Sunday Serenity #383

Mom and her sister Helen

Mom and I got to visit with her sister for several hours today.  It had been a year since Mom had  seen her and nearly 9 years since I had.

The last time I'd seen Aunt Helen and Uncle Dean was the night my dad was dying when they came over to witness his bedside baptism and we all circled the bed and sang "It Is Well With My Soul" one of his favorite hymns.

It was a wonderful visit infused with nostalgia and love.

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Remembering Shirley Temple -- April 23, 1928 – February 10, 2014

Shirley Temple In Glad Rags to Riches, 1933
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

 Learning of the death of Shirley Temple Black this week has thrown me into a nostalgia whirlpool.

Some of my fondest memories as a tweener (ages 9-13) were watching Shirley Temple movies with my Mom on our new-to-us vacuum tube black and white TV given to us by my Dad's boss when he upgraded to the newfangled color TV.  That TV was a monster in a cabinet with doors that was a cube bigger than our washing machine and took nearly as long to warm up as it took the washing machine to fill up.  For several months it resided in the living room but then it was moved into my parent's bedroom where it remained until we moved nine years later just before I turned 18 and Dad decided it was time to upgrade to a used color TV.

Tho Mom had complained of it being an eyesore I think the main reason they moved it out of the living room was so as not to be in-your-face with the occasional visits from certain members of our church--Elders or Ministering Brethren--for whom the decades long prohibition against movie theaters, radio, television and modern music was still much favored though the generation now raising children were easing up on it.  For some reason, in spite of knowing well that history of our Bible Meetings, it had not occurred to me that Mom was seeing the Shirley Temple movies for the first time along with me while in her mid thirties.

Somehow I had mental images of Mom as a child going to the Shirley Temple movies or even watching them on TV--pre WWII mind you.  I suspect this was because, as Mom talked about Shirley Temple being the most popular movie star when she was growing up and how Shirley was only three years older, those images formed in my imagination before I understood about our Meeting's anathema against the entertainment industry or that some of our everyday appliances had not existed when Mom was my age.  Not to mention that a depression era truck farmer with six kids was unlikely to afford movie tickets.

Good-bye Shirley.  I will always remember you as the happy little girl who could put big smiles on Mama's face and provide the two of us with hours of quality Mother/daughter time that included opportunities to talk about and/or soak up by osmosis moral issues like generosity, empathy, duty, honor, integrity, justice, and the power of optimism to trump pessimism and how putting a smile on your face even when you didn't 'feel' it could actually call forth happiness along with optimism.

WOW!  I think I"m in dire need of a Shirley Temple movie marathon.

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Sunday Serenity #375

This is an ongoing series from my Bucket List
of things I desperately want to do before
I loose the rest of my vision

My Bucket List
#14 Ice Skating.  Not just once but regularly--3-6 times a year.

The Skating Pond
by Currier and Ives
1862
Central Park, New York

The 12 inches of snow we got between Thursday and Sunday revived childhood memories of winter activities involving snow and ice.

There were all those times the fire department made a small lake in the mall parking lot across the street from us when the temps were going to be below 32 for several days.  We didn't own ice skates tho.  Mom put bread sacks over our shoes or boots and we 'skated' on them until they were shreds.  

Those started when I was five or six after the asphalt parking lot was laid and ended by the time I was eleven when our winters turned mild and any snow that fell seldom lasted past noon let alone long enough to freeze a shallow lake created by fire hoses.

I've very fond memories of the dozen or so times I got to go ice skating in my tweens and teens.  My parents took us as a family outing to the Portland OR Loyd Center rink several times and our church youth group had events there a few times.  I loved it.  If I could have had easy access (it was a 40 mile trip one way from Longview) it could have easily usurped running's first place position as favorite sporty activity.

I haven't been for decades.  The last time was several years before I got married in 1978.

I'm not sure what getting back on the ice would look like for me now.  Would I and the other skaters be safe with me cut loose on a crowded rink during a public session?  I'll have to give it some thought.  I'd probably need to call some rinks and ask them what their policy is and what they'd recommend for a visually impaired skater.

