Page 10 from my senior year memory book

Description: 

A page taken out of my fire-damaged senior year memory book. This page originally was filled with questions about what I thought about my future.  I covered that page completely, covering it with pink notebook paper and then glued a maze of school pictures of myself snaking up and down the page starting with one of me at age 4 and ending up back at the top with one of my senior pictures taken when I was 17 sitting next to my 4 year old self.  I made little black lines between the pictures so you can follow to know exactly what order the pictures are in.  

Stories:

There it is, a one page summary of my childhood.  Each picture I remember for various reasons. 

4 years old: The 4 year old picture is the only one in which I am not smiling.  I’m wearing one of the dresses that would never die.  My mother sewed clothes and like to make us matching dresses. As the youngest that meant that you kept growing into the same dress over and over.  The good news is that by the time I was four, Sarah and I were very close in size so I only had to grow out of that dress twice.  Mom took me to the public school in Westville, IN to have this picture taken.  The only way to get my hair to cooperate was to have it freshly washed, so I took a bath just an hour before the picture was taken.  The pony tail on top was really tight and I remember it kind of hurt.  I remember Mom being very pleased that my ringlets turned out so nice. "you just wind them around your finger and they make nice sausages." I also remember that the light the photographer aimed at me was very bright and he was a total stranger. That is why there was no smile.

Kindergarten:  St. John's Lutheran School LaPort IN. Red happens to be my favorite color (though there was a bit of the 80s when I preferred lavender) but in Kindergarten it was all about red.  This dress was a hand-me-down from someone--outside our family.  By that year my mother had determined that longish hair was too difficult to deal with and always cut it short.  It frustrated me to no end because short hair (if you couldn’t have a Dorothy Hamill style bob was very unfeminine.  My sisters both had long hair and how was I going to become a ballerina if I couldn’t put my hair in a bun.  

1st Grade: By first grade I had given up my ballerina dreams. (The only lessons Mom could find were on Monday evenings and that was Dad's day off so we'd have to give up family time--that's what she told me. They probably also cost more than my folks could afford.) Now I wanted to be a nurse.  I liked the hats they wore.  I don’t know where this dress came from, but I thought it looked like a uniform and thus I wanted to wear it for my school picture.  Rebecca, my eldest sister, did not like the looks of it and begged Mom to have me wear something else on picture day, but Mom told her it was my decision.  I was unaware of that conversation, until I heard my mother discussing it over the phone after we got our pictures back.  The photographer made some comments about the amount of girls in my class wearing sleeveless dresses and how it made them look cold against the wintery backdrop he had brought.

2nd Grade: In second grade I had a store-bought dress that I remember picking out at the store.  My classmate Stacie also owned the same dress and we kept trying to wear them on the same day and kept failing all year to get it coordinated. 

3rd Grade: St. Thomas Public School, St. Thomas ND. The summer between 2nd and 3rd grade, we moved to North Dakota.  For some odd reason school pictures in St Thomas were called pony pictures.  Not even the photographer knew why and once explained we were the only town who called them that.  Rebecca approved of my blouse with the embroidery.  

4th grade: Rebecca came into my room, pulled out of my closet the sweater I have on in the picture, and informed we that we were all wearing sweaters with big collars for our pictures and I should use the pin that a family friend had sent us from Japan.  I had no strong feelings about the outfit one way or another, so I didn’t argue with Rebecca’s choice.  My hair was a bit longer.  Mom let me grow it out, but I didn’t really take care of it. Late in the year Mom offered that if I agreed to get it cut and folks could see my ears she’d let me get my ears pierced.  

5th Grade. Princess Diana’s wedding dress had big puffy sleeves and high neck blouses were a thing.  This white blouse was bought during back-to-school shopping.  It was a nice blouse.  The thing about me is that I was very short-waisted and as a kid kind of chubby.  Then as I matured I sort of grew at the ends. My waistline in the 5th grade was the same as my senior year. I’m not sure if my ears were pierced yet. I wore very small earrings so it’s hard to tell.  All I had for the first year were studs with my birth stone and later little blue stars.  My hair in this picture was the result of a hair cut that my grandmother had given me.  Mom was furious.  Somehow she cut it so all the curls sort of curled into my head.  “You could just shave my head and paint it black” I would complain.  

