Getting It Done in ’71

Set your time machines to November 20th, 1971 and let’s talk about going away outfits.  I’ve heard they’re supposed to be stylish and sophisticated and perfect, carefully chosen ensembles you wear for the last dance at your wedding reception before embarking on your romantic honeymoon and the beginning of your new life.

Does anyone even do those anymore?  I’m so out of touch with what goes on at weddings.  I was completely out of touch at my own.  It would have made me so happy to get married barefoot on the beach or to simply elope.  W was all for that too, but our  families were both big on tradition and we got swept up in the kerfluffle.  I’m pretty sure my mother and my mother-in-law did more sighing and eye rolling at my lack of interest than I noticed at the time.  They kept asking me questions even though they hardly ever liked my answers.

Things we didn’t get quite right –

1. There was no engagement ring.  We couldn’t afford one and picked out inexpensive gold wedding bands instead.  I would have lost a diamond.  I lost my wedding band three times.
2. There was no veil.  I made a hooded dress with braided silver trim.  It cost about twenty five dollars.  I wanted my sisters hooded dress to be deep purple, but they couldn’t find suitable material in that colour, so it was royal blue.  Close enough.
3. There was no hairdresser.  By the time this picture was taken my self inflicted bouncy curls had bounced their last and I looked more or less back to normal.
4. The best man (W’s brother) and the ushers (my brother and a friend) all had different coloured suits and shirts and ties and probably socks, for all I know, because we told them just to wear whatever they had.
5. The flowers were artificial.  It was November.  There was freezing rain. We had a church ceremony, a church basement supper, and a get together at my family farm house after that.  The dance was a week later a thousand miles away with the grooms side of the family.
6. We forgot to book a room somewhere, so spent our wedding night at my girlfriend and her husbands house after banging on their door and waking them up.  Good thing they both had a sense of humour.
7.  We had no honeymoon, unless you count a two day drive from         my home town to his.

Oh, let’s just stop at lucky number seven, shall see? There’s lots more but this is getting depressing, and besides, I want you to look at those going away outfits!  I must have pulled some random thing out of my closet because my face is saying “I’m married!  I don’t care!”  And W is wearing his university blazer (that’s confetti, not dandruff) but it’s hard to focus on his clothes because of those sideburns!  I can’t even.  I’m sure you can’t either.  Proof that love is blind is all I can say about that.

Weddings make me hungry.  Handbag under my arm, mouth full of cake, ready to blow this pop stand and set the world on fire.  Maybe starting with that brown and beige thing I’m wearing….

Sharing My World 30

 

The little faded drawing in the middle of this picture is at least ten years old, made by our oldest granddaughter, when she was maybe three or four.  The creation and the concept and the words are hers, and all this time later I’ve added a border hoping to preserve her little masterpiece from getting lost or destroyed.  Her initials are above her self-portrait, and GR is a short form for grandpa.  And I guess that day they were being silly.  Worth saving, worth sharing, right?

Share Your World – 2015 Week #22

Finish these four sentences. You can talk about yourself or be creative and write a piece of fiction. It’s up to you. Have some fun.

Never In My Life Have I….

needed so little sleep as I do now since settling into retirement and advanced years.  That sounds better than ‘old age’.  You know, slightly.   I read somewhere that old people need less sleep, probably in part because a lot of them don’t have anything much to do anymore and thus don’t get exhausted.  Or it’s simply part of healthy aging where reductions in the sleep duration and depth are fine, and less sleep is required to maintain daytime alertness.   I’m trying to remember if I ever had a lot of daytime alertness when I felt sleep deprived.  Anyway, 6 hours a night seems to be the norm now.  And no daytime naps.  It’s all very weird.

My neighbour wants me to help her…..

feel less embarrassed by my flower beds.  Really, I don’t even know much about my neighbors on either side of me.  Except that their names are Denise and Faye and they both have amazing things growing in their front yards.  I have dogwood and a little tree that needs constant trimming and rarely gets it, and some kind of thorny berry bush growing wild.  Hey, I make both of them look good simply by being lazy non-gardening me.  They should be happy about that.

