Music on the farm
September 29, 2014
I was shot into nostalgia a couple of nights ago when my friend posted this picture of his kid sitting, entranced, in front of Grandma’s CD boombox. Albert is three and a bit. I was fourteen or so when I sat in a similar position in front of my great aunt’s all-in-one record player. I don’t have a photo of it which is why you’re seeing Albert. The essence is the same.
It would have been mid-1977, maybe more toward the end of the year, putting me at 14 years of age or so. Give me a minute, it’s all coming back to me. That was thirty-seven years ago. It would have been while we were still living in Ohio, which would mean this tale took place during a trip to visit my grandparents in Wisconsin. My great-aunt lived 100 miles (161 km) south-southeast of my grandparents.
The difference between Albert and me is that I knew perfectly well what a record player was. I was entranced because I had two new LPs to listen to. You kids probably know them better as vinyl, if you know of them at all. Between Ohio and Wisconsin, we would have detoured down to Bloomington, Indiana, where my dad attended Indiana University in his attempt to earn a PhD (denied). Incidentally, Bloomington was where I had my only live experiencing of an earthquake. If I reread this before I post and jog my memory, I’ll find a link to a report about that mid-continental oddity. I was closer to Albert’s age when that happened and was actually sitting in the back of a lecture auditorium in class with my dad. Isn’t it funny the things you remember? I have only fond memories of our summers (and one full year) in Bloomington.
But I digress.
We called in on Bloomington on our way to Wisconsin. I can remember a lot about my time there as a three- to six-year-old. About this pass-through visit, I can only remember that I dragged my parents upstairs to a second-floor record store, because by the time I was fourteen I had been obsessed with music for a good year. I had always enjoyed music on the radio, from the time John Denver and Neil Sedaka were warbling and falsettoing their biggest hits, and Olivia Newton-John was whispering “I honestly love you.” But I had begun to possess my own copies of music because I had begun receiving an allowance. Don’t get excited. It was meted out in coins, not bills, and certainly not credit cards or iPhones. Also, this was way, WAY before you could steal for free and (largely) without ramification off the internet.
I wasn’t flush with cash, so I could only purchase two of the three albums I was interested in. The one I didn’t buy was Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat. The two I did acquire were Queen’s “A Day at the Races” and Styx’s “The Grand Illusion. I make no apologies for my choices, or that I still, thirty-five years later, love these musics.
We walked back down the stairs. Fast-forward 350 miles (565 km) to my great-aunt’s side room.
Gosh, I could digress to another tangent about how I fond I was of my aunt and her farmhouse. To this day, I am confident in saying that I would be perfectly content living in that house on that land. If only I had been more mature and financially stable when I would have had the opportunity to make that happen.
Aunt Irma was a great lady. She married well the second time around (first husband, deceased); I’m certain the house and farm were already hers, though I know her subsequent step-children ended up living in a house on the hill above the farm. We had family reunions in her side yard. She had a Collie dog named Sage. I inherited her airline-approved, sturdy cat carrier.
I guess I did digress.
Aunt Irma’s record player was a lot like this one. As I recall, hers had a faux woodgrain finish.
My parents slept in one of the extra bedrooms upstairs. I always found the stairs intimidating. They were very steep, and I feel like I remember one time as a tot actually falling down them a little bit. Maybe that’s why I usually was stationed on the couch in the side room. And that’s where the record player was!
I drove everyone nuts playing and replaying my two new albums for the duration of the couple days we were there. More than once, the doors to the room were closed. This was, I might add, in the days when you listened to an album all the way through, or at least the entire side. Record albums are ROM — read-only melting. You had to buy the whole thing, not just the one song you liked. With records, if you only wanted one song, you could hope that it would be released as a single, also known as a 45. But if it wasn’t, you had to get the album. I remember that I ended up with a scratch in the beginning of “Castle Walls” on the Styx album. I know I played each album at least five times over, front and back.
There’s really not much more to my Albert-inspired memory than that.
Credits:
Photo of Albert by his mom, Jennifer S. Used with permission.
Photo of record player from here, though I saw it on many other sites, too, so who knows who the original publisher is. Used with best intentions.
Ugh, letter to 16yo me, not
September 26, 2013
Usually when I see that someone has written a letter to their something-year-old self I roll my eyes and move on immediately. And now I’m supposed to do that very thing. Groan.
There isn’t actually any reassurance or advice you can give your adolescent self because at that age, you’re going to think you know it all and not listen anyway. And that will just be frustrating for your current self. Nobody wins in this situation.
