All posts by Wildtrumpetvine

Community, Friendship

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. 

 

Community, Nature, Walking the Dog

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!

Community, Family, Nature

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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Family, Nature, Parenthood

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.

Nature, Walking the Dog

This Snow Won’t Go

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Last Wednesday’s snow remains very much with us. Every yard is still an expanse of white.  Our old maples appear far shorter, due to the snow banked high on their trunks.  Snow plows created towering fortresses at every intersection. Roads are bordered by messy, jagged ridges that grow more discolored every day, yet never seem to diminish in size.  Parking lots are dotted with miniature mountains.

Days of bright sunshine combined with frigid temperatures created an icy top layer that sealed in the snow below.  The squirrels, whose zest for life appears boundless, chase each other playfully across it.  Kiko is less enthusiastic.  He investigates the snow piles tentatively, placing each paw carefully to see if the surface will hold.  He is clearly irked when  a leg or two plunges through the crust and leaves him in an awkward position, his dignity compromised.  The shaded sections of our driveway are still thickly coated with ice, making a short trip to the car a dangerous business.  We weren’t able to fit in our mid-winter visit to my husband’s family in Rochester this year, but the landscape of upstate New York appears to surround us.

The predicted warming spell has arrived, yet it has had little effect on our snow cover.   Two days ago, I saw a good omen.  I watched as Kiko picked his way delicately over the mounds of deep snow on our patio to reach his favorite sunny snoozing spot, newly uncovered. That night, however, brought another two inches of fresh powder.

Today we may finally see a change.  The temperature is expected to climb into the high 50s. As we finished our morning walk, a light rain began, and I was cheered at the prospect of some of the snow washing away.  I had barely completed the thought when I heard a long, loud, slow rumble of thunder.  Kiko heard it, too.  Oh no!   That meanie’s back!  (See Evading the Terrible Thunder Monster, April 2013.)  He began to pace nervously, circling the house several times before allowing me to wrap him tightly  in his thundershirt. The daily inconvenience of the snow had me dreaming of spring.  But I’d forgotten that with it comes, for my dog, the nightmare of thunderstorms.  Maybe it would be best that the winter cold continue for a while, snow or no snow.

 

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 Kiko reclines atop the snow, eyeing the street for approaching friends. 

Family, Nature, Parenthood, Walking the Dog

Real Snow. Enough Now.

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Today we have a snow day with real snow, and lots of it.  The schools here in northern Virginia used up all their snow days back in January.  Yet there’s been very little actual snow.  Certainly we’ve had our fill of frigid temperatures and diverse forms of icy accumulation.  But as for the pretty fluffy white stuff, not so much.

Until this morning, when we woke up to over a foot of the real thing.  It’s more snow than we’ve seen here in four years, when we were treated to back-to-back blizzards, pre- and post-Christmas, that paralyzed the area.  Last night’s snow was enough to shut down all runways at Reagan National and Dulles Airports, enough for the government to call a State of Emergency, enough even for my husband’s office to close.  This gave him the chance, at long last, to fire up his essentially unused snow blower, the one he bought in 2010, just after those last big storms.

The street was a smooth, untouched, snow-covered ribbon this morning when Kiko and I headed out for our walk.  We were grateful to be able to follow the parallel impressions left by a car sometime during the night.  In the tire tracks, the snow didn’t flood up and over my boots, or envelop Kiko’s entire body.  Where the snow was completely untouched, my little dog was forced to bound through it with a sort of swimming motion.  He seems to thrill at that first plunge, but his exhilaration quickly dissipates.  Following his exertions, he slept for hours on the playroom sofa.  All day long I’ve been tempted to join him.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we all could be so lucky?

My daughter, of course, was delighted by the snow, and by yet another snow day.  As for Kiko and me, we’re ready for spring.

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My daughter, at home in her element.

Family, Parenthood

Early-Morning Irritability

I try not to use my blog to rant about life’s trivial annoyances. But today I’ll risk sounding like a pouty child. This morning, a series of minor nuisances really ticked me off.

It began around 6:20, when I applied myself, with much concentration, to the vexing mystery of the moment—how to get the little rubber ring to stay put on the lid of my daughter’s new thermos. I persisted, but had no success. The bell of the toaster oven dinged. Because I had devoted too much pointless effort to the thermos, the mini-bagels I had been toasting for D’s breakfast were burned beyond rehabilitation.

