my first grade teacher...

ok,really i am not going to go through my first 12 years of education year by year (and i hear a “thank goodness” yell happening all around the blogosphere). but i did make a cursory list of who i think i will blog about in the next 31 days and i do have about 5 open spots... so at this point any of you might be added. and my first grade teacher made the cut.

this has been the first week after labor day and that means that ALL of our activities are in FULL on mode. all of that makes one wish there was a recision option to this SEPTEMBER TO REMEMBER thing. maybe i just need to remember to say NO to so many activities... but i can’t decide which ones are important- they all feel important...

ok, so this isn’t 40 days of whining about my life... no one would read that. 

so on to my first grade teacher. i don’t have any life defining moments from first grade (i did manage to get through the entire year without wetting myself.) but this woman did make a huge impact on my life...

fast forward 25 years after first grade to when adam and i moved to tallahassee. we were “living” at the beach house and looking at EVERY house in town in our price range. and we made offers on a few houses and every time we would make an offer, the house would fail inspection or someone would offer more money than us and so we would lose out. keep in mind that we had moved to tallahassee from atlanta... half the salary and house prices were about the same. 

but my first grade teacher had a house to sell and she called my mom because she heard that we were looking for a house. when she called me, i had the flyer for her house in front of me because we had driven by her house the weekend before when we had come into town and it looked SO perfect and SO out of our price range. i was about to throw the flyer away (i had no clue it was her house until she started to describe it). i told her that we had driven by it and picked up a flyer but that it was WAY our of our price range. i agreed to come and let her see the children when we came to town next but gave her no hope on us buying the house.

i did take the children by and took a quick peek in the house. it was perfect. a small modest ranch in a wonderful old neighborhood. with a beautiful yard, a garage made into a great playroom. a semi open kitchen, lots of laminate counter space. nothing new and redone, but all nice and bright and ready for a family. the only problem... too expensive. and i reiterated that it was out of our price range. we had a single income and three kids....

and then her husband called my husband and he said that they were willing to take whatever we wanted to offer. they felt like God wanted us in that house. it made them feel at peace to sell the house to our family. 

and we feel at peace in this house. even though it isn’t always peaceful in this house. there are usually a lot of people filling its 2000ish square feet (at times it feels like there is a person for every square foot). there is a lot of bathroom sharing. a lot of “move your stuff out of my way” times. and a lot of “we can fit one more at the table, everyone just scooch over a bit”. but there is a lot of love. there are a lot of Bible studying going on, a lot of feeding a lot of people from that one kitchen and those still laminated topped counters. i have thought about adding a “1 million meals cooked here” sign sort of like that one over the golden arches... ours would be over the green and glass front door. 

we haven’t redone the whole house (yet) and most likely our budget will never allow us to create the kitchen of our dreams, the bathroom of champions, or even a romantic master suite, but we made small changes along the way and our house fits our lives just perfectly. it won’t ever make the cover of house beautiful magazine and there is no confusing it with the latest pottery barn catalog... 

but there are college students who come over and plop on the 20 year old couches and say that they feel at home, there are woman who still talk about how we refought the reformation one season in Bible study in my living room and nary a drop of blood was shed on my grandmother’s white couches, there are middle school girls who will fill up my table, my family room and my playroom this afternoon for food, fun, and a Bible study lesson (and i might need to stop blogging and start planning THAT lesson for this afternoon). most importantly it is a house that i want to use for the glory of God and not for the showing of pottery barn furniture (though at times the appeal of doing both seems nice). it is our home and it is warm in winter and coolish in summer and filled to every corner with love and laughter and life (and craft supplies).

and i owe that to my first grade teacher and her husband who felt peaceful about taking a lot less money for their house than they could have taken. they even left comforters for maxx’s room that are still on his beds today. they said that they could “see” our family in this house. and they had some good vision...

whilst living at the beach and perusing the real estate section of the paper every week, i wrote this little ode to the fine literature that is advertising. several of you are selling your home OR looking for a new one, so i thought this oldie but goodie might be appreciated...

