Who's To Say?

My mother was 16 in 1932 when the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. She had one dress, and since she was the tallest female in the family, there were no hand-me-downs. It was a painful time to be a teenager, and the privations she suffered molded her attitude toward possessions. They were purchased after much deliberation, not taken lightly and not thrown away until there was absolutely no “good” left in them.
Like most of the people who were young during WWII, I remember ration cards, underpants without elastic (they kept falling down), the thrill of  going to the grocery store that had just got in a shipment of bananas, black-outs (even though we were a tiny town in the middle of the country), and the uncertainty that comes from not knowing if our country would win or not. There was a “waste-not, want-not” attitude that clings to this day.
The “Boomers,” the “X Generation,” and the “Millennials” all have characteristics shaped by the political condition of the country, but over the past 50 years there has emerged the attitude that nothing should be saved if it doesn’t have a current use. If something has hung in your closet for a year without being worn, get rid of it. That jar that the pickles came in is just garbage, not something you might use to store left-overs. Old tires are an expensive nuisance to get rid of. When you get tired of a piece of furniture, you just pitch it out and buy new. And if saving stuff is silly, hoarding is a sin or a disease.
The quandary for humans today is deciding what is treasure and what is trash. For many it’s simply saying, “Am I going to use this in the next 3 months?” If the answer is “no,” out it goes. Not for them the crowded closets, overflowing junk drawers, or crammed book cases.
For the rest of us, the decision making is not so easy. Who wouldn’t like to have the very first Batman comic book that you bought for a dime in 1940? The first Barbie doll even in played-with condition is worth a mint to doll collectors. The original  Pez Dispenser that you played with and then pitched would buy you a fancy meal today. The Cracker-Jack tiny metal racer was so insignificant that you didn’t even think about throwing it away. Carnival glass dishes were freebies in boxes of soap. And so on and on.
The trouble is that we can’t tell what is going to have value in the future. That’s bothersome to most of us, but to some it is frightening. And because they cannot know what will have value in the future, they save it all. They become buried in their accumulations and ridiculed for being foolish…or sick.
Perhaps it would be better if we stepped back in our judgementalism and considered these souls as “rescuers.” Rescuers of the trivial and mundane so that in the future these things will not be forgotten.
Most of what they save is probably trash, but mixed into the heaps of stuff will be treasures, things that the contemporary Discarders may even pay good money for at an estate auction and proudly display in their tidy homes.

Published in the Woodford County News Bulletin, 21 May 2014

Walking Home

When I was a freshman at Woodruff High School, we lived on North Jefferson and I walked the 10 or so blocks to and from school. On the way home, I often encountered three grade school aged kids, a boy and two girls returning home from Greely Grade School which right across the street from our apartment house. The smallest girl was always walking up in the grass.

I was shy at the time (I’ve gotten over that, thank goodness), and didn’t really know how to handle saying ‘hi’ every time we met, so often I would cross the street and walk down the other side so I didn’t have to say hello. Seems silly now, but that’s how it was. During my sophomore year we moved  to Dechman Street so I no longer met them when I was walking home.

Occasionally I’d see a dark-haired, older boy going into the house where the three kids lived, but I merely noted the fact and didn’t think any more about it.

Fast-forward a year.

Ronnie Marshall was going to run for school president and he noticed that I was always drawing, so he thought I might be an addition to his campaign committee. The time of the first meeting arrived (February 1954), and Buddy Curtis was to pick me up and take me to another committee member’s house; I think she lived on North Madison across from the Episcopal Church. Someday I’m going to remember to drive down that street and see if my memory is right or if it’s all haywire.

On the way, Buddy was to pick up some boy who was playing in the Woodruff High Jazz Band. There was another boy in the pick-up truck, but I can’t remember who he was. He and Buddy kept talking about how this guy they were to pick up was so funny!

We waited just awhile and out came a guy from the school, and we four (in the front seat of a pick-up) headed the few blocks to the meeting place. All evening I noticed the “funny” boy, and he was indeed funny. Kept everyone in stitches.

I looked for him at school the next week, but didn’t see him. The next meeting of the committee came, and we managed to be sitting next to each other all evening and in the back of the pick-up on the way to my house.

Fast forward again.

The funny fellow turned out to be Jim Fyke. We’ve been married 54 years now, and he still keeps me in stitches.

The three kids I met on Madison Street were his brother and sisters, Gary, Mary Ellen and Barbara. The boy entering the house was probably him.

Soon I was a frequent visitor at 1209 NE Madison. We dated for 5 years before we could afford to get married.

Fast forward yet again.

