A LAST SPUTTER OF NAMES!

I have mentioned this before, but I had my fun picking out names for my own babies, so I try not to be dismayed or surprised or discombobulated when I see the names other people pick out for their own babies. Nevertheless, I have to admit that when I read in the news that Celine Dion and her husband, parents of newborn twins, had chosen the names Nelson and Eddy (although it was reported as Eddy and Nelson), I was shocked. Quickly I realized that although to me “Nelson Eddy” (pictured above)was as familiar a name as the Dione Quintuplets (pictured below), probably 90% of internet users have never heard of any of these people.

(For those of you who have a blank look on your face, I’ll explain: Nelson Eddy was the male half of “American’s Singing Sweethearts” of the 1930s, and paired with Jeannette MacDonald they sang their way around the world during those years. While I was too young to really appreciate them, their names were certainly in my store of knowledge. Similarly, the Dione Quintuplets, 5 cookie-cutter babies, born in Canada in 1934 without any in vitro tinkering, were also so notable that during those early years you could hardly open a newspaper or a magazine without seeing their sweet little faces peeking out at you. As regards names, they got highly individualized, non-rhyming, cutesy names: Annette,Cecile,Marie Emelie,Yvonne. This is your history lesson for today.)

Now of course Celine and her husband did NOT name their kids after Nelson Eddy. Newspapers said that Eddy is honoring Eddy Marnay, Celine’s first record producer, and Nelson is honoring Nelson Mandela. None of us old timers will ever forget the names of these new little twins. We may forget Apple and Orange and Moon and Tuesday, but not Nelson and Eddy, or rather, Eddy and Nelson. I wonder if anyone has ever named twins Roy and Dale? Or Dean and Jerry? (Frick and Frack? – again something the oldsters will recognize.)

People are free to name their kids what they want. More power to them. As I say, I made the right choices for me with my own kids: Sean, Erin, Bryn and Kerry. And through the years I’ve exercised my interest in names by bestowing them on our pets: Spot, Dolly, Annie, Missy, Sammy Davis III, Tigger, Cipsi, Bucky, Gloria Darling, and Squeaky.

In my work of indexing census records I do often come across the most amazing choice of names. Stranger than strange, sometimes. Just this week I was indexing a 1930 West Virginia census and found a family who had six boys. Those boys were named Chester, Lester, Vester, Wester, Nester and Kester. Really! I haven’t gotten over that yet!

There have been times when my kids were little and I’d start to call one of them and the wrong name would start to come out; I’d quickly verbally reorganize and pull out the right name. To the uninitiated it might seem like I was sputtering, but my kids were so close together in ages that sometimes in all the racket I’d just get mixed up in who I was calling. Well, I wonder about the poor old mother of the family above. Think of trying to call Vester and having to make a couple of tries before the right “ester” came out.

I remember when I was a kid we had a family living down the block from us that had a cluster of small children, one of which was Mickey and another Dickey. They had a dog that kept getting out of the fenced yard and into our yard, which aggravated my father no end. He’d always ask one of us kids to go down to the house and ask them to come get their dog – and he’d always refer to “Flicky, Dicky, Chicky’s house.” We’d try to tell him it was Mickey and Dickey, but it didn’t matter. Next time it was back to Flicky, Dicky, Chicky.

I wonder what my dad would have done with Chester, Lester, Vester, Wester, Nester and Kester.

Torn his hair out, probably!

LIFE & THE BELL SHAPED CURVE Part II

...continued from yesterday...

Where was my father during all this? I imagine that my mother, in the understanding way of mothers, probably told him I was having a growing pain or something because he certainly made himself scarce that summer, as did my sister. I don’t think any of it made sense to anyone except me. But I had finally come to the point where at long last I had a self to express, and that self was validated by an icon in American literature whose legacy of words would have a life-changing effect on me. It felt really good!

Luckily, by the time September rolled around I suspect Emerson and I both were tired. I put him on the shelf and headed back to college, the same me but different. Though he was never far from my heart, my passion had expended itself and I was moving on in my life...growing up, it's called. Mother and I settled down to a comfortable relationship again and never spoke about that awful time. It is to her credit that she didn't disown me.

I could not tell my grandson about all this when he asked me about my idol in the “old days,” I felt I needed to give him a simple “Frank Sinatra” that he could understand. I could have also just as easily said Elizabeth Taylor whom I had yearned to look like, Roy Rogers whom I had wanted to marry, or Turhan Bey, whose eyes always set my heart a-fluttering. If Chris had asked me who my "today’s" idols were, I would tell him his old Grandma would accept any of the Three Tenors, whichever one would stand beneath her balcony and sing love songs to her any time she wanted. Oh gosh, all of these people are more in the nature of ordinary idols -- but none could ever have affected my life the way Ralph Waldo Emerson did.

