Section of an Original Cookie box

 

Description:

Side if a cardboard box with logo for The Original Cookie Co, from a box large enough to hold a large pizza sized cookie.  There is a bit of soot damage.

Story:

Mr. Gaba.  My Mr. Gaba, when were were dating, lived and worked at home in Milwaukee during the summers while I lived and worked on campus at Concordia University Wisconsin in Mequon.  The thing was he didn’t have a car and neither did I.  So for us to visit each other he would take a Milwaukee County Transit bus as far has he could and then walk a few miles into Ozaukee County to visit me. (In those days there were no buses going into Ozaukee county let alone any routs that would take you to campus)   He liked to bring me gifts: Candy, flowers, the usual guy wooing a girl things. On one hot Friday night I knew he planned to visit, so I and sat out in a common area on a Friday until he showed up. (Concordia has set hours for when you can visit the room of someone of the opposite sex) I sat in a little alcove area where a few dorms intersected that had stairs and a desk and some dying plants that we called “the jungle”  After 11:00 pm on Friday he came carrying what I thought looked like a pizza box.  I remember thinking  “Oh, that’s nice.  I could go for a slice of pizza.” But it was not a pizza.  It was a large pizza sized heart shaped chocolate chip cookie--really two cookies; a cookie cream filled sandwich, that was decorated with chocolate frosting around it's top edge and inside that border in cursive frosting it read “I love you.”  It was a lot of cookie. 

I asked if he had eaten supper. He had not, so I offered to share some of the cookie and he said, “No, it’s all for you”  It was a lot of cookie.  The cream filling was quite sweet.  I only had a friend or two living on campus that summer and not wanting to waste it and knowing it would get stale in my tiny unairconditioned dorm room that only had a cube fridge with a footprint the same size as the cookie box, I took most of it to the campus library where I worked, and shared it with the staff.  They teased me.  One fellow student worker was a senior business student named Charlie and he would laugh at me every time I came in the library office and say in a sickly sweet voice “I love you.”  I’d laugh, blush, and get what I needed and head back to the stacks.  

Latif was surprised that I kept that bit of the box all these years.  He bought it at the Original Cookie store in the now defunct North Ridge Mall on Brown Deer Road and from there he walked to campus.  That's about 9 miles.  Google says it would take 2 hours and 53 minutes to walk (perhaps a bit longer walking in the heat while carrying a large pizza sized cookie sandwich). No wonder he got to campus so late.  I was impressed with the gesture.   I was happy with the sentiment, but let us be honest, that was an awful lot of cookie for one girl living alone in a small dorm room.  

His efforts and adventures to visit me did not go unnoticed by others. I had a suitemate named Kari my junior year who had a friend whose boyfriend would complain about going out of his way to pick her up for things. Kari, when she heard her friend's story said, "He isn't willing to drive a few miles out of his way to pick you up? My suitemate has a boyfriend who will walk five miles in the snow, in worn out shoes to visit her. [That did actually happen once.] That is what love looks like. I'm not sure that guy is worth your time if he can't drive a few miles to help you once in a while without complaining."

What can I say, My Mr. Gaba is a keeper.

Earliest Jigsaw Puzzle

 

Description:

Six piece jigsaw puzzle of a ballerina tying her laces.  It seems to be on wood.  The back side has crayon scribbles on it and remnants of old grey modeling clay. 

Story:

Most of my life I thought this was made in Japan even though the main girl depicted is blond.  I  assumed that because I’ve owned this puzzle as long as I can remember, and I was born in Japan.  But in the lower right corner it says “Printed in the U.S.A."   It may have been sent as a gift, or given to me after we moved state side.  I was two when we came back; about the right age for such a thing.  I don’t have any real memories associated with this puzzle, but like I've said I love jigsaw puzzles and this would be the one I’ve owned the longest, simple as it is.  When I was little I wanted to be a ballerina. I remember thinking that my favorite girl in this picture is the one in the red leotard, in part because red is my favorite color and also because she had dark hair with a little curl to it.

I figure it may have been in a storage box in our shed since it has no soot marks and I can't think of any other reason why I would have salvaged it after the fire.

Marble Art of the Letter R

Description: 

9X11 dark pink poster board with streaks of blue, black and white paint tempera paint making an R out of the clear space.  There is fire soot damage on the left hand side that could have been cut off, but wasn't.  The back side is blank except for the pencil line of part of a flamingo.  You would have to know it was a flamingo.  Just the base of the neck and part of the body are outlined.

