Tag Archives: Memory

Recalling

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I was listening to a story on NPR years ago. An author had set out to write a book about his immigrant grandparents. Among other places, he traveled to the village in Northern Ireland where his grandparents had lived before immigrating.

He visited an infamous tree in a field just outside of town. It was infamous because once when his mother was a little girl, a “local boy” who was involved in one of the Irish Independence movements, had been lynched in that tree. And for many days afterward, the local British soldiers stationed guards on it round the clock, to prevent anyone from cutting the body down and giving the young man a proper burial.

The author’s mother, grandparents, and aunts and uncles had all told the story many times. His mother had a particularly moving way of describing herself as a small child, clutching her own mother’s hand as the stood in the tall grass, close enough to see, but far enough that the soldiers would ignore them. His grandmother had agreed, even explaining how she had argued with some neighbor about whether her daughter should see such things.

The author was able to verify all the particulars of the young man’s lynching, his long delayed funeral, and so forth. It was that tree, in that field where it had happened. There was only one problem with the identical story that all of this relatives who had been there told. The young man had been lynched exactly 6 days after the author’s mother was born. So, while it was possible that his grandmother had carried her new born baby out to the field to see the atrocity, there was no way his mother could have remembered it. And certainly, as a six-day-old infant, she would not have been standing on her own two feet in the tall grass, clutching her mother’s hand.

The author realized that what must have actually happened is that some years after the incident, his grandmother had taken his mother, her young daughter, out to the field in question, to look at the empty tree and hear the story of the horrible thing the soldiers had done. It’s quite possible there were several such trips, before the family left Ireland and moved to America. The description his mother had heard from her parents, other older relatives, and neighbors, of the body hanging in the tree with the soldiers standing guard, had evoked a vivid image, which his mother had interposed onto her actual memories of visiting the field.

And the grandparents and other relatives similarly modified their own memories when, over the years, they would tell the story to new acquaintances, and the author’s mother (first as a young girl), would interject her own recollection of the day. The first few times perhaps one uncle might have said, “Really? I thought you would be too young to remember,” but our memories don’t have timestamps on them, and it’s easy to lose track of exactly how long one event (the gruesome death of a neighbor) took place after another (the birth of a niece).

The author wound up talking to a lot of experts on memory, and instead of writing a book about his ancestors, wrote a book about memory, and how it grows, mutates, and reshapes itself to fit our perception of the meanings of our life.

I had my own rather dramatic experience in realizing that I had edited my own memories. I have a couple of friends, J and K, that I have known for over thirty years. When I first met them, they had recently broken up after having dated for a while, but they were trying to keep it amicable. Over the years they were both part of a large group of my friends that attending sci fi cons together and participated in related activities. For a while, J lived in California. During that time, K started dating L. K and L broke up. A few years later, J had moved back to Washington, she and K started dating, and eventually married.

Some years after that, I was telling another friend about this particularly funny event that had happened at a sci fi con, and mentioned both J and K’s parts. J didn’t remember the incident at all. I told a few more details, K chimed in with some supporting evidence. J admitted it sounded like something she would have said, and we moved on to another topic.

And then it hit me. Feeling horrified, I turned to J and said, “Oh, I am so sorry…” She started laughing, because she figured it out from the look on my face. It hadn’t been J experiencing the fiasco with us, it had been L. I apologized probably a bit too profusely, because J laughed and said that K did the same thing all the time.

I spent a while afterward trying to remember those couple of years when K had been dating L and also hanging out with our gang. I could only recall four incidents, total. All of them were ones which, from my perspective, exemplified L’s worst personality traits. I couldn’t recall one single incident in which she was not being pretentious, condescending, or disdainful.

I know that can’t be accurate. No one is awful all the time, and K would never be comfortable hanging out with someone who was, let alone nearly getting married to her. Obviously, I made the decision that K’s involvement with L had been a mistake of such proportions that I wished it hadn’t happened. And my subconscious has dutifully excised any pleasant memories of L from my memory. Any memories that have been kept, have had J substituted for L, in accordance with the other judgement I came to that J and K belong together and always have.

It was disturbing when I first realized it had happened. I still find it disturbing that I have to wrestle with my own memories when talking about events with these friends. I can make myself remember that it was L, not J, in the one story. But it makes me wonder what else in that memory has been emphasized, or obscured, or maybe borrowed from some other similar experiences.

It’s scary to realize just how unreliable one’s own recollection can be.

