Somebody’s Princess

While I was getting my nails done today (big, once-a-month treat) a young woman came in with her daughter.  The little girl was wearing a special dress with a velvet sleeveless top and a longish skirt of lace and pink taffeta (“Target,” her mom said when I asked), and her hair was pulled up in a ballerina’s bun on top of her head.  “It’s her birthday today, so she would like her nails polished, please,” her mom said.  The Korean nail ladies made a fuss over her and asked how old she was.  “Six, today,” she said.

For some reason this made me remember being taken to the beauty salon in Clarksville by my sister Juanita.  I don’t remember if I had been before, but I was entranced by the whole experience.  The beautician trimmed my bangs while Juanita was getting a proper ’60s haircut and styling–no blow dryers back then!  Rollers and pin curls and those dryers with big metal bonnets were the norm, and the smells were strong with perfume.

I had been admitted to a world where you were pampered and made beautiful.  And I had no doubt at all that I was beautiful!  The finishing touch was a hairpin with a large fake diamond, which the beautician used to help keep the stray hairs from my ponytail in place.  I was thrilled.

I still feel pampered and treated when I go to the salon now.  I’m no longer convinced I’m beautiful, alas.  The face in the mirror doesn’t look like it did.  But it’s still nice to come out looking better than when you went in, and to feel taken care of for an hour or two.  I hope all little girls get the chance to feel special that way, at some point before the pains of growing up set in.

The Easter Fair in Prague

Czech Easter eggs, from Wikimedia
The last time I took a vacation out of the U.S. was in 2002.  At a fundraising auction for the Y I belong to, I won two round-trip tickets to anywhere British Airways flew.  The hitch was, you had to connect through London.  I considered South Africa, but didn’t really have enough vacation time to make such a long trip worthwhile.  And I wanted to go somewhere I hadn’t been before.  So after much consultation and research, I went to Prague in March 2002 with my friend Dana.

The tourist season had not yet begun.  It was still cold, very grey and rainy.  The castles in the countryside around Prague had not opened for the season, and some of the tourist attractions in the city were closed.  But it was still lovely.  There were free concerts every day in churches and concert halls.  The beer halls were lots of fun–we quickly learned how to order in Czech, and there were any number of Americans there as well.  The streets were dark and medieval, but the people were friendly and spoke a little English.

We shopped for garnet jewelry, which is a specialty of the Czech Republic, and dined in snug, Art Deco restaurants.  We walked the rain-slick streets and went through the remains of the old Jewish quarter.  After the horror of the Holocaust, there are almost no Jews in Prague to this day.

One day we went to the Easter fair, which was set up in small booths in the main square.  Most of the booths were selling plastic garbage made in China or cheap tourist crap, which you could buy anywhere.  But a few of the booths were selling Czech Easter eggs.  Some eggs are decorated by making patterns with wax and then dying the shells.  Others ar dyed and then hand-painted.  Somehow the maker gets the interior of the egg out of the shell without breaking it, I think before dying it.  Then a ribbon is glued to the top or strung through a hole at either end so you can hang the egg on a branch placed in a vase.  The booths also sold woven branches with crepe paper streamers on the end in their traditional spring colors:  pale green, yellow, sky blue, and red.

The eggs were sold in small egg cartons.  I brought six home–and two broke in transit.  I just opened the carton and looked at them, and another one has broken.  Something so delicate was not meant to survive, even wrapped in bubble wrap.  My cat would undoubtedly destroy the remaining ones if I put them out.  So I’ll leave them in their carton, to remind me spring is coming, and that it is a delicate season.

The Long Road to School

Photo from Flickr
When I was a teenager on the farm, we started every day with a “good” breakfast.  It usually involved cereal, almost always corn flakes, and toast, along with milk for me and coffee for Mother and Daddy.  On the weekends Mother was more apt to fry eggs and bacon and bake biscuits, but she certainly didn’t do that every morning.  Daddy and I ate breakfast and then went our separate ways, he to drive to work (or drive a schoolbus, as he did in later years) and me up the long gravel driveway to catch the school bus.

