Tag Archives: family

Where You Come From

24 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in History, personal

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A selection from the box, mostly documenting the first two decades of my mother’s life

Mumblety-odd years ago, my first museum job was in a photograph and print collection, working as a photo researcher both finding and processing collections. There was a voyeuristic quality to the work, sometimes when going through a photographer’s more personal images, but especially when working on a family collection.

As I continued to work in the field, I started meeting with donors, and learned to talk them into giving their collections to the museum. It was easy enough to talk to them about making their memories tangible, creating and preserving a legacy of their lives so that others could understand the past and the contribution they, in particular, had made. How they typified an important part of a state or region’s history.

Susie the Cat makes many appearances

Sporadically, I organized my own photos and ask my mother for images of our family. I certainly took plenty of photos of my own son, but as time went on– and whether this is due to smartphones or trying to live in the moment, or not wanting to break the magical spell of an experience– I stopped taking pictures. I could still talk people into donations, and still enjoyed going through their family albums, but recording my own life didn’t make much sense to me, and I began to consider pitching images and letters and postcards, especially as I packed to move south. Keeping photographs for myself didn’t make sense.

Federal furniture: always central in my family

Sitting in bed on Friday night, Drunk Tailor and I looked through a box of snapshots my mother keeps in a fabric-covered box. He said, “Photographs are what you use to show people what you used to look like,” and to a degree that’s true. They are also proof that you had a life before this moment (think Blade Runner) and proof– perhaps– that you are who you think you are (think Blade Runner 2049). But even more like the Blade Runner movies, photographs of your past, or your family’s past, tell you where you come from, and where you might belong. Love them or leave them, you fit in somewhere in a larger story of people, and that shapes your identity, what you do, who you love, and how you live.

1936: My grandmother’s wedding.

As every year ends, I look back with some sadness at things I wish I had done differently, people I wish I had not hurt, people I wish I’d hugged more. The box of snapshots reminds me that I’m all too common, all too normal. Everyone has those pangs of nostalgia, the words they wish they’d said, the loss they feel as they lose the people they love.

Saint Lucia Day ca 1947

And that’s the point, I suppose: love one another. Be excellent to each other. Take the photos, label them (in pencil, on the back, listen to your archivist), and look at them when you can’t remember who you are, where you came from, or why you matter.

Swim Kittens & The Slippery Seal

06 Monday Jan 2014

Posted by in Swimming

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Warming up, the Slippery Seal in lane 3 (count from the bottom)

The Young Mr has an alternate identity which he has long maintained: the Slippery Seal. When the Seal was much younger, his grandfather lived nearby in a house with a pool; as a result, the Seal spent every possible moment between the ages of 2 and 5 in the water. Eventually we learned to put him in a flotation device and removed him only to warm him up and feed him. He’s the same way, still, at the beach. He doesn’t go to the beach: he goes to the water, and will swim in the ocean in October if you let him.

Despite swim lessons, despite swimming at summer camp, despite my imprecations and pleading, the Seal refused to try out for the local (as in two blocks away) TigerSharks swim team until invited last summer. Now he swims at least twice a week after school, and competes in meets around the state. He loves it, even when he struggles.

A KittenShark finishes her butterfly lap

The meets take hours, as some teams are twice the size (or more) of the TigerSharks dozen-plus kids. On Sunday, the TigerSharks swam against the Barracudas and the Penguins. Both the Barracudas and the TigerSharks have a number of team members in the under-8 category, that is, kids as young as 6 and 7. And zOMG, are they cute. We call them the Swim Kittens or the KittenSharks, because there is hardly a splash when six of them go off the blocks and start paddling. The first time he saw this, Mr S said, “It’s like someone threw an armful of kittens into the water.” The big boys go in like Great Danes, kerSPLASH! and rumble down the lanes.

The cutest thing we saw at yesterday’s meet was a swim kitten on the Barracuda team carrying her Little Mermaid doll. This swimmer was clearly in her first year of competing, swimming very slowly and deliberately, and then clutching her totem Little Mermaid when out of the water and on her mother’s lap. This level of adorableness helps us get through the three-plus hours of other people’s kids swimming, while the Slippery Seal waits for his 30 seconds in the water.

The Penguins coach encourages a swimmer in lane one.

Every team has a different style. The Fox Point team’s coach is Australian, and silently coaches swimmers with hand and head gestures alone. It reminded me of shepherding. One Cumberland team had a real screamer of a coach, but the Cumberland-Lincoln Penguins coach used a lot of hand gestures and rhythmic calls. The TigerSharks coach gives the kids thumbs-up signals, and yells things like, “You got it!” on their last lap or final yards. Older kids give each other a lot of high-fives, but the Swim Kittens alternate between hopping up and down and hugging each other.

The Slippery Seal was very nervous at yesterday’s meet; it was his first away meet, and he was as terrified as he’d been before the very first meet. When he gets really anxious, his asthma kicks in, and he started his notorious Seal Cough. Still, he made it through his first event (breaststroke) just fine, coming in second. He scratched from his next event, the freestyle, because he was using his inhaler, but his team mates told him he could have taken first in it. We spent the hour and half before his final event convincing him he could get through the waiting, into the water, and make it through all four laps of the backstroke.

This took some doing. There was coughing on his part, and pep-talking on our part, and on the part of the 12-year-old team captain (Abby) and the coaches. But he did it: he finished and came in third. And when it was over, I cried, surprised at how tense it had been.

After the last turn, Slippery Seal heads for the finish.

