Our Beautiful Lady of the Red Hat

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Warning, by Jenny Joseph

 

 

Fridays were red hat days at the care center.  I asked dad once what mom did at those meetings.  He thought for a minute, then shook his head and said he supposed she mostly just sat around with other old ladies who were also wearing red hats. And that’s all he had to say about that.  The group took mom away from him for a time and he didn’t like that much. 

I’d venture to guess, by the looks of these pictures, that she thoroughly enjoyed herself participating in whatever it was they all got up to.  I don’t believe any of them learned to spit, but what do I know? 

I always tell people of all ages who have been prescribed eyewear, if you have to wear glasses, you might as well have some fun with it!  Try on something a little wild and crazy – it might just suit you perfectly. Seems to me, the same thing holds true when it comes to growing old.  If you have to do it (and you’re very lucky if you do!) then by all means, make up for the sobriety of your youth.  Have some fun with it. You’ve earned the right to be eccentric, and it’s never too early to take some practice runs.

Changes

     

Little bald headed kids are so cute.  That’s my big brother looking short and happy.  Maybe about to trip over his long pant legs as he steps into the sunshine.  And behind him stands what I’m pretty sure is the cupboard that now graces my sister Ann’s living room, all refinished and restored and looking great.  My brother is looking okay these days too, although a little less shiny because he has a bit more hair on his head. 

 Isn’t it amazing that those portable cupboard units were more or less the only cupboard space for storage and food preparation in kitchens at one time?  We’ve gone completely crazy with our miles of marble and granite counter top and rows and rows of shelves and drawers and our myriad of utensils and gadgets.  I can remember this particular unit, or one very much like it, being out in our ‘back kitchen’ when we moved to Aaron and being used as a sort of miscellaneous catch all – like a giant junk drawer.  Because there we had built in cupboards, painted a strange shade of sea green blue, of all colors, with two enormous corner lazy susans and spaces deep enough for a child to crawl into.  Eventually mom had the kitchen cupboards updated, but she was happy with the amount of storage space and counter top and never asked for anything bigger.  That’s when the blue cupboards got relegated to the back kitchen as well.  And then some of them made the trip into town to be used as storage in their ‘barn’ garage.  I remember her saying once that she thought a person could have way too many cupboards, an idea I personally never embraced.  Although it does make perfect sense to me now.  We wouldn’t collect so much barely used stuff if we didn’t have places to put it. 

 

And here’s my big brother caught in a rare moment of sister adoration.  Maybe he was nostalgic for the bald head and found it endearing.  He went on to have a bald headed child of his own eventually.  And look at the size of that baby buggy!  A five year old could fit in there.  This was no fold up unit that you could stuff in your car.  It was meant for bundling up your child in sixteen blankets and wheeling her outside for a nap in the fresh air.   My mother-in-law gave me one of these contraptions to use when D. was a baby, and it not only held her, but a weeks worth of groceries, my purse, some diapers, and a complete change of wardrobe for both of us.  The springs on that thing were incredible.  One baby kick and it rocked forever, giving me a kind of motion sickness just watching it.  There were no straps or harnesses or bumper pads and lots of places to pinch little fingers, but obviously many children survived their time in it, some of them actually looking happy to be there. 

And yes, I do remember life before strollers and car seats.  And how it was considered no big deal to smoke around your children, as long as you kept the lighter and the matches out of their reach.  I remember life before freezers and microwaves.  And bread makers and laptops and cell phones.  I’m sure the list is much longer than that, but the longer it gets the older I feel, so I’ll cut it off right there for now and save the rest of my ‘back in the day’ blather for another time.  People these days are still having the occasional cute little bald headed baby – happily, SOME things never change.

Random-icity

This picture was pulled up in a completely random fashion from a folder that is shared from our other computer to this one.  The random part comes from the fact that I don’t rename everything, so this one is just listed as a bunch of letters and numbers in a series and the only way I could see it was to upload it.  Well, probably not the ONLY way, but the only method my computer illiterate brain could fathom at the moment.  Maybe I’ve posted it before, but it doesn’t matter. 

