Olive makes the big time...

Olive makes the big time! I sent her picture to mystery writer Janet Evanovitch's website and she was chosen as the picture used on her Facebook account. Look at the number of likes, comments, and shared(65)!

the unexpected grenade...again.

just when i think that i can pretty much take anything thrown at me, in comes the grenade.

i keep wondering what i am supposed to learn from this. well, i guess the lesson is that you just can't prepare yourself for getting blown up. it will happen. period. and then you will have to put back the pieces and move on to a different place.

in my case, i just keep rebuilding a new foxhole. i feel sort of like an infantry man in a jungle war. i dig the hole carefully. i arm myself. i put myself on alert. i spend the dark night with all of my senses on overload, waiting. waiting. waiting.

and then you move the next day to another part of the jungle, and you rebuild the foxhole. you do the same thing...dig, fortify, select the weapons, go on alert. but are you as alert as yesterday? will you miss something because this has become routine?

answer: yes, you will. and i am not sure what you could do better. the energy that is expended trying to anticipate your adversary's next move is draining. and a lot of time it isn't necessary. they weren't coming in the night for you anyway. but you were prepared, just in case.

so time passes. you patrol, night after night. it gets dull and you get numb. you get to not really worrying about it. you think you are stronger. you think you are a survivor. you start to concentrate on other things because this worry really isn't that imminent.

and in it comes.

even if something in your gut told you to be on alert, even it you knew something was disturbing the universe, you just were facing the wrong way. period. you are so stunned when you see the grenade land there that you don't have time to react or protect. and at that point, maybe you just don't want to. at least if you are blown up, you aren't expending energy in the constant daily struggle to survive your own relentless jungle war. sometimes you just gotta get out of the field.

what to do with yourself. you are wounded. stunned is a better word. and then  you go about the triage necessary to determine just how bad this wound is.

but sometimes it isn't about you getting blown up. were there others in the foxhole with you? were they injured as well? your attention has to turn to the others, the ones who were in there with you, the ones who had their own issues, but were near you, sort of having your back, but not completely. a lot of thoughts come to the fore, not the least of which is total confusion. which injury to address first? me? him? her? who goes first, whose issues are the most important at this point? who can be fixed, healed? and who is dead?

what did i learn this time when the grenade came in. actually, i learned that it didn't really hurt me that much. it was a good grenade in a way because it let me know there WAS a grenade, that it had already blown up, and a lot of others knew about it and had suffered their own injuries. it was sort of like the grenade blew up in the foxhole next to me and i slept through it. earplugs in the ears, a troubled sleep, a feeling that something wasn't right, but not sure exactly what had happened. then i see the shrapnel, and the wounds. at this point, what is done is done. i can't put the grenade back together. i can't undo the wounds. i can erase the incident. i just have to absorb the concussion i guess and move on.

what ends up happening here? instead of being more alert, i am less concerned. really. and in a way, it is a sort of relief. i am not worrying about that enemy anymore. it doesn't matter who wins, who loses. it doesn't matter. i was never going to be able to win this war because i was not willing to throw any grenades back. i threw one. it counted. and the pursuit of destruction has been relentless since then. it is sort of amazing that your own mother could be this determined to eradicate you as a person, as a piece of her life. it is mystifying not that she hs done what she has done, but how she could, as a mother, want to destroy her own child. the dermination to do that means she wins, especially when i don't fight back. i cannot win, and everyone else loses as well. there is collateral damage. does she not recognize that the innocent are injured in the pursuit of me? who would do that? i cannot fathom the single-minded determiness of a mother intent on the utter emotional destruction of her own child. i am not sure what will satisfy the desire to injury me totally, but at this point i think the end is near.

but not for me. you see, i have crawled out of that foxhole, and i am starting to dust myself off and, while i struggle to stand up, i am getting there. i am not on my feet yet. i am squatted down on the debris outside of this hole in my life. i am looking around, taking a breath. i am seeing who is injured, who needs my help...lots of thoughts:  "what can i do?" "what do you need?" " thank you for helping me!"

just random thoughts, just random acts. just living. dust and pain and strength and new eyes.

just because you are related doesn't mean...