Today, my outer self still reflects a rather ordinary, average person living an ordinary, average life, but inside is a comfort zone that embraces Samuel Gompers, Ayn Rand, Betty Friedan, the hippies, the march at Selma, Hilary Clinton and still, after all this time, old Ralph Waldo himself.

I did not tell the people at work who my idol was and no one asked. Though we all worked together well, I always felt a bit out of place with them. Generally speaking I would have to say my co-workers read romance novels or comic books, watched hours of TV each night, played lots of bingo and wouldn’t be caught dead at a symphony. And that’s ok with me. I kept quiet because I didn’t like to seem “different,” but I was, and am.

After ruminating a few days on this business of idols, I told my husband about Chris’ project and about my story of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I admitted to him that I guessed I was pretty odd. Jerry laughed; he knows the inner me but never knew the story of how it got to be that way. Then he told me that when he was young he wanted to be just like Igor Sikorsky, the man who developed the first helicopter. Jer said his choice to attend MIT in Cambridge was becaise he felt to have the vision of Sikorsky he needed to have the very best training he could get.

Chris is too young to understand about the real idols both his Grandma and Grandpa had. So Frank Sinatra was a better choice for me to give him. And perhaps “idol” is the wrong word to call Emerson and Sikorsky, but the minds of these men gave force and direction to both of Jerry and me, which to a large extent shaped our adult lives.

As for the statistical bell-shaped curve, you will understand that all my co-workers and most of the ordinary, hardworking, salt-of-the earth people are gathered around its top. A few of us odd ones make up the extremes, which is where Jerry and I, along with Emerson and Sikorsky, willingly place ourselves, sitting happily on the edges of the bell-shaped curve.

LIFE AND THE BELL-SHAPED CURVE Part I

“Grandma,” Chris said, “I’ve got to ask you some questions for a survey we’re doing in my social studies class.”

“Fire away,” I told him, setting down a couple of cookies and a glass of milk for him and a cup of coffee for myself. I figured I couldn’t help him with his math, but I might have a chance with Social Studies!

The questions were mostly about “the old days,” - my old days, to be more specific: what did I do without television to watch, what kind of games did I play during recess, did we have any games like Nintendo. I answered the questions easily and gave him a picture of life before electronics. But I was actually stymied at his last question: “Grandma, who was your idol when you were growing up?”
Now this conversation happened long before “American Idol” hit the airways, so I wasn’t then inclined to think of an idol necessarily as a performer the way we do now. Nevertheless, I thought it would be easier for him to understand if I chose someone he’d at least heard of, rather than try to explain who someone in the ancient past was. And since I supposed he really wanted an immediate answer, I just picked a nice safe name out of the air and offered, “Frank Sinatra.” Chris seemed satisfied with my reply, and with his hunger temporarily at bay and his survey completed, he gave me a kiss and headed out the door toward home.

However, as I cleaned up the crumbs and put the milk away, one name kept coming into my mind. Ralph Waldo Emerson. I couldn’t help but think that my real choice would have to be Ralph Waldo Emerson, but what a strange choice for an idol! I thought it made me seem odd, but after all, who would judge? Why couldn’t I have strange idol?

At work the next day I polled my co-workers as to their idols, hoping one of them would have someone as far out as my choice was. No one did. Sylvia picked Elvis, not a big surprise since she carries around an Elvis tote bag and key chain. Lucy pretty much lives in the 1940’s and her choice of Betty Grable was really predictable. Ron, our aging baby boomer-accountant said Jim Belushi was his idol. And Debbie, our young receptionist, looked as if she might swoon when she squealed, “Ricky Martin.” The rest of the folks gave equally predictable answers; every one of them thought of idols in terms of entertainers. It did appear just as I thought: I was the odd man out. I could see that I was sitting on the edge of the bell-shaped curve on this one.

I have always wanted to blend in, not stand out. In school I did not want to be called on to answer a question or to write something on the blackboard. I didn’t want other kids to know I got straight As. I was painfully shy, and few beyond my intimate group of friends even knew who I was. I was, in fact, a nobody. I grew up thinking of myself not as “different” but just as a rather solitary person who would rather not be in the spotlight.

The fact of the matter was that somewhere way down inside me was a little streak of contrariness that took issue with a whole lot of things. But I was the good girl my folks expected me to be, through elementary school, then junior high and finally through high school, the counterbalance in our family to a major-tantrum-throwing sister. After graduation I accepted a scholarship to college out of town and moved into a dorm. Now I could call the shots in my own life and I felt so free. But what happened, of course, is that I just followed the same pattern of being the nice kid, quiet, unassuming and one that few people knew.

