Michael at play

All aboard!

Down the slide!!

Pedaling a Big Wheel!!!

and Caught swinging

.....finally!!!!!!!!!!

Simple Pleasures? Some Inconvenient Truths...

Sunday, April 22, was Earth Day. RoadRunner, AOL, The State--doomsday reminders everywhere of this specter we call global warming--of the mass extinctions, the wide scale flooding, the increasing frequency of monster storms in our not so distant future.

So many ways to think--or not think--about this issue.

I have reached that age where I can say "not in my lifetime!" with a modicum of certainty. I can assure myself that, through my pursuit of simple neartohome pleasures, I am not the culprit here. Yes, I have not yet exchanged my incandescents for fluorescents. Yes, I have sacrificed two spreading oak trees in their prime, understanding that increased summer cooling expenses may be the flip side of my sunny acorn-free driveway. But I shop online (less driving), regularly maintain my aging automobile, wash laundry in cold water, turn off unused electronics (well, except for the computer), adjust my thermostat (68F degrees in winter; 80F degrees in summer), recycle newsprint and cardboard, pursue simple pleasures...

Simple pleasures, but with some inconvenient truths...

My grandson's swing set, for example. Several weekends ago, my son carefully explained to me why not just any treated lumber would do for this construction project. Some brands exude chemicals harmful to children. Others don't. One producer of ACQ-treated wood (the current industry standard) offers, on its web site, these points for consideration:

• Using treated lumber instead of plastic or steel conserves energy (that used to produce the construction material?) and reduces greenhouse emissions.
• Using treated lumber (as opposed to untreated) saves millions of trees each year because treated lumber lasts much longer.
• Using lumber treated with preservatives that do not contain arsenic (as did the older CCA industry standard) and that form insoluable bonds with the wood is safer for the environment and its inhabitants.

I'll admit this much. I've used, and replaced, untreated wood outdoors. I've purchased swingsets of steel and plastic construction. But what of the trees I've saved by refinishing, instead of discarding, old rocking chairs, another of life's simple pleasures? Polyurethane, much to my surprise and pleasure, is, according to the Center for the Polyurethanes Industry of the American Chemistry Council, an energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, recyclable product.

Energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, recyclable...like a geocache, maybe?

Geocaching, yet another of my family's simple pleasures, is categorized as a sport. Our 21st century's Treasure Island. Coordinates mapped on a handheld GPS. Logged accounts of treasures unearthed, treasures exchanged, treasures left behind for others to discover. These caches are hidden with care to preserve their natural surroundings. Geocachers walk. We hike. We do not disturb. We do not litter. We do not consume fossil fuels, except perhaps in the vehicles that ferry us from one cache's environs to another. We do not exacerbate global warming.

But global warming may one day render the simple pleasure of geocaching obsolete.

Last July we explored an island located in a nearby manmade lake--in search of a traditional geocache (The Fab Five?!). Our greatest challenge was not so much locating the cache as it was avoiding the poison ivy traps above and beside and along our path. According to National Geographic News, global warming will boost the spread of poison ivy. Global warming will also mutate poison ivy into POISON ivy.

There's more. Noticing the intricate patterns of contrail tracings is yet another late-in-life-acquired simple pleasure (Contrails). Did I think to ask what impact, other than beauty, these lacy condensationtrails might bring into being? No... But the answers found me. Contrails become high-altitude cirrus clouds, letting light through but trapping reflected heat, raising the earth's temperature (global warming). As contrails become more prevalent, this increase in cloud cover may render telescopes (on the ground) obsolete and disrupt the very GPS signals on which geocaching relies! The jury is still undecided in the case of contrails versus global warming, according to reports from The Register (UK), National Geographic News, and other sources. But inconvenient truths now complicate this seemingly simple pleasure...

I was aware, at some level, of Al Gore's documentary on global warming released last November. But there were so many ways to think--or not think--about this issue. I had reached that age where I could say "not in my lifetime!" with a modicum of certainty. I could assure myself that, through my pursuit of simple neartohome pleasures, I was not the culprit here.