Bad relationship outcomes weren't just limited in this last year to my everyday colleagues. Family issues continue and as of this writing I am alienated from both my mother and brother. My mother has told my son I am dead and, despite discussions with both Austin and my father and my brother, she is absolutely unrelenting in stating that she will not ever mend the fences with me.

It has been over a year and at this point I have been separated enough from her and the negativeness that I don't regard it much. It concerns me that there is a constant strain in the family. I have been fortunate enough to keep in contact with aunts and uncles and cousins. I have not gone into detail about what actually transpired conversationally between my mother and I in that last blowout. I maintain that it was between the two of us and didn't involve anyone else in the family. Unfortunately, she has decided that she needs to tell her side of things and I am left not defending myself. I don't need to. It is what it is. I think she is happy having me out of her life. She didn't want me in the first place, so this is a nice way for her to have a new beginning in the last part of her life. She is still, by all accounts, an unhappy person, but I don't have to be a part of that anymore. I no longer have to worry about pleasing her. I am sad sometimes and feel a lot rejected, especially in family related things that I am not allowed to attend. Rather, I said she can go and I will be absent as a nod to her old age. Let her be happy. She has spent most of her life unhappy and damaged. Anyone deserves to life you life happily as much as you can.

My brother is another story with a decidedly different outcome.

On again, off again. He didn't have anything to do with me because he was angry that I just didn't let my mother's words and actions just go last summer. As usual, he operated upon HIS truths and beliefs and didn't bother to get all of his facts straight. At Christmas he did send a text (I was home by myself during Christmas as I had blood clots as a result of my second knee surgery in early December.) He made an attempt to talk deep brains with me through text messaging and some other telephone conversations. The truth of the matter is that I don't much care to talk to him even when we are talking. Why? He is self oriented and has an inability to settle on what the truth is. I have heard so many versions of things that happened to him/us as children that I can't believe anything he says. He accused me of having no boundaries when it comes to sharing information, but in reality, he has forced his inconvenient truths on me numerous times despite the fact that I have told him over and over I was not interested. He doesn't care. It usually is all about him, period. He will not let go of the past and seems so focused on wanting to expose ugly things. At this stage of my life I don't see the point. Why confront people with these accusations? What possible good could come from it? Apparently, he doesn't care. He gets focused on his needs, and then it is all over. He has so many various lying personas that I never know who I am  talking to. And there is no such thing as a conversation in which he isn't the center of some sort of problem, and then that inevitably leads back to the childhood crap. How much of that do you have to hear?

He is just a fucked up person and I feel sorry for him in a lot of ways, and I don't feel sorry for him in a lot of ways. He and mom are both cut out of the same bolt of cloth. They have memories like elephants and any transgression goes into the hopper of things-to-hold-against-you-forever. They both constantly bring up incidents from the past, but my brother has so embellished them that you almost want to believe him since he has such precise detail. But therein lies the rub. Too many precise details, and then too many changes to these stories. It is interesting that I am three years older than he, yet I have virtually no memory of these incidents and certainly do not have the details ready to be reeled out at any suggestion. My conclusion is that he absolutely believes all the things he says when he says them. He has convinced himself. I am NOT convinced, and now after a lifetime of these stories, I doubt the veracity of most of them. At one point there might have been a kernel of truth to them. But over time these stories have warped into something that is hard to believe. He just doesn't have any credibility with me anymore. Not that he really ever did, but now I think it is terminal and I don't see him changing much.

a year later...

This time last year...a knee surgery, a missed vacation, a summer spent in the recliner, but a spark...

This time this year...lots of changes, and I would have to say for the most part I am a happier camper. These changes have only come in the last three months, the result of my finding myself slowly emerging from two knee surgeries with a definite lowering of pain.

Pain. 

Fifteen years of it, constantly, unrelenting. You get used to it because you don't have much choice. I was pretty resigned to it, but then all of a sudden I began to get glimpses of it slowly dissipating...

I could be walking down the halls of school those last few days and then notice that I hadn't noticed I was in pain. What a strange, exhilarating feeling, something I had forgotten about and never thought I would experience again. 

