The Seriously First Gaga
I read that Lady Gaga may sue an ice cream parlor for naming its breast milk ice cream Baby Gaga. She did not invent that name. Sister’s first baby doll was called Gaga a half century ago.
Baby Gaga The First did not have an easy start. One night the doll was left outside. She was found dirty, her frilly dress torn, a foot mangled. “Dogs or a varmint,” Mother speculated.
Sister, who had been a volatile little one, cleaned and bandaged Gaga, placing her in a bed fashioned from a box in the dining room. Silent little patients soon lined the wall in the room where Sister had committed many mealtime tantrums, throwing herself on the floor screaming while the family pretended not to notice. When not busy with doctoring duties, Sister tirelessly made us “register” on a pad of paper each time we passed through the room.
With time, the doll hospital faded away. As a grownup, Sister worked for a doctor, administering EEG’s. She married her high school sweetheart, became a government bureaucrat, and had a child. She kept getting promoted, but didn’t like the work and retired in her 40s. After a couple of years, she took a parttime job at a hospital to keep herself busy, working with patients going into day surgery, their families and the medical professionals.
She was in demand, working more than she intended. But she has been happier than I’ve ever seen her. The lesson, I think, is that early passions sometimes can be the most enduring.
Baby Gaga is still with us. Sister’s first patient rests in a home filled with antiques not far from the hospital. The doll is dressed in a soft gown and reclines in a vintage wooden cradle at the foot of a winding staircase. Most of the time, her mutilated foot is covered by a fine blanket. Her expression is serene. And her name is her own, forever.
Speaking of weird
The Iowan remembers numbers. Someone will say, “What was my address and my number on the Upper West Side in 1985?” He remembers. “Okay, what about Jill’s parents’ number when we were living in London in 1977?” Same result. The funny thing is the Iowan is not very good at math. I do better calculating the everyday stuff in my head.
But it gets weirder. As a grade schooler, Mr. Boudreaux had a password for something I was helping him with, an online computer game maybe, I can’t remember exactly. I asked him for the password. He reeled off a long list of numbers. “Are you reading those from somewhere?” I asked him. No. Okay, make up another one. He dictated something, which I wrote down, then had him repeat the sequence. He did it easily. “Are you seeing those numbers in your mind?” I asked. He said no, it was just something he could do. This aren’t special numbers, birthdays, etc. His laptop, for instance, has a password that is a long list of random numbers.
I can barely remember my own telephone number and address. I’m not sure I have a specialty. How about you?
Jungle Cats
This is the sister-in-law’s jungle cat Sugarfoot. He actually is the “sweetest” of her batch. Still, no petting. When SIL and her husband moved from Arizona to Chicago, they had problems finding a vet who would do home visits. The cats are big and don’t do well in cages. You also don’t want to be hauling them through the hallways and foyers of Chicago condo buildings.
The Iowan says it is spooky to spend the night there. You have to lock the bedroom doors because one of the cats can twist open the doorknob. Then, when you leave the room at night, “their glowing eyes follow you. Like they’re looking at their midnight snack.”
Dear Clusterflock
Little Runt was not a cuddly cat, but he would follow me anywhere. We were a bit of a freak show. I would put on rubber boots and walk through large puddles to demonstrate his odd loyalty. He would pick up his white-socked feet in a dainty way, then boldly jump through the water. I loved him more, even, than his mother Whitey, our first cat, who was named for her snow color.
Little Runt was pure tomcat. He started going on rambles, short in duration at first, then longer. Finally, he just didn’t come home. I couldn’t believe it. I was sure he would show up one day, especially because I kept seeing a “false cat” out of the corner of my eye. Some people believe in animal “guides” from the spirit world. So maybe Little Runt has been here all along. It’s fun to consider.
Were you ever the object of incredible pet devotion?
P.S. The photo just reminds me of Little Runt, the smallest kitten in a litter who grew into a large gray tabby. The photo shows my Chicago sister-in-law’s pet jungle cats.
Mr. Boudreaux
Mr. B. enjoys a cookout on a fine summer day. This boy needs a bayou and lots of music and dancing. He doesn’t know it yet. Someday.
Love
This is a vintage photo of the Iowan. He doesn’t remember when or where it was taken. I didn’t know him then, but have the strange feeling I was there. I am in love with the picture — with this man’s beauty, his strong hands, the quiet, the flannel shirt, the VW, and that big blue Iowa sky.
