growing up

The Dude, by any other name, would not be Jeff Bridges

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‘What’s in a name? A lot of funny stuff, actually.’

Many of you were a tad confused, as well as amused, by my recent story ‘The Jerk and The Dude’. So I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight: I am not married to Jeff Bridges.

Granted, Mr. Bridges is pretty darned cute, and is known far and wide for his role as The Dude in that funny Coen Brothers film, but I must tell you that my personal Dude earned his dandified moniker back when Mr. Bridges was still only a Fabulous Baker Boy. Even before that, actually.

His Dudeness-to-Whom-I-am-Wed was dubbed ‘The Dude’ when he misguidedly, but rather charmingly, wore a tie to his freshman mixer at Dartmouth College. I do not have photographic evidence of this, since I did not know him then. Continue reading

‘Where do you keep your cake?’

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‘Questions for my Oldest Younger Brother on his Day’

Those of you who are my Devoted Readers (bless your hearts) know by now that I like to speak softly and poke fun at my Family with a big stick. Today, because it’s your birthday, it’s your turn, King Tut (er, Scott).

It’s been a long time since you and I fought over who got the top bunk. (Yes, Scott was my first Roommate of the Opposite Sex.) And a long time, even, since you and I smuggled a motorcycle into a motel room. (I see a pattern of co-habitation here. If you readers are curious and/or titillated, you can check out that story here.)

But, back to you and your birthday. And those questions.

1. Did you recover fully from having watermelon ‘jammed down your throat’? See, when Scott was just a tyke, he, like many small children, was not into trying new, unfamiliar, or weird-looking foods. He thought that red food — tomatoes, watermelon — looked particularly unappetizing. Our less-than-patient father got particularly exasperated one hot suppertime, and told Scott to ‘try that delicious watermelon right now, or I’ll jam it down your throat’. Not sure I’d recommend this technique to some of you New Parents, but hey, it worked. Continue reading

Great Aunts and Glorified Rice

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‘Summer foods that did not come from a farm stand’

Some of you have read my Ode to Corn, and no doubt share my fondness for what can be enjoyed pretty much straight from the garden. (Or, in my case, the farm stand.) But there was a whole other category of deliciousness to be savored during summers where and when I grew up. And that was the food made by Great Aunts and dished out at Family Reunions.

My favorite of these was a dish called Glorified Rice. Here it is, in all its (sorry, I can’t help myself) glory:

I picked this photo because I have these dishes. Now I just need to fill them

I picked this photo because I have these dishes

Now, the Wikipedia entry for Glorified Rice is pretty hilarious, on a couple of levels. For one, the dish is described as a ‘dessert/salad’. For another, one of its sources was a website called lutheransonline.com, which I clicked (of course) and found is now defunct. Probably all the Lutherans grew up and moved to New York.

But more about these family reunions. They were always held in the summer, mainly so they could be outside. These were the days of Big Families, people. (No way these reunions would fit into a dining room or kitchen. Or a normal back yard, for that matter.) One of my earliest memories is of going to something called the P-A-L (Peterson/Anderson, and Lindstrom?) Reunion, held in Belvedere Park. (There was a swinging bridge that terrified me, but that’s another story.) Continue reading

Everybody into the Gene Pool

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‘There’s no such thing as too many cousins’

I guess it’s the Silly Season. Newspapers in the UK are publishing pictures of baby Queen Elizabeth doing a mini Nazi Salute. The New York Times today featured a cover story on (yawn) Hilary Clinton’s Dad. And bloggers are publishing pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch.

Looks like summertime-desperation-for-readers has set in. I’m thinking that it’s the time of year when just about anything I write won’t be able to compete with the beach. The only thing worse for my stats would be if it were Christmas. Or if I wrote about the ding-dang South Pole again.

So here goes. Cousins. I worry, what with the trend to smaller families and all, that the whole Cousin Thing will be experienced by fewer and fewer in the future. The Child, for example, has seven Henry Cousins, five of whom are pictured at the top of this post. Of course that’s waaaay more than the measly three the Whitmores managed to eke out. From six siblings (!)

I mean, when I was a kid, we had cousins. The Petersons, who were Swedish and Lutheran and played Scrabble and drank coffee, produced this batch: Continue reading

Go Betsy Go

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‘Meet me, meet me. Meet me at the Fair’

When I was a kid, the high point of Summer wasn’t the 4th of July, it was the Clinton County Fair.

This Fair was truly an Event For All Ages. If you were a little kid you got to stuff yourself with cotton candy, then get nice and green on the Tilt-A-Whirl or those crazy swings. If you were an adult, you got to feast your eyes on prize-winning livestock and pies or watch cars crash into each other at the demolition derby.

