Category: Family

Posted on

Another Cape For My Capers

Bow Tie o’ the Day is dressed in a field of red and white hearts on black silk. It clashes bigly with my newest cape. My heart-covered hat does some eye-popping clash as well.

As you probably guessed from the hearts on my cape’s pink side, this is my Valentine’s cape. Suzanne cut, assembled, pinned, sewed, and ironed it just for me. Just like she usually does. You know I have an obsessive hankerin’ for Suzanne-made capes. A girl can never have enough capes.

I’ve discovered that although wearing a cape doesn’t make me a superhero, wearing a cape does make me feel like I’m walking around in my blanket wherever I go. To me, that’s every bit as wonderful as being a superhero. (I asked Suzanne to make me a flannel cape for extra warmth, and she’s all for it.)

Especially as children, but also as adults, we have a tendency to mythologize our parents. We make them more than human. We make them bigger, smarter, funnier, braver, etc., than they really are. We think of them almost as superheroes. And that’s okay. I mean, to be fair, our parents think each of their kids is a genius, an all-state athlete, a musical prodigy, an artist, and a mythological character– all wrapped up into one snot-nosed brat.

Now, I know my parents aren’t perfect. You know your parents aren’t perfect. But they’re our parents. When we realize exactly how precious they are, their mistakes seem to recede into the horizon in our minds. Their greatest kindnesses and triumphs come to the forefront of our memories. We learn to forgive their mistakes and embrace their most excellent accomplishments. That’s as it should be.

Of course, we should try to improve on the worst qualities our parents handed down to us. And we should live by the best characteristics that live in them. We should carry their best characteristics with us always. We should tell stories and tall tales about our parents’ lives to our families and friends and whoever else will listen. That’s how we teach the important stuff forward.

Even when I’m wearing a fantabulous cape, I try to carry my parents’ best qualities with me. Perhaps one day, if somebody mythologizes me into a superhero, I’ll be able to fly in it.

Posted on

Rebels In Love

Each robot on Tie o’ the Day has a heart inside its metal, wiry self. Apparently, even robots have the capacity to love. Aside from loving hearts, Tie has nothing whatsoever to do with these pix of Mom and Dad. I just think it looks snappy.

I guess these photos were taken when Mom and Dad were being Bonnie and Clyde, playing cops and robbers. For nearly 60 years, they were partners-in-crime.

Posted on

It Appears They Liked Each Other

Bow Tie o’ the Day has its Valentine’s Day targets ready for Cupid’s arrows. Be on the look-out for a near-naked, winged baby armed with a bow and arrows.

When I first saw the picture with visible faces, I wondered who the heck Dad was hugging. It didn’t look like Mom to me, so I got my magnifying glass out. I discovered that it really was Mom. The shadows across her face were just weird. Whew! I was worried for a millisecond. Not!

Anyhoo… Something you might not know about Mom is that she is disgusted that people wear un-ironed clothing– particularly to church. She and Peggy Crane spouted off about the general lack of ironing on the planet a bazillion times while I drove them across the county on their daily drinking rides.

Mom and Peggy even threatened to put an ad in THE CHRONICLE, offering to teach people how to iron. FOR FREE! But they decided that wouldn’t do any good since, according to them, no one knows what an iron is. (Oh, my! What a wrinkly world we live in.)

One morning in their Senior year, Dad didn’t show up at school. Mom had no idea where he was or if he was sick. (Remember: no cell phones in 1948.) Later in the afternoon, Dad showed up in a class they had together. Mom quizzed him on his earlier whereabouts and he told her he had been doing an extra job for somebody, to earn some extra cash. And then he handed her the few dollars he had earned that morning. She asked what the money was for, and he said, “Well, if we’re going to get married, we’re going to need an iron.”

Based on all the stories Mom and Dad told me over the years about their courtship, that anecdote is the closest thing to a marriage proposal I ever heard about.

