Category: Memories

Posted on

what’s in a name?

Growing up with a not-so-common name meant finding something personalized was going to be a noteworthy event.

That never happened. Of course someone could pay to print my name on a t-shirt or pen, but you didn’t find one in a store ready to go. I can’t explain why that mattered, but it did. A lot. For my friends with unusual names, such as Fonda, it mattered too. So I know I’m not alone in this.

Belinda Blackberry sm
I’ve heard the Tip-Top popsicle band has undergone some changes over the years, and Belinda Blackberry retired a few years ago.

My brother knew it was important to me, and when he had his chance to get me something pre-personalized, if you will, he went to unusual lengths to get it.

He was backpacking in New Zealand, and there in the grocery store window was a poster advertising “the latest fruity member of the popsicle band,” Belinda Blackberry.

With her slick haircut and wide-eyed smile, this singing sensation’s picture was destined to hang on the walls of my apartment. There was no doubt.

It took some persuasion and few phone calls to the right people, but my brother convinced the bewildered Tip-Top distributor to give it to him. Apparently the name Belinda is far more common in New Zealand than it is in America, so this man was skeptical of my brother’s insistence I would value the poster because it had my name on it.

I bet that man would be shocked, and maybe get a good laugh, if he knew that today, some thirty years later, this ad has been framed and now hangs over my desk at home, to keep me cheery on gloomy days.

No one could appreciate it more than me, for the name as well as the inconvenience & expense my brother was willing to go through to get it mailed to me. And oh yes, the pure camp value of the ad itself.

Thanks go to Tip-Top products, New Zealand’s premier producer of ice cream products & frozen treats. And they know nothing about this post. I’m just sincerely grateful they gave my brother that poster!

Posted on

my best gifts received, part one

In high school, my friend Sue gave me an ornament for Christmas. I remember being a bit disappointed. It wasn’t much of a gift in my 15-year-old estimation.

angel ornamentSue assured me I’d value it more each year. What she didn’t know was her friendship had far greater value.

At a time when I was awkward and insecure, she made me feel important. The first time I met her was as the new kid in sixth grade. I huddled alone in the corner of the playground, the only girl wearing a dress, waiting for class to start.

Shaking, my back against the brick wall, hands clasped tightly together, I was wishing I’d worn jeans as my mom suggested. All these kids had gone to school together since kindergarten, I was sure of it. I’d never fit in.

Sue with her pigtails & bows and another girl, Nada, approached me.

“Are you new?” they asked in unison. We all giggled.

“Yes!” I said, incredibly happy someone had noticed me.

Turned out we were in the same class, with the same scary teacher. They gave me the scoop. She was fat (apparently important information for sixth-graders) and this was her first teaching job.

I don’t know if I was the friend to her she never stopped being to me.

The next summer Sue’s mom was killed in a plane accident. Her father remarried soon after, and certainly the adjustment must have been hard for her. I don’t know if I was the friend to her she never stopped being to me.

A seventh-grade diary entry early in the school year noted she seemed okay. At least I wondered how she was doing. I hope I asked her about it, gave her a chance to talk. I don’t remember.

In high school, my mental health problems arose. As I started to lose confidence, gain weight and sink into a series of deep depressions, she did her best to make me feel better. “You look real nice today,” she’d tell me on days when my dirty hair was held back with a scarf or my outfit played up the extra pounds. I saw through it and appreciated her thoughtfulness. It meant I had a friend.

Every Christmas I think of her and cry a little, missing our friendship and how much it meant to me.

The last time I saw her was about a year after we graduated. I was walking around a lake near my home and she came from the opposite direction, with a boyfriend, I think.

She was genuinely happy to see me. We had an enthusiastic and chatty catch-up conversation, then moved on in our separate walks. I haven’t seen her since.

I’ve tried to look her up, with no success. Every Christmas I see that ornament, think of her and cry a little, missing our friendship and the opportunity to tell her how much it meant to me.

Still means to me.

 

Photo Credit: (background) © Diana Rich; (ornament) © Stuart Monk, both — DollarPhotoClub.com

Posted on

behave (as) yourself! whaaat?

During Christmas break when I was in seventh grade, I added bangs to my one length-fits-all hair style, and for most of my life since then I’ve kept them.

I’ll never be sure how much this plays into it, if at all, but I distinctly remember one boy complimenting me when we returned to class in January.

Beth, Thom & Me Summer 1972
My sister, brother and me (far right) the spring I was in seventh grade

“They look really nice,” he said. “They make your face look less round.”

He was a year older than me, and all through junior high, high school and until the last time I saw him, two years after I graduated, he was particularly nice to me.

I didn’t clue into it until about twenty years later, but I think it was more than just a kind nature.

This very popular, somewhat bad, really good-looking boy quite possibly liked me, the socially awkward girl whose weight fluctuated with the changing tide and insecurities overshadowed everything about her.

It makes you think. I’d realized it already on some level by this time (the age of 36 or 37), but it brought home a valuable truth: no one is who they appear to be on the outside. Why one kid is popular in high school is a bizarre combination of the “right” talents, good looks and circle of friends. He’s not better than the girl with none of that, and if he’s lucky, he knows it.

That continues throughout life. The seemingly perfect couple gets divorced. Most of us knew the Duggars would fall eventually (although perhaps not as far). There’s always the pastor who walks away from his church in shame…that’s just a given in any community. Okay, I’m being facetious with the last one. A bit.