6th grade. Rebecca was a high school senior and in our small town that meant she worked on the year book, in fact she was a year book editor, and thus was onsite for all the pony pictures as the classes came through.  The sweater was new, but the blouse under it was the same one I had on for my 5th grade picture.  Rebecca was upset that I had not put on any jewelry and she thought my hair looked bad, so she grabbed a comb out of my classmate Margo’s back pocket and combed my hair and then took her necklaces off and put them on me.  I'll admit it, this is one of my better pictures.  After the picture was taken she took the jewelry back.  Big sisters, what can you do?

7th Grade: Over the summer I decided I wanted long hair and started to really grown it out. (the story I tell is that I could finally outrun my mother) For a year I used flexible combs to deal with the bangs until they grew out.  I’m wearing the same blouse for the third year in a row, this time with a purple vest.  After three years, I was rather tired of the blouse and it actually fit Rebecca so she took it.  I had some growing to do vertically but Rebecca who was five years older wore the same size tops I did starting in the 5th grade.  If she wanted something different to wear she would wander into my room and help herself to items in my closet.  I’d protest and she would argue that I wasn’t wearing it. (Mind you, at this point I’d still be in bed.) When I’d suggest that I should be able to wear some of her clothes, she argued that she earned money and contributed to buying her clothes whereas Mom and Dad paid for all of my clothes, so they were family property.  

Eighth grade: I stopped wearing flexible combs.  Most days I did a pony tale but for picture day I pulled my hair back with a single long barrette.  I got a new blouse and I took to wearing a silver chain almost every day.

My freshman year Rebecca sent me a vest and blouse. She had started giving me clothes as gifts.  I generally preferred to have high neck lines, (in part because of my modesty complex and there was a certain classmate who liked to try and shoot paper wads down girls shirts, and I didn’t have any interest in giving him a target). But it was a nice combo and I figured Rebecca would be happy to see it, so I wore it on picture day.

Sophomore year I was back to embracing red as my favorite color.  In the late 80s bold colors had pushed out the pastel trends of the early decade. Mom was using her knitting machine again and she made me the sweater.  There are wide bands of different knit patterns but it is all made of the same red yarn.  It had wide sleeves.  Much to Rebecca’s dismay I paired it with a blouse that didn’t match.  If you look really close you can see that the strips on the blouse are bright pink.  

Between my sophomore and junior years we vacationed in Winnipeg and did a week of Folklarama.  At the Hungarian pavilion mom bought me a hand stitched blouse done with traditional Hungarian style embroidery.  A more traditional form would have the flowers in bright reds, pinks, and blues, with green leaves. Those were available, but I asked for the white-on-white figuring it would be easier to pair with things. I wore it for my picture that year.  By then I was very happy with how my hair looked and it seemed with the length, to curl even more than when it was shorter.   Almost every girl in my high school had permed hair and tall hair-sprayed bangs, aka mall hair.  The highest compliment someone could give my curls was to say it looked like my hair was permed.  I liked how I looked as a teen.  I was blessed with mostly clear skin and I finally had the long hair I could put in a bun or a braid or a pony tale.  

The last picture was my senior picture.  There were several to choose from but for my official portrait I like the contrast of the black sweater and pearls. It seemed timeless to me.  I believed that in 20 or 30 years I wouldn’t look and have to explain, “that was the fashion at the time.”  I remember laying out all the proofs, trying to select which one to have prints of.  I gave them names as I considered them.  This one I dubbed “I’m pretty and smart too.”  

One final story about this page.  When I was a freshman in college I was assigned a roommate from Japan, Shoko Honda.  I was sharing my senior book with her and when she got to this page she pointed to my 2nd grade picture and exclaimed “You were FAT!" Then pointing at the next five pictures in turn said “Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat,”  Um...yeah.   I could have been offended, but I chalked it up to cultural differences, and was happy that at least she had put it in the past tense.  

Shopping list

Description:

A portion of a tear-off shopping list with things filled in by both my parents and me. The note identifying this list as being from March '90 was made by my mother.

