What My Father Built

My father was a skilled carpenter and as such, he built many of our play things both inside and out. Outside, he built a slide which was attached to our swing set. He also built a play fort out of wood for us, where we could play soldiers and Indians, which was a very popular game in the 1950s. It even had a look-out tower. Another he built was a jungle gym, or monkey bars, as we called them. We spent hours climbing on the jungle gym and had fun hanging from the bars and moving hand-over-hand on the rungs of the monkey bars. Attached to the jungle gym was a teeter-totter, which I particularly liked.

When we were a little older, Daddy built us a play house. It had windows that opened and a front porch. The spare key to our house was hidden in the recess above the door on the inside of the play house. It was big enough for us to move our table and chairs that my father had made into the play house. We spent many happy hours in the play house which was situated across the driveway from our house. It was nestles in a clearing in the woods near the driveway, near the lilies of the valley.

When we were very young, my father made blocks by cutting shapes from scraps of wood. My mother painted the blocks in bright colors. Being able to make so many things meant we could have many nice play things that we would otherwise not habe been able to afford. My father was very talented and kind to us. He was very creative. We were a priority in his life, and for this, I am grateful.

Weddings

The royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton got me thinking about weddings, so thought I would tell you a little about my weddings. They were very different.

My first wedding to Grandpa was a big affair, but not as big as Grandpa's family would have liked. I had 6 bridesmaids and 6 groomsmen. I remember all my bridesmaids but I don't remember all the groomsmen. Then I had my sister as maid of honor (although she did not return the favor when she got married). The bridesmaids wore light blue long sleeved dresses and "picture hats," which were big floppy white hats that were popular then. (My sister wore a picture hat and veil at her wedding.) I wore a long white A-line dress with long sleeves and a high neck. It was covered with lace and had little blue ribbons with a pearl sewn all over the dress. My veil was a mantilla-style and was also the train. I have a picture of it in black and white and somewhere I have my picture book.

Your Grandpa and his groomsmen wore white tuxedos. I don't remember what my mother wore, but Grammie had a dress made of pink satin and wore a pick hat. They rented practically the whole Radisson in New Hartford and Grandpa Bud brought all sorts of cold cuts and bread to have for after parties for the people from Albany.

The day before my wedding our septic tank broke and couldn't be fixed before the wedding, so we couldn't take showers at my house. I had to go to a neighbor's house to take a shower, as did my bridesmaids. What a mess. Your grandparents were very religious and had a mass brochure printed up for the wedding mass. Someone forgot to bring them from our house to the church and I wouldn't walk down the aisle until someone went back to get them and hand them out, so our wedding started about 15 minutes late.

Our reception was at a golf course club house. We had a band and a buffet. Grammie and Grandpa Bud would have preferred a sit-down dinner but my parents couldn't afford that. We were married a week after we graduated from college. It was a lot for them to afford. It was a nice reception and we left the reception to travel to our honeymoon in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania. We stayed the night outside of Binghamton and then traveled the rest of the way the next day.

The place we stayed had individual suites and included meals and things to do. I got sunburned very badly the first day and was miserable the rest of the time. It was a nice honeymoon for what we could afford. We decided to keep the honeymoon cheap so we could save to buy a house.

We lived with your grandparents from June until April when we bought a house a block away from their street. It was nice to be close to them, but they always knew what we were doing as they drove by our house. We spent every Sunday with them, while Grandpa watched some ball game and I sat with Grammie. This continued even when you were born. It was very difficult to get Grandpa to go visit my parents once every month or so. They lived 100 miles away, so it wasn't far, but he didn't want to miss his time with his family on Sunday.

My second wedding was very different. There were only 3 people at our wedding before the Bandera Justice of the Peace: your mother, and Doug's brother and sister-in-law. We had lunch after at a little restaraunt  in Bandera. And then I went back to work on Monday. We did go on a little honeymoon in November to Mustang Island. Doug claimed I ruined the day when I said something about a former boyfriend, even though he talked about his former wives.

So that's the story of my weddings.

Irish Dances and Best Friends

Everybody has a best friend in school. In grammar school, my best friend was Cornelia (Connie) Farley. Connie was of Irish-American descent and loved all things Irish. She knew how to dance jigs and reels and every St. Patrick's Day, she would try to teach us how to dance Irish dances. We all loved learning the dances and the songs that Connie would sing. 


I would often spend the night at Connie's house and we talked and shared secrets the way best friends do. We were very fond of John F. Kennedy, our Irish-American president. When Mrs. Kennedy was pregnant and gave birth very early (too early) for the baby to survive, I was at Connie's house. We prayed and prayed for the little baby Patrick but to no avail. We cried when we heard he had died and then prayed for the family.


We would make our own magazines at Connie's house. We would cut out articles and pictures from other magazines and use floor and water paste to paste them into our own magazine. They were just articles and pictures that we liked and thought would look better in our own magazine.