In the second semester of my freshman year, we were required to take an American Lit class. We studied many great American writers and finally were assigned Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essay on Self-Reliance. This essay spoke to me at the deepest level. I had no way of knowing that his essay was going to be my epiphany. It seemed to reach into the undercurrent of discontent that had been simmering in me throughout my childhood. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words seared through my soul, separated me from the beliefs of my parents and showed me that I was something more than a cookie-cutter image of them. I was stunned with the impact of his words. I took them for my own and felt I would never again be the same.

When summer came, I still hadn’t gotten Emerson out of my system and during that summer I ran around the house acting for the world like a Baptist preacher in front of a church full of sinners. I had discovered “IT!” No, it wasn’t a religious conversion but it surely was a new birth. And I preached “it” – self-reliance - as dramatically as I could. I wanted my parents to have no doubt about my changed life. I shouted to my mom, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” My mother blanched and bit her tongue. I waved the American Lit book and declaimed, “The only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.” My mother with her orthodox set of beliefs was sure I had lost my reason. I followed her from room to room reading, “Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law.” And then I laid on the final indignity, “I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you!” I was only 18 years old and I thought I understood the world.

.....conclusion tomorrow......

MAKING A STATEMENT, MAYBE.

Jerry and I arrived in Istanbul at the beginning of summer. Until the flat that was to be our home for the next year or so was ready for us, we lived in the Hilton Hotel overlooking the Bosphorus for six weeks. Jerry immediately was picked up for work every day by a young man assigned to be our driver, and it pretty much left me with nothing to do except to sight-see. We knew no one in Istanbul and didn't know a word of the language. Apprehensive about being alone in such a huge city, I mainly did my sightseeing on foot and in the area close to the Hotel.

When we arrived, there were only two MacDonald's restaurants in town, and one was within walking distance. Often I used that as the base I operated out of. When I got frustrated, or tired, or confused -- and initially there were lots of those times -- the familiarity of a Big Mac, fries and a coke did wonders for my spirit.

In my wanderings, what I mostly found of great interest were all the little handwork items on sale in the tourist shops. I knew these were merely representations of the "real" stuff, but until I got a better feel for proper pricing, I figured I couldn't go wrong with what the tourists were offered. I found some pretty gauzy cotton "block-printed" scarves with some interesting floral trimming on them and I bought myself a couple. The pink one, shown above, became my favorite, and when winter came I nearly wore that scarf out wrapped around my neck and tucked down into my warm jacket while I roamed the city, now much more confident on my own.



It was not long before I learned what these scarves really signified. It was not the scarf that was important, it was the edging, called "Oya." In a 1992 article in Skylife, written by Mine Erbek, she says "Oya is the secret language of Anatolian women, in which they express their feelings to friends and family. Whether she is in love or unhappily married can be read in the oya lace around a woman's headscarf."

Oya can be done by needle, crochet hook, shuttle, and hairpin, to name a few ways it is created. Although I have never seen it, the most beautiful examples of oya were usually made with a sewing needle and silk thread. Each design has a message with it. In the rural villages girls as young as six learn to make oya and are taught the significance of each flower, each color and each motif. As they age, what edging they put on their scarves sends a message. As an example, when a newly married woman visits her mother and father after her marriage, she will wear a pepper motif if she is unhappy, a pansy or meadowgrass motif if she is happy.



The message of the oya varies from area to area too, depending on the climate, local traditions an factors. An orange motif is common in the Mediterranean regions; in central Anatolia it is replaced by the tomato or apple motif.



At one point I found a long string of finely crocheted red peppers wrapped on a piece of cardboard functioning as a spool. They were really lovely and I bought them; I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but even if they weren't on a scarf, I liked them enough to include them in the little treasure chest of Turkish handcrafts that I was collecting. Many years after we came home I gave most of my little collectibles to a high school librarian who was trying to figure out what kind of a display to put in her school's display case. I figured that in seeing these thing, maybe young people would become more interested in learning about the area (Asia Minor) through which all of Western Civilization passed in its development.

The pictures I've used in this blog are also from that same issue of Skylife and are credited to Artcamera. If you want to see other very different forms of oya, you can find lots of them on Flickr and by doing a Google search on "Turkish Oya."

HALLOWEEN IS FOR PETS?

Daughter Kerry took Olivia and Justine to see the new owl movie (Sorry I can't tell you what the whole name of it is) and each member of the audience received an owl mask. The family has a very laid-back cat named Moses, so of course he got the honor of wearing the mask. And I got the pleasure of seeing my grandcat in his Halloween costume.

I'm not crazy about the new trend of putting animals in little clothes, except maybe for sweaters or coats to keep the little ones warm on a cold day's walk. My cousin had shelties and when she tied a bandana around the neck of her male shelties, she said they strutted around like typical male show-offs. I wasn't so sure this was true, but after we began fostering one of her dogs, I had to agree with her -- Bucky puffed up, threw his chest out and was one big show-off on his walks. But a bandana isn't a dress or rompers, so I can't really call it "animal clothing."

