i remember 100 percent

memory. distinct. sexual harassment.

yes, i remember certain things distinctly.

and not just about being harrassed, which is just a condition of being female.

i remember my beloved dog coming out, finally after weeks of hesitation, from a tunnel during an obedience training class and looking up at me with trust.

Best dog ever. (Katy Buchanan)

i remember sharing a brief moment with a stranger asking for directions on penn avenue in pittsburgh and laughing when we both realized her destination was about 10 feet away and in plain sight.

i remember being angry during a winter drive in massachusetts with my sister suzanne and her two kids in a scary snowstorm.

i remember a man walking past me on a Cleveland street in the early 1980s and saying at me "nice bouncing boobs." i remember what I was wearing (knee length, pink knit dress, quarter length sleeves), but not what he looked like, just his words.

i remember a mainstream television network science reporter, also in the early 1980s, at a press conference at the University of Pittsburgh, telling me he would like to "take a nap" with me.

i remember a man named Peter who was in my Ohio State karate class helping me 'caress' his private parts in a corner of the natatorium. he told me he was teaching me certain blocks (me, very young, inexperienced and without knowledge to convey my ... discomfort?) .

i remember parts of lots of things. being in NYC as a young woman in the late 1970s with a college friend who wanted to sample a dish at a restaurant in Chinatown ... really rude, she just helped herself to my plate.

i remember being rude myself, when a roommate was smoking in our dorm and i told her to "put it out, it offends me." (this was also in the late 1970s when people still smoked everywhere, freely.)

i remember the taste of ripe tomatoes and crusty french bread at summer camp in the French Alps in the early 1960s.

i remember many years ago, also early 1960s, when our young family was traveling, sitting at a motel pool somewhere in North or South Carolina ... or maybe Virginia, and being hit in one eye with a hot pepper.  painful and blinding. someone did that to me. i remember that distinctly.


i don't remember all the specific details of any of these life events, i just remember those moments. and isn't it interesting that these memories were formed when i was very young.

  
my point is, that I think certain things sear themselves in our brains. maybe we don't capture everything about events, but the important, memory-making details, never go away.  maybe the brain just captures what's most important (how does brain know? i have no idea. brain has it's own secrets). i'd be willing to bet combat veterans have a lot to say on this subject.

so, yes. i believe dr. ford.

Spring quarter snapshots

May has been exceptionally beautiful this year. Azaleas, tulips, iris, daffodils all have been brilliant. And such cool weather. The season has been more fall than spring with grey skies, chilly days and rain, or at least the promise of it and garish white,slanting sunlight

I'm bereft without my camera. This evening in the park, I saw an elegant, plate-like fungus growing in a rotted-out hole in a tree. It had broadly ruffled edges and a creamy white concave surface speckled with brown. I wanted to photograph it.

Why? I have digital volumes of photographs of beautiful flowers and scenes that sit, unopened, unexamined, uncaptioned mostly forgotten, on my computer, on Shutterfly, on Picasa.

I am a digital hoarder. Perhaps the best camera is my mind. There, I can sum up any image at will, caption and context included.  Truthfulness is a whole other matter, given the unreliability of memory. But, it's all I've got.

The Ohio State alumni magazine came the other day, and it included a package on memories of High Street. Horrible, ugly layout. But so fun to read the descriptions of places that once were so alive to me. Pearl Alley. Oar House. The Castle. Quisno's (the original, and I worked there). The student union, in its beautiful mid-century terrazo floor and bronze stair rail glory, before being uglified. I remember a gyro place  and a record store on North High, plus a really tiny hole-in-the-wall jewelry store near where Lane Pharmacy was. (I still have a necklace I bought there.) The Blue Danube. Larry's. Thirsty I. Can't believe some of those places are still around. 

My best memory is of my best friend, Heidi, and I, sitting on a curb one spring quarter not too long before graduation, watching High Street traffic go by, elbows on our knees and just talking talking talking. Somewhere by where the movie theater was.

We had our whole lives ahead of us. It was so lovely to be young.

Nights, quiet and otherwise

On Fridays, my husband and I have a standing date at a local bar, The Saloon. It's something to look forward to, and the bartender, a funny, very nice woman, has become a friend. 

Another delightful woman, whom we became acquainted with through dog walks in the park, comes over and take the girls for their evening stroll on Fridays, saving me from rushing home. Tonight, because of a mixup, she didn't show. Happy, frantic greyhounds greeted us when we got home and I took them for a much-needed short stroll.

One of the things I love about winter nights is the opportunity for stillness.  Tonight, the darkness was so crisp and quiet. A dog barked some way off, and up the street, because it was warm-ish,  kids were outside playing. A little bit of traffic noise on the other side of the park, but otherwise windless silence, cold and clear. We made our way around our little half-block walk and I glanced up at one point to see Orion the Hunter in the southwestern sky, the three stars  of his belt lined up in a shiny diagonal.

It is so nice to be able to be outside in the dark and feel safe. Just as nice is to look up in the night blackness and see an old friend, constant in structure, finding his new place in the evening sky.

As a contrast...

Noisy bar, hoops tournament games on TV ( I LOVE March Madness), heads bent towards each other, ears cupped, sentence fragments heard, then .... "what? I missed the first part of that."