Country Church
I am fascinated with a tiny church that hugs the bend of a narrow country road in my hometown, in Hazel Green, AL. If you were driving too fast, under the influence, maybe, and looked away, you might drive right into the building. There are no windows. Not one single window.
When I stopped to take the photos, a man at a house nearby was wrangling leaves with a gasoline-powered leaf blower. He never looked up. I was nervous because I heard warning barks from dogs. I saw one big white dog, who seemed to be taking his cues from an invisible dog leader. The big dog never left the fence-less yard.
As I drove away, I finally saw the alpha dog. It was a dachshund, who chased my car for a bit. But again, the dog never left the yard. Maybe the surprising location of that tiny church has a taming influence on all who pass that way.
A White Christmas in Hazel Green
Amigo and I were surprised to wake up today and find snow on the ground. The precipitation, about three inches in my hometown in north Alabama, was said to be the biggest snowfall on Christmas Day in the state, ever. People lost their minds, of course, driving through the fields in ATV’s, making snow angels until they were half frozen, building snowmen, and just running around screaming in disbelief.
Amigo, my sister’s “snooty horse,” and I were more jaded about the snow. Still, it was fun to see.
The Birds That Bind
I never knew the old man’s name. The one whose strange, sweet birds glow at the top of my Christmas tree.
I don’t why I answered the ad. It popped from a page of email posts. Freecycle, Christmas ornaments. Something caught my eye. The syntax was formal, old-fashioned. It struck me as masculine, although I couldn’t say why. I surprised myself, I asked for them.
I drove to the house. He was loading boxes into a car. He wore all brown, cardigan, slacks, felt fedora, glasses. His mission was obvious. He was closing down the house after many years, turning it over to strangers.
I told him I was Freecycle Cece, there for the ornaments. He handed over a small box with shaking hands. I saw the birds on top. I remember gasping. I had never seen anything like them. He was silent, but he smiled. He had much work ahead.
I told him the ornaments were beautiful. That I would treasure them. I got into the car and watched him shuffle through the tidy yard.
Every year at this time, the birds circle the top of my tree. I am as careful with them as the heirloom ornaments my mother-in-law gave us, some of which came from Germany years ago. I carefully thread the wire feet of the birds onto their branch perches. They are bound forever by thin green wires. As I am to the old man whose name I never knew.
My Cold War
This is my “casual” ski mask. I have a very thin one that lets me easily top off my attire with a hat. The better to disguise the ski mask, in a strange way. Although wearing a ski mask is not usually an under-the-radar activity, except on a ski slope.
I did add the lipstick so I wouldn’t look so scary. On the other hand…
Cold Weather Antidote
You all can rejoice in the cold if you want. I’m going to be time traveling back to spring 2010 and waiting there until four months from now. I will only seem to be present. If you need the real me, I’ll be at the Tidal Basin wandering where the cherry trees bloom.
Teenagers
It’s true, they have a tendency to refuse a morning sip of juice or a bite of nourishment even on big test days. And my son insists he’ll continue to wear a short sleeved tee and thin hoodie when it snows. He travels light. He is only now carrying his cellphone with him, at 16. Sometimes. He doesn’t take money unless he is certain he’ll need it, but no billfold, only an exact amount crumpled and shoved into a pocket. His one constant companion is his iPod touch, which is filled with Beatles songs.
Today I handed him my phone, with a problem my husband and I couldn’t fix for weeks. Our pride hadn’t let us ask him before. Silly. The boy went click click click. About five seconds. No more problem. He probably couldn’t say exactly what he did.
So, I plan to reframe our situation, mentally. Instead of worrying about coats and food, I’ll think of him as the live-in technical support. He’s no grumpier or high-maintenance than the professional tech teams I’ve worked with in the past. And they probably cost about the same, all in all. I’m also thinking about marketing him to the neighbors. Teen Tech Support in your home. I’ll take most of his earnings, of course. Call it room and board and college tuition.
And I’ll buy myself a nice winter coat.
Little Girl Lost
Wilma had two versions of her favorite saying. I wish I could go back and ask her about that. I’d be quick, not greedy with any time travel favors. I would give her a serious hug and ask, “Why did you say ‘I’ll swan’ sometimes and ‘I’ll swanee’ other times?” Also, “What exactly does that mean?” In truth, this would be a cover for hearing Wilma laugh. For a while, we lost Wilma’s laugh.
Wilma had a little daughter, who played with my sister. Wilma’s son was my brother’s friend. One day, the little girl got sick, went into the hospital and never came out. She had an enlarged heart. No one knew.
