Memories

Tom The Turkey And Thanksgiving Traditions

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Tom Turkey From the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I may have already mentioned it, but it bears repeating, LOL.

Among other favorite things about the day is the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And my favorite parade “float” is Tom the Turkey.

There is just something about him – the colors, the old-fashioned feel of the float, or maybe even because he debuted for the first time in 1971, when I was first old enough to watch and remember what I saw – but he makes me happy.

In my family growing up, my parents (who were big on little traditions or rituals, if you haven’t been here long enough to have read some of those posts) had some for Thanksgivibg as well.  One ritual we observed faithfully each Thanksgiving morning, was the watching of the Macy’s Day Parade while eating bowls of grapes.

Yes, I know that sounds a little strange, but here’s the thing: in the 1970’s when I was a kid, we had a big family, plenty of food and clothing (almost all of it homemade) and books, but not much extra for more expensive “treats”. Apples and bananas were reasonably-priced back then, but not so much grapes. So that was what we looked forward to while we watched the parade. Oh, and tangerines, because they were also “in season” and more reasonably-priced.

Some of my favorite memories of Thanksgiving revolve around this tradition. My mother would have gotten up very early, around 4:00am, to saute the onions and celery in butter, that were to go in the sage dressing with which she’d stuff and sew up the neck and big cavity of the turkey (it was usually a 20-pounder at least, and she used a big darning needle and cotton thread….a process I still use myself when preparing turkey). The result was that the house smelled delicious by the time the parade began at 9:00 or so.

I can remember sitting on the old sofa with several of the younger of my sisters around the living room, and Pa in his chair, while Ma and my older sisters came in and out as they worked on other tasks to get ready for the big meal. The picture window would have steam from all the cooking, and the lovely scent of sautĂ©ed onion and celery, sage and turkey, simply filled the air. We all ate our grapes and tangerines and enjoyed the show. The Rockettes were another favorite, as well. But we always turned off the parade BEFORE Santa Claus came in…because we also had the tradition of no Christmas music, decorations, or discussion until December 1 at earliest! In hindsight, I think it was a great idea. Time and the seasons get rushed far too often as it is. But as a child, it took some fortitude to follow the “rules”. 🙂

My own kids still follow the same traditions, and they enjoy them almost as much as I did (though they get to have grapes a lot more frequently in this modern age!)

So, those are a few of my traditions. Anyone have any of their own to share?

Faithful Companion

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Our sweet English Shepherd, Cassie, resting her head on her toy after playing with Mama for a while…

“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
~ Mark Twain

“To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable.”

~ Edgar Allan Poe (“The Black Cat”)

Lassie 1977

My beloved “Lassie”, circa 1977, at the Homestead

I had one dog growing up. Her name was “Lassie” (original, I know, but she was a full-blooded collie, though the runt of the litter, and the sweetest, most faithful, loyal and intelligent dog I’ve ever known).

Cassie is my dog now…a full-blooded English shepherd, who is also sweet and loyal. We also have two cats, and I had cats all my life growing up, but there is something about a faithful dog that tugs my heartstrings.

Anyone else have or have loved  a pet they still cherish?

Thoughts Have Energy

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think-positiveI stumbled on this poster the other day, and it triggered something in me. A little, niggling voice in the back of my head that reminded me of how I’ve been wrestling with this concept in the past three years, especially since my father’s passing. But I suppressed the voice as I tend to do and moved on.

I went in search of the poster, intending to write down the words and make a “Wordle” of it for my students. When I located it, I admit to being more than a little startled to find that it had been originally posted on the very day my father died.

Here’s why that was startling for me:

It’s kind of funny, but for many members of my family (and I’m talking not just my husband and kids, but also my six sisters and their families, and my mother), the death of our father (“Pa”) seemed to be the demarcation point of a series of unfortunate circumstances (family illnesses, some severe and long-lasting, some involving our children or grandchildren, shocks, stresses, and accidents) that seemed to have kind of piled on as time passed.

Of course Pa’s death doesn’t actually have any connection to any of the other events or challenges. People lose parents – especially an older parent – all the time. But it was kind of noticeable that in conversation it would come up, “You know, since Pa died…” followed by the various incidences or at the very least, a sense of displacement. A sense of things being shifted out of balance that is very subtle but still has impact over time.

