I am unique
March 9, 2011
This isn’t going to be some “because I’m good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit people like me” thing where I talk up my virtues to make myself feel better. That part is a daily struggle with the aspects which I know are good versus those that need a whole lot of work. Tonight, I merely refer to the fact that no one else has the same name as me.
It is a long-held family “fact” that anyone with our last name is related somehow, because there was only one Doudna that came over from the Old World. Maybe you remember him—the kidnaped ship’s swab. Based on the results from this website, it doesn’t look like we’ve been the most prolific clan there ever was. Hmm. I reconsider. That’s 442 active (living) Doudnas (2000 Census). Okay, maybe that’s not bad for an unusual name that’s only been here since 1804.
I remember the first time I ran across my last name out in the wild. I was reading Discover magazine and saw a citation for Jennifer Doudna, a microbiologist. I just looked her up and it seems that in the intervening years, she’s become very accomplished in her field.
If you do a search on me, everything that comes back will be about the person writing to you now, though I’m not nearly as high-powered as Jennifer. But I’ve got one thing she doesn’t—uniqueness. There are two of her.
March 3, 2011
Cribbage scrimmage
February 7, 2011
Cribbage always makes me think of my Grandpa H. He was the one largely responsible for teaching me how to play when I was just a squirt. To this day, it’s the only card game that I would say I actually know how to play. Sure, we play poker at bowling (one card for a spare or strike, two cards for two strikes in a row), but I always have to consult a cheat sheet.
My grandparents would come from Wisconsin to visit us in Ohio for a couple of weeks each year (as we did them). My memory of my grandfather teaching me cribbage is that it happened on the back porch at our house, which would imply that it was warm enough to be outside, which would imply that it was not winter. But I also remember that our visits to them were in the summer as well. It seems a little strange that we wouldn’t have gotten together for holidays. Then again, with the cross-Midwest drive I guess it’s not actually mysterious that nobody planned the drive for Christmas and winter.
Anyway, my grandpa taught me how to play cribbage and he taught me well.
But not well enough to save one relationship I was in. “He” and I had played a bunch of games over the course of a couple weeks and I had lost all of them, and I finally snapped and called the relationship off. Of course things would have had to have been shakey to begin with at that point for something so trivial to become a mountain, and they were for a particular reason, but my twentieth cribbage loss in a row finally broke this camel’s back.
It’s true that whenever I get out the cribbage board I think of this guy just a little, but enough time has passed (you know, more than twenty-five years) that it’s not unpleasant. In fact, I just looked him up online and he’s still very attractive.
But I digress.
These days, it’s mostly when my mom lays a guilt trip on me during my parents’ visits that I play. She and my grandfather also played a lot, and she and I played a lot. Now, she usually has to pull teeth. I suppose it’s stubbornness on my part. When they’re here, it’s the one thing I can get away without doing right away or at all, because everything else she just pesters until I do it because I get fed up with the constant, um, mentioning. It’s a power struggle.
I enjoy playing, I just don’t want to have to feel like I have to. Evidently my cat feels differently.
Get off my lawn
December 30, 2010
Somewhere along the line, I became a curmudgeon. I did and I didn’t. I’m pretty sure I don’t act my age, but at the same time I’m pretty crusty about a lot of stuff. I don’t exactly mean to be. Does that just come with getting older?
I almost climbed a tree tonight. If it hadn’t been winter with a foot and a half of snow hanging around I would have. Maybe. The kids across the street do, why shouldn’t I? When I was a kid, I spent a notable amount of time in trees. There was a woods at the end of our street, and as I recall, there was one old, large tree that we climbed. Sometimes I went with a friend or two, sometimes I went by myself with a book.
My parents visited for the Christmas weekend. I always find it challenging when people—yes, even my loving mother and father—invade my space. I’ve been concluding recently that I’m an actual introvert, especially after reading this article (via mstori). I used to say that deep down I was shy, though anyone who’s spent any amount of time around me knows that I can get chit-chatty with the best of them—if I’m in the right mood and/or have enjoyed my favorite libation.
Now I realize that the reason that I can talk to people quite comfortably—even complete strangers under the right circumstances—all hail the m-dash—is because I’m not actually shy. I just choose not to want to be around other people quite a lot of the time. (Sorry, friends, nothing personal. I know some of you understand.)