We went to the funeral. The brother cried hard. Then, we watched the doctor walk down the steps of the church. He was sobbing. This was the country doctor who took care of everyone for miles around in a clinic where you did not make appointments. You showed up and sat with the farmers and the women with babies and the grandmothers and waited to be called. Then, you picked up prescription bottles from the same front desk where you signed your name. No one had ever seen the doctor cry.
For a long time, Wilma’s laugh was absent in the neighborhood. And the doctor was even quieter.
Years later, my father had heart problems, and the doctor insisted that he travel to see a cardiac surgeon who helped to pioneer life-saving procedures at a university hospital where people came from all over the world for surgery. This physician and his team knew the country doctor well.
It was obvious to me what had happened. The country doctor poured himself into learning everything he could about the heart because so many, including his own, had been broken when the little girl was lost.
Has it Ever Happened to You
I’ve been wondering about something.
I still remember the awkward times. I had decided to leave my tomboy self behind, but it wasn’t an easy transition. One night, I was roller skating fast and hard with Cyn at a church social. The boy called me over. He was one of a group of new people at the church. They went to a different high school, I did not really know them.
I remember smiling as I skated to him, probably with a flourish. My brother’s girlfriend and family owned the rink. I was a little bit of a showboat.
His voice was deep, smooth, quiet, the words devastating. “You are the ugliest girl I’ve ever seen. We all think that. You don’t seem to know it, so, we thought we’d let you know.” My smile drained away. I thought something had gone wrong with my ears, I could no longer hear. He kept looking back over his shoulder at his friends. I remember finally pulling my quivering voice from a deep hidey hole inside and shoving it out of my mouth. “Who cares,” I said, twirling around, pushing off.
Cyn and I skated around each other like fish in water. I told her. She did not go to my church, she was a visitor that night. She did not believe in God, in church, or anybody who made a big deal about them. In her eyes, God, if he existed, had killed her father, or allowed him to die, at the age of 38. So my report, to Cyn, didn’t make much of an impression. She knew how to deal with people like that. “They’re a bunch of big idiots,” she said.
Ten
Ten early memories:
Pink petunia trees waving in the sun and wind.
The collie just wanted to play. Then the big people screamed so he wanted to run and knocked me down. He was pulling and my hands were between my neck and the leash. I was crying but I was just trying to say it was the screaming.
A giant in the shadows lifting the corner of a building a bit so a cat could slip under and hide. This is a secret, he said without words.
A playhouse built for us of straw by my brother, with windows and a door. It rained and the house fell down. For years I built versions of that house that did not fall.
People in boats passing by the windows in the Texas night, in rushing red river water. During the day, the water and the boats were not there.
Eating cheese sandwiches and drinking Dr. Pepper with my best friend at a table behind the meat counter in the little store her parents owned.
My friend crying, pulling at the locked car door as we pulled away to move to Alabama. “We’re just going on vacation,” I said, the fib Mother told to get me into the car.
Our new house, in the middle of a cotton field! We got to pick cotton! Then it was too hot. So Mother asked a lady we had never even seen, “Do you want me to watch your baby?” We watched the tiny baby in our house while the mother picked cotton.
Waking up to singing from the woods at dawn. Coming from the Indian burial mound? Faces at the window, but they weren’t even scary. My brother saw them too. I was mad because he claimed during the day that “somebody’s horse must have gotten out.”
Working on the hiding. Buried in leaves by the swamp in the woods. I didn’t even hear him, but then he was whispering to the leaf pile. “Mother says you have to come in for dinner,” said Daddy.
Dear Clusterflock
Remind me again how to order on Amazon and credit Clusterflock. And tell me exactly. Pretty please.
In Bugger Hollow
This is an “abandoned” photo, taken in Tennessee. The area is called Bugger Hollow. I am not making that up, a road sign announces it, Bugger Hollow Road. You drive along twisty country roads to find this cabin in the midst of acres of fields, grass, trees, flowers and the occasional house. The hollow (holler in the old vernacular) has the most hypnotic smell — clean, pure, green. It is the smell of the meadow, the life force unrestrained.
For Amanda’s Friend, Luke Wilson
Amanda interviewed the actor Luke Wilson recently. He said he liked being in Texas because for one thing he could just ride his horse to this place and that. It reminded me of my hometown ( Hazel Green, AL) where I saw this while driving down the U.S. four-lane this summer.