We would often dress up in our mother's dresses that were long on us and play nun. We enjoyed doing that very much. We would give each other punishments or penances. One day we got a little carried away and Connie hit me a little too hard with a stick and it hurt. We cut back on our penances after that.


Connie went to the other girls' high school after 8th grade and it was the school that I wanted to go to but my parents preferred that I go to UCA. So after 8th grade we lost contact with one another until about 4 years ago when we had our 40th anniversary. Even though I didn't go, someone gave me Connie's email address and we have kept in touch ever since.

Found Another Crush

In my last post about Valentine's Day, I wrote about three crushes I had in grammar school and how one of them brought me my first Valentine's Day gift. I mentioned that I had liked one boy, Allen, the best. He was a wiz in science and math. He always won the science fair awards from third-grade one. He was one of the people I competed with for top grades in out class. I had heard from my mother many years ago that he had dropped out of college and was writing poetry and novels.

Imagine my surprise when he found me on FaceBook a couple of weeks ago! We have been corresponding by email for the past few weeks and seem to have an easy time "talking" to each other about the past and what we are doing today. He lives in New York City and does indeed write poetry and novels and also does voice-overs for PSAs and commericials, and and also works at a radio station. He has a 21-year-old son and has been married and divorced. He changed the spelling of his name to Alen Pol Kobryn, from Allen Paul Kobryn, and you can even find out about him in Wikipedia. He is very much as I remember him, and I enjoy writing to him.

Funny how people pop into and out of your life all through the years. 

My First Valentine's Gift

I was in the 5th grade and I had crushes on three boys in my class. I got valentine in school from all of them and I sent them all valentines as well. All three of the boys I had a crush on lived on the other side of town. Our entire class exchanged valentines on the day before Valentine’s Day, which fell on a Saturday that year.

One of the boys, Timmy Fitzgerald had bought me a box of chocolates and wanted to come by my house on Valentine’s Day to give me the chocolates. Well, on that Saturday, we had a terrible snow storm. My mother told me that probably Timmy would not be coming over because of the bad weather. However, apparently Timmy had very persuasive powers with his father, and he and his father drove all the way across town so that Timmy could give me the box of chocolates.  I treasure the box the chocolates came in for quite a long time afterwards. My mother was shocked that Mr. Fitzgerald drove all that way to our house for Timmy to give me the chocolates.

I remember the box so well. It had a satin pillowed covering on the top of the heart-shaped box.There was a plastic flower on top of the box, too. I kept my treasures in that box for quite a few years.

My crushes were just crushes, I liked Allen the best; he was very smart, as was I. But he couldn’t get to my house easily. His father had a disability and his mother worked to support the family. But I liked Allen so such. And Jimmy was also one of my crushes, but that crush ended in fourth grade when I found out he liked a girl in his neighborhood.

Jimmy and I connected when I lived in Albany. We had lunch and caught up on all his family (there were 12 children in their family!). We still keep in touch on holidays and birthdays, Allen, who now spells his name Alen, recently found me on Facbook and we have been corresponding through email every since. He works as a voice-over professional in New York City and write books and poetry. Alen sent me an article yesterday on Timmy, who was retiring from his Assistant District Attorney’s position in Oneida County. My mother had found an article on him years ago, so I knew he was an ADA. My mother also talked to Alen’s mother and she told her he was writing (this was many years ago). The article Alen sent was really nice; Timmy has been the ADA for abused and neglected children and has 10 children of his own!

It’s strange how I have reconnected with about 4 or 5 of my elementary school classmates. I have more contact with them than I do with high school friends or even university friends. Perhaps it was because we grew up together and feel more comfortable with each other since we spent 9 of our formative years together. The article Alen sent me prompted me to write about my first real Valentine’s gift from a little boy who was able to get his father to brave the winter storms to come to my house on Valentine’s Day.

Favorite Children's Books and Movies

There are certain children’s books and movies that are classics and I remember them vividly and the affected they had on me. My favorite children’s classic was Heidi. I loved the story of the orphaned Swiss girl who charmed her grandfather who cared for her. Not only did I read the most popular book Heidi, but I also loved the rest of the trilogy which follows Heidi as she grows from a little girl to a young woman. I especially remember the descriptions of the melted cheese and bread sandwiches that Heidi ate to build her strength. Those passages would make my mouth order since I loved melted cheese sandwiches.

Another favorite book was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. When I first read it, I didn’t understand that the setting was the time period was the War Between the States (the Civil War). When I read it again later when I was older and realized this, I enjoyed the book even more because I could understand it better. I cried when Beth died, as she was my favorite character, but I also loved Jo for her strength of character and determination. This book, too, I followed with reading Little Men. I couldn’t get enough of Alcott’s stories.

When I was quite a young reader, I loved the Bobbsie Twins series. I was enthralled by the concept of two sets of twins, one dark complected and the other fair. I could identify especially with Nan, the older girl. I remember that I especially liked the book where the Bobbsie Twins go to the seashore.

