Owl Moon

 

     So the owls brought back to mind Owl Moon – let's see if I can remember all the parts of this story correctly. When Amanda was in kindergarten, I was not working, and so I was able to volunteer in Amanda's class on a weekly basis – reading stories mostly.

     On Wednesdays, there were stations in the room, kids moved from work area to work area and did the tasks involved in each. I can't remember what station I was monitoring, but the room contained two entire kindergarten classes, and they were combined for this portion of the day.

     After that, it was time for me to read.

     I sat down in a low chair in front of the children and showed them book I had for them that day – Owl Moon. As I opened the book and began the story, I suddenly remembered that I was going to have to hoot during the course of the reading. A slight panic came over me and I looked at my audience. There were two classes of kindergarten kids sitting with their eyes upon me – there were the two teachers, their two para-pro assistants, a few more mothers who were helping out that morning, and two men, one at the bottom of a ladder and one at the top of the ladder replacing a fluorescent light – I had not even noticed the men until that moment. I was going to have to hoot in front of all these folks! Well it was too late to not read the book, I would have to just move forward. Whatever the hoot sounded like – that would just have to do.

    The story went well – Owl Moon is so beautiful. When I finished, the kids lined up to go outside, and then they left. I packed up my bag and headed for the door to the hallway. One of the men from the ladder said, “Excuse me Ma'am? That was a fine reading of Owl Moon just now – my boy and I read it all the time, it is our favorite book!”

    “Oh thank you, did I hoot okay?”

    “Ma'am, you hoot with the best of them!”

     Well, of course, that made my day, my week.

     How much our family was enriched because owls made their way into it and helped us all to hoot with the best of them!

42 20150211 Owl Moon

The Owl Trivets

     Last summer my daughter, Sarah, and her husband and two children moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina so Sarah could return to school for her advanced degree in Library Sciences. Her sister Amanda and Mike and I and quite a few other folks helped in the move. So many memories came to mind during that moving weekend – like fuses popping in my brain.

     Find the owls! I found myself saying this –  while opening boxes in the new kitchen.

     Back in 1986, just after Sarah's second birthday, we moved from Western New York to a rented house in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Within two months after that we moved to a house we had purchased in the next town over called Dewey.

     Looking back on it now, I can't imagine having gone through all of that – I had never lived anywhere else but the Buffalo metro area with its cold winters and short summers – and suddenly I was in 100 degree weather halfway across the country, pregnant with Amanda, and not only had we unpacked to live in one house but we packed up and moved to another where we had to settle in once again – and oh yeah, there was a precocious two-year-old to make things even more exciting!

     So one morning soon after the move to Deer Creek, I decided that I was going to empty boxes until all of the kitchen stuff was unpacked so we could start having homemade meals again. Sarah was fun company – she could already talk quite a bit, and she was a good helper. But not too long into the unpacking, Sarah started asking me to get to the box with the owls.

     I was not sure I heard her correctly, if she meant owls, I did not know what owls she was talking about.

     As the day wore on, Sarah got more insistent about finding the owls. I tried to think of all of Sarah's toys, but could not think of any owls that she had. The only owls that my poor brain could come up with were iron trivets that were owls – if I kept going through the kitchen boxes, I would find them soon, and perhaps they would appease Sarah until whatever owls she was talking about appeared.

     Well, you know, there were no other owls in the house. The trivets seemed to satisfy Sarah. For months afterward I tried to discern what owls Sarah had really been talking about. There were no owl toys or knick-knacks. There was a record album of Bambi – and one of the characters is Owl; and there was Owl from the Winnie the Pooh stories – could they have been what Sarah was talking about?

     Sarah's request made for such a cute story, that I told all the relatives, and that began the great owl collection. Over the years Sarah received stuffed toy owls, ceramic owls, souvenir owls from exotic lands – Poppee, Sarah's paternal grandfather, carved owls out of wood for her. There were pictures of owls, sketches, more books. Every July, the month of Sarah's birthday, the entire owl collection would be on display on the living room hutch. It was beautiful and impressive.

Sarah with one of her many owls

     Eventually, after Sarah departed for college and never really returned home again to live, all of the owls were wrapped and put into a box. And years later Sarah took the box to her home in Norcross – and last year she decided that the owls would not be going to Chapel Hill with her. Sarah saved the ones from Poppee and a couple of others that were extra special, and of course, the books – the vinyl copy of Bambi was long gone, alas – and the rest of the collection went to good homes during a yard sale.

     After arriving in Chapel Hill last August, we moved all the boxes labeled kitchen into the kitchen and started unpacking. I said Find the owls more than once – hopefully I was not too obnoxious about it.