#13 House Hunting and Fine Literature

Being the connoisseur of fine literature that I am, I would like to pay tribute to the greatest group of fiction writers that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. These artists really deserve to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for short stories (really, really short stories as it is). I myself have been known to spin a moderately interesting tale or two myself, but I am in no way even close to the magical genius that this group of writers possesses. 

I am speaking here of our friendly word warriors, our neighborly sentence strikers, our chummy paragraph parleyers: the incredible real estate agents advertising the current offering of homes for sale. I have spent many hours the last few months reading their body of literature and have to say I am quite impressed (not impressed enough to buy anything that is for sale), but never the less, I am in awe of their skill and talent with the English language. Now this is in no way meaning to say anything detrimental to real estate agents, quite the opposite in fact, if anyone in America is able to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse it is these dedicated and well meaning people. 

Suffice it to say that John Updike himself cannot produce heart wrenching works of fiction like these people turn out on a daily basis. I do not fault them for their (how shall we put it?) creative license when advertising a home- I myself am guilty of extreme exaggeration to make a point. Nor can I or anyone condemn them for this- they are simply trying to do their job to the best of their ability and I simply must applaud their literary brilliance that must rival Einstein’s theory of relativity (in real estate terms the thoery of relativity states that the closer the house is to being relatively condemned by the health department- the more descriptive you have to be with your adjectives). 

I merely want to enlighten all readers to the wealth of good literature that is available in your local paper and free Homes and Lands Magazines. These house descriptions are breath taking adventures to peruse and even more amazing is to see the actual homes after reading the well penned ads (it also makes one aware of the exceptional talent it took to write 20-30 positive words about said advertised house). And the critics say that no one writes good fiction anymore. The critics need to eyeball the Homes section of the local newspaper sometime soon. All the elements of good fiction are right there free for the general public: 

suspense (could that really be the price?)
humor (just a short drive from town, fix this up in no time at all)
romance (you’ll fall in love with this one)
And the ever elusive poetic techniques of 
oxymorons (nearly new, a rare find, spaciously compact) 
metaphor (this house is a bright and sparkling jewel)
similes (as large as the Taj Mahal, just like a Southern plantation of yesteryear)
and imagery (imagine sipping coffee from your spacious deck overlooking your sparkling pool, imagine entertaining friends in your lovely living room fit for a queen, imagine paying only $200K for all this luxury, imagine that the bank doesn’t laugh in your face when you ask them to loan you $200K)

These short blurbs are such great fantastical descriptions that they send my mind racing, my heart pumping, and my hands grabbing for my car keys and saying, “We’ve got to go and check this one out!” I must admit I just never gotten that same feeling from the latest best selling paperback novel. But alas, despite these far fetched descriptions, we have not found our dream home yet Though I have read a lot of ads that sounded exactly like it. But upon arrival at these paragons of House Beautiful there was always something missing (like kitchen appliances that are younger than me, carpet that isn’t shaggy and hopeless stained, windows that actually open, etc). Whenever we got to the “perfect”, “we’ll love it”, or “don’t miss this one or you’ll be sorry”, house for sale there was always something “less than perfect”, “we hate it”, or “if we buy this one we will be sorry” something about it. 

Now as I have said, I have the ultimate respect and admiration for these wizards of the written word. Not only am I a writer myself and therefore feel a kinship with them in that respect, I am the daughter, daughter-in-law, and sister-in-law to some of the finest real estate professionals in America. Real estate commissions put me through college and paid for the fine education that is in no way responsible for the fact that I don’t know where to put a comma and tend to create numerous run on sentences (have you noticed this recently). We happen to have the greatest real estate agent ever searching daily for a home for us (and we wouldn’t want to make her mad or she may sell us the terribly over priced fixer upper next door to her house). She is much more perceptive about these advertisements than I seem to be- but sometimes I just get that urge to strike out on my own and see some of these architectural wonders that are for sale and I have therefore just begun to recognize a few of the most used techniques to sell these fine palatial establishments. I am now ready to enlighten all of you who may one day go house hunting ,so that you too can read between the newspaper lines before you run to grab your keys to go look at one more elusive dream abode. 

Here are a few of my favorite real-estate fictionalized advertisement words translated into how the house actually will look when you go to look at it...