Betrayal.

Granted, the school year was ugly and I was very glad it concluded. While my classes actually weren't that bad, the circumstances under which I was teaching were stressful, confusing and just all around spirit sucking. I went into the summer break with a decided bad taste in my mouth, especially about some of the relationships that I had during the school year. I did a lot of self examination over these last two months and my conclusion is that I am unfortunately going into this year a bit combative. This is a result of my feeling as if I got taken advantage of and misinterpreted by some individuals that I had hoped would not turn out to be false friends. It happens. You adjust. I will. I won't be a patsy this year and I will speak up instead of seething and keeping silent.

Out with the old, in with the new. A big cliche, but sometimes it happens and I think to some extent that has happened to me in many ways. 

Physically, I am a lot better. My diabetes is under control. I can walk and ride my bike. I have been able to do a fair amount of yard work and landscaping this summer, although not as much as I would have liked. I have made some physical changes such as getting contacts (sort of worthless since I have to wear reading glasses), getting my hair cut at Nesbit, getting pedicures, getting a tan, getting my faced waxed. I considered and accepted the possibility of starting to date some and I have this summer. The situations are all of my liking in that I am in no position to wish for more and I don't want more. It was interesting that some men were interested in me at all since I have considered myself undesirable for a long time. I am thinking that attitude has a lot to do with that. If you like yourself a little, maybe that projects to others. I am open to that prospect now that I am not in constant pain. I am most grateful, really, really grateful. I don't think that people really can understand how life changing the retreat of pain can change a person. I am going back to work with people who really don't know any other person other than the pained person I have been for 16 years. They will have an opportunity to see me, or a changed me, this year.

 

pain=gain...eventually

patience is a virtue that most of us don't acquire until well into adulthood, if then. i have to say that i am still not the most patient of people. put me in traffic, or in a line that i can move along, and patience retreats from me at a rapid clip. but as i have gotten older, i have started to slow down a bit and see the big picture...at least sometimes i see it. and sometimes i see it, but i just can't accept what i see. result: i fruitlessly rail against the world. the result is as
you 'd expect: nothing changes. the temperature is still the same, the sun is still in the sky, the mail is still delivered and the world moves on.

this summer could have been a disaster emotionally and physically had i not recognized the bad karma i had brought upon myself, and then just decided not to fight it. my agonizing, awkward split with my mother could be argued in a lot of ways. i could spend a lot of time defending my actions and giving my side. but immediately i realized that despite my belief (even now) that i was correct, i probably should have shown a little more patience. however, in the long run i think the higher powers lined up the conflict. it was the perfect storm and the wave capsized my life.

four days after this conflict, the world takes back what i had taken...a belief that i controlled my life and my destiny. not so. a wave slaps me down, and then another, and despite my best efforts to protect myself from it, i keep my glasses, but lose my ACL in my knee. it hurt, and i knew as soon as it happened that in that second my whole summer was altered in a direction that i knew i would eventually have had to go in, but the moment was then now. no vacation to san francisco. no doing the things i had planned to do in my yard and house. no contact with my mother and banishment from the family.

personal injury wasn't the end of it.  austin's struggle with alcohol and his emotions deepened to the point where he fell down steps drunk, got a concussion and split open his chin. this occurs after his arm hurts enough to get him retired for the summer from the waynesboro generals. now he is in the apartment by himself, nothing to do but summer school, struggling over his infidelities and his quasi-relationship with swimmer girl (who dumps him) and his struggles with his temper. his temper gets him in more trouble two weeks later when he is drinking because he is depressed and punches a kid in the nose, breaking it in three places and knocking him out. he is drunk, again, and this time he earns his second substance abuse strike at uva. he is temporarily banished from the team. he has to go to the judicial council at uva. the end results are that he gets probation to match the 2nd strike. he no longer has any wiggle room. he cannot drink, period. he struggles with the concept that he can not party. but some good comes from it. he begins to learn who his friends are and that  some of his influences are not good ones. he learns about the chemicals that control his body. he succumbs to going to see the school sports psychologist and begins the hard work that he will have to do to become a better person. he is in the tunnel. there is a light at the end, but only he will know how long it will take him to get to that. the journey is slow and often you can get lost in the dark and things get out of proportion. but he is moving forward. as someone once said, you can't move forward until you stop running. i am hoping he has at least slowed down to a walk. his pain hopefully will lead to a gain in him as a person and help him mature and become a better person. and his pain has taught me that no matter how hard you try, you cannot control all things, even the things that affect the people you love.

