Christmas at the compound . . .

This year I’m alone at the compound. My sorority sisters, Teri and Cindy (daughters) aren’t here so we can’t talk about the coming events Cindy, our president, has been planning. I think she’s been all caught up with other events such as what the other president in that White House has been doing . . . nothing good, of course. So it got me to thinking about my parents and how I wish they could be here with me.

I had such a happy childhood with them. I can never chime in when people talk of their bad memories of no electricity, not enough clothes or food, abuse, etc. I never realized how fortunate I was until I was an adult and found out I must have been one of the lucky ones. We never had much money, but we didn’t go without the essentials. My dad was a farmer and raised apples and pears and also a few animals. So we had plenty to eat and my mom made most of my clothes. And we had electricity and a bathroom. What more can anyone want? I remember one Christmas I knew we couldn’t afford much, but when my folks took me to the J.C. Penney store in Hood River and I saw the big, white teddy bear I started crying because I wanted him so much. And sure enough, he was under our Christmas tree on Christmas day. I hope I never did that again as it’s not fair and too hard on the parents. But it sure worked.

We always had a big celebration at my grandfather’s house with Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. One year I was sick in bed and couldn’t go. But Santa found his way to my house and up the stairs and into my room with presents. I think I am extremely lucky to have memories like that – I don’t imagine many people do. My brother and I were very fortunate to have had our parents. I really miss them.

When I had my daughters, my parents started coming to our house in Portland for Christmas. That was always a special time for the whole family. My folks had to put up with all the pets we had at that time. Sometimes we had turtles, duck and a goose, gerbils and even a rat once. In the above picture my folks are sitting on the sofa amidst Christmas presents and dogs. Sammy, our German shepherd, and Brownie, our Dachshund, are lying under their feet. My parents look so happy as do Sammy and Brownie. Those Christmases were good ones.

But all the Christmases have been good. A couple days from now I’ll be flying to see Teri and her family. And right after New Years, Cindy will be coming to see me after her kids go back to college. So today is filled with lots of memories for me, and they’re all good.

Nick has a birthday . . .

Today is Nick’s birthday. Nick is my daughter Cindy’s youngest son – Pat is the oldest. So maybe that means Nick is creative and charming according to the Norwegian study about which I wrote several days ago. I’m also the second child and am very creative and so charming . . . I think Nick takes after me. He has both of those traits. He’s in college now, but when he was younger his family had a wonderful dog named Larry. I’ve already written about Larry in an earlier posting where I was lying on the floor and Larry’s head was lying on my stomach as if he were comforting me.

Larry always hung around the table when everyone was eating. And if they left the table for a minute, he’d eat whatever was left right off the table. I love this picture because it looks as if he’s saying, “What? No bacon and eggs?” He was a special dog and much loved by the entire family. Nick was having breakfast and Larry was watching and waiting for something better.

But now Nick is off to college far away from his home in Washington, and I think he’s learning more than I thought was possible. Nick is a very smart kid and is soaking up all that he can at school. The last time I saw him, he talked about things I could barely understand, but I didn’t care. I just loved listening to him. It’s too bad his birthday is the 23rd, right before Christmas. That was not well planned at all. I used to baby sit Nick and Pat when their parents were out of town. When they were really young, it was so much fun to rock them and sing to them. I did that for hours. And then as they got older it was not as much fun, but very interesting, trying to keep them from crawling out the window at night which they frequently did. But maybe it was just Pat that did that. But how could that be if he has the higher IQ since he’s the older one . . . why would someone with a high IQ do something stupid like that, knowing he’d be found out? I think those Norwegian researchers should stick to their herring and leave the IQ business alone. We don’t need them telling us things like that – maybe we should build a fence to keep them out. Oh . . . I forgot . . . we already have one fence up and probably can’t afford another one right now what with paying for the war and other important things like that.

So Happy Birthday, Nick. I hope you have a very special one.

Too much news!

I wonder if anyone else is getting as sick of all the political news as I am. I can’t turn on the news without hearing about one candidate castigating another one, usually because that one is the front runner at the time. The Republicans nit-pick at each other and the Democrats dump on Hillary. Oprah traveled with Obama through several states which I think should not be allowed. Just because she’s the richest woman in the world shouldn’t give her license to try and sway voters just by her presence. She is powerful. I remember when she was doing her book club on her show, and she elevated author James Frey to the very top of every book critic’s list and even had him on her show, praising him for his work on the book, “A Million Little Pieces.” He called it a memoir which forever gave the term “memoir” a bad name as it turns out he made up much of the book. So after making tons of money from it, he was brought down and even left the country for a while. So now Oprah is campaigning?

I’m getting a kick out of Mike Huckabee – I call him Doofus. He is so religious -- all about family and continually bringing that into his “down home” speeches. He says we should be thinking about the birth of Jesus Christ and our families. Is he giving a sermon or running for office? I wonder what he thinks about the time his son hung and killed a dog at a Boy Scout camp back in 1998. Doofus pressured the authorities to back off the case saying, “There was a dog that apparently had mange and was absolutely, I guess, emaciated.” So it was ok to hang it? The son was dismissed as a councilor and later made Eagle Scout. You can always count on the scouts, can’t you?

I also wonder about Mitt Romney. He made the statement that when he heard in 1978 that Blacks could now enter the temple and hold the Mormon Priesthood, he was driving home from college and was so overcome that he pulled off to the side of the road and wept. I don’t believe he did that for a minute, but that’s just my thought. The story goes that Spencer W. Kimball suddenly received a revelation (what is that?) that Blacks could now enter the temple and hold the Mormon Priesthood. What actually happened is the fact that the Mormon Church would have lost its Tax-Exempt 503(c) status if it didn’t change its views on Black people.

