21 Years

Today is Scott’s 21st birthday. I struggled to find an appropriate card at the Jewel last night. Hallmark, American Greetings, and the like seem a lazy way to recognize a milestone birthday. I understand, however, that when we are rushed and tired, it is easier to let card wordsmiths say it. I will give him the purchased card with cash tucked inside. He can go buy something that will soon be forgotten, but I hope he remembers one thing—his mother loves him. Always.

Photo--Uncle Scott introduces Nicolas to video games. Well, Nicolas is just happy playing with the controller.

Favorite Childhood Christmas Presents & Memories

As Christmas approaches, I was thinking about what were my favorite childhood toys.
My first memory is of Tiny Tears. She cried tears and wet her diaper and I loved her. I must have been about four or five when she came into my life one Christmas. She became the favorite doll until that more sophisticated Barbie stole my heart.

But rooting around in my mom’s closet one pre-Christmas Saturday, I discovered that Santa has lots of help from you-know-who, and Christmas anticipation was set back a notch or two. That is until another Saturday right before Christmas.

During the week, Mom worked her secretary job at Maxwell Air Force Base, commuting 20 miles from our home in the country to Montgomery. Saturdays became her days for grocery shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, errands and trips to JC Penney’s to try on what seemed like hundreds of dress as I tagged along.

When I was growing up, downtown Montgomery was THE place to shop. Pre-Selma to Montgomery march, pre-shopping malls and strip shops. There were two five and dimes. A trip downtown usually meant a visit to S. H. Kress where you could find all manner of cheap stuff, some of it not made in China. Sometimes we’d get a blue-plate special at the lunch counter—the white lunch counter. Even as a child it didn’t make sense to me. Why was there a separate entrance marked “colored” at my pediatrician’s office? The water fountains, the lunch counters.

But I have digressed, dear gentle readers.

On this particular post-Santa Claus-enlightenment Saturday, Mom and I headed to Montgomery Fair Department Store. Yep, the same place where Rosa Parks once worked as a seamstress--work that wore her out so much that she refused to move to the back of the bus that fateful day that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

I already knew my big present that year was going to be a bike. As I nearly raced down the stairs to the store basement and laid eyes on it, I could hardly believe what I saw—a pink and white beauty with handlebar streamers sure to fly once I mastered the art of bicycling.

Christmas was yet to come this year but no Christmas since could match how I felt that day. I learned to ride the J. C. Higgins bike with Grandpa Parsons’ hands supporting my wobbly first efforts. He held on and as I gained momentum, he knew when it was safe to let go and I sailed off, streamers flying.

I invite my dear gentle readers to share favorite childhood Christmas memories. Send me an E-mail and I’ll post your responses or leave a long comment.

Hello, Old Friend

She’s a bit bedraggled but she’s still Barbie. How many women of a “certain age” have tucked their Barbie away in a box just waiting to bring her out for a special little girl to love and appreciate? I came across my old friend this week down in the basement, which is hardly a fitting place for the young lady who once lived in a fine dream home, drove the coolest convertible and had a promising life ahead of her. After you graduated from Mattel U, oh sweet Barbie, did you fall upon hard times and the reality of middle age take its toll?

Nope. Not really. Barbie is going strong. She’s tech-savvy and quite at home today with a new generation of girls. Despite feminist critics, she’s shown that she is one tough cookie just like the girls who once loved to spend rainy summer days plotting adventures in faraway places and picking out what should be worn to them.

Travels Along the Interstate of Life

I wish I had one of those hand-held recorders so that when driving I could just dictate my thoughts, because now that I’m back home after a mini-road trip I can’t remember what I thought was so profound at the time. Maybe it will come to me.

It was along the lines of getting off the beaten path. The advent of the U. S. Interstate Highway System was in many ways a wonderful transportation milestone. I’m sure the trucking industry is happy to get its drivers where they need to be faster.

However, this same advancement in one sense has separated us more from our surroundings. Could you seriously distinguish one interstate highway from another? Well, maybe you could by terrain, but they all tend to blend together to me.

But I think back to when my mom took U. S. Hwy 82 west from Alabama to Texarkana in the summers and then continued on even more rural roads to Haworth, Oklahoma, to visit Granny. We started out after my mom got off from work on Friday and often found ourselves in that soft twilight time right before the sun goes down with a hint of honeysuckle, kudzu and pines as we whizzed by ram shackled barns and forgotten gas stations along the route. Big 18-wheelers, which nearly blew us off the road when we passed them on the narrow two-lane rolling highway, were scary to a six-year-old sitting in the back seat with the windows rolled down. Mom drove until after 10 p.m. when we’d start looking for some cheap motel. Some times it would be so late that it was one-after-another bad choice. But, the ride the next day was shorter.

Once we crossed the Mississippi River, I began to dread the trip through Arkansas. Normally I’d say much of Arkansas is beautiful, but the part around Crossett, which we were forced to drive through, was about the smelliest place in the South. Paper mills. If you’ve lived near one, I needn’t say more. Back then in the days before the Environmental Protection Agency and air pollution control, the giants of the timber industry pretty much spewed whatever they wanted to spew into the air and water, and it was tolerated. Small as it was, I could never hold my breath all the way through Crossett.

