My Favorite Gift -- An Empty Box

Tomorrow we're taking down the Christmas tree and putting all the ornaments away for another year. Among the gifts I will pack up is a tiny empty box that gets a prominent spot under the tree or on the mantel every year. It's a three-inch red and white polka dotted cube, with a tag that reads "To Frankie, Love Mother" in my mother's hand. I don't remember what small gift it once held -- probably something mom picked up at a yard sale or an antique mall, or maybe a little jar of jam or something similar. I don't even know why I originally kept it. It probably just got packed up at some point with all of the gift bags and bows. But after mom died almost a decade ago, this bit of emphemera suddently became important. Each year, I have a gift from my mom under my tree. It makes me smile and it makes me sad, the blend of emotions we all have to get used to after we lose someone we loved. Read more!

Applauding at Auctions

As much as I dislike shopping, I love browsing at garage sales and junky "antique malls," and going to auctions. We have quite a few auction companies in town, including one "high end" house that alternates between really expensive stuff and regular monthly auctions featuring things that normal people might buy. A month or so ago, we went one of the chi-chi auctions.

We observed a ritual that never ceases to baffle me: applauding when something goes for a high price. There was a cool mid-century coffee table by some designer I have never heard of that inspired a sedate bidding frenzy, both from people in the audience and bidders on the phone. The table started at something like $10,000 and by the time it was all over, it went for an amazing $40,000. As soon as the final gavel fell, the crowd broke out in spontaneous applause. Now, this wasn't some sophisticated Paris or New York audience dressed in haute couture. There wasn't a lovely spy lurking in the background, like in the movies. It was a rather frumpy looking mid-western crowd, with lots of jeans, sweat shirts, and baseball caps. Few of them looked like they could spend $40,000 on a table (although looks can be deceiving, I know.) Nonetheless, they all applauded.

Exactly what, I wonder, are people applauding in such a situation? The object itself, which has achieved such a high value? The designer or artist, probably long dead, whose work has inspired such a frenzy of desire? The auction house, for its foresight in attracting the right crowd? Or are they applauding Mr. or Ms. Deep Pockets, that wealthy person who can afford to spend $40,000 on a table, as if to say "Bravo! Way to go for earning so much money that you can afford to spend so much! We admire you! We envy you!"

Maybe its a combination of all of these things. I don't know.

But I do know that we didn't get any applause for our little purchases, which totaled $150. Even so, I was pretty happy with them.

First, we bought four mid-century dining chairs that look great with our 50's dining table. I found the table and original chairs about 15 years ago at a garage sale for $90. The chairs, never the sturdiest, have gotten rickety, and one broke when a 300-pound friend sat in it. (I felt so bad for her! She wasn't hurt, but it must have been humiliating.) The new chairs more or less match the table and are very heavy and sturdy. I love the interesting lines they have ... you can't tell from this photo, but the wood on the sides creates a little triangle shape, and the back is all wood. At $12.50 apiece, I think they were a steal, even though I'll need to recover them.



And, I could not resist buying a set of Russel Wright Modern American dinnerware. My mother had these dishes in this exact color when I was growing up. They are sleek, cool, and incredibly mod. Plus, they remind me of mom. She never had much money to spend on herself or home decor, but she managed to decorate our tiny house with style. These dishes will remind me of her every time we use them. I plan to use them as our every day dishes. I was pleased to get the set for an amazing $100. It's not a full set-- there are 8 dinner and bread plates, and 12 cups and saucers. To have a complete set, I'll need to find the serving bowls and a few other pieces. But that will be a fun endeavor -- something to look for at junk sales! Read more!

Sunday Book Notes -- Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe

I'm inaugurating a new weekly feature -- Sunday Book Notes. If I counted all the objects I own, the vast majority would be books. I've lived a lot of my life in worlds spun of words, so much so that when I was a kid, I often couldn't remember if I had read something, dreamed it, or lived it. Plus, I am lying in bed sick (on Memorial Day weekend! No Fair!), so I've had a lot of time to read this week.

