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...