I look to be about 9 or 10 months old, so it’s possibly March, 1950.  How’s that for astute detective work.  I could likely find a date on the original print, but that also doesn’t really matter, and sounds too much like work.  A sunny Sunday, by the look of dad’s clothes.  Warm enough for mitten-less hands.  Disgruntled brother and dog, obviously interrupted from romping in the snow and anxious to get back to that.  The surrounding snow is well trampled, and Ron’s snow pants are caked with it from the knees down. 

When I was home in October we got together at my brother’s house with the minister who would conduct Dad’s memorial service.   He had been a young boy when dad worked for his family as a hired farm hand, and he shared some lovely memories with us that we’d never heard before.  One of them was how dad helped him get through the devestating time of losing his own mother, an experience Dad had gone through himself at a young age.   He also remembered talking to dad after the still-birth of his first child, and how distraught he was, and that he had said sadly “I can grown everything but a family”.   

Perhaps that explains the doting look on his face in this picture, and how proud he always was of us, and why we always felt cherished and loved.  And why it was so important to him that we loved and cherished our mom.  Even though she dressed us funny.  I mean, seriously, what kind of strange helmut-like thing is that on my brother’s head?? 

I’m glad I pulled up this particular random photo.  I like the warm fuzzy feelings it’s pulled up in me.

Weather & Furniture & Stuff

This is the absolute weirdest November weather I can remember having in a long time.  I’m not complaining, I think it’s great. Today it’s above zero and sunny, the only snow in sight the big blob that’s left of a snowman in the back yard.  And that was from a brief snowfall that turned itself into water in less than a day.  I see pictures of all the snow in the east and the north and it doesn’t seem real to me at all.  I’m sure we’re in for a rude awakening before the month is over, but right now I can’t even think about Christmas.  It looks bizarre to me that people have already put up their outdoor lights and lit up their Christmas trees.  And the Christmas music in stores, annoying at the best of times, is doubly so when the weather won’t co-operate.  The holiday season is supposed to be all about snowdrifts and bitter cold and staying inside by the fire with a hot drink in hand, admiring the twinkling lights and being thankful that you don’t have to drive anywhere. 

The new furniture was delivered yesterday, and of course it looks completely different from how I saw it in the showroom, but in a good way.  It took an incredible length of time to get it all unwrapped from it’s layers of cardboard and foam and plastic wrap, and to remove the staples and tags and papery ribbons holding the little extra decorative cushions in place.  Then Kenzie and I had to take pictures, and try to think of various important reasons to sit on it.  So that’s our anniversary/Christmas present for the next five years or so, I suppose. Now I know the loveseat should probably have been a second chair, because it’s much bigger than I thought it was going to be in our little living room, and all of the pieces take up all of the space.  But that’s also good, since now putting up the Christmas tree looks to be impossible, never mind that I haven’t felt at all like doing it yet, and might just skip it altogether this year anyway, even without such a great excuse. 

 The Chair (complete with beautiful live model demonstrating it’s comfy features….)

 The Loveseat

 

The Couch

How’s that for a variety of lighting situations!  My wall is NOT usually orange, I swear.  We did some serious reading together curled up on the couch – got through two complete “Magic Tree House” Jack and Annie stories. 

We did a lot of other things this weekend too, but the lack of pictures of anything else just means we were having too much fun to take any I guess.

Do You Know Where Your Husband Is?

I don’t.  It’s ten thirty p.m. and he has yet to come home from work.  Not that this is anything unusual.  And not even what I was going to write about, but that’s what popped into my brain when I sat down, so there it is. 

Today I made a table!  Our old portable dishwasher had a great butcher block top which I have been ’saving’ for years in various places around the house because it’s just too good to throw out.  A few days ago W. decided to do some house cleaning and actually put it in the garbage!  How crazy is that?  And then as I was dragging it to safety he had the nerve to ask me what the hell I was doing. Seriously.  Making a table, I told him.  So then I had to actually do that.  I got some red table legs from Ikea yesterday.  Not because red goes with anything around here, but more because grey and black seemed too boring for words.  Then I discovered that the screws provided were going to be too long, so I had to put my project on hold and go to a hardware store today.  There are walls and walls of nuts and bolts and screws in those places.  I’m sure I would have found the right thing eventually.  But a very nice man asked if he could help me, so I showed him the ‘too long’ screw and asked for something exactly the same only a little bit shorter.  Obviously he’s used to this kind of request.  He didn’t even roll his eyes as he whipped out his tape measure.  I needed twenty, and they came in packages of 18, so I bought two packages.  Because you never know. 

