Design, life & music

I didn't really know this about myself, but I was in a design mode before I actually did it for a living. The Bizarre Love Triangle and the arrow (pointing to love) tell me I was problem solving and communicating. Oh, and the music! I don't know what happened to this cassette but am so glad I saved the label. My most favorite of this compilation? KD Lang's cover of 'Black Coffee."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Gba61V2nQ

Short space of time

I'm growing old. Five full decades on this earth and closing in on six. Trying to figure what I have learned, what I have accomplished, whether I will leave our lovely planet a place better for me having been here. As with all of us, I arrived with no say in the matter.

But once I did arrive, even if I could not immediately appreciate it, I was lucky. What does it mean to have an extraordinary, safe childhoood, full of love and adventure? How does that experience define us?

Blue thoughts

Mom and me in 1995 at what was then known as The Jake. We had season tickets then so it was a nice confluence of events that the Cleveland baseball team made it to the World Series that year. Can’t afford it now.
Anyway.
This is a picture of a picture but what strikes me is how the color skews toward blue. Admittedly this is a more than 20-year-old photograph but what is it about either the film’s composition or the development process that makes blue the color that survives? Not just this photo, but if you look back on old pix, old advertisements, everything fades except the blue. I’m sure there is chemistry involved too.
Perhaps Kodak has the answers.

Bras

At some point during our adventures in France, Dad bought Mom a couture brassiere. From a fine company called Cadolle. The company is quite different from what is was in the Sixties (http://www.cadolle.com/.) Here's Mom's brassiere (draped over a pillow). And the label.

Everyone I've ever met knows exactly what they're doing

Note: I wrote this two years ago, in 2015 and for some reason did not publish. Doing so now, for all those waiting with bated breath. :)

In my life, I've met people remarkable to me because they were fully certain in their opinions and beliefs.

My high school best friend, who was certain that her former home in Dunmore, Pennsylvania was the best place on earth. And never stopped talking about it.

A college roommate, who was certain that The Electric Light Orchestra, some ice cream restaurant where she worked, her high school in Akron, were the best ever, period. And never stopped talking about them.

A community of opinionated people who thought the Kon Tiki restaurant in Columbus was the absolute best the city had to offer. And I never stopped hearing about it. (Took my parents. It was un-best.)

In their own minds, they were right, I suppose. I didn't know enough to consider that they wanted attention. But I was awed by certainty. I felt my own experiences paled because I had not lived their best ones. I was rarely, if ever, certain of anything because the only constant in my life was change. A new home and new acquaintances practically every year.

Elyria Catholic High School.

Being in my mother's house now over the holidays, walking in the town where I finished grade school and high school, made me remember all this. What I did not fully realize when I was younger was that my own experiences were rich, full and very much broader than those of the peers of my late teen and young adult life. Then I just wanted, as in every new town and school, to fit in.

Sometimes I've wished my father hadn't chosen this town to settle in after our Army wanderings were over. We had seen so much, and this little autoworkers' town was, and is, so small, and peopled with so many souls who barely venture to Cleveland, much less the world beyond.

Then again, perhaps it is rootedness that gives certainty. We could have landed in Chicago, or Dallas, or San Francisco and still I would likely have encountered people who had been there all their lives, certain it was the best place, ever, to be.

The only thing I am certain of is the gratitude I feel for being rooted in one of the nicest families on earth.

*

About the photo: In my senior year, my class streamed out of the doors in the distance for an informal class photo. There were no thick trees there then. I had a locker near one of those doors.

End of the month, you know?

I had Thanksgiving off. It was lovely, drinks and dinner friends and with family.

Worked the next day, very slow. After work, realized I needed something, fruit mostly, for breakfast. So stopped at the Shop & Save after work. Picked up raspberries, strawberries, a few oranges and some cherry juice. Also picked the shortest cashier line.

Kind of a mistake.

Maybe.

The lady ahead of me was clearly in financial stress. She had on a big jacket with lots of pockets. A green card on the counter by the register. And four stacks of quarters on that same counter. Fussing and wondering.

The cashier was so nice. The lady needed only a dollar and some change to pay her tab and thought she had dropped some under the candy and magazine rack. I looked, the cashier looked and the guy behind me looked. No change.

I'm looking to get in and out on a Friday night. Can I please go home, have dinner and read?

So.

"Can I help? What do you need?" Comes the response: "One dollar and 34 cents."

I have exactly two one dollar bills in my wallet and pass them on. The lady in front thanks me and promises to pay it forward.

Good. Can we move on?

Except no. We can't. She had another item that needed to be scanned separately and by then she had lost her food stamps card in her voluminous pockets, the floor, her purse or goodness knows where.

Her comment was "End of the month, you know?"

I gathered up my few packages and the nice guy behind me let me out. Couldn't wait anymore. By the time I checked out, he was still waiting.

Lady in distress was still fumbling and trying to find what she needed.

And the cashier was being so very kind.

And I'm so glad, because you never know when circumstance might change, that I am not poor.

*

Looking back, I think what a luxury it is to want to go home and read. After work. At a job. That pays. 

The Lottery (with no apologies to Shirley Jackson)

 Each week, I fritter a few dollars away on the lottery. I'll never win. But here's the thing. I already have. We none of us get to pick our parents, but wow, in the lottery of birth, I hit the jackpot. Born to  parents who read to me. That shaped my life. Thinking back, here are some of the authors and illustrators who rocked my world.

C.S Lewis and Pauline Baynes (The Chronicles of Narnia)
Dr. Seuss (everything, but especially the Northgoing Zaks with Stars upon Thars)
James Thurber (he wrote and drew hilariously)
Chas Addams (macabre made wonderful)
Lewis Carroll and Arthur Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland. I will go down the rabbit hole with you any time)
Charles Schulz (he drew Good ol' Charlie Brown and wrote his story, too. Bonus: Vince Guaraldi's music)
Frank Tashlin ("The Bear That Wasn't" https://vimeo.com/138897532Th
A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard (Winnie the Pooh & The Wind in the Willows)
Ray Bradbury & Joe Mugnani (The October Country)
Chuck Jones (Looney Tunes)
E.B. White  & Garth Williams (Charlotte's Web)
plus Babar, Curious George, Calvin & Hobbes, Matt Groenig's "Life in Hell" series and "Nade" a graphic novel heroine from my childhood in France.
And former colleague Stacy Innerst, a wonderful illustrator who reminded me that I won the reading parents lottery. Here is one of his works.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ruth-bader-ginsburg-jonah-winter/1125674822#/

Lucky lucky lucky. Thanks Mom & Dad