Story:

Sarah had a boyfriend (now husband) who did his best to impress his girlfriend's parents and remembered things like birthdays, or maybe it was Christmas, anyway Bob (now my brother-in-law) gave my mom a shopping list holder. It was a wooden thing you hung on a wall that held a roll of receipt paper. The paper pulled down under a serrated cutter and had hooked sides to hold a pen.  The idea was you writer your items on the paper pulled down and then when you went shopping you just ripped off the paper and there was your list. It was handy and Mom put in on the kitchen wall by the dishwasher. 

She made it clear that Dad and I (the only kid living at home at the time) should add items to the list and that way she would remember to get them. We had some fun in those days and Dad played with language and fonts. I doodled pictures and Mom found the whole thing amusing, so she saved the list and a few years later sent it to me in a letter. The handwriting for "red rose tea" is my natural handwriting. The "Ice Cream" and "Grape Juice" I was making an effort. (Had to make Mom feel like the money she spent on my calligraphy course was worth it.) The cursive is all Mom's. I’m pretty sure the Sucrets is Dad's contribution, as is the light bulbs, and of course he wrote, “The preparation of the letter “H” when it is obtainable at a bargain.”  A little 30 year old slice of life.

The three of us had our own way of being together (still do when I visit them alone) that is very different from when my sisters are around. It was not unusual on evenings for the three of us to be in the living room, Dad in his Lay-z-boy, Mom in the other Lay-z-boy, and me in the flowered chair that rocked and spun around, and all be reading our own books.  Dad would occasionally give me one of his books to read.  On one occasion it was a science fiction book called Dreadful Sanctuary  (the cover had nothing to do with the story--or so Dad explained to me, adding that he thought I'd enjoy it. The premise was that earth was thought to be an insane asylum for the other inner planets.  It asked again and again the question "how do you know you are sane?" Anyway, I was reading that, Dad was reading The Tempting of America by Robert Bork and Mom was reading a light romance book.  We were all enjoying our books. Then Mom laughed out loud and felt the need to share what she was laughing at. There was an informal house rule--mostly applied to the Readers Digest, that if you laugh out loud at something, you are obliged to share.  So Mom read a paragraph or two out loud, and I personally didn’t think it was that funny. Dad didn't laugh either, so I read out loud the paragraph I was on and turned to Dad who then read aloud the paragraph he was on. The two of us looked back at Mom, and Dad said, “Your turn.”  Mom was not amused...at the time, but we've all laughed about it later.   

Note about how Hungarian fairy tails start

 

Description: 

Square light yellow non-sticky tear off note.  On the soot stained front in blue ink and rather large letters, considering my father wrote it, “Hol volt, hol nem volt, volt egyszer…”  On the back in my own tiny hand “where there was, where there was not, there once was”

Story:

Some point in high school, probably my junior or senior year, when I really started to get along with my dad, we had a conversation about fairy stories and the Hungarian language.  Somewhere I have a note with the Hungarian alphabet and a phonetic key that Dad wrote out for me.  Dad explained that in English we start all fairy tails with “Once upon a time.” In Hungary child stories of fancy also all start with the same opening phrase. He said it quick in Hungarian and then translated it for me and then wrote it down for me. He made a point of telling me that in the final “there once was” or "volt egyszer…” the "there" should be emphasized similar to (and this is how he explained it to me, mind you, a lot of cracking the ice in our relationship came from watching science fiction together) the way that Kahn in Star Trek the Wrath of Kahn points at the Enterprise, when they are playing hide and seek in the nebula and says, “There she is.” 

This was during my “I'm-going-to-be-a-famous-and-amazing-author phase and I kept the note wanting to come up with a list of how other languages start their fairy tales and write a collection of original fairy tails that use those translated beginnings.  My ambition for that project was short lived, but the note has survived.  

Perspective drawing of STHS locker hallway

Description: 

Pencil on white paper. Drawing of the locker hallway at St Thomas Public Jr. High and High School facing east. The paper is stained with masking tape so I hung this up on a wall at some point. It also has a soot edge.

