When you walk through a storm
by chuckofish
It’s been a difficult week, but daughter # 1 came into town and we dealt with it like the ladies we are.
dual personalities
Tag: children
June 20, 2012
Memory lane
by chuckofish
The boy is getting hitched in about 6 weeks. He is marrying a young lady he has known since the three-year-old class at pre-school (see above).
The boy is the cutie in the second row on the far left with the cool socks and the OshKosh overalls. His bride-to-be is the girl in the sailor dress in the front row, third from the left. They are getting married in the same church his father and I were married in and also the parents of the bride. Practically unheard of in this day in age!
Here they are in the four-year-old class picture–engaged by now, but not sitting together. The boy is still wearing those cool socks and overalls and has added a jeans jacket to his trend-setting ensemble. Lauren appears to be already carrying a handbag.
They haven’t changed much really, have they?
June 15, 2012
Bunker Hill Day
by chuckofish
June 17 is Bunker Hill Day which commemorates the battle fought in 1775 mostly on and around Breed’s Hill, during the Siege of Boston early in the American Revolutionary War. The battle is named after the adjacent Bunker Hill, which was peripherally involved in the battle and was the original objective of both colonial and British troops.
Our grandfather, Daniel Hilton Cameron was born on June 17, 1900 and was always from that day forward called Bunker or Bunk.
He was the 4th child of Daniel and Susie Taylor Cameron of Burlington, Vermont.
I have blogged about Bunker and his baseball playing prowess previously here. School never agreed with him, but he was, by all accounts, a highly intelligent child who was talented in many areas. Rumor has it that he could pick up a musical instrument and play it by ear. Another story has him and a friend taking a car apart at night and putting it back together on top of a porte-cochère as a prank.
A porte-cochère, in case you’d forgotten
Clearly he had other talents as he convinced our strait-laced, deeply religious grandmother to run away and elope with him.
His own deeply religious father had had enough at that point (even though he and Bunker’s mother totally approved of his choice of wife) and disowned him, so he and his new bride were forced to go home to her father in Chicago. (No doubt, he hoped this would teach Bunker a lesson, something he had been trying to do for twenty years.) He worked at odd jobs and for awhile was a taxi driver. Eventually his father relented and they returned to the east where he went into his father’s lumber business. He and Catherine had three girls, our mother the middle and his favorite child. (They were the most alike.)
Funnily enough, when our mother decided against his wishes to marry our father in Savannah, Georgia, where he was stationed in the army, instead of waiting and getting married at home, he refused to come to the wedding, echoing his own stubborn father’s behavior. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. He also eventually forgave her, but think of her getting married far from home without her “daddy” there to give her his blessing.
Rest in peace, Bunker. I hardly knew ye, but I remember when our mother returned from Massachusetts after her own mother died and she wept because she knew she would never see you again. And she was right. You died within the year.
Daughter #1 at the Cameron plot in Lakeview Cemetery in Burlington, Vermont
June 13, 2012
Another ugga wugg memory
by chuckofish
“Well, one afternoon I was supposed to be taking care of Sonny while Mother was out shopping. He couldn’t have been older than three or four at the most. I was about ten. Well, we had a big fight about something, I forget what it was about, but Sonny got so mad he packed a suitcase and ran away. He was always running away. When Mother came home from shopping a few hours later, she found him in the lobby. He was dressed from head to toe in his Indian costume, long feather headdress and all. He said, ‘Mother, I’m running away, but I stayed to say good-bye to you.’
“When she unpacked his suitcase, it was full of toy soldiers.”
(Story told about J.D. Salinger by his sister Doris in “Dream Catcher” by Margaret Salinger)
I cannot tell you how much I love this story. What would you give to see a picture of little J.D. (Sonny) dressed in his Indian costume with full feather headdress?
Well, the best I could do is show you a picture of daughter #1 wearing the Indian costume that my mother made for me when I was in the first grade and we played the Indians in a school production of Peter Pan. Unfortunately, although I searched high and low, I could not find the picture! But I did find the dress!
All the mothers made the costumes for their own daughters, so you can imagine they varied quite a lot according to the skill level of each mama. Not surprisingly, some were store-bought and pretty fancy. I seem to remember some glitter in there too. Mine had real leather fringe and hand-beaded trim.
My older brother even strung me a bead necklace to wear with the dress. My mother, of course, went for authenticity and made the costume brown, unlike some mothers who went for “cute”. There was much diversity of headbands, I recall–some definitely leaning to the “tiara”.
Come to think of it, I would like to see a picture of those first grade Indian maidens, wouldn’t you?
June 8, 2012
We’ll be coming willy-nilly, Lily
by chuckofish
Tiger Lily:
Beat on a drum
And I will come
Peter Pan:
And I will come and save the brave noble red skin
Ugga wugga wigwam! I have always been a big fan of day lilies or, as we say in our flyover state, tiger-lilies. They are all over the place and they bloom for a long time during the hottest of weather. As a small child I was jealous because we did not have any in our yard. I really felt deprived. (Not that I ever verbalized this to my mother who no doubt would have gamely tried to add them to our garden.) Anyway, I have made sure that we always have them in any yard that we have lived in since I had any say in the matter.
Aren’t they great?
June 5, 2012
Small House of Uncle Thomas
by chuckofish
Today in 1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly started a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper. In honor of this I wanted to show you the famous scene from the King and I movie where Rita Moreno narrates a Siamese version of Little Eva’s escape from Simon Legree across the frozen river. Alas, this is not currently available on YouTube.
So here is the best I could do. It is still pretty great.
I remember back in 1994 when daughter #1 did a report in the 4th grade on Harriet Beecher Stowe. As part of her report she brought our VHS tape to school and showed the famous scene from the King and I.
A gratuitous photo of Yul Brynner to please my dual personality.
Amazingly most of her classmates had never seen it. I have always been an evangelist for great movies, even encouraging my children to embarrass themselves in front of their peers. Hopefully they have forgiven me.
Please note that 1851 was also the year that Moby-Dick was published. Amazing!
May 18, 2012
And they call the wind Mariah
by chuckofish
Yesterday at the “Recognition Ceremony for Graduates of the College of Arts & Sciences” they read daughter #2’s name as “Samantha”. Hello. They couldn’t get ol’ Susanna right? Annoying. Well, at least she didn’t trip!
May 9, 2012
Let the wild rumpus start!
by chuckofish
Maurice Sendak died yesterday at the age of 83. Sendak wrote and illustrated more than 50 children’s books–including “Where the Wild Things Are,” his most famous, published in 1963. This book was a great favorite of my children.
Daughter #1’s Wild Thing and Max dolls
As a parent who had to read it many, many times, I appreciated that it was great fun to read aloud (with feeling):
“And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.”
And as a parent I appreciated that its message to misbehaving children who are sent to their room without supper is, ultimately, that home is best:
“And [he] sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot.”
AND IT WAS STILL HOT!
Rest in peace, Maurice.
May 7, 2012
The great bright dream
by chuckofish
“I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.”
(Marilynne Robinson, Gilead).
dual personalities 