A beach, a blanket, and a song

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I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club. It was cancelled almost exactly a year before I was born. Three years after cancellation, the original hour-log recordings were edited down to half-hour segments that were shown in syndication for a few years, and my Mom said I watched it fairly faithfully. I don’t know how much of my memories of the show are from that exposure, because those edited episodes was re-re-released into syndication around the time I was in middle school. I watched some of those episodes, though if my friends caught me, I claimed that I was just watching it to humor my younger sister.

I was already an Annette Funicello fan before. I remember her most from the Beach Party movies co-starring her and Frankie Avalon. When I was in grade school, before modern cable systems, when most places had only three or four stations, there always seemed to be one of those stations that ran movies in the afternoons. Silly comedies were a staple of those afternoon movies, so Beach Party, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini made frequent appearances.

The movies were extremely silly, with outlandish plots. Despite being movies about kids spending a summer at the beach and the ensuing romantic soap opera, a lot of them had at least one sci fi/fantasy element (the professor’s ability to paralyze someone by touching a “nerve-cluster” at the temple, the “improved” chimpanzee that could surf and dance better than a human, a Martian teen-ager sent to the beach as an advance scout for an interplanetary invasion, a mermaid falls in love with one of the surfers, and Frankie hires a witch doctor is to send a sea nymph to the beach to keep the other guys away from Annette while he’s in the Navy).

Not exactly high-concept, but probably a big part of the appeal to grade-school-aged me.

She was in a few of the sillier Disney films of the sixties, as well (The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, and The Monkey’s Uncle).

In all of those movies she played the wholesome good girl. The girl any boy would be lucky to have. Setting aside all the levels of sexism in that, it meant when I was a kid, I wanted to be her. I didn’t consciously admit it. I’m sure that to some of the adults in my life they assumed that I learned all the lyrics to all of her songs, et cetera, because I had a crush on her. (And for the record, I didn’t have a crush on Frankie; his pretty boy persona was totally not my type.)

So I’ve always had very fond memories of Annette and was sad to read that she died. I’m a bit miffed that news of her death has been overshadowed by reporting about the death of a certain former British Prime Minister. I certainly understand why the latter is considered more newsworthy.

Good-bye, Annette. I hope that somewhere you’re strolling along a beautiful beach, surrounded by love and music.

Forgotten or Unknown?

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Our collective memory can be frightfully shallow.

Take, for instance, an on-line discussion I was in recently where there were people who weren’t aware that not that many years ago it was illegal to be gay. By which I don’t just mean that the notion of gay marriage didn’t exist, but that if the authorities found out you were gay, they could send you to prison. I had to tell them of an acquaintance who had been arrested for indecency back in 1970 for kissing his boyfriend in the wrong neighborhood. That meant that he didn’t just have a criminal record, but a sexual offense (albeit a misdemeanor).

Note that he was not arrested for rape, attempted rape, or anything like that. Chris was 21 years old, his boyfriend was 24, they were consenting adults who had just left a gay bar together. It was late at night, and they were making out in the boyfriend’s car near Chris’s dorm at the University of Washington. Yes, they were here in a city with a reputation as being ultra liberal. But they were two men kissing, and that was something society could not abide in 1970!

If I recall correctly, Chris said his boyfriend lost his job because of the arrest, and had a difficult time finding a new one. Chris didn’t begin to run into problems getting hired himself until a few years later, after he graduated and started looking for more substantial jobs than the starving-student-type of employment he’d had before.

He wound up working as a hair stylist, saved up his pennies, and eventually opened his own shop. It hadn’t been what he’d meant his career to be, but he made do.

Contrast that with something I witnessed during my own college days (some years later): one of my dormmates convinced a bunch of us to go with him one night to a park that was near the school. I have completely forgotten what the purpose of the excursion was, now, but we got a bit lost and stumbled upon a guy and a gal who were having sex under a tree.

It was long after dark, they were off of any paths, behind some bushes, and they were clearly trying not to be seen or heard.

We hurried away before the angry guy could do more than yell at us.

Not much further, we encountered a cop, who stopped us and asked us what we were doing in the park after dark. There was a point where I thought we were all going to be showing him our student IDs or something, but something one of the guys said made the cop grin and ask us if we had run into anyone doing something they oughtn’t. And then he made a reference to the size of the girl’s breasts.

