Day for Dads

So, it's Father's Day. I don't usually do special Mother's Day or Father's Day posts, but heck, I've been posting less frequently here lately, and I needed a topic, so, here goes.

My father is a very active octogenarian. I would wish him a Happy Father's Day here, but he would never see it, so there's no point in doing so. He has an old, hand-me-down computer he uses for a database for his collections (stamps and autographs, mostly). I apparently inherited my obsessive collecting from him. He's never been online though, even though I think he'd enjoy emailing and chatting with his fellow collectors around the world, or checking out the space sites, NASA et al.

See, my father's a space buff, and he and my mother (who died back in the early-'80s) appreciated science fiction, so I got my love of space and science fiction from them, especially from my father. We watched space launches as a family. The moon landing in July 1969 became a family event as we watched it on TV. And I'll never forget the night a few years before that when my father announced we were watching a new space show called Star Trek. My younger sister made herself scarce, but watching Star Trek became a weekly activity for me, my father, and my mother.

We went on a lot of family trips. We'd fill our station wagon with us, another family, and suitcases, and hit the road, as far north as Canada (twice! once for Expo '67) and as far south as Virginia. My father could smell out historical markers and covered bridges from miles away, or so it seemed. And we traveled without reservations. Literally. Around 5 pm, my father would announce it was time to look for vacancy signs. My best memories of childhood and adolescence are from those trips. We were regular visitors as a family to museums, too, especially NY's American Museum of Natural History, a place I visited with my family years before it became a stop on school excursions.

My father was far from being a perfect father, but he gave it his best and he helped me make memories to last a lifetime. Every one of those trips has a story in it. And there were other memories that stuck over time. He was fairly self-sufficient, being a decent cook, which was often required. My father refused to cook the fish he caught on his infrequent fishing trips back when he was in his 20s and 30s. And he was a barbecuing fiend. But he also had an annoying tendency to not listen to advice.

One moment shines in my memory. My mother always cautioned that when pouring hot water into a cup or mug, you should place a spoon in the cup first and pour the water onto that so it would absorb most of the heat. My father laughed that off and one day under my mother's watchful eyes, he poured hot water into a mug of instant coffee, lifted the mug, and left the bottom behind. Damn thing melted right off. My mother and I were convulsed in laughter. As long as he wasn't burned -- he wasn't! -- it was a cause for laughter and mockery. My father laughed, too. I think he's been careful when pouring hot water ever since.

See, my parents taught me a lot of valuable lessons and instilled in me the most important values: honesty, integrity, a sense of ethics and fair play, that people should be treated equal. But most important, to me, was the value of a sense of humor, the ability to not take oneself too seriously. To be able to laugh at oneself. That was hard for me, being a shy kid, easily embarrassed. But somehow, that lesson did stick.

Oh, one more thing I learned from my father: sarcasm is a virtue. It's the only language other than standard English that I speak. For what that's worth.

Feeling: half-asleep

~~~o0o~~~

Family Affair

The tech guys got the computers back up at work, mostly, by 4:30 pm. Something to do with the T3 line. Not every computer was working by the end of the day, though. We'll see how things go tomorrow and next week. At least, I have tomorrow off.

My cousin and his daugher were visiting from California, so I went to dinner with them and my father, at whose house they're staying. We had rather bland Chinese food in a restaurant we were trying for the first time. But since this was a family thing, not a food thing, we had a nice time. Since we live on opposite ends of the country, I don't see my cousin very often, and I'd never met his daughter, who is now 18, so this was a special night. I've met his wife, before they got married, and I've never met his son, both of whom stayed home in California.
Feeling:

~~~o0o~~~
computers
family

Day of the Clutz

And as with luck, the clutziness came in threes. First, I squirted hand cream all over myself. Then, I poured water from the water cooler at work on my hand. For the finale, I dropped part of dinner on the floor.

Today was also, apparently, junk snack food day. Normal, relatively healthy snacking will resume tomorrow.

Despite the annoyance of the extreme fading of my early color photos, it's been fun going through them. And realizing one of my mother's cousins is almost as old as his father, my great uncle, was before he died. And seeing photos of my father when he still had some hair. Not back when he was young and had a full head of hair or even a receding hairline, but when he was middle-aged and there was still dark hair around the sides.