There are no ice rinks in the Rogue Valley so I'd have to make this something I do while visiting my family in Longview and Portland.  There are no ice rinks in Longview either but there are several in both Portland and Vancouver.

My Bucket List

#1 Hot Air Balloon Ride
#2 Play on a real drum set
#3 Swim with dolphins
#4 Visit Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop in Paris
#5 Visit the Library of Congress
#6 Attend a Performance of Beethoven's Symphony #9 by a top notch Orchestra

#7 Visit Hawaii
#8 Visit Russia 
#9 Learn Russian
#10 Learn Braille

#11 Celebrate Christmas in My Own Home with All the Trappings

#12 Add Petit Point to My Fiber Art Repertoire
#13 Regain the Strength and Stamina to Run Again
(and then find a safe place for running with impaired vision)

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Sunday Serenity #373

© Photographer Andrew Kazmierski | Agency: Dreamstime.com

This is an ongoing series from my Bucket List
of things I desperately want to do before
I loose the rest of my vision

My Bucket List
#13 Regain the Strength and Stamina to Run Again
(and then find a safe place for running with impaired vision)

Joy Runneth Over
at age 6
hanging my dolls' clothes
on the clothesline

From as far back as I can remember until my late twenties I was a runner.  I ran everywhere inside and out.  Running landed me in the ER three times before I was 15 and almost in a lake when I was three.  Only the quick thinking and legs of my uncle grabbing me up one or two of his strides before the grassy slope I was running down dropped off saved me from that lake and possibly another ER visit--or worse.

At age four I was running circles around my Daddy laying on the living room floor to decompress after work and fell breaking my left collar bone.  At six I broke my nose on a door jamb running down the hall.  The day before my first day in Junior High I was chasing my brother who ran into the house slamming the door and my arm went through the window as my foot missed the step and I fall hanging my upper left arm up on a jagged piece of glass.

None of that slowed me down. For running was my bliss.  Though I did not understand it as such then, running was my stress relief.  It was the one safe way to express exuberance in a family where all strong emotion was held suspect.  It was my main defense against playground bullies and an expression of my impatience to get to the future.  

I preferred to run the two miles down the hill from my Junior High school rather than take the crowded noisy bus and be subjected to the teasing.  If I left immediately after my last class without going back to my locker I could easily be home ten to fifteen minutes earlier.  I ran in dresses and Waffle Stompers with my books clutched to my chest by one arm and my clarinet case swinging from the other.  

Sometimes the bus caught up with me and I heard jeers and that would spur me to run faster, catching up and passing it again each time it stopped to let kids off.  My triumph was to cross the railroad tracks at the bottom of the hill ahead of the bus.

When my 8th grade PE coach had the class running a timed 440 two at a time, I pulled ahead of my running partner immediately and by the time I was on the far side of the track from the coach and the rest of the class she was still on the first turn and I heard the class erupt into loud hoots and hollers that continued until I crossed the finish line where I learned that I had just broken the school record for the girl's 440, shaving over ten seconds off it, bringing it to within ten seconds of the boy's record.  My time was sixty something and the boy's fifty something.

My coach said I had run the 440 like a dash, sprinting the whole way unlike most experienced trained runners who pace themselves on the first 220 and sprint the last 100.  She told me I had raw talent and good form for an untrained runner and said that with training I could compete in the Olympics.

The cheering from my class that day woke up a deep yearning in me and also healed some deep wounds created by the grade-school playground bullying some of those same girls had participated in.  I was told the cheering began when the coach told them that if I held that pace I would break the record.  When I crossed the finish line they swarmed me, pounding my back, grabbing my hand, jumping up and down congratulating me as they continued hooting.

As I made my way through the halls and across the courtyard to my next class the news had already spread and kids were calling out to me with congrats, claps, fist pumps over their heads.  And the teacher herself in the classroom all the way across campus from the track and gym, congratulated me as I entered the room.

