The Little Teapot Who Needed a Home

I honestly think it's a mistake to teach young children to anthropomorphize inanimate objects. It can be really hard to unteach this whole "inanimate objects have feelings" thing.

I was immersed in all the usual kids' stories about The Little Engine That Could, and The Brave Little Steam Shovel and all that. Hitty: Her First Hundred Years was one godawful tearjerker. Apparently most kids outgrow the idea that manmade objects have feelings. But for some of us -- and I don't think it's very emotionally healthy -- it lives on. There's a child-mind alternate reality that my rational adult mind seems to maintain like an archive, in which everything around me has emotions. Stuffed animals. An old worn shirt. My grandparents' 1950's radio.

Sure, there's an emotional connection with people we love, which kind of gets conducted through something that they used and loved, but I can't seem to break myself of the habit of crediting the objects themselves with having emotions.

My rational mind knows that, for example, a lovely old clock in a junk shop is really just composed of gears and wires and glass formed in a factory. But back there in my Childhood Mind, there's this ghastly little kiddie tale taking shape, of The Little Clock Nobody Wanted.

It's awful. Life has enough real heart-tugging stories. Heck, any animal shelter has plenty of them, and those inmates really do have feelings.

The metaphor could get out of hand but if I picture my mind as a house, with different functions and activities happening in its various rooms, this lingering childhood part of it is like the mudroom in almost every way:

It's messy and organized (if you can call it that) by momentary feeling rather than with Mr. Spock-like logic; I kick this off here, I fling that wherever. It's not served by the heating/cooling system of the house; instead it experiences all the highs and lows of my emotional weather. No pretty wallpaper hides the raw beams and no decorative furniture conceals mud-spattered jackets or dirty shoes. In the mudroom, life's grit and grime have not been cleaned up. It's definitely not part of the house tour.

I'd truly like to quit empathizing with objects, but some part of my psyche got arrested in its development. My rational thinking is alive and well and I do manage to call it up, but it has not banished the magical kid-thinking. Maybe that makes me a better writer. I sure hope it serves me in some way.

So we're in this antique shop day before yesterday, and they have a 75% -off shelf. And on that shelf is a pretty little teapot, date unknown.

When I looked closer, I could see that it was, of all things, an electric teapot. With a heating element built in.

Now that I've researched it, I find that these teapots are very common. They're the precursors of those tinny little hotpots we had in the college dorm. There were and are lots of them around, but since we never had them at home and I never collected anything breakable until we got into this collectibles business, I never knew china pots with built-in heating elements existed.

But its commonness would not have made a bit of difference to me even if I'd known it. I looked at this pretty little thing and said, "Oh, it wants to go home with me!"

The shop owner obviously knew that these pots are abundant, because even before it moved to the 75% -off shelf, she'd priced it at only $7.00. Search for "Moss Rose electric teapot" on eBay and see how many you find, selling for about 9+ dollars. But then, add shipping.

Anyway, I loved it, and here it is. 75% -off of $7.00 is ONE dollar and SEVENTY-FIVE cents, and that's what I paid, and however many there are out there, it makes me happy to glance up and see it.

To an Old Love

Corn syrup solids ne'er more brightly dyed!
Confection once belovéd, not despised!

Young alchemists, we bit each layer to savour
each subtle nuance of each colour's flavour.
Yet such restraint, our passion must defeat.
We'd by the fistful cram ourselves with sweet.
Thou caked among our teeth, we'd ram our tongues
thy sug'ry mortar to dislodge therefrom!

O how we loved and gorged ourselves on thee!
O! fickle lovers? never would we be!

But lo, now others fly to other Chews
of faddish shapes and flavours, garish hues,
and in their shadow thou hast come to rest
like fruitcake, an obligatory guest
derided and dismissed, at Hallow's Fest!

But thou deservest better, for the years
of joy thou gavest us, despite our tears
when sentence harsh the dentist would pronounce -
Sweet memories those sorrows surely trounce!

They err who treat their early love with scorn.
For first loves merely sleep and are reborn!

Building business for you !

You can click this for a more legible version.

But the cartoon captions are STILL hard to read, so I'm adding bigger versions of each one -- scroll down to the bottom of this post and you can click them there for the big versions.

I occasionally post a comic-strip ad from the heyday of that kind of advertising. This one uses panel cartoons, but I thought I'd throw it in because it's an ad for ads, touting the benefits of signing on with Sylvania and letting their cartoon ads help you attract customers to your repair business.

