All posts by Wildtrumpetvine

In Atlanta, to be a Daughter

 

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The Atlanta skyline, from the MARTA train, March 21.

Last Thursday I did something I hadn’t done in nine years:  I flew to Atlanta, alone, to visit my parents.  Ever since my daughter was born, she has been my constant travel companion.  Even as a baby she was good company when we flew together. The joy she found in the adventure of airplane travel almost made up for the difficulties of managing the clumsy baby seat and all the various gear she required.  As she got older she became a great help, as she has a natural bent for understanding automatic ticketing machines. With her assistance, I learned to buy and reload a MARTA Breeze card and to make my way through the stations.  It felt strange to be leaving town without her.

The last time I went to Atlanta by myself, Mama had been very sick.  This time, it was Daddy.  In February he underwent a serious surgery that left him in a fragile state.  Typically healthy, hearty and appearing far younger than his years, time was making sudden and unwelcome inroads.  Fortunately, Mama was feeling pretty well.  Her usual chronic health concerns were manageable, and Daddy’s illness spurred her into action.  She had recently had cataract surgery, which improved her vision and gave her confidence to drive again (although only to familiar, nearby places–she wasn’t about to attempt I-85).  It had been over twenty years since she had regularly set foot in a grocery store, because Daddy had done nearly all the shopping and errand-running.

My parents are blessed to have a strong caring network of neighbors and church friends, so my immediate presence hadn’t been an absolute requirement.  I can’t say how grateful I am to the many who step in so graciously to help.  While I offered to fly down at any time, I sensed that Mama preferred I wait until Daddy was feeling better and regaining some of his lost weight. That way he could better enjoy my visit, and I wouldn’t be as alarmed at his appearance.

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Another view from the train, showing the gold dome of the Capitol between the twin “Sloppy” Floyd Towers.  The cream-colored tower to the left is City Hall, which dates from 1930.

I tend to think my family in Virginia can’t get through the mornings without me.  Who will make sure our daughter is really, truly awake and up in the pre-dawn darkness?  Who’ll make her breakfast and lunch?  Who’ll walk Kiko?  I knew they’d be fine in the evenings.  While there would be no cooking, they’d have no trouble eating.  My husband would bring home Chipotle, Chinese or Thai.  They’re capable of opening cans, jars, and boiling pasta.  Those mornings, though, they’d be rough.  Then it hit me.  So what if the mornings are rough? That just means they’ll appreciate me all the more once I return.

So I went, and I’m glad I did.  I’ll go back, too, with more frequency.  As those of us of a certain age already know or are coming to realize (at least those lucky enough to have our parents still with us), sometimes the duties and rewards of daughterhood take priority over those of motherhood.

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The back of the High Museum of Art, much expanded since I worked there in the 80s.

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    The High Museum with the Promenade building in the background.

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The Four Seasons Hotel, as seen from the Arts Center Station.

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I was very glad not to see any snow.  While the weather was cooler than I had hoped, it was sunny, and there were real signs of spring, such as this dandelion in the mulch.  There are no dandelions yet in northern Virginia.

Spring!

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This first day of our Virginia spring began with heavy fog. 
The Worm Moon is on the wane. 

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The sun begins to show its face through the fog.

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In our yard, daffodils and lingering snow. 

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Buds on the sassafras tree.  The fog has given way to blue sky. 

It feels like spring! 

Young Love, Old Love Notes, Part II

 

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I saved two more notes from my third grade year.  These took an entirely different approach.  One was typed on good-quality paper.  An all-caps heading reads:

I LOVE YOU  YOU PREETY GIRL.

Immediately below the heading are 59 lines that look like this:

1ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
(the number one, followed by 45 zeros)

At the bottom of the page, again in all-caps is one word:

TIMES.

Near the top of the page on the otherwise blank right side is this message:

IF GREG TOL
D YOU ANY
THING DO NOT
BELEAVE HIM

YOU

I LOVE YOU

I found this note impressive then, just as I do now.  I’m impressed at the time and effort needed to type so many lines of zeros.  I’m impressed at the absence of mistakes–only one typo in the numbers.  Quite a lot of work went into it, especially for a little third-grader.  And I’m touched by its rather odd tack.  For an elementary school love note, it falls far from the realm of the expected.  I like that very much.

Interestingly, the note has no signature.  I had always assumed it was from Danny.  When I asked him if he remembered creating the typed masterpiece, it didn’t ring a bell. Once he saw a photo of the note, a long-forgotten memory began to crystalize.  He could see his young self in his mother’s office,  experimenting with her new high-powered typewriter.

