Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Quote of the Day
"I see dumb people....they're everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don't even know that they're dumb."
Monday, March 23, 2015
Polly and the Watch House
Polly and the Watch House
They were definitely Merry Janes--you know, little girl party shoes with straps that go across the top of the foot. And they were pink. The best part was even though they were really tiny, you could take them off Polly's feet. And to a 6 year old native Vermont girl who didn't even own a pair of party shoes, life just didn't get any better.
Polly lived in a little plastic round case attached to a wide bright pink watch band. I called it "Polly's watch house." I would look at her and smile as if I knew how to tell time. She had blonde shiny hair, a pink and white polka dotty sundress and a tiny pink hair band that matched those rubber take off/put back on shoes. Sometimes I would flip open the case and take her out for some fresh air, take off her shoes and put them back on...the way little kids do. Taking care. Showing concern. I'd talk to her, too, but inside my head so other kids wouldn't laugh at me. Polly Pocket was, after all, the first doll I ever had and I just loved her. I'd wear her on my left hand so she wouldn't get jostled as I ate dinner or wrote on papers at school. She was a happy clean little thing and she filled my young heart with joy.
Mother told us over and over, "Don't eat those little green apples! They are full of seeds and the seeds are full of arsenic. Arsenic is rat poison!" But did we listen? What did I do? What did we all do? We shimmied up the knotted, snake of an apple tree that looked like it started to grow toward the house, but must have heard MOTHER, and curved itself out and up away from the kitchen window to the garden. It was a crab apple tree and crabs, even back then, had very bad reputations as if they had exoskeletons and creeped sideways, skittled away from you into a dark hole somewhere...So I didn't call them crab apples I called them "baby greens" and popped them into my mouth like gum drops. I would think, "These are not poison. Mother just doesn't want us to spoil our dinner."
Well, it was one of these times that I had shimmed up that snake of a tree like a lumber jack and was eating those apples, and dropping about every other one into Mother's cast off black leather purse when the dinner bell rang. "OH NO!" I cried out and started to position myself to slide down the back side of tree so as not to be noticed. The watch band got caught on the craggy bark and it and Polly fell to the ground. I threw the purse full of apples down and reverse climbed jumping the last feet into the grassy ground. I grabbed Polly, threw her in the purse and took off.
My sisters were in the nearby woods and I had to beat them to the house, but first I had to get rid of the apples or I would be in trouble. I had to think fast so I ran through the garden, into the woods then back down the dusty road, stopping just long enough to unload my hoard by the stone wall. I ran breathless to the house to wash up for dinner.
When I looked at--or for--Polly, my heart stopped beating. "Where is Polly?" I checked the purse I had dropped at my feet. No Polly. Not only was she gone, her watch house was gone too! I couldn't tell anyone so I just ate my dinner in silence waiting to be excused. When I was able to, I ran back up the road and jumped into the waving fiddle heads where I was certain to find Polly and the watch house. Those little greens were everywhere among the field stones, tree bark and sticks. A chipmunk scolded me from a maple tree branch just above my head. No Polly. I searched that evening and the next and many times but never found little Polly. Even after I learned in high school that it takes about a million years for plastic to break down in the environment? I would be walking up the road on one of my daily walks and glance down at that spot. A few times, I even searched around.
I still think about Polly sometimes and her little pink rubber shoes. And I know that she was just one of the many sacrifices of my childhood--not listening to Mother, going against the wishes of the omniscient one. I should have known even back then...nobody gets away with having anything to do with a snake-like tree and eating forbidden apples. I guess I wasn't given the nickname EVE for nothing.
They were definitely Merry Janes--you know, little girl party shoes with straps that go across the top of the foot. And they were pink. The best part was even though they were really tiny, you could take them off Polly's feet. And to a 6 year old native Vermont girl who didn't even own a pair of party shoes, life just didn't get any better.
Polly lived in a little plastic round case attached to a wide bright pink watch band. I called it "Polly's watch house." I would look at her and smile as if I knew how to tell time. She had blonde shiny hair, a pink and white polka dotty sundress and a tiny pink hair band that matched those rubber take off/put back on shoes. Sometimes I would flip open the case and take her out for some fresh air, take off her shoes and put them back on...the way little kids do. Taking care. Showing concern. I'd talk to her, too, but inside my head so other kids wouldn't laugh at me. Polly Pocket was, after all, the first doll I ever had and I just loved her. I'd wear her on my left hand so she wouldn't get jostled as I ate dinner or wrote on papers at school. She was a happy clean little thing and she filled my young heart with joy.
