Aimless

I had a Christmas List (which was a combination of goals and stuff). In the past I've made lists of resolutions (both for the holidays and the new year). And I made 'to do' lists all the time. Posting every day on Holidailies was not included on any of these. Not this year certainly. Probably not in the past. It was something I tried to do once I'd signed up. Failed a couple of times this year, though. Like yesterday.

Yesterday was actually a pretty nice if not productive day. I goofed off working puzzles and watching TV and we walked to have lunch and buy YAB (yet another book) on South Congress. In the evening we walked to Rainey Street and attended a party for New Year's Eve Eve. A warm-up to the over-hyped day that included drinks but no champagne toasts. There were snacks and a lot of friends to visit with. Met a few new people, too. One who swore she knew me from somewhere.

We were home by 10:30 including the walk back. The weather is turning sharply colder today, but yesterday it was still tolerable. For the earlier walk, I was in shirt sleeves at one point. A sweater and jacket and a muffler kept me toasty in the evening. We are going out tonight, to return before midnight, and I think I'll riffle through the extra closet for my overcoat. The temperature promises to be close to freezing and the wind gusty. We are only walking about five blocks, however.

One of the things on my 'to do' list, amidst the tax forms to work on, our business checks and bills, etc. is making display thumbnails for the slides I digitized for my aunt. This has made me sort of sad and nostalgic on her behalf. She is in a retirement apartment, tethered to an oxygen source. Fluid has to be drained from around her lungs three times a week. But here she is, on the left, greeting her two older sisters (next to her) and another woman after they landed in their PanAm plane. Dressed in suits and hats for travel. The aunts are gone now. She was in Hawaii in the Navy. I'm sure the woman on the right was a Navy buddy.

Time does fly. And 2017 is fast-disappearing. I need to shower and get ready to go out tonight.

Santa Arrived

When I sorted through some slides my aunt had saved all these years I found some of a Christmas she must have spent with her sister (the mom of, at the time, two of my cousins). One shot was of the Christmas tree after Santa had visited. A bike for the older one, dolls, little dresses and other toys. When we are kids we have such high hopes for Christmas. We anticipate getting the perfect gifts from our list. We used to scour the Sears Christmas book to dream about that really wonderful toy. Even though there were no people in this one, I had it scanned. I imagine the little girls rushing in to find their loot. Now when I was a kid only the bike would have pleased me. Dress? Meh. Baby doll? Meh. But these kids look like they were well-pleased in this photo:

I wonder how (and if) they remember this Christmas/

Nostalgia

I'm not doing too well with the Holidailies thing. Today I was going to talk in depth about holiday cards, gifts or decorations. But I keep getting distracted. Yesterday I was going to do something more than the 'oops I didn't really post yesterday.' But I didn't. I had to catch up on some financial stuff, I read the newspapers and we drove through blowing snow (really, but it wasn't quite freezing so that was good) to a dinner party and it ran sort of late. I've been sending out holiday cards to a few people and to people who send me one.Today, I sort of worked on the puzzles a long time and then we took a walk on the chilly, sunny day and had an al fresco lunch. Then we had to go to the bookstore and buy presents for ourselves. When I got home I was going to write some more, but I got a few holiday cards in the mail plus I got the images from some slides I had scanned and started downloading them.

Which leads me to the picture above and the title of this post. My aunt, my dad's youngest sister, is 86 years old She's downsizing as fast as she can. She had some 35mm slides and I told her I would take them and go through them and maybe get some scanned. I spent a long time with the loupe and viewer and took some to a camera store for high-resolution scanning last week. The one above was taken in Hawaii in the fifties. She was in the Navy and stationed there. When I went through the slides I had this rush of nostalgia for when I was a little kid and my aunt (who is barely 17 years older than I am) was my idol because she traveled around in the Navy. Anyway, nostalgia is a great time waster, I find. And that's one of many reasons I'm behind on everything else. But isn't that a fun picture?

Looking Back

This is a photo taken in Spring 1949. That's my aunt in the shorts and saddle oxfords. She is 17. That's me on her lap, not yet one. The swing was on our farm in a very large Pecan tree.The field behind us belonged to us (or, actually, my granddad as did the whole farm and house). I think I see some cattle out there. Looking back over sixty-five years. I worshiped this aunt, but I'm so small here that I don't think I'm very sure of her as yet. I have that dark hair like my mother. It is weird but I can almost recognize this baby in this blurry picture as me. I remember the swing from later when it was still there and I could swing on it myself. My aunt looks young but the face is definitely hers. She is the only one of my dad and his siblings still alive. She's recovering from a shoulder replacement and the fall that precipitated it. She sounded good on the phone a couple of days ago.

The end of the year is a time for looking back, isn't it? I've been fumbling through old pictures and scanning them. I got this one out of a decaying photo album of my mother's a few years ago and put it and the other pictures in these non-reactive sleeves.I'd never noticed the saddle oxfords until I was processing this scan.