It really bugs me to have to measure things, so I just eye-balled the plate placement in each corner, marked the holes, used a drill, and then attatched all the plates and screwed in the legs.  And Voila!  A really strange looking square butcher block topped table with big red legs!  It’s not the right shape or even height, really, to use as a lap top table, but that’s what it is. It has to be something, or it runs the risk of getting fired out into the garbage at a later date.  If it were just a tad shorter it would make a great card table for midgets. 

Thankfully I don’t consider myself smart enough to build anything more complicated.  Which is one of the reasons I also went to Leon’s and wandered around their showroom for awhile trying to picture how various pieces of already assembled furniture would look in my living room.  It’s really hard to comparrison shop when the two sets you like are on opposite ends of the store.  So when another nice man asked if he could help me, I told him I wanted the one I was closest to at that particular moment.  He went off to find out if all the pieces I wanted were available.  And when he came back all delighted that they were, I didn’t have the heart to consider changing my mind.

So an earthy mushroom coloured sofa, love seat and chair are being delivered on Saturday.  Buying stuff is just WAY too easy.  One of these days I need to stop.  Although now if my coffee table looks ghastly…..that would be a good 37th anniversary present to myself.  And maybe some nice end tables for W.  Who is STILL not home from making deliveries all over hell’s half acre and beyond.

Nov. 7-11

Here are some pics of the delightful little people that invaded our home this last long November weekend.

Kenzie and Omayja – paints, markers, crayons, glitter glue and play dough – master pieces in progress.

Omayja and Kale 

Madison, doing her own thing.

Corey, “smiling” for his picture.

Looking good!

Watching some of Uncle K.’s home videos.

 

Five kids in the play room.

We had a good few days together!  I’m still recovering!!  haha.  I love them all dearly and can hardly believe how fast they’re growing up.

It’s a LAPTOP!

Thanks to my son, I now have a whole new exciting bunch of stuff to confuse the hell out of me!  I am the happy owner of a laptop HP Notebook, wireless router, network connection blah blah blah.  With a wireless mouse because mouse keypad things make me crazy.  Although the one on this computer is actually not too bad at all.  And because there were a lot of little people around all weekend it was hard to sit down for any length of time and experiment with things, although no shortage of offers to HELP me do that.  So K. did everything, and gawd help me if I screw it all up because he’s a bit too far away to be getting a frantic phone call from his mother every time something needs to be sorted out. 

Okay!  That’s all I wanted to say about that, except that (all on my own) this morning I imported some pictures from my camera card to this computer.  So perhaps there’s hope for me after all.

Family Group

I believe the year is 1956, because we kids look to be ages 10, 7, and 4, or thereabouts;  at any rate, very new to the farm in Arran township where we grew up from these ages on.  We’re all dressed up, which would make it Sunday, and a certainty that we’ve just arrived home from church.  There would have been no time to snap a picture before church – that was always a mad rush making sure everyone looked presentable – and there would have been no one else around to take this picture until company came home with us for lunch.  I remember how much I dreaded having to get dressed up, and how wonderful it was to shed the skirt and the itchy blouse and the dreaded blazer and especially the socks (I still hate socks!) in favour of something old and comfy.  Along with bare feet, if I could get away with it.  We are on the lawn, in front of the infamous lily pond which my dad filled up with rocks so that no child would accidently drown in it.  Mom is wearing a mustard yellow coat that had thin black horizontal stripes and huge shiny black buttons - it was fuzzy and soft and thoroughly luxurious from a 7 year old’s point of view.  Dad disliked the colour immensely.  Mom didn’t care – it was dressy and it was warm.  Funny, the little details that surface when you stop to think about them.

