The Eleventh

Taking photos today at a house I listed for sale, I came across the basement workbench. 

The house was built in 1958, and the couple who built it lived there until they passed away.  Their daughter, a friend of mine, listed the house with me for sale and it has not been easy for her to say goodbye to a house filled with so many memories.  I went through it and took the standard real estate photos, and a few others to give to my friend. 

This is one of them. Who among us from a certain era doesn’t remember a dad or grandpa with a row of baby food jars in the garage or workshop, nailed to a board or shelf, filled with nails, bolts and screws?  When I saw this rack of jars, I was impressed and overcome with nostalgia.  I couldn’t not take a picture.

Tell me about your favorite thing from your dad’s or grandpa’s garage or workshop.

Sometimes when the day is over, I walk past the bedroom where you are sleeping and see your cat at the end of the bed, washing his face as you sleep with your thumb in your mouth. 

I go into the kitchen and sort through the papers in your back pack, scribbled notes with phone numbers of friends, crumpled candy wrappers, twist ties, pretty rocks, acorns and loose beads.  There’s usually a library book about lions or princesses, a folder of spelling words, and sand from the playground.

Your crayons are on the table, a sheaf of paper strewn where we had dinner earlier.  “Mommy” is the title of one picture, and I notice that although my eyes appear pink and tired, you have drawn me with very long eyelashes and a crown on my head.  The picture of “Daddy” is optimistically adorned with a full head of hair.  Another paper is covered in curlicue hearts and flowers, and says “To Mommy and Daddy from Rabbit.  I will love you forever.  Do you love me?”

You spent the evening complaining about the lettuce in the taco salad, and then belted out songs in the shower with gusto, forgetting you were upset with us.  Later, you kissed my arm as I sat working on papers and hugged your daddy’s leg as he got your vitamins out of the bottle.

You show us every day how to behave, by loving us even when we’re distracted, by overlooking our failings and forgiving us when we are grumpy and stern.  I hope we can pay better attention to what you have to teach us, learning to see the best in each other, to be kind, to love without reservation.

Real quick:

My dad’s biopsy went fine today; they found that the tumor is a large one situated at the top of the large intestine, where it meets the small intestine.  They took some tissue for biopsy and will have the pathology report back next week.  The tumor appears to be blocking the intestine by about 90%, which explains the pain and the difficulty my dad is having with his digestive system, resulting in dramatic weight loss.

They’ll likely do surgery next week to remove the tumor, a small amount of the intestine on either side, and the lymph nodes in that area just to be safe in the event it is cancerous.  Either way, it’s unlikely they will do chemo and the doctor seemed to be encouraged by the outlook for my Dad.  Dad was asking questions throughout the procedure and my brother was there to keep the medical information straight.

When I talked to my mom this evening, Dad had gone to bed for the night and Mom and my brother were getting ready to eat root beer floats.  I am just so very grateful, once again, for being from a large family where siblings can be there with my parents during this time. 

And for the prayers and kind words and good thoughts from all of you, I cannot say thank you enough. Keep the prayers coming as we get ready for next week.  Thank you again!

I’m currently going through a phase of funky jewelry, particularly in silver and blue.  My dear, wonderful friend Mindy has an etsy shop and is selling some of her amazing and eclectic items.  You need to check out her stuff by clicking here:    First of all, the jewelry is so pretty, and secondly, she is among the top ten greatest people in the world and she’s supporting her family with this gig.  Will you look at this?!?  This one in particular got me salivating:

And again, as always, I am not accepting any complimentary merchandise for mentioning things on this site:  I, like you, will buy things fair and square.  Just for the record, you can NOT have this bracelet.  I’ve already placed my order.

I’m rather late to the game.  In fact, this is the first thing I’ve ordered from Etsy.  I have had so much fun looking at the things people sell there, and am amazed at the talent I see.  There are some hits and misses (and for those, you can see a collection of regrettable hand-crafted items on the site www.regretsy.com ) but for the most part, it’s a rich and varied assortment of truly wonderful things.

Times are a challenge for everyone right now, but if you are thinking of getting a gift for a friend, or splurging on yourself for the holidays, or just wanting a little piece of jewelry to dress up an outfit, do yourself a favor and check out what you can find on etsy.  So many people, especially women, are making a living selling handcrafted items and it’s a great feeling to know that your money is going directly to help support an individual rather than buying something at a retail store, whose profits are likely going somewhere remote and the employees make less than a living wage.

Most of all, let’s spread a little beauty in the world and wear something that doesn’t look like what twenty other women in the office are also wearing.  Can you help me help Mindy sell out her etsy store by Christmas?

Ever have one of those days?  Yeah.  Me too.

If I could have anything in the world, anything at all, I would not know what to wish for.  I would fear for upsetting the perfect balance of light and dark in my life, derailing the trajectory of a life that so far has been more good than bad and which seems to me to find a way to even out the rough spots and lead me directly to things I didn’t know I desperately wanted or needed until I got to them.