I read The Wizard of Oz and really enjoyed the book. But when I saw the movie, I was absolutely terrified of the flying monkeys. The witches were fine, but those monkeys were horrible. And we always watched the movie when it came on televsion, and to this day, I have little love of monkeys, flying or otherwise.

I didn’t read the play until later, but as a child I loved Mary Martin’s version of Peter Pan when it was on television. I saw the Disney cartoon when I was quite young, probably no more than four. My babysitter Connie Guilfoyle, the daughter of my father’s supervisor, took me to see it. I remember that Connie told me that I could cover my eyes when the part with the crocodile came on because that part scared me. Connie also took me to see Alice in Wonderland. I had an Alice in Wonderland rain cape and umbrella which I loved wearing. It was made of pink translucent plastic and had the characters imprinted on it. I didn’t read the Alice books until I was much older but truly enjoyed them.

When I was older, a pre-teen, I loved reading the Nancy Drew series of books. I had quite a number of books in the series and I would trade books with my friend Debbie Brown who had even more books in the series than I did. I also liked the Cherry Ames series, which was about a nursing student, who then became a nurse and had adventures as she worked in different types of nursing situations.

Another series I loved and appreciated when I was older was the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I never had them read to me when I was younger but loved them when I read them by myself. When I was in high school, I even read the Latin translation of Winnie-the-Pooh. When the Disney corporation bought the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh, I was tremendously disappointed in their version because the cartoon characters looked nothing like the drawings of the characters in the books. And they made Piglet, my favorite character, to be such a coward, when I did not see him that way from reading the books.

These were my favorite children’s books and I have even read them as an adult. They still hold much pleasure for me today as they did all those years ago.

Pets

We had three dogs while I was growing up. The first dog was a beagle mix we named Tinkerbelle. We got her when I was in Kindergarten. She was allowed to wander around, and she went into the road and was hit and killed down the road from our house. We three children were heartbroken, and we cried and cried for days. My father buried her in the woods and covered her burial place with bricks.

Our second dog, Tippie, was a collie mix. If we let her out by herself, she kept running away from home, so my father made a run where she could be kept on a chain outside and not runaway. However, then she barked and barked, and the neighbors complained, so she was given away to someone out in the country.

The third dog, the dog we grew up with for the rest of our lives, was Sissy was also a collie mix that the neighbors, the Geers, who were Joanne’s godparents got for her, because she loved the collie Lassie on the television show. She really didn’t look much like a collie. She had a long snout like a collie and was tan and white with semi-long hair. She was such a good dog. She didn’t wander away and didn’t bark unless a strange car pulled in the driveway. We got her on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, so she was named Assisi, nicknamed Sissy. She loved my grandfather most of all and he loved her. He would pet her and say, “Oh, if only you could talk.” He talked to her all the time when he came through the woods to visit and when he came in my Uncle Donald’s car, Sissy never barked at the car because she knew Grandpa was coming.

Sissy was allowed in the house more than the other dogs had been, but she could only stay in the kitchen. Sometimes she would try to sneak into the living room, but she also was made to go back into the kitchen. When my grandfather walked through the woods to visit, if he walked back, my mother had to keep Sissy in the house because she would follow him back into the woods.

My mother had a bell on the back porch which she rang when it was time to come inside. The bell was for us and for my father, but Sissy knew what it meant, too. If she didn’t want to come in, she would go behind a tree and put her face against the tree so that she couldn’t see my mother and she thought that she was hiding from my mother. However, she didn’t realize that her hind end was in plain view and that my mother could see her. So my mother would call her and eventually she would come in.

The night my grandfather died, my brother went out to the back hall where Sissy slept and hugged her and cried, telling her that Grandpa wasn’t coming back to see her anymore. For months after Grandpa died, whenever my Uncle Don’s car pulled into the driveway, she would get very excited and wait for Grandpa to emerge from the car. She seemed so disappointed and confused when he didn’t get out of the car. It was really sad.

Sissy lived to a ripe old age, but she got arthritis. My parents tried to make her as comfortable as possible, but eventually she had the disease so badly that she couldn’t walk up and down the back porch stairs. When that day came, my brother took her to the vet to have have put to sleep. He cried and cried after that.

My parents didn’t have a pet for a while after that. Some years later, my brother brought them a puppy from a litter he had in North Carolina. He was a black lab mix that my father named Duke, after John Wayne’s nickname. My father loved that dog and Duke was allowed in the house more than any dog had been. He stayed on a chain when he was outside and it was long enough that he could roam around quite a lot. Pat loved the dog too, and took care of him when he moved home after my father died. Unfortunately, my mother gave Duke a bone to chew on and it pierced his intestines and he got peritonitis and died suddenly. My brother was quite shaken up by Duke’s death, as it happened when my brother was stricken at the same time with a case of gout. My mother complained about having to let Duke in and out and sweeping up dog hair, but although she had arthritis, he was good for her and her health went downhill more quickly after Duke died.

I loved all our pets, and today I try to keep my pets healthy and happy, because they make me happy and keep me healthy.