Obama, President Elect

Normally I don’t pay a lot of attention to American politics, the biggest reason being that I find their extreme national pride frequently borders on mindless arrogance and often crosses that line.  But it’s been impossible over the last long while not to have a clue or two about what’s been going on.  Doesn’t everyone, everywhere, recognize Barack Obama’s name?  How funny is it that until a few days ago I couldn’t have told you the name of the Republican presidential candidate off the top of my head?   

Of course, knowing next to nothing about something has never stopped me (and thousands of others) from making comments about it all anyway.  And the events of yesterday did have great historical signifigance, and no doubt will continue to do so.  Thus this little blog - which will get lost in the millions like it around the world. 

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama said.

“It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches, in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited for three hours, four hours – many for the first time in their lives – because they believed that this time must be different, and their voices could be that difference.

“At this defining moment, change has come to America.”

Obama did not shy away from the challenges facing his nation.  “The greatest of a lifetime,” he called them, “two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.”

It certainly didn’t hurt his chances that the George W. Bush government (and the man himself) were both so deeply unpopular with failed economic policies, a seemingly never-ending war in Iraq and an eroding of civil liberties.   So let’s get on with the business of fixing these things, shall we?  Obama is young and smart and he has a beautiful family.  What’s not to like?

The Great Photo Sort of 2008

All day today I’ve been sorting through pictures.  It doesn’t have to be such a slow process I suppose, but when you figure in all the distractions and the day dreaming and the mystery solving that goes along with it, one day won’t bring me even remotely close to getting it done. 

I know I’ve mentioned mom’s photo albums before, and how there never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to their contents.  Her plan was to make each one a variety, so that no matter which one a person ended up with, it would have a little bit about a lot of things spanning many, many years.  So on a typical two page spread I could see myself and a grandchild both at the age of six, along with a sepia colored family group of obscure ancestors from the 1800’s and perhaps a smiling neighbor or an unknown dog or somebody’s cute little kids or even the inside of a motel room from some trip that somebody took, sometime, somewhere.  That’s all fun and interesting I guess, unless you’re looking for something specific.  My own photo albums are all painstakingly labled and numbered and in at least some semblence of chronological order.  So while I was helping my sister sort through things last week I went through every one of mom’s albums and took out only the pictures I wanted and we scanned them and stuffed them in a box and I brought them home.  And now I don’t know what to do with them.

Mom spent a lot of time making up those albums and we’ve ended up messing them all up and taking them apart.  If I spend a lot of time making up albums for my kids, maybe they’ll end up doing the exact same thing.  Heaven forbid they should miss out on all the photo sorting fun that appears to run in our family. 

So my latest brilliant idea is to put all these pictures I’ve brought home in some kind of VAGUE chronological order in one photo album that I’ll call ”Grandma and Grandpa McArthur’s Pictures”.  And when the time comes, my kids can do exactly what I’ve done – go through them and take what they want.  And probably shake their heads at my lack of organizational skills. 

So, that was a ridiculously long preamble getting to my point, which is that now I have a whole bunch more blog material further boggling up my already boggled mind.  Which leads me to picture number one, so numbered because at this moment it’s on top of a pile.

   

It was taken in April of 2005.  My sister-in-law Joe, me, mom, dad and neice Alison at the Care Centre eating what appears to be Chinese take out.  I don’t remember this exact time, but I do remember how much mom and dad enjoyed a change from their dining room meals, and how much they loved to have company.  I’m sure it’s my sister taking the picture, and I’m sure she’s the one who made the dinner arrangements. 

It’s a peaceful feeling knowing our parents were well cared for there.  They knew many of the other residents, even if their stays were short, and almost all of the care givers, if only in relation to who’s ‘kids’ they were.  And almost every care giver I met there had lovely things to say about them. They were very lucky to share a room, considering that some couples end up apart, and sometimes even in different facilities.  And they were blessed to spend their last years together with so many family members and friends close by and always looking in on them. 

I don’t know about everyone else, but the last five years have made me wonder about my own circumstances, should I live such a long life and ever reach the point of needing constant care.  I hope to have a few brain cells left and be able to recall how accepting my parents were of every situation they faced and to be serene and gracious and loving to the end.  And to leave all my pictures in good hands.