Sylvania asks you to contact them in order to participate. It sounds like you made Sylvania your parts supplier and you'd get a big version of that round logo for your window. Passers-by see it and recognize it from Look or the Post and know that it's "the Sylvania sign of dependable service"! And of quality, name-brand, Made In U. S. A. parts.

It's from Radio & Television News for January, 1950:

These humorous ads, running in the cream of the nation's publications, help assure you a steady stream of new customers and greater profit.

The artist is Russell Patterson whose Jazz Age drawings became iconic and who kept going strong for decades.

Eye-catchers, they definitely are.

If you click each one below, it should come up at a readable size:




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Me and Authority

I sometimes say that I'm really not a very sweet, nice person and I usually get reactions along the lines of "Ha ha! You're funny!" or "You're too hard on yourself."

But honestly, sweetness has never been one of my major virtues. As a young child I trusted nobody, felt suspicious of any motivator or program designed to improve my mind or attitude, and felt contempt for kids who jumped enthusiastically into whatever project they were told to jump into.

It would be easy to pump myself up by saying that such children were duller and more sheeplike than I was, but it's seriously untrue. School Enthusiasts were often genuinely bright, creative kids.

Below you'll find an approximation of one of those elementary school motivational doohickeys : The Rainbow Reading Chart.


This is NOT the actual chart. I did not cherish or keep mine, and I've looked at all kinds of reading incentive tools online but cannot find anything like it, so this is a guesswork version that I've created purely from memory.

I've guessed at the categories, but I think the chart was evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction and I'm pretty sure that we got that bonus circle in the middle to use for an extra book in a category we liked best.

No matter - it gives you the general idea.

It's good for kids to expand their horizons and not just read the same kind of thing over and over -- actually I do, really, pretty much see the merit in that -- so some educator somewhere came up with using color as a motivator.

For each book we read, we colored one box in the correct subject row. We were allegedly inspired to read at least one book in every category so as to complete the outer circle, coloring every box around the rim. Then work our way inward, reading more in each row.

We all had to do and turn in a chart, but our level of achievement was up to us. It was handed out by the librarian during weekly Library Time, and wasn't graded. This being the 1960s, when humiliating kids was considered just fine, she held up each chart when we turned them in, so that the reluctant reader, with only 3 or 4 boxes colored at all, got to squirm for a few seconds. In many ways it was a majorly sukky era.

Here's my recreation of the completely filled and exquisitely colored chart of a Paragon Of Educational Achievement and Good Attitude, whom I will call Suzy :


"Suzy" always delivered with gusto. See how snarky I'm being? It's jealousy. She was truly smart, both a good artist and a good creative writer. No idea what became of her after elementary school but I suspect good things.

Anyway she got really into assignments like this and her chart was held up for us as both a show of well-rounded reading -- I mean, Suzy would read anything -- and a great coloring job. Other cool coloring jobs were also praised.

Creative coloring was not discouraged. They weren't rigid about coloring rules, really. Fun was OK. You could use the rainbow, or do all shades of purple or whatever you liked. The main idea was to read widely.

My chart was nothing to brag on. I read only what I wanted to read. It annoyed me that extra books weren't counted once their category was filled, but I basically said "Pffft" to switching over to some topic I didn't care about, when I could be reading another Nancy Drew or Little House story.

My interests really weren't all that narrow. I had spells of engagement in various topics. I pored over the World Book's anthropology section. My family was full of doctors and I went through a phase of fascination with medical advances. History was fun if there was good drama. Squanto and the Pilgrims was a wonderful, sad story. I devoured lots of those Bobbs Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans biographies for kids that later, in library school, we were told were didactic and boring turnoffs for children. Sheesh. They weren't for me!

But anyway, this chart was a one-time thing, done between certain dates. My bursts of nonfiction interest took place either before or after it, and naturally, reading World Book for fun didn't count.

My parents, who were/are none too fond of conformity either (This, by the way, is a Clue), instilled in me no ardor for incentive programs. I read plenty without charts, and they actually kind of wanted me reading less and playing outdoors more. I was really a little snot about the enthusiastic kids. Can't they see through all this Pretty Colors, certificates, Gold Stars crap?! I wondered. When the grownups want to make us do something, they try to fool us into thinking that we're the ones who want to do it.

The thing that -- I guess? -- made me differ from the other kids was not that I was such an independent thinker, but that I had a trust problem. The Suzys of the world really believed that teachers and other Powers That Be had our best interests at heart; that even annoying assignments most likely had good motives behind them. For Suzy, the glass was half full; for me, half empty.

It persists, in that I really really do NOT like authority. I always saw authority as being the creator of meaningless Dilbert-style busywork that keeps people too busy to rock the boat.

