal. But the people who ran the businesses all seemed just a bit friendlier – eager to welcome us and thanked us for coming. This was most noticeable at the Palm Court jazz club and the Commander’s Palace (in the garden district). There were some tell-tale signs of damage and small things that showed that the Quarter had lost some of it sparkle. A walk down Bourbon Street was the same as always, though this time there were no big crowds. There were people there, all right, but they were not shoulder to shoulder.

Just listening to the nightly news or reading the Times Picayune it was clear that there was an underlying tension in the city. The murder rate is very high and people are still living in trailers while sorting through their ruined belonging and destroyed homes. Insurance companies aren’t paying and there is lots of misery that is not evident in the French Quarter or Garden District. Several nights of our visit were marred by extremely loud music and noise coming from a nearby bar. At times it seemed as though the crowd in the street outside the small bar must have totaled hundreds and the cars cruising the street in front of the hotel made a statement with their loud music and un-muffled engines. There was a tension in the air.

We rented a car for a few days and one destination was to see the home where my father lived in the 1920s and see what, if anything of it, has survived. The neighborhood, formerly quiet and well-groomed, was filled with the ravages of the storm, though 18 months had passed. The streets were stacked with debris and the houses still bore the giant X’s marked by rescuers. I was particularly drawn to one home that had scrawled in spray paint – “Owner took pets.” My family’s former home was there and still standing. It was one of the lucky few that obviously had been covered by insurance. A nice new façade was going up on the front porch and the house was being rebuilt.

Our travels took us along the coast to visit friends in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. While the damage in New Orleans had been heart-breaking, the damage in Mississippi was just appalling. In many cases, there was literally nothing left. We drove along US 90 between Gulfport and Biloxi. What had been a vibrant business area was just totally devastated. Churches were turned to twisted beams. I recall having once visiting Jefferson Davis’ home there. It was still there, but barely standing. There was a sign saying that locals were raising money to restore the home. We passed what had once been a nice seafood restaurant that I had particularly enjoyed – a place called McElroy’s. All that was left was a sign that said “McElroy’s will return.”

While the monster casinos (new since my last visit to the area) were heavily damaged, they seem to have all been rebuilt good or better than new and the parking lots are full of cars. This was one of the great contrasts.

Our friends on Ocean Springs took us to lunch at lovely little restaurant along the bayou. It has just re-opened and we were the ONLY people in the restaurant. Our friends drove us through the town of Ocean Springs (fortunately spared), and also through their old neighborhood. Their house was totally GONE. Their home had been on a nice piece of land overlooking the bayou. What I admire about my friends is that they didn’t let it get to them; they found another house, bought new clothes and furniture and got on with their lives. Clearly not everyone has been able to do that.

On our way back we drove through Bay St. Louis, a lovely little village where we had once had dinner with the same friends who live in Ocean Springs. The restaurant was gone – the town was gone. A wall remained with a mural on it, but most of what had been downtown was just concrete slabs and rubble.

The road along the coast was in pretty bad shape, but OK for driving. We repeated a drive we took about six years ago. Then there were majestic homes lining the non-water side of the road. They were surrounded by majestic trees. At the time I wondered how much a house like that would cost. Now those lovely homes are now simply gone! Often there is a FEMA trailer where a home once stood. Occasionally you will see something like a Quonset hut made out of inflatable plastic. Those are churches. Between Bay St. Louis and Waveland the destruction was unimaginable.

Rather than face rush hour traffic on I-10, we opted to stay with US-90 all the way back to New Orleans. We went through rural areas with homes with blue tarps and FEMA trailers; we saw large boats just sitting alongside the road with no water in sight; we saw piles and piles of rubble.

Our route took us back through St. Bernard Parish – one of the areas very badly hit. It was like driving through suburbia anywhere, but here everything is boarded up – the big box stores, the gas stations, the apartment complexes, the supermarkets. Here and there are signs of recovery, but the damage was clearly catastrophic.

This whole area was devastated, but the human spirit is very strong and the desire to rebuild is definitely alive and well. Will New Orleans and the Mississippi coast ever be the same? I doubt it, but it is clear that the soul of New Orleans, while battered and bruised, is still there and the music is still alive. It is also clear that the people of Mississippi will control their destiny and re-build their lives.

New Year's Day

2007-01-01T12:17:00.000-05:00

Here it is New Year’s Day and I am ready for it. The Christmas decorations are down. Being a southerner by birth and upbringing, I subscribe to the tradition and superstition that it is bad luck to have a tree up on New Year’s Day. The last few years I have not been steadfast to this tradition, and have found myself with some lousy luck! So this year, I am playing by the rules. We may be the only house in the neighborhood without even a wreath on the door, but when Christmas is over, it is over. Never-mind that the reason for the tradition was probably that if you left your live tree up too long, it would turn into a brittle, fire-hazard of a dead tree and spontaneously engulf you and your house in flames just because you were stupid enough to attach a lighted candle to the tree.

As a child, we always had pork roast to eat on New Year’s Day, along with black-eyed peas. We really were supposed to eat hog jowl and it was ever present. Being a small child with no appreciation for yucky things, I only had the merest taste of hog jowl each year – just enough to ensure my good luck.

Over the years, this family feast has evolved to be almost there with Christmas in terms of the specifics of the meal. The pork roast is still there; the hog jowl is long ago dismissed as being silly and besides – where on earth would I find hog jowl in the state of Maryland? Certainly not in my local grocery store. We still have black-eyed peas, although they come from a can, rather than dried and in a bag. I have added my mother’s macaroni and cheese, cole slaw, and waldorf salad. Strangely enough, this same menu works for the 4th of July as well.

I come from a family of non-sports lovers. My parents would go to an occasional football game – well, in Birmingham, Alabama, that was what you did – a social thing, but not a passion – at least not for them. Of course, everybody knows that New Year’s Day features football. We made a point of never watching football on TV – especially not on New Year’s Day. Instead we gathered with family and friends (only those rare few for whom football has no special place on New Year’s Day).

Fortunately, I married a man without an interest in sports. So he indulges my little New Year’s Day ritual meal. It is, after all, a homecooked meal and he approves of the menu. My son and his family aren’t big on sports either, so it appears to be no great sacrifice for them to join us for this traditional meal.

Each year I make the same resolutions. Each year, within a few weeks, I have broken the same resolutions. It does get a little boring! Life comes along and sabotages all my good intentions. This year WILL be different….really it will! This will be the year I lose weight, make a lot of money, keep an immaculate house, spend ½ hour a day in quiet contemplation, and keep up with the ironing! And I really, really mean it!

Christmas Decorations

2006-12-18T21:07:00.000-05:00

The Christmas trees of my childhood were always cedar. My parents bought them live at the local tree lot. The day we set up the tree was always special. The decorations were fragile and varied, many of them from the Depression era or World War II. Most of the ornaments were glass and fragile. The angel had paper wings and a scowl on her face, worthy of a Depression-era angel. The string of lights had large pointed bulbs in red, green, blue and orange. Invariably the lights were tangled and my father’s job (cursing the while) was to untangle them. Usually, when they were plugged in they didn’t work. And, of course, in those days if any one bulb was bad or one socket defective, the whole string didn’t light up. Daddy would patiently take his voltmeter and check each socket until he found the problem. Yes, our strings of lights often had black electrical tape splices. We finished off the tree by throwing strands of tinsel on it – always making a horrendous mess. Without fail, before New Year’s Day, the tree had to come down. Forget the 12 Days of Christmas. Down South we had traditions and our tradition was it was bad luck to have a Christmas tree standing on New Year’s Day. Usually we burned the tree at the corner of the backyard, where we burned all the paper trash.

Soon the cedar tree gave way to a spruce imported from some distant northern state. It still smelled good, though arguably as messy as the cedar tree. We added some new shiny ornaments, but the years went by and nothing much changed.

Then in 1958, the year we moved, we got modern. My mother bought one of those aluminum trees that were all the rage. She decorated it with matching pink ornaments and then at night we used a color wheel and spotlight to change its color from red, to the blue, to green, to gold. The pink ornaments really faded into the background. I remember sitting in the living room as a young teenager, thinking about how cool and modern our family was, as I watched the color of the tree change.

That same year, my mother added a hummingbird tree. She decorated a small, green table-top tree with small multicolored hummingbirds that clipped on. They had small fiber wings and tails and actually were very pretty and delicate – a nice counterbalance to the aluminum tree.

In the late ‘50s our next door neighbor taught my mother how to make soap Christmas trees. Actually, they were rather clever and certainly a good mother/daughter activity. We made a cone out of chicken wire, inserted a dowel, and then stuffed it with newspaper. We then mounted the dowel in a square block of wood. But, here’s the best part, we dumped Ivory Flakes and water in the mixer and whipped up this substance that resembled meringue. We added pink food coloring and “iced” the chicken wire tree with our soapy concoction. Then we added some tiny ornaments (just stuck them in the soap) and topped the whole thing with glitter. We made a bunch of them and took them to cheer up the sick and elderly, and, of course, kept one for ourselves. It stood proudly in the entrance hall to greet everyone who attended our holiday party. Fortunately, this was a one season venture!

But, within a few years the aluminum tree was passé. Ornaments in bright colors were back, along with twinkly lights in multi-colors. Once again, we had a live tree. By then I was in college and decorating the tree became part of my “home for the holiday” ritual.

By 1969, I was married and my young husband and I came home for Christmas from Illinois. When we arrived, we had the task for decorating the tree. But Steve never was into tree decorating, so my mother and I did it.

But by 1971, our son was on his way and we were in California with our own home. David was due December 23 and my parents were flying out to be with us for Christmas. I decided that it would be a good idea to do the tree early – just in case. I went to a discount store and bought green, gold, red and silver smallish dull coated ornaments (144 to be exact – 12 boxes of 12) and an artificial tree (we didn’t want to have a live tree with a new baby). I also bought one box of ornament hooks alleged to contain 144 hooks. So I was all set. On December 6, I set up the tree and discovered that I was short 23 hooks. Boy, was I mad and I called the store where I bought the hooks and complained. The answer was – “They were made in China --- you could have a few more or less than is listed on the box. Why not just by another box and you will be set for years to come.” Today that seems like prudent advice, but to an expectant mother, that was an unsatisfactory answer. Instead of indulging them by purchasing more hooks, I simply used some bent paper clips. That will teach them! David was born the next day!

The next couple of years we just decorated that same artificial tree, but the final year we were in California, we decided to go to the Christmas tree farm and cut down a fresh tree. David was older now and we thought it would be a treasured memory (I should ask him if he remembers – I doubt he does). For those five Christmases, my parents came to our house and we all shared Christmas with my uncle and his family who coincidentally lived in the same area.

Once we moved to Maryland, we resumed the tradition of going to Alabama for Christmas. Still, we put up the old artificial tree, decorated it and took it down before New Year’s Day. During those years, when David was growing up, we amassed a collection of ornaments – many of them handmade. You see, I was teaching and it was the norm for students to give teachers ornaments.

When we went to Alabama sometimes my mother already had the tree up before we arrived. That was OK with me, as I had already decorated one tree before we left. But one year I remember, we decided (most likely with David’s urging) that my mother needed a live tree and we went out and bought one. I am not sure how much she appreciated the needles shedding, but it seemed like a good idea. They used the same old decorations, and they seemed special.

The years drifted by. David went from a toddler to a teenager. The last Christmas in Birmingham was 1988. My mother was dying with lung cancer and we all knew it. It was a horrid Christmas. We made a feeble attempt at decorations. There was no party and Christmas Eve we had Chinese take-out. We had Christmas dinner and our friends, the Joneses, joined us, as usual. I did a lot of the cooking, as did Eloise, as my mother was too weak. But she couldn’t stand watching us mess up the gravy, so she threw us both out of the kitchen and did it herself. It was perfect, as always. That Christmas an azalea was in bloom at the back gate. My mother always loved azaleas. I can’t help but think this one bloomed in December just for her. By January 13, my mother was gone.

Those next two Christmases my father flew up to spend with us. We decorated our artificial tree in the family room and bought a new small artificial tree for the bay window in the living room. Daddy wasn’t well, but we tried very hard to enjoy the time together.

We moved into our new house in 1992, though it seems just yesterday and the house still seems new to me. David has been married for many years now and his wife and the grandkids help me with the decorations. I discovered I was allergic to poinsettias, so I have a good-sized collection of silk poinsettias that we pull out every year. I have a special cabinet under the eaves where I store everything. I put a wreath on the door (guess I have had that same wreath now for about 14 years). Most years we just decorate the small tree and put it on the table in the bay window in the living room. All the ornaments are different. Strangely, the only things that survived from those original decorations from my childhood are the cross-eyed angel and a couple of hummingbirds. We still put them on the tree. I have grown rather attached to the cross-eyed angel. I still have a bunch of those dull small ornaments from 1971, but the other ornaments are much more interesting to use and the tree is small. But, whenever we need more ornament hooks, we use bent paper-clips. I have never bought another box of ornament hooks. I guess now it is a matter of principle.

I look around the neighborhood and notice that some of my neighbors have extravaganzas with outdoor lights. I doubt that is something I will ever do. Not that I mind them, but I don’t know how in the world at age 60 I am going to get them up in the trees or strung along the edge of the house. Then, of course, I would still have to get them down by New Year’s Day. A couple of years there, though I slipped up and left the decorations up after New Year’s – talk about bad luck!! I will have them down by New Year’s Day for sure this year. I want 2007 to be my best year yet

Closets

2006-11-26T08:40:00.000-05:00

My bedroom when was growing up didn’t have a closet – not until my father built one when I was about ten years old. Everything I had fit nicely in my small white dresser. Actually, I don’t recall actually using that closet for my stuff, but my mother had it filled with dresses and shoes. My father built a closet in their bedroom, but he had his clothes in that one. My grandparents, who had the back bedroom had a metal cabinet where they hung all their clothes. Now that I think about it, that cabinet was awfully small…still they managed to be well-dressed. My grandmother kept her hats in boxes on top of the closet.

In that old house there was also a very large walk-in closet off the kitchen. It was a strange and mysterious place filled with out-of-season clothes, sheets and towels, the vacuum cleaners, and an assortment of things they had no other place for. Once a year they cleaned it out and it was a big deal.

The house also had a big walk-in pantry off the kitchen. They kept china and food in the pantry. One day I was outside and heard a large crash. A shelf in the pantry had collapsed and all of my grandmother’s fine china was broken. All I have left of it today are a few serving pieces that managed to escape.