So Mom bought an iron, and 71 years later she still has it. Last I heard, it still worked.

I’m sure I’m reading far too much into this, but I think the sweet “iron proposal” is responsible for Mom’s enduring attachment to the importance of ironing. That would explain Mom’s pet peeve about ironing. I don’t know why ironing mattered so much to Peggy though– unless Grant proposed to her the same way.

Posted on

Mom’s A Looker

When I was gathering my Valentine’s Day ties and bow ties to use in my posts, I hadn’t planned to create so many posts about Mom and Dad. But I’m finding it to be quite fun, and y’all seem to be liking the pix and stories about their love affair too. Thus, I’ll put aside some of the other Valentine-y ideas I intended to present, and the neckwear and I will show and tell a few more snippets about my parents.

Tie o’ the Day is content to hang in the background, while Mom stars in this morning’s pix. These are evidence of Mom’s alluring ways. Dad was born into a beekeeping family, and bees were his thing. He was crazy for bees from the minute he could toddle. Based on that fact, I have no doubt Dad thought the photo of Mom dressed up in beekeeper attire was the sexiest of these two pictures. Mom does have nice legs though.

I posted the following story about Mom and Dad a couple of years ago, but I’ll tell it again for those who might have missed it:

Dad’s family lived in Delta. Mom was from Oak City, where the kids went to school until high school, when the Oak City-ites finally rode the bus to Delta High School every day. Mom and Dad didn’t know each other until that came to pass.

But they had sort of met once before high school. Dad and his pals were at the swimming pool at the same time Mom was there with her friends. (I think it was the Oak City pool.) Mom was standing by the edge of the pool when Dad walked by and pushed her in.

Mom was ticked, turned to her gal pals, and said, “Ignernt Delta boys!”

Dad smiled, turned to his friends, and said, “I’m gonna marry that girl.”

And he did. And she wasn’t even a bee.

Posted on

I Learned Love From These Two Kids

Red hearts Bow Tie o’ the Day is ecstatic to be chosen to present this picture of Mom and Dad. They were probably 15 or 16 when this photo was snapped, and I’d bet bigly money this is a selfie taken by Dad.

If you saw my parents together, you saw something wild with life. They played their humor off each other like a vaudeville comedy team. They supported each other’s whims. When they looked at each other from across a room, even in public, you could see absolute brightness in their eyes.

In a time when it wasn’t always okay for women to work, make important decisions on their own, and speak their minds, Dad thrived on Mom being her spunky self. He encouraged her in her endeavors, and he watched with pride as he saw her conquer thing after thing.

Once, to her friends’ amazement, Mom went to the car dealership in Delta and bought a new car on her own, while Dad was in California working with his bees. Dad was fine about the purchase when she told him she had picked it out and bought it. He figured she must have needed it. They trusted each other even to make decisions that affected the whole family.

Of course, they had their disagreements and bumpy times. Of course, they huffed and puffed at each other from time to time. But it was always obvious Mom and Dad were in a deep, wide, tall, true love.

There are billions of things in the universe I don’t know. But I know this truth: I am the daughter of a grand romance.

Posted on

Woof! Woof! Love!

The wall-hanging in this photo has shown up in the background of a lot of my post pix. It dominates our living room, on purpose. Mom chose a similar saying for the back of her and Dad’s headstone. The gist of its message is the over-arching truth with which I was raised. And it still frames the way I try to live my life.

To love and to be loved are not two separate things. Happiness comes from making and keeping them one thing together. (I’m not just talking about romantic love.) We love who we love. And we want their love in return, but we often don’t allow ourselves to accept it. Too often we don’t feel worthy of it, or we push it away because we don’t want to risk the chance we might get hurt. Loving and being loved is definitely going to have its pains, but think of them as growing pains. That’s what most of the hurts are. They are signs a relationship needs some overhauling in order to grow. So work on it. The payoff will happen if both parties are willing to give and take the love the work requires.

