True Confession
I am a junkie for Fiestaware. My favorite colors are turquoise, medium green, lilac, chartreuse and plum. I like all of the colors, though. I have pieces in cobalt, rose, sunflower, sapphire, the old green and red.
I need to stop browsing eBay.
True Confession
I didn’t invite my mother to my wedding. We have been fighting since November and I didn’t trust her not to try to sabotage things for me. She has been very vindictive in the past and I didn’t want my wedding day ruined. It may sound petty to some people not to have asked her to be there, but it was the best decision I could make at the time.
Swirly’s Time Line
Feb – March 1986
The visits with Carol and Paul continued. There was one where I was sick and Mom took me to Kmart to cheer me up. She let me pick out something to “make me better.” I chose a Care Bear, the one with the sunshine on its tummy. I kept it beside my bed and looked at it that night until I fell asleep. Mom told me that it was a good luck charm and that it would make me happy if I kept it. I still have it on my drafting table. I can’t say that this myth held any truer than the tooth fairy or Santa, but I do still have it. Just in case.
Carol and Paul decided that they wanted to move Lisa and me to Greensboro with them. My grandparents balked at this and said that they didn’t want to pull us out of our school. They suggested that Carol and Paul move near them if they wanted to take us.
In March, shortly after my mom’s birthday, a trailer was bought and moved in right behind my grandparent’s home, on the back of the same three-acre lot they lived on. We were asked if we wanted to live with Carol & Paul and of course we were thrilled.
I still remember looking at my new room the first day and thinking how great things were going to be. The walls were wallpapered in a thin stripe pattern of tan and white. The carpet was tan and the ceiling was that spray on sticky-looking-stuff. Lisa and I had to share a room and we got a bunk bed for this purpose. It was used but who cared, I was getting to live with my MOM! I did wonder about the room thing, the trailer had three bedrooms, why couldn’t we finally have our rooms?
This question was answered with a bit of bittersweet news – Mom was pregnant. She was expecting in late May. It was going to be a boy. He was going to have the other room and we would have to share. I was a bit jealous about this whole baby thing. I thought my mom wanted to be with my sister and me and get to know us finally. She was going to be spending all of her time with the new baby, though. Where did that leave us? True, I’d never really been around a new baby and that was kind of exciting, but still…
Print Shop Stories
Rick
Rick was a scanner operator that was hired two weeks after I started. He seemed very knowledgeable, quiet and no-nonsense. A tall man of average build with thinning hair and small wire framed glasses, Rick had been hired because of his extensive knowledge and work experience. His father, now deceased, was a titan of the printing industry. Rick, in his mid-forties, was certain to be just as good.
He worked third shift so I didn’t work with him until I spent a month on 3rd shift. I’d heard the buzz in the building though, he was a master at color correction and was untouchable in the arena of scanning information. I said hello to him in the break room once or twice but never talked to him until he showed up in my domain, the proofing room.
Rick popped his head into the room and said, “Hey, want to come learn how to do some scanning work?” I was bored out of my mind and had nothing to do at the time. I’d actually been fighting sleep. I said sure and followed him to the scanning room.
We sat there in the darkened room as he showed me how to line things up on the scanner and explained how to decide what dpi to scan in at, etc. He showed me how to touch up images, cut a silhouette around something. He started to make color corrections to a job as I watched. Things got quiet. At that moment I REALLY met Rick.
“Have you ever seen Deep Throat?”
“What?!?” I snapped back.
“Deep Throat. The porno with Linda Lovelace where she’s going down on all of those guys?”
I was frozen in place. It wasn’t like working in the print shop I’d never heard anyone say anything like that. I was a 20-year-old girl surrounded by people in their late 30s to mid fifties. Most of them were men. The majority of the men were dirty old men. I was used to their attempts to shock me, to “knock the newbie for a loop”. I just wasn’t it expecting that from Rick. And not on the first day.
“No, Rick. I haven’t seen that movie. I must have missed it at Blockbuster. Sorry.”
He lost interest in the subject after that. Who wants to talk about his or her favorite movie to someone who has never seen it? The real outcome of this incident was the foundation for my Mac and scanning experience and learning what to expect from Rick.
Swirly’s Time Line
Meet Your Mom
I remember being introduced to my mother, shortly after my ninth birthday.
My mother didn’t appear like the image in my head. I won a mirror in Sunday school once for a memory verse contest. I put my wits to good use back then, to surpass the other kids to contend for prizes – in the name of the Lord, of course. The mirror had an illustration on the back of an angel guiding two kids across a crumbling bridge. The older kid was a girl and the younger was a boy. There was a storm brewing in the background, shown by ominous clouds with a flicker of lightning. A small little cottage was there, too, what must be their home in the distance.
I cast the parts in my mind. I was the older girl, of course, watching over my sister. And Lisa could be the boy, I had no problem with cross-casting so long as I wasn’t the boy. (Hey, after all it was MY mirror and my memory verses.)
The angel was my mother, I imagined it so and so it was. I knew very little about her, only that her name was Carol and that she had blonde hair. Grandma, her mother, was very stingy with details about her or my father. Looking back it seems she was ever the harbinger of bad news. ‘Mrs. McLain is your teacher, I like your sister better, your father was trash and your mother would have thrown you in an orphanage if it was up to her.’ Good-news-Grandma, always eager to pop my balloon and turn the hose on my parade.