And what about those people who live in Iowa? They have been bombarded by candidates for some time now. I think they’re there night and day at every diner, Elks Club, hospital, college, bar, chicken coop, elementary school, fire station and just about anyplace where they see someone they can catch up with and to whom they can give their campaign speech about how smart, warm-and-fuzzy, knowledgeable etc. they are. I’ll bet those Iowans are scared to open their doors for fear they’ll find some candidate standing on their front steps, smiling and eager to talk. I also feel sorry for the candidates. How can they hold up through all of this?

But just about when I was ready to turn off the TV (I don’t think so) and not listen to anymore news, I hear that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant! Thank god there’s another Spears who can take over for Britney who is so “last year” right now. Jamie Lynn is 16 and stars on a show on Nickelodeon for 9 – 14 year old girls. She is their role model. She and her mother are getting ready to publish a book on child rearing. Wonderful! Jamie Lynn said she was shocked when she found out she was pregnant, but plans to raise the baby in her home in Louisiana, “so it can have a normal life.” I don’t think there’s much more to say about that except to keep tuned for further announcements from the Spears family. Are there anymore kids in the family? We can only hope.

Wardrobe for Cindy

When Cindy was a little girl, she wanted a wardrobe where she could keep her Barbie and other doll clothes. We couldn’t afford to get the real thing, so I made her one out of a box. My husband was a school teacher and teachers were paid very little those days. Come to think of it, they’re still not paid enough. Teachers have to put up with a lot from unruly students, and if they take action, they may be sued by the parents or the kids . . . or even fired. They must be so careful in their interaction with their students, that it makes me wonder why anyone would want to be a teacher anymore. People say teachers have a long vacation every summer as if that were a bad thing. The thing is teachers can’t afford to not work in the summer, so they all have to get out and hustle to find summer jobs. My husband worked many different jobs during the summers. Sometimes he taught driver’s education and would bring the students by our house where I’d give them all popsicles. I guess that was our vacation. The students would examine my fish ponds, my frog and our dogs and then be on their way . . . sort of like a home zoo. They wanted to examine our girls, but the girls were off limits. Those weren’t bad times as we didn’t know anything else. All of our friends were in the same boat. But I made some great meals, and the best one was my secret recipe for baked spam. We all loved it, so I suppose we had it quite frequently. Maybe that’s why my cholesterol was off the charts in those days. Now I never eat it unless Harry, my grandson, comes to town because I taught him how to love spam. But that happens only about twice a year which is sad because I could eat it every day!

But getting back to the wardrobe, I found a box and covered it with some chenille that had little white balls on the edges - probably from an old bedspread - and I covered the inside of the box with red cloth. I put some wire inside across the top so that clothes could be hung on it. When Christmas came, Cindy loved the wardrobe and had it for many years. I thought it was gorgeous! I have a picture of Teri that Christmas holding a ukulele which was one of her own gifts. I liked it as it brought back memories of my college days and singing with the girls in my dorm. I’ll have to ask Teri if I ever gave her a chance to use it.

Christmas with Teri

When Teri was a year and a half old, we took this picture of her with two of her favorite things during Christmas time. She was wearing a hat that she was given at Halloween which she absolutely adored. She wore it everyplace, all the time. I have pictures of her several months later when she was wearing a ski jacket with a hood, and on top of the hood was perched her Halloween hat. I wish we had saved it.

Also in the picture was a plastic doll with a big butt that sat on the floor and could be hit, knocked or batted - not that we ever did any of those things - but would never fall over. It just rocked back and forth. Her name was Present. I don’t know where the name came from, but that’s what Teri called her. Teri had Present for a long time along with the Halloween hat. I sometimes think there should have been a place for all the special toys our children had when they were young. Then when they were all grown up, they could see them and remember the good times they had had with them. I look in my photo albums and see all the pictures of Teri and Cindy when they were little, and it makes me nostalgic and emotional. I know if they could be here with me, looking at the albums, we’d have a good time with it. But when I’m alone, it affects me in ways I don’t quite understand. The pictures bring tears to my eyes.

I don’t know if I’m alone in my feelings – maybe others feel the same as I in the same situation. Or maybe I’m just weird. Could that be possible?

Who has the higher IQ? And does anyone care?

The other day I was reading “The Oregonian” newspaper and came across an article that really grabbed my attention. The title was, “Firstborns have higher IQs.” I was shocked and dismayed to see that in print. Apparently there was research done on this, and it was done in Norway. Don’t those Norwegians have enough to do making all those bulky sweaters and fishing? How did they ever come up with something like this? The study involved only men and found that firstborns have an edge of 2.3 IQ points on their next oldest brothers. That all comes down to a 15-point difference in SAT scores. Even though only men were studied, they said the results would surely be the same for women. Now how do they know that? What sane woman would ever submit to that sort of testing? What is it with Scandinavian people? Do they all live in their own little quirky world? The article even quoted a psychologist in Glasgow, Scotland, who said that firstborns usually are the most intelligent of all children and the most likely to achieve.

How you treat your children also enters into the picture. It goes on to say that older children are showered with more attention (that’s a lot of crap) and given more responsibility than the younger siblings. Now that last part does make sense – I can’t see a man, watching a football game on TV, asking his 1-year old to get him a beer from the fridge. Wouldn’t he ask his 7-year old to do it? That’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

I didn’t mention any of this to Teri and Cindy as I knew they would start fighting about who’s the smartest, and that’s a fight that would never end. But Jim, my OLDER brother, was here for dinner Sunday, and I brought this article out and waved it in his face and said, “Have you seen this?” Without missing a beat he replied, “I wrote it!” Jim can be really funny and he is smart. But the one sentence in this article that I liked said that the youngest tend to be creative and charming. I’m good with that.