by jphilo | Sep 17, 2009 | Reflections on the Past
Mary Travers is dead, over forty years after Peter, Paul and Mary hit the charts. My sister was in high school at the time. With the infinite wisdom of a big sister, she told me to listen to them. Their music was groovy, she said, but it wasn’t just groovy. Their songs had messages about civil rights, which she was passionate about, and lots of important stuff. They were politically active, she said.
So I listened to their music with her. I liked it because it rhymed and was pretty, and Mary was pretty, and I coveted her long blond hair. But I couldn’t make heads or tails of the politics and thought my sister was reading way too much into their lyrics. Still, we listened together, and while she dreamed of marching on Washington to If I Had a Hammer and Blowin‘ in the Wind, I stood in front of the mirror and imagined growing out my short, brown hair, dyeing it blond and tossing it over my shoulder just like Mary Travers.
In the fall of my sister’s senior year, when I was in ninth grade, the school was buzzing with news of a youth group coffee shop above one of the Main Street stores in town. A live trio (two boys and a girl) of high school students who sounded just like Peter, Paul and Mary sang at the coffee shop on the weekends, and according to our junior high scuttlebutt, it was the coolest of all the cool places to be after the football games on Friday night.
When I asked Mom if I could go, she said no. But my sister, who didn’t think the trio was quite as good as we ninth graders did, went to bat for me. She convinced Mom the coffee shop was not a den of iniquity, and that it was safe for me to go there with a friend. The romantic atmosphere nearly bowled me over the night we went: the checkered table clothes over empty wooden spools, the kind used to hold electrical cable. And every table had a candle stuck in an old wine bottle. I was certain no one had drunk the wine in the bottles, just poured it down the sink and stuck in the candles.
When the trio started to sing, I was transported. My sister had been right. They weren’t all that good, but maybe because I was hearing the music live and not on a recording, the power and poignancy of the lyrics touched something deep inside. From that moment on, I loved Peter, Paul and Mary not because my sister said I should or because the kids at school thought they were cool, but because their music made me believe I could help make the world better.
Almost forty years later, I’m not sure if I’ve accomplished the dreams they instilled within me. But I do know this. Mary Travers and her music (along with my big sister) made my world a better place. She’s gone, but what a legacy she has left us.
Thank you, Mary Travers. You’ll be missed.
by jphilo | Jun 29, 2009 | Reflections on the Past
Recently one of my childhood games, passed on to younger cousins when I outgrew it, was returned to me. The thrill of owning Happy Landings: A Geography Game (Whitman Publishing, 1962) did not overwhelm me when I received the game as a birthday present when I was 9 or 10.
For me, a geographically challenged child from the word go (my best guess is that the game was given after a particularly abysmal score on the social studies portion of ITBS) playing the game was an exercise in failure. The board was a world map marked with red stars. After drawing a card with commands like “Ride over Mackinac Bridge which connects upper and lower Michigan” or “Climb towering Mt. Everest in northern India,” players placed their marker on the corresponding star. I don’t remember ever getting a star in the right place. And since the map, the cards and the markers are in pristine condition, the game didn’t see a whole lot of play at our house or anywhere else.
But as a kid, one thing about the game intrigued me: I could spend hours gazing at the children on the cover. The boy was okay, mostly because he’s holding the pointer which was cool, but the girl was fascinating. She was the epitome of early 1960s perfection. Note the curly hair, the lovely bow in her hair, the unwrinkled shirtwaist dress with it’s own gigantic bow, the lace on collar, cuffs and waistband, and the wonderfully full skirt. And from the look on her face, you can bet she can answer every Happy Landings question without breaking a sweat. She was everything I aspired to be and couldn’t accomplish, no matter how hard I tried. That’s why I spent hours gazing at her picture, trying to imagine what it would be like to have a dress like hers, curls like hers, and smarts like hers.
I’m thrilled to possess the game again because it brings back so many memories: the chalky, booky, dusty smell of the elementary school I attended, girls wearing shorts under our dresses so the boys wouldn’t see our panties on the jungle gym at recess, the joy of discovering Laura Ingalls, the Bobbsey Twins, and Clara Barton inside the covers of library books, and the disappointment of failing another spelling test because I got “b” and “d” mixed up again.
But mostly, I’m thrilled because the game reminds me of how far I’ve moved beyond the child who once owned it and yet how much of her remains. I no longer obsess over lace, bows, ironed dresses, and curly hair. But, I still mix up “b” and “d” when I’m tired, and I still love meeting characters inside a book.
