The Permanence of Penmanship

In the past, young children not even out of the scribble stage of drawing began to scrawl marks on paper “writing” a letter or note to someone. Although I do not remember when I began doing this, scraps saved by my mother and grandmother attest to the fact that I did, as do the ones I saved when my children did the same. Lauded for his work in defining the stages of artistic development in children, Viktor Lowenfeld recognized that the time when children begin to name their scribbles is an important juncture.

One of my early memories is of my mother reading aloud to me. Because she was an English teacher with six different preparations a day, she often read from one of the high school literature books. I loved the poem The Highwayman with its sounds of the hooves of horses.  One night as I nestled beside her while she read, looking at the picture-less page, I realized that the marks on the page, the words, not only told the story, the letters could also tell her how to make the sounds tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot.  So it probably comes as no surprise that I was enamored with words and writing them from an early age.

I’ve always loved pencils – all kinds of pencils. The way the different kinds feel in your hand, the curl of wood produced when you sharpen them with hand-held sharpeners, the smell of the trimmings. Perhaps the excitement of using those big round pencils in first grade to practice forming lower and upper case letters and numbers on the newsprint pages printed with pale blue guide lines explains why I still collect pencils. In third grade I was eager to learn cursive writing, then frustrated when mine looked nothing like the beautifully formed letters of the green Palmer Penmanship posters that formed a border above the blackboard in Mrs. Byrd’s classroom.

I’ve followed with interest the quandary of whether cursive should be taught in schools any longer. Will it go the way of the dinosaurs in this age of technology when the youth use computers, often reduced to tablet size, rather than books? It might not be long before everyone will text, tweet, or use whatever the new thing is to communicate. If so, what remnants will remain for future generations? Will there be no faded love letters?

What about the handwritten recipes passed from one generation to another?  Many of the things I cook are from family recipes, however making condiments is not high on my agenda. In fact, I’m quite sure that I will never, ever, make Fermented Catsup. Yes, fermented. The recipe even mentions needing to skim off the “white that forms on top.” Pee-ew. Just the thought of the stench of a peck of tomatoes fermenting in my kitchen deters me from trying that recipe. Yet I treasure the small card. It is the only thing I have in my great-grandmother’s handwriting. The card with the recipe was written in 1930, not many years before Eleanor “Ella” Christopher died, so it is the writing of her elder years, yet it retains the distinctive precision characteristic of the Spencerian method. My great-aunt, Stella Christopher, sent the recipe to my mother with this note: “This recipe for fermented catsup is in your Grandmother Christopher’s writing. It (the recipe) came over on the boat from England with your great-great-grandmother, Jessie Oxley Sams.”

            I remember Great-aunt Stella well, and received letters or notes from her many times. Even after all these years, seeing her scrawling script brings immediately to mind her appearance, her voice, her laugh, her floral-scented dusting powder. My great-grandmother died years before I was born, but I wish I could have known her. My grandmother often compared me to her, saying “You’re so much like Mama,” especially when I did something creative. Great-grandmother Ella’s stitcheries brought me comfort at a difficult time in my life –the designs lovely to see, the sayings so apropos, words of comfort and inspiration when I needed them. The stitches in the embroidery were from her hand, but her handwritten recipe in fading ink is even more personal.

Years from now emails and tweets won’t be found tucked in a box of mementos. They might live in the cloud somewhere, but it is unlikely that, even if found, they will bring the same sense of connection of the handwritten note. Penmanship is personal, and it has permanence. The recipe in my Great-grandmother’s hand endures, not because I’ll ever serve the delicacy, but because it reaches across the decades, connecting me with a chain of women. Jessie, Ella, Ida, Stella, and Virginia, you will be remembered. Kept in memory, stories, and fading scraps of paper.

 

 

           

 

 

 

Synchronicity?

 

Within the last six months, events near me have included the reenactment of the Selma to Montgomery March, the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the Capitol of Alabama, and the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman.

In March of 1965 I brought some college friends to my house for the weekend, unaware until we arrived that it was the weekend of the Selma to Montgomery March. I remember well the concern that my parents had that perhaps violence would break out, therefore the friends I had brought with me and I were not allowed to leave the house. Although I was within only a few miles of the event, my actual experience of it was, as it was for many, through television and newspaper reports, or through what my father had heard about it at his work.