It's how I felt about assignments that actually had no dark purpose at all, and were only ways to help me grow and learn. This was one of them -- now I see it as kind of a neat idea.

It's how I still feel about School Spirit blather, which I think is strictly a way to channel kids' energies into supporting the Regime in Power, rather than questioning it. It's for sure how I felt about the county I used to work for, with its endless round of meaningless meetings and procedures.

My mission, and I guess I choose to accept it, is to learn to sort good authority from bad, but I will probably never get past thinking that anyone who issues rules or requirements for me is guilty of a power trip until proven innocent.

Major announcement

Since I occasionally mention the fact that i'm a professed Christian, I need to make an announcement.

I've switched. I've become an atheist. If there were a God, then no child would be saddled with the family that Tripp Johnston is saddled with.

- Ruth
with a cold and in a bad mood

Tonight's excitement

WEAR YOUR SEATBELTS, friends

I was distressed to read that one of my college profs died in August, thrown from his vehicle and NOT wearing a seatbelt.

Dick Caram taught English and creative writing at Stephens College when I was there, and I took his poetry writing class. He was a good teacher and a good guy, and a talented writer, and it is a MASSIVE waste.

I don't want to hear ONE more story about any smart person dying for such a stupid reason, so WEAR YOUR BLOODY SEATBELTS, friends. Got that?!

Potentially hazardous

Twice a week we pack the items we've sold and take them to the post office, where they know us well by now, and know that most of our packages contain books. Still, they are required to ask the standard question about our shipping : "Are any of these liquid, fragile, perishable, or potentially hazardous?" After we made the joke about how "Haha! Books are always hazardous! Ideas are dangerous!" a few times, it got old, but the truth remains. They are.

In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses. It was mainstream news, not "mere" book news, and got a lot of attention, with the local paper interviewing all in the book business to see if we were brave enough to defy any violent militants who hopped into town.

20 years later Rushdie is alive and so are all the booksellers and librarians 8~) who were brave enough to declare they would stock it anyway. It was truly scary, at least in major cities, at the time. Nobody knew what could happen. I kept this issue of the Barnes and Noble catalog, explaining their commitment to intellectual freedom, and I still admire their courage.

During Banned Books Week, here's to book peddlers everywhere who keep the light burning.

One of those "Questions" memes

Well, at least I warned you in the post title!

I'm afraid I'd do these memes more if I liked the questions, but readers need not worry. I rarely like the questions. But I liked these. Thanks to Catherine, whose blog I found it on.

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1. Please share one middle school memory. It can be good, bad, ugly, funny. Pictures or words, I don't care, just share.

In 7th grade, I fell madly, head-over-heels in love for the first time. I was a target for some bullying in junior high, and on this occasion, a guy who was usually not such a target was getting a loud raucous razzing from his "friends" for some reason. He just stood there with this "O good grief" look on his face, waiting for it to end, and then... our eyes met. For just one instant I saw that he understood what we pariahs went through. I fell. Major crush, but it was admiration from afar. Obviously no one, even the Cool People, was immune when hecklers could find a reason, but still, he was one of the Cool People and I wasn't. He really was a nice, smart guy. Except for one bad mistake much later in life, I actually had pretty good taste in guys.

2. What's your favorite Beatles song?

I'm Happy Just to Dance with You

3. If I asked you to describe your most comfortable outfit, what would it be?

Workout pants (without the actual workout), T-shirt, bedroom slippers.

4. Would you rather host a party or be a guest?

Be a guest. If people have a lousy time, it won't be my fault!

5. Do you think we will move completely from traditional books to digital ones, and if we do, are you OK with that?

I could survive it, but it's not my preference. Honestly, I think we will not. I think a high percentage of people who like reading like a book in their hands as much as I do. You'll notice that even vinyl records still have their fans, and I think books have a whole lot more fans.

6. Do you learn best by reading, listening or experiencing?

Experiencing, unfortunately. I don't retain heard information well, and while I love to read, I don't retain that kind of learning very well either on a first reading. Though re-reading is a much less painful experience than making hands-on mistakes and re-doing!

7. If you are (or when you were) single, what is the kiss of death for you concerning the opposite sex? (That is, what is one trait or behavior or habit or anything at all that immediately turns you off from considering that person a potential match for you?)

Disrespect for nature and nature's creatures.

8. Snacks. Salty or sweet?

Both! I can alternate eating chocolate and potato chips for hours.

9. Look around you in a four foot radius. What object is around you that you didn't realize was there or forgot was there? How long has it been there?

Hey, thanks! A five dollar bill I pulled out of the coupons/receipts/cashback wad of purse paper when I was balancing my checkbook last week. Forgot it was there in the pile of non-receipts.