It was clear he had seen them, as well, but had decided not to do anything about it. I think he implied that he had been sent to the park because of complaints about such activity, and he thought it was a waste of time, since no one was being hurt.

I suspect the cops reaction would have been very different if it had been two guys.

I’ve been running into a lot of people, when discussing issues such as marriage equality, the Violence Against Women Act, or wage disparity, who are completely unaware of just how recently things that they currently think of as mere fruatrations were either mandated or at least aided and abetted by the law.

For instance, up until the mid 70s, a married women did not have a legal right to withhold sex from her husband. Even if they were living separated, in the midst of divorce proceedings, and he had been witnessed physically abusing her many times, if he forced her to have sex she couldn’t get him convicted of rape. Heck, most of the time she couldn’t get him charged. Finally, a woman who had attempted to get the rape included in the assault charges against her husband (ex-husband by the time it went to trial), managed to appeal the decision not to include the charges up to a federal judge who agreed: if she says “no,” it’s rape.

That didn’t cause a sudden change in the law or practice in this regard, but it was the very first recognition that in the U.S. legal system that a wife’s body wasn’t literally and entirely the property of her husband to do with as he pleased. And that only happened a mere 36 years ago.

There are still laws on the books related to that notion. My favorite are the “alienation of affection” laws. If you look up the topic online now, all you will find are articles that refer to the versions of the laws as they have been altered in response to legal challenges. So wikipedia, for example, says that the laws allow a spouse to file a lawsuit against a third party alleged to be responsible for the failure of the marriage.

The original laws allowed only the husband to file a lawsuit against another person for “malicious conduct that contributed to or caused the loss of affection.” The most common malicious conduct was, of course, seducing her into having an affair. For a long time a wife could not file a similar lawsuit against someone she believed she could prove had acted to alienate her husband’s affections. In the last several decades, most of these laws that have remained on the books have been revised to be gender-neutral, which I suppose is an improvement.

The problem is that while the original justification of the laws was assumption that a wife’s body (and affection, et cetera) were the property of the husband and he could expect the legal system to protect his property rights, the gender-neutral versions still assume a property rights relationship. If you need the law the force your partner to love you, that is not love. Okay, successful lawsuits under these laws don’t end up with orders to anyone to go back to loving their spouse, but when the law is able to inflict punishment because someone has fallen out of love, the principle is the same.

There’s going to be a lot of talk on the news and around the web this week where people are emphatically insisting the marriage has been an unchanging institution for all of human history, and that’s pure nonsense. In the last five decades alone in this country we have redefined marriage in several ways:

  • so that it includes interracial couples,
  • so that it includes persons previously considered less than full citizens because of certain mental and medical conditions,
  • so that even prisoners on death row must be allowed into the institution if they want, and,
  • so that a wife’s body is not treated as the legal property of her husband.

Over the course of five decades before that we have legally redefined it so that a couple who have realized the marriage was a mistake could end it without having to prove that one spouse was abusive, or go through other legal hoops to satisfy society that the marriage was over.

In the century before that we have legally redefined it so that people didn’t have to get the approval of a church (and before that, the official state church) in order to get married, allowing people who were raised in different faiths to get married, as well as allowing those of no faith at all in.

In the last few centuries we’ve redefined marriage in a way that almost no one realizes was never an integral part of the institution: we made marriage about love. For most of human history marriage has been a matter of creating/reinforcing family alliances, securing the orderly inheritance of property, and/or politics. The notion that two people would meet, fall in love, and decide all on their own to get married has only been around for a few centuries.

So any so-called defenders of traditional marriage who mention a relationship of mutual love and respect is not talking about a very old tradition, at all.

Yes, the notion that two people of the same gender might be the ones who fall in love is new for a lot of people, but when looked at in comparison to all the other ways that marriage has changed, it’s actually only a very minor refinement.

Acclimated

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“Bring your coat; it’s cold out!”

I was reminded recently of the last time I visited Arizona. It was 1982. I was attending college1 in southwest Washington. My mom, who had remarried a couple years before, was living in Phoenix with my stepdad and the older of my sisters2.

My sister was getting married3 on Christmas Eve, so I came to visit for Christmas break to attend the wedding and have Christmas with Mom.

Every time we left the house, Mom would urge me to bring my coat. And everywhere I went, I wound up carrying my coat draped over one arm. I regretted not packing several pairs of shorts. The temperature, as I recall, never dropped below the low 60s (Farenheit)4. My Mom and Step-dad weren’t the only people wearing coats at the restaurants, movie theaters, and so on. I was sweating, but surrounded by an entire city of people practically shivering from the “cold.”

