6/8/09

This time it's all about me because I'm the one in the family that I know most about and you know some stories about others will creep in and there will be other stories of me in future posts, but it's all me this time. How did I go from being that cute little girl in the high chair to the lady in purple? I hope to add a couple other pix.

Growing up I always thought that I was extremely homely and fat! In fact I can remember on more than one occasion after I became an adult, that I told my mother she should have paid the school bus driver, Mr. Dunnigan, to drop that ugly child at the end of the line and forget where he left me. She would always shrug and tell me she didn't know where I got such a silly idea. Looking at my pictures now, I realize that I was neither extremely homely or extremely overweight.

I know where the ideas for both came from; the one about my looks was because evidently Audrey and I had been teasing someone about her looks so Mother (Grandma Jeanne) told me that God made me out of leftovers--my eyes weren't the same size, one ear stuck out more than the other, one leg was longer, one foot was longer, etc., and for the crowning blow, He took a ball of putty, threw it at me, and since it landed in the middle of my face, He decided to call it a nose. Now it wasn't until shortly before she died that I told her I remembered her saying those things and that's when I found out why she had said it. Little did I know that most people's features are so different on one side from the other, that if pictures are taken on one side and then the other, some times they're hard to match up as being from the same face--in other words, everyone has one eye bigger, etc. It also took me well into my adulthood to realize that my nose did the same as everyone else's--it held my glasses up, it ran, itched, got pimples, and identified smells--what more could you ask of a nose?

As far as being so fat, that was because of something my least favorite aunt--and for some reason she never outlived that designation--said when I was about 6. Shortly after Mother and I got home from school shopping, my dad's (Grandpa Kelly) sister Aurel came to the house. Of course, like any excited 1st grader, I could hardly wait to show her my new clothes! Her response was to say, "Jeanne, you're certainly not going to let her wear those plaids to school, especially the one with red, they will make her look even fatter than she is." to this day I have worn very few plaids and seldom have worn anything red.

When I was in high school I usually wore between size 14 and 16. I might mention that sizes in ladies clothes have actually been enlarged in the past several years. Also that was before "Twiggy" and many movie stars were not all super skinny.

I remember one time that I got even with Aurel and it wasn't at all planned, but I was glad she was the one. Mother and my aunt Vivian had gone to the store and Aurel was taking care of us kids. It was raining and I had to the barnyard for something. As I went under the fence, I slipped in the cow manure and was covered from head to toe. Aurel had to clean me up.

Until Aurel and her husband glen got a Welsh Corgi, she was allergic to dogs and fleas. When they came to the house, she would sit in a straight chair, pull her feet up on one of the rungs, so she didn't get too close to our dachsund, Gretchen. As if a flea would have the nerve to use Gretchen as its host!!

Oh but the other things, Gretchen would do--she could find a dead, smelly rodent (usually moles) from miles away, find it and roll in it--was an awful chore to bathe her. One day she got run over by a car and had to have a very sophisticated wire contraption on her hind quarters. She stayed at Anna May's for the duration of her recuperation. Gretchen loved to ride in cars, and no one dared leave their car door open when it was in our driveway. One day she hid on the floor of the back seat andAnna May didn't discover her until she got home. 

Well I thought it was going to be all about me, but had a little detour there about Gretchen. She lived to be 16 and wandered to a very busy street farther from the house than she ever had before and was killed by a car. We always wondered if that wasn't her choice.

I was born a few months before penicillin became available for common usage. I had started to walk when I was 8 months old, but then got slowed down a bit after having a mastoidectomy. Now if a child gets an ear infection, anti-biotics are available to take care of it. Even though I was completely sedated during the surgery, it took a couple of years before I would trust anyone wearing white. If I had to be taken to the doctor for any reason, it would take my mother and the nurse to hold me down so the doctor could do whatever had to be done.

When I was in first grade and Joe was in 3rd, he was promoted to 4th grade just before Christmas. During Christmas vacation my dad told me to tell my teacher that I thought I was as smart as Joe and should also be promoted in the middle of the school year. Of course I didn't know they had already made that decision and I remember that my dad was more than a little embarrassed when I came home and told him that I had told Mrs. Broderson and she agreed and gave me 2nd grade school work.

About that same time we used to play a softball game of work-up at the neighbors down the lane, Bachmanns. The nice thing about it was that you didn't need a lot of players and everyone who played, played every position, including hitter. One of the not-always-so-nice things about it was that adults and little kids all played together. One time I was pitching to an adult, Leo. He hit the ball and it came right back and hit me in the face. I was afraid of the ball from then on.

Mrs. Kovalenko was cook at our school and sometimes something will remind me of the smell of the lunchroom and it makes me wish I were back in school at Alderton.

When I was in about the 3rd or 4th grade, my friend Beverly Smith and I were "doubling" on one of the swings; I was sitting, she was standing and pumping. The chains were held in place by "S" hooks. Well, we really were going great, because we went up higher than the bar holding the swings. Unfortunately, that sent us higher than the "S" hooks and when one of the chains came loose, we went flying across the schoolyard. A deputy sheriff took us to the hospital on stretchers in the back of his "paddy wagon." It's a good thing neither of us was terribly  hurt. The doctor in the hospital put one hand under my neck and the other on my legs, lifted me into a sitting position and told me my back had not been broken. It wasn't broken and he maybe was trying to calm my fear, but it didn't help.

The first birthday party I ever had was when I was 7 and it was a surprise party--not for me, however. On the Friday evening before my birthday party, the mother of one of my friends called and asked my mother (Grandma Jeanne) what time my grandpa (Pop) was going to pick her daughter up on Saturday. You see, I had decided to ask all of the girls in my room to my birthday party, had made arrangements for Pop to furnish transportation to and from the party, but had not told my parents or grandparents. As most of you know, my mother was not the world's best housekeeper, so she put my little butt to work helping her clean the house. Bless her heart, she let me have the party and even baked me a cake. I don't remember what kind of cake, but I do remember that she made Jello Bavarian, which is now Michael's favorite Jello. The reason I remember that, is because one of the girls, Karen Wade, had evidently been instructed by her mother not to ask for seconds. So instead, she asked my mother if the rest of it was going to go to waste and mother laughed about that for years. Something that I remember about Karen's sister Audrey is that one time her mother got so mad at her she broke a pitcher of cream on Audrey's head--and Audrey still had to get ready and go to school that day.

Speaking of Audreys, my sister Audrey was named for Grandma Kelly (Ethel Audrey and Grandma FrenchAnna Jane).Joe and I decided she should have a nickname so we called her something that sounded like "Ojjie Jane" or just Ojj. 

And I was called Lucinda at school and Babe at home until I was 15 and decided I would no longer answer to Babe. When I was a kid, the story of Paul Bunyan and his ox, Babe, was very popular. Joe would tease me by calling me "Babe the Blue Ox" and since I already thought I was super fat, I really hated to be called Babe. Funny thing is that even until my parents and Anna May died, whenever they would say "Cindy's on the phone," it sounded much more foreign than Babe would have. It never sounded funny in person, but it did on the phone. Also, when we started looking for pictures a couple of years ago and ran into pictures of me when I was a kid, I automatically thought of myself as "Babe." Now, of course, almost everyone calls me Cindy, unless they say Mom, Grandma or Sis.

Look at this--I wrote part of this 2 nights ago and for almost an hour tonight and I haven't even graduated from 8th grade yet! This may turn into a "marathon read!" so I'll post this and write some more at a different time.

S