As for the cryptic reference to Greg, and what he may have told me–the message I shouldn’t believe–Dan can’t recall.  Greg couldn’t shed any light on that matter, either.  As in the earlier note, he can’t remember having been involved.

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The third note is handwritten in pencil on notebook paper.  It follows the same numerical theme.  Perhaps it was a precursor to the typed note, a sort of rough draft. The numbers appear on the top half of the page, below the words I love You, written in cursive.  Also at the top, printed in what appears to be a different hand, are these words: Look on Back  and from Danny.

The entire bottom half of the page is taken up with the following message, printed in huge letters:

LOVE!!!!
Baby love!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This handwritten note, both Dan and I have come to agree, must represent a combined effort.  I can imagine Danny showing his half-finished letter to a friend, perhaps the omnipresent but forgetful Greg, or someone else.  That boy grabbed the note playfully and wrote the emphatic Love Baby Love message on the blank lower half of the page.  Like the Kiss me after school demand on the earlier note, it’s completely out of character for shy Danny.  Then, for good measure, the second boy wrote in Danny’s name, but used printed letters instead of Danny’s typically careful cursive.

Such a scenario fits in with my recollections of elementary school.  I’m fairly certain I never wrote any love notes during these years, and I know that if I had, I would not have signed my name.  But I’m very familiar with a similar type of conspiratorial collaboration, the back of forth of who likes whom, the ongoing gossip concerning which boys were cute, which ones were funny, which ones were worth our daydreams.  In those old days, the real fun of “liking someone” had very little to do with an actual boy.  Instead, for my friends and me, it simply offered hours of amusing conversation, a pleasant distraction from schoolwork and our childhood responsibilities.  I  assume it was no different for the boys.  I’m not kidding myself that these notes offer proof of true young love.  But at the very least, they suggest that my name was among those discussed, on occasion, by the third grade boys.  I was noticed.  I was not invisible.  And maybe I wasn’t considered entirely crazy.  Thank you, Dan.  After all these years, your efforts and creativity are more appreciated than ever.

For kids today, I have this piece of advice.  If, in this age of texting, Snapchat and Instagram, you’re lucky enough to receive an old-fashioned paper love note, save it.  If it doesn’t bring you happiness now, just wait a few decades.

Snow Day # 10

 

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Just as predicted, more snow.  And yes, schools are closed again.  This is a gorgeous, fluffy snow, the kind that appears to coat tree branches with cotton puffs.  While I got my fill of the white stuff several snow days ago, this one occurs at a welcome time.  My daughter returned yesterday morning from her annual drama trip to New York City.  It’s a twenty-four hour excursion, from 4 AM Saturday to 4 AM Sunday.  They saw the musical Pippin, did an improv workshop, toured the theatre district and went to the Top of the Rock. D slept until early afternoon but was still exhausted.  Today is a much-needed catch-up day, a time to ease back, slowly, into her regular schedule.  A 5:30 wake-up in our house is never pretty, but it would have been frightfully ugly this morning.  Thank you, St. Patrick’s Day snow!

On a sadder note, the kids may be in school until mid-July.

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Young Love, Old Love Notes, Part I

 

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When I was growing up, the exchange of love notes was among the essential elementary school experiences.  Most of us who came of age in the 60s and 70s, I would bet, took some part in the process, as sender, receiver, envious onlooker, or all of the above.  Because, as I’ve mentioned, I’m a saver, a documentarian of life’s minutiae, I have proof that I was, at least for a brief time, a player in that game.

A recent search for some tedious document in the chaos of our home office uncovered something I found far more interesting:  a Raggedy Anne stationery box stuffed with elementary school memorabilia.  Among various artifacts, it contains several notes I received in third grade.  I wish I could remember how I reacted when I received these as an eight-year old.  I was probably flattered, but puzzled.  Evidently I appreciated them, or I wouldn’t have saved them.  I do know that in recent years, they have never failed to make me smile.

In third grade, battling my OCD demons kept me too stressed and distracted to consider romance.  (See In the Way Back, the Old Swing Set, Going Back to Nature, July 2013.)  Schoolwork helped to silence the exhausting voices in my head, so I threw myself with frenzied gusto into learning my multiplication tables, reading Scholastic books and writing stories that starred my dog and stuffed animals.  I tried to keep my craziness under wraps during school hours.  These notes suggest that maybe I did.  Or maybe the sender wasn’t put off by a touch of crazy.  Maybe he was a little crazy himself.  Who knows, now?  Anyway, I’m glad I kept the notes.   No doubt there are those who’d say I’m insane for saving them all these years.