Fittingly enough, I picked this book up at a cafe. Like the one in the book, the cafe is old-fashioned and a little disheveled, serving up unmatched tables and delicious apple pie in a sunny corner building that once was a hardware store. One wall is covered with bookcases. You are welcome to borrow or donate a book. So, when I saw Fried Green Tomatoes on the shelf, I took it home.

I've wanted to read Fried Green Tomatoes since the movie came out in 1991. I loved this quiet little film, which alternates between the story of Eleanor, a fat, unfulfilled, middle-aged housewife in the late 1980s and the tale of lesbian couple Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison in Depression-era Alabama, which Eleanor hears from an old woman she visits in a nursing home every Sunday.

Now, a strange thing happens when you've seen (and liked) a movie before you've read the book: It is almost impossible not to imagine the actors -- their voices, expressions, hair and clothes -- when you read the book. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when the actors capture the characters as beautifully as they did in Fried Green Tomatoes. Kathy Bates is perfect as the frumpy housewife who discovers her spine, and Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary Louise Parker are just as good as tomboy Idgie and the gentle, doe-eyed Ruth who steals her heart. So, as I've been reading the book, I've been seeing and hearing these actresses in my head. (That said, I always try to read the book first. I pity kids whose first exposure to The Lord of the Rings or other treasures is through the movie, no matter how wonderful the movie may be. But I digress.)

While the film captures the essence of the novel, it does gloss rather daintily over the lesbian relationship at its core. The book's matter-of-fact depiction of this life-long love affair is one of its charms. When 16-year-old Idgie, the fierce "bee charmer" who hunts and fishes instead of going to school, falls for "sweet to the bones" Ruth, it doesn't seem to faze anyone. Years later, after Idgie rescues a pregnant Ruth from her abusive husband, Idgie's father gives her $250 and tells her to start a business so she can feed her growing family. There's no sense that they must explain or justify themselves. It is just the way it is. Whistle Stop accepts them into the fold, just as they accept and expect segregation.

Flagg portrays the violence and racisim of the South as matter-of-factly as she does the love affair between Idgie and Ruth. Idgie and Mary are quietly subversive, selling barbeque out the back door of their cafe to blacks in spite of threats from the Ku Klux Klan, among other details I won't give away in case you plan to read the book.

The fictional world of Whistle Stop, Alabama feels real. You have the sense of observing lived lives. The book captures, in a way the film cannot, the full fabric of this little town, through vignettes of people, black and white, most of whom live on the wrong side of the tracks. It's not just Idgie and Ruth's story, but the story of their son Stump, of hobo Smokey Lonesome, Eva the town whore, Buddy, Sipsey, Big George, Onzel and Naughty Bird, with all their joys and human failings. When the trains stop coming through Whistle Stop and people start to move away, when the decades roll on by until the cafe is replaced by a McDonald's, I feel a pang of loss as strong as that when a beloved character dies.

Despite its often rather grim subject matter, this book is full of its laugh-out-loud humor. But, whenever I'm tempted to lapse into an idealized vision of a simpler time of practical jokes and tales tales and scenes of big extended families laughing over Easter egg hunts, Flagg brings me up short with a young man being beaten to death in a tar-paper Hooverville or an ominous visit from men in white sheets.

Perhaps I'm also drawn to the book because it sheds light on my grandparents and parents. Mom and dad spent their childhoods in hardscrabble Oklahoma during the Depression, and Whistle Stop, Alabama reminds me of pictures of my grandmothers standing in their faded cotton dresses in front of sagging frame houses, babies draped casually over their arms.

I also enjoy the disjointed nature of the book, which shifts time periods and narrative perspective from one short chapter to another. We may hear about an episode first from a brief item in the chatty local newspaper, then observe that same event from an omniscent perspective in the next chapter. As I a writer struggling with structure in my memoir, I'm fascinated by Flagg's deft handling of this technique. I wonder if she wrote the book chronologically, then moved the chapters around afterward?