Story:

Let's talk the paper first.  I was, for five years, a student manager of the St Thomas Public High School volleyball team.  I was one of four who had the job each year.  During the season I kept the official score book and assigned the points to the player who last touched the ball for a score.  I would also help set up before the games but two of the managers were always two guys and they did the heavy lifting.  I could go on at length about the poor quality of our net the first year or two and what it took to set it up, but that goes beyond what this is all about.  Anyway the job I did for five years started well before the season.  The basketball cheerleaders would make large posters for each player and the coaches and the cheerleaders and the student managers and put them on the wall.  The cheer squad had five people, so even while it was a larger group of posters there was a lot of help.  I had me.  Sometimes Peggy, another student manager would help, but it was pretty much up to me.  I’d come up with a design and get approval from the coach, and then have to make the posters -which in the day of dot matrix printers meant finding an image, tracing it on a transparency, then borrowing the overhead projector in the library, finding a place (back room in the library) where you could tape up a poster board, and project and trace the image and then paint it and cut it.  Lots of times there was a lot of painting, but one year I decided to do tropical birds.  The coach was a macaw.  The student managers were toucans and the players were flamingos and thus I didn’t have to paint much if I used pink paper.  It was by far my most popular design.  

Second in popularity was the year I just made letter T (our team was the St Thomas Tommies) using marble art.  I cut squares. To get the font right I borrowed a school letter for the T.  Coach and managers were on white paper.  The players were on yellow with purple and white streaks.  

I had learned to do this kind of marble art in the first grade when we did a Valentines art project.  That was in LaPorte, IN and my teacher was Mrs. Kemp.  We made hearts on white paper with red paint.  The process was to figure out the curve of a sheet and make sure it curved down.  Then we had a heart that was taped down onto the paper.  The paper was set in a box and a marble was dropped in red paint and then set in the corner of the box.  From there it was a matter of rolling the box around so the marble streaked across the page.  Do that until the page was covered with streaks.  Carefully take the paper out of the box.  Let it dry a bit and then remove the taped down heart leaving an image made with (what I learned in college was properly called) negative space.   It was fun, made an impression and I really wanted to do it again.  It was in high school that I finally found an opportunity and explained it to Mrs. Kappel, She was OK with it, so I got poster board and paints from school and set up shop in the basement letting posters dry on the ping pong table.  I'm guessing the R was a sample I made with scraps right after the flamingo project (which would explain the colors of paint) and might be the example I used to sell it to the coach. 

Mrs. Kappel was impressed enough by the concept that a few weeks after the posters were up in the gym, I got a phone call from her daughter's Girl Scouts leader in Grafton, who wanted any advice and tips I had for doing such a project because she wanted to try it out with her troop.

Puzzle time tally

 

Description:

A light yellow sheet from a tear off note pad. Top left corner has musical notes and says “O Sing unto the Lord a New song! Psalm 98:1”  The bottom shows a product number 7263 1-86, and the words "With our Compliments Aid Association for Lutherans"  The old circle-on-a-stand-made-of dots logo, then "Appleton, Wisconsin 54919"

Written in pencil is a three column grid labeled, Start, Stop & Total.  Times are written and a total at the bottom shows 9:20  The 9:20 is written large at the top with a box around it.  There is some calculating math on the side.  There are some soot marks from my house fire. 

Story:

Crazy that I've kept this.  This and a surviving photo of my childhood bedroom with a card table, the puzzle in progress, are evidence of my obsession with the enterprise of puzzles and this puzzle in particular.  Obsession might be too strong of a word.  I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, but putting a puzzle together is not just a matter of putting a puzzle together.  Sometimes I challenge myself. There are various things to keep track of.  In this case I was finding out exactly how much time it took for me to do this puzzle.  The puzzle in question was a 1,000 piece Springbok puzzle of a launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia.  I know it was either the first or second launch because those were the only times that the external tank was painted white.  After that, NASA realized they could save thousands of dollars and a lot of weight by leaving it brown.  The picture was taken just seconds after lift off.   The picture shows launch tower, a billow of orange smoke and then a column of white.  The shuttle itself takes up very little of the picture, most of the image is a dark background.  I got the puzzle in the fourth grade.  The same time Sarah my older sister got a Springbok puzzle of the United States that was covered in cartoonish words and landmarks.  Sarah could pick up a piece, scan the picture on the box, and set it on the table in close approximation of where it would end up.  She had a much easier time of it.  I managed to get the shuttle and tower and even the white column of exhaust, but the majority of the puzzle was shades of dark and darker.  In a happy discovery we found that our puzzles had the same cut, so to help things in the end we were able to take advantage of how Springbok puzzles connect tight enough that you can pick them up.  We placed my unfinished puzzle on top of her completed one.  Then I could match the shapes to get it done.  It felt like cheating.  It was the first puzzle I had that was over 500 pieces and the first one where the pieces locked so well.  