I have since come to understand that, if I am to pass on future generations my passion for simple pleasures, I must come to terms with the ever-changing realities of each. I must question the impact of contrails, the safety of chemical preservatives, why I cannot let go of incandescent light. I must face some inconvenient truths.

I've ordered the DVD from Amazon.com.

Michael is 3 !!!

but last summer...

in search of the Lincoln rocker…

Several years ago, I purchased a book. Nothing remarkable about that, bookaholic that I am, nor was the subject of that book, Abraham Lincoln, a newcomer to my personal library. What set that purchase apart was that I acquired all 312 pages (9” X 12”, decidedly fine print!) of Twenty Days: A Narrative in Text and Pictures of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Twenty Days and Nights that followed—The Nation in Mourning, the Long Trip Home to Springfield so that I might own page 43—a picture whose caption reads “Here is the rocking chair in which Lincoln was slumped and senseless when Dr. Leale reached the box.”

I have loved rocking chairs since before memory began. There have been many in my life, but none so remarkable as the justright mahogany Boston rocker under the tree my second Christmas. Except, perhaps, the one I discovered several years ago in the dusty back room of a wicker boutique that also peddled pasttheirprime furnishings… The one that demanded that I learn how to realize its contemporary potential without sacrificing its story, its place in a time before mine.

From the squared nails, the horsehair stuffing, the original floral brocade upholstery preserved under a not-so-long-ago green velvet attempt to modernize, I came to understand that my chair had rocked through many generations before it found its way to me. I dared to breathe the word antique though I, too, had compromised its circa-mid-19th-century authenticity with my eve-of-the-21st-century floral brocade, staple-gun staples, electric sewing machine seaming, hot-glue-gun gluing, polyurethane glossing. Not to mention padding the padding! My rocking chair lent substance and grace to my eclectic surroundings. That was enough.

Until I came across the picture of a Lincoln rocker being auctioned on Ebay… I don’t remember the sequence of it all, one discovery unearthing another. Perhaps it was the caned child’s rocker I bid on there, one of my first and certainly one of my most difficult-to-negotiate Ebay purchases. Today an all-but-the-crest identical chair is listed as Vintage Child’s Caned Lincoln Rocker (vintage meaning that it dates from 1900-1950), with an opening bid almost five times my purchase price.

The staple online furniture glossary definition for a Lincoln rocker is “an upholstered (so how does a caned seat and back qualify?) high back rocker that has an exposed wood frame and padded armrests (not so the caned versions).” But my first question, upon linking that label to the chair in my living room, was not so much about definition as it was about origin. Certainly, Abraham Lincoln did not choose to be shot, nor even to sit, in a rocking chair bearing his name!

From somewhere in memory I knew that Lincoln had indeed chosen to sit in a rocking chair in his box at Ford’s Theater that April evening in 1865. Various accounts (National Park Service, Henry Ford Museum [where this chair is on display today; Ford’s Theater has to make do with a replica]) tell us that the chair, not part of the everyday furnishings of that box, was brought in perhaps to accommodate the President’s physical needs (to stretch his legs? to support his back?) or perhaps just because it matched the other chairs and the sofa brought in for that occasion. The red velvet fabric just below the carved wood crest is stained, not with the President’s blood but with a greasy substance used to dress men’s hair in those days. Accounts tell us that, for 55 years, this rocker, Lincoln’s rocker, gathered dust in a storage room somewhere in the depths of the Smithsonian. In 1929, after being reclaimed by the widow of its original owner (the Ford of Ford’s Theater), it brought $2,400 at a New York auction. Its new owner was the Ford of automobile fame, Henry.

So, if it wasn’t yet a Lincoln rocker that evening in April of 1865, what was it? I was back in home economics class my senior year in high school, learning about Georgian and French Provincial and French Colonial (one had two balconies and I knew I would live in a house with balconies someday). I wanted to name this rocker in my living room, to name the features that made it what it was before it was Lincoln’s rocker. Which is why I needed the pictures. How were our chairs, Lincoln’s and mine, alike? How were they different? What did these likenesses, these differences, mean?