    When we found the trivets – all was well.

    And all will be well.

41 20150210 Find the Owls

Kindergarten Surgery

     Of all the teachers I have had, there should be at least one memory to relate about each one. I can try. I would have to start with kindergarten because I did not go to day care, or pre-school, or nursery school. And gosh, aside from the bus number 6 story, I really don't remember much of anything about kindergarten.

      My teacher was Mrs. Endress. I thought at the time that she was old – so she was probably in her forties. I don't recall her being mean or nice, or if she raised her voice, or if she even talked at all, but I guess she did talk because I would have remembered her not speaking as something odd. She was just there.

      And the other kids were there. I made friends – they were at my eye level. In the classroom there were low desks and chairs. I do have a memory of looking up from between the chair legs. I was down on the floor looking for the paper Easter baskets we had made for ourselves – Mrs. Endress had hidden them in the room (mostly between chair legs) for us to hunt and find our own – a holiday festivity that is most likely banned from the public schools today.

      One day the teacher called me to her desk. I was mortified at being singled out – had I done something wrong? What could she possibly want?Mrs. Endress had me sit in the chair next to her desk. And I was told to stay there until the school nurse came! I was completely weirded out! I did not think anything was wrong with me physically, but Mrs. Endress had noticed a lump on the side of my neck!

      The school nurse came to the class, looked me over and took me down the hall to her own room. Mom was called, and somehow she came and got me – we did not have a second car, so perhaps she asked a neighbor to give her a ride to school and then home again with me - I remember that I went home, but I do not recall how. Eventually I ended up in the hospital - an abscessed tonsil had caused the lump, and then I had surgery. So I guess that was a little bit of excitement for kindergarten!

40 20150209 Kindergarten Surgery

White Overalls

In honor of this day, whose specialness will become apparent upon its reading, I bring you something written six years ago on this day:

White Overalls?

     Today began unusually enough; Mike had not been feeling well - chest congestion and a nasty cough. But instead of saying, let's sit around and watch movies all day, Mike suggested that we take a drive to the Georgia Mountains! By the time we were heading north on 985, the plan was to go as far as Suches to the National Forest near the trout hatchery and then hike about one-half mile to the suspension bridge.

     We have been to Suches for the past four years celebrating the Fourth of July at a cabin owned by friends Steve and Lorraine. It is a beautiful spot on the Taccoa River, and it is where we have done some kayaking. The area of the suspension bridge is an infamous milestone on our kayaking expeditions. The river there has a slight drop, and there are rapid rapids which make it the riskiest spot along the route. And even though this is not Deliverance-kayaking, the river at the suspension bridge, before today, conjured up images of flipped kayaks, lost eyeglasses, and testiness in relationships. Sometimes only some of our group would go kayaking on a given day, and the rest would drive through the park and hike to the suspension bridge to watch and goof on our friends in the kayaks below and take pictures of the subsequent ecstasies of success and agonies of defeat.

    But to go to the suspension bridge today would mean a relaxing drive up to the mountains, a short walk, not too taxing on our poor physical conditions, and the view when we got there. Lovely!

    There were at least two other small groups of people at the bridge when we arrived, and we could hear a few more voices in the woods. Who would have thought this to be such a popular place in the middle of a Georgia winter? We took pictures on the riverbank and a few shots of the steel cords that made the suspension bridge suspend.

    Finally I saw the bridge was empty, and I got on and made it sway side to side as if we actually took lots of risks in life!

    Mike joined me, and as we looked down, the dead branches and fallen tree trunks made one side of the river seem still and stagnant while the other side flowed briskly with the rapids. Much symbolism to be gleaned from that, I suppose.

    We went all the way across the bridge until we were over the site of infamy where I had flipped-over two summers ago and lost my glasses, the place close to where Mike lost his eyeglasses last July, the place where we've screamed and oared and sometimes even succeeded without mishap with no more than just a few scrapes and bruises!

   "Don't freak out," Mike said, taking one of those giant risks. " I brought you up here to ask if you would marry me?"

Official Pic in September 2009

    And that historical and precarious perch is now the site of our engagement!

    Mike presented me with a most beautiful diamond ring. It had belonged to his mother.           And now we are committed to swinging and swaying the rest of our lives together!

    Mike said that over the Christmas holidays, he had asked Sarah and Amanda for permission to marry their mom, so they already knew the proposal was coming! And Mike had also mentioned it to his sister, Ann, who asked him what color overalls I would be wearing to the wedding?

    At first Mike wanted to propose on Election Night, you know, the theme for the election was change, and the whole evening was so exciting. How cool that would have been? but alas, he could not find the ring! 