10. What is your favorite Tom Cruise movie?

Not particularly a Cruise fan but Rain Man was very good.

(C'mon, let's get real here. My question:

What was your favorite Cary Grant movie?

My answer: Notorious.)

11. You buy a bottle of shampoo and discover that you don't like what it does to your hair at all. What do you do with that full bottle?

Pour it out and recycle the bottle.

12. Your favorite Fall comfort food?

Chili with shredded cheddar cheese and sour cream. Corn bread on the side.

Memories of Hugo

It's hard to describe the downpour I woke up to in the pitch darkness of September 21, 1989. I've still never seen rain so hard, and it was only an edge of hurricane Hugo. At this point I was still on Hilton Head, where it never even hit.

But none of us knew that yet. It was looking like it would slam us, and evacuation was underway. We'd prepped the library the day before and closed early.

At 4AM I woke up to blackness and rain like I'd never seen. Pitch dark, the power now out, and torrential rain drumming straight down.

And no wind. Dead-still air and a downpour so heavy that it was truly eerie, like something out of science fiction.

I'd packed what I could in my tiny Tercel and I got outta there after saying a tearful goodbye to my beloved books, my adored stereo. Not that I'm prone to melodrama or anything. I was on the road by 5 AM. Even then, traffic crawled, but it became gridlock later when the evac order became mandatory, and I missed that.

Ever heard of the old Arabic tale about an appointment in Samarra? Because I went straight to what seemed like the most logical retreat. Way inland. Free of charge, because my parents kept an apartment there, so if the island got devastated, I wouldn't be paying hotel rates for days or weeks.

Charlotte, NC.

Quit laughing.

I got there mid-afternoon (Normally, the drive would have taken 5 hours). I did one smart thing -- I filled the gas tank. I hit my favorite newsstand/bookstore, and bought this issue of Elle,

which I still have, and, i think, another magazine. BOY did I come to wish I'd bought more reading material.

(Enjoy the fan service, because it was unintentional and it's the only example this blog will ever have!)

I grocery shopped and noticed people buying up bottled water, batteries, etc. But I figured I'd be out of Charlotte in just a few days anyway, so I bought ... too little.

Let myself in to the apartment, turned on the TV and saw that the storm had increased 2 levels during my drive. From a category 2, to a 4. And had turned a little northwest. And they were warning us to batten down, here in Charlotte?! %#$*!

That was one frightening night. The storm pounded the building. My parents had bought new mattresses for 2 of the beds, and the delivery company had left the old ones on the bedroom floor. I was so afraid that that wind would hurl objects through the apartment windows, that I tried to prop the old mattresses against them. These mattresses had come with the beds in the 1930's and were too limp to prop.

In the morning, despite my full tank of gas, I couldn't leave because power lines were down across the complex's entrance. So I listened to the radio (Working batteries! Way cool) announcing the few gas stations that had power to run their pumps. Sweated in the increasing steamy humidity. Read what I could find. Phoned people. Took some pictures.


In this photo, it's a few hours later and someone has pulled the downed trees aside enough for the lines to raise and allow at least small vehicles to get in and out.

By then, I had to stay and get the place ready for my mom.

My parents lived right where they do now, in the badly hit Grand Strand. They had evacuated inland, to relatives in Conway, and came back to find the living space of their house intact, but the ground floor washed out. Dad stayed in Conway, waiting for the the local motel to reopen and in a couple weeks both parents were in the motel while repairs were done. There was water and phone service in Charlotte, if nothing else and Mom decided to camp out there, with the dog, until there was a better option.

Meanwhile, my friends back on the island were cheerfully informing me that they had no damage. They had power, water, air conditioning .... Tee Vee!

I grocery shopped to stock the place for her. We waited in long lines to get into barely lit stores, They'd count us off in groups of 20(? I think) and let us in, then let in another 20 when enough previous shoppers had come out. They took cash and, if I recall, credit cards, by using those old knuckle-scraper machines and hoping that the card was good. I hope I remember this correctly but it actually makes sense. You might as well sell what you've got and make what money you can, rather than turn people away for lack of cash and then just leave the stuff sitting for looters or spoilage.

Anyway, I remember dearth, rather than money, being an object. There wasn't much to buy except canned fruit and potato chips but I got what I could.

She arrived and we hung out for a couple of days and then I couldn't stand the boredom and went home.

Looking back, this whole plan makes no sense. We all knew Hilton Head was untouched. And closer to my parents' home in the Inlet by an hour, though storm damage would undoubtedly have necessitated a detour inland, but OK, call it a longer drive ...

