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.

Art

I had many pastimes when I was growing up. One of my favorite things to do was to draw pictures and if there was nothing else to do, I could always draw pictures. My father would bring home pads of paper that the students in the print ship had made, so we always had plenty of paper. We had a box of crayons, but one of my favorite gifts was to get a box of new Crayola® crayons. I loved the different colors and the smell of the crayons. I drew pictures of anything you could think of. Pictures from my imagination would spring to life on the blank white pages.

When I was young, before I started school, there was a program on TV called “Ding Dong School.” Miss Frances was the teacher and everyday we drew a different picture and learned our alphabet and numbers and sometimes we would do some sort of a craft project. After I had done my drawing and the show was over, my mother would hang up my picture just like Miss Frances hung up the pictures drawn by the children on the show. I was so proud to have my pictures hanging in the kitchen, a new one every day.

When I was in kindergarten, my father enrolled me in an art class for children at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, the local museum that also had a well-known art school. I went to the art school on Saturday mornings. To me, it was like going to heaven. I loved the smell of the paint in the studio and my teacher allowed me to draw and paint whatever I wanted, making suggestions as I drew or painted. I brought home all my art work to hang up.

One day when I came home with yet another picture that I had drawn or painted, my mother said, “Why don’t you make something useful like an ashtray or something? You can draw and paint at home.” She missed the whole point of the discovery class, which was for the teacher to guide us as we used our natural talents. The next week I experimented with making clay animals and eventually I did make a metal painted ashtray for my mother, but my true love was drawing pictures and painting.

Because my mother felt it was a waste of money to send me to art school when I could do the same thing at home, I did not return to the art school after my classes ended. I was very sad because I had felt so much at home in the art studio. I felt valued and productive and happy there. My mother did not see why they should pay for art lessons when I didn’t make anything useful or different. So my budding career as a artist was squashed early on. However, when we had art time at my school, that was my favorite time of the school week. We were not allowed to paint, and painting was rarely allowed at our house, too, but I was allowed to draw the pictures that I loved so much. I had so much imagination in pictures that I wanted to get out of my head and onto paper.

I believe that children should be allowed to expressive themselves creatively in the media with which they are most comfortable. My media was crayon and paint. Today I still like to sketch and draw and paint, as well as having discovered mosaics. These are my favorite pastimes.