Wishing is pointless. Wishing is for malcontents, who are people lacking in imagination, irony or vision.  When things are bad, you are on your way to something better.  When things are good, you’re to learn from the journey there and help those who aren’t there yet.  It’s a cycle, it’s a process.

I am sitting at this desk, dizzy with a stomach bug I think came from bad lettuce at lunch.  In the other room, my husband is reading Shel Silverstein to our daughter, and she is flinging gales of laughter through the room like confetti.  It is freezing cold and dark outside, but the lamps in the house make pools of light on the tabletops and the furniture. 

What kind of human being would I be if I spent my time wishing for things to be different?  How can we be so blind to what we have, constantly yearning for something else?

I don’t need to wish for anything in the world.  It’s all right here, right now.

I would be remiss if I did not give full props to two magical sources of artistic enhancement:  Photoshop and The Pioneer Woman Photography, recommended to me by my friend Tiffany.  I have Photoshop, but didn’t know anything (and only now know scarcely more than nothing) about Photoshop actions. 

But I downloaded a set of them from Ree Drummond’s Pioneer Woman Photography  and applied one to the picture I posted yesterday of Rabbit. 

Full disclosure, here is the photo straight out of the camera.  You can see the texture of the sofa in the background; it was about 10:30 in the morning yesterday, the sofa right in front of a huge picture window streaming with eastern sunshine through white sheer panels. 

And here is the photo after I applied the Pioneer Woman’s Action set enttled “Lovely and Ethereal.”  I ran it once, but possibly twice (I think twice).

See how it darkened the background and made everything else more luminous?  I LOVE this action set.  Maybe it’s the lazy way to do things, but I plan to learn this stuff step by step someday.  For now, I’m using these and learning as I go.

Here’s another one original:

And then I applied an action I think called “colorize” that kind of desaturated all the color but a few tones, which may not be for everyone but which I LOVED:

Here is the photo after:

And this isn’t going to be a photography blog, beLIEVE me, because it’s just a hobby, but by God if there’s a good photo on my computer, you’re going to know about it.  Thank you for indulging me.

By the way, I know I probably mentioned it earlier but a couple of people asked.  The camera I got is a Canon EOS Rebel  XS digital SLR.  I only have the 18-55 lens, and I’m shooting mostly on auto.  Also, I have a UV filter for the lens, per advice from a friend.  I have two other filters, a fluorescent one and a polarizing one, but I haven’t even removed them from the packaging.  I also got LCD screen protection adhesive, to cover the screen on the back of the camera from the makeup that comes off my face and clings to the camera back.  I’m using the viewfinder only, not the livescreen (even though my friend Steve finally showed me how to use the live screen).

Any camera shopping you need to do, I would advise you do it online through B&H PhotoVideo.  And no, not one vendor or manufacturer has asked me to mention their products and I’m not receiving anything for recommending them.  Just better pictures.

Just let me say it:  this camera is the best investment I have made in a very long time. 

Larger than life, larger than us, he was the man in the size large shirt.

At Christmas, for years, there was an endless succession of gift boxes containing shoe polish, playing cards, Boggle games, wool socks, slippers and shirts.

Plaid flannel shirts.  Cotton dress shirts.  T-shirts with slogans.  All of them size large or extra large.

In high school, my sister and I raided his closet, pulling out shirts with pearl snap buttons and large collars, putting them on over our bluejeans and rolling up the sleeves, tying the front shirt-tails into knots.  We’d bunch them up and throw them in the wash when we were done, pleased with this endless supply of size large shirts.

As we grew up and moved away, our mother received gifts from us in abundance:  roses, comforters, fluffy towels, scented lotions, teacups, gift cards and books.  For dad, it was sweaters and shirts.  All size large.  Because he was the man in the size large shirts.

After I was in my thirties, after I had become a parent and watched my husband be a dad to our daughter, I was talking to my mom.  I told her about my daughter wanting to buy presents for her daddy, and how hard it was to choose a present for a man. 

“How come Dad never wears the shirts we get him?” I asked her.

 She laughed.  “They’re all too big!”

Turns out, my dad was never more than 5’10” and never more than a size medium.  All those shirts, we picked out from the rack by imagining a form to fit the personage we’d built in our memory.  His loud voice and colorful character were bigger than his stature. 

 It’s a humbling and fascinating process to reconcile.  Not only to try to reconcile a personal relationship, but to reconcile your memory to reality.  To re-adjust your impressions to the actuality—of a person, a situation, a life.

Ah, the magical Annette. 

She repaired my ravaged and migrating eyebrows, and vanished my greying roots.  She darkened my hair so that my mother may recognize me when I next visit my parents.  She performed the scalp massage that causes my eyes to roll back in my head and my shoes to fall off my feet. 

Blow drying, brushing, trimming, and applying the smoothing iron, while chatting with me and helping me find the latest People magazine. 

I drove home at 7:00, looking once again like a woman who actually tries to be presentable.  In a cloud of hairspray, the skin around my eyebrows pink from waxing, a feeling of blissful calm from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet. 

NEVER underestimate the healing power of being pampered.