Still; factor in the undamaged comforts of power, air conditioning, plentiful food, and ... Tee Vee! AND the fact that once the roads were cleared it really WOULD be a shorter drive for her to get back.

Why didn't Dad and Mom and I just plan for her to come to Hilton Head and hang out there till they could make longer term arrangements?? I have no idea. I can't remember. All I can figure is that we were all too mentally wrecked to be flexible or change plans. Lack of sleep probably had a something to do with it.

I went back to HH and back to work. These photos of Hugo damage at Garden City Beach (right next to Murrells Inlet, but out at the shore rather than tucked inland like we are) were taken a whole year later, when we had another weird weather event, a BIG snow. Snow flurries occur every 5 years or so, but a few inches are rare. On December 24th, 1990 it snowed 11 inches, which is outright bizarre. The tides have eaten away at some of the snow here directly on the beach, but that really is snow you see all over the destruction, unlceared after a year.



I really hate hurricanes.

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[Dates corrected.] [Again.]

More book repair stuff

Since I was fixing these 2 books anyway, it occurred to me (after I'd gotten started, of course) to document and post another book repair entry, this time showing what I do when a book has completely split apart.

For anyone who happens by -- I talked about the basic materials in my first post on repairing books -- so I won't repeat that here, I'll just refer any interested readers to that post, but I will repeat one thing which is too important to skip:

NEVER repair a book unless you are willing to destroy its value. Repair pretty much does exactly that. If you want to sell it, collectors would rather have it in disrepair. Really. Repair only no-value books that need to be used and handled.

OK. You'll see 2 books here, but i'll show the repair steps for the more complicated one.
It's complicated mostly by my choice. I want to keep the original bookplate and to keep all of the original paper of that ripped endpage.

You may not want to. It would be simpler and would, in fact, look neater to discard the torn paper and make a big, neat, new pastedown. But I like the plate. I like the personal history in an old book. And I also tend to keep as much of a book's original material as possible ... just ... because!

The general idea is to secure the text block to the cover.

The first step requires a decision. There's paper backing against the bound page edges.

The bookbinding guide calls this the "hollow back." It is NOT hollow, it's thoroughly glued to the bound edges, but they call it that.

Is that backing secure? Or is it shredding, or peeling off?

If it needs fixing or replacing, this is the time to do either one, by gluing it down, or peeling it away and replacing it, the same way I have placed new paper on this one.

Two views, one from each angle:

But in this case, the old backing was very securely glued down already and needed no attention, so I just placed the new piece on top of it.

Now -- BEFORE gluing the book together, it's a very very good idea to close the book on the new piece.

This shows me exactly how the piece will conform to the cover. AND when I DO put glue on the pieces, they will already be shaped to each other and will fit together in their natural position, without pulling against each other.

All I need to do now is glue the new piece onto the cover.


IMPORTANT : NOTE that I have put NO GLUE ON THE SPINE. The cloth spine is not supposed to stick to the back of the pages. The text block, as it's called, just kind of hangs into the spine like a hammock, attached ONLY at the hinges.

Press it together. Since glue always oozes out around the edges, lay wax paper between the repair and its facing page, till the glue dries.

If I were discarding the old torn edges, I'd pretty much be finished, but I chose to trim the new piece to fit around the plate ... and to glue the torn paper back onto the pastedown. It looks kind of yucky, since it's been crumpled down into the spine, probably for decades, and darkened. But I wanted to put it back where it belonged!

And here are both books. In the other one you can see that this technique makes a pretty neat repair, especially if you sort-of color match new paper to the old paper.

This is another book I should sell. I'm not sure that a real booklover should even be in this business. I should sell collectible thimbles or something.

Marvels of Insect Life, by Edward Step. NY:Robert M. McBride, 1916.



Loads of amazing photos. as well as the spectacular color plates. This photo close-up of a honeybee's tongue is amazing. Maybe I'll sell it ... um ... later.

It was 20 years ago, maybe today

I've mentioned before that I'm in the amusing position of not knowing exactly when Larry and I met, because I was merely the librarian who issued him his library card at the time.

He's still got the card. The date sticker reflects a couple of later renewals, but I originally gave it to him in September 1989.

So any date in September is as good as another to call the 20th anniversary of our meeting. Though, actually, today is his birthday, so he likely didn't hit the library that very day. But it'll do.

Neither of us was in a life situation amenable to dating one another at the time. By 1992 that was different, but I still wasted several more years doing stupider things. Yeah, it's his birthday, and I'm feeling old and mulling over lost times, but I'm well aware of how few people get another chance at all.

