23 posts tagged “stories about my parents”

How's your day?
Mine, not so good.
My day started out with me sitting on my living room floor - crying - with a power drill in my hands.
About 12 years ago my father made me a table - glass top, wood frame and as long as my couch. I really liked this table. When he gave it to me it was unfinished. I painted it in a Ya Ya style in colors that would compliment all of my mexican art/day of the dead collection. I carried the table with me from Little Rock to Vancouver - with a 3 year stop in Washington state. The glass made it in one piece, but the legs were a bit wobbly - I imagine 3 years in outdoor (non-climate controlled might as well be sitting in a garage) storage didn't do so well on the wood...

Yeah, I guess I could have tried to save the table - I even thought about water proofing it and using it on the patio - but this morning I got up, after a month of off and on angst and obsession about what to do with Dad's homemade table, and dismantled it with my power drill. I was sobbing with my power tool. Then my chuck jammed. Then I went to Canadian Tire on Cambie where a really nice fellow in the hardware department unjammed it. Then I came home and finished taking the table my dad made apart.
I decided to keep the legs and the parts of the frame that weren't splintered from the demolish. What I will do with them is anyone's guess. The long sides of the frame could be used as plate rails and the legs...hrmmmm...
What am I gonna do with that glass?

After a quick back and forth with AgathaFrye about women with stylish facial hair and my own posting about that subject, I decided to tell a story about myself.

When I was a kid - my father always had a mustache. Not quite a magnum 'stache, but it covered his entire upper lip area. When I was little I would watch him shave and always marveled at how careful he was around the 'stache. I once even took the T from my magnetic alphabet set and pretended it was a razor and "shaved" my own face. Just to see what that would be like.

Any way, when I was very little (probably 3 or so) I have this memory of there being lots of people in the house. I seem to remember my middle sister making those big tissue paper flowers and a lot of hub bub around me. How I got a big blue gum ball is beyond me, I'm not even sure it was originally mine (you know how kids are) but I have this memory of standing in the middle of a group of kids with that wad of superman's tights blue gum stretched over my upper lip and saying, "Look! I'm my daddy!"

What happened after that was traumatizing and if it weren't for the afterwards I probably wouldn't have remembered the before - at all.

The gum would not come off. I recall my mother being angry or something because she was shrieking at me about the gum. When she tried to yank it off it, my whole head followed it. I was whisked to the bathroom where alcohol was applied. I remember crying. And that is all I remember. I'm not sure how long it took to take off my blue bubble gum mustache. I'm not sure how long my mother swore in a shrill string of German curse words. I just remember that gum being really really blue.

I just turned 45. It doesn't seem like it has been a year since I was complaining about turning 44...

2007 - where did the time go and what exactly did I do with it?

2007 - HOW CAN I TELL YOU ARE MOURNING IF YOU ARE ALWAYS BUMMED OUT?
2007 started out with much mourning. My father died a few days before Christmas in 2006.
The new year is always a boo hooey time for me as it is. Each year that passes and I am conscience - I know I skated through and somehow didn't end up in a box...but the box is inevitable. My birthday is January 2 - which only adds to my lamentation. Not only am I kissing goodbye another year, but I am saying hello to another candle on a cake. Getting old is a drag. Mourning the past, future and the present...must be my gift.

On the first anniversary of my father's death I did what every good daughter should do and called home. My mother talked for a very long time about her dogs and the renovations to the house and what she had for dinner the last few nights - but never brought up my father or that he had died exactly 365 days ago. Neither did I.
She called me back the next day only to tell me that the packages from Amazon had been delivered. She also wanted to know if I had gotten the Christmas card she sent. I had not.

My dad never really said much but every year there was a check stuck in the Christmas card. Some years it was for 50.00 bucks, other years as much as 500.00.
The yearly parental Christmas card has been a small source of anxiety for me for years because I felt that after a certain age a child really shouldn't expect or accept funds from their parents. I sometimes refused the checks. When this got tiresome I would simply get a gift card for one my parent's favorite store equaling the estimated check amount. This way I was giving them back some of the money - one way or the other.

