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!
Monday, September 11, 2006
Friday, September 01, 2006
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!!!
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!!!
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Carpet
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.
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.
Friday, July 28, 2006
Weight
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.
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.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Phones
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!
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!
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Cleaning Products
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!!!
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!!!
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Books
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!
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!
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Freckles
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.
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.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Chicken
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.
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.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Garden Hoses
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
A Smoker's Tale
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.
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.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Funerals
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.”
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.”
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
My Treo - The Little Magical Computer
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.”
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.”
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Documenting Our Lives
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!
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!
Monday, May 01, 2006
Ironing
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.”
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.”
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Bed Linens
When I was a kid beds came in three sizes: double, twin and cot/rollaway. There were no queen or king size beds and nobody seemed to notice that they didn’t exist. Mattresses were relatively thin by today’s standards and there was no such thing as a pillow-top on a mattress. Ticking was all blue and white striped. Pillows came in one size – the modern equivalent of “standard.”
From the time I was about four on we always had a clothes dryer, but one simply didn’t use the dryer for sheets. Instead, sheets were hung out on the line to dry. Bottom sheets looked pretty much like top sheets because they had not yet invented fitted sheets. I think the reason everyone liked to dry the sheets on the line is that they didn’t come out very wrinkled and they smelled nice.
In those days, sheets were white and not made out of permanent pressed material. They were always washed in hot water with bleach and bluing, ensuring a bright white. It was important to have bright white sheets. I don’t remember anyone ever ironing sheets in my time, except for the period when we had an ironer (which turned out to be of little value except for sheets). I do, however, vividly remember ironing pillowcases. My grandmother taught how to iron pillowcases—a skill I still practice today.
Sheets came in two types – muslin and percale. Nobody talked about thread count, but the greater the count, the better the sheet. “Nice people” used percale. Muslin was considered a lesser product. I could only assume that poor people slept on muslin, but it was OK for them (since they were poor and all).
Pillows had feathers in them until about the time I was in elementary school; then they started being made out of foam rubber. My father HATED foam rubber pillows and one day made quite a stink about it. My mother went out that day and bought him a new pillow. That pillow was made of goose down and cost $35 – a princely sum in 1950s dollars. I still have that pillow; it is by far the best pillow we own and I use it in the late evenings to rest my head on while I watch TV. It still has its tag on it – you know the one that you can’t remove “under penalty of law.” We are a VERY law-abiding family. That pillow is about 52 years old and it still has its tag!
Department stores used to have “white sales” – even after bed linens came in an array of colors. For all I know, they still DO have “white sales.” I just don’t pay attention to stuff like that any more, as I have a lot of sheets (and that’s another story). Now and then I do buy some sheets for our king size bed, but rarely and usually when I stumble on them cheap at some place like Costco (more on that later).
When I was about six my mother went to one of those “white sales” and got really carried away. Knowing my mother, it must have been quite a sale. She bought all sorts of colored sheets and they were even monogrammed in fancy white script letters. I had some that said PEH (Patricia Elizabeth Humphreys). They were soft pink, giving me the hint that soon she was going to paint my room pink (and she did). She also bought a set for my grandparents (who lived with us). Theirs were soft green to match their bedroom. For herself and my father she bought a pinkish raspberry color. All in all, we were pretty hot stuff with all of our monogrammed sheets in pastel colors.
Bedspreads were generally white or beige and lightweight, with little bumps in them, otherwise know as chenille. There were no pillow shams or comforters. You just pulled the spread up over the pillows (which had been rolled), after the sheet and blanket had been pulled up, pulled up the sheet and blanket and tucked them in, added a couple of throw pillows and the bed was made. I wonder why you can’t easily buy chenille bedspreads any more. They were all made by a company named Bates --- I wonder if they have a Web site? Hmmmh…
My favorite bedspread was brown, with little fuzzy cowboys on it. It was too big for my bed, so they put it on the cot in the hallway up in the attic by the attic fan. I don’t recall any ever sleeping on that cot, but it was nice to know it was there. I still have that bedspread. When our son was little I used it sometimes on his bed, but he was never that fond of it. It I now up in the cabinet above the washer and dryer with a few other odd bedspreads I am holding onto for some reason.