But if there is an exception to be made, it is at Halloween. I do enjoy watching the animals in their little costumes. The pictures below were taken many years ago at a local vet's annual pet Halloween party. I've always enjoyed looking at these funny animals, and while I've used them in previous Halloween blogs, they are cute enough to take another look.

Little Red Riding Hood, of course.

Who would have thought of a dog habit!


The Rag Doll cat really didn't care what was done with her. She's easy.


He really wanted to be Superman!


She's not really the ballet-dancer type.

I think of all the holidays, Halloween has always been my favorite of the minor holidays. Kids enjoy it SO much. Animals I'm not sure about.

EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

The nearby town of Ontario, California is developing a nice little museum, and each year around Halloween they have an exhibit of artists' representations of the holiday "El Dia de los Muertos" - the "Day of the Dead." According to literature at the museum, the Day of the Dead festivals in Mexico, Guatemala and the American Southwest have their roots in ancient Aztec traditions, and these two days - the first two days of November - is meant to be a time to remember the dead as well as to honor the continuity of life.

"Consisting of visits to the graves of loved ones, telling stories about the ancestors, preparing favorite foods, dancing, poetry, and the creation of elaborately decorated altars, these celebrations look humorously upon death and warmly welcome visits from the spirits of the departed."

The museum invites artists to show their work at the museum during this period. I go every year because I am fascinated by the way artists express things (I have absolutely no creativity bone in my body and no similar thoughts in my head!) and because each year the exhibit is all fresh and new and different.


Some of the altars on display are definitely the kind I would expect to see in a home. The display above is lovely, low key and definitely understandable. One senses the love of the artist for the subject of the display.


Entirely different, this display above features skeletons and skulls, along with the vibrant colors and it obviously honors people who knew how to enjoy life, even down to the ice chest! This holiday makes great use of skeletons and unless a person knows this, it can be quite a shock or surprise to walk into the exhibit hall and find skulls and skeletons in abundance amid all the colorful displays.


This picture above was paired with a similarly clad male, and they made such a different kind of statement. Beautifully rendered, they had nothing of the color and vibrancy of the traditional displays, but their dramatic black and white figures were every bit as celebratory as the more traditional expressions.



The decorated ladder, with the "angel" on the top, certainly seems to me to have an obvious message. I loved this one because it was simple enough to understand what was being said, although I'm sure much of the symbolism was lost to me because of my lack of "artistic vision!"

"El Dia de Los Muertos" celebrations are definitely not a cultural counterpart to our Halloween celebrations, although Halloween too started out with a religious significance.

As far as I know, the biggest celebration of this holiday locally is held in Los Angeles at the "Hollywood Forever" cemetery. It is a full day celebration, with a fee being charged to enter the cemetery grounds. I'm quite sure burials are never scheduled for that day. Although I haven't been to it, I did quite by accident discover it two years ago when I drove into LA with two cousins to see and photograph an ancestor's crypt that we had just learned was there. When we saw literally hundreds of costumed people lined up to get inside as well as all the bands and vendors that were setting up inside, we realized a very big "something" was going on. At that point we read the signs posted out in front of the cemetery and decided we would see our William J Hurlbut tomb some other day. Hollywood Forever has a website especially set up for El Dia de los Muertos, and I imagine you can find more displays there.

At any rate, I am impressed by what these artists have done, and I thank them for giving me such a visual treat. Also, I am pleased that the little Ontario museum makes it possible for me, as an outside appreciator looking in, celebrate this holiday with those for whom it is a special event.

YUM! A FALL TREAT!

It was in 1963, when my then-husband and I joined a church, that I began discovering good food. As noted in some earlier blogs, my mom wasn't a very good cook nor a very adventuresome one so I just had no vision for what could be done with food. This particular church had lots of pot lucks and it was there that I started tasting really good food and collecting recipes, which the older ladies of the church were more than happy to share with me.

This recipe dates from that period. As far as I know it could have been a popular cake recipe making the rounds in magazines at that time, but for me, it was really the start of a love affair with sweet and gooey things. Since fall is apple time, and nut time too, I'm passing this old recipe on to you. It's easy to make and oh, so delicious to eat.

APPLE NUT CAKE
2 eggs
¾ C oil
2 C sugar
2 C flour
1 t soda
2 t cinnamon
¼ t salt
2 5 vanilla
4 medium apples, chopped in small chunks with skin on.
1 cup of chopped walnuts

Beat eggs until foamy. Add oil and sugar. Mix flour and dry ingredients. Add flour, apples & nuts. Stir until mixed. Dough will be stiff.

Bake in a 9x13 pan 1 hour at 350.

FROSTING

3 oz cream cheese, room temp
3 T butter or margarine, room temp
1 t vanilla
1-1/2 C powdered sugar

Mix and smooth on top of cake.


The rest is up to you. Eat and enjoy!