The thing I’ve always said with regard to this topic is that I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t lived my life the way I have and done the things I’ve done, and since I more or less like myself, I wouldn’t really advise myself to do much differently. And even if I had tried to advise myself, I certainly wouldn’t have listened to someone else giving me directions.
I still don’t.
Right. This is a dead-end.
I got caught doing what?!
September 15, 2013
I’d need a while if I were to recount all of the incredibly embarrassing moments I’ve endured in my life. But whenever the topic comes up, there is one incident that my memory invariably shoots straight to, even though it was, now, forty years ago.
I was about ten years old. I went into the Lawson’s Dairy, the 1970s version of today’s convenience store, I don’t even remember why. Maybe my mom had charged me with the important task of buying some milk, or maybe I merely intended to procure some candy with my allowance. I don’t recall that part. I only remember that curiosity got the better of the cat and I innocently picked up a Playboy or Penthouse and started leafing through it all wide-eyed with wonder.
The store attendant, an “older” man (so probably in his thirties or forties) with dark hair, glasses, and a mustache, bustled over to me and grabbed the magazine out of my hands. “You shouldn’t be looking at that!” I don’t know which one of us was actually more embarrassed. I do know that I nearly ran him over trying to push past him to exit the store as hastily as possible, absolutely mortified. It was a long, long time before I’d go back into that store.
Lies, lies, lies, yeah
September 1, 2013
I fib regularly. So do you. If you claim not to, then you’re lying! I massage the facts, I don’t tell the whole truth, I say I like the food or the beer when I didn’t quite. Everybody does it. Then there are the things that I’ll tell to health professionals in whatever field but about which I’ll keep stumm in casual conversation. You don’t need to know some of those details.
But have I ever told a whopper of a lie? I honestly can’t remember. Continuing on the theme that has cropped up the last couple of posts of remembering back to my youth (which is longer ago for me than it probably is for you), I imagine there must certainly have been things that I lied to my parents about. Well, no imagining about it. You’re a teenager, you lie to your parents.
Actually, going back to that list of things that I remember about where I grew up and the peeing along the side of the church incident, I know I lied to my mom about that. She, of course, wanted to know why I hadn’t just come home to use the bathroom. Home was two doors down. I told her that I just had to go so bad that I wet my pants. I didn’t confess that Lulu had shown me how she always did that and goaded me into doing it with her, sans pulling down my shorts.
When I was an older child, maybe eight or nine, I perpetrated some vandalism. I ended up being questioned about it by the administrators of the building and I did out and out lie and say I knew nothing about what happened. I imagine the adults all really did know it had been me because after it happened I was no longer taken along to that place. Don’t ask, I’m not telling more than that!
Some youthful indiscretions I didn’t get away with. The main one I remember was when I stole pocketfuls of penny candy from the drug store. Naturally, my parents wanted to know where I had gotten it all. I could maintain the subterfuge for only so long, and then it turned into a confession, and then into the inevitable kid learning experience of taking the unconsumed items back to the store and shaming myself to the owner.
The other one that I remember “getting away with” was in high school when I had entered into my rebellious phase the second year after we moved. I stayed out all night for the first time ever with my friend Kurt. When my parents and I were having the heart-to-heart in the aftermath I told them everything except where we had actually been, which was behind a rollaway bed in an upstairs back hallway in the Holiday Inn.
I can’t think of any major lies that I’ve told as an adult. Of course I pull the occasional sickie—again, who doesn’t? And I suppose I do have to count the times when I’ve proclaimed “I’m fine to drive” knowing I probably wasn’t actually.
Lying is an uncomfortable thing to think about. What’s your biggest lie?
Age 6-1/2, amusing myself at home drawing a picture, which doesn’t require lying. Note how my mom artfully framed me off-center so that she also captured the Christmas decoration on the coffee table behind me.
Good luck moving up ‘cuz I’m moving out
August 31, 2013
I don’t exactly remember the day I moved out. By that I mean it was either when I moved into the boarding house or into the college dorm. I have a document at home (I’m writing from elsewhere) that I believe will shed light on the matter. I haven’t updated it for many years because I’ve lived at my last two addresses for eleven and eight years respectively, and I’ve had my job for over eighteen.