i spent the summer in the same chair watching the tour de france and the olympics and a lot of cooking shows. i rediscovered perry mason, route 66, old hawaii 5-0's and the naked city. but i also learned that you have to sometimes embrace the pain and revel in the fact that the new journey isn't as painful as the old journey. i have 50% less pain than i have had in sooo many years. the lessening of that pain has cleared up a lot of ways that i have viewed my life, and that has tended to be in the negative. i don't feel as rubbed raw as i often did. i no longer feel defeated and helpless in the grip of pain. i have gotten a glimpse of what my life can be if i am willing to endure some temporary pain. what is a month or so of pain if you can get the rest of your life without it? we always associate pain with physical pain, but can't we also apply this concept to emotional pain? the physical things we do are just a reflection of the underlying emotional issues that fuel that physical fire. the human body is most definitely governed by its emotional counterpart. we manifest our emotions in disease and physical ailments. they don't call it DIS-EASE for nothing. when we are not at ease in our hearts, our bodies reflect it. we chew our nails, have upset stomachs, become paralyzed by panic attacks, have migraines, restless sleep, tics and any other variety of outward symptoms. our physical reactions are often subtle and occur and grow gradually. this makes them less immediately noticeable, thus making us less likely to pay attention to the warning symptoms that they are sending us. and so it goes...we eventually implode and then the work begins.

so i am in the sunshine now. my pain is less. my internal pain is less, though i doubt it will go away until i have a conversation with my mother. i have adjusted for the most part to the awkwardness of the situation. it makes me sad, but in the broader world i have accepted my mother's reasonings and don't have much anger about it. occasionally i get annoyed by it. but then i think like she does and understand why she must cling to this course of action. as more time goes on i will either become more sad or more hardened. or i could become more free and more accepting. i am hoping for the latter. i have many more challenges ahead, but i am hoping i can maintain the focus on the future that i have today.

she did do some things right

my mother and i have a lifelong love/hate relationship, and it would be easy for me to spend the rest of my life cataloging what was wrong. but what is the point in that? i am dead to her, have been written out of the will, am forbidden to be anywhere in her presence. i could rail against this, but again, there is no point. i would prefer to look for things that she did right, versus what she did wrong. they don't give you a manual when you give birth that tells you how to parent. you do the best you can. i think in her own way she did the best she could. she wasn't equipped to emotionally handle a hyperactive, emotional child. no one gave her the tools, and the childhood she had did nothing towards helping her find those tools. she learned to survive, and to do that she built an emotional wall that i have not been able to often breech. i am sorry about that. i have tried, and i wish it were different. but i cannot make her like or love me, and i can't spend my life saying i had a terrible childhood. i didn't. there were things that were good.

the memory that comes to me first is that of my mother reading to me. she ordered me the books that came once a month and i was enthralled with them. she did read some to me, and she made sure i went to the library and the bookmobile with her. i have to attribute my love of reading to my mother. she was and still is a voracious reader, so she set a good example. she never censored me or checked what i was reading, so i pretty much had carte blanche when it came to checking out books or reading about any subject.

third grade was not a good year for me in so many ways socially and otherwise. however, it was the year that my teacher read us CHARLOTTE'S WEB and that i fell in love with the books about davy crockett and daniel boone. we had a day when we could dress up as our favorite book character, and i choose these two. my outfit was a suede jacket that my mother had. she cut up the jacket somehow so that it looked like it had fringe on it. she also somehow managed to make me a makeshift coonskin cap. it was not a full cap. just a ring around my head and a tail. i also got to wear pants i think and maybe a white shirt that was too big. i was dressed like a boy character. i don't think she was thrilled, but i was. however, a much richer boy at school came completely decked out as daniel boone/davy crockett, complete with the very real fringe jacket and a coonskin cap that was not makeshift. it made me feel lesser, but i still loved the jacket and the outfit. however, the jacket disappeared somehow after this day. i wanted to wear it more, but it was gone. why i don't know. however, i do know my dad to this day still teases me about wanting to wear a coonskin cap!