The hooker with the heart of gold. A cliché to make a point.

A close friend of mine made the observation a few years ago that who we are is “not about behavior.” It rang true for me instantly.

In her case, her husband had had a benign brain tumor that affected the entirety of his behavior, including his ability to hold a job or even help with household chores.

Their church, in a gross misuse of its authority, directed him to leave his family until he could figure out how to become “the man of God his family needed him to be.”

He had a brain tumor. He had brain damage. His behavior had nothing to do with who he was.

Now, that’s an extreme example. But there are plenty of people, say, with mental illness, who do things that later shock and humiliate them. Virtually everyone I know, mentally ill or not, has done something so “unlike themselves” they have a hard time confessing it to others.

I wish I’d known that boy liked me, if in fact he did. I wish I’d had the confidence to openly reciprocate his feelings, because I probably would have felt something for him if I’d let myself. I could have learned, early on, one of life’s most valuable lessons: who we are is more than what others see, it’s more than how we behave, and it’s more than we’ll be able to discover in a lifetime.

Posted on

jaunty…or, my best gifts given, part two. my best gifts received, always.

Ten years ago my friendship with Mary began, and two years ago it ended when she passed away at the age of 53.

Mary had outlived the odds from the day she was born, when her birth mother was told she wouldn’t make it more than six months. Later, her adoptive parents were told the same thing repeatedly throughout her childhood — and as an adult, Mary heard it so often she stopped telling her husband, Mike.

Mary was one of those people who had hundreds of “best friends.” Selbu Modern - pink & gray tamShe would do whatever she could for any of them, including me. She was gutsy and kind. When she went into the hospital for what turned out to be the last time, Mike asked me to make her a “jaunty beret” because her treatment had caused much of her hair to fall out, and she was self-conscious about it.

I immediately set out to find the right pattern and right yarn — something soft for what I imagined might be sensitive skin — and knit up this little hat here.

Actually, this is the second hat I knit in this pattern. I never took a picture of the first one, which went to Mary. When I asked Mike if she liked it, he said she hadn’t had a chance to try it on. After a short time, I caught on. She was too sick for this to matter the least bit.

She maybe never saw the hat at all, or the slippers I included with it. However, I don’t feel anything but gratitude I had a chance to show her my love by knitting this for her, in the off-chance she knew about it.

Last week another Mary in my life died, one month shy of her 41st birthday. It was stunningly sudden. Perhaps we shouldn’t have been entirely surprised, however, for this Mary had lost her eldest son ten years ago to leukemia, and hadn’t been the same since. In many ways she’d moved on beautifully, but her heartache showed itself quietly. It’s possible that pain influenced the way she cared for herself. I don’t know, and it would be wrong for me to assume.

Kims Slippers red rose IIOne day on impulse I gave her a pair of slippers I’d knit from a pattern I designed. She started to cry.

“You don’t know what this means to me,” she said.

They were only slippers, so I really didn’t, but I was touched it meant so much. And oh-so-glad I’d done it. If my one small gesture made even a tiny part of her life better, I only wish I could have done a hundred times more. She was special and deserved to know it.

I’m lucky I have a skill I can use to show my love to others, and far luckier for those I have to receive those gifts. Rest in peace, my friends, your suffering is over. You were a gift and a blessing to me. My life is better because you were in it.

Posted on

a little less class, a little more kitsch

If we’re lucky our homes will never look precisely decorated, because along the way we’ll accumulate campy pieces of kitsch,  treasured objects that speak to our hearts, and we’ll have to display them.

Ah, FranciscoFor me, it was an ashtray given as a joke by some family member, probably my mom or brother. It had a black plastic base with a hand-painted metal flamenco dancer screwed into the middle. Joke was on them. I loved it.

I don’t smoke, and guests in my home aren’t allowed to either, so instead I loaded it with red cinnamon candy and proudly set it on my coffee table.

No one, but no one, saw the beauty in Francisco the Fleet-Footed Flamenco Dancer that I did. It was frequently suggested I replace him with something a bit, shall we say, classier. I really didn’t see how Francisco fell short. (Okay, I did, but love is kind.)

Then I got a roommate. She was appalled, and went as far as trying to enlist my mother’s help to “get rid of that thing.” Mom warned her it was useless. Thus began a minor battle between my roommate and me.

“People will think it’s okay to smoke,” she’d say.

“That’s why there’s candy in there.” I’d reply.

“The colors aren’t right in this room,” she’d try later, standing in the living room as I walked down the hall.

“It’s so small, it’s an accent piece, it doesn’t matter,” I called back.

I never feared for Francisco’s safety, however, until I came home one day while she was on a business trip. He lay on his side on the coffee table, completely twisted off the base.

“Ooooh NOOOOO!” I cried. She forever denied it, but all the evidence said that woman had hired a damn assassin to do her dirty work while she was away.

I immediately called my friend Bud and asked if he could solder the pieces together. Within hours, Francisco sat upright in his proper place again. But I was resigned to the fact he needed a new home, at best somewhere safer in the apartment.

My kitschy little ashtray went into a box and stayed there for I don’t know how many years. He resurfaced every time I moved, but never made it onto the coffee table again. Eventually he disappeared.

I miss Francisco. Everything in my living room now is so…classy. It could use a little lesser art.

Image credit: (shadow image) © adrenalinapura – DollarPhotoClub.com