An Open Letter to My Kids....

Maybe someday you will ask or maybe you won't but hopefully this information will tell you more about what made me who I am.

• Loved to ice skate by myself for hours at the local outdoor ice rink when I was in grade school.
• A new housing development was going up one year and there was a gigantic pile of dirt, must have been 25 or 30 feet high, Grandpa would take Aunt Vanessa and I to it during the winter and we would sled down it out onto the frozen pond.
• Before Aunty Ness was born I used to go with Grandpa to the model airplane fields and spend all day watching him fly the small planes. There was a funky old outhouse that he would take me too and always hold the door open a little because it was dark and full of spiders. He would give me rides on his shoulders and taught me to suck the nectar out of the purple clover there. I remember riding in his pickup, in a brown plastic booster seat (like you see in restaurants) and hitting a bump on the way out of the field and sliding down the seat and under the seat belt.
• Sometimes I'd go with Grandpa to the airport when he needed to check on something over a weekend. The hangers always seemed so huge and scary and smelled like oil, they were cool and dark. He'd always tell me to watch my head as we walked under the airplane wings, but really I think he did it to remind himself not to hit his own head.
• Grandpa would take me up in a bright blue and yellow stunt plane that he took care of for Albert Baggs, the name of the plane was the Funk.
• Grandma was full of adventures when we were kids. We traveled all over, Chinatown in Chicago was always a favorite. We would stop in the funny shops and get rice candy and surprise gift. The surprise gift came wrapped in Chinese newspaper and was usually $1. We would get lost a lot and often end up in not so nice neighborhoods but Grandma always figured out where to go. We went to the hologram museum and played at the beach. One time Grandma to my best friend Cheryl and I to the beach at Lake Shore Drive. We got all wet and didn't have any extra clothes so we took our clothes off quick in the parking lot and put on tee shirts for the ride home. We thought it was very funny. When I got older Grandma and I would always go to Penny's Noodles in the pot for Thai food and then we'd go to the shops on Belmont, The Alley, the army surplus store and the thrift stores were always my favorite.
• One of the funniest trips we took with Grandma was to Indianapolis, IN. I don't think she had much of a plan during that trip. We were in a restaurant when she asked the waitress if there were any good and cheap places to stay. The waitress replied that her roommates were out of town touring with the Grateful Dead and we could stay with her if we wanted, we did!!! We ate at a funny little diner called The Canary Cafe and Grandma scared us by driving down a big one-way street the wrong way!
• Dawn dish soap, the original blue, and saw dust remind me of my Dad. He'd always come home after work and scrub up and Dawn removed the grease. The house smelled like saw dust most weekends I can remember as a kid as Dad was always working on the house.
• Grandma Nonie, your great great Grandma, was feisty as anything. She always wore sequined tops to family gatherings, demanded real wine, and was sharp as a tack right up to the very end.
• From 6th grade through 8th grade I played the flute and marched in the Mokena Meteors marching band. Band was always before school started so I was always up very early. During the summer I would ride my bike up to the junior high for marching band practice and loved marching in the parades. Our uniforms were wool and scratchy and hot and the hats were heavy but it was still fun. I was 2nd chair flute all through junior high even though I challenge the first chair flute, Amy Rice, a few times I never did beat her. I always thought our band instructor, Mr. Lamb, could tell who what playing during the challenge. He had one bad eye, I think it was glass, and he seemed like he was 1,000 years old back then. He loved classic rock, well what we kids considered classic rock, and those were always the songs we learn in band and music class. I played in the pep band too. Louie Louie was always my favorite song to play. I hated solo and ensemble competition as I had horrible stage fright, sometimes not even making it through my piece without crying. I won many medals and eventually learned to get over the stage fright. I decided not to keep going with band once I reached high school as it was like a full-time job at the high school level and I wanted to do other things.
• I started Girl Scouts in 1st grade and stayed with it through 8th grade. My favorite part of Girl Scouts were the trips we would work toward each year. One year we went to Mackinac Island in Michigan, one year Washington DC, and one year to Turkey Run Indian (that's where we tipped the canoe).
• We went to Great Grandma Tippy's house almost every summer when I was a kid. (Grandma with the Cows as you guys called her). She got her name when I was little. She had a dog named Tippy that I recall walking with a limp but I might be wrong. I couldn't keep the Grandparents straight so I started calling her Grandma Tippy and the name stuck.
• I used to make mud pies at Grandma Tippy's house for fun and look at the shells she always had in the gardens.
• Often I would walk down to the levee from Grandma Tippy's house. It was always fun and mysterious because it was such a different place than home. Walking down the dirt road in between the tractor ruts looking for ducks and muskrats and the occasional skunk in the fields or in the drainage ditch. Sometimes I would see decoy ducks floating that a hunter had left. The levee was always fun. I'd look for shells or pretty rocks but mostly it was just neat because I was up high and could see all around and it was always cooler there by the river.
• Your Great Great Grandmother Melba's house was just across the cow pasture from Grandma Tippy's house. I only remember going in it once but it hadn't been lived in for many many years. When Great Grandma Tippy grew up there they didn't have electricity until she was maybe 8.
• I remember Great Grandpa George (Grandma Tippy's husband) taking me for rides on the tractor and he let me "drive" it once. I remember feeling like I was going to crash it. He would take me into town to the general store and I'd get candy corn when I'd come to visit. I'd always eat the white ends off first. They taste the best. He passed away when I was about 6 or 7.
• Grandpa George worked at the grain elevator up by the levee where they would store the grain and fill barges with it. He took me up there once when they were filling a barge and it was very very noisy.