I'm not much of an Olymics fan, so there will be no Olympics blogging. Meanwhile, baseball season kicks off later this week, with pitchers and catchers reporting on or around 2/15. I love this time of year, when anything seems possible, even for the worst team of the past year. Wait til next year becomes this year.

And because I feel I owe you folks some links:
A Puppy Monorail, found on Boing Boing.
Italians know chocolate.
More on health and chocolate.

Feeling:

~~~o0o~~~
personal
links
chocolate

Chanukah Traditions

T'is the season and all that, or close enough, so this reposting is almost timely.

I've been thinking about the Shelly Family Chanukah traditions.

Our traditions are effectively dead now. My father and I agreed to no longer exchange gifts for birthdays and Chanukah and my sister agreed to the same (hubby and I will still give her children presents). After all, gift-giving when you're in your 50s, as I am, kind of loses meaning, especially when it becomes more chore than fun. I love shopping for my closest friends. I love finding things I know they'll love. But my family? We'd slowly gotten to the point where we were exchanging gift cards and that just seemed silly.

The traditions started to lose steam after my mother died and my father remarried. His new wife and her three daughters had their own traditions. So we'd gather for the family Chanukah party with all the gifts piled up and someone would then hand them out, usually one of the 9 kids (not mine, because hubby and I don't have any) once they were old enough for the responsibility. A gift orgy ensued with wrapping paper flying around the den.

I always held the gifts I was giving to my father, sister, stepmother, nice, and nephew aside and after the feeding frenzy at the gift trough, I gave my father and stepmother their gifts, then found time alone with my sister and her kids (our hubbies usually made themselves scarce) and we exchanged gifts.

That's how we used to do it. Me, my sister (3 years younger than I am), our mother and father, gathered in the den, each with our bags of brightly wrapped presents to give out, one at a time. It wasn't as much about the gifts as it was about the giving, me to you, you to me. My mother would carefully remove the paper from the boxes and fold it neatly for future reuse, to be stored in a bag on a shelf in the garage.

My mother was a sneaky sort, too. Pre-giving traditions included my sister checking out the house to find where all the gifts were hidden, then showing me what she'd find. She was also and still is a whiz when it comes to picking up a box and guessing what's inside. She's hard to fool. Not that my mother didn't try.

Sometimes, my mother got sneaky with the giving. One year, when I must've been 7 or 8, she snuck our gifts into our bedrooms, not aware I was awake and pretending to be asleep (I confided this to her years later). And so, after she was done and in bed, herself, I got up and played with the Tiny Tears Doll with Playpen and fingered the keys of my Eminee Organ, then pretended to be surprised by them magically having appeared in my room when I woke up.

The best, though, was the money she would hide in the gifts. I can still picture the night, when my sister was in her mid-teens, and we were opening gifts in the kitchen. She was trying on her new bathrobe and a twenty dollar bill went flying out of a sleeve. There was another in a pocket. And I had to admire Mom's skill in steam opening a box of Mallomars (our favorite cookie), slipping a couple of twenties inside, then resealing the box so there was no hint it had been opened already. To say I was surprised when I opened it would be an understatement.

She died 23 years ago. The holidays just haven't been the same after that.

Feeling:

Chanukah

Hot Chocolate and English Muffins

Another reposting. I'm almost through with these. Hope folks aren't getting bored.

I'm sitting here drinking a yummy hot chocolate and munching on a toasted English muffin with butter and grape jelly and thinking of what I should reminisce about and the memories of sitting in coffeeshops eating the same snack come to mind. On days in my teens and twenties when I was out shopping with friends or my mother, when we'd stop to eat, I would either have a burger, fries, and chocolate malted, or, if I wasn't that hungry, I'd snack on the aforementioned English muffin and either a malted or hot chocolate, depending on the time of year. Comfort food.

I love to shop, but the actual purchasing of things is not required. Shopping was a social event, like going to the movies, only we could talk the entire time. We'd try on clothes and comment on how each other looked. When I went shopping with friends, we'd make a pact that we each had to buy somethin, anything, before we went home. Which is why I ended up with a fairly extensive collection of costume jewelry, though I often was able to find a record or book I really wanted, too. There was a lot of kidding around and then making a lot of noise with girlish laugher as the three or four or five of us descended on a coffeeshop, usually a Chock Full of Nuts, and made the older folks there nervous at seeing so many teens invading their space.