My choosing to want to be by myself, aka not deal with other people—even my loving mother and father—I’m sure is perceived by outsiders as being curmudgeonly. And perhaps so even by my mother. My dad’s the quiet one.
A few posts ago I wrote about three of my favorite movies, whose characters I could identify with. One of those was “Under the Tuscan Sun.” In the other context, I was admiring the main character, Frances, because she just up and stayed in a place where she was traveling for a random reason. I would like to do that. But that’s not where the similarities end, if I’m honest.
In this context, I must note that Frances is kind of uptight—sort of like me! Here again, I am and I’m not. In addition to the spontaneous geographical change she experiences, Frances receives several sage wisdoms from a woman who befriends her, Katherine. One by one, Frances embraces those wisdoms and her life gradually turns around.
One of the wisdoms Katherine expounds (not a particularly original one) is to never lose your childlike enthusiasm. For a number of reasons (this is not one of them), I always weep like a baby for much of this movie. Tonight I did not weep but I did get ever so slightly choked up when I was perusing a London map, when I realized how much I was enjoying this Lily Allen album, and when I was moved to tell my online friends how I feel about them—and I do!
And, for a third time tonight, I have and I haven’t. I am crustier than I used to be, it’s true. But these days I give myself permission not to fake it if I’m not really into it. Do you allow yourself to admit that you might not want to do what everyone else expects you should? Do you allow yourself to sit tight on that lack of desire to conform?
I do. I’m not trying to be superior. In fact, I feel rather inferior tonight. And I’m not pleased that I’m envious of my mom about something. Nobody wants to be like their parent, do they? And you really don’t want to admit that they seem younger than you—their offspring—in some ways.
My mom wouldn’t have climbed the tree tonight because she has two fake knees and one fake hip. I was just worried about what the neighbors would think, so I only stood below it. There’s a difference, not in my favor.
“Take What You Take” © Lily Allen
Rabbits and Pooh: it started when I was a baby
February 22, 2010
Well, of course it did, because I get it from my mother. She claims to have wheeled a bottle of Brer Rabbit Molasses around in a baby buggy when she was a girl. And she began indoctrinating me when I was just a baby. This is the earliest photo of myself that I have seen with regularity. It wasn’t enough for her to have her cute, happy baby in the middle of a giant bed. No, she posed a rabbit toy alongside. The osmosing of rabbit love began.
As I have gotten these photos together this week, I have remembered that when I was photographed as a child, these “candid” shots always included some prop to make the picture “more interesting.” If you think that stuffed rabbit just happens to be peeking out from behind the ottoman, you are mistaken.
I was just the right age to get in at the beginning of Winnie-the-Pooh’s popularity. So there was often a Pooh in the photo. This is Rubber Pooh that you’ll see in a few shots. He was—wait for it—rubber and jointed. He was a friend for a long time. He would wave to my mom while she was snapping the photo or just generally be a bystander in the shot. We really liked those big boxes.
Rabbits were never out of it for long. I can remember riding that rabbit-horse around the house. I sort of remember that I wasn’t allowed to take it outside so as not to “ruin” it. I may be wrong, but that’s how I think it was.
We have the quintuple bonus picture for my sixth birthday—Poohs and a rabbit, and opening a Winnie-the-Pooh stencil kit. That was back in the day when things didn’t have to have a screen and beep and vibrate for a kid to be entertained. I wore out my Spirograph. I can’t quite tell from the photo if I had melted Rubber Pooh’s nose just a little yet or not. I was playing with matches.
When I was a youngster, we summered at Indiana University while my dad worked summers only on his PhD. The campus featured a cute little stream where my mom and I spent a lot of time playing Poohsticks.
The rabbit thing came to fruition with the first live rabbit that either my mom or I had lived with. I’d tell you her name, but then you’d be able to steal my identity. We came to have this rabbit, Rabbit C, because the neighborhood papergirl, Penny W, brought along a box of baby bunnies one day when she was delivering the news. My mom got suckered in.
I was eight in that picture. I’m trying to remember if Rabbit C made the cross-state move with us when I was almost fifteen. I know a couple of years after the move, we had a different rabbit. I’m kind of thinking—yes, now I remember. She did not make the move with us and was interred in the front flower bed where I always used to plant marigold seeds. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I still love marigolds.