Late in 2006 I got the Christmas card the day or so after my father passed. In it was a check for 1,000.00 dollars. I could not believe it. There was also a note explaining that the check was so big so the "tax man" wouldn't get more than he deserved. I didn't cash that check for almost 6 months. If I would have waited 7 or 8 more days, it would have been automatically voided. So, why did I cash it? Because I bet my sisters cashed theirs...within the first week.

2007 - THE HUNT FOR HOUSING!
We bought a condo! That took up a lot of time and effort. I really love where I live although living in a small space is a challenge I am not exactly taking too. I have a lot of stuff - the husband has a lot of stuff - together we have a lot of stuff and we don't even have a fraction of the stuff we had before we moved! I don't want to throw/give away any more of my things! Which leads to...

2007 - POWER TOOLS TO THE PEOPLE!
I bought a power drill. I'm gonna make some holes in stuff.
Actually, I am going to try and put up some shelves.
If I don't hurt myself with the drill my next purchase may very well be a saw of some kind!

2007 -  THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS ME
I applied and was accepted (YAY) into a local art group called Artists in Our Midst - first meeting is this coming Monday. The group is limited to people who live in a certain area of town, and luckily we bought in the area.
I tried starting a painters group when I first moved to Vancouver but found that it was very hard to get people to commit to meeting in real life. I also found that even though the name I tagged the group: VANCOUVER PAINTERS MEET - was not descriptive enough to make people understand that the group was for PAINTERS in the VANCOUVER are to MEET. I got people from as far away as Malaysia joining the group! So after two years of really trying to get it off the ground, I gave up on the idea of hosting a real life local group. I will say that I met some very neat people and two Vancouver artists in particular who are really really good.

After having a ZAZZLE account for who knows how long, I finally threw some paintings and graphics on it as t-shirts and postcards and such. I have no delusion that this will rocket me into pop culture or MTV type stardom, but it has motivated me to get out the art supplies and learn what all those things in GiMP can do.

I painted a little this last year, not as much as I should have, but I was reunited with all of my old work that had been setting in the storage unit. They took the wait just fine and are now setting in storage in my closet.

I also donated 4 small works on paper to Skeleton Key Auctions and hope to see them on the virtual block very soon. The auction benefits the defense fund of the West Memphis Three. More of that when it happens.

2007 - THE YEAR OF LIVING JOURNAL-LESS-LY
2007 was the first year in nearly 20 that I did not keep some sort of a paper journal. I started one on January 1st and never picked the freaking thing up again. Maybe I figured VOX was enough. Come to think of it, I didn't even buy one for this year either...

I'm sure there was more going on in 2007...but damned if I feel like talking about it.

Between December 21st 2007 and January 1st 2008 my mother asked me about 6 or 8 times if the Christmas card had been delivered. With each day that passed and that card wasn't delivered - she grew more and more worried that it had gotten lost in the mail. I countered that she would probably get it returned to her in a few days - not to worry too much about a Christmas card. She kept saying that she really hoped I liked the card. She really hoped I liked the card? At one point I thought I was going to have to send her a Wild Oats gift certificate for a million dollars the way she fretted over this card. Good Lord! Had she slipped a gold ingot in the envelope with this thing?

My mother's Christmas card arrived on my birthday. She had neglected to put a postal code on the envelope.
When I got the card I did like I always do with my parental Christmas card - I look at the envelope for a few seconds. I take in the hand writing, the stamps, the stickers. This year my mother forgot the 's' at the end of our last name. Which is ok because she has been calling my husband 'Jim' off and on for years so it is sort of expected.
One of the stamps had a dreidel on it - the other a knit teddy bear. The envelope was embellished with stickers of Christmas presents and angels. It didn't feel heavy enough to hold a gold bar.

Inside were 3 photos. Two of the photos were of grand nieces and nephews that I had only met once. The third photo was this one:

on the back was written:

No check, just gold.