December in Phoenix, at least that year, was like June in Seattle.

On the other hand, I start complaining about the heat when the temperature gets up into the high 70s—and whining by the upper 80s—which makes friends who live in Phoenix (and Texas, southern California, Florida, et cetera) laugh5. Since for only two or three weeks in August or July does Seattle temperatures get into what most people would classify as summer-ish, my tolerance for heat is nearly non-existent.

Mom’s acclimation to Phoenix winter was particularly amusing to me, because during my childhood we lived in much, much colder places. During my junior high years, for instance, one of my morning chores during winter months was to carry an extension cord out to the driveway and plug-in the engine block heater for Mom’s car. It was actually two heaters: one built into the oil pan, the other into the coolant system. It warmed up the engine block enough to make the car start easily in the cold. On those mornings where the thermometer out on our front porch showed the temperature was colder that -10°F (-23°C), I had to string the second extension cord out to plug in the engine block heater for Dad’s pickup.

It got cold enough to justify the second extension cord at least a couple dozen times each winter.

Some years ago when on Christmas Eve I called my grandmother who still lives in that small Colorado town, she told me it hadn’t been a terribly cold Christmas thus far. “We only got to 25-below6 once or twice this week!”7

And one of my cousins who was there chimed in that the windchill factor was only “minus fifteen.”

Mom lived in that part of the country for a good 18 years, yet only a year or so in Phoenix was all it took for her to start thinking that what I considered early summer weather required a coat. Not a jacket, but a coat!

People are adaptable. We get used to the environment we’re in (physical, emotional, or cultural), adjusting our comfort levels without concious thought. Adaptability is a good thing. It doesn’t hurt, every now and then, to try to step outside yourself and look at what you’ve learned to accept as normal. In the abstract, are those really good things? Is this really where you want to be? Are you really who you want to be?

Similarly, are the people you disagree with just looking at things from a different perspective? Just because I think it’s madness to wear a coat when the temperature is in the upper 60s doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Not in the way they would be if they were huddled under an umbrella complaining about getting wet when the sun is shining and the precipitation is zero.

It’s important to distinguish between the way a person reacts to facts and the facts themselves.

1. During the long stretch of attending part-time, while living with my grandparents and working several jobs.

2. Our younger half-sister was living with my dad and stepmother back in Utah.

3. Which is a story so convoluted that if I used it in the plot of a novel, critics would universally pan the book as being totally unbelievable.

4. I have been known to be out and about wearing shorts when the temperature is 50°F (10°C)—and sometimes colder.

5. Of course, the last time I was in Texas in the summer, I noticed how many people spent those hot, muggy months inside their homes air-conditioned down to the lower 70s, riding in air-conditioned cars to sit in restaurants or churches air-conditioned down to the upper 60s, so I’m not sure they have as much to laugh about as they think.

6. That’s -25°F, or -30°C.

7. Just today my half-sister, who lives nearby, commented that the high temperature this week had been 6°, or -14°C.

Milking it (Not just for eight maids)

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When I was a teenager, the local community college upgraded the lights for its baseball field. After the first night game, a relatively well-to-do widow who lived next to the field called to complain that the lights kept her awake. They were so bright, her curtains couldn’t keep the light out.

So a school official met with her. At her request, he came back during a game and let her show him how much of her house was impacted by the lights. The school brought in some experts to look things over.

Fairly quickly, the school offered to pay to install new windows and blinds, and to investigate whether trees could be planted on school property to shade her house, or whether a tall barrier would work better. She responded with a letter from her lawyer, explaining that the only acceptable solution was the complete and permanent removal of the lights. The letter also asserted that the additional heat from the lights made the house unbearable as summer came on.

The college countered with an offer of more remediation steps, including paying for a central cooling system. She answered by filing a lawsuit against the school and several state agencies.

Thus began a back and forth of offers and rejections. Various state officials became involved. More accomodations were offered. She countered by adding the names of specific officials to the lawsuit, and recruiting various cranks (who would all be part of the Teabagger movement if they were around today) to stage protests, storm board of trustees meetings, and so on.