But within a couple of years after we moved, there was a new rabbit, and there has been one in my life ever since, whether successors to Rabbit C with my mom or, beginning when I was, I’m going to say, about 25, a rabbit of my very own.
Kelly D: what???s in a name?
February 21, 2010
Who were you named after? Your grandmother? Your uncle? I was named after a cartoon opossum. Okay, not exactly. I was named after an opossum’s cartoonist. Walt Kelly, to be exact, author and artist of the Pogo strip.
Pogo ran during the 1950s and ’60s; my mom was quite a fan. I guess there was little debate about what my first name would be. For my middle name, it was between Ann and Lynn. I’m glad Lynn won. I think I remember hearing that if I had been a boy, they would have named me Paul.
My mother corresponded with Walt Kelly for a while. It was at least long enough for her to report that I had been named for him. In return, he sent us his original pen and ink artwork for the strip from my birth day, pictured above. (For those of you who know me, isn’t it fun that the character Bun Rab appeared on that day?) When I was a youth, I remember its hanging on the wall where the hall took a little jog to my bedroom. Now that I think about it, I can’t say that I remember that it’s up anywhere in my parents’ current house, to where we moved when I was 15. No doubt it’s in a box in the basement.
As for our last name, no one’s quite sure of its origins. Our bloodlines are very majorly German, with just a wee dab of Scottish and Irish (in this context do you say Scottish or Scotch?). As near as we have figured it’s Bohemian, which is the more romantic-sounding way of saying eastern Slavic. But as I understand it, the first namesake to come to America traveled from England.
Oh, the things you learn when you call your parents to quiz them for information about your blog topic. An hour later and I now know the following.
It turns out that we’re fairly sure our D last name is Welsh. Bohemian was just one of the theories bandied about. The original D namesake, John, son of Henry and Elizabeth, was English and lived from 1728 to 1808. But that’s not the interesting part. He didn’t just “travel” to America from England. No. Young Master John, it seems, was kidnaped at age fourteen from a wharf in England to work as a ship’s helper on a vessel that was sailing for the New World.
“You mean as a ‘swab’?” I asked.
“Well, you could dress it up a little more than that,” replied my mother.
The ship landed in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, where John met a girl and proceeded to father fourteen children. In 1804, they migrated to Belmont County, Ohio. I grew up in Hardin County, Ohio. I had no idea about the details of this part of family history. My Grandpa D was born in 1907, so figuring 30 years per generation, John was my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather. Not a close enough relative to get me a British passport.
My Grandpa D’s parents were D and Emery. My Grandma D’s were Zimmerman and something else German which I didn’t note quickly enough to pass on here. As I mentioned in the tale of my cuckoo clock, my mom’s side of the family is exclusively German. But yay, I have more English in me than I’ve been under the impression all these years. Instead of one-sixteen Scotch-Irish, I am one-eighth so. But still not enough to get me a British passport.
After I had all the D facts straightened out, I went back to my name. I asked my mom if she really liked Pogo that much or if it just makes a good story to say that they named me after Walt Kelly. She said, “Oh no, I was a big fan when I was younger! I wanted to name you Kelly, so your dad chose your middle name.” The boy name would have been Bruce Allen, my dad’s middle name and my maternal grandfather’s name.
I’m just glad they didn’t name me Pogo.
Well, someone had to say it, it might as well be me.
Pogo cartoon from this source. Check out page 27 for all the comics. It was a different time.
My dad is an amazing musician
February 7, 2010
This is an article that ran in the local paper, profiling the Dixieland jazz band that my dad headed up when he was in high school. That’s my dad on clarinet and my uncle on piano, both at the left in the photo. My mom gave me this photocopy a couple of years ago; it landed on my fridge and there it has stayed. I don’t remember now if it’s an old article that she just unearthed or if it’s a recent reprint. At any rate, it’s a fun and interesting thing to have.
Stepping away from the familial connection for a moment, just look at those boys. Do kids who start comparable groups these days have uniforms? Would kids even have a jazz band, or do they just go for—oh, I don’t know—some hip hoppy, dancy thing that they could present on So You Think You Can Dance or America’s Got Talent?
Yes, I am out of it.