When we moved to our new house, there was a closet in each bedroom and even two linen closets in the hallway. The closets were small by today’s standards, but luxurious by 1958 standards. There was no pantry, so my mother had one of the kitchen cabinets converted to a make-shift pantry – great for food and broom, however. She kept an overflow pantry in the basement consisting of metal shelves in the garage. She couldn’t resist a sale on canned goods, so we always had plenty of food on hand just in case of World War III. There were two closets in the entrance hall. She kept things like table leaves and baskets in one, along with tablecloths. In the other one, they had winter coats and all my father’s suit jackets. The basement had a huge closet under the stairs, but as time went on, the basement itself became more and more like a giant closet.

It’s funny, but I can’t remember much about the closets in my college dormitory, but I know we had them. What I do recall is that each summer we had to take all of our stuff home. I had a clothes bar that stretched across the back seat of the car – once I had a car on campus which wasn’t until my sophomore year. You could always spot the college students on the highways by their clothes rails.

When we first go married I had to share a clothes closet with my husband. That immediately proved problematic. Our first house, in San Bernardino, had two closets in the master bedroom, one of the house’s nicest features. It was luxurious! Still I overflowed my clothes into the guest room closet and had to do the seasonal closet swap.

But when we moved to Maryland in 1976, we bought a house with only one closet in the master bedroom. That was not a wise move. I gave that closet to my husband and for many years kept all my clothes in the guest room closet across the hall. Plus there was a large cedar-lined closet in the basement and I used that for my off-season clothes. It worked, but the seasonal trek up and down the stairs wasn’t fun. Finally, in 1989, I had had enough and we built another closet in the corner of the master bedroom and a huge pantry and two more closets. Life started looking up!

When we built our house in 1992, we knew we wanted LOTS of closets. We designed big walk-in closets for ourselves in an area off the master bedroom. Both have lots of built in shelving and mine even has a window. Recently I installed a small water cooler so I don’t have to go downstairs to get filtered water. Finally, I don’t have to do the seasonal clothes swap anymore. The result, however, is that clothes tend to accumulate unworn in the closet. Once a year I have to go through and get rid of things, otherwise that closet would totally max out and start overflowing to other rooms.

We put big standard type lighted closets in all the bedrooms and have three linen closets, plus a big walk-in pantry, a large entrance hall closet, office closets, and more. And, of course, we have managed to fill all of them.

The closets in my office are especially deep. They are designed to hold filing cabinets, and they do quite nicely. My office, on the main floor of the house, is designed for easy conversion to a bedroom if either of us should be incapacitated and unable to climb stairs. The filing closets quickly convert to clothes closets and the hallway closet, which now has shelving and a spare refrigerator, can be converted to hold a washer and dryer.

I guess with closets, you can never have enough. But in our house, we have sure tried to have to maximum we can. I love closets – they keep things handy, but out of sight. One of the hardships of being an early settler in the US was that most people didn’t have closets. I guess they didn’t have that many clothes and closets were taxed – so why bother! Oh, how the world has changed. Today there are whole stores devoted to closet systems.

The Environment

2006-11-19T09:44:00.000-05:00

As a kid in grammar school, I heard about Smokey the Bear. It was a clear message. Don’t burn down the forest. Not that this was something I had even considered doing, or might do even accidentally. I didn’t smoke, nor did any of my eight-year old friends, and we didn’t even make campfires, except possibly under adult supervision. But we were definitely committed to the cause of conservation.

The years passed, along with the Civil Right Movement, the Vietnam War, the Feminist Movement and all manner of cultural changes. Then, in 1969 – I remember it well, people started talking about the environment. I was grown and married by then. My first thought, was how nice – this is a subject that everyone can agree on. From my limited perspective, it was going to be like all the other raging movements in the country, with the one exception that everyone would be in agreement. Naïve – you bet!

The Hippies easily embraced environmentalism. Right away, that turned off many people. If the Hippies like it, it can’t be important. I wasn’t a Hippie, but I thought taking care of the environment made sense. Not that I did much about it, but I tried to be responsible in my own backyard – whatever that meant.

In 1971, we found ourselves living in San Bernardino, California. Talk about a life-changing experience! Air pollution was REAL. The air was so thick with pollution that you could barely see a block away. We didn’t know we had a view of the mountains from our kitchen window until three months after we moved in. I felt lousy all the time; I remember my joints ached. One of our cars, a Dodge Dart, came equipped with California emissions controls. It cost more money because of it. It was clear to me that pollution wasn’t a matter to be taken lightly, and I made environmental responsibility one of the things that was important to me in voting decisions.

In 1976, when we moved to Maryland, air pollution was not on the local radar screen. Environmentalists were called “tree-huggers” and many thought them to be “over the top.” I kept my own belief system in place and tried to make a difference where I could.

In about 1977 I wrote a newspaper article about Severn Run, the headwaters of the Severn River. The story required me to walk the land with a ranger. I saw the effects of water pollution with my own eyes. From then on, water pollution was high on my list of environmental concerns.

Through my community work, I found myself leading an umbrella association, the Greater Severna Park Council, and a good friend was involved in the Severn River Association at the same time. He got me to attend some environmental coalition meetings. The goal was to bring all the community groups who cared about the environment together to take joint stands. It was a great idea, but it never really worked because of the independent nature of each organization. Still, the result was improved communication. For this group, water pollution was the main concern; air pollution was on the list, but pretty far down.

My work with the community, however, made me understand that in our area there are two major forces – development and environmentalism. In simplistic terms, people see business as anti-environmental and environmentalists as anti-business. But, of course, it is not that simple, and anyone who takes the time to try to understand the dynamic knows that. In my view, it comes down to – you don’t foul your own nest. Business groups in our area have environmental committees who do some fine work. Environmental groups are not necessarily against business, but they do expect business to play by the rules.

We live on the water, in the Critical Area. The 100 feet of our lot closest to the water, we can’t change. We can’t, for example, chop down the trees and plant grass. On the other hand, we did get a permit to build a walkway down to our pier. The older the home, the more the likeihold that the lot was stripped before the law was enacted. Personally, I love our natural backyard. The view changes dramatically with the seasons and we feel like we are living in the treetops.

When I chaired the County’s Cancer Task Force, I learned a great deal about our local environment. One thing I learned was that we do have air pollution issues here in Maryland that are getting more and more significant. I learned that the water pollution is causing problems for our fish, oysters and crabs. But I also learned that you can’t prove any of this causes cancer – at least not any one individual’s cancer. But should we be concerned? Absolutely!

These days I manage a regional carwash association. I have learned that it is much more environmentally responsible to use a carwash than to wash my car in the driveway. Of course, I never have liked to wash my car in the driveway. It is too hard, wet, and messy. Now, I can take my car to the wash and be environmentally responsible at the same time.

I imagine the major effects of pollution will be felt long after I am gone, but it would be irresponsible not to care. My grandchildren’s world could be much better than ours if we put partisan politics aside and unite around environmental issues.

As for me – I recycle my trash; I go to the carwash; and I think my next car might just be a Hybrid.

Furniture

2006-11-12T11:30:00.000-05:00

Furniture has a way of sticking around long after its owners. Not that it is a bad thing, but as the generations go by, the amount of furniture to be passed along to the next generation multiplies. Some items must be given up or wear out, others just keep on going.

I thought it might be fun to trace what has happened to a few pieces of furniture from my childhood. You know…. where are they now?

My grandmother’s rocking chair: I honestly don’t know where she got it or when, but my mother told me that they had it when she was a small child. On one of the arms there is a small round hole that my mother apparently whittled out. My doubt my grandmother was not pleased. This rocker had a stuffed seat and padding on the T-shaped back. From what my mother told me, the rocker had not originally had a padded back, but that the wood cracked and she decided to upholster the back to match the seat. The night my grandmother died, in 1957, she sat in the rocker awaiting the ambulance’s arrival. She was having a massive heart attack. I can still see her sitting in the rocker in her nightgown, her face dripping with perspiration. I think in those days, the rocker was covered in blue fabric. The next year, we moved to a new house and my mother “re-did” the rocker to match the new house. She replaced the fabric with a rose velvet. For thirty-two years the rocker sat in the living room of my parents’ home. When my mother died, I inherited the rocker. I found a place for it in my living room. Then, when we built our new house in 1992, I saw that it had a prominent place in the living room. It is still covered with my mother’s pink velvet fabric. The chair is big and comfortable, and very special. I don’t know what wood it is made of…maybe pine, but it is stained mahogany.

My grandfather’s chifferobe: My grandfather was born in 1878 and I have been told that he received the chifferobe as a young man around the turn of the century. I don’t know for sure, but was told that it was made in England and shipped on the Mississippi to his home in Memphis. I suppose he must have used it between 1900 and 1940, but from its condition in the late ‘40s it was not used gently. The chifferobe used to sit on the back porch. The back porch was really an enclosed room off the kitchen. It has twenty-eight windows, the freezer, the washing machine, the dryer, a green cabinet for garden supplies, and the chifferobe. We kept paint, tools, the DDT dispenser, etc. in the chifferobe. Some of the drawers were missing hardware, so we would stick a screwdriver in the hole to pull out the drawer. The bottom board was rotted, like it had been flooded. When we moved in 1957, my grandfather and I begged for the chifferobe to come along. It found a home in the basement garage. One summer day, at about age 17, I decided it needed to be refinished. It always upset me to see such a beautifully carved piece in such terrible shape. It was go grand – even put together with pegs. So I refinished one drawer (stripped), the bottom one. It looked great, but life intervened and soon I was off to college. My mother saw its potential and took on the task of refinishing the piece. After months of painstaking work, a replacement bottom board (which apparently was some sort of special wood that had been blessed for a synagogue project – but matched perfectly and was available), and new hardware, the chifferobe made its way to the family room of my parents’ home. And there is staying, always with a silk fern on top, for another twenty-five years. My parents used it for storing all sorts of miscellaneous household items. My father closed the house in about 1990 when he moved to an assisted living apartment. The chifferobe came home with me. It found a home in our family room. When we built our new home, we designed it with the chifferobe in mind. It stands proudly on the entrance foyer wall. Behind the small mirrored door, we keep all of our emergency supplies – lanterns, tiny TV, radio,flashlights, etc. We keep keys, candles, wrapping paper, batteries, lightbulbs, vacuum cleaner bags, cameras and more in the chifferobe. I just put a new silk fern on top of it. It is still my favorite piece of furniture in the house.

My grandmother’s library table: My grandmother grew up in rural Clay County, Alabama. From what I have read about her Hatchett Creek Community, every respectable family had a library table prominently placed in the living room. Books were scarce and the library table was a place to display them. Library tables were high enough so that you could stand and look at a book on the surface of the table. When I was little, the library table was in the attic room my grandfather used as an office. Sometime in the mid-‘50s my mother decided to cut the table down (two large pedestal legs) and use it as a coffee table. She hired a man to do the job. He removed the veneer from the top, but on the bottom he left it in place and tacked it down. Although the table looked good, my mother was NOT happy with him for tacking down the veneer. Still, the table (tacked veneer and all) came to be my mother’s living coffee table. When my father closed down the house, it came to me. Like much of the furniture that I inherited, the table was coated with a yellow film (my parents smoked). In the rental moving van on the way up from Alabama, the heat melted the fuzzy fabric of the pads into the coating on the table. It took me many hours to remove all the fuzz and the yellow film, but today the table looks fine. It is still my coffee table in the family room. My mother used to keep the center drawer filled with playing cards. I never really have enjoyed playing cards, but I keep playing cards in that center drawer. You never know…maybe someday I will take up bridge.

My house is filled with items with this kind of history. I love them all.

Being Female

2006-10-27T09:28:00.000-04:00

As a child, I played with other neighborhood children without regard for who was a boy and who was a girl. I didn’t really seem to matter, and we all liked the same things – playing in the woods (a vacant lot), playing cowboys and Indians, building things with bricks and, as we got older, roller skating. My best friend, Mary Jane, and I did play dolls, but not when the boys were around.

Once, when I was about four, I was playing with my friend, Butch, (who lived in the house behind us). It was a hot Alabama summer day, and he took his t-shirt off. That seemed like a fine idea to me, as well, so I took off mine. When my mother saw me running about without a top, she got very upset with me. She told me that I had to put my top on “right this minute” and that I was never to do it again. Meanwhile, Butch was standing there with his bare chest for all the world to see. I looked at his chest and then at my chest --- as far as I could see they looked exactly the same. My response was, you guessed it, “That’s not fair.” But I put my top back on and got on with life, never to remove my blouse in public ever again!

About the same time, another of my little male friends and I were playing in cardboard boxes, scooting ourselves across the carpet by sliding the boxes. For some reason, he felt compelled to show “himself” to me. Of course, I was interested. I knew that boys were different, but the details were unclear. His mother caught him, and he got in loads of trouble. I suspect he never did that again with a girl until he was MUCH older.

The whole time I was in grammar school, the differences between boys and girls and how they were treated were really not noticeable that I can recall. We were all friends, and played together at recess. The boys wore pants and we wore dresses. They had short hair and we had long hair.

In that same time frame, the early ‘50s, it was clear that what was expected for women was very different from what was expected of men. Mothers stayed home; they cooked and cleaned and sewed. When they went out, they went out to shop. Some days it was to the local shopping center or corner grocery. Some days, it was downtown to the big department stores. My mother drove, but my grandmother never learned how. So, my grandmother either rode along as a passenger or stayed home and gardened (which I think she preferred).

As a child, I wondered what my life would be like as a grown-up woman. I wasn’t really all that interested in the “domestic” things my mother and grandmother did. I was fascinated that my aunt worked in a law office. That was, of course, because she never married and had to “support herself.”

By the time I got to junior high, especially 9th grade, things started to change. We started looking at boys not as friends, but as boyfriends. In those days, it wasn’t really possible to be “friends” with a boy. Friendships with boys had to be dating-type friendships. That was a definite change, but one I accepted with—that is just the way it is.

By high school, this was even more pronounced. Some boys became more or less “gods” because they were good football players. Some girls fell into the goddess role as beauty queens. The rest of us, both boys and girls, tried to find our way. We all wanted to go to college, and about 98% of our graduating class DID go on to college. The boys were looking for careers. We girls were not sure what we were looking for.

In high school, I was told to study hard so I could get into college. Actually, I think the girls in my high school did better academically than the boys. Mothers were pushing college (remember, this was the South in the mid ‘60s) on their female daughters as a way to find a “man,” and to learn how to do something in case the unthinkable happens and you have to support yourself. You could get unlucky and not ever find a man, or the one you find may die or, heaven-forbid, divorce you. Or you could pick a real loser who was not a “good-provider.”