Later that week the boy's coach had his class on the track with mine, invited by my coach to see me run and pit me against his best.  One after the other I ran the 50 and the 100 against his best sprinters, winning the 100 and staying on the heels of the boy in the 50.  My weakness was in the take off and the building up to speed in the first 20 yards or so.  

Then it was me against the boy's best miler on the 440.  We ran the first 220 neck and neck but that was only because he was pacing himself like a miler and when he pulled ahead at the halfway point he had plenty of reserve for a hard push while I was already pushing my envelope so that when I tried to stay on his heels I ended up with a severe stitch in my side on the last turn and collapsed.

In spite of that tho, the boy's coach was impressed and lamented that it was too late to jump me through the hoops to get me onto the boy's intramural track team that year.  Deadlines for permissions and such had passed.  The girls at our Junior High did not have any intramural teams so occasionally a girl with talent would be invited onto the boy's team.

In tenth grade I joined the girls track team but I had just spent the school year without taking PE or racing the bus down the hill--my walk home was simply crossing the school parking lot.  I'd lost my edge.  So the next year I took PE in the fall and it was probably the drinking fountain in the girls locker room that gave me Mono.  The doctor would not sign off on me joining the team that year.  I joined again for my senior year but I had not regained my strength and stamina.  

For several years after the Mono, running--all physical exertion actually--betrayed me by causing excruciating pain and profound fatigue. Even relapses.  By the time I hit my mid twenties I had gained 25 pounds and lost motivation as well as muscle mass and stamina.  By my late 40s I weighed 120 pounds more than the day I broke the record in 8th grade.

Over the last four decades I've missed running, longing for it with an intensity akin to unrequited love.  Running had been my Joy.  Pun intended for it had been so integral to my I.  Without it I hardly recognized myself for years.  

Recently running has returned to my night dreams where I am running towards something not away and now I'm daring to hope I can have it back for since January 2009 I've lost 70+ pounds, 30 of them in the last year.

It will take more than loosing the last 40 to 50 pounds to get running back though.  I need to build back muscle and stamina.  I need to regain the desire to exert myself again.  I need to spend less time sitting at the computer, less time crocheting, less time watching videos.  In other words I have to loose the habits of a sedentary lifestyle.  Running won't return to me via simple wishing or daydreaming.

I know how to do it.  Getting more 4th stage sleep where muscle tissue is built and getting back on the mini-tramp for 30+ minutes per day would get me there in a few months.  The question would then become where would I find a safe place for running while all but blind?

I imagine the wet sand beside the surf as the best bet--always one of my favorite places to run--but that isn't something I'm likely to get regular access to.

But I can't let that question stop me from preparing.  I need to trust that the answer will manifest once I've manifested the muscle and stamina.

I would like to be ready for a place to run no later than Memorial Day this year.

My Bucket List

#1 Hot Air Balloon Ride
#2 Play on a real drum set
#3 Swim with dolphins
#4 Visit Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop in Paris
#5 Visit the Library of Congress
#6 Attend a Performance of Beethoven's Symphony #9 by a top notch Orchestra

#7 Visit Hawaii
#8 Visit Russia 
#9 Learn Russian
#10 Learn Braille

#11 Celebrate Christmas in My Own Home with All the Trappings

#12 Add Petit Point to My Fiber Art Repertoire

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Boxed Up Bushels of Desiccated Passions

Mom's Paper's and Misc.

 I finally got Mom's papers and misc consolidated from 11 boxes, three bags, and three shelves of various sizes into 8 bushel sized boxes.  I wanted that uniform look bad enough to empty several of those Bear Creek pear box tops of other things so I could use them for Mom's things.  I even switched the contents of one of Mom's bushel sized fruit boxes with a different label into one of these so they would match.  Aesthetics matter to me even when its mostly junk I guess.

Paper Sorting Station.
See Tomorrow's Sunday Serenity
for the story about that painting.