When the school offered to buy her house for a specific percentage above assessed value and to pay to move her to her new home, her lawyer suggested she take it. She fired the lawyer and hired a new one, and filed more motions to the court. The state attorney general’s office recommended, with all the time and money already sunk into an attempt to get a settlement, that they not risk the expense of all the suits going to trial. They recommended the school moved to condemn her property for the construction of new facilities (they had been buying up property nearby and building new buildings, already).

The process for condemning land when needed for essential services (which, thanks to the original framers of the state constitution, includes education) is much quicker than any lawsuit. The appeals process is more limited, and the standards for filing a suit to stop condemnation are much higher than that to file an ordinary suit.

By the time I was a student at the college, and Editor of the student paper, the final appeal of the condemnation was in the works. She suddenly changed her tune. Those same cranks who had mobbed meetings and staged protests, insisting that none of the offers the school had made were an acceptable solution, now demanded that the school stop the condemnation process, buy her the new blinds, and plant a line of trees to shade her property from the field lights.

Though the drama seemed to be nearly over, I thought it might be worth a story or two. One of the other student reporters was very keen to interview the widow, so I assigned the story to him. A couple days before deadline, he told me the interview had been awkward, but he would have the story in.

The threatening phone calls started before I’d even seen the story, and long before we printed anything. I’d been a student journalist in high school before coming to college, and I’d gotten threats and harassment before. But they had been mostly from other students. This was, I think, the first time that nearly all the threatening phone calls, messages, and notes had been coming from adults outside the school. And some were very vicious, though, to be fair, none were death threats; we usually only got those in relationship to abortion and art show reviews—yes, art show reviews!

I attended the board of trustees meeting where the last opportunity for the school to back out of the condemnation proceeding took place. Dozens of people showed up to speak on the widow’s behalf. But she wasn’t there. She had never attended any of the meetings. She wasn’t incapable of leaving her house. She had hosted several strategy dinners at a restaurant just outside of town to arrange that crowd at the meeting, for instance.

Every single person who spoke on her behalf mentioned again, and again, how she was such a helpless little old lady. And they repeated the appeal for the school to do the very things they had offered to do many times before starting condemnation procedures.

One of the reasons I believe she never showed up at any public meeting was because in person she didn’t come across as a helpless old lady. The student reporter who had interviewed her said that at first she was very sweet and charming, but he must have said the wrong thing at one point, because she became hostile—not in a screaming or insulting way, he said. Her eyes went from twinkly to glaring like a predator. She made several veiled threats indicating she might be able to cause him some trouble if his story didn’t treat her fairly.

Difficult to play the helpless victim when you’re threatening people, particularly in that cold, quiet, and calculating manner.

Even if I hadn’t know that, the personality type was clear by her legal findings. Every compromise that was offered simply spawned more threats, until finally the bluff is called, and suddenly she was all for compromise. It’s classic bully behavior.

Just like Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle, who spent the summer and fall issuing statements that the passage of the Marriage Equality Referendum on the ballot would force his priests and churches to perform same-sex marriages, and urging all religious people to oppose it for that reason. And now that it has passed, he’s issued a set of instructions to the churches in his archdiocese, quoting the portion of the same law that explicitly exempts churches and ministers from performing same.

Classic bully behavior.

Don’t feel like dancing?

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I don’t get the holiday blues.

I used to feel guilty about that, since I have known many people who do. Then one friend, who suffers from rather severe holiday depression, said that she wanted to hear about other people having a good time. “Just because I can’t enjoy it, doesn’t mean I want no one else to.”

My late husband, Ray, struggled with depression most of his life, but he couldn’t stand people who talked gloom and doom all the time. He was often a very happy person, which seems to contradict the previous sentence. He usually explained depression this way, “It’s not that I’m sad or glum all the time. It’s that, no matter how happy I am right now, no matter how well things are going, there’s this constant certainty deep inside that all of it will be taken away any second, now.” Depression is not a bad mood. Depression is not being down in the dumps. Depression is not a dread that things won’t go well. It is a certainty that bad things will happen. Because “bad things always do happen to me,” or “I don’t deserve good things,” or “I always mess things up,” and so on.

In my early teens a relative on Dad’s side of the family decided to tell me in great detail how many members of Mom’s side of the family had had nervous breakdowns. Back then, “nervous breakdown” was the term medical people would use to describe to laymen various acute mental disorders serious enough to impair a person’s day-to-day functioning, usually including the symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. It was usually assumed to be a temporary event triggered by stress. But this relative (who had almost a 19th Century attitude toward mental illness) was trying to convince me that that side of the family had a congenital mental defect. This whole thing happened as my parents’ marriage was breaking down, and I realized later it was a rather clumsy attempt to get me to tell the divorce judge I wanted to be placed in Dad’s custody.