I suppose I ought to give the some stars or thumbs up or something. I'm tempted to use tomatoes, in honor of the book inaugurating this weekly feature, but that's already been done. So how about pies? Every time Evelyn visits Ninny in the nursing home, she takes her pie or cake or biscuits or some kind of tasty treat, and reading this book made me hungry.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: 4 slices (out of a possible 5).
Read more!

Piles of Pillowcases

I used the line “from pill bottles to pillowcases” in my bio blurb because I liked the alliteration and rhythm. I never considered what would be involved in actually finding something interesting to say about pillowcases. But regular readers know I am rarely at a loss for words. So here, as promised is a post on pillowcases. (Yes, I am literally airing my linen in public.)

We have 3 kinds: The ones we inherited or held onto from our childhoods, college days, and first marriages; the ones that go with “bed in a bag” sets; and an enormous quantity of orphans that don’t match anything and seem to reproduce with abandon in the dark privacy of the linen closet. We put most of them to good use. We have 6 or 7 pillows on our bed and never have enough matching pillowcases. We compete over who gets the 4 down pillows, which we call "numphies." (Embarrassing detail of the day. Like most couples, we have a private language.) There's nothing as satisfying as sinking your weary head into a numphy, especially one stolen on the sly from a sleeping partner.

We have two bedspreads (with matching shams and pillowcases) that we rotate. The purple and maroon one is the most glam. I’m usually not much for frou-frou, but purple is my favorite color, and when I saw this set on sale, I had to have it. With its mix of rich velvet and gauzy chenille it looks like something you would find in Cinderella’s castle after she marries the prince. If she was ever the victim of an economic downturn, she could even turn it into an elegant gown a la Scarlett O'Hara. I got an incredible bargain on it…you might even say it was a steal. The department store (Macy’s) was having a half-off sale, along with a coupon for another 20% off. When I took the bed-in-a-bag set to the register, it rang up for about $120 less than it should have. I don't remember exactly what the problem was, but I pointed the mistake out to the clerk. Her response was of the huffy “we don’t make mistakes, this is the right price, don’t make me do any extra work” variety. I tried again,and her attitude became even ruder. So I smiled and accepted the price, getting my $400 bed set for around $70.

Frink has been most gracious in tolerating its frou-frou-osity, but recently he found this Frank Lloyd Wright inspired duvet cover and pillowcases online. The only problem is that the cats like to sleep on it, and their hair shows up quite starkly against the white. Thank goodness it’s washable.

My favorites pillowcases are ones we don’t use often: the 100% cotton cases that were decorated with cross-stitching, embroidery, rick-rack, and ribbons by my mother and grandmother. They are to linens what tuna casserole is to comfort food. Laying my head down on one of these old-fashioned pillowcases softened by decades of wear is a delicious feeling, like being tucked in on a cool summer night or wearing my feet-pajamas to the drive-in movies. Read more!

A Terrible Faux Pas

This is the story of three gifts.

As I write my memoir, I have been struggling to understand my mother's depression and the seething anger that percolated beneath the surface of our family when I was growing up.

Recently, I called my older sister, hoping she might be able to fill in some of the gaps.

“Do you think dad had an affair?” I asked, not expecting an affirmative answer, but not at all surprised when it came.

"Yes."

“What makes you think so?”

“I saw them kissing.”

“Was it Evelyn?”

“Yes. It was when mom took you to the hospital in Denver.” When I was six or seven that is, when I got my doll, Orangeeta.

I suppose I have always wondered about dad and Evelyn, although I rarely allowed these thoughts to become active. Evelyn was a beautiful blonde in her twenties who lived with her parents across the street. I remember a huge smile and bubbly laugh, tight stirrup pants and sweaters. She and my father would go skiing together – my mother never learned to ski - and my father always seemed younger when she was around. Dad liked to joke and be the life of the party, and Evelyn provided an enthusiastic audience.