Taking stock of 2014 I'm thinking that I failed to accomplish much. But I did scan this picture and discover those shoes. And that's something.

Time Passes!

Dad's family 1944. Only his brother is missing. I think that may be because he was away in the Navy. This is during WWII, of course. My dad was rejected for conscription a few times for health. Eventually they took him, though. Except for his brother (who was not yet married) this is his family. I wonder if the picture was taken to send to his brother. None of the sisters are married at this time. His youngest sister, on the ground with my mother and infant sister, is no more than 14.

I have quite a collection of pictures (scanned from prints and originally digital) on my computer and various backup drives. I have several computers on my desk (don't ask) and when they are on they frequently go into screen saver mode and I have them flashing up pictures from a few collections.

When I look at old pictures I can't help but think about how much time has passed and how many people have passed with time. If I see the picture above I immediately think: they are all gone except that baby and teenager. The baby is now my almost 71-year-old sister. The teenager is my Aunt Cappy, featured yesterday. Only my granddad didn't survive to be in my life. But my grandmother, Dad, Mom and the other four sisters are gone now, too.

So much happened to these people. Eight more children would be born amongst three of the women in this picture. They would work and struggle and laugh and cry. (The Ball family, in fact, has a tendency to laugh until they cry.) The children would grow, the people in this picture would grow old, the children would have children and those children would have children. A couple of children would die before their parents.

This tendency of mine to look at who has been lost in pictures as they flash by doesn't feel morbid. It feels like celebrating lives lived and the struggle inherent in life. Let's see...there's a picture of my friend Al on the beach at Normandy, my mother with a snowman, two of our dogs (they are gone, too), my mom with us on the Capitol steps when we are children, my Aunts Mary and Dottie at my sister's wedding in 1965. And there's my friend Charles giving me a hug, So recognizable in these pictures on my screens but no longer in the world. Does this make me sad? No just nostalgic and maybe accepting that one is just a pawn in a long sputtering line of humanity trying hard to stop time but failing. Always eventually succumbing.

What's Eating You?

Aunt Cappy at Shaw's near Pemaquid, July 2005.

This morning I stayed in bed until 8 o'clock. I almost never stay in bed that late. I had some weird dreams. When I got up I thought I should write something for Holidailies right away and get that done. The writing prompt was about shopping Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We will speak of my non-shopping ways another time. Today we will talk about my Aunt.

We call her Cappy. It's a nickname her brothers and sisters (and parents for all I know) gave her. She had two brothers and four sisters. My dad and my uncle and my four other aunts on that side of the family. Two of her sisters married and had kids. The brothers, too. (Two of her sisters never married.) She was single until she was in her mid-thirties. She was in the Navy. She married a Marine late in both their military careers. He went to Viet Nam after they married. He had been in WWII and Korea. They were married for over four decades until he died in 2013. All her sisters have died, too. Her brothers. All the husbands and wives of those siblings. Her nieces and nephews married. Some had children. Some of those children had children. But of her 'generation' on my Dad's side, it is only Aunt Cappy. It's true she was youngest of her siblings. The oldest was 20 years older. Cappy was born straddling the next generation, only 12 years older than the oldest niece.

The Marine she married hailed from a little town in Maine where generations of his family had lived. So they moved there after they retired and they took care of his mother until she died and stayed on in the land of harsh winters and beauty and lobsters until they couldn't weather the winters and finally couldn't maintain two homes so they could summer in Texas.

The picture above is of my aunt when Forrest and I visited Maine on a car trip. Nine years ago. She's joking with the lobsters we will consume. (Funny how the camera she's holding dates the picture. A Polaroid I believe. Although the rest of us were in the digital era by then.) We had a routine when we visited called 'Code of the West' (somewhat inexplicably in the eastern most state) that involved going for lobster at a lobster dock restaurant, taking home leftover lobster meat for lobster rolls the next day in a cooler, visiting the Pemaquid Lighthouse and Museum and having ice cream at a gift shop nearby.

My aunt is on my mind. She lives near Dallas now but on a Thanksgiving trip to Houston she fell and dislocated her shoulder and had to get a shoulder replacement yesterday. Several of my cousins and their wives are on the case. But I'm there in spirit. I took her back to Maine the summer of 2013 to lay my uncle's ashes to rest in his native soil. (And, incidentally, to reenact the Code of the West in his honor. And, let's be honest, do every fun thing he liked that we could make time for. That Marine was always so much fun.) I took her back again this last summer with the help of my own niece (who is, gulp, 46 years old!) to do the driving. Another cousin took her to South Carolina this year. On these excursions I worried that she would have a fall. I was inordinately proud of getting her home upright.

