Okay this prompt comes from A Friend from Far Far Away by Natalie Goldberg to write about an itch. Well there are two itches that came to mind. First was my case of chickenpox – saving that for when I find the photos. The other I have a photo, the itch under my cast. (more…)
I’ve started doing scheduled postings and it has helped me get back to blogging regularly. I was pondering what could I do to add a regular day to my Anything Goes Tuesdays and Throwback Thursdays. I came up with Memoir Mondays where I tell a little memory of mine. It seems people think I’ve had an interesting life. I don’t think it’s anything beyond the mundane but I’ve been told it is. Maybe like many Southerners I have a great
Why yes that is a Mrs. Brady of the Brady Bunch hair cut, thank you for noticing. Also here I am wearing commemorative jewelry from my trip to Washington DC that Bicentennial Year. I was so proud of it. I also remember that was a maxi dress. Yes a floor length dress. Oh and the book was a World Book Encyclopedia turned to Mt. Everest. Why? I don’t know. (more…)
Last week I introduced you to Happy the outgoing cross dressing yellow tabby. Well this week it’s his dignified loving bigger brother Secret. (more…)
I’m a cat lady and I came by it honestly. I’ve always loved animals. However, I have always had a special connection with cats. I’ve been the proud caretaker or play-with-er for many great felines. I have very fond memories of all of them. This one was a Tom named Happy. He came to live with us on Jennifer Street in Greeneville Tennessee bringing along his less gregarious brother Secret. (more…)
Okay here’s something I’m going to try to do. Throw back Thursday posts – old things I have that I’ll share. Some are to laugh at myself like this one here. Others I imagine will interest me enough to share for other reasons.
Here’s what I know about that picture – it’s me! I’m in my maternal grandparent’s house in Laurens, South Carolina’s guest bathroom. That potty was wooden. Which at the time I thought was odd. (more…)
I love my morning coffee. It’s my joy and comfort. I don’t pollute or dilute it with anything. The darker and richer the better! Ahh, nothing smells better than coffee. I love it. From good old Folgers to the expensive favorite of Jamaican Blue – I adore my coffee.
When I first started building a home of my own I thought I had to have matching coffee cups. Since then I’ve given way to MUGS. They keep the precious fluid hotter longer. I also have given way to mugs that express or remind me of things. Matching is boring. Matching is bland. Matching is so June Cleaver. I want expression and the morning nectar of the gods. So my morning mugs have become a collection of favorites. All give me a bit of cheer in the morning. Here are a few of my favorite mugs.
Until Next TIME!
I laughed at this video. I smiled when Curiosity landed and Mission Control celebrated but it was bittersweet for me, accompanied with a sigh of regret. You see when I was a child I felt I was promised manned space travel. Ya know boldly going to other places, not just going out to the back yard to float around for a bit.
I adore Bobak Ferdowsi but he can’t remember watching men repeatedly land on the moon. He’s only 32. I watched his mission team celebrate and thought most of them didn’t see that first hand. Men going to some thing in space is either history and science fiction for them.
I get it. I know it’s better to do it this way. More cost effective to scope it out with robots and all. Yet, I was raised on Capt. Kirk and watching moon landings. Honestly you can’t tell me if we’d pushed as hard to go to another planet as we did to beat the Russians to the moon that we wouldn’t have been there by now. I mean we already had our natural satellite under our belt in just a few years. I honestly thought we’d be launching to go to other planet’s moons from our own by now.
As a kid I bought those dreams that National Geographic published of lush paintings showing what space colonies would look like. Something happened on the way to that place, just like it did for Allentown. We never quite got there. Instead we grew up, we became practical, and put our money in more earthly pursuits. I won’t even debate what ones were worthy of it and what ones weren’t. We did it, it’s done. I know that’s how life goes. You turn right to pay the mortgage when you could have turned left following the dream while living in a tent by the side of the road. I don’t fault NASA for it. Heck I don’t fault us for it. We made choices for good, bad, or indifferent.
It’s just that when I watched those who never crowded three classes into a classroom, dropped the blackout blinds, and watched a the only large black and white TV in that end of the school pick up a snowy picture of people walking on rocks that were NOT ON THIS EARTH… celebrate seeing their remote car do it I felt cheated. Cheated by growing up, cheated by being an adult, cheated of going off this planet to another, cheated of a childhood promise. It was just a wistful sigh for what the 7 year old me thought space travel would be when I was closing in on half a century on this planet.
I watched the younger Mission Control celebrate thinking they can’t even imagine just imagine how hard my 7 year old heart beat with excitement to see a HUMAN do it. They don’t know. They can’t get it. They never believed that promise of “this is just the start – in your life time we’ll…” never set foot off this planet again. No, that was not what they were telling me, but I wish they had. Because then, maybe then I could feel the same thrill Bobak felt.
I’ll have to settle for the enjoyment of watching them celebrate wildly. Don’t get me wrong I read every article I see on what Curiosity is doing. I love the images and jokes made from them. I’ll still breathlessly follow Space X and NASA hoping that maybe I’ll see another human, this one now as much younger than me as the astronauts I watched were older than me, go somewhere in space. I firmly believe we can to do it. We can solve those problems of deep space travel. I know we can because I have a Dick Tracy tv-phone crossed with Star Trek tricorder in my purse right now. I still believe the promises, I just don’t think I’ll live to see them fulfilled. So now I’m hoping for a holodeck here on earth.
I grew up with Knoxville, Tennessee being one of the big towns. If we wanted something and we couldn’t get it in town (Greeneville, Tennessee) one of the big towns to go for it would be Knoxville. We went there to do back to school shopping. We went there for Spring clothes shopping. We went there for concerts. We went there for just released movies. It was the big town with more to offer.