The summer before college, I spent time with my girlfriends talking about the future. We all wanted to do something with our lives other than just be wives and mothers. “It’s not fair” kept coming up in conversation. One friend was going to one of the “seven sisters” girls’ schools. She had to read a book called the Feminine Mystique. She asked me if I wanted to read it, but I never got around to it until years later. I wonder…would it have changed me back then?

Upon arrival at college, it was clear the landscape had changed. This was Auburn University in 1964. There was many more boys that girls (something mothers, including mine, had mentioned repeatedly during the college selection process). And it was immediately clear that the boys got considerably more freedom than we girls. Not that we were exactly looking for freedom. Just living in a dorm and not having parents telling us what to do was a big change.

Girls HAD to live in the dormitory; there was one large dormitory for boys, but boys could live wherever they liked. There as a legal doctrine of “in loco parentis” that gave the university the right to control the lives of its female students – known in those days as “co-eds.” Since boys typically come with parents as well, we were always a bit puzzled as to why they didn’t have to have rules, too. “It’s not fair” was heard a lot around the campus.

State law at that time was quite clear on the subject of drinking. You had to be 21. At Auburn, this was interpreted as “girls had to be 21.” Boys could drink, and did drink – to great excess! The beer and bourbon flowed freely in apartments and frat houses. Obviously, the boys weren’t doing all the drinking, but the girls (who typically mixed bourbon with Coca-Cola) could be kicked out of school. In my dorm, we had to take turns standing at the desk and smelling our fellow students’ breath at the desk. My sorority sisters made a pact – if they caught a sister with alcohol on her breath, she would first be reported internally to the “standards committee” before being reported to the school. Meanwhile, the boys drank and drank and drank and nobody cared. “It’s not fair” was our only response, but we did as we were told (at least I did).

We co-eds had other rules that didn’t apply to the boys. We had to be in the dorm by 11 p.m. on weekends; and even earlier on weeknights. We couldn’t go out in public with our hair in rollers. Slacks were banned, except within the quadrangle (the area formed by the “women’s” dormitories). Shorts were totally banned except in the dorm. Auburn girls, in those days, wore raincoats a lot, even on the sunniest of days in the summer time. Meanwhile, the boys could wear whatever they wanted.

I decided to major in education, although I would have much preferred to major in journalism. My mother thought I would do much better as an English major in education because with a teacher’s certificate I would never be without work.

I did meet my husband at Auburn, and I got my degree in education. In fact, I then went on and got a master’s degree, also in education. Then what? I had played by all the rules and did all the right things.

That was the point at which the REAL issue started to come into focus. I had the degrees, and I didn’t want to save them for the unlikely event that my healthy young husband would die an untimely death. He was an air force officer, but he was not going to Viet Nam – so I felt the odds of him dying were pretty slim. Besides, we could use the extra money we would get if I worked. Also, in college the they told us that if you didn’t use your degree, you would quickly go stale (the world was changing so fast --little did they know) and never be able to work.

Once married, I became a military dependent. I hated that term. I was a wife – a position with special provisions. I got an orange colored ID card. I joined the Officers’ Wives' Club and tried to play my role as best I could, although I wrestled with it a bit. They brought in luncheon speakers to keep our minds occupied. I had the pleasure of meeting and photographing Maureen Reagan, Erma Bombeck, Tom Snyder, Blackstone the Magician and other famous people.

What I noticed about the other officers’ wives was that they were bright, capable women. Most didn’t work, but most had college degree or even advanced degrees. The ones who did work, took part-time jobs just to keep involved in their professions. I enjoyed getting to meet them and made some great friendships.

I worked full-time for the first two years of our marriage and I enjoyed working. We saved the money I made. In time, our son came along and I worked a bit as a part-time college instructor. I kept my hand in, and I enjoyed the deviation from a life of diaper changing and, later, preschool.

In these years, the country was in an uproar over the rights of women. I didn’t (maybe I should have) take the time to be involved then. I was too busy doing my own thing and making my own way. In my field, being education, there really wasn’t much of a problem with how women were treated. There were WAY more of us than men, and women often rose to the rank of school principal.

As time went on and our son started school, I tried working a full-time job and leaving our son in daycare afterschool. It didn’t work very well; he hated the daycare. Meanwhile, the company I was working for closed, and I could do something different.

I ended up accepting a part-time job in an independent school and my son could go to school there for free. It was a great deal for both of us and our hours coincided.

But it was not to last, and the school closed. With three other women, I started another independent school and through eighth grade my son and I had schedules that meshed. But, truth is, I often stayed after regular school hours – something he didn’t really appreciate.

The years went by, our son went to high school and onto college. Meanwhile I became an entrepreneur and started my own business.

I have typically hired women who are very capable and talented, but can’t stand the “stay at home wife” thing. That has worked well for me, and has led us to flexible scheduling and even now, virtual offices. Ironically, I now have the best of both worlds.

When I became executive director of a women’s professional association, I became more in tune with the history of women’s rights, and it became crystal clear to me that there really was (and still is a problem) with how women are treated, particularly in some professions.

At age 60, I feel I can do whatever I want to, and nobody is going to tell me I can’t do that because I am a “woman.” (With the exception of taking my shirt off in public – that would still get me in trouble!). But, what I have to say, in retrospect, is that I could have approached being in business much differently – more like a man would. But that is not who I am, and I have to do it my way!

I hope the young women out there appreciate just how far we have come as women. Looking back, I can thank my “bra-burning” contemporaries for forcing society to re-think how women are treated. I can’t imagine a state university today imposing special rules on female students or enforcing state law selectively on women-only. But are there still things that happen that make us say “It’s not fair.” You bet! There is still much work to be done.

Changes

2006-10-03T19:18:00.000-04:00

There are times in your life when you know things will never be the same. The longer I live, the more of those times I have experienced. And it gets to be a more familiar feeling, but I am not sure it gets any easier.

The first time for me was when our next door neighbor had a heart attack. Uncle Leonard, as I called him, was a very special family friend. The day I heard of his heart attack, it was February 14, 1951. I was just five years old, but I knew he was going to die. I crawled behind the rocking chair and wept. Two weeks later, he was gone, but I knew it instantly and I grieved.

My grandmother died suddenly in 1957 of a massive heart attack. My life was blown away. Nanny lived with us and I loved her deeply. It all happened so fast; it was so unfair. A few years later, my grandfather was gone and I missed him very much.

We moved on December 1, 1958. I would have been contented to stay in our house in Bush Hills forever, but my parents wanted to be “over the mountain.” At the tender age of twelve, I didn’t understand the need to “have a new house” in the suburbs. The first week or so in the new house, I had nightmares. I wanted to go back to the old house; I missed my friends from grammar school. The new school was so different, and so were the kids. They all knew each other and they wore lipstick and listened to rock music. Life was so very different, and I hated it!

Weeks later, on Christmas Eve, my beloved cocker spaniel, Twink, hung herself. I had left her with her leash on in the full open basement of the new house. She had caught the leash under the door molding, fallen off the stairs, and was hanging by her collar. It was awful! The dog I loved so much was dead and it was my fault.

But life went on, and gradually I became accustomed to the new house, the new school, the new kids, the new dog and more. But my body was changing and I hated that too! Why did everything have to always keep changing?

Soon I found myself graduating from high school and off to college. I chose a big state university, Auburn University. There was a side of me that wanted a private, woman’s college, but the pragmatist in me won out. I felt it made more sense to experience the big university – to live in the “real” world and that was more important than challenging myself intellectually. Also, Auburn was a lot cheaper for my parents. My parents drove me to Auburn on a bright September morning in 1964. Several times along the way, I had to stop and throw up. I was scared to death.

The first few weeks at college were awful, starting with sorority rush. I was rejected by my mother’s sorority and that was so very painful. I ended up pledging another very fine sorority, which was actually a better fit for me, but at the time I was not so sure. I really just wanted more than anything in the world to go home.

But I stayed at Auburn, and four years later I graduated. By June of 1969, I had my master’s degree, also from Auburn. I hated to leave Auburn behind, but my time there was done.

Two weeks after getting my master’s, I got married to Steve. I wept the night before. I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. I would have to leave Birmingham and live in Illinois, a place I had never even been. I would have to leave my parents. Life would never be the same.

I remember the day we left our apartment in Illinois. I had come to love our apartment, not to mention my job at McKendree College and Lebanon, the little town where we lived. I could have stayed right there for the rest of my life. But the air force had other plans for us.

We moved to California is September of 1971. We bought a house and a car the same day, and the baby was due in December. I really didn’t enjoy our time in San Bernardino very much, although I met some great folks. Mostly, I hated the weather, the lack of seasons and the smog. But five years later when we left, I felt a sense of loss and remembered those things I had come to love – the sweet scent of orange blossoms, Big Bear Lake in the winter and Oak Glen and its apples in the fall.

When we left San Bernardino, Steve also left active duty with the air force. We spent our last night in town on base and stayed in the VOQ. Early that morning, Steve took my military ID to turn it in. The air force had been part of my life for seven years. I didn’t especially enjoy the officers’ wife role, but I played it well and I grieved when it ended. That morning I looked at the empty place in my wallet where the ID had been and realized that life would never be the same.

We moved to Maryland in 1976 and we bought a house where we lived for 16 years. I never really loved that house, but it worked for us. Gradually, we improved and expanded it and the more we did to it, the more we liked it. We raised our son in that house. It was a bit quirky and bit noisy (due to the high school right behind it).

Change was hitting me on another front. Within three years of each other, both of my parents were gone. My mother had lung cancer and died within a year of diagnosis. My father died on congestive heart failure two years later. I think his heart was broken.

After my mother died, my father sold the house. They lived in that house for 30 years and the years had taken their toll. My father still saw the house just as it was the day they moved in. He didn’t take it well when the real estate lady suggested refinishing the floors, putting down beige carpet and painting everything white. He had made the decision all by himself that it was time to sell the house and for him to moving to assisted living. Still, the process of cleaning out the house was too painful for him to watch. He became ill and had to be hospitalized. I did what I had to do and the house got cleaned out and sold. My father moved to assisted living. And I grieved for a life that would never again be the same. And it wasn’t!

We sold the house we lived in since 1976 in 1992, as we built a wonderful new house on the water. The day I turned out the lights in that house, the memories flooded back. The new house was better in almost every way, but it wasn’t the same.

Professionally, I have had to deal with change as well. When I worked at Wroxeter-on-Severn School from 1978-1980, I felt I had finally arrived. The place was like working in a castle. My office had antique furniture, oriental rugs, a stained glass window overlooking the Severn River. But it wasn’t destined to last. By 1980, the school was gone; it ran out of money. Packing up my materials to go home was tough!

The items that went home with me from Wroxeter soon found their way to the new school four of us from Wroxeter founded in 1980. I worked at Chesapeake Academy from 1980 – 1989 and it became a major focus of my life. But in 1989, it was time to stop working there, so I packed up my things and took them home. The school is still a part of my life as a member of the board of trustees, but it will never be the same.

In 1989, I started Bay Media and worked from my home. Within five years, I knew the time had come to get real office space and hire employees. The challenges were many, but we persisted and stayed in the first location for six years. Our rented space was sold to a tile distributor who intended to gut our unit and use it for warehouse space. Walking out of that unit was tough, but it had to be done.

We moved to a new office location in a nice professional center. I debated at that time whether I really still needed office space or not. I decided that I still required it, so for another six years, to 2006, we maintained physical office space. But the way we do our business kept changing and by Spring of 2006 I was convinced that we needed to go virtual.

Tonight I went to my office for the last time. We worked all day yesterday cleaning up everything spic and span; we spackled nail holes and painted over the logo on the wall. It all went back to white paint. For the last two months, we have been moving stuff out of the office. Everything is out now and I can breathe a sign of relief. But I am grieving tonight because I know things will never be the same.

The promise of a virtual business is invigorating and exciting, but is anything but comfortable. Many changes await, and I know each day will hold new surprises and challenges. But I will do what I always have done – embrace the changes, enjoy them, and eventually grieve for them when it is time for the next change --- the next chapter awaits!

Lawn Furniture

2006-09-11T20:56:00.000-04:00

When I was very small, we had a glider and matching chairs. The set was made out of strips of white metal, with green trim. You could sit on the glider and move back and forth on a hot summer night. I used to love those evenings with my family on the front porch. The grownups told tales of the old days – often about World War II and what life was like. Sometimes I caught lightening bugs in a glass jar with hole punched in the top. Life was good!

In the back yard we had some wooden lawn furniture, but we seldom used it. In fact, I don’t remember ever using it. There were two Adirondack chairs stained dark red – probably to look like redwood. One day my mother told me I could paint them pink. I did, and the yard near the chairs was probably never the same.

When I was about nine my mother replaced the old glider with a fancy new one she bought at a warehouse sale. It had an aluminum frame and bright green vinyl cushions. It was definitely softer to stretch out on than the old one without cushions. I know sometimes when we had lots of houseguests she would bring the glider inside and fold the back down somehow and use it as an extra bed.

When we moved in 1958 we brought the glider with us, but got rid of the two old white metal chairs. My mother bought a round glass topped table with four matching wrought iron chairs. She also bought some of those fold up aluminum chairs with the straps that were all the range back then. We always kept a few of those chairs at the base of the driveway so we could sit out in the evening and talk with the next door neighbors. We also had an aluminum chaise lounge, but it and all the furniture lived on “the deck.” It was great having a deck all up in the trees, but it lacked the magic of the front porch at the old house.

The years went by and my mother bought a couple of really black wrought iron chairs. They went onto the deck and all of the aluminum fold up chairs went to the basement, eventually to be joined by some beach chairs (which my mother never would have bought, but probably won) which still grace my garage. We have never taken them to the beach because we always go to the beach on an airplane. Oh’ well!

Steve and I got married in 1969 and bought our own lawn furniture. We started out with two small aluminum chairs with green straps. In time, we added two r aluminum folding chairs with high backs, orange strapping, and a wooden handles. We bought a strapping repair kit. These served us well through our two years in Illinois and our five years in California, but while we were in California we were overcome by the urge to buy a redwood table and two bench seats. I think having a set like that was requisite to living in the state.

The lawn furniture moved with us to Maryland in 1976. The redwood table never really worked well on the screen in porch. The previous owners had used a spool from electrical cable for a table. We moved that monster to the yard, but it was hard to dispose of. Eventually, I decided to donate the redwood table to Chesapeake Academy for use in the summer program. By then it was 1983. I went to the local discount store and bought a square glass table with white vinyl trim. We kept our aluminum folding chairs for years afterwards until they finally rotted and I couldn’t remember what happened to the repair kit.