One of the instances she cited was a great-uncle who served in the Marines in WWII (in the Pacific campaign) and who subsequently had a serious breakdown a few years after the war. Now I recognize that it was a classic instance of untreated post traumatic stress disorder, not necessarily indicative of any genetic pre-disposition.

Throughout my teens and well into my twenties, I would periodically have depressive states that I couldn’t shake for days for no apparent reason. Because of some other weird medical happenings when I was 17, and because one of my siblings was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was evaluated. The verdict was that my issues were ordinary teen-age volatility, perhaps exacerbated by a higher-than-normal testosterone level (no one was more surprised than I at that last bit!).

Years later, when I finally came out of the closet completely, those periodic instances became much less severe. Since learning that men have hormone cycles, too (most just don’t want to admit it), I figured that those incidents had been a combination of ordinary hormones combined with all that anxiety, worry, and stress from trying to keep a big part of myself secret.

Plus, of course, I’m always deliriously (and annoyingly) bouncy and cheerful from Thanksgiving Day through New Year’s. As regular as clockwork, you could say.

After my late husband, Ray, was diagnosed with an incurable illness, as his body deteriorated before my eyes through rounds of chemotherapy and other treatments, those periodic moody periods became bad, again. And since his death, every year for a couple months—from approximately his birthday until the anniversary of his death—I’m moody and slightly more prone to feeling down.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I understand that depression, mood disorders, or simply bad moods are neither simple nor trivial.

But I also understand that they don’t have to be the end of anyone’s story. It is often said that we can’t control how we feel. I think that’s an over simplification. We can’t completely control how we feel, but we can decide how we react to our feelings. We can find ways to channel them, to moderate them, to reinforce the ones we want to keep, and diminish the ones we don’t want.

I’m not saying it is easy. But I am saying we always have a choice. And even when the choices are between unpleasant options, there is always at least one that doesn’t involve lashing out.

So, if you don’t feel like dancing, that’s fine. Don’t dance. But also, don’t bitch at those who do.

Grandma’s cranberry salad

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One of the best parts of my childhood was growing up with a collection of truly kick-ass grandmothers. I say collection because in addition to my two grandmothers, all four of my great-grandmothers were still alive when I was a teen-ager (one lived until I was in my thirties).

My Great-grandma I. taught me how to make egg noodles from scratch, (which is the first step to making the World’s Best Chicken Noodle Casserole {which she also taught me how to make}), and that measuring cups are only guidelines. My Great-grandma S.J. taught me how to crochet, how to make biscuits from scratch, and how to listen in on the neighbors’ conversation on a party line (if you don’t know what a party line is, google it). Great-grandma B. taught me how to make ice tea with so much sugar, it was amazing the stuff would actually pour (and there is a secret, it’s not just about adding more and more sugar, although that’s an important part). I could go on, and on.

But during this time of year there are a couple things I regret never learning from my various grandmothers: I never learned Great-grandma S.J.’s heavy-cream-and-molasses sweet potatoes (I’ve found and tried some recipes, but so far, none come out right), and I never learned how to make Grandma P.’s frozen cranberry salad. I have recreated a close approximation, but it also isn’t quite right.

Every holiday when I get together with that side of the family, someone laments the absence of Grandma’s cranberry salad. I’m not the only one who has attempted to recreate it. Every version I’ve tried has been tasty, but it isn’t the same.

The funny thing is, that unlike most of the other dishes each of them was known for, this one wasn’t a really old recipe. Great-grandma S.J. once told me she’d learned how to make divinity from her own grandmother, for instance. It’s the reason she couldn’t write the recipe down, she’d have to show you. That had been the case with her homemade biscuits. When I make her biscuits I throw ingredients together and mix. If the consistency isn’t right, you add more of one of the ingredients, depending up how the consistency is wrong. It’s hard to describe. You have to experience it.

Grandma P.’s cranberry salad was something she started making when I was an adult. She’d seen it on a cooking show, she said, and just gave it a try. We know it involves canned cranberry sauce (the chunky kind), whipped cream, canned mandarin oranges, and some kind of jell-o. After that, none of us are sure. Or, more truthfully, we had contradictory memories. Some of us insist it had coconut, but others are certain it had marshmallows, for instance.