In a back issue post I called Welcome to My World I mention 3 newspaper clippings that were found in my father's wallet after his death. I decided to try and contact the people who made such an impact on my father that he would carry around their thoughts in his back pocket. I googled the names and found a little bit of this and that and felt really good about one in particular - Robert Higgins.
I found that he was part of a group of free thinkers in Little Rock. I also discovered that he too had passed away. Being an Atheist, I guess he and my father will never meet on another plane out there in space somewhere...that the only cosmic connection they would ever have would be that scrap of newsprint and the lack of desire or need to believe in a higher power.
So I wrote the group anyway and explained the wallet thing and got a few responses. Seems this Robert Higgins was a real swell guy. Nice and kind and...well...nothing at all like my dad.

It's funny how we automatically think people who agree with our beliefs and share our tastes are automatically cool or good or smart or worthy.

My mother was going through drawers, pulling out things I had seen a thousand times. She showed them to me like I had never seen them before.
"Look, remember this?"
It was a scarf my father brought back from his TDY in Taiwan.
"Look what I found!"
She held out a stack of cloth napkins.
"You should take these back with you!"
I nodded 'OK'.
"This purse belonged to your grandmother...Dad's mom."
I had seen the purse before, but I didn't mind looking at it again. It looked like crocodile skin, but I doubt it really was. The straps were long gone and there was nothing in it, not even a hair clip.

We were in my father's room.

She had moved his bed to the other wall and put up wallpaper. She had taken down the vintage photos in vintage frames of my father's sister and her husband - both dead - and put up some black velvet paintings. The painting over the bed was something else my dad brought back from Taiwan - a jungle scene with two tigers. One is perched on a log, snarling down at the other. An obvious fight for territory and alpha status.
The more I looked at this painting the more creeped out I got. The face, although tigerish and feline, sort of took on the features of my father. I had seen this thing a million times over the years and never noticed that. It made me wonder if he had this horrendous thing commissioned or if he bought it off the shelf, not knowing or realizing why he felt connected to it enough to want it. I also wasn't sure why she put it up, considering how much she hated it. Perhaps she hated his sister and her husband even more.
The other two velvet paintings were from Mexico, both bought at the Arkansas State Fair probably 25 years ago. Both were similar simple arrangements of nondescript flowers, possibly mums, created with sponged on blobs of paint.

I sat on Dad's bed. My mother handed me a page out of a book. It was a bunch of guys posed on and around an airplane. She pointed to a fellow sitting on one of the wings.
"Look at your Dad."
There he was, crouched behind a propeller. Young and handsome and looking like a movie star in comparison to some of the other fellows.
I wanted to know where the picture had come from, where the rest of the book was.
"Somewhere. I don't know. Some book. Some of his stuff." She nodded toward the bookshelf. On the lowest shelf was a stack of his things: papers, a shoe box, envelopes...
I tried to take pictures of the book page. I knew they wouldn't be as good as if I had access to a scanner.
She picked up the shoe box and opened it up and handed me a cd.
"Jimmy Reeves."
I reminded mom that this particular Jim Reeves cd was the cd I had bought Dad for Christmas.
"Oh, yeah. That's right."
I opened the jewel case and one of the discs was missing. I asked about the disc. She said she didn't know but that he had been listening to it in his car. I guessed the disc was still in the player when she gave the car to my sister.

Next to the bed was a console type table that used to be in the kitchen next to the washing machine. She used to keep the microwave oven on it, but when they got a dishwasher it became part of the bedroom decor. There was a rectangular box setting on a doily next to a wood carving of an old Chinese man. The box was covered in shiny fabric with an oriental design. It was unsnapped and I could see several little matching bags tucked inside the box.
I pointed to the box and asked, "Is that Dad?"
I was hoping that the little bags contained measured out packets of ashes. That would have been nice. Small little pillows filled with remains. Mom had said something over the phone that he was sent home in a satin or silk bag of some sort.
"That? NOoooo. Those are smelly sachets. A friend gave me those. You put them in your drawers-"
I explained that I thought she had said something about Dad being in a satin pouch.
"I took most of him out of that bag and put him over there."
On the other side of the bed was a night stand. On the night stand was a table lamp, a very nice family portrait of my mother, father and eldest sister as a toddler and in front of the photo was what can only be described as a painted jelly jar. On the jar was an address label, the kind the Veterans or Heart Foundation or other charities send you with a donation request. The label was askew. Before the idea of my father's remains resting in a white painted jelly jar could sink all the way in - she pulled something from the shoe box and held it out to me.