When I was little I wanted…

to get out of going to church every Sunday.  My mother never let that happen, even though the place was incredibly boring and I hated getting dressed up.  She had some strange and very strict rules.  Church got a little more interesting when I was part of the junior choir and could play Snap…

(Each player has a pile of cards face down and together they turn the cards up one by one until they match.  Whoever says SNAP first wins the other’s turned over pile of cards.  The object of the game is to win all the cards.)

….with my church friend.  We used the left over hymn number cards that went on the  little board on the wall announcing the page numbers of the hymns that we would be singing during the service.  It’s good for a congregation to all be on the same page.  It took a lot of stealth to never get caught playing with these cards, along with sitting in the back row and as far away from the choir leader as possible.  And it made the sermon almost bearable.  Church is where I became a clock watcher, wishing time would speed up so I could go home and do ANYTHING else.   Although whispering and being sneaky was fun.

Will you come here to…

work on my flowerbeds?  Explain to me what I was supposed to get out of Sunday mornings besides mad Snap skills?  Or we could just have coffee and you could assure me that I do indeed appear to be alert and don’t have dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep.  We could play a rousing game of cards.  There might be cake.

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

Half the time I don’t know or care what day of the week it is.  I’m grateful for that.  It’s very freeing.  I’m also grateful for the time to be creative, now that there are 18 hours of being awake in my day.  So do I use all those hours productively?  Pffft.  No.

But I wrote this!  I preserved a memory!  I admitted my small bit of flower bed remorse.  The day isn’t a complete write-off.

 

Dress Up

What do you call a person who makes simple challenges either ridiculously complicated or completely uncomplicated?  Never mind, I don’t want to know.  I fall behind and I catch up.  Or not.  It’s what I do and I am accepting that today.  Tomorrow will take care of itself.  If anything changes I will let you know.

I used to dress up long ago when there were things to get dressed up for, like church and weddings and New Years Eve parties.  Now I dress mostly to be inconspicuous and not naked.  And comfortable and warm.  And hopefully not too embarrassing to my children.  I must admit I sometimes catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and wonder what I was thinking and whether or not a monkey might have more fashion sense than I do.  But, you know, what good does it do to dwell on monkey brains stuff like that?

Let’s dwell on this for a moment instead.

“I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”
―     Helena Bonham Carter

 

An early childhood trauma may be the cause of my aversion to getting all dressed up, and if that’s not really why I have such a reluctance to do it, at least it gives us something to blame it on.

When I was in grade five or six our school went on some kind of a bus ride/field trip to the big city (probably Toronto) which might have involved some kind of science fair.  Yes, the historical details elude me, but that’s not what’s important here.  What’s important is that I decided to dress up for this excursion in a flouncey pink dress with poofy sleeves and a real honest to goodness crinoline.  If you don’t know what a crinoline is, count yourself lucky.  I remember my mother suggesting I was a tad over dressed, but I would not change my mind.

This is a picture of an educational ‘ride’ similar to the one we all went on, although it’s a lot more fancy. What I remember is a round wood panelled room where we all stood in a circle against the walls.  The room began to spin and once it got going fast enough the floor dropped out from under us leaving us pinned to the wall by centrifugal force.  There was a lot of screaming.  It was very exciting.  However, I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole with an uncooperative dress when the spinning slowed down and we started to slip towards the rising floor.  I went down, the dress and the crinoline went up. There were boys there.  Staring at me while smugly wearing their sensible pants.  Stupid boys.  Stupid dress.  And yeah, my hair was pretty much exactly like that.  Growing up is such a distressing experience.

This scatterbrained post was written in response to

Cin’s Feb Challenge Days 17, 18 and 19:  dress up/create/photo walk.

Today it is a balmy minus 5 degrees Celsius here, but it’s still February with bare trees and snow everywhere so I’m not feeling any photo walk motivation.  I am however completely dressed, except for socks. I have created an incredibly awesome picture to teach you all about centrifugal force.

Huh. There you go – challenge met.