With its random bandaids, Tie o’ the Day represents love and the pain love inevitably causes us. We’ve all needed to heal our hearts when they have been broken. If we allow ourselves to love, our hearts will break many times while we live. Family members and friends pass away. Our pets meet death. Maybe someone we fell in love with fell out of love with us. Maybe we lose hope, and our dreams die.
If we choose to, we can empathize with each other’s broken hearts, because most kinds of losses happen to everyone. If they haven’t happened to you yet, they will. We’re part of the human race, and our lives follow similar trajectories. Birth. Relationships. Work. Aspirations. Death.
Loving is worth any pain that might accompany it. A broken heart is often the cost of a full heart. And broken hearts can be instructive. We have the power to look inside that broken heart at all the mistakes we made which caused the heartbreak in the first place. We can learn from those mistakes, and we can get a little better at the practice of love.
Two months after Mom and Dad graduated from Delta High School, they got married in the Manti Temple. Dad had barely turned 18, and Mom didn’t turn 18 until two months later. They were youngsters. Nobody should get married that young, in my opinion. The odds of a couple that young–and therefore that dumb– staying together are miniscule. Mom and Dad somehow found a way to kick the odds and stick together. They lasted 59 years together before Dad died, in December 2007.
Dad suffered through his pain for two years. He stayed with us for as long as he could– for all of us, and especially for Mom. During the last two weeks of Dad’s life, Mom often told him it was okay for him to let go. She told him she would be okay. She told him we would all take care of her. Dad knew we would. But I believe one of the reasons Dad held on for so long is that he was trying to make it another few months, to be with Mom on their 60th wedding anniversary.
Of course, no matter when Dad died, Mom’s heart was going to break anyway. And when he finally did let go, her heart did break. Eleven years later, it’s still broken. But Mom’s heart is also still full of memories and time and the adoration Dad gave her. It’s impossible for that kind of splendid stuff to ever fall out of even the most broken heart.
Tie o’ the Day makes its sweet point with its talky sweet hearts. I’ve always enjoyed getting and giving the little boxes of candy hearts, but they really aren’t very tasty. It’s their shape and their tiny messages that make them an annual have-to-have. It’s a childhood nostalgia thing.
I’ve been posting all kinds of lovey-dovey family lore this week to add to the Valentine’s Day spirit, but I have to make a bit of a sidetrack this morning. I must report on two of this week’s happenings. To put these incidents in context, remember that I had a major surgery six months ago, which I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about in my posts. My recovery has gone wondrously well, although I still feel tugs and pulls and weird pains in my gut on occasion– especially behind my itchy scar. I’m still somewhat limited in my physical activities, especially those which require me to move quickly or use my belly muscles.
The first incident, which occurred a few days ago, is what I refer to as The Calamitous Attack of the Wrapping Paper Tube. The simplest way to explain it is this: One end of a tube of Christmas wrapping paper was sticking out of a storage bin which happened to be temporarily sitting by the pantry– on its way to be stored in the garage until next year.
As I emerged from the pantry, I ran directly into the end of the tube. The wrapping paper isn’t usually in that spot, so I didn’t even think of it before I turned around. I have a normal-size, well-fed tummy– so there’s plenty of free skin-space to be poked hard by a tube, with negligible risk, but of course the tube attempted to impale me precisely on my scar. It felt like someone had rammed a metal cookie cutter into my wound. I can tell semi-important internal things beneath my scar got injured a bit, although I can also feel that it wasn’t a major injury. The normal strange tugs and pulls I’ve felt since surgery are now stranger, and it feels like my scar and beneath it is a complete bruise. Small setback, it is. But who knew a roll of Christmas wrapping paper could even spear a scar? I know it now. Watch out for wrapping paper tubes.
Second incident. Yesterday, Skitter and I were returning home from our walkie to the mailbox. As we walked back, I spied a guy walking a medium-size, leashed dog on our side of the street. Knowing Skitter’s fear of everything, I crossed us to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. A few seconds later, I realized Skitter had seen the other mutt, because she began to shake. On we walked toward home.
Apparently, the other dog noticed The Skit, pulled its leash out of its owner’s hand, and ran across the road to us– baring its teeth at Skitter. I reached down to pick up Skitter, but not quickly enough. Skitter’s absolute, monstrous fear caused her to pull out of her leash collar and run in the direction of home. Of course, the other dog chased after her. I couldn’t think of anything except getting to Skitter before she got hurt in a dogfight, or simply died of being petrified by the entire happening. I RAN! For almost two blocks, I RAN! It did not occur to me running is not allowed at this point in the recovery of my gut. And, of course, I haven’t out-and-out run since the late-90’s. But still, I love Skitter. There was no debate about what I should do, so I RAN!
As I ran after her, I saw Skitter almost get hit by a car. And when I turned the corner and saw her close to our house, the other dog was circling Skitter as she curled into a ball and cowered. (That’s what she does when she’s afraid and doesn’t have a safe blanket.) I had been putting up such a racket during the whole chase that when I finally got pretty close to the dogs, the other dog high-tailed it off to find its owner. Because of my yelling, and because she knew she wasn’t supposed to tug on her leash or leave my side, Skitter also thought I was angry at her. She immediately peed on the porch, in fright and relief. When we got back into the house, she holed-up in her crate. I made it clear I wasn’t mad at her. She believed me and sat between me and Suzanne. But because of the dog almost-fight, she didn’t stop shaking for an hour. She was a walking fur ball of trauma all evening.
This morning, I have two fears which are bugging me: 1. Did the The Calamitous Attack of the Wrapping Paper Tube, combined with the running to save The Skit, cause bigly damage to my healing innards? I’m certainly in more pain than I was before these two incidents happened. 2. Will Skitter now be too frightened to go on our walkies again? Remember, it took her five years to finally be comfortable enough to get excited to do her walkies. She only truly began to enjoy her walkies in the last few months. I’m hoping Skitter and I have not created humongous setbacks for ourselves.
On the other hand, Skitter and I are both tough broads. (We learned to be tough broads from Mom, the Queen of Tough Broads.) The Skit and I have been through a plethora of not-so-good experiences in our different lives, so we already know that these things, too, shall pass.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