"Here's his wallet. Do you want his wallet?"
Taking it from her I whispered, "No".
I opened the wallet and laughed. Dad had two photos, one in each of the places where you would slide an ID card for easy viewing. They were both of him when he was in The Service. He was probably between the ages of 18 and 22 in each photo. I could see him showing these photos off to people to prove that he wasn't always an old man...that at one point he was hot stuff. I shook my head and thought, 'how typical!'
"Those pictures. Funny, huh?" She was holding up a set of curtain valances. "You need these?"
I reminded her that I had less windows in our new place, but made a point to tell her that I had bought a huge pillow covered in the exact same floral fabric at Pier One about 10 years ago.

I went back to the wallet and looked in the slots where money should go. Instead of money there were about 6 or 8 cards: Veteran stuff/Credit Union stuff/a fishing license/etc, 3 clippings from the editorial part of the newspaper and a folded up piece of notebook paper.
I pulled out the clippings. One was about, of all things, Harry Potter. I say it was about Harry Potter, but it was really about religion. Actually all 3 clippings were about religion.
I tucked the clippings back in the money slot and pulled out the folded notebook paper. Unfolding it I caught sight of the handwriting and recognized it as my own. I could feel my mouth pulling down at the corners. My dad was carrying around the last letter I wrote him. I tried to deep breathe it away. I tried to deep breathe away the fact that I was sitting on the bed in the room of the house where he died. I tried to deep breathe away the screw top jelly jar full of his remains. I tried to deep breathe away the desire I had to scream at my mother, "A screw top jelly jar??? What is wrong with you?" And then I just caved in and lowered my head and cried. I cried until the front of my shirt was soaked. I silently cried while my mother devoted her attention to old dish towels and pillowcases. She was right there, and yet I realized I was grieving alone.
I wiped my face with my hands, tried taking in air through my nose, then left her there for a box of Kleenex.

Later that day I went into Dad's room and took his wallet.

What gift from a parent do you remember the most? 
Submitted by jorge456.  

Funny you should ask that today.
Last night I was going through my jewelry box. I don't own a lot of really nice jewelry. I've never really be all that interested in diamonds and pearls. I used to collect rhinestone bracelets and I still have a few of those. I don't wear necklaces, although I have a few vintage pieces that I have picked up along the way because I liked the way they looked. I used to wear earrings. I can't wear them anymore without my ears getting sore. I kept a lot of my favorite ones though. Plus, I have 2 holes in my left ear and for some reason that second hole doesn't mind wearing a bob - so if I feel like dangling something from my ear - I just put it there.

My two wedding rings (funny story that) are nice and inconspicuous. I have a Snoopy ring I have had since I was probably 6-ish. I have a ring from my old boyfriend Lance (the first Lance) that he swore up and down was real garnet, teeny tiny diamonds and gold. I was suspicious about that so I took it to a jeweler in the mall. He put some sort of electric thing on the diamonds and said they were real, but he could tell by looking that the garnets were fake. Many years have passed since high school and in those years the gold has nearly vanished from the ring. Probably not even worth a loon, but I still have it.

Way back around 67 or 68 my Dad was sent TDY to Taiwan for 18 months. I do not remember him leaving, I just remember him not being around then coming home. I remember standing next to my mother in the doorway of our rental house in Nebraska. He got out of the car and bounded up the steps. He picked me up and hugged my mother and me at the same time. He kissed us both in a flurry, back and forth, all over our faces. He never seemed as glad to see me or my mother before or since.