At some point along the way, they introduced stackable white plastic chairs. Of course, I had to have some, so I bought four and they looked with the glass topped table with the white vinyl trim. I had a hole in the center for an umbrella, but I didn’t bother with an umbrella because it would be sort of silly inside a screened porch.

In 1990, we built a big addition to the house and a deck. The screened in porch became a pantry and the white glass topped table went to the deck where it was joined by a smart new vinyl umbrella and about eight white plastic chairs. In addition, because my mother had died and my father was selling the house, I acquired their black wrought iron table and four chairs and their two black wrought iron chairs. The deck was full of furniture.

In 1992, when we built our new house, we ended up with lots of decks, two at the main level of the house and one great big one at the basement level. That is more deck than anyone could possibly need, but we have them now and I have to make the best of it.

We put my mother’s black wrought iron table and four chairs on the small deck off the kitchen. It was perfect for barbeque dinners with our son and his wife. It even worked OK with two very small children joined the family.

The old glass topped table with white vinyl went on the big deck off the family room, along with collection of white plastic stacking chairs and a white vinyl chaise lounger in failing health.

I told my husband I really wanted a glider. He surprised me with a wooden porch swing. It’s nice , but it is not a glider. My daughter-in-law bought me cushions for the porch swing and the chaise lounge. I bought a green topped container to keep them in and green cloth market umbrella for the table (since the blue vinyl one had long since gone to the dump infested with squirrel debris). In time the white chairs got really yucky, so they went to the lower deck and were stacked up for some future need – you never know! And we got high backed dark green ones instead. Not great with the glass topped table with white vinyl trim (maybe I should paint it, but Steve says that would “be a mistake.”)

The two good wrought iron chairs and matching table were set up on the lower deck where they began to rust after 16 years. Nobody ever sat on them except for few minutes now and then in all those years.

I bought two fold-up chairs with white plastic straps to go in the hot tub room in 1992. They are still there, looking new!

A few years ago, I spotted some chairs that folded up and slipped into a bag. Very clever, I thought, and immediately bought two. They were destined to become all the rage. Now you see them everywhere. We now own four, but the second pair are heavier with arms. Who needs arms? We take the lighter ones when we go to outdoor events.

Recently, I decided it was time to re-do our outdoor furniture. This time I was going to think the whole thing through and get some good stuff that was really “suitable” for the deck off the kitchen. I considered some lovely wooden furniture from the grocery store at a great price. I told my son and his wife about my plans. They reminded me that this furniture was likely made with wood from tropical rain forests. Jeez…that had not occurred to me. I would not want to personally be responsible for destroying the ozone layer. It is bad enough that I bought that redwood picnic table back in the 1970s.

The small round table on the deck off the kitchen was not big enough for four adults and two rapidly growing children. I went to a local store and bought a hexagonal table and chair for six. The chairs have nice beige cushions, so I had to buy a big bronze colored container to keep them in and a beige cloth market umbrella.

OK, so I did the one deck and it looks great in fashionable bronze and beige. The other big deck was still green themed. After all, it is OK to have different rooms in different colors, right! The same should be true of decks!

The lower deck became home to my mothers’ black wrought iron table and four chairs. It is starting to rust seriously (again – Steve repainted in once).

Over the next year or so I am anticipating having some more gatherings at my house and need the lower deck. My goal is now to get that deck and everything on it in shape.

So, all the white chairs went to dump. Steve said I could power wash them, but I tried and destroyed the finish. Besides the things chalk like crazy!

Now it seems that the last frontier is the wrought iron furniture. Clearly it has to be thrown away or painted. I considered getting rid of it; then I priced wrought iron furniture. I had Steve get some dark green paint and he has started the scraping and priming part of the process. Probably by the end of the fall it will all look great and can start rusting again with the winter snows.

So, now you have it – half a century of lawn furniture history and drama!

2006-09-01T18:40:00.000-04:00

I am waging a war on clutter, but with a tear in my eye. With every item I throw over the edge of the giant dumpster at the landfill, I throw away a memory. Every time I make a drop at the Salvation Army, I see the items I leave behind as they were when they were new and sparkling. At one point all of these things I am getting rid of I brought home with a promise. But time passes; tastes change; things break! You can’t keep it all… and remain sane.

Clutter has been a family curse and try as I might, I can’t break the curse. There was a time when I didn’t care, but now I care passionately. When I go, I don’t want those I leave behind to have to spend weeks and months of their lives going through my stuff. I have cleaned up after too many dead people to wish that on anyone. But at the same, time I want the stuff I need to go on living; the stuff that gives me warm fuzzy feelings and good memories; and, of course, the valuable stuff.

I recall when I was a kid that junk accumulated in certain places in the house. There was a large, large closet off the kitchen (not the pantry) where the grownups kept out of season clothes and other stuff they didn’t have a place for. About twice a year, they cleaned it out and gave clothes away – usually to the maid or sometimes to charity.

There was a basement with a dirt floor. It was scary down there and I didn’t go there often. They kept weird stuff down there – I remember a coal scuttle (though they didn’t use coal), some big flower containers like they used to use at funerals, lots of garden tools, wood scraps, bags of fertilizer and more.

The upstairs was divided into four parts, but the biggest room was my father’s office. He was an Amateur Radio Operator and had all sorts of equipment, including transmitters, receivers, microphones and more. He also kept all the back issues of Readers’ Digest and National Geographic.

My grandfather had an office on the front of the house, opposite my father;’s on the back side and a hallway connected them. The room my grandfather used was more in name only. I had a desk and his adding machine and a chair, but he seldom went up there. Mostly my mother and grandmother stashed stuff in that room.

The back porch, which actually was enclosed and had a row of narrow, vertical windows surrounding it, was another messy place. It was where we kept the washer, dryer, freezer and old refrigerator and my mother’s sewing machine. We also kept my grandfather’s chifferobe out there and it was filled with tools, a sprayer for DDT and small cans of paint.

When we moved in 1958, everything had to go. My mother was determined not to transfer any junk to the new house. My father set up a workshop downstairs in the basement, finished half the basement into a “rumpus room” (in Maryland called club basement), and set up my mother with her sewing machine in the rumpus room.

Gradually, the “rumpus room” wasn’t needed for “rumpuses” and became my mother’s sewing room. She bought a huge cabinet to store her patterns in. An old dresser was added to hold the other sewing supplies, and the closet under the stairs became filled with fabric. By the time of my mother’s death thirty years later, the room was overtaken by sewing supplies, etc. I had to get rid of it all. I can barely thread a needle.

On the other side of the wall, my father’s “shop” became more and more filled to capacity. He had laundry baskets full of vacuum tubes, lots of electronic equipment – some antique, some worthless and some valuable. But he also had lots of transmitters, resistors, and capacitors – all referred to by the female members of the family as “electronic doohickies.” Some of this stuff found its way into my husband's "shop."

When he sold the house the year after my mother died, everything had to go. That’s when I had to come in a do the really tough stuff and part with decades of memories. But I did what I had to do.

Meanwhile, of course, I had my own home and my own growing collection of stuff. I married an electronics engineer, so, of course, he had the requisite electronic “doohickies.”

When we first got married we had a small two-bedroom apartment. Steve used the second bedroom as a “shop.” I didn’t mind really – it was what I was accustomed to after all.

I guess there are men who don’t collect electronic parts, solder things together, or have boxes of wire. But my father did, my husband does and so does our son. Could it be genetic? But I digress!

When we moved to California in 1971, we bought a four bedroom house. Steve had one bedroom as his “shop” and since we had a garage, we managed to fill it with everything but our cars. When we moved to Maryland in 1976, we got rid of a lot of stuff, but the Air Force would move whatever we had, so it was simpler to hold onto stuff than to get rid of it.

Our Maryland house had only three bedrooms, but it had a full basement. There was a room my husband could use as an office and another large area where he could have a “shop.” The “shop” was where he did electronics and woodworking – not a great combination. We had grand designs to make the basement into something nice and even had several rooms down there that could be used for something. As it turned out, only one room really had much of a life as my office. When we moved out, however, we cleaned out the whole area and had it all redone. It looked great when we left it.

When we moved in 1992, we got rid of loads of stuff. I filled up the large family room with piles –keep, throw away and donate. What we kept, we moved into our new house and we were very selective about what we kept. And for a few years, we were winning the battle against clutter. We purposely went ahead and finished the basement so that it would be easier to keep it nice. Nice theory!

Now here we are in 2006, and the clutter is trying to win again. My husband has an office, an electronics shop and a workshop, plus a furnace room for stuff. They are all filled with stuff that I cannot throw away. I can’t because I promised him that I wouldn’t mess with his stuff. And for him these are precious items.

Meanwhile, I have decided to be totally ruthless with the “shared” areas of the house as well as my own personal spaces. My cleaning lady is my partner in crime. We cleaned out my closet and got rid of dozens of bags of worn out, out of style, non-fitting, or otherwise objectionable clothes, shoes and purses. We attacked the pantry, the large finished basement room, the basement storage room, my office, and various closets. I feel very virtuous, if not exhausted. At last I am winning over the clutter.

I do worry about the unabated clutter in areas of the house beyond my control. Will they somehow spill over into my newly liberated areas? Can I really expect to stop clutter creep? Not really, but I can hope!

My instinct used to be “save it – you might need it later.” Now my instinct is “trash it or give it away – later is too vague to mean anything to me.” If I need it later, I probably wouldn’t know where to find it anyway.

And I guess that brings me to the point, if there is one. Saving stuff only makes sense if you can find it when you need it. Clearly there is trash and trash should be thrown away. There is not going to be “better time” to get rid of trash. Some things should be kept because they are very special. Other things are useful for someone, but not for me –so they should be donated. And for those things that are useful – the useful time better be in the foreseeable future! Otherwise, out they go! Enough is enough!!!

Carpet

2006-08-08T07:51:00.000-04:00

Our house in Bush Hills, the one where I lived until I was 13, had rugs. I can’t remember them very well. One, I think, was green with pink flowers. When we moved, we got rid of all the rugs.

Our new house had wall to wall carpet in the living room and dining room. My mother picked out the color; it was soft beige – apparently very fashionable in 1958. But what way odd was that they put this wall to wall carpet over hard wood floors – beautiful, new hardwoods. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but then I was just a teenager. My father didn’t understand it either, but he went along with it.

Within twenty years, they had ripped up all the wall to wall carpet and replaced it with Karastan oriental style rugs. The floors were still in pretty good shape, preserved by the then ugly beige carpet. It would have been better to have someone come and work on them a bit more, but that didn’t happen until we sold the house after my mother died.

My mother bought a gray rug from the next doors neighbors at a garage sale about the time I was graduating from high school. For a few years, it lived in the guest room.

That gray carpet followed me to graduate school and into my bedroom. My roommate and I bought (for $35) this really strange brown and yellow rug for the living room. Our apartment had hardwood floors, and even in 1969 it was fashionable to cover them up, though not completely.

That gray rug finally was banished from my life when I was married and it went back to my mother’s house and back in the guest room where it lived until we sold my parents’ house decades later.

We began our married life in a small, two-bedroom apartment in Illinois. We had beige wall-to-wall carpet everywhere but the kitchen. That apartment, while fine for my husband by himself, was not fine for the two of us.

Within a few months, we had moved across town to a brand new apartment building. We had much more room and the carpet was much more fashionable. We had a choice of harvest gold or avocado green shag carpet. Green was our first choice and that dictated a decade of color decision-making for furniture and appliances and more.

Our house in California had avocado green shag carpet throughout, except in the family room where is had a flat weave green carpet. We replaced the carpet in two of the bedrooms with a gold flat weave carpet (similar to what is popular today), as we knew shag was on its way out.

Meanwhile, my parents mostly stayed out of the whole shag carpet thing, with the exception of my bedroom (which I had, of course, vacated). My mother, being very handy, put down aqua shag carpet tiles in there. It looked pretty good at the time (but not a pretty site when we had to take them out to sell the house).

When we moved to Maryland, the house we bought had green shag carpet in the living room. It was similar to what we had left behind in California. The bedrooms didn’t have any carpets in place, but the hardwood floors had all been stained very dark and didn’t look great. We replaced the bedroom carpet with ubiquitous beige. Soon the hallway carpet wore out and we replaced it with beige tweedy heavy duty carpet. The living shag was soon history, replaced with a soft green carpet.

When we sold the house in 1991, we replaced all the carpets (except the living room) with ubiquitous beige burbar, as recommended by the real estate people.

My father spent his last couple of years in a very nice senior high rise in Birmingham. The place was, you guessed it, carpeted with ubiquitous beige throughout. My father put one of their nice Karastan rugs in the living room on top of the beige carpet (what you do in senior housing when you have nice rugs to show). The other Karastans went to my basement – all rolled up.

When we moved into our new house a couple of years later, we put my parents’ Karastans in the living room and dining room, and their area rugs in the hallways. We bought stair runners and other area rugs in the same pattern (30 years later) and they matched perfectly.

It is now 14 years later and those rugs are still going strong with almost no signs of wear.

For the rest of the new house, we also selected Karastan because of its durability. The upstairs hallway of our house is hardwood floors, but the bedrooms are carpeted (I did not put hardwood floors under any place I intended for wall to wall carpet). We selected a palette of soft green, blue, and pink for the upstairs bedroom carpets. Each bedroom is a different color. For our master bedroom we have a light oatmeal sort of color that I have learned to regret because it spots easily.

In my home office, we got a nice gray dense, low weave wall to wall carpet that has worn like iron. I think it was also made by Karastan.

For the kitchen dining area we bought a specially cut trapezoidal shaped pink carpet with a light colored border. It looked great until the grandchildren came along. It got nastier and nastier until it was retired. It was Karastan and great, but it could only take so much. Now (and it will be that way until the grandchildren are grown) there is no carpet under the kitchen table.

In the family room we had a matching pink Karastan rug in place. After about ten years I got to the point where it was too spotted to go on living, so off it went to the dump. At about that same time, I had moved from one office to another and had a nice similarly sized Karastan blue carpet as surplus. That one went right into the family room and still looks decent today.

For the basement family room we opted for a gray good quality Karastan wall to wall. It is still in reasonably good condition, despite some rough treatment. My goal is to shampoo it and hope that it is good for another five years or so.

I don’t know what carpet adventures await me in the rest of my life. But if I ever have to leave this house for senior living I suspect I will take at least one Karastan oriental with me to put over the ubiquitous beige wall to wall carpet that will surely be there awaiting me.

Weight

2006-07-28T08:05:00.000-04:00

OK, here is it comes. I am tackling the BIG one!