To be continued....

What We Don't Know.....

I have become painfully aware of how little I know about my parents, not who they are as my parents, but who they are as people. What did they accomplish as children, what things did they do that they aren't so proud of, who did they dream of being, what sort of things did their parents do that they hated as kids, what were family gatherings like, etc. Maybe I just wasn't listening those twenty some years I was home, maybe I was too self-absorbed being a kid or trying to figure out who I wanted to be to care about who they were.

As my Dad's 60th birthday has come and gone and a recent visit to Chicago I'm left with a lump in my throat telling me I don't have forever with them. This may be a morbid thought but it's also a progressive one. Humans are innately sentimental, at least I believe this to be true, over our past, our history, and what events have shaped us to be who we are. We wouldn't spend billions on therapy, self-discovery, and self-help books if we didn't give a shake about the things that happen to us and to those that came before us. We'd simply be one sheep following one another until we met our maker.

My Grandma Tippy had the forethought to compose two small booklets about her childhood some years ago in which she presented copies to all of us each Christmas. I cherish those books and actually keep them in my safe. They are a story, in her own words, of what life was like back when. Tales that seems like fiction, that just couldn't be true; riding horses to school, deep poverty, an orange as a prized Christmas gift. It was after reading those booklets, complete with images she'd drawn herself, that I understood a bit more about who she was as a person, as my Grandmother.

I don't think I am alone in that we so often long to know more about someone after it's to late to ask questions. We don't want to be rude or pry about what their lives were like and unless that person is forward and open about their life we just never assume to ask. Do my kids know that I was second chair flute all through grade school? Do they know I won several first place ribbons in my high school senior art exhibit? Do they know that I once canoed down a river and tipped over in chest deep rapids? Do they care, will they want to know?

This blog was created not as a place of self-promotion but almost as an open working journal, that if kept up long enough, might just become a place my children can come to learn about their crazy mother and her life's experiences. Make a list of all the things you've done in your life, good and bad, add to it as you remember them, ask questions of your parents and Grandparents, keep it in a safe place and someday that might just be the best gift you could ever give to your kids. Sometimes understanding the way someone came to be who they are can give you a greater appreciation for why they do the things they do. There may just be a reason or ten why your Mother does that thing that makes you crazy!