It was at this inopportune moment that my husband wandered blithely into the kitchen. He remarked, in all innocence, that he couldn’t understand why D, who is in the process of choosing the classes she will take next year in high school (high school!), needs to continue studying English. She can read. She’s a good writer. What more does she need to know about English?

That comment, following so quickly on the heels of my thermos and bagel difficulties, was the last straw. My poor fragile camel’s back cracked sharply in half. Some say, I responded, through slightly clenched teeth, that there is value in literature. While reading good books is unlikely to lead to a well-paid career . . .no . . . it’s likely to ensure the absence of a well-paid career, it offers some help in coping with life’s disappointments. I stopped there. I did not add this further petulant bitterness: that reading offers the possibility of occasionally eking out some small measure of joy in a world rife with uncooperative thermos rings, annoying toaster ovens and clueless husbands whose idea of enlightening reading is an online windsurfing forum. H wisely kept quiet until he left for work.

And then Kiko and I went out for our walk. Another lovely light snow had fallen. I expected that the walk would lighten my mood. But no. Paved surfaces were far more slippery than I had expected, and Kiko insisted on attempting a break-neck pace, determined to run, if not in the road, then as close to it as possible, where the cars were hurtling by us more aggressively than usual. The salt from the road frequently stung his paws, prompting him to limp flamboyantly, one foot in the air, yet without lessening his speed. I had to repeatedly kneel down to brush the snow from his paw pads. An icy, gusty wind whipped the snow into my eyes, and the blue glare of the sun on the white ground was blinding. My ears were wet and freezing under my scarf, while my hands were too hot in my mittens. I was reminded vividly of why I find skiing so unpleasant. Our morning outing was an ordeal to be suffered through.

On a happier note, it sure is good to be back home.  Alone, except for my silent dog, now sleeping peacefully in another room.

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H telephoned later, warning me about the icy roads and clearly trying to appease my irrational meanness.  I’m feeling better now.  As Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say:  Never mind.

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It was a beautiful morning to be annoyed.

Community, Family, Friendship, Travel

A Pescadero Classic: Duarte’s Tavern

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Our tour along the northern California coast ended on a festive note with dinner at Duarte’s Tavern, a Pescadero landmark and true American classic.  Duarte’s dates from 1894, when Frank Duarte, an immigrant from Portugal, bought the tavern and began selling whisky from a barrel.  The spot proved popular with local fishermen, whalers and farmers.  While Prohibition was a setback, the original bar survived intact, and in the 1930s the Duarte family expanded the business to include food service (sandwiches, ice cream and pies).  They also ran a barbershop on the premises.  While the barber chairs have disappeared, the plain, unassuming décor has changed very little, which, depending upon your point of view, contributes to the place’s simple charm (as I see it), or its lack thereof.  For the past several decades, Duarte’s has been famous for its flavorful soups, fresh fish, and delicious pies. The fourth generation of the family now runs the restaurant.

At the recommendation of our friends, who are Duarte’s regulars, we began with a combination of the two house specialty soups, cream of green chile and cream of artichoke.  Served with fresh sourdough bread, it was as tasty as they had said it would be.  The locally caught sole was just as described: absolutely fresh and simply prepared.  I only wish I’d been able to sample the Crab Cioppino.  My one Bay Area food regret is not tasting this regional specialty, a hearty seafood stew.  Next time.

No one missed out on Duarte’s most famous pie, however.  Our friends had spoken highly of the olallieberry pie.  You East Coasters might well ask What?– just  as I did.  Surely that’s a made-up word.  It sounds like something Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat would serve up on that cold, rainy day.  Perhaps in an early draft of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat, the happy couple dined on slices of olallieberry pie? (for which the runcible spoon would be well-suited.)

But no.  Olallieberry is a real word referring to a real berry, although one of fairly recent origin.  Essentially, it’s a locally grown blackberry-raspberry hybrid, a cross that was developed by way of the loganberry and youngberry,  (I had no idea my knowledge of berries was so rudimentary).  Olallie, interestingly, is a Pacific Northwest Native American word for berry.  At our table that day, all seven in our party ordered the olallieberry pie.  No one was disappointed.

When we return to California in a few years, we’ll make sure to seek out our good friends again. I’ll even give them more than a couple of day’s notice of our impending arrival.  And when we drive along the coast (next time we’ll venture farther south, to Monterey and Carmel), we’ll stop by Duarte’s.  I feel sure it will still be there.   Maybe the fifth generation of the family will be running the place by then.  On second thought, no.  We won’t wait that long.