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Each of us, at the time. Larry is with Younger Daughter on the Hilton Head beach.

September 1989 brought very very good things into my life.

Happy Birthday, Love. 8~)

The Very Thirsty Spider

I know that helping a slighter dumber member of her species beat Natural Selection is not exactly what a hardline ecologist would advocate, but I couldn't help it. Neither could Larry.

We felt for this girl, and partly because we let the "pest" control technician kill one, right there in the same corner of the same porch, a couple years ago. He sure doesn't do that anymore - each guy who comes out tells us he's been duly warned not to harm garden spiders.

We also owed her. She's kept the entry to our house free of mosquitoes and has waylaid and lunched on one of those nasty stinging horseflies that ventured up.

The fact that this one chose to build her web across the doorbell is rather inconvenient

but she pays her rent, and, I mean, we're not ridiculous about it, we've removed other encroachments of the web that began to cover too much of the doorway and told her sternly to expand in the other direction.

She seems healthy enough, but we noticed she wasn't fattening up as nicely as her cousin down in the yard. She'd had the foresight to build deep inside the portico, which protects her web, but has a downside: fewer bug passersby to catch and eat. Still, she'd caught some, she had grown. Maybe she was just settling into a lower-metabolism state for the coming autumn.

But something else occurred to us. Because of her seclusion, it also rarely rains on her web. All living things need water in some form and she hadn't had many juicy insects lately and wasn't getting much liquid.

Webs get rained on naturally so at worst it couldn't hurt. Here, Larry endows her web with a fine mist of water.

And though it's hard to capture, I can tell you, she skittered over to the droplets and began slurping them up like they were ambrosia.

But...it says so on the internet!

I just took this shot of my weather gadget on my iGoogle page.

It did not get above the 80's (F.) at all today, much less after 5PM. What bizarre instrument fed them this figure?

The most trivial 1969 anniversary post you will ever read.

Of all the 1969 anniversaries that seem to be coming up, the one I just might cherish most is the appearance of hair straightener on the drugstore shelves, giving me my first victory in a long series of hair battles.

I will love Eugene Payne forever because he drew me without curls. Better known for editorial cartooning, and winning a Pulitzer for it in 1968, he did some portrait work in Charlotte, NC during the '50s and '60s, and my grandmother commissioned him to do pastel portraits of Emily and myself when we were six.

She arranged the sittings without consulting our mothers, so my unfortunate mother had most of my despised (by me, not her) curl cut off shortly beforehand, causing my grandmother near-apoplexy. Grandmother had instructions for Payne: "Give her curls!" i.e.: They're gone? Fictionalize 'em!

"She said she doesn't want curls," said this wonderful man. Few defied my grandmother. I still like this portrait.

Long straight unstyled hair rode in on the early feminist rebellion, but the straight unstyled look became its own thing-to-conform-to. My problem,

and it took being this elderly to prove it, is that I wanted it not because it was fashionable but because it was comfortable.

My hair was uncontrollable.I fought it, clamped it down, and hated it way before the hippie era. It wasn't about looks. The wiry bulkiness, the endless springy tickling, drove me to distraction, and it was worse to keep hearing that appearance was supposed to be all that mattered.


I hated the totally uncool "easy care" chop job that kept my bangs from curling outward. I tried repeatedly to grow longer bangs and fought a losing battle against the curl.


By 1969, when I was 15, straight hair was in, and along with it came a great product: hair relaxer for us Caucasians. CurlFree [TM] got more publicity, but I found it pretty wimpy. My favorite was Straight Set [TM]. It contained lye. It worked.

Of course, it also stripped my hair out and turned it into straw, which meant I still envied the girls in the magazines.

But it was better than nothing. Once, often twice, during the week after a straightening, I'd heat up some ultra-moisturizing conditioner in a kitchen saucepan, apply it directly to the dry hair and wrap a towel around it for a couple hours. It was a week of work for every straightening, but so worth it. I could almost be normal. I could wear bangs!

Curliness made a fashion comeback and my beloved Straight Set disappeared but products were always available in what they called the "ethnic needs" section of the drugstore.

And over and over through the years I have had to listen to the critiques of people who have a variety of reasons for shouldn't-ing at me:

"Everybody should just be natural!"

Good thought. I'll give up eyeglasses too. Loan me your car, since I'd rather not total my own.

"Be yourself! By failing to be Who You Are, you are Failing to Love Yourself!"

Lord save us from The New Age. Excuse me, but to say my hair is Who I Am would the antithesis of valuing myself as a full human being.

Women in particular go with: "Oh isn't it cute how everybody wants what the other person has! I always wanted curls!"