In the winter I remember standing up at the road in the dark, waiting for the yellow school bus to appear shortly after 7 a.m.  I had my lunch in a paper bag, my books under my arm, and a coat wrapped around me.  Bear in mind that girls were not allowed to wear pants to school until I was a senior in high school, so picture me shivering in knee socks and loafers, waiting for the bus.

The farm was 17 miles outside of town and about 20 miles from my junior high school and high school.  But the ride to school took well over an hour.  The bus crawled along winding country roads, stopping frequently where there were clusters of houses, then speeding up a bit in the lonely spaces between farms.  Some of my cousins rode the bus, but most of the other riders were kids I didn’t know well.

The bus had hard, dark green vinyl-cushioned bench seats with a curved metal bar on the top of each seat, so you could hold on when the driver took a curve a little too fast or if you wanted to stand up and talk to someone.  This would invariably cause the driver–generally male and grumpy–to shout, “Y’all sit down right now!”

During the winter the sun would come up in the course of the ride.  If the clouds were thin I could see the sunrise through the scrubby trees and bushes along the side of the road as we roared past.  Red skies at morning, sailors take warning—a pink sunrise was considered a sure sign of rain or sleet to come.

The bus ride to school was usually quiet, since all of the teenagers wished they were still at home in bed.  Some of them slept all the way, while others gossiped or tried to finish homework.  I often sat with my cousin Judy.  During those long rides we didn’t talk much.

I watched the countryside flashing past and daydreamed.  I don’t remember what I dreamed about.  But I was convinced this was just the beginning of the road for me.  I had no idea how long the road would be or where I was going.  Even as I absorbed the stark beauty of a winter sunrise,  I knew I was going somewhere, some day, out of the hills and hollers.

What We Owe to the Carter Family

Photo from The Carter Family Fold
Most of my friends who read this are probably saying, “Who on earth are the Carter Family?”  Even for me, growing up in Tennessee and exposed to the Grand Ole Opry and other country music from an early age, I didn’t know who they were and what their influence was.  Then I got a DVD from the library of a PBS special, “The Carter Family:  Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

My family is musical on both sides.  In Mother’s family, Aunt Geneva played the harmonica and Uncle Fatty (Jesse) played the guitar.  My grandmother on the Jones side played banjo and autoharp.  I never heard her play or sing, because she died when I was small.  But I often heard Aunt Geneva and Uncle Fatty.  I thought they got their songs from the radio, and that some of them were old songs from our part of the country.

After watching this show, I now know that the songs they sang did come from the radio and from records–of the Carter Family, and later of the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle.  A. P. Carter started in the late ’20s with his wife Sara and sister-in-law Maybelle, recording old songs from the Virginia mountains where they lived, close to the Tennessee border.  Then over the years he went further and further afield, looking for more material.

Old songs that went back hundreds of years, and blues and field hollers, were all fodder for them.  A. P. arranged the songs and sang harmony; Sara sang lead, and Maybelle invented a new style of guitar picking unlike anything that had been before.

When Mother sang “I’m thinking tonight of my Blue Eyes,” that was a Carter Family song.   “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Keep on the Sunny Side” were all in my family’s repertoire, and all Carter Family songs.

Now the Carters are called folk musicians and roots music.   During the folk revival of the ’60s Joan Baez recorded some of their songs.  Maybelle’s picking inspired Doc Watson and others who took her style into the mainstream of country music.

But for me those songs bring back a rainy Sunday afternoon in Aunt Lou and Uncle Floyd’s “parlor” sitting around the coal-burning stove.  Aunt Geneva is playing the melody of “Wildwood Flower,” then Uncle Fatty picks it in Maybelle Carter’s style, picking the melody and strumming chords at the same time.  Then they sing, Mother and Aunt Lou joining in and patting their feet.  Daddy and Uncle Floyd sang too, but softly, for the others were better singers, and they wanted to hear them.

I wish I could hear their voices again.  Maybe it’s time to get out my old Sears Silvertone guitar.  Or better still, listen to Roseanne Cash (June Carter’s stepdaughter and Johnny Cash’s daughter) sing “Long Black Veil.”  She has that lonesome mountain sound, brought into the modern world.

