Technology was not part of the everyday world in the 1950s and 1960s. Our phone was attached to the wall. We had a party line. No celebration was involved. Several people shared the same line.
If you wanted to make a call, and someone else was busy discussing how terrible a neighbor looked with hair the color of an orange cat, you could interrupt or wait. Neither was a good choice.
When I needed to write a school paper, I went to the library and rummaged through the card catalogue. One row of drawers next to another. If the subject wasn’t boring, this task was!
The librarian found the research book I needed via the information on the card. Then I copied what I needed along with the reference onto my notebook.
Sometimes, the material was available in the World Book Encyclopedia. Our family bought a set from a door-to-door salesman. The series contained anything you wanted to know about aardvarks to zippers, provided you didn’t need in-depth information.
Typing the final result made Atlas’s job of carrying the Earth appear easy. I started with a manual typewriter. A sheet of carbon paper was placed between the original and the copy. Since the backspace didn’t provide an eraser, either the entire page needed to be retyped or the error needed to be covered with a white blob cover-up.
Erasable paper eventually came onto the scene. However, it smudged. And, of course, the biggest mistakes appeared at the bottom of the page. I didn’t keep track of the time needed to complete one five-page assignment. On my father’s Royal typewriter. In a basement corner.
It was a royal pain. The advantage? Only one I can see. I sure learned discipline. And gratitude.When the task was completed. Eventually.
When we are children, we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind. Patrick Rothfuss
Nope, No Wedding Yet
The rock at the bottom of the street of my grade-school home was like a mini-mountain, perfect for climbing. It was hidden behind enough trees to be its own paradise, a place for a kid to climb and become king of the world. At nine, I saw nothing peculiar about a strawberry-blonde girl king.
The great play arena eventually disappeared as developers plowed through. But in the mid-1950s, Joe and I claimed the world. He was my self-proclaimed boyfriend. Fourth-grade style. I hadn’t graduated from paper dolls and mud pies, so the notion of a white veil followed by a life in the kitchen sounded as appealing as living with a perpetual mop. I was allergic to homework responsibility, much less life responsibility. Imagination had greater appeal. Joe was a friend who happened to be male.
He wasn’t like the other guys in my class. I knew his family wasn’t tidy. I didn’t care. He was Joe. He didn’t need the meaner boys around him to be okay. He wasn’t the tallest and most handsome. Mom never met him. That alone was good enough for me. Outside, Joe and I could always be free. From homework or chores. We challenged an open space where the air moved freely around our imaginations and the blue sky was on our side.
“Hey,” he said one day. I saw a kind of shy smile in his brown eyes that didn’t match the same dirty blue jeans he wore all the time, and he planted a kiss right smack on my lips.
I thought, oh yuck, but didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Joe wore a kindness that transcended grime. You had to face foreign lands on a rock to see past the classroom, to understand Joe. We never talked about school stuff. Only the next jaunt into places we changed simply by creating them.
“I’ve got a special surprise for you since your birthday is coming up,” he said. “Come to my house.” We cut through two yards and landed on his street in three eyeblinks.
“Hey, Mom!” he called. “Where’s the engagement ring I found? I am going to give it to Mary Therese.”
Mary Therese! My at-school name. I groaned. Oh no. Formal talk. Sounded like a nun. Not me. I’d never hit anyone with a ruler in my life. And I would be off balance with a rosary that big at my waist.
A wedding would spoil that lifestyle but neither wife nor sisterhood sounded appealing. And call me Terry, my at-home name.
How could I say something about how I thought girls had to at least have boobs before getting engaged without sounding personal? But Joe’s mom wasn’t mine. The question would need to wait.
“Oh Joe, I’m sorry,” his mother said, not sounding sorry at all. “That ring got accidentally flushed down the toilet.”
Joe groaned. His head down, and his right hand on his head. Now that I didn’t need to worry about a commitment, gratitude filled every cell of my tiny being. Who needs a ten-year engagement? Or worse, a lost recess for a wedding ceremony.
Yet somehow Joe quickly recovered.
Our relationship ended long before puberty. As time passed, I hoped Joe found someone. Later. Much later. Long after the septic system absorbed my first engagement ring. I always wondered whether it had been born in a box of Cracker Jacks or found on a sidewalk.
At least now if someone asks if I ever broke someone’s heart I can say, “No. The ordinary toilet took care of that for me.”
The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence. (Denis Waitley)
Corner kick. Forward. Goal.
Thirty minutes to run, compete, score,
in an ordinary soccer game.
Yet these are TOPSoccer kids,
who identify their teams
with different-colored uniforms.
