More Library Tales

I was shelving nonfiction books today and came across a book called The Lemming Migration. Ah yes, The Lemming Migration. I mentioned in the comments for my previous post that my school librarian -- we'll call her Miss McCarthy, shall we? -- was crabby crabby crabby. Maybe it's because my friends and I would take every chance we got to watch the Walt Disney movie of The Lemming Migration. We had these Super-8 viewers and film cartidges. The films were only about 5 minutes long, but you could watch them forwards and backwards. So we would watch the lemmings go of the cliff and plunge to their deaths in the icy water, and then we'd watch them all miraculously fly up out of the water and quickly back away from the cliff's edge, only to repeat it all over again. It was endlessly amusing to us. Not to Miss McCarthy though. Maybe it's because she suspected this about the movie.

As a former student of mine once said when she brought the severed duck feet in for Show & Tell: "Thome people might think thith ith kind of groth."

Happy Birthday to my bro. Paul

That's him on the right. The family mythology goes that I was promised to him for his 3rd birthday, but I came a day early and he was pissed off. That may explain why he became my nemesis for the next 12 or so years, putting his enormous intellect to use cooking up ingenious new ways to make me cry, such as combining my name (Suzy) with the word "pig" and calling me "Sig" or directing beams of light at me and chanting, "Spotlight on stinkbomb Suzy." (When my parents finally intervened, he changed it to "Spotlight on you-know-who." When they put a stop to that, he figured out that all he had to do was quietly hum the cadence of the chant. He was a master.) He ended my one person crime spree at Treasure Island by teasing me mercilessly -- using the now patented quiet humming method -- about something I shoplifted, until in desperation I returned said item (I suppose I owe it to him that I'm not doing time in San Quentin.)

I was a textbook example of the Stockholm Syndrome and worshiped the ground he walked on. A day he let me tag along with him and his friends was a good day indeed, and I lived for those times. I frequently tried to buy my way into his good graces with Bazooka Joe comics, of which he was a passionate collector.

Somewhere around the time I was 12 the antagonism stopped and we became friends. I love him dearly. Happy birthday, Paul!

The Birthday Cake: A Love Story

Today is my birthday (48) and half my family is doing the college freshman orientation thing in a different state, so it's just me and my younger daughter. She's excited about making the day special, but of course she's still sleeping ... I'm the only morning person in my house.

I always say I don't like birthdays, but I actually do. If my family ever really took me at my word -- "I don't want anything" -- I'd be hurt. So the absent family members gave me gifts before they left. My eldest went to a Renaissance Fair and brought back a hand-blown glass goblet; I admire these things every year, but I never buy any. So that was very sweet of her and I love it. And Mr. Ether gave me a little tiny German-made metronome. I've been learning to play the guitar for a few years now, but I am very shy about it. Mr. Ether (a professional musician himself) has been unfailing in his support of my efforts -- a gift in and of itself.

I'm looking forward to the cheesecake my younger daughter is making. I started to write that no one has made me a cake in my adulthood, but that's not true. When I turned 25 I decided to throw a party at a park shelter. I had my heart set on a European-style torte with fruit and marzipan from a German bakery, and I asked my mom if she would pick it up the day before the party. Alas, she did not, and the bakery was closed on party day.

My mom decided to make me a cake; she made a mean pineapple upside-down cake. But two of my mom's idiosyncrasies were never doing things in a timely way and doing everything on a large scale. So she showed up at the park about an hour late with an enormous pineapple upside-down cake in the back of the station wagon. It had just come out of the oven and -- I'm not exaggerating -- it was about the circumference of a garbage can lid.

She was embarrassed about not getting the cake I wanted and being late, so she was in a bad temper. She inverted the cake onto a big board the way you're supposed to with a pineapple upside-down cake ... and raw cake batter ran out all over the back of her car. The cake was so huge and she hadn't baked it long enough. It was entirely raw in the middle!

I was mortified and furious -- selfish little so and so that I was. I still feel guilty about my attitude. It took me many years to see that she made me that cake because she loved me. And I was so ungracious.

My mom died 6 years ago. When we were cleaning her house, one of the things I kept was her favorite cookbook, The Settlement Cookbook. The book opens up every time right to the pineapple upside-down cake recipe, which is stained and tattered. And I say a little "thank you, Mommy, I love you" every time I see it.