Moons of Jupiter

With Ron, in Malmo, Sweden

February is a tough month for me.  Daddy died in February, when I was only 22.  My late companion died in February some years ago, drowned during vacation in Florida.  So I’m always glad to see the back of this month, and spend some time remembering.

The first time I saw death close up was my grandfather’s death when I was a teenager.  My father drove us up the hill from our farm to Pap’s white clapboard house to wait for the ambulance.  Aunt Nina had heard Pap fall in the bathroom, and found him dead on the floor.  He was almost 90 years old.

I saw the ambulance men bring Pap out on a stretcher.  He was neatly dressed, as always, in grey pants, a crisply ironed shirt, and black laced-up boots.  He had combed his thin, fine white hair, but he hadn’t shaved yet, so his chin had white bristles.    His cold blue eyes were open wide, his nose jutting, his jaw slack.  He looked surprised, nothing more.  Daddy stood frozen as his father went by.

I have seen death again since then, my father in a coffin, my mother, Ron breathing out his life in a frantic knot of paramedics.  I have seen old people fighting death like commandos, wrestling it down, falling to it.  I see it advancing down the hall, lurking behind a hospital bed, swerving on a highway.

I used to think that, whenever you lost someone, eventually the gaping hole would be filled by another comfort of some kind.  Now I think that we’re all like the moons of Jupiter.  We’re pelted by meteorites.  Sometimes you get a glancing blow.  Sometimes you get a crater.  Sometimes you crack into pieces, and you’re not a moon anymore.  You keep orbiting around.  The holes may not hurt as much, but they are still there.  And we look for comfort.

Sweets to the Sweet

Valentine’s Day has me thinking of hearts, flowers and candy–especially candy.  I was ruined  years ago with Belgian chocolate, not Godiva, but Neuhaus and other brands brought fresh from Brussels, with no preservatives, dark chocolate with real cream fillings so you had to eat them in a week or they would spoil.  Even the shapes were beautiful, shells, hearts, sculptured curves.  Ron would bring them back every time he went to Brussels or flew through the airport.  As my admin assistant at that time said, “It’s hard to go back to Hershey’s when you’ve had this.”

Daddy was always fond of chocolate, but we never had anything like those Belgian chocolates when I was growing up.  If times were good Mother got a Whitman’s sampler on Mother’s Day.  Daddy’s favorites were chocolate-covered cherries.  Mother always got him a box for Christmas, as well as chocolate drops filled with coconut.  Uncle Floyd always gave us a tin of King Leo peppermint sticks for Christmas.   Once Mother went through a fit of baking fancy cakes, and she made a heart-shaped cake for Valentine’s Day.  I think she got the idea from Good Housekeeping magazine.  Valentine’s Day was not a romantic date for my parents by the time I came along.  I think having a fifth child at age 38 (her) and 40 (him) was enough for both of them.

Valentine’s Day was not a big occurance at my house, but it was fraught with anxiety in elementary school.  In the second or third grade each student in my class had a paper bag to be their “Valentine mailbox,” and we were expected to slip valentines in to our friends’ boxes.  Mother was adamant that I give valentines to the whole class.  “Nobody should be left out,” she said.  “It’s mean.”  So I dutifully gave one to everybody.  Most of the class did the same thing, having equally strict mothers.  But there was always some child too poor to buy the boxes of cheap valentines, even the punch-out kind.  I felt embarrassed and ashamed for the kid.  And we each were acutely aware of who in the class got the most valentines–usually some little blond girl.

Our school did not have the elaborate cupcakes, cookies and decorations that became prevalent a generation later.  I just remember those funny candies with the sayings on them like “Be Mine.”

After I grew up, Valentine’s Day became more of a ritual.  The boyfriend took me out for dinner, brought me flowers, maybe candy, maybe some small piece of jewelry.  We drank champagne.  We swept any issues under the carpet and had a romantic evening.

Those days are behind me now.  But I still like the flowers.  Maybe I’ll pick up some the day after Valentine’s Day, when the prices go down!

R.I.P. Don Cornelius–I Miss the ’70s

Photo by Cottonball 09 from Wikimedia
I was saddened this week when Don Cornelius died.  I hadn’t thought about “Soul Train” in a long time, but immediately the theme song and the animated train popped into my head.  “Soul Train” was “American Bandstand”‘s cooler, funky brother, in every sense of the word.