Mother told us over and over, "Don't eat those little green apples! They are full of seeds and the seeds are full of arsenic. Arsenic is rat poison!" But did we listen? What did I do? What did we all do? We shimmied up the knotted, snake of an apple tree that looked like it started to grow toward the house, but must have heard MOTHER, and curved itself out and up away from the kitchen window to the garden. It was a crab apple tree and crabs, even back then, had very bad reputations as if they had exoskeletons and creeped sideways, skittled away from you into a dark hole somewhere...So I didn't call them crab apples I called them "baby greens" and popped them into my mouth like gum drops. I would think, "These are not poison. Mother just doesn't want us to spoil our dinner."
Well, it was one of these times that I had shimmed up that snake of a tree like a lumber jack and was eating those apples, and dropping about every other one into Mother's cast off black leather purse when the dinner bell rang. "OH NO!" I cried out and started to position myself to slide down the back side of tree so as not to be noticed. The watch band got caught on the craggy bark and it and Polly fell to the ground. I threw the purse full of apples down and reverse climbed jumping the last feet into the grassy ground. I grabbed Polly, threw her in the purse and took off.
My sisters were in the nearby woods and I had to beat them to the house, but first I had to get rid of the apples or I would be in trouble. I had to think fast so I ran through the garden, into the woods then back down the dusty road, stopping just long enough to unload my hoard by the stone wall. I ran breathless to the house to wash up for dinner.
When I looked at--or for--Polly, my heart stopped beating. "Where is Polly?" I checked the purse I had dropped at my feet. No Polly. Not only was she gone, her watch house was gone too! I couldn't tell anyone so I just ate my dinner in silence waiting to be excused. When I was able to, I ran back up the road and jumped into the waving fiddle heads where I was certain to find Polly and the watch house. Those little greens were everywhere among the field stones, tree bark and sticks. A chipmunk scolded me from a maple tree branch just above my head. No Polly. I searched that evening and the next and many times but never found little Polly. Even after I learned in high school that it takes about a million years for plastic to break down in the environment? I would be walking up the road on one of my daily walks and glance down at that spot. A few times, I even searched around.
I still think about Polly sometimes and her little pink rubber shoes. And I know that she was just one of the many sacrifices of my childhood--not listening to Mother, going against the wishes of the omniscient one. I should have known even back then...nobody gets away with having anything to do with a snake-like tree and eating forbidden apples. I guess I wasn't given the nickname EVE for nothing.
A String of Pearls to Hold
When I was a child we were very poor and most of the time, especially during the summer times, we really didn't know it. It's strange how you don't know what you don't have until other folks make an issue of it. We were ridiculed on the school bus and other kids made fun of the way we dressed in hand-me-downs and hand-made clothes...that sort of thing.
I, for one, was proud that my mother knew how to sew and loved helping her make wool blankets for all of our beds out of old coats and skirts, lumberjack shirts and caps. Mother read stories and books to us nightly (we had no television) and when she read the whole Laura Ingalls Wilder series to us, I pretended to be a pioneer girl, just like Laura. When she read Little Women, I was Jo. I was Heidi and I was Anne of Green Gables. I reveled in their struggles. I admired their spunk. They were all poor and almost proud of it= they were growing up and developing their character. I didn't care what other kids said any more than they did. But some of my siblings did care what other kids said and were embarrassed about the way we lived and where we lived.
What I knew that only probably the more sneaky of my siblings knew, was that we might have been poor but our mother certainly wasn't. Upstairs in Lorette's closet, there were three plastic garment bags full of furs and lovely black shoes. And in among the slips and nylons of Mother's stocking drawer, she had a beautiful ruby ring with matching necklace and screw-on earrings. We played "tea party" with real china and dug in the mud with silver spoons with a "B" monogrammed on them for Brown. And I knew where everything was hidden. So when I was sent to my parents' room for my daily naps, many times I would slide off their double bed and sneak over to my mother's oak bureau with crystal knobs and I would pull pull pull until the bottom sticky drawer gave way, use that drawer as my step and pull the slip drawer open just enough to squeeze my tiny hand in. Then I would take out the navy blue white trimmed boxes, sit on the floor, open them up and pretend that the ruby jewelry trimmed in gold was mine. I would sing a little song to myself "ruby and gold, ruby and gold, I'm young now, but when I'm old, ruby and gold, ruby and gold" and when I heard someone outside my parents' bedroom door, I'd come back to reality and put away the boxes, or if I didn't have time, slide them under the bed until I had a chance to put them back properly.
Once my sister, Jerri, caught me with the boxes and said, "We aren't allowed to look through Mother's things. I'm telling!" and I said I knew that but I couldn't help myself because they were so pretty. Ruby was our Mother's birthstone, or so we thought. This meant a lot to us that we somehow held her special jewelry in our hands. It was the color of our hearts, we told ourselves. Maybe Dad had given those jewels to her when they got married. Maybe it was our Grammie Brown's jewelry and Mother stole it from her or maybe she was keeping it for her because their house on the Stagecoach Road might get robbed by a stagecoach bandit...