Story:

When you attended a very small high school there were not a lot of options for electives. In my time the electives for freshmen consisted of Band/no Band and Choir/no Choir. Juniors and seniors could take Chemistry/Physics (they alternated by year) or Home Economics, but not both in the same year since they were during the same hour. Sophomores' electives included Shop and/or Bookkeeping.  Neither was required but you pretty much needed to take one or the other or you wouldn’t have enough credits to complete your sophomore year. I had reasons to not want to take either. Regarding Shop, I hated taking classes that encouraged free movement in classroom, because it gave too much opportunity to be harassed by people. I had one classmate in particular that I wanted to steer clear of.   I also hated the idea of bookkeeping. It sounded boring. It also involved these long practice sets that were many week projects that had only a final deadline, so you had to keep up with the work and not procrastinate. It was all about self discipline and time management. I was not good at either of those things. We had had a similar home budgeting unit our freshman year in the general business class and that was enough to convince me that an entire year of bookkeeping would be miserable. So I had two classes I wanted to avoid and needed at least one of them to have enough credits to complete the year. The solution was to take a North Dakota High School Association accredited correspondence course. There was a whole catalog of things to take. The thing was you had to pay extra for them.  Each course was only a half credit, so to fulfill the credit requirements I’d have to take two. I don’t know how I convinced Mom and Dad to spend the extra money on me. Maybe I justified it by reasoning that they never had to shell out for a sports physical. I don’t know, but that year Mom paid for it. I could have taken a foreign language, but that didn’t really appeal to me. In looking things over and fancying myself an artist, I signed up for calligraphy and basic drawing. Mom foolishly thought that the calligraphy course would help my handwriting be more legible--that was a funny thought.  

Turns out instead of a class with two or three month long projects I now had two semester long courses that only had the deadline of needing to be done by the end of the term. It was a struggle, but at least I didn’t have to endure being harassed by classmates, and I was doing something that interested me. I was usually sent to the library to do my course work (another bonus--one of the few rooms in the school that was almost room temperature in the winter.) Mr. Hanson, the principal, was my proctor and signed off on the things he had to. I recall that for the final he sent me to the library to take the test by myself, and then I brought it to the office and he just initialed the form and handed it to me to put in the envelope and mail. The form had him agreeing that he watched me take the test, knew that I didn’t use course materials while taking it, and that he had sealed it in the provided envelope, and would be mailing the test. None of those things were true, which speaks to my squeaky clean academic reputation even though, unlike my older sisters, I didn’t want to take his bookkeeping class.  

I have several of the projects from both classes in my box of archives. This was the project for a single point perspective drawing. I left out a garbage can at the end of the hall and completely left out the framed pictures above all the lockers of the composite senior class photos that dated back to the early 1900s. Also the wall on the right hand side after the doorway is wrong.  Maybe I was sick of drawing lockers. The lockers themselves are a little off, but I think anyone who went to school there would recognize the place. 

Notice of Assessment of Mobile Home

Description: The last tax assessment of our mobile home before our house fire on November 14th 2005. The assessment was signed on March 10th. Story: The thing about mobile homes is they are like cars, they depreciate in value. Ours was a 14X77 1986 Kingsley model, a single wide that had been passed from one seminary family to another, often sold at cost, and so it was with us. The assessed value according to Allen County was $7,140. There was a housing glut in Fort Wayne and homes with a foundation were abundant and cheap, further driving down the cost of mobile homes. At the time the blue book value of the Mazda Millennia that we drove was greater than the value than our home (not by much, but there you go). For the money we paid each month, it solved a lot of problems, and was also the most spacious home we ever had. Came with two sheds and two parking spaces. Great for having gatherings. We had some truly wonderful parties there, the first being a house blessing. It was on that occasion that Dr. Judisch entered our home and looked around and declared “This isn’t nearly as dreadful as I thought it would be,” causing several guests to fight back laughter. We had good neighbors in the Moyers that became such good friends that we meshed our names and called the giant puddle formed between our properties the Moyba or the Gamoyer depending on how you wanted to play it. If it was wet outside we'd talk about crossing the Moyba (or the Gamoyer) to visit. It was, for its time, a good home, but I in no way regret it being gone.