A third chair—a rocking chair which actually belonged to Abraham Lincoln while he lived in Springfield, Illinois (1844-1861)—helped me make sense of the differences. The Springfield chair (image and description courtesy of the University of Illinois Library Collections) has thirteen buttons: Top to bottom, in rows of 1, then 2, then 3, then 2, then 3, then 2. My chair back features only the first four of these rows. A row of three below them would compromise the lumbar support this skillfully crafted 18th century back provides. Simply stated, my Lincoln’s rocker is a lady’s chair. Lincoln would not have been comfortable seated in one proportioned so. The other difference of note is the carving on the crests of these chairs. I have yet to find any two identical, though elaborate leaf, nut, shell, flower, and/or fruit designs are common elements. A third, and subtle difference, is the degree to which the back of each chair balloons. My chair back varies little in width from top to bottom while both chairs where Lincoln sat widen slightly above the upholstered armrests.

Similarities? Upholstered armrests, back, and seat. Exposed wooden (black walnut, mahogany, rosewood) frame. Runners and legs without decoration (his chairs and mine). Noticable “c” curve in the front legs. And the arms, the gondola arms! Lincoln’s Springfield rocker arms sports lotus flower carvings at the end of each curve. The Ford’s Theater rocker’s elaborately scrolled gondola arms are identical—yes, truly identical—to those on the chair in my living room.

Before Lincoln’s rocker was Lincoln’s rocker, it was Rococo or, perhaps, Rococo Revival. The curves are Rococo. The original pastel brocade upholstery of my rocker (but not of Lincoln’s two) is more reminiscent of this period than of the revival era. But elaborately carved crests are characteristic of the Victorian Era’s Rococo Revival (1850s-1870s). On Ebay today there’s a rocker much like Lincoln’s (Ford’s Theater) and mine being auctioned in Falls Church, Virginia. Its Ebay listing? “Rococo Revival walnut horsehair rocking chair”…

Questions linger.

In those days before brand names, before mass production, did the carvings on a given head crest represent a particular craftsman’s work, a particular family or region ? For years I thought the crest on my chair was acanthus leaves. Those on each side of the center may well be. But the leaf in the middle, braced by a large nut (or small fruit?) on each side? More art than science, perhaps. I cannot seem to name them.

I have always thought my chair mahogany—the color but do I know the grain? What about rosewood? What of black walnut?

I wish I knew its story, the story of all those generations rocked gently there and why it came to be in that dusty back room of a wicker boutique so that I could bring it home. But I would like to think that we have begun to weave new stories, this chair and my family now. I would like to think that my Rococo Revival chair will gently rock many of our generations yet to come.

A kinder, gentler fate than that of Ford’s rocker, forever to be known as Lincoln’s…

Lincoln's rocker (April 1865) and mine (April 2007)...

http://www.nps.gov/archive/foth/linchair.htm

for the love of a rocking chair…

Before I came to love a swing, before I came to love a Ferris wheel, I loved my rocking chair. The Christmas I was not quite two, the Christmas before I crossed the broad Atlantic, the Christmas before I became, for too brief a time, the bilingual world traveler, dual citizen at heart, posing here—I loved that rocking chair!
Loved it enough to repair it, to lovingly refinish it for my own first child and daughter (as I, my mother, my grandmother before her were also first children, first daughters; as my first granddaughter would also be). As soon as she could sit unsupported, I posed my first child and daughter in that rocking chair.
Years later, I have come to understand that rocking chairs, too, become frail with time. Too frail to survive moving from home to home to home. Too frail to survive one small boy’s (my first grandson’s) love. Yet perhaps strong enough to cradle my childhood dolls, someday, when I’ve once again braced and glued and loved it back into a chair that remembers how to rock.

Swings I have known...

When I was five...

There were only five

on that summerlike New Year's Day...

The swing needs another coat of paint this spring...

Is there room enough for seven?

The hammock swing is my favorite...

Its clone lives on Michael's screen porch :-)

(see picture at top of this post).