I honestly don't think anybody wants what the other person has. Women who pay about the same annually for perms that I do for straightening may want lovely cascading curls, but they do not want my orange afro. What most of us want is a nice-looking and easy-care happy medium. We're not trading places, you with your perm and me with my straightening. We're more like meeting in the middle.

I kept up the drugstore relaxers, with a brief go-natural break in 1990.

Let me emphasize: brief. I quickly resumed my use of Dark and Lovely [TM]. By now manufacturers apparently considered a "No-lye formula" a selling point, to my dismay. That lye was g‑o‑o‑o‑d stuff, man.

Then they invented bio-thermal hair straightening. It never wears off, leaving only new growth to deal with. I read about it in the newspaper in 2000, but it would be 4 more years before it was available locally.

It's wonderful. It's a joy. In exchange for a long afternoon at the salon twice a year, I can, for the first time in my life, ignore my hair instead of working on it every morning.

I still keep it long. I can pin it up, à la Elly Patterson, for occasions on which I need to act willing to age gracefully, but mostly I'm unapologetic. It's not my fault that the hair I wanted at 15 is only available to me now when it's age-inappropriate. They'll undoubtedly hack it off when I'm in the nursing home. Not before.

We now return you to the 20th century.

This computer has multiple problems -- yes, again, and ever since I bought it -- but anyway, it has a bunch of dysfunctions, including no sound. Multiple attempts to fix it -- my repair guy was here for 4 hours -- have failed.

I'd gotten awfully used to MP3 convenience. Now: no carefully compiled playlists. No easy clicking, no uninterrupted 90+ minutes of music at a time. Worst of all -- no YouTube! Larry is fine with my using his computer, but since everything at his desk is set up for a left-handed person who likes s-l-o-w mouse scrolling 8~) I won't do that every day.

But I can access music to work by, using old fashioned 20th century technology, CDs, a player, and my headphones. CDs not only have a full, rich sound -- MP3's are cruddy, really -- but many I bought in the 1980's still play. There's a lot to love about music that's not disposable.


This also got me to dust and organize my bookcase to make room for the boombox.

I really would like to get Sindows out of my life forever. We've already gone un-Window Shopping at the local Apple dealer, and I'm thinking on a Mac for next year, but right now I can still work and write on this machine, so that purchase can wait until the other bugs --- and there ARE others, including no saved log-ins anymore (Yes, I've done all the suggested fixes)-- drive me so insane that I take this thing to my cousins' house on the next Confed'rate Holiday and let 'em fire their cannon at it.

I do not like my computer.

Sanctuary

I hated Junior High School with a passion. When people play games, like "If someone promised you a million dollars, would you ___?" I can say with confidence that, while I would take a million dollars to relive some unpleasant things in my life, there is one thing that even a million could not induce me to go through again and that was junior high. I was a target of bullying on grand scale. I'm not sure why. I was from the right side of the tracks and wasn't particularly odd looking, though I was somewhat fashion challenged.

12-14 is a cruel age. I wasn't alone by any means. A kid who exudes shyness and tendency to submit will kind of attract it, like blood attracts sharks, and the structured environment of elementary school had given way to the looser movement of shifting classrooms which allowed the meanest people free-er reign for bullying others.

Two days ago we were in Charlotte visiting Cousin Emily, and she asked me to go with her to my old junior high. She was donating to them some posters with vintage photos of the class of 1936, which her dad was part of. I've visited other sites from my youth but never had any desire to go back to that school. It appears in unpleasant dreams often enough. I (smiling) accused Emily of trying to "help" me "confront my demons" which she found hilarious, but we went, sat in the office, handed the old photos to the assistant principal who was a very nice, enthusiastic guy, and Emily said, "Could you give my cousin a nostalgia tour?" while I rolled my eyes.

But, though not particularly nostalgic about the place, I was a little curious to experience it again. Predictably, the school seemed smaller, less intimidating. There were some new buildings. The landscaping was lusher.

And I did remember something good, something I actually wanted to see. The library.

1968 had been a pinnacle of school misery, but at the end of the year, I became aware of an option for the next year. You could be a Library Assistant. It wasn't the hot activity. Hip people who craved authority and power wanted to be Office Assistants. I doubt if they had any power at all, merely got to stand at the desk and say hello to visitors, or staple and photocopy things, and might have had a little fun, but anyway, there was very little competition for library assistant positions and I applied and was accepted for the 1968-69 year.

Taken 8-13-2009

The school library was physically, as well as symbolically, apart from the rest of campus. The building and the walk to it are so much the same that it's almost weird. It's not the library anymore, but used for chorus and band. That shady walkway which ambles down to it, taking you away from the roar of the crowd, has not altered a bit.