He brought back many treasures from his Taiwan trip; everything from dolls to hand painted fans and bamboo trays to silk lounging pajamas. He also brought home a box of bootleg albums, some of which I still have. I kept them mainly for the lyrics that were printed on the back of the album covers. The translations are hilarious! I heard my first Wanda Jackson on a Taiwanese bootleg as well as the soundtrack to Hair. I can not deny the influence of bootlegs.

He stocked up on wooden objects. Jewelry boxes (the one I mention above), fat and happy Buddhas, war dog book ends, huge clunky carved fruit bowls with heavy wooden fruit. To this day the banana of the set may well be one of the most obscene things I've seen carved from wood. I can tell you my mother was not very amused at the hand-flipping-the-bird-statues he brought back. He also had one that was throwing a peace sign and today, this very moment, I have to wonder why a guy like my dad would have bought that...

On to the QotD...
He gave me a small red box. Inside would be 3 rings. One was an odd orange cusp looking thing. I did not like it. The second was a round stone that when looked at one way was dark as onyx, but if you turned it to the light it shown like mother of pearl and colored foil bits. This one I liked, a lot. We would moved to New Mexico and I would wear that ring for the first time and lose it that same day. Mrs. Burke let me out of the class so I could search the places I had been on the playground. I was crying and searching the desolate playground for my ring. It was there, but it was gone.

The third ring in the box was too large. It was a big people's ring. My dad said it was white gold and topaz. My mother complained that it was a boy's ring or a man's pinkie ring. She said it was too masculine for a girl. I didn't care because I loved the look of that ring and as soon as my fingers got big enough I was gonna wear that ring!

It sat in that red box for a really long time and when it was obvious my fingers were never going to get "masculine" enough to wear the ring, we had it resized. And here it is:

I opened a box yesterday labeled: VINTAGE HATS.
No books or lasagna pan found, but I did find my fez...and my Russian winter hat, and an old mink scrap from a WW2 era coat that belonged to my mother. Yes, the styrofoam bowler hat was in that box too!

I used to wear hats a lot. That was the best part of 80's fashion - the comeback of women in hats. Of course, I mean HATS, not baseball caps or those dippy sun-visor things.

I also opened my box labeled: TOYS and GAMES.
It truly was Christmas in July! Look, I got a scary old doll with a rotting velvet dress from 1922 and a porcelain harlequin! Dawn dolls and Rosebuds and a bunch of Barbie clothes my father sewed long before I was even born!!!

As far as the games go, I have 3 - Scrabble, Ouija, and a funny kid's game from the 70's called OOPS!

Before we left Arkansas, my mother gave me the rest of my childhood possessions (the ones she didn't give away to the less fortunate, obviously). In that box was a ceramic teddy bear. Nothing says, "cuddle me" like a ceramic teddy bear...
Anyway, this was something my dad had made for me. For awhile he was big into hobbies like painting on velvet, ceramics, macrame...then much like me, he woke up one day and it was as if he never did those things. So we had a few pieces of his ceramics around the house. I know you have seen the ceramic bust of the Polynesian girl with the flower behind her ear, we had that too. I have seen them in thrift stores from here to NYC. You might even have one in your family closet somewhere.
So, I was unwrapping this ceramic teddy bear yesterday and sort of remembering odd, somewhat creative, things my dad would do and sort of laughing about it. He might have been an artist if he would have let himself go in that direction. OR maybe not.
I grew up with this crazy looking thing in my bedroom. The eyes are sky blue discs with harsh black pupils, everything else is brown. Even the tongue is brown, a lighter shade of brown, but brown. He also has wisps at the corner of each eye that make him look like Edward G. Robinson dolled up to play Asian. I turned the bear over to see my favorite part - on one foot the letters J N K are etched into the plaster. The other foot has a similar etching: M O N A. Even etched with an orange stick in plaster, my father's handwriting is unmistakable.