    Then he wanted to take me to the Pigeon Forge Storytelling Festival in January like we did three years ago and stay at the Cuddles Cabin again and maybe soak in the hot tub outside with the snowflakes falling and oh my gosh that would have been so romantic; but the Pigeon Forge festival is in June this year, go figure, and the Cuddles Cabin prices have soared sky high, and he still couldn't find the ring.

    Yesterday the ring was found, and Mike decided North Georgia was the place to go with the proposal!

    The perfect place.

    On our way back home, we stopped in Dahlonega where Mike and I had our first date four years and three months ago; that night it was the Smith House for dinner and the Holly Theater for a show.

    Today we went to the Crescent Moon for a beer. Writing on the bathroom walls is encouraged at the Crescent Moon so Mike wrote: On 2/8/2009 De and Mike got engaged on the swinging bridge MDM.

    Yes we did, and now yes we are!

39 30150208 White Overalls

Locked Out

     Whenever I step onto the deck at my house and/or whenever I have a piece of cherry pie, I am reminded of Mama Cat. Mama Cat adopted us when we were living in the rented house on Realm Lane, in Georgia here in 1991. She was Siamese in looks but not in meow, and as you might guess, she was pregnant. Not too long after we took her in, she had three kittens which we later gave away and then had Mama fixed. She was used to going outside, and I think she had a few of the neighbors feeding her and sheltering her from the rain and cold also.

     When we moved to our new house on Glynmoore Drive a year later, Mama was reluctant to go outside at first, and just when we got used to the idea of her being an indoor cat, Mama decided to go out again and she explored her new surroundings and endeared herself to the new neighbors.

     Well, it was probably the summer of 97 or 98, I have it written in one of my letters to the girls – so the exact date is somewhere. From the summer of 95 through 2002, Sarah and Amanda spent one month each year on Long Island with their paternal grandparents and other relatives including three cousins – those summers were great times for all involved and have left the girls with cherished memories and a few good stories (and some plays!) that they still tell. 

     When the girls were gone, I was quite alone. Mostly I worked a lot of overtime at the lab, and sometimes I got up enough energy to do some extra cleaning around the house before the girls' return.

     And one late Saturday afternoon, I put a piece of cherry pie on a plate, and with a fork, and either a book or a magazine, I walked out onto the deck for some relaxation. The deck is off of the sunroom, just past the kitchen, and it is an entire story above the backyard with no stairs from the deck down to the yard. Mama Cat was in the house, and when she realized I was on the deck, she went to the storm door and started meowing to come out and join me. I was enjoying my reading and made the choice to not leap out of my chair to open the door for the cat.

     And that prompted Mama to jump up toward the door handle! I don't know if she had figured out that the handle was the way to get the door open, or if she was just trying to get my attention by bouncing off of the door. Mama kept jumping at the door handle, and then it happened – she managed to hit the latch that locked the door! I was locked out of my house on a deck one story off the ground!

    I got up from the chair and tried the door.

    Yeah, it was locked

    Mama Cat was excited when she saw me walk her way! – but she was soon disappointed because I could not open the door for her.

   There was no point in trying to get off of the deck and safely into the yard because the other doors to the house were locked, the garage door was closed, there were no windows open on the first floor – so there would still be no way for me to get in the house even if I attempted the hazardous descent from the deck. If I called out to passersby, they might have been able to help me off the deck, but then that would be it. This was before cell phones – so I had no phone on the deck with me, like I usually have nowadays if only to play words with friends while relaxing.

     But the deck has the house along two of its sides – one wall is the sun-room and has the door to the deck which was the door Mama Cat locked. The other wall is actually the wall to the master bathroom – and the window from the bathroom overlooking the deck was open! There was a screen there, but I decided I would get the screen off somehow, hoist myself up and get into the house through the bathroom.

    Having decided what to do but not yet how to do it, I sat back on the deck chair and ate my piece of cherry pie.

    Not too much later, I started picking at the screen. I don't think I poked a hole in it; I might have just jiggled it a lot until the inside latches came loose one at a time. When Mama Cat heard the noise, she went to the bathroom window and got on the sill to watch and advise in her own special way. I could not believe the gall she had to think that I was fussing about the window so that she could get out!

    As I gave a running commentary to Mama Cat for having locked me out of the house, she watched anxiously for the moment the screen would give way and release her from being locked in the house!

     Finally the screen came off, and then the logistics of how to climb into the window and not fall head-first into the bathroom had to be worked out – I was squeezing my way in while Mama was trying to get by me. But I got in, fixed the screen and taped the latch on the storm door to the deck in the unlock position such that catpaws could not move it ever again.