You can find love all over the place. For example, I’m wearing dog bones Bow Tie o’ the Day in Valentine’s Day honor of all the mutts in my life who have loved me. And in honor of my skittish Skitter who is snoring beside me as I type this post. She loves me even in her sleep. Our dogs simply love us. And they so clearly assume that we will love them back. They trust us. They expect us to befriend them and care for them. They make us better people because we cannot help but melt in their presence, like we give ourselves over to any baby that is near us. We coo at dogs. We talk to dogs in our baby-talk voices. We want to feed dogs and touch them and protect them. We want to cover them in warm blankies. Dogs pull the best parts of our hearts out into the open.

With my bipolar head, sometimes I feel lost and foreign even to myself. Having a dog around when I’m on one of my mental extremes can make me feel like I’m at home in myself, even if the feeling comes and goes. Even Skitter, who was severely abused before she rescued us, makes me feel at home in my bipolar self– just by following me around, or doing her chew dance, or prancing to the mailbox with me. Skitter’s abuser could not destroy Skitter’s capacity for love. That’s how strong love is. I can’t help but exude love for her. She brings out the baby-talk in me. “Skitter, are you ready to go walkie?” The love goes both ways. That’s happiness. Her giving and receiving love is healing The Skit. It changes me. It strengthens an attitude that stays with me in my dealings with my fellow beings.

Perform love, wherever you go. Let your love rain down like glitter from the heavens.

That’s my sermon for this morning, and I’m sticking to it.

Posted on

The First

Four wood Bow Ties o’ the Day have arranged themselves into an interesting frame, to highlight a tremendous milestone in my family: Mom’s and Dad’s first grandchild. Of course, that means the little rugrat is my first nephew. Jeff Tucker has been in the family for around five decades now. Today is his birthday, so “Merry birthday, Jeff!”

In this picture, from left to right: Mom; Jeff; my grandpa, Leroy Anderson; my grandma, Zola Wright; and little ol’ me with my straight bangs. The grown-ups are overjoyed in this photo. Jeff is wide-eyed at all the attention, and I look somewhat stunned. But you can easily see Mom is absolutely gleeful.

Mom worked as a “lunch lady” at the high school during this time. When she learned Jeff had finally been born, Mom dressed up in a gray wig, tossed a shawl over her work apron, and grabbed a cane. She walked into work looking like the stereotype of a doddering old grandma, yelling, “I’m a grandma! I’m a grandma!”

Posted on

A Breather And Weight

If you’re a regular reader of these posts, you know that although Suzanne and I have been a thing since 1985, we took a break from each other for a few years– during which time we made our biggest relationship mistakes on other people, instead of on each other. (That’s sort of a joke, but not completely.) I spent most of my break on the other side of the country.

I ended up teaching in Maryland in the 90’s. (I’ll explain how that happened in a future post.) While I lived there, for a year or two I had the long hair you see on these ID’s. I should have been wearing Bow Ties o’ the Day back then, which would have made my whole look more hip, but I hadn’t had the complete neckwear conversion quite yet. Despite what you see in the pix on these ID cards, my hair actually looked nifty. I wore it in a ponytail, which made me blonde from the back. I have no idea why my hairs weren’t ponytailed in these photos. Kinda scary, eh?

That extra poundage of fat you see on my face in the ID snapshots is the kind of weight I call the-extra-ten-pounds-of-fat-you-gain-when-you’re-living-with-someone-you-know-you’re-going-to-leave-soon-but-you-haven’t-yet-been-able-to-extricate-yourself-from-their-evil-tentacles fat. Yeah, that kind of fat.

Posted on

Office Lunch. Office Not-lunch.

Circles and browns. That’s Bow Tie o’ the Day. Shirt o’ the Day is seeing the state of the planet more clearly with its zillion pairs of glasses. In this photo, we are hanging with Suzanne in her office for an hour. It’s time for lunch. It’s cold outside this time of year, so our usual lunching at the park is not an option. This place will have to do until spring temperatures show up.