Here is the cubby desk and its cupboard after I pulled everything out of it.  The paper sorting set up on the desk there is for my papers.  I set the painting I found with others behind the file cabinet to block the ugly view as that is what I gaze at when I look up from the screen.

In the cupboard, bottom right is a boot box full of books I pulled out of one of Mom's boxes that had papers laid on top.  On the left are some fragile items I'll need to find better homes for or leave here if I can't.  The middle shelf right is a stack of empty three-ring binders.  Some were already in this cupboard but the bulk I'd pulled out of the one of the bigger boxes weeks ago, emptying them of the 'Alphabet Soup' papers destined for the recycle.  The left side contains a stack of empty file folders, pocket folders, three-ring binder tabbed dividers and report covers.  Same story.

'Mom's Alphabet Soup' was my affectionate name for all the councils, boards, advisory committee, and support groups that Mom participated in throughout the 80s, 90s, and right up until her broken hip and stroke in late 2008.  Tho she had slowed way down after Dad's cancer diagnosis in 2004.

I meant no disrespect by that nickname, it was my admission that I could not keep up.  I remember only BVI and AARP.  That last needs no explanation.  BVI was the Blind and Visually Impaired Support Group for which Mom was President for awhile and I acted as her secretary.  I created a database of members on my recently acquired multi-media computer in 1996 and maintained it until I left Longview in 1999.

I just realized something that is making me sad.  I've just made this room entirely my own with this makeover.  Tho Mom's stuff is still in here, little of it is on display.  None of it is where she left it except what is in her desk drawers, file cabinet and the long wooden cabinet my Great Books set sits atop.  But that's only because I haven't gotten to them yet.

My sister said that if what happened to any of the stuff in here mattered to me I should take responsibility for sorting it because no one else in the family is going to have the patience.  She like Dad before her envisions a dumpster when the time comes.

I imagine that for every bushel I sort through I might find a shoe box full of stuff worth saving and even that is a matter of opinion.  Mom was a collector like me.  She collected a lot of clippings from newspapers and magazines.  She was also an inveterate greeting card sender and receiver--still is.

But seeing it boxed up like this now makes too real the fast approaching time in which all of the things that mattered to Mom and few others will be boxed up...

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Nostalgia Nudges

A few fond memories showed up among Mom's things over the weekend of the stuff shuffle.

Many of these knick-knacks I remember from my days as the family duster.  Mom taught me how when I was five and would hide pennies under them to encourage me to lift each item up.  As I got older the pennies morphed into nickles and dimes and then stopped around age 9 when an official allowance was implemented.

Mom made this belt she told me last Friday.  I don't remember knowing that before.  I do remember seeing it in her dresser among other accessories but I don't remember seeing her wear it.  I suspect that was because she never regained her tiny waist after my arrival.

I jumped to the conclusion that it was crocheted when I first spotted it again Friday but a closer look revealed that was mistaken.  I was mystified by it for several minutes but was finally able to reverse-engineer it.  I'll save that story for tomorrow.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Music to Write By

Yep, I'm still going on about the music with Brainwave Entrainment tones from Mind Power MP3.com I discovered last weekend.  Only now I have more than the three free samples and the YouTube channel for Ed has gotten me this digital 20 album library plus bonuses for Christmas.  Some of the bonuses are more BWE music, some are ebooks and one is a digital course with some of each.  Altogether 30 to 40 items averaging over 10 minutes per audio file download.

I've no desire to spend hours at the tedious task of downloading them one by one (the only option given) before I stop to listen.  So I've started out by targeting several that I'm anxious to have available ASAP.  Yesterday I shared why Moonlight Sonata was so important to me.  Today the spotlighted album is Energy Activation: Holst - The Planets.

I discovered Holst's symphony, The Planets, at the same time as Beethoven's 9th via the same classical music radio station while living in Longview in the early 90s.  I had been listening to the station in the first place because my creative writing professor at Southern Oregon State College (now SOU), Lawson Inada (since designated as Poet Laureate for Oregon State), had turned me on to the usefulness of music to help set the mood or feeling tone of a poem, story or individual scenes.