I guess I have always been fat. Looking back at pictures of me as a baby I had fat little cheeks. My body wasn’t huge or anything like that, but my face was round and puffy. Some things never change – they just get bigger.

I grew up in the South and had a steady diet of wonderful food, most of which is now banned in polite circles. If you could fry it, we fried it! Or, we saturated it in gravy. And salt was almost one of the three food groups. Salad was iceberg lettuce with tomatoes (which I hated). We did have some healthy foods too – fresh tree-ripened fruits and wonderful melons; fresh peas, beans and squash. And there were always plenty of wonderful pies and cakes. My mother was a fantastic cook and quite the hostess, and people raved about her recipes.

My grandmother was the traditional Southern cook. She could fry incredible chicken and her green beans seasoned with fatback were amazing. What I particularly loved (and have never really been able to replicate) is her fried corn.

Most of my childhood, I enjoyed food, except for a brief period when I was about three, when for some reason I decided that I was not going to eat in front of my father. My parents told me that if I didn’t eat I would have to put on my little white shorts and my little white shirt and go to the hospital. They kept them in the bottom of my dresser. After a few weeks, I relented. And I haven’t stopped.

About the time I was 14 I realized I was FAT. My mother grew concerned about my weight. Now, looking back at the photos from that time, I really wasn’t fat at all. I probably weighed 130 pounds, but you were supposed to have a waist like Scarlett O’Hara and I never have – ever. Of course Scarlett got all laced up in a corset.

In typical teenage fashion, I ignored my mother’s warnings and ate whatever I pleased.
And it wasn’t hard because we had great food. And although I played tennis every day, I usually followed this vigorous exercise with a cherry turnover topped with an incredible sweet buttery sauce (the specialty of a local coffee shop).

My mother, who had a small weight problem herself, managed to buy some cans of Metrecal powder from the man down the street who was a hospital administrator. She bought several cases of the stuff. I don’t think I have tasted anything more blah than this mixture. It sounded good – just 900 calories a day. But the boredom was incredible! We kept it around in case of World War III. Some people had a fallout shelter; we had about 40 cans of Metrecal and some Clorox jugs full of water in the laundry room.

By the time I graduated from high school I was pushing 150 pounds. My mother, in desperation, took me to the doctor. No way was I going off to college being FAT! The pediatrician gave me the “cure” – the same “cure” that thousands of teenage girls all over the US were given. Diet pills (now known as amphetamines) were all the rage. One little green and yellow pill and you didn’t want to eat. Of course, you talked a mile and minute and actually fooled yourself into believing that you could focus.

But, the summer of 1964, I lost a whopping 27 pounds and I was off to college looking good at the magical weight of 125. That summer I ate the grapefruit diet. I had half a grapefruit every morning, plus one piece of bacon well-drained and an egg fried in a Teflon skillet. Mid-morning I ate 7 dry soda crackers. For lunch I had a hamburger patty and a salad. In the afternoon I had a small cup of lime sherbet. For dinner I ate what other people ate, but severely limited my portions and no bread or dessert. As diets go, it wasn’t awful.

The first year and half at college I took the diet pills regularly, though some days I took them in the afternoon, instead of the morning and found I could stay up late and study. Of course, every other slightly pudgy girl in the dorm was doing the same thing. I watched in horror as a few friends became addicted to the pills. Soon I discovered that I was feeling lousy, so I threw the pills out and vowed that I would never take them again – no matter what any doctor told me to do!

Of course, I promptly gained 20 pounds and by the time I graduated from college I was about the same weight as when I graduated from high school. What put the weight on was the “machines.” There were soft drinks in small paper cups with ice, candy bars and cheese crackers. It was in college that I discovered the combination of chocolate and peanut butter and its addictive properties.

The year of graduate school I ate OK and lost some weight again, and by the time I married I weighed an acceptable 135 pounds – still FAT, mind you, but not all THAT fat!

Within a couple of years our son came along and I gained about 20 pounds. I jokingly say that he is 34 now and I am still carrying the baby weight. I know it is bad joke, but at least party true. I did lose some of it -- for a while.

By the time we moved to Maryland I weighed 145 – respectable for a 30 year old, but still FAT. Soon 145 had crept up to 155 and then to about 160. I think it might have been wafer bars with chocolate and peanut butter that did it. Another factor was my mother’s heart attack in 1977. I stayed in a Birmingham hospital day and night, subsisting on nothing but machine food (i.e. sodas, crackers, candy bars). Fortunately, my mother recovered, but my weight was another matter.

My mother made most of my clothes from the time I was a baby until I was in my thirties. She would measure me and just make them bigger. She would, of course, lecture me each time that the waist had to be a bit bigger, but I wasn’t listening. After she died in 1988, I was forced to encounter the real "Women's World" section of the department store and began to appreciate outlet shopping as a way of life.

But then along came Atkins. I had found my perfect diet. I could eat fried food, fatty steaks, pork rinds and whipped cream. I loved the diet, felt great and lost about 18 pounds. Then it stopped working. Or may I just fizzled out with it. You can just eat so much whipped cream.

Next I tried a weight loss system where they provided all your food. Every week I had to go blow into a machine and they would be able to tell if I had cheated. I hated the food, and though I lost some weight I couldn’t stick with it. In time, I regained what I had lost and more.

Then I tried Weight Watchers and even a special program for people with 50 or more pounds to lose. It worked for a while, but I lost interest. Something came along to jar me back into my normal eating mode. I still have a file drawer of coupons which I am sure are of no value now.

After that I got really busy with my business and resolved that being FAT was OK – at least for now. But from time to time I would try Atkins again, or pick up a fad diet book at the bookstore. I would try a new diet and it would work for a bit, but then I couldn’t stand it anymore. Meanwhile, my weight kept going up, with the occasional downward dip.

A few years ago I bought some motivational CDs that are designed to help you relax and while you are relaxing the tapes sooth your soul with building a new, not overweight persona. These actually do seem to help! But you have to listen to them!

Over the years I have consulted professionals with expertise in this area. They all say the same thing – eat a balanced diet and the weight will come off.

So, finally, as my 60th birthday approached, I realized that this was going to have to be a watershed day in my life. I used to think 60 was old, but, of course – no longer! I want to live another 20 or 30 years and I want my quality of life to be good up until the day I go. Probably an unrealistic dream, but…

The day after my 60th birthday I told myself – “Self, you are running out of changes. You know how to eat right. Start doing it. Don’t try to play mind games and rationalizations. It is no use. Just eat the right stuff. If you don’t do this, you are going to die too soon!”

So far I am about 6 weeks into my plan, and I have lost about 12 pounds. And I feel better than I have felt in years. I am sleeping through the night without any sleeping pills. But more importantly, I am happy. Yes, I am definitely losing weight and this time it might just work. The main reason it might just work is that I have literally changed the way I think about food and it was amazingly easy.

I know you are trying to track through this and figure out how much I weigh right now. Don’t bother; I am not going to tell you. The only way you can find that out is read my driver’s license and add 5 pounds.

Check back next week for a summary of my diet and an update on my progress.

Phones

2006-07-16T07:47:00.000-04:00

When I was about four they taught me my phone number; it was 6-6130. The phone was heavy, black, sort of a square shape, with a very heavy receiver. It belonged to Southern Bell (aka The Phone Company). My mother taught me how to dial the numbers and it took a lot of effort to get my small fingers to move the dial. It made a clicking sound when you let go of it. In time, if I listened carefully as my mother dialed the phone I could tell who she was calling by the number of clicks.

I don’t recall that my grandparents, who lived with us, used the phone very much. My mother mostly managed the telephone. It lived on a small stand in the hallway between the bedrooms. I still have the stand; it sits in my entrance hall today with the silk flowers in a vase and a pair of porcelain doves I got as a wedding present.

When my mother used the phone, I didn’t like it because she would talk and talk. I was supposed to stay there with her while she was on the phone and read books. There was book shelf right next to the phone and if she got on a really long call I would pull all the books off the shelf and amuse myself by rearranging them (sometimes failing to put them back).

My father seldom initiated phone calls. When he did answer the phone (usually after it was passed to him by my mother), he responded with something that sounded like “Harry.” I wondered why he only spoke on the phone to my Uncle Harry, until I learned that he was actually saying “alright.” I guess he meant – OK, so you have me on the phone, ALRIGHT, tell me why you called.

When I was in elementary school, they changed our phone number to State-5-6130. That meant, we had to dial St5-6130. Everyone complained about it a lot--- just one more thing to remember. You could tell by your exchange where you lived. My father had a Fairfax for his work number. Our friends who lived “over the mountain” all had numbers that started with Tremont.

We did eventually move “over the mountain” ourselves, back in 1958. In the language of Birmingham, “over the mountain” means on Shades Mountain and points south, rather than within the confines of Jones Valley, as defined by Red Mountain. The move back then to “over the mountain” meant you had arrived.

So with our move, we got our Tremont exchange, and our number was Tremont 9-2215. After a couple of years, however, they ran out of Tremont numbers and gave us a new number – Valley-2-3003. My mother was not too happy about this; I think she always liked the old Tremont number better, but life goes on. Eventually, the phone company dropped the use of letters and our number became 822-3003.

Along with our move “over the mountain” came a new kind of telephone. In fact, we actually had FOUR telephones in our new house and each one was a different color. We had a beige phone in the family room and yellow wall phone in the kitchen. Down in the basement we had black wall mounted phone in the laundry room. My parents had pale blue phone between their twin beds. All of the phones were rotary, very heavy, and belonged to the phone company.

List most teenagers in my acquaintance, I mostly used the laundry room phone. There was more privacy that way. The laundry room was just off what we called the “rumpus room.” Today this room might be referred to as a “club room.” The idea was that the homeowner would finish off part of the basement to be extra space to be used for casual entertaining (aka place for teenage kids to hang out without damaging the good furniture).

It wasn’t long, however, before I wanted my own phone. My Daddy ran a wire into my bedroom and hooked up an old phone he had in his collection of used “stuff.” This one was VERY old and sort of round shaped. The dial made a loud noise and the receiver was quite heavy. While it was, of course, originally black, my mother painted it gold. It somehow went with the gold trim on the furniture that she had painted white. In those days it was fashionable for teenage girls to have French Provencial furniture. Rather than splurge for all new furniture, my mother simply painted their old mahogany furniture.

My father also decided he wanted a phone in his basement workshop, so he installed one. It was a conventional looking phone in basic black, but it had a red hand set. He liked red a lot, so why not.

I don’t think the phone company ever knew about those two phones (mine and his), but eventually it became a moot point when it became OK to add your own phones.

We never did have “Princess” or “Slim-Line” phones – not in our family. Some of my friends had them, but “we” didn’t like them because they were too light and silly looking. A phone, should, after all, look like a phone and not be so light that if you pulled the receiver cord too hard you pulled the phone onto the floor. But, we were sort of unusual in our taste for big clunky phones.

Sometime when I was still a teenager, we started having area codes. Now our phone number of 205-822-3003, but we didn’t have to use the 205 except when dialing from out of state. Just one more number to remember!

When I was in college, we didn’t have phones in our dorm rooms. Instead there were a couple of phones on each floor and another in the sorority chapter room. For that reason, we didn’t talk on the phone very much. When you got a phone call in the dorm, someone to answer the phone and come get you.

When Steve and I got married, we opted for one phone in the kitchen and another in the bedroom. We kept up with this arrangement up until we built our new house in 1992. From our apartment in Illinois, to our house in California, to our house in Maryland, we had a yellow wall phone in the kitchen and white phone in the bedroom. But when we moved to Maryland in 1976, we upgraded to touch-tone.

When we moved to Severna Park, we were given a 544 number. Soon I learned that the 544 number would forever brand us as newcomers. Real oldtime Severna Park people have 647 numbers. But, in time, 544 became more socially acceptable. Other new numbers that nobody ever heard of were assigned to the latest influx of newcomers.

Knowing the value of the 647 exchange, when I set up the phone service for Chesapeake Academy, I asked for a 647 number; ditto for Bay Media, Next Wave Group, and FacetsWoman. Our fax number is a 544, but some things in life you have to just live with.

We got our first answering machine sometime in the 80s I guess. At first I swore I would never have one, but in time I gave in. Now, of course, everybody has them and they have become a way of life.

But in 1992, when we built our own house, we included a phone system. We have phones all over the house – the kitchen and master bedroom, of course, plus all the other bedrooms, the laundry room, and both of our offices. We even have phone jacks on both of our decks. Although we moved from Severna Park to Arnold, we stayed in the same phone exchange and and did not have to give up our old 544 number, which we have had since 1976.

In 1996, when I set up my office, we bought a multi-line phone system. We have about 15 instruments spread throughout the offices. It is an OK system, though it seems to be vulnerable to losing its programming during power outages.

I got my first cellular phone at a Chamber of Commerce raffle in the early 90s. It was a “bag phone” about the size of shoe box. It plugged into the car’s cigarette lighter. I thought I was “hot stuff.” The phone was “free,” but the service wasn’t. I found myself with a monthly bill to Cellular One. Sure, it was the poor woman’s cell phone because it wasn’t actually wired into the car, but it was a big help and gave me great comfort. I was glad I had it the day my car’s timing chain went out at the entrance to the 14th Street Bridge in DC.

The bag phone eventually gave way to the “flip-phone.” It was large and gray and clunky, but so much better than the bag phone. I could actually fit into a large purse.

But eventually it died, and I got a Nokia stick phone. I never liked it as much and I was glad when I could upgrade to a Star Tac flip style phone. Sadly I lost that one out of my purse when I fell in the snow. I ended up with a Motorola stick phone – the cheapest thing I could get at the time because I was so angry with myself for losing the cute little Star Tac. In time, however, the batteries started fail, so I started looking for a new option about a a year and half-ago.

My current phone is a Palm Treo 650. I love it! Of course, it was so much more than a phone and that makes it all the better.

I see yet another phone revolution in my future. Our son is doing VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) consulting and is going to help me set up a VOIP system for my business. I imagine in time we will have a similar system for our home. But one step at a time!

Cleaning Products

2006-07-04T21:10:00.000-04:00

I noticed recently that our dishwasher was developing a bit of mildew and I was not happy about washing dishes in it. In response to my complaints, my husband (being a husband) did not suggest new dishwasher; instead he recommended using Lysol to clean it. So we bought a bottle of old fashioned Lysol and ran it through the dishwasher. No doubt it killed any germ that might be lurking in there. But, of course, the house smelled of Lysol.