The thing that I don’t want to say to any of the family: I bet all of our contradictory memories are right. It fits right in with Grandma’s style of cooking. “Oh, I don’t have any shredded coconut? Hmmm, oh here’s some marshmallows, maybe they will be good…”

And probably the real reason it never tastes right, is because it’s missing the most important ingredient. The one we can never replace…

Crying

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I was sitting in my usual seat at practice for the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus. I was tenor section leader at the time, and we had just finished singing a song that I particularly loved. The conductor then said the name of another song, “What’ll I Do?” an Irving Berlin classic from back in the 1920s. I should have known what would happen.

We started singing. I always had a freaky good memory for music, so I always had songs memorized very early in the typical practice cycle, and would start memorizing the other harmony parts to keep my focus. Besides, my favorite choral professor in college had insisted that was the only way to learn.

So I was one of the few people in the chorus who was off book. Good thing, too. The first half of the first refrain is when it started:

What’ll I do
When you are far away
And I am blue
What’ll I do?

The song is about a lost love. And most of the lyrics refer to the loved one being with someone else, now. So it’s a break up song. I had not broken up recently.

But my first husband had died only weeks before.

And I started crying.

I kept singing. A part of me got very stubborn. I knew the music. This was rehearsal for an upcoming concert, one that was going to be dedicated to Ray, in fact (since he had been involved as a volunteer for years, specifically the music librarian the last year and a half before his death).

I wasn’t sobbing. I mostly managed to keep control of my breathing. But the tears were flowing and I couldn’t make them stop. I didn’t want to disrupt the rehearsal by standing up and walking out.

We reached the end of the song. And it was break time, anyway. The conductor told us to be back in 10. I tried to get away. But Adrienne grabbed me.

She had been a super volunteer with the chorus for years, as well. She and Ray had often working together at the back of the room on various things for the chorus while we sang.

She grabbed me. She kissed me, and then she let me finish fleeing the room.

I found out later that most of the folks sitting around me had not realized I was crying while we sang the song. As Mary 1 (we had two Marys singing tenor) told me, “I didn’t know until I saw Adrienne grab you, and saw the tears welling up in her eyes.”

I was standing around outside, cursing myself for having quit smoking just a year or so before—and seriously thinking of walking over to the group of smokers to bum a cigarette. But also knowing how angry Ray would be at me for starting up again on his account. He had never managed to quit, see. Even when his illness and the chemo started destroying lung tissue, he just couldn’t. He had been unbelievably proud of me for quitting. Knowing how disappointed he would be had been the only thing that kept me on the wagon for months after he died.

I pulled myself back together, walked back inside, and finished the second half of the rehearsal.

It’s a little early in the year for me to start getting melancholy about Ray. But only a little. His birthday was two days after mine. So as my birthday gets close, I keep thinking about him. I start being moody. And it doesn’t let up until November, when the anniversary of his death comes around.

I think about him at other times of the year, of course. I don’t always get weepy. Sometimes I smile, or even laugh. I remember it was a bit more than a year after he died when I realized that I would smile when remembering him about as often as I was sad.

But the September through November period is fraught. Ray was a little crazy about anniversaries. He would give me anniversary cards for things like our first date, the first time he made me breakfast, the first time I made him breakfast, the first time I bought him flowers, et cetera, et cetera. I could never remember all of those anniversaries. I knew our first date had been early in September, and when we had our commitment ceremony a few years later, it was on National Coming Out Day, in October, but all those other things blended together, for me.

Even though I don’t remember the exact date of those anniversaries, this time of year reminds me a lot of those firsts. And as we near November, it reminds me of a lot of our lasts (which at the time we didn’t know they were, of course).

It’s been fifteen years, but being awakened by any sound too close to that of a bookcase falling over still sends my heart into panicked super overdrive.

But crying is good. It reminds us that we were loved. That the loss hurts so much should also remind us that we had something precious enough to deserve being cried over. And it should remind us not to take what we have now for granted.

I have a lot of wonderful, talented, loving people in my life. I don’t deserve to have all this wonderfulness in my life. Thank you for letting me be a part of yours.

“Maybe it was the heavy syrup?”

writing, ,

When shopping late-ish last night for ingredients for packing lunches this week, I grabbed a can of the wrong fruit salad. Instead of the version packed in fruit juice, I got the one packed in heavy syrup. Which means the extra sugar absorbed from the high fructose corn syrup negates the healthy value of the fruit fibre.