I’m inclined to think that it was the boarding house to which I moved when I first left the nest. When I get home and can refer to my sheet we may find that it was the dorm, but the boarding house is where I’ll start. The only thing I can say that I remember for sure without consulting the reference material is that I was at university for only two and a half weeks my first go-round. (Also, geez, life-changing high school occurrence and first moving out, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown remembering these things from my youth!)
I tried college for a couple of weeks. It didn’t work out. The following semester I tried again. I lasted a little longer but still nowhere near a full term. I think it was about then that I made my move.
It was my first experience, so I knew nothing about anything, not what “a room” meant, or “shared,” or “boarding,” or any of it. I just knew it was what seemed like an inexpensive price that meant I wouldn’t be living with my parents anymore. As a post-high school teenager, not living with your parents can seem like the most important thing.
I wasn’t savvy enough to have gone over and looked the place in advance. I only reacted to the “facts” in the newspaper ad. If I had been, I wouldn’t have been surprised when my part of the arrangement turned out to be as the (bed)roommate of another young lady. The “private” room was merely the semi-divided off area in between the stairs to upstairs and the other divided-off area beyond which my comrade and I slept. She and I had to go through “private” room to go back downstairs to the bathroom. There were not, as I recall, any doors in our upstairs area, just half-walls.
Here is where you will either roll your eyes or think, huh? One of my favorite memories of the place involves the house TV downstairs. By which I mean the television that we young squirts could watch after our older landlord-couple retired for the evening. When you’re eighteen or nineteen, the age I am now (fifty) seems like the end of the world. They were probably about that age then.
I remember coming home after work one night (again, I’d have to consult the document in order to say exactly where that was). It seemed that the old people had gone to bed so, it being the age when MTV actually played music videos (first half of the ’80s), I took advantage and turned the TV on real low to MTV. It was about two-thirds through Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” video when the old man came in and said the equivalent of “turn that long-haired hippy-freak music down you damned kids!”
That was the last time that I dared to turn the television on in that house.
It wasn’t long after that that my coccaine-snorting though good-looking acquaintance Jon sent some flowers to the house. Everybody got very excited and thought a proposal as imminent. I did not, but they were all a little sheltered.
It was a month-to-month arrangement, I stayed there only a few months. I think I also remember that I had bought some pans to use in the house kitchen, because we had to supply our own supplies. I think my two porcelain pots are those original equipment.
When I attempted to resume university the next time (after a year at a technical college where I learned some computer programming on punch cards), I decided it would be a good idea to move into a dorm. I didn’t go away but I still wanted to get away.
I had an adjustment or two of roommates, but it wasn’t awful by any stretch of the imagination. There are some boy things I could go into (like a crush starting a rumor about himself just to see how gossipy we all really were, and we were) but my fondest memory was about Def Leppard.
The album “Pyromania” had just come out. Pauline, who lived across the hall, and I both possessed it. For a few weeks we loved nothing more than to fire up our record players and play dealing turntables with Pyromania. I think we had fun just coordinating the synchronization, but I enjoyed also the imprecise phasing in and out of how the 33-1/3 revolutions per minute happened (you know, 33rpm) and how that sort of simulated cross-hall stereophonics. You know, hi-fi.
The other main memory about moving out over the years is that the first time (or two or three), everything I took with me fit in the back of my 1973 periwinkle AMC Gremlin—with the back seat folded down. Eight years ago for my last move (some twenty-five years later), I rented the largest U-Haul truck and filled it to capacity. Next time, I’ll probably have to hire an actual moving service.
I often have nightmares about having to move back in with my parents. Shiver me timbers. That would never work. That’s why it’s a nightmare!
– – – – – – – – –
Now that I’ve been able to consult my sheet, I see that time has clouded my memories. I lived in that boarding house for only one month, it looks like, and I had two other addresses besides my parents’ house before I moved into the dorm two and a half years later.
I was going to give you the Street View shot of the boarding house, but the town doesn’t rate full coverage so there’s only a low resolution satellite view. Then I thought I’d show you the dorm, but Street View only goes on the parallel street a block away. So I guess you’ll have to make do with this photo of me in the dorm. One of my finer moments, for sure!
What was and what would never be
August 27, 2013
I really wouldn’t mind being just a little more buzzed as I write this because, you see, I have been prompted to ponder that thing that happened in high school that changed my life forever. I could pinpoint a few incidents* that more directly concern school time itself and the people I knew. But if it is to be boiled down to a basic essence, the only correct response is The Move.