Somehow it never occurred to me to consider how mom must have felt about this woman. I naively assumed that Evelyn was equally a friend of my mother. Once, when I was 8 or so, I used my allowance to buy mom a picture frame for her birthday. Mom seemed to like it, but her smile froze when I explained that I had chosen the frame because the model in the cardboard picture looked like Evelyn. I was hurt and puzzled when mom shakily asked why I would give her such a thing.

Now, after having experienced the crushing rejection of my own husband’s affair with a woman he found more attractive, I can begin to understand the source of my mother’s pain and bitterness. Later, Evelyn married and moved to Houston, where she and her husband, a professor, were murdered in their bed by a disgruntled graduate student. How did my father grieve this loss? What looks and unspoken words passed between my parents when they heard this news? Whatever they were, my parents kept them private, their arguments, if not their hostility, buried well beneath the surface.

Although I'm sure mom didn't keep score, in my mind, the other gift offsets the terrible faux pas of presenting my mother with a likeness of her husband's pretty mistress.

This gift is also a picture, a cheesy bas relief of a colonial style kitchen, molded in plastic copper. I seem to remember spending 49 cents on it at the five and dime on Main Street when I was quite young. (Allowances were much smaller in those days.) When mom opened the present, I could tell not only that she liked it, but that she was visibly touched.

Much later, when I was an adult, she told me that this tacky picture was one of her favorite gifts. She said that even when I was a little girl, it showed that I paid attention, that I understood her style, and tastes.

This ticky tacky plastic picture hangs in my kitchen. It doesn't match anything, but it reminds me of my mother and the prized gift she once gave to me. Read more!

Preserver of Posterity or Pack-rat?

Putting together my recent post about my small collection of Barbie doll clothes got me thinking about what you do with things like these. I have a shoebox filled with the Barbie clothes my mother made for me some 40-odd years ago, along with several doll dresses and a tiny quilt sewn by my grandmother (just like the full-size ones she made for her children's beds.) I even have a red & white cap and skirt my great-grandmother knitted for my mom when she was a little girl.

I didn't give them to my nieces when they were young enough to actually play with them because they're just too precious and delicate. I suppose I'll give them to the girls when they grow up and have daughters...but of course, the doll clothes will be even older and more delicate then, and those children won't be able to play with them either. So what do you do with things like these?

It seems downright wrong to get rid of such family heirlooms. So, after I took the photos for this post, I put them back in their shoebox in the linen closet. And there they will sit, rarely seeing the light of day, except when they will be passed on so they can inhabit another generation's closets. Which doesn't seem quite right either.

Frink says I should put them on the cat. But I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Frink loves me is precisely because I'm not the kind of person who dresses the cats. (Even though, perversely, I love the website Stuff on My Cat.)

Anyone out there have any better ideas? Read more!

The Art of Dressing Barbie

My mother was an excellent seamstress, a skill I never had the talent, interest, or patience to acquire. (It took me all year and many tantrums to finish the gathered apron in my junior high home-ec class, when all the other girls finished that, the peasant blouse, and the gathered skirt to boot.) My mother, though, could turn a bolt of cloth into anything, from a fitted suit with flattering darts and covered buttons to pleated draperies and matching bedspreads.

But mom's special talent -- or at least the one I valued most when I was a child -- was Barbie doll clothes. My sisters and I had the most fashionable Barbies in town, outfitted in exquisite hand-sequined gowns, sleek satin sheaths, and hand-knit sweaters fastened with buttons no bigger than a lentil. She even made plaid pajamas and a robe for Ken. (This was long before Barbie dumped Ken for an Australian surfer dude, who wouldn't be caught dead in flannel pjs.)

My Barbie’s favorite party gown was a blue strapless number with scalloped flounces held up with tiny rosebuds. If the evening was chilly, she could throw on the matching satin-lined coat, which closed with miniature pearl buttons. (I got rid of my Barbies years ago, so my nieces gave me one from their vast collection to model the dress, which, like most of the other clothes, is now sadly worse for the wear.)