my mother gave me records a few times, which is something i loved, and i especially remember that she tried to buy things she thought i would like. one christmas in high school she bought me some albums: Jim Croce, who i didn't know much about (but who i came to love and ultimately purchased all of his albums); the soundtrack to MY FAIR LADY because at that point she had figured out i liked musicals and was watching a lot of them in reruns on tv, including that one. barbra streisand because i thought she was wonderful. she didn't know enough about me to be able to buy anything specific, but she tried. my first 45's were at christmas when i was in the 4th or 5th grade. i remember them as well: "WE CAN WORK IT OUT" by the Beatles; "OVER AND OVER" by the Dave Clark 5, and "I AM A ROCK" by Simon and Garfunkel. i played them to death, and saved up my 75 cents to be able to continue to buy 45's. when i went to the kings departments store or with my grandmother to the dime stores on granby street, i always went to the records department to see what they had. i didn't always get to buy, and sometimes i really had to struggle to pick the one record i could buy and take home. i spent a lot of time in my room listening to the 45's over and over, as well as the albums i eventually bought. i still have many of them.

from reading comes good writing, and while i have often shirked from showing her things i wrote, i think she has been proud of that, especially when i have been published. she has rarely encouraged me to do much, but writing has been one thing that she felt i should continue to do, maybe write children's books she said. in one way i am fulfilling that request by writing on this blog. she will never read it, but i am doing it and i feel good about that part of me.

i was never much of a doll kind of girl, and when the barbie dolls came out, i did not have one. i did want one, and my recollection is that my father went to kings and bought me just the barbie doll. it was around $3 or so. the clothes for the barbie were outrageously expensive and i over time had very few outfits for barbie. however, my mother did knit a blue outfit for her and made a few handmade outfits for her. i appreciated that and i know she did it because she wanted me to have some clothes for the doll when i played with the other kids.

no fifth grader wants to be unfashionable, and i was no exception. my mother made some of my clothes, but i didn't like wearing them because the kids at the bus stop made fun of me about them. i had heard the stories from her about not having nice clothes when she was growing up, so i wore them with both a sense of shame and a sense of sorrow. i felt bad for my mother and what she had been through. i couldn't really tell her that i didn't like them because i knew it would make her mad and hurt her feelings. i finally did get mad and tell her that i didn't want anymore homemade clothes. she did not take that well and said a fair amount of mean things back to me. but i didn't have anymore homemade clothes either. from then on, she bought me what she wanted me to wear, regardless of what i wanted. there was a compromise somewhere in the middle, but she marshaled my fashion choices up until i was way into adulthood. i have maintained the same attitude about those choices, in that she only buys what she wants to buy me. but i think in some way it was her attempt to have me look nice and that drive to do so is a direct response to her own upbrining and the lack of nice things. she has worked to have nice things and appreciates them much more than most people. i have never cared much about expensive things and clothing is not a priority. unfortunately, we are not on the same wave length and i am an embarrassment to her in just about every way physically. but at this stage of my life, i still understand. i have tried to be grateful and to give her the accolades that she felt she deserved for the gifts of clothing despite whether or not i wanted it or would have picked it out for myself. i have given her free reign over makeup, hairdos, haircuts and all sorts of clothing because i thought it would please her and make her like me better.

we have a shared interest in dishes and recipes and some cooking. she has often gifted me with dishes and serving trays and bowls, etc. i have often thought that it was easier for her to buy something like that versus saying anything meaningful. so i have taken the gifts of dishes and cookbooks and things of that ilk as her way of making some connection with me. i have kept many things, almost ALL things, that she has given me in that way. they have no market value, but were just symbolic to me.