Suzanne eats yogurt for her meal. For my meal, I watch Suzanne eat yogurt. I’m never hungry at that time of day. I like to hang with Suzanne at lunch because I can make sure she takes the time to eat. I like to know she hits PAUSE from her duties for a bit, and also for a bite.

The other reason we lunch together is because we need to right now. This has been a tough year for us, relationship-wise. No worries. We are more than fine, and we will continue to be more than fine. We’ve just had some tinkering to do.

Before we sold the Delta house, it was necessary for me to split my time between both places. Now that we’re in one house, I’m in Suzanne’s face and space all the time. Even though living in one house is exactly what we’ve always wanted, we have both had to make adjustments to our daily routines. The more time we spend together, the more the tinkering pays off.

I also think my summer surgery made last year more problematic, in terms of our relationship. In some ways, it’s made us closer. But recovering meant I had to mostly be a slug, which meant Suzanne had to take over the house and outside errands. She also got a hoity-toity promotion, which means she got handed a long list of more responsibilities, which means longer hours at the office. For a few months, I was just one more job she had to do. And I felt incredibly guilty about that. I still do. Suzanne said she was happy to do it, and even happier that I let her. It’s almost impossible for me to accept help with anything. (Except the computer glitches. Suzanne is welcome to fix my computer issues at any time.)

In the context of these things, can you feel the occasional tension popping up?

With fashion, I always try to achieve dis-harmonic clash. In relationships, clashing is not ideal. Suzanne and I are on the same page on pretty much everything, but there is always a torn page or two in any relationship. There’s always relationship work to be done. You can love someone– as in, you can feel love for someone. But for that love to be “real,” you have to commit to doing the verb of love too. You have to actively love, by doing things to show the love you feel. Sometimes we forget that fact.

Posted on

Oh, Happy Day!

I successfully finished my prescribed physical therapy for my stoopid rotator cuff this morning. I’ve been PT-ing for two months, and I am pleased to report my shoulder has full motion and is no longer painful and incapacitating. I have an exercise routine I’ll need to faithfully continue to do in order to keep my roto cuff in shape, but I’m done visiting the physical therapist twice a week.

In celebration of this delightful news, I’ve got some bright colors going on. Bow Tie o’ the Day is especially joyous. Its colors and fabric design are based on the incredible stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral in Chartres, France. I’ve seen plenty of photos of them, but I think I could handle seeing the stained glass windows of the cathedral in person. Maybe it wouldn’t kill me.

Suzanne spent time in Europe twice when she was a young whippersnapper in the 80’s. She has always wanted to take me there for a long-ish vacation. She especially wants to show me London. Now that Rowan is no longer a child and is out of the house, we can certainly go if we want to. And, of course, Skitter loves to have Suzanne’s sister, Marjorie, stay here with her when we’re off somewhere, so leaving the Skit is not an issue. It is I who have been the hold-out.

First, I’ve never cared much for doing bigly travel. I did spend a fantastic two weeks drinking beer all over Ireland 20 years ago, but I’d rather take many short jaunts, instead of fewer major jaunts. I’m fine with just seeing mostly non-touristy, out-of-the-way cubbyholes of the U.S. of A., which I can find anywhere we go.

Second, with Mom being so old (88-and-a-damn-1/2), I haven’t felt comfortable with the idea of being an ocean away from her for an extended period of time. I’ve consistently told Suzanne I won’t go out of the country until after Mom passes away. But the other day, for some reason I started to feel differently about it. I told Suzanne we didn’t need to put off going on a European adventure anymore, because I think Mom will probably live another 88-and-a-damn-1/2 years. We’ll die before she does, so we might as well renew our passports now, and start saving and planning to go wherever and whenever we want.

But we’ll certainly buy travel insurance.