Not sure the place they came from exists any more.

That was also where I discovered

the wind chimes (also cloned)

tuned to minor keys...

Ten Things I Didn't Know About Jigsaw Puzzles...

1. that jigsaw puzzles for adults have been around for 100 years. Contemporary [early 1900s] writers depicted the inexorable progression of the puzzle addict from the skeptic who first ridiculed puzzles as silly and childish to the perplexed puzzler who ignored meals while chanting "just one more piece," to the bleary-eyed victor who finally put in the last piece in the wee hours of the morning.



2. that early jigsaw puzzle pieces were cut out on the lines in the picture, which meant no interlocking pieces and no pieces that showed adjacent elements in the picture.



3. that early jigsaw puzzles for adults did not include pictures of the assembled puzzle.



4. that early jigsaw puzzles, priced out of the range of the average worker (10% of monthly take-home pay), were often the featured entertainment at high society weekend parties.



5. that Parker Brothers stopped manufacturing games in 1909 in order to produce jigsaw puzzles full time.



6. that jigsaw puzzles became a kind of therapy during the Great Depression. Puzzles seemed to touch a chord, offering an escape from troubled times as well as an opportunity to succeed in a modest way.



7. that unemployed craftsmen created the affordable jigsaw puzzle in their home workshops during the Great Depression.



8. that, during the Great Depression, libraries and drugstores rented jigsaw puzzles and newstands sold weekly jigsaw puzzles every Wednesday.



9. that the first ever world's most difficult jigsaw puzzle--Convergence--challenged hundreds of thousands of Americans in 1965.



10. that wooden jigsaw puzzles, once the playthings of the rich, are making a comeback today.

Reference: Williams, Anne. Jigsaw Puzzles: A Brief History. http://www.mgcpuzzles.com/mgcpuzzles/puzzle_history/literature_on_puzzles.htm

LASIK

Subject: One more thing--

Date: 7/24/2003 8:56:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time

--and this may be a major key to why the world looks so different with my new eyes... I went outside to get the paper this morning around 7--my very first trip outdoors (beyond the screen porch) without anything covering my eyes. The first WOW was the grass near the front steps. And something finally clicked! The entire world is closer and larger than it has ever been! I've always known that glasses reduced my world (amazing how much thinner everyone is when I'm wearing my glasses...) but contact lenses must have done that also, if to a lesser degree. Since that view of the world is all that I've known for forty years, I thought that was how the world looked to everyone. Add that to depth perception (just pray that I don't get too carried away with my new-found confidence as a driver) and amazing colors/variations in color...absolutely awesome...

...and overwhelming. I have cried every morning since the surgery--tears of joy and wonder at it all...

Hazel, Rosie, Princess Mary...

HAZEL, ROSIE, PRINCESS MARY

blew into my world when I was seven.

I remember them still...

Home from school...early

(Hazel was coming, they said)

Whooooshing

Howwwwwwwwwwling

Daylight dark

I remember the wonder, the awe, the power

of Miss Hazel, outside...

and Daddy and Mommy and Evie, baby Pat, me

all safe inside...

and when the yellow sky came, and the eerie quiet,

Daddy sitting in the truck

in our front yard

listening to the radio...

Rosie was born that October day

--before or after Mommy fed Pat

by the light of my First Communion candle?-

I don't remember--

but I remember that Rosie

(Mommy made her for me)

was beautiful

and I loved her...

Showed Rosie off to my best friend...

Embarrassed Mommy (all these years, I never knew)...

Mary came into my world that Christmas,

Ideal's princess,

and I loved her too!

Sad, sad Rosie,

discarded childhood treasure

cremated

(cleaning up the past, moving on, they said...)

and Hazel's memory

overwritten

by the Donnas and Hugos of my life...

But Mary, my princess,

smiles down at me from her basket throne...

and I love her still...

Ideal's baby

His mother’s name was Mary. Ideal? What more fitting label for them both?