Inside, two walls were almost all window and looked on woods as richly green as they are today. As a library in 68-69 it was, not dark, but sort of shady and nice. The librarian was a hip, cool young woman right out of school, who wore miniskirts. We hung around the checkout desk and stamped things and alphabetized cards and stapled stuff and generally had a serene hour a day in that wonderful, quiet little building where no one harassed anyone.

It was really good to see it again. I skipped the classroom buildings and the girls' bathroom where I would spend lunch hours eating crackers, to avoid the harassment of the lunchroom. Most of that is all renovated and doesn't resemble the old days anyway.

OK, OK! Emily was right. Revisiting it was good. Thanks to this delightful place, ninth grade was not as bad as seventh and eighth had been. High school (grades 10-12 in our system) was, actually, comparatively, great. Jerks seemed embarrassed to behave in quite so immature a manner as they had back in junior days, and while school irritated and angered me often, I never feared it again.

Fighting nature

My garden makes kind of pleasant, innocuous blog material, but that's because I avoid telling the parts of the story that are slightly more interesting but definitely more embarrassing.

I'm afraid I'm one of those wackos who took survival measures when Y2K was coming. In 1999 we were still in NJ in our wonderful Victorian house with its nooks and crannies, and I piled canned goods and a huge sack of Sam's Club rice into an odd little closet I kept shoes in. Later, when a local food drive arranged with the postal service for carriers to pick up donations, I dragged the 20(?) pound rice sack out to the porch and our poor mailman hauled it away.

c. August 1997, just after we bought the house.

But, no, I have not entirely changed my nutcase ways, because I honestly think that the ability to provide ourselves with at least some of our own food could become a necessity rather than a hobby. If we never need a food-producing farmette, the kids just might. Or might want one. The current economy being the mess that it is, I wanted to begin my learning process now. This place we're in now is not very good for a sustainable life, but it's fine for a learning laboratory. We'll have some acreage eventually. Why be a novice in 5-10 years?

This is part of the reason why I'm trying things that are more difficult to grow. I like some of the easier crops like lettuce and cukes well enough, but, bottom line, salad holds limited interest for me. I want to be able to raise serious sustenance vegetables that keep better and have more recipe versatility. I'd rather fail more and learn more, than succeed at things I don't care much about. Ideally, I'll have a greenhouse too, and have a small but steady production of salad veggies.

I'm as complete a novice at this as one can be. I've never been into gardening for pleasure. I have to avoid sun, which means getting out there at 6:30 AM to work on it while the yard is still fairly shady. I'm also not a morning person, so this is a radical shift.

I'm also not a detail person. Gardening, especially organic gardening, requires some vigilance and attention to detail. You can't just decide to take a few days off. Nature doesn't.

So I'm not exactly a natural-born gardener. An online friend once told me that if I ever joined her role-playing group, they'd probably dub me The Goddess of Convenience Foods and Take-Out. I have to fight nature, and by that, more than the predators and the weather, i really mean my own nature.

While gardening is kind of calming and satisfying even for my temperament, for me it's more a means to an end, than an end in itself.









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So! I planted my carrots and broccoli almost 2 months ago. We oughta be eating the stuff by now, but neither was the right crop for its location. They didn't die, they didn't grow. They all just sat there suffering in the too-long day of full broiling South Carolina sun.

Both are now in containers. I used to have ornamental trees in these two square planters, years ago. Each crop has a planter now, and both are perking up. Naturally, as soon as I put the carrots into a shadier spot, we've had nothing but cloudy days and downpours. I can move the planters to adjust for weather, so we may get some food out them!

The peppers are happy in the raised bed, though. They love this climate. We harvested 2 and had stuffed peppers, and Larry's (mumble...thriving...mumble) garden produced enough tomatoes for me to make a sauce that looked pink and wimpy, but that had the richest, most delectable flavor... o my! Home grown tomatoes demonstrate the blah-ness of grocery store produce to a mind-blowing degree.

And the rest of my big box garden is now an attempt at, believe it or not, a pumpkin patch. A weird but very sincere pumpkin patch. Larry had a couple plants that needed a spot and I thought I'd try it.

We're also dinking around with pest-discouraging companion plants, which is the reason for the marigolds, and the basil, which you see there to the left, between the pepper plants (and which contributed to my delicious tomato sauce). Nasturtium seeds are in those rectangular planters. Nasturtiums are supposedly good for discouraging certain bugs as well. We'll know a fair amount by the time we've got space for a mini-farm.

I'm learning in fits and starts.