I treasure these old notes, a testament to the sender’s ingenuity and thoroughness. The one shown above follows a traditional format.  On heavy folded construction paper, a heart with carefully ruffled edges is drawn in pencil and colored in crayon. The message is simple, direct and emphatic.  I love you appears seven times throughout.  It’s signed by one boy, Danny, on the inside.  Oddly, on the back, there are two signatures:  Danny and Greg, accompanied by a pencil drawing that could be a flying saucer but is more likely a pair of lips.  Inside there is an additional message:  Kiss me after school please.  There was much difficulty with the writing and spelling of please.  It required several erasures, a cross-out and a correction.

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Because Danny (now Dan) and I are Facebook friends despite not having seen one another in over thirty years, we’ve been able to compare our recollections of the circumstances surrounding the note.  Soon after we got back in touch, he asked if I remembered receiving a love note from him in third grade.  He was more than surprised to learn that not only did I remember, I still had the note.  Dan distinctly recalled being dared by another boy (Bill, not Greg) to put a love note in my desk.  He took the dare and tucked the note in my desk after I’d left school, planning to retrieve it early the next morning before I arrived.  He forgot about the last part, and so when he entered the classroom he saw me unfolding the paper. 

Dan had no memory of the note’s appearance or wording.  He couldn’t remember conspiring with Greg in creating it.  He was completely astonished at the Kiss me message.  That didn’t sound at all like him at all, he said.  I had always thought that very same thing.  I remember Danny as a very funny boy, one who’d do anything for a laugh.  But he was quite shy.  I couldn’t see him demanding after-school kisses.  Maybe I assumed that was Greg’s handiwork.  I’d say he was bolder kid, one with a somewhat devil-may-care attitude.  And yes, I’m Facebook friends with Greg after all these years, as well.  When I asked if he remembered co-authoring a love note to me, he did not.  His response was diplomatic; he didn’t want to sound callous or disappoint me.  His heart, he gently but clearly recalled, belonged to another third grade girl. 

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Dan observed that the Kiss me sentence appears to have been written by a different hand.  The pencil lead is darker, and the words are printed, unlike Danny’s all-cursive I love you above it and those that appear on the front.  All the writing on the back, including both signatures, would appear to be written by the Kiss me author.  Dan concluded that, shy as he was, he must have mentioned the dare to Greg, who stepped in to offer moral support.  He probably wrote the Kiss me line on impulse, thinking, Why not?  Maybe this will get interesting!  Could be that’s when he decided to sign his own name and Danny’s, putting himself in the running for the kiss.

The note didn’t prompt me to kiss anyone after school.  I was definitely not that kind of girl in third grade.  But  these decades later, it’s nice to look back and know that I was asked.  And to know that someone, perhaps with a little encouragement from a friend, decided I was worth the effort of all that careful coloring and the writing of I Love You seven times.  That makes it  a note worth saving.
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The photo above shows our second grade class with our teacher Mrs. Small, the year before the note was written.  My third grade photo has gone missing.  Dan is the sweet-faced boy at the left end of the top row.  His mother tended to dress him in a suit on picture day.  I’m second from the right on the top row, wearing, of course, an outfit made entirely by my mother, down to my red, white and blue scarf, my hair pulled back in a pony tail. Years ago, when I first showed this photo to my daughter to see if she could find me, she had considerable difficulty.  After she pointed questioningly to many girls who were clearly not me, I grew a little exasperated and showed her.  Oh, she said, with much surprise.  I thought that was a boy, with short hair and a tie.  Greg does not appear in this photo; he was in the other second grade class that year. 

 

Snowmelt, and Can it Be, a Hint of Spring?

I can’t be alone, among those in the snowbound sections of our country, in having recently felt lost in some permanent winter limbo.  Last Friday that sensation was particularly acute.  I was on the fifth day of a nasty cold that was keeping me exhausted, shivering, stuffy, head-achy and generally miserable.  Each day brought a new symptom.  That morning I welcomed the onset of a deep, bone-shaking, throat-searing cough.  I had hoped for a couple of hours extra sleep after H and D left for work and school.  Typically on dark, overcast mornings, I go upstairs to find Kiko curled up on the foot of my bed.  As soon as I get out, he jumps in.  But this morning he had been continually underfoot, pacing, staring expectantly, demanding to walk as soon as possible.  He was oblivious to the morning’s gray hostility.  So by 7:30, under a leaden sky, my dog and I were picking our way across piles of dirty brown snow, a biting wind whipping at our ears.  He was scampering merrily.  I was trudging grumpily.