When I was shopping with my mother, however, it meant quality time. We talked and caught up with things (I'd already moved out on my own by then). If I bought clothes, I knew they looked good on me. My mother was my best critic and would tell me honestly if something looked good on me or not. And then we'd stop for something to eat and continue to talk about the important and not so important things in our lives.

Nowadays, I shop with my best friend when we get the chance to visit or by myself. And when I'm by myself, I take the ghosts of the past with me. My mother is usually there, looking over my shoulder as I try on skirts or sweater tops or jeans, giving me her assessment, and as she was when she was alive, she's always right.

Feeling:

memories

Sugar Cookies and My Grandmother

My father's father was a baker (I had a butcher and a baker for grandfathers!), but my mother's mother was pretty good in the kitchen with both cooking and baking and one of her specialties was sugar cookies. My father has been cleaning out his garage and came upon the rolling pin in the above photo and gave it to me. This was the very rolling pin my grandmother used and the one I used when I helped her make cookies.

They weren't drop cookies which are what my chocolate chip cookies are (Joy of Cooking recipe). We'd roll out the dough, then use cookie cutters for the shapes. For the sugar cookies, that meant round. The topping was a mix of sugar, cinnamon, and chopped nuts, but because I don't like nuts and never have, my grandmother made a small mixing bowl's worth of nutless topping, so there were always at least a half dozen cookies just for me.

My grandmother, a follower of the "pinch of this, pinch of that" school of baking, never wrote down her recipes, which I assume came from her mother back in the "old country" (Ukraine). For a while after my grandmother died, my mother, sister, and I were on a hunt for a recipe that would match those cookies. One of my mother's friends had one that came close, but something about the dough tasted different. Maybe the missing ingredient was my grandmother.

Feeling:

memories

Laundry and Checkerboard Cakes

I know those things don't sound like they have anything in common, but they're the two things I can remember my sister and me doing in a mostly cooperative manner. She might be nearly 3 years younger than I am, but she's long acted as if she were the older sister. And we fought all the time. Our mother once told me that if one of us said "day," the other would say "night." Yet on two occasions, we set aside (most of) the bickering, during our teens, to do something constructive together.

Laundry. Our mother was a stay-at-home mom before the SAHM acronym was even a germ of a concept. Almost everyone's mother was home in those days. Rare was the mother who worked outside the home during the day. And while our mother did try to teach us some domestic skills, I for one resisted the teachings. I hated cleaning my room and I loathed dusting. The only time I willingly dusted was when my sister wrote her name in the dust on my dresser. But there we were one afternoon, home alone, in our mid-teens, thinking we'd surprise our parents by doing the laundry.

Maybe we just didn't follow the directions carefully or maybe there wasn't clear instructions on how to measure the detergent, and I don't recall anything telling us what to do if we used too much, but there we were, in a panic, bailing out the overflowing suds coming out from the toploading washing machine's lid. Good thing our parents found the incident amusing when they got home.

Baking. My paternal grandfather was a baker. He worked for a big kosher baking outfit in Brooklyn that supplied small bakeries in NYC. His specialty was breads, but every week or two, he'd bring us cakes and cookies along with breads and bagels and bialys. And one of my favorite items in those care packages was the checkerboard cakes. The little yellow and chocolate squares fascinated me and one evening, again when we were home alone, my sister and I decided to make one.

We'd baked before, from mixes, making yummy Duncan Hines chocolate cakes topped with creamy Duncan Hines or Pillsbury icing. We'd even managed to make brownies and cupcakes from mixes. So how hard could it be to adapt a mix for chocolate cake and one for yellow cake and make a checkerboard concoction. Damned impossible if you don't have the right equipment, which we not only didn't have, but didn't know we needed. Layering posed enough of a challenge, let alone the jam between the squares. What we ended up with was the messiest marble cake ever created. Tasted pretty good, though. And again, our parents, especially our father, found the whole thing amusing when they got home and saw what we'd been up to. We did have to clean the mess in the kitchen ourselves, however.

My sister has gone on to become rather adept in the kitchen, especially with baking, and her husband is into the culinary arts, too, though neither is an expert. Me? I do make one thing from scratch: chocolate chip cookies. Yum. But for all other baked goods, there's got to be a mix involved somewhere.

Feeling:

memories

My Father

My father will be 80 in January, so while the original post was for Father's Day, it's always appropriate.

Monday, June 06, 2005
Earliest Memories for Father's Day
I had a nice phone call with my father tonight and something he said got me remembering a few things from the past, the only two things we did together, just the two of us, before my sister was old enough for such family outings and my mother stayed home with her.