It's been a good early hoops tourney season for Pittsburgh. Pitt, Robert Morris and Duquesne all are deep, if not winners of, their conference tournaments. That is awesome for the Dukes, who have been awful for so long. When Carl & I moved to Pittsburgh in the early 80s, he didn't have a full-time job so he did a lot of stringing for the wire services. Mostly Duquesne and the Penguins. Both were awful at the time. And, the game, in the broader sense, was a lot different then. Not so much money was involved. I went to some of the games with him and sat right behind the press table. Freezing! At least the basketball games were. Because the teams were playing on top of ICE! Eek.

It was fun, though. We were young and poor and what the hell, games for free!

Different now. Older. Comfy (sort of). More of a mind to watch on TV than attend. But with March Madness, who cares? Park in front of a screen and you are guaranteed four or five hours (not that I dot it) of fabulous college  basketball. And, best comparison between the 80s and now? Its men and women. They are all awesome. All this from someone who went to one (that I can remember) football game at Ohio State as a student. Funny how we all grow up.

Friday at the Saloon, the games were on, people were happy and talking. I decided to ask two women across the bar if I could take their picture. Both lovely ladies, they agreed and we chatted for a few minutes. Allyson gave me her card and an impromptu speech on doing something that you love for a living. She's right! Not all of us are blessed with a passion and a gift, but still, better to be trying for something you love (and I think that is the artistically challenged me) than to live in a drudgery that feeds only your body, not your soul.

Allyson and Barb were so gracious, they let me take their picture and it is included in this post. Allyson is on the left.

My birthday, and remembering college

My birthday is coming up. Seems like only yesterday that I was celebrating my 50th birthday by watching the implosion of Three Rivers Stadium in Feb. 2001 from high above the North Side of Pittsburgh, at a friend's house in Fineview. It was such a fun party and breathtaking to watch the old stadium stand motionless for seconds after the charges were set, then collapse into a heap of concrete and rebar moments later. Considering that taxpayers spent a lot of money for its replacement, and that Three Rivers itself wasn't even paid off by the time it was taken down, perhaps it wasn't such a great day for celebration. But it was also my birthday. And any day you get a chance to drink champagne on a Sunday morning in February is a good day.
I've been feeling that I have not had much to say lately, but look, here I already have a whole paragraph and the start of another. College seems like a hundred years ago but one of the things I remember is that it was a time when calling long distance was a big deal (on my rotary dial phone) and that writing letters posted to the U.S. Postal Service was a weekly .. I don't think duty is exactly the right word but that's the one I'm going to use. I wrote weekly to my parents, my sister Elizabeth, friends I had met who had moved on to different schools, my Dad's mother. Quite frequently I looked at the sheet of paper thinking I had nothing to say and before I knew it, pages would be filled.
Looking back, it seems hard to believe that, as a young woman in college, I would have nothing to write about. It was one of the most interesting and exciting and best times of my life. Perhaps the best.
It didn't start out all that well, what with me in Morrill Tower at Ohio State in a pod with 11 other very young women. The two women who were my roomates in our pod (four bunkbeds but only three occupied) didn't make it past, respectively, the first quarter and the first year. Maybe that's part of what throwing a bunch of young strangers together in close quarters is all about. Weeding out the partiers and those who are destined to become pregnant.
Sophomore year I bunked with one new roommate, from Rumson, N.J. and two from freshman year. Our bathroom mirror on North Campus read "Free the Nosker Four." We never did find out what that meant. Nancy, the Rumson girl, and I became good friends but she moved on to art school in Philly after one year at OSU. The other two, Mary Jo and Donna, found an apartment together after our sophomore year. And I quit. For a year or so. Then went back and my last two years, after finally choosing a major and meeting someone who is still a friend today, were tremendous. I got a job, stayed on campus during the summer, had an apartment and desperately did not want to leave after graduation in March 1978 (yikes! 31 years ago).
Things I remember about those last two years. Donna and Mary Jo throw a party at their new apartment, somewhere near Chittenden, I drink too much at their housewarming party and a football player carries me upstairs to a bedroom, where I pass out. Seeing "Star Wars" at the theater on High Street, near Lane Avenue and being totally awed by the opening scene as the starship zooms into view. Sitting on a High Street curb on a summer evening with my friend Heidi, watching people go by, talking about everything and nothing. Reading the Citizen Journal, a failing afternoon Scripps Howard paper (perhaps that should have been my cue to choose a major other than journalism), at my secretarial job in the department of anthropology. Reading papers by professors in said department as I typed them and wondering why they had no grasp of the English language. Sitting by Mirror Lake, reading, and realizing that across the "lake" someone was taking my picture. Juggling at a Renaissance festival outside Ohio Union. Watching soap operas inside Ohio Union (whose cafeteria line, in retrospect, seemed a lot like the one in "Animal House". Working at Quisno's (not the chain) Sub Shop and taking salt pills when it was hot and chopping hot yellow peppers to put on the subs. Seeing an old boyfriend who always made my heart stop come in to same shop and smile at me and me not being able to even acknowledge him. Another boyfriend and I cocooned away in my apartment during a fierce January or February snowstorm (back when we had real winters!)
Look at me. Sentences and paragraphs later. And I remember it all like it was yesterday. Of course. We all do.
Present day. Its been cold and white for what now seems like forever and for what seems likely to continue to be forever. But the cold world is not devoid of beauty. The picture at the start of this entry is of the sunset from my neighborhood from the past weekend.