my grandmother and i were much alike, much to my mother's consternation, and i spent what seemed to me to be most every weekend with my grandmother. there could be lots of reasons why, but my mother had no problem letting me go, and i think my grandmother somehow knew i needed to be with her. there was no pressure from her, and she was quirky and happy for the most part, although never fully healthy. my mother's intentions may not have been surfacely based on any feeling for me. however, i want to believe that deep down inside she knew she could not give me what i emotionally needed from a parent, so she sent me to my grandmother who was (in my mother's eyes), never much of a parent. my mother has still a great resentment for my grandmother. she believes that my grandmother did not care about her children's appearances or needs, that she was weak. there probably was a lot true about that, but i will never know. my grandmother gave me room to just do what i wanted, be it reading or watching tv or writing up recipe cards. that kind of one on one time did not happen with my mother. she was busy with my asthmatic brother and focused on him. as she told me, i didn't need her. he did.

a few months ago the mother of one of my colleagues died at age 90 and i went to her graveside services. her children and grandchildren spoke about her and things she had done over her life. there were a few tears, some good laughs, and the emergence of a person who was multifaceted and apparently well loved by her family. as i drove home from that service, i was thinking about what i would say if asked to speak at my mother's funeral. what good things would i talk about with fondness? what could i say about her that would be sincere? in a very horrifying moment, i realized i could not think of a single thing. not one. anything good that i thought of would be immediately countered with the ugly flip side of the situation. she was a good businesswoman and a professional...but she was also ruthless sometimes in how she dealt with people. she often appears to be totally sincere and interested in you. she will compliment, chat, do all the things friends will do. but at the same time, if you cross her in anyway or your actions displease her, she is like the human camcorder and the "recorded" mistakes that you have made are set loose and marched in front of you. i don't think i can think of a single person that she has ever liked completely. everyone has faults and has garnered her distaste at some point.  but the plus is that she at least tries to be nice. she is very much the southern woman in that she is never insulting, rude or sarcastic to anyone, even if she loathes them. it is amazing to see her operate sometimes. i just don't have that ability to be that insincere, but she is probably better off for the ability to do it than i am. i bruise way too easily. she doesn't appear to bruise at all.

in all crisis situations, my mother is the one who is level headed and organized. she shows no emotion and knows exactly what to do. when my uncle teddy died when i was in college, my mother was the one who organized the cataloging of all of the food brought in so that my aunt would know who brought what and would be able to be specific in thank you notes. my mother kept everyone in the kitchen organized in the preparation and delivery of food and drink. she kept everyone on time. she did respect my wishes not to view any bodies and came to my defense on the days when there was a family funeral and i was mortified at the thought of seeing bodies. she did run interference with my dad's family when uncle teddy died and nan, my father's mother, died. i am grateful for that.

i have, unfortunately, inherited in my old age the ability to not tell family members about bad things, at least not in a timely basis. ironically, it is my parents that i have kept information from, almost all of it dealing with austin and the sometimes disappointing things that he has done and that i know will upset them. my father actually knows some of these things, but a number of them my mother does NOT know about and daddy and i have agreed that we would all be better if she is kept in the dark. she was the one i learned this from. she more than a few times let me finish exams or get through some sort of crisis before letting me know that something worrisome had happened.

my time spent with my grandmother i believe was a way for my grandmother to have a second chance at doing something right with a child. my mother did not think that she had been given what she needed. rightly or wrongly, my grandmother got a second chance when i was born, and at that time in her life she was able to do that. i felt this way when austin was born, and i have encouraged him to have a relationship with her that is NOT based upon anything other than one on one with her. if there is anyone that she really loves and is fierce about, it is austin. she has spent a lot of time buying him things, doing things for him, taking interest in his baseball. she follows his games on the radio, sitting with her little computer watching the game tracker. until this last falling out, she would talk to me after the games and she knew exactly how many strikes he had thrown, how many walks he had had. she was rarely critical of him, although she could certainly shred his teammates and his coaches. i have always viewed this attitude about anyone who would be a rival or a threat to austin as being a protective gesture. the nastiness of it is very disturbing sometimes, but at this point i have to believe that despite what she says, the real basis for it is love. if she has that capability, i want her to express it as best she can. if austin is the recipient, that that is good. i am not jealous of him or his relationship with her. i am happy about that.