At the gathering of the five Fyke siblings in June 2013, Barbara (the youngest, the one who walked in the grass) said that the three of them often talked about the pretty girl they met on the street. She and Mary Ellen noticed that the girl had a leather purse! And a camelhair coat! And they wondered if she were nice or snooty. I had no idea they even noticed me, let alone remembered so many details.

You know, I can never tell teen agers that their high school loves are just passing infatuations, because Jim and I fell in love when we were just 17 and 15, and I can’t imagine having lived the last 59 years (54 married, 5 dating) without him.

Tina and the Electric Plug

   At our recent Fyke family gathering, the five ‘kids’ were reminiscing about their youthful experiences. Barbara (the youngest) said her mother was the very best at instilling fear in her. She said, “She had me so scared of electrical plugs that all she had to do was point one at me and I thought killing electricity was going to jump out of those two prongs and strike me!”

   Then Harvey added that they were darned lucky to have had a mother. He told of a time when he was about 3 or 4, which must have been about 1940---he heard the story from one of his parents much later. They lived in an apartment in Peoria. It had limited electricity, and the only place to plug in the electric iron was into an outlet hanging on a cord from the ceiling.

   One afternoon Willis came home to a completely dark house. He asked what happened, and Tina just said that the lights went out. He went to the basement and put in some new fuses, and all was fine. Except that he saw a table knife with a very blackened tip lying on the table. He quizzed Tina on it and learned that she couldn’t get the iron’s plug out of the socket, so she stuck the knife in there to pry the two apart.

   Then Jim remembered seeing that knife around for years and years, and suddenly all their memories coalesced and they had the whole picture, and Barbara finally learned why Tina frightened her so about electric plugs.

Grandma's Funeral

First you have to understand that Grandma and Grandpa were not church goers. In fact, Grandpa Hammond told everyone he was a Christian Scientist, because they were ignorant people in good old New Boston who were afraid of anything that was as strange and unusual as Christian Science. And also, he had learned that Christian Scientists didn't believe in doctors and medicine, and proclaiming he was one of them kept him from being hounded to go to the doctor. As far as I know, he never had any actual contact with a member of that faith.

You need also to know that Grandma was a musician. When she was a girl, she played the piano in a movie theater run by her mother, providing "mood" music to whatever was going on on the silent screen. She sang well and she appreciated good music of all kinds.

Grandma was raised a Baptist, but there was no Baptist church in town. When she died, my Aunt Mary came from California to take care of things. She made arrangements for burial in the New Windsor Cemetery and hired the local Baptist minister to do the grave side rites. The minister's wife played the autoharp (or was it a zither?), and she and her husband would sing "Nearer My God to Thee."

The day of the funeral arrived and it was cold and windy, but at least there was no snow on the ground. We all trooped to the cemetery where there was a tent to keep off some of the wind, just SOME of the wind. It blew through like only a prairie wind can blow.

The minister decided it was time for Grandpa to 'come to Jesus' and he set out to tell Grandpa the error of his ways for keeping Grandma away from the church all those years. At least that's how I remember it. Never a kind word was said about our wonderful, laughing, kind Grandma. I don't know if he was preaching eternal damnation or not, but that's how it seemed to me.

Then the preacher and his wife began their rendition of the old hymn. He was a pretty decent singer, and she wasn't bad as a musician, but the wind blowing so steadily apparently dried out a string...or something. Anyway about 2/3 through the first verse she hit the sourest note you ever heard. Then when they got to the same place on the next verse, she didn't avoid it. She waded right in and played that bad note again.

Joy, Corrine (Joy's mother) and I were red in the face from having to hold in our laughter. We could just imagine Grandma cringing in her casket at that awful screech. As soon as we could get behind the nearby shed, we dissolved into uncontrollable laughter. Just then Aunt Sally came around the building and thought we were sobbing. Our family not being comfortable with outward displays of emotion, she turned around and went back the way she came.

They say laughter and tears aren't far apart, and on that cold day in February, we couldn't have agreed more...and I dare say, Grandma was laughing right along with us.

Gladys Lelia McUne Hammond 1890 - 1970

New and Improved

Lots of new and wonderful things turn out to be just plain pains in the elbow.

In the 50s and 60s it was thought that Daylight Saving Time would be helpful because it would allow people more daylight time in the summer evenings for activities. Most states have adopted it, and that’s fine ---except that it means that 4^th of July fireworks have to start at about 9:30--- but then they decided that we need to go back to Standard Time in the winter so there would be more daylight in the morning --- and going to the grocery store after work means doing it after dark. I wish someone would just let us stay on Daylight Time.