Steve said the smell reminded him of his childhood. His mother apparently used to be regular used of Lysol. It reminded me of my childhood too. My grandmother used to soak her flower bulbs in it. For both of us it was a very familiar smell. He found it nostalgic; I can’t say that would be how I would describe it. Actually, it really reminded me of the dog pound.

The other day I bought product that is supposed to clean the shower automatically. All you do is put the dispenser in the shower and the last person of the morning pushes a button; the thing beeps for 15 seconds; it then starts squirting liquid all over the shower. I am optimistic that it will work, but it will be another week before I know for sure. My husband, on the other hand, is skeptical. He is a big believer in the old fashioned scrub brushes. I lack his enthusiasm for scrub brushes; they make my hands hurt and I don’t do well on my knees or on ladders. Most things that need scrubbing are in inconvenient places.

All of this got me to thinking about how cleaning products have changed in my lifetime. When my mother and grandmother did their Spring cleaning they relied on Tide in the bathtub for the Venetian blinds; they used Johnson’s Paste Wax on the hardwood floors; they used Glasswax on the windows; they used ammonia or bleach to clean nasty places, but never mixed ammonia with bleach. They scrubbed the sink with Ajax powdered cleanser. They had liquid wax for the furniture. Nothing seemed to come in a spray bottle, much less a spray can. Cleaning was a BIG deal and there seemed to be no short cuts.

I remember when Pledge spray wax came out. My role in the past, when it came to cleaning, was to dust. They were always wanting me to dust. When Pledge came along suddenly waxing was within the scope of my duties. Did I feel powerful or what?

The Glass Wax soon gave way to Windex. Along came 409 and Mr. Clean and a parade of specialized cleaners to make the life of the housewife much easier. By the time I was young and married, I had a whole new arsenal of cleaning products to choose from.

I guess we all have our favorite cleaners. Personally, I like Dow Bathroom Cleaner. For years I have used it in the bathroom, of course, but also in the kitchen. I have discovered that it will clean smoker residue off furniture, as well as layers of old wax (or a mixture of the two).

Regardless of the cleaning products, cleaning is simply hard work. Maybe we don’t have it as rough as our mothers and grandmothers, but we don’t have as much time to clean either. We working women are continually trying to squeeze in cleaning between everything else. All the new products we have make it quicker and easier than in the past. Is our cleaning as deep and effective as the way past generations did it? I don’t think most of us even come close. When you have cleaned a window with Glass Wax (they still make it), that window is CLEAN. I think that is true of most of the old labor intensive products. They were time-consuming to use, but they did a great job!!!

Books

2006-06-27T06:43:00.000-04:00

When I was a very little kid, I used to amuse myself when my mother was on the telephone in the hallway (in those days the phone was a stand in the hallway) by rearranging all the books on the bookshelf, also in the hallway. Well, perhaps rearranging the books is not exactly correct. My mother said I like to pull them out, but didn’t do so well at putting them away.

I used to collect the Bobbsey Twins books. I think I probably had about 30 of them when I moved on to harder books. My poor mother had a hard time finding some library to take them when I no longer wanted them. Kids loved them, but I guess they are not considered fine children’s literature.

In my public school, books were included in the deal. Mercifully, I was not given the option of retaining my elementary and high school texts. I did manage, some years later, to get a copy of Dick and Jane, my first reader. Later, when I was a student teacher, I managed to acquire a copy of English Grammar and Composition – the 12th grade edition (the one that has EVERYTHING in it).

College textbooks were easily sold for the first couple of years, but as I got closer and closer to graduation and the books became more relevant, it seemed more important to keep them. I still HAVE them. Not that they are good for much anymore.

Graduate school texts – well, you never get rid of those, right?

Meanwhile, while I have been accumulating textbooks, the whole world has changed. It used to be necessary to hold information close to you, just in case you needed it.—even if it was outdated. Now, it is easy to find information just when you need it. So, why do I have all these old textbooks, mostly written by dead people?

Then there are the paperbooks. You pay good money for them, so why get rid of them? Well, at some point you know you have read them and will likely never read them again. I do manage to get rid of many of mine, but my husband never has, to my knowledge, parted with a single one. In his case, maybe it is excusable, as he often re-reads them.

This week, I have been thinking about books a lot. I just seem to collect them. I don’t really mean to. It just happens. I attend luncheons and conferences and authors speak. They autograph their books, and I buy one almost every time. Who could resist?

Then there are the medical reference books. True, they have come in handy over the years. I don’t know why I have a small shelf filled with them. Pre-Internet I had to deal with the prolonged deaths of both of my parents. I was hungry for information. So as a result I know more about obsolete treatments for lung cancer and heart failure than the average person.

Costco is a dangerous place for a book lover. They have all of these great books at very cheap prices. They have the latest and greatest in hardback that can easily slip into the cart next to the Feta cheese, underwear and towels.

Regardless of the reason, I have a lot of books – too many books! I should have been going to the library all these years. After all, I am trained as a librarian and worked as one for twenty years. You would think I would get the idea! Sure, sometimes I do actually go to the library, but not often enough. You see, all the books that somehow make their way into my life are there waiting in patiently in line to be read. I wouldn’t dare introduce a borrowed book to jump in line ahead of them all.

I did get behind on my reading. It has to do with eyeglasses. If you can’t focus on type, you can’t read books. It is that simple. It turns out that I am a polycarbonate non-adapt. That means that the expensive polycarbonate lens I spent good money on (because they are supposed to be better than plastic or glass) don’t work for my eyes. Now I have plastic lenses and can see again. That means I can read books again!

But, now what to do with all those books! I am going to give a bunch away. Maybe I will give them to the Rotary club to send to people all over the world. Sometimes I wonder what the people in Senegal really will do with my old psychology text from 1965. But maybe some person hungry for knowledge will dwell on every word and this book will change that person’s life. It gives me comfort to think that anyway!

Freckles

2006-06-20T23:53:00.000-04:00

I first knew something was different about me when I was very small – maybe about three years old. We would go to Florida and I was not allowed to go to the beach between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. – EVER, even if it was cloudy.

My mother said that I “fair skin” just like my grandmother. My grandmother DID have very light skin and she didn’t seem to have any freckles – at least none that I noticed. She was born in 1890 and must have spent many hours wearing a sun bonnet and long sleeves. She said she used buttermilk on her skin to keep it pretty and white.

By the time I was full-fledged kid about 8 years old, I had freckles all over my arms, face and legs. I somehow thought if I used suntan lotion the freckles would magically run together and turn tan and I would be “normal.” Alas, it never happened! I would use suntan lotion and wait for the tan. Instead, I got sunburn. I discovered Noxema at a very tender age, later followed by Solarcaine. It was clear to me that I was condemned to a life a freckles, while all of my friends were turning gloriously tan.

As a teenager, I really started to hate my freckles. My friends were sunbathing and I wasn’t. I simply couldn’t without blistering. There was no sunscreen, just suntan lotion and it didn’t do anything much for me. The only thing for me to do was to stay out of bright sunlight for extended periods.

Then along came a miracle product—QT. All you had to do was to smear this stuff over your body and presto, you turned a golden tan. From a freckled kid who couldn’t tan, this stuff seemed like a miracle. But then I tried it and found that I was left with orange streaks that made me look really strange. It took a few weeks for them to fade and I swore – never again.

At about age 20, I was a Girl Scout camp counselor in southwestern Georgia. One camp director decreed that we would lead the kids on a “forced march” of about 7 miles over red clay back roads. The camp director euphemistically called it an “endurance hike” and there was no escaping it. The chosen day was 97 degrees in the shade. We staff members begged the camp director to cancel the hike, but she was determined. Some little girls passed out and were close to heat stroke. It was a nightmare, but I made it to the end. The back of my neck was SO sunburned that big water blisters lined the back of neck from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. My recovery took days and I could only wear a white T-shirt to reduce the risk of infection. I know if I ever get skin cancer that will be the place.

Steve and I took our honeymoon in 1969 to Puerto Rico and we even took a flight over to St. Thomas. Steve’s mother, who has always been knowledgeable in health matters, told me to buy a product called “sunscreen.” It had a magic ingredient called PABA. I did and it worked – this was the miracle I had been waiting for all my life.

I had long since given up on the idea of being tan. I just didn’t want to get sunburned – not because I was afraid of skin cancer. I just didn’t like being sunburned – it hurt and was messy!

Between sunscreen and care to stay out of the sun I managed to avoid sunburn for a couple of decades. In one weak moment, I was talked into using some “quick tanner.” They SAID it was different from the stuff when I was teenager. It would not turn me orange. Well, of course, it DID turn me orange and it looked awful. I felt really stupid and vowed “never again.”

At this point, I have resolved that I will never be tan. There is nothing that can change that. It was so nice to be in Scotland among lots of people with skin just like mine.

Last year, we took the grandchildren to an amusement part in Pennsylvania. We took a boat ride with a young black girl about ten years old. She was very chatty and told me with great excitement about her trip thus far. But I could see she was staring at me. Finally, her curiosity got the better of her and she asked, “What are all those spots all over your arms?” I tried to explain about my ancestors from Scotland and “fair skin.” She smiled and nodded and was clearly still puzzled.

Not too long ago, I met some ladies who had gone to a store in Ocean City, Maryland and had their full bodies spray painted. The indignity of it all won out over the temptation . But I have a feeling if I were spray painted “tan” I would look downright strange and no doubt, orange! But it is an interesting thought!

This weekend we took the grandchildren whale watching off Cape May, New Jersey. The boat was to leave at 1 p.m. We joined the other tourists on the uncovered top deck with the best view. I came prepared with sunscreen and lathered us all up with the stuff, especially the back of my neck. But after about five minutes, I couldn’t take it anymore and went below. The others soon followed. In my old age, I know discretion is the better part of valor.

At age 60, I am freckled and that is just the way it is going to be. I know that I am more vulnerable to skin cancer than the average person. I no doubt look my age, but I really don’t have a lot of wrinkles and my skin is in decent shape. I don’t get freckles on my face anymore—just mostly on my arms. I imagine this is because I wear foundation that blocks the sun enough to withstand regular activities.

These days they tell people not to suntan, and to always use sunscreen. Pale and pasty is still not “in,” but I don’t care. I am what I am, and I have learned to love my own skin. It is the only skin I will ever get, so I might as well be content with it.

Chicken

2006-06-12T23:17:00.000-04:00

Growing up in the South, chicken was mainstay of our diet. My grandmother could fry a chicken like nobody else, not even my mother, and certainly not me – not even using the same skillet and following her directions fifty years later. I think bacon grease was the key ingredient. We always kept a jar of bacon grease next to the stove and used in liberally for frying, supplemented by Crisco. Nobody thought about cholesterol. Bacon grease was perfect in green beans, although fatback is the more conventional artery clogging choice.

My grandmother died at 67 of a massive heart attack; my grandfather had “hardening of the arteries” and died at 86. Hmmmh….could there be a connection?

Of course, I loved fried chicken and I even hummed when I ate it, I loved it so much. I always had the drumsticks – that was my right as an only child. My grandmother or mother always cut up our chickens and did it a certain way so that there was a “pulley bone.” It as a pulley bone because played a game with it before eating it. One person pulled on one side of it and the other person (preferably a visiting kid, but an indulgent aunt would do) pulled on the other side of it. The person who got the longest section “won” and your wish was to come true. Now, of course, the pulley bone is just part of the breast unless you buy your own whole chicken and cut it up.

In those days, chickens didn’t have huge breasts. The white meat was moist and tasty. But compare that with today’s average “D-cup” size chicken. No doubt all the hormones they are pumping into chickens enlarge their breasts while doing a number on the taste, not to mention the nutrition.

Thinking of chicken parts, always brings to mind my sorority sister, Sally (not her real name), at Auburn University. She is a wonderful person, successful, bright and articulate. But, apparently she grew up without any personal acquaintance with chickens. One day I was working as a graduate assistant in the Curriculum Lab (educationese for library) and in came Sally looking quite distressed. She had just been kicked out of elementary school art and told not to come back to class until she had seen a chicken. Obviously, it was far easier to go up one flight of stairs and ask to see a picture of a chicken than it was to seek out a live one – even when attending an agricultural college (i.e. cow college). Sally explained that the assignment was to draw a picture of a chicken and she had drawn one with four legs. I patiently explained that chickens had two legs. Sally questioned that, “they have the long legs in the back and the short legs in the front, right?” In some parts of the South, drumsticks are referred to as “long legs” and thighs are referred to as “short legs.” Sally got no end of good natured ribbing and a few weeks later we happened to be out in the country and actually sought out a real-live two legged chicken for her inspection.

So much for fried chicken – let’s go on to other popular preparations. Sometimes my mother smothered chicken. You coated it with flour, added some water and butter, and put it in a heavy deep skillet in the oven. Another favorite was chicken and dumplings (reserved for special occasions because the dumplings were so much work). Sometimes we had chicken pie – vegetables, just chicken and pastry – yum! Sometimes we barbequed it (but never on Sunday). Roast chicken was a Sunday treat.

My mother loved to make chicken tetrazini (and frankly, so do I) because it is a great party dish. Whenever she made it, she made a second casserole which she froze. That way we had an extra dinner for some night when there was no time to cook. When she had her heart attack (yes, she had one too at age 59 and survived), she was in ICU and insisting that my father and I go home and heat up chicken tetrazini from the freezer. We would have been just as happy with 2 couple of Reeses and Coke from the machines, but we went home and dutifully ate our chicken “tet” (as we called it).

I remember going to Marshall Durbin with my mother and grandmother to buy chickens. They only sold chickens and it was widely believed that they had the best chickens in Birmingham. For my grandmother, shopping at the chicken store (I guess it would be properly called a poulterer) was a luxury. She used to tell of her days on the farm growing up and she had to kill the chicken in order to have it for dinner. They used to pick up the poor chicken and spin it around by its head, effectively “wringing its neck.” I have no idea how they kill chickens today at the processing plants, but wringing seems unusually cruel.

My father apparently went through a stage of wanting to “raise chickens. “ This was in the late 1930s I think. I can’t imagine what possessed him to do this. From what I hear, however, this was a fantasy many men shared in that time frame – perhaps an urge for a simpler life. From what I hear, the chicken raising didn’t last very long or involve many chickens. By the time I was born in 1946 there were no chickens and there wasn’t a lot of conversation about growing them either. I don’t think it turned out to be nearly as much fun and it was rumored to be.

At any rate, here it is 2006 and I had chicken for dinner. I bought it pre-roasted at Costco, along with a new tea kettle, plastic bags, vitamins and supplies for the office drink machine. Pre-roasted chicken isn’t bad; Steve will actually eat it and not complain and it lasts for a couple of meals. Of course, the best part is the part I am not supposed to enjoy – the skin.