As we neared Texarkana, I began to look forward to our traditional stop at the gift shop where I could straddle the Texas-Arkansas state line, one foot in each state. I guess only kids think that kind of gimmick is clever. These days there is a post office on the state line and tourists can still pose with one foot in Texas and the other in Arkansas, but back then we always left Pecan Joe’s (or whatever the shop was named) with a pecan log and some sort of tacky souvenir I couldn’t live without. At this point, Granny’s place was less than a couple of hours away where we could count on her fried chicken, fresh from her garden corn and green beans and a strawberry shortcake if we timed the arrival just right.

There’d be cousins and aunts and uncles who, while not close in distance, were family just the same. After dark the kids ran around and around the house and garden playing chase and catching lightning bugs, too tired afterwards to even wash the dirt-bead necklaces from our tanned and sweaty bodies. Soon, we’d all be piled onto pallets (is this uniquely Southern or do y'all know that I mean a temporary bed on the floor?) of Granny’s quilts. The next day it was off to the river to swim or fish, and Mr. Martin, Granny’s second husband, would let us ride there in the back of his dilapidated old pickup Chevy truck, rusted and dust-covered but a fine four-wheeled country chariot to a gaggle of pre-teens who’d scrambled into the back with no thought to safety; this was before seat belts after all. Or we’d run down the road to visit Hett and Emmett’s earthen storm shelter with its cool darkness, an oasis from unbearable Oklahoma heat. Never in our wildest thoughts did we imagine that our dear Granny would one day wish she'd been in that bunker that night a tornado blew her and her little home away. She was tough enough to survive that but not the stroke that struck her down several years later.

These are the memories of my childhood. Life in the 50s and 60s was different of course. Was it better? I suppose every generation favors its own times over those that follow. I can’t imagine our children and grandchildren talking about a trip to visit granny in quite the same way. The interstate means faster car rides--the kids in the back with a DVD player, iPod, GameBoy or PlayStation to entertain. Sure families are together in one sense. And in another, they are very much individuals only sharing a space each in a world of his own.

“More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America.” The impacts of the Interstate System remain controversial, but it did, as President Eisenhower predicted, change the face of America—not simply by altering the landscape during construction, but by supporting changes that transformed our society in the second half of the 20th century.”

from Celebrating 50 Years: The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System

“When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” John Steinbeck

In A Life on the Road, CBS’s Charles Kuralt explained why he preferred the back roads:

“If the traveler expects the highway to be safe and well graded, he may as well stay home. The little roads without numbers are the ones I have liked the best, the bumpy ones that lead over the hills toward vicinities unknown . . . I keep thinking I will find something wonderful just around the next bend.”

This summer will you find something unexpected “around the next bend” or will time squeeze the spontaneity from your life yet again?

Retro Father’s Day

It was at the bottom of a very large stack of boxes filled with books, and I thought “oh boy, more books.” Pleasantly surprised and tired from unpacking the books, I tripped down Memory Lane as I have a tendency to do while unpacking when I discovered the treasures in this box. Maybe that’s why it’s taking me so long to get everything unpacked. I can’t stand the clutter and the uncertainty of knowing in which box that cordless screwdriver lurks, but dang it, I just get caught up in the emotions and memories.

But I digress, dear gentle readers.

The box contained our record collection, the one we and numerous mover-guys have carted around since the 70s. Heck, we don’t even have a record player or turntable since freeing ourselves from the Fisher-Price player our son Jeff had as a kid. But I did run across an ad in this week’s Big Lots flyer for a Retro Stereo System for $45. I suppose there’s a market for old Baby Boomers like me who may want to revisit their rock n roll days if they’ve clung to the old records as we have.

And what music did the young Sheila and the young Bill listen to? Of course Beatles—lots of albums since they were my first love. My first album, Something New, is there. The Bee Gees, James Taylor, ELO, movie soundtracks, Bill’s Burt Bacharach records, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, The 5th Dimension, The Hollies, Chicago and yes my old Carpenters albums are still there too along with Bill’s The Sea by Rod McKuen. There's no accounting for taste which, in some cases (not mine of course), has thankfully changed.

The first record I pulled out opened to photos of the individuals and then a big group shot. Inside were the lyrics in script. And although I hadn’t listened to the Moody Blues in years with the last time a concert at Chicagoland’s Ravina, I remembered how much I used to love their music. A CD is just too compact to carry the impact album cover art did. What we’ve given up in the name of compactness, we’ve lost visually. Oh well, that’s progress. Or is it?

My favorite discovery--those old kids’ records from the Muppets and Disney. Jeff, do you want those? Remember Lydia the Tattooed Lady? Now, there's a great song!

I can see why we hold on to these objects from the past—why it’s so hard to let go of them. Would I have brought forth these memories without the box of records to trigger the recollection? I fear not.