 Then there’s one-way streets. In the 50s most ‘modern’ cities turned their major thoroughfares into one-way streets. I can remember when Jefferson and Adams in Peoria became one-way, and the only good thing about them as far as I was concerned is that you usually only had to watch for traffic from one direction when you were crossing the street. Hardly any city I have been in has truly grid-like street systems, and many times there’s a street going north but not a matching street going south, for example. Bloomington is a good example, and I can get lost in Bloomington’s downtown faster than you run a yellow light. One-way streets were supposed to make travel faster, easier and more efficient. Now Peoria’s city fathers are considering turning Jefferson and Adams back to two-way streets, because it would be faster, easier and more efficient.

And then there are ‘traffic circles.’ Our midwestern city planners are busy adding circles to all kinds of intersections, in spite of the fact that they are a pain to navigate, even in a downtown like Washington’s (Illinois, not D.C.). I remember all too well getting into a traffic circle in Washington, D.C. with my two kids in the car. We went around it twice because I couldn’t get over to get off on the street I needed. When I finally did get over, I was spun off onto the wrong street…in the wrong part of D.C. It was spooky! People who are familiar with the circles in their neighborhoods are comfortable with them, but for visitors they are a nightmare.

And what’s with the bike paths? Everywhere in the cities you see these 6 or 8 foot wide strips laid off on the streets, and they are supposed to be for bikes. But I never see any bicyclists on them. I suppose if you are fond of riding your bicycle in the city, you like them, but they seem like a lot of money gone to waste to me.

I remember many years ago that I acquired a dread of the words “New and Improved.” Whenever I saw them appear on the packaging of a favorite product, I groaned. Never did I find the product improved. Usually it meant that whatever I liked about the product was now gone. “New Blue Cheer” didn’t whiten as well; new Crest didn’t clean teeth as well; new wrinkle-free fabrics were the worst at wrinkling, etc.

But no matter how much I grouse about it, people who design things are going to continue to make them ‘new and improved,’ and I’ll just have to switch routes or products or schedules with everyone else.

Bug Collecting Is Not for Sissies

Sissies don't like insects. They especially don't like June bugs that bumble and scrabble around lights in the early summer. When I was about 10 years old, I didn't want to be a sissy, so I decided to LIKE June bugs. Come evening, I'd get hold of a bug by his middle and hold him up so his legs were working in mid air, or I'd let his pincer pinch my finger and he'd be stranded there. In case no one ever told you, June bugs are very stupid. Like the proverbial teen-aged boys, they only think of one thing. I wasn't what the beetles were looking for, so they caused me no harm. [When I went looking for an image of a June bug, I discovered that the beetle with the pincers was a stag beetle. Wicked looking beast, isn't it?]

Getting acquainted with June bugs led to my bug collection. Somewhere I must have seen how real etymologists mount their collections, and I got together some sort of frame with a glass and some cotton to pin the dead bugs to. It was pretty interesting, until nature took it's course. No one told me that dead things, no matter their size, are prey to smaller things. When all those little, icky white worms appeared, I suddenly lost interest in that hobby and the whole kit and kaboodle went into the trash.

I still like bugs, but I now insist that most of them stay outside my house.

I have watched for hours as an ant carried a bit of potato chip from my patio toward his hole. So far I have never had enough patience to follow an ant all the way home though, but I'm young enough that I might manage it some day. I taught all my kids to enjoy pill-bugs that roll up into a nice little gray ball when you disturb them. And I got my husband and brother-in-law to watching the paper wasps as they came to my flower bed, gathered up a ball of mud and flew off. After awhile they had the wasps named. There was the efficient one, and the workmanlike one, and the idiot one who never seemed to get a decent ball of mud collected. Wasps are interesting to watch...as long as you stay far enough away from them.

Now, I'm not a sissy, but I do have to admit that two kinds of bugs send chills up my spine: centipedes and earwigs. Just thinking of them makes me cringe. And you can't kill a centipede with your garden trowel,  because if you hack it in two, it just grows a new whatever-you-cut-off. I wonder if scientists have studied this trait to see if it could help in regrowing limbs or fingers or nerves.

Spiders aren't bugs, but for all intents and purposes they might as well be. I can't say that I want a spider crawling around on me, and I give them plenty of space, but I don't let anyone kill the spider by the back door that kills untold hundreds of bugs and leaves their carcasses for me to clean up.

One summer I had a jumping spider as a pet in the window over my kitchen sink. I had noticed that there weren't any fruit flies around the ripening tomatoes that I set there. Then one day as I was doing dishes, I saw the little striped guy come out of the corner, whirl around until he sighted in on a fruit fly, and with a mighty leap, jump and catch the fly. After that experience, I have treasured jumping spiders and have passed the tolerance on to my children. There was a dime-sized one in the sunroom last fall. I hope he is just hibernating and will be back when the weather warms up.