My earliest memory dates back to when I was 2 1/2, when my mother was pregnant with my sister. We were at a bungalow in the Catskills and, though I've seen the old home movies enough to reinforce any memory, there's one bit of memory that didn't come from the movies. I remember the sheer terror I felt when I was placed on a tree branch for a photo.

But the memories that inspired this post came when I was 5, shortly after we moved into our first house, the summer before I started kindergarten (and I well recall the terror of my first day of school, crying the whole block to the elementary school, not wanting my mother to leave me there). One night, my father took me to Rockaway Beach, to the boardwalk, to see the fireworks. And I recall going with him to see "The Shaggy Dog" and we bought two wind-up shaggy dog toys, one for me and one for my sister. He was amazed that I remembered those times, but for me, I can't imagine not remembering the special times I spent with "Daddy."

I wasn't the tomboy my sister was. I couldn't play ball with him and I wasn't thrilled with his stamp collecting hobby. He did take me, just me, to stamp shows, where I was bored (I would enjoy them more now that stamps have gotten so cool looking). I remember him taking pulling us on our sled and when we all made snow angels in the back yard. And I remember his putting stinging methiolate on my scraped knees (my mother favored the milder mercurochrome) and heating needles to pry splinters from my fingers, and even finding ways to yank loose baby teeth from my gums. I grew up thinking there wasn't anything he couldn't do. He was physically strong and could open any can or jar, nevermind that he was the one who'd tightened them so only he could open them.

He wasn't an easy person to be close to back then, before my mother got sick and he learned to express his feelings. He was and remains, though, the strongest man I know emotionally. He's always been a social person, a people person, something I wish I was more of. And I craved his time and attention and hated when he spent time with my sister instead of me. I'm glad I got to tell him how much I love him and how much I cherished those early memories.

So, Dad, though you have no idea what a blog is, this entry's for you.

Feeling:

fathers

My Favorite People Reposted

While I make a practice of not posting photos of people in my life, or of me, this one is old enough I think to not count. This is my favorite photo of my parents, taken before I was born and, I believe, a year or so before they got married in 1950, so it's probably from 1948 or '49. It was taken one summer. I believe they were on a mini-vacation.

My mother died in 1982. She never got to meet my fiance, now hubby. I didn't even meet him til 1983. I think she would've liked him. I know he would've liked her, but as with my father who is nothing like his father, my mother was nothing like his mother. There would have been some culture shock, I think. We were and remain a fairly informal family.

My father, now 79, is still going strong, though he is no longer the (to me) tall, cute man with the wavy dark brown hair and a cowlick I inherited. In fact, he doesn't really have any hair left to speak of. He remarried in 1986, the year after hubby and I got hitched. My stepmother died last year. My father is good at living his life, keeping active, enjoying friends and family and his hobbies. He's been a good role model, as was my mother. I couldn't have asked for better.

NEXT: Music, Music, Music

Feeling:
personal

Between Saturday and Sunday

More Chanukah links can be found here.

I called my cousin M a few hours ago. I'm in NYC and she's in CA, so I always have to keep in mind the 3-hour time difference. M and my mother shared a name, though my mother spelled her name slightly differently. My nephew M is named for my mother, part of the Jewish tradition of naming children for close, deceased relatives.

Anyway, it was great hearing M's voice. She has a nice, kinda husky voice that tickled my memory and put me back in the past. She'd gotten the copy of the entry I put here about her hubby E who died this summer and she emailed me to tell me how much it meant to her and so I had to call her because I never did tell E how much he meant to me and I don't want to not tell the people I love how important they are to me and how much I love them. There's something about getting older and realizing the generation before yours is getting older, too, and seeing some of them, and even now someone in mine, die that is a painful reminder that carries a lot of regret. So M and I talked about how we'd falled out of touch and will be in contact with each other and isn't email great. And it is, because it's gotten so much easier, when both parties have internet access to email than to pick up the phone and call these days and I wonder how that happened because I used to love talking on the phone. But time gets away from us sometimes and the calls don't get made.

Sometimes, it takes a holiday or an event like my nephew's bar mitzvah or sadness like E's death to give us the push we need. I'm glad I picked up the phone tonight and M is glad she was home to answer and for a little while, E was with her and my mother was with both of us.