I hope that she rebounds to take the risk of being on unfamiliar ground again. There is an army of nieces and nephews and their progeny who will hopefully be there for our last elder of that generation. Maybe we will keep taking her on trips even though we fear the fall, especially the out-of-town fall. I wish she lived closer to me. (She is in a retirement home near Dallas.) But that would imbue additional responsibility. It's been a few years since we had parental units to look after. None were quite as fun as Cappy, though.

And whenever I see some older person being looked after, by a child or someone else, I now wonder: who will look after me? I posed that question to Aunt Cappy one time. She said: "Be nice to your nieces."

Merry Christmas

FFP poses with a stuffed Santa at a party at the Headliners Club.

The Visible Woman...celebrates.

There are no more presents to open. I got my present earlier and I love it. FFP liked his new muffler and umbrella (or so he said). It's not the one in this picture because I didn't let him open until Christmas Eve and this was the day before. 

We got up around 7:30. At that moment when a hot coffee from the Capresso machine sounded better than staying in bed. I sorted the ads to throw away out of the paper. Just glanced at a couple. I have no intention of shopping after Christmas, but I like to see what they are pushing.

Yesterday we walked down to SoCo and ate at a favorite spot, Snack Bar. I had a salad of avocado, pineapple and quinoa and FFP had the same and we shared an order of crispy Brussels sprouts although I ate most of them. There were lots of people down there, presumably getting last minute gifts. We only went in to Off the Wall, Tesoros Trading Company and South Congress Books. At South Congress Books we bought a book of jazz essays by Phillip Larkin called All What Jazz: A Record Diary  Who knew he wrote about jazz? And a biography of Peggy Lee. I guess you could say we bought ourselves some presents. We refused the gift bags offered however. FFP came home and immediately started reading the Peggy Lee book. I wanted to take up the Phillip Larkin book because I'd started one essay in the store and it sounded great. But I'm going to finish Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch first. It's my bedside book. (I read papers in my chair in front of the TV and while eating.) I finish books, but slowly, since that's usually my only book reading time.

We came home and finally decided to stay in for the evening. We watched Le Notti Bianche on a disk rented from Netflix. We listened to an extra on the disk which was a reading of the Dostoevsky story it was based on. (I love this movie. The way it looks. The way they film flashbacks. The atmosphere of the streets.) I read papers all the while, missing this and that in the film and reading I'm sure. We ate a dinner of what was in the refrigerator. And we had drinks. I had two lovely Manhattans on the rocks, mixed by FFP. On Monday at our club party they had Bloody Marys and I had two and they were delicious. I think FFP even had one. (We did walk to the party!) FFP started thinking about mixing one and had to run around the neighborhood and find some mix. He tried the store in the building but it was closed early for the holiday and so he went about four blocks to a liquor store he called to see if they had it.

So we celebrated with cocktails and an old movie and reading. Happy Christmas Eve to us. It was nice, actually.

Early in the evening I called my Aunt Cappy on the phone. She lives near Dallas and my cousin and his wife and one of their daughters and her family live not too far away. However, I think everyone was in Taos for Christmas. My cousin in Houston has a wife and mother-in-law not doing that well. We don't like to drive IH35 this time of year. So there she was, alone. (Her husband died in January. She couldn't attend his memorial in February because she was in the hospital with pneumonia. I helped her return his ashes to his native state of Maine in the summer and she did quite well on the trip.) She said she'd saved our gift for Christmas morning. It wasn't much: some ballpoint pens in a retro style and a package of note cards with a typewriter as decoration. (She still has a typewriter and uses it occasionally!) She said, yes, she was alone. Then: "I spent lots of time alone in the barracks before I was married." (She was a career Navy woman. She married a Marine within a few years of both of their retirements.)

I thought of a Christmas I spent alone, before I was married. My parents went to Colorado where they had grandchildren. My aunts who lived nearby (the older sisters of my Aunt Cappy who never married) had gone to West Texas where there were two other sisters, married with children. I didn't get an invitation from anyone I worked with. It was a sort of wonderful experience, actually. I had presents from my parents and sister and probably some from my aunts and I saved them for Christmas morning. I opened them and then later called Colorado to thank them for the presents (and hear the chaos of the kids and their presents in the background). I don't remember any of my gifsts except one. It was a pencil sharpener. A crank-style one, heavy duty. Instead of having to be screwed to a shelf like in our schools at that time it had a lever that activated a powerful suction cup to stabilize it. That was back when I dreamed of writing a book on yellow pads with Number 2 pencils. Back before computers for the home. (I programmed computers at the time, having my code typed onto punch cards for the compiler by a room full of ladies. Yes they were all ladies.) I never wrote a book on yellow pads with pencils. I never wrote a book, period. I kept the pencil sharpener for a long time, however.