Once when we were digging around in our mother's drawer, we found the usual, silk stockings, hair pins, baby diaper pins, lone guarder clips, a few lovely scarves, a black velvet hat with a black fishnet veil attached, slips and tops, we felt something bigger and thinner than the boxes that held the jewelry. Jerri took it out and opened it up. "Ahhhhh!" we both said in a hush. It was an off-white string of pearls with an unusual double latch in the back. It was attached to the interior of the velvety blue box on two sides, so it remained as if it was actually always sitting around someone's neck. This piece of jewelry was the best thing we ever uncovered in the whole house! We didn't dare take it out of the box. We just stared at it until we finally had to snap the box shut and pretend to nap.
So, after that, anytime someone on the school bus or in the school yard would taunt us or call out names to us, Jerri and I used our secret code. We would look at each other and say, "ruby and gold, string of pearls to hold" and laugh that laugh of children who know that childhood is made up of crazy moments as well as magical ones. Mean kids as well as fun kids...and childhood only lasts a short while but adulthood? Oh, adulthood lasts forever!
I, for one, was proud that my mother knew how to sew and loved helping her make wool blankets for all of our beds out of old coats and skirts, lumberjack shirts and caps. Mother read stories and books to us nightly (we had no television) and when she read the whole Laura Ingalls Wilder series to us, I pretended to be a pioneer girl, just like Laura. When she read Little Women, I was Jo. I was Heidi and I was Anne of Green Gables. I reveled in their struggles. I admired their spunk. They were all poor and almost proud of it= they were growing up and developing their character. I didn't care what other kids said any more than they did. But some of my siblings did care what other kids said and were embarrassed about the way we lived and where we lived.
What I knew that only probably the more sneaky of my siblings knew, was that we might have been poor but our mother certainly wasn't. Upstairs in Lorette's closet, there were three plastic garment bags full of furs and lovely black shoes. And in among the slips and nylons of Mother's stocking drawer, she had a beautiful ruby ring with matching necklace and screw-on earrings. We played "tea party" with real china and dug in the mud with silver spoons with a "B" monogrammed on them for Brown. And I knew where everything was hidden. So when I was sent to my parents' room for my daily naps, many times I would slide off their double bed and sneak over to my mother's oak bureau with crystal knobs and I would pull pull pull until the bottom sticky drawer gave way, use that drawer as my step and pull the slip drawer open just enough to squeeze my tiny hand in. Then I would take out the navy blue white trimmed boxes, sit on the floor, open them up and pretend that the ruby jewelry trimmed in gold was mine. I would sing a little song to myself "ruby and gold, ruby and gold, I'm young now, but when I'm old, ruby and gold, ruby and gold" and when I heard someone outside my parents' bedroom door, I'd come back to reality and put away the boxes, or if I didn't have time, slide them under the bed until I had a chance to put them back properly.
Once my sister, Jerri, caught me with the boxes and said, "We aren't allowed to look through Mother's things. I'm telling!" and I said I knew that but I couldn't help myself because they were so pretty. Ruby was our Mother's birthstone, or so we thought. This meant a lot to us that we somehow held her special jewelry in our hands. It was the color of our hearts, we told ourselves. Maybe Dad had given those jewels to her when they got married. Maybe it was our Grammie Brown's jewelry and Mother stole it from her or maybe she was keeping it for her because their house on the Stagecoach Road might get robbed by a stagecoach bandit...
Once when we were digging around in our mother's drawer, we found the usual, silk stockings, hair pins, baby diaper pins, lone guarder clips, a few lovely scarves, a black velvet hat with a black fishnet veil attached, slips and tops, we felt something bigger and thinner than the boxes that held the jewelry. Jerri took it out and opened it up. "Ahhhhh!" we both said in a hush. It was an off-white string of pearls with an unusual double latch in the back. It was attached to the interior of the velvety blue box on two sides, so it remained as if it was actually always sitting around someone's neck. This piece of jewelry was the best thing we ever uncovered in the whole house! We didn't dare take it out of the box. We just stared at it until we finally had to snap the box shut and pretend to nap.
So, after that, anytime someone on the school bus or in the school yard would taunt us or call out names to us, Jerri and I used our secret code. We would look at each other and say, "ruby and gold, string of pearls to hold" and laugh that laugh of children who know that childhood is made up of crazy moments as well as magical ones. Mean kids as well as fun kids...and childhood only lasts a short while but adulthood? Oh, adulthood lasts forever!
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