While their goals wear shared energy. All players pause
as a girl with a walker
reaches for a short kick.
Then a comrade on her team assists to score a goal.
Kids with special needs become more than unique.
They are individuals with fresh skills.
illustration made from photos, public domain pic, and colored paper
“There’s no problem so awful, that you can’t add some guilt to it and make it even worse.” (voice of comic strip character, Calvin, Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)
I found the following short poem among a stack of papers I saved. The pile needed to be faced before it reached the ceiling. Copies of stories since published, others that fit in the practice-until-you-get-it-right category, and sentimental items. I kept a few letters from friends now deceased. A birthday letter I wrote to my dad.
The pile is gone. The recycling bin was heavy before it was dragged away. The moment is free now.
I wrote Guilt in the winter of 1994. That is what it says at the bottom of the original. I can’t recall why that information was significant. I also don’t remember why these simple five lines appeared on blue parchment. It doesn’t matter. Move on… Learn… Grow…
I feel a very unusual sensation—if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude. (Benjamin Disraeli)
Darkness.
Because the electricity is out again. And I am accustomed to flipping a switch and accepting light. As my own right. Without any awareness of entitlement.
Darkness.
It can be a gift or a curse. Deepened colors reveal dimension in a painting. Shade provides relief from the bright sun. Or darkness can mean hatred without reason, an ignorance of color or shade.
Darkness
can be found in a moment or it can be stuck inside a locked mental space. It can be a fear, based on the past, or a fear, set on immediate danger.
Light.
The power has returned. Mechanical clocks flash and beg to be reset. They remember this moment and begin from here. A fresh place in local time.
Light.
Who do I know who needs a simple touch? Power. Start. With a word. Gratitude for who that person is. Now.
Light
joins with power. Hospitals heal patients. People can survive and thrive. A new day. And a new day in this simple, small house where two septuagenarians celebrate the gift of another day.
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
“It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you—and inside every other person, too.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” (Cherokee legend)
This year has had nothing to do with twenty-twenty vision. Not yet. Perhaps recognizing dark and light within, can help root out the angry wolves inside me. May my flame be directed into light instead of uncontrolled, destructive fire.
acrylic painting I made recently based upon a photo of a birch in Acadia Park in Maine
There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing. (G. K. Chesterton)
The scene is a circle of young women. In the distant past. I am among the women as I admit I am close to despair.
“Look at the beauty of the trees in the yard,” one member advises. She spreads her arms as if she were Mother Nature enjoying her handiwork.
The scene she describes doesn’t lift me. I feel censured for embracing a less-than-perfect place. And the blue rug where I sit opens. Or at least it seems to open. I fall through. Hidden inside.
Later. Much later. I realize I couldn’t accept the glory because it wasn’t mine. It belonged to someone else. I’d been given a simple answer to a complex situation. An accepting nod would have been better.
Strange. I understand this after my ears needed amplification to catch the most uncomplicated conversation.
It is also strange that I am grateful for the depths because now I can recognize a natural gem and celebrate its worth.
The news advertises fear. With or without facts depending upon the source. A friend calls about her confusion. I don’t have answers. I listen…
There is no us and them; it’s an illusion. We are all human beings, and we all have a responsibility to support one another and to discover ways of wresting the power from the very, very few people who control all the cash and all the property. (Roger Waters.)
Amazing how lost I can feel even though I know exactly where I’m turning left and right. Three errands. Each simple and specific. And yet my thoughts travel as if my brain synapses have no connections. I want to save the world. It isn’t going to happen.
A red car turns ahead of me into the parking lot as a small boy sticks his head out the window. He is a handsome child. Mocha skin. Hair shaved to reveal a perfectly shaped skull. He returns inside immediately. I imagine the voice of the driver, probably a parent. “Get your seatbelt on right now, young man.”
Then I see the identical shaved hairstyle of a smaller boy.He is seated in the middle of the back seat. The red car is no longer a vehicle in a line of traffic. It is its own world. A mini-community that turns toward another part of the shopping center.
I don’t know the family. And yet a scene hits me. The earth from a distance. Made from easily delineated parts. Water. Land. And everything is blurred as if it had no mountain, valley, creatures, or specks of dust.
When one group of people has never interacted with another, notions develop without dimension, fact, or touch.
“I’m not prejudiced,” an unnamed white woman announces. “I just think all lives matter.” The rebuttal comes, “But is your life being threatened? Has it ever been threatened because your pale-peaches skin has too many freckles?” And the response is a cold stare.
Us and them. May these words become pronouns again and stay out of the judgmental realm. They are too easily used as weapons.
A wider worldview. It may be the only solution. Yet not an easy one.
terrypetersen 