What is the likelihood ...

... that my daughter is the only kid going to college with soap and bunny slippers handmade by her mom?

This just in ...

... from my lovely daughter:

Famous people who got married on your birthday [which is coming up on 8/21]:

Dennis Kucinich and Elizabeth Harper - NOT A JOKE! It's on IMDB!
Walter Matthau and Carol Grace - Awwww, I love him!
Humphrey Bogart and Mayo Methot
Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

Anna may not know the origin of the word "nadgers" or even what it means, but she knows everything there is to know in the media world.

Thanks, honey. I love you!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (and I don't like them!)

Speaking of Robert Redford (yes I was, at the end of my previous post) his first Sundance Theater just opened here. Anticipation of its coming put a small locally owned movie theater out of business; they saw the handwriting on the wall. Movie tickets at Sundance cost $10 plus a $3 "service charge" even when you walk up to the box office 5 minutes before the show starts because "every seat is reserved." (That may be par for the course in big cities, but it is unheard of here.) Now the hoi polloi of our fair city can enjoy independent films in a rarefied setting and congratulate themselves on how they are patrons of the arts. (Yes, I know I'm being cynical and unfair. But I'm feeling curmudgeonly.)

Sigh. I miss the old Majestic theater in downtown Madison, with its broken down seats, precariously hanging chandelier which we always sat under on the off-chance it would fall so we could sue them and never have to work again, brewers yeast to shake on your popcorn, and every night a double-feature of independently made, vintage, or art films all for a couple of bucks. That was before independent film making was big business, raking it in for the likes of Robert Redford, and there were art cinema houses in just about every college town. It was big excitement when the Majestic would publish their monthly calendar, which was stuck with magnets to many a refrigerator around the near east side of Madison.

Oh jeez, I'm turning into a codger. My 18-year old daughter, who is planning to study film production in the fall, does not believe that once upon a time her mom really loved movies. Were the movies themselves better, or just the environment?

Petroglyph

Pardon me for posting yet another picture of my children. March is a very nostalgic month for me, I guess. This photograph makes me laugh. The look on the face of my younger daughter, as well as her body language, is priceless.

And then there's the petroglyph. (You can click on it to -- er, um -- enlarge it.) Look closely. Look again. Yup, your eyes aren't deceiving you. This was at Dinosaur National Monument in western Colorado, an amazingly cool place. Besides a great wall of dinosaur bones there were ancient rock paintings of things that looked an awful lot like spaceships. And aliens. And then our friend here. (My kids would say that pictures like this are the reason they are warped.)[I disagree. I think it's the ones with underwear on their heads.]

It also reminds me of a very sweet period of time when my girls were little: before the bickering started in earnest [I think this is the trip where it actually started, when the younger one snapped the older one's Walkman headphone as if it was a wishbone ...], the serious diaper-butt, when they wanted to wear the shorts I made for them, when they liked having those short haircuts, when my youngest was in her [extended] red shoe phase ... (ironically, she is now acting in a musical production of the Hans Christian Anderson story The Red Shoes.) I loved having small children, as hard as it sometimes was.

The Joy of Winter

Ladies and Gentlemen ...
Dust off your Hammond organs, please. Flex your fingers for ... The Skaters' Waltz.

My youngest daughter persuaded us to go ice skating with her tonight. It's so much easier to stay inside, but ah, skating is one of the pleasures of living in a place with winter! And it's finally winter! And it's free!!

We didn't make it out of the house until after the warming house had closed, but that's okay. It wasn't too cold to change outside, there was plenty of ambient light, and the ice was freshly groomed. We were the only ones there, the 3 of us plus the Georgia the Wonder Dog (always happy to go anywhere, especially if there are treats involved. Go here to read more about Georgia's love affair with treats and how it almost led to her untimely demise.)

In my memory, half my childhood was spent ice skating. We'd skate until our fingers and toes were numb, warm them up a little, and then skate some more. I remember walking home from the park on feet that felt like all the toes had broken off and were rattling around loose in my boots! I don't think I ever got frostbite though. Would it have mattered? Naw. I was a kid!

Then I'd get home and fight with my brother over who got the choicest spot in front of the register to thaw out. And then we'd repeat it all the next day. I hope I never get too old to enjoy this weather!