     We did not go looking for adventure when the girls were gone, but sometimes adventure found Mama Cat and me!

38 20150207 Locked Out

First Confession Part 2

     When I left off in part 1 of my First Confession story, I was struggling over my list of seven years' worth of sins that I had committed – wondering if I needed to report an exact number for each sin, and finally hoping that God would be okay with a sincere estimate. I decided to say I had disobeyed my parents 7 times – an average of once per each year of my life, and I bore false witness perhaps 7 times – again an average of once per year, and I said the name of the Lord in vain 1 time based on the story my dad had told about me cussing when trying to light a match at the beach when I was two - no need to second guess that one as I could not recall ever having said the Lord's name in vain.

     The day for our first confession arrived. We met in our classroom, and the nun told us to get in a line, and she marched us down to the church. The confessionals were in the back of the church – all the pews faced the front. There was no one else in attendance. We sat in the pews in the back, but we were facing away from the confessionals, and there was a wall or a half of a wall between us and the little closet-like rooms for confessing.

     The nun made a signal, and the first student stood up in the furthest back pew. And I could hear footsteps on the tile as the seven-year-old walked to the confessional. A door opened and then closed. Then silence. After just a minute or less, the door opened and closed again. There were three footsteps and then....nothing! Where had the classmate gone? Not back to the pews. Not out the main door of the church – there would have been more steps to get all the way to the door! Why were there just three footsteps and then nothing?!!!

     The nun signaled for the next person to stand up. I heard footsteps to the confessional, the door opened and closed; after a minute or less, the door opened and closed again, and three footsteps and nothing! Again!

     I was terrified enough as it was – and now all I could imagine was that there was a portal to hell three footsteps away from the confessional – and each child was being pushed in for being so evil! What else could it have been?

     One by one each classmate got up and went to confession. I was in the last pew of children. The longer I sat there, the more I shook with fear. When there were only about six of us left to make our first confession, the nun suddenly appeared in front of us – her hands were on her hips. And she was mad!

     The nun said, “Father has just informed me that he does not want to hear another child say that he or she has committed murder!”

     My mouth dropped open! Then the nun signaled for the next kid to approach the confessional.

     Oh my gosh! My classmates were making up sins! They were lying in confession! How could I have been taking this whole thing so seriously while the other kids were fabricating confessions? Well, now I know it is because they were just trying to please the big people – somehow the adults wanted us to say something – so the other kids decided to confess to murder. And again, as in my specific gripes in Part 1 of my First Confession story, I blame the big people for this.

     The revelation of classmates making up their sins did not ease my own terror, of course. I shook as my own footsteps approached the confessional. I looked for the portal to hell, but it was well hidden. My voice cracked as I spoke my sins. The priest was neither fire and brimstone nor sympathetic – he sounded a tad bored, perhaps doubtful of my honesty.              Rather than feeling purified, I felt petty and small.

     When I left the confessional, the nun pointed, and I walked in the direction of her finger – three footsteps, which could be heard on the hard floor, and then there was a carpet all the way to the main door of the church.

    And my ride was waiting outside.

37 20150206 First Confession Part 2

365 Memories

     Most of the storytelling venues I attend are for personal storytelling. And sometimes people, especially young people, will tell me they only have so many stories inside of them! They believe that their lives are not interesting enough to come up with two or more tales a month or even two or three a year! – how does one come up with more than a few stories other than to have lived a long time?

    And I think back to the year I was going to send Sarah and John a memory a day while they were in England – and even though I only sent 6 months' worth, I had notes enough to fill a whole year. And you know, they can turn into stories – from family classics like the one about my grandmother, the illegal immigrant, to anecdotes like the time Amanda and Sarah, at grade-school age, were playing cards and Amanda said to Sarah, “You have a great joker face!”

Amanda and Sarah - Joker Faces 

    So I decided to start, with hopes of finishing, this blog of one memory a day for a whole year. My goals are many – first - the challenge, the feeling of accomplishment, the wealth of material for stories for years to come – so success, even if no one else ever reads it!

Story Jam in Dahlonega August 2013

    Secondly, it just might motivate some of the folks who do happen to read an entry or two to write down their own memories, just a list of one or two words – teachers, classmates, trips to the emergency room, Disney movies, unforgettable characters, sins, forgiveness – and this might inspire more stories.

     Thirdly – if others can put a list of memories together, (even in his/her own subsequent blog!) - then perhaps some folks might realize that at least 12 stories could be developed from the memories, and that could be a reflection of a whole life – 12 stories, or 10, or 8 that is not too much. And they could make for a truly decent autobiography to pass down to family.

    And wouldn't that be awesome?

36 20150205 365 memories