Ohio
From the time I was one and a half until I turned fifteen (or, more precisely, until two days before I turned fifteen), I lived in a small town in northwestern Ohio. We all were friends to one degree or another, and the way the nucleus divided into various functions as we grew up seemed only natural. I can’t say they’re all completely fond memories, but I remember a lot of things very vividly. (1)
If you actually scrolled down to read the list, you can see it didn’t take long to get to boys. That’s probably because I hadn’t been long into puberty when we moved to Wisconsin.
Wisconsin
On the surface it seemed like The Move would be a good thing. I was well-familiar with the (larger) town because one set of grandparents lived there and every summer we’d visit for two weeks. A girl my age lived next door to my grandparents and we had become friends over the years, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. To this day I’m up for a good adventure and at first, then, that’s what it was.
It was a familiar, yet still new, place. I had the summer to hang out with my friend. We could spend more time together doing the things we liked—listening to music, walking to a nearby stream, teasing the boy on the other side of her house.
My sophomore year, my first school year there was a gas. I went from a class of 80 to a class of 750. It was all big and different and exciting. I made some friends and had decent kids in my classes. It was alright and I even ended up with a boyfriend by the end of the year. He had an old red Ford pickup truck. That’s not particularly important but I remember it. Well, okay, I lost my virginity in it.
The aftermath
During my junior year things went to pot. The big, different, exciting just seemed big and different. I began to resent having been yanked away from my childhood and friends and possibilities. I always refer to it as yanked away, even thinking about it thirty-five years later. I acted out in the typical ways. My circle of friends changed to parentally-perceived less desirable kids, including my second boyfriend, mainly because they weren’t that first boyfriend whom I had broken up with but whom my mom couldn’t let go of. I dared to stay out all night. I got drunk with friends who were in college (drinking age was 18 at the time). I smoked pot with a boy two years younger (a lifetime of difference in high school!). My grades dropped.
The other best friend of my original girlfriend got together with my first boyfriend, and my own new (post-move) best friend got together with my second boyfriend before we were out of school. As far as I know, both couples are still together. My mom is still friends with the first-boyfriend-circle of my former friends.
Meanwhile, I maintained a healthy correspondence with my Ohio friends, not only with my two best girlfriends BG and DH (sorry, gals, I’m going with maiden names) but with RB as well. (2) So I got all the lowdown on who was getting together with whom and how I was missing out on it all, which only cause me to feel that it should have been me but that never could be. It poured gasoline on the fire of my feelings of separation. I was sad and resentful and behaved like it.
My best friend BG in Ohio got me a senior yearbook and, bless her heart, took it around for everyone to sign. And bless their hearts, even former adversaries obliged. Of course, all the boys I had had crushes on were long gone (they had all been one and two years older than me), but everyone else was very nice about it. It should be telling that the only class reunions I’ve ever gone to (or attempted to go to—one year I drove all the way from Wisconsin to Ohio but chickened out once I got to the supper club parking lot)—were the Ohio ones. I haven’t kept in touch with anybody from Wisconsin (though I do occasionally “research” people online).
Redemption
I was able to let go of a lot of it after I attended the fifteen-year class reunion of my Ohio school. Those were the people I still cared about the most and seeing many of them finally put to rest some unresolved feelings about the whole moving situation. There’s no going back (well, there was a little bit of going back with SB, that first kiss in fifth grade), but I was thrilled that they remembered me and seemed to still like me—even my adversaries who, it turns out, claimed not to remember most of my evil, song lyric-leaving deeds. It was the same sort of experience at the twenty-fifth-year reunion. And by then I had taken up golf, so once again it was easy to hang out with the boys.
There are many more related stories I could add to this on both sides of The Move but I think you get the idea. Does anybody know anything about RB?
(1)
Fingerpainting in nursery school in the Methodist Church.
LG encouraging me to drop my shorts and pee in the bushes alongside the Methodist Church. I wouldn’t pull my pants down but I peed anyway.
My mom picking some purple lilacs from the back yard and all the little white bugs that scattered out of them when she put them in water.
Being still required to take a nap and when I got up, discovering that all the neighborhood kids were playing on my swing set and my mom yelling at them.
Being told by TM while running a race in our late-gradeschool “Olympics” that I ran fast for someone with short legs.
SA mistaking my art class collage for his, and wrecking my neatly painted black border. LEM chiding me for retying my pigtails myself.
Being kept in from recess in fourth grade to be admonished by my teacher to play with girls more, looking at her with great earnestness, and declaring, “But Mrs Kelsey, I don’t like girls!”