When I went to college my mother took me to JC Penny’s and we got matching sheets and towels. My sheets were pale apricot color, as were my towels. It was some sort of warped tribute to the Auburn University colors, orange and blue. Besides, I liked pale apricot; it went well with my freckles. My mother made me pale blue bedspreads.
These sheets served me well through graduate school, but when I got married it was time for new sheets. Permanent press was new and hot, so some of my gift sheets were permanent press and some were not. Guess which ones I still have.
In the late 60s and early 70s sheets were, like everything else, very colorful. Flowers were big and bold and the colors were bright. Bottom sheets were fitted and sometimes were a solid color in contrast to the bold print of the top sheet.
When we first got married we bought a king-sized bed. My husband is 6’5” and didn’t like for his feet to hang off the end of the bed. He selected the mattress and it turned out to be not very good and made of foam. By about 1973 it had to be replaced and we were in southern California at the time, courtesy of the air force. We went to the local mattress store and bought a mattress; it was a California king. None of our old sheets fit it because California kings are shaped differently from regular kings. Of course, we didn’t know that when we bought the mattress.
For the life of that goofy mattress, we bought California king sheets. By 1976, we were in Maryland, in the land of regular kings. California king sheets were not to be had at any price. So, we got along without new sheets, save those purchased on an occasional trip to San Bernardino (our old home) and the local Pic’N Save.
Eventually, the California king mattress wore out and we bought a regular king. The old sheets that were wedding gifts fit again and we could buy new sheets at almost any store. Ah, the freedom!
Then that mattress wore out and we bought a new one. It was somehow thicker than the old one and the old sheets (including the California kings) didn’t fit. They would spring off at the corners. Undaunted, I purchased some garter like contraptions to hold them on against their will. These little devices, that resemble a garter belt, stretch diagonally across each corner of the fitted sheets.
I bought some new sheets and they fit my new mattress just fine. For a time we were in sync – but only when I used the newest sheets.
Then I bought some more new sheets and the bottom fitted sheets were WAY too big. Not only did I not have to use the garters, I had to fold them over in the corners. Strange, I thought! Maybe they think they will shrink. Then I discovered the sad truth, the new sheets were designed for pillow-top beds. So once again, my mattress is out of sync with my sheets.
While I was going back and forth with sheets for the king size bed, I was quietly collecting twin and double sheets. My grandmother gave all of her sheets to my mother and so did my aunt. When my mother died, I got all of her sheets. Conveniently, I also got all the double and twin beds. The sheets fit the mattresses until we had to replace one twin mattress. The only kind we could buy had a pillowtop. Now my antique sheets don’t fit anymore on that bed and I have to use the old garter things, now unneeded for the king-size bed.
I still have the old chenille bedspreads on three of the beds in the house, but I have quilts for all the beds (but they are too good to use). One bed has a quilt on it. Our king size bed has a comforter that won’t cover the pillows because it is too short (but that has to be OK, as I like the comforter) and the pillows look OK in their cases. No way am I going to pull them out of pillow shams every night. Do people really do that?
What’s next? Probably a king-size mattress with a pillow-top. Only my newest sheets will then fit at all. My newest sheets are flannel. I never heard of flannel sheets when I was growing up, but in recent years I decided to try some of them. My husband insists on cutting the thermostat back at night and those flannel sheets feel great on a cold winter night. They aren’t percale, nor even muslin – oh the shame of it all! They are what might well be described as “Yankee sheets.” They are OK for winter, but not for the other seasons. Percale is still required!