The crazy clothes, the free-form dancing, talk of brotherhood and tolerance–say what you like, there were a lot of good things about it.  And who didn’t love the Jackson Five?  Who can sit still when you hear those silly songs?

I went off to college with a pair of pinwale corduroy elephant bells and a matching print blouse with four-button cuffs and a collar that went halfway down my chest.  I had a baby-blue knit midi-skirt that I wore with my roommate’s white knee boots, which were embroidered with flowers.  Embroidery and ethnic accessories were big.  I embroidered stuff on a chambray shirt for the guy I dated my sophomore year.  He made me a beaded necklace which was too small to go over my head and didn’t have a fastener (oops).

My black friends were heavy into the SuperFly look.  Even some of the white guys were.  Someone who will remain nameless (to protect the guilty) wore green plaid cuffed bellbottoms with gold-and-green leather platform boots and a brown leather jacket.  Believe me, Elton John looked normal back then.  My friend Ed kept his “Sergeant Peppers” suit well into the ’80s–brown tweed, four buttons, epaulets on the shoulders, and flared pants.  He wore it with a brown leather coat.  He was stylin’, for sure.

And the music had a good beat, you could dance to it.  That’s probably why disco refuses to die out as wedding and party music.  You can’t really dance to the Police, as much as I loved them later on.

Enough nostalgia, already–this is not something I normally indulge in.  To paraphrase Woody Allen, life is like a shark.  You have to move forward or you die.  There are a lot of things about the ’70s I don’t regret leaving behind, like discrimination against women being open and legal.  But just one reminder for us all–the Equal Rights Amendment did not pass, and in this advanced 21st century, we still do not have equal pay for equal work.  Boogie down on that.

Ice Storm

This winter has been very mild so far, except for a weird October snowstorm.  I’m not sure why I’ve been remembering the ice storms of my Tennesee childhood.  Maybe my sister Sherrie sparked the memories with her account of a storm a few weeks ago on their farm.

Snow was rare where I grew up, and always the occasion for celebration.  I got out my sled, and Daddy played with me as the runners sank into wet slush.  Ice storms were more common.  Rain would begin to freeze, then coat trees, roads and the ground with a glittering layer.  When the sun came out the next day, everything sparkled.  The reflected light was almost blinding.

Often the ice on the road would cause school to be cancelled, since the school buses couldn’t run safely on their long routes through the country.  There weren’t any snowplows or salt trucks, so we had to wait for the ice to melt before school could resume.

Sometimes the ice would be heavy enough that tree branches would break and fall on the power lines.  If the power was out in many places it could be days before it was restored.  The poor folks who went through this after the October snowstorm here know what that is like.  We had resources on the farm, however, that made a couple of days of ice storm aftermath seem like a holiday to me.

Daddy hooked up a generator to the freezer so our frozen food wouldn’t spoil.  We had a wood-burning stove in the garage, which never had a car in it, so the garage functioned as a den.  Mother cooked on top of the stove, which can’t have been fun for her, but I thought it was great.  She even allowed my dog to come into the garage, when normally he was banished to his doghouse.  Often my aunts and uncles on the main road would get their power back faster, so we were invited for lunches and dinners with them.  Afterwards they would all play Rook, the only card game they were allowed as young people and still their favorite, and laugh and talk.

Two days was about my limit, however.  After that I really wanted to be back in school with my friends since none of them lived nearby.  But a couple of days off with my aunts and uncles, and time to read all I wanted to, was a real treat.

Y’all Come Back, Now…

Mother and Daddy at home on the farm
I think I was in junior high or high school when Aunt Evelyn died.  She was an aunt by marriage to Uncle Fatty (Mother’s brother Jesse), and had been sickly for years.  Poor Aunt Evelyn was always having polyps taken out of her colon, in and out of the hospital at least once a year, and felt unable to cook, keep house, or do anything resembling work.  Mother disapproved of this mightily, and all the community paid lip service to feeling sorry for Evelyn while privately wondering if it was all imagined.  Then one of the polyps turned out to be colon cancer and she died.