- unique= strange and ugly. Either the front resembles an aircraft hanger or it has a weird floor plan where the kitchen is in the middle of the master bedroom and the living room is accessible only by a rope bridge over an alligator pit (the alligators will cost extra of course)

- spacious feeling= tiny

- adorable= tiny

- cute= tiny

- precious= tiny

- cottage feel= tiny

- charming= tiny

- cozy= tiny

- large lot= tiny, but maybe you can add on someday to the house

- spacious back yard for the kids= tiny but maybe you can just let the kids live in tents outside

- updated= someone painted the walls to make you think it is new

- pristine= another newly painted one hoping you won’t notice the dirty cracked linoleum from 1952 and the kitchen appliances from then also (not a stellar year for kitchen appliances)

- wonderful yard, beautifully landscaped, park like setting= the house is bad inside but maybe if I go on and on about the yard no one will notice

- alarm system= you’ll need it in this neighborhood

- quiet and private= far away from civilization, usually down a dirt road

- builder’s personal home= way overpriced because he put tons of extras in it and then went bankrupt

- model home= really nice flowery wallpaper, really high flowery price

- handyman’s dream= a living nightmare with a huge hole in the middle of the family room but surely you can fix that easily enough

- needs some TLC= that stands for Takes Lots of Cash to fix up this bargain basement beauty, tender loving care won’t get you toilets that flush, an oven that heats up, or air conditioning that actually blows cool air in the hot hot summer

- low maintenance exterior= good thing cause you’ll need the time to fix up the inside

- lots of curb appeal= everyone will think you have a nice house from the outside, just don’t invite them inside

- sloping lot= if it snowed in Florida, you could have a ski slope in the front yard

- sparkling pool= after you clean all the sludge from it and fix the pump

- close to shopping= WalMart is in your back yard

- in desirable older neighborhood= with undesirable older plumbing, heat and air, and roofing system, plus aqua tile in one bathroom and shocking pink in the other

- near hospitals= you may need to visit a hospital after trying to put in new counter tops, new cabinets, new carpet, and new windows

- rec room= they converted the garage into a big room and now there is no garage

- turn of the century living= you will be using an outhouse for your toileting needs

- a great investment= hope you won’t want to live in it too, just sell it off for a profit to some unsuspecting sap from up north

- view of the lake= if you have binoculars

- on the water= your neighbors septic tank is open for inspection

- wonderful neighborhood= not a wonderful house but at least your neighbors will be nice and sympathetic

- neat and clean= someone has mopped the cracked linoleum floor, vacuumed the shag carpeting, and bleached the rust stained tub

- you must see this to believe it= there are no words to describe this house but maybe if enough people come to see it there will be a sale

- too good to be true= too good to be true, there will be something wrong with it but you won’t realize it until after you are paying the mortgage

And finally my favorite...

- spectacular, 3 large bedrooms plus a great master suite with jacuzzi tub in large two sinked bathroom, brand new kitchen, fabulous wood floors= definitely out of my price range!

#9 my first grade teacher...

ok,really i am not going to go through my first 12 years of education year by year (and i hear a “thank goodness” yell happening all around the blogosphere). but i did make a cursory list of who i think i will blog about in the next 31 days and i do have about 5 open spots... so at this point any of you might be added. and my first grade teacher made the cut.

this has been the first week after labor day and that means that ALL of our activities are in FULL on mode. all of that makes one wish there was a recision option to this SEPTEMBER TO REMEMBER thing. maybe i just need to remember to say NO to so many activities... but i can’t decide which ones are important- they all feel important...

ok, so this isn’t 40 days of whining about my life... no one would read that. 

so on to my first grade teacher. i don’t have any life defining moments from first grade (i did manage to get through the entire year without wetting myself.) but this woman did make a huge impact on my life...

fast forward 25 years after first grade to when adam and i moved to tallahassee. we were “living” at the beach house and looking at EVERY house in town in our price range. and we made offers on a few houses and every time we would make an offer, the house would fail inspection or someone would offer more money than us and so we would lose out. keep in mind that we had moved to tallahassee from atlanta... half the salary and house prices were about the same. 