Yesterday I was at Costco and looking at king size sheets. They had some for $59.95 that were of fine percale and soft colors popular today. I was tempted, but $59.95 still seems like a lot of money for sheets. I’ll have to give it some more thought and see how bad the ones I have really are. This is a major investment after all. They had some others for $35.99, but they were made out of jersey. For a brief moment, I contemplated getting a set of the jersey sheets, but I decided my self-esteem required percale. After all, I am a southern lady and a southern lady doesn’t sleep on muslin, much less jersey. Isn’t life strange?
From the time I was about four on we always had a clothes dryer, but one simply didn’t use the dryer for sheets. Instead, sheets were hung out on the line to dry. Bottom sheets looked pretty much like top sheets because they had not yet invented fitted sheets. I think the reason everyone liked to dry the sheets on the line is that they didn’t come out very wrinkled and they smelled nice.
In those days, sheets were white and not made out of permanent pressed material. They were always washed in hot water with bleach and bluing, ensuring a bright white. It was important to have bright white sheets. I don’t remember anyone ever ironing sheets in my time, except for the period when we had an ironer (which turned out to be of little value except for sheets). I do, however, vividly remember ironing pillowcases. My grandmother taught how to iron pillowcases—a skill I still practice today.
Sheets came in two types – muslin and percale. Nobody talked about thread count, but the greater the count, the better the sheet. “Nice people” used percale. Muslin was considered a lesser product. I could only assume that poor people slept on muslin, but it was OK for them (since they were poor and all).
Pillows had feathers in them until about the time I was in elementary school; then they started being made out of foam rubber. My father HATED foam rubber pillows and one day made quite a stink about it. My mother went out that day and bought him a new pillow. That pillow was made of goose down and cost $35 – a princely sum in 1950s dollars. I still have that pillow; it is by far the best pillow we own and I use it in the late evenings to rest my head on while I watch TV. It still has its tag on it – you know the one that you can’t remove “under penalty of law.” We are a VERY law-abiding family. That pillow is about 52 years old and it still has its tag!
Department stores used to have “white sales” – even after bed linens came in an array of colors. For all I know, they still DO have “white sales.” I just don’t pay attention to stuff like that any more, as I have a lot of sheets (and that’s another story). Now and then I do buy some sheets for our king size bed, but rarely and usually when I stumble on them cheap at some place like Costco (more on that later).
When I was about six my mother went to one of those “white sales” and got really carried away. Knowing my mother, it must have been quite a sale. She bought all sorts of colored sheets and they were even monogrammed in fancy white script letters. I had some that said PEH (Patricia Elizabeth Humphreys). They were soft pink, giving me the hint that soon she was going to paint my room pink (and she did). She also bought a set for my grandparents (who lived with us). Theirs were soft green to match their bedroom. For herself and my father she bought a pinkish raspberry color. All in all, we were pretty hot stuff with all of our monogrammed sheets in pastel colors.
Bedspreads were generally white or beige and lightweight, with little bumps in them, otherwise know as chenille. There were no pillow shams or comforters. You just pulled the spread up over the pillows (which had been rolled), after the sheet and blanket had been pulled up, pulled up the sheet and blanket and tucked them in, added a couple of throw pillows and the bed was made. I wonder why you can’t easily buy chenille bedspreads any more. They were all made by a company named Bates --- I wonder if they have a Web site? Hmmmh…
My favorite bedspread was brown, with little fuzzy cowboys on it. It was too big for my bed, so they put it on the cot in the hallway up in the attic by the attic fan. I don’t recall any ever sleeping on that cot, but it was nice to know it was there. I still have that bedspread. When our son was little I used it sometimes on his bed, but he was never that fond of it. It I now up in the cabinet above the washer and dryer with a few other odd bedspreads I am holding onto for some reason.
When I went to college my mother took me to JC Penny’s and we got matching sheets and towels. My sheets were pale apricot color, as were my towels. It was some sort of warped tribute to the Auburn University colors, orange and blue. Besides, I liked pale apricot; it went well with my freckles. My mother made me pale blue bedspreads.
