Through the Elephant

A year-in-the-life is a journey through elephant bowels. It is dark, you're all squished and surrounded by poo and all you want is to make it out the other end in tact, and able to see daylight.

The problem is, your travel companion for the duration is a year's worth of excrement, hopefully slick enough to at least make the exit pleasant. Happy New Year, enjoy the home stretch, and I'll see you out the other side.

2010 Almost a Wrap

This is where I'm supposed to wax poetic about the end of the decade, ushering in the new year, etc. Ah, that's kid stuff. I'm glad to have sort of figured out how to blog so I can post pictures. It seems a good idea to have a theme for the photos and update regularly. I may or may not take me up on that.

I would like to laugh more in 2011 and create something artistic. That's bloggable.

Happy New Year!

Another attempt at photos

The nest is not empty yet. Or as Phoebe Buffet would say: "Don't 'Aw Pheeb, that sucks' me yet!"

I've Been Meaning to Do That

Besides trying for "way too long" to figure out how to add copious pictures to my blog (unsuccessful), I have a jumble of things I've been meaning to do. Here it is--possibly in list form--so I can check off each completed goal, or more likely: later refer back to, lament how it’s still undone and contemplatively decide if it’s still worthy of my time.
1. Finish Sara's toddler clothes quilt I smugly started 12 years ago. (It waits, nicely folded in my art closet next to the sewing machine I bought myself for my 33rd birthday.) Happy graduation, Sara! Perhaps you could reach another milestone worthy of a toddler-clothing scrap quilt once I finish it!
2. Take photos outside early in the morning. (seems like a good idea for differences in light and shadow, but insert reasoning for not doing here:             )
3. Alter a book with all those gathered collage pieces I’ve meticulously cut out of magazines, and even purchased from the “ephemeral” section of ebay.
4. Organize my art room (formerly known as “the office”) so I can attack aforementioned projects.
5. Stop obsessing over dog and cat hair covering every inch of my home.
6. Get new carpeting to get a fresh start on the dog/cat hair thing.
7. The snow on the tree outside is so beautiful in the sunshine right now, that I shall take a photo forthwith. Brrrrr, got it. If I can figure how to post photos, check number 2 off this list even though it’s nearly ten-thirty.
8. Read more books from the Newbery winners and/or classics.
9. Become more technologically adept, or hire/cajole someone to turn my thoughts into words and pictures on my attempt at a blog. (Alexander comes to mind—he could make this blog thing work with his eyes closed!)
10. Sketch out funny thoughts as comics and try to soak up some of Sara’s talent for visual artistry.
11. Convince Sara to publish her exquisite drawings, paintings, comics and observations because she is a comic and artistic genius.
12. Always have Pandora music in the background—Pandora knows what I’m all about and will feed me inspirational sounds.
I will stop at 12 “Things I’ve Been Meaning to Do” (or is twelve Things-I’ve-Been-Meaning-to-Do?) Damn. There’s another thing on the list: figure out intricacies of punctuation and titling. bluurrrgghhh!

Goody, Goody Gumdrops

"Goody, goody gumdrops." It was the 1970's kid-equivalent of being too cool to care. Things we said and did, and where the expression or event even came from are sometimes nuggets of wisdom lost to time. But sometimes, they sneak up in memories and make you want to investigate... Notice anything familiar?

Detroit, circa 1972 via Uncle Joey:
(everyone puts his ratty tennis-shoed foot in the middle and then...)

Eenie meenie, dipsy deeny, high pone tusk. Tusk in, tusk out, tusk around the water spout. Have a cherry, have a plum. have a stick of chewing gum. My mother said to pick the very best one and you are not...it!

Detroit, circa 1974 via childhood friend Julie Walters:

Kindergarten babies, first grade tots,
Second grade angels, third grade snots,
Fourth grade peaches, fifth grade plums,
And all the rest are dirty bums!

On the way (skipping, running or jumping) to Stellwagen Elementary School 1970-1975:

Step on a crack: break your mother's back.
Step on a line: break your father's spine.