but my first grade teacher had a house to sell and she called my mom because she heard that we were looking for a house. when she called me, i had the flyer for her house in front of me because we had driven by her house the weekend before when we had come into town and it looked SO perfect and SO out of our price range. i was about to throw the flyer away (i had no clue it was her house until she started to describe it). i told her that we had driven by it and picked up a flyer but that it was WAY our of our price range. i agreed to come and let her see the children when we came to town next but gave her no hope on us buying the house.

i did take the children by and took a quick peek in the house. it was perfect. a small modest ranch in a wonderful old neighborhood. with a beautiful yard, a garage made into a great playroom. a semi open kitchen, lots of laminate counter space. nothing new and redone, but all nice and bright and ready for a family. the only problem... too expensive. and i reiterated that it was out of our price range. we had a single income and three kids....

and then her husband called my husband and he said that they were willing to take whatever we wanted to offer. they felt like God wanted us in that house. it made them feel at peace to sell the house to our family. 

and we feel at peace in this house. even though it isn’t always peaceful in this house. there are usually a lot of people filling its 2000ish square feet (at times it feels like there is a person for every square foot). there is a lot of bathroom sharing. a lot of “move your stuff out of my way” times. and a lot of “we can fit one more at the table, everyone just scooch over a bit”. but there is a lot of love. there are a lot of Bible studying going on, a lot of feeding a lot of people from that one kitchen and those still laminated topped counters. i have thought about adding a “1 million meals cooked here” sign sort of like that one over the golden arches... ours would be over the green and glass front door. 

we haven’t redone the whole house (yet) and most likely our budget will never allow us to create the kitchen of our dreams, the bathroom of champions, or even a romantic master suite, but we made small changes along the way and our house fits our lives just perfectly. it won’t ever make the cover of house beautiful magazine and there is no confusing it with the latest pottery barn catalog... 

but there are college students who come over and plop on the 20 year old couches and say that they feel at home, there are woman who still talk about how we refought the reformation one season in Bible study in my living room and nary a drop of blood was shed on my grandmother’s white couches, there are middle school girls who will fill up my table, my family room and my playroom this afternoon for food, fun, and a Bible study lesson (and i might need to stop blogging and start planning THAT lesson for this afternoon). most importantly it is a house that i want to use for the glory of God and not for the showing of pottery barn furniture (though at times the appeal of doing both seems nice). it is our home and it is warm in winter and coolish in summer and filled to every corner with love and laughter and life (and craft supplies).

and i owe that to my first grade teacher and her husband who felt peaceful about taking a lot less money for their house than they could have taken. they even left comforters for maxx’s room that are still on his beds today. they said that they could “see” our family in this house. and they had some good vision...

whilst living at the beach and perusing the real estate section of the paper every week, i wrote this little ode to the fine literature that is advertising. several of you are selling your home OR looking for a new one, so i thought this oldie but goodie might be appreciated...

#13 House Hunting and Fine Literature

Being the connoisseur of fine literature that I am, I would like to pay tribute to the greatest group of fiction writers that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. These artists really deserve to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for short stories (really, really short stories as it is). I myself have been known to spin a moderately interesting tale or two myself, but I am in no way even close to the magical genius that this group of writers possesses. 

I am speaking here of our friendly word warriors, our neighborly sentence strikers, our chummy paragraph parleyers: the incredible real estate agents advertising the current offering of homes for sale. I have spent many hours the last few months reading their body of literature and have to say I am quite impressed (not impressed enough to buy anything that is for sale), but never the less, I am in awe of their skill and talent with the English language. Now this is in no way meaning to say anything detrimental to real estate agents, quite the opposite in fact, if anyone in America is able to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse it is these dedicated and well meaning people. 

Suffice it to say that John Updike himself cannot produce heart wrenching works of fiction like these people turn out on a daily basis. I do not fault them for their (how shall we put it?) creative license when advertising a home- I myself am guilty of extreme exaggeration to make a point. Nor can I or anyone condemn them for this- they are simply trying to do their job to the best of their ability and I simply must applaud their literary brilliance that must rival Einstein’s theory of relativity (in real estate terms the thoery of relativity states that the closer the house is to being relatively condemned by the health department- the more descriptive you have to be with your adjectives). 