That Pa was really the emotional and physical center of our family and a strong, much-loved, vital presence for my mother, all seven of us daughters and our own families made his death very difficult, of course, but he had been ill for the six months prior to his death, and so we were also relieved for him when his suffering ended.

Still, it was a struggle to pull out of the sense of shock of losing him in our family. I tried to turn as much of my thoughts and energies as I could to the positive, even through the challenges that seemed to arise out of nowhere (I was even able to finally finish Moose Tracks on the Road to Heaven, after having struggled with writing it for two and a half years prior, thanks to some of the lessons and experiences I had during his illness and death. Ultimately, a full five years after beginning, I wrote “The End” this past May).

Anyway, as the issues cropped up one by one, they tested my emotional mettle, but I soldiered on.

I’ve been mostly successful with it. As a child, I couldn’t bear the least amount of change (I even begged my parents to save the old linoleum they ripped up after they refinished the kitchen floor when I was five), but I’ve become an adult who is becoming comfortable with the realization that control is an illusion; I know and accept that the best I can do is choose how I will react to the circumstances I face, positive or negative. Pa tried to teach me that all my life. I learned the lesson slowly while he was alive (probably because he was always there as the emotional “safety net” for all of us) – then in big, heaping leaps once he died.

My life has settled down and been very good again in many respects. But I wonder, sometimes, if I still spend too much of my energy “watering the weeds”. I keep working and slaving over what I “have” to, all the time, and letting myself get bogged down in responsibilities and feeling trapped by them.

Thoughts are energy.

I tell my own children this all the time. And the whole convoluted story in this posting is just to say that, seeing this poster has made me realize that maybe I need to do a better job of remembering that statement myself.

I’ve been getting better at it, but I have a ways to go and some polishing to do in terms of the thought patterns I allow myself…and that allow positive or negative into my life here and now.

And those are my philosophical thoughts for the day (maybe even the week).

Happy Wednesday! May it be a positive one for you.

Hubknuckles

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A sweet book from a simpler time

When they were in elementary school, this was a favorite book for both my girls, especially around this time of year. It has some lovely black and white, soft-edged illustrations by Deborah Kogan Ray, and it was originally published in 1985, purporting to be based upon a slightly spooky but also sweet and ultimately positive experience had by the author, Emily Herman, when she was little.

My younger daughter so enjoyed the details and descriptions in the story, that from the very first time I read it to her, she begged for us to have “spaghetti and meatballs” for supper that Halloween, since that’s what the narrator and her family have in the story on that night.

We’ve been having spaghetti and meatballs for Halloween supper ever since. 🙂

Here’s the book’s description:

“Every Halloween, Hubknuckles pays a visit to Lee and her younger sisters and baby brother. The children watch the ghostly figure from the safety of their warm kitchen, experiencing delicious little tickles of fear.
But this year, Lee has decided that Hubknuckles isn’t real. “Hubknuckles is just a sheet and a flashlight,” she tells her sisters. “Either Ma or Pa makes him dance.” And she is determined to prove it.
What Lee discovers after an eerie dance on the lawn with her silent, shadowy partner is sure to delight young readers, who will be enchanted by the softly glowing illustrations of this unusual Halloween happening.”

I recommend it highly if you have or know of young children who enjoy reading or being read to, say from kindergarten age to age 9 or so. It remains one of my older daughter’s favorite stories. And my younger daughter, who is a decade older than she was on that long-ago Halloween when we first read Hubknuckles together, is now an avid reader in own right, in large part due to the way books like it triggered her imagination. This story is available for kindle or in hardcover (though the link I’ve provided in the title here leads to the hardcover version at amazon.com).

One of the things I miss, now that my girls are no longer so little, is the loss of those opportunities to read to them like I used to. Seeing this book brings back many happy memories of times together, snuggled up and enjoying a good tale. But I’ve ordered copies for both of them, so they maybe they will be able to recreate that magic when they read it to their children one day.

Halloween, 1970’s Style

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Halloween circa 1975 edited framed

At the Homestead, circa 1975

So, I was going through some old photos recently and stumbled upon this photo –  one of the few I have of the epic Halloween parties we used to have when I was in elementary school.

Everyone is sitting around the big kitchen table at the Homestead, chowing down on the homemade pizza, cupcakes and popcorn, along with bowls of chips and corn curls, all while dressed in their costumes.

One of the cool things about this picture to me is that none of the people sitting around the table are me or members of my family: They’re all friends from school or up the road.