 This cold had hit me harder than most, and I was finding it difficult to power through.  Maybe the excessive chill of the winter had sapped my strength.  That Friday I was especially gloomy, knowing I wouldn’t be able to spend the day bundled on the sofa, dozing and working through weird Tivo selections such as Hal Ashby movies from the 70s.  I had managed to do little else for four days, but my time was up.  We needed groceries and every known household paper product.  Prescriptions were awaiting pick-up.  It was the day for my allergy shots.  Kiko would need another walk.  And I should probably make dinner for a change.  Ugh.  I counted the hours until I could go back to bed.

But Saturday was indeed a new day.  And best of all, it felt like a new, much-anticipated season.  The sun was shining with a glorious intensity, the sky was blue, and the temperature was climbing into the 60s.  The robins were feasting. The snow was melting.  Suddenly, winter was on the run. For the first time in what seemed like years, it felt like spring.

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The melting snow added a sense of drama to our first spring-like day.  This was an early spring day akin to those described in The Secret Garden  and my favorite books of childhood poetry.
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What do you know, there are tiny buds on the cherry trees!

It’s Snow Day #9. Will We Make it to #10?

For the ninth day since the beginning of this school year, classes are canceled in northern Virginia because of snow or extreme cold.  This has to be a record-setting number.

As for snow, I’ve had sufficient.  My dog and daughter, however, disagree. 

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Kiko enjoys dashing playfully through this snow, which isn’t as deep as our last one.  Just when I noticed that the snow had piled up on his multi-colored soccer ball so that it resembled an Easter egg, he ran to attack it, hoping I’d fight him for it. 

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My Favorite View: At Home, with Moonlight on the Snow

Briefly, we were almost completely without snow. For several days, our lawn had been visible (our messy, muddy, stick-strewn lawn). Heavy fluffy flakes began falling in earnest this morning, and now the neighborhood is blanketed in white again. Should there come a time when the snow melts for real, there is one aspect of it that I’ll miss. That’s the vision of moonlight on the snow.

My all-time favorite view is the one from our upstairs windows onto the snow-covered front lawn on a moonlit night. February’s full moon, according to my Farmer’s Almanac desk calendar, is known as the Snow Moon. Here in Virginia it’s certainly lived up to the name. During our recent snowy spell, many nights were clear, the sky black, the stars intense, and the moon big and bright. So bright that it lit up the snow with a gasp-inducing glittery incandescence. Against the glowing white snow, the shadows of our maple trees were dramatically dark blue. This magical view always takes me back, back to the first January we spent in our house, when our daughter was a year old. That winter I often gazed out at that view, brand-new to me, rocking, nursing, cuddling my baby girl. It felt good to be in a place I could call home.

The memory of that time is perhaps particularly vivid because, for so many years, I had postponed settling down. By my own choice, I was a latecomer to marriage, motherhood, and a fixed address. When I arrived as an eighteen-year-old at UGA, I discovered how much I enjoyed campus student life. Thanks to a taste of the working world following college, I soon realized that graduate school offered the chance to return to a life free from many cares of traditional adulthood. I managed to be a grad student for eight years. That sounds like an incredibly long time, I realize, but there were many in my field of art history who lingered far longer. I relished that busy peripatetic life, happily unsure of where I’d be the next year. I moved at least ten times during grad school, including two house-sitting stints and a year-long residence in London for dissertation research. Traveling as a student was cheap and easy. I had acquaintances scattered across continents and no strings to tie me down. I made wonderful friends, met a great many unforgettable characters, and had exciting adventures.

But even I couldn’t sustain such a rootless lifestyle forever. By the time I met H, I was feeling the need for a change. Yet because he was seven years younger, I assumed our timelines would always be hopelessly out of sync. Wouldn’t he need another decade or so to figure things out?

Fortunately he required only half that long. Five years later we began our married life together in a tiny Butler Tract apartment in Princeton. It took us only two more moves before we landed in our old Virginia farmhouse. It seemed to wrap its arms around us and say, You’re home. You’re a family. Stay a while.

We have, and we will. On every snowy, moonlit night, before I go to sleep, I look out the window and give thanks that I’m here in this house with my husband, daughter and dog. My only regret is that my parents aren’t nearby. All else considered, I’m right where I want to be. Right where I hope to be tomorrow and for years to come. After so many years of running, it’s good to rest and be home.

My favorite moonlit view is unphotographable. But this recent early morning scene of Kiko on the lookout gives some sense of the blue shadows on the snow.

H and D in front of our house, soon after our offer was accepted in December 1999. That was back when the maple stump was still a full tree.

Our daughter in the spring of 2000. Back when she enjoyed playing with a basket of crumpled paper. And when her eyes were still blue. They’ve since changed to green.