When I realized my mistake, after getting home, I wasn’t thinking of my blood sugar or related topics. No, the moment I saw the words on the label, from some dark recess of my memory came the sound of an actress in a situation comedy saying, “Maybe it was the heavy syrup!” images from the sitcom flooded my head: the wife saying she had left a note on a car because she lost control of her shopping cart and banged into a stranger’s car; the husband saying she shouldn’t have left the note; an insurance adjustor contacting them with an exorbitant bill; denials, recriminations, meeting with the married couple who owned the car, seeing the car which looks like it was run over by a herd of buffalo; finally, the hilarious scene where two of the characters observe one of the owners of the car doing incredible damage to their own car trying to back out of the driveway.

The problem is, half of those scenes in my memory are in black and white. And in one set of scenes, the protagonists who are being stuck with a bill for damages they didn’t cause are Marine Pfc Gomer Pyle and his Sergeant, and in the other it’s Edith Bunker and her husband, Archie.

Now, the heavy syrup line is only in the All In the Family version of the tale, though it is the most hilarious line in the episode, thanks to the acting talents of Jean Stapleton. But otherwise, the two episodes from two shows made by different companies a decade apart, are incredibly similar.

Many people (some of them dear friends) would take this example as proof that all TV is bad, recycling old plots.

But if recycling plots makes something irredeemably bad, than no story created by humans in the last 10,000 years or more is good.

There are no truly original plots. Humans have been telling each other stories for as long as we’ve been human. Certain neuroscientists and anthropologists have made a very good case that telling stories is the most critical defining trait differentiating humans from other creatures. In all those generations of tales told round the fire, someone has already thought of the cool idea for a tale that just occured to you.

There is no such thing as a unique character. There is no situation which, at least in the abstract, hasn’t been used for a tale. There is no incongruity that hasn’t been exploited as a punchline.

The magic isn’t in the setting, or the situation, or the character, or the nifty plot twist you think no one will see coming. There is a certain alchemy in the combination of ingredients, but even that isn’t it.

It’s the execution.

Can you, the storyteller, evoke the situation in the mind of your audience? Can you make it so compelling that they willingly follow you into the dream, and make it real?

Just as the joke about the heavy syrup wasn’t that original, but the actress made us believe, for just a moment, that her character was so innocent and naive, she believed that the heavy syrup in a single can of fruit could be responsible for all that destruction.

Update, June 2013: Since Jean Stapleton’s death, I’ve been getting a lot of hits on this page with people searching on Ms Stapleton’s name and the about syrup. I suspect you’re looking for a video clip, such as:

Or:

I hate when I do that

Uncategorized,

So I forgot to do something with one of my deliverables at work, and we discovered an ommission. We were running this project a few bodies short in every department, and I was also having to do some tool development that had been budgetted in another project that was put on hold, so things were crazy. Several other people who should have noticed all missed it.

And my fabulous boss, who has almost a psychic ability to see problems before they happen, is on maternity leave.

Fortunately, it was discovered before things went to the customer, and we’re in the midst of fixing it, but I still feel like an idiot for letting this happen.

Things slip by us all the time, but this involved me missing the sort of thing I normally don’t. And, particularly given the medical history of three of my grandparents, any mental lapse always makes at least a small part of me panic. Is this a sign?

Or were we all just overworked, trying to do things faster than usual to get this project out of the way for new projects?

Given I wasn’t the only one who missed it, I realize it is probably the latter. Still.

I hate when I forget things.

Earlier this week, someone either in a conversation or online, mention a music album that I thought I should look into buying. I remember feelinig quite strongly that I would like to have it. I think, vaguely, that it may have been something I owned long ago… Or perhaps it featured a musician I haven’t heard in a long time? I don’t know, but I was certain I should get it, and resolved to look into it at the soonest opportunity.

And for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was.

Or, a few weeks ago at the Brony Dinner my hubby organized, someone mentioned a name which made me go, “If that isn’t a domain name, it ought to be.” and someone else thought they could think ofsome good content for it. Several someones agreed it was a great idea. “It’s not like I don’t own several domains already,” I said. “I ought to snag that one.”

Again, I don’t have the slightest clue what it was.

And I’m not completely certain that it was at the Brony meet. Maybe it was at Writers’ Night? I remember the conversation, but not who said what.

And I had one more example…. That I’ll write about just as soon as I remember what it was. ^_^