Is that why every detail in every square of concrete sidewalk is so familiarly etched into my memory even today? The sidewalks had their own personalities back then. I knew the various patches of concrete so well. Some had a friendly, smooth appearance and an inviting appeal to drag an old piece of chalk across for hopscotch. Some were more mottled, cracked, or heaved up with elm tree roots and were to be avoided when skipping, jumping rope up and down the block, or racing Big Wheels or Krazy Kars. Some had cracks or dents that resembled faces and were a comfort knowing they remained the same season after season.

I wonder if low-to-the-ground things and the ground itself are still familiar to today's kids, or if the concrete jungle I grew to know intimately, was just my own childhood way of feeling at home in my surroundings? Do kids avoid cracks and lines to save their parents, have jump rope songs about missing links and being out, or do put-your-foot-in-the-middle rhymes to decide who's "it"?

Maybe today's kids have new and improved singy-songs that have a basis in fact, or fair decision-making methods that are more articulate and modern. Well, you know what I say to that?

Goody goody gumdrops.

Thanksgivings Past

Thinking about Thanksgivings past...

Images come into my head of apple-turkeys stabbed with toothpicks skewered with mini marshmallows and gumdrops. I guess it's a fine way of keeping kids feeling creatively involved in the festive process while the adults (okay, the womenfolk) worked like dogs on the feast we kids would soon criticize. A note of state-the-obvious: don't give kids free reign on a bag of gumdrops and mini-marshmallows and then later try to get them to eat purple-red-glop and seemingly chewed-up soggy bread just because it's "tradition".

Other memories include festive, extended-family dinners at Grandma & Grandpa's home in Detroit, where my birth order--5th oldest cousin out of ten--secured me a pernament sequester at the "kid-table". There were usually two kid-tables, with a vicious pecking order of who got to sit at the one closer to the "real" (turkey-clad) table. Those at the better kid-table got first dibs at dessert pies.

A kid-table prerequisite was for the card table to be sporting one bum leg, just to add a bit of excitement to the occasion. A favorite kid-table tradition by the older cousins was to wait until someone's milk glass was filled to the top, then furiously and savagely begin cutting into the meat portion on his or her plate, trying to upset the delicate balance of the card table.

Teenage-year Thanksgivings were the worst for cooperation and thankfulness. In my family of four kids (in an age-differential span of five years), the holiday may as well have been named the anti-thanksgiving. The order of the day was work avoidance, complaining about the looks of what was eventually going to  be plopped onto our plates, and campaigning for the use of paper plates for the meal since the mess was growing bigger as each quarter of the Lions' loss to the Bears progressed. If I was a parent in that household, I'd have canceled Thanksgiving and declared a day-of-drinking instead.

We still laugh about the time my younger brother declared that Grandma Cass' pumpkin pie meringue topping looked and tasted like styrofoam. Ah, teenagers and Thanksgiving: a dish best served as leftovers at noon on Friday.

Well, it's time to give thanks for all we have, and I'm thankful I have memories of Thanksgivings past. I will try to save some gumdrops and mini-marshmallows for the apple-turkeys.

Creativity Mandate

There must be some sort of nesting quality I have that spurs me to "be creative". When I was a kid, my sister and I, when needing a creative fix, declared "Let's do projects". And we did. We'd hunker down and create board games, write poetry, play pretend games, or discover an attic and transform it into a clubhouse.

It was so easy to just abandon everything and "do projects". Now that I'm old(er), doing projects has come to mean cleaning out the refrigerator, reorganizing my closet or finding the stepladder so as to replace all the burnt out light bulbs. (side note: think of creative reference for stepladder meaning not your real ladder, but the ladder your other ladder married after divorcing your real ladder. It's not the boss of you and never will be.)

Creativity gets squelched when you become a certain amount of "responsible". I guess I have reached that level. Weekends start out being so full of potential, too... Then eventually, thoughts of doing projects gets sucked into the void and replaced with appointments and schedules.

I hereby declare a mandate: a creativity mandate. I will create something everyday that is wholly unrelated to responsible, scheduled, committment-type behaviors. Perhaps I will take a photograph or post a blog entry or sew a pillow or write a poem. I may denounce my relationship with my stepladder and disinvite her to the light bulb and smoke detector battery's wedding. Maybe I'll just listen to a favorite song and think creatively for that time.

There I have it: Mandated Creativity. I like it.

Let's do projects!