That Christmas I made myself some coffee, maybe a little breakfast of bacon and eggs. I got the Dallas Morning News and I turned on my stereo and listened to the Beatles or something while reading every single page and section of the paper. If I'm not mistaken, I may not have owned a TV at that time.

Like my Aunt Cappy, I can deal with being alone. Even on the holiday when it seems most people gather in large groups. But I almost never am alone and I almost never was at Christmas before I married either.

Today we are relaxing with coffee and papers. We may have a walk this morning. Probably have some chicken and veggie tacos for lunch. Then we join a family gathering for dinner and drinking. 

Favorite Aunt

I like my dad's youngest sister and the man she married. Because of their fierce independence and their willingness to keep going and come back from accident and illness to reclaim that. This is a picture of lobster pots on the dock in Maine when we visited their (summer) home in 2005 and went to the coast for a lobster and steamer clam feed and a look at the scenery. I wish they wouldn't maintain two homes. One in the middle of nowhere Maine and a rented apartment in the Dallas area. It's too complex, I think, when you are getting older. I mean we are almost two decades younger and we are simplifying. But still. I love the way they embrace life, the way my uncle hints that we need to go eat a bunch of raw oysters and exults when we do it, the way they have their cocktail at 4PM, health and situation permitting. When they are in Texas they sometimes manage a trip down here, but they always seem to manage a trip to Memphis to gamble. You have to love it. But I worry, yeah, that one day they won't be able to manage it all.

Family Dancing

[Picture is from September 2006, Design within Reach Store, Austin.] Note cool hairdo (not). And yet, no gray.

I love seeing my family. Especially my dad's sisters and my cousins from that side. Yesterday my cousin from Houston came over with his wife and two of my dad's sisters and the younger one's husband were down from Dallas. What I don't love about seeing family is wondering why my cousin (who is younger than I if only by a year or less) has gray hair. And why my aunts are older and my dad is using his walker around the house. We played a domino game called Spinners. It's mostly luck with a bit of strategy if you care to concentrate. Everyone can still follow the game and match the pips and complain about their bad draws.

But it's hard to ignore when you are with family how old everyone has become. Except me, of course.

Nothing Taboo Today

I'm going to talk about whatever I want to today, particularly the briefly banished subjects of holiday spirit and downsizing. Because I make the rules after all. I also have a rule that the picture doesn't have to have too much to do with the words! But I'll reach for a tie-in.

I went through an album of pictures, mostly ones rescued from aging cheap albums my mother had kept, that I have in those inert plastic sheets in a sturdy storage case. Eventually I hope to sort through all the photos, getting some scanned in, some discarded (hmmm...what landscape is this?) and consolidating them as much as possible. This is tedious at best, but is an ongoing thing that I have worked on at least. This is the type of downsizing that is most tedious. Really personal things are hard to deal with. In other downsizing news, we have gotten pickups of several loads of 'stuff' and taken two car loads to the thrift store.

This particular picture was actually taken on a holiday. Thanksgiving 1967. And yes I have on shorts. Because we are in Florida. That is my aunt, Dad's youngest sister next to me. She was still in the Navy then, stationed in Pensacola. I am not yet twenty which means she is in her late thirties. My dad and mom are there. Mom is writing a letter to my sister. I know this because I wrote on the back of the picture. Dad looks tired. Maybe he did most of the driving to get us to Pensacola.

I loved holidays at this age. And I adored this aunt who was in the Navy and had adventures (or so I thought) when I was a kid. She was married at this point, but for less than two years, to a Marine.

What is so odd to me about this trip is that I remember almost nothing about it and have had to be reminded that I was ever there. I know I would have been excited to spend Thanksgiving with my aunt. I think two of my dad's other sisters went along. Those two aunts (one younger than my dad, one older) never married and I adored them because they doted on me and all the other nieces and nephews. I loved being with them. This picture was taken with my Polaroid camera. But I don't know who took it.

This trip is in a mist for some reason. A trip I took to Pensacola in the summer of '66 is vivid. I got to fly for the first time. My friend and I drove my aunt's car around while she was at work on the base.

I wish I remembered more about this time. I guess we had a turkey dinner. Why can't I find more pictures? [Ed. Note: You might find more pictures from this trip if you weren't blogging all the time.]

What about those other banished topics? I'm reserving the right to talk about teeth at a later time. But my holiday spirit has probably been raised as far as it's going to get. I opened a few boxes of decor and put them around our big room. I found the video fireplace with the Christmas music. And a good friend is going to come over for coffee or tea tomorrow and we are going to work for a little while on a jigsaw puzzle. My friend wants to capture that sort of Christmas feeling. It reminds me of my mother. Sadly, my friend has the same cancer my mother did. Happily she's in remission but she has many health problems from the treatment. My mother loved to stare at jigsaw pieces and sip a cup of black coffee. While wearing a Christmas sweater or something, of course. (And hey...look at the blouse in this picture. I told you she liked bright colors!)