One last thing that hasn’t changed? I still don’t like playing geography games, so please, buy something else for my birthday this year!
by jphilo | May 12, 2009 | Reflections on the Past
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.
by jphilo | May 8, 2009 | Reflections on the Past
Our lilacs are blooming, their scent perfuming the air and filling my head with memories of the day we planted them. The shoots came from the backyard of my childhood home in the town where I grew up. Mom, spade in hand, dug out small saplings and told of friends and neighbors who had given shoots to her years before. After years of gathering different varieties, her collection of pink, lavender, dark purple and white lilacs was the envy of the neighborhood and her particular delight. Her delight became mine the weekend we planted those shoots in the southwest corner of the yard of our new home.
Yesterday morning, I grabbed the clippers and tramped across the dewy grass, hoping to find enough blossoms to make a decent bouquet. But when I slipped behind the spruce trees and stood beside the lilacs, the size of the bushes rather than the abundant, lush blossoms nearly bowled me over. The dozen shoots, barely three feet tall when we planted them in the early 1990s, had multiplied into a solid, seven foot hedge.
When had the lilac saplings spread and grown until they were identical to the ones in my mother yard? When had it happened? I thought back through the years when we moved into this house, the kids young, Mom still teaching. I thought of Dad’s death in 1997, the sale of the house where our parents raised us, and Mom’s move to her house in our town, where she lived for twelve years. I thought Mom’s illness which recently led to the end of her life as a homeowner.
And then I knew when it happened. The answer was as delightful and poignant as the bouquet in my hands. “Just in time,” I thought as the scent of lilacs filled my heart. “Just in time.”
by jphilo | Jan 16, 2009 | Reflections on the Past
For the past three days, we’ve been in the deep freeze, with temperatures below zero even at noon under sunny skies. The floor in front of the kitchen door was so chilly, I rolled up towels and stuffed them against the crack in a vain effort to block the cold. When my husband saw my handiwork, he said I’d become my mother. Well sure, she used that old trick all the time, and sure, I vowed never to be like her, but that was before it was -18 two nights running. So it’s no wonder that last night as we lay shivering in bed, despite the extra layer of blankets (except during several hot flashes when I threw off all the covers, but you don’t want to hear about that), another one of Mom’s cold-busting efforts came to mind.
During her childhood, her dad gave her some of the wool sheared from the sheep on their Minnesota farm. She and her mom cleaned and carded the wool and made it into a batting which they covered with muslin. Together they tied the layers together, sewed the edges, and stored it away until it was needed. Maybe Mom used it in her unheated bedroom in the drafty farmhouse where she grew up. But we didn’t use it in the house where I grew up. By then, central heating had rendered the wool batting obsolete.
At least until this cold spell hit and kept hitting. During one moment of frigid desperation, I considered driving over to Mom’s, hauling the batting to our house and huddling beneath it. But it was too cold to travel in pajamas, so I shivered away until a hot flash came to my rescue, but you don’t want to hear about that.
This afternoon, life is improving. The temperature is above zero, the central heating’s doing find, and the wool batting is once again obsolete. If only I could say the same thing about my hot flashes. But you don’t want to hear about that.
by jphilo | Aug 13, 2008 | Reflections on the Past
Every August, when I see the back-to-school ads, my stomach twists into knots. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count how many years since I’ve been a student, and I’ve been out of teaching now for five years.
But when the school supply ads start running, my body does this Back to the Future time travel thing, and I start worrying about class lists and buildings without air conditioning and how much time is needed to get a room ready. Since I don’t have to worry about those things for myself, I worry about them for all my teacher friends which I’m sure they appreciate a whole bunch.
This August, I’ve got deadlines that are keeping me as busy as any teacher I know. My fingers are actually getting sore from typing. Even though there’s a clock ticking in the back of my mind as time goes by faster than I can type, a bushel full of gratitude sits alongside that ticking clock.
I’m grateful for a husband who supports me. I’m grateful for a daughter who loves college and a son who raises goats at a monastery. I’m grateful for a comfortable home and all the fresh vegetables our CSA share is providing this month. I’m grateful for a warm day and laundry to hang on the line. I’m grateful, delighted and astounded by the opportunity to write each day and have a book contract deadline.
Someday, maybe even next year, I hope to change my back-to-school ad reaction. A little happy dance and a song of praise would be nice change of pace from a knot in the stomach. So keep your eyes and ears open next August. I might put on quite a show. You won’t want to miss it.