I merely want to enlighten all readers to the wealth of good literature that is available in your local paper and free Homes and Lands Magazines. These house descriptions are breath taking adventures to peruse and even more amazing is to see the actual homes after reading the well penned ads (it also makes one aware of the exceptional talent it took to write 20-30 positive words about said advertised house). And the critics say that no one writes good fiction anymore. The critics need to eyeball the Homes section of the local newspaper sometime soon. All the elements of good fiction are right there free for the general public: 

suspense (could that really be the price?)
humor (just a short drive from town, fix this up in no time at all)
romance (you’ll fall in love with this one)
And the ever elusive poetic techniques of
oxymorons (nearly new, a rare find, spaciously compact)
metaphor (this house is a bright and sparkling jewel)
similes (as large as the Taj Mahal, just like a Southern plantation of yesteryear)
and imagery (imagine sipping coffee from your spacious deck overlooking your sparkling pool, imagine entertaining friends in your lovely living room fit for a queen, imagine paying only $200K for all this luxury, imagine that the bank doesn’t laugh in your face when you ask them to loan you $200K)

These short blurbs are such great fantastical descriptions that they send my mind racing, my heart pumping, and my hands grabbing for my car keys and saying, “We’ve got to go and check this one out!” I must admit I just never gotten that same feeling from the latest best selling paperback novel. But alas, despite these far fetched descriptions, we have not found our dream home yet Though I have read a lot of ads that sounded exactly like it. But upon arrival at these paragons of House Beautiful there was always something missing (like kitchen appliances that are younger than me, carpet that isn’t shaggy and hopeless stained, windows that actually open, etc). Whenever we got to the “perfect”, “we’ll love it”, or “don’t miss this one or you’ll be sorry”, house for sale there was always something “less than perfect”, “we hate it”, or “if we buy this one we will be sorry” something about it. 

Now as I have said, I have the ultimate respect and admiration for these wizards of the written word. Not only am I a writer myself and therefore feel a kinship with them in that respect, I am the daughter, daughter-in-law, and sister-in-law to some of the finest real estate professionals in America. Real estate commissions put me through college and paid for the fine education that is in no way responsible for the fact that I don’t know where to put a comma and tend to create numerous run on sentences (have you noticed this recently). We happen to have the greatest real estate agent ever searching daily for a home for us (and we wouldn’t want to make her mad or she may sell us the terribly over priced fixer upper next door to her house). She is much more perceptive about these advertisements than I seem to be- but sometimes I just get that urge to strike out on my own and see some of these architectural wonders that are for sale and I have therefore just begun to recognize a few of the most used techniques to sell these fine palatial establishments. I am now ready to enlighten all of you who may one day go house hunting ,so that you too can read between the newspaper lines before you run to grab your keys to go look at one more elusive dream abode. 

Here are a few of my favorite real-estate fictionalized advertisement words translated into how the house actually will look when you go to look at it...

- unique= strange and ugly. Either the front resembles an aircraft hanger or it has a weird floor plan where the kitchen is in the middle of the master bedroom and the living room is accessible only by a rope bridge over an alligator pit (the alligators will cost extra of course)

- spacious feeling= tiny

- adorable= tiny

- cute= tiny

- precious= tiny

- cottage feel= tiny

- charming= tiny

- cozy= tiny

- large lot= tiny, but maybe you can add on someday to the house

- spacious back yard for the kids= tiny but maybe you can just let the kids live in tents outside

- updated= someone painted the walls to make you think it is new

- pristine= another newly painted one hoping you won’t notice the dirty cracked linoleum from 1952 and the kitchen appliances from then also (not a stellar year for kitchen appliances)

- wonderful yard, beautifully landscaped, park like setting= the house is bad inside but maybe if I go on and on about the yard no one will notice

- alarm system= you’ll need it in this neighborhood

- quiet and private= far away from civilization, usually down a dirt road

- builder’s personal home= way overpriced because he put tons of extras in it and then went bankrupt