That’s the thing—you are just supposed to eat the white meat; and if it is dry and tough, so much the better. In fact, lots of people buy their chickens in little frozen blobs of breast meat and when you cook it on the George Forman grill it has absolutely no obnoxious fat.

I don’t have fried chicken often, and when I do I feel positively decadent. Of course, I don’t save bacon grease and I don’t keep shortening, so I have to use Canola oil. It isn’t quite as tasty, but it is tasty enough to remind me of another time. And if I fry some okra along with it and maybe even fry some corn, I can pretend it is 1954 and Sunday dinner.

Garden Hoses

2006-06-09T07:51:00.000-04:00

I grew up calling a garden hose a hose pipe. My husband thought it was a very strange and redundant way to refer to a simple hose. Obviously, hose pipe was a term that evolved. I can just imagine a time when there was no such thing as a garden hose. There must have been pipes for watering flowers. Then someone came along with a flexible rubber tube and the hose pipe was born. There is probably some relation with hosiery, but I am not going to go there.

My grandmother used to water her flowers every night and she let me help her. She showed me how to use my thumb to intensify the spray. Sometimes she used a nozzle. She would set it so that the water would spray out in a fine mist over all of her flowers. I don’t remember watering the grass very often, and there was no such thing as a lawn sprinkler. Somehow the grass did OK, content with rainwater.

We used to use the hose to fill the plastic wading pool, but the one thing I simply was forbidden to do was to drink from the hose. Somehow there was a connection between polio and drinking from the hose. Some of my more raucous little friends did sneak and drink from the hose, and fortunately they didn’t get polio. Of course, I was an obedient child and didn’t drink from the hose. I must confess, however, that I sometimes did enjoy a squirt from a water gun (which has been filled by the hose), applied directly to the mouth. Nobody seemed to notice. All of this became moot once the Salk vaccine hit the streets. From a kid’s view this meant – finally we can drink from the hose.

When I was a teenager, we moved to the suburbs and we got a big lawn. The big lawn required a sprinkler. We had one the kind that flipped-flopped back and forth; the kind you could easily dash through to get to the mailbox if you were fast. We had a special faucet at our house that allowed us to get high pressure. Apparently the faucet was somehow hooked up directly to the water line. My father would use it to wash down the driveway and the sidewalk, as with that big lawn came lots of pine needles.

There was a decade in which hoses were irrelevant to my life. I was in college and as a young married couple we lived in an apartment.

We moved to California in 1971 and got a sudden immersion all things related to watering. Our first home was in Highland, California, near San Bernardino. Without imported water the place would look like a desert. There were months on end without any rain. Some folks gave up and paved their front yards and painted them green; others opted for the Astro-turf effect. Our house, fortunately, came with built in sprinklers in the front yard, but the back required constant watering. Our sprinkler heads were “Rainbirds.” People in the know bought Rainbirds because they were high quality and wo rked great. The sprinklers were not everywhere they needed to be, so watering was a daily necessity for most of the year. Of course, brush fires are a way of life in Southern California. I recall once using the hose to soak our wooden fence and the wooden shingles on our roof, as a fire endangered us.

When we got to Maryland in 1976, our new house didn’t have any sprinklers built in. We found a Rainbird unit we could mount on a garden hose and endured 16 years of occasional watering when the rain was not sufficient. Mostly we didn’t do much with our hoses in those years. We would spritz off the porch or carport floor sometimes or wash the spiders off the house.

Thirteen years ago, we built a new house and we installed a sprinkler system. Yes, we used Rainbird heads. This sprinkler system is tied in with home automation unit. We can set the sprinklers to go on at a certain time every day, but there’s more! We can turn them on remotely from anywhere using a phone. Not that we ever do, but it is nice to have that capability I guess.

We put a hot tub room in the basement of our house. At first it was great! I had the room filled with lush plants and watered them using a hose with a spray gun attachment. Yes, we designed the room so that it used outdoor materials, so getting the walls wet is not a problem. Of course, the hot tub broke and is now on Steve’s to do list. The plants that didn’t die, got moved upstairs and the hose sits idle in its custom designed box.

This house came complete with lots of decks and they seem to always need cleaning. Just washing them off with the hose won’t cut it. We must power wash them. For years Steve insisted on doing all the power washing, but eventually I got impatient and asked him to teach me how to do it. Of course, now he has opened Pandora’s box.

I have to say I get a charge out of power-washing. I feel like an avenging angel setting the world right. Step by step I make the decks look brand new again. The power is great. Now if I could only have enough strength in my hands to connect the hose tightly enough so that it won’t drip all over the place.

A Smoker's Tale

2006-05-30T22:09:00.000-04:00

Both of my parents smoked, and as a child growing up I didn’t think much about it. Many grownups smoked – in fact, most grown-ups, who weren’t really old, smoked. My mother smoked Winstons and my dad smoked Kents. My mother drank a lot of Cokes and the combination of a Coke and a cigarette punctuated the completion of each major task. For both my parents, the morning started with a cigarette and ended with a cigarette. From the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, to a barrage of TV tobacco commercials, to magazines with pages filled with cigarette ads, cigarettes were part of our culture and a part of my daily life. I couldn’t smell it; it was around me all the time.

I went through a period when I was an adolescent when I thought smoking was a disgusting habit and I vowed I would never do it. But vows are easily broken when the pressures of teenage life kick in. About the time I was a junior in high school, I noticed that the “cool kids” smoked. And, being a normal teenage girl, I longed to be “cool.” Soon the pressure mounted and the temptation was just too much. One night when my parents were away, I tried it. I coughed and sputtered, but I felt so “cool.” During the remainder of my high school days, I smoked very rarely and even then, I didn’t inhale (really, I didn’t.)

In college, almost all my friends smoked. Cigarettes were sold freely; there was even a machine in the dorm next to the Coke and candy machines. By spring, I was hooked on Newports; I preferred the menthol flavor. I guess about my sophomore year in college, my mother confronted me. She said that she knew I was smoking and I might as well do in front of them. She also told me that she didn’t see anything morally wrong with it; just that it was not too good for you (but it 1966 and the evidence was sketchy and my father said he didn’t believe any of it!). So I kept on smoking and now smoked more and more. I was a grownup and I was still not “cool,” but I was hooked. Cigarettes were only about $.35 a pack, but still a costly habit.

I smoked all the way through college and grad school. I preferred to study at the dorm rather than the library because they made all the smokers sit in one room at the library and it made me cough. My library research was probably weaker than it might have been had I been a non-smoker.

Shortly after I got my masters I married Steve and he also was a smoker. Being a purist in many ways, he smoked unfiltered Pall Malls. They made me gag. Somewhere along the way I switched over the Benson and Hedges 100s. They had a really smooth taste and lasted longer. Besides, we could get our cigarettes really cheap at the BX. I think they were only about $.20 a pack.

When I was pregnant with David in 1971, I confess I didn’t totally stop, but I still had one now and then. There was some “talk” that smoking could be harmful to a developing fetus, but it mostly seemed like talk. Still, I took it seriously enough to cut way back. My mother had smoked all through her pregnancy with me and I turned out OK.

My parents continued to smoke and we did too! The years crept by. When we would visit my parents, a regular ritual was the trip from Vestavia south across the Shelby County, Alabama line for cheap cigarettes. All four of us puffed and puffed away.

Steve, my husband, suddenly decided to quit. I am not sure exactly why he made that decision, but he did it “cold turkey.” He smoked his last cigarette the night that Nixon made his famous “I am not a crook speech.” About a week later my parents came to visit us in California. Steve was not a pleasant person to be around – not surprisingly.

But time passed and in 1976 we moved to Maryland. Steve never smoked again and I continued to smoke and smoke away. Everyday I worked on fixing up our new house and every day I seemed to smoke more and more. By February 1977 I was up to 2 ½ packs a day. I had tried to stop a few times, but with no luck. I tried the low “everything” cigarettes, NOW, but just smoked more of them.

Then on March 23, 1977 everything changed. My mother had a massive heart attack and had to be resuscitated. It was a nightmare that went on for weeks and weeks as she clung to life in a Birmingham hospital ICU. My father and I sat in the waiting room and smoked and smoked—I guess I was smoking three packs or more a day during that period and living on Cokes, cheese crackers and candy from the machine. I gained 15 pounds. Whenever we went into see my mother in ICU, she said she would ask for a cigarette. She could smell it on us! Of course, smoking was not allowed in ICU (although it was in regular rooms).

The one day in April 1977, her conditioned worsened. The doctors told us she had a 1 in 5 chance of making it through the night. But if she could survive the night she had a good chance of surviving long term. I sat in a lounge chair at midnight in the ICU waiting room and I made a silent prayer to God that he would let her live and if he did I vowed that I would never smoke another cigarette until the day she died. She DID make it through the night. She lived another ten years.

I think my deal with God was pretty powerful and the other factor in my quitting was that my world was turned totally upside down. I fashioned a plastic tube and stuffed in with peppermint. I sucked on it A LOT. I knew that smoking was as much a physical addiction as a mental one. There is something about the movement from hand to mouth that is very addictive. For months after I stopped smoking I would smell the tobacco odor whenever I showered – as if it was coming from my every pore stimulated by the hot water. I cleaned my house and removed the yellow scum from everything. My health started to improve and my energy level soared. There was no longer the need to punctuate every accomplishment with a cigarette. With in a year, I found myself employed in a private school where smoking was not allowed.

Gradually, fewer and fewer of the folks I associated with smoked. I found myself disliking the smell of tobacco. In particular, I couldn’t stand to smell the brand my Dad smoked.. For some reason, that brand make my eyes water and gave me a sore throat. Whenever I would visit him, I asked him to smoke another brand – any other brand! In general, however, as the years went by I came to hate the smell of smoke, although every now and then I got the urge to smoke. But I never gave in.

Meanwhile, my mother was doing well after open-heart surgery. She never smoked again, while my father continued. She didn’t like the fact that he still smoked and he tried to smoke more often outside. He still didn’t think there was any real health issue with smoking.

Ten years after my mother’s heart attack, she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. That diagnosis rocked my world! And to compound the problem, her doctor told my father it was his fault; that it was his second-hand smoke that gave her the cancer. He was never the same after that. He was there lovingly for my mother throughout her year-long illness. He never smoked in the house while she was there. More and more of her time was spent in the hospital.

One afternoon, he left the room for a smoke and I stayed there with her. It was at that moment she stopped breathing and despite a Code Blue and about eight hours of manual respiration, she was gone. I have to admit that in the flurry of activity, the signing of the big black and the realization that she was really dead, there came to fleeting thought that “this is when I supposed to have my cigarette. I don’t have to not smoke anymore.” Then, of course, there was no power on earth that could make me smoke. I had just witnessed my mother’s year long struggle with lung cancer! What a bitter irony!

My father suffered greatly after my mother’s death. Depression took its toll. He loved my mother so deeply and the doctor’s words blaming his second-hand smoke for her death kept going around in his head. Within less than two years, he was dead from congestive heart failure. I honestly think it was a broken heart.

My parents were amazing people. My mother was talented, creative and probably the most all around capable person I have ever known. People loved her outgoing personality and her zest for life. My father was brilliant; he was an inventor; he was a leader in his community. He was the man who first transmitted data over a telephone line – really! And yet, these wonderful and bright peoples’ lives were damaged by tobacco.

My parent’s things were coated with the same yellow scum that coated everything in my house years before. I cleaned it off furniture, art, crystal and more. I found that Dow bathroom cleaner would take the scum off the furniture without damaging the finish. Some of my parents; furniture was very special because my mother had refinished it. My favorite piece is a chifferobe that belonged to my grandfather and which my mother lovingly refinished. It stands in my entrance hall today.

What about me? Was I damaged too? Certainly, the 14 years I smoked were not good for me, nor were they good for our son (who fortunately has never even been tempted to smoke). Once I had a doctor tell me that if I had not quit, I would have been dead by now. That was probably 15 years ago. It has been 29 years since I smoked a cigarette. I am not around smoking any more. I request non-smoking seating in restaurants. There is no force in this universe or amount of money that could make me smoke even just one cigarette. I know that if I had even one, I would be hooked!

Soon after my mother’s diagnosis I became a volunteer for our local American Cancer Society. I guess it was my way of striking back. After her death, I continued to volunteer. It seems that our County has an unusually high cancer mortality rate and the cause is not clear. I was intrigued by this problem and agreed to work with our local County to chair a Cancer Task Force. This seventeen member multi-disciplinary task force looked into possible environmental and lifestyle causes of cancer, including lung cancer.

And, so here’s the kicker! I was running a meeting of the task force one evening and speaker was an expert in the causes of lung cancer. The expert reviewed various lung cancer types one after the other, but did not mention oat cell. Oat cell is kind of lung cancer that killed my mother; it is aggressive and fast growing. The expert’s response literally blew me away! I felt light-headed; I could believe what I was hearing! Oat cell cancer lung cancer is connected with chemical exposure more than smoking. Huh! My mother didn’t mess with chemicals. So, I asked “what kind of chemicals?” In an instant I knew that everything we had thought about her illness and how it happened was wrong. It turns out that the chemicals that often cause oat cell lung are the kind that were used to refinish furniture. My mother LOVED to refinish furniture. That was her hobby. Patience was not one of my mother’s virtues. She used the most powerful chemicals she could buy to strip off the old finish and she never wore a mask. She was not known to be a person who took the directions and precautions all that seriously. Usually she did her work with the garage door open, but little other ventilation.

Had we but known! My father would not have tortured himself with guilt about the second-hand smoke. My mother would have surely been more at peace with the whole situation. She was someone who always wanted to get to the bottom of a problem and find out what went wrong. Sadly, neither of them ever knew.

So, maybe it wasn’t the cigarettes after all! Still no doubt they made the situation worse.
Did this outcome change my opinion about smoking? No way! It is a terribly addictive habit and I personally will NEVER smoke again. Still, those 14 years may get me one day. No more smoking and no more furniture refinishing for me.

And, what about our task force? We never could get to any “smoking gun” for the cause of cancer in Anne Arundel County. What we do know is that with a lifetime of human behavior it is difficult to isolate the variables that may lead to death. More likely it is a confluence of factors that come together for any individual to make the cancer kick in. Lifestyle, environment, and heredity all matter. It is clear that more of these factors come together in our area than in most places. One thing for sure, we are on our own in this. The government can’t protect us from ourselves. Smoking is bad for you; chemicals can harm you; our environment has many problems and no one really knows what they all are. Smoking is a nasty, stupid habit that can destroy your life.