she is not a hugger, and watching her trying to hug or greet someone is sometimes painful to watch in its awkwardness. she is not one to tell you she loves your or to compliment you. she once said to me that she didn't need to tell me she loved me...i knew it. well, that didn't fly with me, and it still doesn't. most people express their love for people. but i recognize that this generally accepted behavior is not something that my mother can do, or at least not easily. i appreciate and am often saddened by her efforts. it makes me sad that it is so hard for her to try. but that is who she is and she can't do much better. she doesn't want to change at this point in her life, and i respect that i think. it does not uncomplicate my life or the awkwardness of my current family situation. but it is life, both mine and hers, and it has to be taken one day at a time. i am trying hard to see the bigger picture and to let go of my anger and sadness about the course of our relationship over a lifetime.

the love of reading that she gave me led me to many worlds that i could escape to. the irony of it all is that from those many books i learned to believe that people could or should act like the characters in books. people should have good virtues and practice them as often as they could. we should always strive to be kind. yet in my real life, that has become a great expectation that was not always delivered. in my mother's real world, and in mine, there are no guaranteed happy endings, and quite a few disappointments. however, you don't get soul growth from having a life of bliss and easiness. you get it from the trying and difficult situations. so in that way, i have my mother to thank for a lot of soul growth in this life. if nothing else, that may be the greatest thing she did right.

a lifetime of lovely books

My uncle jack gave me the most wonderful books when i was a little girl, and i have kept them as if they were golden treasures. they were mostly birthday gifts each year, and one of them THE ADVENTURES OF CAROLINE AND HER FRIENDS is one of my greatest possessions. i loved the book so much that i had it recovered to the tune of $50 a long time ago. it has turned out to be one of the most sought after and valuable books out there. apparently only a few of the books were printed in english (the author, pierre probst, was french.) the books were about a little girl, caroline, and her animal friends, and the wonderful adventures they went on. each of the creatures had their own personalities, and when you turned a page, you could almost predict what that particular character would be doing in the scenario! throughout my whole life, i only saw one copy of this book, and it was in the library of bayside elementary school which i attended from first to third grade. as an adult, i finally went to the library of congress in d.c. and was able to see other caroline books! the author wrote a number of them, but i had never seen but the one book which i had. the books were in french, but the animals and their illustrations were such a joy to look at. later, i had my friend mary jean kelly lowe purchase some of the books in france, as she lives in paris. she translated them for me and sent them over.

i have a lovely book called LORNA in which a photographer took a doll that looked like barbie all over europe, photographing her as she struggled through a fairy tale. the photography was gorgeous, and it is again a book that i have never seen elsewhere. there were other books that my uncle gave me, including a cookbook when i was a middle schooler, and my first copy of THE JOY OF COOKING. he still sends me clippings from the papers that he thinks i would be interested in. i am happy to say that i think the built the foundation for my love of books.

one of my memories of childhood is my mother sitting on the stoop of our house in diamond lake estates reading to me before the bus came to take me to school. we were on split shift that year, and half the year i went to school from 8-12 and the other half from 12-4. apparently the school was overcrowded and this was what they had to do to free up the rooms. in any case, i remember her doing that, and my looking down the street as the bus slowly made its way towards us. i don't know what she was reading to me, but i do remember her doing that. she also ordered some books for me...BLACK BEAUTY, HEIDI, LITTLE WOMEN. i remember when they came in the mail and they seemed so wonderful and older than the books i was being read at the time. my mother also signed me up for the BEGINNERS book club and each month books came. the first ones i got were GO DOG GO, GREEN EGGS AND HAM, ONE FISH TWO FISH, RED FISH BLUEFISH, and PUT ME IN THE ZOO. not all of the books were written by Dr. Seuss. i would get one or two books a month and there were lots of books! i had all of the CAT IN THE HAT books, HOP ON POP, TEN APPLES ON TOP. at some point the books became less interesting and my mother stopped the club. i believe that she gave those books to my cousins after i had stopped reading them. they would be worth a lot of money today, but more than that, they would be worth a lot to me for the joy they brought me on rainy days as well as having my mother read them to me.