In later years I would do that puzzle several more times, without help.  I became more focused on noticing the nuances of shape.  Shape and shade sorting became standard practice.  When I was in high school I decided to see how long it took me to put it together unaided.  Nine hours and 20 minutes speaks to the difficulty of the pictures.  I have some 1,000 piece puzzles that have more colorful pictures that I can put together in an afternoon.  I’m not sure if I have a copy of the log of “mistakes.”  We had a ping pong table in our basement in North Dakota and I often spread out my puzzling endeavor on it.  There was a while I would take all the pieces out of the box and lay them out in a grid, and with simple multiplication know exactly how many pieces were in the puzzle. I would then attempt to assemble it with the rule that I shouldn’t touch the pieces until I was certain they belonged together.  I would keep track of how many times I messed up and then calculate an error-per-pieces calculation.  This shows that I not only enjoy doing puzzles, but I like statistics.  

The emphasis on spatial reasoning: visually moving the pieces in my head before I picked them up, I attribute to my father.  Not that he really had those skills, or set out to teach us to think that way, but we would give him puzzles and he would not let us touch the pieces.  So the only way we could help him was to “make suggestions.”  “Dad, I think that piece might go there,” we’d say, pointing a piece and place. He would pick up the piece and always try it out a wrong way first, and then the right way.  If it didn’t fit any way he’d say “Awk, you’re wasting my time.”  By "we," I mean Sarah and me.  Mom and Rebecca had no patience for such challengers.  There are a few artifacts that pay tribute to my love of jigsaw puzzles, but few that highlight the obsessive ways that I often put them together.

Sadly, my Space Shuttle puzzle is now buried in a landfill, with the remains of our mobile home, lost like mythical Atlantis.

The Muffin Wrapper

It’s all stuff and things that have been collected in now two boxes.  Some are papers. Some look like junk, but for various reasons I saved them and they serve as external memories.  But to what end?  Why hang on to these things? I’ve been telling myself for years that they hold stories.  So with NaNoWriMo November 2020 I made a start.  I used the free public scanner at one of Milwaukee Public Library’s branches (all the MPL locations have free scanners) or I have taken pictures when using the scanner was not possible.  There is no particular order.  Just whatever I pull out of the box. Each has its own story, assuming I remember what it is.

My plan is to share an item or two and what I remember of it each week in this blog.

The Muffin Wrapper

Description:

blue used muffin wrapper folded into a tight triangle with pin hole in ruffled edge.

Story:

I grew up in a traditional home.  Mom was a housewife,  Dad was a pastor and he was the man of the house.  If he called, you came.  He would sit in his Lay-z-boy and if he needed something he would call.  Our house had mostly linoleum floors so voices carried.    Before we had a TV with remote control it was not unusual for him to call and you to come and be stuck in the living room flipping channels for him.  We had limited stations and I often committed the TV schedule to memory so I could let him know what was on a station if we encountered a commercial. If he was eating a snack he would call you to take the dishes to the kitchen for him.  Anyway this happened sometime in the late 1980s.  I was in high school and Dad was sitting in his chair eating a homemade muffin.  No idea what sort of muffin, but he ate it, and in his usual fastidious manor had finished it and folded the wrapper and folded it again and made it form a tight triangle.  Then he called.  I came and he handed it to me saying, “Ruth, a gift for you.”  His intention was that I take it to the kitchen and toss it in the trash, but I was a very sarcastic teen and by this point would even dare to tease my father so in my most sarcastic voice I replied  “Really, for me?  Thank you Dad.  I will treasure it always.”  I then went not to the kitchen but to my bedroom where I used a push pin and added it to my bulletin board. 

The bulletin board in my sisters room was filled with awards and certificates, but I did not have so many accolades and had grown very cynical about awards so in high school I changed board to fill it with buttons and art work and all sorts of random colorful bits, like ribbon bows that I took off of Easter bunnies, or the beaded bells that my Grandma made.  So here it is more than 30 years after he ate that muffin, it survived about a dozen moves including a house fire. I still have it. The muffin wrapper.  Perhaps the most treasured muffin wrapper in the world.