When I discovered Him on Ebay, time telescoped to my eighth Christmas, when I was seven, to my much beloved Princess Mary. I found her Ebay twin, bringing this Mary and her baby (two of them, actually) home to people my grandchildren’s Nativity, to welcome a new millennium.

Revlon ballerina angels. Another maker’s Bob (or was it Bill?) now-known-as-Joseph. A shabby chic lop-rockered green wicker cradle, gardener’s moss for mattress. Simple homemade cloaks, cords to anchor them to brows and waist, feet bare...

I was curious about this Ideal baby. How had I missed meeting Him all those years of being a child, of having children of my own? I bought a book, an Ebay find, an Ideal history. I read.

In 1956, Ideal created millions of dolls in the image of our infant Savior—some Protestant, some Catholic. (Wasn’t He born a Jew?) Churches approved, I’m told.

The public wasn’t buying. Thousands of overstocked babies. Ideal in crisis, financial ruin on the horizon. One salesman’s solution? Sell the babies, all bids accepted, no questions asked.

Did you know that, in the depths of the gray Atlantic off the coast of Hatteras, there’s a breakwater made, at least in part, of those babies no one wanted? Sacrilege? I thought so.

I had not thought of burial at sea. I had not thought of the Graveyard of the Atlantic. I had not thought beyond the seemingly callous, convenient disposal of something sacred.

Burial at sea is for all time. Although the dolls were not scattered (much as Catholic tradition does not sanction the scattering of human remains), all the Atlantic is now their grave.

What blessing, what honor for men and women whose remains have also been committed to the deep!

[This story is for Kira Rose who, like her Grandmommy, loves dolls. In this photo (Christmas 2006) she is sharing the Christmas story with her cousin, Michael. In some small way, around or under or through his obvious enchantment with his handmedownbutreal cell phone, I know that Michael is richer because of Kira’s storytelling.]

Reference:

Izen, Judith (1999). Collector's Guide to Ideal Dolls: Identification & Values (Second Edition). Paducah, KY: Collector Books.

Arachnid

All those years of
Rearranging two decks of
Always and forever
Challenging cards
Has
Never dulled the elation
I feel when the game is
Done! I won!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

13 Ways of Looking at Arachnid

solitary
solitaire

a waste of time

therapeutic
prime processing time
Alzheimer’s prevention

video card death sentence

perfect score=1000 points

14 years of addiction

104 cards, two decks, four suits

599 won-and-saved perfect score games (last four years)

challenging all the same
but best left at home…

How to Be Michael’s “Nonny”

Answer his million and one questions
Let him retell his life
Know that he never forgets
Show him how to use your digital camera
Bring the camera when you visit
Don’t forget
Give him your old cell phone AND its charger
Let him hold your new cell phone
Let him show you the buttons he’s not supposed to push
Keep your cell phone on because he asked...
and let him know that’s why
Honor his routines
Strap him in
but never make him clean his plate
Know that he loves birthday cakes
Let him ice Cassie’s...
Drink the coffee he “makes” for you—“again!” “again!” “again!”
Notice his “big boy” underwear
and “big boy” booster seat
and “big boy” bed
Tell him you’re proud (he says “Cassie is too!”)
Let him climb the stairs
Know that he forgets to be careful...
Help him with his clothes—taking off and putting on
Let him pick them out
Help him use the potty
Find his stool
Let him wash his hands all by himself
Walk with him as he rides his tricycle
Don’t sit down with Cassie
Don’t notice he hasn’t figured out the pedals
Know that he wants to coast downhill backwards
Take Cassie off his tricycle when he tells you she isn’t big enough
Read to him—“again!” “again!” “again!”
Bring him books and more books and many more books and...
Watch DVDs with him—“again!” “again!” “again!”
and show him which button is “Play” and
Answer his million and one questions
Never leave without a good-bye hug...




[This was also an unintentional sidetrip in my multigenre exploration of play/simple pleasures. Michael is, in so many ways, my connection to the simple pleasures of childhood...]