I do not remember the exact time when the Confederate flag began to fly over the dome of the Capitol in Montgomery, nor do I remember the exact year it was moved from above the dome to the capitol grounds, but I do remember, at least vaguely, the events. It was not possible to convey in a recent conversation with a visitor, someone much younger than myself who had never lived in the south, an understanding of the debates and protests swirling around the flag.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Harper Lee, but my college roommate was from nearby Beatrice, and took me to Monroeville in 1965 or early 1966. During that visit she pointed out the courthouse (where years later I attended the local production of the play, To Kill a Mockingbird) and all the locales that inspired scenes in the book.

Psychiatrist Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity in the 1950s.  I can’t say that I really understand his “acausal connecting principle,” nor have I usually put much store in coincidences. But in my reading, I’ve often been aware that sometimes books seem to land in my hands or work their way to the top of the stack to be read at an uncannily appropriate time.

How does this all tie together?  I’ve been a member of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave for many years, and attended the yearly conference for the last four years. During these gatherings I’ve met many authors, heard them speak, and/or bought their books.

Sometimes these books have become lost, or at least misplaced, in the many areas where books end up in my house. Knowing that I would see Chervis Isom at this year’s conference, I was relieved when his book, The Newspaper Boy, resurfaced in time for me to read it before I saw him. He grew up in Birmingham during the civil rights era, and bravely details in this memoir the development and changes in his own attitudes over the years. I finished reading the book on Tuesday, July 14, the same day that Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was released. I began reading it the next day. To read the two books back to back was a very interesting juxtaposition.

Also attending and speaking at the conference were Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Four Spirits, a historical novel about the 1963 bombing at a church in Birmingham that killed four young girls and T. K. Thorne, author of Last Chance for Justice: How Relentless Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers. Since the conference was planned well in advance, it was perhaps a bit of synchronicity that the speakers were lined up months before the events I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

Reviews, both good and bad, of Go Set a Watchman have appeared in almost every newspaper and flooded the internet, and I am not trying to add to that number. Someone recently said, “You can’t hold time in a bottle.” Certainly, there are times I would not want to hold, but I am thankful that there are those writers who can hold it in a book.  Their stories, perhaps better than anything else, can help others understand the past and move forward in the present.

           

             

 

 

Happy Birthday to Me!

It was a great day, and more fun when I visited with friends in the evening. So I’m not really having to proclaim “Happy Birthday” to myself out of loneliness – I received cards, calls, texts, e-mails, and numerous messages or timeline postings on Facebook. I have definitely not been neglected.

I have never tried to conceal my actual age (well, not once I was twenty-one, anyway.) A friend of mine says “A woman that will tell her age will tell anything,” as though it’s a bad thing. I’m to the stage when I’m glad to have made it this far. But having said all that, I was a little put off when I opened Facebook the day before my birthday and there it was “Carol Robbins Hull turning 72 tomorrow.” Somehow in cold hard type it seemed, well, I’m not sure what it seemed. Intrusive, maybe. If I choose to tell you my age, that is one thing, but for Facebook to blab it to the whole FB universe seemed a bit heartless. Of course, it probably means only that I didn’t do the settings right and their computer just spit it out to alert people that my day was coming up, and I will admit that I loved reading all the posts that people send me on my day.

I’m not quite through complaining though. In past years I’ve received birthday cards from my insurance agent and sometimes the dentist, and that was fine with me, a bit commercial, but at least I actually have some kind of relationship with them. However I received one this year that offends me. It says that I have something special just for me: a hearing test and a gift card to a restaurant when I order my hearing aids. I guess what my cousin’s husband says is true, that once we get to a certain age we are presumed to be “deaf, blind, and lame.” I am tired of being bombarded weekly with ads for those things you ride around on, hearing aids, and old-folks-friendly phones. I can still hear pretty much all I want to hear. True, I do have to ask people to repeat things sometimes, but that is usually because I wasn’t paying attention in the first place. After cataract surgery my vision is the best it’s been since I was ten years old. And I may not keep up an athlete’s pace, but I’m still getting around pretty well. Not running any marathons, actually not running at all, but then I rarely did even when younger. My mother thought that ladies shouldn’t perspire, much less sweat (a word she never used) and I’m somewhat in agreement.

There are at least a few establishments that I refuse to do business with because I really dislike their ads. Because I am getting older (I refuse to say old) it is possible that I might someday need a hearing aid, but if one more sales piece thinly disguised as a good wish arrives, this place will most certainly find itself on that list. So all you companies that bombard women ‘of a certain age,’ with unwanted reminders that we are not twenty-one any more, take note. I think I speak for most of us when I say, “Stop it!” Outwardly we may appear as youthful as we feel, but don’t count us out yet. We still know our own minds, and we are a choosy lot.