I always felt smugly sorry for my friends, whose Barbies had to wear ill-fitting, poorly-stitched store-bought clothes. Later, after my mother began selling some of her creations, other girls in town also could dress their Barbies in hand-made originals.

Mom sold the outfits so she could buy my father gifts with her own money. These gifts were usually things like boxes of chocolate covered cherries (dad's favorite candy) or bottles of Old Spice, but sometimes she used her earnings to buy him original oil paintings. I have one of these paintings, a landscape by Colorado artist Lyman Byxby. Mom paid $40 for it. My sister has the other paintings, including my favorite, a bold, abstract city scape. I wonder how many tiny dresses, how many hours spent cutting and stitching, these paintings represent.

For much of my life, I was dismissive of my mother's talents. I could justify my behavior by claiming that I saw her skills as mere "women's work" at a time when I was all about rebelling against the status quo in general and my family in particular. And there is some truth to that. But this explanation feels a bit too easy, a bit too neat. The messy reality is that for most of my life I was not a nice person. I was self-centered and tempermental, a bridezilla without the excuse of a wedding. And my mother was the most frequent target of my anger.

Even in Baby Boomer America, the land of perpetual adolescence, it took me longer than most to grow up. Looking back at the younger me isn't easy, and as I write my memoir, I often find myself sinking into depression. But these well-used doll clothes have made me feel a bit better. They have reminded me of several long-forgotten conversations I had with my mother. I don't remember the details, but I do remember letting her know how much I cherished the doll clothes, the fanciful birthday cakes, and the other things she made for me. And for that I am very grateful. Read more!

The American Woman Cooks

Just opening The American Woman's Cookbook reminds me of my mother. On the title page she dashed off a quick recipe for Kaye's Cooked Frosting, which conjures memories of elaborate birthday cakes shaped like the Easter Bunny or tin drums with candy cane striping. Food was the centerpiece of my family's life. It was how we celebrated occasions and one of the only ways my mother felt comfortable showing love. Mom was a traditional Southern cook, serving up mountains of fried chicken (cut from a whole bird), vats of buttery mashed potatoes, and stuffing made from scratch. Every Christmas we had a pink concoction called "winter strawberry salad," made with miniature marshmallows, whole cranberries, and pecans, which mom would crack and pick out while watching tv. Her specialty was breads and deserts, which for some reason had names that didn't quite fit. Her "steamed puddings" were actually tiny, raisin-filled muffins that we devoured like popcorn, and her Key Lime Pie used lemons, not limes.

Mom's favorite cookbook was published in 1942. It is a fascinating artifact of a lost way of life, with chapters like "Wartime Cookery," "The School Lunch," and "How to Feed a Family of Five on $15.00 a week" (Tip #1? "Buy Carefully"). In the "Useful Facts About Milk" section, there's no mention of 2% or 1%, but we do learn how to pasteurize our own milk and that Vitamin D milk is a "new way to get this important vitamin." The book is formal and rather dictatorial in its instructions on how American women should care for their families, and it offers all sorts of helpful hints for those struggling to make ends meet in the face of food shortages and rationing.

In the "Useful Facts About Food" chapter, we are told that "every bit of fat from scraps of meat, bacon drippings, roasts, soups and poultry may be made into a mixture useful for general cooking purposes." I well remember the dented tin bacon grease canister that sat on our counter and the pots of chicken necks and gizzards boiling on the stove. (Page 170: "Never discard the bones of turkey or chicken as they always will make a delicious soup.") Mom's chicken soup was loaded with chunks of carrots and celery and wide egg noodles. This soup is one of the few meat dishes I recall actually enjoying, and if a bowl were put in front of me today, I'm not sure I could resist eating some.