At his first meet, the Slippery Seal inhaled water and stopped swimming, with a booming cough that silenced the entire pool. At his second meet, he stopped swimming because he thought he was going to have an asthma attack (he didn’t). He sees a specialist for the asthma and has a therapist for the anxiety, but nothing can teach him he can really do this but doing it. I think he learned that on Sunday– and that he can have his own Swim Kitten Cheer Squad. Sometimes it’s hard to accept that people want you on their team, and want you to succeed, and have more faith in you than you do yourself.

Sturbridge: Always Something to Learn

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by in Events, Living History, Reenacting

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Adorable, right? But so very miserable.

This year, it was about anxiety.

After some too-public parenting and a minor diversion home and back to Sturbridge this past weekend, I can say that yet another event has taught me yet another set of lessons.

To wit:

  • Adolescents do not think clearly and will not tell you what is going on except under duress. Expect tears.
  • Keep the kid busy.
  • First aid help exists, use it.
  • Pack Gatorade.
  • Bed sacks increase warmth and comfort immensely.

The Young Mr, seen above in Full Pout Mode, had a roiling head full of anxiety made worse by heat and dehydration, for which he refused water and the suggestion of luxuriating in the air conditioned splendor of the upholstered sofette in the lobby of the Bullard Tavern. He made it through one activity and then I took him home because he felt so unwell, complaining of a headache and a stomach ache and feeling hot and then cold that I thought he was really ill. (We’ve had some tense “will-he-or-won’t-he puke-in-my-purse” train rides home, so I tend to overreact.)

Here he is as the ensign, displaying the colors.

Not until Auburn and a large bottle of Gatorade later, when suddenly his stomachache and headache were gone, did I figure out that it was mild heat exhaustion and anxiety, not flu or something worse. And then realized I could have taken him to the first aid station instead of home. But, once home, after a nap and a fight and a dish of curry, he’d promised to go back up on Sunday, which was much better.

Their lyrics were hilarious.

Again, he got to serve as ensign and carry the colors, marching behind the guys as they sang their way through the village. But somehow, Sunday, everything seemed better than it had the day before, when he hadn’t told me how much he fears the start of high school, and how worried he is about his future.  No more reading the New York Times for him…

This isn’t the costume or action report you might want, but living history with an adolescent is challenging. The Young Mr is just too young to field (he’s only 14 but almost 15) and he doesn’t want to be a drummer. It’s a challenge to find things that he can legally and safely do that integrate him into the unit of guys, which is what he really craves. Perhaps it’s because he gets to try out what it’s like to be a man, while still being a boy.

A Visit with the Ladies

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by in Clothing, History, Museums

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The apple never falls far from the tree, my mother used to say, of me and my grandmother, her mother, Elsa. Elsa went to a woman’s college, majored in botany, graduated in the mid-twenties, and went back to western New York State, where she opened an eponymous dress shop.

Elsa, Studio Portait ca 1935

Elsa, Studio portrait ca 1935

Elsa managed that shop for more than 50 years, dressed most of the women in town (or at least the type of woman who knew how to dress, and be dressed), and even dressed a woman who later became a donor to the architectural collection I managed in St. Louis.

She was a controlling woman, no doubt, and carefully managed and cared about her appearance. She was also a lady of a steely, ladder-climbing type native to the 1940s and 1950s, full of the foibles and desires of the daughter of immigrants who spoke Swedish at home. The stories they told about her would make a cat laugh: the day the local radio station called and Elsa answered the phone (on air? That part was never clear) to find out that the household had won a month’s supply of white bread.

“Oh no,” she said. “I don’t believe we care for that,” and hung up.

Not of the quality to which she had become accustomed, you see: she insisted on some picky particular white sandwich bread for fancy lunches, and otherwise ate the limpa rye the cook or  Ingeborg made. All the household help was Swedish, as were the women who did alterations at the shop.

Elsa married late, at 35, and her husband moved into the house she shared with my great-aunt and their father, August, known as Morfar after my mother was born. Buying trips to New York for her store resulted in the delivery of boxes from Saks Fifth Avenue, deliveries that came so often, in such quantity that my grandfather questioned her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “They just keep sending them.”

Elsa in Italy ca. 1980

Elsa in Italy ca. 1980

They were boxes of shoes, spectators and sling backs, pumps, court shoes, Cuban heels, stilettos, peep toes, sandals, every kind of shoe you can imagine, and all in brown, tan, beige, ecru, off-white, cream, none of them black or red or blue or green. Beige: that was her signature color, beiges and browns with occasional accents of coral or green or gold. She assigned blue to her younger sister, my great-aunt Gladys, and when Gladys once dared to buy a beige dress she liked, Elsa had a temper tantrum. A quiet one, but effective.

She died before she could meet my husband, died before I was married, and I am sorry about that. But I remembered her this week when I went with my friend (and Registrar) to visit two older ladies, sisters, on the East Side. We picked up a collection of clothing worn when the two ladies (now in their early 90s and late 80s) were babies, the wedding dress their mother wore in 1918, the dress one wore in 1939 that her daughter wore again in 1970, with quite the wrong black moccasins, at a Christmas Eve party in Georgetown.

The sisters reminded me of my grandmother and aunt, and the clothes reminded me of what my grandmother sold and boxed and wrapped in her store. Sitting at the mahogany table for lunch, drinking tea and eating a slightly stale roll, I missed Elsa and Gladys terribly, but was glad for all they’d taught me about how to behave and what the world was like for independent women in the 1940s and 1950s