The Child and The Dude take in the view from the (extremely rusty) ferris wheel

The Child and The Dude take in the view from the (urk, extremely rusty) ferris wheel

And if you were a teen, you got to wander around the midway in awkward same-sex groups, giggling at each other and arranging to ‘accidentally’ ride the ferris wheel together. If you were a boy teen and ‘going steady’, you got to win large stuffed animals at the shooting gallery for your girlfriend to parade around the fairground like pirate booty. Continue reading

They didn’t do this for fun, you know

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‘Summer jobs I did not have. But I swear I did not make them up, either’

When I was a kid, a summer job was babysitting. Or working at the 5-and-10. Pumping gas. My best friend Norma had the coolest job of anyone I knew. She worked at the Dairy Queen. One of the perks was you could eat as much DQ as you wanted, which sounded pretty sweet until she told me she had a hard time even looking at a banana boat after the first couple of days.

But these jobs absolutely pale in comparison to the gigs scored by my personal family members in their respective college years. The Child spent one summer working with computers. ‘Yawn’, you say. Well, these computers were located here:

The Child's workplace one summer. She had her own apartment above the stables. Very Thomas Hardy-esque

The Child’s workplace one summer. She had her own apartment above the stables. Very Thomas Hardy-esque

That’s Wadhurst Park, a 900-acre estate in East Sussex. Which is in England, folks. It’s owned by the second-richest guy in Sweden. (Makes you wonder where the richest guy in Sweden lives.) Oh, and here he is, Hans. The Child said she was invited to tea with him and his wife once while she was there. The conversation was less than lively. Not sure if she met the dog.

Hans Rausing, The Child's Boss and the second-richest man in Sweden.

Hans Rausing, The Child’s Boss and the second-richest man in Sweden.

Incidentally, Hans’ dad made the family fortune by inventing the milk carton. Honest. Oh, besides owning that dog in his lap, Hans owned pigs. That’s one of them pictured at the top of this post making friends with The Child. (In addition to working with the estate computers, she performed various livestock-related duties. Including, sometimes, a bit of pig wrangling. And mucking.) Continue reading

Remembrance of Watermelons Past

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‘A look back at Summer in the town Time forgot (though we did get our Ladies Home Journal)’

I used to think Prince Charles was a total wimp. See, back when I was a kid, we had something called ‘bedtime’. Which meant that you were supposed to go to bed at an appointed time. Not when you got tired, or when you felt like it. ‘Bedtime’ was by Parental Decree.

And mine was 8 o’clock. And this meant 8 o’clock, Young Lady. No matter if it’s in the middle of summer and there’s no school and all the other kids are still outside and it doesn’t even get dark until after 9.

When I would whine about this to my mother by saying something like: “But Mom, I’m almost 13! Going to bed at 8 is for babies!”, she would reply thusly: “Well. Prince Charles of England is 16, and he goes to bed every night at six!”

Gosh. I hated Prince Charles. What a wimp.

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The Emperor has no peppers

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‘A Tale of Two Families (and an identity crisis)’

Okay. Let’s take a quick poll. What’s a brownie? Is it thick and cake-y? Or sort of gooey and dense? And what about oatmeal cookies? Fat, with raisins? Or thin and chewy, with chocolate chips?

And, not to make this all about sweets, what about potato salad? (that is, if anybody out there even eats potato salad anymore): is it sweet and sort of vinegary? Or made with mayo? And if it’s the mayo-y kind, would that be Hellmann’s, or Miracle Whip? Continue reading

Confessions of a B-Team Mom

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‘You never step in the same family twice.’

Apologies to Heraclitus, for mangling (er, adapting) his line. He said something like ‘No man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.’ I’d actually never heard of Heraclitus till I googled that quote, which I had floating around in my head. (Um, brief aside: Am I the only one who thinks ‘Heraclitus’ sounds a tad, well, unseemly? Or do I just have jet lag?)

See, last Thursday was my Little Brother Doug’s birthday (he’s the guy squirming in my lap in the picture at the top of this post.) And last Friday I got to go out west to visit our Mutual Mother, who now lives in a quaint little town on the Oregon Coast. But no more of that for now.

On the endless plane ride out there, I got to thinking that, since I am almost 12 years older, Doug and I were, for all intents and purposes, raised in completely different families. (Those of you who’ve been along for my Blog Ride know by now that I am the oldest of five: Scott/Me are the Big Kids, Laura/Doug are the Little Kids, and Roger is stuck in the Middle Kid position.) Continue reading

The Princess and the Parent

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‘Stuck in the Maternal Memory Loop’

Yesterday The Child turned 24. How can that be, when just yesterday The Child turned four (!)

Welcome to the world of the Maternal Memory Loop, where scenes from the past find themselves superimposed over the present. And insist on being played, and replayed, in the Maternal Head. Stuck there, until I slap myself silly (figuratively, that is) in a futile attempt to dislodge them.

See, my conscious mind knows that The Child is a Grown Woman who works in Boston as a Software Engineer. But my memory-loop mind insists that she is a Child who works in her Room as a Kindergartner. (Cue adorable photos):

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