I've been a vegetarian for 32 years (actually, what I call a "hypocrititarian," since I still eat fish.) I thought I had it rough in the days before frozen veggie burgers and soy crumbles, but this old book's chapter on "Vegetarian Dishes" reminds me of how hard it must have been to be a vegetarian in the 1940s. There are recipes for Peanut Balls, Peanut Scrapple, Peanut Butter Cutlets, Baked Peanuts, Peanut Souffle, Peanut Chops, Peanut Loaf (not to be confused with Nut Loaf). God forbid if you had a peanut allergy! For some variety, they offered up Chestnut Croquettes and "mock sausage" made from Lima beans, along with the more mundane spaghetti and macaroni.

The cookbook includes more than just recipes, covering the whole gamut of food-related activities, from shopping to entertaining. There's a chapter on china and table settings, complete with charts and stern instructions on what is proper. "Breakfast china is gay, sprightly; color runs rampant upon it; often whole gardens shine on its face. But it should not be used for a dinner, which demands fine china of exquisitely fine design. Luncheon is still another thing. Its china may vary as the season -- or as the whim of the hostess."

Mom had several sets of china. Our everyday dishes were premiums from the gas station or laundry detergent boxes; the one I remember most was the wheat china, with its golden sprigs of amber grain in the center, which came in boxes of Duz detergent. (I recently saw a set of these at a junk store and was barely able to resist buying it.) Her "whimsical" china was pink Russel Wright pottery, and her fine china was a delicately patterned floral, by Haviland. Mom bought the Haviland and a monogramed set of silverware at a yard sale in the sixties. Her own family had been poor -- there was no china to inherit -- and while we were comfortable, I don't think my mother could have afforded an extravagance like new fine china. (I have vivid memories of this estate sale, because I made my first-ever yard sale purchase that day -- a wooden bobblehead Japanese doll. Just a month or so ago, I found two more dolls like it, but smaller, which I couldn't resist buying.)

The chaper on entertaining is called "The Friends Who Honor Us." It cautions that while many families"see in their social life an opportunity to train their children in the social graces and amenties....Many guests are not interested in children and some are annoyed by them." And, beware the folly of Entertaining Without a Maid: "There are distinct limits to what should be attempted for pleasant and dignified results." For casual entertainment and family get-togethers, the book recommends the Rumpus Room, made possible by "the retirement of solid fuels from domestic consumption [which] has resulted in the rearrangement of basement space" (ie, the coal cellar.) The Rumpus Room was not only an ideal spot for hamburger picnics and games, but for the "taffy pulls and popcorn-ball parties of the oldsters' childhood."

The most interesting chapter is the one on "Wartime Cookery," which instructs the American woman on how to do without, including lessons on "The Return of the Soup Kettle" and "The Kitchen Garden," recipes for deserts without sugar, and tips on coping with metal shortages by breaking the reliance on "foods prepared outside the home to be purchased by her in tin cans." This chapter provides a view of a long-lost time and place, when a whole nation suffered together from the effects of war, and also helps me understand my mother's obsession with stockpiling food.

Mom was born in 1927 in Oklahoma, growing up during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, marrying (in a suit, with a corsage instead of a bouquet) not long after World War II. She spent much of her youth on a farm, earning money to help her family by picking green beans at 10 cents a pound for the local canning factory. She learned to put up her own food, especially fruits and jams, and she filled shelf after shelf with homemade pickles long after we could afford store-bought. My mother used to drive my sisters and me crazy with her excessive, obssessive shopping, especially for fabrics and groceries. If she found a good sale on donuts at the day-old bread store, she would buy 30 or 40 boxes and put them in her freezer. She continued doing this even after she and dad had divorced and we kids had grown and moved away. Sometimes we laughed about "mom's department store" -- whatever you needed, you could find it at mom's (she was generous and always happy to give things away). More often, we nagged and harangued her about her overflowing cabinets and freezer. Mom's cookbook helps put it in perspective. My mom learned early how to scrimp and save, how to eke the most meals possible out of a single cut of beef, how to lay out patterns to use every square foot of cloth (saving the scraps for quilts), and especially how to stock up when things were cheap and plentiful. In these hard times, maybe such skills are not so old-fashioned and irrelevant after all. Read more!