I see young women today smoking. Despite all the evidence, they keep on smoking. If only I could somehow make them understand.

Funerals

2006-05-22T08:03:00.000-04:00

When my grandmother died on June 5, 1957, life was never the same for me. I had just turned 11 a couple of days before. I simply couldn’t believe that she was gone. It was horrible. That was my first real acquaintance with death and I hated it. My mother planned the funeral and did what she could do to make it a good funeral, as such things go. She was very pleased that so many friends came to the funeral, sent flowers, and came back to the house afterwards. From my perspective, it was gut-wrenching. I was old enough to understand about death and its finality, but not old enough to accept it.

Over the years, I have been to many funerals – some for dear friends and relatives and others for acquaintances. My grandfather died a few years after my grandmother. Nothing, however, prepared me for the pain of having to bury each of my parents decades later.

I come from the South and down South, when people die, they are embalmed and put in a casket for viewing. The funeral follows the funeral home chapel or at the church, with the burial to follow. Everyone then comes back to the house for a pot luck spread in honor of the deceased. Depending on religion, there might be something to drink. In my family, we congregate in Birmingham at the Embassy Suites (with free drinks, free breakfast and nice suites). We have been to so many family funerals where we opted to stay there that my son calls it the “death hotel.”

My mother used to always take the same thing to funeral gatherings. She made a molded chicken salad, done up in individual gelatin molds. When she died, one of her friends made her recipe for the funeral. My mother would have been proud.

When my father died, he was living in a retirement high rise. His two bedroom apartment was way too small to accommodate a funeral gathering. He founded the Chamber in the town of Vestavia Hills, so the town leaders got together a gathering at the local library. It was a fine tribute.

These days more and more people are getting cremated. That thought used to make me shudder. Now it isn’t so bad. I am not sure I could do it though, but I guess if I was dead it wouldn’t matter anyway. Of course, I am an organ donor and can’t imagine any better final gift.

As I approach 60 I am not comfortable contemplating my own mortality. Not that anyone really is! I could just ignore the whole subject and let my family figure out what makes sense for them to do. After all, funerals are really for the living! They give a sense of closure. On the other hand, I suppose I should do the really responsible thing and figure out something that makes sense to me. That would be kinder than giving them one more thing to worry about.

Lots of things have changed over the decades. Open caskets are less popular. Personal tributes are generally done, as opposed to the generic funerals of the past. Memorial services weeks later are a popular option. Charitable donations are preferred over flowers. Guests don’t have to wear black. Cremation seem more common than in the past. Internet tributes and Web pages are sprouting up. In Maryland there is a big public dispute about the appropriateness of roadside memorials. I spoke with a friend recently who reported going to her first “PowerPoint funeral.” As Bob Dylan said, “The times they are a changing.”

My Treo - The Little Magical Computer

2006-05-17T00:09:00.000-04:00

Just over a year ago I was wearing a pager and carrying a cell phone and a pda in my purse. I seldom left home without my laptop computer. It took all of this equipment just to keep me organized and in touch, especially when I traveled. I spent two hours each evening, after a busy day at the office or after a day of travel, just dealing with my email. In short, I was a slave to my equipment; my shoulders were dragging from hauling all this stuff around; and I longed to make a change.

Finally, my excuse came along. The pager started to fail; the cell phone couldn’t hold a charge. The blue paint chipped off the Zire. These were all clear indications that the time was right.

At first I thought I would get a Blackberry. People who have them seem to love them. But I loved my Palm Zire and on a whim checked to see what Palm offered. I was amazed to see that they had a product that would replace my cell phone, my pager, and my pda and also do email. I read the reviews and I was hooked. It had to have a Palm Treo 650.

No, I am not getting any money from Palm for writing this. They have no idea that I am doing this. I just love my little Treo and want to tell the world about it.

Is it perfect? No! It sometimes has to reboot and sometimes it gets as ornery as any computer I have ever dealt with, but its good qualities far outweigh its bad.

Is it addictive? You bet! Just having the capacity to deal with things almost in real time is a bit of a rush. But, the most amazing thing I have found with the Treo is that it allows me to capture little snippets of time that would otherwise be essentially wasted. And that alone is a precious gift.

Can I live without it? Of course, and life is actually very calm without it. But I would rather know what is going on and deal with it immediately when I can. That keep small problems small and I don’t have to waste time worrying about what “might be happening.”

Documenting Our Lives

2006-05-09T00:13:00.000-04:00

When I was kid I was given a diary. Each day I wrote what I did. In those days, I was a lot like the kid (arts commercial) who recounts his day in monotone at the dinner table. I went to school. I went to Brownies. I went to the grocery store with my mother. She bought chicken. We had fried chicken for dinner. I watched I Love Lucy. I read a chapter in the Bobbsey Twins and I went to sleep. My, what an exciting life!

I couldn’t imagine why anyone would be interested in reading that and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. But, for about 3 weeks, I dutifully wrote an entry each day and locked the book with a key. So much for keeping a diary!

When I was in junior high and high school, I faced what I now know was normal teenage angst. From my perspective it was a constant “tug of war” between the desire to be popular and the desire to make good grades. If you made good grades you were condemning yourself to be a social outcast. I got my first taste of depression and I reveled in it, writing my deepest darkest thoughts in what might be called an “occasional diary.” It wasn’t a diary at all, rather a three ring binder left over from “speech lessons.” I hid it when I went to college and I don’t think my mother ever found it. I took it when we cleaned out the house.

In college, I was really too busy to write down much of what I felt. But sometimes, when depression would grab me, I would turn to my old trick of writing out my feelings. Most of that stuff went out with the dorm trash, but it was therapeutic.

For decades I never wrote anything personal and I didn’t keep a datebook. I didn’t need one; I could remember my schedule (that was when I was younger and still had an agile brain).

My parents, on the other hand, were living busy active lives and both of them kept calendars in 8”x10” calendar books. My father’s was mostly just a record of his appointments and speaking engagements. My mother’s, however, got progressively more personal. Hers was more of an after-the-fact documentation of how she spent her days. In some respects, it resembled my childhood “diary.” When she was diagnosed with lung cancer, she started recording her medical appointments, as well as how she felt each day. She knew she was documenting the end of her life.

Both of my parents are gone now. I still have their calendars stuffed carefully away in the attic. I can’t throw them away, because to do so would be to not value their lives. Maybe in another ten years or so I will read their calendars again and look for similarities in my own life at their age.

Meanwhile, over the years, various people have suggested that I journal. They would have me take use a journaling book and with pen and ink write down my innermost thoughts. I tried it. Truth is I don’t do handwriting very well these days. I think far faster than I can write so I end up with skipped spaces and funny looking letters. Sure, I can make to write a check and sign my name on a charge slip. I can even write a post-it note of instructions for a staff member. About the longest document I write these days is a handwritten thank you note. Truth is, handwriting for me in now agony. I can type on my Treo far faster and more accurately than I can handwrite. Sad, but true!

The next logical step was to try journaling on my laptop. For a few months last year I documented my struggle to lose weight and exercise. I found myself journaling, but it took up too much time. The diet failed, as did the exercise program. So that was the end of journaling. Will I try it again? The diet and exercise -- yes. The journal – not likely.

Then along came blogging. I had been reading about blogging for some months. When I was ill with the flu I decided that it was time to find out more about how to blog. Within half an hour of finding out how to blog, I was blogging. At first I thought I could do it every day, but after a while I soon realized that once a week was about the right pace for me. Honestly, I am enjoying writing my blog and I am also enjoying your positive feedback. It always surprises me that people are reading. I expected that some FacetsWoman readers would read it, but now I find I have readers from other parts of the US and even one reader from Scotland.

Comparing journaling with blogging, I have to say I like blogging much better. With journaling the idea is that other people WON’T read it and you go to some effort to keep them from reading your innermost thoughts. With blogging you write stuff (admittedly not always your most innermost thoughts) with the idea that someone might read it. For me that makes it a lot more fun!

Ironing

2006-05-01T12:59:00.000-04:00

My grandmother ironed A LOT. I think she really somehow enjoyed it. She was very good at it. Actually she taught me to iron when I was very young. I used to be assigned all the handkerchiefs. My father used white handkerchiefs, and they were frankly pretty dull to iron. My grandfather, on the other hand, used handkerchiefs that were white in the center with colored borders. Some were blue and others brown. His were much more exciting to iron. What I especially liked was folding all the corners just so.

Ironing in those days involved sprinkling first. We had a Coke bottle with a sprinkler head on top it of. Before you started to iron a piece, you had to sprinkle it first. I think most things had been pre-starched first, so the water seemed to wake up the starch.

Sometimes the maid would also help with the ironing and my mother would also iron. My grandmother, who was in charge of ironing in our household, kept the frilly dresses for herself and for my mother to do. The maid did the really boring stuff and I did the easy stuff. In retrospect, we spent a lot of our lives ironing. Mercifully, only one person could iron at once. Summer days were especially hard; the iron was hot and the sweat poured off of us in the Alabama heat. The oscillating fan helped a bit.

My uncle somehow came by an electric ironer and gave it to my Dad. This is an example of appliance that never really hit the big time. My mother was happy to get it, but using it was a different matter. It was OK for tablecloths, but not much else.

Men’s shirts were always sent out the laundry. They came back stiffly starched and wrapped around what we called “shirt cardboard.” My father’s shirts, like his handkerchiefs were always white and he liked them heavily starched. No pink or blue shirts for him. My grandfather, on the other hand, preferred striped shirts with white colors. He always wore a collar pin that connected the two corners of his collars. His shirts were very interesting! He used to let me help him pick out his clothes each night. It was fun to coordinate his suit, with his shirt, tie, handkerchief and socks. Between the two of them, they used 10 sheets of “shirt cardboard” every week. This means that I had an endless supply of “shirt cardboard” for drawing or school projects.

When I was in high school, I liked to wear oxford cloth shirts with Peter Pan collars. My mother hated them because they were so hard to iron. By then I was not too interested in ironing (strange how that happened) and she had to pay the maid to iron them. She could have sent them to the laundry like my Dad’s, but that would have been too expensive – besides, they wouldn’t look right all stiffly starched like his. I think that was one of the best parts of my going to college; I took my oxford cloth blouses with me and ironed them myself.

In my dorm, they had something called the “Ironing Room.” There was one of every floor. They may have still them for all I know. We spent a lot of our time in college ironing and soon gained an appreciation of the drudgery ironing involved. Still, it was a necessary evil.

About the time I graduated from college, things started to change. Men were wearing “wash and wear” Haspel suits. Some fabrics were coming out that didn’t need ironing. My father was wearing “permanent press” shirts. These new fabrics were a mixed blessing. We hated to iron the old cotton stuff, but these new fabrics felt a bit “slimy” and were hot in the summer. Most of us had some of each.

I recall back in 1969, when we were first married, we had dinner with a couple who lived in the apartment across the hall from us in Illinois. Steve spilled something on the tablecloth. The hostess replied, “That’s OK. It’s wash and wear!” My engineer husband still chuckles about the idea of a “wash and wear” tablecloth.

Enter POLYESTER! I was in California at the time and embraced it. Hooray, no more ironing ever! The stuff was ugly and it was hot, but everybody was wearing and loving it! The ironing board was stuck in the back of the garage and iron stuffed in the closet. Until we moved to Maryland in 1976, we lived in an ironing free bliss. Sure, you had to be quick at getting to the dryer and hanging things up, but it beat ironing.

At the time when we were in California, Steve was in the air force and wore a wash and wear blue shirt and polyester trousers. Rarely, he would have to wear fatigues and they had to be ironed. I soon tumbled to fact that they are best handled by the laundry. The irony – the thing he wore to do dirty things had to be starched and ironed! The uniform he wore daily as an “officer and a gentleman” could come right out of the dryer onto the hanger!

In Maryland, polyester was not as prevalent as in California. In fact, it was going out of style in 1976. But, I still had a lot of it and wore it. Within a few years, however, it was gone from my wardrobe. What remained was a mixture of “wash and wear” fabrics, wool (that mercifully seldom needed ironing) and things that had to go to the drycleaner.

Soon, I started ironing again and I wasn’t enjoying it either. The spray starch I had discovered in college was now my best friend. But I wanted us all to look good and ironing seemed the only way. How I hated it! My husband preferred the softer feel of un-starched shirts, but they often still needed ironing.

My son wore oxford cloth shirts in high school and they had to be ironed. Guess that is nature’s revenge. I taught him how to iron them and he took care of them himself in college! Shortly after he married, I suggested to his wife that she send them to the laundry. She took my advice! His come back from the laundry handing on hangers and he is happy.

After 37 years of marriage, I am on my third iron. The one I bought in about 1978 recently died. I bought the new one at Costco. It is digital and wonderful and it is heavy enough and large enough to do a really good job. Does it make my like ironing any better? No! But it does seem to go faster.
Unlike in my grandmother’s day, ironing is not a big part of my life. It is something I do when I have to (because I need to wear something) or when I am on one of my “organized” kicks. Still, it is necessary sometimes.

My husband no longer wears a coat, tie and white shirt to work. He wears plaid shirts without a tie. His employer, like many others, has changed their rules and he is very happy to go to work in a plaid shirt (the plaid is not required, but he IS an engineer and they seem to like plaid for some reason) and slacks. If I am fast, his shirts don’t need much ironing, but they do need touching up a bit. The microfiber slacks are great – no ironing required. I have learned to send the Dockers to the laundry.

I stopped wearing oxford cloth blouses decades ago and I hate “fat” polyester. These days I wear knit tops most of the time and mercifully they don’t need ironing. Some of my slacks require ironing; others don’t (a tough of polyester is just fine, thank you). I have to iron many of my blouses, as I wear them over my knit top in the summer time. More ironing is one thing I dread about the summer. Right now, I have loads of stuff I washed at the end of last summer that I need to dig out and iron. And by now, it is all really wrinkled.

I have a fancy laundry room in my house with a small pull-down ironing board. It reminds me of the ironing room in my college dorm. I put a small black and white TV in there for use while ironing. BUT, I kept my old standard size ironing board. It is now set up in my sitting room, calling to me every night. One night soon, it will grab me. I will turn on the TV and take pleasure in ironing my husband’s shirts just so and remembering my grandmother.

Meanwhile, however, there is this wonderful stuff put out by Downy and it is magic. You can spray it and wrinkles go away on all but the seriously wrinkled. I never travel without it. While it is not a complete ironing replacement, it really does help!

Will future generations iron? Thirty years ago, I would have said “never.” Now I say, “probably, but only when they can’t figure out how to get out of it.”