Thus in the late 80s I had started keeping a file noting the emotion a musical piece called up in me and as I began using them to tune my mood for a writing session I kept records of which musical piece was playing while I was writing the scene or poem and would play it again when returning to work on it. It wasn't long before I realized that not only did the music tied to the written piece recreate the mood it triggered the memories of my unrecorded thoughts and intentions regarding the piece during previous sessions.

Energizing Classical Music - Holst, The Planets
(I think the track is Neptune)

The really cool thing about Holst's The Planets is that it is a mini mood library all by itself with each of the 7 movements titled with the name of a planet having a completely different emotional content.  Nearly all of the major moods were represented so it became a standby goto album if I didn't already have another piece of music in mind.  A good number of my poems were composed with one or another track from this album playing on a loop.

I've since lost the records I'd kept on which music conjured which mood and which had taken ownership of which story and haven't got around to recreating it.  The memories of this valuable tool were triggered by listening to some of the classical pieces on the Super Mind Music YouTube channel.

I had gravitated to classical, jazz and piano to accompany my writing as I'd learned that, at least for me, it was important that the music I listened to was instrumental or foreign language (as in Operas or the Chorale in the 4rth movement of Beethoven's 9th) as any use of words that I recognized yanked me out of the dream state and out of the story and even out of my own thoughts as tho my own thoughts were being overwritten by someone else's.  Apparently tho when it is a language I can't understand the voices are just another musical instrument.

 Several more of my one time Write By library of music are represented in this collection. Among them are:  Vivaldi's Four Seasons, several more Beethoven pieces (but sadly not my most favorite music ever, his 9th symphony), several Mozart, and some Bach, Chopin, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky.

But that's not even half of what's in this library. There are many other music genres represented from acoustic, trance, ambient, electronic, contemporary, and jazz.  Several pieces were composed for this project.

All of the positive or neutral moods are represented: contentment, peace, acceptance, trust, ecstasy, bliss, joy, euphoria, calm, energized, alert, open, love, compassion...  If I need to conjure any of the negative moods for a poem or scene, I'll have to look elsewhere.  But then again, I probably don't need the help with fear, anxiety, anger, bitterness, resentment, irritation, doubt, revulsion, regret, sadness, grief etc. as I'm well practiced in all of them.

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Still Entranced

Supper Mind Music Library

I'm still entranced by this music and probably will be for some time to come now as Ed has gotten me this digital 20 album library plus bonuses for Christmas.

It is going to take awhile to get them all downloaded so instead of going after them in the order the links are listed I'm going after the ones I'm most anxious to start listening to first.  One of those is the Blissful Meditation: Piano Moods as one track is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata which has a lot of nostalgia value for me going way back to toddler hood at least.  My Dad used to play it on the piano a lot when I was little so it became part of the soundtrack of my early childhood into my mid teens.



I wanted to embed the the video containing their BWE enhanced Moonlight Sonata track from the Super Mind Music YouTube channel but they had embedding disabled so I found this wonderful recording which is beautiful but does not contain the Brainwave Entrainment tones used by Mind Power MP3.com.

Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata with Full Orchestra

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Lingering Longing

I got to spend over two hours browsing the shelves at the Longview Public Library this afternoon. My sister dropped me off and then came back for me after she'd served Mom her dinner.

I just love the Longview library. Not only is it a beautiful building inside and out it just has an atmosphere of welcome and wonder. I suppose a lot of that sense is created by the many many many hours I spent there in my first two decades. It was my first library and my memories of it go back to toddlerhood. Storyhour, first card, homework, reading to my babysitting charges in the children's room... My piano recitals were held there.

Going there always puts me on the nostalgia train...

I came home with 11 books. Or rather back to Mom's. As the librarian told me the due date I realized I would not be renewing this batch as I'd be home (back in Phoenix) before they were due.

