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Old Stuff for this Fantastic Friday

Old Stuff for this Fantastic Friday

IMG_0737This Fantastic Friday post is a trip down memory lane. First stop is seven years ago, when Mom broke up housekeeping. Second stop is almost fifty years ago. Third stop is the present, with the pictures framed and on the wall, as the new photo above shows.

I’m a sucker for old stuff. And a whole bunch of old stuff found its way to our place after Mom sold her house last March. My original plan was to immediately do some creative decorating with the treasures. But with weddings, one niece graduating from high school and another from college, and a new book contract the original plan got sidetracked.

But in this brief respite, I hope to find time to play with my favorite goodies – three brightly colored, cardboard Disney puzzles. They’re relics from the late 1950s which somehow survived our childhoods in almost perfect condition. How  a miracle like that happened, I don’t know, unless Mom stored them on a high shelf and allowed us to play with them under her watchful eye only after washing our hands thoroughly. If that’s how she did it, we kids must have thought she was the meanest mom in the whole world. However she managed to preserve the puzzles, fifty years later, I am thankful.

Every time I see the puzzles, it’s Sunday night in Le Mars again. Mom and Dad are playing cards with my aunt and uncle in the dining room. My sister, brother, and our three girl cousins are in the living room, watching Walt Disney, eating popcorn, and shooing the dogs away when they get too close to the popcorn bowls.

Walt Disney, the most creative man in the universe, is talking directly to me. He’s dropping hints about a new movie called Mary Poppins, inviting my family to visit a theme park named Disneyland in California. While his attention turns to Mickey and Donald, who are up to their usual hijinks, I daydream about visiting Disneyland and meeting Walt at the gage. Then, I remember that my dad’s in a wheelchair, so even if we could afford to drive across the country, he couldn’t ride the rides.

For a little while, I’m sad and jealous of my sister who got to go on a camping trip to California with my aunt and uncle a few years ago. But I break out of my funk during the commercial. My brother and I go to the kitchen to get more popcorn from a huge Tupperware bowl.

Our uncle stops us. “Hey, Jo-Bo. Hey, Johnny. How would you like to go with us to the Black Hills and Colorado this summer? You girls can break in the new TeePee pop-up camper.” He turned to my brother. “And you and me, we’ll sleep in the trunk of the car every night. Whaddya think?”

My brother and I look at each other. We grin and nod furiously, then run to the living room to spread the good news. Before long, the popcorn is gone. The dogs are scavenging for crumbs. We’re wrestling on the floor with our cousins. Walt Disney’s voice mingles with my parents’ voices and my aunt and uncle’s as they say good-bye and push our protesting cousins out the door.

Every time I see those Walt Disney puzzles, I smell the popcorn and hear Walt Disney saying good night and asking us to come back next week. I remember our trip to the Black Hills and Colorado and see the morning light glowing outside the canvas sides of the Tee-Pee camper. I am jealous of my brother who is sleeping in the trunk with my uncle. I am wading in a mountain stream, building a dam across it with my cousins.

It’s time to frame the puzzles and put them on the wall. They should be where I can see them.

Colorado, Here I Come!

Colorado, Here I Come!

Tomorrow, I’m driving to Colorado for a writers’ conference. It’s my first overnight visit in the Rocky Mountains since my Uncle and Aunt Donna took my brother (age 7) and me (age 10) and their daughters (ages 7, 6, and 4) on their annual family camping trip. (No need to feel sorry for my sister – she went with them a year to before all the way to California.) Because of my father’s wheelchair, our family didn’t go on camping trips. We didn’t take annual summer vacations. Going to the Rockies was an experience I would never have had except for the generosity of my dear uncle and aunt.

The conference is at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, and I’m thinking the sleeping arrangements will be slightly less glamourous than those on our camping trip. For that excursion, Jim and Donna had purchased a TeePee pop-up camper, quite an extravagance in our family’s 1960s penny-pinching days. We five women slept in the camper and pretty much filled all the beds. “Us men,” Uncle Jim boomed, “will sleep in the trunk of the car.”

“John gets all the luck,” I thought every night, as my little brother announced, “It’s time for us men to go to bed,” and swaggered off to the trunk with Jim. It’s taken me years to get over being miffed at the men, but this trip to Estes Park might take care of it.

I hope the trip takes care of some other things, too. At the conference, I will work with a national publicist. Hopefully, she can show me how to get A Different Dream for My Child: Meditations for Parents or Critically or Chronically Ill Children, which was inspired my son’s condition, into the hands of parents who need it. If that happens, much of the credit goes to Cec Murphey, the  author who helped Don Piper write the best-selling Ninety Minutes in Heaven. Cec uses the royalties from that book to fund scholarships so new writers can attend conferences.

Someday I’d like to introduce my Uncle Jim to Cec Murphey. I’d like to tell them how their generosity taught me to move beyond my father’s illness and my son’s health condition and be generous to others. I want them to know they made a difference, not only in my life but also in the lives of people we don’t even know.

That’s Fast Enough

That’s Fast Enough

I can’t believe this blog is up and running. I worked on it day after day, spent most of a weekend on hold with various tech support people and finally this afternoon all systems were pronounced go. So I tried to publish the site. No go.

After another hour on hold, a patient support person worked with me until we discovered something was wrong with the blog. Once it was deleted, I was able to publish. Except of course the blog. I had to start it completely over. So here I am, up later than I like to be, typing my first entry. After days of waiting and waiting, things are moving way too fast.

And that made me think of a camping trip my husband and I went on a month ago. It was a hot August weekend, so hot the only place we wanted to be was out on the boat. And after watching the teenagers cool off while being pulled on the tube, I decided to take the plunge. I plopped down in the tube and floated slowly as the boat idled while the skipper moved the ropes into a safe position, I told the pilot, “Tim, this is fast enough. I’d like the whole ride to be this speed.” Tim grinned and took off, full throttle. I held on for a wild ride that was way more fun than my leisurely float.

I’m thinking that’s what this blog will be like. I want a slow float but could be in for a wild ride. The only way to find out is to plop down and get started.