In my day the place we went was West Towne Mall. Near that was a the hip cool place to get record albums (yep talkin’ vinyl here) the day they were released, Cats Records. Couldn’t get albums until a week maybe two after release in Greeneville. Just like movies you had wait for them to be out a bit to make it down the pipeline to Greeneville.
Back in my grandmother’s day the hub of action in Knoxville was downtown. Gay Street was where it happened. That’s where her daddy took her shopping and where she went shopping with my Papaw in tow.
I have a photo of them made by a street photographer on Gay Street. We think it was the mid to late 1930s when this was taken. In those days a street photographer made your picture then tried to sell it to you. Kinda like what we see at amusement parks today but then it was in busy places, like Gay Street.
I grew up with men that had odd nicknames—Trub, Hoot, Tip, Unkie. Being a child I never really thought of how those nicknames came to be. They just where. I took name to be what you told me it was. So my grandfather’s baby brother was Unkie. I never thought it was shorthand for uncle, nor did I think he was really my mom’s uncle. He was and always will be my Unkie.
Herbert Denton Rolen was the last of my maternal grandfather’s siblings. He died two weeks ago at the age of 93. The whole family feels the loss of that generation. I can’t say his passing was sad, it was a release for him. It was sad for us because we won’t have his grin that rumbling chuckle, or those strong gentle eyes watch another generation of kids grow up here with us. The sadness is selfish, for us. Still one of the good ones is gone from this life and I’ll miss him.
However, when I remember him I’ll always smile. My first image of him is in olive green work clothes – shirt and pants matching, sitting silently in the corner as I entered Granny Rolen’s house. He’d grin at me not in the condescending ways adults can smile at children but more in the conspiratorial way kids beam at each other when they know they could get into fun the adults might not wholly approve of them doing. Oh nothing harmful just stuff that could get good clothes dirty or make us late for dinner.
Granny, really my great grandmother, had grape and scuppernong vines. She was protective of them. I now know it was probably because growing such things in the climate of East Tennessee isn’t easy. As a kid I didn’t know why. But I knew I loved the fruit. If there were some ripe she’d go out with me to pick them. I wasn’t allowed to pick without her because she wanted to be sure to get just the ripe ones. One visit I waited for her to come out. The golden green globes looked so good I couldn’t resist. I picked one and popped it into my mouth. OH! It was bitter. Unkie came grinning from garden.
“That one wasn’t ripe. They are bitter until they turn gold.” He laughed as he watched my face and my hurry to spit the fruit from my mouth. “That’s why she wants you to wait.”
I suddenly felt guilty. “I’m sorry.” I was also worried I’d just gotten myself in trouble with three generations, Granny, Nanny, and Mom. I must have looked worried.
“Don’t worry I won’t tell.” He grinned and patted me picking some gold ones from higher up where they got full sun.
He and I were buddies then. Just like I was his brother’s, my grandfather’s, little buddy I was Unkie’s too. That day he became my Unkie because he didn’t tell on me. He understood what it was like to be a kid. He took time from working the farm to play with me. To catch tadpoles with legs, to chase grasshoppers in the field, to swing in the shade while eating ice cream we’d churned with Granny.
I knew he was in the Merchant Marines that’s why he wasn’t there all the time. You’d never think the man in dirty farm overalls, with the shy smile, and East Tennessee twang in his voice had traveled the world. He was good ole’ down home folk. However, he’d been to every continent except Antarctica. He’d sailed through the dangerous seas of World War II. He’d been in Vietnam during the fighting and even visited a nephew serving in the US Army there. He’d seen the world but loved the valley that held his family farm. He’d come back every summer to cultivate that land, to play with kids that showed up, to fool strangers into thinking he’d never left those East Tennessee hills.
One story he told was when he was a young man his mother sent him to town to get a new broom. At the time the transportation available was their old mule. Herbert was a large fella so his legs hung awkwardly off the mule as he rode to town for the broom. He got the broom and was riding home holding the broom to the side and plodding away on the hair too small for him mule. That was when he spotted his sister Sammie Sue with her new beau. She turned red and ignored her baby but not little brother distracting the beau. Well, being one who couldn’t resist a good laugh Herbert shouted “Howdy” to his sister waving the broom. He made making sure that not only the beau saw him, but everyone else on the street did too. As he’d tell the story his smirk would spread, his eyes sparkle, and he’d end the telling with a good laugh.
He was one who loved to laugh. The laugh was a warm and welcoming one rolling up from his belly, erupting as a chuckle, then breaking into a full laugh would roll out making all who heard it join him. The big man never seemed threatening but always seemed loving, cuddly, and safe. The kind of protector a child and a country deserved. The kind of man who was pleased to oblige both.
The last conversation I had with him was one of equals just like the day I’d eaten the sour grape. Except this time we talked of warfare, Navy, ships and service. He as a man who’d retired from it, me as a wife of one doing it. He’d showed me a picture of his ship. Then he turned it over and showed me the billets of his service, various ports of call, missions we’d call them in US Navy. He told of life aboard the ship, port calls, and fear during war. My son was there to hear it from one who had lived history. Unkie was tired when we said good-bye but it was a good kind of tired. I knew because that grin that had welcomed me all my life was still there on his lips.
Last week I drove to Tennessee to attend his funeral. We all mourned our loss. Then over a fellowship dinner graciously given to the family by his church we began to laugh and grin remembering him. He brought us together as a family with smiles, memories happy times we’d all shared with him. I am proud to say that good man, Herbert Rolen, was my Unkie.
Mary Louise Eklund 