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Thusday 13: Nostalgia

Join in @ Thursday 13

13 Nostalgic Images

Dollhouse just like the one I had in the 1960s.  Made of painted sheets of aluminum bent with slotted tabs 

My baby sister pushing the baby doll carriage at our maternal grandparent's.  Grandpa  had replaced the  tattered cloth bed with a cardboard box.

The ceramic pitcher my mom made juice and Jello in when I was little.  it had matching juice glasses

Old readers from the 30s and 40s which were part of my early years of reading.  Mom read to us out of these before I learned to read

My first embroider started age 11

Hollyhock Dolls my mom made this summer which sent me back to very young age watching her, her mother or her aunt making them

The public library in Longview WA where I got my first  library card at age 5

3 for 1: Me age 5 holding my favorite baby doll which had been my mom's, sitting on our first swing set with my future highs school in the background

Me age 9 or 10 reading to my baby sister and cousin in our front yard.

My Dad's parents would park their camper in our yard when they visited from Idaho.  That's me age 3 with my Grandma

Views of our house.  The early years before the remodeling begun when I was  5

I had one of these Cheerful Tearful Dolls 

Inside the house I lived in from 6wks to 17yrs 9mo.  That's Mom sitting in the kitchen holding me shortly after they moved in.  View taken from the living room.  Both rooms were paneled in Knotty Pine with Knotty Pine cabinetry in the Kitchen.

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Childhood on the Vine

Mom made these dolls from the hollyhock blooms today and when I saw them I was thrown back decades in time and miles to the north to the back yard of my Great Aunt whose fence was covered in hollyhock and who showed me how to make them. At the time it seemed to be magical this taking of one thing and transforming it into something else entirely.

Well I've been awake since noon Wednesday. Had a big day today. Would like to give a play by play but if I don't get to sleep soon I'll sleep through Mom's departure for my brother's in Portland at noon and will have to say my goodbyes by phone before I leave town Sunday.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Story Fed Child

I've been scrounging Mom's house for things with childhood memories attached. Today it seems appropriate to share pics of a few of the books that shaped my early years.

Above are two of the first level readers my Mom read to us with her trademark pointing at each word as she said it. It was how I learned to read before kindergarten. Though it wasn't until late in second grade that they all learned that I had never learned to sound out words. I had just learned to recognize them as pictures with names. Like ideograms or hieroglyphics. I recognized them from any angle.

Based on the styles in clothing and furniture in I Have a Secret it must have been late forties to early fifties but Mew-Mew, Bow-Wow was from 30s which was when my Mom w as learning to read.

I should have opened them up and snapped a couple shots of the pages.



These are from the sixties and were bought for my baby sister and I remember reading them to her from when I was 8 until my early teens. She started kindergarten when I was in sixth grade.


These three shots are of my Dad's Audubon's Birds of America. This was published in 1950 and first belonged to my Mom's aunt who must have given it to Dad. I am assuming this as Aunt Marie's name is stamped inside with one of Dad's address labels stuck just below.

The dust jacket is falling apart and I laid the remaining pieces together for this picture but they are kept inside.



I loved looking at the pictures of the birds from an early age and imagining stories for the birds in them. As I learned to read well enough to sound out the names and info I tried to memorize it.

I always loved the cover under the jacket and could stare at it endlessly.

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Little Pitchers

Back in the day when I was of an age to be included in that group referred to by grownups as 'little pitchers' --you know, those odd creatures with big ears? -- this little ceramic pitcher with a rooster and flowers painted on it was a frequent fixture of the lunch table.

I was going about Mom's house this evening looking for items of nostalgia that conjured up memories of childhood and this was one of the first to catch my eye.

I remember Mom serving milk or juice in it at lunch time. I also remember her using it to mix Jello, putting the powder in and then pouring boiling water from the tea kettle in and stirring with a metal wand with a spiral of metal on its end that jiggled when you shook it in the air.

I remember, being allowed to pour the hot liquid Jello into small dishes for serving and setting them in the fridge. I also remember drinking the hot liquid Jello itself--usually when I was sick.

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