Following that incident up with drawing a diagram of the playground and mapping out in different magic marker colors the different routes that my boy friends and I would take to our secret meeting behind the baseball field backstop.
Receiving my first boy-kiss ever from SB just beyond that backstop while wearing a dress with a gold top and turquoise plaid skirt.
Having to ride with LK to bowling on Saturday mornings, only he always drifted toward the center line and scared the wits out of me.
Playing the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” on the bowling alley jukebox and wanting to be a bass player more than anything.
Having my sixth grade teacher set me up with RB who had been in her class the year before, for the start of what would be an ongoing, very adversarial, love-hate friendship.
Going out for track in 8th grade only because I had a raging crush on BW, a sophomore, which became awkward because he and RB were good enough friends and RB was also a (legitimate) runner.
Hours spent bike riding around town with RB.
Leaving song lyrics in the lockers of crushes and adversaries in order to convey my feelings, I’m sure not as anonymously as I thought.
In junior high having my best friend push me into boys I liked, such as BW.
Endless summer days spent at the pool with my friends, always with CKLW AM radio on the PA to entertain us.
(2) I suppose it’s telling that I gave you initials of the people in Ohio but not of the Wisconsinites.
*I’ve touched on related subjects to varying degrees previously in this blog, and if I hadn’t had to migrate services it would be a lot easier to find those references and link to them (though I did find this one and this one). On the other hand it’s been a couple years since I wrote regularly, so I guess I won’t beat myself up for repeating some things, and it will come out differently second time around anyway.
I interrupt my regularly scheduled post (which was to be an account of how I came to love salads so) to gloat. There’s no sugar-coating this—I WON!
I have never been part of any “in” crowd. Every now and then I’ve gotten to the cusp, but I can’t honestly say that I ever completely broke through. That’s not to say I haven’t had my groups of friends. Of course I have. But if you know me away from here (or even, possibly, if you’ve been reading along for any amount of time), you’ll know that I mostly don’t give a flying fuck what other people think, so that’s probably a good indication that I’m not going to shmooze my way into very many cliques.
One time during my senior year in high school, I tried, sort of. The school was large enough to have both cheerleaders and a dance team and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to try out for it. My two or three friends and I worked up our routine and performed it on the day. When we were finished, I took off with some other college friends who had come to watch. I got to school the next day only to be greeted with queries of why I had left early. It seems I had been unaware that there was a second part to the try-outs. I did not rise in social standing, not that I was particularly bothered about it. I went back to band and every thing was as it was before.
For the last four years I have felt vicariously popular. I’ve mentioned on other occasions that my friend Rob left me here in Minneapolis for the sunshine of Silicon Valley. He works at Yahoo! Inc. and has fancy friends who work at other high-faluting companies or invent things or start start-ups. They like me (I think) (I hope)(don’t answer). This makes me feel good, even thought they’re half a continent away.
The context tonight is close to home—bowling. I think one of the reasons why I enjoy my leagues is because the people in them like me. I wouldn’t say people liking me is important to me, but every now and then I ponder why I do enjoy it so much and that’s a large reason I come up with. I do alright with the execution of the sport, which helps, but I’m not an elite bowler (averages over 210 or 220). I’m just good enough (average in the 190s, usually) to hang with the crowd I hang with.
A few weeks ago the league secretary asked if I’d be interested in filling the vacant vice presidency for next year. That’s not as important as it sounds. The secretary does all the heavy lifting and if he happens to be absent the president fills in. The vice president is actually only third in line. Also, because it is a mixed league at least one officer must be a woman, and since I am one of only a handful of women in the league, I am an instant forerunner by default.
My gut response was to laugh in his face because I shirk responsibility, however slight, whenever possible (even though I’m good at being in charge). But after a while I realized that I was flattered that he had asked me, so I said sure, I’d do it. Tonight at the banquet, when it came time to (re-)elect officers, my and two other names were put forward. Two others? So much for feeling hand-picked. But I immediately understood that it was a good thing after all—because it would be a popularity contest! And I felt a high degree of confidence that I would prevail.
The nomination was opened and from all around the room I heard “Kelly,” “Kelly,” “Kelly.” I didn’t hear one “Julie” or one “Ann.” I felt smug. And popular. And good.
So I can’t actually lay claim to any special amount of social apathy, loath as I am to admit it, and I probably sound rather shallow at the moment. The affirmation of my peers is important to me after all.
I just won’t go around admitting it in public.
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.
Kelly’s Unnecessary Blog 