Her body was taken to Nave Funeral Home, which had just opened.  Mother, Daddy and I drove into town for the viewing.  It was very strange going to Nave, because I had known it as something else–the Rudolph mansion on Madison Street, where my sister Juanita had rented an apartment with one of the Rudolph girls after she graduated from Austin Peay.

The Rudolph mansion was a square, three-story brick edifice with white trim, two or three porches, a porte-cochere, and numerous fireplaces, sitting in a spacious yard with old oak trees.  I remember that Juanita’s bedroom had a white-painted brick fireplace with a marble mantlepiece.  As a child I thought it the height of elegance (as I thought everything Juanita did or owned was).   The Rudolph family had lived there for many years, but I guess the upkeep got to be too much.  So for a while they rented it out as apartments.  Then they sold it to Mr. Nave, who made it into a funeral home.

The conversion was tastefully done.  The high ceilings and dark wood floors with carpet runners kept the feel of an expensive family home.  As we walked in a dark-suited usher greeted us, asked which viewing we were attending, and led us to the proper room.  Aunt Evelyn looked smaller and thinner than ever in her coffin, but the makeup added some color to her face, maybe more than she’d ever had in life.

Mother sat with the other women at a comfortable distance from the coffin, wearing her Sunday dress and talking in a low voice.  I sat with her, keeping my distance from the dead, and itching to leave.

Daddy stood by the coffin with a small group of his brothers, friends and cousins.  As always, he was pleased to be with them, and they all chatted.  Daddy even chuckled a bit at something one of them said, a kind of “heh-heh-heh” laugh.  “George!” Mother hissed in a shocked whisper.  “Now, old woman,” he said, and stayed with the group a while longer.

Finally Mother and Daddy were ready to go.  Instead of going out the front door, we went to the side entrance with the porte-cochere, since it was closer to the parking lot.  Another dark-suited attendant opened the door for us.  Mother thanked him.  Then the man smiled and said, “Y’all come back, now, hear?”

Daddy and I burst into helpless laughter.  We laughed all the way to our car as Mother tried to make us hush.

Girls and Horses

When I was a child, I wanted a pony or a horse so bad I could taste it.  I was obnoxious.  I read “The Black Stallion,” “Misty of Chincoteague,” and that dreadful sentimental tearjearker whose name I forget, about the carriage horse that gradually sank to pulling a coal cart (this was in England) and was rescued by an early member of the Humane Society.  Was that “Black Beauty”?

I collected glass figurines of horses and then some kind of high-class plastic ones which cost way too much money for what they were.  When I fractured a vertebra in my back (a story for another day) at 10 years old and was in the hospital for a week, my cousin Marvel baked a chocolate cake the day I came home, and topped it with a glass Palomino with a saddle and bridle.  That’s how far gone I was, and how public it was in my family.

What is it about girls and horses?  Putting aside the obvious sexual imagery (and please, I beg you to do that), I think it’s all about control of emotion and empathy for a larger, more dangerous other.  And it’s also that horses have big eyes, lots of emotion and not much in the brains department.  Kinda like men 🙂

I went to see “War Horse” last week.  It was both a beautiful, sweeping story of a boy and his horse, and a powerful antiwar message.  I highly recommend it.  You need to see this movie on a big screen–you cannot get the sweep and majesty of it on a DVD.

Why do horses move us so?  They have been noble creatures from their earliest days, painted in caves in France.  There’s a whole nomenclature in heroic statuary in which the horse’s pose indicates the rider’s accomplishments or nobility.  Yes, in an equestrian statue, there is a message if all four feet are on the ground, or one front foot is raised, or the horse is rearing on its hind feet.

This from Wikipedia (accuracy to be confirmed):  Hoof-position symbolism

A popular belief in the United States is that if the horse is rampant (both front legs in the air), the rider died in battle; one front leg up means the rider was wounded in battle or died of battle wounds; and if all four hooves are on the ground, the rider died outside battle. However, there is little evidence to support this belief.

But how strange and rich that we impose those beliefs!  Horses carry a lot of freight, and a lot of weight.