i have a memory of my mother reading HEIDI to me and my eating cracker barrel cheddar cheese while she was doing it. it was fitting, as i recall the book talked about heidi and cheese:)

when i went to elementary school i discovered the school library. from there i found books that i would check out over and over. those were books about davy crockett and daniel boone. when austin was younger, i went on line and started buying up copies of the books i loved as a child. he never read them, but i was overjoyed to find them and they are on the shelves of his book case. i still have the hardback copies of all of the wonderful marguerite henry horse books. my parents gave those to me at christmastime, and i remember marking them in the pages of the sears & roebuck catalog. they were hardback books with paper covers, wonderful books with wesley dennis illustrations. those books are in an old suitcase that belonged to my mother on the bottom of my closet. books that i did not have i ordered. i read all of her books, but didn't own all of them. one of the things on my bucket list was to see the pony penning on chincoteague, and that was a direct result of reading the MISTY OF CHINCOTEAGUE books! i have been to the island, but have missed the pony penning.

one of the things that they did when we were in school was to have book fairs and book periodicals. the periodicals were just printed fliers with a number of books for our age that we could order. there was a little coupon that you filled out. you gave it and the money to the teacher, and when the books came in it was a wonderful thing. the book fairs were bigger and the books were not paperbacks, but hardback. they cost more. i bought one book on cats and i believe i used my own money. i still have many of those paperbacks that ordered up through middle school. as i got older, i just changed what i read, but i don't think i was ever without books.

my mother was an avid reader and took us to the book mobile in the janaf shopping center in norfolk. i can remember getting a book called WINKEN, BLINKEN AND NOD. i am sure there were other books and she let me pick out what i wanted and i would take them home. this tradition continued up through high school when a bookmobile came to the safeway shopping center once a week. i would go up there and check out books and sometimes order books from the library to be brought to me the next week. eventually i went to libraries with my mother. when she would go to janaf on saturdays to get her hair done, i went next door to the library there and read or checked out books. when we moved to richmond, one of the saving graces for me was that my mother found the closest library, which was a little tiny one in bon air. we went a lot and i moved on to adult books. the first author that snagged me was leon uris and his book EXODUS. i read all of the books that he wrote and i became fascinated with the arab israeli conflict. i had to read books in school for english class, but i rapidly found that i only wanted to read what i wanted to read, and that did NOT include TESS OF THE DURBERVILLES or any other sort of british lit. i did read LORD OF THE FLIES in 9th grade and learned about symbolism. THE OUTSIDERS was a major book in my life and it was one of the genre creating books that defined teenage literature. up until that year 1967, there really were no books for girls other than NANCY DREW or THE HARDY BOYS for boys. i got a TRIXIE BELDEN mystery book when i was in the 5th grade, and that lead me to spending my money at King's department store purchasing all of those books as often as i could. i also have kept those books as well and all of these books bring me a lot of comfort and pleasure just holding them and looking over them.

books have transported me to many places and were an oasis for me when i was a kid. i spent most of my middle school years devouring books, especially after we moved to richmond and i had no friends. however, i did have friends in books and when we traveled i always took books with me. when we went to colorado in 1970 i took the whole series of books about elsa the lion, which was the BORN FREE series by joy adamson. ginny tudor, a friend down the street who was several years older than me and had a job at thalhimers bought them for me the night before we left and i was so happy to have gotten them before the dreaded trip. i spent time lying in the back of warnie and uncle harry's station wagon reading about africa and lions while the station wagon lumbered across the heart of america on its way to colorado and a dude ranch.

as time goes on, the books i own become more valuable price wise, but in many ways they are priceless to me. austin is not and never has been a reader himself, so these books were never a part of his life. he loved being read to, especially about dinosaurs and he loved the CAROLINE book. he was read to up through the harry potter books, which bebo read to him. but when bebo left, austin never finished the books. he didn't want to read on his own, and that is when he literally stopped reading. my hope is that maybe i will have grandchildren who want to read and might enjoy these old books. maybe by writing this i will give them some history about myself and who i am and how these printed things shaped my life and created a love of learning for me.