Midlife Musings

… What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any funny/odd memories of the library?

Aside from school libraries, I remember first the library here in my home town. When I was a teen, it was located in a building beside the old middle school. It was called the old middle school to distinguish it from the new middle school that opened the year I went into sixth grade. But I don’t remember going there then. I don’t remember going to the library until I was in my teens, because I rode my bicycle. And yet, I must have gone before that, because I remember being there, just not getting there. I remember the green carpet and the sun through the windows, and the smell of old books. It was just one room, this library.

Amazingly enough, almost three decades later, the library has relocated. Now we have two whole rooms. And the next county over charges 20 bucks a year for a card if you don’t live there, which I refuse to pay. Needless to say, I buy most of the books I read.

Wow. Just wow. I spent the weekend with my family. Yep, that side that I thought I didn’t mention that much but realized I did when I searched the blog. I guess that … lack … bothered me more than I was willing to admit. I guess admitting it would have hurt more than pretending I was okay with how things were. Or were not, in this case.

It was a transformational weekend. It was … a happiness to just be there with them. For the first ever, there was no tension. We were all just there together, with each other, enjoying that good feeling, and it was as if we had done it this way all my life, except that I could breathe, and I was not afraid.

One of my kids told me I was weird while we were there, and she was just joking around. I was headed out the door to go talk with my cousins who were in the yard, and I poked my head back in and said, “No, here I am just one of us.”

Will you trust me when I tell you that my words are inadequate to express my feelings? Ok, so here I am, with my Aunt and my cousin’s daughter and my Drama. And we are family. Finally.

is do the best we can do with the information we have at the time. I’m saying this to remind myself of the truth of it.

So often in life, we find out stuff later that would have changed what we did at the time. It’s still important to keep on moving forward when that happens. We cannot change the past, period. There is not one thing we can do now make the tiniest bit of difference then. It is what it is. If we fall into the trap of second guessing ourselves, and not letting ourselves move on, then we end up missing the present as well. Then we are twice-robbed, and that doesn’t do anyone any good.

If you know you did the best you could with the knowledge you had, let it go and move on. Love now. If it matters eternally, it’s already settled.

That would be my dogwood. I’ve been holding out hope, but now it is the middle of May, all the other tress are green, and yet the dogwood is not only not green, but it is also dry and brittle. Remember I told you I transplanted 2 trees last year, at the wrong time of year? Well, they both actually died, but the root ball lived on the one, so I have saplings coming up from it at least. Too bad I don’t know what it is yest, though it does resemble a peach. There are no other peach trees in the neighborhood, not even in my side yard where we dug that one up, though, so who knows.

You know what else? After all the drought, this year we have had heavy rains, and irises “hate to have their feet wet”, and so only a couple of them bloomed. Yep, two years of low bloom from the drought, followed by a year of no blooming because of too much rain. I just can’t win in the yard. Unlike my Grandmother, who could make anything at all grow. She always had the most beautiful flowers in her yard, right up until she moved out of her house. In fact, Mama has been working in the yard there this week, getting the place ready to rent. (They killed at least two SNAKES! Ugh! But remind me to tell you about AuntF and the snake story one day, it’s a good one.)

Anyway, back to the green, and not so green things in my yard. I saw an ad for <silk plants and it made me stop and think. Most people think of silk plants as an indoor item, but you can use them outside. And you know what? They don’t die if you move them at the wrong time of year, and they bloom right on time, rain or no rain. Bloom right on time. Hahah, I slay me. They come already blooming, and they stay that way, of course. Unlike mine, which apparently come not blooming and stay that way.

Ok, you want to hear the snake story? Fine. I have an Aunt with MS. AuntF is wheelchairbound, and occasionally bedridden, but she does get out and go places, and one of those places is the family reunion, which is where the story I am about to relate began. Now, she also smokes, but she has to wait for someone to light the cigarette for her, and sit with her while she smokes it, in case she drops it. This means that she smoked pretty much nonstop at the family reunion, and AuntF smokes in a style best exemplified by Hollywood, with long fingered graceful movements and a casual nonchalance. SO. We were sitting around last year, and talking, and she starts talking about the time there was a snake at her house, in the drainpipe and she “called Uncle R”. Her “Uncle R” was my Grand-dad, the same one I have spoken of several times on this blog. He happened to be very scared of snakes, which Mama and I knew, but maybe AuntF did not. So she told us that “Uncle R shot the sit out of that drainpipe”. Needless to say, I had vision of Grandad, eyes squeezed shit tight, blasting the side of the house, because yes, indeed, he did the business with a shotgun.

Fast forward 40-50 years, and we’ll wrap up with an event this week. I told you Mama had been working in the flowers at Grandmother’s, and there had been a couple of snakes killed. When she came across the last one (and also, my mother is TERRIFIED of snakes. it’s genetic. We can’t help it.), H was there. H is the grandson of AuntF, and he shot the snake. With a shotgun. And so when Mama told me, as I was laying on the floor doing my belly buster exercises, I just looked at her and said, ‘Well, did he shoot the shit out of that flowerbed border?” and we laughed and laughed and laughed. The rest of my family looked at us like we were insane. It was still funny, and I can’t wait to see AuntF again.

It occurs to me that yesterday’s post might have been a bit confusing for those of you who do not know me personally, and maybe even for some that do. I mentioned Daddy’s grave and just last week I told you Daddy bought me some shoes. Well, neither one of us has lost our minds. Daddy and Daddy are too different men. They are so different, even, that I have been told I say the word differently depending on which I am talking about, and that those who know I have two dads can tell which one I am talking about by the way I say the name. I suppose that’s true, because they feel, smell and taste different inside my head.