And everyone has marveled at the web of the orb-web spider, like Charlotte. The precision engineering that goes on within that little creature that allows her to construct her web is truly astounding.

One of our kids had a pet praying mantis one summer. We named him Manfred and kept him in an aquarium with a glass lid. I never realized how hard it was to stun a fly instead of killing it until I tried to get living flies for Manfred to eat.

I can never tell the story of Noah and the Ark without wondering why he let two mosquitoes on the boat. ...or two fleas....or two flies. I suppose they serve a good purpose, but I'm glad no child has ever asked me that question.

As a hobby, bug collecting has been interesting and informative and harmless. But I must admit that it's much better to collect them by picture and memory than by mounting them in cases. And now adays I am much more of a sissy than I was at 10.

Sewing - First, Last and Always

My favorite hobby:

My first experience with a needle, thread and fabric was with my Aunt Corrine's rag bag and darning needles. She must have been desperate to find something to keep the three of us busy (Joe was too little then to join in the project.) I don't suppose we made anything recognizable, but we really had fun. I think Joy and I were about five or six and Herman would have been three or four.

I think we played with that rag bag more than once, and probably progressed to smaller-eyed needles. What we all remember most though is the time one of us carelessly 'lost' a needle in the easy chair. Joy's dad, my Uncle Eldon, plopped down in that chair to read the paper, and popped up just as fast. He was MAD! That was the only time he spanked us, and I think he spanked us all....including our friend Marchia who had the misfortune of playing with us that day.

The only person who could always find a needle in an easy chair was my husband. To this day I am VERY careful that I don't lose a needle, because it will ALWAYS be he who finds it.

My first real sewing project was a little dresser scarf to embroider. My Grandma Hammond was always embroidering pillow cases and scarves and she must have got this project for me. I still have it around somewhere. The sewing is bad, but I'm sure it looked good to me. I never finished it.

Through my youth I was always designing clothing for my dolls. There was a variety store across the street from my house, and calicos were about $.29 a yard. I would buy a quarter yard of several of them and then try to make pretty dresses. It was about then that I discovered that pants were not that easy to make!

At that time (early 50s) we girls all took home ec. My teacher was Elsie McCluggage at Woodruff High School, and she had us all make a card-table sized cloth out of Indian head fabric trimmed with hemstitching. For some odd reason, I chose to use yellow cloth with brown thread for the hemstitching. Those have never been my favorite colors, and I've always wished I had chosen something prettier. I got a B on the project because my knots were too big. It's been 51 years and I'm still using the table cloth.

My mother was the managing type, and always wanted everything done right. I would never let her teach me to sew, because I didn't want her to tell me what to do. I eventually decided to make myself a housecoat WITHOUT HER HELP. I'm sure she thought I was crazy, but I did it. I got a pattern that included piping and buttonholes, and I got the whole thing finished. I used that housecoat for years. It was some kind of symbol of triumphing over my mother.

For my graduation from Bradley University, my gift was a new portable Slant-Needle Singer Sewing machine. It was and is wonderful. I would be using it today as my major machine if it weren't for the fact that it didn't have the zigzag feature. No machine ever made better buttonholes.

I made all my maternity clothes and clothes for all the kids as they came along. Eventually I made daughter Robin's wedding gown, which taught me that I didn't know diddly squat about sewing a hem in chiffon.

Over the years I have made innumerable quilts. I like the hand piecing, but doing the actual quilting is too big a job, and I get it done by others. I've also made many large banners and such for our church, as well as a banner for the Sewing Guild, and I'm always surprised to see they still use it.

My most recent projects are purses made from silk ties, snuggly slippers, aprons, and girls' skirts made from old jeans with a ruffle of pretty cotton to make them flirty. Oh yes, I also finally made a sock monkey and have taught several sock monkey making classes. Several of my students had never sewn a lick, and it it's always 'interesting' to teach someone to knot a thread and how to make a running stitch without poking the needle down one side, pulling the threat taut, and poking the needle back up the other side. I never knew how much my left hand does when I'm sewing until I tried to teach someone the basics.

Today I have an awesome fabric stash. A year ago I thinned the herd by one third, but you'd never know it. I love those tubs and boxes of fabric! Going through one is like a trip down or up memory lane, and I'm sure the mental exercise has staved off Alzheimer's for me.

As any sewer can tell you, there is nothing as rewarding as completing a project that is so well done that everyone thinks you bought it. And it's so easy to forget all the projects that didn't turn out that way.