Ravensburger (aka Bid Time Return)

JP: So, RT, I guess you’re going to glue me together and frame me?
RT: And where exactly do you think I might hang a gaudy landscape such as you?
JP: You were comfortable enough using me as your dining room centerpiece the last two years!
RT: Covered you up when company came for dinner, if you’ll remember.
JP: One long hot week in July!

I so love the challenge of a new jigsaw puzzle! Have so since memory began…

Ravensburger was grounds for divorce though.

From puzzles, that is.

Well, almost…

We often gift each other with similar, sometimes identical, gifts in my family. Every Christmas counts at least one package with that telltale dry rattle even the youngest among us recognize. Christmas 2004 was no exception.

I honestly can’t remember if I gave anyone a puzzle that Christmas but I do remember discovering the puzzle roll-ups and thinking how convenient that would be now that there were no spare puzzle tables in our lives, now that every flat surface in our homes were needed when setting places at mealtimes for our ever-growing extended family. I bought a puzzle roll-up for Kimberly.

And Kimberly bought a puzzle roll-up for me. A sheet of green felt—generous enough to cover my dining room table, leaves and all. Spacious enough to accommodate, with inches to spare, the 3,000 piece Ravensburger spring azalea scene that came with it. 3,000 pieces!!! I was intrigued. My personal best was 1,500 but I’d had help with that. Could I solo this challenge?

When company left—New Year’s 2005 had dawned—I opened Pandora’s box. Something to while away dull January and February. Surely I’d be done by spring… Not!

The bottle of glue—why puzzles need their own kind I haven’t yet figured—sat on a nearby shelf, undisturbed, all that year. When company came, we ate in other rooms, at other tables, or, sometimes, spread placemats over the few pieces that had found and held fast to their mates.

That Christmas, 2005, I rolled the stillfarfromcomplete puzzle up in its felt shroud, tucked it out of sight in one of the new cabinets purchased for the tuckingoutofsight of noteveryday things. That Christmas, 2005, I had an awful idea, a get-even idea. Kimberly discovered her own 3000-piece Ravensburger Pandora’s box under my tree.

When company left—New Year’s 2006 had dawned—I unrolled the soft green shroud. So much of my work undone in all that rolling and unrolling... By summer, I vowed.

When company came—a week in hot July—we covered blue water, magenta azaleas, a border that had been redone twice over and more until every fit was fitting—with blue linen. Out of sight. Out of mind. Until…

Thanksgiving 2006. So close and yet so far away, that lastpieceinitsplace jubilation. Please! By Christmas? Please!!!

JP: OK, so it’s December 27th. And what of it?
RT: When they told me three pieces were missing, I just had to check on dinner…
JP: Two were cowering under the felt.
RT: I know. I heard. But that last piece???
JP: Can’t remember where they finally found it… Wasn’t my doing, you know.
RT: They saved it for me. Brought their cameras in. Don’t you love the angle of this one?

JP: You look almost gleeful, pretending to be all that young again…
RT: If you could only read my mind…
JP: Thinking where to hang your latest accomplishment, your masterpiece?
RT: Not exactly…………….
JP: I’ve grown accustomed to this room, soft lighting, brocade walls…
RT: Turn back the clock, JP. 3000 bits of priceless time. Time foreverlost…
JP: What then…
RT: Bid time return? scccrrrrruuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnchhhhhhhhh!
JP: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo……

Contrails...

I was supposed to be working on a poem for my multigenre project, right? My theme was play, as in a kind of history of my family's (sometimes just my own) pursuit of leisure. Simple pleasures would be the subtitle...

I was writing out of doors, trying out the idea of a six-room poem, seated on a gazebo (or was it a pergola?) floor. A crisp blue February sky and memory of contrail-watching the week before when visiting my mother who was recovering from surgery.

Is contrail-watching a kind of play, a simple pleasure? I'm not sure...yet. I just know that in this last year I've noticed more contrails, discovered more rainbows, than in a very long time...

Sharing this work in progress with Idon'twannabeapoet adolescents the last couple of months has been a pleasure, as have the poems they have crafted in spite of themselves... Is this about play? Playing with words, maybe...

Here goes...