But apparently my dad and the fellows were not. They played such prestigious events as intermission at a square dance, the straw hat promotion day, the West Side picnic, a meeting of the Young Adult Klub. I’m not poking fun here, but how much more wholesome can you get? Do we long for those innocent days when children were named Vernon and Myron? I just might. People were nicer to each other and didn’t go barreling down the freeway in their Chevy Suburban gas hogs thinking everybody better get outta their way.
My grandfather—my dad’s dad—was fairly musical in an informal way. As a kid and young adult, I remember Grandpa often strumming his ukelele and singing (with a deep voice that would hold about twenty Tiny Tims), or producing a unique double-toned whistle that I could never imitate. My uncle still plays and was a piano tuner by trade. My dad is just about the most incredible musician that I know of.
Although he played the clarinet in his youth, my dad is very much a keyboardist. My parents both always played piano, and my dad was pretty adept at the pipe organ for a while, too. His first career was as a professor of music at the small liberal arts college in the town where I grew up, and he moonlighted as the Methodist church organist for a while. Then he became a piano and organ salesman, which he still is, though the organs have evolved into digital keyboards, and the pianos as well are just as likely to run on motherboards as have hammers that strings.
As a salesman with a storefront, my dad has ample opportunity to “demonstrate.” This puts his playing skills on display whether in the presence of customers or not. The talent that my dad has that I never developed is that of improvisation. He doesn’t need to read music and it seems like he can sit down and play anything.
Every now and then, he gets a piano-playing gig. When my grandmother was still living, her fellow residents would always look forward to his visits because he would sit down at the piano and provide some dinner music, just because he enjoys playing.
I began piano lessons when I was six or seven and added the flute in fifth grade. For one of my college graduations, my parents gave me a digital piano. I’m ashamed to say that it’s been unused for too many years. Maybe I will dust it off one of these days in conjunction with this mini-creative renaissance I’m having.
Tattooine, aka my non-existant ink mark
January 23, 2010
Heretofore, I’ve never had the desire to get a tattoo. I’m not sure I do now, though perhaps I do moreso than I did in, say, September. That’s when I drew on myself with a couple of different Sharpies. And it turned out that I didn’t mind how it looked.
I have always maintained that if I did more body art, it would 99.9% be likely to happen as a demure nose piercing. I have never thought that I wanted to get a tattoo. But two funny things happened. About a year ago, I accidently discovered that my mom had gotten a tattoo. At age 70! Without consulting my dad! Who didn’t realize for months afterwards! I certainly don’t feel like I have to keep up, or tell anybody if I do. Then we had the marker tattoo mission. And I liked it! I didn’t try to scrub it off. Today I’ve been thinking about it again. If I did actually go through with the real thing (which I’m not saying I will), I would get this rabbit, pretty for sure. I could see having it be about 75% of the pictured size. However, I think the overall line thickness to rabbit-size proportion is exactly right. Maybe I will have it done at Saint Sabrina’s, or maybe I will have it done in Camden. TBD, perhaps sooner than I think.A symbol of my heritage
January 12, 2010
I can think of no better thing than my cuckoo clock to represent my general and personal heritage. I am 15/16 German and the fourth generation to possess this clock. Like many a family history tale, my clock’s backstory involves immigrants and sending help to relatives still in the old country.
From the sounds of it, my Great Grandpa Gross came to America and his brother Herman stayed in Germany. During World War II, Grandpa Gross sent care packages back to Herman and his family. My mom was a little girl and remembers helping. When the war was over, Uncle Herman sent four cuckoo clocks to Grandpa Gross in appreciation. Grandpa and Grandma Gross got the largest one and each of their three children, including my Grandma H, got smaller ones. When Grandpa and Grandma Gross died, their large clock went to my grandmother, who eventually gave it to my mom, her only child. When my grandma died, my mom kept my grandma’s smaller clock. She doesn’t know where her aunt and uncle’s clocks ended up. Four years ago when I bought my place, my mom had the large clock restored and passed it down to me. The clock actually isn’t as old as I thought it was, being “only” from the late 1940s or so. Apparently Uncle Herman was a clockmaker of some sort, though he did not make the cuckoo clocks; my mom thinks he was a watchmaker. During my first trip to Europe with my parents which involved a lot of time in then West Germany, we were fortunate to have the time and be close enough to get together with Cousins Christian and Ute and Christian’s family, who still live in the Black Forest in the Furtwangen and Vöhrenbach area. It is a joy to hear cuckoos every 30 minutes—it’s so quaint in this digital, beepy age. Though a lot of the time, even when I’m sitting in the same room with it, I don’t even notice it. If I’m fully asleep, I don’t hear it at all. If I’m fading in and out, I hear the tinny gong that goes off with the cuckoo which I never notice when I’m awake and which sounds like someone banging a pot around my head. That other 1/16? Scotch and Irish.