So, again, my mother didn’t quite look like the image in my head or on my mirror back. She had the long blonde hair, but her was a thin and straight, pulled back not flowing. Her face wasn’t as soft and her nose was a little pointer than I’d envisioned, more like Grandma’s than I liked. Despite all of this, I was ecstatic. My mother! After all this time! Finally I would get to know my mom and be freed of the evil granny’s hold for a while.
Things Progress
I remember the house they were in – it was a duplex. The walls were white and there were owls everywhere, not real but in every other conceivable form. They were made from seashells, rocks, ceramic, painted, carved, pottery, realistic and cartoon looking. All of the stared at me, inspecting the new arrivals and not hinting at either their approval or disdain. Much like Paul’s expression, they remained reserved and almost standoffish.
We were returned in one piece to our grandparent’s house Sunday afternoon. We pranced about with our new horses, but we had to leave the crayons behind, perhaps a bribe to get me back later, I guess. I had stuffed the silver in my pocket to admire while I was gone. Not because I thought it had any monetary value, but as a reminder of the weekend. In case I never saw my mom again.
And just like shown on my mirror back, there was a storm gathering force in the background.
To be continued … soon.
Songs Stuck In My Head
“Crying” Roy Orbison
“Hot In Here” Nelly
“Woman Woman” Gary Puckett & The Union Gap
“The Good Stuff” Kenny Chesney
True Confession
I’ve been suffering through a sinus infection for the last two days. Today I tried wipe my nose and the tissue slipped on my snotty nose, dragging my finger and the tissue into my right eye. Of course my eye started tearing up, but it hurt to open it. Snot eye, how gross.
Swirly’s Time Line
Third Grade
When the list was posted again for class assignments the summer before the third grade, I was anxious and excited. Once again a car ride, which was longer than really needed, ended with my grandmother’s fumbling for the parking gear and my leaping out of the car to find my name in the rosters. Every year it had been the same. The same experience of my legs sticking to the car upholstery, the veins left from the fake leather making spider vein impressions that now are real and not simply indentions. The same heat in the car making me torn between sympathy for the Thanksgiving turkeys we devoured each year and desperation for Grandma to roll down a freaking window.
The Verdict
Also, as happened every year until after the fifth grade, Jason Fox was in my class. Luckily, my friend Michelle and the other geek, Eric, were, too. Again, though I would suffer with the perverseness of the Foxster I would have my savant peers to help balance things out.
The teacher listed for our class was Mrs. McLain. Surely not the same Mrs. McLain I had as a mid-season replacement in the second grade. Wait … Shirley. Yup, it was the same lady Grandma assured me. After the news of my new teacher, I was certain that the teacher’s aide would be my only hope for a good year. Her name was Mrs. Walker, the one who was perhaps my saving grace. I hoped she might be another balance, like the nerds were for Jason.
After an extensive wait of sweaty, humid weather and anticipation, summer vacation was over and school started back. I climbed on the school bus and rode off to my first year of cursive handwriting. The third grade – where I would learn more sophisticated math and get to read real books, the type with more words than visual aides.
This class was a 3rd and 4th grade combo class. The class was divided basically in half. The geek group (Eric, Michelle, a few other 3rd graders and me) was introduced to “AG” – the Academically Gifted class. We got to leave regular class and spend time with the AG teacher, Mrs. Hice, and participate in “accelerated reading”. It seemed like a bad idea at first, but it turned out to be the best thing about the year.
Mrs. Walker
Mrs. Walker turned out to be an odd woman. Her hair was below shoulder length and lush and curly, almost too perfectly so. It was a nice change from Mrs. McLain’s wiry rat’s nest. She was a bit on the plump side but dressed smartly, as Mrs. Caviness had always been. I decided to progress with her and to ignore Mrs. McLain as much as possible.
Despite my best efforts to like her, Mrs. Walker became more disagreeable the more the year wore on. By Christmas I was living for AG time and starting to like Mrs. McLain a lot more. I got my only elementary “B” grade from Mrs. Walker in handwriting. She made notations on my report card that I talked too much, too. I got to the point that I would rather draw Jason’s requested naked women pictures than to listen to Mrs. Walker squawk about cursive – which I had so been looking forward to. That lovely curled hair now resembled horns at times, if only to me.
Mrs. Hice
Mrs. Hice was a bit of a peculiar lady. For starters, she had a spider fetish. She wore spider lapel pins, dangling spider earrings and for our Christmas craft project we made a silver spider tree ornament out of pipe cleaners, two bulbous ornament halves and some silver thread. I still have this contraption in my decorations box in the attic and laugh every year that I pull it out. Mrs. Walker’s idea of a Christmas craft project was to take half of a walnut shell, cover the inside with glue and sprinkle glitter in it. That seemed so … second grade. The fourth graders were less than impressed and I remember seeing many of these crappy things littering the bus floor on my ride home just before Christmas break.
Things were the same as always after Christmas. I woke up in the mornings to Grandpa calling out, “Yah-hoo, Mountain Dew!” or “Rise and shine!” My life didn’t seem that magnificent but it was tolerable. I still liked my art classes with Mrs. “Purple Leaf” Brady, I was intrigued by Mrs. Hice’s eccentricities, I had friends in my class and I always knew my memory verses for church. Things were okay, as they always are before a big wave of change.
To be continued … soon.
… previous stories …
2nd || 1st || K pt 2 || K pt 1 || school starts || birth to age 5