- model home= really nice flowery wallpaper, really high flowery price

- handyman’s dream= a living nightmare with a huge hole in the middle of the family room but surely you can fix that easily enough

- needs some TLC= that stands for Takes Lots of Cash to fix up this bargain basement beauty, tender loving care won’t get you toilets that flush, an oven that heats up, or air conditioning that actually blows cool air in the hot hot summer

- low maintenance exterior= good thing cause you’ll need the time to fix up the inside

- lots of curb appeal= everyone will think you have a nice house from the outside, just don’t invite them inside

- sloping lot= if it snowed in Florida, you could have a ski slope in the front yard

- sparkling pool= after you clean all the sludge from it and fix the pump

- close to shopping= WalMart is in your back yard

- in desirable older neighborhood= with undesirable older plumbing, heat and air, and roofing system, plus aqua tile in one bathroom and shocking pink in the other

- near hospitals= you may need to visit a hospital after trying to put in new counter tops, new cabinets, new carpet, and new windows

- rec room= they converted the garage into a big room and now there is no garage

- turn of the century living= you will be using an outhouse for your toileting needs

- a great investment= hope you won’t want to live in it too, just sell it off for a profit to some unsuspecting sap from up north

- view of the lake= if you have binoculars

- on the water= your neighbors septic tank is open for inspection

- wonderful neighborhood= not a wonderful house but at least your neighbors will be nice and sympathetic

- neat and clean= someone has mopped the cracked linoleum floor, vacuumed the shag carpeting, and bleached the rust stained tub

- you must see this to believe it= there are no words to describe this house but maybe if enough people come to see it there will be a sale

- too good to be true= too good to be true, there will be something wrong with it but you won’t realize it until after you are paying the mortgage

And finally my favorite...

- spectacular, 3 large bedrooms plus a great master suite with jacuzzi tub in large two sinked bathroom, brand new kitchen, fabulous wood floors= definitely out of my price range!

#4 though she should have been #3...

whoops, i messed up already. and thanks to dina for reminding me... and just because of that dina, i will NOT post really really really embarrassing photos of you when i write about you on my blog... i will only post the really really embarrassing photos...

i totally forgot to write about my GRANDMOTHER!!!!! and i would have met her long before mary jane and ellen came into my life. but who didn’t love that little photo retrospective yesterday (besides mary jane and ellen)?

and today i am totally going to cheat. first i mess up and then i cheat. nothing much changes in my life...

i am going to use a little (and by little i mean a REALLY LONG) ditty that i wrote in 2000 when i was living at the beach house before we moved to tallahassee. to catch some of you up to date with this...

we moved to tallahassee from atlanta in 1999 (november to be exact). we sold our house in georgia and were looking for a house here in tallahassee. because adam’s job in tallahassee paid him about half of the job he left in georgia and the houses here were no cheaper than the ones in atlanta, we had a bit of a problem finding what we wanted (or one that was standing upright). so we lived at my family’s beach house, the BEFORE version to what it is now.

no heat, no a.c., no washer/dryer/dishwasher, one bathroom, bedrooms all open to each other and the main living area, 3 children ages 5 and under, and adam came down about every other night since he was working so hard at his new job and he would stay in town at mom and dad’s a lot. i was going CRAZY. ask anyone who knew me then. my only sanity was writing long emails about my idyllic life at the beach (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha)... i was a blogger before there were bloggers....

anyway, this will eventually get to my grandmother, i promise.

one of the emails was about two very important lessons that my grandmother had taught me. ooh, i LOVED my grandmother. she was my only grandparent that i really knew (my dad’s parents died when i was young and my mom’s dad had died when she was in college). but for me, that one grandmother did the work of about 100. 

she was at EVERY school event, she drove me to north carolina for summer camp AND let me pick a new 8 track musical selection for our trip each year. she lived within walking distance so we were at her house all of the time, (it was where we “ran away” to when we needed a break from our family). she cooked at least one meal a week for our family. she let me read all of her perry mason mystery books while i was still in elementary school and i watched so many matlock and perry mason episodes at her house that to this day i can determine who done it in the first 5 minutes of any of those shows. we spent our summers with her at the beach house and her car trunk was always full of new toys for us to pick one or two on a rainy beach day. she also convinced my mother that NOWHERE in the Bible did it say that a girl couldn’t have pierced ears. yeah, she was a force to be reckoned with, and a force to have coca-cola and peanuts with for an afternoon snack. 