See, this was the only occasion all year when I and my two closest-in-age sisters (who were the only ones young enough to have this kind of party, still, since we were the youngest three of the seven girls) could invite several friends each to the house for a “big blow-out” party.  Oh, we had friends over all the time, and there was always enough food for another three or four plates, but this was one time when we could have up to 14-15 guests AT ONCE. It was an event planned by us and anticipated by our friends all year.

Most of our friends lived in the small city nearby, where our schools were. We were in the country, and that made a huge difference for a Halloween celebration, much of which could still take place outside, in beautiful mid-October weather.

We’d set up a “Haunted House” in the one-room camp that Pa had built years before out in the woods behind the garage, and some of my older sisters would “man” it. Big, black tarps were strung throughout to make “rooms” and in each room was a different “spooky” tableau…some with moving characters who would jump and frighten those touring it.

We’d have games, like “Guess the object” where the players had their eyes blindfolded and had to guess what was in the bowls…peeled warm grapes for eyeballs, a turned out jello-mold for brains, warmed pasta with sauce for “guts” – you get the idea) 🙂 Of course we’d also play “kick-the-can” and other running-around-in-the-yard-and-woods kind of games. Loads of fun.

It was a great opportunity to be creative, in this simpler time before technology and our addiction to it made everything more accessible and therefore less mysterious and exciting.

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Me in the costume my mother made me to be a “Scheherazade”-type princess

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One of my sisters as an “Executioner”, complete with a “bloody” axe with which she cut off my head, LOL

I never realized how much work it must have been for Ma, though, preparing all that food. And of course, we almost always had homemade costumes, not just because they were “cooler” than anything we could find in the store, but also, I learned later, because they were more economical. My parents were frugal in all the right ways, so that I never experienced a sense of “want” other than the healthy kind. 🙂

It was an innocent time filled with great memories, when Halloween was centered on fun instead of “evil” connotations, and living in the country made for some rousing good times.

Anyone else have any memories of old time Halloweens to share? Please do in the comments!

 

Grandpa’s Crows

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Crow in the tree edited

Crow in the tree at the cemetery

Well, technically for me, they’re “Pa’s” crows, because the man whose crows are the subject of this post is my father…but my kids and the other grandkids (and there are a lot of them…I’m one of seven girls, and we each have between one and four kids of our own) got used to calling them Grandpa’s crows.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it seems to me that crows get a bad name. They’re often associated with death or darkness, they’re maligned for having one of the least pleasant voices of the bird kingdom, and many people consider them pests. But they hold a very special place in my heart, for a variety of reasons, most of them tied to my father, otherwise known to our family as “Pa”. Continue Reading…

Danse Macabre

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Getting in the mood this Saturday night for All Hallow’s Eve, and since Danse Macabre by French composer Camille Saint-SaĂ«nsis is one of my favorite classical pieces of music for this time of year, I thought I’d share…I also fondly remember watching this accompanying PBS video in the 1980’s. Does anyone else remember watching this one (in elementary school, or like me, in high school…just because I liked it 🙂 )?

Shades of the USSR Night Train

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Waiting for a night train in Upstate NY

I live in a pretty suburban area (well, it’s a small city, surrounded by rural areas). We drive everywhere in cars, and the nearest (tiny) train station is about 20 minutes away.

Hence, it’s been a couple years since I’ve been on a train…and much longer since I took one at night. In fact the last time I rode a train at night was when I was 21 and an American student, living and studying in the former USSR.

Just this past weekend, I found it necessary to take a train at night again (long story involving some other travel and a death in the family, necessitating my attendance at the wake in another city). It was only an hour long train ride, from point A to point B, but waiting in the old station  – pretty much every train station in Upstate New York is “old” – and then standing at trackside, for the train to come in, brought to mind that other time and place from two and a half decades earlier.

I got used to riding the night train during the months I lived in the Soviet Union. It was the most common form of travel in and around the cities (primarily Leningrad and Moscow for me), and my “free” time after classes, which I used to explore palaces, museums, and the countryside around, usually brought me back into the home station during darker hours.

But I always felt and was “safe” because there was virtually no crime on public transportation or on the streets at that time (the citizens were too fearful to step out of line, and there were soldiers with big guns wandering all over the place)…but the atmosphere was oppressive to say the least.

My latest night train experience, I’m happy to say, was a little different (and the seats were more comfortable too). 🙂