Gifts that Last

Over the Christmas holidays my nephew often brings me a pound cake. He’s mastered the method of creaming the butter and sugar, mixing the batter, and consistently turns out perfect cakes that practically melt in your mouth. The cake he brings me won’t last long in a house full of relatives. Even some of the children will pass up decorated cookies for a slice.

Why would a perishable cake be part of an essay on gifts that last? Because my nephew is part of the fifth generation to make the cake from Mary Etta Merrill’s recipe. Mary Etta, or Ma Ette as she was called, was my great-grandmother. Since she died before I was a year old I don’t actually remember her. I know of her from a single photograph, some family stories, and the pound cake recipe. She gave the recipe to her daughter-in-law, my grandmother, who then passed it down to the rest of us. It’s a simple recipe, made from ingredients found in a farm wife’s kitchen: sugar, real butter, eggs, flour, and vanilla. No fancy extra ingredients or frosting, just a plain cake. The delicate flavor is comforting; its simplicity makes it memorable.

Perhaps this came to mind because I was thinking about the treats that I make, some of them only for the Christmas holidays. As I come across new recipes, I try new things, but it is the old recipes that mean the most. They have stood the test, the kinks worked out, the seasonings adjusted, et cetera, before they were passed on. Beyond that, they have a history, a connection that the new things don’t have yet. It brought a smile to my face when I pulled out the recipe for fruitcake cookies on which my mother had noted “Recipe given to me by Pat Garner’s mother in 1964.”  I helped Mother make the cookies that year, and have made them either with her, or on my own every year since. If you do the math, you’ll see that for me this year’s batch marks fifty years, a half century of my making these same cookies.

            I’ve written before about the almost sacred ritual of making candy at the holidays with my mother, and of the sadness when the time came to make candy the first year after her death. To my great comfort, one of my sons asked to make candy with me that year, and continues to do so. His wife, my daughter-in-law, makes chocolate fudge with peanut butter from the recipe that my mother received when she was in college.

            Trends in gifts come and go, often heavily influenced by advertising agencies that produce the slick gift catalogues, catchy slogans, and glitzy television ads that bid us buy, buy, buy. But my great-grandmother, grandmothers, and mother were the wise ones. Although I received other gifts, material things that for the most part have long worn out, other than a few treasured pieces of jewelry, it is the other gifts that have endured. The gift of their patience in teaching me to cook, the lesson that some things are made special by preparing them only for important occasions or holidays. And the most treasured gifts of all, ordinary little slips of paper with recipes written in their familiar handwriting that bind me to them with memories as delicate as the aroma wafting from the oven, and as warm and sweet as the just-baked cookies and cakes.

Another V. B. R. Story

Many years ago, while studying a work in a college literature class, the professor pointed out that long after the books were published the writer took his pen to his hardbound copy, making changes and corrections. If I could remember which author this was, I could find on the internet a photograph of a page from the book complete with the scribbled additions.

Given this, perhaps I’m in good company. I hesitated to publish V. B. R.: My Mother’s Story because I knew it was incomplete. But there came a time to decide that I could sit on it another half-dozen years or go with what I had. Part of the hesitation came from my realization that there were so many questions that I had never asked, so I simply did not have that information. Another thing was that I don’t have as good a memory as I thought I had. Little details from events that I had either heard about or in some cases, been there for, escaped me. On the other hand, Mother had a remarkable memory.

In cleaning out a closet this week, I came across a notebook with notes from a trip to Bella Vista, Arkansas, we took with Mother in 1999, when she was 83 years old. By this time macular degeneration had taken most of her sight. When my husband mentioned a town we were going through, Mother said “That’s not too far from Mena. I’d love to see if that restaurant is still there.” So we went to Mena. In 1928 or 1929 she had accompanied her Grandma Christopher who was to spend the summer in Mena for health reasons. Mother’s uncle had driven them there and settled them in a house that had what were called housekeeping rooms.

I do not have Mother’s sense of direction. Can you imagine being able to direct someone to a town in another state - without benefit of a map, or sight to read it, or the ability to see the landmarks - that you have not been to in seventy years? Following Mother’s directions we drove around the town as she told us about the places she remembered: the park, the block where the house had been, the Christian Church they attended on Sundays, the library, and the post office.