and i think i can sum up the thing that i loved most about my grandmother... she had time for us. she sat in her chair while i sat on the couch and we talked while i looked through all her magazines. i could read and chat with her at the same time... it was a perfect relationship. she always had about 30 magazines on that coffee table. ladies home journal, good housekeeping, woman’s day, etc... always a nice cover story about marie osmond, or kathie lee gifford.

my grandmother was the wisest woman that i ever met (all those magazine articles must have helped). she made the most wonderful friend chicken. every year she made a pound cake for my teacher (and even in middle and high school, she still made a pound cake and i took it to my favorite teacher). she mailed cakes to me in college . also she made me into the gift giver that i am today because she LOVED to give gifts. in fact after she died and we were going through her house, we found drawers and drawers full of things she had collected to give us as gifts.

so without further ado... a story about my grandmother.... and look, i used to use capital letters. i was so traditional back in the early 2000’s...

A new coat and singing in the choir 

The two most important lessons about marriage and motherhood were taught to me by my beloved grandmother. One piece of advice was given in direct response to a question that I asked her and one was just a random comment that struck me as funny and then as I thought more about it, I realized that it was the purest form of wisdom and sage advice that I had ever heard. 

And since you are my dear dear friends (or better yet since I happen to have your e-mail address), I will share them now with you...

First the effortless one to ease you in (since I know at this point you are dying to hear what my dear departed grandmother had to say on these life defining subjects). This is the marriage advice and I feel that my dear friend, Mike Sytsma, the fabulous marriage counselor, will have to pay me part of his extremely large salary because he is going to be using this in his practice every day from now on (he will probably write his entire PHD dissertation on this singular event). 

Long before I got married, I asked my grandmother this question (that all young girls must ponder in their head), “Grandmom, how will I know he is the one?” She didn't even have to think over this weighty matter, she just began telling me about a time that she and my mom shopped for a winter coat (at this point I thought that perhaps she had not heard the question and was going a bit senile), but she went on talking about they had looked in lots of stores and tried on lots of coats and then had found the perfect coat (I believe she said it was a wool blue coat with a large collar though that is an unnecessary detail but yet very interesting). 

They bought this coat and then they didn't look at any other winter coats, there was no need to look at any other coats after they had made their purchase. I must have looked extremely bewildered at this tale of found fashion in response to a deep marriage question, so she summed this up for me by saying...

 “Whether you are looking for a winter coat or a husband, try a few on and once you've got one that is perfect there is no need to look for another one, you just wear the nice one you got.” That is it, simple and true. I should really write a marriage book on this principle entitled Coat or Old Coot: It's All the Same. I could sell millions of them and then I can buy a new winter coat (just kidding- I have no need for one in Florida).

 I however did not go into the next question I had which was ,”What if the coat becomes unfashionable or gets the collar torn off or becomes too worn?” The analogy doesn't go that far I guess.

After understanding the coat principle, this next one on motherhood was a little more difficult to ascertain. My grandmother (the crafty Southern woman) hid this little jewel in an innocent statement that she made to me one day in church. It took me weeks to actually understand it and three children to actually realize what it meant in my life. And some days I'm not sure if I actually am getting it right. 

Soon after my youngest brother went to college, I went home for a weekend and attended church with my family. I had just stopped teaching school that year and had only one baby at home. Grandmom attended church with us that Sunday and sat with us in the balcony. The biggest surprise of all was that my mother was not sitting with us as she had done every Sunday throughout all of my life (in fact to digress a minute, one Sunday I had asked my mother if we would be going to church that Sunday and shocked as she was at that question she queried in a relatively calm voice, “Will you be brushing your teeth today like you do every day”? When I answered in the affirmative she said in a matter of fact manner, “Then we will be going to church today like we do every Sunday”. And that was the end of that.)

