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.

First Grade Leaf Art

Description: 

Sheet of dark construction paper, might have been black or a very dark brown. My name is written in crayon the top. There are the impressions of six leaves, three maples in orange and three oak in yellow, made with tempera paint.

Story:

It was another first grade art project with Mrs. Kemp. We took leaves and sat them carefully in tempera paint and then applied them to the paper and lifted up the leaf. The trick was to have enough paint that you can see the shape and some of the vein work but avoid blobs.  I think I did OK. The white crayon at the top with my name looks like my own first grade handwriting. My mother kept it in a file for years and then somewhere in my adulthood gave me the file with the art work and all my report cards and some other bits she kept. I know it was pre-fire because there is some soot marks on the edge. I’m guessing it was in a file folder still when I pulled it out of the house. There are old tape marks on the back. I don’t think I ever hung it up, but I think we had a large display of these on our classroom wall for a parents night event.  

Geometry constructions

Description:  

Typing paper (that was a thing) cut to squares with black and white stars: one six-point, one five-point. Made using a compass and a straight edge. I also have a few papers ripped out of my geometry notebook explaining the basic method to make them.   

Story:

The notebook pages are mine, and while I really enjoyed that unit of geometry in high school, I was not nearly as talented as my sister Sarah who made a lot of these drawings and carefully inked them in. I liked to fill my bedroom wall with all sorts of things (the bulletin board was not enough), and so I put them up with masking tape -thus after thirty plus years the acid has bled through. Even the coloring in with the black fine point pen is more carefully done than I have patience for. My sisters and I all had the same teachers and from 7th to senior year at St. Thomas math was taught by Mrs. Hollis. 

Most of the geometric art you can see in the picture is Sarah's work. If you can zoom in you can see that the big orange poster is a spiral of a rectangle. It was an assignment to pick a polygon and make a spiral. Sarah had suggested I do the rectangle, so that is the one bit of geometric art on my walls that was mine.

Coca-cola can

Description: 

Coca-cola classic can with original formula seal.  Under the ingredients “CANNED UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE COCA-COLA COMPANY, ATLANTA GA. BY COCA-COLA BOTTLING COMPANY WEST, INC., BISMARCK, N.D.58501 AND GREAT FALLS, MT. 59401. The copyright is "1986 THE COCA-COLA COMPANY”  There is some soot damage on it.

Story:

When I was in the fifth grade I was in a group called Acro.  We were an acrobatic tumbling group that would perform halftime at high school boys basketball games.  Not as impressive as a gymnastics team or the Fargo Acro team that used mini tramps and looked to be flying.  Ours was much more rudimentary and, to be honest (most of the others started in the 1st grade and I started in the 4th) I was not really good at it. But we did not compete and were not scored and so my lack of talent did not offend anyone and I felt free to keep trying.  However, I was naturally flexible. 

In the 5th grade our coach, Mrs. Barker, challenged us to develop the ability to do the splits and offered to buy a can of pop for anyone who learned to do the splits before she did.  Pop was not a daily feature of my life. (Being a Wisconsin girl now I want to type "soda" but in my Dakota days it was "pop" so I’m writing "pop" for this account.) Once a week on Friday we were given the privilege of having one glass of pop from my Father's supply.   Apart from that and from visits to grandparents in Winnipeg, if we wanted a can of pop, we had to spend our own money.  I think in 1983 the cost was 35 cents out of the vending machines by the gym.  My weekly allowance was 25 cents. Anyway the promise of a pop was enough to encourage me to work on my stretching each night and well before our first performance I was able to do the splits.  The thing is, I never got my can of pop.  She kept forgetting to get it for me. 

Now St Thomas Public School was a small school in a small town, so my grade school acro coach was my junior high language arts and phy ed instructor.  She also taught girls high school physical education.  I would, on occasion, remind her that she owed me a can of pop.  We would get dressed for gym class in high school and she would tell us to warm up by stretching and I’d slowly slide into the splits in front of her and say “you know, I’m kind of thirsty.”   No one else had taken her up on the challenge or at least no one ever made a point of expecting her to make good on her promise.  My senior year in the spring she asked me what my favorite pop was. I told her it was Coca-Cola Classic. (New Coke was still a thing.)  She filed that away and on awards night my senior year she added one award that was not in the program and presented me with a 12 pack of Coca-Cola.  

My classmate, Terry Mattson, asked if he could have one and I refused. Well, he asked for one and I offered to trade him for one of his many sports trophies, so technically he refused. For years I had lamented the fact that all my awards consisted almost entirely of certificates and ribbons and I had earned this.  Metals and trophies elluded me. My plan was to save the first can and make a base for it and fashion my own trophy out of it.  I cleaned it and left it on the counter, but Mom figured it was trash and tossed it out.   I was angry, but it's not like I didn't have a replacement for it, so the can pictured here is the second one from that 12 pack. I never mounted it.  Not sure where it was in our spare room, but it survived my house fire and here it is part of the only award I ever received for a sports-like activity.