And yes, we found the restaurant. The Skyline Café that opened in 1922 was still there! Mother had such fun telling the server that it was her 83^rd birthday, and she had eaten there when she was only twelve of thirteen years old, and was so pleased to find that it was still there. As she had done seventy years earlier, Mother dined on fried chicken, then ordered ice cream for dessert. Although she declared it a good meal, later she remarked to us that it wasn’t as good as she remembered it being. Then with her usual insight, she said something about things often being better in our memory than in reality.

It was good to find my notes and read what I had written about the trip, but that reality pales in comparison to the memory of Mother’s delight in finding that on her 83^rd birthday, the Skyline Café was still open.  

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

My dear friends, I realize I've been all but insufferable recently. Thank you for putting up with me while I agonized over finding a format for the book about my mother, worked on it at a snail's pace, then decided to 'do it myself' with a well-known self-publishing site. All who know me must have laughed at the thought, given my lack of competence where a computer is concerned. And did I mention that I bought a new computer and tried to go from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 in the middle of all this?

 A rational person would have hired someone to edit, format, design the cover, etc., but then, I'm not often accused of being rational. I've learned a lot, but didn't quite get it right after all. Should have ordered that second proof copy! But it is out there, errors, flaws and all. Since Mother was an English teacher for over 35 years I really didn't want it to be full of grammatical mistakes, but you may find a few. The other mishaps in it are somewhat minor, mostly due to my impatience at the end. In a strange way that almost fits. My father was a perfectionist, and would take forever getting something done to his standards. Mother did a good job on most things, but her attitude was more of a 'don't piddle, just get it done' attitude. As for as she was concerned, perfection was not always necessary when good enough would do. So, though not perfect, perhaps it is at least good enough.

I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude to my family and friends who have encouraged me in this project. Even as a writer, I simply cannot put into words how much the support has meant to me. I have been surprised and delighted by the number of you who have 'liked' on Facebook, commented, or sent me messages. That so many of you would be interested in something I thought I was doing only for our family humbles me.

Last, but certainly not least, I am so grateful for the support and kind comments and reviews by my fellow writers. The writers that I've had the opportunity to meet are so generous in their support of fledgling writers like me.

I cannot thank all of you enough for sticking with me through the slogging through this project,  and now my 15 minutes of, if not fame, at least celebration.

Who Knew Such a Little Thing Could be so Difficult?

On September 8, I proudly posted a photo of me holding a proof copy of “V. B. R., My Mother’s Story” on Facebook.  I admitted in the post that it was probably too soon to brag about this accomplishment. Was I ever right about that! My anticipation that the book would be available by the end of the month exhibited all the optimism of a rank amateur. I’d worked so hard on it, edited it over and over again, and was certain that when I opened the covers I would find this wonderful, perfect product. Wrong again! Not only did I spot errors, my proof reading friends found plenty as well. And though I appreciate all their suggestions other than correcting errors, I chose not to make some of the changes.

One that I did make was to number the pages, but had I known what a nightmare this would turn into for me, I might have said "Who needs page numbers? The book isn't that long." You see, the computer and I have a love-hate relationship. I love it, but it hates me. Did I mention that I am also in the process of learning a new computer, of moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1?  I’m certain that some nerdy kid somewhere with a serious disrespect of senior citizens is taking some twisted pleasure in my difficulty in making this switch.

But back to the insertion of page numbers. A normal person with a good working knowledge of Word might have done this with ease. Even I have done so in the past. Not so easy this time around. Two main problems: I didn’t want to number the title page and other front matter, and  I was switching the document from the old 7 to the new 8.1.  After enlisting the aid of friends, and spending untold hours on the various help sites on the internet I found that many of the things they suggested did not appear in any of my tool bars, but I finally got it done. So proud of myself, I was about to pop! Then I converted the file to a pdf for uploading to be printed. Where did that extra blank page come from? And better yet, how to get rid of it? You guessed it – the fun was just beginning. Other tries resulted in not one, but multiple blank pages that did not appear in the formatted Word document, but would find their way into the pdf. Or the numbers would start in places other than where I thought I put them.

Why did I continue to put myself through all this, rather than just scrap the idea of numbered pages? Sheer stubbornness. The more times it all went wrong the more determined I was that this was not going to get the best of me. Cross your fingers for me. An hour or so ago I uploaded what I hope is an edited version, complete with page numbers!

If it doesn't work, I'll probably snatch every grey hair out of my head trying again and again to fix it. Should that happen, and you see me running around completely bald-headed, please lend me a cute hat.