 But this Sunday she was nowhere to be found in our Baptist-balcony-this- is-our-pew-until-heaven-and-earth-pass-away seats. 

Today she was singing in the choir. 

Now I had never seen her singing in the choir (though she does have a lovely voice which must run in the family since I too can croon a tune with the beast of them- oops I meant the best of them) and so this choir-singing thing was news to me. I leaned over and asked Grandmom, “When did Momma start singing in the choir?” 

Grandmom looked at me and said, “She's always sung in the choir.” 

She had a tone in her voice as if to insinuate that I was the most out of touch daughter ever not to know this simple fact about my own mother. Then she added, “She just took a little break after Max was born.” She was referring to my older brother Max who at this point in the story was over 30 years old (sorry to publish that fact Max, but it was integral to the story). A little break, I thought, a 30 year break is not what you refer to as a little break, it is a complete lifetime. But it dawned on me later what this all meant (and since you may all be as clue less as I was I will spell it out for you since it is a published fact that too much Barney can frizzle your brain into mush). 

It was all about the sacrifices that a mother makes, the things we give up for the time being because we are involved in the daily dirty hands and peanut butter lunches and ABCs and “he hit me” and “she did it first” kinds of exciting stimulating events that seem to crowd out all other forms of human pleasure that we used to know in a former life. Other things (like singing in the choir, painting a masterpiece, reading books that aren't published by the Little Golden Book Company, traveling blissfully to Europe with only a backpack and a map, being a gourmet chef, eating at a restaurant that doesn't have a slide and ball pit somewhere on the premises, saving the world, wearing the latest fashion, wearing something clean for more than 10 minutes, or even correctly balancing your checkbook to the exact penny) take a back seat for a season. 

But if we wait long enough a season will come around where we have time to do those things again. And to my grandmother it was as if my mom had just taken a short break (age can give you that perspective, I guess) and was back to her normal routine. I think about that a lot in this season of tattle telling, just one more story, finding that lost shoe, and “make my cereal without milk” just after I have poured milk on it already days. 

Someday the books will get written, someday I can see all those plays, someday I can wear something that didn't get bleach spilled on it, someday I can appear on Broadway (well, I can dream can't I). Maybe my children will ask my mother, “When did Mom start directing award winning Shakespeare productions (traveling to exotic countries without carrying a pack and play, dressing so nicely in matching outfits that are nicely pressed, winning Oscar awards with dazzling acceptance speeches that wind up as soundbites on the Today show, or yet even speaking in full sentences)?” 

And my mother (God bless her choir singing heart) will say, “Your mother has always done that kind of stuff- she just took a little break after you were born.”

my mother is singing in the choir again. today she is singing up in heaven. now my grandmother NEVER ever sang in church because she swore that once when my brother, max, was a mere baby she sang to him and he put his hand over her mouth and so she never sang again. well,  i like to picture her singing next to my mom in the choir and i hope that they are saving a place for me. and i hope they are saving a solo for me and a snazzy little dance number too. because in heaven i am going to be one heck of a dancer and singer. and they will be there to applaud for me and perhaps deny knowing me (though that would be a lie and so they won’t be able to do that no matter how much they want to)....

sorry if you had to read that whole thing again after an 8 year hiatus... and sorry that i won’t blog again until we return home from the beach on monday BUT this was an early bonus to the SEPTEMBER TO REMEMBER... and you really could break this LONG entry into about 3 segments and nurse it over the long weekend BUT now it is too late as you are at the end. and why didn’t i tell you that earlier? 

because i would like to get it into your brain once again that I AM NOT PERFECT... I LEFT OUT MY GRANDMOTHER REMEMBER... but now she is all settled into the blog and wouldn’t she be thrilled? i bet she would have gone gangbusters on these newfangled computer thingies.... and she wouldn’t have minded a bit that i forgot her, she would have been reading a perry mason book and drinking a coca-cola to pass the time until her blog entry came up....

and here is another photo from my extensive collection of scrapbook pages... the stars around it are really evocative, aren’t they? anyway this is a great photo of my grandmother and i love how my brother max is holding her hand... perhaps he is just making sure she doesn’t break into song...