These sheets served me well through graduate school, but when I got married it was time for new sheets. Permanent press was new and hot, so some of my gift sheets were permanent press and some were not. Guess which ones I still have.
In the late 60s and early 70s sheets were, like everything else, very colorful. Flowers were big and bold and the colors were bright. Bottom sheets were fitted and sometimes were a solid color in contrast to the bold print of the top sheet.
When we first got married we bought a king-sized bed. My husband is 6’5” and didn’t like for his feet to hang off the end of the bed. He selected the mattress and it turned out to be not very good and made of foam. By about 1973 it had to be replaced and we were in southern California at the time, courtesy of the air force. We went to the local mattress store and bought a mattress; it was a California king. None of our old sheets fit it because California kings are shaped differently from regular kings. Of course, we didn’t know that when we bought the mattress.
For the life of that goofy mattress, we bought California king sheets. By 1976, we were in Maryland, in the land of regular kings. California king sheets were not to be had at any price. So, we got along without new sheets, save those purchased on an occasional trip to San Bernardino (our old home) and the local Pic’N Save.
Eventually, the California king mattress wore out and we bought a regular king. The old sheets that were wedding gifts fit again and we could buy new sheets at almost any store. Ah, the freedom!
Then that mattress wore out and we bought a new one. It was somehow thicker than the old one and the old sheets (including the California kings) didn’t fit. They would spring off at the corners. Undaunted, I purchased some garter like contraptions to hold them on against their will. These little devices, that resemble a garter belt, stretch diagonally across each corner of the fitted sheets.
I bought some new sheets and they fit my new mattress just fine. For a time we were in sync – but only when I used the newest sheets.
Then I bought some more new sheets and the bottom fitted sheets were WAY too big. Not only did I not have to use the garters, I had to fold them over in the corners. Strange, I thought! Maybe they think they will shrink. Then I discovered the sad truth, the new sheets were designed for pillow-top beds. So once again, my mattress is out of sync with my sheets.
While I was going back and forth with sheets for the king size bed, I was quietly collecting twin and double sheets. My grandmother gave all of her sheets to my mother and so did my aunt. When my mother died, I got all of her sheets. Conveniently, I also got all the double and twin beds. The sheets fit the mattresses until we had to replace one twin mattress. The only kind we could buy had a pillowtop. Now my antique sheets don’t fit anymore on that bed and I have to use the old garter things, now unneeded for the king-size bed.
I still have the old chenille bedspreads on three of the beds in the house, but I have quilts for all the beds (but they are too good to use). One bed has a quilt on it. Our king size bed has a comforter that won’t cover the pillows because it is too short (but that has to be OK, as I like the comforter) and the pillows look OK in their cases. No way am I going to pull them out of pillow shams every night. Do people really do that?
What’s next? Probably a king-size mattress with a pillow-top. Only my newest sheets will then fit at all. My newest sheets are flannel. I never heard of flannel sheets when I was growing up, but in recent years I decided to try some of them. My husband insists on cutting the thermostat back at night and those flannel sheets feel great on a cold winter night. They aren’t percale, nor even muslin – oh the shame of it all! They are what might well be described as “Yankee sheets.” They are OK for winter, but not for the other seasons. Percale is still required!
Yesterday I was at Costco and looking at king size sheets. They had some for $59.95 that were of fine percale and soft colors popular today. I was tempted, but $59.95 still seems like a lot of money for sheets. I’ll have to give it some more thought and see how bad the ones I have really are. This is a major investment after all. They had some others for $35.99, but they were made out of jersey. For a brief moment, I contemplated getting a set of the jersey sheets, but I decided my self-esteem required percale. After all, I am a southern lady and a southern lady doesn’t sleep on muslin, much less jersey. Isn’t life strange?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)