My first Daddy is indeed dead, and it was his dad’s funeral we attended Sunday. He died when I was thirteen, but I’d not seen him since I was 6 or 7. It wasn’t what either of us wanted, but it’s the way things happened, and there you have it. You might as well put your past behind you, because you certainly can’t change it. I remember very little about him. A jar of marbles on a dresser, being carried through the snow. I was ….not happy as a child, and my solution to that was to blank my memory. I remember very few events, even up through my teens, and my first miserable marriage. Apparently, I found a trick that worked and I stuck with it. From the small tidbits I do remember, I know he loved me, and that is enough. I can remember things if I am reminded and/or shown pictures, and that is also enough. See, no one takes pictures of bad things, so then all my memories can stay good. That’s my Daddy.

My second Daddy is my mother’s second husband. They married when I was nine, and I have called him Daddy for 31 years. And he truly is my Daddy now. It took a very long time for us to get to that point. A lot of time, and a lot of pure-tee hurt, there is no denying that. He’s a huge man, and his voice is very deep, and I was a very small child, and so I stayed scared of him until I moved away from home. And then when I came home, I guess we both decided that it could and should be different, and so we made it that way. He may have never carried me through the snow so my shoes would not get wet, but I know he loves me just the same. He’s the one who drove me to the university hospital when Drama was life flighted out of our community hospital on a breathing tube. He’s the one who drove me to the eye doctor last year when I thought I was going blind. That’s my Daddy, too.

So there you have it, as well as I can explain it, anyway.

You know there are a lot of things that make me feel guilty. One of them is that I am not able to help my mom with Grandmother’s stuff as much as I feel I should. I’m not blowing her off, but I am just heavily scheduled. (BTW, Mama, next Saturday, we are on. I think.) I’ve enjoyed the couple of times I have been able to go with her, but it’s not easy work. It’s not hard work, either, but it is heart work. I touched on that just a bit when I told you about the note I found.

See, in between the old issues of Birds and Blooms and the shower chairs, (yes, two, Granddad’s old one was still there, I think) we find things like this:

and this:

The picture is of my grandparents, probably taken not long after they married. There is one of Grandmother alone from that same day, and I have a picture of it as well. The bowl in the second picture belonged to my great grandmother. In fact, I have a lot of pictures of people and things that I need to tell about, but the telling is also heart work. And I am just not ready to work quite that heart right now.

Saturday was the Pinewood Derby for my boy scouts. I worked in the kitchen selling hot dogs to raise funds for camp scholarships, and so my angle on things was a little different from most of the spectators. This scene that I have captured here is a very poignant one, and I want to introduce you to the hero pictured here.

Lief was my oldest son’s den leader last year. He’s a big burly guy, with several earrings and more than one tattoo. He’s bold, and he’s loud, and the kids just LOVE him. Mr. Lief, Mr. Lief, Mr. Lief. And not just from Stuntman, either, but from most of my kids, LOL! Lief has no kids, and he was rooked into leading the den by a friend of his. His day job is teaching, which seems pretty basic, until I tell you that he teaches at the juvenile detention center. I just found out a few weeks ago that Lief is not as young as I thought. I guess I figured that he taught there because that’s the type of job he could find, being so young, and with the earrings and tats an all. In fact, the man is 35 years old. But really, none of that is what makes him a hero. That stuff is just an ordinary guy who happens to care a lot about kids.

In this picture, he’s helping with the Pinewood Derby. He had the job of gathering the cars after each run and taking them back up to the front of the room. On his way back, he’d crouch real low and “five” the boys as he went. The kids absolutely ate it up! You see I’ve caught him here with the American flag while he was waiting for a set of cars to come down the track. In one month, Lief is going back to Iraq. Yes, I said back. What makes him a hero is that a month from his tour, he’s still making these kids’ day, still involved with them, still so “here” for them.

I mentioned before that there were a few things I wanted from my Grandmother’s house to remind me of her and continue the connection we had. I went with Mama today to do some sorting and cleaning and to get some of those things. Oh, we found some grand treasures: things that belonged to my great-grand-dad (did you know that as late as the 50’s driver’s licenses were issued without a picture?), the original receipt for the farm (now I know exactly what “bought the farm means”, and I’ll tell you about it another time), the picture of Uncle Bill, a compact that Granddad sent to Grandmother, even though she didn’t wear makeup, rare pictures of her smiling, and I learned that Granddad frequently transposed Grandmother’s initials.

We had to go through a lot of stuff, and we have scads more to go. No stack of papers can be thrown away unsearched, because we’ve found pictures and such tucked in among stuff that is “worthless’ to us. Today, for instance, I opened a small box that my Uncle brought down from the attic last week. It was on a box of “bank china” that my Grandparents got for me eons ago. On the outside I read “handle with care”, and then I untied the well-tied string and opened the box. There was a note that just said “Bowls Tommy gave to me. Love, Grandmother” on the back of a calendar page. Yes, my Grandmother was ever a frugal woman, and long before budgeting software became the norm. There was no indication on the paper who the bowls were meant to go to, and signing the note “Grandmother” only limited the possible pool of candidates by 3, since every other member of an incredibly large family refers to her by that name. So, employing my usual wit and sarcasm, I said “Hmm, thanks Grandmother.” A lady was there talking to Mama, and she asked if there was a name on the box, and I said no, and closed the box. As I was closing it, I noticed the name that had been hidden under the string, “Denise”. That’s me. And I opened the box again to see what it was exactly that she had wanted to give me, and I saw that note again, and it was as though I was seeing it for the first time, this note my Grandmother wrote to ME so long ago, knowing I would probably not see it until she died and she signed it “Love, Grandmother”, and I kinda sobbed right there, and the tears are pouring down my face right now, even as I type. Because she is dead now about 6 weeks, and yet “Love, Grandmother” rings across eternity to me.