The genuine article
January 6, 2010
Genuine Pooh is something from my childhood that I would never part with. This is not that bear; it is Green Genuine who stood in for Genuine for this photo because Genuine is at my mom’s house and wasn’t available. So I guess technically I have parted with Genuine, even though I know exactly where he is.
Genuine is an old Steiff bear that was my Grandma H’s and that she gave to me when I was a youngster. I named him Genuine because he reminded me of the original Winnie-the-Pooh illustrations. I loved that bear hard. After he had been dragged around for years, my mom got into Teddy bear collecting and we began to realize that he actually had some collectable value. Fortunately, I was older by then and didn’t mind treating him more reverently.
He wasn’t my first Teddy bear. When I was really small, I had an amorphous brown thing that I was attached to. When he became threadbare and ratty, he was replaced with what was purported to be an exact replica. My mom tried to convince me that it was just as good, but New Teddy was nothing like Old Teddy. I continued my devotion to Old Teddy, and New Teddy sat alone off to the side. I also had Big Teddy who, at the time, was almost as big as I was.
Genuine became a minor celebrity in the bear world, or rather a photo of my grandmother as a girl clutching him did. Among other places, it appeared in Peter Bull’s 1984 book A Hug of Teddy Bears. I don’t have a copy of the photo, so this poor drawing will have to do.
In doing a little research this evening to find a photo of a similar bear to Genuine, I figured he’s a 1905, 1908 or 1920 Steiff. There were similar and different looking bears for all three years, so I don’t know exactly which it would be. The two above look most like I remember Genuine, and I think he looks more like the one on the left with the pointier snout, smaller nose, and more slender limbs. Grandma was born in 1903, so maybe it was a 1908 bear as she would have been about five or six as I remember the photo.
(I haven’t seen Genuine for many, many years as he has been residing in my mom’s bear room, which, incidentally used to be my bedroom.)
Green Genuine is a souvenir from my first trip to England, which was with my mom on a group Teddy bear tour. I found him at Teddy Bears of Whitney. He was a one-of-a-kind prototype by bear artist Sue Lain (hence the odd color of mohair) and he reminded me of Genuine, so I bought him. Now that I see him next to the Steiff bears, he doesn’t really look that much like Genuine. I think we have a photo of the two bears together.
And now that I think about a photo of Genuine and Green Genuine together, I remember that my mom also bought a Second Genuine that was in better condition than Original Genuine. So there are two Genuines and one Green Genuine.
And now I have to stop, because the letters that spell G-e-n-u-i-n-e are beginning to take on a life of their own and look weird.
(Through the) kitchen window
December 22, 2009
I don’t have much of a view out my kitchen window. If I lean one way, I can look into my neighbor’s kitchen. If I lean the other way, I can sort of look into his living room. I can see to the back of the building, but that’s easier if I just go to my bedroom window.
At least I have a kitchen window. The kitchen that I previously used for 11 years had no window. It wasn’t even on an outside wall. It was a little galley kitchen in the interior building hallway wall. My view now isn’t all that great, but at least it goes beyond my wall. I love to cook and spend a lot of time on Saturdays and Sundays flitting around my bigger but still not huge cooking area. If I open the mini-blinds, it seems somewhat more roomy, especially if it’s daytime. Growing up, I have the fondest memories of our house that was two doors down from the Methodist church. But when we moved to our house on Willeke Avenue, I know my mom was really excited to be going to a kitchen that looked out the front of the house. That’s where the interesting things happened, apparently. Now, my parents’ kitchen looks out the back of the house. But I know my mom enjoys that view, too, as she encourages the local wildlife to visit the yard, even squirrels. @thedigitalghost, her central Wisconsin squirrels are even fatter than most Northern squirrels. Fergus would be beside himself. No, I don’t have the greatest view out my kitchen window, but the mortgage makes it and the kitchen all mine! Omigosh, did I just find a positive about having bought a place?
Kelly’s Unnecessary Blog 