Then I wondered, is this unusual in small towns?
Portrait
The Iowan and our son strolling on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. It’s not difficult to tell the connection between these two, even from behind. I love this picture. And I love them.
Watch Your Feet
This bad boy was found by a couple of men at their hunt club in Screven, GA. Conrad Greene said the eastern diamondback rattlesnake measuring 6 feet, 6 inches, “didn’t even rattle. It merely lifted its head up above the grass, surveyed the scene and tried to slither away. But it didn’t make it far. Conrad popped it with the .44 mag he carries for such occasions.”
As reported by Georgia Outdoor News…
“Where You At?”
I can be staring at the Potomac River within minutes. And if I time it right, the drive from the D.C. area to the ocean takes less than four hours. I’m there now. Rehoboth, Dewey, Bethany in Delaware, or Ocean City in Maryland, it makes no difference to me. All that matters is the big water.
Do you have a place where you can feel difference within seconds? Like taking a deep breath for the first time in weeks. Or feeling the fist in your stomach unclench.
Surrendering
There’s a bird on my head in this picture. I’m posting it to demonstrate my ease in the natural world. But that has not been the case in my dealings with the inanimate, ever. I was thinking about this after Shelia helped me work out a vexing problem with website posting that doesn’t bother anyone else in the least.
I started out young in this. I could not wear a watch. My uncle, who owned a jewelry store, said there are people who demagnetize them. He would give me a watch to wear to see how long it would take to stop, then he would fix it and observe. When battery watches became popular, apparently I “stripped the power” from them. I started wearing watch pendants. They stayed powered up longer because of the clothing barrier.
Later, the head tech at the news service where I worked said I could “walk into a room and throw a bank of teletypes out of whack.” When I was named bureau chief in Baltimore, my boss told me to use the office fund to buy that tech his favorite Jack Daniel’s to make sure the experts stayed on the BW Parkway keeping my computers running “because you especially need them.”
All of these hardware issues contributed to my phobia/fears about computers. But my relationship with the inanimate world has been getting better of late. I surrendered to it, stopped fighting and getting mad. I would say to these technical things “it’s all okay.” I am not intuitive about them, still, but I am no longer breaking them when I walk into a room. Maybe if I start loving them, somehow, the way I love plants, who knows what could happen. I can even wear watches now as long as I baby them a bit. I alternate them now and then, giving them each little rests.
Wilson Pickett | Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
No. 1 on my own personal joy list: Prattville, Alabama’s own Mr. Wilson “Wicked” Pickett singing “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love”. That’s an electrifying shot of happy right there.
More From Hazel Green, AL
We climbed to the top of the old Indian burial mound, where a beautiful plantation house stood for a century before burning to the ground in 1968. We have history with the site, so my sister, brother-in-law and I went in late one afternoon. Friends of the family lived there and the twins babysat for my sister and me. They loved scaring us with tales about the ghosts that roamed that house. And we loved being scared.
The woman who lived in that plantation house in the 1800s was the subject of wild rumors. A Black Widow, they said, accused of killing seven husbands. Some of them were buried in old graves at the bottom of the old mound. So we looked at the graves there first, then my sister started charging up. We had no idea what we would find. We saw the foundation, then the back steps. This photo was taken by my sister because I had the video camera, filming. I think it’s quite spooky.
All of a sudden, I was alone, at the top. It was utterly dark up there, and quiet. Then I heard what sounded like gunfire in the distance. And voices. I couldn’t find my way out. Everything was grabbing at me, it seemed, at my clothes, my hair, removing the bandana on my head, pulling out the intricate barrett anchoring my hair in an up-do, finally snatching at my hair itself.
It was “The Blair Witch” all over, but real. My sister, who had easily walked off the mound, had to send my BIL to haul me out. The fear in my voice was palpable. I wouldn’t put the camera down, though. I was clinging to it with one hand. My other hand was shown pushing away overgrowth.
After I got out, I realized there had been no gunfire. It was July 4, fireworks were exploding in the skies. Then it came to me. No one goes up there anymore. The fertile land all around is farmed, but the mound is grown up and the long driveway planted over with cotton. We don’t even know who owns the land now.
I didn’t feel any menace up there on top of that mound. I think it was just lonely. The mound probably just wanted some company.
From Hazel Green
“The caffeine in my coffee must have been dead. I was sittin’ out there in the chair asleep and didn’t even know it until a plane flew over and woke me up.” — Miss Nell, 90
